Chapter Text
A wild, bitter wind shrieks along the valley. Behind Fili, to the east, the twilight deepens to a coal-dusted, dim grey. He follows the orange glow of the fading sunset, clinging to the edges of a smear of thin, wispy clouds. Clear evenings meant clear nights, and clear nights meant cold mornings. Already, he can see the breath lingering before him in the dawn, great swollen clouds of steam that rise in the morning before the breeze snatches it away. When he was small, with Papa, he used to pretend that he was a dragon.
Fili found out very quickly that Uncle Thorin’s people don’t play that game, anymore.
He purses his lips in a sharp whistle. “Lija!” A white-faced goat, her hide streaked with a deep brown, whips her head around. “Here!”
She bleats, stubbornly, nosing at the clutch of thorny weeds one last time before picking up into a trot. “Greedy girl.” Lija pauses at his side, so he can scratch under her ears. She’s a favourite; Fili had helped Papa birth her, curled into his side as the rain pattered down on the thatch above them, leaked through the weak spots and trickled along the walls, making smelly puddles in the mud and dung. It was a long and difficult labour, and Lija’s mother, Lemmiki, died an hour or so before dawn. Papa showed Fili how to pour a cup of goat’s milk along his forearm, a gentle trickle from his wrist to palm to finger, mimicking a teat to feed the trembling kid, while he butchered Lemmiki’s still-warm body. Nothing ever went to waste.
He whistles again, waves his crook for good measure at the stragglers. The goats pick up pace; none want the humiliation of being hauled by the neck, slung over Fili’s shoulders and carried like a sack of potatoes back to the village. “Come on! It’s getting dark, you lot!”
Fili counts in his head, going down his list of names. Álfrós, Syren, Vallmo, Nejlika... He’s one short. Young Sóley, a curious and painfully headfirst billy, four summers old. Exasperation hisses in Fili’s teeth as he retraces his steps along the rocky ridge. “Sóley!” He calls into the twilight, an eye on the deepening shadows. There had been rumours from the Men, beyond the town walls, the wolves had been spotted by traders. “Here! Sóley!”
Silence. Not even an indignant bleat of resistance. His flock trailing him, Fili sets down his crook, to climb hands-and-feet along the jagged cluster of rocks. “Stupid—” But as he looks over the ridge, to the rocky weave of foothills, Fili’s breath dies in his throat. Two dark figures, fifty or so paces away, negotiate the stony clusters of grass. One has Sóley strung over his back, hooves lashed together. “Hey!” Fili grasps the sling hanging from his belt, digging in his pocket for a choice stone. “ Hey!”
The figures hear him, pick up pace, the tiny matchsticks of their bodies twisting to look back. He’s a good shot, but Fili needs to get his eye in first, so he goes for the other first, swinging the leather over his head and letting the rock fly. Jagged rocks cause more damage, slicing through flesh at close range, but smooth, rounded pebbles are more accurate. Fili chooses the later, watching white-knuckled as the smaller figure recoils, struck in the small of the back. He pitches, overbalances on the rocks he was clambering over, and tumbles down a twenty-foot ledge. Fili grins, grasping for another stone. This one hits the black figure carrying Sóley on the back of his leg, and he buckles, one knee going down and Fili can imagine the awful scrape against the smear of dusty scrub and rock. Good.
Sóley bucks and kicks against him, his bleat thin as a whisper. Fili picks out another stone, lets it fly, this time hitting the stranger in the small of his back. They’ll hurt, even at this distance, leave coin-shaped bruises that will sting for weeks. Another. This one hits the shoulder, the silhouette stumbling as Sóley brays into the twilight, buckling again under the weight. Fili loads up the strip of leather, raises it over his head. He must have hit somewhere close to the head; a sharp cry pierces the wind and this time, the thief leaves Sóley bound amongst the rocks, picking up to a run.
“You best be running!” Fili pants, making his way down the ledge as fast as he can. Ever-loyal, his goats follow. Sóley bleats, writhing in his bonds. “I’m coming, Sóley! Just wait!” The runner has disappeared, swallowed up in the shadows, and Fili doesn’t spare another thought for him as he grasps his belt-knife, slicing through the coarse rope that bound the poor goat’s hooves. “You’re all right,” He murmurs into the soft, hairy flank, feeling Sóley tremble beneath his hand. Álfrós, his mother, noses at his side. “You’re all right.”
Fili looks up, his heartrate evening out, at the pinpricks of light that gleam above him. Night is truly coming on, and he only has half an hour, at best, to cross the half-mile back to the village. He straightens, his hand on Sóley’s left horn, curving around the plane of bone. Wait. The other.
He crosses the straggly rocks to the ledge, where the second thief had fallen. A prone figure, curled up on its side, with a veil of dark, shoulder-length hair. Fili sighs. The wolves would smell him in an instant, and make a tasty meal of him, dead or alive. And Fili may be hardened for his age, so his Uncle claims, but he wouldn’t condemn a soul to die. So he walks along the shallow edge, some goats following, some peering down over the cliff-face.
“I know. Don’t look at me like that, Alma. A goat-thief deserves many things, but death isn’t one of them.” Fili sinks to his knees. The light is weak, so thin and grey that all he can make out are pale shapes and shadows. A quiver of arrows and a bow is slung across his back, and Fili takes those first, then the bone-handled knife slung at his waist. He’s dressed like a Dunlending wilder, from what Fili can tell, in what feels like animal skins, poorly stretched and treated. The fellow is thin and lanky, clearly just a boy, but warm beneath Fili's palm and after an exploratory hand on his neck, still alive. He groans to the touch, groggy but awake, and it’s too dark to see if his eyes are open. “Come on, then, mister thief. We’ll see to it that you face the bailiff tomorrow.” Fili bears the body over his shoulders, like he does with one of the obstinate billies, hefting the crook in his right hand and the bow and arrows on the left. “If you’re lucky to still be breathing.”
By the time he makes it back to the village, darkness has crept into every corner, wringing the last threads of grey from the air. Fili follows the trail of lamplights and fires through open windows, cracks in the doors. They live on the edges, beyond the walls of the town that housed a thousand men; unwelcome, uneasy outsiders. Though they mine coal, forge iron, craft weapons and horseshoes and a dozen other tools for these men, build stone walls that will last a thousand years, they will never be more than outsiders.
He takes the back way, as he normally does, dodging the little dirt paths that connect their cluster of a hundred or so hovels; this splinter of lost dwarves that Thorin called his tribe. The goats are too curious, nosing at potted herbs on windowsills, bundles of hay left to fix uneven thatching, woven mats of rushes before the doorstep, and once they have their teeth around something they could eat, always too priggish and stubborn to be called away. Thorin called them ill-trained, despite Fili explaining a dozen times over that goats simply can’t be ordered about like common sheep. As true and wild as the water, they forced their own path if they insisted. And Fili had to this day never met anyone harder of will than a goat in search of its next meal.
It’s a good thing, Fili thinks, that he can slip through in the darkness and no one can see his burden. The dams are too nosey, always asking questions, trading scraps of gossip amongst one another like nuggets of gold. Always wanting to know his and Uncle Thorin’s business, as though they were concealing some great secret, some hidden life, from their view. He shakes his head. At the end of the road, backing onto a barren, rocky outcrop that towers over their cluster of huts, is the tiny cottage that he and Uncle Thorin call home, with its whitewashed walls and thatched roof, the single room that smells of smoke and cured goat-meat no matter the season, the little attic above it where he and Thorin sleep, pressed in close on cold nights, forgetting their strange alienation of one another in the search for warmth. And beside it, the barn that he and Thorin and a handful of other dwarves built themselves, from reclaimed wood scavenged and foraged and carefully dismantled from the wreck of an old farmhouse left to rot a mile away. Every home has an allotment, fenced with bark strips and stunted pikes cut from old branches, crammed with potatoes, pumpkin, cabbage, kohlrabi, onions, carrots or turnips, but theirs had been stamped to a barren crust of dirt from the hooves of Fili’s goats, with the slimmest shoots of weeds eaten away the moment they emerge from the ground. Fili props the crook up on the fence and opens the gate, squinting in the starlight as the pale shapes of goats pass through, counting. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Thank Mahal. He closes the latch, weaving through the bleating crowd of fur and limbs. “I know, I know. I’ll let you in now.”
They pour into the barn, a narrow, mean building about ten feet wide and fifteen long that stank of dung, for those not used to the smell. Fili slings the boy down from his shoulder into the corner where he’s left a little nest of hay and a blanket, for the long nights where a goat was sick or in labour and needed his care. He’s as careful as he can, but there’s still a moan of pain. “You wait right there. I’ll be back.”
Thorin’s still out. He’ll be around at one of the other’s houses, Fili guesses, sipping ale and talking in that low, conspiratorial voice of his, refusing dinner because he knows their larder is almost bare. They go to great lengths to avoid each other; even greater to make it seem as though it was natural and unintended. Fili blows on the slumbering coals, feeds it with a little wood, puts a pot of water on to heat and lights his oil-lamp with a pinch of tinder. It’s a sealed glass-lamp, like the ones used by distant cousins in coal-mines. No dangerous gases here, but a hay-filled barn would catch alight in moments, trapping him and his goats alike.
He unlatches the barn door, and steps inside. The stranger is silent, slumped on his side, facing the wall. Carefully, quietly, Fili sets down the lamp and sinks to his knees beside the boy, pulling back the curtain of dark hair covering his face, keen to get a look at—
Him.
His skin is greenish-grey, the blood along the left cheek black and sticky as tar, with his ear turned to a sharp point and Fili gasps as he scrabbles back, horror and disgust rising as he realises he has brought an orc into their village. One of the people that destroyed his life.
One of the people that killed his mother.
His heart in his throat, Fili reaches for his belt-knife. He’s got to do it now, quickly, before the creature gathers his bearings. A cut in the throat, ear to ear, deep enough to sever the arteries and he’ll bleed out within minutes. He’ll carry the body away before dawn, throw it down over the eastern ledge that overlooks the river and tell nobody, no one, of what he’s done. Fili’s dry tongue rasps against the roof of his mouth as he shuffles forward, studying the orc. It’s far from the first he’s seen before, and there’s no mistaking it, the beaten hide boots lashed to his calves with strips of leather, the row of bones sewn into the kilt of his animal skins.
Fili’s hand freezes in mid-air. What orc has he seen that ever had a full head of hair?
A soft groan. The orc stirs, eyes crack open and Fili lingers, hanging, trapped in this moment of indecision and terror and a bitter, burning rage. The orc gasps, his bleary eyes widen and with a fresh burn of shock, Fili sees that they’re brown .
He’s not an orc. Not completely. Not with those eyes, that nose, that dark thatch of hair.
“What are you?” Fili whispers. The orc says nothing, eyes fixed on the knife in Fili’s hand. He’s breathing raggedly, clearly in pain, grabbing handfuls of hay. Keeping his movements slow, Fili sets the knife down on the ground, beyond the orc’s reach, but close enough to snatch it, if he needs to. “What— are you?”
“Where am I?” His voice is a low rasp, like a knife on a whetstone, punctuated by a sharp gasp of pain as he tries to move.
“Are you half-man? Is that it?” Fili looks him up and down. “No. You’re too short to be a man. What are you?”
“Where did you take me?” The orc spits in return. “Where is this?”
“You tell me and I’ll tell you.” Fili licks his lips. “A-And if you don’t, I-I’ll kill you.”
The orc snorts, rolls his eyes, disbelieving. Again, he tries to prop himself up, and fails, grunting at the strain. “A gaz-uruk. Where am I?”
“Gaz—What? In common tongue.”
“I’m half-dwarf.” He spits through gritted teeth. Fili’s stomach drops into some unknown cavern within him, as he realises what he almost did. “Where. Am I.”
“A village. My barn. I carried you. There’s wolves around. I couldn’t just... leave.” The overawing impossibility races through Fili like a fire. How? How is it possible for the blood of orcs and dwarves to mix like this? “A-Are there... others like you?”
The orc – can Fili call him that? Is that really what he is? – narrows his eyes for a moment. Orc or dwarf of half of each, he’s still one thing. Just a child. “No.”
“Let me—Let me get something.” Fili slips the knife into the sheath at his belt, and rises to his knees. “For the bleeding.” The boy watches, teeth clamped down to bite back the pain, and Fili notices as he stands that one leg is held out a stiff, awkward angle. Orc bones aren’t as strong as his own, he thinks. They can more easily break.
Outside, Fili locks the bolt and sucks in a deep breath of air. The cold seizes in his lungs, makes him start. He needs the moment of clarity to unravel this knot in his head. A half-orc, half-dwarf, weak and wounded, in his barn, surrounded by his goats. The attempted thievery seems so insignificant now, the softest afterthought. A half-orc, in his barn.
While Fili finds cloth for bandages, the door creaks. Frozen, Fili looks up from the leather-bound trunk pushed against the wall, heart hammering. For a moment, he thinks it’s the boy, and that somehow he slid open the bolt from the inside and limped across the dirt, but then a familiar silhouette fills the doorframe. It doesn’t quell the anxiety.
“Uncle Thorin,” Fili murmurs, eyes darting back down to the trunk. “I-I, uh—have to look after Syren. I think her kids are close. I-I’ll be in the barn all night.”
“All right.” Thorin steps inside sweeping his cloak off his shoulders and hanging it on the hook nailed into the back of the door. “Have you eaten?”
“Not yet.” Fili grabs a handful of cloth. Good enough. “I just have to—just let me look at Syren. I’ll come make my supper soon.” Thorin sighs, sinks into a chair as Fili takes the pot from off the fire, where the water is cheerfully steaming, and pours it into the pail he uses for milking.
“Fili—” Something tightens in Thorin’s face, his shoulders hitched as though bracing himself for an impact. He closes his eyes for a moment. “No. Later. Tend to your goats.”
“Um—all right. Thank you.” Fili keeps his eyes lowered as he scoots around the table, stopping to scoop up the little wooden box of herbs and tonics, mostly gifted, some pilfered, but all from Óin. He can sense rather than see Thorin tense as they brush past one another. Fili tenses up too.
The boy watches Fili carefully as he kneels down beside him, plunging one of the rags in the milk-pail. “What are you doing?” He hisses, cold and untrusting, snarling as Fili wrings the cloth out.
His hand freezes in mid-air, warm water dripping down his wrist. “Cleaning off the blood, so I can bandage you up.”
“You’re... helping?” He sounds so incredulous.
“You’re still bleeding a little.” Fili wishes he could force his expression into a smile. Something warm and comforting. “Can I?”
With a grunt, the boy nods, closing his eyes as Fili leans in, sweeping back the dark curtain of his hair to expose a nasty gash just above his temple. He jolts, bites back a hiss as Fili presses the cloth to the wound. “Does it hurt anywhere else?” Fili asks mainly to distract himself, to pull his mind away from the fact that he has his hands on an orc’s skin right now, soft and healing, attempting to repair a wound that he has made.
What would his father say, if he saw this?
“Foot.” The boy grunts. The one held out at a splayed, awkward angle. He shrugs one shoulder, eyes still closed, trying to spirit himself away to somewhere else, too. “Lots.”
“Lots of places, or your foot hurts lots?”
“Both.”
Fili wrings the bloodied cloth out in the water, watching the threads of black bloom into clouds, disperse, and sicken the water to a cloudy grey. The orc opens his eyes now, watching as Fili lifts the lid of his little box, sprinkle pinches of herbs and a dash of an oil into a tiny clay bowl and mix into a brown, smelly paste.
“I need to bind your head tight,” Fili says, quietly, taking a bone needle, the thinnest any dam in the village could make, and the ball of linen thread. “It’s probably going to hurt.” The boy just shrugs, in return.
They must be taught to harden themselves against pain, become numb to it, Fili thinks as he stitches the wound in a slow, careful silence. He can tell by the way the orc steels himself, holds his breath, grits his teeth and hardens every muscle in his body before Fili even touches him, that it's intentional. Dwarves do the same, but only on instinct.
His skin is softer than the coarse, hairy hide of a goat, and Fili has to be careful. At least he’s not struggling. After poor Viðr came out the worse from a swooping falcon, it took three other dwarves to hold the ageing billy down while Fili had stitched him together.
“Barash,” the boy mumbles, eyes half-lidded and vacant. “What happened to him?”
“The orc you were with?”
“Mm.”
“He ran away. With a few more bruises than he arrived with.” A thought clenches in his stomach, tight and painful with horror. “They’re going to come find you, aren’t they?”
The boy snorts, but remains still. “No. They won’t.”
Fili wants to believe it. Wants to believe he hasn’t just started some kind of war between them. That there won’t be scouts, then soldiers, in search of their own, last seen tumbling down into an unknown end. That this won’t end in bloodied violence, the death of dozens, all for the sake of a single goat.
“I have to look at your foot,” Fili murmurs when the gash is stitched, covered over in the paste of herbs, bound tightly with a strip of clean cloth. The best that he can do. Over his elbow, the goats still watch, cautious and uneasy, their strange, sideways eyes fixed on this stranger. “I need to take the boot off.”
“Sure.” He shrugs again, trying and failing to seem nonchalant, unaffected by this. But there’s that hitch again, that held breath, that hiss of pain as Fili unwinds the leather strap that holds the boy’s boot in place. There’s no sewing, it seems, just a single piece of coarse hide – boar, or ox – tripled over under the sole for strength. The foot is swollen to thrice its side, mottled as black as stormclouds in a broody twilight. Bruising, Fili thinks. Of course, it would be the colour of their blood.
“Can you move it?” Fili asks. The boy pauses, and they both watch the toes twitch pathetically. “Right. Um – I don’t know if it’s broken or not. I’ve never seen a broken ankle before. We don’t—our bones don’t just break like this.” He needs help . He needs Óin, and his centuries of careful knowledge here.
But how? There’s no letting anyone in on this. They would see him and think him an abomination, a horror, a twisted wrenching into pieces of what is good and right. Óin would tell Thorin. And then what would Thorin do? His hatred of orcs is tempered sharp with blood and grief, sharper than what Fili could think possible, heavier than one heart could ever carry.
He lost his mother to an orc. Thorin lost father, grandfather, brother and sister. Left the tapestry of his family lineage hanging by threads.
And now, Fili is nursing one as though he would a sick child.
This is different , and he knows it. There is trickle of blood that this creature shares with his people, and Fili cannot withhold his mercy towards it. He wouldn’t want to.
“I think just keep it as still as you can.” Fili settles back on his folded legs. “Try not to move.”
The boy snorts, gesturing at his head. “Sure.”
“I—Are you hungry?” The boy shrugs. “Do you want something to eat?” Silence. Of course, he’d never show weakness, even for something as natural, inevitable, as hunger. “Right. Just wait here.” He opens the door, latches it behind him, shivering as a blast of wind slices across his bare cheek.
Thorin looks up, nursing a cup of ale. He nods, curt and tight, and doesn’t smile. “How is... Syrel?”
“Syren. She’s all right. No sign yet, but she might breach in the night.” Fili opens the door of the dark-stained, chest-sized box of wood they called a larder. “Is there any bread left?”
“A crust. I put yesterday’s pottage over the fire. It should be warm now if you stirred it.”
Fili closes the door so he can look at Thorin. “Oh. Thank you.”
Thorin takes a short sip from his pewter cup, searching for a moment’s pause to gather his thoughts. “You said you hadn’t eaten yet.”
Fili takes one of the clay bowls down from the little shelf, stirs the pottage so the hot centre and cool edges meld together, and scrapes the blackened pot clean. A hearty supper for one; lean for two, but the food is too scarce for Fili to take any more.
The boy eyes Fili as he closes the barn door, slides the inner bolt him. Fili hears him sniff. “What’s that?”
“I made it yesterday. Should still be good. Potato and cabbage, mostly. A bit of rye.” He sits cross-legged, holds it out. “Want some? Do you need help eating?”
“Can you—sit me up?” The boy winces in pain, straining to prop himself up on his elbows.
“Oh, sure.” Fili sets the bowl down, fluffs up the handfuls of hay as best he can. Lija steps forward, nosing at his supper. “No, girl.” He knees her away. “Not for you.” Hands under arms, Fili lifts the strange, bony frame as best he can. There’s a sharp grunt of pain; the boy must be nursing some heavy bruises under that bone-laid vest. Cracked ribs, perhaps, or both. All Fili can do for him is to keep him still and comfortable.
“Thanks.” It’s such a strange word from such a hoarse, twisted tongue. The boy cups the little bowl with one hand, spoon in the other. It quivers in mid-air from his trembling, but Fili knows the last thing he wants right now is help. A minute of silent chewing, he holds it out.
They pass it back and forth, eating slowly, savouring the heat and spices, lost in their thoughts. A hundred questions crowd on Fili’s tongue and he knows that the other must be doing the same, all bursting to get out, and he doesn’t know where to begin, how much he can extract before he goes too far, asks the wrong thing, and the boy closes off from him, upset or hurt, refusing to say any more.
As Fili’s scraping the bottom of the bowl, though, the boy clears his throat. “Who do you live with?”
“Just me and my uncle.” He says after a moment. “I... My mother died when I was little. She, uh, was killed in an orc raid.” Fili lets it hang there, knowing it needed to be said, that it might add a little more weight to his act of mercy. Something tells him to be open with the truth, if economical. Lies will be unravelled so quickly. Not everything needs to be told, but some things... just have to be. “My father died of consumption two years ago. Didn’t have any other family who could take me in, so I came to live here.” He sucks on the spoon until even the taste of cabbage has faded. “What about you?”
“The whole clan lives together.” Brown eyes, still not quite focused, stare over Fili’s shoulder, over the curious, craning necks of the huddled goats, to the shadowy planks of the wall opposite, studying the grain of the wood, the beam of the low ceiling with a careful wonder that makes Fili wonder if he’s ever been... inside before. How do orcs live, if not in homes? Do they find caves for shelter? Cobble tents of animal skins, or just huddle together under bushes and trees, a cluster of beasts in search of warmth?
“Do you...” Fili has to dislodge the question, “um, have parents?”
He snorts. “Of course I have parents.”
“Which one was... the dwarf?”
Those dark eyes dart to him for just a moment, then slide away. “My mother.”
Fili wants to ask more; so much more. Which of the seven houses she hailed from, which Hall, when she was born, if she was still alive. But there’s a flash of pain on the boy’s face – not from his head, not from his ruined ankle, not from other innumerable cuts and scrapes and bruises he will not reveal. It’s a deep, inner pain, a wound that will never heal, that still bleeds and burns within him. It’s a familiar pain. And so Fili pushes it all back, and says nothing.
“Do you feel... sick?” he asks after a time. “Like you’re going to throw up?” The boy shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. “Can you see all right? No doubling of anything.”
He sniffs. “It’s fine.”
“Does your head hurt?”
“Of course.”
Fili’s mouth thins into a tight line, trying to remember the questions asked of dwarves who come back from the mines nursing a blow to the head. “Do you remember what happened?”
“I...” A hitched half-laugh, that tightens to a grunt of pain at the expansion of cracked, tender ribs, “was with Barash. We cornered the straggling goat and were about to make off with it when you sconed me.”
“I defend my goats...” Fili wishes he had a name, something to address this boy with. But ‘boy’ on its own seems so harsh, so condescending to someone just a little younger than himself. “What’s your name?”
The boy watches him carefully, now. “Why?”
“So I know what to call you. I’ll tell you mine first, if you like.”
He rubs at his sharp little nose. “Go on, then.”
“Fili. Son of Vili. Son of Hóli.” It’s a sharp, contentious edge between him and Thorin, the invocation of his father’s line, but Fili will not relent. Even if his mother carries noble blood, he’ll be his father’s son until his last breath.
The boy’s face tightens for a moment. “Is Fili a common name?”
“Common enough amongst the Firebeards - my father’s house. I have three second-cousins with my name. A lot of us have similar names. Dili and Nili and Gili and all that.” Fili slides the little brass latch on his box of herbs and oils home. “Your turn.”
“I...” He licks his lips, showing sharp, even teeth, the canines long and pointed, “have two. My orc-name is Gazund. I never use the other.”
“You have a dwarf-name, too?” Gazund nods. “Well, I’m a dwarf. So we’ll use that. What is it?”
His dark mouth twists, in uncertainty or pain, Fili cannot guess. He doesn’t know until the name slides out, strangled in irony. “It’s Kili.”