Clarity of Purpose, Chapter 16
Title: Clarity of Purpose, Chap. 16
Chapter Summary: Lost in the woods of the Dark Elves, Bilbo searches for his companions.
Relationship: Thorin/Bilbo
Characters: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield
Fandom: Hobbit/Lord of the Rings. Begins in 2968, twenty-six years after the events of "Clarity of Vision" and fifty years before the canonical events of "Lord of the Rings." Thus, characters' ages and the geopolitical situation will be different than LoTR canon!
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2700
Summary: Thorin Oakenshield and Bilbo Baggins have been parted for many years now, despite the love they bear each other. Now Thorin's research has uncovered a dire threat to Middle Earth--the Ring he carried a little while and then gave to Bilbo. Together with a group of companions composed of the different Free Peoples of Middle Earth, they must attempt to destroy the artifact before its Dark Lord can re-capture it.
The scent of crushed juniper branches, pungent and piercing, was the first thing Bilbo Baggins became aware of. He started to sit up, then groaned and fell backwards again, his head spinning and his muscles shrieking protest. Juniper needles prickled the small of his back, but he ignored them as he tried to cast his mind back, tried to remember how he had ended up in a juniper bush in a--it was a forest, wasn’t it?
He cracked his eyes open with an effort and looked up at the canopy of dark evergreens, their dusky branches nearly blocking out the dim sunlight. There was a hushed gurgle of a creek nearby, a rich scent of loam and decay all around him. The woods were still and silent, with not even a breeze stirring the massive pines and firs.
And yet Bilbo felt somehow that he could sense a sort of vast wind moving, a current of dark malice that ebbed and flowed around him unseen.
He staggered to his feet. “Thorin?” he croaked, staring around him wildly. They had been running, he remembered that. Thorin had been carrying him, screaming at him to--to do something. With a flash of terrifying clarity, Bilbo remembered a searing weight on his finger, remembered looking behind them to see--
With a gasp of horror, he wrenched his mind away from the vision of the two Ringwraiths bearing down on them, their undead eyes kindled with hatred and hunger, their withered hands reaching for him. Scrabbling in his pocket, he reassured himself that he had put the Ring away without dropping it.
“Thorin?” he called again. “Dis? Gimli?”
The forest swallowed up his words as if they had never been spoken. He was alone.
Alone! He felt his knees trembling and it took an effort to keep standing. Always Thorin had been with him, giving him strength, helping him in. Now here he was alone in a haunted wood, far from Thorin--who could be dead or dying, slain by those terrible wraiths! The Nazgul could be coming for him next, slipping silently through the trees, coming up behind him--
He whirled frantically, his eyes scanning trees that seemed somehow to twist and writhe as if caught in a gale. But there was no wind! A flicker of cool laughter seemed to twine with the gurgle of the little creek, licking his ears, and Bilbo shuddered. Better perhaps to simply lie down here in the bracken and wait for death, better perhaps to simply let his bones moulder here, becoming one with the earth, vines binding his bones, flowers blooming in his eyesockets, at peace and beautiful, so beautiful…
Perhaps it was that he had started to grow used to voices in his head that were not his, perhaps it was just natural hobbit resilience, but Bilbo shook his head fiercely. “No!” he said out loud. “I’m not staying here. I’m keeping away from those dark riders, and I’m going to find Thorin and the rest. So there,” he added as if he were a stubborn child, and the flicker of laughter beneath the brook’s song took on a silvery edge before fading out.
“East, east, we were to go east,” Bilbo muttered. It was difficult to tell the angle of the sun through the thick trees, but eventually he set off with the sunset at his back as best he could.
It was an eerie, unpleasant path he trod: the sense of swirling malice like a silent and invisible thunderstorm hovered over everything, and strange lights flickered in the distance. Once he thought he heard Thorin’s voice back the way he came and hurried back, calling to him, but then he heard that whisper of crackling laughter again. Gritting his teeth, he turned his back on the voice and kept going east, ignoring the lights that looked like torches beckoning off his route. As twilight fell and the woods grew ever darker, green eyes flickered at him hungrily here and there in the undergrowth, but he kept putting one foot in front of the other, stubbornly moving forward as the wood swam and swirled around him like a dream. There was a rhythm to it, a sort of blankness of mind and focus of will necessary to keep moving forward through an atmosphere that seemed to thicken and curdle, freighted with cruelty and a terrible weight of ages.
At one point, the strange not-wind broke into a peal of eldritch triumph, a tintinnabulation of silvery satisfaction that left Bilbo clutching at his head and crying out, trying to block something that was not a sound from his mind. Then it ceased, leaving Bilbo reeling and staring around himself as a kind of silent purr resonated through the forest. “If I had to describe it,” he would say many years later to fauntlings when they asked, “I would say it felt like a cat licking its paws after a large bowl of rich cream. Or after it had caught a particularly tasty canary.” The fauntlings would shiver with terrified delight, and Bilbo would try not to remember too well how it had felt to be surrounded by that sense of replete malevolence.
He kept walking forward, trying to ignore the unpleasant shudders running up and down his spine, trying not to dwell on terrible images: Estel sinking into a slough, swallowed up forever; Dis pinned down by wolves; Thorin staring upward with empty eyes, a vine wrapped around his throat. One foot in front of the other, Bilbo, he told himself. Don’t think.
And he was doing fairly well at that, plodding forward diligently, until the moment that he raised his eyes and saw the two cloaked Ringwraiths wrapped in their dark robes hovering just in front of him.
A shriek of terror bubbled from his throat, and he fell backwards onto the soft earth, trying to scramble backwards while keeping his eyes fixed on his hunters. But the Ringwraiths didn’t move, didn’t stir, and after a moment Bilbo realized that what he was seeing was merely the tattered robes of the Ringwraiths, strung up like laundry on two trees. Or like trophies, he thought, and shivered. The robes hung empty, the animating force within them fled: just rags and scraps of leather.
Once the Men of Numenor, in their pride, cut down leagues of forest. These two were lords among them, and we do not forget.
Bilbo swallowed a whimper as he realized the thought was not his own.
We have no power to destroy such as them, but we can rip them from their corporeal form and send them mewling back to their master. And so we have done.
There seemed to be a moonbeam, a shaft of pale light between Bilbo and the tattered remnants of the Nazgul, but there was no break in the tree canopy above them to let in such a light. Faint motes danced within it like sparks of dust, rising and falling. It was a good hunt, the best in centuries, said the ice-cold voice in Bilbo’s mind.
“What--what are you?” Bilbo managed.
A curl of lazy amusement twined around him. You could see us clearly if you were to put on that trinket in your pocket.
“No thank you,” Bilbo said quickly. “You’re--the Avari, right?
Unwilling? The word was a contemptuous whip-flick. So the cowed and the cowards call us, those who heel at another’s beck and call. We are the Sadorwaith, the Faithful, Those Who Remain. A pause. And what are you, small being?
“I am--I am Bilbo Baggins.” He drew himself up to his fullest height. “A hobbit.”
A curious little thing. The voice in his mind was different this time; looking to his left he saw what seemed to be a scattering of pale green fireflies rising and falling in a column. It might be fun to play with him. We could send him dancing, dancing! Across the ferns and the thorny briars, into the bogs and the cold cold waters… The voice trailed off into something like a yawn. But the hunt was so exciting, and we spent much of our powers in sending the Numenoreans away…
Leave him be, Uial, murmured the first voice. Leave him be and rest a while.
“My companions!” Bilbo’s voice was too loud in the drowsy glade. “Will you let my companions pass as well?”
A flicker of cold amusement. Perhaps. Perhaps.
“Promise me!”
The flicker turned to a crackle like breaking ice, all humor gone. Do not try us, small thing. Be on your way, and be thankful there was more pleasurable quarry than yourself this night.
The glimmering lights faded away and Bilbo felt himself alone again in the clearing, with only the two ragged, empty robes swaying in the breeze for company.
Shivering, he pushed onwards, heading east.
He lost track of time as he trudged on: he walked when he could and rested when he had to, his sleep uneasy and troubled with whispering voices. Sometimes he called his companions’ names, but he never heard an answer. It seemed, as he walked, that the air grew warmer, the chill of winter giving way to the softness of spring. The ground grew more yielding, and there were sprouts of new growth peeking through the soil. He was hungry, he realized--as hungry as if he had gone days without eating rather than just one night, a ravenous pinching in his middle, but he dared not eat anything under the indifferent stars of Taur-nu-Eleni.
After a long and timeless time, he heard the sound of a rushing river further to the east, and he hurried toward it. The brambly evergreens thinned at last to reveal a wide, shallow river, dotted with sand bars. Beyond it, on the far side, was a thick stand of birch trees, their white branches veiled in a mist of fresh green leaves. Somehow the sight of them after nothing but gloomy pines and firs lifted Bilbo’s spirits, and he eagerly picked his way across the river. It was icy cold, but the sand felt good beneath his weary toes, and he stopped to use it to scrub the grime of his long walk from his feet.
He reached the other side mostly dry, shivering with cold and with relief, for the oppressive weight of Taur-nu-Eleni seemed to fade as he crossed the water. Wherever he was, he felt sure somehow that it was someplace different. He pushed through the line of birch trees--and stopped with a gasp of wonder.
He was in a garden.
A vista of snowdrops and crocuses stretched out before him, dotted with forsythia bushes in riotous golden bloom. Here and there a tree leaned over the flowerbeds: ash and hawthorn and birch, one of them a cherry tree covered with pale pink blossoms. Winding through the beds of flowers were paths not of stone or pebbles, but lanes where rosemary and thyme were planted like a carpet. He stepped onto the green path and the sweet scent of the crushed herbs reached his nose, causing a wave of dizzy homesickness to rush over him.
“Hello?” he called softly, but there was no answer. He heard a lark singing softly, but there were no other voices; it was as if there were no one there at all. And yet it was clearly not a wild land but a garden, well-tended and cared for.
He wandered the garden in wonder, gazing around him in utter delight at the radiant cherry-trees and the nodding daffodils, exclaiming softly at the view around each corner: “How lovely!” or “Exquisite!” He drank in the scenery like it was wine, and even the pained hunger in his belly seemed to recede as he padded down the flowery lanes.
But both wonder and hunger were banished utterly when he turned a corner and saw Thorin Oakenshield lying at the foot of a gnarled beech tree.
For a moment Bilbo’s heart thudded to a stop, for he lay so still. Then he saw one mail-clad hand move slightly, and before he could think he was running along the green path toward him, calling out his name and throwing himself down on his knees next to him under the spreading canopy of leaves.
Thorin’s eyes flickered open and he smiled at the sight of Bilbo’s face. “Heart’s-ease,” he murmured. “I feared I had lost you forever.”
For a moment Bilbo couldn’t speak at all, but merely clung to him, grasping handfuls of his long dark hair as if to tether himself to the reality of his presence. “But you’re hurt!” he cried as his hands came away smudged with half-dried blood.
“It is nothing serious,” Thorin said. “I was unconscious for a time, and then I wandered long in those fell woods.” He shivered. “I heard voices--my father’s, and my brother’s. And I nearly followed them, but then I thought of you and kept going east. Have you seen any of the others?” The hope faded from his face when Bilbo shook his head. “We must have faith that they too will resist the lures of that place, and find their way...here.”
He and Bilbo gazed together at the lush flowerbeds and blossoming trees. “Where are we?” Bilbo asked.
“I know not. Our maps held nothing of this.”
“It should be creepy,” said Bilbo. “A garden with no gardeners, perfect but empty. And last I knew it was only mid-February, far too early for even these spring flowers.”
“Unless we wandered in Taur-nu-Eleni for longer than we knew,” Thorin pointed out. “Time seemed...strange there.”
“Either way, this place should be foreboding. And yet…” He breathed in deeply, smelling mint and loam. “It’s so very beautiful, and peaceful.”
“I have felt revived since the moment I entered it,” Thorin agreed. He sat up gingerly, leaning against the tree behind him. “I have only seen the Shire in winter. Is it like this in the spring?”
“Like this, yes. But this is far beyond any garden of the Shire.”
“It puts to shame the gardens we built in the heart of the Lonely Mountain,” Thorin said ruefully. “I was so proud of them, but in comparison to this, they are paltry indeed.”
Bilbo bit his lip, and Thorin apparently caught the chagrin on his face, because he ran his hand softly through Bilbo’s curls and pulled him close.
“You shall see them one day,” he said. “And indeed, even if you choose never to visit Erebor, they brought me joy to craft and nurture. I came to love the little shoots and the furling leaves, the promise of the opening bud. I have no regrets in that regard, Bilbo.”
Bilbo was about to say something, but suddenly a voice spoke nearby:
“A garden...in a mountain?”
It was a woman’s voice, low and resonant,and somehow reminded Bilbo of the sound of his mother’s voice when she had held him to her heart and sang him lullabies as a small child.
He and Thorin stared around them, but the garden was empty save for themselves. The voice came again:
“A garden...built by dwarves?”
There was a vast creaking and rustling, and the tree they were leaning against suddenly shifted, bending over them despite there being no wind to move it. Bilbo and Thorin looked up at the tree looming over them, and Bilbo realized with a shock that there was a face carved into it--no, not carved into it, but a natural part of it, the gray bark seamed into a lined face crowned with fresh green leaves. But it was the eyes that held him most.
They were hazel, green and gold as a new spring, and though they were serious a smile lurked somehow within them as a rose lurks inside a bud or a butterfly within its cocoon. Bilbo stared in amazement and heard Thorin make a choking sound of panic as he scrambled to his feet.
“Hoom,” said the tree.
Chapter Summary: Lost in the woods of the Dark Elves, Bilbo searches for his companions.
Relationship: Thorin/Bilbo
Characters: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield
Fandom: Hobbit/Lord of the Rings. Begins in 2968, twenty-six years after the events of "Clarity of Vision" and fifty years before the canonical events of "Lord of the Rings." Thus, characters' ages and the geopolitical situation will be different than LoTR canon!
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2700
Summary: Thorin Oakenshield and Bilbo Baggins have been parted for many years now, despite the love they bear each other. Now Thorin's research has uncovered a dire threat to Middle Earth--the Ring he carried a little while and then gave to Bilbo. Together with a group of companions composed of the different Free Peoples of Middle Earth, they must attempt to destroy the artifact before its Dark Lord can re-capture it.
The scent of crushed juniper branches, pungent and piercing, was the first thing Bilbo Baggins became aware of. He started to sit up, then groaned and fell backwards again, his head spinning and his muscles shrieking protest. Juniper needles prickled the small of his back, but he ignored them as he tried to cast his mind back, tried to remember how he had ended up in a juniper bush in a--it was a forest, wasn’t it?
He cracked his eyes open with an effort and looked up at the canopy of dark evergreens, their dusky branches nearly blocking out the dim sunlight. There was a hushed gurgle of a creek nearby, a rich scent of loam and decay all around him. The woods were still and silent, with not even a breeze stirring the massive pines and firs.
And yet Bilbo felt somehow that he could sense a sort of vast wind moving, a current of dark malice that ebbed and flowed around him unseen.
He staggered to his feet. “Thorin?” he croaked, staring around him wildly. They had been running, he remembered that. Thorin had been carrying him, screaming at him to--to do something. With a flash of terrifying clarity, Bilbo remembered a searing weight on his finger, remembered looking behind them to see--
With a gasp of horror, he wrenched his mind away from the vision of the two Ringwraiths bearing down on them, their undead eyes kindled with hatred and hunger, their withered hands reaching for him. Scrabbling in his pocket, he reassured himself that he had put the Ring away without dropping it.
“Thorin?” he called again. “Dis? Gimli?”
The forest swallowed up his words as if they had never been spoken. He was alone.
Alone! He felt his knees trembling and it took an effort to keep standing. Always Thorin had been with him, giving him strength, helping him in. Now here he was alone in a haunted wood, far from Thorin--who could be dead or dying, slain by those terrible wraiths! The Nazgul could be coming for him next, slipping silently through the trees, coming up behind him--
He whirled frantically, his eyes scanning trees that seemed somehow to twist and writhe as if caught in a gale. But there was no wind! A flicker of cool laughter seemed to twine with the gurgle of the little creek, licking his ears, and Bilbo shuddered. Better perhaps to simply lie down here in the bracken and wait for death, better perhaps to simply let his bones moulder here, becoming one with the earth, vines binding his bones, flowers blooming in his eyesockets, at peace and beautiful, so beautiful…
Perhaps it was that he had started to grow used to voices in his head that were not his, perhaps it was just natural hobbit resilience, but Bilbo shook his head fiercely. “No!” he said out loud. “I’m not staying here. I’m keeping away from those dark riders, and I’m going to find Thorin and the rest. So there,” he added as if he were a stubborn child, and the flicker of laughter beneath the brook’s song took on a silvery edge before fading out.
“East, east, we were to go east,” Bilbo muttered. It was difficult to tell the angle of the sun through the thick trees, but eventually he set off with the sunset at his back as best he could.
It was an eerie, unpleasant path he trod: the sense of swirling malice like a silent and invisible thunderstorm hovered over everything, and strange lights flickered in the distance. Once he thought he heard Thorin’s voice back the way he came and hurried back, calling to him, but then he heard that whisper of crackling laughter again. Gritting his teeth, he turned his back on the voice and kept going east, ignoring the lights that looked like torches beckoning off his route. As twilight fell and the woods grew ever darker, green eyes flickered at him hungrily here and there in the undergrowth, but he kept putting one foot in front of the other, stubbornly moving forward as the wood swam and swirled around him like a dream. There was a rhythm to it, a sort of blankness of mind and focus of will necessary to keep moving forward through an atmosphere that seemed to thicken and curdle, freighted with cruelty and a terrible weight of ages.
At one point, the strange not-wind broke into a peal of eldritch triumph, a tintinnabulation of silvery satisfaction that left Bilbo clutching at his head and crying out, trying to block something that was not a sound from his mind. Then it ceased, leaving Bilbo reeling and staring around himself as a kind of silent purr resonated through the forest. “If I had to describe it,” he would say many years later to fauntlings when they asked, “I would say it felt like a cat licking its paws after a large bowl of rich cream. Or after it had caught a particularly tasty canary.” The fauntlings would shiver with terrified delight, and Bilbo would try not to remember too well how it had felt to be surrounded by that sense of replete malevolence.
He kept walking forward, trying to ignore the unpleasant shudders running up and down his spine, trying not to dwell on terrible images: Estel sinking into a slough, swallowed up forever; Dis pinned down by wolves; Thorin staring upward with empty eyes, a vine wrapped around his throat. One foot in front of the other, Bilbo, he told himself. Don’t think.
And he was doing fairly well at that, plodding forward diligently, until the moment that he raised his eyes and saw the two cloaked Ringwraiths wrapped in their dark robes hovering just in front of him.
A shriek of terror bubbled from his throat, and he fell backwards onto the soft earth, trying to scramble backwards while keeping his eyes fixed on his hunters. But the Ringwraiths didn’t move, didn’t stir, and after a moment Bilbo realized that what he was seeing was merely the tattered robes of the Ringwraiths, strung up like laundry on two trees. Or like trophies, he thought, and shivered. The robes hung empty, the animating force within them fled: just rags and scraps of leather.
Once the Men of Numenor, in their pride, cut down leagues of forest. These two were lords among them, and we do not forget.
Bilbo swallowed a whimper as he realized the thought was not his own.
We have no power to destroy such as them, but we can rip them from their corporeal form and send them mewling back to their master. And so we have done.
There seemed to be a moonbeam, a shaft of pale light between Bilbo and the tattered remnants of the Nazgul, but there was no break in the tree canopy above them to let in such a light. Faint motes danced within it like sparks of dust, rising and falling. It was a good hunt, the best in centuries, said the ice-cold voice in Bilbo’s mind.
“What--what are you?” Bilbo managed.
A curl of lazy amusement twined around him. You could see us clearly if you were to put on that trinket in your pocket.
“No thank you,” Bilbo said quickly. “You’re--the Avari, right?
Unwilling? The word was a contemptuous whip-flick. So the cowed and the cowards call us, those who heel at another’s beck and call. We are the Sadorwaith, the Faithful, Those Who Remain. A pause. And what are you, small being?
“I am--I am Bilbo Baggins.” He drew himself up to his fullest height. “A hobbit.”
A curious little thing. The voice in his mind was different this time; looking to his left he saw what seemed to be a scattering of pale green fireflies rising and falling in a column. It might be fun to play with him. We could send him dancing, dancing! Across the ferns and the thorny briars, into the bogs and the cold cold waters… The voice trailed off into something like a yawn. But the hunt was so exciting, and we spent much of our powers in sending the Numenoreans away…
Leave him be, Uial, murmured the first voice. Leave him be and rest a while.
“My companions!” Bilbo’s voice was too loud in the drowsy glade. “Will you let my companions pass as well?”
A flicker of cold amusement. Perhaps. Perhaps.
“Promise me!”
The flicker turned to a crackle like breaking ice, all humor gone. Do not try us, small thing. Be on your way, and be thankful there was more pleasurable quarry than yourself this night.
The glimmering lights faded away and Bilbo felt himself alone again in the clearing, with only the two ragged, empty robes swaying in the breeze for company.
Shivering, he pushed onwards, heading east.
He lost track of time as he trudged on: he walked when he could and rested when he had to, his sleep uneasy and troubled with whispering voices. Sometimes he called his companions’ names, but he never heard an answer. It seemed, as he walked, that the air grew warmer, the chill of winter giving way to the softness of spring. The ground grew more yielding, and there were sprouts of new growth peeking through the soil. He was hungry, he realized--as hungry as if he had gone days without eating rather than just one night, a ravenous pinching in his middle, but he dared not eat anything under the indifferent stars of Taur-nu-Eleni.
After a long and timeless time, he heard the sound of a rushing river further to the east, and he hurried toward it. The brambly evergreens thinned at last to reveal a wide, shallow river, dotted with sand bars. Beyond it, on the far side, was a thick stand of birch trees, their white branches veiled in a mist of fresh green leaves. Somehow the sight of them after nothing but gloomy pines and firs lifted Bilbo’s spirits, and he eagerly picked his way across the river. It was icy cold, but the sand felt good beneath his weary toes, and he stopped to use it to scrub the grime of his long walk from his feet.
He reached the other side mostly dry, shivering with cold and with relief, for the oppressive weight of Taur-nu-Eleni seemed to fade as he crossed the water. Wherever he was, he felt sure somehow that it was someplace different. He pushed through the line of birch trees--and stopped with a gasp of wonder.
He was in a garden.
A vista of snowdrops and crocuses stretched out before him, dotted with forsythia bushes in riotous golden bloom. Here and there a tree leaned over the flowerbeds: ash and hawthorn and birch, one of them a cherry tree covered with pale pink blossoms. Winding through the beds of flowers were paths not of stone or pebbles, but lanes where rosemary and thyme were planted like a carpet. He stepped onto the green path and the sweet scent of the crushed herbs reached his nose, causing a wave of dizzy homesickness to rush over him.
“Hello?” he called softly, but there was no answer. He heard a lark singing softly, but there were no other voices; it was as if there were no one there at all. And yet it was clearly not a wild land but a garden, well-tended and cared for.
He wandered the garden in wonder, gazing around him in utter delight at the radiant cherry-trees and the nodding daffodils, exclaiming softly at the view around each corner: “How lovely!” or “Exquisite!” He drank in the scenery like it was wine, and even the pained hunger in his belly seemed to recede as he padded down the flowery lanes.
But both wonder and hunger were banished utterly when he turned a corner and saw Thorin Oakenshield lying at the foot of a gnarled beech tree.
For a moment Bilbo’s heart thudded to a stop, for he lay so still. Then he saw one mail-clad hand move slightly, and before he could think he was running along the green path toward him, calling out his name and throwing himself down on his knees next to him under the spreading canopy of leaves.
Thorin’s eyes flickered open and he smiled at the sight of Bilbo’s face. “Heart’s-ease,” he murmured. “I feared I had lost you forever.”
For a moment Bilbo couldn’t speak at all, but merely clung to him, grasping handfuls of his long dark hair as if to tether himself to the reality of his presence. “But you’re hurt!” he cried as his hands came away smudged with half-dried blood.
“It is nothing serious,” Thorin said. “I was unconscious for a time, and then I wandered long in those fell woods.” He shivered. “I heard voices--my father’s, and my brother’s. And I nearly followed them, but then I thought of you and kept going east. Have you seen any of the others?” The hope faded from his face when Bilbo shook his head. “We must have faith that they too will resist the lures of that place, and find their way...here.”
He and Bilbo gazed together at the lush flowerbeds and blossoming trees. “Where are we?” Bilbo asked.
“I know not. Our maps held nothing of this.”
“It should be creepy,” said Bilbo. “A garden with no gardeners, perfect but empty. And last I knew it was only mid-February, far too early for even these spring flowers.”
“Unless we wandered in Taur-nu-Eleni for longer than we knew,” Thorin pointed out. “Time seemed...strange there.”
“Either way, this place should be foreboding. And yet…” He breathed in deeply, smelling mint and loam. “It’s so very beautiful, and peaceful.”
“I have felt revived since the moment I entered it,” Thorin agreed. He sat up gingerly, leaning against the tree behind him. “I have only seen the Shire in winter. Is it like this in the spring?”
“Like this, yes. But this is far beyond any garden of the Shire.”
“It puts to shame the gardens we built in the heart of the Lonely Mountain,” Thorin said ruefully. “I was so proud of them, but in comparison to this, they are paltry indeed.”
Bilbo bit his lip, and Thorin apparently caught the chagrin on his face, because he ran his hand softly through Bilbo’s curls and pulled him close.
“You shall see them one day,” he said. “And indeed, even if you choose never to visit Erebor, they brought me joy to craft and nurture. I came to love the little shoots and the furling leaves, the promise of the opening bud. I have no regrets in that regard, Bilbo.”
Bilbo was about to say something, but suddenly a voice spoke nearby:
“A garden...in a mountain?”
It was a woman’s voice, low and resonant,and somehow reminded Bilbo of the sound of his mother’s voice when she had held him to her heart and sang him lullabies as a small child.
He and Thorin stared around them, but the garden was empty save for themselves. The voice came again:
“A garden...built by dwarves?”
There was a vast creaking and rustling, and the tree they were leaning against suddenly shifted, bending over them despite there being no wind to move it. Bilbo and Thorin looked up at the tree looming over them, and Bilbo realized with a shock that there was a face carved into it--no, not carved into it, but a natural part of it, the gray bark seamed into a lined face crowned with fresh green leaves. But it was the eyes that held him most.
They were hazel, green and gold as a new spring, and though they were serious a smile lurked somehow within them as a rose lurks inside a bud or a butterfly within its cocoon. Bilbo stared in amazement and heard Thorin make a choking sound of panic as he scrambled to his feet.
“Hoom,” said the tree.