Bilbo Baggins happily wandered off to fiddle with his new weapon. He was already picturing himself returning to the Shire, entering the local shooting contest, and soaking up the cheers of the crowd. He still hadn't worked out the mechanics of the thing, but he could tell it beat throwing rocks.
Bella, meanwhile, was up at the front of the column, working out the route with Thorin.
She was being patient about it. "Thorin, why are you so set against Rivendell? Going around it is only going to cost us time."
Thorin's face didn't budge from its usual stone. "Don't buy into all those flowery adjectives from the books. Graceful, just, kindhearted—all of it horseshit! Those are elvish books. I'll tell you how it really is: elves are a pack of selfish cowards! They're weak, they're low, and there's not a scrap of honor in the lot of them! They won't let us through Rivendell."
The two of them had been over this several times now. Bella had expected Thorin's mule-headed temper, but it was still infuriating. The stubborn bastard was like a boulder.
Elves were one thing—but why was he shouting at her? Only the Ring of Fire kept her temper in check. The old Bella would have washed her hands of him by now.
"Thorin, let's say for the sake of argument you're right. I don't know your world. All my knowledge comes from books. I'll admit that. That's precisely why I'm talking to you about this in private...
Forget the elves for a moment. Let's talk about the Lonely Mountain. By your own account it holds wealth beyond counting. Where I come from, wealth tempts even the best of men—and we're talking about a mountain's worth. If you don't have the muscle to defend that fortune, you need to rally more of your people. Or find allies along the way..."
Bella genuinely didn't get Thorin's thinking. Her own view was closer to "bloodlines don't make a king—soldiers and strong horses do." Walk up to the Lonely Mountain with thirteen dwarves instead of a few hundred or a few thousand troops, and even if you somehow took the mountain, what then? A whole mountain's fortune drops neatly into your pocket? That was like sending a three-year-old to market with a bag of gold.
Either you muster every dwarf you command and march on the mountain like a parade—or you cut deals with every power along the way. Ask for money, for soldiers, for weapons, and promise a share afterward.
Unfortunately for her, this ruthlessly practical outlook was incompatible with Thorin Oakenshield's blood-right fundamentalism.
In Thorin's view, he was the King under the Mountain. That was what his ancestors had handed him. Therefore the treasure inside the mountain was all his. His to share with whomever he pleased. That wasn't necessarily wrong in a general sense—but it was wrong here, because the residents of Lake-town and King Thranduil of the Woodland Realm were very much not on the same page!
Lake-town at least had the excuse that its townsfolk needed compensation and money to rebuild.
Bard, acting governor of Lake-town, had Thorin's pledge that a share of the treasure would go to Lake-town's people. But was that pledge actually legitimate? From a human point of view: Lake-town deserved compensation. From the dwarvish point of view: not so much. The pledge had been extracted while the Lake-town population had disarmed Thorin and surrounded him completely. It was more humiliating than a surrender treaty.
It was the same dynamic as those scam bus tours. They corner you and won't let you leave until you've forked over a couple thousand. After being coerced like that, did anyone really expect the tourists to honor the contract after the fact and feel grateful?
The facts were: Lake-town provided a little help—a single small boat, a change of clothes per person, one weapon each—and on the back of that a whole town wanted to sit around waiting for their cut.
Looking at it purely from the result, though, they had at least given something. Expecting something in return was defensible, barely.
And what had the Woodland Realm elves offered? Nothing. Not a single thing. Legolas's old man—Daddy Handsome, as the dwarves called him—was just going to march his elvish army up in broad daylight and loot the place. Not even a pretext he could say out loud!
What was the root cause of all this? Greed? Sure, no denying that. But also: Thorin and his crew were weak. Weakness was the original sin.
Thirteen dwarves versus tens of thousands of soldiers meant nothing. They'd get robbed because they could be robbed. Bloodline? Bloodline could sit down.
Bella considered herself right. History was going to prove her right, too—the elves and the men of Lake-town did not, in the end, respect Thorin's bloodline claim.
"Thorin, I know you have a plan B. Balin told me you and Dáin Ironfoot—the king of the Iron Hills—are cousins. That's the ace you're holding, isn't it? So why not just lay it on the table early? Yes, if it comes down to swords drawn, the confrontation might resolve the way you're hoping—or it might blow up into a full war."
Thorin was eerily calm. His expression even carried a touch of pride. "We dwarves don't fear war. Do you know how many dwarf kings have died in battle? I'll tell you: past counting. I'll say it again—you can't truly understand elves from books. Elves are cowards. The second Dáin shows up with the Iron Hills army, they'll scatter like startled rabbits, right back to their burrows."
Bella stared blankly at him for a few seconds, then pressed a palm to her forehead.
She got it now. Thorin had a plan—he was saving it for the money shot. He wanted to pose.
The elvish army would march up, and then the dwarven army would come roaring in from behind, and Thorin would stand on the rampart with a crooked smile on his face and do the whole grim-warlord routine. Wouldn't that be great?
"Believe me. We dwarves are far more united than those elves." Thorin dropped each word like a weight.
Bella was almost out of arguments. She was groping for something else to say when Kíli galloped up to them on a fast pony.
"Both of you! There are orc warg-riders on our tail! They're less than half a day behind us!" The handsomest dwarf in the company handled scouting. Unlike his hammer-and-axe kinsmen, his bow work and horsemanship were the best among the dwarves. Right now he was cutting straight through their argument.
"How many of them?"
"Can we gather them in one spot?"
The two of them asked at the same instant.
Thorin, a seasoned war-captain, wanted to know enemy numbers first.
Bella, classic mage-brain, wanted to bait them into a cluster so she could AOE them.
Kíli didn't want to offend his mule-headed uncle, and he didn't want to offend Bella the mage either. He answered both questions in one breath.
"Looks like a lot of them. Maybe over a hundred and fifty. They're all around us."
Their side, hobbit included, was fifteen. The enemy outnumbered them ten to one.
After the earlier messy brawl, Bella had built up some sense of her own command ability: a theoretical giant, a practical midget. What she'd learned from novels and TV did not hold up under real combat. For now, the smart move was to talk less, watch more, and soak up experience from people who actually knew what they were doing.
"Command isn't my strong suit. You call it." She handed the decision to Thorin.
Thorin surveyed the terrain around them. It was flat country the whole way—nothing for cover.
Their horses might be fast, but they weren't outrunning wargs.