Chapter Text
No one told Fili what happened. He saw it all, but no one told him. It was years before he put it all together.
He understood some things, of course, as he lay beneath the crushing weight of his father’s body, the smell of blood filling his nostrils. He understood that Papa had stopped moving, and what that meant. He was young, but their lives were entwined with farms and pelt-trappers and rat-chasers, and he had seen animals die. He wept, but he wept silently, because the orcs were still there and Papa had lain on top of him as he died and whispered, “Hush, hush, don’t move,” and that was the last thing he ever said to Fili.
He understood that they were hurting Mama. She had screamed, a sound full of rage, and cursed them, in such words as he had never heard his beautiful, regal mother use in her life. He thought they were killing Mama, but time went on and he could still hear her sobs. He lay still. They mustn’t find him. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to help Mama, but much more than that he didn’t want to die.
They would have killed Mama. He was sure of it. But one of the hunters who had been riding with them, for safety – fat lot of good that had done – had ridden fast away as soon as he saw the orcs coming. And soon (not soon enough, but better late than never, Mama said later, as if the soup had simply gone cold from the waiting) there came two dozen men from the town carrying what weapons they had. No dwarves. There were no other dwarves in town that day, apart from Mama and Papa and Fili.
The humans killed many of the orcs and chased the others away. Still Fili didn’t move. He was too afraid. He heard the humans calling to Mama, heard her say in a voice raked raw, “I can stand, leave me be,” and then, “Give me something, please.”
There were large feet standing in Fili’s eyeline, filthy and clad in sandals. “Poor fellow,” someone said, as a second pair of feet joined the first, and the second replied. “Her old man, you think?”
Then suddenly hands were grasping Papa’s body and lifting him away, and Fili heard a strangled cry. One of the humans yelled. “Hey! Hey, dwarf-woman! Here!”
He heard Mama scream. “Fili! Fili!” and he curled into himself, blinking against the sun, and Mama ran to him and hauled him into her arms and kissed his head, crying much more than when the orcs had been hurting her. “My baby, my baby, oh, I thought they’d killed you, oh my darling,” she sobbed. Pressed against her, Fili couldn’t see her face, only a curve of bloody lacerations on her neck, and again three or four times on her breast, her naked breast beneath the cloak the humans had given her to cover herself.
The next day, Uncle Thorin and the others came back. Fili had only faint memories of his father’s funeral, and of Thorin making himself a bed in the main room of their tiny house, the one that served for kitchen, dining and sitting in the evenings. He remembers Mama was cutting onions while Thorin sat on Papa’s chair with his hands hanging between his knees. He said he would stay as long as his sister needed.
“Needed for what?” she laughed, but there was nothing sweet in it. It wasn’t real laughter. It was like the vinegar left over when laughter has been crushed and left to sour. “What will you do, Thorin? Do you expect me to wilt without a man to chop the wood?”
“I only want to help,” Thorin said patiently.
“I’ll tell you what you can do,” Mama said, sounding gentle, but Fili knew it was the voice she used when Papa refused to take a job because he didn’t like the way a particular man had spoken to him. “You can go and find a wizard, and you ask that wizard for a spell that can let you go back to last week. You go back, you save my husband’s life, you stop four filthy orcs spilling themselves inside of me—”
“Dis, your son can hear—“
“My son already heard!” Mama slammed the knife into the chopping board, burying it an inch into the wood. “My son heard everything! Can you help that, Thorin? Can you take that back?” she tore down the collar of her dress, her bosom shining in the late-afternoon sun and the bloody scabs sitting like insects across her skin. “Can you heal this, keep their teeth from leaving scars? Is that why you’re here?”
Fili began to cry, as quietly as he could. Hush, hush, Papa’s voice whispered in his ear. But it was Thorin who stood up and picked him up, Thorin’s strong arms holding him close and Thorin’s hair that tickled his nose as he pressed his face into Thorin’s shoulder. He took Fili outside, bouncing him and whispering to him that everything would be well. They just had to be patient.
Thorin stayed through all that summer until the trees turned red and then brown and their fingers stretched thin into the sky. Fili began to sleep through the night again, but sometimes he awoke in the darkness and the weight of the blankets felt like his father’s body, and he could smell blood. One of these nights he found that Mama was not lying next to him in the bed they had shared since Papa left. He climbed down onto the floor, the bare boards cold on his feet, and went to the door. Mama kept it well oiled, because sometimes she couldn’t sleep, and then she went outside during the night and didn’t come back for a long time.
Fili opened the door a little. The hearth was burning in the main room. Thorin and Mama sat on the rug in front of the fire, though there were perfectly good chairs right behind them.
“You’re sure?” Thorin asked.
Mama nodded. “I haven’t bled since before Vili died. And I’m beginning to feel a stretch in my belly.”
Thorin looked away into the flames. He put his hand on top of his sister’s and their fingers clenched together. “What should we do?” he asked at last. “Will you… does the midwife…?”
“I’ve spoken to her. She has ways,” Mama shook her head.
“I’m frightened for you, Dis. They say a dwarf running early to battle may have a better chance at life than a woman running early to the midwife.”
“I know,” Mama sighed. “That’s not all, Thorin. Suppose… suppose it isn’t theirs? Suppose… not a monster, but a little brother or sister for Fili? I would… I do want that.”
“And if it isn’t?” Thorin asked.
“Then I’ll end it myself,” Mama said softly. “A thing like that… no. It would be a mercy for it as well as for me,” her hand squeezed around Thorin’s. “Will you help me?”
“I will do anything for you,” her brother replied, and Fili shut the door and slipped back into bed. He’d understood only a little of what they said, but he knew the word ‘midwife’ and he knew ‘brother or sister’. He fell asleep smiling that night and only stirred a little when Mama came to bed, kissing his brow as she settled beside him.
The winter bit cold and hard while Mama and Thorin worked even harder to keep the woodshed and their stomachs full. Fili did not tell them of what he had overheard, but he knew that brothers and sisters came from women, grew inside dwarrowdams like roots in the earth. He had seen human women with their skirts pushed far out like they were hiding pots under there. But Mama did not look like there was anything inside her. She looked only sick. She did not smile. Her hair grew lank, shadows hung under her eyes and her voice was thin and snappish when she spoke. Thorin began to prepare meals in the evening because Mama was too tired. Fili wondered if something had gone wrong. Babies died all the time, he knew. Perhaps the baby had gone wherever Papa had gone.
Then one day, Mama came home early and told Fili she was going to be ill tonight. She walked around and around the house, her cheeks flushed, her hands holding her back as if she had slept on tree roots. Soon Thorin returned from the town, spoke to her in hushed tones, then went away and came back with a human woman. She had grey hair tied neatly back from her face, and carried a heavy basket at her side. The sun was dying in the west, red and burning.
Fili tugged on his mother’s elbow. “I’m hungry.”
“There’s oatcakes in the pantry,” she pushed him away. “Stay out here in the kitchen. Don’t come into the bedroom, no matter what you hear.”
Fili ate an oakcake. The woman and Thorin went back and forth from the well, filling up pots and buckets of water, some of which they set on the fire. They told Fili to stay out of the way and shut the bedroom door behind them, and he sat under the table.
Sometime after that, Mama cried out, over and over. It was like when the orcs had been hurting her. Fili put his hands over his ears and felt tears on his cheeks.
Hush, hush, Papa whispered, and Fili bit back his sobs.
At last he could stand it no longer. Mama was hurting and he had to help. He went to the bedroom door and opened it, the well-oiled hinge turning silently. He slipped in the gap and shut it behind him.
No one saw him, and he didn’t understand all that he saw in turn. Mama sat on the bed, naked from head to toe, with Thorin behind her, his arms wrapped around her. The human woman knelt at the end of the bed, between Mama’s legs, with a bucket of water beside her. She was speaking in a low purr. “Come on, now, dwarrowdam, come on now,” she was saying. “Make your grandmothers proud. You’re almost there.”
Mama cried out again. Thorin was whispering to her, pushing away the strands of hair that hung and caught in her mouth. Mama sobbed, “Why isn’t he here? Where’s my husband? The bastard, the bastard, how could he – how could he leave me –”
“I know,” Thorin clutched her hand. “I know, Dis.”
“I can see the wee head, lovey,” the woman said. “It’s almost over.”
And then she was standing carefully, holding something in her outstretched hands. It looked like nothing to Fili: a ball of grey rags, perhaps, trailing a twisted rope and glinting in the light of the candles. The woman’s eyes were wide and she looked up at Thorin. “It’s as you said.”
“No,” Mama wept. “No, no, no. It can’t be.”
Thorin laid her back against the pillows and took the wretched thing from the woman. It had begun to move, and for a moment the movement seemed hideous to Fili, as if a piece of dead steak had come alive on his plate. Then the shapes resolved into tiny limbs, the bulge of a head and the flutter in and out of ribs. Thorin was holding it away from his body as if it were made of nettles. “Dis,” he said. “Dis, are you sure?”
“Do it,” Mama rasped. “Do it. Don’t let me see it.”
Thorin took the wriggling thing around the bed to where the bucket stood waiting. For a moment he simply stared at it, his brow twisted and his mouth set in a hard line. Then he looked up from his burden to the door and his eyes widened as he saw Fili sitting there. Fili had his hands pressed over his mouth.
“Mr Dwarf!” the woman cried suddenly. “She needs you! The afterbirth – hold her, I must make sure – we mustn’t let it tear, hold her!”
As soon as she began to speak, Thorin jerked back to life. He crouched and laid the thing on the bare floor, rushing to his sister’s side.
The thing began to cry. Fili stood up. None of the adults turned towards the wails. They were busy with Mama. Fili went to it, tugged off his vest and carefully picked it up, mimicking the way he had seen women in town carrying their new babes. Mama was crying out in pain. No one was looking at Fili.
He slipped out the door into the other room. The baby was tiny, but he could still only just hold it with one arm while he shut the latch. It was quieter here. Fili crawled under the table and began to rock the baby. Its eyes were squeezed closed and there was a lick of black hair on its head. Its skin had a strange, grey-green tinge beneath the greasy slime that covered it all over, but inside its mouth was a clean pink. He could see that it was a boy. A brother. He was Fili’s brother. He didn’t understand what was wrong with him, why Mama would not want to see him too.
He whispered to the baby as he rocked his whole body back and forth. “Hush, hush.”
The baby’s wailing faded and he closed his tiny mouth.
Inside the bedroom, Fili heard the human woman say, “There, there, you’re finished. You can rest.”
“Is it done?” Mama asked. “Thorin?”
There was the sound of footsteps around the bed. “Where is it? I put it here!”
The door was thrown open. Thorin stood there in his sweat-drenched shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows. Mama turned her head from where she lay and they both rested their gazes on Fili.
“He’s here,” Fili said in a small voice, clutching the baby close. “I have him. He’s safe.”
Mama put her hand to her mouth. Thorin’s face was bloodless, his expression empty and unreadable. He looked at his sister, and she shook her head.
When Kili was only a few days old, Thorin took a pair of scissors, cleaned them, heated them up in the fire and did something to Kili’s ears, while Mama held him still. The baby screamed and screamed afterwards even when they bandaged his head and tried to give him rum to soothe him. His speech came late, stumbling and lisping, but Mama sat with him and made him shape his words over and over until he got them right. And when he did, she smiled at him and told him what a good boy he was, and he clapped his pudgy hands and grinned at her, his dark eyes crinkling up and his laughs turning into hiccoughs.
As he grew taller, Kili’s greyish skin was burned brown by the sun and his hair grew thick and dark on his head, like Thorin’s. He was always thin, so thin that right into his teens, Thorin could still pick him up with one arm and swing him about. When they moved to Ered Luin other dwarrowdams shook their heads and told Mama he might have the honey-sickness, but Kili didn’t have any sickness. He was strong and he was loud and he smiled, all the time, at everyone and everything.
There was wildness too, a fidgety nature that quickly exhausted Mama and Thorin and left only Fili to keep him occupied at the end of a long day. He was quick to anger, first to start a fight, but without the rock-hard stubbornness of his uncle and brother – he was the first to flee from trouble or fear, in his early years. But Thorin patiently, slowly taught him to hold his ground. He worshipped the dust on which his uncle walked, so soon enough Fili could not get him to run away even when it was the sensible thing to do. On more than one occasion, Fili physically carried him away from a scuffle with human children, berating his idiocy the whole way.
Fili had never loved anything as much as he loved his brother.
Sometimes their play fights together got too heated, though, as brothers do together. One day they were wrestling and Fili was winning, as always, and then he felt a blinding pain in his arm. He threw Kili off and ran back to Mama, who was carrying crates into the forge.
“Mama!” he cried. “Mama, it hurts!”
His mother took hold of his arm and looked at the ring of red marks, several of them welling up with blood. “Who did this?”
“Kili. It’s Kili’s fault,” Fili blurted out, just as his brother ran up behind him. Kili was wailing too, because the game had stopped and because he hated when Fili got attention and he didn’t.
It happened so fast. Mama raised her hand, there was a crack like a hammer against a cold the anvil and Kili was flung down on the packed dirt outside the forge. The breath left Fili’s chest, his lips parting and tears drying up in shock. Mama grabbed Kili’s collar and dragged him up. She locked her fingers around Fili’s wrist and wrenched his arm close so that that it was inches from Kili’s face.
“Look what you did!” she roared. “Look what you’ve done to your brother! You must not bite, Kili! You must never bite!”
Kili swayed on his feet, real tears welling up and spilling down his cheeks. The side of his face was already going pink. He whispered, “I’m sorry,” and then sobbed it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
Fili looked up at Mama. Her features were twisting and then something broke in her expression. Her arm extended to grip the pole that supported the forge’s awning, but it didn’t seem to be enough. She sunk onto one knee, and reached out to Kili, drawing him in and wrapping him up in her arms.
“I know, my darling,” she whispered. “I know. Thank you.”
And one day, years after that, Fili would understand. He would learn a little bit about the world here and there, something of evil, something of cruelty. He would remember the weight of his father’s body and the bucket that stood at the end of the bed the night his brother was born. He would touch the shell of Kili’s ear and be batted away, but not before he felt the faint roughness of the scar there. And when his brother laughed he saw teeth that were just a little too sharp, not enough that anyone would notice, not unless they were looking for it. And it would all come together in his mind.
Kili would tilt his head and raise his eyebrows and ask, “What is it? You look like you just sat on a red-hot wire!”
Hush, hush. Fili would make his mouth smile. “It’s nothing.”