A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Eighteenth Entry - Demons

I knew the moment I woke that I was late to see Thranduil. I rolled off my mattress, drank the water that had been left for me and left the food, and pulled myself up at the bars. I apparently wasn’t done being tired yet. “Oy!” I called through the bars. “I’m up, may I go sing stuff?”

Soviel appeared around the corner and unlocked the door. “Are you feeling well enough?”

“It’s my head that hurts, not my throat.” I resolutely stepped through the opening and irritably swayed. Soviel righted me, and though it still made me want to grumble to do it, I took her hand.

It took me longer than usual to get up the stairs, but with my wonky balance that wasn’t entirely surprising. I was focusing on my feet as I wobbled up the last several stairs so I didn’t notice until I was on the platform, Soviel with her hands held near to make sure I wouldn’t drift over again, that both Thranduil and Legolas were there, the latter being seated on the low wall surrounding the platform with paperwork of his own. Thranduil stood beside him overlooking the work. I knew they’d already been told of my new injury by the way their eyes touched on the hair over my right ear before touching on my face.

“How is your balance?” Legolas asked first, startling me. I rarely saw him, so I supposed he wasn’t as interested by me as the other elves seemed to be. “Oloran said that you had preexisting difficulties.”

I glowered at him. “I asked Oloran not to tell.”

“It isn’t his place to withhold information strictly upon your request,” he smoothly reminded me, and I only sighed.

“I’m much better when I’m upright and not moving. I was hanging upside down from a ceiling when I had the last bit of dizziness, and that dizziness is entirely unrelated to this one. I suppose he told you what I told him on the matter?” I was standing with my fingers linked together behind me, as I unconsciously did when being interrogated, as I wryly saw it. My hands tended to come together in front of me when I was the one asking questions.

Legolas nodded. “He did. Poison in your water source.”

“It’s a come and go problem and it always goes away. This will go away too, it’s just more problematic because it’s nearly constant for now.” I was glad I hadn’t rebraided my hair yet. It let me hide the majority of the cuts.

“Are you able to walk unaided?”

“If I must. I’d not be happy about doing it on your spectacularly narrow walkways though.”

“Would you prefer a chair?”

“Nope, thank you. I like standing.”

The four of us sat or stood there in a long quiet. There were a lot of these among the elves, where they were rare among the dwarves. They were starting to grate on my nerves. At last the king opened his mouth with a question I was glad to lay out an answer for. “Does your homeland often engage in wars?”

“We’ve had a great number of them throughout my realm,” I briskly replied, my hands adjusting themselves. “My homeland has been involved in perhaps more than its share of them, being a relatively young country.”

“How young?”

I chewed my lip. History hadn’t been my favorite. Especially not ‘recent’ history. “Two to three hundred years, depending on how you define a country as being ‘established’.

“Still in its infancy,” he remarked, and I gave a dry, sardonic grin.

“You’d be amazed at the trouble this baby nation gets itself into. Anyhow.” I launched into fairest, edited summary of the wars we’d been involved in through the last hundred years, to start, since they were the ones that were ‘closest’ in my mind. Thranduil was interested in the causes of the wars, the reasons each country had gotten involved, their reasons for the alliances they’d formed and a number of other things such as strategy and terrain and longevity of each of the wars and the battles within. I couldn’t remember much of the internal battles, but a few of the strategies I remembered, and the terrain in particular. I liked ground- and dirt-related things.