Part VI: No Yellow Brick Road

Faith lay in her bedroll, enjoying the feeling of not having to get up. She was snuggled in amongst her blankets, a cocoon of warmth protected from the cold air. This was the first time since she had arrived in this world that she had slept through the night, and now she was enjoying a bit of a lazy morning lie-in. It was only hampered by the lack of a nice soft mattress.

There was a small, eastern facing window in the loft, and Faith could see the deep blue of the sky, with red tinted clouds drifting in it. She could also hear the sounds of movement coming from downstairs, and decided that it was time to get up.

Bilbo and the children were still asleep in their beds when Faith sat up. She looked down from the loft and saw that Marjukka was awake, and moving quietly around in her kitchen. Faith heard the sizzle of bacon hitting a hot frying pan. That sound roused Bilbo from his slumber.

Gandalf was awake. He asked Marjukka if she needed any assistance, and she chased him away, shaking a wooden spoon at him. It seemed that no one was allowed to cook in her kitchen, except for her. Gandalf backed off, and went to sit at the table to wait for her to finish.

Faith could see no sign of Beorn, so she figured he was somewhere outside, maybe prowling around the small farmstead in bear form.

She was still wearing the granny gown that Marjukka had given her, and the rungs of the ladder felt cold against her bare feet as she climbed down from the loft. The ground floor felt even colder. She went over to where her clothes were still hanging by the fireplace and felt them. Everything was dry now, so she gathered them up, along with all the items from her pockets that had been laid out on a shelf, and went into the bathroom to change.

The floor didn’t feel so cold after she got her socks on. Faith put on her boots to make a quick trip to the outhouse. She was a little surprised by how much of an improvement she felt that was over her usual toilet arrangements from the last week. She caught sight of Beorn tending to the ponies in the stable on her way back to the house.

Everyone was up when she got back inside, and breakfast was ready. Bacon and eggs joined their usual fare of pancakes with butter and honey. Faith thought that it was all delicious, and thanked Marjukka as lavishly as her language skills would allow. This resulted in Marjukka giving her a second helping of everything.

Beorn came in as she was finishing her second helping. He declined to eat any of the bacon or eggs, but he did have a huge pile of pancakes, that he washed down with a generous tankard full of milk. He started to talk to Gandalf and Teuvo about the weather. It had been clear and cold when Faith was outside, with only a few wisps of high clouds, but Beorn seemed to be concerned about how it was going to change. She couldn’t follow all of the conversation, but it was clear that he expected it to be snowing before the end of the day.

Gandalf, and Beorn turned their attention to her. “You need a cloak,” Gandalf told her.

Faith shook her head. “No cloak. Not cold.”

“It has been warm, these past days,” said Gandalf. “It will be colder from now on.” It took some repetitions, and several rephrasings to get his meaning across to her.

Faith shrugged. “Not cold.” As long as she kept active, and had lots to eat, she knew she could handle a lot worse weather than what she’d seen so far. Nights might get a little hard for her, but the blankets of her bedroll were pretty warm.

Gandalf, Bilbo and Beorn didn’t seem to be willing to accept that. Marjukka didn’t believe it either. She went to a trunk, and started to dig through it. She came up with an old woollen cloak, with a hood, that looked like it had seen better days. Faith could see that it had been patched multiple times. Marjukka held it up, and called for Faith to come over to her.

Faith bowed to the inevitable, and went to try it on. It was a little big for her—Faith guessed that it was Marjukka’s, and she was a large woman—but that would work out well: she could wear it over her leather jacket. It smelled a little musty, like it had been in the trunk for some time.

Faith still wasn’t happy about taking it. These people were living out in the wilderness, and she didn’t know how good their margin of survival was. Their comfortable house indicated that they were doing quite well, but winter was coming, and she was eating their food, and now taking some of their clothing. She didn’t like the thought that Asla and Jaska might be going cold and hungry before spring came. It seemed that no one was going to take “no” for an answer, though.

They started to pack up to leave for what should be the final leg of their journey to Beorn’s home. If Faith understood correctly, it was about five days journey away—assuming that the weather held, which, judging by Beorn and Gandalf’s conversation that morning was not likely.

Beorn brought the ponies around, and their bedrolls and things were reloaded onto them. Bilbo went to one of the wooden chests strapped to the back of his pony, and started to rummage through it. Faith was surprised to see glints of gold coming from inside it. He pulled out a delicate gold chain, with a jewel pendant that Faith was pretty sure was an emerald.

Bilbo presented the necklace to Marjukka with a bow. “Please accept this small token of our appreciation for your hospitality,” (Of course Faith didn’t exactly understand what he said, but she imagined that it was something like that.)

Marjukka was overwhelmed by the gift, and tried to refuse it, as Faith had tried to refuse her gift of the cloak, and with similar success. Bilbo was quite insistent that she take it. For Faith’s part, she was quite surprised to learn what Bilbo had in his wooden chests. She had listened to his story about the dragon’s treasure, but she hadn’t really believed it. Even though neither Gandalf nor Beorn had ever said anything to indicate that his story wasn’t true, there had always seemed to be a bit of an air of indulgence from Gandalf where Bilbo was concerned. Faith reminded herself to check her assumptions. There seemed to be quite a bit more to Mr. Baggins than met the eye.

The wisps of high cloud that Faith had seen earlier that day were lower and thicker as they set out from the farmstead, and the clouds continued to drop lower and become thicker as the day went on. The sky was completely overcast by noon, and the first flakes of snow started to fall.

The snow fall became heavier, and the wind started to pick up into the afternoon. Faith became glad that she had the cloak, and especially its hood to pull up over her head.

By late afternoon the visibility had dropped to less than a hundred yards, and Beorn was starting to look for a place for them to take shelter from the developing blizzard. They found it in a small copse of fir trees that cut the worst of the wind. Beorn and Faith were able to build a shelter for them and their ponies—a larger version of the lean-to she had made her first night—from some trees that he chopped down with his axe.

That night the only watch was kept on the fire, to make sure that it didn’t go out. The others huddled together under shared blankets, sharing their body warmth too. Faith spent much of the night holding Bilbo in her arms. As the smallest of them, he was the most affected by the cold. She thought about what her friends back home would say about her spending the night sleeping with a midget. She wondered what they were doing. Were they still looking for her? Trying to discover what had happened to her? Was Willow working her magic to track Faith down and bring her back? At the moment, that seemed to be the best shot she had at ever getting home, and it didn’t seem like a good one. She didn’t know if there was anyone here who could send her home. She was holding the local equivalent of a Munchkin in her arms, but there was no yellow brick road; no “off to see the Wizard”; no Glinda to tell her to click her heels together, while saying “there’s no place like home.” She’d already tried the heel thing; it hadn’t worked. She just might be stuck here for the rest of her life.

The blizzard howled on into the next day. Faith could tell that Bilbo was getting worried. “Should we stay here?” he asked the others, during a brief lull in the wind. “Perhaps we could make it back to the farm.”

Gandalf shook his head. “In this weather, it could take us days to reach it, and we could easily pass it in this storm. We are not far from Beorn’s home now. The Forest Gate is only a league from here. If we wait out the storm, we should be able to reach Beorn’s in a week, even through all this snow.”

“Gandalf is right,” said Beorn. “While the blizzard lasts, we cannot move. Once it is over, it will be as easy to go forward as back.”

Bilbo turned to her. “What do you think, Faith?”

Faith was surprised that he’d asked her opinion. She had understood enough of what was said to know what they were discussing, and what their options were, but she didn’t know this land at all. “Your world, me not know. You go, I go,” Bilbo seemed to understand what she meant. He and the others had become quite adept at interpreting her fractured Westron. She would go along with whatever the others decided. With both Gandalf and Beorn in agreement, it looked like they were staying put for a while.

The wind died down that evening, but the snow continued to fall. The temperature was rising, causing it to come down in large clumps of flakes. Faith stood with Beorn, watching the falling snow. “You know, if it wasn’t so damn cold, this would be kinda beautiful,” she told him.

He rumbled a non-committal response, which made sense, since he couldn’t have understood what she said, but something about how he stood told her that he was thinking similar thoughts.

The night was silent. The falling snow absorbed any distant sounds. Faith could hear nothing but the crackling of their fire, but despite the stillness, and the beauty, she felt uneasy: like there was some threat lurking just out of sight; hidden by the darkness and the snow.

She tested her sword in its scabbard, making sure that she could draw it quickly. “Is quiet,” she told Beorn. “Too quiet,” she added in English, with a grin.

Beorn didn’t know why she smiled, but he seemed to share her unease. He shifted momentarily to his bear form, and sniffed at the air. “Wargs!” he growled after shifting back. “Wake Gandalf and Bilbo!”

Faith didn’t know exactly what Wargs were, but she remembered them from Bilbo’s stories, and knew that they were bad news. She quickly roused the others, and told them what Beorn had said.

Gandalf added more wood to their fire, making the flames rise higher. Faith could catch glimpses of shadows, circling their camp at the limit of the light, and the flash of reflected firelight in the eyes of whatever was out there.

She shed her cloak. She wouldn’t be needing it to keep warm for the next little while, and she didn’t want it interfering with her freedom to move. The deep snow made the footing uncertain enough, without having to worry about tripping over its hem.

Beorn moved the ponies into their lean-to, whispering encouragement in their ears to keep them from bolting. Once they were secured there, he shifted back into the large black bear.

Faith and Gandalf stood with their swords drawn, and their backs to the fire. Beorn stood between them. Bilbo stayed behind them, keeping the fire burning brightly, and with his small sword in hand. Faith was glad to see that he put up no false bravado. He knew his limitations in a fight like this. The best thing he could do was stay out of their way, while making sure that the fire continued to burn, and that the ponies didn’t pull free from their tethers.

The Wargs slowly circled in closer. Faith could see them clearly now: large wolves, nearly as big as their ponies. There was a look about them that told Faith that these weren’t normal wolves. There was a malevolent intelligence to their eyes: evaluating her and the others; looking for a weakness in their defences.

One of them decided that Faith was the weak link. It suddenly charged toward her. Faith stood her ground as it rushed at her, until the last instant, when she dodged to the side while bringing her sword down in a slice across the back of its neck, severing its spine. The Warg’s body crumpled, and rolled to a stop behind her, its blood oozing out into the snow.

A blood curdling howl went up from the rest of the Wargs, and they attacked. None of them repeated the mistake that first one had made. They came at Faith and the others in twos and threes. They kept their distance now, trying to bait her into an attack of her own at one of them, which would create an opening for another that would allow it to get at Gandalf or Beorn from behind, or at Bilbo and the ponies. Similar actions were going on all around them, with Wargs trying to get past Gandalf and Beorn.

The Warg that Faith had killed was joined by others. One fell to Beorn’s claws, and another to Glamdring, but there was no indication that this was making the Wargs reconsider their attack. Each new death only seemed to further enrage them. Faith had wounded several more, but none fatally. The snow all around her was splashed with blood, but so far, all of it came from the Wargs.

The combination of snow, packed down by her boots, and the blood from the Wargs was making the footing even more treacherous. The blood melted the snow that it spilled across, but it quickly cooled and froze again, making black ice in the darkness.

A Warg lunged at Faith. She tried to side-step it, but her foot slipped on the ice, forcing her to fall to her knees. The Warg was on her before she could recover. She couldn’t bring her sword up before the Warg was inside its arc. It knocked her over onto her back, and its jaws moved for her throat. She felt a stab of pain as its claws raked her thigh.

Faith held the Warg off with one hand on its throat, and she bashed its jaws with the hilt of her sword, breaking several of its teeth. It howled in pain and rage, and tried even harder to get its teeth into her.

The Warg yelped, and pulled away from her. Faith caught a glimpse of Bilbo retreating, the tip of his sword bloody from where he had jabbed it into the Warg’s ribs. The Warg tried to twist toward him, but Bilbo hit it on the nose with a brand he had taken from the fire, and was holding in his other hand. The Warg’s movement gave Faith the room she needed to slash her sword across the beast’s throat. Its hot blood sprayed across her, for the moments it took for the Warg to die, and then its body collapsed back down onto her.

Faith heaved the carcass off her, with some help from Bilbo. “Thanks!” she told him. She looked around. The Wargs had pulled back to regroup. They had left six of their fellows lying dead in the snow around the campsite. The remaining Wargs went back to circling their camp, at the periphery of their vision.

None of them got any more than cat-naps that night. The Wargs kept harrying them, probing for weakness, hoping to catch them off guard, or napping. Faith and Beorn both killed another before the sky started to brighten with the approach of dawn, and the Wargs finally faded away.

The snow had stopped falling shortly after midnight, and the sky had cleared. With the clear sky had come a sharp drop in the temperature. Faith’s pants became stiff from the Warg blood frozen into them. Her leather jacket had repelled the worst of the blood that had spilled across it, but she had it in her hair as well. She wished she was like Beorn, and could wash herself by going and rolling naked in the snow. The Warg blood felt so gross that she was almost tempted to give it a try.

She did roll in her jacket, and rub snow into her hair to to wash out the worst of the blood. Bilbo melted snow in a pot over the fire so that they could all do some washing—while Faith was the worst, all of them were splattered with some blood.

It turned out that not all of the blood soaking Faith’s pants had come from the Warg. While washing up, she discovered that she had received a nasty gash in her thigh from the claws of the Warg that had leapt on her. The wound must have bled profusely at first, but the bleeding had stopped. Faith was more concerned about the tear in her pants.

Gandalf insisted on cleaning and bandaging her wound. Faith made her comments about him being a dirty old man who just wanted to take a gander at her legs in English, but there was a twinkle in his eyes that made her think that he understood both the gist, and the spirit of what she said. She sometimes thought that he was picking up nearly as much English as she was Westron, though the only English words she had heard him speak were the ones like “cigarette,” which had no local equivalent.

Speaking of cigarettes…Faith checked her pack…three left. She’d been saving them for special occasions. She planned to save one, just in case she managed to get laid, but she figured that surviving the Wargs was cause for celebration. She took one out, and lit it up.