A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Alternate Entry Thirty-Five - Miscalculations

{*So I'm now more invested in writing the Original Fiction than the Fanfiction, so I've got to adjust the OF to fit the FF, and it doesn't always mesh properly. Therefore the Council at Rivendell is indeed occurring in completely the wrong month, and likely other events from now on will not perfectly fit the verse as I wish they could. I am very sorry.}

I woke feeling as though I were suffocating. There was wool covering my face in layers, and something else wrapped around my mouth. My wrists were bound and my entire body wound and wound up inside the woolen thing. Based on the creaking I estimated I was in the back of a cart or wagon. I heard muffled voices as we stopped somewhere, and held very still as sweat glazed over me, under my clothes, and decided my best bet of escaping was to surprise them with the fact that I had woken.

The voices increased in volume and I rocked as they began unpiling the weight from on top of me, then dragging me down too, my breath smacking out of my lungs when my back struck the frozen ground. Voices were becoming more distinct but still were indecipherable. The blanket around me was shaking as they unwrapped it, and as much as I wanted to open my eyes to the pain of the light breaking in I remained still, and blind, until I realized they were indeed finished unwrapping me, my legs were just tied together from the knees down. There was nothing I could do to run away. So I opened my eyes and, seeing a curious soldier leaning down over me, snapped my knees to my chest and kicked him in the face hard enough that he flew onto his back, clutching what sounded like a broken nose and a few matching teeth.

"The little bitch!" he screamed as I was dragged to my feet, I also screaming now, to attract as much attention as possible from people who may not yet realize we were here. But I didn't even know where 'here' was. We were on the wooded edge of a clearing, and the sky looked strange beyond it. As I was lifted by my elbows and thrown again when I thrashed, I understood why: this clearing was on the very cusp of a tall cliff, the faceless inflectionless winter sky bearing down upon us. Beyond the shouts and conversation of the men, the snorting of the picketed horses, I could hear the distant breaking of waves.

We were on a cliff, on a cliff above the sea. And if the elves knew where I was they would have rescued me already. I was on my own.

The king emerged out of a cluster of his silvery armed men with a smile, extending his hands. "Ah! The little princess awakens. Looking a bit worse for wear, but that's to be expected. I must say, it rather takes all the satisfaction out of it that she doesn't speak the language. Ah well." He clapped. "We take what we can get." He had reached me now, and bent so our faces were almost level. If he came much closer I could do for his nose what I'd done for his soldier's, just with my forehead instead of my feet.

Much to my displeasure he did not lean that close, instead raising his hands to gently lift my coronet from my brow. "What a tiny little thing!" he exclaimed, making his men laugh when he tried to balance it atop his own head. "Well, fairy, you'll not be needing this much longer." He tossed it off to the side where one of his men caught it and threw it in the back of the wagon that had snuck me here. The king then straightened. "By golly, when's the father going to figure it out? Bloody hell, I'm bored already," he laughed.

I plunged forward and plowed the top of my head into his groin, and very swiftly he was no longer laughing. He collapsed on top of me in the snow and I battered back at his neck and face with my heels, snarling at him as he tried to roll away without further shocking his offended gemstones.

"Tie her to a bloody boulder and drop it over the side!" he howled, and rough hands instantly locked under my arms and yanked me to my feet.

I started screaming again as they fetched a rope and tried to contain me—it took two of them to tie my ankles by a long stretch of rope to a convenient rock sitting like a shattered tooth on the crumbling lip of the cliff. They had to untie my legs to make the rope long enough, though why the length mattered made no sense to me. As soon as he could the man tying my ankles stepped away and out of my range. "She's good!" shouted another man from the cliff's side, and the man holding me off the ground dropped me, as the man with the boulder shoved it over the edge.