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Bella had very little hope that she would be immune to dragonfire by the time they reached Erebor, but she thought it was worth trying for anyway. Certainly it would be more useful than growing plants, which was what her current talent was.
It was a respectable talent, held by nearly half of the Shire and responsible for the extraordinary fertility therein.
It was also an entirely useless talent on a quest.
If she’d had the other major talent in the Shire, there would have been some use, and she would have been at some pains to keep it.
There was a reason the dwarves’d had such trouble finding and then navigating the Shire, and if not for Gandalf’s mark on her door, they might never have found it. A talent like that would certainly come in handy for a burglar.
But she was a Baggins, and that had always been more of a Brandybuck talent, so instead of hiding their camp from trolls, she turned the grass under her bedroll luscious and thick overnight.
She did not need greener grass. She needed to be immune to dragonfire.
So she took over as much of the cooking as Bombur would allow, and when none of the dwarves were looking she touched the edge of the cooking pot with her bare finger.
She jerked away almost immediately, but she stubbornly resisted the urge to stick the blistering finger into her mouth.
Fire, she told her subconscious firmly. We need to be afraid of fire.
All the old stories insisted that this was a bad idea, but all the old stories had been about Big People trying to force hobbits’ talents to change. None of them had been about this.
She gave in and stuck her hand in a cold river the next day, but she didn’t stop straying just a little too close to the fire.
At Master Elrond’s house, she tried a different tactic. She went to his library and asked the keeper of it for texts on burns.
Master Elrond, she learned, was a famous healer who had a particular interest in burns, especially cursed ones. There were many such texts.
She asked if there were any with helpful illustrations.
There were.
She settled into the coziest window seat she could find and grimly opened her books.
She nearly gagged when she read the first description, much less viewed the illustration, but she continued grimly onward.
Burns are bad, she told herself firmly. Very bad. There is nothing we need to be afraid of as much as burns. Don’t worry about food. We have plenty of food. Burns are what we need to be afraid of.
It was possible, of course, that she could end up immune to ordinary burns and very much vulnerable to dragonfire, but this was probably the best she could do.
She went to Master Elrond’s Hall of Fire that evening and was a little disappointed that the fires within in were small, quite contained, and rather merry.
But the music was so entrancing that she couldn’t help but stay.
She was terrified when she fell in the goblin’s mountain, both because, well, falling, and because the last thing she needed was for her talent to decide that falls were the real evil.
Although if she ended up bouncing after long falls, she could probably still find some sort of use for it.
She did not end up bouncing, but she did end up surviving.
She also ended up with a new ring, which was nice.
In fact, she survived right up through when the orcs starting throwing burning pinecones at the tree she was in.
It was probably a bad sign that her first reaction was delight.
No. Fire BAD.
The last thing she needed was getting her instincts about that mixed up.
So she threw herself forward out of the tree and into the walls of fire springing up, and, incidentally, saved Thorin.
He looked at her differently after that.
She thought something was changing. After the goblin mountain, the grass under her bedroll wasn’t quite so springy anymore.
But fire still felt frustratingly hot.
She kept stubbornly close to the fire anyway. Whatever her subconscious thought she needed, she knew better.
There was still a dragon at the end of this journey, and someone had to be ready for it.
She gripped the ring in her pocket to ground herself and scooted a little closer to Beorn’s fire.
In Mirkwood, she woke up to a perfect circle of bright green grass and flowers around her blankets.
She had to bite down on those blankets to keep from screaming in frustration.
Unfortunately, the other dwarves woke up, looked at the limp and somewhat sinister grass around their own bedrolls, looked at hers, and drew the obvious conclusions.
“I’m a hobbit,” she snapped before they could draw dangerous conclusions. “We grow things.”
Ori’s eyes were wide as he picked one of the new dandelions. “You can do magic?”
“It’s not magic,” she insisted. “It’s just a talent we have.”
Thorin looked consideringly at their ever shorter rations. “If we found a fruit tree,” he began, “and you slept in it – “
“It would probably be safe to eat from it in the morning,” she admitted begrudgingly. “If we can find a fruit tree.”
They could.
Bella thought the chances of the dwarves just forgetting the whole thing had dropped to depressing levels.
When they finally reached the mountain, Bella had to admit the truth: She was almost certainly not fireproof.
She wasn’t sure what she was, since things had stopped growing around her as soon as they escaped Mirkwood, but fireproof definitely wasn’t it.
Neither was sneaking.
This ended with a lot of running from the dragon.
The ring in her pocket almost seemed to burn in her skirts as she ran, but of course that was a silly thought. It was just a plain gold ring, no magic about it.
Although maybe the metal had gotten heated and it was burning her, because whatever her talent was, it was plainly useless.
Bella kept running.
“We should be careful,” Balin cautioned them as they moved among the piles of gold. “Dragons sometimes curse their gold.”
The dwarves chorused out a ragged acknowledgement. Most of them were still staring in awe at the piles of treasure around them.
Bella was interested in very little of it, but she had promised to help find the Arkenstone, so she dutifully began digging through a pile of jewelry.
One of the dwarves froze behind her.
“Bella,” Fili said cautiously. “Is the gold getting brighter when you touch it?”
Bella looked down.
“No,” she said stubbornly.
“It is!” Fili said excitedly. “Uncle, look!”
Thorin came and looked. So did the rest of the dwarves.
“What a gift, lassie,” Gloin said.
“Yes,” she said hollowly. “A real talent.”
This. This was what her subconscious thought she needed more than being fireproof? Aesthetics?
This was the sort of gift that got simple hobbits minding their own business locked up in towers for the rest of their lives. This was useless.
“I will keep touching the gold,” she said through gritted teeth, “on the condition that no one asks any questions about this. Ever.”
The dwarves’ teeth shut with audible clicks.
Except for Ori, who started to say, “But what about – “
Nori helpfully clapped a hand over his mouth. “No questions,” he promised with a wink. “I know all about that.”
The men from Laketown showed up wanting compensation for their lost homes. Thorin agreed to this and a little extra on the provision of a few more trade goods to help get them through the winter and an agreement to have a more formal treaty discussion at a later date.
Thranduil showed up wanting a set of gemstones he claimed were his.
Thorin claimed he had lost all right to that particular commission when he had turned his back on the refugees from Erebor.
They were still arguing about that when Gandalf showed up and informed them that they were all about to die.
Well, actually what he said was that an army of orcs was on the way, but that was certainly what Bella heard.
At least she’d found the Arkenstone, though. She’d dutifully made it shinier before passing it on to Thorin.
She was starting to think that if she was going to get through all this gold in one lifetime, she was going to have to start swimming in it.
After the battle, when Bella had finished visiting a still healing and very grumpy Thorin, she bumped into Gandalf smoking his pipe outside the healers’ tent.
“It is a very good thing Thorin did not succumb to gold sickness,” he said. “Things might have gone much worse if that old curse had reared its ugly head.”
Bella was still too frustrated with her own magic to care much about anyone else’s.
“Thranduil has heard the reports from his people on your effect on his forest, by the way,” the wizard added. “He would be very happy to come to some arrangement with you.”
“It’s not consistent,” she said gloomily. “I made flowers grow in Mirkwood, I make goldy shiny here . . . and all I could do under the Goblin King’s mountain was make Gollum’s ring useless.”
Gandalf stopped smoking his pipe. “Gollum’s ring?”
“Oh,” she said, realizing she’d never mentioned this. “I told you about him before, remember? He had this ring that turned him invisible, but it’s never worked for me. Here, see?”
She offered it up to him.
He stared at it for a long moment.
“Do not offer that to me again,” he said hoarsely. “I must away.”
She stared after the rapidly retreating wizard. She hadn’t known the old wizard could move that fast.
“Making people flee,” she muttered to herself. “Another useless talent.”
And with that grumbled complaint, she set it out of her mind and went to see if Bombur had managed to find anything other than fish for them to eat.