As agreed, Bella delivered thirty cartloads of gold, silver, and jewels each to the Dwarves and the Elves, and the necklace of white gems that King Thranduil had pined over for so long was recovered and handed to Legolas to carry home. It looked like a generous payout, but measured against the sheer scale of the Lonely Mountain's wealth, that little bit was a drop in the ocean.
In a feudal society in the middle of a war, Bella had more money than she knew how to spend.
After mulling it over, she set aside a small portion of the treasure as start-up funds for the new kingdom of Arendelle, and the rest she sealed away with magic for the time being.
The royal capital, Dale, was placed under the security of her Centaur General, while internal affairs were handed to her Faun General.
A mountain as vast as the Lonely Mountain sitting idle would be a waste, so after consulting with Sögrin and the other Dwarves, Bella hired Durin's Folk to mine it for her on a fifty-fifty split. Since the Dwarves were getting the better end of the bargain, they agreed to supply Arendelle with a standing army of one thousand warriors.
From the Elves, Bella likewise hired a force of one thousand to fight for the fledgling kingdom.
The political situation inside the Woodland Realm was, in fact, surprisingly tangled. Strange as it sounded, the Elves had their own ethnic rifts. King Thranduil and most of his kin were blond Sindar; his subjects, however, were overwhelmingly dark-haired Silvan Elves. From Bella's perspective, a minority ruling a majority; it felt a bit like the Manchu Qing arrangement.
That sort of ethnic tension was hard to smooth over. A few light reads of the surface thoughts around her, and Bella had her purse open, hiring a unit of dark-haired Silvan Elves to fight under her banner.
Centaurs, Dwarves, Elves, and Humans together made up Arendelle's armed forces.
Dwarves and Elves didn't get along. The Centaurs didn't trust Humans. The little Narnian creatures didn't trust Dwarves, though they were warm toward the Elves. And the Humans didn't trust any of the other races.
The friction between them ran deep, but with a great war looming on the horizon, those petty grievances hardly mattered.
Tall walls rose around Dale. The Dwarves were master builders, and the people of Lake-town were willing to come work since Bella's side was offering good pay. The Centaurs and the rest of the Narnian races threw themselves into building what they saw as their new homeland.
Only the Elves seemed a little out of place in this new realm, and Bella had a fix for that too. She sent the little creatures of Narnia over to charm them, bringing water, bringing fruit, while the Elves patrolled near the Lonely Mountain and shot down any treasure-hunters who tried to slip inside and loot the place.
Roads connecting Dale to Lake-town, to the Lonely Mountain, and to the Woodland Realm were being laid at speed, and as each new road was completed, day-to-day exchanges between the various peoples gradually improved.
At the request of the Narnian races, Bella erected a statue of the great lion Aslan in the center of the city.
The statue would lend many of the animals a spark of their own sentience. That was a vague way of putting it, a little idealistic, but it was genuinely what happened. In Arendelle, seeing an animal hold a conversation was nothing strange.
The people of Lake-town, the humans who had migrated from small northern villages drawn by Bella's dragon-slayer title, the Narnian peoples, the Dwarves and some of their kin, and a small contingent of Elves, all counted together, Arendelle's population was close to twenty thousand. It sounded modest, but in truth this already made it a major power in the North.
Bella hadn't held a coronation ceremony. She intended to wait until the Queen was in place, and hold the ceremony together.
Ten days after Smaug's death, old Balin arrived.
He hadn't known about the dragon's killing beforehand; he'd heard the news on the road and rode hard for Dale.
Thorin had moved far faster than Bella. Back when she'd been commissioning the Windlances, Thorin had already stood before the assembled Durin's Folk and declared the founding of the Kingdom of Khazad-dûm. He now styled himself Thorin the Second.
The Elves of Rivendell and Lothlórien had provided some early assistance, and by now Durin's Folk had recaptured the mines. They were locked in a grinding back-and-forth with the Orcs across the open plains, through underground tunnels, and over the surrounding hills.
The old Dwarf's purpose was perfectly clear to Bella. She didn't waste words, simply produced the Arkenstone and held it out.
"This is what we agreed. And tell Thorin: Mister Baggins was the one who obtained it." She passed the gemstone into the old Dwarf's hands.
There was no postal service here. Thorin couldn't use magic, and neither could he transfer objects remotely. Deliveries had to be carried by hand, and the courier had to be the most trusted, most loyal person available.
Old Balin took a look around inside the Lonely Mountain, then rode hard for home.
Durin's Folk alone could barely hold the Orcs at bay anymore. Thorin's plan was to use the Arkenstone to summon all Seven Houses of the Dwarves and bring them into the fire pit of Khazad-dûm together.
Whether Thorin's actions were heroic or foolish, Bella couldn't say. Either way, her own eighteen hundred soldiers were not jumping into that abyss.
She handed over the Arkenstone, sent along her blessings, and that was that.
After seeing the old Dwarf off, Bella turned her attention to the wider continent.
One word summed it up: fierce. The Dwarves were a nation in arms, and with all seven clans marshaled, their combined host could only be described as a torrent of steel.
The giant Orc, Azog the Defiler, was formidable in his own right. Strong in single combat and, rare among Orcs, possessed of genuine tactical brilliance, he used encirclements, feints, diversions, and every trick in the book. Yet even he was losing more battles than he won against the Dwarven juggernaut.
As a member of the Council of the Three Rings, Bella watched from a distance alongside Elrond and Galadriel. The Orcs of Dol Guldur alone could no longer hold back the Dwarven host; they were now drawing reinforcements from Mount Gundabad in the north and Mordor in the south, and the two sides were locked in a stand-off across the entire front.
The Dwarves, wary of taking too many losses, pressed their attacks cautiously. The Orcs, wary of being stabbed in the back by the Humans or the Elves, were equally cautious. They fought every day, but the intensity stayed at a slow, steady simmer.
"I've been away from home for a long time. I'm going back for a while. If anything comes up, send word to me." Through the faint resonance between the Three Elven Rings, Bella, Galadriel, and Elrond could pass simple messages to one another.
In Arendelle, she left behind a set of single-use magical communication tokens. Day to day, the peoples would govern themselves; if anything serious came up, they were to call her. That was the King of Arendelle's style of rule.
The Battle of Five Armies had long since grown into a war of ten, even fifteen armies. The Dwarves alone fielded seven, and once you added the Elves, the Human reinforcements from Gondor and Rohan, and the Orcs across the line, calling it fifteen was probably underselling it. The Lonely Mountain side, by comparison, seemed quite safe. It was time for Bella to leave Vanaheim.
Standing before the Front Gate of the Lonely Mountain, she let her eyes linger on Smaug's grim, severed head and gave a long sigh. Mecha-Smaug wasn't just talk. The head and the corpse: she was taking both with her.