The whole idea of the council had been proposed by the townspeople's own representatives. Were they really going to oppose it now? They'd have to be out of their minds.
The town representatives shook their heads in unison.
"Good. It's decided, then." Bella made it official. From that moment on, the Lake-town Governing Council was formally established.
The council answered directly to the sovereign of the land, that is, Bella.
In the original timeline, Bard would have become the town's lord. Now he was merely one of seven members of the council, his authority and his voice diluted by more than half. He had no way of knowing what the future would have held, of course. When he left the meeting, there was a smile on his face and deep satisfaction in his heart.
Distribute coin, share out power: simple tactics, but effective. When Bella asked Bard for the last Black Arrow his family possessed, he hesitated only briefly before handing over the heirloom he'd kept locked away.
Bella examined the Black Arrow in her hand. The arrow was forged entirely of steel, two meters long, with a head so heavy it seemed to be made of some special alloy.
Sharp, heavy, lethal: every word of praise applied to this Black Arrow. The only drawback was that there was only one of it.
"It really is the last one. This arrow has been passed down in my family for a hundred and seventy years..."
Bella reached out and brushed her finger across the arrowhead. She'd barely applied any pressure, and the black tip had already drawn blood. "Sharp indeed. I understand."
Black Arrows didn't sprout from the earth, or grow as fruit on trees, or come as gifts from some deity. This was something forged by the dwarves of Durin's line. If they could make one, they could make a hundred, or a thousand.
Dwarves lived long lives. There was no risk of some "intangible heritage" being lost. There were still plenty of dwarves alive who had forged the original Black Arrows back in the day. As long as the material could be supplied, forging another batch was no problem at all.
If the Black Arrow could be wheedled away, then the windlance mounted in the tower at the town center was not about to escape either. Even Bard couldn't, with a straight face, claim the windlance was his personal property, and Bella had no qualms whatsoever. She simply ordered her people to take it down and study it.
One arrow to pierce a scale, a second to find the heart: Bella found the killing efficiency astonishingly high. With a tool this good, there was no reason not to use it.
Drafting a thousand laborers from Lake-town, Bella led the townspeople north to give Dale, as many northerners still called it, a rough round of repairs.
The city's geography was excellent: fertile land all around, the swift River Running flowing past it from its source at the Lonely Mountain making for convenient water transport, and a central location squarely between the Lonely Mountain and Lake-town. Bella intended to make this her future capital.
But the city had been razed by Smaug's flames a hundred and seventy years ago, and now only ruins remained, silently testifying to its former glory.
Old men, women, and children all came to work. Their sovereign had said: a day's work meant a day's pay. Spirits ran high.
Bella opened a portal and brought the various peoples of Narnia through to Dale.
After the White Witch's defeat, conditions in Narnia had grown ever harsher. The many races there were starving, and it looked as though they wouldn't survive the winter.
"The conditions here are wonderful!" The Centaur General embodied the saying "first horse into the fray" rather literally. He was the first to step through the portal and into Dale.
In truth, the climate around the Lonely Mountain was anything but warm. To say nothing of farther places, there was still drift-ice on the Long Lake; the temperature really was low. But compared to Jotunheim, this place was paradise.
Some of the more thickly furred little creatures, like Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, would have cooked themselves to death if they'd been sent south to Rohan or Gondor.
The peoples of Narnia regarded humans with deep suspicion, and the townspeople of Lake-town had no idea where these centaurs and fauns had come from. The two sides had different customs and didn't share a language. Bella's solution was to put them all to work. Friendships and understanding would be forged in shared labor.
Three days later, a great army marched out from the lands east of the Lonely Mountain, the region the dwarves of Durin's line called the Iron Hills.
And it was a great army indeed. Vast, sprawling, no end in sight.
When the Lonely Mountain had fallen all those years ago, most of the Durin folk had followed Thorin's grandfather west to the Blue Mountains. Some others had settled not far away, in the Iron Hills.
The current King of the Iron Hills was Thorin's cousin, Dáin Ironfoot, the dwarven warrior famous for riding a pig while others rode rams.
In the original timeline, after Thorin's death, it was Dáin Ironfoot who had inherited the throne of the Lonely Mountain, uniting Erebor and the Iron Hills into a single kingdom. When the Lord of the Rings trilogy formally began, he had led his people, alongside Bard's grandson, to defend the Lonely Mountain against the unceasing assaults of orcs from the north.
Now, this pig-riding warrior wore full plate armor, hefted a war-hammer, and was leading ten thousand dwarven soldiers to Khazad-dûm to reinforce Thorin.
"I'll leave you two thousand warriors! They'll obey your orders. But I'll say this up front: my fine lads do not fight alongside elves, and you will pay them proper wages!"
Dáin Ironfoot had presence to spare. He spoke like rolling thunder. Perhaps to assert dominance in the conversation, the dwarven king kept astride his beloved pig even during normal talk.
The pig looked rather intelligent, nearly on par with the talking beasts of Narnia, but Bella found it thoroughly repulsive. If not for those two thousand dwarven warriors, she wouldn't have bothered speaking with Dáin Ironfoot at all.
The bond between Thorin and Bella was just barely enough to get her a hearing with Dáin Ironfoot. To keep two thousand of his soldiers behind while his army marched off to war, what would she have to give in return? Hard coin. The treasures inside the Lonely Mountain.
Dáin Ironfoot had his own concerns. For the honor of the Durin folk, he had to help Thorin; that was an obligation he couldn't shirk. But he didn't want to throw all of his own people into that vast pit either. When Bella made her request at just the right moment, he was happy to go along with it.
Preserve his strength, and make a tidy sum on the side.
Bella needed those dwarven warriors to help her handle whatever Orc armies might appear, and along the way she'd put them to work fortifying the city, forging weapons, and making windlances and Black Arrows.
There was no elf who couldn't shoot, and no dwarf who couldn't smith. Two thousand dwarven warriors meant, in effect, two thousand blacksmiths.
Dáin Ironfoot wanted to preserve some of his forces; Bella wanted to make use of their skills for the work of her realm. Each got what they wanted, and neither side was a fool.
When the talk turned to windlances and Black Arrows, Dáin Ironfoot thumped his chest. "Don't you worry. My fine lads will forge these things for you. To the Durin folk, they're really nothing difficult at all."
He led his army of eight thousand dwarves south along the Long Lake, then took the Old Forest Road east-to-west, crossed the fords of the Great River Anduin, and marched into the Misty Mountains to rendezvous with Thorin.
Dáin Ironfoot had left two thousand dwarven warriors with Bella, and would be paid according to the intensity of their labor and fighting.