Bella's promise to the Woodland Realm was much the same as the one she'd made to the Iron Hills Dwarves: return the White Gems of Lasgalen that Thorin's grandfather had once owed Thranduil, then pay the elves for their service according to the intensity of the fighting.
In theory, the gold and treasure in Bella's possession could no longer be measured in tons, chests, or wagonloads. She had invented a new unit for her wealth: the mountain. She had a mountain of gold and silver, and she didn't have to worry about money at all.
The problem now was that Smaug had to die.
She knew his weakness. She had a stockpile of Black Arrows and Wind Lances. She had gathered enough elven archers. As far as she was concerned, the time to slay the dragon had arrived.
Bella had used the Time Stone again and again to run through her dragon-slaying plan. Smaug, blissfully unaware, had been killed several hundred times over in timelines that would never come to pass. From those simulations, Bella chose the option with the best outcome and the lowest cost. Then she led her allies to the Lonely Mountain and began the hunt.
There were only two ways into the Kingdom under the Mountain: the Front Gate and the Side-door.
The Front Gate had been sealed when the dwarves fled the mountain. Those great stone slabs, twenty meters (sixty-six feet) high and weighing several tons, were beyond Bella's strength to budge, and certainly beyond opening without waking Smaug. That left only the Side-door.
Tradition said the Side-door could only be opened on Durin's Day, that evening near the start of winter when moonlight struck the door and the keyhole revealed itself.
As a sorceress of some accomplishment, Bella didn't need to wait for Durin's Day.
It was still a first-level spell, Identify. She rapped the stone door sharply with her staff.
"Reveal your secret!"
The keyhole obediently appeared. She then produced her universal key, and the Side-door of the Lonely Mountain swung open without resistance.
"Mister Baggins, do you remember everything I told you?" Bella asked the hobbit at her side.
Thorin had granted her the Lonely Mountain and the lands around it on a single condition: she had to retrieve the Arkenstone. Bella took this very seriously.
She had run the entire dragon-slaying plan through the Time Stone more than three hundred times, which meant she'd also charted a relatively safe and quick route for the hobbit's burglary.
You couldn't predict everything. It was like chess: at the second move there were already more than seventy thousand possible outcomes; by the third, nine million; by the fourth, the number climbed past three hundred billion.
And that was chess, not people. People came with far more variables; Doctor Strange's fourteen million outcomes were honestly on the low end.
A human brain wasn't a supercomputer. It couldn't process that kind of data. As far as Bella was concerned, after reviewing three hundred possible outcomes, her preparation was already thorough enough.
The hobbit looked a bit troubled. He had indeed remembered everything Bella told him: half a notebook's worth.
Precise prediction was impossible, but the rough route was clear.
Walk a certain number of steps after entering, turn left for a certain distance, then go around a dwarven statue… and finally, look down: the Arkenstone should be right at his feet. As long as he picked it up and ran back, handing it to Bella, the job was done.
Too many steps to keep in his head, so he carried a notebook.
Just to be safe, Bella had also drafted a number of small-talk scripts for him to use on Smaug. They were topics that, observed across hundreds of timelines, had proved most effective at drawing the dragon into conversation and buying the most time. Combined with the ring he carried, his safety was as well-guaranteed as it could be.
"This will really work? You're certain the route is safe?" The hobbit was still uneasy.
"Trust me. I've already foreseen every scenario. You have ten breaths to compose yourself. Go! Run! Hurry, move!" Bella shoved the hobbit inside, then waved to the figures in the distance. A large group of dwarves came forward carrying Wind Lances, ready to enter the mountain and begin installation.
The elves would be the third group to deploy, moving into combat positions only after the dwarves had withdrawn. Their moment hadn't come yet.
"Move! Everyone, with me!"
"Keep your footsteps light. Don't look left or right. Trust me, everything is unfolding as I expected."
"You there, yes, you. See that platform over there? I need you to mount your Wind Lance on it. Elevation thirty degrees, arrowhead facing northwest."
"You. See that pillar? Two meters (6.5 feet) west of it, I want a Wind Lance set up. Elevation seventy degrees, arrowhead pointed straight ahead."
"And you…"
Bella was meticulous, arranging the entire battlefield down to the placement of every single bolt.
Some of the Black Arrows would be fired in volleys, others individually. Some would inevitably miss because of unpredictable variables. But without exception, every angle and every position covered an area Smaug was bound to pass through.
"Stop at a dwarven anvil, then go west. Whoa, this is an anvil!" Bilbo Baggins stopped in his tracks and sized up the hunk of iron, which stood taller than he was. He ticked off a line in his notebook and turned west.
He walked without bumping into walls, without being spotted by any enemy. Smoothly, easily, he made his way into the underground halls of the Lonely Mountain.
"Fifty-five paces northwest. Northwest…" He had circled the underground palace eight times already, completely unable to get his bearings. His compass, thrown off by the magnetic fields of various ores, spun like a pinwheel and refused to settle. Bilbo finally took out the magical item Bella had given him, a north-pointing compass that always pointed true north. He studied it carefully and at last located the northwest.
Courtyards, forges, barracks, displays of dwarven craftsmanship: the hobbit pressed deeper and deeper inward.
"Whoa!" When he stepped into the inner chamber and saw the golden ocean stretching before him, formed from countless coins, goblets, diamonds, crowns, gold chains, and other treasures, even a hobbit's famously high resistance to temptation wavered for an instant.
The sea of gold ran beyond sight, his entire field of vision filled with that yellow glow. The hobbit's stout little heart thumped hard, more than once.
"Give it to me… no, I couldn't even carry it. Forget it." He recovered quickly. The pull of the golden sea on him lasted barely two seconds before he shook off the daydream completely.
"Ten paces to the left… check. Five paces forward, good, check. Mm, twenty-two paces diagonally forward to the left…"
Walking across an ocean of coins meant his footsteps couldn't be exact. Bella had said so repeatedly: there would be some margin of error, but no more than five paces off.
"Stop!" Bilbo Baggins's notebook was down to its last page, last line. When he came to a complete halt, he looked down and around.
He spotted it at once: the Arkenstone, exactly as Bella had described and sketched for him.
A gem dug out of the heart of the mountain, roughly the size of a hobbit's fist. A brilliant white radiance filled his eyes, faint yet steady, as though the stone were slowly breathing.