THE ONCE AND FUTURE KINGS

Chapter One: Journeys End…

"Aren't you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers."

Kili immediately regretted having said it, as soon as the words left his lips.

Granted, suavely inviting her to search down his trousers, as he could have had ANYTHING down them was a lot better than the alternative.

Like beckoning her over to the bars and informing her that he had the biggest cock this side of Mount Doom, even bigger than his brother's or his Uncle's, and they had won many a barroom bet and made many men twice their height cry over more than the loss of their money.

But why would Captain Tauriel want to know?

Well, she doesn't want to know, you idiot, you want her to know!

As if that would make her decide to fall madly in love with you.

For the son of one of the greatest poets of the Third Age, that was rather awkward.

Kili was inordinately proud of that; he may have been the youngest, and the least experienced, in battle, in life, and with women, but having the odd inch over the competition when the competition were his brother and uncle, well?

An advantage was an advantage.

Still, that was not the sort of thing you said to a woman.

To a she-Elf, at that.

Indeed, Kili had no idea why he had said anything about it at all; there was no suave way to talk to a woman about the dimensions of your warhammer.

It was embarrassing, juvenile and crude, and he wished he'd had his sword, so he could cut his own head off, for being such an idiot.

Tauriel raised an eyebrow.

"Or nothing?"

She smiled, and as she left, Kili smiled to himself, as well.

"That was horrible, little brother! You're lucky she likes you."

"Go fuck an orc!" Kili snapped.

He said it in Khuzdul, just in case Captain Tauriel disliked bad language.

Fili walked over to the bars.

"No, I mean it, Kili, I think our jailer really, really likes you."

"That's what you said about that girl at Rivendell. Who played the harp."

"That was a man."

"You know the one I mean! The one who was a girl!"

"Well? She let you lie with her, didn't she?"

"I could have been any man, as long as I wasn't an Elf! It had nothing to do with me!"

"Then I think that our jailer specifically likes you. And not just because you're not an Elf."


After they had their dinner, Fili lay down and went to sleep, and Kili could have.

For a hundred years, as tired as he was.

But he wanted to see if she would come back.

She had observed he was tall for a Dwarf, well, Tauriel was short, for an Elf.

Only a few inches taller than he was.

She did come back, and he embarrassed himself, again, saying the good-luck charm his mother had given him was cursed.

But then he resolved that he would stop acting like he thought Fili would, and just say what he felt he should.

"Where did you get your touchstone?"

"My mother gave it to me as a way to remember my promise."

"What promise?" Tauriel asked.

Kili shrugged

"That I will come back to her. She worries. She thinks I'm reckless."

"Are you?"

"Nah."

Which was a lie; Kili knew that he was incredibly reckless, apt to jump to conclusions, wore his heart on his sleeve and couldn't hide his emotions.

Also he was impulsive.

Especially when it came to women.

Fili was a rake; he might as well have been a prince of the Fair Folk as of the Dwarves, the way he had with women.

He could meet a girl, catch her eye, come to know her, spend the night with her, make an impression, and bid her farewell until they met again, all between evening and morning, and leave her happy to have met him, and happy to meet him again, even if it wasn't for months, or years.

Kili, on the other hand fell in love with every girl whose hand he tentatively held; and he always seemed to attract women who wanted to take advantage of him.

With the exception of the girl who played the harp at Rivendell, he didn't have casual affairs, but all of the affairs, alright, both of the affairs he did have ended horribly.

Leaving Kili, both times, with a broken but hopeful heart.

Actually, the harpist at Rivendell, she broke his heart, too.

And he'd only known her for a week.

"Well, it certainly sounds like I'm missing a party." Kili said, glumly

"It is the feast of starlight. All light is sacred to the Eldar. Wood elves love best the stars."

"I always thought it was a cold light. Remote and far away."

"It is memory. Precious and pure. Like your promise. I have walked there sometimes. Beyond the forest and up into the night. I have seen the world fall away and the white light forever fill the air."

Tauriel painted Kili a beautiful picture of a beautiful place, and he all-too-willingly went there with her.

"I saw the fire-moon once. It rose over the hill near Dunland. Huge. Red and gold it was that filled the sky. It was the strangest thing, because it made me think of my father. And a verse he wrote."

"Your father was a poet?"

"Yes. Probably the only Dwarf who's name you might recognize. Lothinwaen, son of Cain."

"Really? Your father was the great poet Lothinwaen? When I read his verses, it made me feel as though everything I heard about Dwarves couldn't be true. I have a book, a compilation of his works. Which verse?"

"Does you book have 'Lion of the Morning'? When I saw that fire moon, I thought of the last verse. My forbidden love/Your black heart I treasure/Red gold lion of the morning/My forbidden love/Your very sight, pleasure/Though Hell is warning/I may be damned, o my brother/But for thee, o my lover/I will burn in hell or heaven/Red gold lion of the morning."

"That whole poem was heartbreaking and beautiful."

"And?"

"And what?"

"You mean you're not going to say anything else?"

"There are many ways for a man to come to terms with what happened to your father. He decided that his brother did what he did out of love, and made up his mind to return that love, a thousandfold. That is beautiful, and heartbreaking."

"I hardly remember my father. Or my Uncle. The Great Beast. I was only four, when mother took us away. I know it's a strange thing to say about a man, especially a great warrior, a great archer, but my father was always very beautiful and very melancholy. He told me, once, that a man should have no shame in what he does for the sake of true love. He was very defiant about it. Meanwhile, it didn't seem odd to Fili and I. I'd wake up in the morning, and run into my parents' bedroom, and there they would be, all three of them, my father, my uncle, Vargbrand, and my Mum, asleep in bed. I thought that all married people slept in the same bed. I figured you wouldn't care, if all you were doing was sleeping in bed, with your brother and your wife. It was only after I found out about the rest of it that I understood where it was wrong."

"Do you think it was wrong?"

"Well, a man is meant to love his brother. If they loved each other too much, is that the worst of all possible sins? Yes, they were brothers. If they weren't brothers, I don't think it would have been as wrong. I mean, these things happen, don't they? Just nobody talks about it. And then there's my brother. He doesn't think anything you do while your trousers are down is wrong. He just doesn't fancy men, that's all."

"That's an enlightened attitude coming from a Dwarf."

"Fili isn't enlightened. He's a libertine, he says. I say he's a fookin' degenerate."

Kili laughed, and Tauriel laughed with him.

Then he realised what he'd just said.

"Excuse my language, Captain Tauriel!"

"I am a soldier, Prince Kili. I have heard, and said, worse. This very day, probably. Just between you and I, I've had a little too much to drink at our festival."

"I wish I could go to the festival. We heard you, in the wood, making merry. And we were all so hungry. Is the Elvenking going to give us food?"

"Of course he is. I am waiting to open your cells, when the servers come."

Their conversation was interrupted when five of the burliest Elves in the Elvenking's service brought Thorin Oakenshield, and got him locked in the room next to Kili and Fili's.

He wasn't going easy; by the time he was locked in two of the Elves were on the floor, reeling from blows, the other three were picking them up and fleeing, and Thorin had yanked open the oak door that was behind the barred door to his room, and he was standing by it, beating his fists against the bars, howling and cursing, in Westron and Khuzdul.

Balin, who was being held in a cell on the upper tier shouted over Thorin, telling him to calm down.

The only thing that seemed to calm Thorin down was seeing the look of fright on his ginger-haired jailer's face.

"You've no need to fear me, girl. I mean no harm to you." He told her, gruffly.

"He's alright, Captain Tauriel. He just has a terrible temper." Kili whispered.

"Jailer! Jailer, come here!"

Thorin Oakenshield's voice had such a commanding, kingly tone that Tauriel automatically obeyed him.

She thought it odd, the way he looked around his cell, which was rather more a room than a cell, how suspicious he was.

"What is this? What am I expected to do to keep this?" he demanded.

"Expected? What do you mean? Had you been thrown you in a dungeon you would have screamed that you were being treated unfairly, but when my King shows you kindness, you suspect that there is some base motive afoot?"

"Perhaps you do not, because you are young, and green and you do not know the son of an orc's warg, the snake who's coiled on that throne! Thranduil should not be throwing me, anywhere! How was it an assault on his kingdom that my party and I were nearly devoured by spiders, driven from the path, and that we have all but starved to death in the forest? Is it now a crime to be hungry and lost? Do you think that we would have made ourselves known to you, if we had any other recourse to cheat death?" Thorin demanded.

Tauriel had been wondering that, herself.

But she couldn't say that to Thorin.

"That is why you are not being put in a dungeon. As for what you are expected to do, my lord Thorin, you are expected to stay here, until you have thought better of the King's offer. Or until he thinks better of it, himself. You will have food, and if you need it, medicine. I will go now, but soon I will return, with your surcoat and cape, and clothes that are not hanging in tatters from you body. All that you will not have are your weapons."

"What about my nephews? And my men? Will they be treated with the same care?"

"Your nephews are lodged in a room like this one, because they are princes. They are right next door to you. The rest of your people are in cells, but they are not damp or dingy, and they will also be given food, and medicine, and treated well. My King's intent is not to punish you."

"I know what your King's intent is! And yours, Captain Tauriel. I am a hundred and ninety five years old, I know well the fascination Elf women have for the men of my race. I have seen the way you look at my nephew, and I do not think it is in pity that his tunics is in rags around his wrists and waist. You would do well to forget Kili. The dark-haired archer you have set your cap for. He is but a boy."

"Uncle!" Kili protested.

"Shut your pie hole, lad! Why don't you look before you leap, this time, so that you will not have your heart shattered, once again! You are your father's son, Kili, when it comes to love, and lower matters. You will end up like he did, if you don't watch your step!" Thorin warned.

Tauriel blushed.

The handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed archer, barrel-chested and well-made like his Uncle and tall for a Dwarf with strong long-fingered hands and hair on his wrists and curling out from his collar did not seem a boy to her.

Kili had neither spoken to her as a boy or looked at her the way a boy would.

He seemed, in all ways, to be nothing but a man.

She came to his defence.

"I think that your nephew is hardly a boy, Milord Thorin. He cannot be faulted because he has a soft heart, rather than just a hard head."

"A hard head, is it? Then even the boy sees your intent? Though I cannot blame you for it. Your King is one of the few Elves in Middle Earth with blood in his veins and not ice water, with his concubines and his near a score of bastards. Kili is a foolish boy. Leave him to his foolishness. His brother is far more worldly. Set your cap for him and he will knock it off, for you."

Tauriel bristled at Thorin's double-entendres.

"You order me about as if I should listen to you!"

"I am the King Under the Mountain. And I am responsible for the lad. Just because I am your prisoner makes me no less a king, and you no less a soldier."

Tauriel looked as if she would like to have said something to him about that, but she thought better, turned on her heel, and made a point of slamming the door as she locked him in.

She was walking the halls when King Thranduil came down, and opened Thorin's cell.

Tauriel hid in the shadows.

The drama between the two kings had been so much a part of her life for the past 200 years she could not help but listen, to see how it would pan out.

"Well, Thorin, we have met again. And I am not dead."

"That is because I am weak from war and starvation, and you have taken my sword!"

The two kings, Dwarf and Elf, stood, glaring at each other, in the small room.

"How do you like your accommodations? I have honored your rank, King Under the Mountain, and given you a room, rather than a cell. I have also given your nephews their own room. And your men are housed comfortably, in cells, but nothing damp or dark or dingy. You come to me from the wickedest part of the wood, lost from the path, starving and battered, and I have decided to feed you and clothe you, and send healers to tend to your wounds. I have treated you fairly. Can you not treat me fairly? Have you changed your mind, as regards my offer?"

"What are you offering me, Elf? You powdered, perfumed, shaven arse? You perverted ponce! You could not help but tremble when you saw me, as if all you recalled of the friendship, the love we once had for each other was the filth that you tempted me to, in your perversity! Well, you'll get nothing from me, Elf!" Thorin seethed.

Tauriel raised her hand to her mouth to keep the gasp in.

These two men, two kings, famously virile lovers and seducers of women, they had once been lovers, themselves?

She could hardly believe it.

But one thing was for sure, now she could not tear herself away.

"Do you dare speak to me of the love we had for each other, when we were boys? When we were as brothers? Before you violated my sister, got her with child, and abandoned her to her shame? And you speak of my perversity? You were my dearest friend, Thorin. My only crime was to be a stupid boy, who loved his friend too well! It was you, acting as you always do, motivated by your pride and your lust! Do you think that because I did the bending over, that makes you any less culpable, Thorin Oakenshield?"

"My fault? It was not my idea! You, you were the one, talking all that high minded nonsense! You...you tempted me, you bewitched me! You pretty words about our friendship and our honor, that a man could never love a woman the way he loved his dearest friend! It was your lust, not mine! Your idea, not mine! And you disguised it in terms of brotherly love and honor! Never in my life have I engaged in such perversity, again! Or even been tempted to! I've had a thousand women, if I've had one, and I'll bet I might have had a thousand men, only that is not what I wanted!"

"Nor have I, Thorin. I have a wife, a son and heir with her, five concubines, and ten children with them. With another on the way, and one grand-daughter. Unlike my fellow Elves in Rivendell and Lothlorien, I am not tempted to go to the Undying Lands. I enjoy this realm too much. But, in all these years, never have I made eyes at another man! And I have had many opportunities. Indeed, I am the King, I could have whoever I want for my pleasure. We Elves are civilized, we do not consider love between two men or two women a to be perversity. Just a preference. But it is a preference I do not seem to have."

"Do you think I do? I've had my share of offers from queers and ponces, and I've not been interested, either! It was a long time ago! I was a god damned boy, and Dwarf fathers keep their daughters locked up! You knew of my desperation, and you took advantage of me! You had some perverse curiosity and used me to satisfy it!"

"That is exactly what you did to my sister, a mere child, not even a thousand years old! You tempted her with fine words of love and honor, used her to satisfy your lusts, and threw her aside!"

"By all the gods of both our races, I hope the filth that pours from your mouth does not fly to their ears! I love your sister, as I have never loved any woman before or since, no matter the great number of women I have lain with! I would not have, had you let me marry Anorloth. Because you and I both know I wanted to marry her, and you, you jealous bastard, you wouldn't allow it! You have made your sister a whore and your nephew a bastard, because of your jealousy, because of your anger! How dare you say that I used her, how dare you throw garbage over the love I have carried in my heart for Anorloth, all my life!"

"What you carry for my sister, Thorin Oakenshield, is in your breeches, not in your heart! You have no heart, you are a venomous, greedy, vengeful, crafty old whoremaster, who would throw both his nephews and all of his kin into the fire from the jaws of a dragon just to satisfy your ambition. You would walk on your hands through a river of shit to get to your ocean of gold, and make your way to your throne on a wave made of the blood of your people, and mine, and every man, woman and child in Laketown. It matters nothing to you that you helped to build the place from nothing, you would see it destroyed for your vengeance! You know nothing of love, only of lust! Anorloth loves you most truly and you lust for her most foully. I do not approach the beds of my concubines with so little regard for them as you approach a woman, as nothing more than a series of orifices in which to deposit your seed. That is why I took her from your miserable cottage in Laketown, and it is why I would not let her come to you in New Belegost and it is why for fifty years I have locked Anorloth away from you, and not even let her see you, at all! The thought of you defiling her makes me want to retch and vomit! And to think, once that I loved you, Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror! To think that you were my dearest friend!"

"Do you think I loved you any less? My friend! My brother! How could you send me, my father, and my grandfather, how could you send us, and our people, to the four winds, to death, for some? How could you turn Anorloth out, into the ruins of a refugee camp on the lakeshore, in the wake of the dragon? Was it my fault that your father went over the water, and left you to be the king, before you were of age? Why take it out on me? Why would you betray me? It was jealousy, and nothing else! You were jealous of your own sister!"

"Jealous? How many days and nights did we know, and on how many did we lie together? One! I was not jealous of my sister that you loved her, I was furious at how you used her! You had her, and then you let your cousin at her, and you threw her aside, like she was some whore you could fuck and forget about! If you had to live, as I have, with Anorloth's grief, all these years, if you had to see, every day, how your son Thalin is torn between two worlds that can never be united, then you would understand betrayal!"

"I have done all you would permit, to be a father to my son! He must sneak from this place in the night to come to his kin; and then only for a few months can he abide with me before he must return here, to see that you have not turned against his mother, again! And as for Anorloth, I have done all you would allow, to do right by your sister! Who took him in, and Anorloth, when you cast them out, on your whim? I had nothing, then, but I gave of what I had for them!"

"Damn your thick Dwarf skull, Thorin, you had me! You only had to offer me your apologies, and I would have offered you mine! I would have given you my forgiveness, if I might have had yours! I would have helped your people, and given you my sister's hand! And you have not changed! Once more I offer you my help again, in exchange for a chest of gems that are as a drop of water in the ocean of your treasure, and again, you spit on me!"

Thorin spit on the ground.

"Come closer, and I will spit in your face! Do you think I forget that when I returned from losing all I had at Azanulbizar, and found that you had taken my wife and my son from me, too! Thirty years was a short time for you to wait, to have your final vengeance on me! What do you want from me, Thranduil? Do you expect I should trust your word? Do you want me to crawl? To beg? Do you think that you can cast the wrongs you have done to me and mine in the past in some rosy light on you that makes it look like it is my fault that you betrayed me? Do you expect tears? A kiss? If I had any love for you, it was spent when you betrayed me! I would see you dead, at my own hand, that is all I would give you!"

Thranduil smiled, mirthlessly.

"As I recall, Thorin, your love is never spent. You are like a bull."

"You may recall, laddie! For you'll have no more of me. Not even if you got on your knees and begged me for it. Like you once did." Thorin spat.

"What if I was to tell your company? Your nephews?"

"Tell them what? That you're a quivering, simpering nancy boy, and when I was young and horny and dumb enough to stick me cock in anything human with a hole in it, you liked to take it up the arse, and once I gave you what you wanted? You want to go and tell your prisoners how you bent over double at my feet and whored your fine Elvish mouth for me? Maybe it doesn't matter to your folk, but it does to mine, and they'd judge you to be the queer, not me!" Thorin thundered.

"What if I told them that you kissed me on the lips?"

"It would be a filthy lie!"

"No, it wouldn't."

Thorin was about to speak, again, and then, he laughed, maliciously.

And, in the crudest manner possible, he pulled aside his tunic and with his massive hand he grabbed the massive bulge at the front of his breeches and spat on the floor.

That was an insult, in any language.

"So, you speak to me of a fookin' bargain! Well, I have one for you! I will offer you more than jewels, something dearer to your perverse heart! If you will help me to finish my quest, Elf, I'll give you what you want. Every inch of it! And now that I am a grown man, there is more than you've had, before! You may keep the change, with my complements! And those of my father! And my grandfather!"

"Is there nothing in your hard old heart but contempt? Can you, this man who who offers me humiliation and rape as if it were love and friend ship, can you be the Thorin who was my brother? Whose blood I mingled with my own? I want you to admit that you had real feeling for me, Thorin. That we were comrades, so close, bound by such friendship, that there had to be nothing we did not share. Neither of us are, as you put it, queers. We were the best of friends. It was perfect, and it was pure, and I am sorry now, that I see you again, and only bitterness and hate remains between us. I see myself in your face, and I hate what we have both become!"

The Elvenking's voice broke with emotion, and Thorin's hatred softened, for a moment.

Tauriel peered around the corner, so that she could see inside the cell.

"I came and took my sister because she is not suited to a life of work and toil! She had grown so thin and drawn, and all thirty hard years were etched on her face! I took her home to save her life, and I had the decency to wait until you were away at war! I took my nephew because he is as much an Elf as a Dwarf and he knew nothing of his own people! Besides, some women are strong as men are. My sister was never one of them, and you know it!"

Thorin looked at his feet.

"I do."

"I hate to see myself in you! Your face is like the one I see every morning, in my mirror. A jaded, vicious, vengeful, bitter old man. How have we become the rotten bastards we are from the men we once were?

"Life is as great a bastard as either of us, that's how. You were my well-beloved friend, Thranduil. I will admit to that. And we did become brothers, in blood. A man is meant to love his friends. His brothers. Only we loved too much. As only boys can love, as men grown cannot."

"You did kiss me on the lips, Thorin. And said no man had a better friend than you did."

"Once, that was true."

"Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror. My dearest friend, my most hated enemy. How has it come to this?"

"Come to what? To you and I trying to murder each other with words, in your jail? We are men, now. Boys, no longer. We are kings. And the dragon came, and now I have come to kill him, where you will not. Or die, trying."

The moment had come.

The boys inside the two bitter old men, each crying out to embrace his friend, reached for each other, through the many years of hate, and death, and fire.

Taken up in that moment, Thorin reached for Thranduil's hand, and the Elvenking took it.

Without malice, without lust, without anger, and for only a moment, they were brothers, once more.

Only for a moment.

Tauriel felt her eyes fill up with tears.

Then, they parted.

"If you mean to keep me here, and you still expect me to trust you, you might give me a sign that you do not think of me as a lesser man. If I believed that your offer of help, in exchange for your gems was as one King to another, and not a trap, I might consider trusting your offer. Let me see her. I face death, Thranduil. Whether here in your halls, at the hands of the Orcs who pursue my every step, or from that filthy dragon. Let me know love once more, before I die. If you were ever my friend, my brother, if you care at all for your sister and your nephew? Let me see Anorloth."

Thranduil swore, in common Westron, and threw up his hands.

"Why should I not? If I do not give her permission, she will come to you, without it. For when there is a side to take, mine or yours, Anorloth picks yours. It is all my fault, never mind the dragon, and never does she think that even if Thalin could, never could she have survived the rigors of your people's wandering life. Rather I and all her kin shall be incinerated by a firedrake that I knew was too powerful for me to openly fight! Lo, for the past three hours, my sister has cried and screamed for you. She has begged me to let her come to you. And threatened me when I said I would not. She has torn at her hair and her clothes, and reminded me that you are Thalin's father, that you are her lord and husband, at least at common law. It is true, I have not let her leave this place to come to you, in fifty years. And if I want there to be peace in my household as long as you and your folk are here, then what else can I do? She will make a fool of me in front of all my people and all these Dwarves if I do not, so I will send her to you!"

"And how long will these negotiations between us take?" Thorin asked, sharply.

"Would you treat me and mine so well, if we came as beggars to New Belegost? I will continue to provide you and your men with food and shelter from the dangers of these woods, until I have decided what to do with you. Until you are all regained of your strength. Or until you decide what to do with yourselves. That much, I owe you."

"For that, I would grudgingly thank you. My dearest friend. My hated enemy."

"Not your most hated enemy, Thorin?"

"That is the dragon Smaug. I will see it dead, and laugh in it's dead face, and piss on it's stinking corpse!"

Thranduil smiled, in spite of himself.

"I almost believe that you will find a way."

"You know I will. My hate, too, is never spent."


For 600 years, Tauriel had been a good woman and a good soldier.

One of the things she was good at was not listening to whispers and rumors.

She knew that there were women of her kind, even married women, who complained that the blood in their husbands' veins had turned to cold clay and dust, and that they had might as well be made of marble, for as good as they were, as men.

And she paid no attention to the whispers behind her King's back that though he was beautiful, he was anything but cold, having taken his wife's five sisters as concubines and having six sons and four daughters with them.

They would laugh, and say that whoever had first put the kiss of mortal lust on Thranduil's lips, she must have been some woman, for his blood had, in some 3,000 years, never ceased to boil with it.

Tauriel was without a mother and father, they had been killed by orcs.

She grew up in Thranduil's household, raised, in committee by the queen's five sisters, along with his four daughters, and his six sons.

Thranduil's youngest child, his fourth son, fifth counting the Queen's son, Legolas, was a child of ten years old, and Legolas, who was 1,900 years old was his eldest.

Morgana and Amlugdagnir, better known by the Westron translation of his name, born one year apart were was the second and third youngest, at 609 and 610.

She was Tauriel's closest friend and companion, but Morgana was soon to be the third oldest because Aearonhen, Morgana's mother, was with child.

Aearonhen was also the mother of Estel, Thranduil's youngest son.

She had the same mother as the Queen and her sisters, but her father, the man who raised the Queen and her sisters was just that, a man, of Numenorian blood, a Ranger who retired from two hundred years of war to a ready-made wife and family.

The King credited her fecundity to having a mortal father, and among his brood of bastards, Morgana the Witch and Dragonkiller, the boisterous warrior, were his favorites.

Even his concubines would laugh and say, on the 7th day, the king rested, but Tauriel never laughed with them.

Because the man whom she had such feelings of love for did truly seem to have dust in his veins, and be made of marble.

Legolas was always a little embarrassed at his father's excesses, and he did not readily accept Thranduil's explanation that he intended his people to survive and prosper, into the next ten ages, even if he did have to see to it, himself.

Most embarrassing to Legolas, though was his aunt, Thranduil's half-sister, Anorloth.

Anorloth was also Oropher's daughter, but her mother had been a Dark Elf, who had some Dwarven blood.

Anorloth had a half-breed son, Thalin, whose father was Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror.

Thranduil was considering allowing his half sister to marry Thorin, despite the enmity that had developed between the former friends, but when Smaug came and made all the Dwarves homeless paupers, he refused the match, and turned his sister and his nephew out without a penny, when she reproached him for cowardice.

Anorloth and Thalin, lived with Thorin for thirty years, in which he became the blacksmith of Laketown, and kept one eye on his mountain.

When he marched off to war, Thranduil claimed Thalin for an Elf, and took his sister back to his palace, both against their will.

Meanwhile, Thorin Oakenshield had just lost his brother and his father and grandfather to a war against the orcs that many Silvani thought they should have fought in.

Tauriel still thought it cruel how her king told his former friend that he could marry Anorloth once he had built himself a suitable kingdom.

It only took Thorin thirty years to build New Belegost in the ruins of Belegost, in the Blue Mountains, and create a homeland for his people, and a suitable kingdom for an Elvin queen.

But then the Elvenking called New Belegost poor lodgings in exile, and said Thorin could only marry Anorloth when he had regainred the Lonely Mountain.

Thalin made frequent journeys, to the Iron Hills and the Blue Mountains, and in defiance of her brother's wishes, Anorloth went with him.

But, for the last fifty years, Thranduil had his sister under an enchantment such that she could not leave his kingdom.

Tauriel thought that was crueler yet, but she never said so.

Indeed, embarrassed though Legolas might have been to have a cousin who was half-Dwarrow, Tauriel well knew that most of the women who forsook their cold marble husbands went, deliberately, in search of either Rangers or Dwaves.

Particularly Dwarves.

Burly, hairy, barrel-chested, bearish and lusty, Dwarf men were said to be everything the men of the Elves weren't, and Tauriel tried not to listen to all those appalling jokes about the length and girth of their "warhammers".

Indeed, Tauriel rose to become the Captain of Thranduil's guards, outranking two of his sons and three of his daughters because she kept her mind on her duties, and tread the upward path.

Which the King rewarded.

But he also rewarded his daughter, Morgana, giving her the position of Court Seer.

Morgana, who was tall, raven-haired, blue eyed and built far more voluptuously than Tauriel was, not to put too fine a point on it, a sorceress.

Indeed, she was known as one of the two great human sorcerers in the North, and in all of Middle Earth.

Morgana of Mirkwood, who was the only woman in recorded history, and only one of two beings not a demigod in three ages to perform and survive the Rite of Odin, for which she, like the All-Father of the Aesir, gave an eye.

She gained great wisdom, and, among other powers, the ability to transform herself into a wolf, or a raven.

The only other sorcerer to be able to achieve that feat was the infamous Dwarf, Captain –General Lord Vargbrand, son of Cain, of the Iron Hills.

He was commonly known not only as the greatest general of the Dwarves of the Third Age, but as the Great Beast, and often called the Wickedest Man in the world.

Some said he was dead, and others claimed he could not die.

Vargbrand had married Princess Dis of the Blue Mountains, and had one son, Prince Fili, raised by Thorin Oakenshield to be his heir.

Morgana only knew of Vargbarnd by reputation, but in her travels, she had come to know his son, very well.

Tauriel often wished that Morgana would tell her more of Prince Fili's skill as a hunter, a scout and a warrior, and of his princely virtues, rather than speak of what a charming, handsome scoundrel he was, and how he was quite the great beast, himself.

No one trumpeted the prowess of a Dwarven lover louder than Morgana did, and her father looked the other way, in indulgence of his favorite daughter, on whose craft and council he depended on almost as much as that of Legolas, himself.

The Elvenking was often heard to comment that if Thorin Oakenshield ever came to retake his mountain, then Morgana might have Fili for a concubine of her own.

Which would never cease to make Legolas storm away in a huff.

In a court where everyone seemed to be very free with their favors, under a king who wished his people to be fruitful and multiply, and didn't seem to care if it was only that they were fruitful, Legolas held himself to the traditional moral standards of the Sindari.

When he was a very chaste man, Tauriel was obliged to be a very chaste woman, as a result.

The only finer model of piety and chastity in Thranduil's house was Legolas' aunt, Anorloth, who remained true to Thorin

Unlike Morgana, Anorloth had truly fallen in love with Thorin, and he with her.

She often spoke to Tauriel about their meeting.

Thranduil had held a great feast in honor of his friend, his blood-brother Thorin's birthday, his 21st, in the Great Hall of the Elvenking, and that is where Anorloth first saw Thorin Oakenshield.

She was a petite woman, a little over five foot, with red hair and violet eyes, and she was much younger than her brother.

She had been around Tauriel's age when she met Thorin.

And according to Anorloth, it was love at first sight, for both of them.

He danced with her all night, and when her brother was not looking, stole a kiss.

A kiss, Anorloth said, that breathed the fire of the forge of the Dwarrows' Mahal, himself into her body that had never ceased to burn.

"Dwarves love only once, Tauriel. That does not mean to say that one of their men will not tarry with other women. Some will, and some will not. But they only love once, and their love does not flag or fail. Even with Morgana and her junior Great Beast, you can tell by the way she speaks of him that he has inspired a loyalty in her, and even if he has a girl in every port, a dwarf will make sure he visits every port to see them. Women do not say they make the best lovers just because they are virile and manly. They make the best lovers for their nature, for Dwarves are capable of a greater capacity for love and for loyalty than any other race. Even if you meet a Dwarrow, casually, you will meet him again, if he has to walk on broken glass, barefoot, to find you. I will always love Thorin. When he comes to his Mountain I will be his Queen, and on the day he faces death, I will carry him, myself, to Valinor. Because I cannot bear the idea that we shall be parted in life, or in the afterlife."

Tauriel was moved by the depth of feeling that Anorloth had for Thorin Oakenshield.

And the dedication Thorin had, after so many years, to his wife and his son, whom he never forgot.

They seemed a noble people to Tauriel, a far better choice to be the masters of the Mountain than a filthy firedrake.

Which was why she could not understand why the King had them all imprisoned, and he didn't immediately make a move to ally himself with Thorin Oakenshield and march on the Mountain.

Instead, he shut each the Dwarves up in his jailhouse.

They were given a bed to sleep on, food and drink, and clean clothes, and those who were ill were allowed to have visits with the one called Oin, their doctor, and they would have the opportunity, once a week, to bathe.

It was a far better deal than they had starving in the forest, after being hunted and nearly eaten by spiders, but Tauriel could not understand why Thranduil would do such a thing.

Was it not in his interest that Thorin retake the mountain?

Could they not again, be allied?

Or would they let old wounds and the bitter hatred of two rotten old bastards ruin the last, best hopes of two great peoples.

Tauriel was at a loss for what could be done for it.

So, she decided that she must do her duty.


Thorin would not admit it to Thranduil, but he was exhausted.

And hurt.

And starving.

He sat on his bed, heavily, having used the last of his strength to spar with Thranduil.

His jailer soon returned with food.

A tray of food; it was like a miracle to the starving Dwarf.

Hot roast beef, and buttered potatoes, a bowl of fruit, and a loaf of bread, on a plate with cheese and butter.

It was all Thorin could do to keep his dignity, and not to fall on the food like an animal while she was still in the room.

After she left, Thorin tore hungrily into the meal; he could have devoured it all, but then he thought of Bilbo, who had been just as abused as he, only he was, though valiant, still a small Hobbit.

He saved some of the food, wrapped in a cloth napkin, and hid it under his bed.

Almost as soon as he had done so, Thranduil's captain admitted Morgana the Witch, who accompanied servants in livery that carried an alabaster tub, filled with hot water.

Morgana the Witch was known all the way to the other side of Middle Earth as a powerful sorceress who had been the ruin of many men.

"Do you not have servants to do menial tasks, in this palace?" Thorin asked.

Morgana the Witch stepped closer to Thorin than a woman should to a man she was not well known to.

She bowed low, at the waist.

"I would not call it a menial task to serve you, my Lord Thorin. Let me take those filthy rags and burn them."

"I have served you, Morgana, and been served by you. One night in the midst of such magic is enough for me. I am far more superstitious than my nephew, Fili."

Before Morgana could reply, a red-haired, grey-eyed Silvani, with the beaytifully impish face of a true daughter of Danu, very short for an Elf, shorter than Thorin, but dressed in clothes as splendid as the Elvenking's strode into his cell with an air of majesty.

It seemed to Thorin that in the last fifty years, since she had bourne the dangers of the world to come and meet him, Anorloth had grown more beautiful.

More strong.

"If my lord and husband needs help with his bath, Morgana, I will take care of him. You may go. Now."

Thorin's heart leapt into his mouth, and he was rooted to the spot.

"My lady, the King says I must lock this door, and not unlock it until the wee hours, when I come to check on the prisoners." Tauriel interrupted.

"That suits me, Tauriel. I have no desire to leave this room, so soon."

Tauriel bowed her head, and left Thorin's cell, locking the door.

Taking Morgana with her.

Anorloth walked over to Thorin, and took both of his large, hard, powerful hands in her small, white slim ones.

Freckled on the back.

She had freckles on her arms, too, and on her back, but not on her face.

Anorloth bowed, all the way to her waist.

"I see you, Sunflower. But I do not believe my eyes." He said.

"I am ever at your service, my lord and husband." She said, in Khuzdul.

When Anorloth lifted her head again, there were tears in her eyes.

Thorin put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her, fierecely.

She made a tiny little sound, like the coo of a bird, and melded herself into the heat of his embrace.

Even after his breath was spent, he held his Anorloth tightly against his chest, as if someone was going to come and take her away.

"Though I dream of you every night, Thorin, even before I have fallen asleep, still I had forgotten just what a man you are! I knew that you would come! Not just for Thalin and I, but for Thror's Mountain. Your Mountain. I never doubted you." She continued, in his language.

"Even though I have come as a beggar in rags? Even though you come to me in a cell, at your brother's mercy?"

Thorin pushed himself away from her, embarrassed that he was ragged and filthy and hurt.

Anorloth laughed, sadly, and poured some healing salts into Thorin's bathwater.

"Sometimes it seems to me as if half the world is at my brother's mercy. He has become far less great a man than he assumes he is. Thranduil is not the man you remember. Since he withdrew himself from the stage of the world, what has he done? You have done much! You made a home for me and Thalin, and your close kin in Laketown, for thirty years, then you made war on the orcs, and they have still not recovered in their numbers from the beating they took from the Dwarves. Even after my brother kidnapped us, and you lost almost all your kin, were you defeated, as he is? No! Not Thorin Oakenshield! You became a great king, rebuilt New Belegost and made it your people's new homeland, and then took it upon yourself to raise both your sister's sons. And what has my brother done? Not much."

Thorin took off his ragged tunic, and when he unlaced his breeches and tried to pull them down, they, and his loincloth, fell in pieces on the ground.

"Poor lodgings in exile, that's all they are. I am a mean, hard old man, with a filthy mouth and worse habits. Whoremaster and heartbreaker. A greedy Dwarrow blacksmith, with rheumatism in his back and his knee, reaching with both hands for every piece of gold and piece of arse he can grasp. That is the ugly truth, my beautiful Sunflower."

Thorin eased himself into his bathwater.

He closed his eyes and rested his head against the rim of the tub.

"Now that I've had a decent meal, all I need is a bath, and I'll be my old, miserable self, again."

Anorloth sat down beside the tub, and started to undo his braids.

"You do flatter yourself, don't you, Husband?' she joked.

That caught Thorin off guard, and he laughed.

"I remember how I would come home to our miserable heap of shite shack at night, filthy from the forge, and you would leave Thalin in Dis' care and jump into my arms. It's my faults you love me for, and you would not have me any other way!"

"I have thought of a lot of ways, these past fifty years. I have had little else to do, but sew, and wlak in Mirkwood, and wait for Thalin to come home and tell me what is going on in the world. Little my brother cares to know! He styles himself a Great Elvin Lord, like the Warrior Kings of the First Age, but all he has done for almost two hundred years is fornicate and fulminate. His dynastic ambition terminates at the end of his cock, and his horizons are not far beyond. He doesn't seem to understand that just because there will be ten, or 12, or twenty more of his direct descendants in the world, if it all burns in the eye of the Enemy, he will burn, too. We were the ruin of him, Thorin. You and I."

"Your brother ruined himself. With his jealousy. I feel sorry for his children, and when he has them, his grandchildren, who will either die or be forgotten here, with him. But you and Thalin will not be among them."

"I hate to abandon him. But what can I do, when he is too proud, and too stubborn, to see the error of his ways? Soon you will be home, King Under the Mountain. And Thalin and I , we too will be home, at last."

"You speak Khuzdul as if you were born in my grandfather's halls."

"My grandfather was, or so my mother said. And my great brother, the Elvenking, son of a High Elf of Rivendell, he will never live down that his father married a Dark Elf, who was the daughter of a common Dwarrow tinker."

"And his sister is the wife, at common law, of a Dwarrow blacksmith. Like mother, like daughter." Thorin laughed.

"I am not like my mother. I have never been touched by the narrow, hairless white hands of one of my own kind."

"It is well you were not. The men of your kind are strange. At least your bastard brother remains a man, and not a marble saint, whose motives no man with blood in his veins can know. Still, if Elrond has the last Homely House, then this is The Last Disorderly House! Your brother! Married at two hundred, a boy by the standards of your people! A father the same year as he was married, and two hundred years ago he was wife to six and father to seven more! A son ten years old and a concubine with child, and he cares not what father or mother his brood of rutting bastards bear their children on, as long as they come under his dominion! If that witch niece of yours connives to get my reckless nephew to fill her belly with Thranduil's first grandchild, I'll let an Heir or Heiress of Durin be raised in this place over my dead body!"

"Thorin, have you really so much moral authority to speak from?" Anorloth asked.

Thorin dropped the soap into the bottom of the tub, picked it up, and gestured at his common-law wife with it.

"I have no bastards, and no mad desire to fill the world, or outfit my kingdom with them! Thor's mighty hammer, look where that spider bit me! Fookin' blood of my fathers, had it got me an inch to the left, I would have to be the Queen Under the Mountain!"

He scrubbed gently at the bite, and looked at it with great worry.

Anorloth could no longer hold her laughter in.

"What?" Thorin demanded.

"You! You and Thranduil! You were such good friends, like brothers, because, by my faith you are the same man! You will not reconcile because you are both stubborn, stiff-necked bastards, each of whom expects the other is secretly after his arse, but fairly little do you think of your arses for the entirety of the universe for you both revolves around what's in front, rather than in back! And when one of you dies, though the other has spent two hundred years shouting that queer bastard, he was never my friend and only after my arse, the one who lives will weep and tear his clothes and scream that he has lost his brother!"

"You do not know the shame, Anorloth! The shame your brother and I both carry!"

Thorin got out of the alabaster tub, and took the towel that Anorloth offered him.

"Shame? What shame? The truth is that neither of you knows whether you did, or did not. We drank pure Sindari absinthe together, you and Thraduil and I. On many nights. After almost two hundred years, who can remember anything?"

"You think that I don't know it? How many nights do none of us remember? The gods only know what we did. Or with whom? We were wild in those days, I know, wild and pampered and privileged and free to indulge our every whim. Your brother was older, it's true he grew up before we did and I cannot blame him much for refusing to believe that his sister's 24-year-old lover who was only sober while he was asleep and who had laid siege to every merry widow in Erebor and every unfaithful wife in his kingdom was marriage material. But it has been two hundred years, since! 30 years later, I was a responsible man, with a trade and a home that he built with his won hands, in a city he helped to raise from nothing! 60 years later I was the lord of New Belegost! Why then, could you not be my wife? Why did your brother let my people die and my kingdom burn when the dragon came? Was he so fond of his pretty face that he was afraid Smaug would give him more hideous scars, that no amount of magic could conceal? Where was Thranduil at Azanulbizar? There was no dragon there! His son, Dragonkiller, fought with us. Where was his army? What did I to do him, to make your brother hate me, so?"

"Other than seducing his sister and giving her a half-breed child? You wouldn't get his jewels for him. Those jewels were not Thror's to take. They belonged to Thranduil's mother. They are all he has left of Morgan le Fay. At least I know I will see my mother again, in the Undying Lands. Our father is dead. His mother is dead. Full-blooded Elves do not have the same kind of souls that mortals have. Dead is dead, Thorin. Forever."

"Do you think that I should have lost my father, my grandfather, my home and my birthright, that thousands of my people should have been burnt or eaten alive and yens of thousands scattered to the winds, because of it?" Thorin asked.

He threw the towel on the stone floor, angrily, standing with his hands on his hips, demanding an answer.

Anorloth looked him in the eye, and put her hand on the side of his face.

"No. My brother was wrong, then, to abandon you. Wrong now, to imprison you. I would like to see you two reconciled. But I can see why that is beyond hope. Let me take these filthy rags, and burn them."

That light came into Thorin's eyes, that mad light of deep hunger that drove the men of his line insane.

Thorin was almost two hundred years old, that was quite old, even for a Dwarf.

But he was not shriveled or bowed, or graying, he was a finer, stronger, and more handsome man than she had ever known him to be.

Perhaps there was magic in the madness of the Heirs of Durin; maybe they really did burn bright and hot with the fires of Mahal's forge, until their savage gods of the Aesir took them, through, batlle, to the halls of Valhalla.

"Later, wife, you can worry about my dirty clothes I've thrown on the floor. That dress you wear, I want to see it beside them. Before I make it as ragged. I have waited fifty years, and not one night has gone by that I have not thought of you. I will wait no longer." He growled.

"How can you still be mad, and impulsive, after all these years? Will you snort, and stamp your feet, and flare your nostrils, like you did, fifty years ago, when I came to the Blue Mountains and surprised you in your bedchamber? Tear it, my lord and husband. My burly, bonny, raging bull!"


"I wonder what's keeping Morgana?"

"Shut up, Fili."

"Don't sulk, little brother. Uncle and I aren't the only ones in line for a little jailhouse romance with the lovely Elvin ladies of Mirkwood. Keep reciting your Da's poetry, and all that about my Da, and Mum, and their star-crossed love and tragic death, and you'll be well in!"

"You can even make a joke of our fathers being dead?"

"Wargshite! Why does Mum go to the Iron Hills every summer?"

"To visit their graves."

"For two months? If I live to see our great-grandfather's halls, I am going to the Iron Hills, first thing."

"You've been saying that since we were children."

"I know my Da. And yours. I saw them have fights that put that last one to shame! Before you were born-"

"I know. Your Da threw my Da through a stained-glass window, and my Da fell from the tall tower to the smaller one, and when your Da ran out to see if he was still alive, my Da stood up, shook the glass out of his hair and punched your Da out cold."

"They're not dead, as I live and breathe, Kili! Maybe they would have made rotten fathers, but we are men, now, what bad influence could our fathers have on us?"

"On you? None. How could you be worse?"

"Thank you, little brother."

"Fili?"

"Hmmm?"

"Have you ever made a woman scream, like that?"

"Not quite like that. Not yet. But with another 70 or 80 years of practice, who knows?"


Much later in the night, Thorin fell into a deep, sated slumber, like a drunken man.

He almost didn't awaken at the sound of the small, rather embarrassed voice at the bars of his cell.

"Thorin? Erm, Thorin? It's, ah, me. It's Bilbo. I'm not looking, just, erm, well, I'm here."

"I hear you, burglar. Wait a moment. For I have been, this night, in the midst of Valinor."

Laughing at his own joke, Thorin got the plate with the napkin full of food from under his bed.

He opened the oak inner door and passed the plate through the bars, to Bilbo.

Who was looking at him, with an expression of mingled horror and awe on his face.

"Take the plate, burglar. Before you are spotted."

"I'm terribly sorry, Thorin. And it's not as if I'm…queer, or anything. It's only, well I…it's no wonder you fellows are so popular with these Elf women! With most women, I would expect. That is, I mean, well, you certainly are tall, for a Dwarf, aren't you?"

Bilbo chuckled, and then looked under the napkin.

"Roast beef and baked potatoes. With bread and cheese. Well, that's very nice! Of course if it was fried orc, it would be very nice, about now."

Then he peered through the bars.

"Your good wife, she is still alive, isn't she?" he joked.

Mindful of the fact that Bilbo was a good foot and a half shorter than him, Thorin grabbed his pillow, and held it in front of his abject nakedness.

"I have not yet slain a woman with my hammer, Hobbit." He laughed.

"Well you probably could if you hit one over the head hard enough. And I have met your son. He's agreed to hide me in his rooms. He looks just like you. Only taller and ginger. Like his mother, I suppose."

"Anorloth is only four foot nine."

"Well, that explains a lot. But that King Thranduil, he's over six foot I daresay, so I suppose that's why your son's so tall. Takes after his Uncle. Speaking of taking after his uncle, I think Kili is beginning to follow in your footsteps. I don't mean to tell tales out of school, but your jailer seems awfully interested in watching Kili. He was telling her all about his famous father. And reciting love poems to her. And that hard-eyed warrior, well she looked positively dewy over it! Then again, so did Kili."

"Maybe he'll find a way to hammer us out of these bars, before you do, Bilbo."

It took Bilbo a moment to get that joke, and then he and Thorin both laughed.

Bilbo sat down, and sliced off a piece of bread and a piece of cheese, with Sting.

"And what about that giant woman, the black-haired one, with one eye? By Yavanna's garters, pardon my Elvish, that is the prettiest girl with one eye that I have ever seen! If I had a stepstool, mind you, and a very large vial of love potion to confound her with, well, I could do her quite a mischief!"

"You would need neither to win her favor, burglar. That is Morgana. The witch. She gave her eye performing the Rite of Odin. Odin, who made Mahal, who made us. In exchange, she has gained a piece of the All-Father's wisdom. And the ability to change her skin, and become a raven, or a wolf. She is the most powerful sorceress in Middle Earth since the First Age, when Morgana Le Fay, her grandmother, was the Queen of all the Northern Lands. Of Men and Elves, alike."

"You mean the Morgan leFay? The daughter of Danu? The actual Morgan le Fay?"

"Thranduil's mother."

"I see. And out of all the possible men in the world she's mad about our Fili?"

"Morgana has had all the possible men in the world! And Elves. And Dwarves. If she has known men of the Shire, she's had them, too! If she has not, well, now's your chance, Bilbo! In 610 years, the Witch of Mirkwood has not had many lonely nights. She would fuck an orc out of sheer curiosity, if she could find one with a cock that wasn't bent and knobbly. Fili follows his own father, Vargbrand, the Great Beast, down that well-trodden path. The woman ought to shave her beard into the shape of a welcome mat! She's not all she seems, Bilbo. When I was a young man, and I had her, she was a foul-mouthed, insatiable, ravenous whore with a great sloppy cunny. That said, once she's got you in it, by Thor's brass bollocks, it's like an iron fist in a velvet glove, the way that witch can swink! And she's got the Devil's own mouth on her, that's true, enough. Tits as big as a man's head, too. And, of course, she looks with special favor on my nephew. Two peas in a pod, my nephew and Morgana."

"Why did they call him "the Great Beast'? Fili's father, I mean."

"Vargbrand is the greatest general of the Third Age. But he has a taste for torture. The orcs who he would capture that he allowed to go back to their fellows gave him that name. Of course, they may call him the great beast, also because he'd fuck anything human that would agree it to it, as long as the person wasn't not deformed, or a child."

"And your sister thought he would make a good husband?"

"That is what I told her. A sadist, a sorcerer and a sodomite to boot! But she told me that she loved him! Why should she have cared if he was good looking, the man was an animal! You know who it was he claimed to love, other than my sister. His own brother. His younger brother. Can you imagine that? Fucking your own brother? What does it matter if he was pretty as a woman? A man shouldn't even think such things about his brother, let alone act on them! Fookin' animal!"

"That is truly disgusting."

"Not to Vargbrand and Lothinwaen! They were in love! Wargshite! Poor Lothinwaen. Kili's father. He didn't know any better, did he? He was a lad of fifteen and his brother was a man thirty years old when he battened onto him. He wrote beautiful love poems for his brother as well as Dis. Lothinwaen loved them both; he truly had a poet's soul and a warrior's heart. As Kili does. But my sister thought they were both husband material. Madly in love with both of them. A pervert and a poet. She still goes to visit them, in the Iron Hills. I have told the lads they are both dead, for I wanted them to have no hand in the raising of my sister sons. Those were the condition for Dis to come home to the Blue Mountains, for me to raise Fili and Kili."

"I shouldn't wonder you did! Still if that Morgana has a special liking for Fili, maybe he can hammer us a way out of here."

"I would put my trust in you, Bilbo, rather than my nephews' art with women. They are boys. Put a pretty Elvish girl in front of them who wants to ride them all the way to Mordor with their bollocks for a seat cushion, and back again, and escape will be the last thing on their minds."

"Yes, well, I won't be distracted by these ladies. Primarily because I cannot seem to locate a stepstool. Honestly, Thorin, I don't know how I will get you out of this fortress, but I shall find a way. Now, I think I'll go and say hello to the other fellows. Then I'll find my way back to Thalin's rooms, have my dinner and just die for a little while."

"I have faith in you, Mr. Baggins."

"One more thing, though. What in Middle Earth did you say to Thranduil, to make him so angry at you? I didn't catch it, my Khuzdul is not good."

"I told him that he could burn in hell."

"No, I got that part. You've said that to me often enough. And you didn't tell the Elvenking to go fuck himself, because I've heard a lot of that one, too. I actually know a lot of bad language in Khuzdul, thanks to this journey. I know "Eat shit and die", and, "Piss on you", and " son of an orc's warg" and "Fuck off" and "fuck you" and all the variations on that theme. I know all the naughty bits, of course. But I don't know that one."

"I told Thranduil that if he did not like the way our meeting had gone…"

"I got that part. You said it in Westron, after all."

"…that he could suck my cock, and make it a love story."

Bilbo's lip trembled, but he did not laugh.

"Your command of profanity, in any language, Thorin, is truly staggering."

"Thank you, burglar. Mahal's beard, it is the witch! Hide in the shadows, Bilbo. If she sees you, she'll might keep you for a pet, like a pink poodle on a gold chain."

"That might not be the worst thing that could befall me."

They both laughed at that, but Bilbo made himself scarce, anyway.


With Tauriel walking after her, asking what she was about, Morgana made her appearance, with a purple velvet robe, trimmed and lined in lush fur, over her arm.

She was wearing a filmy purple nightdress that left little to the imagination, and every Dwarf in the jailhouse was at the bars of his cell to have a look.

"Fili, my sweet prince, my very great beast, where are you?" she cried.

"I'm in the last cell, Morgana!"

Dramatically, for Morgana did everything dramatically, Morgana flung herself against the bars of Fili's cell, seemingly unmindful that her bosom had almost completely slipped from her nightdress.

Considering that Fili, though also tall for a Dwarf, was about five feet and three to Morgana's six feet, when she thrust her arms through the bars and pulled him into them, the Dwarf prince had the opportunity to observe the faultiness of Morgana's nightdress up close and personal.

"Durin's shorter and curlier beard, Morgana, you can't know how good it is to see you again!" He said.

The other Dwarrows laughed.

"What are you doing, locked in our jailhouse? Has my father lost his mind?"

Morgana tucked herself back into her nightdress and turned to her friend.

"Tauriel, unlock this door."

"But Morgana, these are your father's prisoners."

"The other 12 Dwarrows are my father's prisoners. Prince Fili is my prisoner. And I will set him free when my father sets his companions free."

"And you will tell our King that, when he asks me where one of his prisoners is? And how will you keep Prince Fili from escaping?"

"You've got to be joking, girl? Do you think he's going to want to escape?" Dwalin shouted.

Fili winked at Tauriel.

"Come to Morgana's room after she's fallen asleep, Captain Tauriel, and I'll show you."

The other Dwarves shouted and hooted, but Kili came to the bars of his cell, angrily.

"You leave her alone, Fili! Or when I get out of here I'll give you the worst fookin' beating you've ever had!" he insisted.

"I was only kidding, little brother. My dance card is going to be quite full." Fili assured him.

Meanwhile, Morgana unlocked Fili's cell with her own keys, and gave him the fine robe.

"So that no one sees the Heir to the King Under the Mountain in filthy rags."

"I meant it, Morgana. You cannot know what I have been through!"

"You can tell me all about it, as I draw you a bath, and tend to your wounds…and your every whim. No matter how foul, how base or how absolutely filthy."

"Mahal's beard, Morgana, you are the Devil's Own Whore!"

"And you are his own son, Fili. And a very great beast, yourself."

Fili picked Morgana up, like she was made of feathers, and threw all six feet of her over his shoulder.

"Prepare to meet your destiny, witch!"

Morgana shrieked a laugh of orgiastic glee, as Fili carried her up the hidden staircase she had come down.

Then again, Dwarves were very strong.

Very strong, indeed.


"You did say, Thorin, that the witch was partial to any man? Any male person, of any race? At all?" Bilbo asked.

"Go and find yourself a stepstool, burglar. But you would not want to ride into that battle without a sheath for your sword. And take a bath after. In hot water. The hottest you can bear. With lye soap."


Tauriel walked the halls for another hour, shining a light into all the cells, finding all the Dwarves asleep in their beds.

And Anorloth asleep in the strong arms of Thorin Oakenshield, her lord and husband.

But when she got to Kili's cell, she found him awake.

He had taken off his tunic, and was standing in the back of his cell, in his boots and breeches, bare to the waist, furiously scratching at a series of large itch welts, the size of gold pieces.

There were three on his side, one on his chest, and one on his back that he could not reach.

He swore extravagantly in Westron, and contorted himself with the effort, and had Tauriel not been staring at him, she might have laughed.

But Tauriel was staring.

In his tunic, it appeared that Kili would be barrel-chested, muscular and well made.

Out of it, his strength was apparent.

He had whorls of silky black hair all over his chest, that thinned across his torso and then thickened again where they disappeared below the waistband of his trousers.

His arms were as well-muscled as an Elvish man's legs, and they too were covered in the same whorls of silky black hair.

The muscles in his broad back moved and rippled with his attempts to reach the welt, and when he finally got to scratch it, he let out a sigh of satisfaction.

Tauriel wondered if it was love she was feeling, or just lust.

But whatever it was, she did not feel good or quiet, or chaste; she had this wonderful, awful feeling of hunger, something completely different for what she felt for Leglolas.

It was like the hunger for food after a long fast, or water after a long walk.

Something that was animal and instinctual, but it did not make her feel low and base, but rather more alive than she had for a long time.

As alive if she was made of starlight.

She suddenly understood why Anorloth could never forget Thorin, and why Morgana came in the middle of the night with a fine robe for Fili, and why even her King, a man whose preference was exclusively and excessively to women would hunger, only once, as she now hungered.

To have the very fires of Mahal's forged breathed into her soul, from the kiss on her lips of one of the Heirs of Durin.

Then her eyes met Kili's.

She was embarrassed, but he only smiled, warmly.

He was happy to see her.

"Can you not sleep, Prince Kili?"

"Not when I have been bitten all over by those god-damned, accused son of an orc's warg fookin' spiders!"

Kili contorted himself, scratching, again.

Tauriel blushed and turned her head away.

Without his tunic on, his breeches left very little to the imagination.

Well, if I searched down his trousers, I would have found quite a weapon.

She felt hot blood rise into her chest and her face, and laughed them away.

"You cannot suffer so, from such a small thing, a fine strong man like you!" she said.

Kili smiled at the complement, and blushed, just a little.

"I am exhausted, but there is no way that I can lie on my bed that I'm not tormented! They are no small thing! Oin put some kind of ointment on these bites, but they itch and they burn. I've got four more of them…elsewhere, and they're driving me mad!"

"I know the sting is maddening. We have a remedy for the bites of the spiders. I was bitten too, in the fight and I have a jar of it in my pocket, to put on when the bites madden me. Here."

Tauriel passed the jar of ointment through the bars.

Kili unscrewed it, sniffed the contents and put some on the bites on his side.

"It works! It works! Mahal's hammer, it works."

He put a little more ointment on his fingers, and them put his hand down the back of his pants, and finally, he gave her back the jar, turned his back to her and put it… somewhere else.

"The beasts, they did not bite you…there…did they?"

"One bit me on the inside of my thigh. That is the worst….and now I can't feel it. At last! Peace!"

He turned around again, tying the laces of his breeches.

"Now I can put my clean clothes on, tomorrow, and tonight I can sleep. Thank you, Lady Tauriel. I suppose if you would have searched down my trousers, you would only have found a bunch of spider bites."

They both laughed, and bid each other good-night.


Tauriel finally went to her rooms.

Unfortunately for her, Tauriel's rooms in the King's household adjoined Morgana's.

And she and Prince Fili were putting on such a performance you might think the couple in the next room were the Devil and the Whore of Babylon.

Through the wall came such an appalling racket that Tauriel left her bedroom and went into her sitting room with her blankets and slept on the divan.

They raised such a terrible racket that she heard the King, who must have been in Morgana's mother's rooms, slamming the door of that chamber and pounding on Morgana's.

"Are you being murdered in there, girl, to make you scream, so? And what have you taken to your bed, a bellowing ape? I am your father, do you think I can sleep in peace through such racket, knowing full well what you're about? I realize it is beyond your capacity, witch, to be chaste, but could you at least not wake the whole household? You sound as if you were being murdered with a dull knife! The next time I come to this door it will be to break it down, with an axe in my hand, and I shall use the handle of it to beat your suitor back to whatever part of this palace he belongs in!"

The door of Morgana's mother's room slammed, again, and after that things were quiet enough that Tauriel could go back and sleep in her own bed.

But she did not sleep.

She lay awake, thinking of Kili.

Whispering to the dark.

Paraphrasing Lothinwaen's words, and understanding just what he meant.

"My forbidden love, your stout heart I treasure. My raven-hair'd lion of the morning. My forbidden love, your very sight, my pleasure. Though Hell is warning. I may be damned, Dwarrow lover, but for thee, and no other. I will burn in hell or heaven; my raven hair'd lion of the morning."

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: Who wants more forbidden love in the Last Disorderly House? You do, of course! Is Thranduil really jealous of his own sister? Is Anorloth the only one in the family that Thorin desires? Will Thranduil of the six wives stoop so low as to make him deliver on his offer, whether Thorin wants to, or not? Or will Morgana wear down his will, and land Thorin in trouble with Thranduil and Anorloth? And what of faithful Anorloth? Can she and Thalin, son of Thorin, conspire with Bilbo to free the company? Can Fili persuade Morgana, with his mithril tongue and mighty hammer, to help the company escape? And what of Kili and Tauriel, our star-crossed lovers? Will they, or won't they? Could this be, at long last, love? Will Thorin and Anorloth's tragic history repeat itself with Kili and Tauriel And what happens when Legolas discovers that his lady fair of some 500 years is flirting with a captive Dwarf-prince? And, last but not least, will there be lemons in the next chapter, or will I continue with the lemon-scented prose? Tune into Chapter Two, coming soon, and find out for yourself!)