Thorin awoke early the next morning and aching. Deep grooves pained his palms and his hair was a fine mess. He crawled out of his sleep-sack, his body tender all over. The base of his spine throbbed, as if it had been resting all the night on a jagged rock.

The dwarves were breaking their fast already around a cook-fire. Urdlaug had exchanged a case of silverware for a pair of hams, eggs and a round of cheese the size of a wagon wheel, from passing merchants, the previous day, and the day's first meal smelled divinely heavy. She was already shouting orders at her sisters to help with the dishing out to the hungry company.

Oin stepped into his path obstinately. "For you, majesty." He thrust one of his bottled remedies into his hand. It was a milky substance tinted green, too green for any dwarf's liking, and it smelled even more peculiar. "What is this?"

"For sleep," Oin said loudly, passing him an unpalatable-looking potion. "For peace of mind both day and night," he continued, louder still. Thorin looked around edgily. "As your faithful subject, brother-in-arms, and healer, it is my duty to see-"

He uncorked it and gulped it down and nearby retched, while Oin put up his hands in disapproval. "You take it before you bed down, Thorin. Now, I think you are in a long day, if you make it to high noon."

"Near deaf he is. Don't need to be nobody's business," grumbled Dwalin. Out of earshot and hunkered down over a plate of hard bread smothered in runny eggs, ham and smoky cheese, he sat between Freyda and his brother, edgily. He had taken to accepting Freyda's company when breaking his fast the days past, which seemed to lighten her, except that he rarely spoke to her at all. Sometimes his lips moved as if to say something but all that came out was a grunt or more oft, a belch.

"It is all of our business whether he likes it or not," Freyda put forth finally, and boldly. "The worse things'll always stay inside. Dwarves like him always keep it locked away. 'Less he breaks and spills 'em like ye just tossed me mornin' potion!" Her voice rose to a deep squawk as Dwalin grabbed her bitter black coffee instead of his mead, took one sip and chucked it cup and all over his shoulder. "Southron swill."

"My Southron Swill! I like it!" She gave him a playful jab at the top of his arm. Dwalin stopped chewing halfway through another bite, the hint of a smile that had begun to form at the contact receding back into a contemplative surliness. "And what if he does? What if he does?" Dwalin put forth, hiding his unease at what the answer might be.

"He's got someone to confide it in, if I'm not mistaken." Her pale brows raised. "Well, what do you suppose they talk about when they're off together? The weather?" The brows wiggled again, this time a bit more serious in intent.

"Yer daft, the both of ye." Dwalin dismissed both Freyda and his brother's agreeable motions with a wave of his hand.

Balin steepled his fingers thoughtfully. It had not been his place to say, but it felt more and more to him like it might be after all. "It may be that he has grown fond of the lady's company. I doubt it is any more than that. After all, it is not an… opportune time, brother, with all that has been and all that will be."

He summoned Thorin to their cook-fire gathering with a jerk of his head. He squirmed impetuously against Oin's prodding and meddling. Eda was eavesdropping on the other side of the apothecary wagon. That much he knew, and not even the hawing of the Ibexes could hide that Siv had joined her now too. His head began to feel a bit groggy.

"Let me see your hand," tut-tutted Oin. Thorin opened his palm and Oin raised a pair of bushy gray brows at the mean-looking gouges. One of them was bleeding. "To prevent infection," Oin lectured with the practiced patience of a healer, applying a paste to his hand that first stung then settled into a pleasant tingle. "Now leave it be. I'll dress it again in the morning." He rifled absent-mindedly through his medicine kits for the bandages, as Thorin winced impatiently. He wrapped linen over the hand. "Be quick about it," Thorin grumbled. "I should like to tend my hair before it is in mats." Oin squinted over at Brynja and Bofur, doing precisely that for each other, her gentle laughter, and Gimli's childish grumbling as Emli fixed the plaits at his beard nearby. The healer parted his lips to say something but thought better of it.

He fell asleep in the saddle sometime after they had gotten on with their travels, and woke again in the dark, covered in a blanket in the back of Donbur and his sisters' wagon. He saw a flash of flame-red, a hushed female presence around him. He muttered her name half-awake. She did not answer though, and soon it was little tawny-headed Anbur that tugged the blanket up around his shoulders though. "It is alright, your majesty." The dwarfling's voice was tender, but sad.

II

He rose after night had fallen. Dwalin sat alone by the remains of the cook-fire as if he had been waiting for him. "Ye need to sleep. Ye fell from your pony," Dwalin admonished quietly though. "I am fine. I do not wish to sleep."

"Oin give ye some of that poppy grog?"

"If that is what it was, I shall not be imbibing of it again. Not that I would." He took up his sword and his ax and stalked off, annoyed.

"Where are you going?" Dwalin called after him.

"My watch."

He went off against Dwalin's grumbling, his head still feeling irritably afloat. The land before him rose in a gentle wave of earth and sloped down again. He found his way easily enough in the dark, with the light of a single torch. The night had never seemed more unkind than here in the wilds. They were on the borders of the Trollshaws and the terrain was growing hillier.

When he reached the other side of the rise, he found not Gimli and Oin but Meisar, alone. "He got into the wrong patch of mushrooms. Belly's in knots. Oin's making him some potion," she explained with distaste. "I've taken their watch." Meisar made a welcoming gesture beside her and Thorin sat. She smoked a long-stemmed pipe. It was a quaint instrument, and whatever she smoked from it smelled like burnt strawberries. "Pipe-weed from Frogmorton," she offered. "It has a relaxing effect and helps with sleep." She handed him the pipe gently.

"Do not think I have not seen your own troubled sleep, my lady," he muttered, defensively. "You watch me sleep?" she remarked, unsmiling though. Her face set itself stonily again. "It is better than that bitter milk Oin gives you."

"I shall not be needing it again, if it matters," he responded, coolly. He shined the torch in her direction, making her blink. Two dogs curled up lazily at her feet, the third in her lap, as always, and her hair was different. The double plaits had given way to a braided bun half the size of her head, another plait snaking down her back, folded in half with its end clasped at the nape of her neck, so that her hair came to the small of her back rather than halfway to her feet. Fly-away strands framed her cheeks and forehead and the end part of the braid was crooked. In the days of old it was a shame for a dwarf to have crooked braids, but hard times had made it of little consequence now. He thought of Bofur and Brynja and their messy plaits, what mattered, what didn't.

Brushed and braided twice or thrice daily, but always messed somehow. They were never apart, not even for a moment. It made a queer pang inside him to think, one he was greatly unfamiliar with. He settled beside her, his back against the hill, sword across his knee. He planted his ax in the grass between them. "I do not watch you sleep, dunininh. Only the night of the orcs."

"The orcs?" Her head swam trying to recall the chaos of that night. Already, it seemed alarmingly distant. "When you were struck in the head. Am I surprised you do not remember?" he reiterated flatly.

"I remember. I remember much, my king. Too much I think." "And?" His voice was tinged with some inquiry, as to what she was hopeless to identify. His eyes in wind-licked torchlight were demanding, and his long hair, simple as it was kept, was silk-smooth luxurious and dark as onyx. And his plaits, the ones that were rooted before his ears, were as always, strictly even, so perfectly symmetrical. The silver of his hair-beads gleamed regally.

There emerged a hint of fear and pain in her that he could not discern the source of. At once her gaze had seemed awkwardly transfixed but as contemplation returned to her expression, it was dark with trepidation. He eased a bit, his body inching its way a bit closer, until he was leaning against the handle of his ax. "I did not mean to imply anything about your… sleep. Only that, I…"

"Speak freely, dunininh. Meisar…"

She drew a short breath inward. "It is the wee hours, your watch has come and gone, and you are out here, with me, again," she observed quietly. It was a question, and now he was the one helpless to answer, at least in the words he was capable of speaking aloud. She eyed him uneasily, remembering the feel of his hand clutching hers to the solid expanse of his shoulder.

"I would rather some company than toss and turn about."

"I have not heard that about you."

No soul lonelier than Meisar the Beardless. He heard Donbur's voice in his head repeating it, even that cheerful lout unavoidably dour in his description of her. "You have not heard what about me?" He crossed his arms and eyed her stiffly.

"I have been told... that you are a secluded kind."

"Told? Believe not what you are told. Believe only what you see." "I see a dwarf who has suffered over many deaths, including his own."

"What do you know about living? Or death for that matter?" he rumbled, defensively.

"I am a dwarrowdam of Dale. Do you think I do not know death?" she snarled back. All of the reverence, the quiet, disarming stoicism was ripped away, and there was a raw, trembling pain. She stood quickly and faced him; him sitting at a slight elevation above the ground, and her standing, she met his eyes relentlessly. He flinched away from the infernal indignity in her gaze. "When I tell you I remember, it is not to boast, my king. And I would give all that I did not."

"The inferno?" His voice was calmer and it brought her down several degrees in return. "Yes. The day the dragon destroyed Dale, and claimed Erebor. I could not have been more than a few years old."

"And you see it now? After all these years?"

She sat again. "I see fire. Only fire. And a little of what was before, but it is of no importance these days." She turned again to Thorin with a great sadness in her eyes. He did not like her eyes like that; they looked too much like his. They were heavy again. She looked like a carved effigy hovering over a tomb. "Tell me," he said more gently. "What did-"

She interjected, sharply but distantly. Her eyes were closed. "I remember the house with the terra cotta floor. High above the streets; we had a small apartment in a round tower. I lay on the floor of my home often in the heat of summer; it was cool to the touch. And my mother's feet with her great fat toes. She wore little rings on them. It is never her face I can remember, but her feet alone."

She opened her eyes. "On that day I remember the hot wind. It came through the windows and all through the little streets. I went to the marketplace with my mother and my brothers. I had two or three of them, I think, all much older. I was the beloved babe of this family. If only I could remember their faces. The last I saw my father he was telling us to be quick about our errands. There was a storm coming in from the north, he said, a strange storm. I remember the sky was gray like smoke over yonder."

Thorin sighed. "Crops and villages to the north were laid waste to. We thought it to be skirmishes among men, a pack of orcs at worst. The sentries were put on alert, but we had no idea what was coming until it was too late. By the time we called a full alarm, he had already circled the mountain from the north and turned back toward the gates of Dale."

"It happened so quickly. Before Smaug breathed his first on the city, it was so ordinary a day, except for the wind. I clung at my brother's leg and begged him for a coin in the marketplace. There were pretty painted horses on a perambulating thing that turned 'round."

His heart wretched in and tightened in his chest, but he urged her on.

"So he left me with my pony to ride around and around. Little human and dwarven children were all about. A dwarven lady with heart-shaped hair was selling toys. She was wearing the prettiest blue and gold gown, and her face is the last thing I remember of my life in Dale. She was selling trinkets, and kites for the children. And then she looked up and screamed as they all blew away. But they didn't… rise up in the air like birds. They turned black and fell as ash."

She smiled bitterly at the memory. Dead Thorin concluded, silently. Just as my kin most beloved. Long ago he had concluded that none could understand his pain, not even those who had suffered similarly. In Meisar's pained smile he saw his own, the one had once comforted Fili and Kili with, forced for sure, but done not out of falsehood but love…

His arms ached and his fingers twitched but he could not give her that comfort. "And the inferno? How did you survive?" He took her pipe up for the first time and smoked heartily. The smoke carried on a light wind and made a burning sensation in her eyes that produced tears. "Meisar…" he said gently. She could not read his face through the blur of salty liquid quenching her smoky eyes.

A Firebeard lass, she reminded herself intensely, staring at the orange plait whose end was coiled messily on her lap. She dared not look in his eyes for fear of what she might see, now. "And then… and then, there was the shadow, a great shadow, and then the roar, and the blast of the horns. I ran where the people were running, crying for my brothers, my mother. As you can expect, I never found them. But I saw a whole crowd buried by a falling tower. Three years old and knew not yet my mother's face but I have seen theirs in my dreams ever since. One never forgets the look on another's face just before they die, and know it is coming. I saw them in the rubble with their limbs crushed and blood coming out of their mouths, sputtering for help, and I could not… could do nothing."

Just as he had seen the arrow in Fili's throat. He had not seen Kili die. Kili was already dead. Had he lain close to his brother when he breathed his last? Had they comforted each other somehow? Mahal, he had prayed. Grant them only that. And then he had slipped into unconsciousness, a blackness colored red, and would never know.

And he would never ask. "What did you do?" he asked instead, to the woman sitting stiffly beside him, her eyes somewhere else, while he was stifling the hitching of his breath, against that terrible moment, which felt like it was crushing against his ribcage.

Or Thror. He had not seen the pale orc's sword slice through his grandfather's neck but when he tossed the head at his feet the expression of his final moment was frozen upon his face.

"Do? What does anybody do? The fire-wind singed the clothes off of me and all but a few wisps of my hair, all of my beard if I ever had one. Had not tumbled down the steps of a root-cellar, I would have been singed away too. After that I ran into the wilderness with a thousand other people who were burned and naked and screaming, and I took the dress from a dead girl lying at the roadside."

They had run. Some naked, some with the beards singed clean from their faces, which was as good as naked to a dwarf.

"I saw the mountain by night lit up and the sky was the color of blood. Nargubraz," she recalled mournfully. "When the sun went down for days after." Red and more red.

"The dwarves that survived had signs carved with the names of their kin, holding them aloft, calling their names. The same names, for days and days, and after awhile, a little at a time, they went away. I couldn't even remember the names of my own, and anyway, it seemed my throat was so dry from thirst and smoke. Even this day I cannot remember, only my eldest brother. I think his name was Taras. A few leagues south of the mountain, the day after, the ground shook, and we thought the dragon was coming out of the mountain to finish us off. I was alone. Somebody picked me up and ran with me. I would have been trampled otherwise. It was a woman, a human. She left me when she saw that I was a dwarf, kicked me and swatted me and cursed me and all of kin for bringing the inferno. I suppose another dwarf took pity on me or I would have died there. I do not know. After that, for years and years, it is mostly a blur."

The last time he saw Thrain he had been mad and rambling. Orc blood still staining his clothes from the battle, he left, without provisions, on a pony, into the night. They rode to the west and to the east in search of him, and he had rode day and night until saddle sores opened on his thighs and Dwalin and Balin had summoned him home in desperation and despair. Fundin was gone and Frerin, Dis sent south with kin to Dunland while they marched north to Moria, and he was alone.

"You were no more a babe. How can you possibly remember?"

"The memories of dwarves are long. We remember because we are meant to. I am sure of it."

She wanted so much to reach out and place her hand over his. His pinky twitched, palm pressed flat against the rock, gripping over the edge of it with the other three fingers. But she could not, not again, not now.

There were so many things she had endeavored never to ask him. Alas, endeavoring, she found, had counted for little as of late. "And what, my king, do you see?"

"I saw a king on a hill, riding away."

She scowled the way he did when elves were the subject, but it was a dreamy, wistful kind of scowl. "Yes, yes. Platinum hair like the gems they coveted, their kind. Dwarves told me the covetousness and betrayals of Thingol and Thranduil alike since I was young, but I always thought that elves were strange and sort of beautiful. After the dragon, when we followed in the tracks of their armies, I was glad. I wanted to see one up close. I thought they would help us. After all, they weren't orcs or goblins. But at the forest, they shut the gates to us. On the borders of the Greenwood, many dwarves succumbed."

He remembered. Remembered Thrain struggling to stand, weak from shellshock. Dwarves who sneaked into the Greenwood to forage never came out. Thror wandered aimlessly in the aftermath, helpless to soothe the wailing of one dwarf or another over their dead, far from their shelters of stone, a shovel or the strength to dig a grave rarer and rarer by the day. After a week or so, he stopped shielding Dis's eyes to the sight of carrion crows picking the flesh from the dead.

As they moved south hugging the eastern borders of Mirkwood, he remembered Fundin trying to bribe one Elven guard then another. Dwalin and Balin carried their mother the whole way south when it failed. He remembered. He remembered the gold that was melted into her fingers, neck and wrists, where she had donned jewelry. An ear was singed half off, gold and useless flesh melded grotesquely together. Blistered and cracked, the old dwarrowdam cried in pain every time she moved. When she died in the East Bight weeks later, it was the only time he had ever seen Dwalin cry.

Had he seen her there, he wondered, among the throngs of dwarves that wandered in a state of confusion and shellshock southward from Erebor? He had been amongst them, his rich blue robes disintegrating on his body, the fur of his mantle matted, his feet blistering in his boots. He searched a reserve of grim memory for a dwarfling lass alone, her hair crisped away by dragon-fire but for a few orange wisps. Perhaps, but there had been so many of them they started to blend together, even the littlest of the dwarf-babes. He had seen far too many parched-lipped baby dwarves in their death rattles, in the arms of a mother already dead, to want to remember the faces of any of them.

Somebody had cared for her, or how would she have survived? He reckoned it, assuredly as he was able to convince himself that some good still existed even in the dark times. Dwarves take care of their own.

But not elves. A long-simmering hatred boiled in him momentarily, quelled over time, flaring like an ulcer in his belly now. A king had turned his back on a king, but on a child. How many of their kin had seen her begging for bread amongst the others? Looked into her eyes (were they so piercing, so heavy then?) and turned away from her?

"They are no friends of dwarves and never will be. A dwarf's honor is in the oaths he swears, the friendships he forges. They are like iron. Elves will never honor such a concept." He countenance darkened dramatically.

The wistfulness floated away from Meisar's expression and she was the grave effigy again. "I will not press you on such matters, if it is troublesome to you, my king. I only ever meant to tell you… that I am sorry for the ones you lost. Even worse is that you can remember the many of them, something I cannot say for myself." His lips twitched indefinitely. "Save your sympathies for the living, my lady."

"I protected your life with my own, my king. Not because you are dead, but because you live."

He purposefully ignored her. "I will not imply that you are ignorant the sufferings of our people. I know that you are not, and for your kin I too grieve."

He sighed again, easing his mouth away from her pipe. "I am afraid I have smoked away all but another breath of it," he apologized. His head, in spite of all the memories that had bottlenecked in his psyche, one after the next in chaos, flooding back, were gone suddenly, like a tide washed out to sea before a catastrophic wall of water rushed back into shore. But it never came. He was filled, in that moment, with more peace than he had known in some time. Inexplicable, it washed over him more like a warm bath.

She imbibed the last, let her lips linger on its tip a long, hesitant moment, and gazed out onto the horizon through the thin chain of smoke. The sun was coming up and it was blood orange.