A/N: Arukhel- The Need of All Needs
Zibellino: A fashion accessory of the late medieval period, a small pouch made of sable or fine fur that was carried at the waist. While perusing a guidebook of medieval and Renaissance fashion on a totally unrelated venture, I thought it a fitting accessory for the well-kept Missus Gloin :)
"Look there! It is the valley."
Meisar set her walking stick into the ground and leaned on it. A modest smile settled across her lips. Against the rising sun, it was a sublime sight to behold. "Likely we will meet the Elvish guard soon. They patrol the land vigorously, but not so harshly from dwarven travelers."
The modest smile became a slightly more amused one at Thorin's characteristic grimace. "The high elves will bring you no harm. Why must you be so dour?"
"No harm but what good?"
Meisar lowered her head. "I have heard the same words said on our keeping company." Thorin grumbled an apology under his breath. He turned to Meisar tiredly. The night had been long, more dreams, more tossing. She had peered out from under her bedroll as Dwalin kept watch over him, his constantly-grimacing face almost tender. She had chastised herself inside for feigning sleep.
"My king… Meisar?" a stuttering voice came from behind. They to see Ori, chest up and shoulders back half-shaking alas, in his wool-cased hands clutched tightly his great book. He was alone; the rest of the dwarves, even as dawn broke rapidly, still slept back in the camp.
"Ori? You've followed us all the way out here? And so early?"
"I-I did," he stammered again. "But for a reason!"
He fumbled with his book as they waited for him to speak. "I have made you a gift. Both of you." He opened his book and pried the thin silvery chains from its creases, taking out a pair of square lockets from where they had been nestled in the top of the book. With a reverent bow of his head, he presented one to Thorin. "In celebration of your courtship. It is dwarf custom after all."
"Gyda made the frames, with a bit o' wire from Eda, the silver chains from Gimli, and the renditions I provided, by my own hand," professed Ori with a timorous pride. Wire was twisted decoratively and painstakingly in rectangles that held the portraiture snugly within its borders. Wire hinges at its side and a cover, also of meticulously bent and swirled wire, made a locket of it. Thorin traced his thumb around the edges, wordlessly, before he opened it. On parchment it was her likeness indeed, rendered in ink the heavy-lidded gaze, the high but rounded cheeks and small, pert mouth. To commemorate the courtship of Thorin II Oakenshield and Meisar, A Daughter of Dale.
"And for you my… er, dunininh… Meisar…" Ori took a step forward and one back, his head twitching, unsure of what courtesies were to be offered to the lady of this king, lowborn, unfamiliar, as plain as un-buttered bread.
"You will thank Gyda kindly for her part, and Master Gimli as well," Thorin placed a gracious hand on Ori's shoulder, drawing a sheepish, high grin from the young dwarf. "I am happy that you are pleased by them. I best be getting back now." Ori scurried away; they could practically hear Dori's voice shouting for him all the way from the camp.
"I think Dori expects the worse when he awakes and finds Ori is not there," Meisar smiled with her head tucked against her chin, a shyness rising in her suddenly as if she were a young maid, wooed by this king the first time. She gazed fondly upon her own wire-crafted locket and the small portrait of Thorin held within, his proud nose and slight mouth, every strand of hair so carefully inked. She had peered once or twice into the pages of Ori's book as he jotted exhaustively in it, runes and pages of text in the Westron tongue, and drawings of even the the most mundane things upon the road. Never had she, or any, doubted the skill of the plucky, if occasionally bumbling dwarf's hand.
"I shall treasure it always," she said quietly toward Thorin. His eyes fixed blankly as he ran a finger around the border of the frame again. "Thorin?"
"I do not deserve you," he half-gasped half-growled suddenly. "One who brings me such comfort when I have discomforted all, some to the death."
Meisar felt a sudden pain in her heart as if an ax had struck it clean through. She placed her hand upon Thorin's shoulder and he grasped it tight and pained. "It is my nephew, my heir, whom I should look upon as he courts a One of his own." He closed his locket swiftly.
"For all that you have done for our people's sake, is it truly that much to ask? A bit of comfort in this world, even lo... affection?"
He was silent and glowering. She put her hands on her hips and stared at him with her heavy eyes set and determined.
"You marched upon that mountain with a company of thirteen, my king."
"Fourteen," Thorin reminded dismally. "There was a halfling with us."
"Yes, I know that the Hobbit was the first into the mountain. It was he who played the dragon's mind and drew him out, for what it is worth. That is beside the point."
"Then what is the point?" he grumbled. He clasped his hands about his head. Flush with regret, Meisar knelt before him desperately and grasped his face in her hands. He pulled away from her.
"A greater evil was long in motion before you set foot out of Ered Luin for Erebor. Darker forces than you at at your worst took them from this world. Can't you see that?"
"You will drive me mad, woman," Thorin grumbled in her direction.
"When you are driven mad, I know bad things follow. It nearly destroyed one precious thing. Let it not destroy another." She squeezed his hand a little tighter, her touch still feeling uncertain to him. The gold sickness had nearly killed him once before. But what was this? When she looked at him, she thought sometimes she could understand the nature of his pain and loss too perfectly. And sometimes she could understand nothing at all.
"If armies of elves and men had not stood against you when you blockaded the mountain, and you had not summoned the dwarves of the Iron Hills, who would have stood against 100,000? You and your thirteen?"
"I know not what could have been. I know only what was, and it fills me with grief."
"Mad with gold lust, that I know. Your greed and pride corrupted you and led you to war but for a trinket. I know. We dwarves are imperfect creatures, aren't we? Unlike others who are pristine and good and without flaw. You were foolish my king, reckless, prideful, unbowed even by reason itself. Is that what you want me to say?"
"I certainly have no fear of hard truths."
She rose and stood behind him, exasperated.
He felt himself flush and then harden inside his chest with shame. Possessive, he thought. Cursed. But she was too hard, too graceless to be the jewel that disarmed him of all his rationale. What had he ever been entranced by except precious stone? What had he ever loved except his own family? The last jewel that had done so had glimmered and shined and drew all to it as if in some hypnotic haze. Meisar could not entrance anybody, except a pony across a shallow stream. Not a jewel but an uncut stone, holding within it something that felt more precious to him at that moment than any substance.
"Meisar…"
He reached swiftly for her withdrawing hand and his blue eyes begged her not to leave, their steeliness ripped back unnervingly. She laid her hands delicately at first to his shoulders and massaged the stiffness of them with careful tenderness. A rising swell of disquiet in him she could feel engulfing her own body and again, it urged her toward him rather than away. She sat quietly behind him on the gentle slope of stone, a soft, assuaging hum emerging from her seemingly without her volition. She grasped at his shoulders a little tighter. With a sound that was half a whinny and half a strangled sob, he arched his body about to face her and cleaved hard against her chest, fingers digging desperately against her upper arm. Such unmasked need had never been so plain and she willed herself forward against an urge to draw back. She wrapped her arms around him, one arm holding his head to her, clutching at his hair, the other wrapped over his opposite side to let him shift his head to lay in her elbow crook.
"Would that you regain something…" she sighed. Her lips stopped moving, twitching after the words had squeaked out of her throat. "Your kin gone to their father's halls would see you have some peace. And me. Whether you think yourself deserving or not, I am here."
Her gentle words were stilted but pure of intent, and they soothed him. His heart burned and cried out and he felt it begin to constrict in his chest.
"Do not let it still your heart. Your people love and need you, and I-"
She stopped there abruptly again. "Oh who am I to say," she muttered softly, despondently.
Her fingertips curled against his cheek as his gaze fixed into some untold distance. As her lips fluttered to offer something else in comfort, he turned swiftly back to her and crushed his lips to hers, resisting the urge to sob into her mouth with every sinew, every fiber of himself. And he kissed her with all the fury he had grieved with, bit her lip and drove his tongue clumsily and harshly into her. He kissed her until it hurt and kept kissing her.
"If I could ease your pain…" she sighed when he had pulled his lips back from hers at last, when the need for air became urgent for both.
And I have taken it unto me now, with a willing heart. Your pain and your grief and your tenderness.
"You have, Meisar. You have. Stay here with me awhile. Please…"
"I shall not leave," she murmured. He leaned back on her weightily and furrowed his brow against her kiss, an unsteady growl in the back of his throat becoming a vulnerable sigh. She pulled her lips from his temple and rested her cheek into the top of his head, her nose burying itself warmly into the heady scent of his hair. There was a king, laid in her arms like a newborn babe. His vulnerability began to unnerve her slightly. What was fidgeting on the tip of his tongue, unspoken, barely conceivable to either of them? What would she know of it even if she could tell what he was thinking? He was the first man who had ever kissed her, and he was a king.
Her fingertips stroked the shell of his ear as she brushed a lock of hair back. Even the lightest of such friction made him quaver. Perhaps its unfamiliarity alarmed his skin, and when she saw the hairs standing up on the back of his neck she drew away.
How could she have imagined it was precisely what he desired, the essence of that very moment? To become a princeling again, in her embrace as if he were in mother's arms again. He could not remember her face; he had no memory of being in her arms as a child, only her voice, which was deep and rich and sang slowly to him. She had died when Dis was still a suckling babe, and Thrain had been guarded and melancholy since. All he could remember in that moment were the fireflies on the roof, his head on Thror's shoulder as the old king paced with him through the great throne hall when he was a restless child, singing a song about gold raining down from the ceilings. The day they had laid Tania in her tomb, he had paced that long walkway with him the same. He cried into his grandfather's beard until tears could be wrung from it. How Thror had loved him. How he had loved him, in spite of himself, more than gold, if it had come down to it. He knew. Or he thought he did. He had loved them more than gold too.
He heaved a thick sigh against her. He would not weep. No, he would never weep. He would gasp for breath, and struggle to swallow his sobs. And he would keep his head there upon her bosom however awkwardly, so that she could not see how his face contorted.
But she could feel it. Feel his agony and her ardor well up together deep within her. His need made her weak. It made the scent of his hair headier, the touch of his body resting against hers acute. She drew her arms quietly around his head and held him. She let her fingers grasp at the luxuriant dark hair that had fascinated and incited her. She stroked it as if she were calming one of her excited hounds. The three stayed back from them, as if in reverence.
A warm murmur pressed comfortingly upon his head, her chin in his hair, the touch of her lips penetrating down to his very scalp light and hesitant as it came. "You have a beautiful voice my liege. I have heard you singing with Dwalin again, these past nights." It was the only thing that came into her mind to say. When he sang it was sad, and yet it was beautiful. Like him.
"You haven't a voice?" he asked.
"No my liege."
"I would hear you sing," he half-demanded. "It would comfort me."
So she began, a nervous, high lilt. Her shoulders, once rigid, slacked under the heaviness of his head, and against his grief, he felt a tender hand rest on his cranium again. "I beg for you not to stop," he said. Her voice was a heavy croon, and it came to rest on him soft as a dove.
"Good," he said quietly. Her voice trailed off finally but not the gentle manner in which she had been rocking him back and forth. "Shall I find another song? I know a few." His head had slipped down to rest against her lap, as a kitten or a small babe might cleave to its elder.
"Nay. That will do. Thank you," he enunciated lowly. A gentle grip on her knee became a tender rhythmic stroking and grasping. "Thank you…"
When he raised his head his lips were on hers.
She pulled back and grasped his jawline in her palms, forehead to his, the tip of her nose cool against his own. "We are together now and none will hurt us. I shall not allow it. Do you remember what I swore to you my king?"
No reply came except for a muffled breath against her sternum.
"My king...?"
"Thorin. It is Thorin only."
"No. You are my king and I am your lady. And I swore to you something and I will do so. With my ax and my sword... and my heart."
II
"Have you seen Siv?" Emli inquired witheringly.
"Out gathering firewood with Nori I think. At least that's what I sent her to do."
"Well good. Keep her away from my Gimli. I'd pay you an extra shilling a day just to keep your eye on her."
"That won't be necessary."
Emli cocked her head down at Meisar. "You look troubled."
Meisar scooted to the side and motioned for her to sit. The older dwarrowdam did so, with some enthusiasm, which might have once been an annoyance to the king's lady, but was now an utmost comfort. "What was it like, when Gloin first courted you? Did it ever make you feel… strange?"
"Light on my feet? A knot in my belly? Yes, yes, all of that. Now what hangs so heavy in your mind? You might as well tell me now, because I'm going to find out one way or another."
She held out her wire and silver locket to Emli. Emli opened it and raised her eyebrow with a certain admiration.
"Gifts," Meisar told her. "A dwarven custom they say. He has one of his own now."
Emli smiled. "Beautiful. And dwarven custom, indeed. See here, I carry one of my own." She took out a jeweled locket from the zibelino pouch at her belt. Inside were tiny portraits of Gloin and Gimli. "Given to me many years past by my husband. He carries one of his own." Raising it to her face, she kissed the portrait of Gloin. "This separation is not the way of a family. I miss him so."
"After all these years it is still a longing?"
"So powerful I am as boneless as a jar of preserves," professed Emli. "You are perturbed by it? That feeling?"
"I have never felt it before now."
"Many dwarves shall never feel it. And those who do, dare I say, encounter trouble to process it. Like Thorin Oakenshield?"
"I have known him to be affectionate and kind," Meisar said briefly. The comfort he sought, the weight of his woes, were too much to be expressed indirectly, inexplicable as they were raw.
"I have seen that there is love in his heart. That I am surprised he has taken a woman to his ardors, it is not to say I think him cruel and cold."
"Balin sees light in him. He believes this courtship is a thing of good."
"It is," Emli smiled warmly, with a hint of some melancholy. "Those he loved before are gone from us. But we living things of all kinds, even dwarves, must love something, or what reason is there to be here at all? Even if it is our crafts and not a One, it will do. But Thorin was luckier than that, in spite of all misfortunes. He had his nephews. I used to find it peculiar that he showed no interest or urgency in finding a wife for himself. Exile or no exile, a king is a king, and a lineage must go on. When I think of it now, I think he was reluctant to have a family of his own. I suppose he didn't want to feel like he was replacing them. They were dear to him beyond measure. In his halls I had heard him sing many nights to those boys, when it was but a great open space in the mountainside and many of us bedded down in the great hall together, to keep warm on winter nights. He had an old chair covered in furs where he sat before the fire, telling stories of the Lonely Mountain, singing songs until they fell asleep in his arms. I can see them now. Even their mother was hopeless to comfort them as he could; even when Kili was but a babe in his swaddling."
"Myself of all women. Chosen by a king. It baffles my mind the reason. But I have stopped questioning it. If I gave it any real thought, it might drive me mad. Just as he was driven mad. Am I, as I thought, a living Arkenstone that captivates him for no special reason, or a misguided means of filling up a space in his heart now that they are gone? His nephews. Fili and Kili." Her tongue felt sharp, as if cut, daring to utter their names for the first time.
"He did not choose you, nor did you choose him. The Creator chose you for each other. Therefore, you are neither a stone nor are you his lost kin." She wagged her two fingers to her beaded braid and Meisar picked it up and held it to her for a closer examination. Emli squinted at it through her little jewel scope. "He claims you as his very own," Emli said. "And would shield you from all harm should he have nothing but an oaken branch in his hand to do so."
"I am no one's possession, not even his, though I…" her voice trailed off from the first stout assertion.
"Possession?" Emli laughed and discreetly brushed away her tears at some distant memory of cold, cavernous halls and tiny dwarven princes. "No, my lady, you are not a diamond necklace, something that could be bought or sold or owned. It is not like that." A seriousness returned to her face, always purposeful, Emli. "You'll get no sound advice from any of these ladies, not even Brynja. Wedded and bedded she might be, now, but she is young, and they are both Blue Mountain stock, the children of miners who were themselves the children of tinkers and miners. They would know nothing of your predicament now, my lady."
"Emli, I must say, you are haughty sometimes."
"Haughty?" Emli contested, her voice an indignant squawk. "Realistic, is what I am. And I have been cold at night and hungry in worse times like the lot of us. You think Smaug paid any attention to rank? I've dirtied my hands beside my husband, and brought my son into this world lying on a lumpy pallet, in what could be called a hovel. What I mean to say is that you are the lady of a king now, and those closer to Line of Durin are better to advise you. Does that make more sense to you?"
"I suppose it does."
"Suppose? Stop supposing and heed what I am telling you, word for word. You need a woman's guidance in this matter. My husband's kin have served loyally the Kings Under the Mountain for generations, and my own mother, who perished by Smaug's wrath, was matron of honor to Thorin's mother and Thror's wife before her. You best know what you are dealing with. The Durins are… well… they are… complex in their natures. I don't mean to say troubled or mad but they are prone to certain afflictions. In a kinder way, they might be called personality traits, found in most dwarves but in greater, sometimes inconvenient, abundance in the Line of Durin."
"Possessiveness and lust. Do you think all dwarves have not known this? Do you think I have not seen it myself?"
"Have you?"
"Perhaps."
"And does it frighten you?"
Meisar sighed again, her head and chest once pained by the intrusion of such thoughts, emptying suddenly, feeling light, tingling. "If I do, then it seems the better part of my heart is stronger than that fear. Should I be afraid of that?"
Emli paused, for once, absent an answer.
"Courtships are still strange to me. I never imagined it would happen, and especially not this way. Tell me, where do we go from here?" She stopped rubbing her fingers anxiously over the courtship beard when Emli reached out and took her hand in hers with sisterly warmth.
"When Gloin first courted me, he braided a single plait like this into my hair, to show that I had given him permission to call on me. That is a dwarf woman's sacred right, to give or to deny. A man has no power over that. To wear the first courtship braid is an emblem of our power."
"And then what?"
"On the day we were betrothed, he braided another. When we were married, a third plait. And when Gimli was born, it came together as one again," she explained proudly. "And those, you see, are dwarven courtship braids. Each of course bear the signature of their maker." The three little braids were woven over into a singular plait, rested on a bed of her loose hair. They were held together at the crown by her wedding bead.
Meisar felt her mouth go dry. An unimagined future tumbled in like a great flood, possibilities like oxygen she could not quite reach.
"Ah, and there is my son. It is that time, my boy," Emli chuckled proudly, drawing Meisar quickly back into the moment.
Gimli sat and took up her comb and horse-hair brush. Emli beamed as he began his work. "I pray Mahal my Gimli should marry one day, for he has mastered his courtship braids so well. When mine grow frayed from travel, he helps me to reset them. A dwarrow gentlewoman would be smitten by the skill of his hands."
A quietly sulking Gimli grumbled but said nothing. He lifted the intricate plaits, and brushed his mother's hair carefully. When they were together, Gloin would do this for her every night. Now that Gloin's absence stretched over many months, it was Gimli's duty. Afterward she re-plaited Gimli's hair. She brushed his beard and chided him about putting snarls in it by rolling over too often at night. Gimli was a handsome young man, strong and spirited like his father. He bristled at the idea of marriage, aloud, to his mother's consternation. "You should be so lucky as your father and I, to know true love, when so few of us dwarves will ever have the privilege." She looked over at Meisar again. "As should you. As should Thorin Oakenshield. It will be the better for all of us."