A King of Ash and Fire

by Lady of Arda

"And though... love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps the greater." Thorin Oakenshield has survived the Battle of the Five Armies, but at a grievous cost. A second chance at life, and a first at love, will stand against the changing tides of Middle Earth. Thorin/OC. Dwalin/OC. Post BOFTA AU.

32. FEAR BOTH THE HEAT AND COLD

Upstairs, he pushed open the door to her room without a knock.

Eda, Virta and Oin formed the innermost part of a curious, fearful klatch that huddled about the sickbed. The usual dwarrowdams made up the rabble, but his own compatriots too, Dwalin and Balin in the shadowy corner of the room nearest her. The room felt small and tight with all of them clustered in.

"Adyum!"

At the sound of his voice, the dwarves parted for him, Bofur and Brynja scooting up out of the way from where they had sat in benevolent vigil, their arms full of three whimpering curs, kept from their owner's side. Nudging Oin aside, Thorin sunk heavily beside the bed and grasped the hand that was flung limply over to her side. Her solid returning grasp of him felt a reassurance, though Eda's presence felt ominous over him. "Her temperature is quite high," the female healer cautioned gently from behind him. "The men tell me several of the townspeople have taken ill in recent days. Not uncommon this time of year."

"Dwarves do not take fevers like this."

"No," Eda agreed warily, something on the precipice of her well-wizened composure making him squeeze a little harder on her hand.

He turned back to Meisar and studied the delirious and stirring tension of her face with growing discomfort. "I've arranged the boats," she looked up at him in a daze. "Tell the company to leave ahead. Why are they all here? They need to board."

"There won't be any boats going. The storm rages on, mizimel."

Her sore body cried out in half a panic. "All of you, go! Fools. The boats are here. Id-selâf. You'll miss. The mountain… the mountain." Eyes that seemed to flutter open with greater acuteness braced against a new comber of urgency. She flailed lightly under the bedclothes. "She must stay hydrated or delirium will take hold," exhorted Eda. "Fetch some more water quickly and boil it first." Virta attended to the request briskly and Eda tailed her out, in hopes that the kitchen might have an excess of healing herbs on hand, where her own were low.

"Oin?" Thorin looked up at the remaining healer in desperation. Determined as he always was to appear unperturbed in the eyes of any of his own, it would not mask itself, not now. Their closeness was too much to bear.

Oin put the back of his head to Meisar's forehead with a nonchalance that irked the king briefly. He shrugged. "Unusual for a dwarf to be taking a fever like so, but nothing a heavy dose of peppermint can't flush out. Elderflower or yarrow to open the pores and let it sweat out quicker would be better but it is winter and these rough folk we are amongst," Oin prattled on. "Stuck here another day, perhaps two. Such luck."

Thorin couched his hand down to touch her forehead, warily, the eyes of the other dwarves studying his every flinch. A thin tress of hair plastered at her temple he instead brushed clear, resisting the urge to pepper her with comforting kisses, even chastely. A fever would not take her, no. His fear, until then half-realized, delivered a cruel blow to the whole of his body, which he steadied himself against only with great gumption. "I will stay with her," he insisted quietly. Dwalin moved stealthily behind him and nudged a low cushioned stool under him to sit. Dwalin's hand then rested on his shoulder and remained there, even as his own took up his betrothed's clutched fist again and rubbed a gentle, reassuring thumb over the ridges of her knuckles. Even there she was imbued with fever and sore when she bent her fingers around his to hold. In her hazed wakefulness she caught sight of Dwalin's bald, tattooed head looming somewhere above her, beside Thorin. It seemed to glow like the dome of a grand edifice. "You've a light about you Mister Dwalin. A light follows you," she strained, warbling over a shuddering chest-cough. "Sweet golden light. Yes." She saw a great manse of stone fulgid with light, a low cold morning light, winter at dawn.

"A very golden light indeed, my blessing," Thorin smiled out of the corner of his mouth at Meisar, eye strained at Dwalin and head nudging itself toward the dwarrowdam standing at a distance from his side. He caught the way Dwalin's eyes softened in their once creased, edgy corners toward the iron-smith, and decided to press no further, as Meisar clutched his hand and groaned more audibly. "Stay with me, Thorin. Stay with me until I sleep again." That soft, pleading tremor of her voice in this fragile interlude could have undone him wholly, his love for her flooding all things, leaving his knees weak and his heart to spilling over. The very thought of her discomfort troubled him too deeply for words. There were only three he could adequately speak to her at the moment.

"I am here."

He hunkered low at her side and clasped her hands in his own again, over her sternum, kissing them over and over, until the two healers returned. Virta administered a hot peppermint tea, drawing a sip-full at a time from a steaming, fragrant bowl into a stopper.

Virta assessed carefully after a teacup full was taken and seemed heartened. Not at all like her parents or siblings she was russet of hair, blue of eye, with a calm, wise look about her in spite of her young age. She was sturdy but not corpulent, beard worn in several plaits at each hinge of her jaw and at her chin. She gave Thorin a reassuring smile. "She's worn herself out, my king. A good shepherdess unto this flock," hummed the apprentice dwarrowdam gently. She put her hand on Thorin's arm just above the elbow. "Give her a brief spell to rest and recover, and she will come to Erebor every bit a queen."

The peppermint tingled on its way down her throat at the last and then soothed. At a distance, a wet wind slammed up against the window, the distinct whip of sleet. "No boats?" she repeated, the chatter that had lingered over her head seeming to clarify.

"I'm afraid not," confirmed Oin.

Crimson-rimmed eyes seemed to smile with her lips. "I think perhaps it is alright then."

"Aye," Thorin muttered, something subtly disquieted about the edges of his voice. "Perhaps it is."

The flick of her eyes, bleary under the heavy lids he had so adored the enigmatic quality of, sharpened just a little and brought him into focus above her. "Will you sit by me awhile, Thorin? The sight of you heals me so."

"I take my leave then," relented Oin. "I will send Eda or Virta to see that she is properly hydrated, given peppermint or yarrow in a tea every hour." He silently pried both Virta and Eda, and the rest of the dwarves with them, out of the room. When the door closed again at the last, the crackle of the fireplace was the only permeation in the thick silence, after they had all departed. He watched the rise and fall of Meisar's chest in vigilant silence, the breaths eventually coming to an evenness. He exhaled, audibly. Sitting on the chair drawn up to her bedside, he looked woeful again, like the king she had met on the road west of Bree.

A feverish hand brushed over the side of his face and caused him to pull in a startled breath. "It seems other things may cloud your mind enough, so that my feverishness might only add to your burden." She rolled sideways and hugged the pillow beside her, eyes no longer so depleted their clarity studying him sideways. He lowered the upper half of his body to rest on the edge of the bed, place his hand upon the top of her head, and return the other to holding hers again over her chest. His forehead to hers felt so hot she imagined for a moment their skin sizzling together there, and she felt him smile with an uncanny serenity, so that she ached just to sink into and draw her strength from it, even if he felt ominously un-eased in the moment. "Never could you add to my burden, only lessen it. Dare I say, I have gratitude for this tempest that keeps us here."

"Indeed?" She put her arms up and draped one around his shoulder, a separate hand held sturdily to his heart. She drew him to lean over her again and meet her eyes. Even in her feverishness there was a separate fire, a greater light. "Thorin, you were not spared to be broken again."

"Thus I stay by your side." He avoided whatever she was implying with a quiet stoicism, determined to care for her, with lesser care for woes that would have betided him anyway. Soft kisses he dotted at her temple and sighed lengthily. Her hand still pressed up against his chest he shifted and settled downward into the feverish pillow of her bosom, all fierce warmth there, fever its source or not. To grope at the soft knolls and knead them in their unhindered state, buffered from his touch by but a light tunic, he kindled no inclination. To feel her heart and be assured of the life in her was more than he could have hoped for, his more private tribulation briefly, if sufficiently, steeled against but for that temperate thump.

"Will you stay with me until I sleep?" She stroked his hair, fanned across his shoulders and back the way he lay, face rested with a weighed tenderness into her chest. She liked the hot plumage of his breath there, the way she could almost feel the bristle of his beard touch bare skin. "Men lananabukhs menu. Thorin."

"I will not leave your side nor rest an eye."

A knock at the door was followed by said door being wrenched open impatiently. In strode Emli with more tea.

"Most improper, betrothed or not!" the older dwarrowdam squawked at the sight of their closeness. The sound of Emli's voice made Meisar's heart skip a beat in her chest, disrupting the straining if lullaby-like rhythm with which it had beat; Thorin, whose head had rested over her heart at the moment, groused lightly. "You'll take a fever too my king. Let her be," Emli urged on.

"You order your king around so, dear Emli."

"Yes, indeed. And my queen too," she replied crisply. Emli looked over Thorin once and briskly, before dropping in a respectful curtsy. "Humbly I, Emli yasathu Gloin, loyal guardian of your bride's robust health as well as her san, request you take your leave of her bed, my king, Thorin son of Thrain."

"I am quite certain we may keep chaste company whilst I am ill with fever," Meisar rebutted sarcastically.

"All the more heat to make you rash and wanton," Emli dismissed. At Meisar's own yielding behest then and reluctantly, Thorin left and Meisar tried to sleep while a few of the other dwarrowdams were soaking and laughing in the tub in her room. The strong, fresh scent of pine soap filled the air and the inn's hired girls came in and out with towels warmed by the fires and small creature comforts for the bedridden dwarf woman whom the whispers all down the halls and kitchens said would be queen under the mountain. Day and night the women of Lake Town seemed to whisper amongst themselves of their peculiar guests, ever fascinated by the all of little bearded women. The maids were all scrappy Laketown girls, tall and hearty creatures on the cusp of womanhood. They left and Emli returned to her careful grooming, sitting close by Meisar's side. Freyda was weaving some hushed tale to Gyda with whispers and giggles and flicks of water as punctuation marks to a story that Emli was keening and straining her ears to hear.

"Uncertain my lady, of whether I've had too much ale, but I thought I heard Freyda tell young Gyda that she kissed Mister Dwalin. Kissed. Mister Dwalin. Can you believe such a thing?"

Meisar turned achingly over toward her. "Could you have imagined Thorin marrying?" A wooziness came tiding about her again, an afflictive heat on her skin even as she shivered with a mighty cold that seemed to come from the inside even more than the whistling winds outside of her bedclothes. They called it a fever, the men, and the dwarven healers who had buzzed about her bed and whispered over her for what seemed like a slogging muddle of time, hours or days she did not recall. She was in her room again was as much as she sensed, and Thorin was not there. She groaned for the absence but was grateful for the closeness of Emli to her at the moment. To have given her coin for a single room was of no use, she should have known. Gyda and Freyda, perpetually joined at the hip, would remain. Emli, ceding the bath to the other two, had taken her hair down for the night and un-plaited her beard after giving each a careful wash, and for that alone, it was certain she would not leave and wander about where it might be beholden by any male dwarf or man, unkempt as good as naked she always said.

Emli, for her part, finished contemplating the matter- or her knotted hair. "No. And kissing even less so."

"Then entertain all and any possibilities, Emli."

Emli bent to her level with her mouth pressed righteously. "Should have seen what I saw. Freyda, laying there in her robe. Mahal knows if anything was beneath it. Hair down and wet. And him. Dwalin spread over the back of her legs like… like…

Raincloud barked once up at Emli. The dwarrowdam nodded a firm confirmation in the cur's direction. "Like a dog about to mount another," bristled Emli. "Says he's only soothing her sore back like he does for Balin. Nonsense. And Gimli seeing that scene, oh I…well at least you and your king have a modicum of decency in the affections you bear each other, whatever they may be."

"Is that a question?"

Emli shook her head no with uncanny tenderness. "The way he looks at you is with such affection. New life takes in him through you, as I have not seen, even when the princes still lived." Emli blinked back tears from her eyes.

A worrisome cloudy heat rolled over her again. "Emli… what would you do. If Gimli… something happened… oh Emli, the lady princess. I hold as much fear as he does himself."

"My Gimli? Well…" she held a thin, pained smile determinedly. Pulling up the stool to steady herself, she sat and placed a cool wet towel to Meisar's neck and forehead. "I would crawl into the tomb beside him. As a mother forsaken all my will to live I suppose," she bowed her head furtively over Meisar. Drink and a determined, gentle care of her queen to be had loosened Emli enough that evening to allow Gimli to imbibe unsupervised downstairs. "Perhaps someday you will be a mother yourself, and will know what it is to love and fear for someone with equal fervor. But a worthy burden, alas."

There was a knock at the door and Emli leaped up, clad in just an oversized dressing robe, her brief slip and drawers with the lace trim at the bottom. "Towels at last," she crowed, crossing the room to the door, her smiling countenance regained. "If these daughters of men want to see what a right woman looks like, then they shall see. What kind of man desires a hairless woman anyway, a man who-"

She opened the door and Thorin was standing there, averting his eyes in haste. "Mahal keep me! My king!" Emli spun and then all but leaped over Meisar in a frenzied arc, dodging behind the bed. She had cloistered herself in the bathroom by the time Meisar called out for Thorin to enter. He did so, trying not to be too overt with his amusement of her hysteria behind the bathroom door. Taking a seat again by her bedside, Gyda watched them with the studiousness of a well-trained chaperone. The young dwarrowdam leaned forward between them and draped the blanket up over Meisar's chest and shoulders. "Propriety dictates a lady ought not be beheld in her smallclothes before marriage," she declared, righteousness setting her gawky shoulders firm. It was a rote script if ever he had heard one; Emli might as well have been the ventriloquist. Still, he did not begrudge her. A mouth that was unused to smirking tried desperately to conceal one.

"I shall strive to observe," he assured Gyda. A smirk became an internal fire and inconvenient twitch and pang remembering a fist-full of calico, tearing up the seam, pulling open tattered curtains to the inner sanctum of a most unfamiliar and thrilling temple, beholding her thus. A fire inside and out. He gave Gyda a reassuring if innocuous glance. "I came to bid you goodnight," he turned to Meisar tenderly, folding his hand about hers and resting both heavily at her sternum. Her hand reaching up to grasp at his dangling plait, he was tugged, psychically, to place a kiss upon her lips, curling his tongue to stifle its impulse to weave with hers.

It was no time for such a kiss, he silently chastised himself, all while his mouth worked languidly over hers and he filled with need. Had Emli been hovering he might have refrained from any tangible, physical gesture. No dwarven sentry with ax and shield would ever guard her the way these women did. At least Gyda was too timid to say anything. He could feel her eyes wide and absorbent on him but cared little for it. Once it troubled him to let anyone into something as intimate. Now it seemed an unprecedented instinct. Even if his thick loose hair rendered an opaque veil around the task his lips were busily completing for the night, he wanted her to see. To understand what made him live again.

Her arm crept out from under the blanket to snake around his shoulder and hold him, her touch imbued with some level of unrequited need deeper than her want of his company in her feverishness, or plaintive yearning for the immediateness of his touch. Aguey lips moved and silently begged him to kiss her again and he obliged, Gyda's presence non-withstanding. Like a deaf man watching lips move in a foreign tongue she may have been to this particular language, the furtive flick of tongue he gave her just under the hood of her top lip, tenderly indulging her.

I remember. Her bleary eyes looked up and ached. She clutched both hands above the top of the blanket, a determined playfulness to her grasp there in spite of the sore state of her body.

"Athune." He offered a final tender kiss on her temple. When he rose, he gave Gyda one of his usual officious looks. "See that she is hydrated and kept warm, Gyda. If anything changes, fetch me imminently. If she asks for me, fetch me imminently."

"Yes your majesty." The girl dipped devotedly and held her reverent position until Thorin had departed. "You can come out now, Emli. He's gone," called Meisar. Emli emerged bundled in her robe and swooned at the foot of the bed, flopping her upper body over the foot-board. "Say not to Gloin that the king has seen me in such a state!"

"Thorin Oakenshield has no interest in your underthings, Emli," Gyda assured. Emli waved a dismissive hand at her. "The king could behold my bottom bare!" she retorted sharply. "But no dwarf except Gloin shall ever behold my hair a'soaking wet and my beard a mess."

II

Thorin took a small midday meal with Dwalin in the common room, still heavy with the scent of Urdlaug's cooking, and ice, and the lingering scent of the morning fish haul, and mannish pipe-weed to drown latter out a bit. The tall-folk gathered without saying much to any of the dwarves who remained, and chafing at their presence, perhaps thought it better just to leave them to their own. Dwalin watched the inn-keeper's thin, craggy wife put out a strong-smelling beverage at the fire. His nose wrinkled for the familiarity, not entirely unpleasant. In seconds he heard the thunder of heavy feet making their way down the stairs. Turning around, he saw the men who had lingered part quickly when Freyda came through with a determined stride. Her strong shoulders, truculent eyes and blonde braid girded through in sharp glinting metals, seemed to reduce the heartiest-looking of those even twice her height.

"Southron Swill!" Exclaiming with rapt jubilation, Freyda took the jug off the fire and popped the stopper eagerly. She inhaled with a smile that melted all the bellicosity of her eyes. "Oh have I have missed ye!"

The Lake Town woman remarked, "Drink up lassie. Had plenty of the stuff coming in from the East, but they say traders have been troubled down that way." The Lake Town woman sitting by the fire addressed Thorin directly. "There come dwarven refugees far from the East of late. Troubling news they bring. Uncommon rumbles."

"In lands that have always been unforgiving," Thorin assured gently from where he and Dwalin sat kitty-corner to the woman's rocking chair. She was knitting a small pair of booties, on eye on two dwarves sitting near her.

Dwalin hunkered close to Thorin and sighed. "I din think she's too happy with me at the moment, Thorin."

"Why not? I hear her back is much fitter for your efforts."

The wiry beard twitched with surprise and girded itself against what could have been mortification. Suddenly he was morose in his expression, even thoughtful. "I made a wee mistake in thinking I knew."

"Knew what, Dwalin?"

"Thinkin' I knew the nature of someone else's pain. Or their strength for that matter." He settled back, cracked his knees outstretched and watched Freyda beat the last drops from the jug into her cup, and kindled a cool, admiring half-smile. "Like yours. She's a strong one. Things ye don't always stop to see. Until ye learn them, whether you want to or not."

"She is a fine lass, Dwalin. I am glad you find her company so... so."

"Aye, and how does yours heal?"

"She is sleeping now. I think for the better she goes. At least I hope." Thorin's eyes turned to the endless barrage of icy rain and wet snow beyond the window. Dwalin's hand moved to pat his and then grasp if fully, lingering so long the men were looking sideways. "A strong one, aye." When Freyda skimmed across their orbit, the hand that had clutched Thorin's suddenly released and tapped hers with determined want. "Is there a cup to be spared?"

Putting her lip out, Freyda gazed into her empty clay cup and shook the even emptier jug. She shrugged, a bit helplessly, and turned to the old wife who was knitting and studying the interactions of the two brutish-looking dwarves with subdued if steadfast curiosity. "Any more?" she asked she innkeeper's wife, hopefully.

"Aye, but you'll have to grind it yourself. Got four jugs made and all gone, and stiff little fingers," the woman replied. "Mistress Urdlaug may cook heartily but you dwarves eat at a rate to boggle the mind. At least Mistress Urdlaug is generous." She glared lightly, her previous mild amusement pinching itself, and passed Freyda a pouch of cold beans. Freyda looked at the un-ground coffee, then Dwalin, his face forgiving, if eager. "Fair enough," Freyda ducked her head agreeably at last. She ground the beans by hand for a long while until they were pulverized and boiled water over the fire in the common room hearth, strained it again and again until there was a full jug wrung from the grounds and her efforts had borne just dividends.

"Here ye are, Mister Dwalin." She put the whole jug in his hands as if she were handing him a newborn babe. "Nurse it carefully now. My arms are half-numb."

"Thank you lass. Freyda."

"I'll go check at your lady, my king," Freyda settled. She turned and her broad figure cut a path across the room again that made the men part for her and stare at their feet.

"Strong lass. mighty lass. See how she makes them quiver in their wee boots? Abnâmul. Aye, oh, Mahal, Thorin, what do I do now?"

The innkeeper's stringy wife buried her face downward into her knitting and tried not to laugh at the worrisome keen coming out of the scabrous dwarf. "The better question is, what have you done already, Dwalin?" Dwalin's eyes were kindling such an unfamiliar heat, it beguiled him. More beguiling yet seemed the lack of courtship braid for the months of banter and stilted flirtations, which surprised him, but not really. Dwalin was still Dwalin. The new world still too new.

"Nothing!" Dwalin's beard twitched warily again, sputtering a reply with arms crossed. Thorin pretended he didn't see the edge making itself visible. Dwalin never was a good liar but he couldn't couch exactly what he was meddling away from. Thorin ran his hand through his still sleep-knotted hair, drew a lingering hand to his throat to ponder, the bead on twine about his neck rolled in his fingers, unconsciously but not so deeply. "You might start," he suggested quietly to a strangely vulnerable Dwalin. "With a small token."

II

The fever, which had ebbed in the morning enough to let her dress and fix her hair a bit, resurged again Meisar took to bed before the darkening of the day.

"A packet of dried peppermint with hot water would be most appreciated, if the kitchen can spare some," recommended Oin, to Thorin. He had come to her room the moment Gyda came flailing down the stairs to inform him of her temperature spike. He had not left her side since and only now, at a practical request, did so, however reluctantly. When he made his way downstairs again, Bard's son was there, and seemed to be waiting for him.

"Thorin son of Thrain, would you speak with me?" He rose from the fur covered chair and placed himself in the dwarf king's path. Thorin crossed his arms before the young man, trying to contain want of glowering openly at him. He had his father's physical qualities down to the quiet, astute way he moved. "Do you come in your father's stead, to chide me?"

"No. I am the Master of this Town. Dale is my father's place now. I wish to speak with you, one lord to another."

Thorin stopped and studied the young man with guarded curiosity. "When I was a young prince beneath the mountain, the Masters of this town were chosen from amongst the eldest and the wisest of its men."

Bain shifted his eyes uneasily at the dwarf-king. Inches shorter than he was, king under the mountain still cut an intimidating presence. His father's laments had repeated over and over again the maddening quality to be beheld in that dwarf's eyes, but Bain, remembering his guarded if needful countenance those months before, searched silently and saw none of it. He glanced around less subtly for the other, even more menacing looking dwarf that shadowed him, but he was not to be found. "I have been chosen nonetheless," he asserted, humbly-toned of voice but with that quiet, familiar steel. "The people called for me, and I heeded their call. I must do right by them, and by that measure, you also."

He was a boy, confident but stoic, lacking his father's grimness but not his stern, dutiful countenance. "Sixteen years old and entrusted to the whole of this community." The dwarf-king's harsh blue eyes seemed to examine him too closely for comfort, but when they looked into his own seemed to ease in their acerbity. "I find that admirable, your lordship, and see that you have done well here." Before him, the boy's rigid shoulders eased a bit. "I regret," Thorin began again, reluctantly. "I regret that I implied you anything less. I was only surprised by your age."

"You are betrothed?" the boy said flatly. Whether it was a question he could not tell. He had an eagerness, an uncomplicated curiosity to him that lacked his father's dramatic bemoaning of the fact.

"I am." Thorin never uncrossed his arms, hoping it might indicate, politely, his impatience at the moment.

"A choice of your council, majesty? From which of the Seven Families does she hail?"

Thorin kept a guarded, thin smile in response. This boy-lord was well-studied. Or so he thought. "A choice of my own, and I do not know. I think her to have no noble lineage, so far as dwarves define nobility."

"A bold choice, politically," Bain remarked again. Thorin thought there was something cryptic on the tip of his tongue, subtle but present. He had an uncanny wisdom, a steadiness to his words, for so young a man.

"I marry not for politics."

"All marriages are political, my king," replied Bain quietly. "Whether they are love matches at the foundation or not."

"My Lord, we shall treat with each other more formally when I settle in the mountain. We shall speak of politics then." He pressed past Bain as civilly as he could manage, and crossed a common room full of glaring Lake Men and ducked into the kitchen, where Urdlaug was still diligently at work.

"Are you preparing supper too the whole of the town now? They give us such unkind glares out there you would be foolish to waste your talents."

"My daughter is to be wed the night after next," Percy answered for her, beaming with pride. The lithe young woman with straw-blonde hair was assisting Urdlaug with gladness, smiled back at her father. "My wife would provide the cooking for the occasion but she's taken to bed with fever. Mistress Urdlaug has been offered coin and free passage across the lake if she would take up the duty."

"I have agreed," confirmed Urdlaug. "To be home would be preferable. But two days' time shall make no difference. My father would be proud that the race of men here have seen that a dwarf's skill is not limited to the molding of metals and stones."

"Well, we all know that well enough," hissed the grouchier of the cooks, a thin gray-headed woman hunched over a pot of fish stew in the back of the kitchen. "Molding of metals and stones. Hoarding of metals and stones."

Dylis looked back at him sheepishly. "She lost much in the dragon-fire. Forgive her discourteous tongue."

Thorin nodded, quietly forgiving. "I imagine it is not an uncommon sentiment."

Dylis nicked a glazed scrap of ham. "The rest of your dwarves the lot find tolerable I dare say. The carpenter is amused to say the least, if a few shillings wealthier for the antics of your wedded kind." Urdlaug scowled quietly in sync with Dylis's darkening, sheepish expression. "Alas, most would sooner throw your majesty to the icy waters, for the mess with the dragon. Bard and Bain have both asked their folk to treat with dwarves more kindly since the Lonely Mountain's been settled again, for the sake of our shared prosperity. I'm inclined to encourage such. We've seen hard times before that we wish not to return to the days of."

A prosperity you would not enjoy had a dragon not singed away the corrupted slum you once dwelt in, miserable and empty-bellied, he thought, acerbically, but thought better of saying aloud. Do they not see the price they have paid is the price I have also paid?

Urdlaug drew to his side defensively. "If these same men shall be guests at the wedding I toil so to provide for, they will give my king a shred of respect in his presence or out of it, or take none of my food. Such callous regard for one dwarf is the same for us all."

"You signed a contract Urdlaug. As your king I ask that you respect it, regardless of what unkindness may be directed my way."

"I do not regard you as such!" Percy justified quickly. A skeptical Urdlaug pulled a knife and slammed it down on her pie crust. "Nor do I. Nor does Bain for what it worth," Dylis hastened to add. She addressed Thorin sturdily. "He wishes your majesty the pinnacle of successes as king and would see you well. It would mean the better for all of us. It's just that… so much was lost. Things that can't be rebuilt for some of them. Surely you understand?"

"I do, and with sympathy for the aggrieved. Alas, we all pay a price," Thorin replied skeptically. He plucked a few bags of dried peppermint off the shelf.

"Is she well?" inquired Dylis earnestly.

"A mild improvement since morning," he answered once without looking at her. He turned around and allowed a guarded smile to widen just a little bit in her direction. "She is strong. My wife in waiting. She is strong." He could feel the woman smile and felt a lesser tension wrack at him.

"Aye, it is true what you say, my king," Urdlaug relented finally, giving Thorin one of the first smiles she had given in as many months. "I honor my word. My ham pies may make those dour mannish faces less so, and I will be in Erebor at my father's home, in time to be making a few for yours."

.

When he opened the door again he found her bed rumpled and empty, the healers, even the pecking klatch of dwarrowdams, all departed. She was awake and sitting on the cushioned seat of the great bay window. A lumpy silhouette she cut, wrapped in a heavy blanket head to toe. Snow swirled about in the dimming evening lantern lights outside. "Dried mint to be infused into the tea," he cleared his throat gently, coming into the candlelight and the ring of winter snow-glow that haloed the window-seat and her. He set two cups on a small footstool beside her.

"Come sit with me, my king," she smiled under a rumpled woolen veil. He shucked his boots and sat across from her, drawing one knee up toward his chest and outstretching the other toward her. She grasped for his toes with her own. Exuberated by the sight of small, almost dainty feet he had been since first glancing them on a lazy summer day by a stream. They were pale and bare, and naked only to the ankle she was, clad in loose trousers from there above. The tips of her toes brushed over a rude reddish scar in the center of his foot that seemed to cut clean through one end and out the other. He drew away from the contact and she flinched.

"Did I hurt you?"

"Nay," he replied, gazing woefully at his foot. "Only a particular Gundabard orc is responsible for any pain, here. And most places there too." He indicated toward the foot whose toes were curling intensely. "Put a sword clean through it." Meisar scooted closer to examine the wound. Something about the foot itself, not even the scars it bore, simply the bareness of it, absorbed her. Newly naked skin to her; she had known so little of his own. Hot and stifling as the heat kindled in her so many times to know the touch and heat and bare texture of his skin, the geography of him in all his roughness, she had pressed it down, in her heart imagining a more ceremonious pinnacle to introduce her to all of him. Besides, she thought, he needed something of an entirely different nature at the moment.

"It is beautiful from in here, don't you think? The bargemen I have heard say the storm will break by morning, and we will be able to depart." Thorin turned from her and issued a quiescent gaze above the rooftops outside, strained at the sight of the mountain looming close. He dipped a bag of the tea into the hot water and watched it dissipate, his eyes locked, his head somewhere else, perhaps many places. He took a first brief sip and let the heat and tingle of the mint fill and warm through his ribcage, settle the florid and growing intensity there. He looked back at his bundled betrothed and was calmed, if for a moment. She scooted herself across the window-seat to draw to his side.

"I did not know you were fond of teas."

"A certain hobbit encouraged me to find them palatable."

She grinned lowly through her stubborn feverishness. A face which had once been so difficult to read in spite of its nakedness of beard now subtly expressed her virtues, all the goodness of her character so plain to see he felt an indignity kindle in him that any had thought her cold, unfeeling company.

"I cannot face her, Meisar."

The hand he had held tenderly he shifted and pressed downward to brace his fingers about her wrist and press to her sharply, against the rising tide. She lifted her hand to cup his face in, the racing pulse of his callused fingertips pressing at her skin, their blood-flow syncing, mingling, rendering them one. "You can and you will. I will be beside you, if you wish me to be, when you must come to her. And you must. She has lingered long enough in her sorrow, alone. As have you."

"She will love you. I am certain of only that," Thorin smiled bitterly against her warm palm. "As would have my sister-sons. Aye, much mischief I think, were they here, this courtship might have known, all their shenanigans I could imagine. Perhaps giving this love the greater light it deserves. You deserve more than to bear my grief this way, my blessing."

"Their affection is, beyond the vale of death, still kindling for you. For us. There is joy in the halls of your fathers for this love we bear each other, Thorin."

"And sorrow in my home. I dream... of blood. A blood rain, but rubies. A million rubies. It is a mourning jewel you see."

She swallowed hard and girded his sinking head in her hands. "If you sat upon that throne a broken king with no reward for any of your travails, what would they have fought for? What would any of the thirteen, Mister Baggins, have endured rightfully then?"

"They lay within that mountain, cold and gone. A kingdom full of ghosts, my queen. Old curses and broken people."

"We can be put back together again, and live, even if some the pieces are missing. Thorin, look at me." She pulled his head up determinedly, her eyes starting to crest with tears. "My blessing, my king, I love you. I will go forth with you always. On the morrow we come home."

"You'll not go anywhere in this condition. I'll stay here with you." He seemed, in his countenance, even hopeful for it, which made her chafe internally.

"No. No. I will be fine. Eda will stay with me should I not recover within the day. You must go. Messengers have carried word to her I am certain, of your nearness."

Thorin shook his head, pained. "I will not greet her without you beside me. I do not think I could." The flicker of his eyes against what might have been tears alarmed her with more veracity than she had expected, exposed to his furious ghosts as she had already been.

But this was not a ghost.

In the twisted confines of her blanket she shifted over onto the opposite side of her hip, the soreness of her muscles causing her to wince. Thorin lifted a lukewarm cup of peppermint tea to her lips in response. "I am sorry. I pile each of my laments upon you while you are faced with your own."

"There is no better time than now, in a quiet wait like this, and my chastity belt retired and unlocked." Thorin looked up with knit brows, to Meisar's subtle amusement. "I call her Emli." She scooted to sit with her knees to his crossed legs, draping one leg lovingly to anchor over his own. His lowered head murmured into the palm she girded against his jawline again. "Single-minded and loathsome I have been called. Do they know the truth of it? Any of them? I would put my life in place of theirs, Meisar. I would lay in my tomb, forsaking your love, so that they would live."

She leaned her hairline to his temple with a reassuring tenderness. It was a fragile confession is a brutally frank one, and she was gladder for it than hurt, she found, kindling an even deeper purity of affection for him even. "I find I take no offense to such a sentiment. Which is so say, I would never think to underestimate the depth of your love for them, or your sister. And that is thing of purity. It renders all corruption past or present powerless, my king. Your love.""

He stroked careful fingertips over the side of her face, gauging her temperature, simultaneously worshipful. A finger under her chin brought her up to look into devastating blue eyes yet full of grace. "My love is all that bears my weight. You are solid. You would muster yourself without me. Perhaps then destined to remain a lone woman in this life, but you, you could bear it. You would find your way. Thus I would give them life and forsake mine, for I know your strength."

"You overestimate me, Thorin. You couldn't imagine-"

"But," he interjected with a gentle impatience. "I… I cannot live without you. The Creator... by Aule's hammer I was not spared but sorrow or for mercy, or for my kingdom, but for you. A king I could return, but wander the halls of that place, drunk on grief, or worse, I would. And watch the faces of my loyal kin disintegrate for my sight. A king of ash."

"You are a king. Of fire. Of forges rebuilt. Of a people strengthened again after years of exile and pain. Of... my heart." She trailed her hand down to his chest again. "My heart knows yours to be a heart of fire. It is strong to bear what is to come, and you will. Tomorrow, my king. Tomorrow we are home again, and will never be parted from it again. Home. Aye, it is all the ghosts, but is the living that matter now."

.

The fever broke later that night and burst in a thick, clinging sweat all over her body that grew cold on her skin. She sweated through her last set of clothes- tunic and outer skirt and breeches, her small-clothes, even the sheets of her bed. The dwarrowdams and Oin and even the hired girls tended to her with such gentleness she nearly wept with gratitude for it. Dylis had a granddaughter of twelve whose outgrown dress she gave her. It was burgundy and heavy winter-wool, itchy, but warm. She closely resembled Ori in his lumpy sweater coats but with a rounder constitution than the young dwarf who was writing furiously of the reconstructed Lake Town in his great book come the next morn, drawing maps and noting the names of the notables- Bard and Bain and small, noble portraits of each. Meisar resisted the urge to suggest a graying of his head and a grimmer expression for the former but thought better of it.

Dori swooped in over him. "Up, up and ready. A bargeman on the quay says they jumped ship in the marshes just west of here. I've found another headed that way to dump some municipal waste. We will go soon, you, and I, and Eda."

"But we must get home to the mountain, Dori. I don't want to row with the trash!"

"I agree with your brother," Meisar inserted herself stonily, her feet still feeling a bit light beneath her. "Thieves are not treated kindly in these parts. Perhaps it is best they be left to lay low."

"It's family," Dori protested to her. "We can't leave them. My belly's been in knots for days don't you know."

"Come what may, we will protect them," Eda joined Dori. "Warn us of the risks it is appreciated, my lady. But you'll not change my mind on the matter."

"You'll need some help then."

"The coin has already been paid," Eda assured.

"No," Meisar came back. She handed Raincloud, who had been wriggling in her arms, to Eda. The other two hounds followed his head and circled Eda's feet obediently. "They can stay on a scent through marshes. Take them."

The bargeman hollered in for the two of them and his tone suggested a man who would not wait.

"Now comes the parting we so dreaded," Eda wiped her eyes.

"It is not goodbye. I will meet you at the mountain. I'm sure somebody there will know where to find me."

"Yes, yes, and I'll bring them back safe. These three furred babes and the other two mutts. Farewell, athune."

Bofur and Brynja, bundled in their cloaks, exhausted, miserable and sore after several nights regulated to a flimsy cot in Urdlaug's room, arrived in the common room readied for travel.

"Brynja, Bofur, that's… who's missing?" Meisar stomped over the stairs and hollered up. "Emli! Emli, Gimli, can't be late this time about!"

"Coming! Coming!" the singing voice rung aloud from up the stairs. Emli finally tottered down the stairwell on Gimli's arm, attired in a heavy traveling cloak of yellow wool so luxuriantly nappy it was better called a fine velvet, silvery fur tippet drawn at the neck and the front of her cloak held closed by periodically placed jeweled buttons. Hair impeccable and beard pomaded, she seemed to be donning every piece of jewelry she owned at once.

"The dwarves of Erebor will think the king's hair gone red," Meisar grinned at her, Emli's gumption and her fiercely-groomed pride never wavering even in the face of a soggy morning. "Escorting such an elegant lady your son is, they might think you queen."

"150 years of exile at an end and near to several years without the sight of my husband. It is an occasion worthy of the most sumptuous ensemble I can muster, this dastardly weather or not." Emli studied her frowzy clothing with bemusement. "Gloin and I are well-recognized, so I shall not think I will be mistaken for anyone more regal than I am. You on the other hand."

Meisar shrugged back at her with little care for it. "I suppose I don't cut queenly a figure at the moment."

"It is what is in here," Emli said, gesturing to her heart with a diamond-studded forefinger. "Even I know that."

"Will father be there, 'amad?" Gimli asked, restlessly. His beard, for its wiry natural qualities, had been rendered lustrous, even silken in its appearance, and hair too, which was worn loose down his back out the regular sturdy singular plait. The young dwarf, who might have sulked dramatically in previous days rigged into and chafing in his good clothes, was jubilant. "Tonight we sup in the Lonely Mountain. No stops, no sleep, 'til home. Tell me about it again, 'amad. Tell me how lovely it is."

"Our home." Tears of pride began to well in Emli's eyes but her smile quickly faded as a gust of wind rushing in from the outside took Gimli's hair and beard, claps and all, into a tizzy. "Dizhat Turg," Emli carped. "No son of mine shall go to Erebor looking a vagabond." She hurried to fix Gimli properly as the first of the bargemen came in to collect their passengers.

Meisar went to the window to watch Dori, Ori and Eda depart, Dori fussily holding Fred at arm's length to carry him onto the boat. Urdlaug too escorted her siblings to the quay, hugging each goodbye as they boarded a separate barge already weighted down with their belongings, kept in the town's stock-house just down the quay. Bofur, Bifur, Brynja and Hegi joined their lot.

"I have heard you were taken with fever, my lady," a young high voice startled her. She turned and Bain acknowledged her respectfully, joining her at the window. The boy-lord's eyes were bright with concern.

Meisar fetched a footstool quickly and climbed atop it so to better meet Bain's eyes. "It might serve us better so that neither of us bend our necks so, to speak civilly. I greet you in good faith, Bain of Lake Town." She gave him as comforting a smile as she could muster. He was young and baby-faced, that face bearing such a seriousness to it nonetheless. He had Bard's sturdiness which she could not help but admire.

"Are you in better condition this day?"

"It broke, the fever. I am well."

"My lady?"

Bain took a step away as Thorin, his traveling cloak donned, moved swiftly to the dwarrowdam's side. But not between them. He brought her own heavy wool traveling cloak and draped it tenderly about her shoulders, fastening it for her. Bain looked between the dwarven couple with their hair braided alike at the temples, taciturn sets of eyes, one wintry blue and redoubtable, the other with a cutting quality under sleepy lids, but capable of benevolence, he thought to himself. When the king's eyes turned sideways to her, they shifted tangibly, like the first break in the Lake ice after a long winter that showed the placid waters beneath, too long hidden. The way he looked at the lumpily-clothed, tired-looking dwarrowdam at his side who would be queen caused something in the young lord to ease. The dwarf woman, he mused, looked less a queen and more a vagabond in her blood-clot red wool dress that was sized for a mannish child, and something about her plainness seemed oddly endearing, even to him as a man. The king, in simple but well-structured traveling clothes and plain cloak, turned to him civilly.

"I take my leave, with kindness," the boy-lord said finally.

"As do we, my lord. Your hospitality here is much appreciated and will be returned," Thorin said, offering him a vambrace-girded hand. Bain took it, meeting his eyes one more time.

"Climb upon no box or stool to speak with the likes of men," Thorin chided lightly when he was gone. He counted heads silently of the dwarves mulling about the common room in their traveling clothes, waiting for the bargemen. He plucked her off and set her down on her feet before him.

"I was always taught never to look up to one of them," Meisar retorted, tiredly. "A sore neck is a more diminishing reminder of our height difference than a footstool's assistance."

He smiled a gentle yielding smile and pulled his temple and his nose to press against hers closely in spite of their audience and her still-warm temperature, nuzzled the tips of his beard to her nose. "You have a giantess within you. Men shall tremble in your presence someday my queen."

"Nay. No more trembling with fear for each other or hatred," she grasped his face determinedly. A deluge of worse thoughts for which only her grasp, her sudden determination, might soothe, he gazed and felt the once taciturn eyes full of grace.

The first bargeman pushed opened the door and hollered passage for twelve.

"My only Thorin, may be tremble but for each other's sight."

Abnâmul- Shapely, fair to look upon

San- Purity

Dizhat Turg- A dwarf with an unkempt beard