100 followers! This makes me a very happy hobbit! Thank you JJgirl9 for putting me over that threshold. Every one of you are so very much appreciated. Just remember, reviews are ALWAYS welcome, from old and new commentators alike. In fact, I very much like seeing what you all think.
"Good morning! Itriz! Itriz! Come my lady, the day has well dawned," an unfamiliar voice in the morning came barreling into Meisar's chamber. She opened one eye to see Aroin buzzing about the foot of her bed. That face was Gloin's face with a subtler, slightly wispier beard, no less adorned. It clinked as she conveyed herself about the room, flinging open Meisar's armoire and making a face at her meager wardrobe. She had Gimli's purposeful, eager way of moving, ardent but not entirely dudgeon. She would never tell Emli to her face but he was Aroin's nephew in true.
"Is it morning?" she yawned at Aroin, crawling out from under the dense warmth of the blanket.
"It is indeed, and these days shall pass quickly there is so much to do. The princess would much like your company as she readies herself for the day. Up! Up!" She tugged the blanket away and Meisar grimaced. Aroin retreated and she dressed quickly in her green travelling dress, still rumpled from her pack, its hems uneven with the borrowed pins pulled out. Her braids hastily fixed from their sleep-mussed state, she padded up the stairway to Dis's rooms, feeling slightly ashamed of her disheveled state and feeling intense relief, but a bit of bemusement to find that Dis had only dressed up to her chemise and bodice and the first layer of heavy linen underskirts. She stood by the fire hugging herself, Griet and Bertha holding her day's wear for her, helping her to dress. Black again, and fine subtly patterned brocade at the pieced sleeves, still all black. Her rubies in a black velvet box held by Griet. "Put the bum roll on," grumbled Dis. "Dwarves will be whispering about my thinness. Might as well try to fool them." She sighed as Bertha fitted the padded roll around her waist and Griet adjusted the somber final over-skirt atop it.
"Then your highness should eat," lectured Aroin in her high voice, sitting at Dis's writing table over a stack of contracts and a plate of bread and cheese. "You've barely touched your bread from breakfast."
"It sticks in my throat," muttered Dis. "Bread."
"Porridge then will do you fine. You'll nourish yourself on more than ale this day," ordered Aroin in no uncertain terms. She rose again and circled Meisar like a buzzard hawk. "Have this one teach you a thing or two about proper plumpness. Look at this figure, lovely," smiled Aroin, patting Meisar efficiently from her hips up to her shoulders. Meisar jumped and she responded crisply. "Sizing you up for the seamstress to have an idea is all. I'll see to it that Dagny have you in a few proper dresses, in addition to the obvious. Which we must get started on imminently, if we are not to have her at her wedding in yellowed crochet like a Lake-Town fisherman's daughter."
"And what a splendid taste in the finest fabrics you do have, my dear sister," a far more familiar voice followed a knock-less entrance. Emli smiled disingenuously at Aroin as she glided in, her orchid gown of a grating similarity in shade and far more vibrant than Aroin's muted lavender of the day. "I imagine the marketplaces will be brimming with the finest. A few swatches of velvet, brocade and silk damask wouldn't hurt. You always pick the most handsome bolts."
The two dwarrowdams stood on either side of Meisar possessively, her seated in the middle half expecting them to each take a half of her and pull. "Write it down and send one of the maids to fetch them," Aroin countered, shooing Griet and Bertha. Griet, wide-eyed and chestnut-headed and Bertha, a squat, dark figure, looked at each other and shrugged dumbly.
"Fine as these young ladies are we need someone well-schooled in the finer aspects of textiles," Emli came back. Aroin's put her hands on her hips and Dis put hers in the air, causing the comb Elsa was holding to snag halfway through her thick black hair.
Aroin turned to Meisar, preening. "If the king's lady does require some advisement in the selection of fine dwarrowdams to serve in your household, I would be more than happy to assist," Aroin offered, shifting her eye to Emli on the opposite side of her.
"The king's lady has chosen members of her household to serve already."
"A coal miner's daughter amongst them I hear," sniffed Aroin, which made Emli's eyes widen indignantly.
"A very fine coal miner's daughter, who is more than fit to serve a queen," protested Emli, a barely-concealed seething indolence seeping through her tight smile. "Lady Brynja I would have you know is wedded to one of the thirteen who claimed this mountain from Smaug and the Darkness. More than suited to serve a king, and a queen, Lady Aroin."
"It is not to say my chosen ladies are not women of fine character, only that… I have heard from so many during my first days under the mountain what a fine preference you have in all things, my lady Aroin," Meisar smiled fawning at Aroin, her urgency to defuse the situation making her heart pound though not the way Thorin made it so. "Your brothers, and the dwarrowdams that have been my company, have spoken ever so highly of your tastes." A calmness washed over her as Aroin's smile surveyed suspiciously, then widened with smug pride, her furrowed brows relaxing, and spinning to Emli to raise one up at her in a haughty triumphant motion.
"My lady Aroin," said Dis quietly. "For all you do to keep my household and my affairs in order, please. Do take this and buy yourself something nice in addition. It is a gift," she offered, pressing several coins of high value into her palm.
"As my lady princess wishes," replied Aroin crisply, curtsying with her skirts all billowing under her. "Midnight blue velvet for Thorin's garb. Preferably of the embossed kind," Dis called after her as she made the most dignified possible retreat. The door shut and Emli crowed in victory.
"You are learning fast," Dis remarked slyly. "Alas, Aroin is formidable. Don't underestimate her." Emli pouted in defeat as Elsa picked up Dis's comb again and restarted her work on Dis's hair, smirking in amusement. Dis's thick dark tresses were worn long to her waist, plaited simply like Thorin's. A single thin braid was worn at the back of her head, clasped in a sterling wedding bead. She wore two more narrow plaits in front like Thorin did, each clasped in sterling also. "For my sons," she explained, caressing one bead between thumb and forefinger and then the other. "As are Thorin's plaits. The one in the back that hides is for his people," Dis grinned wistfully. "And soon he will have another one to declare himself a married dwarf." Dis's smile emerged now without the pain it had previously borne. "Which brings me to something I rather have enthusiasm for- preparing for this wedding."
Meisar nodded agreeably, hoping to keep Dis's mood buoyed. "You will be a queen soon. And I am a princess again after many years a lady brought low. We will learn together." "Now," said Dis. "A dwarf never looks up to anyone. Not even you, you tiny thing. A dwarf woman walks with her head straight and her shoulders back. No more sloping and slouching and slinking about. But most of all a dwarrowdam holds her own, proud and bold as any man. Though I best teach you the womanly arts in time. We'll have much work to do making the garments for the wedding. It's tradition after all. So tell me, can you embroider?"
"I can repair clothing."
"Good enough. Make jewelry?"
"No."
"Music? Poetry? Dance?"
"None of those things. Thorin is teaching me to play the harp though. And I can sing a little, though not very well I don't think. Oh Dis, I have never quite been a woman. A lady."
"We will remedy that," Dis assured serenely.
"We have not much time in that case. Thorin says we are to wed on Durin's Day."
"A fortnight!" Dis exclaimed, throwing her arms in the air again. "Impatient as always, my dear brother. Well that doesn't give us a hair's-breadth of time." Dis looked at her again cockeyed. "What now? Is this wedding to be held in secret?"
"No, not quite, but I suppose it shall be a quiet affair."
"Whatever it shall be, we must get to work, don't you think? Summon the rest of your ladies. Griet, would you fetch them to us?"
Griet curtsied and went to her duty. Minutes later Freyda, Gyda, Eda and Brynja arrived in Dis's chambers, reverently curtsying each with her own distinct attempt at poise toward Dis. Elsa nudged Dis with discreet tenderness. "Finish your porridge, love," whispered the old nursemaid, even more discreetly taking the half-empty cup of ale from the princess's side. Dis finished her dressing with a decorated black velvet cap and semi-opaque veil that dipped in a solemn V down the center of her back. Around her waist she fixed finally a long gold chain like a girdle, two small carved lockets dangling at its end on her left side, clinking solemnly together. They looked very much like those that held the portraits Ori had gifted her and Thorin upon the road. Dis squeezed one in her hand and her lips moved in a semi-silent offering to no one in particular.
A sullen Freyda nudged Meisar. "I must tell you of my dilemma," Freyda whispered lamentably. "Can I come to your room tonight?"
"Tomorrow would be preferable," Meisar assured, resting a comforting hand on Freyda's sinewy forearm. "Tonight Thorin and I have a small commitment."
II
They could smell the simmering, spiced meat stew and warm bread an entire level up, a wafture of warmth and welcome all too familiar to both of them. A winding staircase took them into a part of the mountain where the stone opened up into a cozy hollow of living quarters. They were close to the forges but the stone between them buttressed the noise, and kept the apartments there warm. Here, in the heart of Erebor, an old friend was eagerly awaiting them for supper.
"He shall be glad to see us I think," Meisar remarked quietly. Thorin's eyes were red at the corners, half-moons of sleeplessness beneath them. "Are you alright, my love? You look... tired."
"A long night is all, my blessing," he murmured vaguely.
"Kurdu-ûh?"
A single tear edged its way from the corner of Thorin's eye and he tore his hand from hers to strike it assiduously away. "A king's tears are his own." His voice was sharp and high.
He turned from Meisar but found her obstinate toward his protest. She spun him to her solidly by his shoulders, his body recoiling from the surprise at the vigor of her motion. "As mine are my own, but you cannot help them from falling. Or else they will drown you." Meisar caught his face in her hands before he could turn his back on her again. With less pigheadedness, she stroked his cheeks. "And what use is a drowned king, tell me?"
Vexed, he pulled away from her, and avoided the sudden hurt in her eyes for the terseness of his movement. Hurt turned to indignation that sprung her to reach out and spin Thorin back around to face her once more. "Kurdu-ûh. My heart. Please…"
"Meisar..." he grasped both her hands, stopping in the middle of the deserted stairwell, raising her closed fists to his face and raining kisses on them.
"Men lananabukhs menu, adyum," she soothed, wanting all of him in her arms, to lay there, to heave his sobs into her chest, and let their solitude in each other be a shelter. But not here. She could hear the clanking sound of miners, the first trickle after second shift, rising up toward them. "I love you, Thorin."
"Let us be on our way," Thorin said finally. "He'll not want to wait for supper."
.
A crushed leg in the Battle of Five Armies had rendered Bombur somewhat invalid but never cowed, except where the beef pies at supper were concerned. Indeed he had grown enormously fat, fatter even than before, though the rumors proved false that it took five dwarves to move him.
It in fact, took six.
Bombur came from scrappy roots in the coal mines of Ered Luin, the son and grandson and great grandson of tinkers and miners, himself a proprietor of a bakery in addition, in the southern parts of Ered Luin where they had dwelt. They had made soups and breads and meat pies that were the talk of the community there. In the Lonely Mountain, for his part in the defeat of the dragon and of the enemy, he was given a generous share of treasure and goodly lodgings for his enormous family. They had all come, his fourteen children and several grandchildren, who had been borne of his eldest son and his wife, Lagert.
A memory of cake with strawberries, and goat hooves trampling cotton-lace on the train of the dwarrowdam's white dress, a sweet nog that made her head swim. When Lagert looked at Meisar she nearly dropped the wheel of cheese she was lugging into the dining room.
Thorin patted him heartily on his back. "You are to be married? Is is true, my king?" Bombur inquired through a crushed mouthful of salami.
"It is."
Virta's head appeared in the ajar door to the dining room, her wide smile eager. "Somebody special has come to see you father. The king's betrothed herself." Virta then swept back into the common room and escorted Meisar jubilantly to Bombur by the arm.
Bombur dropped the stick of salami he was chowing on. "It can't... it can't be."
"Hello Bombur."
Bombur's lip trembled above his many chins, fingers clutching tight about the salami stick in his hand against his sudden silence. "Meisar!" he boomed finally. He held out his arms for her, and Meisar embraced the corpulent dwarf warmly. Thumbs that seemed as thick as her wrists stroked her cheeks tenderly. Bombur's warm eyes took her in with fatherly affection. "I never thought I'd see ye again! Oh girl, sweet girl! Let me have a look at ye!"
Bombur's eyes filled with tears as he hugged Meisar tight. The poor little woman was engulfed into his mass. When Donbur came puffling in at the supper bell, he finally released her and gave his son a surprised once-over. "Oh aye a woman grown you are. Now where is the king's betrothed that has come to greet me in my home? Let me see her. Is she a beauty like this one?" he smiled and kept holding onto Meisar's hand as if she were a wee child again, in a crowded marketplace. Neither Bombur nor Bira had ever let her hand go in the crowded markets of the Blue Mountains, nor did the elder girls though she was only a quiet little scrap who had crept into the bakery one winter night to stay warm by the ovens, and had not been shooed out in the morning when Bira came in. As a girl it had made her feel inexplicably safe, those engulfing fleshy hands clasping hers as if they had a reason not to lose her. As a woman, it made want to weep with joy, but she held back.
"Aye, she is," Thorin offered.
"Well, where is she? I want to see her!"
"You're looking at her, my friend."
Bombur looked between them obtusely.
Thorin cleared his throat awkwardly, Meisar's suddenly amused grin ducked out of his sight.
"It is I who have asked her hand in marriage, Bombur."
The sudden denouement caused a half-chewed salami crumble to fall from the side of Bombur's mouth. Meisar looked at Urdlaug and she shrugged. Supposed she did, that Bombur's immobility had left him bereft of the gossip in Erebor, she stepped forward and came on her knee to him in his great cushioned chair with the little wheels on the bottom. "We met upon the road, Bombur. It just... it was." She rose and leaned back into Thorin's arms, the first ringing of the supper bell causing her to jump upward and brush the top of her head against Thorin's chin. He smiled gently. "Our lady has guided more than our people home."
Bira waddled into the room shaking the bell in her hand and Donbur half-tripped over his feet through the swinging door behind her.
"What have ye done with my boy? He's… lean," chuckled Bombur. Donbur of course was the size of a forging shed and feasting like a hobbit at a harvest festival at his father's supper-table. "Aye, my dear Meisar, had ye not had a foot to his backside from the time ye stepped on the road from Ered Luin, I fear he would not have made it past Bree."
"It is what I do for those I care for," she replied. She squeezed Thorin's hand clandestinely, drawing a little smile to the corners of his lips. She felt herself suddenly as glad to have seen that smile as ever she had been.
Bombur looked up at Thorin and grinned warmly. "And here ye stand, a king's betrothed. Well done, lass, well done. Now, let us eat and be merry for two triumphant returns. From what I thought certain death." Tears began to crest in the fat dwarf's eyes but the plate of powdered cream puffs Urdlaug hauled in and set down before him quickly relieved them. The children young and old waved their plates and jostled in the messy queue about the table for their food. Bombur had so very many children and grandchildren that their quarters were bursting, but awash in dwarven camaraderie. The little ones fought for space at Bombur's knee, growing ever rarer as his girth began to crowd them out. Bira and the girls chased the children harried through the rooms trying to get them cleaned up for supper. Sons and grandsons leaped about tables, rattling plates as they clashed with toy swords. The girls clustered about the cistern mirror combing and braiding their hair and beards before they came to present themselves to the king. Even though Thorin had been a king and Bombur and his kin humble miners, he lived among them, a blacksmith with hardened hands as hard as theirs. Bombur and Bira's bakery there had been a prosperous place but they had opened their doors and broken bread with the king of their heart's generosity even when the yeast was scarce.
While Thorin and Bombur imbibed together, Bira, Lulia and Virta pulled Meisar into their room. Bira was as fat as her husband with elaborately arranged hair.
"There have been whispers in Erebor and all among the dwarves in Dale, even the men-folk. The king has found his One," Bira chirped. "Scarcely did I believe. And here now, it is my little beardless runt that shall be queen." Bira nearly engulfed Meisar in her mass. "I wept for you when you left, my dear. I did not think I would see your face again. Now I shall behold it always. When are you are queen."
"It is the most perfect thing that has happened in his lifetime, since… since Fili was born. And Kili. So much hope then. I never thought I would see it in his face again," mused Bira. Blue-gray eyes bore that quiet determination fragments of Meisar's consciousness seemed to suddenly remember, seeing those eyes again, remembering their heaviness and weariness all those years ago. Bira was different though altogether, this share of treasure well-caring for a dwarrowdam none could surpass in deserving such reward. Several great fans of hair were arranged on top of her head in an elegant architecture descending from crown to cranium in four broad, flat-looped fins. It gave way to thick strawberry-and-honeyed-blond hair, its highlights ashen with age, gathered in a thick cerulean snood. Braided into her hair too lay a beautiful brooch that rested at the center of her forehead at the hairline, the thin bejeweled chains that anchored it woven into her hair and forming a delicate headpiece. Heavy jowls with their fine graying hairs were lightly beaded in real diamonds. Meisar has never been so glad as to see this humble woman, who had labored over bread-ovens, sweating and with back aching half her life, so well-kept. Bira seemed utterly glad of countenance. "Aye, he has not been seen with such a joyful countenance since he was a young prince, before the dragon and the wars took everything in these parts," agreed Lagert quietly.
Bira shook her head. "Thorin has been burdened and lonely for many a year. I have not seen him smile in so long."
"We have known each other so few days," Meisar sighed. "It seems so strange still."
"That is the whole point of the One. It is practically set in the stone from the first sight. I should have been well aware from the time he brought me mincemeat pies at Yuletide and asked nothing in return that Nifur was my One. It took some time, but all things were as they were meant to be," Lagert bounced her restless dwarfling on her knee. "You are a thing of utter good for him- and us. The weight of his burden falls upon all of us when he is afoot. You are precisely what this king needs. If you ask me, he should have had it a long time ago."
"Do you love him?" Bira asked more bluntly.
"I have not known love. But if that is love, then yes, yes I do love him. So very much."
The supper bell rang in the dining room and all of the children were sprung. The floor shook as they all clamored about the supper table at once, Urdlaug swatting away hands both big and little that reached for her cheese-tarts and ham pie. They were all so very fat, every one of them. It was like looking into a pile of pumpkins. Bombur looked over his massive, gathered clan and smiled proudly.
"I would see you at our nuptials, Bombur, though I see too that ample movement comes at a strenuous price, my friend," Thorin offered.
"Nonsense!" snorted Bombur, sending the powdered sugar from his cream puff in a little cloud before his nose. "I shall be there, to escort my little runt to the altar, seeing as your father himself could not be here to do so." He slung his arm lovingly around Meisar and the weight of it nearly caused her to double forward. She smiled with tears in her eyes though. "Would you, Bombur? I would be... honored."
"With pride!"
"But how shall you move up about?"
"With a bit of elbow grease and perhaps some cooking grease too. After all," he looked to his six eldest sons with pity. "What is family for?"
Itriz- Rise!
Kurdu-uh- My Heart
Men lananabukhs menu, adyum- I love you, my blessing