A/N: Hello readers. I just wanted to give you a quick update on things. Thankfully, the summer months are when I have a bit more time for "recreational" writing, so I hope to be able to post new chapters more often. I've decided that I want to take this fic much further than I originally planned, and make it an epic, for lack of a better word, yarn of Thorin and Meisar's time in Middle Earth together, up until the end of their respective lives. There are many adventures for these two (and their compatriots) to have, if you will follow me along for the journey.

"Do you hear it?"

Thorin was stirred by the tiny rumble of her voice on his breast. He felt the light brush of fingertips ghosting over scarred ribs, slotting their tips into the grooves of his skin.

"Do I hear what?" he murmured.

Meisar was suddenly quiet again, curled up on Thorin's chest in a light chemise that was twisted and ruched from sleep and left her legs bare to just below the solid, ample curve of her bottom. Parted thighs rested over and squeezed between them his right leg, the fabric of her ivory night-dress all bunched there. He had not dressed in anything more substantial than the wrap of a blanket for a day and a night, new in itself to his experience, though hardly disagreeable. He scooted and sat up halfway against a rise of pillows at the head of their bed, keeping her head pressed close on his chest. He liked the pluming touch of her breath there; it made him feel alive, desired and loved.

He squeezed his palm over her shoulder, rubbed it lightly, and let his hand slide easily down the arched curve of her back, her belly pressed into his flank. Again he listened but he could only hear the distant sound of hammers, the feet of a thousand dwarves going about their business above and below. The fortress city never slept, especially when there was a cause for merrymaking in its every corner and hollow.

"I can hear them all around the mountain. They are celebrating," she whispered.

When he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could hear the laughter, the thump of empty barrels rolling along a corridor somewhere in the distance, and music. A band of pipes and drums in a distant echo. "It is a good sound to hear after so long. I have not heard such merriment since Midsummer in the Shire." His hand slid up from the small of her back where it had momentarily rested to her shoulder again, traced a forefinger about the shell of her ear, and grasped for the tips of her fingers with the opposite hand, which was rested close to hers on his torso.

"Are Hobbits like dwarves? Do they marry rarely too and celebrate like this when there is a wedding?" She sat up and gazed down upon him carefully, her fingertips in the grooved white scars over his ribcage again. "Do they celebrate the sheer miracle of existence, as we do?"

"They marry often. And they feast and drink and dance regardless of whether it is a marked occasion. It is their nature. All existence is worthy of celebration. And why not? They are not a race accustomed to the hardships dwarves have known. Little do they leave that small corner of the world. They find it rather distasteful to do so, if truth be known."

"As we do not leave this one?" The small plump mouth that formed soft commas at the corner, not like the deep creases and smile lines of jollier types. But he had made her smile. And it made his heart weak with joy. He kissed that agreeable mouth, un-kissed since he had dared to at first, on that night just beyond the reach of the Trollshaws. She shivered then as she shivered now, perhaps with the same want.

For she is mine and mine alone, and I am hers.

"I would remain here with you, for as long as a Hobbit remains in his smial in the West." He suckled at the lower lip languidly, tasting of smoke and mead. They had not left their chambers, which was customary after the marriage ceremony, but neither harbored much desire to. And stayed in bed for that duration almost wholly they had, finding the tenderest points of exploration, and punctuating every encounter or so soaking up and cleansing in the hot waters of the spring-bath, re-emerging invigorated, or pleasantly lulled altogether just before sleep. They had gone about it in a fumbling way time to time as any without a great deal of experience might, but coupled with the unyielding ardor of their want. The layers of bedclothes they had piled atop the well-used ones below were warmly scented in damp leftover bathwater and sandalwood soap.

Meisar settled to the left of him at his side, propped lightly on her elbows. She took his hand in both of hers and massaged it, wordlessly. "I was afraid," he confessed, vaguely, his eyes somewhere else.

"Afraid of what?"

The blue eyes turned back to her, their depth as always, un-measurable. "That I would hurt you. When we were, together."

"I have been hurt," she said. Thorin reached down and stroked the troll-bite scar on her leg, the raised skin textured slightly. He kissed the hair that had been rendered a burnt smear of ash on her head by dragon-fire once, and never cut since. "But not by you. Never."

She stroked the scar on his chest and worked her way downward along its wretched path. Several others on his belly she caressed gently, as if in want of healing, the love and the lamentation in that gentle touch. A tender, healing want or not he felt himself grow hot and stir again, and Meisar pressed down the cover of the blanket and found the column of him bared, thick and lazy-looking in its restful state, like a serpent after a hearty meal.

"I do not think anything could pry me from your side at the moment." She slid down and grasped the thick, heavy column and gave it a light stroke, pressing her thumb against the curved ridge of skin just below the head of it. It gave a sharp twitch as it began to harden again.

"Nor I from yours. I do enjoy your company very much. So very much," his breath hitched with the words, then the sudden strength of his arms flipping her swiftly over onto her back, pressing up the thin chemise over her. Thinking he might wish to couple then she reached to press up her skirt the rest of the way over her hips and to her chest, wrap her legs about the broad width of his hips. He pried her off, gently, laid her on her back with the pillow under the small part of it, raising her hips a little. "I should not go so swiftly at that task," he intoned. "Is it not a more laborious process to please a member of the female sex? I should help you... get ready."

"Is it?" she teased lightly.

"If it is true that you are not like men, who can become like stone and ready for all things in a swifter breadth of time."

Thorin had never been a patient dwarf but he seemed to linger on her again in this state as if the days they would remain un-bothered in their chambers would not end. Squeezing slowly the soft bit of her to the side of her navel between his lips and then his teeth. Wanting to feel the scratch of his beard on her skin, everywhere, the most intimate flesh summoning him in its own voice, deep and husky, it rang in her ears. But she found herself in want of something entirely separate from the pleasure he had shown her.

Her husband lowered his upper body to rest between her thick parted legs with his head dipping over to kiss her sternum, dragging the coarse board down over her stomach, peppering the dry, bristly sensation with the venusian dew of kisses. His arms flailed upward simultaneous to his busied mouth, head still buried in the soft skin of her abdomen, and caught her breasts, massaging them from beneath, working fingertips around the nipples and giving them light simultaneous squeezes that made her yelp. He kissed and kissed on downward and rubbed his beard against the red tuft of her pubic hair, with the fingertips still playing on her nipples, when her leg slid off of his shoulder, impatiently. Meisar slid herself upward on the bed and sat upright again.

"Are you alright, my love?"

"Thorin, I want to do the same," she informed him abruptly. She twisted her hands in her lap like a nervous young girl, and her cheeks were flushed all ruddy again but her eyes were set and determined of her desire. "I want to please you… the same. Like you did in the forest that night. I want to…"

"Oh..." His breath caught momentarily in the back of his throat.

"May I?" She sat forward and placed her palms against his chest and urged him to lay back. Around his neck was still the simple stone on the twine chain, messily carved, the first token she had given him in courtship. Her arm snaked around his side, massaging the side of his torso, the small dip of waist and back up again, massaging her half-closed palm against the hard skin. "You trusted me then with your life," she reminded him. "Would you trust me now with your pleasure?"

"Ghivashel, have you any notion of… how?" The notion of anything akin to it had not crossed his mind nor been suggested. Dwarves were urged to be productive in their couplings where their race was precarious in its growth.

"Emli told me not to use my teeth."

She took silent note of his cheeks, colored strawberry-wine. She pressed the top of his thigh, stroking over the thick hard muscle and pressing it to lay flat and encourage him to relax in the slightest, endearing as this uncertainty was, this dwarf who had torn her skirt in the forest as if she were a common trollop and opened her, and tasted her.

"Fair enough," he conceded, as breathlessly.

She pressed both of his arms backward to lay flat over his head on the pillow, her thumbs in the pulse points of his wrists, stroking him there, rising to kiss his jawline, his neck, and make her way southward on a path that still lay mostly un-mapped. Heated curiosity panged and ached at her; she suckled deep kisses against his neck, his collarbone, pausing to close her teeth lightly around the latter and play with the line of it on her tongue. Her mouth seemed to wander of its own will toward all the parts of him she had yet to explore the terrain of, at least so intimately. To offer a fumbling touch was one thing; to let her mouth be the journey-woman in such a quest was new and exciting.

Fingering the line of the collarbone, she leaned down to his chest, to the apical point there. She pressed her lips to the neglected pulse point and felt it quicken. "I will go slowly," she promised him, quietly and with an abiding reverence, the way he had assured her on the first night of their marriage. She fluttered her lashes against his left nipple before circling it swiftly and experimentally with the very tip of her tongue.

The intensity of the pleasure was like a knife. Thorin's mouth remained in a tight line, pressed rigid up on the pillow still, the tendons in his neck flickering up every once in awhile, then down again when her touch endeavored any brief cessation. She traced the contours of his broad chest with one finger then three, molding the tips again to the scars on his rib area. She rubbed her palm over them, stroking his flank up to his armpit, softly tickling the thatch of hair there which made him smile.

Long, lingering kisses trailed across his belly and settled finally, where she did, on the skin just below in the dip of his navel. He was hard lines here too, all veins and small dips of firm skin all the way down to where it pooled in the coarse, springy hair that was at his base, not entirely unlike his beard. She skimmed her fingers across the black curls between his legs, feeling him stir in their wake. She felt the rush of blood and smiled. He growled and groaned and went pale in his cheeks as the blood traveled elsewhere it was so urgently required.

He welcomed the shy, if intent, touches with an ardent greed for them, felt her breasts fall heavy onto his chest as she worked, the tickle of her furred nethers pressing on his stomach, dragging the dew gathering between them over his abdomen. When he had taken of her this pleasure in the forest, he had kissed her thighs, her belly, taken handfuls of her ample figure and molded them like a sculptor would a mound of clay, however hurried, however wanton he had been that night. A want of a mutual worship surged and made her knees so weak that she laid flat and propped herself on her elbow over him, continuing her efforts.

She kissed him just below his navel on the sinewy skin. The flesh grew hot on her lips, the muscles all contracting at once. Broad in the torso and hard-muscled, he still quivered and squirmed at the contact.

He gave her a small squeak of encouragement, such a sound as she could never have imagined wrung from his throat it was so meek an utterance. Ah, but dwarves in the face of the unknown, she smiled lightly to herself, can be ever unpredictable.

He relented and let his head rest back upon the pillow, staring at the ceiling where he saw stars. She had not yet even arrived at the inevitable destination, determined to tease him, he thought, not knowing whether it was impatience that shuddered through his hips and chest and prickled his fingertips, or a wholly opposite want that the process might go on for hours, even days.

"Relax," she cooed. "I promise I won't hurt you."

Her tongue, so warm and wet and foreign, first made contact with the tip. He shuddered.

"Is that right? Did I hurt you?"

"No! No. You did not. I... keep going. If you please..."

Shyly at first, soft sweet lips embraced his manhood at its pink and darkening tip. His skin was salty there, and she tasted herself on him, their cloying sexual musk entwined. The size of him had intimidated her when she first beheld it, but now not so much; even if she could not hilt him in her throat the first time she pleasured him with her mouth, time- and practice- would surely allow it- or so Brynja had gently assured. She let her tongue softly graze the heated flesh once more. She left no curve, no ridge of him unexplored, the transformative, hard heat of him, yielding to her stimulation, utterly molded by it. She sealed her lips carefully around the swelled head of it, closing, creating a fervent pressure with her mouth over his tip. She made the shaft slippery with the wetness of her mouth, all warmth and wanting.

She had grown so bold, he smiled. She sighed, and her soft hum against his sensitive flesh drew from him a deep and feral moan. His length had not been tended to so heatedly. The shaft thick and hard, the head rosy and velvety-soft on her tongue. He was smooth skin and harsh ridges together. There was a delicate ridge by the head that pulled a desperate groan from him when she rimmed it gently with her tongue. It left him shaking for a long moment, his fist curled tight around a handful of the sheets beneath him. He had an understanding of this part of his body, the sensitivity of it being at times a formidable territory, even in the grip of his own hand, seldom as that was endeavored. When he had first pressed himself into the untested channel of his bride, felt the contract of the wet heat on his every inch, he had stayed his reckless want. The first touch of her tongue, making motions on its tip, its studs and rivers of veins all pulsating in response, raised a sudden worry in him that it might not be the same this time. He concentrated on the peripheral pleasure, the warm palm massaging the top of his thigh, the tickle of her hair on his belly, and the small, impressed noises she made with every new exploration of a new trail of skin, a new epicenter of his bliss.

The clean skin from last night's bath tasted lightly of the musky sandalwood soap along the base, where it met the other intimate components. She let her fingers wrap tentatively around him there, holding the twitching column steady to continue, letting her tongue wander up again along the ridge of his underside, back up to the curve of the glans, then down again. The slit of him at the tip was already expelling light, pale drabbles of his arousal. She swirled her tongue over it curiously, the liquid bitter on her tongue.

Thorin moaned softly the deeper she took him, the ever-so-soft graze of teeth along the underside, teasing the ripened vein and up along the curved band of skin just below the glans that made him writhe suddenly when it was grazed by her touch. He wanted to reach down, to take a fistful of her beautiful red hair that was gathered up in a tight knot on her head, guide her along his contours in a furious rhythm, but decided he would best leave her to her own explorations, relentlessly curious to see where she would go next. She treated the shaft skin so fastidiously the process could have gone on for much longer, he imagined, little strokes of tongue, shy and exploratory; he had never felt anything as exquisite or as strange. His manhood slid along the rough patch of her palate.

Every sensation, from the slight crack of his spine when he arched it, too overcome with pleasure to bear another stroke of her tongue on his most sensitive flesh. Thorin let the same controlled groan escape him, trying desperately not to thrust his hips upward as they ached to, and push at the back of her throat and choke. It was unpleasant for the woman; he knew as much.

Meisar's fingertips gave the jewels a cursory touch, their weight dense, the skin tightening ahead of the inevitable. As much she knew, without fully comprehending the mechanics of the process. She had lain beneath him several times and felt him spill, the manhood resting from its stiffness afterward, the accompanying jewels drained of that density in the aftermath. Her curiosity for his most exquisite male form, a dwarf whose strength and rugged beauty had made her his own, had never been so rapt, nor she so eager a student of anything that was powerful enough to give this sort of pleasure. This sort, that left Thorin wholly at her mercy. Her love, her own vicious lust for him could have overflowed, but he did first. The ferocity of the pulsations had become too great. He let a sharp huff that turned to a hiss, and withdrew himself swiftly from her lips.

He spilled onto the sheets in a messy arc.

Meisar sat back on her knees and Thorin hesitated to meet her curious eyes, that seemed to dread something, displeasing him or worse.

"I would find it too tawdry, as a king, to... release, there," he explained, running a finger over her bottom lip reverently. A trickle of the pearl-colored seed made a fine line down over his member still. He felt a brief tingle of shame for wasting it in such an effort.

"I didn't hurt you?"

"Of course not, my blessing. That was... it was... very good." A high flush colored his cheeks swiftly. She cleaned him with a handful of the already messied sheet.

He smiled at her gently. "I would give you all the pleasure known to the flesh, but I shall never treat my queen as a common doxy."

"It was my idea," she countered, cajoling.

"You surprise me more each day then."

She rose and opened the door the linen cabinet carved into the wall and found there were no more blankets or bed-clothing to be had. "I think it is time for a clean bed to be made," she chuckled quietly. She shooed Thorin off the bed and stripped the top layer from it, casting the blanket on the floor and then the next.

"We could call for Griet or Bertha to do that," Thorin suggested.

"Having a maidservant is one of the hardest things to get used to," Meisar observed. She dropped an armful of dirty bedding on the floor.

He could make his own bed as certainly as he could wield an ax, but he didn't feel much like undertaking the task at the moment. It seemed a fussy chore.

"I'll make the bed proper later then," she chuckled, tossing the rumpled sheets and top-covers onto the floor with the rest. She wrapped her bed-robe over her chemise, padded toward the door and opened it only a crack so that her head could poke out. He heard her whisper quietly, almost proudly, to Oliada, their wishes that the laundresses or one of the maidservants might bring them a new set of bedding.

Thorin tossed the brown warg-skin and the additional pelts down on the floor into the nest of pillows beside the fire. "Come, and sit beside me. It is warm here."

She wrapped up in her bedrobe by the warmth of the fire. A knock at the door startled both. Thorin wrapped the fur pelt over his naked loins, another about his shoulders so that he gave the appearance of being properly dressed, and summoned them in. Griet and Bertha and a squat old laundress in her gray wimple and linen dress entered. They were their lips against mischievous smiles, all except the laundress, who scolded the girls and told them to gather the old bedding quickly and without nonsense. Griet and Bertha turned first and curtsied quickly at the king and queen wrapped in furs by the fire, innocuous as they could manage to present themselves at the moment. "You can leave the new sheets. We'll manage, my ladies," Meisar told the maidservants congenially. The laundress hauled the rest of the bedding onto her cart and shooed the girls out before her, making a curtsy without moving her eyes from the floor.

He flicked off the furs quickly and poured two chalices of hot wine that had been warming over the fire. "A fine way to start the morning," she remarked playfully, taking a long sip of the hot wine, letting the spice of it linger on the tongue. Thorin sat behind her on the nest of furs they had made by the fire-side, the blanket tugged about her just off her shoulders, his lips there, nuzzling the juncture of neck and collarbone. "I know the scent of your skin already," he murmured, the breath caressing her. "I know you as those hounds of yours would the scent of a beast they track across the plains. I could not forget you, you are so sweet."

"Well then," Meisar said in return. "I do hope Fred and Redcoat and Raincloud are enjoying their time with Bofur and Brynja, not tearing the place to shreds, whining all night. Poor beasts."

Thorin pulled back and laid himself flat on the thick layer of furs and pelts, cracking his stiff back, then rolling over again to place his head on Meisar's bare knee, the chemise she still wore all twisted and rumpled over her legs. He ran his fingertip along its soft gauzy hem. Setting aside her empty chalice, she instinctively, almost as if in the maternal way, gathered his head and rubbed him, from his temples to his aching neck, smoothed the stray hair back from his forehead. She worked blunt fingernails into his scalp, tenderly massaging, pleased at the sounds that were coming from him, little drawn out groans.

"You please me so, my bride. I could not imagine any other happiness except by your side. I live for you."

"I'm glad we found each other," she cooed. "I would have lived an unhappy life otherwise. Mahal does make all things as they are meant to be..."

These quiet, tender moments always seemed to punctuate the fury of the passion in which they met each other intimately, and physically. "The world will need us soon, to perform other duties," he laughed, self-deprecatingly. "I cherish these moments."

She laughed a slow peaceful chuckle. "We're not spring chickens anymore, my blessing. We'll have to be diligent either way, if we're to produce an heir."

"Diligent we will be then." He sat up and tugged the chemise down from her shoulders.

.

II

All through Erebor the festivities still went raucously on. Food and drink were plentiful in all of the halls, great and small alike, and dwarves came and went along the corridors in packs, their laughter thumping at the stone from floor to ceiling.

Together Balin, Dwalin, Gyda and Freyda made their way down the maze of staircases and winding halls down toward the forges deep in the mountain's heart. The hammers and the fires of their prosperity rung out in great heaves but seemed to be drowned altogether by the sounds of the merrymaking coming from the lower levels of the city. They crossed the busy center of the forges, past their borderlands and down another set of broad stairs to where the area spilled off into a cavernous space, the walls half-dug out. Lanterns and braziers were lit all along the path that kept leading to the sound of a rambunctious gathering somewhere further down the way, lined in high walls that gradually grew darker the higher up one gazed, so dark none could be sure where its roof actually lay, except to guess at the echoes flying up toward it into the dark. An open space emptied up and a wall of noise hit them.

The hollow thump of empty barrels echoed, loaded onto sleds and lifts to be hauled out or up, to be refilled by the dwarves' own kitchen breweries or sent back to the brewhouses of Dale. At the bottom of the stairs, dwarves were roving and drinking in packs large and small. In the center of their relentless revelry was a square empty space cordoned on by lines of hemp tied to upright axes fixed into the floor, all makeshift.

They descended, all of them wary except the two dwarrowdams, who strode in and blended easily into the crowds, in spite of the fact that most of them were male dwarves of the less genteel kind. Miners in their sooty suits, grizzled old soldiers and muscular sentries off duty, their faces, which might have been menacing on the job, contorted with drunken laughter. The air was thickened by the smoke and the scent of heavy winter lagers, bodies of varying degrees of ripeness, meat cooking somewhere, everywhere. Dwarrowdams in tight packs clustered on the peripherals of the raucous crowds of dwarf men, whispering to each other, giggling behind their hands, some drawing their cloaks with a coquettish aire of modesty, as if their presence was imbued altogether with some level of disrepute.

Underfoot the floors were sticky with a layer of spilled mead and beer; the dwarrowdams picked up their skirts and cloaks so they wouldn't be dragged in it. Freyda had come prepared, in the skirt that came only to her calves, cloak rolled and held against her torso.

The merchants who threw all caution or repute to the wind and tested their entrepreneurial spirit in The Pits had managed to create a haphazard track where they could circle their carts and wagons around and try to shout their selling points over the chaotic chatter of the crowds. MORIA MOONSHINE one read. FIREWORKS, read a cart beside that, FOR USE OVER HILL ONLY. The four dwarves greeted Bifur and Hegi there with merriment. Hegi smiled; her teeth, which had been half-rotted from her head, were replaced on the top with substitutes made of pure mithril. "Found a craftsman in the healer's guild to make a set of false teeth with a chunk I carried from Moria many years ago," the mad miner boasted. "Selling fireworks is good business. The drunks like 'em." She showed her teeth again and nudged Bifur, inundated in customers who quickly drained the barrel of its contents and filled Bifur's hands with coins.

"What ye doing here?" Bifur questioned earnestly, the slightly unhinged gaze turning on Gyda and Freyda.

"Come to see what these "Pits" are all about. Miners and Blue Mountains dwarves be talking nonstop 'bout 'em rearin' up again, all excited like," Brynja said, sweeping unseen and most congenially to Gyda's side. Dressed down in a wool jumper and blue linen blouse, she wore Bofur's scarf at her neck. Bofur couldn't be far. "Sure is nothing like the tusslin' clubs in Ered Luin. Ye remember dontcha? The ones that met in the old caves that our mothers dinna let us go to watch."

"Precisely what they are," Balin replied crisply. "The pits my dear Brynja are naught but a gathering of ruffians drinking too much and pummeling each other for some deranged sense of glory," sniffed Balin. "Ruffians. And tankards for a pence each. Nothing virtuous could come of it." Balin noted the exasperated faces of dwarves he could instantly recognize as foreign, of wholly different tribes seeking their good fortune in the reclaimed Erebor, or the children of Durin's Folk born in exile and raised in steads far less churlish than the Blue Mountains perhaps. Those dwarves, with their good clothes and clean hands, clung to each other's company as if they might meet death any moment. Talk of the "fight night" down in the resurrected Pits, in celebration of the royal marriage and the return of the king, had spread over the city to all classes, all guilds and stations, and curiosity always got the better even of the more upright sorts.

"A pence! I'm getting myself one!" Freyda said eagerly.

Dwalin attached himself firmly to her arm. "Come down here without an escort? Yer mad."

"I can tend to myself as fine as any dwarf!" she protested. She flicked the braid, pale and studded, over to him, tapping his arm and prickling him with it. He shivered, lightly.

"I did not mean... I did... might I buy ye a tankard?" he offered, moving his hand downward to hold her with his fingers linked into hers rather than at the elbow.

"Aye," she agreed, a smile on her lips starting to emerge in true. "Aye, I would like that."

Tending the makeshift pub-counter were two stout elder dwarrowdams, barmaids as wide as wagon beds with faces like gargoyles who distributed the drink in a no-nonsense manner. Behind them were piled barrels of ale, mead and malt beer like cordwood, a lift above their station pulling the empties away.

"A tankard for the lass and one for myself," Dwalin requested, slapping down two pence on the counter. A dwarrowdam about to dive face-first into a tankard was suddenly slammed from behind at the small of her back by a rowdy group starting to brawl nearby, bumping her belly-first against the edge of the counter and doubling her over. Freyda quickly pulled the dwarrowdam up and she belched ferociously back at her.

"Siv!" squawked Freyda.

She seized her at the shoulders and turned her, putting her head to the side lest a flood of regurgitated drink splatter her. Siv shook off the hit easily and retrieved her mead quickly, gulping what was left in it, letting a fair stream dribble down over her chest and soak the neckline of her dress. "Yer getting beer on yer clothes ye loutish girl!"

Nori came swooping in from the other side of the bar, took Siv in his arms and kissed her sloppily when he was assured she was not injured in the fray. The offending dwarf crashed his way back toward the counter, drink flying, soaking the side of Nori's head, causing him to bite hard on Siv's lip. "Dinna mean that, lovie," the knave soothed. He sucked the bottom lip indulgently. A clique of older dwarrowdams looked on disapprovingly. Siv pulled back and went over his shoulder, licked a drip of cold spilled mead from Nori's ear and glared at them. The old biddies departed in revulsion and Siv waved in Bofur, Brynja and Bifur to the empty space now freed at the bar, so they could all gather together, the old comrades.

Balin nudged Dwalin with amusement, joining them at last. He chuckled at the dwarrowdams he had arrived with, already imbibing. "''Amad once wandered down out of curiosity one evening. Queen Lotte was quite unhappy when the news reached her," cajoled Balin. He raised his eyebrow, paternally, at Siv.

She ignored him as Nori pilfered a towel from the bar counter and wiped her savagely pressed up bosom and the front of her dress. "Don't think Meisar will care too much," Siv belched again. "Report to the queen's stead I will when I'm called to 'er. When she and the king get un-stuck from each other, I'm s'posing."

"Ye think they're happy?" inquired Brynja more innocently.

"Yer married, lovie. What do you think?" Siv laughed and whispered something in Nori's ear, flicking her tongue against it and drawing a roar of degenerate laughter from the knavish dwarf.

"Speak like that as a lady o' the court you'll be out on yer ear," scolded Freyda. "A pretty dress ye don but a filthy tongue ye still got."

"Aye, but proper courted I am. M' no hussy," she corrected. Her hair stood in three peaks just like Nori's, with the official courtship braid trailing down her back. "Stole a thief's heart right back, how about that?"

"I've given up the thievin'," Nori pronounced, chest out, lips pressed together smugly. Dwalin raised a skeptical brow at him. "Got me a'plenty from the quest to make a proper home wif and keep me pretty Siv on." Black eyes sparkling the regular way, Siv raised the hand-fan, Laketown lace dyed a garish pink; it matched her dress, low off the shoulders with puffy silk sleeves. Freyda guffawed. "Come down here dressed all fancy like that. Never been to The Pits have ye?"

"There's a first for everything. Or so one'd think," Siv dripped slyly, offering Dwalin a wink and a nod. Dwalin pursed his lips at her, irritably, but her black eyes said everything. A pair of dwarves slammed by, one sending the other tumbling, pouring half a tankard of mead down Siv's front and down her bodice again. She smacked him with the ruined fan.

"Does yer cousin know yer here?" interrogated Freyda.

"We came together," Siv grinned, in time with Eda's swooping in to treat the tipsy dwarf who'd fallen just beside them. Virta alternated between administering crude medicine to the injured and drunken at Eda's side, and howling at her wandering sisters to stay close to Urdlaug and Donbur's concession carts. Two strong healers hauled the dwarf up to his feet and Eda slapped him smartly across the face. "Idlizumuni!" Eda scolded, snapping him back to a semblance of consciousness, at least enough to stand, and sending him on his way.

"Pits are not what they used to be," grumbled Dwalin.

"Oh but they are," Eda countered, as two more dwarves tipped head-over-arse at her feet and passed out wholly, drinks still in their hands. Dwalin raised his forearm and deflected- hard- a dwarf given a shove by his chums hard enough he would have sailed into Freyda head on.

"Bring him to the healer's station. I'll give him a potion for the headache he'll wake up with," laughed Eda, putting her old back into lifting the half-dead weight of the fallen dwarf.

"Beef pies! Beef pies with Hamadî!" boomed Urdlaug over the crowds nearby. Those who heard the call clustered quickly at her cart, in various stages of inebriation. Dwalin put down a pence for a pie, studied the crowds disapprovingly. "Drunken louts crave hearty food, and are easy to part with their coin," said Urdlaug, noting his foul expression. She slipped Bofur a pie.

"Not a place for a lass to be alone," Dwalin muttered in Urdlaug's direction. She sneered in response, jingling the full bag of coins at her belt. "Tell me that when I don't have a bag of silver to me own. Got a big family to keep fed."

"Fight's on!" a dwarf boomed so loudly it shook the walls.

The crowds pushed and shoved their way toward the peripheral of the fighting floor, all jostling for a good view. Minor spats and insults were called out with every comber of spilled beer that sloshed over the tops of cups and down the backs of clothes, soaking hair, tipping into boots and leaving them sloshy in the tight space. Dwalin grimaced against clothes damp with sweat and alcohol that brushed up against his bare forearm, kept his opposite tightly linked into Freyda's. She stretched her neck high to see over the crowds, straining on the tips of her toes. Reluctantly, Dwalin prodded his way through the crowds for a closer view. She seemed strangely eager for one.

"A fine fight! Two of the strongest, the hardest, the meanest of the dwarves in Erebor go head to head for honor, and for a prize worth envyin'!" the dwarf announced to the rapt crowd. "To the king!" the official boomed. "A celebration of marriage! Of renewal! Of STRENGTH!"

A familiar red-crowned head moved into the center of the sparring floor after him.

"To the queen!" Yrsa daughter of Bombur chortled. She waved a flag that was tied to her spoon hand as she swept back out, opening the match to its participants officially. Even the most hard-faced and drunken of the Pits' regulars let out endeared sighs all at once, parting like the waters of a great sea to let the dwarfling through, where Urdlaug set on the front of her cart and put her to slicing bread.

"For our candidates this night..." the official, a grizzled old sentry waved his arm to the nearer corner of the floor. "Hroth, son of Toth, the finest blacksmith in the Blue Mountains with a fist to match, or so he says. Let us put him to the test! Place yer bets one last time!" Out of the corner of Dwalin's eye, he could see Urdlaug abandon her cart swiftly and shove her way through the crowds toward the bookie's vestibule.

The dwarf on the far side of the sparring floor that Freyda was calling wildly in support of was smaller than Dwalin in height by several inches and wider by the same in width. A pale-haired figure with alarmingly blue-green eyes, he wore his graying beard in two four-strand plaits each clasped with heavy silver rings. The crowd roared. He doffed his tunic and entered the middle of the sparring floor bare-chested, back littered in angry-looking scars, a chest full of crude tattoos.

"A legend of the Pits. A dwarf not to be reckoned with by man, by orc, and especially by elf! The Golden Boar!"

Again, the crowd roared their approval. The Boar was balling his fists, getting into position against Hroth on the other side of him.

"Begin!" cried the official.

Hroth the blacksmith went in low only to be uppercut hard in the jaw and sent reeling backward onto the ground. He found his way to his feet, fumblingly. A second time, The Boar charged head-on at Hroth.

By then Urdlaug had jostled her cart to the front of the audience to caterwaul her support for The Boar. Each time Hroth took a hit, she threw her head back and laughed. Her sisters twirled and leaped in wild victory dances before her cart.

Each time, The Boar seemed to lay Hroth clean out on the floor with a hit that looked like it was no more than a tap of the fist. And each time, he put his hand out to help the poor blacksmith clamber back to his feet, pat him on the back and wait for him to regain his posture, his relaxed stance as his opponent freely regathered and cocky smile firing up the crowd. Dwalin studied this Boar. This Boar, that Freyda was waving her arms in the air chortling her support her, grinning ear to ear. A dwarf much beloved of me. The words sat in his head and swam, mixing with the overwhelming cacophony of the dwarves around him. The Boar was an older fellow but not as old as Balin. Gray and white subtly streaked his hair and beard but he was so fair in color it was difficult to say the extent of his graying, and he could not tell whether the lines on his face were the creases of age or the scars of war. He was average in height as far as dwarves went but tremendously wide and brawnier of form than any he had beheld in all his life, the muscles in his arms and shoulders menacingly displayed. An old soldier, chewed up and spit out like him, Dwalin mused, imagining he would be not unlike this gnarly figure in years to come, but not nearly as hefty in size and in strength. A fear and a vague envy rose in his throat, prickling at the back of his palate.

Much beloved.

"So... ye like this one?" he leaned to Freyda and gestured toward The Boar.

"Aye," Freyda replied with a haughty grin. "Aye, I do. He's quite the figure, isn't he? I know he's good for this win, given the opponent." She nudged Urdlaug in acknowledgement, the corpulent dwarrowdam gleeful beside her.

Quite the figure. He stood transfixed at the distance even, watching the give and bulge of The Boar's back and shoulders, his neck as thick as a tree trunk, and picking up the blacksmith Hroth and slamming him down so hard he thought he heard the crack of a skull.

Quite the figure, oh aye. Dwalin's wallowing in his own thoughts was loudly interrupted as Hroth the blacksmith went down for the last time, raised an arm off the floor in abject surrender. The dwarves standing around the edge of the ring went wild hooting and hollering over the victory.

The officials, the working sentries come down to keep the peace for under-the-table pay, and Hroth's friends all helped him out of the sparring floor. As Eda and the healers tended to him, he sprung up and made a bitter face at The Boar as he collected his praises. An insult or another was exchanged and there was chaos. Dwalin watched as The Boar slammed Hroth in the gut with the force of a charging infantry. The latter went down writhing in pain.

Dwalin felt his own midsection, long-hardened in form, suck in tight and quiver under his clothes.

"Ibkhi'ruki! Ibkhi'ruki!" the official bellowed. He wedged himself between the two dwarves, arms outspread to keep them apart. The official jostled and the flat of his palm bounced off The Boar's chest, and he shrank back in fear when he realized it, eyes closed and face scrunched bracing for a hit. But The Boar just laughed. He turned on his heavy heel and made a beeline for the bar. The crowds opened a path for him quickly.

Urdlaug pocketed her sum from the bookie, so dense in the bag it didn't even jingle, all the while grinning with vindictive glee. Hroth slunk off with his guild chums, The Boar's posse calling out insult after insult after them. The crones doing the wenching behind the bar scolded all in guttural tongues.

"His name is Onar. He's one of them mercenary types," Brynja whispered to Balin, squeezing his arm to get his attention. "Ye do know who he is, right?"

Balin shrugged a quick no as Brynja's eyes wandered to and made a quick note of Dwalin as Onar the Boar parted the clamoring crowd of his supporters and made his way toward them. He smiled broadly when he caught Freyda in his sight.

"Darlin'!" The Boar thundered with a wide grin that bared all his teeth, surging toward Freyda. Several were missing, and as many chipped in two or three fragments. His smell of sweat and damp leather and the musty, drying stripes of several grades of beer, mead and ale in his beard was overpowering. His hands were heavily scarred, the knuckles at several places having been visibly stitched for tears that must have gone straight to the bone itself. The dwarf's shoulders alone seemed like they could have borne the weight of two dwarves carried atop them. Dwalin had been gently holding Freyda's arm under her cloak and drew away in haste as The Boar embraced Freyda tight in both arms and spun her around. He kissed Freyda's cheeks and shook her by the shoulders laughing uproariously. "Me darlin', me darlin', did I impress ye some?" roared the victorious dwarf, a boisterous laugh like thunder that seemed to ring out against the stone.

"Aye, ye did, and then some." She kissed The Boar back on his cheek.

Dwalin visibly pressed down the lump in his throat and clenched and un-clenched his fists twice over, but Freyda only kept smiling. She wrapped both arms affectionately around The Boar's, his forearm besting Dwalin's in circumference by an inch at least.

"Balin, Dwalin," Freyda beamed. "I'd like ye to meet my father."

.

Hamadî- Slices of Bread

Idlizumuni!- Sober up!

Ibkhi'ruki! Ibkhi'ruki!- Break it up! Fight Over!