BINAZSÂL- Without Loneliness

"Diligent you say?"

Thorin rolled over the end of the blanket and back into the nest they had made of furs and fat pillows by the fire, separating himself momentarily from her heat.

"Yes, I think we have been." Her voice was like the song of a small bird, too soft for the harshness her voice had once exulted, but she was out of breath alas. The braziers had tapered low on the walls but the fire still burned heartily in the hearth, lighting them against the dark of the chamber, their own little ring of endless light.

There, she was laying by the fire, curled up with one knee drawn toward her chest and the other curled and bent daintily below it at ease, her arms in front of her, head tucked coyly at her shoulder on the rise of the pillow, watching him. He picked up her discarded chemise and his blue robe from the floor, placed them on the chair. His flushed skin, his un-brushed hair, all the kingly layers stripped away until he was the Thorin that she alone would know, in this raw state, perfect and pure and hers. He made every inch of her tremble with awe.

A longish sleep had calmed them from the vim of their coition, the close heat of the fire making them utterly profligate in their activity, then at once exhausted from it. A hunger neither could satiate except by sleep, or taking the lightest of refreshment on ale or bread. "Thorin..." she put her arm out to beckon him close again.

Thorin circled and speared another log on the tip of the fire poker, setting it on the fire to kindle before coming to roost again in their little nest of velvet, mismatched pelts, winter wools and brocade pillows, luxuriant but primal somehow. He spidered his fingers up her back, drawing a soft tickled laugh and then a gasp of sudden pleasure when the playful fingers became one, tracing up the line of her spine, making her back arch forward. He tugged the furs about them, drawing close again with the whole length of her body pressed against his, knees curved to fit against the backs of hers. He ran his fingertips down the length of her arm and brought the whole of his rough palm upward again, to her shoulder and traced the seam of cartilage at her neck with the tip of his finger and then his lips. Her scent was sweet, ambrosial. He rested his cheek in her hair.

When he raised his head, he found himself following her gaze toward the shadows dancing on the far wall, her eyes, the harsh topaz-hazel of them voided of all but a raw tenderness upon the cherry-wood cradle that was placed in the corner. There were new linens already in its little pallet.

"It was my own," Thorin murmured. He nuzzled kisses against her bare shoulder from behind, her head rolled back languorously as if in a dream to brush her cheek against his hair, feel his breath on her skin.

"A city destroyed, but an infant's wooden cradle has survived such wrath?" she cooed, thoughtfully. Thorin as a babe, wailing and grunting in his cradle; the thought made her smile. He slipped out from the heat of the blanket's cover and adjusted himself lazily to lay her beneath him on her back. Her eyes gazed up toward him with such fragile hope it could have made him weep. He studied the premature lines on her face; nakedly and with a plain honesty was written there her goodness. He stroked the little shade of hair back from her cheek, kissed her forehead. "For a reason the Creator knows only of, so that I might be here with you my sweet Meisar, and possess it again."

"I love you," thinly came her voice as if on the knife's-edge of tears. "Thorin, I love you so." His arms weak, he came like a babe himself to rest against her body again and begged her wordlessly to hold him as such. His head on her torso, she stroked at his hair. He made a purring sound, almost like a tomcat. The low rumble of his voice as it caressed her vibrated on every inch of her skin; it settled where his lips did, on her belly. He stroked around the tender podge of it, so pale and soft and supple. A long time he lingered there, ghosting the tips of mustache over the skin.

"Tell me, what is there than you love so much? Except that it is your favorite pillow at the moment?"

He nuzzled his beard into her navel. "Mahîn." Place of Creation.

She put her hand down on her stomach, smoothing a strand of his hair back from it to touch her own skin and imagine it slowly expanding. "It will hold your heir soon, Mahal be kind." And leave me not too old for this. Mahal in your mercy give new life where you have taken the old.

"Are you sure you are not already?"

"I would not know for some weeks." She blushed and went quiet, having little interest to explain to him the nature of the female's physical indicators of such things.

"Oh? Then we must do all to ensure that good news come swiftly." His lips met hers ephemerally once, tasting lightly of ale and smoke, and deeper again, skimming his tongue astride the crease of her lips to part them, slipping inside with great want.

"The have granted us this love we share, The Great Smith and his bride Yavanna. But will they grant us this also? We mustn't be greedy in asking," she tut-tutted quietly, her enigmatic smile a gentle reminder of things left unsaid.

"But I am greedy. I am greedy for you, all of you." He leaned over her and stroked his flat palm over the length of her body, callused palm on her breast, the heaving bosom he could devour as if it were made of honey and mead. He ghosted his mouth over the tip of her right breast, her sigh of approval a sweet sound.

"Aye, then I am greedy also, my king."

"One could not fairly call the love I bear you greed," Thorin suggested lowly. Her skin tingled by the touch of lips and beard shifting over her skin with his words.

"I am not your Arkenstone?" she queried, half a question that had once troubled her mind, the way his eyes looked at her, drank her, the way a thirsty man might set upon a mug of ale or water. That want. From a dwarf whose want had almost destroyed him.

"No," he responded, breathy and low. "You are my queen. My only one true love. Belmêl," he murmured playfully the last against her breast. He touched the small pink nipple and it stiffened on his fingertip. "I am well and truly happy as I have not been. There is life where I should not have expected it. There will be life…" He slid lower and kissed the small podge of stomach, being very feminine in shape and lovely to look upon; her hardy, ample figure bespoke the hope that she might take well to carry a child and more strongly so than one of a daintier composition.

"I love you so much I cannot bear it sometimes. Thorin..." His fingers searched her skin beneath the cover of the fur and slid up into her warm lapels of her sex, then inside her, one at a time, the long middle finger thick enough then joined by the ring finger, sliding along the glazed walls in small, nimble pumps. He pressed the middle one knuckle deep and curled it, experimentally, finding a textured protuberance meet his touch, pulpous, though its texture to his fingertips was like that of an un-shelled nut. She writhed and rolled over in such a way that his fingers were fast drawn out of her, making a small suckling sound as they were hastily departed, coating in a fine, slick layer of her arousal. When he lay on his back and stretched he found her drawn to his skin, draping one thigh over his hips timidly so that he was beneath her, bending her head forward to kiss his lips. Her hand wandered from his neck down to his side, her touch still skittish in the way that ponies could be ahead of a coming storm, quick, eager to move from one place to another, without a sense of direction but an urgent pull toward something. A memory of stolen kisses and hushed nights on hard ground, his heat so close but so far. Thorin wriggled against the sensation of her hips shifting clumsily toward his pelvis, both legs penning him between them, her weight a welcome if foreign sensation.

Pulling away from the kiss for a breath of air, she found his expression slightly mystified, edgy with curiosity. She scooted, eyes downcast, further down his legs, but found him curved up against the lower part of his belly, thick with want again. Uttering no word, she slid gawkily into the position she had drawn away from just, legs straddled over his hips, pressing him back to lay flat on the pillow beneath his head.

"It is... I thought, perhaps... another way," she explained, tremulous at best. His eyes blinked twice at her, clouding over. She could see the swell in his throat where he was swallowing hard. "I want to look at you," she reiterated quietly. "I want to see you when..."

"Like this, mmm?" he smiled with a gentle curiosity that veiled a growing and urgent desire for this new endeavor. He pushed her knee out so that she straddled him all the more fully. She felt his muscles shift languidly under her as he moved and readjusted himself to hold her more steadily onto him. In her thighs her muscles tugged and burned a little, spread so widely to accommodate the width of his broad, sturdy hips.

"I don't know how," she confessed breathlessly. "I think... like this?" She put her own fingers against her cunny to spread herself and position her entrance over the tip of him. His eyes fixed at the exposed channel that was the color of a ripe grapefruit in its state, the lips haphazardly pulled away from the small button of flesh above her entrance. He held himself in place with one hand, helping to steady her movements. He tried to sit up against her but she put her hands on his chest and urged him back down, the timidness apparent behind that ardent move endearing.

"You are the shepherdess my treasure, are you not? Come then, show the way. I could not be displeased by any touch of yours. Know me as you know this Earth you have traveled long over," he assured her gently, his hands on her thighs. Broad spread thighs pressed to the sides of his own were quivering with strain or uncertainty of how she should move; he could not ascertain. They had ventured here from their wedding night in a nearly-shared state of strangeness to this new, carnal territory, content enough, for now, to explore together in as many ways as could be had.

"Is it like… riding a pony? Should I…?" She closed her eyes and remembered long days at Jenny's mount, a bulky cloak to cover the way her hips moved in tiny circles to press her mons against a saddle horn, in want of something she could not fathom, Thorin's nearness, a stolen gaze, stoking a flame she had once feared to do anything but extinguish. Pressing the hips of her body so rigid in its chastity and in her quiet dutifulness to king and kin, in shameful secrecy of this force she had never before known. In want of something she now took as generously and as eagerly from the king who was now her husband, the dwarf who had taken her virtue but several nights hence, and who now roved his eyes over her, naked and wanton, fingers that had never touched another wrapped tentatively around the base of his maleness, replacing his own, and guiding the rosy, desire-fattened head against her body slowly.

Pressing into her was a maddening slide, one inch at a time, still so tight, this mine not wholly tapped to its depths, not yet. She shivered with the sudden knowledge that every small quiver of her body was visible to him now, his eyes ever watchful over her for all and any sign of her pleasure or discontent. She smiled to herself, once apprehensive at the thought of herself bare before him, and taking in his attentions now with delight. He grasped her hips and tugged her forward, deepening the penetration and hastening her lips to part in awe for the sensation, however sudden. Slowly she sunk herself over him, guided by firm hands at her hips again, stroking the soft obliques in encouragement. Meisar accommodated him readily, the sudden sensation that of a finger pressing into a shrunken glove, prodding and pushing again and again to fit. Her walls being quite tested by the depth of the penetration and the girth of him further swelling in her as she moved over him. When he was in to the hilt she rounded her hips in tiny circles over him, feeling the coarse hair at the base of his member drag over the sensitive, wetted skin of her spread lips.

Rising again with his neck craned up at the pillow, he held her palms playfully against his whilst she was straddled atop him, using nothing more than the concentrated strength and flex of her hips to steer him against the heat inside of her. Pressing the heels of his palms to hers in unity, he pressed against her as she pressed to him there with the movement of her hips being a delicious resistance.

"Like riding a pony? Yes, I suppose. Accustom yourself to the rhythm, and both rider and steed shall be satisfied," he purred, half a maddened growl, at last. Thorin raised tingling fingertips off the floor where they had briefly clutched themselves around a small pillow for sheer grit against the desire that swelled in him all too fast, finding the soft flesh of her bottom with them, making a cursory effort to guide her up and down, up and down again. His knees were bent slightly up, her hands which had pressed against the floor to steady herself coming up to press on his chest. He tossed his head back down, his long hair splayed over the paler fur of the pillow beneath him. He groaned, wanton as a doxy, at the fulgid slap of her delightfully fat bottom against the tops his thighs as she moved back and forth, back and forth and up and down with no direction except toward their pinnacle, wherever and whenever it might explode into a thousand little stars before her eyes.

His hands came around from there to the small of her back to circle the front of her hips and up her belly to her breasts and down again, leaning her back, changing the angle ever so slightly but enough to make her hiccup a sweet little sound of surprise and then pleasure. She rocked forward again and let her hair tumble forward, a soft orange veil that framed down her sides and spilled over his onto the floor. He grasped a handful of flesh at her bottom to guide her. And so she became the rider taking on the jagged lone-lands, and settling into the gentle valleys and waters of the Trollshaws, filled by his flesh to his last inch, straining up the flanks of the Misty Mountains at last until she could reach the highest peak.

He felt his own climax urging toward fulmination. "Mizimel, I cannot... hold much longer." His hips rolled up in a controlled thrust, the agony of concentration written on his lightly scrunched face, head thrown back again on the pillows. She could see the new sheen of perspiration begin to form at his hairline. It was a cynosure worth studying, that regal, beautiful face, with all of its sternness and silent strength and even insecurity swept away, pure in its expression, simple with bliss.

"Meisar," he half-gasped, stilling himself readily. She felt his hard fingers press into her folds and prod at the slick skin above where his manhood was buried and throbbing. He took the wee bean between thumb and forefinger and squeezed, hard. With the surge she came undone around him, violently, crying out her shock and pleasure toward the ceiling. She pressed him hard by his shoulders and swiped another long stroke of him inside of her, her hips arching and sliding forward then back again in a most frenzied of any climax she had experienced yet.

"Ifbilab! My love..." she keened, half an assurance and half a command. Her gaze drew down on the tightening of his throat against the will of the lower part of his body, the press of his slim lips giving way, to gape open and gasp short breaths with the freeing of his seed. His face contorted with pleasure, mouth open as he absorbed her and she him, filling her until she thought she might flood; it came now in not one forceful spurt but three, each with the upward jerk of hips that pressed his maleness up against the very gates of her womb. Her Mahin. Her place of creation.

"Oh Thorin. I cannot believe we have known each other so." Blissfully he sighed upward and drank the sight of her flushed skin, her clouded eyes, the heavy breasts that swayed with her every move, and he longed with a deeper intensity to feel her crest beneath his touch and like a wave over the sea, ease down again. He liked the feeling of her weight on him, so solid and dense and soft together, the touch of her. He ached for it. A lifetime of keeping his distance from such pleasures of the flesh, as most dwarves were wont to do, had yielded such concupiscent reward that he could not have for all his years expected to know, or half deserved in the nagging shadows of his mind. But he took her anyway, took this dwarrowdam who was no more a Firebeard princess than he was a king in jewels and robes in his pauper days, this plump, unassuming little wife of his, plain-featured, austere as un-buttered bread in her way, but more radiant, incandescent and flushed and unadorned and perched bestride him, still trembling from the force of their coupling. But she had been beautiful in old traveling clothes and the shocking orange hair that spilled wantonly around him now drawn up in stern braids, her face as solemn as stone. She had been beautiful always. Her love flowed through his veins and made him alive again, and in the way that greed had clouded his senses before, it mattered not whether he deserved her or not. It was a bittersweet lingering in his throat that wanted only her nectar again.

"Beauty and joy of all my heart," he breathed, thinly. For a moment she stayed heavily astride him, clawing for breath, and sunk down forward bent at the waist to rest on him, nuzzle her cheek to his hairy chest. The whole of her lower body felt numb. Dead weight on his hips she might have been had he not wriggled between her legs with his finger again, stroke the throbbing nub in an attempt to soothe it but only cause her to spasm and cry out again, a bay that echoed, overwhelmed, grobbling out something that resembled words but not too closely. He drew away from her spot and held her close again to his chest, his heart coming up swiftly against his ribs again and again, a vibration that seemed magnified a hundred times in the quiet afterglow. He had not tired of her, not had his desire ebbed even as his body calmed itself again, a dull throb in his manhood, his jewels feeling hollow and caught against the perspiration and their shared fluids, sticky at his inner thigh.

The furs and the blankets beneath them were damp with spilled ale and their exudations. This libidinous, unbridled sanctuary they had made, no more kingly he thought at at the moment than a house of doxy lasses upon the lesser-traveled roads, a jumbled bed by the fire, on the floor, they had made and marked. Still he kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her over again, and wished there would be no end to these precious days that were running so short already. I would hold you as the fire-breath of any beast ripped through these halls. I would hold you as my kingdom of ash grew cold. You are the hope and the warmth that ends all sorrow for the cold and the dead that lay beneath us now. You are the only thing that saves me from the cataclysm I have well earned.

"Well," she sighed in his arms, moving her hips away from the dampened patch on their blankets. "I might do best to make the bed."

.

II

Dwalin stilled the whole length of his body against the sudden, unfamiliar urge to shrink backward as Onar's scarred golden brow raised high in his direction, eyes that seemed to look him straight him to the bone. His hair was not the pale flaxen of his daughter's; a little more goldenrod, shot with darker streaks of gray. He had her dimpled chin though, her chin and her truculent eyes. "Friends of yers?" Onar the Boar queried of his daughter.

"From our company upon the road, father. Dwalin is first lieutenant of the king, and close to him as brothers are. As is Mister Balin, his elder brother."

"Brothers?" Onar's eyes wandered between the two dwarves, Balin with his snow-white beard and Dwalin not even at the graying time of his age yet, war-chewed well beyond his years for sure, but maintaining a certain brawn of youth, the younger brother. "Would peg ye for father and son," Freyda's father remarked, his observation sharp like that of a bird of prey.

"We have grown up much the same," Balin chuckled. "Far too fast indeed. I was half to my whitening age it seemed when he was but a chubby babe wriggling in my arms. Alas, we fought side by side at the great battle at the gates of Moria."

"A soldier ye are then?" Onar queried, agreeably enough. "Skilled enough s'pose ye are; dinna wind up on the pyres at the East Gate at that clash. Smelled the smoke in Dunland we did. A black day."

Balin smiled congenially. "Skilled enough or just lucky, I consider myself anyway. I am far better suited to the task of... well, concierge of sorts, given to imparting more wisdom than ax wounds, especially in my white-beard age. Advising. Genteel type sorts of things are better suited to me. Like my father before me, advisor and friend to King Thror himself. Thus, it does leave my brother the lone soldier by profession of all of us."

Onar's lip tugged itself upward in one corner, an unreadable half smile. "A good lad to keep in yer stead then. These are uncertain times for dwarves, even now," Onar remarked, a hint of approval that still didn't put Dwalin at ease.

"Oh aye, a fine soldier, but fine company too," Freyda interjected gawkily. Her smile smoothed when it was turned at her father. "Dwalin has shown to me much kindness, Da. Sure, the finest warrior in all the Seven Kingdoms, but agreeable company I would say, when he is called to be. The king could have no more loyal a friend in all this world, nor could I."

Dwalin's lips struggled against an oncoming pained smile, for what he could not quite say. The skin on his arm tingled for want of Freyda to hold fast to it again. She had hard hands like his own but a gentler touch, a woman's touch.

"A formidable daughter ye have, a lass whose qualities should be envied by any," Dwalin smiled modestly under his wiry beard and ducked his head reverently to Onar. He was quivering down to his kidneys the longer he tried to avoid The Boar's penetrating study of him. Somewhere, in his depths, he could sense Balin keeping an amused laugh in his belly at his brother's palpable unease, and wanted to smack the old codger just for thinking it.

The quirk of that smile stayed on Onar's lips. "A dwarven father of most stripes would keel head-about-arse in shame should his daughter be roamin' the Pits free. But I trust my Freyda to break any of these ruffians over her knee in two if the need should arise. I have no fears for her honor." His eye glinted menacingly in one corner. "My daughter is not a young lass that should ever be treated in any manner unbecoming. Any manner."

"Aye," agreed Dwalin. "Ye have not a reason to fear for her, or her honor... or her safety."

"Is that so?" Onar came back, the eyes that were momentarily shining with an uncanny ease narrowing again. Onar finished off one tankard and handed it to a passing steward without looking at the lad. "I would speak with ye as one Dwarf to another, Mister… what do ye call yerself again, lad?"

"Dwalin, son of Fundin. At your service..." He bowed stoically, politely. Onar seemed amused, the way Balin could be when he knew Dwalin was trying hard at something, but his was a geniality that he had long learned masked a silent menace. He himself had employed it on the edge of a brawl. Keep them off guard til the knuckle dusters crack the teeth. Yes, yes. Oh yes. He resisted the urge for his face to scrunch in bracing wait.

"Get the lad an ale," Onar finally motioned to the steward then turned his intent gaze back at Dwalin, after a long silence. "Daughter of mine, good-as daughter of mine..." he smiled once affectionately at Gyda. "...Mister Balin, give us but a brief interval, will ye? We need to talk, Dwalin son of Fundin and I, alone."

Belmêl- Pillow of All Pillows

Ifbilab- Spill!