Onar sat himself heavily on an empty mead-stained bench shoved in a corner near the barkeeps' counter. Several other dwarves, his kin or his enforcers Dwalin could not be certain, lingered there on the peripheral around them, thick and scarred like the two of them, flinty-eyed each, one missing half an ear and the other flat-nosed and more brutish-looking than all the rest combined.

"Ye wished to speak with me?" Dwalin began, haltingly. Onar didn't answer for a moment. Dwalin tasted blood on the inside of his lip. Onar grumbled in their direction as his chums were being scolded at length by the squat old barkeeps that were clearing the mess from their stead. The pits had cleared themselves out swiftly enough once all the bets had been tendered and cashed out, the barrels of spirits empty, the minor brawls fought, the legs given out beneath the drunken. Onar put a bruised hand out to invite Dwalin to sit, a half-smile unreadable, his barrel chest pushed out toward the other dwarf. Dwalin stared at the dimple on his chin that was visible between the long twin plaits of his beard. Just like hers. Her father's daughter oh aye but he is not her.

The bigger of the two wenches circled about in a huff and set before Dwalin and Onar a set of tankards frothing at the top with cold mead. "It's the last of it," the serving wench half-grunted in a dusky voice.

"Yer close to the king, are ye?" Onar queried first.

"I am."

"Good then. My Freyda has joined the queen's household. Still can't keep 'er out of the forges even with a mighty position like that. Keeps a forge down in the iron smiths' parts. Only lass in the whole guild."

"Sure she holds 'er own," Dwalin mumbled into his mead. The dwarf with the mangled ear was keeping his eyes steady on him, standing with his arms crossed against the counter. Not fearing the onslaught of a hundred goblins toward me but get me cornered by these four and...

"Oh aye, but there comes a time when a father must worry for his daughter," Onar continued, his thick pale beard loose from its plaits and finally rendered to some manageable state. He separated the thick coarse hair and started to plait on one side without combing it first. "My Freyda has carried the weight of me on her shoulders, literal meaning. Now it is my turn to look after her. For once." Onar's smile broadened, revealing his chipped teeth. There was a queer light in his eyes, a tender affection a wee child might look upon a kitten with when he spoke of his daughter. "It has been my Freyda and I since my wife and my son were taken to the Father's Halls, enough years past."

"One must worry for his children, always, aye." He took another sip of mead but it stuck in his throat suddenly. Ply them with alcohol and heavy food and by the time ye slam their heads into the stone and crack the skull they've got no fight. He put the tankard down and cleared his throat, and looked around for Freyda but she had disappeared altogether.

Onar stroked the plaits of his beard, all matted and coming apart. He separated the tangled sections of his braids with thick clumsy fingers. "They're gabbing always, them two, quiet-like. Whisperin', frettin. Conspirin' about something. I've seen a change in me daughter I don't know the nature of quite. Perchance the sort'o thing a lass don't speak about to 'er father." Onar stopped his braiding and looked up narrow-eyed at Dwalin.

"I've little experience with dwarrowdams or their ways," Dwalin mumbled in response. Little but much. Not the things ye speak of to the father. And this father has eyes like a hawk.

"Ye are so kind to her, as she says. Maychance ye might be of help to me with something. I've got a feeling, ye see, a sense. Perhaps ye could explain it to me," Onar leaned in, the half-smile un-twitching, the tempest of the blue-green eyes controlled. His gaze drew downward to Dwalin's hands. His knuckles were white around the tankard.

Me hands. He sees me hands and sees me soul and everything they've each done. And he can smell the rotted leaves and sick trees of Mirkwood and a lass's breath on me just like he can smell the fear-sweat on my neck. He felt a heat in his fingers as if burned. They tingled like small needles had been brushed against them and he set his tankard down. "Doubtful but I'll... be of help if I can." He forced himself to meet Onar's eyes.

Onar set the tankard down hard enough to make Dwalin flinch back. "I have no patience of besotted boys taking their chances at my daughter."

Dwalin half choked on his mead but regained himself quickly, his eyes watering. Onar wasn't making any motion to strike him. Instead Freyda's father was casually flicking a line of dirt from under his nails off into the distance, but his scowl was painted solidly on his lips, more contemptuous than angry. "Them youngins down in the forges. Mouth-breathing lads. That's what they are. Litle dwarflings swingin' their hammers thinkin' they know about the world. Whelped in the better days of exile, if any can be had. Soft boys. Unlike you and I. I say."

"Cannot be called that, I s'pose."

Onar's arm tightened, the hard bare skin of his forearm resting on the back of Dwalin's neck, the fingers a little deeper into his far shoulder. "I would be very… disappointed, should any lad try to treat with my daughter in any way… untoward."

"Ehm, do ye think... she has been mistreated down there... in the forges I mean?" The knuckle dusters' tips were biting into Dwalin's palms, felt near to drawing blood.

"Dunno. She beg yer ear for a problem of 'ers? The king trusts ye so perchance she might too I reckon, in her way. A lass turns to a... strong arm, when she's in need." Still his eyes were chatoyant, like a grizzled old tomcat's, smoldering on a mouse.

"No, can't say I've... heard any complaints. I am certain any ill tidings would be dealt with good enough by her. She is... a formidable lass."

"Aye, she is. And I say, none but a worthy One shall even think to look at her twice. Or they will have me to answer to. And I can be... a tad forward sometimes." Onar laughed but the blue rope of vein on the side of his neck was swollen and pulsing, the way his own did when he was full of pent-up rage.

"Well understood," Dwalin breathed out.

"Freyda. My only daughter. Most beautiful dwarrowdam in all the world. Don't ye think?" Onar's lips, the top one painted with a thin line of a scar through the dip under his nose, retracted back into the half-smile.

"Aye, a lovely lass." Dwalin swallowed a gullet-full of air.

"Then you'll understand my need to be taking ye so into me confidence, Dwalin son of Fundin. Yer a dwarf who's got enough sense not to be keeping things from... well. Me anyway. Or so I hope." The muscles in Dwalin's shoulders coiled so fiercely under his skin they began to cramp, painfully, but he dared not flinch against it. "Ye can trust in me I give ye my word, Onar."

"Good." Onar's hand came down on Dwalin's back, hard, gave him two hearty pats. He slithered his whole arm around Dwalin's shoulder again, pulled him in close. "Perhaps ye keep an eye out on her for me. See that none who would not be worthy of 'er company try and get it, especially if she does not wish it. Only one as formidable as she, as ye say Mister Dwalin, is worthy of her company. That much I know, without bein' too overbearing a father." Onar drew back and released a deep belly-laugh.

"Aye, I will see to it," Dwalin promised. Forced himself to meet The Boar's eyes again. "She is a... dear friend of mine, after all."

"Father, ye have had too many now!" Freyda blustered in, waving away the wench who was setting a new tankard before Onar. "Let us retire for the eve, father. Ye can barely walk as it is!"

"Got these mutton-heads to see to," Onar jerked his head in the direction of his posse, all the bite and menace gone out of them, wobbling around on their legs like newborn lambs. "Ye go on ahead. I'll be home soon, me darlin'. Keep a lantern burning fer me in the door." Dwalin stood quickly. "If I have yer permission to do so, I would escort yer daughter back. Might be ruffians staggering about in the halls still."

Onar guffawed, whether amused or annoyed Dwalin could not tell. He gave an exasperated sigh. "Well don't ask my permission, lad. Ask hers."

"I would like that, Mister Dwalin. Very much so," Freyda accepted gently. Dwalin waited until they were out of Onar's sight to proffer his arm. When she put her own around his he could feel his bicep tighten deep down to the bone, against the soft but sturdy fabric of her blue linen dress, her palm meeting his forearm. She held his arm in hers all the way back up the the winding stair. "We live close. It is not far," she said. "Did me da treat kind with ye?"

"Aye," Dwalin replied quickly through pinched lips. Freyda seemed pleased by this.

"We'll set back to our duties come tomorrow. Will I see ye in the king's court, Dwalin?"

"Of course," Dwalin mumbled.

"I shall be with the queen, whatever they will have her tasked with. I hope I can help her in my way. And they are inseparable, her and Thorin. So I hope to see ye too, prayin' our two households be joined more rather than less. As often as can be."

"Freyda..." Dwalin tried to pull from her side but her grip tightened on his arm, with unmasked need and some degree of curiosity.

"Are ye afraid, Dwalin?"

"Yes!" he let a deep, rumbling, honest sigh of an answer.

"Of me da?"

"Aye!" He had been holding his breath and let it out in one long, anxious exhalation. He nodded once, vigorously, again in confirmation.

Freyda laughed her booming laugh, released his arm to clap her hands in amusement. "Oh Dwalin he does like ye. If he didn't, you'd be pummeled into a jelly by now. He'd a' broken yer arms in a thousand places he thought ye had 'em around me so." With that she slid her arms around Dwalin's waist, took his around her own. They were stiff as boards, refusing to melt into her, but they way they shook and then stiffened harshly she could tell he longed to. A soldier's discipline she thought dourly to herself.

"We've had more than that, ye know. So aye, I am afraid."

"But ye cared for it when we did?"

His arms loosened, placed themselves at her sides and then around the small of her back. "I did. I care for ye, Freyda. I find ye to be the finest lass I have ever known. I think of ye, as oft as I... I do care for ye, oh aye." One arm snaked up from where it had rested at her waist and touched the fluffy outline of her jaw. "I have seen Thorin care for this lady of his, and I have seen him made joyous by her. I have seen his light... and I... we have always followed each other ye know."

"Ye deserve yer own happiness then!" Freyda exclaimed at him. "Do ye even know how to want it?"

"Freyda…"

"When I kissed ye then, did ye… like it? That's a fair start. Would ye do me the kindness to answer me honest?"

"I did. I… thought how much I would like to have ye bestow another."

Freyda's eyes widened with hope. "They say ye cannot feel the stirring from it unless it comes from... from yer One."

He hesitated before leaning it, only to draw back quickly and survey his surroundings warily. There was no sign of Onar, not an echo of his rugged laughter or his chums even at a distance. Dwalin took a sharp breath and did not exhale.

"Are ye frightened of my da, so?"

Dwalin kissed her hard. "I am. Very much so."

He kissed her until there was no pocket of breath left in his lungs.

"And do ye feel it in here? The other thing?" Freyda's hand went up to his heart and it was racing, pounding through his furs and his mail and his leather. He could feel her breath tickle his skin through his beard, and her fingertips, her fingertips were hot and bewildering, on his face and now his neck. He wrenched her suddenly around and pressed her flush to the stone wall.

"Aye I do." He pressed the back of her head to the stone none too ardently, snaking a hand around her cranium to cushion the force of his longing, and kissed her as if he might devour her face, mouth enclosed around her own entirely. He tasted of the sharpest, smokiest mead and there was salt on the tongue she wrapped hers with in desperation, tasted like Donbur's pretzels coated in the thick salt from the Sea of Rhun that the men with the funny hats traded in the markets of Dale. Oh, he had never kissed but he kissed like a dwarf in love. His wiry beard tickled the insides of her nostrils and made her tsk a hitching sneeze back against his kiss.

Momentarily he stopped kissing her mouth to let her breathe and buried his head into the side of her neck, cherishing the smell of her skin, iron and lavender. He allowed his tongue to emerge a sliver and trace the seam of her throat. Iron and lavender still. His kind of lass. "Fear gives ye strength," he mused between lavishing her lips with his own. "Fear tells ye what direction ye ought go. Fear springs it in ye to act accordingly."

Her nose was on his head, breathing against the bald skin. "Don't let fear guide ye. Not now. We've nothing to fear," Freyda assured gently. She squirmed against Dwalin's hard body whose every inch felt molded to her own. Her hips shied back in the sliver of space that was between them, her bottom squished to the stone. He kissed her lips again, loving the way she parted them for him and suckled back on his upper lip.

Dwalin sighed heavily. "It is not that, lass."

"Then what is it?" Dwalin's torso rubbed against her own through their clothes as he drew back, making her insides sing.

"I have not treated ye as I should have. I have not done ye honorably in… everythin'. It is time," he breathed. He took her fluffed cheeks in his big rough inked hands and stroked them gently. His eyes were more afraid then than they had been when they watched her father bend Urdlaug's scorned love into the shape of one of her brother's soft pretzels.

"Time fer what?" she asked, her hands at the side of Dwalin's neck, feeling the vein rise and pulse.

Dwalin ran his fingers along the ridges of the pale braid that was slung over her shoulder in front of her. "Take it out lass, yer braid. I want to make ye a finer one."

.

II

It was the afternoon when the knock came at the chamber door and the older dwarrowdam who answered absorbed a quick surprised breath. "A wizard!" the dwarrowdam in the linen coif said then, half-delighted, half-afraid. "My lady... a wizard."

"Let him in, Elsa," a familiar voice instructed from inside the chamber. "I have been expecting company."

Gandalf stepped into Dis's antechamber where a flurry of dwarrowdams were gathered, several seated in a clique of their own, another two working together on a collar of precious stones. He thought he recognized the haughty, bulb-nosed dwarrowdam who looked slightly ridiculous in her green gown that made her look like a lizard, with the flared collar of perfectly starched Gondorian lace. The way her hands moved, with that graceful acquisitiveness, over parchments and a neat stack of gold coin holding down a sheaf of deeds. She was the only one who didn't look up from her middling activity to the tall gray-clad figure stooping in the chamber above them. The other dwarrowdams rose and were equally fascinated and openly wary of his presence in this all-female realm which he had never expected he might to party to someday.

"I apologize my ladies, if I have come at an inconvenient hour. I wish to be no nuisance-"

"You are no nuisance to me, Gandalf. Were it not for the keenness of your wisdom, I would not have Thorin home again. Or his queen," a voice reassured. Gandalf watched a black-clad dwarrowdam rise from her seat by the fire which had hid her from his view. He stooped lower to offer Princess Dis as courtly a bow as could be managed when he was bent painfully at the shoulders already.

"If it is some news of my brother you seek, I am afraid I have none. Except that he has taken the traditional first days of marriage as we have done in times before, no work and no visitors and no disruption. I have seen his queen but once though, and she assures all is well," Dis said.

"Indeed, and how does his queen fare?" inquired Gandalf. He thought of the dwarrowdam he had met in her chambers before the wedding, the plain glow of her face at the sight of Longbottom Leaf. A simple backwards woman not a queen of Durin's Son but she will be one regardless.

"She has gone from a solemn old woman to the very blossom of maidenhood," trilled Eda, who appeared to be also a healer or a nursemaid of some stripe, like the linen-coiffed one who had let him in. Some of Meisar's ladies had taken to keeping the princess company in their queen's immediate absence.

"I do believe that blossom has been plucked at its stem," noted the haughty dwarrowdam who had moved from one task to a sheaf of embroidery, her thick fingers hard at work on her sampler; as always, she didn't even look up to see the stiffening expressions around her. One of Groin's own I see now Gandalf recognized silently. She had Gloin's nose enough to be his twin, if dwarves were known to bear them (to his knowledge, never had there been).

"Rightfully so," Dis replied, curtly.

"Plucked, I do say, without any previous takers, it seems well-assured." She drew the needle with its thick glittering red thread upward and plunged it down again through the taut fabric, intentionally.

"Oh Aroin, you couldn't possibly-!" Dis gasped. She heard a low, disquieted hum stick in Gandalf's throat beside her and flushed pink with embarrassment.

"I give the laundresses' guild fair coin to provide me with the information I need," Aroin interjected.

"You could have no possible need of such information," Dis said, prudently, her lips pursed, very slight like Thorin's in shape. Gandalf shifted in his seat beside her.

"I would know more about this strange dwarrowdam who is suddenly queen before I see you take her into such close company," Gloin's sister retorted. She eyed Gandalf, pleased with herself. "Or you for that matter, your highness."

"We have vetted her quite well enough," insisted Emli. "Put our lives into her trust and here we have come to the mountain alive and well for it." Gandalf recognized Gloin's wife for the sumptuous decorum of her person alone- no dwarrowdam in Seven Kingdoms could maintain her hair and beard as finely as a wife of Gloin's. He had seen her son at dinner the previous evening and thought him well-appearing, and related as such to Emli which made her pink-cheeked with pride.

"Let us speak not of such uncouth things in the presence of our company. A wizard and without a wife, you surely have no interest of such talk." Dis waved Gandalf into her private chamber. They sat in the two chairs by the fire. Gandalf took the wine she served between them with an entertaining enthusiasm. "I hope the guest chambers have been comfortable for you, Gandalf."

"Yes, and one suited for tall-folk I am lodged in. It was a considerate forethought, my lady princess."

"Would I be so crude as to shove you into a dwarf's lodgings? Your knees would dangle from the bed. 'Tis rather uncomfortable I say. And you are a most honored guest here in our halls."

"No, I would expect such treatment from a lady of your dignity." Dis drank again and laughed, sardonically, at the comment. "I never did get the opportunity to apologize. I am afraid I put you through worse grief than ever you deserved." Gandalf put his hand to his heart and bowed his head before Thorin's sister.

"It is forgiven, Gandalf. What was done is done. It had to be done. I can only trust it was. I dare not think otherwise."

He realized she was not looking at him with the sleepy Robin's-Egg blue but Thorin's eyes- sullen and unforgiving. Gandalf stared at her solemn lodgings, the black-draped bed, her black gown and black calotte and veil, her rubies like a handful of blood, and suddenly had no words.

"Balin tells me he found you in the ruins of my grandfather's library. I am sorry it is not more properly rebuilt at this time; they're working on it. The scrolls and books are scattered still."

"It suits me well enough for the moment, my lady."

"Is there something you are looking for? Might I be of some help?" Dis rimmed the brim of her cup with her finger, making it sing. The ruby ring on her forefinger seemed to glare at the wizard, suspiciously.

"My lady princess, where is the Arkenstone?"

She looked up, clearly alarmed but that tiredness in her eyes seemed ill-suited to express it it any arduous way. "Returned to the heart of the mountain, where it should never have been plucked from. It lies in an empty sarcophagus where I believed my brother was resting too. They say it was placed upon his breast, so that as time turned flesh to bone it might slip through the rungs of rib to lay forever where his heart once was. A good heart, replaced by something cold and cruel. Many a night I woke in cold sweat to think of it. It does not belong here, not even in death."

"And it remains there, even if Thorin does not?" Gandalf reiterated quietly.

"Yes," Dis answered. Her pale throat tightened.

"Good. Good, good." The wizard was mumbling into his wine. "I want to take it out," Dis said, the brooding princess suddenly ardent and almost anguished in her mannerisms. Gandalf's head rose in alarm. "I want to take it out and throw it back into the depths of this mountain from where it came. It was this mountain's beating heart and we tore it from the stone. Let it return to its own, as my brother's heart was returned to beating."

"My lady, do not un-bury it. Not for any reason. I beg this one thing of you. Even for such a nobly-minded cause you would be ill-fated to let it rise again. It is only a quiet darkness that must claim it now."

"A quiet darkness?" Dis sighed. "A quiet darkness has claimed quite enough already."

Gandalf sighed. She was a pale creature, this dwarrow princess, all fretful and lined, and her hands, the fingers being much thicker than his own but still delicate looking for a dwarf's, shook when she put the wine cask down a second time. "Strange bedfellows, dwarves and wizards. You know we keep to our own as much as we can, and trust not the magic of others so much. But you, Gandalf, have seen my father and my brother, and my sons, through many journeys. My father respected your wisdom. Though he himself was not a wise figure always, he was a principled one, and he would only ever do the right thing by his own, even in his terror and grief. So… I will trust in you also, even in my own. Though I question, sometimes, what drove you to my brother's aid."

"You may cloister yourself in these mountain halls as those before you have done, but the world goes on. It goes in directions that are like a compass in the wind, no one path certain. With Erebor reclaimed, there may yet be hope to avert a darker phase from blackening this earth. There are other forces which may plague you yet."

"Thorin will deal with it then. I have no fight left in me for such things, dragons or orc filth or the ill-meaning among tall folk. He's a king now. He's reclaimed his birthright. Now he will have to live with it. And Meisar… she will be queen. She will learn, I think. I will teach her the finer points of a life lived in a royal household. But of sorrow, I can teach her no more than she already knows. Unless she were to bury her children someday too, and then, I'll have wished myself dead."

"Dear sweet princess," the wizard placed his hand on her cold one. "Do not linger in this. I would do all to see that you do not linger in this black room for all your days. There is life yet to be had."

"Is there?" her dusky voice inquired, squeaking with the oncoming rush of disquiet. Her eyes were wavy with tears. One fell cleanly into her wine glass and made a cascade of little rings and ripples. "It may be a unfair question to ask of a wizard, knowing that you do not marry and I doubt you have loved as my brother loves now, as I once did, but tell me, can love save someone so broken? Can it hold back the pain of living just enough?"

"Yes, it can," Gandalf asserted. He took her shaking hands and soothed them in his own dry palms. "And it will hold back a greater darkness than has been known. I fear."

.

III

In the middle of the night a thin cry split Meisar's slumber, stirred away by his sleep which was restless then violent beside her.

"Thorin!" She rolled over on the bed, steadied his thrashing head in her hands, fingers anchored in his hair which was lank and damp with sweat, as was the pillow below him. She lay half atop him hoping it might wake him, might comfort him to know it was only her there. Not the ghosts or the beasts or the fire or the rain of blood.

"Thorin!" She shook him with a great deal more vigor, spurring his body to fling upward, and his eyes were open but they were not awake. "Thorin!" she grasped his shoulders and swayed him back and forth until he seized hers in return and almost threw her back. By the time he was truly awake they had held each other back with fingernails mutually burrowed into each other's shoulders, bracing hard against each other's thrash and torque. He exhaled with a deep and unyielding anguish and fell back.

"It was a dream my Thorin; it was a dream." His sweat-drenched hair held fast to the pillows around his head where it was flung in every direction. "Just a dream," she repeated, low enough that she seemed to talk to herself, hovering over him, wiping tears and sweat from his brow and cheeks with her fingertips. "Just a dream."

Thorin took her hand and clutched it as tightly as he once had, unaware, in his restless sleep upon a bare summer earth. "Them," he related flatly. "I saw them again. Dying. Dead."

Silently she took up the fresh hand towel at her bedside and soaked it in the basin. The cool water absorbed the sweat that felt infinitely colder. She ran it over his face and his neck, the texture of it slightly abrasive; it seemed to scrub the black memory of sleep from his very pores with the perspiration. "That is very good, my love," he sighed. A trickle of lukewarm perspiration escaped down the side of his neck and was soaked up by his sleep-shirt. It was a strange sharp-smelling sweat that made the hairs on her own neck stand up and her armpits begin to prickle with oncoming emulsion. Fear sweat. Terror sweat. She had woken up enough nights soaked to the skin to know what it was, though it seemed distant. She had only been a dwarfling when the dreams were the worst, dressed in rags or a dead human-girl's dress, and clutching her little poppet, the indents of her palms leaving stains on it.

"Meisar?"

She had leaned listlessly over him, the towel clutched in her fingers and squeezed tightly over his forehead, letting the moisture from it trickle in little rivulets down his face. He blinked the droplets away.

"It's alright," she said gently.

"Is it?" he said in half a daze, his eyes wide and frightened. He looked like a child with those eyes asudden, innocent, and afraid.

"It is." He looked up and her and regretted such a display, her eyes crested in tears. "Oh Thorin..."

She wrapped both arms around his head and kissed his damp forehead, pulling him tight to tuck under her chin like she had tucked that little doll to her when the falling stones and the fire came, again and again. She pressed her cheek into his forehead and rocked her body back and forth over him, whether in soothing him or herself she could not be certain. Thorin's breath pushed sharply from his nose and made a cloud of heat on her breast where he was clutched close.

He let his head rest on the pillow again but stirred quickly and came to bury his head on her lap. Her legs folded to the side of her, he reached and held her bare foot, rubbing the top of the sole with his thumb mindlessly. He stretched his body lengthwise so that the tips of his feet were dangling over the bed and squirming. Meisar bent forward and petted his hair as he lay into her, shaking, but at a palpable sense of ease by her presence made. She felt it, but in the anguish of his sleep from which he had woke in such a state, felt no pleasure from it. What words of comfort come now? she wondered. She felt dry in the throat, as if she had none at all, and it was better to say nothing at all, just stroke his hair, still his breath into a peaceful rhythm enough to sleep a little more.

"They are not here to haunt us, Thorin." But she could feel the ghosts all around. She had seen a dwarf in Thorin's crown with a glimmering beard all gold and gray, with fat acquisitive fingers, and a stout woman also crowned, a silver-headed matron sumptuously gowned, by his side, in her sleep, looking onto them from the foot of the bed. But they had been kind presences. She had seen fire too, underground windowless rooms full of smoke with crying dwarflings and mothers breathing their last, and dwarves with blackened chins where their beards had been fighting their way to the gates of the city, and dwarf women emerging into the afternoon sun with their clothing burnt to their skins, covering themselves with their hands as they staggered out of the mountain, weeping under a white starred sky.

Sitting up again and throwing the coverlet back, Thorin doffed his nightshirt and flung it, crumpled, onto the floor beside the bed. The chill of the bedchamber made the sweat feel viscous on his skin, and he washed as efficiently as he could from his own basin, sitting up over the side of the bed. Thorin bent forward at the shoulders and rested his elbows on his knees. His head felt heavy. His hair clung densely against his face and plastered itself in lank strands against his shoulders. He felt Meisar's presence quietly, warmly in his breadth, the smooth skin of her forehead coming to rest against his shoulder blade. The awareness of her nearness alone was enough to soothe the ragged bleating of his heart. It slowed in his chest; his ribs stopped vibrating.

"Lay down," she urged. "You must sleep." She nuzzled her head forward over his shoulder from behind, a sound that might have come a coo from a daintier woman but was just enough a rumble from her to be commanding in nature. Her thumb pressed into the bulge of his bicep, her undone hair sweeping on his clammy skin when she kissed his bare shoulder and rested her head on it. She was a comfort he still found alarmingly immediate, even now.

Meisar had sat on her knees behind him and now unfolded her legs and urged Thorin to bed again. "I will stay with you. I will be here when you sleep," she promised. Thorin, holding her hand still, kissed her thumb, and surrendered to her urging. She kissed his hand as he lay beside her again and she then pressed him to turn his back to her. Feeling her draw near behind him, he clutched the pillow closer against his chest and buried his cheek against the tasseled edge of it. She stroked the solid curvature of spine down to the divots above his backside. His skin was dry again, tense muscles and scarred skin. She kissed the back of his shoulder and held him close from behind, rubbing his shoulders back and forth, up and down. Thorin relaxed against the empathetic, loving vibration of her breathing against his back, the small comfort of her arm draped around him, the warm smooth muslin of her nightgown and her slightly rougher hand still holding his.

A small whimper and his eyes were closed again. But he woke within minutes and this time rose from the bed entirely, lit the candles in a flurry, and then pulled on his breeches without small-clothes and a new tunic from his bedside drawers. He belted it swiftly, donned his long elegant sleeveless surcoat over the whole messy ensemble. He held out his hands to her for her to rise as well. She pulled on a loose kirtle over her nightgown and a thick robe as well, left her hair like his own, loose and wild.

He pulled a heavy cloak around her shoulders and fastened it, tenderly, but his eyes were somewhere else again. "Where are we going, Thorin?"

"Shh..." he kissed her forehead. "Come now. I need you with me, there."