Author's Notes:

IKHL- MAKING PEACE

Weliann: I am very honored by your review! Really, it made my day. I've had a couple of people say the same along the lines of "why doesn't this fic have more reviews/favorites?" I don't know really, but I appreciate every one and encourage them, so don't be shy! Anyone with a blog is certainly welcome to give me a fic rec. I wouldn't complain LOL. I'm afraid this fic has warped the vast majority of my life into it so I DO spend a great deal of time on the details, and expend much of my mental energy these days with my characters- trying to keep them happy or at least sane, building upon the world Tolkien originally built for them, picking out outfits and jewelry for them and so on. But I enjoy it thoroughly and I'm glad you do too.

In the morning they broke their fast together in Dis's antechamber. Dis in her bed-robe, the Eastern silk patterned in orange and plum abruptly meeting a thick collar of northern fur, was as discombobulated, her eyes puffy. Elsa set before her porridge with berries and a cup of strong tea. Her tired, circled eyes looked in need of something strong herself. Whether it was coffee or strong mead was uncertain.

Thorin's appetite being little in the morning, he chewed bread in small pieces, biding his time intensely. They looked at each other once every few moments and did not speak at all.

"Will you not eat, uzbadnatha? It's been a trying night. You need to eat and regain your strength for the day," Elsa's eyes flinted at Thorin accusingly.

Dis didn't answer. She moved a berry around the bowl with a tired, fixed stare.

"I'm not hungry," Dis insisted, sullen as a child.

"Naikhlî!" Meisar snapped. Elsa jumped a foot.

Her own voice nearly caused her to do the same but her dissatisfaction was raw and would not abet. "I'll not sit here in this silence." The snap of her voice, as deep and commanding and sullen as it had been upon the road, seemed to frighten Dis. "Right this between you now. I'll not be caught in the middle of your quarrels, for I have no skill in negotiating them."

"How you snarl, sister," Dis half-wept in shock.

"I..." Meisar stammered guiltily, voice caught in her throat in shame, a voice that broke through indignantly again. "No, I did not mean that. I did not mean to. But..."

Apologetically, Meisar placed her hands on both hers and Thorin's, feeling as stretched in the mind as her arms did reaching for either of them. They recoiled from each other on opposites sides of her. "This cannot be. It will not stand."

"My dearest, perhaps you should leave us to-"

"We spoke of this, Thorin. I'll not sit here as you turn your back on a promise," Meisar scolded back. "Or perhaps you would not have woken us, sister, to all break our fast together. I will not be brought here to endure this."

Their hurt and shocked eyes tugged her in opposite directions but she held Thorin's gaze tenaciously, stubborn as that gaze fell down to avoid her.

"I should not have spoken to you that way, Dis," Thorin murmured almost too low to hear.

Dis's face twitched and then twisted into something that resembled half a sneer. She made a pattering sound with her lips like a horse.

Thorin's fist striking the table rattled all the dishes and Elsa even further from her seat. The nursemaid was holding her breath.

"Do you see what I am trying to do, Dis? I am trying to say I am sorry," Thorin repeated, thumb and forefinger pressed into his temples against the frustration of it all. He took his sister's hands and all but shook her. She looked like a rag-doll, taking the words in, but without expression. Then the tears came.

"I know your heart," Dis breathed. "I know the love that was in it for them." Her face crumpled against the oncoming flood. "My words of anguish. I would take all back," she wept; the tears came in hot rivers down her cheeks and drenched her beard.

"Burushruka igbulul e," Thorin repeated into the crown of her head thrice over. She had sunk halfway from her seat to curl and hide into the shelter of his arms. Hers were curled up front of her over her chest and forearms covering her face, all trembling.

"Let me live quietly now as I desire. I do not wish to be in the sight of the world," Dis pleaded. "I need time to gather myself, my strength. It is slow-coming, brother."

"It is granted, though you needn't my permission. You should have told me sooner. I fear I over-taxed you now, with the coronation and the like."

"On the better occasions they may call me she Mazzannaguna. But I do not want to show anymore. I have run out for a time I'm afraid. My courage fails me to see that you were not their death. I cannot face what was their death, the filth... I saw the mark they put on grandfather's head and I... would not see the desecration of my sons... Thorin! I was too blind to see all of it. I would gouge out my own eyes if I never had to see!"

"Do as you must, and I shall impart no duty onto you," Thorin vowed. "Live as you must, if it would stay your hand from striking me."

"Sigin'amad would approve I'm sure," she managed a weak smile. "If this cropped beard would cause her some consternation still though." She touched Thorin's bearded cheek before sinking in tears into him. Her weight pulled him down until she was on her knees and so was he.

"I am sorry for all, Thorin. The last of my kin, whom I owe my loyalty and my love."

"You owe me nothing, Dis. Just please, please do not fall apart. I cannot see you so aggrieved. Anything in the world that would make you less so I will see to it that it is done."

"Put your own first," Dis said. "Take care of your wife and take care of your kingdom. What is outside of this stone is unworthy to trouble ourselves in, you know it. Let me, at the least, live cloistered in peace. I do not want to think of the world anymore."

"I cannot stop you from trying," Thorin relented. "But even in the safety of stone you may find it a difficult task."

"Never will I lay my hand upon in hatred again, nadad. It was not your doing, not yours... a wretched stone." Her sobs into his doublet shook him so resoundingly he braced for each one. "Our kingdom for a stone, nadad. And a necklace of starlight..."

"Yet our kingdom survives in the absence of it. It has risen up from death itself."

"Nothing rises up from true death itself, not even you," Dis shook her head through her blur of tears.

There was no knock before the door creaked on its hinges and ushered in Aroin, who stopped in her tracks at the threshold to the antechamber at the sight of Dis and Thorin each on their knees embracing, Dis holding to his shoulders for support, in tears. Meisar, at a distance to be called at the least awkward, was sitting back with Elsa who was finishing her porridge in a hurry.

"Uzbadnatha! What wretched state is this?" Aroin swooped down like an eagle to pull Dis upright and examine her for the more acute of distresses, tugging her out of Thorin's steady grasp that had only just begun to soothe her. Dis hiccuped involuntarily another sob. She put her hand on the floor for support and it shook.

"Has someone caused this upset?" Aroin stroked the tear-stained face and tangled wisps of black beard along her jawline. Thorin on his knees sat slowly back into his chair and returned Aroin's accusing glare.

"Aroin, perhaps we ought leave them be for a moment," Meisar suggested. Elsa stood, seemed as eager to leave.

"But my lady! Targ Durinul, you've upset her, haven't you?" Aroin's indignity turned on her and then pungently eyed Thorin in turn. Her efficient if genuine tenderness regenerated swiftly toward Dis, still on her knees, leaning her head on the seat of her chair listlessly.

"Come, let us take the air, uzbadnatha." Aroin began to buzz about the chamber efficiently, fetching cloak and Dis's boots from the armoire.

"It is between them, Aroin. Let us go," Meisar said more forcefully. Dis reached up and took Thorin's hand out of the corner of her eye and held it, pleadingly.

"A brisk walk will halt the tremors and tears..." Aroin bustled on.

"No," Meisar insisted.

"Majesty?" Aroin's heavy brow wriggled at her in surprise, then tenacious disagreement. "I digress, respectfully."

Rising, Meisar tugged the cloak forcefully from Aroin's arms and set it over the empty table. "I am your queen, and I command you now. Let. Them. Alone."

"Very well," Aroin nodded curtly and opened the door for Meisar to pass, and she after. She was wearing that awful green dress with the pleated collar that made her look lizard-like, and her face too seemed to be green with stupefaction.

"It is a matter between them is all," she half-apologized to Aroin in the corridor. The dwarrowdam patted her up and down with eyes at once efficient and hawkish, then offer an enigmatic but ever so subtly satisfied expression.

"You're learning," Aroin said with smile as she strutted away down the stairs, trailing Elsa, giving orders for her chambers to be suitably aired.

.

Brynja sat at the desk in the room with Emli peering down over her head and Siv with her feet up, watching her slowly make her letters out. Her legs were up so much that any could see Siv's stockings were a scandalous shade of rose with crystal-sprinkled garters at the knee, nearly lost in sea of blue-and-white taffeta.

"'At's right, getting better," Siv praised. "Parchment'll fit more than a few letters at a time though lovie." Brynja's writing was still big and crooked but far better formed. "Try this way," she said, as her skirts fluttered down in a great cloud. Her strings of jewels swung down in Brynja's face and she delicately pressed them away so she could see her papers and study Siv's correcting marks.

"Siv, why ye wear all the jewels ye own to none but our lessons?" Brynja asked with a girlish curiosity.

"Because I can," Siv answered smartly. "Born onto a saddle-blanket amid ruffians. Come up in the world I have, no shame. Like I don'a hear the clack-clack o' your little slippers there, Bryn." She used her stocking foot to ruffle the hems of Brynja's plain skirts and show the dainty flat shoes with the moonstone-and-yellow-diamond buckles, which Brynja still wore with her plain wool stockings. "Bofur use his fortune wisely, eh?"

"He had them made for me at the cobblers' guild, special," blushed Brynja.

Siv grinned, studied her face in the mirror, pulling the plaits that connected her eyebrows to her hairline so that they arched her eyes upward in symmetry. On a ribbon around her neck an uncut garnet was engulfed into the savagely-pushed up bosom along the square neckline of her dress, lined in ribbons and in bows also.

"All dressed up like a layered cake with nowhere to go," Freyda jibed under her breath. She herself was prettily if simply garbed in an embroidered wine-red tunic and fur vest, a straight paneled skirt and black felt boots. She nudged Siv aside in the mirror to fix her own plaits. Siv went back to helping Brynja write her letters in a straight line.

"Nowhere? Nori's a'comin' 'round to take me to the market this evening. Maybe buy Dori some new candlesticks if'n it'll lighten the old codger a bit," she groused back at Freyda. Meisar groaned and slipped past them toward the bed. "If the queen's got none for me to do," Siv arched her neck sideways to peer at her. "You'd let me, wouldn'cha Meisar?"

"Won't you join us, my queen? Your handwriting is still rather jumbled," Emli prodded. She crossed her arms in disappointment as Meisar fell face-first into the bed and laid unmoving, ignoring her.

"I'm very tired," Meisar grumbled. "Let me rest a moment."

Dis's sobs might have well been her own, her chest ached so much from the emotional work of the morning. Cruel words still haunted her dreams, a gleeful anticipation of her barrenness that came not from the lord of men who had seen his world incinerated by Thorin's work, but her own. The crack of an anguished palm on the face that she loved to kiss, as if it were her own flesh. It was too much for less than several turnings of the sun and moon.

She rolled over and something hard and cold struck against a nub of her spine. Reaching under herself, she tugged out an envelope of parchment paper that felt heavy, a seamstress's name written over it's addressing lines. She shook it and it was still full of coins.

Meisar racked her head into the pillow in annoyance. "The fourth seamstress's bill. It must have fallen underneath somewhere," she lamented.

"Send one of the sentries to bring it. Or Siv," Eda suggested.

"You bring it! M'at an important duty of teachin' Bryn her writing. Why not you rise up from yer dotage that you're in the past days, cousin."

"Dotage? Are you calling me portly?" Eda squawked back.

"No," Meisar said, their voices melding together obnoxiously. She brushed her hair over her face to hide her annoyance from them. "I'll bring it. I need… a walk."

"I'll go along with ye. Dwalin was to meet me here for the same," Freyda volunteered.

The tiredness in her, the want of some escape at the same time, made the request grind at her patience like teeth. She wanted to be alone but Freyda was easy enough company. She'd be mooning over Dwalin enough perhaps to leave her to her thoughts.

"Nisullukan," she agreed. Meisar threw on her good cloak and pulled the long trail of hair up over, shaking it loose down her back and all the way until it lay straight at her knees and the final strands were dislodged from under the cloak.

"My queen, at least let me dress your hair," Emli pleaded. Her hair was still loose for the earliness of the morning except for the marriage and courtship plaits.

"No need," Meisar declined tiredly. She caught sight of her fully loose hair in the mirror and realized it needed a comb-through if nothing else, but her arms felt too drained to so much as lift the instrument to do so.

"A married dwarrowdam should not go about with her hair all loose, and especially not a queen," Emli countered, plunking her by the shoulders down onto her seat. "If you go in the sight of the people, be a queen amongst them."

"Were that I knew how entirely," Meisar sighed.

"Start here," Emli answered, placing in her enormous winding bun of plaits a solid circlet with a sapphire piece in its center. "A sapphire for Durin's House."

"I am only going to bring the seamstress her dues and have a walk with Freyda," Meisar protested weakly.

"And this one is only going to the market," Emli shot back, eyeing Siv. Siv's lips perking out of the corner of Meisar's eye, jewels rattling and twinkling in the firelight she was sitting near, skirt up, fixing her stockings, admiring the shape of her legs in the rosy kashimire. "You'll not be less adorned than her, lest she be mistaken for you."

Meisar eyed Siv with her youthful zeal and irreverent charm, her sparkling coal-black eyes bursting with it, as heartily as her bosom burst out of her bodice. "I doubt that will happen," said Meisar quietly and with a woeful realization.

"You have a look about you this morning," Emli craned her head down to appraise her heavy eyes and pale cheeks. "Are you well?"

"Tired is all."

"Tired or no, you must be the queen at all times. Besides," Emli continued, straightening out her hanging braids, brushing the gray dog hair from her bodice after she had shooed the stubborn dog from her lap. "If a queen does not have some sumptuousness to her, what use is it to say we a prosperous people?"

Emli stood back and smiled her prim smile that brimmed with such exuberance underneath from the pride in her work. "There. Don't you look lovely."

"Come now. Dwalin is here," Freyda urged, tilting Meisar's mirror toward herself to give her hair and beard a final inspection. She smoothed the flyaway over her forehead impatiently.

Dwalin as always hid his joy so well, but his eyes always gave it away.

"Pretty, lass," he said. He dipped his head to Meisar in his own sedate manner. "M'queen. Will the king be-"

"No, I'm afraid not. He is in Dis's chambers for the time," Meisar answered. She could appreciate in the moment that Dwalin needed few words to understand. He nodded again with a steady, unwavering acknowledgement, and his hand slid down fastidiously to take Freyda's.

.

Air rushed into the city in crisp heaves of breath. The long banners emblazoned in the sigils of Durin's House fluttered on the flanks of the doors to Thror's Hall and the lanterns suspended from the ceilings flickered in the breeze. It was the jewelers' market day in the foyer and on the lower levels the iron-workers were holding a special fair to showcase their wares. Dwarves of both guilds in their aprons came and went busily along the mazes of stairs and mules were being constantly refreshed at the lifts to transport their displays and their carts. Somewhere, as always, there was music playing, behind stone walls in one of the smaller halls a slow reverent bagpipe. Dwarves waited at the doors of that manse in fine clothes.

"Will it snow again, Meisar. Can ye tell?" asked Freyda. She hugged her arms around herself against the wind when they were on the belvedere looking out onto Dale.

Meisar looked out over the landscape to the horizon. Clouds like smoke rolled over the pale sun. In jagged rings around Dale the snow was gray with the falling ash from the city's chimneys, black in some places from coal dust. Small patches of brown grass struggled through especially along the roads and footpaths which were still slick with ice and tamped snow. Once she could smell it on the wind, whether snow would hold or a day would come when spring would first punch through the dry, bitter air. The answer was always on the horizon. She squinted her eyes and took a deep breath. But the air was suddenly foreign and unreadable. She had become so used to the scent of mineral-baths and hearth fires and the sizzling meat at the merchant's stands and pipe smoke and hot metal and Thorin. The scent of his hair and his skin in the morning was the whole of the world and nothing outside could penetrate the safety of it.

The external world was new again and unfamiliar. She could no longer read the wind.

"Mikhhal," she answered distractedly. "I can say only with certainty it will be spring soon enough," she smiled then through her sudden feeling of being bereft of something she had once doggedly possessed. A few dwarvish wagons made their way to and from the city along the icy path in slow steps. She watched as the horns signaled in the distance on the guard-tower over the gates of Dale and they bowed open easily for them to pass. She wondered what it must have looked like, the ruins of the city of her birth perched on by elves with bows aimed, like bats on the edge of night waiting for the fireflies to escape Erebor. Bard pleading and cursing just there below.

For a moment she was glad the dwarvish shine had taken in his stomach like a swift fist, and simultaneously grateful for his prudence, however severe.

"Soon, but not now. Yer freezing, lass," Dwalin counseled. He swiped off his cloak and wrapped it swiftly around Freyda.

"Aren't ye cold though?" Freyda answered with concern, Dwalin's forearms bare. She touched the sinewy line along one. Meisar watched the instinct of his muscle to recoil stop itself, the tense lines relaxing suddenly, at her touch.

"M'fine, lass." He grasped her shoulders and kissed the cold red tip of her nose in the sight of the sentries, who made murmurs of surprise under their helmets. His mouth tightened into a straight line when he realized the gesture had been a public one.

Perhaps for a moment the world was only the two of them, Meisar imagined. The feeling had been one she had only known in the depths of love.

"Don't know how ye survived winters in the wild-lands, m'queen," Freyda remarked, shivering. "Bear the cold alright and the furnace o' the forges, sure, but what drives a dwarf to that?"

For a moment, Meisar thought she could remember the smell of wet earth after rain. Melting snow and half-frozen mud, the skeletons of beech trees in the Coldfells. A strange wind that drove her west for good.

"M'queen?" Freyda poked her in the shoulder and she leaped back, as if struck.

"I'm sorry. Dinna mean to startle ye. Yer thinking about something?"

She and Dwalin stood together, her back pressed up against him to warm him, his hand in hers. She smiled, a warmth coming back to fill a space that had been suddenly empty. She turned back and peered down over the railing into the city. There was laughter and joviality amongst the dwarves strolling the foyer, bounty at their mercantile carts and stands.

The sound of small unfamiliar yelps made the ears of Fred, Redcoat and Raincloud prickle together and they began to yowl at once. A trio of dwarrowdams passed along the belvedere, each holding in her arms a small flat-faced dog. Their black muzzles twitched in confusion against the queen's dogs pulling at their leashes below. They all began to bark at once then.

"Athune," the three gasped together, realizing, when Meisar turned and showed her beardless face, all dipping curtsies, as their dogs clawed up their bosoms against the hounds' barking.

"Ainâth," Meisar, reactive, curtsied back. "What amusing creatures you have there."

The youngest, a stocky girl with chestnut hair and a wispy beard, untangled the dog from the adorned plaits. "We see you with these curs so often we thought to have some of our own. We got them in Dale."

The other two, who looked to be sisters or at least kin, nodded in agreement against their own frantic pets. "I call this one Miss Lady. She is very spoiled by now," the one who seemed the youngest dwarrowdam explained of her pet in its emerald collar, flat face gnawing at the matching brooch on the dwarrowdam's chest.

"Dwarves with dogs?…." Dwalin crossed his arms, his expression somewhere between amused and suspicious. The women's eyes turned to him and he took a step closer to Freyda, enfolding her hand in his.

"The ladies of this city see us with them and want their own," the girl said.

Dog-hair on her clothes. Meisar smiled inside as the three plucked the tan bristly hairs from their clothing, fixed their hair against the dogs' pawing, tending on the creatures adoringly. Let them come back and see I am not alone.

Dwalin watched them and held in an amused smirk. His half-smile toward them had the dwarrowdams blushing. "First-liuetenant," the dwarrowdams half-giggled together, dipping polite curtsies. Their dogs made snuffling sounds at him and Freyda glared at all so unhappily the three departed in haste.

"We must get to the seamstresses' guild before the turning of the hour," Meisar announced hastily. Dwalin and Freyda trailed her down the stairs back into the city foyer, where a crowd was busily gathering and beginning to clap and cheer. Dwarves at random parted and a young couple made their way through, the dwarrowdam in gold and white and a tall bridal crown, blushing under her beard. A bridegroom stood proud on her arm, stroking a new plait in his beard with the opposite hand. The males acclaimed him in crude tones until another dwarf who appeared to be the bride's father gave a stern rebuke. Merchants offered free drinks and samples of their fare, charms and trinkets. Meisar stood back with Dwalin and watched the scene play out in mirthful harmony. Pipers followed and a steady beat on a boar-hide drum.

When she had stood upon rail of the terrace overlooking the world outside but a moment past something had felt lost, ominous even. A reader of the most crucial script, holding all the secrets of the world past and future, had she been, it felt, and suddenly she was blind. But under the mountain there was life. The energy of it filled her very veins, its stubborn hope and diligent prosperity, its courage to love. The world may yet suffer. Dis may lose her mind. Thorin may hold old demons at bay on the edge of a sword and I may yet pick up the pieces of both's failings. But there is life now. There is such life here.

Something deep in her stomach coiled against the word. Life.

There will be. If I must snatch the hammer from Aule's own hand and make it I will.

The bride drank of a great chalice and downed it in a single go, a dainty hand to her mouth first to catch the overflow and then the groom's eager taking up of that duty with his own.

And they will kiss his swaddled head in homage.

"The queen!" a dwarf shouted. "The queen has come amongst us! Inrib! Inrib!"

Dwarves came around and crowded to pay their reverence, kisses to her hands from the men and warm embraces from the dwarrowdams. Their affection was jarring. She looked down at her dress and it was studded in gray and chestnut hairs from carrying Fred and Redcoat. The dogs buried themselves to hide in her skirts as the dwarves came one after the other to her. The bride in her cumbersome crown pushed her way through eagerly.

"My queen, would you give us your blessing? Oh, I plead to you so. It would mean the world," begged the bride.

"You shan't plead to me. It is gladly given," Meisar told her. "Marriage is a happy thing. May it be long and joyous for you. Maimhidi."

"We will be well-married and happy all our years with the blessing of such a queen," gushed the bride.

"Our king looked so glad with you at the coronation feast. I remember him in his halls in the Blue Mountains, how little humor or joy there was in him. To see him as he looks at you is a very precious thing," the bride said.

I am his jewel and I am not weary.

The father of the bride came and joined hands with his daughter, beaming with pride. He had the characteristic simple, sturdy iron decor of the Blue Mountains about his person, iron beads in his beard, simple braids. But his garb was new and pristine, currant velvet and sable, warm boots and a beautiful dress of gold-and-white broadcloth for his daughter, the dwarrowdam with curling red hair tamed under the crown.

"Thorin Oakenshield and yourself have set quite the example if I do say so," the old white-bearded ushhan remarked, finding his way through the throng of guests to offer Meisar his salutations. He knelt almost in full to kiss her hand. "There will be several more marriages coming in the weeks next. Unprecedented! I have never in my life seen such a queue of weddings! Even in Ered Luin in more prosperous times, and as you know, Blue Mountains dwarves are a marrying sort more than other clans."

"That I have been told," she responded. Told. His humored rumble caressing her skin as she lay on a bed in Laketown staring the ceiling and the blips of dots in her eyes, while he removed her stocking with his teeth. "The more that marry, I think, shall be for the better of our race. That we live on. Marriage is very happy thing."

Behind her Freyda's look changed to one of consternation and then near annoyance. Dwalin's eyes longed for her against her turned-away head. Sometimes, like Thorin's, his lips moved but no sound came out.

Freyda let go of his hand and crossed her arms. The disconnect between mutual and equal but separate longings so tangible to anyone who read the language of their faces, the movement of their hands, that it needed but a single thread to be joined and woven together wholly. The stiffened warrior, if only he could see.

"Yer pale as a sheet, m'queen," Dwalin's unsentimental rumble interjected her train of thought, the throngs dissipating when the wedding banquet was called to begin.

"Overwhelming is all, that they seek me so. I suppose I'm used to making myself scarce, unseen," she shrugged. Their sudden affection had warmed her inside where the labors of the day had left her cold, the worries of the world.

"Yer queen now," Dwalin half-guffawed. "Best ye get used to makin' yerself the opposite."

"That I know now," she agreed. "Times have changed indeed."

.

In the evening, when Thorin's council chambers were ended, she sat at the vanity and undid the elaborate structure of plaits Emli had created earlier, hair coming down, spiraling out from the braids into a great mass that her comb seemed to drown in. Through the veil of hair she could see Thorin at the fire, silent, and he began pacing the room around her.

"Lord Elrond," he said finally. His eyes through her wall of hair seemed to burn impatiently.

"What of him?"

"I have heard it said today at the coronation feast it was said he left straight after you, when you went to tend on the dogs, and very intently so. Did he speak to you?"

"Yes."

"What did he say to you?" Meisar looked up and his eyes were strangely interrogative.

"You are cross about this morning? I think it so. So now you interrogate me about the business of elves?" She set her brush down impetuously.

"No," he assured. He knelt quietly beside her chair, the two of them facing into the mirror together. He gathered her hands in the warmth of his. His eyes were red in the corners with enervation.

"My sister is not easy to cope with, nor is she well. I do not suspect she ever will be again. We must tolerate her rashness at times I'm afraid."

"She is a mother who has lost her children. You will have to do better than tolerate." It struck her suddenly that it was not Thorin she came to crying out in the night now, but like a babe wailing in the cradle, the tending owed seemed not the shared responsibility it was meant to be.

"We have forgiven each other for our faults, many times over," Thorin said.

But he was a king, his duties, his own anguish as much to bear... the thought suddenly made her ridden through in guilt through her chest, and Thorin's suddenly softening visage toward her seemed to understand the sentiment.

"Does it offend you that the elf lord speaks to me without your knowledge? Do your councilors find it offensive? Do they... as some may find me? I... should not have spoke to Dis so harshly I think. Will you tell her I'm sorry?"

She wanted to tell him but the words wouldn't form in her head or on her tongue. Weary-looking old thing. Stunted fat elf. She let out a frustrated heave of a sigh, her face crumpling helplessly and then growing a scowl of sudden reproach.

He thought for a moment. There were too many considerations at once, of a trying day. "I trust in your wisdom far more than I would an elf, even a very wise one. It was a simple question, my love."

"A queen knows there are no simple questions."

"Do not be cross with me, Meisar. There is much you have not seen, or could understand, yet."

"I understand far more than you imagine," she replied, almost tersely. Elrond had borne a strange weight in his eyes, his posture that night. She loathed the cryptic way he had spoken to her of strange gifts and the delicateness of their peace.

"Thorin..." she sighed. "It has been trying, this day. I have been pulled in many directions. They do not always agree."

Thorin, like her dogs when nights were the darkest, nuzzled his face against the back of her hand which was gripping and releasing her peignoir at her knee until the fabric was wrinkled and damp. He sat back on his knees and took her hands, shaking. "Let me brush your hair mizimel."

Sitting at her side on a floor cushion he took up her comb and started on the ends. It eased her inside, the care he exerted. "He asked after Gandalf. It turns out Lord Elrond did not know he had intent to visit Rivendell. He looked quite surprised that he should be expecting him at all."

"He admires you. I can appreciate that," Thorn smiled toward her.

"Perhaps you can. But can anyone else?"

"Any would, if an elf can."

"And what of wood elves, their… slightly more hostile kin? What of Thranduil? He did not come."

"An invitation was dispatched to his realm. A pity he did not attend, but a lack of plain manners that a reply did not even arrive. Shaik. Then again, the less of the elves in our halls the better." A tug, of his indignant thought wrought, tingled at her scalp. He looked up, apologetically, set the hank of hair aside, and stroked the red thick veil with the back of his hand tenderly.

"Seems a strange slip of courtesy for a king," Meisar added.

"Aye," Thorin agreed.

A strange gift, sometimes a curse, those who can hear drumbeats on a distant horizon before others.

"Perhaps the elves are isolating themselves on purpose," she proposed.

"For what cause?"

She could not fully read Elrond's creased brows, concerned but quietly and enigmatically so in his Elvish way, even in retrospect. "Perhaps there is something in this world they wish to avoid."

You look as if you yourself have the seen the dead rise, my lord. His slight smile caught itself and betrayed everything, and nothing at all.

A comforting bristled touch soothed her immediate pensiveness, as Thorin rose up on his knees to kiss her cheek. "You worry yourself so, over what I do not know."

The world is changing.

"I am a queen now. It is my lot to worry," she leaned down over him and kissed the crown of his head.

"I would have you let me worry for the things worth worrying over."

"We are in this together though. I shall not forget my coronation vows."

He rose and knelt again at the side of her chair and took her hands in his to kiss. His elbows were rested against her knees. "We must tell each other everything then. We must have no worries that we keep inside. Will you swear to me that?"

The world is changing.

There were no words inside that came to her, in quite how to convey it to him. She liked the light in his eyes at the moment far too much.

"I will."

There was another that gnawed at her relentlessly and stung again when she thought of it more clearly, the words that had been on the parchment in the giddy, excited handwriting. A near-certainty. She desired so fiercely to share the unkindness, to hear his words of reassurance. To tell her she was beautiful, even to rebuke them. The need for such validation was new and made her feel uneasy suddenly.

Honesty and honor. Does it mean we share everything or use our wits to decide which should stay unsaid for the sake of our peace?

Relenting, she tilted her head in the direction of the bed. "Let us come to the one place where we have no secrets then, and our vows be sealed."

"Ya fa binuslukh," he sighed as they closed themselves under the furs of the bed and put out the bedside candles. He closed the space between them in the dark, warming her.

His beard brushed the nape of her neck and pressed lower, billowing against her neck with gentle breath, his arm over her, a fingertip gliding along the seam of her peignoir. The warm tingle disrupted by a memory of cruel words. Suddenly it mattered not. His love is all that matters.

"On my own life," she said. "I can to you swear also."

.

Naikhlî!- Make Peace with Each Other!

Burushruka igbulul e- I'm sorry

Mazzannaguna- She who continues to show courage

Sigin'amad- Grandmother

Nisullukan- Of course

Mikhhal- Possibly

Ainâth- Girls

Inrib- Acclaim!

Maimhidi- Be Blessed!

Ushhan- Marrier (person form). Not sure but I think it could fit as someone who is the equivalent of a priest/minister/judge.

Shaik- Craven

Ya fa binuslukh- With or Without a Dragon (in good times or in bad)