A/N: Weliann, I apologize for not responding to your review in the last chapter. I'm getting used to doing so lately! Your insights are wonderful. Anyway, I think you are probably right about Erebor, and Middle Earth in general not being "medieval" in the strict sense. Only because Middle Earth is certainly pre-modern I used that umbrella term not really being totally accurate about it. From the dwarves, specifically, I get a Greco-Roman vibe anyway. Just getting the feeling that they are more technologically advanced than some of their peers in Middle Earth; I imagine them having amenities like plumbing, hot baths, aqueducts, maybe even some kind of steam-powered engine in their industry. I sometimes wonder if their leaders/monarchs have the sort of absolute power that say, the Master of Laketown, exercised. Maybe that whole experience had something to do with their on-spot democracy with Bain and Bard at the helms, respectively LOL :)
On the last day of summer, the peoples of Dale, who had swum in the waters in the shadow of Erebor through the season's dog days and frolicked about the fields and patches of saplings on its outer skirts, mostly retreated back into the walls of the city, seeking the shelter of the cool stone within to shield them from the heat. The summer had seemed to go on forever. In Erebor, few took notice.
"Do you know, Oliada, of an old tale? A man and an elf-maid fell in love, and were wed in spite of the protestations of their kin," Meisar said to the sentry, walking along the long terrace.
"No," the sentry shrugged. "No tell tale of elf in east."
"What sort of tales do you tell in the East then?"
"Tales of shadow growing, darker tales," Oliada answered flatly. "But here, many betrothals, much happiness, in dwarf king's stead," she rebounded, lightly. "Lady Siv and Lady Freyda to be married?"
"Yes, and which will wed first is the question I dread having to ask sometimes," Meisar chuckled. "Each wishes to be."
"Not competition," Oliada sniffed. "Not like best ale."
"We've all had a bit too much of that." Meisar put her head up toward the sky, the powdery azure of it hazy. Hot breaths of wind blew dry from the east, rising over the hillside, blowing in scorching and languorous as the day itself.
"A festival in celebration of hard work, and a most welcome return to it," she declared, easily. Her thatched shoes that let her toes show thwacked against the stone with every brisk step. Elder dwarrowdams strolling along the terrace acknowledged her with polite curtsies but turned back into their close circles fervidly once she had passed. Talk of the queen's bare calves showing in the light of the day had scandalized them lately, in the absence of anything more substantial. Sometimes it made her smile, their idle concerns. That they had the luxury was a blessing, she thought. Dwarves had known worse complaints, after all.
"I am glad to get back into the normalcy of things, truth be known, Oliada." A normalcy that might alter itself with time, for the better. She smoothed her hands over the middle of her torso, the stubborn wrinkle in her pinafore, silently.
"Gardens set for fall?"
"Pumpkins soon," Meisar answered cheerily. "I think the children of the kingdom will be very fond of them. Urdlaug tells me they make excellent pies."
The wind rolled down the side of the spur again, fluttering a wall of ominous tidings toward them.
"There is a strange foulness to the air," Meisar said, warily. The wind from the east grew strong in a couple of gusts, hot and peppered with decay, an acrid smoky tinge.
"Midden heap of Dale? Ripe at summer's end, my queen," Oliada suggested. In Dale, they piled the garbage and waste somewhere over that hill when the marshes dried. She paused on the belvedere, searching over the horizon, not a moment past lazy blue now low with pale grey clouds toward the forest of Mirkwood, darker going East, with a split of radiant sun parting the grays, putting Erebor in a warm scope of light.
"Must be then. So many men new to that place. Imagine the rubbish!" she tried to make herself chuckle, but even disingenuously, it would not summon itself.
At a distance the dust kicked up from the dry late summer earth over the slope just west of Dale. "La'i," Oliada gestured, over the hill. Two trails chugged their way down at a frantic pace. The dwarrowdams watched the swirls of dust settle behind them. "Dain Ironfoot come over very hill to confront army of elves and men. Wind up fighting great battle against orc and goblin hoard instead."
"Something is wrong," she relayed to Oliada with a pit in her stomach forming hard and edged. "Something is-"
The first shriek pierced the air and put the sentries all along the belvedere at alert. A girl sprung from the cloud of dust on a horse and then a boy, also on horseback. High above on the outcroppings of rock to the mountain's side four more figures peered down, their shadows predatory, their mounts not horses. She knew what it was from the snarls of them echoing off the walls of the mountain, before the cache emerged into the clear air.
"ORCS!"
Oliada drew her spear and the sentries at their back sprung to alertness, screaming back echoing into the foyer of the city. The frantic shrill rising of the warning horns blasted.
The pack of orcs, five or six strong, navigated the steep terrain with frightening ease on the backs of their beasts, leaping down on the trail of the mounted children. The dust trails forked frantically, one in the direction of the pond at the mountain's base, the other sprinting opposite, parallel to the gates of Dale as they began to reel shut.
"Ikhrikab!" Meisar boomed. A red flag was raised at the terrace of Erebor, flapping frantically in the wind, warning Dale to close its gates to coming dangers. Over on the walls of Dale, the sentries were scrambling similarly. The gates of the city slammed so hard they could hear it in Erebor.
Abruptly, the second cache pursuing the boy peeled around and flew at the girl as her horse spooked in the low saplings ringing the pond. The girl's horse fell in a savage onslaught of orc and warg, launching the child into the water. The fiends that waylaid the horse were too engaged, too ravenously tearing its already-dead flesh, to notice the child. They were eating the poor beast so manically the crunch of its bones could be heard on the high terrace. Orc and warg battled, snapping for blood-caked hide and entrails.
They seemed to forget the girl. But she was in the water, and had slipped under.
On his mount, the boy reeled around the sharp, narrowing tip of the still pond, dust scattering into its tranquil surface, the gentle ripples never so ominous as they spread and rose toward in the direction of the gate. Mounted bows fired from the ramparts of Dale, killing one warg, the beast tumbling over to crush its rider fully. The screams of the men on the city's ramparts echoed to Erebor, ripe with fear and adrenaline. Three more orcs on wargs pursued the boy.
The girl, alone, emerged and stumbled from the water and started on foot toward the front gate.
"It is only a little girl!" Meisar gasped, her hands up to her face. She felt all of the air sucked out of her, crunching her bones with its inertia just as the beasts set upon the poor steed.
A child, a child. It raced her in her head with hot fast urgency. She turned and rushed toward the stairway that led back down into the city foyer. "We must let her through! Tell them to open the gates!" The words flooded out so fast Oliada, scrambling behind her, gaped silent without understanding her command. She turned sharply to survey the scene from the belvedere once more. The boy wheeled and jerked against the coming fray, turning his steed toward the gate of Erebor.
"Open the gate! Let them in!" Meisar ordered the commanding sentry.
"No! The orcs will follow too close behind!" the commander balked. Assailed as the were by the heavy crossbows of Dale, they pursued still.
"Clear the foyer. Send every armed dwarf to the gate, now! Imkhimi!" she repeated, harshly.
"My queen!"
"It is my command. Now open the gates, and let them through!"
"Very well," the commander relented, fearful. "But you, my queen, are responsible then for your commands."
"Responsible for my commands? Be it that I am," she hissed back, snatching the pole-ax from the next sentry's hand. "Then I shall stand at the forefront and slay it myself if I must!" She thundered down the steps and waited as the chains at the gate frantically clanked in raising it. "Ibkiri!"
"The king will have our heads!" the sentry exclaimed.
The armored guards stood quaking over the railings above, spears pointed downward toward the gate. The burliest of the vanguard flanked the gate, axes ready. They parted as the girl staggered through and collapsed four steps into the foyer, dwarves swooping in to drag the injured girl to safety while the others set mercilessly upon the orc and his mount outside the gate as they tried to surge through, killing both in a manic spiraling fountain of blood that soaked plate armor so red it looked like the Blacklocks'.
The girl's injured form left a trail of blood on the marble floor. Nearly all had fled the foyer except for a few staunch merchants, guarding their wares, weapons drawn, and Donbur at his cart. His chest was thrust forth, iron ladle in hand, his mouth curled in the cruelest snarl his face could muster.
"My queen, for Mahal's love, I beg you!" the same sentry wailed.
"I will beg his pardon then, and vouch for you also," Meisar replied coolly, her head hot with adrenaline. She triangulated out from the gate to square in on the form of the boy, riding hard. The snarls of the orcs whipped her in the face like claws.
"How'd you suppose you'll do that?" the sentry inquired in a squawk, chasing close behind her.
"Tell him I pushed you," Meisar relayed with a swift bite of sarcasm except that it wasn't in the least.
"They are coming!" another shouted in the vanguard. "At attention! Raise your weapons!"
Meisar snatched the lacquered spear from Oliada's hand against the sentry's frantic protests and pushed her way to the front of the sentry's vanguard, the weapon pointed and poised.
"My queen!"
The boy thundered through on horseback, fast tumbling from his steed. Dwarves swarmed around the frightened animal, waving their arms, struggling to corral it.
"Stand fast," Meisar ordered, harshly. She brandished the spear, alas, in the split second she had raised it, hot-blooded and ready, was lifted from behind under her arms by the tallest and strongest of the sentries, his armor buckling, clanking against the beating of her legs against his knees.
"Put me down!" She looked toward Oliada below her but the sentry's eyes only dipped apologetically back up at her, standing in front of the sentry to shield her. She writhed and kicked repeatedly until her limbs were numb. Begging and cursing, her commands went un-heeded.
"Forgive me, my queen, I cannot let you do this." She struggled in his arms mightily, throwing her head back against his, but it only struck bluntly against his edged helmet, dizzying her, a pain shooting through the back of her skull and blurring her sight. She could only see a rain of spears come down upon the orc and its warg, the bite of metal to flesh and bone penetrating and hacking away, so swiftly there were no more dying cries after several seconds.
The sentry was still grasping her tight when the last sprang through on foot just under the closing gate, dodging a rain of spears only to run headlong into Donbur's cart as his foot heaved and overturned the enormous steaming pot. The dying shriek of the orc waylaid the dwarves back, skin braised in scalding stew before a ladle struck its head hard enough to leave a bowl-shaped dent in the skull. Donbur stood above the dying creature and and raised the ladle to strike again when a sentry ran it through with a spear and another hastily lopped off its head. Meisar struggled out of the sentry's grip in time to catch Donbur's expression of abject disappointment that his blow had not been the fatal issue.
"Zaznel!" a merchant hissed next to him, spitting on the corpse. The spittle hissed with the still-scorching soup on its form. Meisar followed a separate brighter tail to the girl lying moaning and croaking in fast sobs on the stone floor.
"Baistifi!" Meisar barked at the gathering knots of frightened dwarves lingering helplessly over the girl. She shoved all of them aside and fell to her knees, the tacky touch of blood coming through her clothes and sticking to her knees. The stain crept upward against the soft raincloud-gray linen of her dress. The girl's leg was gushing fast.
"Scissors!" she cried out to the gathering, gawking crowd. "Scissors! A knife!"
A merchant quickly passed her a sharp double-edged razor that she used to hack the fabric of her own sleeve without care that it scraped ominously against her own skin, drawing blood just below the elbow. She tore the last fibers of the sleeve from her body as another of the dwarves gathered finally began to howl for a healer to come. The sleeve she wrapped in a tight knot around the girl's leg just above the knee, ebbing the blood flow. The girl cried in pain under a veil of sweaty, bloody hair matting against her cheeks.
"Dear child, don't move," Meisar tried to soothe. The girl's chest made a cracking sound when she squirmed and blood sputtered again from the wound in her leg. "Fetch a healer! Jalaignig!"
"Queen Meisar?" the girl's hair fell from the side of her face where it was plastered against a bloody cut.
"Tilda!"
The girl's frightened face gazed up at her, dizzy with pain. Meisar shook her fist at the dwarves standing idly dumb-struck about her, a voice that had once sprung dwarves from their languor. These only stared back at her, frightened, confused. "She is the daughter of the Lord of Dale! Get the healer here, now! Where are they!"
"Bain!" Tilda wept, pleading. Her arms flapped and thwacked helplessly against the stone floor.
"I am here! Tilda!" Bain limped through the squall of dwarves, butting their shoulders to part with the heels of his hands. Blood ran from a cut on his forehead, his baby-face dark with worry. Sweat poured from his temples, his shirt soaked in a stew of blood and sweat, ominously-scented. Swaying, he was pressed aside as Thorin and his kingsguard surged through.
"What is the meaning of this? What has happened here?" the king thundered at the dumbstruck assemblage.
"An orc attack!" one merchant offered timidly. "Two injured mannish folk. Here."
Thorin nodded a terse gracious acknowledgement at the merchant and quickly spied Meisar bent over a figure on the ground, one arm bare and bloody, the other merely bloodied.
"My queen!" He tried to pull her up by the shoulders but relented when he saw the girl, looking between them alarmed. Meisar's entire form pulsated hard in his grip, the scent of blood too sharp on her. He backed away.
"I am alright. It is not my blood," Meisar assured, standing back, as Oin and Virta raced in.
.
In the shadow of a darkening afternoon, the flash of the man rushed through the foyer at a pace that dizzied the dwarves coming back into the area. Dwarf children cautiously poked the body of the dead orc with sticks and poles, mothers disapproving, fathers hard-eyed on alert. The blood on the floor spread in several cruel patterns. Two merchants quarreled and haggled over the body of the warg, arguing for its pelt.
Sentries followed the man at a brisk pace, calling for him to halt. But the man all but flung himself against the high doors of the throne hall as if they would bow open by the force of it alone.
"King Thorin! Your majesty!" the desperate caterwaul rose to the ceiling and thumped down again.
On the other side one of the stewards opened the door and Bard thrust himself into the crack as it slowly bowed open. Pushing a sentry aside with either arm so forcefully they each wobbled backward in their heavy armor, he finally stopped, dizzied on the edge of the long unguarded walkway. Two more stepped in front of him and crossed their axes before his path. The sentry's ax, in Bard's grip, was wrenched suddenly from him and the dwarf flung backward.
He was hit in the knees from behind hard enough to make him cry out in shock. The bite of a ax at his throat stopped his breath.
"Dwalin!" Thorin barked suddenly. He butted himself forcefully between Dwalin and Bard, swiping Dwalin's ax away from where it had pointed inches from Bard's neck. "Apologies, my lord. You were not immediately recognized and-"
On his smarting knees Bard reached and grasped at Thorin's shoulders as he came around in front of him, heaving forceful exhalations and the fragments of words.
"They came here! They... my children, majesty." The dark, sober eyes that had never shown a hint of personal turmoil to his own were wild with it.
"My lord, come," Thorin urged calmly. Placing his hand on the lord of Dale's shoulder felt foreign to him, if not exactly discomfited.
"Where are my children?!"
"They are safe," Thorin assured. Dwalin backed off and set the other sentries around them at ease with a flick of his hand to put their weapons down, leaving Thorin before the lord aching on his knees.
"Can you stand? My lieutenant is a soldier by profession. I'm afraid his touch is often a brutal one," Thorin abjured, acknowledging Dwalin with an irritable twitch to his glance. Dwalin scowled down at the two of them.
"Take me to them! One lord to another, I demand you tell me what has happened!" A rivulet of a tear squeezed itself from the corner of Bard's eye. His grip on Thorin's shoulder tightened, as his body swayed from side to side. He winced as he stood.
"Ease yourself, my liege. They are resting comfortably, in the healers' halls. An orc packed waylaid them near our gates."
"Bain, he arrived for a leisurely ride with his younger sister. Were they both hurt? How badly?" Bullets of sweat darted down the sides of Bard's face, collecting in worried drops on the edges of his stubbled cheeks. Thorin could smell the sharp worry of it.
"I saw nothing of the fray," Thorin said calmly. "I am only aware that it was the queen's command that the gates be opened to them."
.
Bard leaped the stairs four a time without a care for the narrow structure of their walkways, one level, another, hitting the landings on the balls of his feet, so swiftly Thorin flung off his robes and followed, straining for breath.
"I doubt you know you way through this maze, my lord," Thorin stuttered breathlessly behind him. "Allow me to keep pace, if you would."
Bard spun on his heel on the landing toward Thorin. He looked up around the great stone labyrinth constructed around him, dizzying in its elaborateness.
"One step for your lordship is several for mine, or more," Thorin reminded him. By the time they reached the healers' halls several levels down, Bard's shirt was soaked through in sweat, even in the chilly confines of the underground. The infirmary was cramped but lit. On the far end, straddling two beds pressed together, Bain sat up and called his name. Flinging aside a knot of commiserating healers in their white aprons, he raced to the child's side, the boy as tall as he, cradled like an infant in his father's arms. Bard kissed his head over and over, clawing for his own breath.
"Da!" Tilda cried and put her arms out for Bard.
He and turned and found her comfortably tucked in a little bed, her head and legs bandaged, her chest buttressed in a wrap. The queen herself was perched ever-watchful over the girl's bedside, on a stool. He would have taken her for a healer in her pale bloodstained pinafore, except when she raised her head and he could see her face was beardless.
The dragonslayer buried his face into his daughter's hair and wept against it.
"What are you doing here?" Thorin asked her low and tersely beneath his breath while Bard embraced his children together.
"I would be a poor host if I did not see to my guests, unexpected guests or not," she replied, plunking down from the stool on her feet. She felt Thorin's eyes on her, ominous, held her gaze unblinking to him.
"Queen Meisar," Tilda called. "She has stayed with us, father. She wrapped up my leg and it stopped the bleeding." Stepping up on the stool again to come to her level, Meisar embraced the girl tenderly who has her height and a half nearly, but who could have been an infant in her arms for all it mattered at the moment. She held her and took in the warm scent of her hair, the grass stuck to her, her eager sweet innocence.
"It was the least I could do, child," she murmured. Thorin looked past her, stiffly. Bard, sat on the edge of the bed, sprang his arms out toward her and pulled her unflinching into a zealous embrace. The gesture made her mouth gape in a silent squawk. Thorin flinched and grimaced with eyes blackening in disbelief, but he did not speak, or move to pry the lord from his queen's closeness.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you. My good queen, they would be dead without you." The sobs rising from deep in his chest rumbled harsh against her. Thorin drew back, guiltily, no less truculent in his silence.
"A parent should never lose a child," she replied, soberly, peeling herself primly back from his embrace. Yet she still gathered his hands in her own, so tiny in the man's, pale and plump to his thoughtful, worked fingers.
"Do you have a child, Queen Meisar?" Tilda asked, earnestly.
"No."
"Where do dwarf babies come from? Their mamas? My mama carried one in her body, right here," the girl gestured to her stomach. "Then he came out."
Meisar laughed. "Sweet child, where do you think we come from? Holes in the ground?"
"I thought eggs. But, like stone eggs. You hatch out of the mountain like diamonds." Her eyes were wide with wonder at the revelation.
Bard's smile widened with amusement. "Were that that were true, child, it would be very uncanny to see," Meisar concluded. Bard wiped a tear from his eye ducking from her view. "A dwarf woman bears a child much like your own mother did."
"She is gone now. So is the baby," Tilda fretted, her big eyes sad.
"But you are here, and your father, and your brother," Meisar reminded her gently.
"And Sigrid, safe in the city," Bard added. Would it be so good after all, he wondered. Tilda was still squeezing the queen's hand. She wore a veil over her tenderness perhaps. Like others.
"Thank you, good queen," he dipped his head with a hand to his chest.
Virta came to the child's side and checked her ribs. Oin supervised, glancing over her shoulder.
"She will be alright. The kingsfoil will prevent any further danger to her," Oin imparted to Bard.
"Her ribs will take care, and time, to heal though," Virta hastened to add. "'Twas a nasty fall from that horse. I scarcely comprehend how she managed to run with such might to our stead."
"She is a willful girl," Bard smiled.
"May we come back sometime, Queen Meisar? Erebor is very beautiful. I want to see all of it," Tilda asked excitedly.
"Of course you may, child."
"I'll need to examine her chest to check the bruising. Perhaps the menfolk could clear out," Virta said.
"Walk with me. I would speak with you, healer," Bard all but commanded. Oin twisted the trumpet in his ear, grimacing at Bard. A man did not give him orders. But he rose and directed Bard quietly toward the door.
"You would speak with me?" Oin said impatiently once they had exited.
"I thank you, healer, for your services, and I give the queen my due respect for the tenderness she has shown my children. She is childless. It may yet be a pity."
"A very great pity should it come to pass, which I do not expect. They have been wed less than a year. In the absence, the king has named his successor," Oin relayed, restively.
"Has he indeed?"
"The son of his cousin, and his namesake no less, Thorin Stonehelm, the young lord of the Iron Hills, who has his father's tenacity. Bless his beard."
He had seen the father's eyes, and knew they would never look kindly upon him down the generations one to the next, the stubbornness and memory of dwarves. Were he to remain in the Iron Hills though, what a defense he would mount, if he had his father's tenacity indeed. He may need to. Someday.
"His father was a very loyal lord, to his kin. A fierce fighter, a fierce tongue..." Bard recalled warily.
They need him there then, not Erebor. Erebor must have its own. This shadow is long and growing.
"Dain did not suffer those who would offer insult and obstruction to his kin, nor will his son," Oin declared, surly.
I would extend my hand, and my hope, to Erebor, knowing what lies East, one hostile to me for his father's memory, another more so, and darker.
Bard's stomach began to extend and rush back in like an accordion inside his skin, remembering the words of a wizard. Location and strategy, a mountain one chess piece in this grand wheel of time and a city merely another.
"Perhaps it would best serve the Iron Hills to retain a tenacious leader in their stead," Bard suggested nonchalantly. "It is a formidable stronghold in lands East of this realm."
Should Thorin Oakenshield have seen his wife's tenderness would his hand also extend? An ally made was an ally kept if all were honest in their dealings, and a dwarf's word unto generations was as if written in stone itself and made law. Perhaps Thorin will be kinder still, if he knew…
"Do you seek to speak with me of politics, my liege? I am only a healer. It is not my place, nor do I wish it to be," Oin crossed his arms stiffly.
Do I take back my hopes for her barrenness? Do I wish this agony upon a woman who has been kind to my own?
He remembered Thorin's eyes at the gate that day and couldn't bring himself to say it yet.
"If she is kept beneath this mountain like the queens of old we may yet the familiar sins come forth again. I do not want that," Bard confided to Oin.
"Perhaps, my lord, you know what you speak of, but I would remain silent on the matter no less. It is not your place," Oin scolded. "You still have not learned the perils of ordering a dwarf about, especially a dwarf woman."
"The queen is a woman of good heart. Might that… someday her own children might inherit that good, that she has treated my own with."
I do not wish for her misery, no, no, nor my own. We will all need to stand together someday.
"We shall see," Oin replied stiffly. "In the matter of the politics that surround such a thing, I stay far, as I am meant to, and yourself, more so, lord of men."
"Not a matter of politics, master dwarf. But sentiment only perhaps," Bard sighed.
.
Meisar's clothes were still blood-stained when she came back to their chambers, and found Thorin with his back to her even as the door opened, standing stiffly at the fireside. When he looked back, a paroxysm of anger flashed briefly across his lips, tightening them under the lengthening shadow of his mustache.
"You look at me as if I have shaven the beard from your chin," she intoned, a murmur peppered irksomely.
"I trimmed my beard once with my own hands, so close to the skin... I could taste the blood on my lip. I did so of self-mortification as much as to honor the beards that were cruelly singed around me," Thorin recalled grimly, not looking at her, only tersely into the light of the fire below. His arm rested itself on the mantle above the fireplace, stiffly.
"For what error, Thorin? To have fled the breath of a dragon instead of stand in its path and perish?"
"The lives that were mine to protect that were lost. My people... yours too in spite of your... predication toward the solitary life. Or have you forgotten?"
She caught his darkening glance in the mirror and glared back.
"I have not forgotten."
"This kingdom fell under attack this day. For your command, it could have ended with more pain than we could bear, ourselves or this kingdom."
Tears began to prickle the corner of her eyes, insult, guilt, stinging. She blinked them back with defiant force. "The only fatally-issued blood on the floor this day was that of an orc pack," she retorted.
"And were it a different result?" he snapped suddenly. "Then what?"
Her gaze struggled to find a place where it might hone and pierce. It drew itself to the intensity of her laryngeal swell, his terse narrowed eyes, stormy seas again, not her loving pools.
"To shut the gates and stand idly in watch as a fellow lord's own children fell, and their blood be on my hands?" Meisar exclaimed at him. "Never!"
"Do not speak to me of children and falling. My own sister's children… and for my sake! Do you think me ignorant of such a thing, Meisar? I have had blood on my hands a long while now, woman."
Cruel heat surged outward from her heart and rose like lava in her throat. She wanted to shout but only a hoarse protest came out. "Do not call me woman. I am your wife. I am your queen! And I am queen of this kingdom and will do for its sake what is right to be done, and not stain our gates on the blood of our neighbors, again!" Stiffening, she held her feet like glue to the ground underneath them, fighting, mightily, to keep herself from shaking in his presence, either from fear or from the sting of insult.
"And what of our own?"
"Yes, what of our own? I see our own coming hungry and destitute to our kingdom from the East. The soil of rich farmlands fallow, abandoned. They are coming, and something is pushing them. And now orcs, on our own spurs no less my king. This... shadow. Something… which may cause us great need of our neighbors' goodwill someday, I suspect."
"May I ask just what that is?"
"I do not know."
"Of course not," he said, bitterly. The way the shadows of the room cast themselves darkly over one half of his face momentarily frightened her, his expression almost as black. She rocked back slowly on the balls of her feet, somewhere in herself summoning the will to be angry, rather than frightened.
"Should you have shut the gates to the children of a fellow lord you would have made an enemy for all times. We cannot afford that."
"It would be a small price to pay with the lives of our own on the line."
She put her chin up, trying her best for a haughty obstinacy, a glare that she hoped might buffer him backward just a little. "There are no small prices in this world, not anymore," she held. "You should have learned that long ago."
"These children are worth your life? You could have been killed. What of our children then?"
The way it rolled from his tongue, sharp and accusing, yanked her shoulders backward from their stubborn squared pose. "Ours? We haven't any."
"Precisely."
Her cheeks stung together as if slapped once and then again on the opposite, her head wobbling from the pain. Thorin's eyes had never treated her sight so cruelly, his silence unyielding and pointed. Her mouth flopped apart, lips numb, but no words came out for several seconds. She was shaking so hard she could barely stand.
Was he right?
No. Those children live. I will never stand in regret. NEVER.
The tears finally rolled hot from her eyes. "By Mahal and Yavanna, would that I had authority over such a thing! And yet my prayers are unanswered, and you offer me such insult atop it!"
Thorin put his hands out defensively. "I do not insult you! I would see that you take care over yourself, and not... Mahal, my wife, would your life be forfeit for their sakes!? You are reckless beyond my words! I would not lose you for it!" he thundered.
"You would not lose me, but you would wound me with your words so? Perhaps you ought to then." She threw the fur-lined robe on over her bloodied shift.
"What nonsense do you speak now?" he growled.
"Tasakhi akhlatzunsh ak l'uslukh n'azghu," she said, her eyes weighted and sharp against him. She flung open the door with her dogs clinging worriedly at the hems of her clothes, whining, tailing her out.
"Where are you going?"
"To your sister's rooms. Some things only women can understand, Thorin. Cool your head. I may return in time. Perhaps."
.
La'i- Look!
Ikhrikab- Alarm!
Imkhimi- Form a Barrier at the Entrance!
Ibkiri- Arm!
Baistifi- Step Back!
Zaznel- Foulness of All Foulness
Jalaignig- Go at Once!
Tasakhi akhlatzunsh ak l'uslukh n'azghu- He sees the hawk on Gundabard but not the dragon in his view (focuses on trivial things rather than larger more pressing matters)