Khalith- Peace/Truces That Are New
Author's quick note: I am amazed at the response the last chapter got! I want to thank each of you who reviewed- JustAnotherGirl94, Fireelfmaiden1, hobbitpony1 (welcome back, wondered where you'd gone!), Stahly93 (my new dear friend!) and Angie.
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"Amthâg, sister! Such insult, cruelty! I must be away!" Meisar stormed into Dis's antechamber in a fury. Throwing the robe off, she left Dis and Elsa to gawk at the bloody chemise underneath. Her half un-plaited hair lay wild over her shoulders and down her back.
The nursemaid rose with her hands cupped over the bottom of her face. "Are you hurt, my queen?"
"No," Meisar answered caustically, sinking into Dis's armchair. "It is not my blood."
"I know," Dis came back plainly. Rising from behind her curtained bed, she surveyed Meisar's stained dress. "Elsa, good gracious, get her one of my robes. Off with this poor rag!"
She wrapped one of her bedrobes over her; it smelled of her perfume and stale wine. Meisar looked into Dis's eyes and found the skin sagging beneath her eyelids in dark circles, puffy with wear. The black wispy beard on her jawline was flattened from sleep, as if she had only just arisen. "Sister, I have never seen you in such a tempest."
The tightness in Meisar's neck eased as Dis hugged the bed-robe close around her shoulders. She exhaled, calming, but still raw inside. "Rarely has such a day come that a storm of this sort arrives on our doorstep."
"Arrives to insult you so? I would not take it personally from an orc," Dis offered. Her pale hands withdrew.
"So you have heard then?"
"News travels very quickly in this kingdom, even to my poor self here in my rooms."
Her clouded hazel-topaz eyes blinked tears away from Dis's view, red rims giving her away too quickly. "An orc speaks a language I do not even comprehend, so not insult stings me from its tongue. But Thorin? I refuse to look at him, Dis! It is like a knife in my stomach to hear him speak that way."
"What way is that? Sister, do come and say." Dis's listless eyes grew with abruptly with concern. The languor warmed, and she sat by Meisar's side, a cold hand coaxing the heated angst from her own.
She should have heard the frantic pattering of feet outside but it was too late.
"There you are!" Emli exhorted. "You were not in your chambers and your husband the king is in quite a disagreeable mood. For the commotion at the foyer I feared-"
"I am alright," Meisar insisted. "Unhurt."
Emli scowled as another pair of feet came pattering through the antechamber door and into the bedroom. "Ah, there is my queen, and in one piece," Aroin clucked, efficiently. "The king is in rather a sour mood at the moment, enough to snap at his own kinswoman." Aroin's crossed arms and pinched lips regarded Meisar with quiet patronage "I don't suppose your brief foray into orc-wrangling up the foyer today has anything to do with that."
Emli efficiently noted Meisar's tear-stained cheeks and issued a defensive supercilious glare toward her sister in law. "Tenacious, my queen. I hear the dragonslayer's children are swiftly healing."
"I can think of a sentry whose groin remains bruised however," Aroin followed, her amused grin never quite without its haughty pretense. "Those little feet have a sore kick, majesty."
"Then one of you may offer him my sincerest apologies," Meisar said icily.
"Brave but stupid," Aroin concluded. "But some say we dwarves shy from no fight, even to our own fault."
"You have some nerve to insult your queen with such words!" Emli scolded. Meisar gripped the rest of the chair and held her sudden swell of unhappiness in her throat. The cacophony in the space was making her head swim, heatedly.
"Leave us, if you would. There are things better discussed amongst ourselves," Dis urged, calmly. Reluctantly, Aroin and Emli withdrew.
"I think Bard will appreciate the gesture if no one else," she grumbled at Dis, easing her grip on the furniture.
"They will come to. It is not your orders after that draw the dark things near, nor the children's flight to our gate." Dis's eyes moved without her, her hands, on Meisar's shoulders, light and distant.
"I suppose I don't follow," Meisar said.
"My brother finds this disagreeable?" Dis redirected swiftly.
"There is a world beyond us we cannot ignore. It is a world that makes me fearful sometimes."
"There are things as well below this mountain that we ought not ignore but we blithely do," Dis said cryptically. Her lips pursed in regret finding Meisar blinking confusedly. Elsa silently twisted her hands, a look of disquiet behind her.
Dis turned and rose. "Well, now you have learned a lesson. It is not a dwarven marriage without these tiffs. We are far too obstinate even with those who are our closest in this life. I came to Thorin's stead enough times when Eili and I were rowing."
"I do not suppose your lack of an heir was ever the cause."
"He had a far fouler temper than Thorin." She set down her cup, a moment ago filled. "I was blessed to find my sons so easy in their temperaments, Fili anyway." She settled back into the seat as if she never intended to rise from it again.
"And Kili?"
"Prone to tantrums, but for a good cause, usually. He had a sense of justice in this world, which was uncanny. He thought beyond our own kin, like you." Dis touched the lockets hanging from her waist and her fingertips recoiled. "I see so much of him in you."
"What is in this mountain that we so blithely ignore?" Meisar asked more pointedly. When she spoke of her children, it made her ill at ease sometimes.
"A thing I might pontificate on another day, sister," Dis answered tiredly. "Now, it is better for us to see each other through our travails."
But she had already closed her eyes and all but drifted into a wine-infused sleep.
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She woke in the evening for a light supper, a soup of boiled chicken, leeks and garlic. Elsa insisted on a a haunch of roast hare with fennel to fortify her.
"I heard Donbur son of Bombur killed an orc in the foyer today," Dis finally said with an agreeable curve of a smile, serene, if not merely intoxicated into placidity. She raised her soup spoon to her lips and ate it steaming hot without so much as a wince. "It goes to show anyone that a dwarf under threat is no dove. When summoned toward that sort of hot-blooded courage, are not we all warriors born?"
"We have learned to be," Elsa said. "All of us."
"To think you would have speared one yourself is a moderately amusing thought," Dis relayed to Meisar, tight-lipped. "And for those who you would have thought all but strangers?"
"I was right in my action, in my command. I shall never be sorry for it!" Meisar said stubbornly. She reached across the table past Elsa and poured herself another cup of ale from Dis's flagon.
"I would never ask you to be.," Dis cajoled. "Will you stay here tonight? I would welcome your company."
"Should I?"
"I think so. Give Thorin time to think, about more than a few things, not the least his queen alas," Dis counseled.
The eventual knock at the chamber door could not have come at a more convenient moment.
"King asks if queen will return," Oliada inquired, stoic with discretion.
Meisar smiled and patted the red-armored shoulder of the sentry, her eyes still red and stormy. "Not tonight, Oliada. Not tonight..."
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"Your altruism garners my admiration, if it does not also unnerve me sometimes," Dis remarked as they turned down the top covers of her bed together. Elsa settled on her pallet bed and was assailed by the tongues of three hounds searching her face for traces of chicken broth. She shoved each off with a curse but by the time she had fallen asleep, swiftly so, Redcoat was cradled against her chest.
"You believe I did wrongly then?" Meisar intoned.
"A tribe must have loyalty to its own first," Dis said. "But a father's love is as a mother's; it should not know death. A princess believes you may have erred. A mother thinks you did right."
"And which are you?"
"My children are dead, sister."
Ignoring the the raw prickle on the back of her neck from Dis and Elsa's odd silence, she relented toward sleep, tucking herself into a cocoon of covers next to Dis, the princess's nightcap drawn low. On her pallet bed Elsa turned over. "Don't mind, my queen. She's been... thoughtful, the days past. Were that I knew what of."
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Thorin entered the crowded nook, assailed by the medicinal scents of every variety. Jars full of potions in a range of shades from bloody red to spring-moss and even orchid lined the shelves, and in the corner Oin bent over a long table, knife in hand carefully opening a long seam down the center of the orc's sternum to its stomach's pit. Thorin stepped closer and recoiled from the smell that bloomed from the dead orc.
"I require a dose of your wisdom, my friend," Thorin announced himself, his comma half smile peering down over Oin. The healer rose, bumbling toward his shelves up the elbows in blackish blood.
"A sleeping potion? Trouble of the stomach?" He reached up toward the shelf and drew back in disgust at the sight of his own hands, spinning and plunging them into the basin of water beside the table. Thorin sat as he scrubbed with a strong pine tar soap.
"A portent," Thorin said.
Oin stopped from churning his hands in the basin, sloshing it over the side, and drew back to dry himself with a towel that was quickly a rancorous shade of purple. "I must admit it is a strange request, even from a king. A portent shows itself. Rarely is it sought."
"But it can be."
"In reading the innards of a thrush, yes," Oin affirmed.
"It will do."
"Is my king troubled by some force?" Oin inquired.
"Perhaps, as is my queen," he admitted with tight vagueness.
"A potion to aid in the begetting of a child when there is a considerable passage of time without conception, a mixture that is oft employed consists of-"
"It is not that," Thorin snapped suddenly at him.
"I apologize for implying there was trouble then," Oin grumbled. Thorin pulled the opposite chair and sat across from him. "My queen is unhappy with me I'm afraid alas."
"The cause I cannot imagine," Oin grumbled. "She caused quite a a stir in the foyer the other day."
"What shadow lies beyond our reckoning?" Thorin asked abruptly. "The queen is certain a pack of orcs is not merely a pack of orcs, though I am inclined to believe it is. She speaks of a hawk on Gundabad flapping its wings, and accuses me of being too blinded upon the ground to see what it sees. There are days her sort of wisdom is very unfamiliar to me, and I wonder..."
Oin twisted the trumpet in his ear, trying to follow Thorin as his voice wandered into his own sphere at the end of his spiel. The king looked forlorn.
"That is a question whose answer may be a long quibble, and longer to read," Oin said.
"Then I shall be in want of it," Thorin reaffirmed, turning a swift heel. "I suggest you find yourself a thrush in the meantime."
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"He has spoken most unkindly, for that I have borne no children yet. It hurts more than for him to call me fool for my orders at the gates," Meisar whispered, high with shame. She turned over in Dis's bed to meet the princess's face more secretly, in the lull of the wee hours. She could not sleep. Not even the sisterly homeyness of Dis's presence could have coaxed her into it. "I am not young, Dis. I am afraid... I will not."
"You fear too much," Dis admonished in a whisper. Dis's nightgowns were all so fussy, belled sleeves and lace and silk linings. Meisar felt like a doll in her clothes, too stiff to move comfortably. Perhaps I have become too used to sleeping otherwise, free these trappings entirely.
'Tis as likely that he's impotent as you are barren," Elsa snorted from below.
"Elsa!" Dis scolded.
The nursemaid waved her off irreverently. "It works both ways, my lady. He's not in the swell of youth either, and you and I both know that a dwarf-woman may yet be gray-headed and become with child."
"And see," Dis half-cooed, stroking the orange flood of hair that was fanned out over to her side. "Not a silver or gray to be found yet."
"I think it is the maker's way of assuring our continuing on, seeing as we're as stubborn to regenerate. Need a bit more time is all," Elsa reckoned, assuredly.
"It is the one thing I find myself so... un-stubborn about," Meisar intimated. "It is what I desire above all things, and not just for Thorin's sake. Oh, I am cross with him, but I love him the same."
Dis smiled serenely in the darkness. "Aye, so we may be slow to forget our slights, but a One is always forgiven."
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The dwarrowdams came to Dis's chambers in the morning at Emli's direction to assist in the management of the governing papers that were backing up. They went diligently, if quietly, to work in the antechamber so not to disturb Dis's sleep, though it was past ten above the mountain. In the corner Siv and Freyda pored over a book of textile swatches and ribbon samples, earning stern looks of rebuke from Aroin and Emli, busy over their papers. Meisar took on her stack in silence, wishing to be part of no argument. It was not any quibble the elder dwarrowdams could not ignite and then settle against their young counterparts, for they loved doing so, so very much.
"Fine, but give me your thoughts first if it isn't trouble to your likes," Siv negotiated. "How is this for an autumn bride's colors? I rather like this one for my hair," she swept a curtain of ribbons down over the parchments.
Freyda sprung up in the corner. "But I'm kenning to be married in the autumn! Ye can't have us both married then!"
"Says who?" Siv shot back. "Don't see it set in the rule book in stone, Freyda."
"I claimed it so first! Not set in stone, only in honor, Siv!" Freyda exhorted.
"Meisar! You must disapprove of this!" Siv complained.
"You will simply have to settle the matter amongst yourselves," she snapped. "I have more important matters to attend to, than to see to your quibbles over ribbons and dates."
"I'll not be summer or spring as a bride! My hair'll wilt like a winter rose in the humidity," Siv whined. "Nor winter. Who marries in winter?" She laughed nervously when she realized Meisar was glaring at her. "Technically last moon o' autumn, m'queen. No insult."
"I'll not sweat in me gown in spring or summer, like the great forges!" Freyda squawked.
"You're just afraid Dwalin will get a sunburn on his head," Siv quipped back.
"I have had enough of insults," Meisar groused. "The two of you will settle this amongst yourselves. You will break a turkey's wishbone to decide the matter if you cannot settle it alone. That is final."
"You'll not hear the last of this, lass," Freyda warned Siv, to her irreverent waving-off.
"Enough. I will go to the gardens and see to the pumpkin stock. I trouble myself to find more agreeable company there!" Meisar pushed back her seat so violently it nearly toppled to the floor. She threw on her sun-hat and her thatched shoes, over the plain blue kirtle and belt she had donned for her morning comfort. Attire better fitting the peasants amongst tall women, Aroin was swift to admonish her, but she had gone.
The Stonefoot women at the hanging garden at first seemed incredulous to her appearance there. They had watched the onslaught of orcs from the gardens in horror. Gossip traveled quickly, even amongst their insular sorts. The Stonefoot matron Rebka knelt before her and blessed her courage in as many kind words as she had known in some days. "Those who dwell in this kingdom may be divided in their opinions," the dwarrowdam said. "But it takes a female to understand."
She sat and watched the afternoon sun begin to dip in the sky, blinding white of the heat of the day giving way to sharp tangerine and then pink. The pumpkins were beginning to sprout. She stretched out her feet and from her belt tumbled a stone that plunked itself in a crater down in the dirt. She dove for it, dirtying fingers in the soil, clearing it from the facade of the simple gray stone.
Honor. Skill. Beauty. As crudely as it had been written into the surface it was something solid and unbreakable. The Stonefoot women, who had been packing their tools into their rucksacks and their fresh crops onto baskets atop their heads, came and gathered around. The youngest of them, Mira, set a crown of blue flowers upon Meisar's head. "Blue for Durin's Line. It is always brave, and never broken," the girl pronounced in her heavy dialect.
Meisar burst into tears.
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Dis jerked up as the queen swept in, heaving breath.
"I need to be with him," she concluded quietly once she had settled in the seat beside her. Sweat or tears Dis could not adequately say, pooled at Meisar's armpits and on the collar of her dress. Her feet were dirty, and her knees and hands. "I do not want to be away from him another minute." She wiped her dirt-laced hands on the front of her dress. "I would swallow my pride if only..."
"Have a bath, sister," Dis interjected warmly. "Ease your weary limbs a bit, scrub the dirt off, and think of it."
"Yes, I may be in need I think," Meisar agreed, sighing exhausted.
Dis tossed a wrapped fragrant sphere of soap toward her. "Use this, all over. It has certain properties. He will never be able to resist you."
Settling, she waited for the embrocation of the myrrh onto her skin to soften her surfaces. Inside she felt prickly; the erstwhile apartness from him stung. She washed the dirt with a coarse brush that left her skin chafed before she applied the intoxicating soap Dis had given her. She lathered it into her armpits and between her thighs, all down their insides to her knees, and then her feet, washing between each toe. He would have her, like starting over, new and pure.
"Eili and I were the same sometimes," Dis assured gently as she tried her best to squeeze her hair to dry, dressing in a new chemise. "To blow hot and then realize you are too cold without each other... in all marriages, but especially dwarves, I think, it is the same." The warmth had come into Dis's countenance, which briefly relieved her, the distance she had kindled at once narrowed. She began lacing the back of Meisar's dress tightly, enough to make her breath hitch.
"Sister?" she half-gasped from the squeeze of it.
"Don't make it too easy for him."
By the time Griet had finished re-braiding her hair, as dry as it was going to get while their waking hours remained, Meisar's shoulders had begun to relax, surrendering to whatever end lay behind her own chamber door. Griet stood nearly two feet behind her, hair taut, finishing the ends of her braid with a pale blue ribbon. "For Durin's line," the maidservant said. "It is no easy task in defeating it."
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Their chambers, even from the outside of the door, lay as quiet as a tomb. She entered, on feet that could hardly bring themselves to cross the threshold. Underneath her dress her skin felt warm and supple and soft as silk. The silence echoed the susurus drag of her skirt hem on the bare stone. She slipped into the ajar door to the bedchamber.
Thorin, undressed for the evening to his tunic and pants, sat by the firelight and surveyed his correspondences in its glow. A more sensuous profile was never so strikingly rendered in that struggling light.
"There is no force that could keep me apart from you so long, not again," she announced her presence, cautiously, barely above a whisper.
As she watched his gaze sink and rise again from her feet to her face, she knew. There was a touch of dark irony in his expression, but more nakedly, a contriteness and uncertainty.
Thorin turned quietly from the fireplace, stood, put his arms out as if to beckon her into them. At her first step he took her hand and kissed it. The hesitant, if darkly thoughtful way his lips seemed to furl and pucker in stiffness, still lingering on the knuckles of her hand, his own fingertips considering the bend of hers slowly, she held her breath, only daring to glance up and see the bare part of his face flare with heat. He kissed the back of her hand chastely over the ridge of her knuckles, crossing from the smallest finger on her left hand to the smallest at her right, slow and intent, the way a journey over mountains might rise from foothills to peaks and down the outer hills again.
"Thorin," she breathed. She reached a trembling hand out to lay on his cheek, with just the fingertips. "Thorin…" She repeated herself when his fixed gaze didn't remove itself from just over her shoulder, toward the flickering of the sconce behind them as it puttered out. Her lips touching the naked part of his cheek jolted him, electric, back into the world, from whichever one he had occupied himself in.
"Adyum…"
He engulfed her mouth in his far beyond the borderlands of her lips, yanking all the air out from between them in that one swooping contact.
"There is nothing in the world that would make me wish to be apart from you, any longer," he heaved a ferociously hot breath. The coarse brush of beard magnified a thousand times, awaking after absence. His scent was sharp and needful, the hard brush of his lips against her own as potent.
She almost summoned the will to recall his rebukes, bitterly as dwarves would, but it would not rise so easily in her. "I could not see Thorin… children. I could not allow it," she sobbed into him.
"My good, good, queen I know." He held her cheeks and kissed them in turn over and over.
"Were that a child came to me for the sake of saving another… my own child, our own." She leaned against his elbow to balance herself, overcome.
He covered her face swiftly in apologetic kisses, wicking the tears. "One will. Many. I will see to it."
"How?"
"The only way that there is." He nipped teeth along her shoulder, moving swiftly to embrace her from behind. He crumpled her skirt in his hands, lifting it, moving to cup her bosom ferociously in his hands. "To bed with you now. Lie on your back."
"But you must help me then. My dress, it laces up the back. I cannot..." she turned, mercurial, stubbornly refusing him the sight of her desire, making her chartreuse eyes black with it, how they craved so craved mightily the adoration his own sad blue eyes had shown her, and first of all people they had ever turned to in carnal delight. I am your wife, I alone. She waited patiently as he undid the laces to the back of her dress.
Once the over-gown had been divested of her, she felt the back of his hand skim impatiently over her thighs through the thin fabric of her under-skirt. He flung her skirt up so that its hems brushed at the back of her head, her goodly plump bottom pale and trembling with curiosity for where his hands might roam or pillage, as he brought his rough palm down upon one, making her yelp in surprise. The skin tingled. His hands greedily encircled the hind globes, squeezing and kneading, pausing to give each a little smack again from behind.
"To bed with you," he whispered, a second time, with a tone that suggested a third would not suffice.
The heat, begetting once more that urgency to join his flesh with hers again, however brief and terse this absence. The lingering of bitterness that she had held in the back of her throat, wincing at his words, ebbed for good, allowing her to open herself more fully to this act of forgiveness, whatever he desired it be. Considering the smooth thighs with his fingertips, he retreated downward to set the hem of her under-skirt back over her knees and let it flutter back.
His nails sinking into her sides, she felt a demanding grasp migrate to her hips and suddenly her entire body was jolted as she was tugged downward and her legs lifted to rest over Thorin's shoulders.
Strands of hair he flicked irritably up from his face dragged along and tickled the inner plain of her thigh that was already tingling, smarting, from the trail of bites he had left. His eyes flicked up at her. His steady commanding grip over the top, thickest part of her leg, lunging forward against her with his mouth, sinking teeth into the flesh of her inner thigh, letting a stray lock of his hair fling itself forward to catch in the parted rosy channel of her slit.
"Is this what you missed, storming out on me?" His teeth sunk into the skin again and she arched her back desperately against it.
"I did." But inside she wanted him contrite, coiled in it so deep he would be loath to leave their bed ever again.
"I wish so much to possess every part of you my queen; I would not let you leave again," he growled against the sensitive line of her flesh where the orange tuft met the bottom-most crinkle of her belly. The way his beard migrated roughly over the sensitive, aroused heat below made her back arch sharply up from the bed in anticipation alone.
He growled long against the extant curtains of her sex, the luxuriant red-orange thicket showing the small pooling diamonds of moisture along the crevice that parted her. He traced a finger along its ragged arch where it met her belly, fine hair that could be parted as waves of grain in a field, one finger joining another to parse through, and find the waiting channel to part, as a glacier's first crack before it poured helplessly into some abyss. The abyss, like the Misty Mountains themselves, held smaller peaks and jagged paths, to find and be found. He placed his mouth upon that most secreted place of hers, licking from the fleshed crux to pearl and rounding about it. His tongue made swift, pointed circles around the nub as her legs squeezed with unbearable tensity about his head and drew back when he moved. Her knees drew up and spread her wider, for him. The buffed curves of her heels dug into his back and shoulders, offering a frantic massage.
He acknowledged her fleetingly, devilishly quavering a breath of laughter against her secret place. Her body twisted side-ways at the waist against the hold of his hands, his forearms flexing against her undulations, pinning her hips sturdily down to the sheets. She reached for the fur coverlet and grasped it in her hand.
"And are you near now, my tender-heart?" When his tongue slid inside her again, his fingers found the hood of her rose diamond and slipped beneath it to massage the smarting pearl so avariciously the stimulation of it stopped her breath.
"I cannot hold! Thorin!"
How cruelly, how intently, he could halt her on that precipice and draw back, when only thus he had made every single one of her muscles concentrate in pure, unfiltered ,wanton joy. Her obstinacy seemed so flimsy now, her limbs quaking, holding themselves at once stiffly then slack again in surrender.
He rose from kneeling at the foot of the bed with a predatory swiftness and intent that she did not see until the abrupt dip of the bed jolted her and all of his weight suddenly shifted against her. There she could feel the true warrior's strength, the relentless fiery dwarven will that left her own trembling for mercy. His hand was large enough to gather both of hers by the wrists and pin them indelicately above her head.
"What shall you do to me my king? What can you do to me?" It throbbed relentlessly between her legs. His fingertip plucked her nipple like the string of a harp until it hardened, idly, where elsewhere he himself grew hard and she watched the way it was curling up against his body already, flushed and eager, even under his clothes.
"Do? I intend to torment you until you come apart in my hands, woman."
"Did I tell you not to call me- oh!"
He had slowly, with intent teasing, traced every line and seam of her womanhood, slid two fingers up the flooding channel and teased the edges of the outer lips in tandem. The fibers of her drew up tight inside against that touch, so pointed, so ardent, nothing enigmatic about their intent.
"There?" he questioned, carnal. "Is that my queen's most secret place?" The tip of his finger found the delicate end of the swollen stalk and stroked it, as one finger clandestinely plunged inside, her body rushing to expand and fit the second of them that slid inside her, their thickness pressed in and out. His fingers had always been so attentive, as skilled in the closed velvet walls as plucking the harp strings to make a beautiful song. The first pointed movement of his fingers sliding inside her drew a moan from her. There was a haughty smirk on his lips from it.
"I think there, yes. I found it, my queen. You are not very good at hiding from me, are you?"
"You are akin to losing your way I hear," she gasped.
"Then tell me, if you are the shepherdess still, what path to take. Guide me then."
"I am your queen!" As shepherdess I will guide you all from the path of the wolves, as queen... THORIN!
She had all but croaked the word. The fingers crooked inside of her held her climax captivated, pulling away from sweet spot while Meisar clenched and unclenched the soaking walls against Thorin's digits. Seething desire, un-appeased, the finger curling as if to pull her to that edge and dangle her over it, her feet trembled, not against the furs beneath her heels, but on the air, suspended in her yen. He thrust in and out until he had her squirming and bucking against his hand. Fingers slid to rub her swollen pearl, bring her to a quivering edge and halt, with that same haughty grin that made her hiss at him in return.
"Miss me you did," he growled, in him an ardent, singular need of this one moment, the bliss of her expression, his own doing, and he, the only one who would ever be inside her with any of his digits, and look upon her face when she came to the brink and spilled over it. It quaked violently up through her abdomen with every bump of his tip against the inner centrifuge. Against her own will, she offered a swift upward undulation in surrender against him.
Heated essence, long pooling, sprung from her when he let his thumb twitch once and last against the rose-diamond. The vibration of her zenith resonated thrumming against his palm, with every wild writhing undulation of herself beneath his touch. He growled and grunted with such self-satisfied pleasure as she rode it out on his fingers.
In a fleeting haze of a moment, his tunic was raised off, tossed blindly, and the taut muscles of his torso that had sung beneath her fingers with urgency for her calmed, distracted, with the snap of the leather laces parting and being fitfully shoved off. The veins on the side of his bicep standing up as he knelt over her. She pressed her palm up against his warm, furred chest and stroked the slight rise of the pectoral, Thorin finding his way to her. He pinned her wrists against the bed and let the ends of his hair trail over the tips of her bosoms, once he had torn open the remaining calico of her calico top, and then kissing, biting, until she was tender. His belly undulated with the stiffness of self-control barely aware of its own struggle, against hers, rocking quietly between her thighs, against the pearl with the swollen head. Thorin still left the muscles in her stomach tight with anticipation when she felt the firm heat of him on her entrance. Growling, plunged into her, to the very core of her that ached for him.
She stroked the she hard sheaths of sinew and muscle from his shoulders to the quavering narrow of his back, pausing along the spine to scratch outward from the column with blunted nails, her knees drawn back so far they bumped against the inner folds of his elbow, perched over her, quavering on their support of his weight. On the first eager thrust they buckled over her. Blunt fingertips kneaded at the back of his neck when his hair flung forth and spilled upward over them, capping her head, exposing the nape of his neck to the heat of her fingers, the distant caress of the candle.
"Will my queen leave me again in anger?"
"If you do not anger me."
He rewarded her cheek with a hard thrust, her head thrown back forcefully, a motion so ardent it made her gasp harsh enough he thought the wind had been stolen from her. Her legs quavered and buckled against his, and swiftly, before she could regain herself, grasped onto her hair by the root and pulled her back to gaze savagely up at him once more. The savage abrasion of kisses over her lips, pinned to her, tongue-to-tongue, their wresting for dominance of each other's warm domains there growing in ardor, wild, out of step to the thrusting of his hips far below. One, then again. Inside she was too numb from the pleasures he had offered before to consider her own enjoyment of the act, only abet his own with small rolls of her hips up against his, an act of forgiveness she could easily bear.
Blooming inside, ferocious with heat, every fiber shifted, widening, as if… the part of her that lay at the gate of her womb had bowed open just like the doors of a great hall, in welcoming, and welcome she did. Rocking and panting, a river breaking through a dam the moment he reached his zenith, only opened her further, well as split down the middle, bared and visceral, but more alive than she had ever been.
He came in stuttering heaves of breath, yielding in small jerks that eventually calmed as his elbows buckled over her, and rested, finally over her. He would leave his touch floating in her blood long after. In the meantime, she settled against his broad chest and listened to the coming-down of his heart from its furious zeitgeist.
His bottom lip grazed, exhausted, up the stiffened cartilage of her neck, nose finding the uncovered jawline, savoring the touch of the bare skin there. Meisar the Beardless.
"Thorin, look at me." She guided him by his chin with her fingertips, to meet her eyes. "I do not wish to be apart from you. In rashness, perhaps I thought it wise." The back of her hand followed his jawline and fanned out in fingertips that traced the outline of his ear. "How swiftly it is I miss you."
"My queen..." he kissed her hand, exhausted. "My pining I imagine comes yet swifter for you. I have thought..." he grasped her by the zaftig globes he adored so much to bring her closer, kiss her head in a series of sighs that wandered off into a quiet, rapturous silence. "There is something in the way you see this world that frightens me, and blesses me all the same." He felt the thick soft thigh lie over his and the shreds of her clothes. Her under-skirt lay soaked in his seed and her own desire, and torn to shreds. She undid and slid out from under and flung the useless garment from her body onto the rug below.
"I have only just had a new set of under-linen made. What ever shall I tell the seamstress?"
"You may tell her it is for having been so well-loved. That you are, always."
.
In the morning when she woke, Thorin had gone. Quietly, it seemed, even urgently. The clothes he had put out for himself the night before were still hung over the armoire door. She could feel the ghost of a kiss on the peak of her cheek, still dewy with the warmth of that touch.
He had not wanted to leave her. He had kissed her cheeks and her hands and the bare nape of her neck so many times, but she had not even stirred.
.
"The Lord of Dale has been calling upon you all morning, my king," Ori said nervously. "He is in the council chambers with Balin."
Gloin paced the space behind Bard in the chamber. The lord of Dale sat over a plate of sweetmeats and bread and ale that the steward had brought, eating with quiet impatience.
"I bid you morning, my lord," Thorin offered. Bard stood and bowed shallowly. "I expect your children are healing well. If not, we offer our healers' services readily."
"They are each well enough," Bard replied. "I came because this attack has been troubling my mind. I have been thinking of where they may have arrived, what means we may employ to discover their origins. It may be that they are not alone."
"The dwarves beneath this mountain have been rattled enough by the presence that struck us, as I imagine your citizens have been. Alas, as king, my duties are many, and many important days still linger on my calendar to come. Is this of such significance I would alter those?"
"They tell me that the queen has some skill in the art of tracking and... a general knowledge of the wild-land ways. Might these months beneath the mountain have diluted it I wonder?"
"And what purpose would I serve in answering that?" Thorin asked defensively.
"I propose a party of trackers to ride out and seek the origins of these beasts. If we know, we may raid and kill them at the source. My men are willing. Are your own?"
"Oin has taken the beasts into his workshop to dissect, and summoned several dwarves whose experience as healers lends them knowledge to the origins of various flora and fauna that might be found upon them. It should tell us enough."
"The safety of my kingdom is paramount, my lord," Bard said, exasperated. "You seem utterly uninterested, to which I dare say I... find myself in a frustrating position. I urge you, my king."
"Let us see what Oin has to say then," Thorin suggested, rising sharply. "If you do not mind a brief sojourn, my liege." Bard dipped a nod of agreement, Thorin glaring over his shoulder back toward him. "Additionally, I would prefer it if you left the queen out of any further negotiations. I will speak with her on that matter myself."
In the healers' halls, Oin grumbled, looking up from the bloody scene as a coterie came in. Dwarves perusing his jars of ointments and potions quietly filed out past the king and the Lord of Dale.
"Will you tell us what their corpses have rendered you in knowledge?" Thorin inquired of Oin. "Their deaths, perhaps a picture of their lives, wretched as they may be."
"Had this one's head not been so considerately separated from his shoulders he would have a far more unpleasant experience of death. A pity it was put from its misery so swiftly," Oin began.
"Thanks to Master Donbur I suppose," Thorin smirked. Bard did not.
"Rather ironic too, to be maimed by such a mouth-watering pot o' stew," Oin observed.
"Ironic?" Bard's brows shifted, impatiently. The smell was beginning to make him feel faint.
"A light kick to the stomach would have been that one's fate, a slow fate, and that he got. It was right full, the cavity, stretching at the seams. As if he gorged himself to bursting and did not know to stop."
"A last supper of my daughter's horse," Bard said caustically.
"It would not come as a surprise. They are each emaciated," Oin explained.
"They attacked out of hunger then perhaps? Desperation for sustenance?" Thorin inquired. "How does one eat a horse and burst so?"
Bard winced silently at the thought.
"It is not my prerogative to question the motivation of one such as this foul being. But certainly they were in need of refreshment. See here," he pulled the bubble of the stomach, oozing, from the cavity of the dead orc's middle and showed it too close to Bard. "The liege of Dale's children not being that refreshment, it seems they ate at least one of their own mounts in addition to the girl's. Fur and all." He turned out the lining to show the undigested warg skin clinging to the walls, smelling of death and wet fur.
"For what cause? From what station? What do you say now to my proposal, majesty?" Bard urged.
"In two month's time I shall host a large delegation of my kin from the Iron Hills, and have that to contend with preparing. Now this bedlam lays at our gates. My liege, I am in no mood for added burdens."
"That does not trouble the cares of the world, the king under the mountain's mood," Bard lectured, to Thorin's perceptible vexation.
"Like a vanquished peoples wandering in the wilderness, a gang of stragglers. I think it to be no more concern," rebuffed Thorin.
"Separated from the larger pack," Bard suggested forcefully. "Or on run from a home base. Scouting perhaps."
"Do not you have a pack of good hounds and a few trackers yourself, my lord? You come asking me for this? A dwarf?"
"I had several expert trackers amongst my kin, but they are all dead. None in the city have volunteered in light of my inquiries for one. I have heard you are familiar with a very good one alas."
"Perhaps I am." Bard stood stoutly as the king's chest rose and fell in stiff annoyance before him. "Perhaps I shall speak of this to her, if she will hear me." Bard made an inquiring harrumph at the way Thorin's voice trailed off, acerbic and slightly wistful together.
"But I shall not place my queen in the path of hazard. Not again, and certainly not for your whims and unfounded suspicions," the dwarf king adjudged pointedly.
"Very well," Bard acquiesced with a tired glare. "Perhaps then I shall find another way. A path... around this conundrum of ours."
.
Amthâg- insult