Author's Note: I suppose there comes a time when you know you are too far gone, researching the symbolism of birds to fit the current dilemmas in your narrative, and checking them against the Atlas of Middle Earth to make sure they are inhabitable to the local climate and season.
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"You are quite sullen I think, my love," Meisar observed over her shoulder toward Thorin, circling around his writing desk with his shoulders stooped over it. A wind, unbidden, swooped down the broad conduit of the chimney above the fireplace, swirling the night air in the chamber, rustling stagnant pipe smoke from where it had pooled, growing effervescent by the minute, in the cranny above her vanity. She exhaled of her pipe's contents again, watching that same wind inhale voraciously back up the chimney, channeling the smoke swiftly with it. The white dove's-tail of the smoke caressed Thorin under his nose and made him twitch, turning his attention to her at last.
"Naturally. I was compelled to leave you far too soon this morning." His heavy hands rubbed her shoulders and pressed thumbs in gentle circles around the nape of her neck. In the mirror his eyes were drowsy in the slow, windless flicker of the candles next to the vanity.
"For what cause?" She placed her hand on her shoulder over his, stopping their motion. His hand fluttered under hers.
"The nattering of men. It is ceaseless." He shed the padded over-shirt that was worn beneath his dark extant robe, tiredly flung over the nearby table itself. In the stubborn grips of summer's last breaths, he did not wear a lighter tunic beneath any of it. He slid into the bed over the furs in his trousers, lay atop them on his back.
She had come to understand a longer spell of silence to bespeak a certain impatience for her to join him, but his eyes kept a glazed stare up at the ceiling even as she crawled over him to her side of the bed and settled close to his side. Summer was on his skin, a dwarven summer- sweating iron and a hint of summer ale almost skunky from the heat, and her pipe-weed. She wrestled her arms from the floppy sleeves of her robe and lay atop the fur cover beside him, the thin straps of her sleeveless shift twisted around her shoulders. The unrobed stalk of her leg lay over his, but he seemed to pay her little mind, and dozed to sleep as quickly as he had lain down it seemed. She watched the steady rise and fall of Thorin's chest as the candles started to gutter out. The sound of her husband's breathing comforted her and kept her attention raptly on him. His breaths were his way of telling her what was happening in his heart, and in his head, when he would not tell her himself. Some things even his stubborn shell would not hide, but would not yield in plain words either.
"There is not something you are not telling me, Thorin Oakenshield," she sighed, too quietly to wake him.
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Early in the morning, a steward came with Griet to the door of the antechamber. Thorin was already gone to his duties at the council chamber and the rabble of dwarrowdams had huddled once again to attend on their piles of petitions, payments and wedding plans, the latter as always scolded down against the petulance of the betrothed and their manuals of jewels and fabric swatches.
"My queen, there are two children here, who wish to see you," the maidservant announced. Meisar nodded an affirmation with some bemusement. Yrsa and Anbur never asked; they simply tumbled in with crumbs on their clothes, seeking sweets and small tasks to occupy them. But now the door opened and two lithe figures ducked beneath its frame to pass, hesitating just on the opposite side of the threshold. The escorting stewards departed behind them, leaving Bain and Tilda before the coterie of dwarrowdams. Busy at their papers, stacks of coins, and thick books of textile samples, they looked up in cool curiosity at the two.
Bain ducked a quick polite bow and nudged Tilda to a clumsy curtsy. The scars on his forehead were healing, if crusted over thickly, and the girl winced as she stood straight again.
"Little lordling and little lady, what a fair showing!" Eda crowed. Her exuberance seemed to put the two at ease, but they passed through the gauntlet of dwarrowdams timidly toward the queen, each silently staring. Meisar, elegant if at ease in the morning in a loose caftan of coral silk and a fur bed-robe, gave them a more familiar look.
"To what do we owe this visit? Come, won't you join us, young lord, and lady?" Meisar offered.
"We have come, my queen, to bring you a gift of thanks," Bain said. "Silks for your ladies, and perfumes." He set a bundle wrapped in fine linen, its contents clinking within, upon the table and let it fall open to reveal a cluster of perfume bottles, bulbs of rose-glass and geometric urns of pure onyx. Tilda struggled the four bolts of jewel-colored silks up beside it, nudged aside by the swarming dwarrowdams, Siv in a swirl of salmon and pale peach that bloomed around Tilda and swept her close to Eda's side.
"The brightest indigo one there- she'll have a whole gown made from it, with big skirts and sleeves. She's going to look like a blueberry," Eda smirked, squeezing the girl's hand, as Siv laid her claim.
"I like these tall-folk after all," Siv squealed over the fabrics. The dwarrowdams plucked the stoppers and inhaled the fragrances greedily. Jasmine and rose-water, frankincense and sweetened fennel swiftly clouded the room.
"Come, girl, embrace me as your friend," Emli beckoned Tilda. Still many inches taller than the dwarrowdam, she stepped to her timidly and was crushed nearly breathless in her embrace. "Now," Emli said, peeling Tilda back efficiently. "I do not suppose you have only come to bring us gifts."
"I... we," Tilda stammered. "We came to give the queen our thanks for preserving our lives and..." she looked up at Bain nervously.
"A dwarf has ways of seeing things for what they are," Emli explained succinctly to her.
"Father does not believe King Thorin will hear him properly on the matter. We thought to come to you," Bain answered for them. His dark eyes darted, around the edges of hope.
"Then you are both in that habit," Meisar sighed. He has his father's quiet lot of strength, and his forbearance, bless him. "Though I respect your motivations, I hope it will not become a crutch. Thorin and I govern together, and we are not akin to keeping secrets, you ought know."
"It is not polite to circumvent the king in any case," Aroin scolded, hoarding several bottles of perfume in her jeweled pouch. Tilda shrank behind Bain.
"I will hear them nonetheless," Meisar said firmly. "They come in good faith. Now for what matter, I ask."
"Come now, sit where you please," Emli offered sweetly, deflecting Aroin's haughty appraisal of the two.
"They say you lived in the wilderness all alone once, like a ranger. Can you look at the ground and read it like a book?" Tilda sat up straight on the cushioned stool that she occupied, in a dress of summer linen sprinkled in tiny flowers, burgundy and blue, against the gray. She wore with it a high collar of Laketown lace, yellowing with her perspiration already. Her dress was that of a woman far older, Meisar thought, the girl, though swiftly flowering toward womanhood, still bearing the wide look of a child's, soft and pink at the cheeks from the summer sun. Her mousy hair was beginning to turn a finer shade of honeyed brown, worn in stubs of braids that grazed her shoulders.
In contrast, Bain was as swarthy as his father, but pale and serious together, a mop of dark hair growing long like Bard's, hanging at that awkward length just below the ears, to short to tail or braid. He ate sparingly of the plate of crumbled cheese and twists of dried goat-meat and flat-breads, that were offered to them by Brynja and Gyda, though Tilda ate with aplomb.
She remembered eating a hearty plate, years ago, with the same enthusiasm. What hardships had these poor lambs known? Nary a dwarf had been a stranger to hardship, and Lake-Town had been a rude outpost during the dragon's sleep. All the same there was a fierce need in her to envelop them in a certain aegis. There was a lord in Dale but no lady. Nothing was more acute than a mother's absence. A dwarf-mother, like a mother of any tribe, was first compelled to shield her children. For them it had been done once, and as fierce as then, might be again, she imagined, though it still felt foreign to her, like a bird that came home to find its eggs vanished, a foreign sphere in their place.
"To an extent," Meisar answered finally, purposeful in her modesty. "Scent-hounds like Raincloud there are necessary aids," she gestured warmly to the gray dog that had climbed Tilda's skirt and lay belly-up in her lap. The notion of what they had come for made her queasy though. Redcoat was hiding under her skirts again, thumping his tail out from under the hems in warning, like he did when he was ill at ease for some cause.
"It is the orcs, majesty," Bain went on. "Father believes that the pack was not starving survivors. He fears they may be yet more, and with a stronger source. He asks that we come to you, my queen, and see what we can do, together, to discover and eliminate that source."
"How do you heal, little lordlings? I imagine you are sore still, and to come all this way," Eda inquired, maternally, buffering Meisar for a moment while she considered their dilemma. Her weathered tenderness took the bite from Aroin's stubborn glare. Bain knelt as she checked his scars, felt his ribs.
"What does your father propose exactly?" Meisar asked.
"A tracking party, to range out beyond our lands and seek their origins. We have no trackers, or none willing. Will you be an accompaniment? If the king will allow it," Bain replied. A furtive glance stolen about the room indicated the quarrelsome, if silent, disapproval of the dwarrowdams, but he pressed on.
"The king is my husband. Some believe it is a woman's duty to capitulate to her husband's wishes in all matters, and I don't think he will easily convinced."
Tilda's eyes sunk but Meisar gave her a small reassuring quirk of a grin. "But we dwarves are far too stubborn to see one thralled by another entirely. I will seek his counsel on the matter. But you ought know that our husbands seek nothing more fiercely than to protect us, and it will be no easy task."
"My queen, he is most welcome to-" Bain started to say.
"A risky venture, for certain," Meisar interjected, with some trepidation. "Some say three quarters of their whole race were vanquished by that one battle. But a fourth of their population is still formidable, wherever they lie and regroup. It is what any vanquished tribe aims to do- replenish. Nature imbues it in us to fight for our survival at all costs."
She smiled tenderly at the children, but with unease stirring aptly. "We dwarves know well enough the desperation for replenishment after such a slaughter. Our race was lost by half, in the Battle for Moria alone. Do not think orcs are much different, when faced with annihilation. How nature makes us all alike in that way."
"I am not afraid, and neither is my father. Well, in truth, my lady, I think he is afraid... but I know not entirely of what, beyond the obvious," Bain confided. "At Esgaroth and in Dale there is great disquiet. I think this matter must be resolved, or it will continue."
Meisar considered him in silence for a moment. Bain was careful not to meet her eyes too directly and press her from her contemplation. "You worry for your father's sake," she concluded finally. "Leave the work on Thorin to me."
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Thorin had been hearing the quorking of the ravens all afternoon, even at the distance of the front gate. Ravenhill was welcoming a steady parade of them, from all points, circling and one-by-one seeking refuge within the tower rookeries. Dis had gone too- to the tombs or the cellar-market for trinkets, Elsa reckoned- but could not be certain. He had sought her, but decided his burden was unlikely to be shared by her, after all. But Meisar. The stealth of her will, quiet in reckoning until it reared, frightened him. She left too many things unsaid in the meantime.
She swept across the room soon enough, to his gratification, trailing the heavy perfume behind her. "Come to me, Thorin. Do you like this scent." She pressed his nose into the flank of her neck in embracing him. "It was a very fine gift I received this afternoon."
"From who?" his voice rumbled with placid curiosity into her skin. It was a serene scent, warm like her, cooler edges softened out much like the first winds of an oncoming autumn, but still foreign somehow. He set his arms quietly about her waist and tugged her closer.
"Bain the Master of Laketown and his sister, Tilda. Bard's children, as I'm sure you know."
"He did not announce their coming," Thorin stepped back. The long arms of her perfume outstretched after him.
"Why? They did not come for you; they came for me." The plump heart of her mouth drew in tightly. Her pride, once so meagerly expressed, had a way of voicing itself, sullenly when challenged now.
"An imprudent gesture. Bard should have informed me." Thorin turned away from her and crossed his arms solemnly over the table, strewn in parchments again. Ori, and Meisar's scribe, were bringing them in stacks faster than either of their councils could reckon swiftly enough. He could smell the acrid vestiges of the wet ink. It crawled up his nose and seemed to curl the hairs there. He craved her perfume again.
"You are very testy with the dragon-slayer, Thorin," Meisar attested. "Do you truly keep him in such enmity?"
"A man who once claimed what is mine..." Thorin grumbled. "Who says he will not again?"
"Claim? He has come to claim nothing, Thorin. Only to make a small request of us. A tracking party will set out to seek the orcs' source, and destroy it if we can. He has begged my skill of it in the matter."
"Of us? Or of you? Are there no trackers in his city? No wandering rangers stalking the inns? Or does he believe my queen to be naively swayed by the proposals from the mouths of babes? Shakhaka ai-targkhi."
"Useless," Meisar half-spat. "I have no beard," she reminded him with a tip of bitterness on her tongue lingering. "Besides, what use is it to assume what his intentions are? I think they are quite clear."
"Men can be less plain their dealings than dwarves. I have spent more time conferring in their midst than you have. Perhaps you have been smart enough to avoid them in your long-ago travels, but it will do you no favors now."
"Regardless, I am very sure you were invited also," Meisar said. "I would have refused otherwise. Would be quite improper."
Thorin sat down and crossed his arms, sullenly. "And did you give approval for this notion? I'd hope you would confer with me. I'll not have some green lord get ahead of himself with my wife."
Meisar stifled a smirk that was almost at his concern, green-eyed in nature and almost petulant. "Ah, so that is it. Do you think he attempts to claim me? For what? Truly Thorin, ma ikhyij thaiku khama nurt ze' suruj."
"He is the one who leaves my halls empty-handed, to his petulance, and thus sends his children to you. He supersedes me, stealing your time like a thief in the night. It is not an honest dealing," Thorin asserted grumpily.
"It is if he has exhausted the honest options. You really should have told me." Her light cloak fluttered behind him, the perfume starting to ebb from her midst. Sitting, he reached his arms to settle firmly at her waist, drawing her back.
"I did not think it worthy of troubling you, adyum."
She placed her hands over his and brought them together before her to hold. "All things in this kingdom are worthy of troubling me with. I am the queen, and I do not have the luxury of my duties being solely in bearing an heir to you. I'll not hide like your kinswoman of old. Besides, there are only certain hours that I might be abed with you in that matter. The rest I will try and make use of myself."
He thought he saw a gleam of woe in her face, the way her mouth twitched ahead of itself and she halted its expression resolutely. The lids of her eyes drew down when she was sad, he had found. (He didn't know if she knew it).
"Abed. Or by the fireplace, over that table there, in the bath..." Thorin cracked wise, in his stilted if indubitable way.
"Now is not a time to humor me so, my husband." Her eyes were sharp and cross in response, the lids drawing back to meet his eyes in sharp conscience, a sight he had not known since the first days upon the road, when the drunken lot of traveling dwarves were slow to obey her.
"It was unworthy of me. My apologies," he grumbled.
"Forgiven. I should have known you would hearten me, always. She touched his cheek with her fingertips still smoky from her pipe, leaving a tiny smudge. "Alas, you may have need of friendship one day, if not friendship, then a good alliance. I would like to know where these orc filth have come from. If there are more, it may be to the detriment of all of us."
"Stragglers and outlaws like these... they were slain by the hundreds in the marshes and on the borders of Mirkwood by elf and dwarf alike, months beyond that battle. I should think them too weak for detriment."
"Are you perturbed by this notion because you truly believe us safe, or are you so annoyed that it was Bard's idea?"
Thorin's hands withdrew swiftly from hers and he tucked them sharply into his armpits, crossing them again about his chest. "Us? Do you mean the dwarves of Erebor? The men of the lake? Gondor? Should I send a raven to Bilbo Baggins in the Shire and warn him of evils to come?"
"Have I touched a nerve?"
"Yes," Thorin grunted.
"Then let me touch another, and one that you just may find relevant. If there is some rabble in these lands, who's to say the westward path from the Iron Hills will be safe? They are all wilder-lands, and half their span we hear no news from. What better place for dark forces to kindle their enmity again?" Meisar put forth, deflecting Thorin's mordancy. But something about his words tickled her in a dark pit in her stomach, inexplicably.
"Iron ore and minerals of all stripes travel between our kingdoms with an uneventful regularity. We have seen or heard nothing to note that would deem it unsafe."
"As did children ride horses and swim in the fall-pond in the shadow of the gate until a week ago."
"I would be much gladder to focus on the arrival of my kin in the coming days, less to speculations about their journey," Thorin grumbled, but deflated. "From the safety and comfort of this mountain, where I might do my duty, and guard your life with some assuredly. It is all I desire. I would be lost if anything befell you. I..."
"You shall never lose me, Thorin," she whispered, cradling her cheek into his hair. "You are my first thought and my last."
"Your will is so stubborn, mizimel," he lay his head on the dark fur of her mantle, where the perfume clung deepest. "It is far beyond my ability to understand why you hearten to some things. I am afraid it is going to destroy you someday, and I will not see it coming."
Curse him, the dragon-slayer. How easily he has found the chink in my hide, and here now, see, wretched waterlogged upstart, I have bared my chest in blind pride. Now loose your arrow, and pray that you miss.
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He sought Oin when the small council had dispersed for supper later that evening, but the healer had words for him that reminded him of childhood tutors, eager to curb his impatient habits.
"I gave you forewarning that portents do not show themselves for our convenience," Oin lectured. "Alas, if meant to be, they are here before us, if we are willing to look for them." The nook smelled of overripe melons or some sort of gourd, and something green. Oin filled empty bottles of his solutions and ointments, varied in color and scent, but rosy in comparison to orc rot. He went on with his work while taking Thorin's audience.
"Then what news?" Thorin inquired.
"Much, in fact. Perhaps it was meant to be that you sought a window in the first place. To start, I have seen a magpie amongst the black birds that take shelter upon this mountain, our friends of raven-kind being the most obvious. But the magpie, my king, is a cunning prophet. It flies unseen amongst the ravens, unless you yourself are clever enough to see it slip by, for its own purpose, right under your nose. More oft than not, we are blind to it, by no fault of our own."
"Today I have failed at that it seems," Thorin lamented. "A worthy portent perhaps."
"A magpie has a reputation as a thief, in particular the more... brilliant of objects, particularly if they sparkle and shine. They have been known in the days of old to snatch diamond and emerald right up from their cases in the markets, sunder them away for some secret purpose," Oin quirked a brow smartly at Thorin. "Does a jewel thief slip under your sight this day perhaps? I have heard the dragon-slayer left the gates in a very terse mood."
"In spirit perhaps, he slips beneath my sight, but not my queen's," Thorin admitted. "A cunning prophet, this jewel-thief bird you say? What of the magpie's children then?"
"A magpie's children? Ah, well, you see, in addition to being a thief amongst its other less fortunate connotations, the magpie is also a creature that is ill-served in a state of loneliness. So perhaps it keeps its children close, as good parents ought. Alas, it seeks new friends. Urges us, by its presence, to seek them ourselves. To forgive petty slights under our roofs, for a greater cause."
"And what of the shadow? What of a darkness that lays at our door, which lays unseen still?"
"Ah, and now here, that is what I have found most... intriguing, now that I am keen to open my eyes, since you requested I do so. I see a shadow, but a distance. It is far, far at the horizon yet. Perhaps a small and passing thing, perhaps far greater. It cannot yet be said."
"Meisar reads the earth sometimes as you read the body. It is wordless, yet it speaks."
"I find her sort of wisdom very uncanny still. Alas, I know only this: there is always a shadow, my king. Such is the world. Our strength lies in reading at the gathering storm-clouds rather than the rain that comes of it. Go above the mountain once in awhile. Perhaps you shall learn to read it, as we each learn the texts of our crafts and gifts, be they written plain or not."
"How does one stop a shadow?" Thorin asked.
"Easily enough, the answer at least; it must be destroyed at its source. You must destroy the force that casts the shadow in the first place. But that is not a portent. It is only common wisdom."
"Seems logical, but how to we do that?" Thorin pressed on.
"We don't. We strengthen our defenses, and fight it when and if we must. That is the dwarven way of things at least."
"So I ought dismiss this so-called tracking effort as a ridiculous waste of time?" Thorin said, hopefully.
"On the contrary," Oin rebutted sharply. "My brother will tell you that a king with loyal kin has no need of friends, only benefactors, But the portents have always pointed out the weaknesses of relying on friends whose goodwill stands atop a pile of gold. You see, when a shadow falls, it may fall on all the world some day, and you may find yourself in need of some ally who has proven themselves loyal beyond fickle gains."
"The Lord of Dale pesters me about the matter. I believe we've more important matters to attend to here at home," Thorin tried to reckon.
"Which brings me then to the final of the curious birds that have come about these halls. A red-shouldered hawk sailed its way over the foyer not several days past, as I advertised to the city the healing properties of the the pumpkin-pulp poultice, yielded of the queen's own gardens no less and-"
"Inflammation and sore joints. I am familiar with the poultice. Now what of the bird?"
"Patience, my king. The red-shouldered hawk is a migratory bird of a moderate breadth of travel, but very akin to making a home at one place, which it will seek very faithfully even after long times gone. Fond of oak trees..."
Oin made an exasperated face toward Thorin's own, his swift nods of acknowledgement echoing the plink of his braid beads against the silver clasp of his sur-coat. "It is also a bird known to join with its typical rivals to fend off threats to its nest. The loss of its home is a grave wound which it will fend off vigorously, but it will not lose its head for its pride. It calls upon others to sturdy its place in the world, lest it all be lost."
"A very clever parable," Thorin commented.
"Do not forget our own prophecies, with or without the messages of the birds," Oin chided. "A king of friend and kin has need. It might be best you remember that."
Curse him, he has found it, my weakness, but Durin's Beard, by all curses, he has found hers too. As the bowman held the Arkenstone in his palm, the magpie holds again the most precious of jewels. Alas, the arrow is swift.
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Shakhaka ai-targkhi- He spits on one's beard (he offers grave insult)
Ma ikhyij thaiku khama nurt ze' suruj- Don't close the mine for one empty-handed day (don't overreact)