BASNKARÂSH- Footprints
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"I thought you would approve," Meisar said, turning to Thorin early in the morning, before even the dawn had come above, she thought. She was already dressed.
"Only if you are wearing armor beneath," Thorin replied, unenthusiastic.
"Naturally," she answered, hoping to alleviate that flinted concern of his, by opening the laces of her tunic from the neck to show him the hauberk underneath. "It is Freyda's own. A bit tight across the chest, but it serve its purpose, pray it not need to though."
"This dragon-slayer's trust in your wisdom unnerves me," Thorin sighed. "Alas, it was your queer sort of wisdom that first garnered my admiration." He bent to kiss her head. "Your wisdom, and your lovely red hair. I wonder, could another find you as ravishing as I do?" The smile quirked down suspiciously on the last.
"Do you suspect me admires me, Bard?" Meisar intoned cheekily. "They say men, unlike dwarves, are covetousness of each other's wives sometimes. Lord Elrond says it is why they are weak, at least in part."
"I believe he respects you," Thorin grumbled. From the corner of the room by the fire, Dis rose, somber in her gray fur-lined over-gown, her hair drawn in a tall hood. She pressed her lockets on their chains into Thorin's palm, closed it over them, and kissed the knuckles over again. "Take them, brother. They will look after you."
He embraced Dis and kissed her tenderly on her cheeks. "I will care for this with my life."
"Will you don your armor?" Dis asked, worriedly.
"A coat of mail, concealed. I am to meet Dwalin at the armory now. They have made for us lighter coats each, that heat worthy of summer might not trouble us while wearing them," he leaned and kissed Dis's cheek again. Bira trundled past him as he started to exit, bearing heavy thatched baskets under each arm.
"Bira!" Meisar rushed forward to relieve her of her burdens. She exhaled and sunk into the lounger, her jeweled coiffure rattling with her. "You hauled up all this way? I beg you, sit and rest!"
Bira gulped the concoction of cold goat's milk and raspberries that had been left un-imbibed of at breakfast. "Only to see you off properly supplemented. Spiced wurst and pimento cheeses in there, and cinnamon raisin tarts. A second basket for the dragon-slayer. My children after all, do quite like his."
"Bira," Thorin greeted her with a kiss on her cheek on his way out, Dis by his side. "How does Bombur fare? Is he well?"
"Well enough in the company of the children," Bira reported cheerfully. "Were that the boy-dwarflings had the energy the girls do in running about their queen's small errands or as healers. They are happier sitting upon Bombur's knee listening to tales of the dragon and the magic waters of Mirkwood." She turned back to Meisar. "Blueberry tarts for the dragon-slayer. Urdlaug said he enjoyed them at the coronation feast. Perhaps a bit to be left with his healing babes? Such a gesture could not hurt."
Thorin thought he saw both Bira and Meisar glance at him then, half an encouragement, half a warning.
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When he returned he was in a mantle of vair and tunic of coal-gray, only its lapis cuffs and center seams lending any brighter shade to his person. The tunic was of a fine summer linen breathable enough to take a summer's ride, and breeches of dark umber tucked into his boots. He crossed the room past Meisar reached into the bottom drawer of his dressing table and withdrew a velvet-covered case. "For you, my queen," he said, opening it.
A miniature of his own raven crown was set in the white silk lining. "It was made for Dis lest she be coronated, but she did not want it. If we are to journey beyond the borders of our kingdom, I would have all that behold you know you to be the queen under the mountain. I have heard it questioned whether you are the queen of the dwarves or one of the Dunedain. This should settle the fact."
"Could it hurt to be both?"
"To have the wisdom of both, no. But you are the queen of Erebor, a dwarf queen, a dwarf woman. These are first, before the traits of other sorts," Thorin adjusted the crown over her hair in its tight crispinettes.
"I am in need of no friend by the likes of this mannish lord," he insisted. "But this latest rabble? For it's sake I might entertain an ally, if not a friend. I would have the future be but a modicum less uncertain."
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They were met outside the gates of Dale just after dawn by Bard and a troupe of his men. Mounted on a gleaming white destrier, Bard was in ringmail over aged leather and black moleskin, gray-streaked dark hair drawn back in a tail. If not for the magnificent steed, he would have blended into the shadows under the walls.
"Well met, your majesties," he offered in greeting.
"Better met was my queen, my lord," Thorin smirked darkly. "I give you due credit for your cleverness in superseding me. Children are the most innocuous of ploys."
"I intended no subterfuge, but I find you are difficult to persuade else-wise," Bard retorted.
"Well here we are," Thorin said through his teeth. "And consider it my queen's persuasion more than your own."
Up on the ramparts and over the walls of Dale the local smallfolk and foreign traders crowded to observe, Easterners in silk billowing robes and Gondorian traders with long drooping mustaches and hair cut round like pudding bowls below their ears. Bard smiled. "They are mostly the merchants and the fishmongers up from the lake as they would be at this hour anyway, but the word has spread, and they are intrigued by the notion of a dwarf woman leading a trackers' venture."
"You'll have the company of three of us anyway," Freyda said proudly toward him.
"Thought ye came to farewell me, lass. Can't have ye coming. It's dangerous," Dwalin chided lowly.
"Strangled an orc with me own bare hands once! Speak to me o' danger like I'm a wee girl," Freyda rebutted loudly. "I'm coming along whether it pleases ye or no."
"Can't! Final!" Dwalin tried to assert over her waving his protests off as if dust from her shoulder.
"Meisar!" Freyda pleaded finally when he would not relent. "Tell him I ought be by yer side then. Who's authority is greater now? Yers I think."
"We ought travel more lightly than this," Meisar observed, ignoring Freyda's histrionics, and stared toward the line of dwarven guardsmen in their heavy armor lined up abreast atop their ponies behind Thorin. "The larger the ranging party, the easier to mar the ground, muddy the scent, and attract dangerous company."
Percy's men grumbled behind them, the dwarven guards silently quarreling across to them, of who would retreat. "What do you propose then, majesty? That we range out unprotected?" Percy questioned with impatient decorum.
"Ye don't even have yer mail," she heard Dwalin arguing in whispers behind her with Freyda again."
"I've got a battle ax, a sharp set o' dirks, and you! Need nothing more 'an that," she insisted.
Bard eyed the way the tip of her broad nosed twitched and her mouth set itself pugnaciously again, daring either queen or intended husband to challenge her. His own guardsmen were not even half as unbending, nor as tenacious, as this dwarf woman half his height. She caught Percy curling a lip impatiently at her and gave him such a look that he ducked his head toward his saddle-horn.
"No," Meisar retorted finally, toward Bard and his men. "I would not propose that at all." She turned from Percy toward Freyda. "I've reconsidered, Freyda. Alas, on one condition. You'll do me a small favor, and I'll permit you accompany us."
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An hour later Freyda returned. By the time Bard realized it, the armored dwarves with the rising sun gleaming on their metaled backs from the east were retreating toward Erebor, and half his mounted men standing down too, their replacements but five-strong and mounted on mawing goats. The first of them was a broad-shouldered boor, painted at the face as if for war, and his forelocks dyed blue to match. Four dwarves fell in a ragged line behind him, as rough and uncouth in their appearance as the painted one.
Muted in a jerkin of brown boiled leather over his mail, trousers of dun deer-hide worn with dark boots, Dwalin regarded them with a sniveling sort of pride. They greeted him with boisterous regards, more reverent toward the king himself only in ducking their heads to substitute a proper bow.
"What is this?" muttered Percy.
"The Golden Boar there, who could best the brawniest of your own in a brawl, and his band," Meisar answered up at him. "My lady's kin, she has roused them to be our swords-for-hire on this journey."
"Aye? What are ye paying us?" Vigg demanded, sullenly.
"Better be in pie," grumbled Hepti.
"Ye can have pie if ye want, just stay sharp a few days and I'll have ye full of cider to go with 'em," Freyda promised, irritably. Bard looked skeptical, to which Freyda's lips quirked loftily up toward him. "Even the fat one there'd have an orc gutted and mounted on yer wall before ye had yer sword drawn," she assured. "I take m'king and m'queen upon this road. I would not have but the best for 'em."
"Indeed," Bard answered, warily, looking away from her toward the replacement escort. Onar ran circles on his goat around Vigg and Vestri, spooking their mounts, to his great amusement. Hepti was still finishing his morning bread and sausage rolls atop his and swaying against Onar's taunting, the crumbs flung back by the wind clinging all in his beard and into the folds where it creased against his wattle. He wore a veritable tent of iron-ringmail, dark as a dragon's scales, and straining at his flanks against its fastenings. The others wore mail also, except Vigg, who donned a breastplate scarred in arrow dents and a long ribbon of claw-marks. They cursed, belched, poked each other in their flanks with the tips of their knives.
"I doubt ye will find them charming, but they're the best at what they do," Dwalin relayed up to a vexed Bard. "Shan't want for a better defense," he shot a truculent eye back at Percy and his remaining men in their bulky armor, the men glaring skeptically from underneath their mismatched half-helms.
"And what is that?" Bard inquired, at a loss as to whether that best involved mead.
"Killin' orcs," Dwalin guffawed. Onar reeled his goat beside him.
"He'll be me son by law soon, milord of men," Onar informed Bard with his chest thrust out against his rusty mail shirt. "Betrothed to me own daughter, the king's own right-hand and battle-shield."
"My congratulations on your betrothal," Bard offered obligingly, softened by the exultant pride in Onar's declaration.
Dwalin acknowledged his salutations with a swift grunt. Under their cloaks he had his arms set gently around the waist of the blonde dwarrowdam, though. She moved her hand over the inked back of his, and he could not hide an agreeable look.
Thorin and his queen were mounted on their ponies and calling their brethren to attention.
"Mahikdim!" bellowed Thorin, his men coming to form up swiftly. The queen called to her hounds in their foreign guttural tongue. Their matching crowns caught the nebulous morning light, glinting something fierce from his polished hauberk, his spurred black boots. She was as austere in appearance, except for the elegantly embroidered tunic, muted in shades of marigold and gray, and worn without further decoration beneath the sleeveless brown sur-coat trimmed in gray wolf-skin. Bundling her hair were twin crispinettes of silver-and-gold thread, worn at either side of the raven crown that centered them. Beneath the coat and tunic were light trousers that allowed her to mount the pony comfortably with a leg at either side.
"And how shall we ride, my king? I'll not be ridin' behind, under the rumps of their horses," Dwalin groused earnestly.
"The dogs will go first. We'll see if they pick up the scent, and follow," Meisar instructed, taciturn against Dwalin's sneering up at the men. She laid a scrap of leather that had been cut from an orc's clothing before the snouts of the three hounds, beating the ground with their feet in waiting. A howl went up from Red-Coat, and the others set off after him. The party followed, departing due north once they had reached the far-western edge of the Lonely Mountain's long spurs. The hounds had followed a trail unbroken.
Bard slumped in his saddle, tired. The night had brought him little rest. Meisar was awake and eyes wide. He admired her alertness against Thorin's similarly drooping form on his mount. With her hair all drawn in the crispinettes it gave her face the added severity, a dwarvish severity for certain, with the drawn brows and the stalwart, set look about the chin and jaw. Only her eyes bore anything remotely as eremitic as Thorin's features. Their shade at once, like a bowstring being drawn taut, focused and lanced at the ground again.
They went on, west to sling around the mountain and then north. Bard had to squint at the ground and still saw nothing, no more than weather-beaten grass and small depressions where it had once been a marshy reserve full of stagnant, musky waters.
"How can you possibly find anything of note? There is nothing there."
"Sometimes, my lord, there are benefits in being close to the ground," she answered without looking up. "Without having to stoop anyway."
The long marshes due east of Mirkwood lay parched, the dry summer having left even the very porous of grounds in drought, and their shallow depressions passable, perhaps to a well-built wain but nothing weaker. The red-coated dog whined and howled first, digging furiously into the ground with his brothers following. The queen dismounted quickly and fell to her knees beside them, running her fingers through the clawed grass.
Percy's men gawked at the sight of the dwarf queen on her knees at the ground, bent so close to the earth her nose was nearly smudged in it. A few leagues north the marshes had given way to grassland, shallowly undulating, dotted in stray beech and oak that strained to survive the withering summer, their branches twisted and cracked. She saw something in the dust and leaned to it. The raven crown nearly tumbled from her head and a hand flew up awkwardly to keep it in place before removing it altogether, holding it in her armpit like a parcel.
"Orcs," she said over the yapping of the dogs around her feet when she rose again. "Fresh here, undisturbed by rain. Eleven at least. Five mounted."
"Last fell but three days ago over the city," Percy realized with worry. Bard's hand clutched itself tight around the sword at his belt. But Orcrist, in Thorin's hand, gleamed pure silver.
"If they are afoot, this blade will glow blue," Thorin reminded him with a gentler reassurance than his sullen morning mood would have predicted. He held the sword by its hilt so tight his knuckles turned white.
"I know," Bard murmured. He had watched the Elvenking lay it on his tomb.
The mounted men took small impatient steps on their horses behind her, as she followed the path. It was paused at a fire-pit dug shallowly into the ground, blackening a circle of earth. Meisar poked it and withdrew the greasy bones from the ash. "Hare by the looks of it," she said. "Now what orc cooks their food is the question."
"Not these, and what else eats a wild boar in its entirety?" A porcine skeleton, bones gnawed at around stringy sinews and greased in blood and offal lay nearby, raw, and buzzing with flies. In the waning summer heat, the smell was overwhelming. Boars stalked the Elvenking's realms in autumn, but rarely ventured outside the eaves of Mirkwood.
"Warg prints for certain here, but come, look closely. These tracks are of a wain, two wheels, drawn by a pair of horses each, small horses judging from these prints, and swift." Fred whined underfoot. "They come up from the south." Bard and Thorin each dismounted and came to her side, staring at the ground.
More than a whisper of decay seemed to rise from the ground itself, the boar offal baking too swiftly in the summer sun. The ground itself, hoarding its murky waters somewhere far below, seemed to belch under her and ripple.
"Chariot," Oliada murmured a stony conclusion, bending close to Meisar, away from Bard and Thorin. "Easterling sort. I know it."
"What would Easterlings have business with this far north? There are no trading posts here." She closed her eyes and could see their scarlet clothes and swarthy skin, and their gleaming gongs and chains of gold, slashing the desolate northern landscape like a bloody cut.
But who would have seen? Who would have dispatched a raven to report? There were no villages in the marshes east of Mirkwood, not even the hovels of wild-men or wandering rangers. They crossed these lands for a reason, perhaps.
"No good," Oliada whispered.
"A single chariot, eastern in nature we may surmise, girded by the tracks of warg and orc, no indication they skirmished with each other, or the ground would have yielded bloodier tidings," Meisar surmised to her husband, and Bard.
"Emissary, ambassador seems size of party," Oliada added, darkly. "But to whom?"
"Dorwinion wine merchants on their way to Mirkwood? Mahal knows the Elvenking is like to grow quite mumpish without his Eastern wines," Meisar smirked, darkly.
"Mumpish indeed, for no barrels have come up the Celduin in months. His birds report it, agonizingly, nearly every week. His writing is well-crabbed since," Bard interposed over them, to which Thorin gave a sharp gleeful grin.
"Besides, they have no cause to travel over land," Bard added. "The currents are swift the further south and east the river winds and it carries them in far better time; a small party traveling at pace would not much be noticed."
"But they are noticed," Meisar corrected him sharply. "And we shall find their purpose."
"Destroy it if we must," Bard added, fear rumbling in his stomach like the distant thunder.
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At night when they made camp, Bard waited in the shelter of the firelight with the dwarves while Percy and the guardsmen tended the horses at the ring of muddy water nearby, and erected a canvas tent, marked in the city's arms, a faded bell-tower, once the great pride of the city, the pealing of those bells, thundering and cavernous, the littlest from shop windows ringing like the cries of tiny birds. His father had told him of those bells, long silenced, except for the two in their high towers that rung dolefully and officiously at morning, noon and nightfall.
Under the black sky the dwarves made fires and squabbled with Percy and his men over first watch. Hepti's keg belly rolled with laughter, snatching up a handful of smoked sausages from the frying pan ahead of Bard as they sat together to eat.
"Save some for the dragon-slayer," Thorin scolded, japing. "He is far too thin."
"Is m'king calling me fat?" Hepti warbled through a bite of meat.
"It is your seat that calls you so when it breaks beneath you," Thorin reiterated, as the wooden bench groaned under him in warning. Bard smirked. Once some food had been yielded to Bard with assurance, Thorin rose and tarried off somewhere into the dark corner of the camp. Perhaps to find his queen, who had circled the black perimeters with her dogs again and again.
"Well give him some then," Hepti ordered, scraping three more links of wurst from Lofar's plate beside him back into the pan to heat. Vigg glared at Bard from across the fire as he plucked them up to nosh at. They were savory and well-seasoned.
He stayed close to the fire and glanced up at the sky, searching the black panorama with increasing worry. The cloud cover that had rolled over lightly in the evening let only the light of a few stars eek through. The moon had ducked behind them.
"Do you fear a moonless night, my lord?" Thorin asked suddenly above him, Meisar now by his side. The steely blue of his eyes made Bard's stomach shrink back inside his skin. Those eyes seemed to read him too easily for comfort, even in the dark.
"Only if a red sun rises after it," Bard replied.
"A mannish superstition," Thorin muttered under his breath.
"Those who spend so much time out of the sight of the sky have no place to speak of the tidings it brings," Bard said curtly.
"Blood is spilled everywhere at some place in this world, each day," Meisar interjected, peaceably.
"You know of what they say then, my queen?" Bard asked.
"If you recall, you came to me, on the accord that I have spent less time under mountains than beneath the sky," she answered tartly to him.
"Aye, I did," Bard capitulated.
The flap of the tent was opened and pinned back by one of Bard's guardsmen. He jerked his head toward the light coming from the candles within, their tallow wafting acrid. Thorin set his pack upon the ground and unfurled his sleeping roll with it.
"There is enough room for a few dwarves, at the least, inside" Bard proffered, and as quickly, Dwalin, Freyda and Ori had filtered past him and taken shelter within. "A few, I suppose."
"Bloody dwarves," Percy grimaced, when he retired inside for sleep, only to find the dwarves stuffed within, inordinate in their chatter. The wide pallet of stuffed straw he had put down for himself was occupied by four dwarves, two at each end, foot-to-foot.
"Dwalin?" Thorin quirked a brow at him, gesturing to the empty place on the broad pallet beside Freyda. The gawky one with the book and pen scooted at the king's grinning behest into the narrow vale between their feet.
He, like Thorin and Meisar both, had undressed only of his mail, leaving his coat on, even his boots. Bard arranged his roll on the other side of the tent and offered Percy a spare, his man accepting it witheringly.
Dwalin shied away from her to sleep, so that he lay almost over the edge of the pallet. Thorin nested himself close to Meisar hoping he might heed the example, but he cowered away even further, and left Freyda to curl up against the fur blanket she was holding, cursing.
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The light glinting from the locket in his open palm woke her. Firelight, not moonlight; at the edge of the camp the men were playing dice on watch. Meisar peered out across the camp through an open flap by her bedside, slid her feet into her boots, rising quiet as a ghost, exiting through a slit in the tent side, large enough for a dwarf to pass through if not a man. Thorin did not stir beside her, nor did Dwalin, Freyda or Ori. The former two were in each other's embraces, heads lain together in sleep. The hounds whined as she bent to retrieve the lantern on the ground outside and set quietly away from the tent.
The locket she had extracted gingerly from Thorin's sleeping hand. She opened it out at the edge of the camp, Kili's visage offering an expression back to her, set mouth, straight eyes, trying too hard at seriousness. He would have never succeeded at that so well, she imagined. Not even in old age, bearded and noble, which he would never see.
But the stars.
She tilted the open locket upward toward the sky. Imagining the careful inked rendering might shift and that dimpled face smile in the delight she had been told he greeted the night sky with. The portrait was unmoved. She raised her arms up toward the sky holding the open locket toward it. The past and the present converged in her body at that moment in such an enigmatic way she could not explain the energy with which it coursed through her. She stood, even as her arms began to ache, holding him up toward the stars.
As if he could see. But the tomb was canopied in stone, not sky. Perhaps the Halls of Mandos were not so dark. Oh, would it be that the stars shined upon him there...
"Arah!" Oliada hollered. The end of her spear nearly shaved the stubble from Bard's cheek. He whooshed backward, out of the way.
"Spared, by the luck of your reflexes, from my loyal Oliada. Though I think my husband might kill you if he finds you out here with me," Meisar said only half with cheek.
"My queen, I did not mean to... may I ask what you are doing?" Bard all but gasped in wide-eyed exasperation. She could almost feel the slowing jag of his heart after the spear's desisting.
"I could not sleep, and I am not alone," Meisar answered. Fred sniffed Bard's boot and drew back slowly. The other two hounds bristled behind Meisar's leg.
"Nor could I. I fear these lands. That, and you each snore rather loudly. It is not a wonder anymore why it is you dwarves marry so seldom," Bard quipped.
"There is more to it than that I think, but it may well be true," Meisar said.
"What do you hold there, my queen?" His head tilted down toward her clasped hands, shaking still.
She held the open locket out to Bard. He gave a doleful smile. "I know this lad."
"Thorin's nephew Kili. He loved the sight of the stars. Strange, I know, for a dwarf. He... the relic there, stays in his mother's pouch close to her now. She bid Thorin take them, as protectors of a sort."
"Did you know the night of the dragon's descent, he was nearly killed by a slow-moving poison of the blood, from an orc's arrow." Bard shook his head slowly. "Such terrible pain. He lay at my home in Laketown, on death's door."
"And what spared him?" Then at least.
"An unexpected ally," Bard answered vaguely, but the way he eyed her sideways and intently it seemed the unexpected was meant to be left anonymous too. And yet he had hastened to drop the hint.
"You seek me for alliance, Bard? Alliance, or something else?" Meisar asked pointedly then.
"Your experience of the world. I have found it a curious thing, my lady," Bard admitted. He had heavy, if gentle, eyes, plainspoken, in the way that most north-men's were.
"You have no trackers amongst your own men? That seems odd," she scrutinized him, eyes suspicious even in the dark. It seemed stranger to her.
"I suspect there may be more than a handful amongst my people, but forthcoming they have not been with their services. I think they are afraid to wander far from the safety of the city walls," Bard relented.
"Do you blame them?"
"No," Bard said after a considerate silence. "Thusly I am grateful to you."
Though fierce, they did not seem to be able to look inside him, to read every twitch and fidget of his form like the guts of a red-bull in search of portents, the way that Thorin's did. Hers seemed to have little reckoning of him at all. Her eyes were older than her face, which idle rumor had rendered closer to a crone's than a maiden's, but neither pinpointed that face exactly. North-women were swiftly aged; he had not been around dwarf-women enough to comprehend the intimacies of their life-cycles. He averted his sideways straining glance every few seconds lest she catch him.
"Now I am not so sure. The delegation comes from the Iron Hills, soon I presume?" he swerved the subject matter quickly and discreetly.
"They do, in a month and a few more days," she answered, her lips twitching as they drew tighter together.
Bard began to speak again after a longer, even more terse silence. "It is not that I do not fear the Line of Durin to be a cursed one, albeit by not fault of its own. But the world is bigger than that. Not so long ago, I was a bargeman, poor as a rat. The world was small. Now it is a much larger one I must consider, and it includes the Iron Hills. They may be your kin, but they will prove important in our own realm, I think."
"Do the Iron Hills trouble you? A fine young lord, with his mother's aid, rule there, fair and just I believe."
"I stood complacently as an army of elves laid attack to his soldiers, his own father. I do not think he will look upon me kindly if he is king under the mountain after Thorin is. Nor my son, who may govern Dale after I am gone."
"Then Lord Stonehelm and Bain are much alike, young but fast-learned, loyal to the good of their realms. Perhaps they shall be better friends than enemies if their commonalities are realized," Meisar speculated, encouragingly. But in her heart there was a darkness like an un-aired room. And Bard was picking the lock to it like a common thief.
"But will he reign or will your son?" he inquired. She felt the door inside creak open, and feared it so loud on its hinges he could hear it. She swallowed fast and with her throat closed in pain.
"If I have one," Meisar answered quickly. She avoided the careful side-gaze Bard was shifting at her.
"I am sorry," Bard begged pardon quickly. "If you forgive me I would... I am vaguely aware your plight."
"Forgive me for my bluntness my lord, but you presume to know something, which I am certain you know nothing about." When she looked at him again, she was the maid he had first beheld in the inn at Laketown, taciturn and heavy-eyed. In Dale they had deemed her a lady that a mannish sort would be in her third decade, even her fourth. Northern women never lived long beyond those years, stooped and graying at forty, shriveled crones by five-and-five, and rarely longer lived than that.
Laughing in winter, great with child. Only bones by spring.
"I had hoped for something different once," Bard offered cautiously.
"Once?" Meisar's stiff brow lifted at him.
"It may be an important matter to more than the two of us, whether or not you are mother to a new generation," Bard enumerated with trepidation. What better for a princeling of Erebor than a mother wise enough to see beyond her own desires? To be as shield to the father's madness.
"Do you think?" She had a funny hope in her eyes, almost like a child. Full of a more seasoned longing though.
"I was told so, and I am inclined to believe it," Bard said with some confidence. "Gandalf does no doubt you, that is for certain."
"When last I saw him, he intended to treat with you in Dale, for his own purposes. I wonder what those might be," Meisar gave him an interrogative glance.
Bard's lips pursed in hesitation.
"Nary a soul is here to hear us, and Oliada is loyal to keeping my confidences," Meisar assured. Oliada gave Bard a flinted look but nodded in confirmation.
"I suspect there is much more he left unsaid," Bard began. "He knows something far greater than either of us, something beyond us. When he tells me each of us will have a role to play in the world that will be, he pauses, as if he is waiting. For something to reveal itself. But he will not even say to speculate, not to me."
"Nor to Thorin."
"What is really happening here, my queen?" he turned to her swiftly with naked fear in his eyes.
"This is not a sojourn merely to track an orc pack, is it?" Meisar questioned earnestly.
"Perhaps not," Bard half-whispered. "Read the earth. Map its beats and rumbles. What does it tell you in the dark, my queen?"
For moment she was silent and contemplative in a somber way, but when she raised her eyes to meet his again, there was a small knowing smile quirked about her lips and perking at her cheekbones, with more than a hint of irony. "You are far more cunning than you think, dragon-slayer. Sending your children to convey your tidings, under my husband's nose, knowing he cannot deny me as he denies you."
Bard shrugged. "I suppose I have learned to be. But that besides, my children have become very fond of you."
"As I have them, my lord. Urdlaug and her mother send their blueberry tarts specially to you, for the kindnesses your children showed to theirs. You can be certain we are not enemies."
Bard fell to his knees before her, reached as if to take her hands in his but swiftly withdrew when he saw Oliada licking a sharp glare at him like a breath of flame. "When you commanded those gates be opened to them, my queen, it was not just my children you let through. It is... a symbolic opening of our realms to each other's hospitality, each other's protection. I should pick up and forgive even the worst trespasses, though I know dwarves oft will not."
"It is true we are long of memory and bitter sometimes. But Thorin's heart is a good heart, as was his grandfather's before him, in spite of his erring. It is an imperfect thing, but it is... to all good things realized, in time."
"In time..." Bard repeated, warily.
Meisar shifted on the sore balls of her feet. A coldness from below seemed to course through her from the thick skin of her feet into her chest, where the only warmth was the locket now pressed against her breast. "I left the wilds for Ered Luin in much haste, my liege. Beneath the earth it rumbles and drums with the beats of many feet. So many on the move, throughout this world. Have you ever seen a herd of sheep spooked by a pack of wolves bearing down upon them?"
"The dogs of Lake-Town began to howl all at once, when Smaug awoke inside the mountain, before it dawned on the men of the town what was coming."
"I have sensed something akin to that. But long before I was a queen, I was a shepherdess. It is my duty to see danger at every turn. It is vested in me to see ill, I fear."
"I am afraid," Bard admitted suddenly. "I am afraid... that a foul thing beyond our reckoning returns, under our noses. Slowly, perhaps. But I am in my way a shepherd too, my queen, and my flock... my children." He stopped and turned to face her. "I intend to strengthen my prestige, not for the love of power, but to see that they will always be safe. Dale shall grow. It will be a kingdom, not a city on its own. I think it necessary."
"Two kings in such closeness. Does Thorin know?"
"Not yet," Bard said. "Gandalf, however, supports the notion."
Meisar faced him silently for a long spell in the dark, with their lanterns dimming and the dogs whining over them.
"You have my friendship, my lord," she divulged finally. "I see in you, and your children, a degree of goodness that earns my liking, if not my whole trust, quite yet. I will work on Thorin."
.
"Rise and shine!" Vestri threw open the ten flap, letting a lance of the sun beam in. Bard winced as his abdomen was smushed underneath a heavy boot, then his side, two dwarves stepping over him as if he were a log. He rolled and shouted at them before a third came trotting giddily across the tent. Meisar woke with her head swimming. Bard had walked her back to the edge of the camp, seen Dwalin and Onar on watch, throwing his ax to his betrothed, how she faced him with a bombastic grin turning querulous as if in battle itself, and decided it best not to be seen at the queen's side without the king's company.
He circled back and crept back into the tent, relieved to find Percy and the other dwarves sleeping. The watch changed throughout the night, but he had slept soundly enough, until then. The musty fur was yanked back from the dwarves' pallet and the annoyed yelps of the dwarves ricocheted off the tent walls. Freyda kicked Vestri in the shin with a pout.
"Oh, look there, he's shy," Vestri deflected the hit and smirked down on Dwalin, tossing the fur haphazardly over Thorin and Meisar's heads. Dwalin scowled up at him, huddled to the far side of the pallet. "The most honorable Dwalin. Did you get a goodnight kiss at least, Freyda?"
"Pallets don't squeak and creak. You can get away with much," Vigg guffawed.
"Good morning to you too," Thorin groused, yanking the fur back down. Their impertinence made him glare through a curtain of tangled black hair, but he seemed more irked than indignant.
"It smells of dwarf in here!" Percy complained, raising his head from his sleeping roll. Boots thumped around his head in a tizzy.
"Wet goat and rotten onions!" Freyda smacked Vestri from rolling over the pallet between her and Dwalin, making kissing sounds at each of them. She drubbed at his back with her feet until Lofar broke wind ferociously in Vestri's face and finally dispersed them all, king and queen un-spared, from bed.
Dwalin sprung up and yanked his boots on as Onar spilled inside after his gang, cursed through a line of retches, and turned tail back out again, crudely congratulating Lofar on his revolting work.
"Gods be merciful, are you all so uncouth?" Bard whined. The staidness of Thorin's halls on official business, even the raucousness of their celebrations, had ill-prepared him for this level of doltishness. But he had seen the four of those louts sparring with each other casually in the evening, and their fierceness of it had given him some sense of security, if his revulsion at the moment was not lessened in the least.
"Before we lose the will to break our fast, my lord, come!" Percy pleaded, Bard not needing any further encouragement to vacate swiftly.
"Call on me when you manage to scrub the scent o' fish oil out of your skin, lake-man!" Lofar retorted after Bard.
"He is a lord, mind your manners," Thorin scolded tiredly, raising the collar of his tunic over his nose. He threw open the side flap of the tent to let the cool morning air filter in, before electing to evacuate altogether.
.
Dawn had brought a pink sky. Pink as a newborn's cheeks. Had it been a red sky, it might have been as Owenna's face, bright crimson, sweat pouring from her in childbed even in the leaden heart of winter. Pink as my son's cheeks, the first and the last. When that winter had ended, Bain was gaunt and pale from hunger, and Owenna, and the baby, both gone. Bard turned back toward the camp and watched the leonine dwarf-woman, coating her hands in the sharp-smelling paste of aloe, rubbing it into the bare pate of her betrothed, scorched by sun. A sudden twist of yearning, of some wistfulness that felt too distant to comprehend, twisted in his belly, and weakened his knees a moment.
"Perhaps she will be an autumn bride after all, even a winter bride," he heard Meisar speculate amusedly behind him, to her spear-wielding guard, the woman who still frightened him so. Her eyes were as black as a snake's and as quick. She pardoned her way her past Bard toward the fire where she sat in front of Thorin on the ground and he gathered her night-frayed plait to tame and comb out.
Thorin's tenderness in preening over his wife's hair would have been the least of his concern but it piqued a certain curiosity in Bard. Of the things he cared for that he had known, Bard winced, the cruel voracity of his need for that wretched stone, which, for its force over him, he had lacked any true affection for. He took his time with his wife's hair by measure, benevolent and patient in doing so. Percy cooked a pair of trout for them to eat over the morning fire, but he had lost his appetite.
His weakness or his strength? He pondered it quietly, deriving an odd comfort of the sight by then. The queen, that scrap of a dwarf queen, who had Owenna's earthiness, if not her dullish wits. Not a lackwit by far, my Owenna, but straightforward in her ways and plain. Sweet Owenna, who could not write her own name, but kept his on her tongue to the last.
He had heard of dwarf males possessing their wives with a fierce guardedness when they chose to marry. But here it seemed, the king himself deferred to her, at least in the matters at hand. When her own hair was tended and covered again in the nets that held them out of her way, Thorin switched her place and she disentangled a thicker braid in the kitchen of his head, holding a larger ring in her lap that had clasped it while she plaited the dark locks, once combed, again, and with careful precision.
More careful than Sigrid or Tilda even tended their own fine locks. He thought of his daughters huddled over the cloudy shard of a mirror in Lake Town, enough mornings, twine and scraps of old burlap artfully tied in bows at the end of their plaits and tails. And begging to comb Owenna's before bed. How he had envied her acquiescence to his daughters' wills even then. He had loved her hair so, her braids swinging over her hips like a pair of ropes to draw up the water-bucket. Brown hair, like a bear's hide, plain and welcoming. She had not had the chance to gray by the time she was buried on the long lake's far western shore.
Meisar finished braiding the locks that flanked his temples, with such care placing the carved beads back into their ends, checking their evenness before she gave him a silent pass to rise again.
They rode again for half the morning, following the hounds, a parallel set of ruts that went north and north and further still, until it was high afternoon and the crests of the Iron Mountains were visible far in the distance over the rolling plain.
Thorin glanced behind him at Bard shivering on his mount. The sky was cobalt, placid as midsummer, but there was a bite to the air.
"It is far colder here it seems. Imagine, we enjoy summer's warmth in Dale still," Bard guffawed when he caught Thorin watching his trembling.
Thorin took the heavy fur cloak from the pack strapped to the goat's hindquarters behind him. "Make use of it if you wish," he indicated, offering the folded garment toward Bard. "My layers are sufficient."
"Thank you, my king," Bard said, wrapping the cloak around his shoulders. It was thick and sturdy, the vair of the finest quality. He would have rubbed his cheek on it and bathed in the sheer luxuriant touch of it, were it proper, or none were watching. "Graciously." He ran his calloused worked palm over the fur, savoring the touch. The cloak, which was Thorin's full-length, barely dusted the rump of the horse wrapped around Bard, but the breadth of it on his shoulders showed how much broader Thorin was in that way.
"What news from the Rangers of these lands? Surely they have use of messenger birds, if there are dark stirrings to report," Meisar questioned from ahead.
"The Dunedain have long scattered from these lands. I have not heard their kind ranging these parts east of the Greenwood or north of it at all for many years, and if they have, their dealings with these parts are paltry at best," Bard explained.
"By some estimates, the battle eliminated them to but a fourth of orc numbers. But if they are as stubborn as dwarves, they will regather their forces and strengthen again, with time on their side," Meisar surmised stonily.
Ahead, the clouds lay low from the grayed, bald peaks of the mountains, leaden sheets over the sky that rumbled long, low warnings off the faces of the hills and trickled east.
"There's a storm coming," Percy observed. "Will we tarry on up those hills?"
"I would not venture it my lord," she said, her voice shaking. "It is an ominous wind that sweeps down. It smells of death."
Bard inhaled deep but he could only smell rain. He peered down from his destrier at Meisar on her pony, the little legs of the beast thumping up and down on the ground in place, and her eyes, full of fear. He thought for a moment she might tumble from her mount.
"My king, how far is Mount Gundabad from these hills?" Percy asked Thorin.
Thorin looked upward against the wind and swayed, coming close to his queen on his own mount. "Not far enough."
"We should return to Erebor, Thorin," she said, quavering to her husband. Mount Gundabad was enough days' ride from their position still, but the wind came again from the west and she got a clouded look in her eyes as if she might faint right there. The tracks before them sunk deep into the rain-softened earth that ringed the rims of the mountains, slithering into a pass into the hills.
"I do not need follow to know where they lead," she concluded. Her little hounds were crying out like the dogs of Esgaroth on the eve of the dragon's wake.
.
The bells pealed at a distance and closer still, they could hear the shouts of relief for the dragon-slayer's return. Bonfires burned at each of the four corners of the city and before the gates. The children of Dale chased each other, shrieking, around the fire, waving sparklers. If they feared night raids, they came out boldly in defiance. Meats sizzled over smaller fires, the food drawing out even the standoffish foreigners from the city walls. Gondorians with their doublets patched in the White Tree mingled with dwarves and north-men farmers over roasted chickens.
"We will keep the night-fires burning, to ward off night raids," Bard assured. He came down from his horse and was greeted by the people of the city fondly. The women brought him steaming plates of seasoned whitefish and bread, encouraging him to sit and rest. His eldest, Sigrid, came to bring him a horn of ale. The dwarves still camped on the outskirts of Dale had brought many barrels of summer ale to the congregation, which the men were imbibing of happily alongside them.
When Meisar and Thorin came into the undulating light of the fires, the people hailed them too. But in the crowd a woman's called out. "Hail to the queen at the gates! The opener of gates!" More cheers went up and men and women of Dale coming to offer their salutations to her, and to Thorin but for politeness it seemed. She felt her face grow hot with bashfulness at the notion, which showed itself so plainly. She accepted their graciousness, as staidly as she could. The children gave her small bouquets and trinkets from their parents' market stalls.
"A strange sight," Percy quipped, sharing a game hen and its drippings over bread with Bard.
"In the city of Dale," Bard murmured quietly. "For the first time in all of history, the queen under the mountain is not only seen and known, but, it seems, better loved even than the king."
.
-Mahikdim- prepare for travel!