There was no more to do than sleep then, exhausted as they were. They had bathed and scrubbed the earthiness from their skin in rosewater soaps that had been a gift from Sigrid of Dale. Thorin stayed, and in the bedchamber she pressed aside their pile of discarded clothes for more comfortable wear. She slipped the argent satin shift over her head and sighed. The fabric was cool against her skin, a welcome luxury against the blisters and aching back that the several days upon the road had brought. Her feet were cracked and chafed at the toes and heels, enough to draw thin films of blood at each. She waited for Thorin to emerge from soaking a long while in the warmth of the bath. When he finished she was sitting with her legs folded demurely to her side on the bed. The deep V at the bosom of her night-shift fastened in a little silver clasp. She hooked and unhooked it in her fingers.
"I have wanted nothing all of the day except to be here with you again," Thorin rumbled in a tired drawl. He sat and leaned forward on the bed, letting her to ease the tangles from his damp hair with a wide comb. She wound it into a single loose plait for the night.
"I think to reward you for your graciousness toward the dragon-slayer," she smiled. She placed his damp plaited hair to one side, leaning forward over his shoulder to lay a kiss in the groove between his nose and cheek, his face resting back against hers for a tired moment. She swept her lips over the bottom ridge of his cheekbone again, tenderly.
"A just reward is to be here with you, now, with the dragon-slayer's whinging far from our minds," Thorin murmured.
"Perhaps I should not have let Bard goad me into it," she smirked, self-deprecating a little. They had reached only the jagged northeastern borderlands of Mirkwood when they decided to turn back. The foothills trickling south of the Grey Mountains had lain desolate before them, clouds as low and gray as coal dust lingering north over the Withered Heath like some warning. As they tarried south again back home, the sky had turned black behind them at noon-day. They had done right she told herself. Redcoat and Raincloud had whimpered ceaselessly, and Fred had curled under her cloak atop her horse, trembling until the Lonely Mountain was in sight.
Thorin taking her hand jarred her back. "Bard… Bard was subjected to Lofar, crowing out the back side like a rooster to wake him. Seeing his face when it hit him was enough to render it all worthy, ghivashel."
She laid her head on the back of his shoulder, felt his skin still warm, still damp through his sleep-shirt. Her arms linked, stretched at length, about the breadth of his chest from behind. "Was it all for naught, Thorin?"
"Orc tracks and Eastern chariots, side-by-side, roaming in tandem it would seem- it is a worthy discovery, worrisome, but worth our knowing. I imagine they do not think any dwarf clever enough to uncover it." He leaned up and lightly kissed her mouth. "But they have not met my queen."
Thorin reclined and stretched on the bed beside her, propping himself on the back of his elbows with pillow at his back. An arm slid from sturdying himself to curl about the small part of her back and draw her close.
"I pray they shall not," she murmured, worriedly. "I do not... I have smelled death on the wind and felt a darkness in the earth itself, like footsteps under the ground. I do not know where it is coming from. It is as if the whole world shakes, but I am the only one who can feel it, or so... I think." She still sat stiffly with her legs folded under her, and cast a heavy, hooded glance down at Thorin. She touched his bare chest with her fingertip, aloofly, tracing the defined edges of pectoral muscles.
"Your freckles are back," he murmured. He stroked her knee with the thumb of his opposite arm, gazing up at her with affection. The breadth of her sun-blushed chest had gone from ivory to lightly speckled in fine grains of freckles. They crossed the bridge of her nose like tiny soldiers too and climbed over her shoulders from behind.
"The sun brings them out," she replied sheepishly. The pink of his skin from the sun under the thick, dark-haired forearms, a line above his brow burnished reddish even, showed as aptly that absence from sunlight in the daily doses men were used to. It hadn't seemed even that long since the road home. And yet, they were closing on their marriage's first anniversary. A union marked in days, weeks, months, each with fresh awe, soon to be years.
"Where do we go from here then?" she wondered.
"We will defend our borders against all raids, at any cost," Thorin asserted. "Should we have tarried up those hills, Meisar? Into the mountains?"
"No. The wind smelled of death. I know it. We would not have made it out alive."
"I smelled only rain and the electricity of the air before lightning."
"Trust in me," she urged, quietly. She knew but there were no words to speak of it further. It was a foreign tongue, that sense.
"Are you a seer, Meisar? They say... some have the gift of foresight. You should have told me if-"
"Nay. It is only... I cannot explain it. It is not seeing stone I carry in my heart, not like that. I hear the wizards have several though..." She turned and gave Thorin's cheek a light stroke. "I think there are things Gandalf did not say. Maybe he should have," she concluded. "He is as withholding with Bard it seems too."
"Withholding what?"
She thought of the many things she might ask the gray man, but not of the darkness of the world, only the potential light. Still, he lingered in her mind.
"Some heavy knowledge. He carries it in his shoulders."
"So do you," he observed with a small smile. He sat up and kissed her shoulder.
"Sometimes I wonder," she began. "Old tales always spoke of utter defeat."
"Of what?" he asked.
"Darkness," she said, like lead on her tongue. "A greater one, anyway."
"It was fought and won outside this mountain, my blessing." He pushed aside the sharp plunge of her nightgown and and discarded the silver clasp, letting her breast out, low and heavy. "You are shaking. Lay down."
As she did so, he opened the gird of ribbons that fastened her sleeping gown at the waist. The air fell on her torso along with his steady warm breath. "Your freckles. Even here." He shifted his head downward and kissed the heavy fleshed peak of her left breast. "It is like a map," he mooned softly. "Like a sky full of stars at night. I could chart each one."
She sighed deep into her stomach against his doting there, wondering if he could feel the way that rumble cried out for him inside the way an empty stomach bayed for sustenance. The coarse hair in his underarms tickled her sides as he rested his weight into her, her knees steepling to hold him, his beard pressed firm into her.
"You will be a mother soon. I promise," Thorin said lowly, making a small reassuring motion around her navel with his fingertip.
"Promise? Love of mine, you ought not make promises uncertain of keeping," she said. She pressed her thighs firmly around his sides where he rested over her, his head on her stomach again. She ran her fingers over the damp plait of his that had left a trail of rosewater scented dewdrops upon her belly, as he crawled back up and over her again.
"Uncertain? Indeed, as are all things in this world. Alas, let me try." He kissed the tip of her nose with a gentle smile and her neck just under the chin. Her bosom was gently circled then grasped in the whole of his hand, gently squeezing then fondling more firmly at the nipple with his thumb. The kisses migrated from suckling at her lower lip to the breast his hand had relinquished in favor of journeying down over the satin surface to her crooked knees where he pressed and set the rest of it up over her hips. There were more freckles still, on the insides of her thighs and marching along the ridges of a forest drenched in flame.
The hot, firm digit of his buried itself inside her and drew a shudder of a sigh from him. She pressed up against his chest where the scent of the rose-water still lingered about him, adhering into the coarse hair there in small damp furls. The veined ridge of him pulsed reverberating heavy with need deep inside her, in and out again in long slow thrusts. Her heat drew tight around him.
"Yavanna, giver of fruits, be kind to us," she sighed into the heat of his mouth. No force could dissuade her from concentrating all of her energies into rising with him and retreating her hips down against the bedclothes again, grunts and groans and heavy sighs rumbling swiftly over her with every breath of his.
Spending his life-source into her in a suddenly-stuttering, impatient rhythm, he swift found and settled in a comfortable entwinement with her in the afterglow. "My queen, mine own heart, there are enough tidings rolling our way, for better or worse," Thorin breathed into her hair, his voice gravelly in want of sleep.
"I would not like to think about any of this right now," she insisted quietly, drawing herself to the furnace warmth of her husband's broad form. The refuge of him was all she ever desired, not wealth or prestige or even the respect of her own, only his. "I just want to be with you. I want only you..."
"You shall, always. At least until morning comes. If you do not mind, I am sending you on another small mission tomorrow."
.
II
"To be honest with you, I don't know what we will find. I have not seen either of them in months," Meisar relayed worriedly in Oliada's direction. They navigated the spur carefully on the backs of goats that pawed and picked along the uneven sheaves of rock with wavering steadiness beneath them. The small barrel of Dale whiskey made a blum-blub sound on the rump of the goat.
Ahead she saw the shape of a small shed or dwelling on the bare rock of the small plateau. The shadow of Ravenhill hung low over it. There, she could see her, in a long belted shift and her arms full of jars. Hegi rushed into the daub-and-wattle, spooked, and emerged, spear in hand. Oliada's hand was on her own spear when Meisar dismounted, arms empty and out. Hegi dropped her spear and rushed to embrace her so hard she was nearly thrown backward.
"Queen Dunininh!" Hegi crowed. She kissed Meisar's cheeks until they were slick with lickspittle.
"Brought you something," Meisar said, squirming against the wetness on her cheeks. Oliada procured the parcel from under her arm that was filled with goat jerky, a yard of tangerine samite, a fine beard comb of boar-bone. Hegi considered the gifts giddily, raised her overgrown brows over a gnaw of jerky.
"You come to me, queen, to bring me gifts? You miss me so?"
"Of course I do. But I have come to ask a favor of you also. Whatever it was in your wagon back upon the road, the one that... detonated... are you capable of procuring more of it?"
Hegi clapped her hands in delight and swiftly put a little finger into her mithril grill to pick the strings of chewed jerky from their chinks. She looked up at Meisar and winked as she did. "Explosives. Finest you will have. Dwarven fireworks it is not. Not for party tricks."
"We do not seek party tricks, that is good then. The defense of Erebor, and of Dale is what we seek. After the orcs came and attacked the gates of-"
"Come in, come in," she waved them down into the open hatch of her berm, under the wattle-and-daub construction on the plateau of rock above. "We speak more."
"This my home," she beamed, spinning with her arms outstretched in the round-walled living room. There were several heavy rugs beneath their feet, and the air smelled richly of cloves, with a hint of something more acrid behind it. The daub-and-wattle above was her primary work-space, she explained. The berm was her pride, away from the bustle of the inner city. Several rooms more there were; she opened an oaken door into the bedroom beside hers and laughed as she snatched the fur-blanket from a sleeping Bifur, who woke with a start.
Separate bedrooms, Meisar thought, with a blackened humor. That is a good sign, at the very least.
"I give you what you ask," Hegi said, sitting at her square table with the legs carved like those of horses. "Like table? From Rohan woodcutter. Anything you ask is yours. I am loyal subject after all." She stood and bowed giddily.
Sitting again, her mouth straightened. "On condition that king pass decree. Make punishable offense to call poor Hegi mad."
"Oh Hegi. Why would anybody do such a thing?" Meisar smiled, her teeth pressing against the inner parts of her lips, struggling for her own graciousness. Hegi's silver-and-black beard may have been combed and gently oiled, shiny and lustrous, and no longer resembling a nest of crows in a rook, but she sat at her horse-legged table and shaved a swift dusting of powder from a ball of iron and lead with her knife, laughing at the possibility of sparks.
"You need me," Hegi said, clutching Meisar's hand and staining it in black powder, grinning. "Battle is over, but now there is a war coming." The knife caressed the ball again, slow and intent.
"A war? What portent have you known to foresee war?" Meisar inquired. She sat stiffly hoping Hegi would put down the knife.
"No portent, my own eyes," Hegi said vigorously.
"So I see," Meisar replied with a hint of irony.
"You think you are the only dwarf to have ever survived on her own?" Hegi almost spat. Meisar stuttered back. Oliada never took her eyes from the knife beside her.
"I have known few others, admittedly," Meisar demured, finally.
"When I came back up, they called me mad. They did not believe a word,' Hegi complained, bitterly.
"Came up from where, Hegi?" Once the lady-miner had spoken of Moria but Moria had been forsaken long before her lifetime would allow it. Or so she thought.
"Under hill," Hegi answered. "Do you know why I know the world is changing?"
Bifur quietly poured them each a tall narrow glass of her shine, watered Oliada's and Meisar's in the juice of pressed grapes, but not Hegi's. The stern, defined symmetry of the sentry's face did not abet, a modest imbibing or not. She sat close at Meisar's side and watched every move of Hegi's hands, the dark powder under her fingernails, now neatly trimmed albeit, the missing tip of a pinky neither had ever noticed. The eyes that had always shone with a certain unbalance, opaque and wild, were dark and clear as cloudless night, and contemplative in their way.
"Poor Hegi falls down old shaft above Barazinbar, traveling through the Misty Mountains on my way to kin back home. I went to the Iron Hills with my brother to harvest ore, but I got tired of the smell of boar after not long. So I tarried home. But I never made it, you see." The common tongue came easily to her now, inexplicably.
"Dark place, cruel place," muttered Bifur, in Khuzdul still.
"Aye, have you ever seen it?" Hegi drew her blackened finger around her cup, the reflection a brief blinding gleam on her knife. "Its slopes are red like blood. They say enough pass over it with sore reckoning to follow. Well, I had such fortune. I should have known."
"Months upon months I crawl in tunnels alone. I fell so far I did not know which way was up when I came to the bottom. I tumbled like a little stone, down and down. And down there, are orcs and goblins, hordes upon hordes, cave trolls chained like ox to plough through the stone, until they drop. Poor beasts. I crawled like a mole with my ax through so many tunnels. Tunnels upon tunnels, more and more. I stalked across ancient halls long silenced, and down the walls of coal-black mines. Mithril's light to guide my way," she smiled again with her teeth gleaming. "Mithril in my pockets, mithril hidden all sorts of places. It belongs to us by right."
"As do those halls, which we built, but we are not the ones in those tunnels, are we?" Meisar reminded dismally.
Hegi's face twitched and darkened. "They never sleep, under the mountains. I drank their blood and ate their flesh for sustenance when I caught one unawares. Very poor meat, them. I survive but for the swiftness of my ax and spear. Once I wore the skin of one over my own to disguise, learned the Black Tongue a bit. Hegi not fooled. Orc more easily so, and goblins even stupider. But stupid and vicious and determined."
"Determined for what?"
"They are creatures who love to taste the whip. What master wields it more cruelly, or with more promise?"
"I suppose I couldn't say," Meisar shrugged.
"Nor should you. It is a curse to utter it," Hegi said. Bifur sighed at her with unmasked admiration and fear knitted together in wide black eyes like her own. She reached across the table and patted his hand, a calm curve of a smile.
"Hegi," Meisar said, soothingly. She placed her hand over the trembling of Hegi's. "I do believe many of those are vanquished, judging what you saw. They came above, and besieged this very mountain at that terrible battle. I think that is what you-"
"I came above..." Hegi's smile settled, dreamily, ignoring Meisar's reassurance. "See light one day and come up above. Thank Mahal and run for Ered Luin, I did. Ask Mahal for patience then, kindness. They called me a madwoman when I tell them what I seen. Does my queen believe?"
"Do I have any reason not to?" Meisar said, shakily. Bifur refilled each of their glasses and they drank, without a second thought.
"This thing all things devours, only darkness. Only dark..." Hegi's voice trailed off against the settling of another cup of shine. She slumped into her chair and Bifur sturdied the back of it as she slipped, boneless, toward the floor. He darted into her room and brought a pillow to place under her head where she lay.
"Will she wake anytime soon?" Meisar asked.
Bifur shook his head no.
.
II
Dagny had made him a new jerkin, quilted suede pine-green, with thick aeneous laces threaded down the front in a subtle line. Dwalin considered the garment against the gray samite tunic also his now. Thorin's gift, for his coming along the recent journey; in Thorin's chambers he stood shirtless and grateful. The air was starting to grow colder again, but his scars felt hot on the surface of his skin.
It felt as if Thorin was now the newest person to see them, though he had known every scar and nick of his body for enough years, inflicted a few even. Alas, he was not the newest. In a smaller fur pouch there was a gift for Freyda too. He had not opened it. He stippled his fingers along the outline of something hard under the lining, twisting it in his hands.
"Sup with us tonight, my friend, you and Freyda both," Thorin entreated. He slipped on his own tunic for dinner, the same soft umber as Dwalin's, though his was paneled and embroidered elegantly, and worn without a jerkin, only a wide belt.
"Aye, will do." Dwalin stood in front of the armoire mirror, adjusting the long whiskered flanks of his beard, straightening the stiffened courtship plait in the left one, once he had dressed.
"I did not think I would ever say it, but the courtship braid is well-looking on you. It suits you better than you know," Thorin said. "And a set of new clothes. You needed another jerkin, my friend. Freyda will find you ravishing either way I suppose, boiled leather or velvet."
"She'll be akin to that idea, aye. Gyda's took up with the sewin' guild of late, made 'er a new dress. She'll want to wear it too I s'pose," Dwalin said nonchalantly. His eyes drifted to a separate place, invisible. "Very pretty, when she's... a lady. I find her so."
"She will be a very happy wife made, Dwalin. I am certain of that. If nothing else."
.
"Begging your pardons," Meisar apologized, breathless, several minutes late to the annex of Tania's Hall where they were to gather for dinner. Dis had declined, claiming a roiling of the stomach, and Brynja had agreed to take the dogs for a stroll into the fresh air where Meisar's rushing about had left them pacing and grumbling. In the meantime the stewards had waited on the food, poured too much ale already.
"We were called to mediate a dispute between two merchants over a market stall space in Dale. It ended in blows," Meisar explained dismally.
"Are you hurt?" Thorin all but sprang up from his seat.
"Of course not. It is their pockets that will be hurting. Three silver pieces each, for disturbing the peace, as is law. They should have waited and taken it to The Pits," she assured.
"She learns admirably," Balin offered, smiling. "It is good to see the crook of the shepherdess still strikes the sheep where they are amiss."
"My crook? Freyda's ax, in true. When she drew it from under her cloak, the peace was swiftly restored," Meisar piped in, gratefully. Beside her Freyda laughed in doleful agreement. A side-less surcoat of deep forest green with yellow silk paneling and black wolf-skin trim was worn with a dark under-gown and sleeves, painstakingly embroidered at the chest in bronze thread that narrowed into a sharp V shape. She wore a thin bronze torque about her neck and her hair loose in braid-waves swept down her back, except for her courtship plaits, amply displayed in front. When Dwalin's eyes fell on her, his fingers turned hard about the handle of his cup.
"These sheep are dealers of Eastern goods. I pray they shall not shear the wool from their own backs to keep even," Meisar added, guiltily. "There is a territoriality about market spaces in Dale I know, but the drought of trade from those parts has made it all the worse I suppose." She adjusted the round hood edged in opal that had sagged lopsided in her rushing. A tippet of brown sable was worn with a plain high-collared overgown in midnight-blue with the rounded shoulders shaped high and ruched, and a pale blue moonstone set in gold filigree on a thin chain.
She took her seat at the table, nearly breathless. "For better word, Hegi will do as you wished, husband," Meisar informed them. "For a small favor. She wishes you to pass a decree by her, outlawing any dwarf or man from calling her mad or scandalous in her living." Royal decrees were posted at the doors to Thror's' Hall at the start of each fortnight, announcing new laws, new work, the comings and goings of the world beyond, worth reporting.
"Very well then." Thorin dictated to Ori with an amused smirk. "No dwarf shall slander the name of Hegi, daughter of Skog. Two bronze doubloons for each offense."
"Make it a silver piece the crown's coffers may well overflow," Gimli smirked. "She is right daft."
"Wiser than you think, Master Gimli. But were that she were merely daft..." Meisar sighed, darkly. It is a curse to utter it.
Thorin's hand placed itself assuring over hers. "We will send word to Gondor to keep watch at the southern and eastern borders of their realm, since these... inconveniences in trades continue. Be vague about the reason. Best for now."
"Haradim and Eastern men have besieged them before; they may figure it out on their own," Balin said. "The ravens say they have already doubled the watch at their southern borders since the Battle of the Five Armies."
"Against what? Or who? Dol Guldur is vanquished of its evils where it lies, Mount Gundabad of little concern so far removed. Now there is a question,' Thorin sipped his ale contemplatively. "Is there a portent for that?"
"Prophecies and portents; there is always one or another, people everywhere squabbling over their truths, finding the answers where it suits them," Balin sighed. He felt a twinge of yearning to have been so young again, to have Dwalin's vigor and brawn rather than the weight of his own wisdom. But he remembered the chaos of younger days, the ashes, the hunger, and his aging bones seemed to favor the fragile peace of the present, his king happy, and his brother…
Across the table Dwalin sat with his betrothed and doted upon her, rarely with his words, especially with company, but his face betrayed him. He was in love. Bless his beard a thousand times.
"Let us eat and discuss merrier tidings over supper," Thorin propounded. "Thorin Stonehelm sends word that his delegation shall progress at the agreed time, and arrive in Erebor the first week of the new moon."
"It comes so soon. What news of the Iron Hills coterie then? We've fifty-and-a-hundred strong to provide for here. Shall we send a regiment to patrol their way too? What shall we put in their pockets for the task?" Gloin all but groused.
"Hush, the treasury is not scarcely stocked by any means," Emli scolded. Gloin's lips moved to grumble but his wife's hard pause over her cup silenced him.
"That may not be untoward. His lady mother intends to bring every willing dwarrowdam in the Iron Hills to serve in her entourage. By willing, I mean every one should be expected, for fear of her reprisal." Emli nodded in curt agreement to that.
Thorin gave Gloin a forceful half smile. "Chivalry, as well as practicality, requires that regiment now. Dwarf women after all, are our greatest treasure, worth all the spears and axes in the Seven Kingdoms to protect."
Dwalin smirked in quiet agreement at that, clandestinely placed his hand over Freyda's beneath the table, on her knee. An unspoken endearment, the affection still rang like bells. "Well, that's true enough."
"A dwarven lady need only one sorta spear to let 'er know what treasure she is," Freyda whispered not quite as clandestinely into Dwalin's ear, to Gimli's abrupt choking on his pie. Dwalin fiddled blindly with the fur pouch in his lap, passed something to Freyda under the table then. She looked down and her eyes grew wide with delight, Dwalin's subtle smile entreating a deeper pride and giddiness that was not ready to reveal itself so publicly yet. It made Meisar smile against some unspeakable heaviness inside, and it was not the rich soup or ale settling in her belly already.
"There can't be more than seventy-five in all his lordship's halls last I estimated," Balin related. "The dearth of dwarf-women there is four to one."
"I am certain then a few will come in hope that their Ones might be found beneath the Lonely Mountain then. A few dwarves packed off the Iron Hills, a few more for our kingly halls. Seems a fair trade. Were I a lady of those halls, I would eagerly seek out a place in her retinue. Intolerable as that woman is..." Emli plucked her fork up and ate before she could be rebuked by Thorin.
"He is my cousin, and I shall succor him finely in our halls, and see that he comes here safely first. He and his mother both," he eyed Emli, mildly scolding. "The treasury shall provide, I am certain. Gloin?"
"Aye, my king, it shall," Gloin relented.
"Perhaps a fine dwarrowdam shall come, of a less-rude quality, though I doubt it much, that shall find you comely company, Gimli," Emli mooned at her son.
"Nay, I think not," Gimli concluded quickly, busy at his cups. He signaled over his mother's adjusting his napkin over his doublet to the steward to refill his ale. "Iron Hills girls have no manners." The ale was quaffed and a ferocious belch issued. "None at all, 'amad. Shan't be interested in their like I don't think."
"Not slouching like that anyhow," pecked Emli. "Not even an Iron Hills girl will be impressed by a well-bred lad who sits like a hunchback over his supper."
"Speaking of marriage, will Freyda be soon a bride?" inquired Balin. "Any set plans, brother?"
"My lady!" Brynja burst in, high with panic as Freyda fumbled for a word or two.
"Brynja?" Meisar stood and took the hysterical girl by the shoulders.
"It is Fred, my lady! He's... he's... fallen!"
.
"I bent to lace my shoe and he sprinted ahead toward a mead-and-wurst cart at the lift. He slipped, m'lady, beneath the rails and down," Brynja sobbed. "I gave chase, I did I swear. But it happened too quick!" Brynja followed her in a rush across the city foyer and down the winding stairways, down and down. She felt her heart like she felt the descent into the city, dropping further down to an inevitable bottom.
A group of dwarves gathering around pitiably shaking their heads quietly parted as the queen and her lady arrived at the scene. They muttered quiet words of sympathy and mulled around, as if they were unsure it was polite to disperse. On the ground lay poor Fred. The briefest of suffering, Meisar's head swam with the realization, when she scooped up the limb body. His neck had been broken in the fall, and likely killed him instantly. He was still warm.
"M'queen," the dwarves about muttered in unison, dipping at their knees in quick solemn bows.
"You may disperse and be about your business if you wish," she said, her voice strangling against the tightening of her throat. It felt like a noose, the will to grieve aloud. But she had determined that her people would never see her cry, not again. I should be made of stone.
She carried Fred back into their chambers. The other two dogs lounging by the fire sprang up and tried to climb her skirts to get at their friend. Redcoat licked her face and tasted tears. His howls turned to a quiet dirge. Raincloud buried himself into the hem of her skirt, refused to emerge for many minutes, while she sobbed. Doubled over, she pressed Fred into her abdomen and held his head to her chest, stroking the wiry fur. Brynja scurried around in the room, her feet like drums. She brought a sheet of dark wool to wrap him in.
"I beg your forgiveness, Meisar. Please..." Brynja leaned into her shoulder from behind and shook with weeping. Meisar's stomach coiled in guilt thinking the poor girl was in fear of her anger.
"There is nothing to forgive, Brynja," her fingers traced the outline of the wool aloofly, as the dogs huddled at her sides. They sniffed and poked him with their snouts and pawed at him with the tips of their feet. When he did not move for several minutes, Raincloud and Redcoat curled up, pitifully, in the billow of her skirts, whining like the weeping of old women, quiet and heavy with a certain weighted wisdom.
"When friend or kin has died, they say all creatures are needful to look upon them, to see and smell and... confirm... or it as if..." Meisar started to ramble. Her eyes felt opaque.
"I'm sorry... I'm sorry..." Brynja sniffed, pathetically. Her eyes were so red from crying they looked inflamed by coal dust rather than tears. Meisar's finally came freely. They flowed so hot and stinging it was like the juice of a tart fruit drained into raw skin. She had rubbed them from her eyes so many times it was starting to feel like it.
"It's not your fault. A dog doesn't belong under a mountain. These like to run free." She held onto Brynja's hand hard in the way that Thorin had in his sleep so long ago, crunching bones or close to it.
"I'll help ye bury him, m'lady. I've taken me mattock. We ought lay him in the stone, perhaps up on the spur near'a gate, so he can see o'er the horizon on a clear day," Brynja offered.
"Yes," Meisar agreed finally. "Yes, he would like that. He never quite got used to being under the mountain so much. I don't think he liked it very much."
She carried Fred wrapped like a parcel, held tight to her chest. Brynja wore her old wool dress and Bofur's scarf and slung her mattock over her shoulder like she had in the Blue Mountains, to and fro from coal mines and quarries. Passing dwarves paid her heed and she kept her head lowered so none could see the tears fighting to remain confined.
Her arms had begun to ache by the time they reached the gate and felt the cool air streaming through in light gusts. Summer grasped a long while after its typical end in the day; at night, the air was perfumed autumn.
Together they climbed the narrow stone steps up the closest spur in the dark. "Here," Meisar declared. It was where Thorin had taken her the day before their wedding, where Gandalf had found them close to full entwined. A curse to utter it.
Brynja hacked at the loose dry soil and stone in the pithy lantern light. "Poor Fred," she whispered into the turned-over earth, cold and damp beneath the layer of stone Brynja had laid to fragments with her mattock. "Poor little hound. How faithfully you have served me." She lay him tenderly in the hole.
"You do the first dust," she told Brynja gently. "He was very fond of you."
Brynja sprinkled a handful of dust and pebbles into the ground, over the dark wool of his shroud. Together the two dwarrowdams shoveled and plowed with their hands until he was covered. Meisar piled the rocks upon the grave mound and wept. She thought of Dis, the privilege two dogs had known but not a mother for her sons. They were there, she reckoned, heavily, in the darkness, in stone where they belonged as equally as Fred did in the view of the sky.
"I think I may to go the tombs and mull this. I think my sister may there. Who but a mother who has lost her children to comfort me? Fred was one of the closest I had to that," she said dismally. Brynja started to withdraw a hand from her shoulder but hesitated and placed it back, solemnly. She hated that girl's doe eyes when they were sad; she was too kind for this. "Be with Bofur, my lady. Love each moment we have with those who are in our hearts. I can tell you only that."
.
The high octagonal arches of the descending halls lit down into the heart of the mountain where the most silent parts lay. She knew how much Oliada despised the tombs and left her at her post in the royal quarters, to keep watch or get some rest if she pleased.
She could smell plum-wine and heavy perfume at the gates to the necropolis and knew Dis was there. I could follow a trail of her perfume in these airless crypts, and find her without a lantern Meisar thought mournfully. As she followed the wretched path she had come to know, the diligent clink-clink-clink of iron on stone rang gently in the dark.
"Dis," she called aloud. The clank stopped abruptly.
"Here, sister," Dis's voice was high with a sort of anxiety down below. Meisar made her way down the stairs to the royal graves. There Dis sat with her back against Thorin's tomb, her dark skirts all spread around her. "I am sorry I did not attend supper. I felt..."
"Your stomach. It's alright, Dis." She came and sat in the space between Thorin and Fili's tombs. Dis didn't move from her spot. She put her arms to Meisar and cradled her when she saw the stains of tears and dirt upon her face.
"You weep, sister?"
"My dog fell a great distance and died. I've buried him by the gate." She turned out her dirt-stained palms, shined the lantern at the stains on her coat.
"I am sorry," Dis stroked her hair, hard.
"I should not be here asking your comfort when I see whose tombs you pay tribute at."
"A very good tribute," Dis muttered, cryptically. She exhaled, nervously. "A mother's love, even in death." She held Meisar's cheeks in her cold hands. "A sister's love also."
There was something exceedingly flitting in the princess's eyes that gave her the briefest and eeriest of pauses. "Dis," she whispered. "They were the closest to children I had. Maybe that I will have. But two are still living."
"We mourn for each that leave us before their time," Dis kissed her forehead, her cold lips like the touch of death. She shivered. "A friend is a friend."
But a child is a child.
"You shall bear one of your own, or many. I promise," Dis cooed. There was sweet plum wine on her breath and heavy.
She might have told her the same thing she told Thorin, but Dis yawned dramatically then. "I grow tired. Shall we take a warm drink in my room, Meisar?"
Dis passed her the lantern and stood slowly, and slunk away, a few steps behind her all the way up the steps, the clank in her pouch not the silver of her lockets or girdle but iron.