Author's Note: I meant to post the "big important chapter" as one but having gotten a bit carried away with this part (sometimes you're just in "that" mood, what can I say), I have decided to divide it into two. The other half should be up soon, possibly tomorrow.
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What have we done?
Such had an answer, just not a conclusion. As it tumbled down into the cavernous heart of stone, what would tumble down with it?
Dis slunk off to her rooms before Thorin was expected back. A messenger boy came later; Thorin and Dwalin had decided to keep each other's company in the forges after council. As men would time to time, she reckoned, relieved that Thorin might not see the way the shook, how her mouth pinched in an attempt not to make herself retch with anxiety. Dis's serenity as they traveled the length of the city afterward had disquieted her in the subtlest of ways. Dis's face was one that looked as if it would never shed a tear again.
Her trembling sent her to crawl into bed, shunning supper, and the maids' offer a healer's services. Griet and Bertha and a new chambermaid, Niva, supped in the antechamber, gossiping over the capon with rosemary and herbed potatoes.
The perfume of the flowers hanging from the walls in bunches had sweetened the air in the chamber. The rugs had been cleaned, beaten over the rails with enormous paddles on the front gallery the day before with so many others, on a day designated for the task kingdom-wide. Fine Eastern rugs in hues of red, purple, ochre and emerald, wavering like exotic flags. Blue Mountains rugs threadbare underneath were handled more carefully, preferring blue and gray shades with tassels made of rags on the ends. The dust and dirt rained down all morning over the gate. Somewhere in her memory she could see Bira doing the same, a blue-and-orange rug, Bira plucking orange hairs from the fibers with a sticky paper, laughing at how close it matched her children's, and little orphaned Meisar's all the same. Lagert's first baby had just been born; she was rocking him in a cradle in their tiny dusty yard. They had all been happy that day.
Where was Thorin? While she sat in the doorway in Ered Luin and watched Bombur stir the potato soup in a cauldron as big as he while Bira beat the rugs and the baby dwarf grunted and cried in Lagert's arms. In Dunland still? Wandering with his hammer and ax, weary, dirty. A peoples hungry and downtrodden following close. Watching their king. In forges of men, stables, ramshackle inns and abandoned hovels. His hard young face set like stone in its pride, pride becoming anger, perhaps something in between that there was no word for. The sad blue eyes she had first beheld, where they so then? So demoted, so beautiful.
As she lay and took in deep breaths the clean fragrance of the room with its new flowers and pristine rugs, serenity washed over limbs and then settled warmly in her chest. The sensation itself, the serenity of her entire body, was at once indolent and unfamiliar in light of what had just been wrought. The exhaustion of the weeks and the weight of her new knowledge lifted, inexplicably, as if picked up by effervescent powerful hands from her own shoulders. Her heartbeat slowed with the pace of her mind, aligning with something far away from here, beneath her. Keenness set in, a fire in her body that would not let her rest, less a burn than a kindling warmth, building. Slow and needful it was building, and Thorin was absent. Forging, the messenger said, like the days of old.
Could he remember Thror guiding his hands over the anvil, the hammer, the bellows?
Or the guidance of his heart, possessed by a stone. Did Thror weep now in the Halls of the Fathers for loss or for relief, at last?
Thorin's smithing days had intrigued her in a melancholy way once but little more now. Was he there, presumably in Freyda's forge, to make something beautiful and intricate, or utilitarian? He was with Dwalin after all, the latter would be the likelier.
She imagined his hands black with soot, his forearm thick and taut from labor, his sweat, his strength. She rolled into still-warm sheets that smelled of him, slick underneath her linen drawers, hips twitching about over the sheets. He was not there, she remembered glumly, but pressed suddenly upward she was as if by unseen hands toward remedy of that absence. She sat on the side of the bed to catch her breath, find her heartbeat. With eyes shut she felt it with her own hand through her skin, it's slowing, it's gentle thump, swiftly aligned with something far beyond itself. The perfection of all the world as it seemed at that very moment was enough to draw tears to her eyes. Her dogs drew around her feet affectionately, anticipating a walk, but the pinch of disappointment didn't last when she nodded a firm no. They retired to the cool stone to sleep, using a tuckered Burt as a pillow.
Rising impatiently, she selected her clothing with efficiency, her green samite summer sur-coat with sleeves cut above the elbow for coolness and comfort, worn over her ordinary undergown, plain ivory lawn with long, loose sleeves. The hour was late and the maids had gone, but Oliada's duty would not end until midnight. When she asked the sentry to walk with her to the forges, she obeyed, with her usual silence, but the eyes that asked questions, never realizing just how easy they were to read sometimes.
Oliada stopped at the foot of the stair. "You wish to walk city this time of night? Not all asleep now. I get cloak?"
Meisar smoothed her extant garment, concluded it was more than proper. Her hair, though crownless, was plaited and drawn up in a great cinnamon bun.
"They know their queen by now," she assured Oliada. "They've seen me with dirt on my knees."
"Making things grow," Oliada repeated as if an answer long rote. From an arid realm, gardens were still a strange novelty to the Blacklocks.
"Yes," she answered, half in a dream. The air was sweet, dry, carried from a summer's night gently in. "Making things grow."
The sentry didn't blink, and spoke less thereafter on the path from the royal hall to the forges many levels below. She didn't ask the reason her mistress might venture to that place after hours. Or her returns to the royal halls at odd hours, with soot on her dress and tears on her cheeks and in a Blacklock veil, Dis slinking back to her chambers marked the same. Her silence was reverence, other times loyalty; it confounded the queen to say which on any given day.
Oliada might understand. Perhaps she knew precisely why the darkness deeper down into the mountain and not just at the tombs frightened her more than an onslaught of enemy fighters. But there was no use, or want of saying. Oliada, like Thorin, would understand in time.
They would have to.
Never had the fortress city been more beautiful to her eyes, even in the lull of night. The smaller lamps flickered above hanging in ornate chandeliers of iron, the bigger hanging lanterns snuffed for night. The shadows and the small light collided between the great columns and illuminated the angles of the arches above. She could smell iron in the air, iron and bread. They trod past the ventilation grids of the great kitchens, the laughter and quick chatter of the cooks and bakers prepping for the morning bread audible on the other end. There is gladness beneath this mountain. Gladness and hope. More than has ever been felt before.
Somewhere far beyond their path it was raining outside. She could smell the wet earth far below the circulation allowed in by the terraces, the electricity of the clouds, summer torrents nourishing the ground, the life buried deep within it. It had not rained in several weeks. In the morning the merchants would complain of mud but the farmers' markets would clatter with hope of an autumn bumper crop.
Above the quiet of the a great forge's' smelter, she followed the pounding of a single hammer in the otherwise dark, silent circumference of forging stalls, from up the winding stairs. She narrowed her eyes at the glow coming from Freyda's forge just before the hall rounded about.
"I'll be fine. Get some sleep, Oliada. We'll find our way back."
Slowly, she opened the door to the forge, faint with a whiff of fresh-cut cedar. Freyda's rune carved above the handle joined with Dwalin's.
She stepped into the light of the small forge on quiet feet. The last thing she wanted to do was startle him. The narrow forge was lit in a reddish glow that would have felt demonic under other circumstances, save for the comforting sight of her husband at the anvil, as if it were old times, the dwarves of Erebor robbed of everything save for their pride and their hammers.
For better or for worse, he never could let go of the past. Something about him, the rough slate-blue tunic rolled up to his elbows, laces fastening its front long threadbare and undone, leaving his broad chest half exposed and soaked in sweat fanned her heat like the bellows to his side.
Where did he get such a a dreadful rag like the one he wore? A token from Dunland? In spite of it, he was more exquisite a sight to her eyes than she could process rationally, long hair plastered haphazard to his cheeks, drawn back in a leather hair-tie straining to keep the lot of it contained. It sent another wave of heat roiling through her that she was quite sure was not the warmth coming off the forge at all. He was focused and intense and there was a hint of anger glowing in his eyes when the hammer swung and clanged and swung and clanged again. The coals glowed in the small pan across from the anvil on the far wall, wafting relentless heat outward. She did not like to imagine what he was thinking of. She knew too well.
The dew of his perspiration rolled from his skin in beads, down the well-muscled back and over broad, steadfast shoulders. Beads had begun to form on her forehead and over the arch of her top lip. She felt the dew pooling in the cleft of her chest and start to spread sticky and heated on the inside of her thighs. It tingled there, swelling more with need in the heat of the small forge, the sight of him more welcome than it had ever been, and in such a state.
She had once thought he found smithing work degrading and wondered why he came down here at all, save to aid Dwalin. "Smithing work is the pride of all dwarves, not a service we provide for pence for ungrateful tall-folk," he had told her long ago.
The hammer stopped and he rested his hands on the cool part of the anvil, catching his breath.
"You are awake at this hour, adyum?" His voice was low; he did not turn around. She shrunk back into the darkness just outside the door, momentarily.
"I could not sleep," she confessed, stepping a little more into the light. His eyes considered her inexplicably, blinking back rivulets of sweat.
"I feared I would not see you until morning then."
The baritone of his low utterance made her tighten, his taciturn mouth that had spent too much time willing itself not to smile. It is what he saw in me at first, and I in him, and fell in love. He stood up straight, the muscles in his back tightening hard under the sweat-dampened, clinging tunic. His dwarven breadth seemed at once more intimidating, more ferocious than that of a man.
"I brought you malt-beer. You've been at this work awhile."
"There are some times when you truly know what it is I desire," he chuckled lightly. She set the stein on the bench and he snatched it up, gladly, and drank deep and long.
"A few instruments to repair for Dwalin," he explained when he had his fill. "A kingdom must be run; it does not slow for the sake of the domestic, and Freyda hasn't been able to-" he seemed to stop himself. "Councils and audiences all hours; it is tedious. Smithing feels more natural. It feels… true." He raised the finished instrument into the torchlight and examined it.
The steel had sung a tempestuous tune in that forge though, and she knew his eyes, when in all but body he was somewhere else. He bent again over the anvil in a moment of rest, his hair falling forward into his face. She wrapped her arms around him from behind, taking in his raw scent of sweat and smoke and hot metal. His hair smelled of smoke.
"Are you alright, mizimel?" his head cocked back in concern, his baritone gentle again.
Alright? I am perfect. And confounded. And afraid to hope. She focused on the beat of her own heart, the thump of his, as it calmed, and finally, they aligned.
If Dis was right, neither hers or his would be bereft again.
"Yes," she whispered. "I am perfectly well. I just needed to be with you now, so very much."
She took up a cold soaked towel from the cooling tub next to the anvil. She pressed it to his forehead, his neck, feeling him flinch, then relax against the soothing cool of it on his flushed skin. She dabbed the cold water down his neck and sponged slowly, warmed the icy touch with a line of kisses down the side of his neck, pushing the loose hair aside.
"Does that feel good?" She slipped her hands beneath his tunic to feel the hot, slick skin beneath. He groaned into her touch, and she drew the clinging tunic away from the turgid plain of his skin, the scent of him iron and smoke and sweat. The sharp brine of him lingered stubbornly on her lips.
"Are you a king or a rag-picker's whelp? What is this dreadful shirt?" she laughed. The breadth and tautness of his body underneath the thin, sweat-wrung tunic clenched and fluttered beneath her hands.
"Discard it if you must," he relented, turning and lifting his arms outward. His eyes indicated an investiture very much in the present, the intensity of his body soothing itself to her touch. "It is very… hot in here."
She urged his arms upward again once she had pulled the tunic over his head and tossed it off to the corner of the stall. She ran the cold, wet towel across his underarms, horizontal from one to the next across his broad chest and southward then. The coolness of the water had alleviated him of further perspiration; the hair dried on his chest, whorls unfurling toward a uniform springiness from the indentations of his pectorals to the thickening line at his stomach. It had taken little of the sharp, raw scent of him; she craved its closeness more, for him to mark her with it like animals did, as his own. The barely-audible rasp of his chest hair against the tip of her nose triggered a hard groan from him.
"You… came here to see me? To see that I am quenched?" His heart quickened beneath the flesh and bone with the tip of her nose drawn over his chest, slowly and pointedly, her thumbs at the pulse-points of his wrists, his arms slack.
"In a manner of speaking," her voice sunk low to so he could barely hear. His heart, its flutter lingering on the tip of her nose, coursing through the veins at his wrist, was in pace with that of the mountain itself. He drew her close against his torso, his chest starting to thump in thick beats again. It was the first she had felt all three of them, like a great triumvirate, perfectly aligned.
His thumbs on her face dug hard, leaving streaks of soot on her cheekbones. The intense, icy blue of his eyes had given way to black, and unblinking, he held her gaze. She found her hands on the rim of his breeches, then in their center, fumbling with drawstring, and entirely without her mind to command it so; it simply was.
Spinning her about, he bit the side of her neck, pulling the sur-coat open from behind and slipping it off. His nose traced the seam, up and down with deliberate slowness. She attended to the laces at the kirtle herself, shucking it to her waist where stubbornly twisted and remained. Sweat-beaded torso met her naked back, his arousal slotted to the small part of it, kirtle in a bunch at her waist.
"I am yet to be quenched," his voice rumbled a little higher than her own, and she was lifted beneath her glutes and sat upon the anvil. "You anticipate my thirst with such precision alas."
"Is it so hard to guess?"
"Nothing could please me more than your presence now," he breathed. "Nothing."
"How can I explain…?" she shifted the left side of her bottom on the anvil. The palms that had been flat and stiff upon the anvil found their way to her waist and squeezed her as he kissed her mouth, his lips tart with the malty beer.
"Explain what?" He came into the shelter of her legs' embrace, pressing on his hips, drawing him close. He slid his hands up the ample curves of her thighs.
"Why it is I desire you so. Right now."
She felt his mouth descend into the well of her breasts, sheltering there like a pigeon from the rainstorm. He kissed the mountain pass between her peaks and found the path freshly dewed, and all the roads that led south, the tiny lines that made a center crease in her soft, lush belly a suitable road for now.
"I would give you all the world that is mine to give," he exhaled. "I would put a child in you, as fine as Freyda's. I would give the world I know to do so…"
You have already been given of it. But it is not a gift, only a price long overdue. Trust us. Trust Dis. Mahal. It is all that is left now.
"You have given me your love. It is enough."
"It abates not, my treasure. You are as beautiful as the day I married you."
"And the night?"
She gripped the sides of the anvil for dear life as he descended close to her belly and rubbed his beard against her there, her crumpled kirtle in his hands. His hair pooled against the creases of her hips. The kirtle was not like her nightgowns; her sweat drew it to the ample curves of her thighs and hips but it was not a dainty, flimsy shift but opaque and thicker-woven. He could scarcely tear it from her with the sort of ease he desired at the moment.
"Singular and fairest of maids."
As her hands drew down to trace the line of his breeches, slick skin and drying leather a path in the dark, he lifted her upward with urgency, turned her 'round when she was on her feet and managed to wriggle her out of the kirtle at last from behind, dropping it to the sooty floor.
"Thorin..."
He molded her globes in his hands like soft clay, and then her waist, his rough hands on her back, pushing her gently forward, and coming about to cup her breasts from behind, his arousal against her through the leather. His hands were spread and cradled between the steel and her bare skin soon, only slipping them out from under her when he was assured it was not too hot for her comfort. He nudged her legs just a little further apart, and cradled the half-moon undersides of her bottom again, her hips arched in waiting and the crease of Thorin's middle, bending, and hers from behind, arching up, eager to receive.
His hard fingers skimmed the slick inner length of her thigh, an excursion that ended with blunt tip of his finger setting to softly gliding and stimulating the wanting skin between her swollen lips. The natural dew of her desire that drenched the inner shell of her nethers already drew from him a gratified moan, his second finger joining the other over her rose-diamond.
The snap of his breeches coming off, to his knees from the sound of it, set her knees to girding themselves against collapse. In a single stroke he was sheathed. She went weaker still. Her walls clenched and begged against every thrust, swift as they came. His sweat and hers dripping over her thighs and buttocks mingled smudging soot roughly about them. She arched her back against the furious rhythm, felt his heavy jewels smack at the tender flesh in her most sensitive of places where openings were bridged. His palms flat on either side of her steadied him, but soon he had taken to gripping her loosening knob of hair, leveraging against his need.
.
Thorin took himself back to a place he not been in some time. A village in the Riddermark. Men. A few shillings for a set of horseshoes. A few more for a sword. Dis was still a girl and working in the forge with him, so small she had to stand on a box to reach over the anvil. Thrain could work in the light of day with his bad eye but not nights. Thorin worked nights when it was cold and kept warm in the forge, and Thrain and Dis slept there so they would not use up the firewood in their modest house. Heat. Metal like the flank of the dragon's belly. The hammer slammed and slammed, just to make it go away quicker. Dunk it in water, the hiss like every sideways look and jeer from men.
His anger rose in his throat and emerged a deep, rumbling growl into soft flesh. Take it and mold it. His hands gripped gentle curves of hips. He closed his eyes, went back to the forge, but it was not the shed in the Riddermark. No. Great forges. The rumble of huge hammers overhead. Thrain and Thror at his side. Teaching him to treat the metal with reverence, to handle it lovingly even if it needed to be pounded madly to bring it to fruition.
He raised his hammer up and brought it down again. She made a similar sound even, a high, ferocious sound. Thrain would have him pump the bellows into the fire, raise the heat. Hers clasped around him like the hands of men on his shoulder, with more demands, or tossing him from a tavern door.
He made a strangled roar. Like old times, in anger, over the anvil. Cracked skin stung from the dripping of sweat into the unraveling seams of epidermis at his forehead. The handle still-too-hot of a hammer opening a callous in the heel of his palm. Skin going reddish from days in the summer sun over the unforgiving plains of Dunland, like hers had been once. The past was past but the fire was ferocious, still burning, like a vein of coal deep beneath the silents of the stone. He thrust until he had filled every inch of her, and drowned her entirely in his essence, his fire.
She bent herself in the opposite direction with a fresh tug at her scalp, back ferociously arched, to seize the dip of his head toward her. Her neck stung with the exertion of trying to reach him, groaning thinly from her throat. The force ramped her rump into him in a single ferocious buck, drawing him to depths previously untested, with might. His member ran roughshod over the pleasure spot deep inside of her. The way she writhed and bucked herself up against him again, the undulation of his strong frame above her keeping her greedily pinned, was enough to undo him in simultaneous crescendo. He let a low roar, and left her a quivering puddle in rapture splayed unceremoniously over the anvil, her sweat slicking the surface, smearing ash and soot over metal and skin.
When he opened his eyes, he was there. Home again. Under the mountain and no longer the young, noble prince but a king reborn, with his queen.
.
His weight pressed above her small frame steadied the trembling, except in her knees. They buckled so hard the anvil's underside rang with their bumps against it. She scraped her bare feet, numb, against the grime of the floor beneath them, sliding back, trying to straighten and stretch her legs, but how they quaked. Thorin scraped the lank veil of hair plastered to her cheek back and replaced it with the mop of his own, that too flung back, and his mouth occupying in turn, kissing cheek and jaw and neck with the bluster of an inexperienced boy.
It was only then that he appeared to have found the source of the relentless quavering, or felt the panting, frantic heat of her breath up close, arms like noodles flailing aimlessly until they found the sides of the anvil again but failed to grasp it.
"Meisar?"
He caught her naked body, soaked in sweat and smeared in soot, in his arms before she fainted over.
"Thorin. Thorin... oh bless me." He picked her up as if she were a tiny stone and deposited her on a pile of blankets in the corner of the forge. He splashed handfuls of water over the heat of her skin, coolness bringing her back to some semblance of place.
"I did not mean to overwhelm you," he professed, with audible lament.
"You did no such thing." It was a good lie, a sweet lie. Not like so many others. She drew his blunt-fingered, worked hands against hers, mingling theirs together, sliding along the sweaty surfaces of each other's palms in absent suspension for a long moment.
"It was not too much for you, you are certain?" he breathed, lying beside her.
"Quite the opposite," she pecked his furred chin with fast kisses, relentlessly growing in fury until she had his mouth to hers, laving him in mercurial, greedy kisses which he returned with matching urgency. His cheek rubbed in the soot and grim at the edge of the blanket where it met the unforgivingly hard floor. She pulled him back, brushing stale crumbs, bits of coal dust from the side of his face.
"I thought I would have exhausted you by now," he remarked, keenly.
His breathlessness piqued her further. "I am most keen to your company, Thorin. I cannot explain… I would have you again. Now." Deep hunger that clouded his eyes made her whimper, an all consuming fervid passion blackening the azure of his gaze.
"A forge that is never cold is a rare gift to a dwarf," Thorin chuckled. "Mahal keep your fires stoked so for all times. I would be a happy pauper blacksmith again for that."
"But you are a king, and you have me nonetheless."
"It seems I rule a kingdom of ash at the moment," he smirked with a dark hint of irony at the corners of his lips, considering the stains on his hands, the whole of both their bodies.
"A king of ash and fire," she whispered, pulling his hand to the orange tuft between her thighs, urging the tips of his fingers to woo the turgid cleft. Hers grasped the column of his in tandem, pumping the transformative flesh to its needful state, minding the mysterious process to which it became so.
"I am ready," he concluded, hoarsely, after a prolonged, and meticulous effort on her part. He rolled the smaller blanket and propped it under her neck, and himself on the weight of his arms over her. She stroked upward at him and guided him in. As he twitched from the tight heat, his thick tail released itself, his long hair splayed and plastered across the breadth of her chest as he lowered himself on his arms to her. The bead of his temple braid flicked against her rosy point as he rose and thrust, first with a rejuvenated vigor, and again, several more times, with the careful stamina of a plough-horse at field. Her calves rubbed over his bottom, down the backs of his thighs. At first he was tenuous and slow, in order that he might ready himself to the fullest, she supposed. She craved it in spite of the throb and ache in her core.
As he kissed and absorbed the perfume of fresh exertion down her neck she lay her cheek to the rough blanket beneath her, until his free hand raked her hair back from her forehead and tugged it sharply, so that her eyes were only on his own, their gaze no longer careful and cloudy but possessive and black with desire. The opposite arm pinned hers quite firmly beside her head, entering into another thrust with aplomb.
The burn of fingernails digging against his thighs migrated to his back and he hissed in pleasure against her. Teeth grasped her lower lip and his beard rasped over the tender skin around her mouth. Sweat and heat poured from her now, nails raking over his skin. A sharp tug at his scalp let him know that she was close, as the muscles in his own belly began to tighten ahead of it. The vibration of her need and her enthusiasm sped his own coming, yielding to turgid need, where the sheer depth of his zenith raised him.
And then she raised him, flipping him with all her might, every fiber of momentum in that plump, tenacious body of hers finding it in her need to pin him beneath her and ride, not a plough-horse's pace but a man's horse. Her palms pressed themselves to his chest in a desperate attempt to leverage and steady herself, against the clenching of all her muscles about his throbbing heat.
Coaxing yet another stream of searing fluid from his body, he spilled into her unyielding. She rode his waves of bucking and spasming and growling beneath her, her own body growing rigid, ahead of the coming peak. Hot spurts of liquid were pouring out of her, his passions and her passions spilling together, her chalice running over. The sated length slipped out of her and she groaned, at its absence, hard flesh soft and pliant again. He threw his head back at last and sunk into the rough, damp heat of the blankets, until her hips rolled to a final halt.
In the glow of the dying embers, his queen lay splayed unceremoniously on the forge floor once she had rolled off of him. He did not feel like a king, no. He was a blacksmith again, tired and sweaty and full of intense energies both determined and enraged. Plundering a stable girl in the back of his forge, a nameless lanky fair-haired girl who smelled of horses. Not his queen, not his Meisar.
"We are like a pair of peasants rolling in the hay," he exhaled finally.
"Are we so different?" She traced the border of his jaw with the tip of her finger. He drew her palm against his lips and kissed it repeatedly, nudging her thumb into his mouth with his, suckling lightly.
He withdrew it with a thoughtful gaze. "Perhaps not, but I think it less than proper for a king to have his queen this way," he let a tiny ironic smile curve the corners of his lips.
"Very improper," her deep coo responded in kind. Her thigh made gentle friction over the brawny length of his, laid beside him and entwined. "Scandalous."
"Dwalin confides Brundin was forged right here, the night of their betrothal," Thorin informed her. He gazed about the small forge, its rude walls, hard floor and Freyda's scrap metals in half-finished heaps along the wall.
Meisar wriggled on the blanket under her, a little perturbed. "I'm sure they had other nooks? Halls within halls, my love."
"I may overstep my confidences in saying so, but Dwalin is sure of it," Thorin related.
"Such a surety is a gladder one than most."
Thorin rolled again onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow and lay over her. His kiss migrated from her lips to the tip of her nose, the mound of her bosom in hand. "Well I am glad, Meisar. I am most content, at this very moment."
Thorin kissed the fingers that rose up to trace the seam of his lips. "I think I have not been so keen to have you twice in such a short span. Some spell has come over me perhaps. The wizards did not leave you any secret potions I am aware not of?"
"None from wizards, no. They could comprehend… this." She looked at him, the mess of his hair falling over her and clinging more to the sweat on his broad shoulders, his eyes clouded, and his breath slowly steadying. When he was at ease, laughing in his understated manner, the vibrations from within him changed, the rumble amiable, more akin to the purr of a large tomcat than the snarl of a beast. The curve of his smile in full bloom could have been the shape of the mountain's heart itself. A thousand times more brilliant, for I have seen both now.
"Comprehend what?" he asked finally, catching his breath again.
"Our happiness."
"I am happy. But I think," Thorin relented, sitting up, "that I would prefer my own bed before day breaks."
Grimacing, he forced himself into the damp tunic and pants he had with far greater eagerness discarded, gathering Meisar's kirtle and coat for her. They hurried the length of the city, heads ducked. When the first-morning whistle blew they broke into a sprint until they reached their chambers.
Thorin's scent was on her skin, his sweat and iron scent, and for a moment she did not want to wash it away. He stood in the center of the room, undressing again with the same eagerness.
"I am much in need of a bath," he sighed. His eyes regarded her with a sort of pitiful glee, her kirtle filthy, her face as black and streaked on one side as miner's. She rubbed her cheek, catching sight of herself in the mirror, her hair wilting, coming out from its coiffure in wild strands.
"Would it be so bold of me to ask if I might join you?" she asked.
"I would like that," he acquiesced, sliding the garment once more from her shoulders.
The servants had put out the large ceiling lanterns in the bathing chamber earlier, leaving it entirely dark save for a few candles hastily lit.
Pale skin streaked in soot all over, her comely, amused smile beamed down at him in the low candlelight they had kindled on the sides of the sunken tub in the bathing chamber. She sat on the edge of the tub with her legs in to the knees, stirring the clear water, bundling her hair up with long pins. Thorin was already in the water, groaning at its all embracing warmth. He drifted to the side of the tub, rubbed the washing towel with a gentle lemony soap and cleaned the soot stains from her, parting her legs, running the soft wet towel between them before washing her belly of the black soot from the forge. He petted the dip of her flanks and her thighs with the sopping terry. Ground into the hard grit of the forge floor beneath the layer of old blankets, her back was stippled and welted from their exertions. Thorin gave a lamenting groan.
"You might see a harder workup done on yours, had you a mirror," she chuckled gently, gliding through the streams of light that the lantern and candles offered, to seek her basket of soaps. "I think a wildcat has attacked you."
"Aye, perhaps."
"Come then, let me clean the wounds." She reached into the shallow bowl, piled high with spheres, oblongs and cubes of various cleansing soaps, selected the sandalwood. He leaned as anticipatorily into her touch, his wet hair in knots.
The expanse of his back was not freckled and set like a bricklayer's as her own was, but taut and defined by its strength and breadth, and hurt. An orc-whip with a knot at the end trailing from his left shoulder-blade to near the bump of his spine. A small white burn-mark. The warg-tooth peeking around the side of his flank from the front. She ran the textured hand towel along his spine, circular motions drawing outward, the soap making swirls. His hard, sore muscles un-knotted themselves steadily under her hands, massaging his tired shoulders once his hair was combed free, the shampoo left to set. Water and stubborn streaks of soap residue smattered down his back still, tendrils of wet hair over his shoulders again, loose from their pinning.
Her thighs squeezed a tender comforting vise around the hard dips of his waist from behind, as she ran her fingers through his wet hair before pinning it again in a tail, urging him again to lean into her, her lips rested upon his cheek from behind.
"Your turn," he murmured, twisting in the water to pull her in. They sank together shoulders deep into the tub in its deepest point, shuddering in relief for the embrace of warm water together, their sweat and grime sloughed off tediously. They washed each other in earnest with the rougher of the cleansing towels until the soot stains were vanquished on each of them. Drawing him to a shallower point, she lifted and scrubbed the tuft beneath his arm, scrubbed of the musk of exertion, exuded a light scent of sandalwood and a hint of something more natural.
Fingers treaded down his chest and the sopping line of hair that disappeared below the surface, her hands like the birds that stalked the rivers in summer, stealthily diving after what lay beneath. She tended him there with the softer of the hand towels, knobs and crevices such requiring a defter touch. He slunk and groaned into her, head rested on the damp top of hers, still fragrant with lemongrass. He took her by the elbows and bid her sit on the submarine bench on the tub's edge, lest his knees give out.
Her knees brushed the smooth marble at the tub's wall, drawing back from the pinch and burn of muscle in her thighs and groin, straddled at Thorin as they were. His nipples grew pink from the heat of the water, beneath whorls of drenched chest hair and their peaked tips reaching outward practically begging to be touched.
He thumbed the last stubborn streak of soot from her cheek, wet beard less than abrasive when he leaned forth to kiss her. His mouth was bitter and malty together with the stubborn snap of beer, the sandalwood soap caught in his beard, rubbing the inner parts of her lip as he kissed her and leaving its taste. She reached his shaft and stroked gently at it again.
"Again my jewel? You will exhaust me long before my time," he laughed, eyes with an uncanny besotted sparkle.
"It is our time. Now, if ever."
His tongue dipped into the hollow of her throat in acquiescing, suckling the dewdrops of the bathwater from her skin. Lips closed around and sucked gently the tip of her bosom as she rose up and down on his lap, buoyed by the drag of the water, and drawing out the pace. Her muscles ached and grasped for him, feeling as if she could (and would!) reach out from that place and snatch him deep inside her and never let him go.
"Please… Thorin…" She kissed the rounded peak of his ear.
"My lady," shuddered Thorin quietly. She traced the erogenous seam of his ear, the tip of her tongue flicking along the ridge inside. His grip around the small of her back tightened. There was an implosion of every fiber of her being deep within, surrendering. She slumped down into the water into his arms again. "How I crave you is beyond me. I would never be apart from you again."
The Creator makes all things as they are, when they are to be. She realized slowly it was their day of rest when she did not hear the doors open outside and the dogs cry out with the coming of the maidservants to bring linens, messages and morning tea as they usually did. Neither Aroin nor Dis either would be at their door, and tired as they were, would have dismissed them anyway. Dried by the fire, they crawled into bed together once more, clean and dry in warm linens, content to lie close and sleep, at last. She would not allow herself, not even until long after he had tuckered out. She waited until that effervescent beat that had summoned her away to a separate destiny, found hers and lined with it. She kept her hand on Thorin's chest until his was too.