AUTHOR'S NOTE: I just want to say a very Happy Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all of you. I put so much into this work and appreciate every follow/favorite and review beyond measure. Let us just say I have been planning this gift to you rather strategically for some time, so that the holidays might bring yet another gift to all of you. I know you have been waiting a long time.

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Meisar woke up hot all over but there had not been a fire in the hearth for days. It was summer after all, its last days drawing down hot, dry and serene. She felt sweaty and slightly feverish all over but when she touched her skin it was soft and dry like the thin calico of her nightdress. An hourglass on the table was marked at the early hours of the morning, early enough to sleep a little more.

Twenty-nine days and one night. Since the heart of the mountain was returned to it. The weather beyond held with neither deluge nor drought. Patrols came back from the southern reaches of the plain and reported a blessed lack of disquiet. Merchants could set out for fall sojourns before the winter remanded them to Erebor, Thorin had decreed only a day before. He slept easily that night, either from small victories or a long bath before retiring. Her back and stomach had been sore; she had been more than happy to be an accompaniment to him there.

A sense of security and of amicability in the world and within herself had ever graciously settled since that night, and Thorin, how he made her heart beat a hollow in the middle of her chest, even now. His scent of musk-and-clove soap, otherwise subtle, struck her as suddenly the least so. She leaned into his shoulder from behind, stroked and kissed the sparse-haired skin and massaged the knob of bone beneath with one finger, gingerly. He rolled onto his back with a hitching snore, never waking. His chest rose and fell and quaked with a deep jagged inhale. She traced the outlines of ribs under the hard layer of muscle, careful not to tickle him to wakefulness.

She ran her fingers tentatively over the center of his chest, lowering her face to kiss him the same when it did not stir him, the prickle of that thrill on her skin and in her veins, as coarse a touch inside as the hair against her face. She kissed all the sinews and lines of his muscled torso, the white grooves of scars with tenderer intent, as always.

Lower, the springiness of the hair around his base tickled her chin lightly, lips still pressed into the indent of his navel. She kissed the hard ridge just below, sucked a small podge of skin into her lips and treated it gingerly with teeth. A careful journey ended at his unstirring length. The tight skin at its tip jumped at the first touch of her mouth and so did he, leaping, with a stolid gasp, into full wakefulness. Meisar sat back quickly on her haunches over him, amused.

"I am awake then, my queen." Reclining again against his pillow he welcomed the light kiss she doled upon his cheek in playful contrast to her charged efforts. Behind her he was lying on his side again. She leaned forward into the pillow she was holding before her, a dull tenderness and ache familiarizing itself in the pit of her stomach. He caressed her lower back and the upper reaches of her bottom and her thighs with a lazy touch through her light chemise, pulling the flimsy fabric back up over her legs. She discarded the pillow and scooched around to face him. He laid his head upon her lap and kissed her through the chemise again, finding his way upward to tug her errant breast from its sheath.

"This is mine," he whispered. "Could anything be more beautiful than you are?"

"You fawn like a newlywed," she sighed, gladly, and stroked his thick long hair and held him playfully to his duty there. The steady warmth of his mouth contrasted the rougher touch of beard against the sensitive skin, so sensitive she was inclined to draw back from its touch. His mouth around her nipple contracted hard and it made her wince once, enough to encourage him to desist a moment, with some look of confusion.

He buried his face against her stomach and nuzzled there with eager precision instead, her full figure a gift in some way. He stroked the broad flanks and quaint crinkles at her side, pulling her gown out from under her and leaving her the way he pleased her be always. She laid on her side and propped herself on her elbow, stomach still tender; she hugged the pillow under her again, holding her breath.

"I cannot explain how your beauty astounds me the way it does on this particular morning," he said, licking, nibbling, biting the peripheral of the globe, devouring hip and thigh in a rain of hungry kissing. "I'm afraid I find you irresistible, adyum. You glow with some life in you."

"I am, for the time, the most happy. I cannot explain it either." His face drifted across her stomach to its opposite side, feeling tender already at the touch. She clenched her muscles tight inside and held her breath. Her 'afana was past its anticipated coming that week by several or more days but it had shown itself the more inconvenient of nature's rituals more than once.

"Thorin, I..." she stumbled. "I fear it may come to that time soon and I-" He quirked a curious brow up at her. "A woman's burden."

"But not yet?"

"Nay." A lessened urge that particular morning for that act was in her, for his virility to enter and release in her, perhaps for the tenderness of her body in the places she would have liked him worshipfully tend otherwise.

"Then I shall find elsewhere to give my attentions so generously," he smiled coyly. He scooted down and laid on his side once more, his head on her knee, his long hair draped over the pale ridge of her leg. "Your pretty legs. Are they sore too?" His rough fingertip circled the dents around her knee, kissed the plateau of the cap. "Singular and fairest of maids," he murmured. "Mine."

His lips made a trail down the shin, pausing to stroke the elegant, thick calves on either side. When he reached her ankle he massaged the bone on either side with the heels of his palm. Her toe wiggled flirtatiously at him. She had used Brynja's special lotion on it the night before to soften her feet after a bath, tempted to see if she was right about its effect.

"Well my queen, I have certainly made a happy discovery then." Thorin laid on his back languidly and took her foot in his hands to massage it into submission, the sole and then the toes, which wiggled in his grasp, tickled.

"Your feet," Thorin continued. "Are surprisingly soft. I am very displeased I do not give them more attentions." The toe kept wiggling at him, pushed boldly forward to stroke the side of his face. "My lady's toe is a very determined little limb." He popped the largest of her toes cheekily into his mouth.

"Good gracious, Thorin? What has possessed you?" His beard tickled her foot and made it jump.

"Some spell must have come over me. Or I've realized how much I miss you when you are not with me."

"Duty calls us, perhaps?"

"Yes, but I have a duty to do unto you as well, and one I would rather do any day than hold council." The toe slid back into the eager heat of his mouth, his teeth and tongue teasing it, her laughter quick and flushed.

The flumping sound of her dogs scurrying and Burt's aggressive squeal should have been a fair warning, but the door was thrown open in a breadth of a second.

"Majesty!" Emli threw up her hands, spun and fled. Thorin slid her toe from his mouth with a grimace.

"Yes, Emli," Meisar called, amusedly through the door when she had hastily risen and searched for a proper set of clothes, and gone to the bathing chamber to relieve herself and wash quickly.

"The dwarrowdams of the gardens are in the presence chamber, yours. Rebka's quite irritable. They've got some quarrel over the pumpkins or melons or such, requesting to see you on the matter."

"Yes, of course. Beg their patience. I will be along soon," she agreed wearily. The front-lacing bodice was one she had learned to manage putting on herself, but even with the layer of her undergown she felt the sudden, rippling tenderness when she crossed and cinched the laces over the generous expanse of her bosom. It was sore there, deep in the tissue and not just as the adequately-pawed tips. She winced out of Thorin's sight and slipped on the light over-gown. He was busy rifling through her jewelry box in the meantime.

A cobalt-and-brown sleeveless patterned surcoat with silver-and-gold trim she donned over the pale cream summer-silk cotehardie, belted in a matching tassel. Quite new, the dress was tighter than she had recalled, when Dagny fitted her for it at the beginning of the summer. In the vanity mirror she considered her face, her skin agreeably rosy for the time. Thorin placed her smaller raven crown upon her head, careful not to dislodge the crespine that held her hair in a great harried nest beneath.

"You are the queen under the mountain. Never forget that," he reminded, kissing her cheek gently from behind. He fastened her moonstone on a blue silk ribbon around her neck.

"I am a gardener today, I sense."

"Speaking of, Griet brought melons while you were in the bath chamber. Plucked from the terrace vines this morning, last of the summer variety," Thorin opened the brown sphere with his knife, revealing the green fruit within. The sharp, ripe scent of the melon tempted her too much in spite of her unsettled belly. She took the knife and sliced a wedge cleanly from the rind, letting the juice dribble down her chin carelessly. Thorin laughed.

"What?"

"I never thought you cared much for melons."

Meisar stopped chewing, wiped the sticky film from her lip. "Well, only that strange red one from the Umbar; it's pungent. This one is green and just the right tartness." She looked down and the whole half of it that had been portioned on her plate was gone. She chewed the end of the rind for the last burst of flavor.

When she set out with Oliada she was still chewing an end of it, but placed it back into her girdle once they had come out to a public place on a walkway high above the city gates. Meisar looked down upon the world below, the figures of people going about their business moving like ants down below in the mines and markets, the road to Dale congested with wagons. Oliada stiffening at attention in the corner of her view preceded the entrance of Dis through the parting crowds and to her.

"You are awake so early," Meisar observed quietly, embracing her first.

"I have desired much to walk again. The air is sweet, sister, and I could not sleep anyway," Dis answered, her smile as always a modest, enigmatic one, deepening the lines at the sides of her mouth. "Can't you feel it? Something wonderful has infused this small world of ours."

She looked around at the scene in the foyer. Even Aroin, buttered up and gaily-clad as she always was, had a pinch of ease to her countenance rarely witnessed.

"Ah, what a delight. There is the queen," preened Aroin, embracing her and kissing her cheeks for the gathered merchants and miners at rest to see. Dis did the same in turn and took her arm.

"Well met, my dearest sister." She studied Meisar's face for longer than a polite breadth of a glance.

"You look tired, sister. But alas, you glow. There is something lively in you. Tell me, what of your senses of this world? You always did know what was at its heart," Dis crooned, smiling for the gathered dwarves doffing their caps and waving their hand-fans at them. "Athane," they called. "Uzbadnatha."

"I don't know. I've felt… jumbled lately, inside. I have been tired, quite so," Meisar answered. "I know not what from, but the world, it feels right again."

"And you?"

"My belly is sore," she said, touching it lightly over her belt. "A few days will say much I think."

"I know," Dis said, at the presence chamber door. "I suppose I leave you here now. Garden well. It grows where true care does."

Finding herself to be short of breath by the time they reached the queen's presence chamber adjacent the councils', she sunk into the cool velvet of the chair and waited for the dwarrowdams to stop nipping at each other in their spiteful dialect. Rebka curtsied once she had finished her diatribe at the other two dwarrowdams.

"Well met, my ladies. What seems to be the controversy?"

"This one is set to ruin the pumpkin crop. It will be all her fault," Rebka accused the Broadbeam girl, Duma. The latter drew back but puffed her chest forward defiantly, arms crossed.

"I begged an audience my queen, to say otherwise. She is a harridan, majesty. I beg remedy of you."

"And now the brats run to you like crying babes. Are you a mother to settle quibbles between children? I tell her the queen is busy," Rebka hissed.

Meisar sighed tiredly, already aching to leave. Her feet prickled numbly under the table, ankles rolling to stop the sense of her head about to fall from the balance of her shoulders. The Stonefoot matron was a quiet force in the gardens but querulous when challenged. The two younger dwarrowdams under her watch looked uneasily toward Meisar from behind Rebka.

"I suppose I shall go up and see for myself then," Meisar relented, not quite relishing the idea. Her head felt light.

"You look a little flushed, my queen," Emli remarked, fanning her with her plump hands and a then a parchment swiped from Siv's stack.

"It's nothing," she waved off Emli's hovering, a little annoyed. "The air would do me well anyway."

The end of summer was a dry, mellow heat not so fierce as the last, or as parched. Rain was coming every few days, and the farmers that arrived in Dale to huck the last of their summer crops spoke with unfettered hope of a bumper for fall now. In Erebor's own gardens, time was still of the essence. Rebka argued with the girls all the way up to the side of the mountain and continued yelling at them from the winch basket as she was hauled up. Meisar shaded her hand against her face against the glare of the sun, oppressive at midmorning. The sharp light made her head swim.

"See here now, my queen," Rebka directed her attention succinctly to the pumpkin vines and their tiny blossoms within. "This one, unkempt-beard one, is trying to drown them! It has rained and yet she waters again today!" She pointed an accusing finger toward the Broadbeam girl, an ungainly maiden with a frizzy brown beard and pair of loose plaits.

"The soil is parched, Rebka," protested the younger Stonefoot woman, moving between Duma the Broadbeam and Rebka to shield the former from her spiteful posturing. Rebka crossed her arms stodgily, waited for Meisar's assessment with only slightly more patience. Meisar bent low over the row of pumpkins, examining their flowerings carefully, delicate as they were in their early days of sprouting. The sharp, earthy aroma of the dirt, still fresh with rainwater, was enough to dizzy her again. The hems of her dress were dirty already, but she took the tiny rounded springing of a pumpkin in her hand and examined it closely.

"Perhaps a little more generous with water, actually. They require more of it than other crops. But be careful. Rot will set it if you leave them too damp," she concluded, standing and bracing herself against a somersaulting sensation in her upper body.

"Told you so," the Broadbeam dwarf-maid whispered tartly to Rebka behind her shoulder. Rebka rewarded her with a hard tug on her beard.

The harsh clatter of the three women assaulted her skull and beat against it from the inside. She dropped to her knees in a sudden wave of nausea, her hands gripped about the stone edge of the terrace for dear life. She heaved over-ward, sending the sick splattering down onto the bare stone below, thankfully uninhabited. The women desisted their quarrel and pulled her back, sitting her up on a jut of rock. The elder dwarrowdam's small, elegant brown hands steadied her wobbling neck. "Queen, follow hand," Rebka commanded, a voice that was used to giving orders. Meisar squinted against the sight of her face rather than the hand that was waving back and forth before her, hard but concerned eyes, large and black like many Eastern dwarves' but not narrow like Oliada's, her skin the shade and texture of a raw almond. The two girls began to whisper to each other behind her.

"An overripe honeydew perhaps. I ate nearly a whole one," Meisar shrugged, her head swimming still when she came to. "I never much cared for melon before but suddenly they are the sweetest fruits." She felt a sting welling in her eyes from the acidity of her stomach contents welling up again. Rebka steadied her carefully, checked her forehead for fever. Her hands were soft and scented with earth. "I could have another even now."

The Broadbeam girl with the frizzy beard gasped, nudged in the ribs by the other into silence. The sentry brought the basket on the winch up swiftly at Rebka's barking command, and the dwarrowdams held her by the arms to guide her in. As the basket was lowered she could see the hands of the old dwarrowdam, her lips forming the word in the old tongue. Please.

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She was back in her chamber, in her bed, before she had a sense of what had transpired. She remembered being ill, the warmth of the sun, the delicateness of the little pumpkin plants. And being carried by a set of guards with the dwarrowdams from the gardens scurrying behind, along with a sizable crowd of Erebor's foyer merchants and buyers. She flushed with sudden embarrassment inside, hoping Thorin would not be disturbed.

Freyda was at her side, with Brundin in a little sling held to her chest, and her hand on Meisar's forehead. Brundin wriggled impetuously and she slid him out of his holster, laid him on the bed to roll around. He wore a tiny shirt and drawers and a leather cap upon his head, spittle forming in the tiny, wispy beard. When he grunted it was almost at the depth that Dwalin did when he had a biscuit to eat. Meisar reached down and let the tiny hand grasp around her finger.

"Ye haven't fever like I see usually but ye are very warm to touch," Freyda observed. Brundin snorted and she picked him up, rocked him against her shoulder. "Overripe melons ye say?"

"Are there any left?" Meisar asked, her stomach sharp with need for another again. Water filled her mouth under her tongue. At the end of her bed she could see then Siv and Brynja, each looking quite flabbergasted. Brynja was holding her shoes, and Siv her sur-coat. They curtsied in unison as Dis came flying in.

"Sister?" Meisar rolled her head to one side as Dis sat and took her hand, silently. She felt suddenly mercurial in her cotehardie and bodice and wanted them off too."You all come because I have thrown up once? It is a hot day out."

"I came because the Blacklock told me you were ill. You were ill yesterday too, and the day before she tells me, with a bit of fatigue and upset stomach," Dis observed pointedly. The other dwarrowdams withdrew, knowingly, leaving them alone. "Enough time. In any case, I shall fetch Eda along now, and Oin."

"Why?"

"I am to think, after everything, you would have figured that out by now. Hasn't anyone told you? Not even Freyda?" Dis asked with a flush of disbelief.

"Told me? What?"

"Never you mind. I will fetch them along, and quickly."

Brynja and Freyda reentered as soon as she had gone off on her errand, helped her to disrobe of her cotehardie and necklaces. Eda was in the chamber as swiftly as an arrow flew.

"Help me out of this, will you?" she pleaded dizzily, her arms flailing uselessly to rid herself of the hated bodice that was only left over her linen chemise. Brynja helped her to sit and shimmied it off carefully from her shoulders. She flopped back onto the pillows, a small relief to the soreness in her back. As the bodice came off she sighed in relief. Eda pressed upon her chest with the heel of her palm, intently. The tenderness became raw at the touch; Meisar flinched back and winced.

"Sore?" asked Eda.

"Yes, quite."

"Belly too?"

When Oin arrived it then was with Thorin on his heels. Again, the other dwarrowdams withdrew, Freyda grinning silently as she kissed Brundin's head in his little sling against her chest. Thorin sat beside her on the bed and rested her back against his chest, bidding her sit up.

"My queen," he sighed. "I came as soon as they told me."

"I'm alright, Thorin, really," Meisar rested her hand across the forearm holding her close to him. He kissed her head.

"Lost your morning sustenance, did you?" Eda asked efficiently. "And dizzied?"

"You should have told me if you were feeling ill, my darling," Thorin stroked her hair. He shooed her dogs away from leaping onto her chest and frantically licking her face. "The gardening could have waited."

"Things grow when they are supposed to, and not any other time," Meisar protested dizzily, pressing Raincloud down to rest submissively in the crook of her side. Redcoat followed suit, to Thorin's annoyance. "They must be nurtured correctly."

"A moment, my queen, let me find the fastest on her feet of our ladyships," Eda moved efficiently out of the room, called for Brynja to fetch a skin of Dorwinion wine. "Be quick about it, if you can," Eda delegated, Brynja turning fast on her heel.

"There's one I way to be certain," Eda concluded, filling an empty porcelain pot half up with a skin of Dorwinion wine that Brynja managed to rustle up with impressive brevity. "Here ye go, have a wee in it then."

"I had one only just," Meisar shrugged. "I don't think I can go again."

Eda patted her hand tightly. "Something tells me, my queen, the call will beset you soon again," she said, tinged in a strange hope. "Until then, tell me, what of your 'afana? Should it be soon or no?"

"Come to think, it is past its time this month," Meisar replied. "A few days alas."

Thorin squeezed her hand a little harder, the opposite inching around her side, stroking her flank, for a long while not daring to, but then, with slow measure, coming to grasp close against her belly.

"Ah, and here it is," Meisar sat up at the touch, her stomach tingling with the urge to void again. "In the pot you say? With the wine?"

"Aye," Eda answered. "An old means of... well."

They all left her to make water over the pot half full of Dorwinion wine in a semblance of privacy. The dogs both made aggressive eye contact through the whole process, not the least dumbfounded of all of them. It seemed an absurd idea to her but Eda was adamant enough to be trusted. She kept her hands on the floor to steady her dizzying, squatting with the haunches of her feet trembling with worry and tinge of something far more weighty challenging her balance.

"By the hearth," she informed Eda, when they returned. Thorin threw off his outer robe and wrapped it over her when she climbed back onto the bed and settled into his embrace again, wanting nothing more. She wanted Eda gone and her strange experiments too. But knew. She knew. But could not bring herself to say.

"What are they doing?" he asked, watching Eda and Oin analyze the contents with the deftness that healers did.

"You don't want to know. Come to think, nor do I know. Eda, Oin, what is this?" Meisar called over to them.

Oin acquiesced to her impatience, came over without a word to her and waved his hand efficiently, urging her to lay back again. Meisar glanced sidelong at Eda still stirring up the pot's contents with one of her own long hair-pins and grimaced. The elder healer drew back at last and clapped her hands to her face.

Oin put his trumpet to Meisar's heart, and then her stomach, tactfully ignoring Eda. His eyebrows shot up and he said nothing.

"What is it? Master Oin?" Thorin urged.

"It is nothing, my king."

"Nothing? And yet you wear a look of such surprise?"

"It is not nothing," Oin corrected himself. He slung his scope over his shoulder. "Or should I say, it is nothing wrong."

Eda pattered over in a rush with her hands trembling. "An old midwife's trick. If a woman ought wee in the wine and it changes its color when mixed, she is with child. And if no, then she is not. Years of tending dwarrowdams this way and tall-folk too, I have not once been mistaken."

"And?' Meisar squeaked. She felt dizzy again but Thorin's hands gripping the back of hers steadied her in the least.

Eda glanced at Oin and Oin then at Meisar, and smiled. He took her hands and folded them on her belly, patting them kindly.

"Oin?"

Eda burst out weeping and Oin began to chuckle with joy. "Yavanna be praised, for the fruits at last she gives. My queen, you are with child."