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The three of them lie side-by-side on the thick mattress. Their hands are clasped, their eyes turned up to the canopy. Draped lazily across a curved frame of entwining serpents and dragons, the blue fabric winks down at them, embroidered with hundreds of diamonds.

 The three of them are still in their mourning-clothes. Thorin and Frerin wear matching blue robes, braided with gold. They are billowing and ostentatious, the both of them feeling like badly-stuffed dolls. Dís wears sapphire-blue silk, gathered too tight at the waist, with paper-thin slippers that do nothing to shield her feet against the cold of the stone. None of them cry, for their tears would do nothing but stain the memory of her. But they lie barefoot in her bed, inhaling her lingering scent.

“The stars are so pretty.” Dís has a high, lilting voice, as sweet as a nightingale. Her bird-chirrup bounces against the stone, thrown back at them. She is talking about the diamonds sewn into the blue fabric that hangs above them. Her brothers follow her gaze, saying nothing yet. “But nobody can see them here. Why didn’t they hang this on a wall? Why is it hanging over Amad’s bed?” She feels Thorin’s fingers tighten around her own.

“So she had something to look at.” Frerin whispers a short response into the unforgiving stone silence.

“To look at when?” Her voice is soft and curious. But neither brother will answer her.

If her mother ever cried, Dís does not remember it.

The memories are few; she holds them close to her chest like jewels. Scattered, hazy pictures and sounds crowd together in her mind. A smile. A hand. A laugh. Blue eyes. Raven-black braids. A lilting cadence. Dís lays in her bed at night, organising the scattered pieces of memory, stretching them out and laying them side by side, constructing a picture of the woman who died. It becomes a habit for her, one she indulges in all too often, laying alone in the dark, listening to the throbbing heart of the mountain, beating in time with the heavy pulse in her own chest.

She has no memories of sadness, but that does not mean they never happened.

It takes her some time to realise that Thorin and Frerin no longer like each other.

The years after their mother dies are dark and uncertain. The strained relationship between the two brothers cannot bear the weight of such a heavy burden. The precarious bond between them is severed. Thorin marches on forward, firm and resolute. Frerin collapses, he is unable to cope with the excruciating grief. Dís watches in silence as her brothers turn away from each other. Thorin is embarrassed by the conduct of Frerin. Frerin is disgusted with Thorin’s stone heart. They do not speak to each other. Frerin’s failures multiply and his image tarnishes. He humiliates the name of Durin, the accusations echoed by Thrór and Thráin. Dís visits her brother in the night and hugs him close while he cries. They sleep together, Frerin curled around his sister desperate for comfort, terrified of loneliness, his tears falling to the curve of her ear, down her neck. He is bitter and helpless. 

They sit side by side in silence in the feast-hall. Dís holds Frerin’s hand underneath the table. She can feel it shake. She can see his brown eyes cloud, he blinks, they are wet and he bows his head.

Five years pass, and her mother’s bed fades into memory.

Talk of marriage arrives with Dís’ twentieth birthday. She stands naked in the mirror, lit by a dozen candles, staring at herself. She touches her rounding thighs, her spreading hips, her growing breasts. This new body is strange and alien to her.

Thrór entertains ambassadors and messengers. He has new dresses cut for Dís. He gives her hair-clasps of mithril and diamonds. She is paraded before these wandering travellers, hair woven in elaborate braids, glittering, draped in silk and velvet. She sings to them, with her beautiful bird-song voice echoing against the stone. It carries deep into the passages of the mountain, into the forges and mines. It binds hearts and enraptures souls.

Erebor is in love with her. She wakes each morning to find love-tokens and gifts waiting for her. Thorin watches her fingers unwrap the binding effortlessly, her blue eyes sparkle as she examines the finely-wrought objects of affection. She keeps every single one and her chamber becomes cluttered and dazzling. It astonishes her, how delicate works of such meticulous craftsmanship are wrought from the broad, blackened hands of her subjects. It is a disconnect.

Her favourite is a brooch made of white gold and laid with diamonds. It is a crescent moon and four stars. It is her favourite because it reminds her of the blue canopy swaying above her head, Thorin’s hand in hers as the three lie in their mother’s bed. She knows the name of its maker, a distant cousin of theirs and a close friend of Thorin. Dwalin. She has only met him three times. His eyes are dark and shoulders very broad. He has marked his skin with blue ink. He sends a throb of fear within her heart. But she wears the brooch on the silk of her robes, the diamonds glittering in the torchlight as she raises her voice in song before a captive audience.

The dragon’s fire claims many victims. She is young, too young to help herself. She stands frozen, her limbs weak and mouth open, as smoke fills the sky. The stone dwarves stand silent at the entrance of the mountain, watching as Smaug desolates their home. They do nothing. She has lost her brothers, her father and grandfather. She cannot find a familiar face. Soot is smeared on her cheeks, and her hair is unbound. Dís is unrecognisable as the goddess-princess, the jewel of Erebor as her father so lovingly claimed. Her love-tokens are burned and abandoned.

It is Dwalin who sees the blue silk buried beneath the scorch marks and grey of ash. He lifts her in her arms, for she cannot walk in the shock, carrying her like a child away from the screaming and the death. He shirks the animal fur on his heavy frame, wrapping them about her shoulders. She presses her face to his chest and screams, the sounds muffled in the fabric of his tunic. His fingers tremble as he cups the back of her head.

Frerin and Thráin find her in the evening. Dwalin relinquishes Dís to her brother but she holds on to his furs. The night is cold and she does not have a cloak. She leans against her father, numb. The day has passed in a violent haze of fire to her and she has not yet understood what has happened.

Thorin and Thrór come later. They are singed and broken. They have wrestled with the dragon and lost. They are dry-eyed but silent. Thrór orders a march through the night. There is no time to rest under the shadow of their burning home. Dís is placed astride a mule. Her slippers are gone. Her dress is black and grey. But her eyes still shine blue, glittering in the torchlight. They are the only jewels she has left.

She bathes in a dim tent. Thorin and Frerin stand guard, not speaking to each other, arms behind their backs to protect the modesty of their sister. Dís washes with a single pail of cold water. She peels the dress from her body, the white skin a shock to her. She has been grey for two days. Her fingers tremble as she wrings the water from the soft cloth.

She has new clothes. A pair of trousers, a leather jerkin, a weather-stained cloak. They are like a costume to her. She has a long bandage, to bind her breasts close to her. For these are the clothes of males. The cloth is tight and she cannot heave deep sighs. She presses her hands over her chest. There is an odd familiarity in the flatness. It is almost comforting to her.

Dís steps into the morning sunlight wearing her new costume, shades of grey and brown. She braids the hair along her jawline in thick, simple plaits. Thorin gives her new clasps of dull brass without ornament. There are tears in Thrór’s eyes when he sees the most beautiful maiden in Erebor reduced to such poverty. Dís returns the fur to Dwalin with her head bowed. She is ashamed of her ugliness. But Dwalin holds her hand in his monstrous paw and declares the plain clothes show the world her beauty runs deeper than silk and gold.

And she smiles, for just a moment.

The towns of Men confuse and frighten her. Everything is big, too big, and she feels so small astride her pathetic mule, holding on to a scrubby handful of mane while Frerin clutches the reins. She keeps her head bowed and mouth closed. She is instructed to keep silent, for her lilting birds-song voice will inevitably give her away.

The Men have little to offer the Dwarves. The Dwarves had nothing to give the Men. Thrór and Thráin hammer out a desolate compromise; a cart groans towards the dusty campfire, laden with sacks of grain and potatoes. It is never specified what the King of Dwarves gave up for this paltry feast, but the thin, pinched faces of his subjects turned upwards in thanks is a sight that no gold can buy.

Dís and her family are offered a shabby room in the Lord’s house. Thrór sniffs and suspects it is meant for servants, but doesn’t dare criticize the hollow show of hospitality. There are only two beds, a pair of chairs before a rusted brazier, and no window. The five of them eat on the floor, cross-legged in a circle. Conversation is short and strained, and Frerin cannot hold back his tears. He sets the bowl down on the stone and declares that he cannot do this. He asks why they do not seek out the hospitality of the Iron Hills. He does not understand that the massive refugee population of Erebor will overrun them. He wishes the dragon’s fire had killed him. Thráin’s mouth is twisted with shame and Thrór cannot look his grandson in the eye. Thorin turns away. None offer him comfort, but none rebuke him. Dís holds Frerin’s hand and leans on his shoulder, looking more masculine than him in her leather clothes and Thorin is obviously disgusted.

The three siblings lie in the bed, shoulder-to-shoulder in their underclothes. Dís is pressed closely between them, on her back. She stares up at the low ceiling. There is no canopy of stars to wink down on her. Just soot-stained, uneven boards of sagging wood.

It is mid-winter when Thrór calls them. The five of them, bowed against the cold and shivering in their furs and skins, clinging to the warmth of a tiny fire. Dís is thin and wasted. She struggles to bear the toil of the road and Thrór can see that her life is fading. She is strong of heart and soul but her delicate maiden’s body is breaking under the strain.

He confesses that he has sent out messages to the Firebeards and Broadbeams, offering Dís in marriage to their young princes. Thorin is pale and Frerin shouts that he cannot do this. She is a daughter of Durin and must marry within their own folk. Dís holds back tears and she clings tightly to Frerin as her grandfather explains that there is no other way for her. There is no young dwarf in the Iron Hills worthy of her hand. It will take decades to rebuild a new homeland, and she will not survive the road. She is shocked that they think so little of her, but holds her tongue. She holds a hand against her side and feels the ribs poke at her beneath the skin and cloth.

Thráin is in agreement. His voice is heavy and eyes low in defeated resignation. Dís is a daughter of the noblest of Dwarf Kings. She will make a very suitable wife for any son of the Seven Fathers. She will live out her days in comfort and luxury, removed from the bitter struggles eating away at the iron will of Durin’s folk.

She will also fetch a hefty bride-price, although nobody is willing to say it.

Another road, another mountain range, another town of Men. Dís and Frerin remain in the wind-chilled camp while the King and his heirs attempt to haggle enough food to keep them alive for the rest of the winter. A sickness passes through the camp and the elderly and very young are the worst hit. Dís does all she can, spending the long nights with the healers, spooning thin soup into slack lips. Death clings to her, black and rotten. She sees mothers howl and cling at the bodies of their children. She sees aged warriors sob as their wives and brothers close their eyes and breathe their last. She sees pain and desolation in the eyes of every single one of her subjects. But she feels nothing. She has become a shell, withered and hollow. She lies stiff and cold in the grey light of early morning, and although Frerin tries to warm her heart, she remains stone-faced and silent.

She is no longer a shining jewel. She is becoming dull and hardened. The smooth skin of her white hands is becoming coarse and callused. Her soft, rounded figure is falling away. She is thin and bony. Her blue-stone eyes are clouded and lifeless. But she can still sing. And she does sing, on the edge of her breath as her hands press damp rags against the burning foreheads of her people. They sigh and relax at the sound of her beautiful voice. It reminds them of the lost maze of stone they once called home.

Thrór and Thráin and Thorin return empty-handed. They have been told to pack up and move on their way. The master of these lands does not take kindly to vagrants and wanderers. He has no use for the skill of Dwarves. Thrór is bent and grey under the weight of his people and it frightens Dís, trembling in her threadbare cloak.

They find no shelter in the towns of Men that winter and many of their people are killed by hunger, cold, and sickness.

Thrór declares enough is enough with the spring thaw. They have lost a quarter of their number in the last three months and the rest of his subjects are lifeless and subdued. They have given up their hope and even Dís has stopped singing.

Dunland does not share the prejudices of other Men. They are wildlings, exempt from law and creed. They allow Thrór and his people to set up a ragged camp on the edges of their mountains, beginning to forge a tentative line of trade. The mines are poor, and yield only iron. Dís watches as Thorin and Frerin leave in the grey of morning and return black and exhausted and hungry. They both earn deep respect from their people, toiling in the stone beside labourers and paupers. Wanting to emulate the humility of her brothers, Dís attaches herself to a clutch of wives who work at spinning and embroidering linen from the thin flax plants that cling to the earth. They speak of their husbands and children, Dís listening in silence.

Sometimes, they forget she is there and talk grows coarse, venturing into the marriage bed. Dís keeps her ears sharp as her face reddens. The temptations of the flesh have not been ignored in the three years of road-travel. Children are still conceived and born, and tongues still wag. They compare the sexual prowess of their husbands, of their own skill, bragging and despairing. Dís grows nervous and fearful in this tentative eavesdropping, as a complicated game of wits is laid out before her, one she will soon have to learn how to play.

Thrór receives messages from the Firebeards in late spring, the Broadbeams in early summer. The same sons and heirs which five years ago were paraded about in front of Thrór as potential suitors for his granddaughter are suddenly married, too old, not fit for marriage, sickly, infertile. Thrór accepts these obvious lies with bile in his stomach. He calls his family in and lays the papers out before him. Thráin is shaking but Frerin bursts into tears of relief, clinging to his sister. She will not be torn apart from him, not yet.

Thrór sends ravens to the Blacklocks and the Stonefoots in the East. He does this in the dark of night so nobody can see him. But Dís watches, her nightingale voice seized with terror in her throat.

Two more years wear through the Longbeards. Dís is back in a modest dress of blue linen, her hair rebraided in the twisting ropes reminiscent of Erebor. She no longer spins with the miner’s wives, but their words echo about in her head. Frerin breaks his wrist in the mine, and is declared unfit for work. The pair keep themselves busy in the camp, one which looks for a fleeting moment as though it could some day be considered home. Frerin teaches her how to shoot, and they sneak out in the dawn to hunt rabbits and deer. Dís in turn teaches him how to sew, the pair turning the hides from their chase into clothing and sleeping-sacks for their people. Thrór frowns upon their antics, but it is nevertheless productive, and they earn a certain level of respect amongst the people for their service.

Two exhausted ravens come to Thrór in the night, when almost everybody is asleep. Neither tribes want her. He swallows bitter disappointment and in the morning calls his grandchildren together to break the news. Dís, while not free, is no longer shackled to the prospect of marrying an obscure prince from a foreign land. She feels as though a great weight has lifted from her as she ventures into the light. The sun shines on her face with a new warmth. She can be whoever and do whatever she wishes.

And she wishes to prove her grandfather wrong.

Dís seeks out Dwalin, asking him to teach her the ways of the sword and axe in private. She knows that he will keep her secret. He is one of Thorin’s close friends, but never once masked his affection for her. She saw his dark eyes widen in surprise at her strange request, those broad shoulders hunch in confusion, a shrug. But he nods, eyes locked with hers as he holds her hand, swearing an oath of secrecy.

Summer wanes into winter, frost hardens the ground and makes the caves unbearably cold. Dís and Dwalin work with numb fingers and clouded breath, throwing shadows against the stone walls. While lacking in physical strength, Dís is quick to catch on to the technical ability of axe and sword. The iron weapons are natural extensions of her white arms, slicing through the air and into the straw-stuffed training dummies Dwalin has found for her. She is fast, faster than most, almost elf-like with her light tread. She wears once more a pair of leather trousers and a sleeveless jerkin, binding her breasts tight. She feels stronger when they are hidden. Dís’ slender arms thicken as the seasons pass, her shoulders slowly broadening.  

It is midwinter when Dís finally manages to knock Dwalin to the ground in one of their sparring sessions. She stands before Dwalin in the pale lantern-light, drenched with sweat. Her hair trails in a single braid down her back. She is panting, her shoulders are slumped in obvious exhaustion. She throws aside the axe and offers her forearm to him. The muscles twitch beneath the pale skin as she pulls the warrior to his feet. The motion is fluid and effortless. Dwalin looks at her and realises that she is far stronger than anybody could have ever imagined.

It is no surprise to either of them when he kisses her. The only shock to Dís is that it took so long.

Dís plans to wait until the spring to show her grandfather what she can do. She plans to wear a sleeveless dress in the cool air, one that shows her thick arms, gathered tight around the middle to show her iron stomach. But he calls her first, asking after the maiden in a rare meeting of shrouded solitude.

The cave is very small, bearing only a low table, a single stool before it. She hears his breath thrumming low in the stone, watches his dark eyes in the light of the single candle. Dís reads his face in a heartbeat and knows that her life is about to change, irreparably.

It does. Thrór beckons her forward and takes her hands. She leans on the edge of the table, feet dangling from the ground. She is a little taller than him in his position. His eyes gleam as he looks up at her, shattering the fragile glass she has built her tentative life upon, tearing an ugly gasp from her throat.

He has had an offer of marriage from the Ironfists. Of their six brethren, they are the darkest and most distant. The grudge between the warlike clan of golden-haired savages and Durin’s Folk stretches beyond the reign of Durin VI. Their Kings have not spoken, either in grace or anger, for nearly two hundred years.

She wants to scream at him. To thrust the candle in his beard. To choke him. To proclaim she would never, for a single moment, allow herself to be handed over in exchange for gold, to lead a life of servitude in distant mountains at the edge of the earth. But she cannot speak these words. She remains silent, her lips trembling as tears well up in her eyes and spill over onto her cheeks. Thrór’s voice is trembling as he whispers that there is no other way for her. He pleads with her. The gold will buy them enough supplies to venture in safely to the Blue Mountains. They cannot remain as they are, toiling for scrap metals in the hills of wildmen. He entreats her to think of her people. Her life will buy them hope.

She asks after her price. Her voice is low and cold and she steps away from him. Her respect edges towards anger but she will not raise her voice against her King. He is her King now, not her grandfather. Her grandfather would never sell her for gold to a tribe of dwarves little more than beasts. She has no grandfather. And he knows, looking at her furious blue eyes in the candelight, that he no longer has a granddaughter.

“Five hundred pounds.”

Dís’ face is grey as Thrór utters the words in his desolate little study. Five hundred pounds of gold. For her. She shakes her head. It must be a trick. She cannot believe that a single person, one life, is worth so much money.  It is impossible. Thrór’s face is shadowed and dark. The prospect of so much money has relapsed his dragon-sickness. Dís looks into his eyes and knows there is no convincing her King to reach inside his heart and consider her. His weakness for gold has smothered his love for her.

That very same night, Dwalin agrees to meet her in their training-space, although it has not been used for training in some weeks. Dís waits for him in her best blue dress, her hair braided the way he likes it, with the small plaits woven about her face. He would run his trembling fingers through them, press kisses on her face as his chest aches with desire.

He won’t let her talk first. His words are a stumbled rush as he reaches inside his pocket. Dís can feel her heart break as Dwalin pulls out a small carved box. The ring inside is a band of silver. Dwalin has carved her name and his in runes, entwined, linked with each other, continuous with no beginning or end. He is on his knees before her. Dís cannot breathe. He will ask Thrór for her hand on the morrow. There is no reason why he will not accept; Dwalin is the strongest and fiercest of his young warriors. He has proven himself a valuable asset to the Longbeards in the long years of exile, battling against rogue bands of dark creatures that threaten their desolated people. He is the great-great-grandson of Nain II. There is no better match for Dís, not amongst Durin’s folk.

She listens with a ravaged heart, feeling it beat limply within her. Her eyes are dead and lifeless as she pushes the ring away from her, shaking her head. Her voice is lost in her throat, she cannot speak. She can only sink to the ground and cry bitterly, clinging to him, feeling his hands tremble, his breath shaking in his throat as he fights back his tears, overwhelmed from her rejection.

She never explains why. She cannot tell him why. She wordlessly rises to her feet, pressing a single kiss on his lips and fleeing from the room, thick and heavy with memories that claw at the hem of her dress. Leaving Dwalin on his knees, the ring falling abandoned from his hands and rolling across the ground into darkness.

Frerin screams and sobs. He clutches at Dís and shakes his head in blank refusal. He will not allow it to happen. The Ironfists would prise the body of his sister from his dead fingers. Thorin is bone-white and silent. Their eyes meet as Thrór’s voice rises against Frerin in the low stone room. She begs with him silently, pleading with her brother to turns Thrór’s weak heart away from the allure of gold. She will marry outside her people but she will never become an Ironfist. The stories of barbaric savagery are long-winded and numerous. She cannot do it. Thorin’s blue eyes fill with tears and he looks down at the ground, shaking his head. The word of Thrór is iron-bound and Thorin will not question it.

Ravens pass through the air, heading to the East. They return many weeks later, croaking their ugly replies and are sent back again. Five hundred pounds is the settled sum. Dís is to marry the only son of Víli, son of Hepti, in a decade when she is fifty years old. She whispers the name aloud to herself at night, as though the sound would make the prince attached to it somehow more real. All she knows of the Ironfists is that their noble line is famed for their brilliant golden hair. They wore it unbraided, like the manes of animals. She pictures this wild golden mane in her head but the face beneath is entirely blank.

Dwalin learns through Thorin that she is to be wed. He smashes his hammer against the stone wall of the forge and shows Thorin the ring. He cannot contain his emotions. Love has bound his heart and will not let go, not ever. He is sobbing uncharacteristically on his knees, in crippling anguish. They think the conversation is private but Dís listens, fingers curled around the doorway, wracked in silent tears that fall down her cheeks and splatter on the cold stone floor.

She never shows Thrór what she is capable of.

There is no point. Dís lays aside the axe and sword, withdrawing from the life she knew. She walks onwards in an ashen and desolate world, going through the motions of daily life with stiff, mechanical gestures and words. Ten years seems like a lifetime away, but with each passing season, the fated day beckons closer and she cannot escape it. Dwalin wants ten years of sweetness before the bitter parting, but Dís turns away from him, not bearing to offer her heart to him, only to have it torn away. She already has his, it beats in her hands and she is going to let it slip through her fingers and bleed out on the stone. But she must save hers for another.

He is drunk, one night. She is sleeping, but the sound of his heavy thudding, his clumsy crashing and banging awakens her. She comes to him and he sinks to his knees, wrapping his arms around her thighs and pushing his face between her legs, drunkenly gabbling. He is never going to let her go. The son of Víli would have to fight Dwalin to the death for her. He would die for her. He was going to die for her. All of this she listens to with tears muddling her vision, heart in pieces, and she sinks into the ground beside him, pressing her lips to his, the taste of honey mead and tears and saliva hot in her mouth.

His hands wind in her hair and he cannot control himself. She is on her back with his shaking hands pulling at the hem of her nightgown, mouth on her throat. Dís cannot breathe, she lies trembling on the stone, torn between moaning in pleasure against his skin or crying out for help. His hands find her naked thighs and drift upwards and Dís arches her neck against the floor, holding fistfuls of Dwalin’s furs.

It is Thorin who finds them, awoken by the crash of an earthenware bowl falling to the floor. Dís is still a virgin when he walks into the entrance-room, a cry tearing from his lips and smashing against the rock.

Just.

Thorin cannot see, he pulls Dwalin from his sister and holds him down while Dís pulls her nightgown back over her knees.

He sends Dwalin away. There is nothing else he can do. He cooks up a half-baked reason for Dwalin to travel to the Iron Hills and tells him not to come back until Dís has left for the East. There is nothing else he can do. He allows the pair a supervised farewell, in Thorin’s private room. They kiss and Thorin lets them, although he pulls Dwalin apart when his hands drift downwards to Dís’ throat. Her eyes are wet as she watches him go. Thorin returns and holds her for a long time, stroking her long black braids. It will remain their secret, Thorin promises. Nobody will ever know of what transpired between Dís and Dwalin. He will take it to his grave.

But it is too late for Dís. Her heart is outside of her body. It is lost to her. It is travelling northwards, to the Iron Hills, never to return.

The promise of war came with a southerly chill.

Desperation and ruthless pride had driven Thrór to his rash declaration. Khazad-dûm will no longer be the squatting-place of Orcs and Goblins. They will retake their sacred home. He fears black Orcish steel far less than dragon’s flame. Dís watches as her father, her brothers, and her King arm themselves for battle. Every male between the ages of eighty and two hundred is shod with iron, axes and swords in their hands. Thorin and Frerin, decades from their coming-of-age ceremonies, are the only exceptions to the iron-bound law of age. They are a numerous and frightening force. Thrór sends messages to his people in the Blue Mountains and the Iron Hills. They will come to the aid of Durin’s folk.

Dís stands at the front of the crowd as she watches her family leave her, kissing each of them in turn. She embraces Frerin far longer than she should. She knows the odds of her brother returning are so very low. He is weak and frail and thoughtless. Frerin is not a creature of war and she knows Thorin will not protect him. Frerin has doomed himself with his inglorious conduct and his lack of restraint. Thorin will not protect him.

“Please bring Frerin back.” She whispers in Thorin’s ear as she kisses his cheek, eyes welling up. “Don’t leave him to die.” Their eyes meet as she withdraws, his hands find hers and they entwine, Thorin’s fingers trembling against her.

“I would never leave him.” He murmurs to her, his voice faltering in the chill wind. She wants so badly to believe him. “I would die for him. And for you.” And she wants to believe that too, she really does, as she disentangles her hands and steps back, a sob burning in her throat as her brothers turn away from her, faces pointed northwards, towards violence and bloodshed. Leaving their home behind.

A year passes, in limbo.

A year, and Dís hears the call of the horn from within the mountain. She and the wives and sisters and daughters all gather in the hall that beckons the outside world, the doors closed, as they always were now, without those to protect them.

She leads an order to have them heaved open. They are made of iron and very heavy, and it takes several dozen strong pairs of hands to turn the thick wheel and activate the mechanism. But the doors swing open with a low groan. Dís standing in her best dress, arms spread open in a greeting. Ready to receive her brothers, her father and her King, to welcome them back into their makeshift home.

Thorin stood in the doorway.

Alone.

Alone.

Alone.

The scream resounds through the mountain. It breaks hearts and crushes souls.

Thorin is on his knees beside her. He hold her arms and tries to whisper in her ear but she claws at him, beating him away, screaming, screaming a single name which echoes in the hall, thrown back in her face as it bounces off the stone, softer and softer, drifting further away with each throbbing heartbeat.

Frerin Frerin Frerin Frerin Frerin Frerin.

Thorin is King under a mountain which is not his.

There is no coronation, for there is no crown. There is no feast, for there is no food. There is no music, for no hands can play the dusty instruments. There is no court, for there is no throne to sit upon. Only a solitary figure beside the fireplace. Alone in a cheerless room.

He comes to Dís in her modest bedchamber. She lies awake in her bed, stiff and cold, eyes turned up towards the ceiling. He climbs in beside her, wordlessly. He has yet to cry at the thought of his family. Dís has given all she can. Her soul and spirit has leaked from her eyes, leaving behind a husk. Thorin clings to this husk and he can feel his eyes are about to burst.

“Please – I’m so sorry.”

His voice is plaintive and broken in the night. She remains stiff under his touch. He buries his face into her shoulder and she can feel him shaking with the effort to hold down his sobs. He crawls until he is on top of her. It is almost erotic, the way he straddles her and presses his face into her breasts, his breath heaving. He does mean for it to be; he used to lie with her like this as a child and it is not his fault if his face presses into something which was not there before.

“Forgive me Dís-”

He cannot speak anymore, his voice breaks and he is battling the urge to be sick. Dís’ hands are trembling at her sides. This isn’t the brother she wants in her bed and it makes her sick to think on it. But it’s the only brother she will ever have, and her arms wind around his waist, pulling him down into her. Thorin crushes his nose against her collarbone and gaps for air. She looks up at the ceiling, running her fingers through the tangled curls of ebony hair while Thorin pulls at handfuls of her nightgown and fights back his anguished tears.

She watches the firelight flicker on the stone ceiling, waiting, waiting for Thorin’s agonized breathing to fade.

Thorin waits some time before the subject of marriage is broached. Dwalin has returned to the mountains of Dunland. Unable to bear being apart from his kin, Dwalin begged Thorin, his new King, to rejoin his people as they clutched each other on the doorstep of Azanulbizar. Under the promise that he would not lay eyes on his sister, Thorin agrees.

Dís is a shadow, a ghost. Her soul has died with Frerin. Thorin realises only now that they were closer than he ever could have guessed. Guilt weighs on his conscience, for he knows Frerin’s death is his fault. He will never tell Dís. No Dwarf will recount the horrors of what they saw, what they suffered in the drawn-out war with the Orcs of Moria to their wives and daughters. A raw, dark part of Thorin’s mind had been torn open with the death of Thrór, and Frerin, one that would not be so easily closed.

Thorin is unable to sleep with the guilt smothering his soul. Nor is he able to confide in another living being his pain. He suffers in silence, turning inwards, feeling the pieces of his mind slip through his fingers as he struggles to hold on to himself.

Dís must leave. There is no other way. He wants to keep her. He wants to hold her here, beneath the stone, the last living remnant of his broken family. But he knows that it is not possible. He knows she does not want him. She wants a heart which has stopped beating. A body which has breathed its last. The poor yield of iron is beginning to fade. The miners shake their heads and rumble with discontent. Their only meagre income has a year or so left, at best.

Five hundred pounds of gold will buy their people passage to the Blue Mountains. It will provide them with the means to build forges, to lay seed-crops. They will live in peace and plenty. It is not Erebor, it will never be Erebor. And Thorin will not allow himself to forget his birthright. But home it will be, for a least a while.

Her eyes reflect his as he finds her kneeling beside the fire in her room. She seems to have already anticipated his coming. Her hair is loose over her shoulders. The comb lies abandoned on the ground beside her.

“I will miss you.” And she means it, too. Thorin sits opposite her, kneeling on the deer-skin rug, the rug she shot and skinned and treated, all by herself. “I will never forget any of you.”

“And we shall not forget you.” Thorin takes her hands. “You do not begrudge me for this – do you Dís?”

And she looks up at him with very bright eyes. Her mouth is twisted and wrinkled. She looks for a moment as though she is going to cry. But she blinks and her face is smooth and calm. She shakes her head.

“The best thing I can do for our people is marry the son of Víli.” She sounds dark, hurt and angry at the words. And Thorin does not blame her. It is a cruel, terrible world, where Dís is worth more as a piece of treasure, to be traded for gold, rather than remain amongst her people, working with the skill of her hands. “My own heart – it doesn’t matter.”

“You will be a Queen.” He brushes a lock of dark hair out of her face, curling it behind her ears. Her eyes are downcast.

“A Queen of monsters.” Dís looks back up at him, and there is fear, real fear in her bright blue eyes. “I would rather be nothing. I would rather wake in the morning in rags, with nothing but my own hands to depend on, than in a bed of silk and velvet as Dís Ironfist.” She is not trying to tug at Thorin’s heart. She is merely uttering the truth. But Thorin closes his eyes and grits his teeth, the burning in his chest threatening to consume him.

“I’m bound to this Dís.” He breathes, leaning in. Their foreheads are touching. “I-I don’t want to lose you.” His voice is thick and Dís knows he is about to cry. The thought terrifies her. She cannot ever remember Thorin shedding tears. They remain kneeling beside the fire for a long time, words uttered and silent passing between them in the dark hours of the night until morning breaks and the rest of the mountain wakes.

They cling to each other for three years.

Dís slowly forgives Thorin for what he has done. Thorin begins to come to terms with himself, absolving his sins by throwing himself into his unwanted role as King. The iron vanishes and the wildmen of Dunland cut off their trade. A raven arrives in the night; the Ironfists will come on the first day of summer to take Dís away from him.

She wanders the narrow halls they have carved for themselves from the rock. It holds nothing for her. She has severed herself from it. The people within too, they no longer hold the same brightness. She has learned to part with them. She sees Dwalin from only a distance. He will not look in her direction.

They struggle through the winter, eating the last of their stores, counting down the days until the Ironfist Dwarves come with their golden bounty.

The Hall is lit with every remaining candle and lantern. The last of the coal is thrown into the fireplace. Thorin has poured everything the Longbeard’s have left into this paltry show of welcoming excess. It is a pale shadow, a bare whisper of what Dís deserves. This is not a true ceremony for his new brother-in-law. But it is all they can do. Scouts venture into the sunshine and find the convoy trundling slowly towards their home. A large cart groans under the weight of a fortune.

Dis waits in her room. Her hair has been woven more elaborately than ever, each braid fastened with a clasp of silver. Half of them are not hers – they have been donated for the cause. To maintain the precarious facade that Dís, daughter of Thráin, is worth the five hundred pounds that is being paid for her. Her hands are folded in her lap. She is oddly calm. She has learned to come to terms with this. Ten years is a long time to wait, a long time to overcome her nerves and outrage. She will serve her people in the best way she knows how.

She closes her eyes as fragments of Erebor pass through her mind. Her room of love-tokens. The huge stone statue of Durin, presiding over their feast-hall. The glistening Arkenstone resting in Thrór’s magnificent throne. Her wardrobes of silk and velvet in every imaginable hue. The train of Dwarf-ladies who lived on her whims and calls. Her jewels and rings and necklaces of silver and white gold. A life of pointless excess. She remembers nothing solid from it, only flashes of dazzling wealth and opulence.

The years afterwards are much stronger. The ash and earth and stone, cold and grey around her. The weeks of trekking across unforgiving rock in boots that didn’t quite fit her. Her leather jerkin and long trousers. Sleeping under animal-skins while the cold wind cut through the air. Clinging to the hands of dying souls, whispering prayers of grace to them in Khuzdul as the life left their eyes.

The horrors she has faced have not weakened her. They have made her stronger, harder, fiercer than she ever could have imagined, lying beside her brothers and staring up at her mother’s canopy of stars. She has defied every expectation that people had of her. She wields the weapons of her people with skill and pose. She can shoot and hunt and fight. Dís takes in a long breath and opens her eyes, looking down at her ringed fingers. 

She is a daughter of Durin and she is not afraid.

He is younger than she imagined. Younger even than her. Dís feels her throat close when her husband-to-be enters the feast-hall. He is tall, his golden hair stretches down to his waist. From this distance, it looks to be braided. But she touches it later and realises that it is matted into dreadlocks, tangled knots over a foot in length that can never come out.

His eyes are blue, darker than hers. They remind her of a cold twilight. His beard is short, because he is so young. It covers his chin but only barely. Gold is woven into the matted dreadlocks. She can see rings of gold through his ears and nose. Dís shivers as he approaches her, and she is unable to breathe. She has never seen a Dwarf as raw and wild as the figure who stares in her direction. She does not know what to make of him.

He sinks to his knees before her. He takes her hand, presses it to his mouth. He covers her wrist with her lips, eyelashes fluttering against her forearm. He will mark her here, will have his name etched on her skin with blue ink. Dís looks down at him and finds that her stomach is clenched and painfully tight. He withdraws, opens his eyes, looks up at her. A loop of gold pierces his eyebrow. He is gold, all gold, in his skin and hair and the metal through his face. She finds herself unable to look away from him. Something pulsates deep within her, and she does not know what it is.

There is something careless in the way the prince hands the gold over to Thorin. It clearly means nothing to him. He can only imagine the wealth hoarded by the Ironfist clan, to consider five hundred pounds such a worthless, paltry sum. His insides burn with jealousy.

He entertains the prince and his retinue for a week and he does not like it. They are loud, uncouth, and angry. They start fights with his comrades. They drink too much, they stay up until the dawn and keep the mountain awake with them, singing and shouting until their voices turn hoarse. They eat with their fingers, tearing meat from the bone with their teeth. They make lewd remarks towards the Longbeard wives and daughters and Thorin cannot control them.

The prince and Dís see each other only in public company. They do not speak to each other, they are not permitted to speak to each other. She is not his, not yet.

The night before the name-ritual, Thorin cannot sleep. He paces the room and mutters. Sweat breaks out on his skin. The prince of the Ironfists is a cruel and violent man. He will not be a good husband to Dís. Thorin is terrified he will hurt her. But he is hamstrung. Ten pounds of gold have already been spent in trade with the Dunlendings and he owes more. Near dawn, he cannot bear to be alone with his soul any longer and bursts into his sister’s room.

She is sitting up in her bed, waiting for him, waiting because she knew he would come to see her in this last night, staring outwards, her hands folded in her lap. He crawls into bed beside her and embraces her wordlessly, lips pressed against her cheek. She lies down obediently, and Thorin winds his limbs about her, desperately seeking the last vestiges of warmth and comfort from her vanishing soul.

“I will be all right.” She breathes, staring up at the ceiling. “He will not conquer me Thorin, I promise you.” She knows there is no way out, she knows they cannot escape the fate Thrór has given her.

Thorin simply clings to her in silence, terrified his voice would betray him.

Every single Dwarf within the mountain of Dunland turns out to watch the ceremony.

Except one.

Dís knows that Dwalin is not there to see this and she is glad. She cannot bear to think of him right now, cannot sink into the memory of his drunk lips murmuring into her throat, his legs wrapped around her, his hands on her thighs. Those are memories she keeps for herself, in the lonely stillness of night.

She does not wince or cry out as the blade cuts into her skin. She bears the pain silently, watching as the prince slowly carves his name into her wrist. It is a long, careful process. Balin swears oaths and prayers for them, his voice firm and authoritative in the stone hall. Thorin has made a good choice in having him preside over the ritual. Dís finds her voice has lost her as the ink is worked into her skin. She looks up and sees the prince is looking not at his work, but into her eyes. There is something primal within his own eyes and she finds her heart beating madly in her chest.

She takes the sharp carving tool, repeating the soft prayers uttered by Balin, her voice flat and lifeless. She must keep it devoid of emotion. She is calm and in control of this. She will not allow her marriage to begin with her on the back foot. She will be this prince’s equal. She is a daughter of Durin.

But Dís looks into the dark blue eyes and she is afraid.

Their parting is brief.

Thorin whispers in her ear, arms wrapped tightly around her shoulders. She is all he has left. He will take his gold, the gold he has traded for his sister, and travel West with his people, forge a new home in mountains that will yield them a warm future. She will travel East, from the homes she has known, taken away to a strange and distant land, a people which is entirely alien to her. They will not see each other again here. They may not see each other again at all. He is afraid for her but does not let the fear show on his face. He gives her a parting-gift; Thrór’s axe. Dís looks at him with wide eyes and Thorin smiles. He leans in once more and whispers that he hears she has an impressive skill with the oldest of Dwarf weapons. Dwalin has betrayed his vow of secrecy. Dís holds the axe in her hands and feel the weight of her ancestors in her strong arms.

Then he addresses the prince. He clasps the elbow of his wild, golden-haired man and he follows suit. Their eyes are locked for six or seven endless moments. Thorin is disappointed in his brother-in-law. He did not expect somebody as young and wild as this blonde prince which stands before him and he does not think that he is worthy for his sister’s hand. They do not exchange words. They do not need to. Thorin’s eyes narrow. The prince twists his lip in a smirk.

Then, he pulls apart. He turns away from Thorin, taking his wife by the hand. He guides her to the front of the cart, helping her climb onto the seat. He catches Thorin’s eye when he does this, and he smiles. It is a cold, cruel smile and Thorin knows that his sister his not safe. And he knows he can do nothing. If he rushed and killed this prince on the spot, he would risk war with the Ironfists. And his people are too tired, too hungry and cold to fight. He would lose. He is bound into this marriage, as much as Dís is.

Thorin is afraid.

It is a grey, cloudy day when Dís is lead away from her people. She sits in still silence, with her hands in her lap, staring outwards at the land which is still familiar to her, knowing all too soon she would venture into strange, alien territory. She stares out at the world she knows, drinking it in for what she knows is the last time. She can feel the body of the prince against her side. His arms are bare, they are thick and powerful. They could crush her. His dreadlocks waft in the stiff breeze, brushing against her face. She shivers.

The night approaches and they make camp. It is the first night they will spend as husband and wife and Dís is unsure of what to do. She notices that the prince orders his retinue to make camp a little further along the road, leaving the newlyweds alone, out of earshot and sight. She recalls the words of the wives, gossiping around the spinning wheels as they turned flax stalk into linen. Their wagging tongues are all Dís has to prepare herself for this moment. That, and a broken, drunken encounter, a touch that sent her heart racing, dragging a moan from her throat. A violent haze that was ruptured by her brother’s voice, screaming, a hard shove. Neither of these memories will do her any good.

She doesn’t know whether she should sit or lie down in the back of the cart. She does not know if she should be entirely naked, if she should remove half of her clothes or if she should wear everything. She cannot ask. She does not want to seem powerless in this.

He comes in bearing a lantern. She has settled for her nightdown, a shorter garment that reaches her knees. It hugs her breasts and stomach, and she kneels on the blankets, hoping that he will not notice her trembling hands. She does not know how he will find her figure. She is putting her weight back on but Dís is far from the soft, fleshy princess she once was. Her body is stronger, her waist rounded with a new thickness. She wishes he would speak. She does not expect a love-poem, but she wishes that he will speak.

He says no words as he claims her mouth with his. The lantern hangs from a hook in the ceiling, he crouches over her and takes her face in his hands. The force of the kiss knocks the breath from her lungs. He is stronger than she could ever have imagined. There is no gentleness as his hands drift downwards, kneading her flesh, pressing her into the blankets. Only a dark, violent passion. She wants to cry out, wants to tell him to stop, but she cannot breathe. His touch sends fire along her flesh. His fingers brush the skin of her thighs as he reaches for the edge of her skirts and Dís quakes beneath him, gripping the front of his leather tunic helplessly.

She is aroused. Dís realises this as the nightgown is torn from her body, rent down the middle, and he attacks her naked skin with his mouth, his hands, dragging the air from her lungs in gasps and moans. She expects a short tumble, a rough thrusting between the legs and a sigh. The wives seem to gather that this was the norm on the wedding night.

This cannot be his first time. His hands are too quick and skilful. He knows where to kiss, where to touch and caress. He turns her into a quivering, moaning mess before he has even removed his shirt. He takes her hands and places them on the fastenings of tunic, a wordless command for her to undress him herself as he kneads the soft flesh of her breasts. She cannot think, cannot breathe, but somehow she does it; her stumbling, faltering fingers pull the bindings free and she lays eyes upon his naked skin. He bows his head and trails his tongue across her. It is molten gold on her skin. He sends a violent shudder through her, in places she didn’t even know existed. She feels like a clumsy stranger in her body. He is a well-worn traveller.

Afterwards, he lies beside her and feels her heartbeat beneath his fingertips. It races for a long time. It makes him smile. He knows that she is his irreversibly. There will never be another. She lies on her back, gasping. His hand seems monstrous on her chest. She turns her head and sees that he is staring at her face in the dim yellow light. She is overcome with an urge to bury her face into his chest and cry. But she holds herself back, refusing to yield to him. She turns on her side, away from him, pulling the blanket over her shoulders as she tried to regain her heart, her breathing. He draws close to her and makes her shake, stretching his arm across her. She wished he would hate and spurn her. It would be easy if he hated her. She does not know how to react to this. She knows she cannot give in to him, yet she cannot pull herself free.

She feels as though a very big part of her has fallen away, it has dropped into the darkness and although she has scrabbled about, it is gone and she can never get it back.

He asks her to sing on the second night. There is something in the way his voice flushes, his eyes lower to the ground as he makes the simple request, that makes her stomach soften. She knows she cannot for a moment deny him.

She kneels, filing her lungs and rising her voice to the soft, muffled air of the caravan. He lies on his back and watches her. She sings with closed eyes, an ancient lullaby of her people, keeping the beat by tapping her fingertips against her thigh. When it is over, she looks down to find him staring at her with very wide eyes.

His voice trembles as he asks her to sing again, hands reaching out to her, touching her leg. She looks down at his fingers, so thick, and she will not deprive her young prince of the happiness that gleamed in his dark blue irises.

And closing her eyes, she returns to the soft, lilting lullaby.

The journey is long and fraught with cold and peril. Dís spends her days pressed into the side of her new husband, listening to him breathe as his arms tug at the reins of the ponies. He speaks little; he is not a creature of eloquence. He seems cold and apart from her and Dís feels as though she is travelling alongside a stranger.

But it is an entirely different person who comes to her at night. Her husband, the prince of the wild Ironfists, is virile and passionate. They are foreign and exotic to one another and it makes them both excited. She is a prisoner in her own body, and it is at night when she is freed, with his hands, his tongue. He sends her heart racing and limbs afire. He seems most aroused when she moans and thrashes around him, her strong arms straining against him, her bird-song voice high and keening, face contorted in ecstasy. She asks him about this afterwards, peeling the sweaty dreadlocks from his face, running her fingers over his half-inch of stubble. He is so young. Dís is by no means old, she is only fifty herself, but she finds out several weeks in that her husband is only thirty-six. He is barely out of childhood.

He chuckles and responds that he likes to make her scream. He takes her hand from his face, pressing kisses against her fingertips. He murmurs that he enjoys most of all the feeling of her thrashing and fighting against him.

She is drunk from her climax. She does not realise at time, how dark and chilling this is to hear.

The wastelands are cold and grey in the disappearing autumn. Her clothes are not warm enough; he has expected this, and extracts a thick mantle of silver. It is the brilliant fur of a kind of bear which roams the foothills of his mountains, he explains as he wraps the animal skin around her shoulders. Her face emerges from the heavy silver-tipped fur, blue eyes the colour of lapis. The lonely, desolate air seems to make them shine brighter. He kisses her eyes, feeling her dark lashes flutter against his lips.

That night they make love on the animal skin. It is deliciously soft and warm against Dís’ back, she can feel every strand of hair rasp against her flesh. He turns her over and grabs a dark braid, winding it about his hands. She curls her fingers into the hair and muffles her screams (of pain or pleasure, she is not entirely sure which) into the mantle, breathing in the scent of rock, of snow and rain. The wild aromas of where East met North, corrupted with the smell of her own sweat and skin. It is deep and intoxicating, she lifts her face from it and breaths in long, dizzying gasps. Golden dreadlocks trail past her, brushing the animal’s fur. He bites her shoulder, and Dís cries out, the sound sending her prince over the edge. He convulses, throwing his weight on her as his legs give out, and the both of them are sent sprawling into the bear-skin, a tangle of limbs and hair and sweat.

She realises that she has fallen quite heavily for him. She does not know how, or when, or why, but she has. It is a strange, unearthly sensation. He is so unlike Dwalin. He is thinner, shorter. His hands have a different weight to them. He is short with his words while Dwalin would mumble Khuzdul poetry to her. He has never said she is beautiful, while Dwalin could never speak of her beauty enough. He doesn’t kiss her with tender kindness like Dwalin did, but with a rough, unbridled passion. But somehow she is bound to this Ironfist prince. Something crumbled within her and now she is his. It is a cold, frightening thought and it sends a chill down her back. Dís realises that she is completely at his mercy and it terrifies her. She buries her nose in the fur mantle and feels panic swell within her.

If the deerskin before her fireplace had a smell, Dís does not remember it.

The first snowfall is achingly beautiful to Dís. She watches it, nose and eyes peering out from her heavy bear-skin, tiny white flakes clustering on her long eyelashes. Her prince finds it an annoyance. He growls and mutters that it is too early in the year to have snowfall. But the wonder in her eyes brings a smile to his lips.

That night, Dís dreams of her brothers. She dreams that the three of them are lying side-by-side in their mother’s bed, of crisp white linen, staring up at the canopy. But it is not the canopy they look up at. It is the stars. And Dís looks down to see that the three of them are lying in a bed of snow. She turns to see her brothers. They are stiff and frozen and cold beside her, their eyes open and faces sallow and waxy.

She awakes in a sob. It startles her prince and he watches with dark eyes as she turns over and holds her arms close about herself. He touches her shoulder, pressing a kiss to her temple. Wordlessly she rolls over and melts into his embrace, winding her arms around the torso of her husband. She closes her eyes but cannot shake the image of Thorin, lying dead in the snow. It feels like a chilling premonition to her.

There is a welcoming ceremony for them. Her young prince stops the cart at the top of the pass, turning to her. They are here, he speaks. He takes her arm, pressing the mark of his name against his lips. She is home.  Dís finds that her voice is lost, her hands stiff and cold. This is not home for her. She has no home. Home is a distant, vague concept. She has only a handful of scattered memories, singed with dragon’s flame.

It is a blur to her. She is led by the hand from her cart and into a huge hall. The carvings seem crude to her, but she holds her tongue. Her young prince retains his hold on her as he leads her along the hall. She feels the eyes of the Ironfists on her. They are a strange people. Dís had thought, had hoped, that the wild dreadlocks and gold rings of her husband and his retinue were an oddity. She saw now that it was a style replicated again and again throughout the feast-hall. There are no braids, no ornately maintained beards string with silver and gold. The clothes of the Ironfists are made from leather and fur, in shades of red and brown. Her blue linen is a stark contrast. She feels a collective intake of breath as Dís kneels before the throne of Víli, son of Hepti. She declares her loyalty to him. She promises to bear him sons in the name of the Ironfists. All of this she does with her eyes downcast, her heart removed from her body. She rises to her feet, watching as Víli, his blonde mane streaked with grey, rose to his feet. He takes Dís by the shoulders, planting a graceful kiss on each cheek. He welcomes her with surprising humility and decorum, and for a moment Dís wonders for a single moment if her people had maybe had the wrong impression about the Ironfists for the last two centuries.

They feast on venison and pork. Dis has only a single knife to tear her meat with. She watches the others all eat with their hands, the princess of Durin sitting beside her husband in a strange hall. She eats slowly, aware of the fat and grease that drip down her fingers. She sucks on them, feeling her prince tense beside her. His hand finds her knee underneath the table.

That night Dís sleeps in a bed for the first time in seven months. She lies on her back, forehead slick with sweat after her husband has taken her, staring up at the ceiling, regaining her surroundings. There is a canopy here. It is of red cloth, and it is painted with a picture of the sun, a bear, a lion. She looks up at it, her fingers curled in golden dreadlocks. She feels the body beside her shift and twitch; he leans downwards and places a kiss on her throat, but Dís does not break her gaze with the ceiling.

To look at when?

And after thirty-five years of confusion, Dís feels her heart constrict in painful understanding. She aches with pity for her mother, her poor dead mother, and her fingers tug at the roots of her husband’s hair as she clings to his dreadlocks. She lifts his head up to her face, wanting to look at him. His night-blue eyes, his angled jaw, the little tuft of golden hair, the rings in his nose and ears and eyebrow. She doesn’t want to look up in bored exasperation at the canopy. She wants to look at this face. It belongs to her now, and she can have no other, no matter where her heart lies. And she is not sure where it beats. His eyes widen as she takes her jaw, running her thumbs along his beard. Her kiss is soft and sweet and tender against his lips. He starts to get excited again, he hardens and his hands drift along her skin (and oh Mahal, he is young, he’s worn her out not half an hour before and already he’s thinking about what he can do to her next). She opens her mouth to say no when he reaches between her legs and it becomes a moan.

She does not look at the ceiling. Not with open eyes, at least.

The weeks pass. She is sheltered from the Ironfists. Her prince wants to integrate her slowly into his culture. He knows that to immerse her completely will leave her drowning in shock. She is allowed to have her own suite of rooms, but Dís does not want them. She does not want to sleep in a cold, empty bed, alone in a strange land. Her prince takes her for slow, rambling walks around the kingdom that will one day be theirs. It is far better than Dunland, but not a shadow of Erebor. But Dís holds her tongue, she pretends to be impressed with their gold-hoard, acts as though she had never seen mines so stuffed with seams of glittering jewels.

They are less preoccupied with fashioning their treasures into objects of skill and cunning. They are focused instead on crafting strong, biting weapons, on developing machines of war. She wonders who they plan to go to war against. And after some days of wondering, she asks her prince outright. He shrugs. Nobody, he murmurs, running his fingers along the soft flesh of her arm. But they have to pour their time and energy into something and it was more useful than crowns and jewellery and decorations of gold.

She agrees with him half-heartedly, watching the way the fire made the gold gleam in his eyebrow.

There is a feast held in her honour six months after her arrival. Dís steps into the feast-hall wearing her blue linens, her head held high and beard braided into her hair. She walks half a pace behind her husband, and as they sit, her hand finds his under the low stone table that stretches across the front of the stone hall.

She is used to eating without cutlery. She chews with her mouth open and breaks the bones in her teeth, sucking out the marrow as though she had been doing it all her life. Some customs are easy to adopt. She wipes her hands on her dress and leaves grease-stains. Fat glistens on her chin and she finds her prince looking at her with fierce longing. Something turns in her stomach. He should not find such greed and sloppiness attractive. She sets down her bone and wipes at her mouth with a sleeve, eyes downcast. She feels for a moment as though she is descending into a pit, against her will, and when she reaches the bottom they will snatch the ladder out from her grasp.

The mead flows; talk grows raucous and coarse. Her prince joins in, slopping his drink down the front of her best blue linens and she feels her face redden. He is giddy, like a child. He wraps an arm around her shoulders and kisses her cheek, throwing his head back and roaring with laughter. Dís allows herself to drink too much mead, she feels her head lighten, a smile spreading across her face and refusing to leave.

They run hand in hand down the main corridor. Dis is singing breathlessly, and he listens. Even drunk, she is pitch-perfect, cadence high and lilting. She is a little bird, raising her chirping voice into the air. She spins about and falls into his arms. The both of them crash against the stone and she sit between his legs, propping herself up with her arms, laughing. His hands caress her face and he whispers that she is beautiful.

Her voice falls silent – he has never said this before, he has never spoke about her appearance, which would be so exotic and alien to him. She thought he must have found her ugly or odd-looking, holding his tongue out of respect for his wife. Her heart pounds at his words and she can feel her eyes misting over. He kisses her and whispers against his lips that he loves her. There is something so soft and breathy in his voice, it is something she has yet to come across, in the year she has known him. She opens her mouth to speak but finds her voice has died completely in her throat, she cannot utter a word in her overwhelmed shock. He misinterprets her parted lips as an invitation to kiss and he does so, heavily, arms around her waist.

He falls lax and Dís has a rare opportunity to hover over him and watch his face from above. His beard hair is downy, so unlike Dwalin’s. It still feels strange on her fingers. She still expects it to be coarse at the touch and she is always surprised to have the soft hair move under her fingertips. Dís feels her mind whirl. She can say with certainty that yes, she is in love, and it is passionate and dark and powerful and exhausting and terrible and euphoric. She is in love with her prince but not their people, not yet. She will try, she is going to try, to find a thread of humanity within them. But she is pulled back and sheltered. She sees them only in crowds and glimpses. Only a handful of elderly ladies speak to her. She is cut off from them and does not know why.

But she has her wild young prince and as she presses a kiss to his nose and his heart leaps, she is able to fool herself for a moment, and declare in her mind that she does not need anything else.

She wanders alone one night, while her young prince is sleeping and her mind is alive and racing. She slips out; she knows how to sneak about in dark halls and corridors without being seen. Her feet are bare against the stone and her fingers trail across the carvings as she wanders in the darkness.

It is a scream that makes Dís turn and run. Run towards the sound, not away. Her feet slap against the rock and her breath hitches but she is able to slow down and maintain a veil of silence as she approaches the lamplight.

The maiden-no-more is on her back, stretched out like an animal on the butcher’s table. Dís cannot breathe. The front of her dress is torn in half, she is held down by a pair of thick arms. Sand-coloured hair hangs dreadlocked over his shoulders. Another presses her thighs into the stone, head bowed as he works in short, thrusting motions. Bile rises in Dís’ throat and she claps a hand over her mouth. Her stomach is twisting, it heaves in horror and she is going to be sick.

She turns away and flees to her room. She is unarmed and the Dwarves are tall and strong. Fear has paralysed her limbs and left her numb. She bursts into the room she shares with her husband and sinks to the floor. She does not know what to do. Her prince is sleeping, naked in their bed, the firelight on his skin. Dís kneels on the ground for a long time, her tears dripping down her cheeks and pooling on the stone floor. She twists her braids in her fingers and pulls down hard, shaking her head. She cannot break the image from her mind. It isn’t the thick fingers clasped around her arms which send an awful shudder down her spine. Nor is it the broken gasps that leave her stomach knotted and pitching. It is the eyes, the grey-blue eyes, dull and hazy, looking blankly up at the ceiling. The eyes of someone who waits in agonised patience for it to end.

She crawls into bed after some long hours and pulls the blanket over herself. Her limbs quake. She casts an eye to the fireplace. Thrór’s axe is mounted to the wall above it, an object of ceremony and ornament, rather than of war. Her throat closes and she struggles to breathe, pushing her face into the pillow so the ragged sobs will not wake her sleeping husband.

She witnesses her first fight.

She walks arm-in-arm with her prince along the halls. His eyes watch hers, the way she looks up at the ceiling, the walls, taking in a scenery which is still so strange and foreign to her. She catches him looking at her and smiles. They kiss, his hands linger on her sides and he does not pull away.

They come across the fight as they turn the corner. A tight ring of people cluster in the wide stone. They see their prince arrive, they withdraw a little and he pushes through to the front of the crowd, Dís pressed into his side. Her heart throbs within her. The two Dwarves beat each other like hammer on raw iron. Blood is everywhere. Their shirts lie abandoned on the ground, One has the other in a headlock, his bloodied, sweat-sheened arms straining in the firelight. They scream around her and Dís looks up to see her husband shouting alongside them, his eyes gleaming. The Dwarf locked into place is beating his fists against the rock. He bends down and his teeth sink into the other’s arm. There is a howl, a mouthful of flesh is spat out on the stone at Dís’ feet and blood cascades. She struggles against the arm around her, beating him off, pushing and tearing her way through the thick crowd. The smell of blood clings to her and she stumbles blindly, pitching forward on her knees as she gasps for air. The sound of flesh hitting the stone is a soft slap in her ears and she cannot block it from her mind. She shakes her head and moans.

And his arms are around her, they hold her up. His fingers touch her face and she opens her eyes, looking at her husband. She runs her hands along his soft child’s beard and presses her nose into his throat. The smell of sweat, a low musky undertone, helps to drive the stench of blood from her nostrils. It does not dissipate completely but it helps.

“Why?” She whispers that night, her hands clutching his. He pulls the blankets down and strokes the skin of her hip, pressing a kiss to the land he has claimed for his own. “Why were they fighting?”

“One stole the other’s pony.” His voice is a low thrum in the base of his throat. His young eyes lock with hers. “The pony-thief lost. They’ll spike him for it.” His skin shivers with blood-lust. Dís finds she cannot answer him. “You’ll have to go.” He breathes against the skin of her neck. “I’ll be beside you. Just don’t pass out and you will be all right.” She winds a dreadlocked curl of golden hair around her finger and nods silently.

She learns what a ‘spiking’ is, very quickly.

It is a soft, buttery afternoon with little wind. One of the few warm days of the year, she realises later as she thrusts her hands inside her furs. Her dresses are all stained and ruined; she wears a robe of crimson, cut too low for her liking, gathered too tight at the waist. She is on display.

King Víli sits on a throne of carved wood, presiding over the ring. A single iron pike is erected in the centre. The seats are built from planks of pine-wood, they are grey and weathered, worn smooth from decades of heavy use. His son is at his right hand, and Dís sits alongside him, in her own chair. She has a soft cushion of yellow fabric. Her hand is entwined in her husband’s. He sits on the edge of his seat, leaning forward in anticipation.

They bring the Dwarf out and Dís feels her chest throb. He is stripped down to a pair of short trousers, his face bloodied. They have shorn his beard and hair. He is forced to kneel before his King, a shaved, broken creature. He is bowed in contrition and Dís feels her husband clench his fingers tighter around hers.

The judgement call is swift. King Víli does not believe in mercy. Dís looks across and sees his blue eyes are cold and violent. He does not abide thievery. The Dwarf is screaming, pleading with Mahal to spare him. Dís feels her ears ring and her chest is too tight. Her husband leans in and tells her to remain calm. She must not look disgusted. Disgust is a sign of weakness. She nods, but is unsure if she can hold back the wave of nausea that beats at her throat.

He screams as he is lifted onto the pike. It pierces his spine, crushing through ribs and rising out of his sternum. The soldiers know how to miss the main organs. He will not die so quickly. Dís blinks and tries very, very hard to keep her face still as blood gushes and his screams grow weaker. The crowd cheers, they take bets on how long he will last. Her husband is almost out of his seat entirely. He has released his hold on Dís, he grips the arms of his chair, knuckles white, staring transfixed as the criminal releases his dying breath in a harsh, ragged gasp and slumped backwards, his green eyes looking up at the sky, glassy and dull. Dís holds handfuls of her crimson robe and shakes her head, almost imperceptibly. This is not justice. This is cruelty and barbarism. She turns her head, looking at her young prince.

No eyes shine brighter around the ring than his.

“Why did you marry me so young?”

She cannot help but ask. They are lying together in the comfort of their bed, her head lying on his shoulder. They look up at the lion and the sun together. She feels an intake of breath come from him.

“You were twenty-five when the letter came for me.” She whispers in the firelight. “Why did your father force you to marry at such a young age?”

“He didn’t force me.” His voice is deep and rich tonight. It sends a shiver through her chest. “He allowed me.” She looks up at him, arching her neck. “I asked him for your hand – No, I demanded that I take your hand.”

“How?” She has no idea that he took such a domineering role in arranging her marriage. She has always assumed that it was something he was forced into by his King. Like her. Dís watches him with a pounding heart, a roaring.

“We heard about you, when I was twenty. Word reached us through the stone about the only female heir of Thrór, once King under the Mountain.” Dís clenches her hands around his. This is not real news to her. She knows that gossip must have travelled along the Orocani Mountains. It is the only way they could have known about her, for Thrór would have never sent a raven of his own to the violent Ironfist clan. “I heard the rumours about the beautiful young songbird without a home. I-I went mad.” She sits up, naked, looking down at him. “I went mad with this uncontrollable desire. I had to have you. I knew you were almost twice my age at the time but I didn’t care. I had to have you, as soon as I could. I insisted to my father that I would have you as my wife and no other, ever. We fought over it. But I won.”

Her heartbeat thrums within her, low and heavy. She is aware of a terrible whirling throughout her head.

Dís realises that her husband is hiding her from a very violent truth. The Ironfists are a sadistic, bloodthirsty tribe. He keeps her locked away in a small series of rooms, giving her books and clothes and puzzles, anything she wants. But he will not let her wander about by herself and after seeing those grey-blue eyes staring up at the stone ceiling and the glassy green eyes turned towards the sky, she knows why.

He disappears for several days and leaves her alone. She asks for a loaf of bread, a side of pork, and a cask of wine. And she locks the door, barricading herself in. She can hear the others hammering on the door and shouting but Dís will not give. She takes the axe down from over the fireplace and sits in a chair facing the barred door, refusing to allow entry to a soul. She does not sleep, she does not touch the food provided for her. She waits, wielding the ancient weapon of her dead King in her strong arms, breath shallow in her throat. Waits for her prince to return. She will allow no other to cross the threshold.

His voice is muffled against the door but she knows it is his. The axe clatters to the floor, her hands shake as she pushes aside the heavy worn furniture and fumbles with the lock. He stands on the threshold, thronged by guards, in his travelling clothes. His face is white and eyes shockingly dark. She embraces him with all of her fading strength, pressing her face into his neck and pleading with him to never, ever leave her.

She catches him training.

He cannot see her, and she watches, withdrawing into the shadows. She is not supposed to be out. She has given the ladies who watch her the slip, and the moments before she is found are precious.

He is stripped to the waist. Dís watches the taut muscles flicker beneath his skin, sheened with sweat. This is a figure she knows well. He is raw and powerful, the raging beast who shares her bed and completely dominants every inch of her soul.

He is the age Frerin was when he died and Dís cannot imagine a more polarised counterpart. She watches his limbs fly through the air, hands bound to his dual swords by his gripped fingers. His dreadlocks sail on a breeze. He trains with blunted swords, his sparring partner girt with mail. Dís looks on in silence as he raises his arms above his head and knocks the weapon’s from the other’s hands. He has subdued the Dwarf but he does not stop, he continues to strike him until the other Dwarf begs for him to stop, his voice high and frightened, blood gushing from his split lip and broken nose. Dís has edged red crescents into her hands. She takes a step away from her husband. The sound of his satisfied panting fills the air as he lets the swords clatter to the ground.

She turns away and cannot dispel the sound of those horrible hoarse cries from her head.

His face hardens. His eyes begin to lose their childlike softness. Dís knows it is coming but it still sends a throb of sadness through her as she looks into his face and realises that her prince is no longer so shockingly young. His beard begins to grow longer. She runs her fingers through it and watches the curls spring back against his face. She changes too; her arms grow soft and fleshy and her middle thickens from countless feasts and rich meals. Her breasts are bigger than ever and he whispers into her collarbone that they are fantastic. Dís feels as though she is bloating out, her body is too weak and soft and it frightens her. She spends long hours in her rooms when he is wandering throughout the mountain, bracing herself against the floor, running on the spot, taking the heavy axe from the mantle and slicing through air. The muscles slowly harden once more but they remain hidden beneath a layer of fat, a coiled secret.

She has learned to venture outside the walls of their chambers unescorted. She must, for he is bound to long hours of training, in weapons, in hammer and tongs, in skill and cunning. He is the King-to-be and his role is sharply defined. He has done everything all backwards, marrying so painfully young, but he holds Dís in the night and claims he will have it no other way. It was worth it to swoop in and seize her, to carry her off to the Northern wildlands before anybody else could claim her.

Dís lies compliant in his grip and feels his heart beating against her ear. She can see her name on his wrist, looking black in the dim light. Her eyes lower to the twin mark on her own skin. One day. If the raven was just one day later, Dwalin would have already asked Thrór for her hand, he would have said yes, knowing his distant great-nephew was the best Dís was going to get amongst the Longbeards. He would have been bound in his blessing and the Ironfists would have had their offer rejected.

The realisation makes her feel very cold. She was close, achingly close to a very different future thirty years ago, standing in the cold stone room with Dwalin’s arms about her. She is turbulent and confused, because she knows she is unhappy, forced to wander amongst a people that frighten and disgust her. Yet she thinks of living in a world without her golden-haired prince and she feels as though her heart will break in two.

She reads her name, again and again and again, on that skin. She knows she is passionately and fiercely loved. And it should be enough. It should be enough to stop the awful cleaving in her chest. But it is not. She is homesick and in pain. Nothing can stop her soul from being rent in two.

The years pass, and her husband turns fifty.

There are no children yet – there will not be for a long while. There is no rush to produce an heir, they are both very young. Her husband would still not be of age for twenty years, if he lived within Dís’ people. But they do not, they live in the Orocani Mountains and her prince was considered an adult when he left to claim his bride.

There is a magnificent feast. She has not seen a table so laden with food in over twenty years and she does not know where to begin. It overwhelms her and she does not eat enough in the end. Her stomach grumbles in the night and he presses a hand over her middle, chuckling.

And when the food is finishes, he touches her face and asks her to sing. He asks her to make it a birthday present for him. His beard is thicker now, it is beginning to curl over his upper lip. But his eyes still have vestigial traces of that childish softness, gazing up at her. She sings for him regularly, he entreats her too, entwined together in the blankets, his head resting on the pillow, watching as she recalls the songs of her people. But he has never asked her to sing before others. She is tentative and nervous. But she rises to her feet, pushing back her chair and standing on the middle of the dais, she closes her eyes and raises her voice in song.

It is an old ballad of Erebor, a love-poem set to music about a couple in love, who are torn apart by war. He is killed and she wanders the world alone, searching for his soul. She doesn’t know why she has chosen this song to sing at her husband’s birthday. It seems an awkward decision. But it is sung so sweetly, every note hitting utter perfection, that nobody seems to mind the dreary lyrics. She opens her eyes to find the Ironfists looking at her in shock and wonder. They are unused to soft, beautiful music. They prefer raucous drinking songs, and battle-chants. She returns to her seat in silence. They don’t know how to react to her. But her young prince, he grabs her hand very tightly with his and for the rest of the night he won’t let go.

There is another public show of judgement.

The offending Dwarf is sentenced to forty lashes for trying to run away after accruing a mountain of debt. He is not young. He is tied to a thick wooden post, stripped of his shirt, arms bound, stretched across the wood. Her nails dig into the arms of her chair as the sound of screams, the cracking of the whip, press against her ears. She has learned how to look slightly off-centre, to appear as though she is staring intently at the scene before her when in fact she is looking at a patch of earth, but she cannot block out the sounds of his anguish.

She gives her husband a sidelong look. He looks physically aroused at the sight of this Dwarf having the skin flayed from his back. He bits on his lip and Dís sees that familiar clouded look in his eyes. He crosses his legs and hunches over as the punishment winds down, catching her eye, the skin of his face flushing red. She doesn’t know if he is really ashamed of his reaction, or if he is putting on a show of contrition, for her.

She sends and receives ravens, filled with lies. She is happy. She is doing well. The people are kind and generous to her. Her husband treats her as he should. She watches these lies fly off towards the West and receives the same false pleasantries, months later. Thorin is doing an honourable trade.  Ered Luin is slowly rebuilt. Their home is humble but they still have much to be proud of. He is growing mature and wise.

She keeps the letters bound in blue ribbon, slipping them between the pages of a book from her homeland. Dís takes the letters out when she cannot sleep and reads them in the light of the fires, searching through them, picking them apart, reading between the lines for the truth that she is sure Thorin is reluctant to say.

But she finds nothing suspicious and she returns the letters to their secret place, lying in bed and wondering between the sheets if Thorin does the same thing with her scant, hollow replies.

There is another feast. Víli is not present; he is battling a stomach-sickness and his seat is empty. Dís watches as her husband talks, leads a crude drinking song, throws his head back in laughter that bounces back at him off the stone ceiling. There is something relaxed and happy within him. He is not under the leash of his father and Dís finds her heart reaching out to him. She finds herself sharing in this warmth that blossoms within him.

It sours.

Quickly.

Someone makes an inappropriate pass at Dís. It is stupid and thoughtless and she thinks nothing of it but her husband goes completely wild. He grabs the Dwarf and throws him to the floor. The air dies in her throat as her prince smashes her fists into his face, his ribs, over and over. The feast-hall grows loud, they rise to their feet and watch. Their cheering fills the air. Dís rises to her feet and jumps over the table in a scream but someone grabs her wrist, holding her back as blonde hair flashes in the firelight. Her prince is beating the Dwarf to death. Tears fill her eyes and she cannot breathe as she watches blood redden the hands which touch her with such dark passion. The beaten victim gushes blood from his lips, it bubbles from his lips and he convulses. He has been struck too many times over the head, and he is dying. They all know it; cries rise in the air and the Ironfists scream at their prince to finish him.

He grabs for a knife at his waist. Dís screams but her voice is lost in the crowd. He plunges the blade into the Dwarf’s chest, making a quick slice before letting the metal clatter to the floor. Dís watches in speechless horror as the fingers of her husband reach inside the wound he has made.

The heart still beats in his hands, a reflex, pulsating blood down his arms. Her prince raises his eyes. They are as black as night and he meets the gaze of his wife. She is frozen. She cannot move. She cannot speak or breathe. She can only watch, in petrified horror, as her squeezes the muscle in his hands. It is pulverised in his fingers, a mess of blood and tissue.

Dís collapses to the stone, unconscious.

She will not touch him.  She will not look at him. He reaches out to her and she shrinks away, as though the blood of the Dwarf, the remnants of his heart, are still on fingertips and he will stain her white skin with them. He tries to speak to her and she covers her hands and shakes her head. So he leaves her alone, alone in a cold bed to stare at the ceiling and cry, and he retreats to a tiny side-room with a low couch, an open fireplace that leaves the air dull and smoky. He will wait, will starve her out like a trapped rabbit, will wait for her to slink from her hole and return to him. She will not allow herself to be deprived of his affection forever. Not in this strange, uncertain world of darkness and violence.

Three days pass and she refuses to eat. Food is brought to her and retrieved untouched. She is unable to sleep. Each time she closes her eyes, she sees her husband standing before her, the still-beating heart of another soul in his trembling hands. She is wracked with terror. She never knew her prince capable of such gruesome cruelty.

But.

She remembers the way he leans forward in his chair as they witness the public executions. His overindulgence in subduing his partners within the training yard. The physical pleasure he took from watching the pain of others. The way he would shudder within her as he tore a scream from her lips.

His obsession with pain has long roots stretching back as far as she has known him. And now he has begun to hurt others and Dís does not know when he will stop.

The worst thing happens. Dís stops bleeding. She kneels with the cloth in her hands, morning after morning, her heartsick terror growing. Five weeks have passed since the incident in the feast-hall and Dís still will not speak to her husband. He grows impatient. He storms into her room and screams at her. She holds her hands over her ears but his voice still penetrates her head and she cannot block him out. He realises too late that he will drive her away with his shouting and throws himself on his knees before her, begging for forgiveness. Tears glisten in his eyes and Dís feels her heart constricting as she thinks about the life which has begun inside of her. He promises he will never hurt her and pleads for her graces. He wraps his arms around her knees, pressing his face in her thighs and will not stop asking over and over and over for her to return to him.

She does the only thing she can. She curls her fingers in his hair and coaxes him to his feet. She winds her arms around his shoulders and presses her face into his neck, shaking violently. 

She does not tell him for a month. She does not tell anybody. She stains her rags with red wine for three days so her maidservants will be none the wiser. She lies awake in bed with her fingers tracing her stomach, looking up at the painted lion, roaring down at her. She is frightened for the both of them.

He faces no punishment for what he has done. He was within his rights to seek revenge on the one who insulted his wife. He is the prince of the Ironfists, above law and justice. He can do as he wishes and this thought leaves Dís cold. It is not the first fight her husband has been caught up in. She has seen him return to their chambers with a black eye, a split lip, a tender shoulder. But he has never ended another life, not that she is aware of. Not in such a cruel, violent manner. The image of the beating heart in his hands dances before her closed eyes and she can feel her skin quiver beneath his touch. He claims her, as he always does. She wishes she could say that she was stiff and numb and unmoving but her flesh beckons at his call and she cannot stop her hips from moving against him, her mouth from crying out.

She still sings for him, but her voice is tentative and broken and it is not the same. He presses his lips to her eyes and whispers that he is sorry but he knows and she knows too that it will never be the same. Fear has pulled her apart from him and she does not know what to do.

She writes the same letters to Thorin. But at the end she tells him that she is with child. It is almost cruel. She adds it as an afterthought and wonders if she should rephrase the words. But she sends the message away as she hears clumping footsteps approach and when her prince enters the room she is motionless in her chair. He puts his hands on her shoulders and kisses the top of her head and she wants to scream.

There are tears in his eyes as she finally breaks the news to him. He holds her sides and plants kisses on her stomach. He proclaims that his son (for it will be a son, there is no doubt in his mind of that) will be King of the Ironfists and rule over his tribe with strength and pride. He says nothing of honour and courage. They feel to Dís deliberately left out.

She swells, a fruit. The heir of the Ironfists grows within her, a seed within her stomach, made of gold. Her husband becomes soft-spoken. He no longer raises his voice to her. He treats her with gentle kindness. He kisses her chastely at night and withdraws, leaving her alone in her cold half of the bed. She splays her fingers over his stomach and feels the skin pulled tight around the child inside of her.

He is kind to her but not to others. She hears whispers. He is bitter and violent. His fights are brutal and numerous. He nurses his bruises in secret but she can see them when he undresses in the firelight, behind her half-closed eyes. She is terrified but as long as he keeps his hands away from her, she has no reason to fear for her safety. This is what she tells herself, turned away from him with her stomach bulging out in front of her. She does not want to be a mother, not yet. She wants more time to tame the beast with her name on his wrist. She wants to subdue him and she knows that it is now impossible.

Everything goes smoothly. Dís is lucky, she is told as she is laid out in the bed. They press crushed poppy seeds against her nose. Her face is slick with sweat and she screams as another wave of agony floods her. She is screaming for her husband. Where is he. She needs him here. She doesn’t care if it breaks tradition to have a male in the birthing-room, she needs him. She screams his name at the top of her lungs, fighting against the arms that tried to pin her to the bed. She cannot face this pain without him.

He smashes the door with his fists in his effort to meet her. The room explodes in splinters and breaking wood and he crawls on the bed. He crouches behind her, offering his hands to her, his legs encircling hers. She arches her neck in a howl of anguish, her grip almost breaking his fingers. She is in more pain than she could have ever imagined.

It is not long before Dís falls lax and a high wail fills the room. They are both exhausted. He slumps against the headboard and she falls into him, her body broken and bloodied and spent. Her blood covers his trousers. The naked infant is placed on her chest, and husband and wife both draw their arms across him.

It is a boy. It is a boy with a soft tuft of golden hair and her prince cannot be happier.

He names the child Fíli. He gabbles to the infant, crouching over the crib while Dís watches in her chair. He cannot bear to be apart from his son. The crib is placed in their room and he spends every waking moment with the babe. Fíli is chubby and red-faced with a powerful cry that neither can sleep through. She is offered nurses and nannies but Dís refuses them all. She will raise him unaided. She is resolved. Fíli will not grow up to be a savage of the Ironfist tribe.

He will be a son of Durin.

She does not tell this to her husband and she does not tell this to her new King. She keeps the promise secret, within herself. She will teach him the ways of her own people and he will break the tradition of bloodlust and violence which has plagued this warlike clan for centuries. If she is forced to live here and become their Queen then she will make a difference to these people. She will not have victims suffer, like the grey-blue eyes and the thief and the debt-dodger and so many others she had seen beaten and broken and dying.

Fíli has blue eyes. He is an image of his father, they all crow as they gather around his crib. Dís smiles to herself and knows that they are wrong. She knows that nose. It is Durin’s nose. He is not unrecognisable as one of her people, even with his shining mane of gold.

Fíli is still a wrinkle-faced infant when they are called back to the ring. It is the custom that every Ironfist soul attend the gatherings and children were never an exception.

He stirs restlessly against her breast as the Dwarf screams in agony, his amputated limb falling to the ground. A high price, for attempting to steal one of Víli’s gold goblets.

Dís and her prince have their first physical fight, two years after he holds the still-beating heart before her and crushes it within his hands.

She learns that he killed a pony the day before while on a hunting trip. The poor creature slipped, broke a leg, their prey escaping from him. Her prince lost control and beat the pony to death. She rounds on him and cannot believe that he would be so cruel.

He thinks she is screaming too loudly, she will wake the sleeping infant, and tries to hold arms at her sides and keep her quiet. She breaks free and loses herself. Anger takes over, anger against her husband, against the Ironfists and their bloodthirsty culture, and she punches him. Violence is the only language they respond to, so she punches him, landing a blow in the chest and he reels back, stunned. He has never seen this side of her. He cannot believe that she would raise her fists to him; rage clenches around his heart in a fist and refuses to let go. He throws her into the floor and straddles her, spittle landing on her face as he screams himself hoarse. He slaps her face, hard, his wife staring defiantly up at him, twisting beneath him like a trapped eel.

Fíli watches the entire exchange in his crib, his fingers curling around the edge of the carved wood as he sways on unstable feet. Golden curls swirl in a halo about his head and his blue eyes watch intently. He is too afraid to cry.

He cries in frustration and anger in her arms. He clings to her and whispers and sobs in the night, tears filling his eyes and hers. He is terrified that she will leave him and he begs for her to stay. He is sorry for everything he has done, he will never lay a hand on her again, he swears by the name of Mahal that he will never touch her in anger. She is more precious than all the gold Middle-Earth.

She has never seen him cry like this. It is as terrifying to her as the blinding anger. She knows that this is an awful sign. It means that her husband is losing control of himself. Rage and sorrow are bundled together, they are in knots and he cannot pick them apart.

She kisses away his tears. She accept his words of contrition. But she does not for one heartbeat believe that she is free from his wild soul.

The son of Víli loves Fíli more than any other being in Middle-Earth. She watches in her chair by the fire as he kneels on the rug beside the fire and holds his arms out. Fíli staggers, unused to walking, and it takes several tries for him to make his unsteady way to his father’s arms. She watches as her prince crows in delight and holds his son, pressing kisses to his face and stroking his soft blonde curls.

He carries the child on his hip and shows his son the grand feast-halls and the forge, showing him around a kingdom he will someday rule over. Dís follows her husband, lingering behind. She does not want to leave Fíli alone with this monster.

Thorin sends her a letter. He is overjoyed that he has a nephew and sends his love. He says the settlement of Ered Luin is coming along well. His language is polite and concise.

It does not feel like it is Thorin who is writing to her. Dís does not keep this letter. She crumples it up and lets it burn to ashes in the iron grate.

Dís refuses to take her son to the ring for the next round of public humiliation. He sits on the rug before the fire, playing with scattered toys. Her prince stands in front of her, his dark blue eyes smouldering. She doesn’t have a choice in this. She must go. They must both go.

She calls them a tribe of savage beasts. He hits her across the cheek.

The sound of the slap makes Fíli drop his toys and he looks up to see his mother and father facing each other, both with curled fists. He tells his wife to pick up the child and follow him, stepping away from the fire. She stands very still for several moments, but eventually her courage crumbles, she reaches up and lifts the chubby little body in her arms, pressing her lips against the golden curls.

It is an execution. Dís sits with a cold, closed face. Fíli stirs restlessly in her lap, reaching for a gold bracelet that dangles from her wrist. He is sentenced to be spiked and Dís is not allowed to cover her son’s eyes as the sobbing body is lived onto the iron stake and a scream cuts through the air.

Something has broken within her. Something on the point of snapping for a long time. She feels the pieces laying in the bottom of her soul as she lies in her bed, turned away from her husband. She bore his violent passion for a long time – too long, she realises, and now she has had enough of it. The birth of her son has brought about a new fire within her and she is no longer going to be helpless beneath him. She will fight him and she will fight him to the bitter end.

His love for her is fading. She can see that it is dying inside of him. Violence and anger and hatred linger there now. He was a child when they met and now he is a warrior. He has succumbed to the greed and rage which characterised the Ironfirst clan. It took years but Dís can see now how it has changed him. He has proven himself in bloodshed and cruelty and it is so unlike everything she has ever been taught by her father and her King and her brothers and she does not know what to do. She has reached the bottom of the pit and he is in there beside her. He reaches out blindly, stumbling for her in the darkness and calling out, but she is gagged, her hands are bound to her sides and she cannot free them.

Fíli still sleeps in their chamber. His father thinks the child in slumber, but Fíli’s golden curls shuffle, unseen to him. Dís thinks she sees the movement out of the corner of her eye and she begs for her prince to stop but he continues his long, fluid motions between her legs, bending down to kiss her on the temple and whisper that she is only seeing things.

He drives himself very hard into her and she cannot stop the moans and grunts of pain. He is deliberately punishing her, she can tell, and she bears it without screaming. He takes a handful of her hair, resting the other hand on her hip as he adjust the angle and arches his back in a low moan. He presses on the small of her back, coaxing Dís to lower herself further into the mattress and Dís complies, sinking to her elbows.

She sees another flash of gold and she knows that Fíli can see every inch of this. It brings tears to her eyes and she whispers for him to please stop but her husband drives her voice further and further out of his mind with every crushing thud against her skin.

They grow desperate and violent.

Dís strong, strong enough to hold her own and she will not bear his attacks in silence. He can have her in their bed, any way he likes, but he will not hit her without consequence. They descend into scuffling, into fisticuffs that end with torn clothes and bruised skin. They fight over nothing and everything. Over what colour Fíli should wear, over whether he should wear braids or dreadlocks. On what they should eat for dinner. On where the prince was last night.

Fíli has his own room now, locked away from his parents. He cannot see them but he hears the screams, the sound of flesh on skin, his eyes wide and blue in the dark. He cries but they do not hear him over their shouting and he wails alone into an empty room.

Dís knows the visits to the ring are doing irreparable damage to Fíli.

He grows bigger, his limbs shooting outwards like beansprouts, and they cannot keep him in clothes big enough. His wrists and ankles flash in the sunlight. He watches the screaming, the blood and torture and pain in silence, holding on to Dís’ index finger. She does not how to explain what it is he is seeing. Words are at a loss to her and she cannot shield him from witnessing such violence and horror.

She is fragmented. Dís feels as though she is losing her mind. She beats her fists against walls of iron and nobody is listening to her.

They have their worst fight on the eve of Fíli’s fourth birthday.

It is so terrible because afterwards there is no reconciliation. Dís turns away from her husband, she refuses to share a bed and a room with him. She sleeps in the chair beside Fili’s crib, head propped up on her hand. She will not lie with him again. She has performed the most important of her wifely duties. She has given him a son. She considers begging for release. She considers fleeing in the night.

But Fíli whimpers in the darkness and she is brought back to earth with a jolt. She holds her son in her arms and knows that she will never leave him. She must bear what has happened to her somehow. She must raise Fíli to be a King that will change these gruesome and violent people. She has to find a way to survive in amongst a culture she never learned, she never accepted, without the one thing that anchored her to the stone – the love of her prince.

She is tossed in a violent sea. Everything rushes and roars about her and she cannot breathe when she kneels before him in the morning and asks for her own bedroom. He clasps his hands in hers. He moans, he begs. He cries. But for all his raw emotion, her face is stone-like. Unmoving.

Her new bed is smaller. The mattress is firm and new and the sheets are clean. She lies on her back. This canopy is pain white, with no designs to stare down at her. And for this she is glad. She finds an odd comfort in staring up at something so clean and plain. It is without stain and blemish. It is what she aspires for, lying alone in a bed which is so very, very cold.

She hears him roar through the stone, for their rooms are still close. He breaks the furniture, he screams. She dashes into the nursery and binds Fíli into her arms as she listens to his violent outburst, Fíli restless and terrified in her grasp. It fades near dawn. She lays the child to rest and presses her ear against the stone as the room descends into silence. She thinks he has fallen asleep. But she is wrong. She strains her ears and she can hear dry, exhausted sobbing, throbbing against the rock. She presses her forehead against the wall and blinks back tears as her heart breaks into pieces. She wants nothing, nothing more than to dash in and take her prince and stroke his hair and press kisses to his skin, but she is helpless. She does not know when she will have her prince and when she will have her monster. And she has begun to fight against the both of them as they slowly bleed through, leaking into one.

And she cannot fight him anymore. She can only withdraw entirely, leaving her child behind as she returns to her cold, lonely bed.

Her prince declares Fíli is old enough to have his own chair at the ring. He does this to punish Dís and she does not scream. She shakes her head in blind shock.

Fíli sits on the left side of Víli. Away from Dís. He is instructed by his father to sit still and quiet, as all the other children do. She watches his little body clothed in red leather climb into his new seat. His golden curls reach his shoulders, neither dreadlocked or braided because mother and father are yet to agree on it.

Dís leans forward but she cannot see if his face is calm or twisted and crying. There are two punishments today. The first is a Dwarf who wrote an insulting, bawdy song about the King. His tongue is cut out and left on the ground, for the crows to fight over. At least he cannot scream, she thinks as she watches the bloody figure falling to the ground, twitching in agony as blood rushes out onto the dust.

The second is far more gruesome. It is the punishment for a plot to end the King’s life and Dís knows it is going to be terrible. He is quartered slowly, his screams rising into the cold autumn air. She cannot look, she reverts to her old trick of looking slightly off-centre. She listens through the howls of pain and the cheering of the Ironfists but the Royal family is silent and strained.

She takes Fíli’s hand afterward, studying his face carefully. He has not cried. But his bright blue eyes are dark, and there is a quietness to Fíli that lasts for several days before he finally breaks into laughter.

She knows that he is going to turn out exactly like his father. Like Víli. And the thought makes her howl in pain as she twists her fingers in the bedsheets at night, because she is powerless to stop it.

His anger comes to her, as she knew it would.

It comes in a fit of drunken rage. She is playing with Fíli in her dimly-lit room when she hears the thudding of his boots. She throws herself against the door but he breaks the lock and pushes his way in. Fíli is all long limbs and curly golden hair. He darts into the wardrobe before his father can see him, pulling a silver bear-skin mantle over his head, looking out with his dark blue eyes and barely daring to breathe. Dís screams and tries to beat him off but he shoves her to the floor and she realises for the first time he is not alone. He knows she can fight back and he has brought help in with him to hold her down. These are not Dwarves. They are Men of the Eastern wastelands. Their red hair gleams like copper in the firelight and their eyes are cold. She screams. She didn’t expect this, she didn’t want this. She doesn’t know where they came from but she knows that her prince is going to use them to shame and humiliate her.

He holds her face in his hands, as he used to in times past, but this time his touch is stiff and cold. It is a cruel mockery of their former closeness. He asks her if this is better, if this is what he truly wanted. His breath stinks in her face and she cannot answer. She sobs. Three Eastern Men hold her down while her dreadlocked prince rips the front of her clothes. He continues tearing, he pulls out his knife and cuts away at her clothes, Dís screaming beneath him as she twists and writhes in the hands of three strangers. He cuts everything away until she is naked beneath the eyes of these three Men, pinned to the floor.

There is no trace of love in his eyes as he takes her one final time. He is drunk and angry and bitter and in pain. She cannot look at him, she screws up her eyes and turns away but a pair of hands force her chin upwards and her prince pushes his hands on her face, prising her eyes open and she must look at him because his hands are hurting her face terribly and her tears are making his fingers slide across his skin.

He does not touch her. He does not drive her to explosive ecstasy. He does not make her writhe and whimper beneath him in undeniable pleasure. He is rough and disconnected and he takes the time to make sure it hurts. And as he finally shudders within her, remaining inside of her for a long time, Dís looks up at him through her tears as his face contorts and for an awful moment it looks as though he will cry.

But it breaks. He is grey and clouded. He turns away, withdraws, fixing the front of his trousers.

“Do what you want with her.”

It is the last words he will utter in her presence. Whether by her will or his, he knows she is irrevocably lost to him. He knows she feels nothing but hate for him. And he, he does not know what he feels. It burns within him, a raging fire and it seeps through his eyes, it makes his limbs quake and he feels as though he will never stop burning for her. But he does not know if it is love or hate or anger. All he knows is that it pains him, it pains him terribly and it distorts his mind and he cannot continue to feel it.

She screams for him, screams for mercy. She lashes out and kicks and struggles but the Men are stronger, much stronger than her. Her prince turns away, he turns and walks out of the room as one of the red-headed men fumbles with the fastenings of his trousers and positions himself between Dís’ pinned legs.

And Fíli watches in silence, wrapped in the furs that have a raw, animal smell to them, a smell left by humans. Watches in a terror that is too deep for words and motion. Even if he wanted to leap out and scream, he is unable to move a muscle, or have a single syllable pass his throat. He is four years old and he does not know exactly what it is he is seeing. He will not know for a long time. But he knows that it is hurting his mother awfully, and he is burning with fear and terror, biting down on the fur to muffle his sobs.

She screams, she cries and she lashes out but she cannot break free of their hold. She is their prisoner, utterly, and they force her into cruel and lewd positions. This is a punishment for her and they want her to understand the meaning of humiliation.

Afterwards she kneels on the floor with her head bowed. She listens to them leave and she remains kneeling on the floor, her arms wrapped around her stomach. She hears the soft patter of feet, looks up to see her son standing beside her with tear-stains down his cheeks. He touches her face with his clumsy, childish hands. Amad, he whines. Her pain terrifies him and she realises that he is torn apart inside.

She holds trembling body close and rises to her feet. She does not know how much Fíli has seen. She can only hope that he had his face turned away and hands held over his ears. As she stands, her eyes linger on the huge mithril axe mounted over the fire. It makes her breath stop and her limbs quake. Thrór’s axe gleams in the light and fills her soul with a new fire.

She works in the night, filling a large pack with food, a rope, a tinderbox, a map, water, salves, herbs. And gold, as much gold as she can carry. Everything she can think of that is required to last them the journey.  It is early summer but she throws the mantle over her shoulders, knowing she will need it within a few months. She breathes in the smell of their sweat and skin and her mind flickers backwards, to the two seasons within the tiny caravan. She kneels in the stone and cannot stop the sobbing as it wracks her chest. She does not want to do this. She loved him. She loved him more than she thought it was possible to love another.

Loved. Not love.

It hardens her resolve, it makes her tears dry and her chin lift upwards in defiance. Her young prince is dead to her. Those childish soft blue eyes, that soft downy scrap of a beard, it is gone and a monster stands where her husband should, raw and violent and powerful.

She loved him for thirty years.

She lifts the small body in her arms. Fíli is dazed and sleepy. It is late now, very late as the pair steal away from the deep caverns within the Mountain. She knows its secrets; she knows how to escape through a side passage and emerge on the slopes, facing towards the East. They will not expect this of her. She is trying to give them the slip.

She has a pony. She does not ride it yet; she slings her pack across his back and places Fíli astride the creature, wrapping his sleepy body in her mantle. He is confused but holds on to the mane dutifully, his eyes drooping in the darkness. She does not dare to make a light, and lets the silvered moon guide their way down the treacherous mountain path.

She stays away from the main road, for she knows they will come for her. Dwarves are able to cover long distances without food and rest, and it is three days before she dares to crawl into a tiny dark crevice and lie down with Fíli held close to her.

Dís feels strangely at peace as she walks along the narrow pass with her King’s axe strapped across her back. She is unafraid. She is crippled with grief and longing and she cannot break the image of her prince’s soft blue eyes, wide in wonder as he watches her sing. But she is not afraid. She looks at her son, watching as he stares around himself, at this new land of grey rock and stone that is alien to him. He is strong and sturdy, well-fed and red-cheeked. He will survive the journey. She is not worried for him. Not yet.

She braids Fíli’s hair for the very first time. He whines at her touch but sits still at her sharp voice, waiting patiently for her to finish. She gets excited and goes overboard; two braids on either side of his head, behind his ears, become three, and two more from his scalp hang down to his shoulders. She binds them with loose thread, for she has no clasps or beads to weave them with.

Fíli touches them self-consciously. They feel soft and strange and he turns his face up to hers and asks why he cannot wear his hair like Adad. She crumples in disappointment, kisses his face, and replies simply that they are not going to see Adad again. They are not going to go back home.

“Where are we going then?” His voice rises in the night; he is confused and afraid and she knows that she is torturing his soul.

“We are going to see your uncle Thorin.” She knows the name will have very little meaning to him. Dís has said almost nothing of her family to her son. She has deprived him and guilt rushes at her. But that will change. She holds him close, running his fingers through the braids in his hair and singing gently, a lullaby of Durin, watching his eyes lower and heaving chest even out in sleep.

She does not bleed again. She checks every morning, as she did four years before, and finds that cloth white and clean.

She kneels in the stone and heaves and vomits out her precious food and wails in anguish.

This cannot be happening to her. Not now. Not now.

She kills a bear in the foot-hills; a massive, silver-grey beast that is not unlike the creature wrapped around her shoulders. Fíli steps back and watches as Dís raises her arms and severs head from body with her axe.

They eat the meat cold and raw, because Dís is still too afraid to light a fire, too afraid that they will see her.

There will be monsters and beasts throughout the journey and Dís will slaughter them all with her axe. She will lose the fleshiness of her limbs and harden into muscle and sinew and she will be a ferocious mother-beast, defending her cub to the death.

They venture to the southernmost point of the Orocani Mountains. Dís is not lost; she is taking a route they will not suspect of her. She knows that her prince will scour the countryside, looking for his lost wife and son. He will not allow them to leave. He loved her fiercely once, he will still hold on to her, and he prizes his son over the wealth of every Kingdom of the Seven Fathers.

She rides the pony as the stone gives way to dust and the ground stretches out before them. It is a barren wasteland and there is nowhere for her to hide. She cannot take the route she wants to, via the Iron Hills, side-stepping the Lonely Mountain and travelling through the Greenwood. She must travel south, if she wishes to remain unseen. It has taken two months to get to this point and they are low on food. She will travel towards the Sea of Rhûn and cross it aboard one of their horrible wonky ships. She knows her heart lies in pieces on the stone floor in the home of the Ironfists. She has left it behind, for her prince to trample on the scattered fragments. She stole it back from Dwalin only to give it to another and she cannot bear the agony that floods her chest.

She swears she will never allow another soul to touch her.

Her stomach begins to swell, familiarly.

She lies down in the dust and watches the stars with her hand on her middle. She does not want this new child. She feels it feed on her soul and she sickens with hate against it. She has one already and does not want another reminder of her young prince. She does not even know if it will be his. There were three Men, three Men of the East who could also be the father of this bastard child and until it is born she will not know. She cannot look into Fíli’s dark blue eyes, they bring sobs to her lips and she turns away in sick helplessness because she cannot bear to look at her own son and it is a terrible failure to her.

She feels the parasite grow within her with growing nausea, although the morning-sickness has long passed. She comes closer to the settlements of Men and is able to buy food and rest with her gold. Fíli sleeps in the soft bed, snoring lightly, and Dís lies beside him, holding the lump of her belly with two hands. She was planning on wearing the clothes of males, as she had done a lifetime before in the long trek from Erebor to Dunland. But while she can bind her breasts close to her and try to speak with the boom of a man, she cannot hide her growing stomach.

A pregnant Dwarf-lady, travelling alone, with a young child. She is attracting stares and whispers and she knows it.

Fíli is not seasick. He bounces about on the deck and makes friends with Easterling children. He is wild and loud and brash and the Men snap at Dís to control him. But she holds her stomach and groans, white-faced and sweating as she heaves out every morsel of food she can bring to touch her lips.

She feels a small degree of safety as she sets foot on the other side. She is halfway there.

She is looking at her wrist almost daily. It stares up at her, the blue mark, the tattoo of her husband and she claws at it in anguish. She cannot ever forget him for a single moment while it is burned into her skin.

It is sacred. It is a deep tradition with roots that stretch deep into the stone. She knows to tamper with it is a taboo. It is a soulmark. It is a scar for life and she is bound by the laws of her people to leave it remaining, a symbol of the claim to her. She cannot touch it.

But she loses her head one night. Too long she stares at the runes on her skin and she thrusts her dagger into the fire, shaking. Fíli is awake, staring blearily out at her as she kneels over the fire and grits her teeth, trying not to cry. Her stomach protrudes from her, carrying a child she does not want, sucking the strength out of her and leaving her hollow.

She waits until the blade is red-hot and folds the clothing from her wrist. She will not, she cannot do this anymore. She hardens her jaw because she knows this will hurt and hurt terribly and she cannot cry out and wake Fíli. The skin hisses and she arches her neck, letting out a high keening sound into the night. But she cannot pull away yet, she holds it until she is sure the ink would have been burned out from the vessels beneath her skin. It is bleeding badly. She is shaking in pain and her fingers slip on the jar of salve, she cannot unscrew the lid. She grows dizzy, overwhelmed with what she has done and her vision grows black.

She wakes up to find a tiny handful of salve pressed against her burn, the wrist bound loosely in a clumsy bandage. She lowers the blanket and sees that Fíli has dried blood on his fingers and she crushes her lips to his forehead, her swollen stomach pressing down on him.

They have no pony for the last leg of the journey.

She has no gold left to trade. She has nothing of worth, except her King’s axe and the bony old creature and it is a decision she has no qualms with making. The stablehand looks at her pregnant stomach, the child clinging hungry and dirty to her skirts, and offers her three times what the overworked old nag is worth. She shoulders the pack and straps the axe across her back and holds Fíli’s hand, her stomach tight and swollen and painful. Her ankles balloon in her boots and Fíli cries that his legs hurt. He is pale and his ribs are beginning to stick through his skin. She tells herself this is better than remaining with the Ironfist people. Only another month or so of cold and hunger and terror and they will be safe. She feels cruel as she makes him go on but there is nothing else she can do.

They travel through Rohan and Dís keeps to herself. She hunts her own kill and will not reveal her name. Men ask of her kin and she keeps quiet. She does not feel safe yet. She is sure that her prince waits for her, lingering behind the corner, ready to strike and she cannot let him be led to her.

She accepts food and rest. Most are willing to help a pregnant mother in obvious need, even if she will not surrender her name. Fíli fattens up once more; he runs in the wild meadows in new boots and tunic, his golden hair streaming out behind him with six braids in his hair.

The North-South road will lead her straight to the Western shores and she would be a fool not to take it. There are whispered rumours of Orcs using the road at night but she has her axe and she is not afraid.

She sees the mountains of Dunland in the distance. They are grey and craggy and familiar to hear, and she can feel her soul reaching out to them. She is closer than ever to her people and the sight of the familiar range sets her alight. She points them out to Fíli and explains that she used to live in those hills, the ones on the horizon. He grows confused and asks why they aren’t going in that direction.

“Because we are going to a new home.” She clasps his hand, feels his little fingers in hers and squeezes gently.

He comes in the first days of winter.

It is Dwalin who calls him down from the forge. His eyes are wide with fear and he is reaching for his axe. Thorin slings his sword at his side and follows his friends, heart crushing with sick horror.

The prince of the Ironfists is screaming into the feast-hall. He tears down the tapestries and flings chairs across the room and overturns tables. His retinue are with him and there is a scuffle between them and Thorin’s comrades, a battle of fists and feet and the flat of the blade and the Ironfists lose, outnumbered. The prince stands before Thorin and Thorin cannot breathe, he cannot take his eyes of the monster in his feast-hall. He could never have imagined this brutal violence. His face is hard and the muscles ripple beneath his skin.

“Where is she!” It is an inhuman roar and he rushes at Thorin. He reaches for his sword but the prince is there first with his fists. He knocks Thorin to the ground and beats him into the stone. “Where is she! You are hiding her! Where is Fíli! Where is my son!” Dwalin pulls the monster from Thorin and receives a hard blow in response. Thorin coughs as he rises to his feet.

“I have searched everywhere - She is here! Where is Dís!” Thorin’s heart has stopped beating. The prince overcomes Dwalin, he lunges for Thorin but this time he is ready and he raises his fists. “Where is my son!” His voice screams into the hall and Thorin is cold. He blocks the prince’s violent fists but cannot land a blow of his own and he is forced back down to the floor. “Where is my son!” It is a mantra and Thorin can feel his heart beating madly in his chest. He does not know. He has not received a letter from Dís in three years and he has no idea of what has become of her. “They left our home a year ago! They must be here! Where are they!” Thorin’s breath is choked in his throat. “Give me back my son!” The prince snarls at him, he looks into Thorin’s eyes and reads the genuine shock and grief.

And he howls. Dwalin and Gloin hold an arm each and pin him to the ground and the prince lets them, shaking his head as he sobs in uncontrollable grief. Thorin kneels before him, his lip bleeding and a bruise forming on his cheekbone. He grabs the front of the prince’s leather tunic with trembling hands and finds tears are blurring his vision.

“What did you do to her.” His voice is a low whisper. His voice shakes madly and Thorin’s mind is whirling. He refuses to believe what has played out before him. The Ironfist prince has turned his home inside-out looking for her. He has searched everywhere else. She is not here because she no longer exists. The prince’s head is slack and he has given up in his fight. His life has fallen away from him and he has lost his will. But Thorin feels no pity for his brother-in-law. He shakes him, hard, and shouts in his face, his bruised ribs throbbing. “What did you do to her!”

He never tells them. He never utters the words but Thorin can tell by the look in his eyes that he has hurt Dís terribly. He expects death for what he has done and that is guilt enough for the King of Nothing. He watches the prince wail into the floor and he feels the lump rise in his throat and threaten to explode as he thinks of the sister he will never see. His gaze flickers upwards and he sees Dwalin is fighting back tears. He is fighting them back and failing, and they trickle into his beard and glimmer on his cheeks.

He does not kill the prince. Death is too good for him. He is within his rights – as the brother of Dís and a King, he is very much within his rights to execute the one who has killed her, prince or not. But he looks at the sobbing figure and he knows that the prince wants to die for what he has done to his wife and son and he will not give him the satisfaction.

He shaves his jaw. He cuts the dreadlocks from his scalp and lets them fall into the fire, the burning smell thick and acrid in the air. He has no brand and must use a heated knife to cut the runes into the prince’s face. His hand shakes and he has to stop and take a deep breath but he finishes the marks on his cheeks. He uses his own knife for the occasion, the knife he was given in his youth by his grandfather.

He leads the exiled prince to the foothills of the Blue Mountains himself, and shoves him into the winter snow. He staggers, stripped of his cloak and boots. He remains on hands and knees in the snow as Thorin turns back, the wind biting into his scarred face. His retinue is long gone. His wife and son are dead. He lies in the snow and begs for death and when he wakes in the morning, alive, disappointment and anguish wrack his soul.

He rises to his feet, touching the marks on his beardless face. His cut hair. He is an Unperson. He will never speak to a member from his tribe, from any tribe. He is cut from the tongues and minds of the living and the writings of the dead and nobody shall ever remember him.

In a month she reaches Tharbad. It is an ancient city inhabited by cousins of Dunlendings and she is able to curry favour, clumsily recalling gestures and languages learned from her King’s trade with the wildmen, decades before. She is given a small room and food.

Fíli sleeps and she leans out the window, looking down at the waters below from an ancient house built in a shadowy past. The city is crumbling about them all, stone wearing to dust. Her stomach throbs. The parasite inside of her is kicking out and turning. She presses her hands to the taut skin and wordlessly pleas for him to stop, to stop moving.

She is close now, so close.

Winter has arrived thick and fast. Their feet kick up snow and she is bitterly cold. There are few other travellers on the road this time of year and they regard her with curiosity. Most have never seen a Dwarf-lady before, and to have their first glimpse a lone pregnant soul, tugging the tired body of a child behind her, is a thing of utter strangness.

The road forks, she heads left. She passes through the Shire. The Halflings confuse her and delight Fíli. She takes shelter in her very first hobbit-hole during a particularly nasty storm that lasts for three days. The sweet mother there gives Fíli a cloak lined with rabbit fur. Her own children are only a little smaller than Fíli and the golden-haired Dwarf prince makes fast friends with them, telling them stories of their flight while they show him how to play conkers. Dís sleeps on a mattress of heather, with Fili snuggled in beside her. She looks up at the low ceiling and cannot hide the joy and relief as she listens to the howling wind, safe and warm in this small bed.

The road ends at the White Downs. It is small, humble town, filled mainly with Halflings and a few Men. She steps into the smithy, wondering if she can perhaps offer her services for a day or two in exchange for a bed and a hot meal. It is a Dwarf bent over the bellows, a young apprentice Dwarf with black hair, a sight she has not seen in thirty years and Dís bursts into tears.

He jumps in shock, sits her down and presses a steaming mug of tea into her hands. He does not know her but she is in plain trouble. He sees the axe strapped to her back, noting the fine craft, eyeing her pregnant stomach, looking at the golden-haired child that clung to her skirts, and immediately offers her his own bed. He asks after her name and she gasps for air.

“Dís,” and the Dwarf drops the spoon he is holding. He has heard of her. Everybody has heard of the lost sister of Thorin Oakenshield, driven to madness and death by the Ironfist clan. He doesn’t wait until morning; he sends a raven into the darkness that very night and helps her slowly to his shabby little room over the pub.

“I’m Bofur.” He introduces himself as she kicks off her boots and raises her swollen ankles to the bed. Dís reaches out and clings to his wrist and will not let go.

“What are you doing here, Bofur.” She leans against the pillows, eyes half-lidded. Fíli sits beside her on the bed, cautious and mistrusting. Bofur pulls up his wobbling, three-legged stool and takes a tentative seat beside her. He explains. His father was killed in a mine explosion twenty years ago, his mother in childbirth and he was taken in with his brother by his Aunt. He explains slowly that he should be a miner like his cousin and brother but he doesn’t want to be. He wants to make things with his hands, rather than take them from the earth. He has taken this apprenticeship because they said he was too young in Ered Luin. He is thirty-two and cannot wait any longer. He will return to his brothers beneath the Blue Mountains when he is fifty and can take up hammer and tongs.

Dís smiles because he has dreams and he is fulfilling them, he is choosing his own destiny. She is jealous of him. She lies in the bed and the baby turns somersaults in her stomach, pressing against her. Hate burns inside her and her smile fades.

Dís does not have the strength to move from the bed. She lies on the mattress with dark shadows under her eyes and Bofur is deeply concerned for her. She whispers that she will be all right, she just needs rest and peace. She just needs to regain her strength. So Bofur takes Fíli with him to the forge and leaves her in his dim little room, his room that doesn’t even have a fire. She sleeps and when she does not sleep she stares up at the ceiling and waits for somebody to knock on the door, hands on her stomach. She claws at the skin as though she could tear the child out.

And she dreams. She dreams that Frerin is lying dead on the ground, eyes open and glassy. Frerin lies dead and her prince stands above him with the beating heart of her brother leaking through his splayed fingers.

She dreams that she is lying in her bed in the Orocani Mountains, on her flat, unpregnant stomach and she feels a hand on the back of her neck. She opens herself to her husband obediently, feeling his dreadlocks on her skin. But she looks backwards and it’s not her prince, it is Thorin who crouches over her and she is startled awake, wide blue eyes darting about.

Fíli bursts in and jumps on the bed. He has made a present for his mother. He has hammered a crude little pendant for her, out of scrap iron. The rune of her name is carved on the beaten surface in wobbly lines. She sits up and lets her son bind it around her neck and she promises she will wear it for the rest of her days. Fíli wraps his arms around her and nuzzles her throat and she is filled with overwhelming love for her little child of Durin.

Bofur is startled awake from the floor by a scream, and he leaps up to find Dís moaning in the bed, clutching her stomach. The labour is early, too early, she is supposed to have another month. Fíli hold his hands out to Bofur and they are covered in blood.

He dashes in the hallway and screams for somebody to help him. Dís arches her back and cries out as the pains ravage her, she holds her stomach and Fíli starts to cry. Bofur finally finds a grumpy old woman rubbing at her eyes, begging for her aid. She mutters but clumps up to his dark little room. She sends the two boys away and holds Dís by the hand, counting out the timing between her pains by the lantern light, counting idly in her head as she sobs in agony. Early births are always the hardest, the woman mutters, and she can tell by Dís’ stomach that this babe is very early indeed.

The night wears into morning and stretches past noon. Bofur sits in the pub with Fíli, showing him how to play with a little wind-up horse he has created. Fíli sits on his lap and his little hands turn the key again and again, he claps his hands and laughs as the horse takes a few steps and falls over – for it is not completely perfect – looking up at Bofur with large shining eyes.

In the mid-afternoon, the door is pushed open and four Dwarves enter the room. They wear thick, rich furs and mail and there is no denying who they are. Bofur rises to his feet and hefts Fíli in his arms. He can see them staring about the half-filled room and he pushes past the tables, rushing towards the King of Durin’s folk.

“Thorin Oakenshield.” And Thorin looks at him. His face is white and brittle. He has obviously struggled with himself and will not believe it is Dís until he has seen her with his own eyes. “Your sister, she’s upstairs-”

“Direct me.” Thorin orders breathlessly, seizing the young Dwarf by the sleeve. He has not yet noticed the golden-haired child in Bofur’s arms. Bofur looks at Thorin, at the three Dwarves that shadow him, and stomps heavily up the narrow stairs built for Halflings. Fíli stares at this strange, dark-haired creature who looks like his mother. Uncle Thorin. His lips move silently in recognition as he is jolted in Bofur’s arms.

They burst in to find Dís screaming in a bloodied bed. Bofur has to hold on tight to Fíli, who wrestles in his arms and yelps. Thorin staggers forward and cries out in pain. The woman shouts at them all to go back the way they came but Thorin sinks to his knees beside Dís and refuses to leave her.

“I’m here.” He moans, pressing his lips against her sweaty forehead. He thinks at first that perhaps she is numb to the world, she cannot see or hear him, but she grips his arm and clings to her brother. She sobs in relief, through a hazy fog of agony. Thorin is here, Thorin is here and she is safe and she is home, she is almost home and she will never have to see any Ironfist Dwarf for as long as she lives.

The baby is eventually born in the evening. It is another boy. Dís sinks against the pillow, semi-conscious and the woman tries to lay the infant on her chest. But she turns away, beating it back with weak, trembling hands. Thorin watches her horror as she lays eyes on the baby for the first time. It is thin, too thin, its limbs are very long and wiry and thin and oh Mahal no she sobs hopelessly, clawing outwards. Thorin pins her arms at her sides and murmurs in her ear but she shakes her head. She is screaming now, screaming for Fíli. She wants Fíli and nobody else. She doesn’t want this changeling baby. The parasite has finally left her body and she now wants it to go away.

Thorin is left holding the baby as Dís wraps her limp arms around her lion-haired son. He is in bitter shock. He didn’t think she would react to another child, by him, with joy, but she pushed the baby away with grief and hatred and he cannot let that lie. The baby is small, too small. He whimpers and shifts but does not cry. Thorin sits in the three-legged stool and cradles the pale little infant. His second, unexpected nephew.

He looks up to see Dwalin hovering in the doorway. He looks at Thorin and there is pleading in his eyes, he wants to come in and look upon the one who has stolen his heart away and he is in physical pain. Thorin nods in silence, watching as Dwalin sinks to the floor beside the bed. He strokes that soft black hair with trembling fingers and Dís opens her eyes to see him. She does not smile. She looks exhausted, worn-down and hollow. She allows him to touch her but her arms remain around her son and she will not let go of him. Dwalin can see that she doesn’t want him, not the way he wants her, and his empty chest constricts as he withdraws his hand. He does not know what will happen ten, twenty years from now. Perhaps she will look on him with more warmth in her bright blue eyes than she does now, will attempt a shadowy echo of the pure, complete love that bound them to each other for that wonderful fleeting moment. But for now, her gaze is cold and empty and she does not want him.

He stands to his feet and turns away from her. Thorin watches his dear friend leave the room and he can hear a muffle moan in the hallway, breaking into a sob. Perhaps it is best. Dwalin can never have her. She belongs to someone else. Someone who never existed. He looks down at the sickly babe, who is now sleeping. He has a soft fuzz of dark hair. Thorin is sure he caught a glimpse of brown eyes.

“You will have to name him.” He breathes. Dís looks at the bundle in Thorin’s arms and she cannot suppress the shudder. “Do you want to name him after one of our people?”

“I can’t.” Her breath is shaking. “He’s not – He can’t...” She shakes her head and finds she cannot breathe. Thorin slowly crosses the room, standing beside the bed. Fíli looks up in his mother’s arms, eyeing the bundle in his uncle’s arms with no small degree of mistrust. He does not know where this creature came from. He does not understand the concept of a brother. It is a distant, alien thought to him.

“No, you’re right.” He has misunderstood her. “Brothers are named together.” He looks down at Fíli and his heart softens. He is a beautiful, strong boy. He is a little lion-cub, with his long golden hair and Thorin already loves him fiercely. And he loves this little bundle in his arms too. And he loves the drawn-out, tired mother in the bed most of all. “You don’t have to name him tonight.” He sits down, slowly. Dís eyes the tiny lump of blankets. She moans and turns her face away. “Dís, he will wake soon and he will be hungry.”

“No.” Her voice is thick with tears and Thorin does not understand why she is turning away from her infant son. He does not understand the hatred and despair she has nursed while the baby grew inside and fed off her starving, exhausted body. He does not understand that he is conceived from the coldest, darkest night in her young life and it serves as a chilling reminder of the final time she ever laid eyes on her husband, the last violent act he committed. He doesn’t know that she has seen the child’s long thin limbs and she is sure in the depths of her heart that he is a disgusting half-breed, with the blood of Men flowing through his veins. He doesn’t push her. He looks at her and he realises that she will never reveal her secrets. She will never utter a word about the horrors she has witnessed in the Orocani Mountains. And it would do no good if she did. It would only cause pain for her, and for him too. So Thorin will let them remain, locked inside of her.

“It will be all right.” He will tell her, when she is less anxious and tired, that her husband is no more. He will tell her that she will never hear a word from the Ironfist clan again. No matter what happens, they will never touch her.

And they will try. Thorin looks at the blonde child, curled against Dís’ side. They will try. For Víli is now heirless. His wife is dead and he can have no more children. He has no son and no grandson and within the next hundred years, he will die. He will die and the Ironfist clan will need a King. But they will not take him. Thorin looks at his nephews, resolute. They will not take either of them. For these two boys are princes of Durin. They are Longbeards, not Ironfists. They have no father, they never had a father. Thorin swallows and realises there is a heavy lump in his throat.

He will protect them. He will guard them with his life. He will raise them as his own. He looks at the strong, chubby child with golden curls and braids. The thin, sickly, premature infant. He will undo all of his past mistakes. He will not fail them, the way he has failed his brother, his father, his grandfather. No harm shall ever come to them while he breathes, and no soul will take them from him. Not Elf, Man, Orc or Dwarf. He will not marry; he has no need to marry no and he glad, because he has known for forty years that he would be a horrible husband. She would have had to wrestle his heart from Erebor and the Mountain will never release her fists of stone. He has no love to give a wife. He has forgotten how to love, for the last thirty years and he will have to learn how to once more. But Thorin will love. He will name these two children his heirs and he will protect them from the darkness.

Dís opens her eyes. She is withered and helpless but she holds on to Fíli and will not let go of him. She looks up at Thorin and she is so very tired. She moves aside a little, and after a pause, Thorin carefully lies down on the bed. Fíli lies sandwiched between his mother and uncle, and the newborn is curled up on Thorin’s chest. While the baby slumbers, the three stare up at the ceiling. Fíli is sleepy. Dís looks up at the low, sloping boards and all of a sudden, they rush together. Every roof she has ever lain under, and oh Mahal, there are so many, too many to count. Homes and caves and cells and stars, from here to the Eastern edge of the world and all she wants to do is lie down beneath one, just one, and sleep. Sleep for an age. Sleep until the last breath of Durin fades from his chest and the race of Dwarves will see their final dark night.

Thorin’s hand finds hers, wrapped around Fíli’s chest. His fingers tighten around her and squeeze. They lie here together in mourning. Grieving for a life which could have been, a past which is lost, a future which is dark and uncertain. But they grieve together, their arms bursting with these two children, the objects of hope and promise, Thorin’s heart swelling with love that shines brighter than any stolen gem or golden treasure.

Dís breaks her lifelong gaze with the ceiling. She looks over at her solitary brother. And she smiles.