How I Leave You

When the Dust Settles

The gown I have picked out for tonight is beyond exquisite. In truth, it has to be, for I fear my reputation has begun to precede me. I have heard the songs they sing about me. About the goddess of sea and gold. How her blood turned gilded when she slit her throat for her king, and how he, in turn, worshipped her above all the treasures in his mountain.

How he sacrificed the one thing he held most dear, just for a chance that she might live.

And live she did.

I smile at the memories. At how I felt the first time I held my children in my arms. It struck me, then, how much they were like night and day, the two of them. Thrór, with his hair dark as the hour of midnight, and his eyes shining like the stars in its sky. Soldís, bright as the morning sun, its rays caught on her golden skin, and the dawn captured in her eyes.

It seems so long ago now. Far beyond a mere ten years. It's easy to be amused by the anger I felt back then. When the dust had settled and the pain no longer threatened to split me in two, my mind became my own again, and I was able to think clearly for once.

Able to remember why I had left in the first place.

Thorin was engaged, and it was to someone who wasn't me. I had nearly died giving birth to his bastard children. And still, he had not hesitated to give up the Arkenstone for them. For us.

Back then, it did not make much sense to me. Not until that morning when Bilbo had come to visit me in the room I'd thought of as my own less than a year earlier.

When he told me everything I had been too foolish to realize all along.

The very night Thorin and I had the fight in the hallway, he dissolved his betrothal to Dís.

The very night before I decided to leave him, he rid himself of the one thing that stood between us.

And when he came to my room in the morning to tell me this, it was only to find that I had gone. That not even a letter remained of me, for the one I had left behind was addressed to Bilbo. Only the mithril on my bed served as a reminder that I once had slept in it.

Though I had not told anyone else where I had gone, it did not take them long to figure it out. Thorin sent ships of patrols to search for me in the waters of Rhûn, but my homeland is large, and my kingdom well-hidden within it. The searches were in vain. And still, in spite of this and the months passing by, in spite of how I had given no impression that I was to return, Thorin waited.

Every day, he went to the crystal cave and waited by its waters just in case I might breach them. This was why Bilbo stayed, the hobbit told me. To make sure he was there if Thorin went mad again, though it would be a sickness of love and not of gold this time.

Every day, he sat by the springs, waiting for me to return to him, not knowing if I ever would.

Not knowing I was pregnant.

Apparently, the dwarven lords were growing increasingly upset with their king, for not only had he refused their finest lady for the hand of an outsider, but now he sat alone on his throne, with no one to rule by his side.

Freiya was furious, of course. She almost convinced her father to go to war, if only she might see Thorin suffer, just as she had.

Though I do not like her, I could not blame her. I, too, had tasted the pang of rejection. I, too, knew what it could make someone do.

But even after ten years, I still have yet to meet this Lady Freiya. Tonight, she will come into my home and see what could have become hers.

I do not fear her. Neither her wrath nor her power.