Disclaimer: Faramir, Eowyn, and Middle-Earth in general are the property of the inimitable J.R.R. Tolkien and his estate. I own nothing but student debt.

Author's Note: This takes place perhaps 4-10 years after the marriage of Eowyn & Faramir. Also one of my first forays into Tolkien fanfiction, so constructive criticism -- especially any suggestions for better characterization -- would be a beautiful thing!

Her eyes, wide with apprehension, were fixed firmly on his face. They were clear blue eyes, the image of her mother’s, and thoroughly dwarfed under the powerful hand splayed across her brow. He pursed his lips and made a small, considering hum – her eyes lit up with hope, quickly concealed. Still with furrowed brow and introspective mien, he moved his hand and laid the back of it against each flushed cheek, pretending not to notice when a bit of the “flush,” in the form of faintly sticky berry juice, clung to his knuckles. He straightened, frowning majestically down at the little figure on her little cot.

“Hmm. And you’ve felt like this all day?”

The child nodded vigorously, and then added a piteous postscript.

“It’s got worse the last hour, Father.”

His mouth twitched, but he nodded solemnly.

“Well,” a deep breath, a long sigh, “I am afraid there is nothing for it, Theodwyn. You have clearly pushed yourself quite to the brink, and I must insist that you rest.”

Theodwyn summoned a sigh from the tips of her toes and dropped her head in a most convincing attitude of despondency. Given a few minutes, her father reflected, and she might even coax out a few tears. Devious little thing.

“I suppose,” eyes downcast to hide the triumph, “I must…not have my lessons tomorrow, then, father?”

So that was the game. He had suspected as much.

“Ah. No, child, I suppose you must not.”

Again a quivering sigh, an audible sniff. His daughter would make a fine storyteller someday. Or a lying diplomat’s wife.

“I am so very sorry, Father. Will mother be very angry with me?”

Not with you, perchance, but..

“I will tend to your mother, youngling. Now,” he stooped, nearly braining himself on the lamp swinging low from above, and left a brisk kiss on her cool forehead. “Sleep well, my love.”

He blew out the flame and pushed through the canvas, leaving his daughter alone in her own small tent. Shadows had been heavy inside the thick canvas, but outside day still lingered; the late sun was still readying himself for bed, and the little clearing was bathed in a warm bronze glow that seemed to have embodied itself in the woman kneeling beside a dying fire, gleaming russet and gold and veiled in the sun-tinted hair that flowed down her shoulders. His wife.

She was warming a shallow pan of some dark liquid, a sweet-smelling draught against the advancing chill. The wind was gently fragrant now, but it was yet early in the spring, and the night would be cold. Her eyes flicked from his boots to his face as he approached, and she sighed a long-suffering sigh.

“Faramir, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that child.”

He maintained his sober expression with difficulty.

“She is quite warm, Éowyn. I’m afraid she’s in no condition for her lessons tomorrow.”

Éowyn snorted.

“And conveniently, tomorrow’s lessons would be in the swordplay and riding she so despises…”

Faramir settled heavily beside her, reclining back on his elbows and watching the embers drift upward.

“That is convenient, is it not?” he inquired peaceably. “Nearly as convenient as the fashion in which Boromir is never subject to headache when the time comes to follow his mother sword-swinging and herb-gathering, but has twice on this expedition alone been entirely too ill for any application in the booklore in which he is so far behind his younger sister.”

The lady of Ithilien bent low over the simmering liquid, and a wave of golden hair swung before her profile and hid her smile.

“You would doubt the word of one trained as a healer, my lord?”

“Only when she happens also to be a mother.”

He laughed, and she brushed the hair behind one ear that he might see her smile at his laughter, and perhaps hoping too that if he noticed her smile he would miss the glint of concern in her gaze. She rose briskly from the flames, holding the saucepan, and called out in a loud voice.

“Bergil? Bergil!”

A young man emerged from one of the two smaller tents that flanked the large central structure, this one to the left whereas Theodwyn slept to the right.

“M’lady?”

She spooned some of the drink into an earthenware mug Faramir handed up to her, and offered it to the servant.

“Boromir is asleep?”

The lad bowed and murmured a low thanks as he took the mug.

“Yes, m’lady, he’s at last dropped off.”

Éowyn nodded.

“The Lord Faramir and I are going to walk a bit,” summoning raised eyebrows from the aforementioned lord, to whom these plans were news. “Retire when you wish, so long as the children are comfortable; I know your father will let nothing near the camp, and we may return late.”

Bergil nodded, his hand straying self-consciously to the still-new sword at his side, and Éowyn granted him a smile. She held a hand to Faramir, whose eyebrows were still raised but who raised himself without protest, and he followed her long, steady strides into the cool shade. Bergil, ramrod straight, paced the clearing behind them, ready to cry challenge at every squirrel and windswept leaf.

“You have never shown me Henneth Annûn, which long was your home here,” Éowyn murmured, when they had paced into the early darkness of the forest. It was more than a mere statement; Faramir nodded and moved silently to the lead.

They walked a long time in silence, enjoying simply the soft noises of the evening, the warm light around them, their matched footsteps and matched breaths in the solitude that had become rare and elusive these past years. Faramir spoke only when they had passed the silent pool that mirrored the magnificent sky.

“This was a wise thought of yours, a few days in the woods before..”

Éowyn shrugged, trailing a hand in the dangling fronds of an ancient willow tree.

“I would not have the children miss spring entirely. We may be a month or more in the city, and the gardens are but painted pictures to children who have known the wilderness.”

He breathed in deeply, as if he would bottle up inside the rich foliage around them.

“Before I came to Ithilien, I thought nothing could be lovelier than spring in the White City; now it seems cold and sterile, even with the white tree in bloom, as it never was in my childhood.”

They were come now to the steep paths up to the secret caves, the places where in the days of war none could walk save men of Gondor and their blindfolded allies. His feet still remembered the secret ways, though they were dim and uncertain to his mind; Éowyn followed his sure, silent footsteps, and said nothing until they were nearly at the summit.

“How long, my lord, will you keep your trouble from your healer and your wife?”

Faramir grew very still above her on the narrow road, and turned with care. Éowyn looked up at him without speaking or flinching, her hair ruffled by the breeze and her eyes fearless. He took his gaze from her with a slow exhalation, and resumed the ascent with weary steps, speaking to her over his shoulder.

“What would you know?”

She brushed the hair from her face, hiked her skirt higher and followed him.

“Why you grow silent and dreary each time I mention our summons to the city – summons for a joyous occasion, to celebrate the naming day of the king’s first child and son. Why you go so often to be alone since this summons came. Why you go to bed late and rise early, and why in the interval you rarely sleep, or sleep only to start awake and go into another room, where you think I cannot hear you, to pace and weep.”

They had come to the water-veiled opening now, and she reached for his shoulder and turned him to face her when he would have entered into the cave without a word.

“I would know these things, my husband.”

He let out his breath in a long, slow sigh, and nodded for her to proceed him through the fine curtain of sky-colored water. She did so, with a suspicious glance backwards, and sat on a low boulder as soon as she entered, fixing him with an expectant stare.

This was no longer the last outpost of a besieged and hopeless force but merely an abandoned campsite, a military shelter that common travelers still could not find. It had been almost a decade since the rangers of Ithilien last dwelt here, but signs of their presence remained: a hunk of bread too stale to tempt even the most intrepid bird, a few rickety or broken furnishings, a discarded blanket gnawed by the mice and the damp, a pile of rusted weapons. Faramir wandered slowly among these haphazard mementos, conscious of Éowyn’s eyes heavily on his shoulders; he paused, and still facing away from her, fingering a moth-eaten cloth on the rotting table, he spoke with a distant gaze and a voice she had to strain to hear over the soft song of the falls.

“Minas Tirith is, to me, a blessed place. There I knew my mother, and my father; there I learned lore from Mithrandir and swordplay from my brother; there I saw the heir of Isildur walking among men, and calling me friend and liegeman.”

He turned his head and smiled wryly at her.

“There too I saw a woman whose sorrow could hide neither her beauty nor her strength, a woman who no longer desired to be a queen nor a warrior but was content to become the white lady of Ithilien, for whom all things grow, most especially her husband’s joy in her and in her children.”

He had earned a quiet, tense smile in return, but Éowyn was not to be strayed from her purpose.

“And yet you are unwilling to return to this city of so many blessings,” she observed softly. Faramir sighed and turned again, the set of his back weary and burdened.

“It is a city, too, where all the dwarves’ skill cannot hide the gaping emptiness of places where old homes stood and are no more, a city where all the trees brought by the Elves cannot replace the mighty and ancient oaks where I played as a child. It is a city where there are still too many women clad all in black, too many children who scarce remember their fathers, too many families who go weekly to the burial houses to honor those who will never come again.”

His hand tightened into a fist, and the ragged tablecloth disintegrated beneath his grip.

“It is the place where my father died. The place where I would have died were it not for the loyal treason of Beregrond of the guard and a half-grown Halfling.”

His voice wavered, steadied, and then broke abruptly.

“I cannot remember, Éowyn. I remember darkness and cries, evil voices and great terror; I have memories that have become nightmares and nightmares that may be memories, but I have no way of knowing which is which. And what I fear the most is that those very things that I most desire to be only feverish fancy, that those are the events that truly happened, that the sights and the sounds and the cursed smells of a house, a city full of death are no delirium but living recollection. My own mind, even beneath the Black Breath, could not give me images of such horror as haunt me now. Minas Tirith is the place of those images, Éowyn, those nightmare-memories, and I…”

His voice grew very soft, and he bowed his head.

“I am afraid.”

Éowyn rose and moved swiftly toward him, and her voice was like a clear bell that echoed through the stone.

“And you think I am not afraid as well?”

He turned to face her, wondering; she drew very close and took both his hands in hers. She was little less than him in height, just enough that he could see the crystal droplets still clinging to her hair, and she held his gaze with the force of her words.

“Do you think the sight of the Pelennor field is easy to me, I who lost there my only father and took the wound that troubles me yet? Do you think I relish the memory of the black beast, of the Nazgul, of the broken body of my king and the despair that held me even after Isildur’s heir drew me from the Shadow? I too would have died but for the stubborn disobedience of one small friend; I too know the nightmares where I am burning, dying, for that one small hand has come too late. I know.”

She set her hands on his shoulders.

“We will go to the city to honor the happiness of a friend, my husband. We will be together. And you taught me not to fear the shadows when I do not stand alone.”

Faramir smiled suddenly, a bright dawn bursting in his eyes, and he took her face in his hands, smoothed the damp hair from her temples, and kissed his lady.

She rested her head upon his shoulder when the kiss was ended, and they held each other thus some little time. She slipped from his arms at length with a playful smile, moving with seeming purposelessness to a mound of abandoned weapons. She knelt thoughtfully, fingering one dilapidated blade, and rose, giving it a cautious swing. She glanced up at him, one eyebrow quirked.

“A good balance.”

He snorted, leaning carefully against the venerable table.

“Those are swords of Gondor, shieldmaiden of the horse-lords. Of course the balance is good.”

She shot a dangerous look over one shoulder, still giving the blade slow, measured movements.

“And Rohan has no good swords, man of Gondor?”

He shrugged.

“I said not so, lady of Rohan, but if you would..”

The sun had nearly reached the horizon, and golden light streamed through the thin watery curtain into the cave. She whirled and sent the sword arcing toward him in one smooth motion, gleaming in the fiery radiance. He caught it reflexively, glancing up at her in quick surprise. Éowyn caught up a second blade from the pile and slid into a wary crouch, a laughing challenge dancing in her eyes.

“And what then of Gondor’s swordsmen, Lord Faramir?”

He moved toward her cautiously; then, with a quick laugh, he attacked. Faramir son of Denethor would have been accounted a good swordsman in any family that did not also include Boromir, and neither years of peace nor the bearing of two children had blunted Éowyn’s skills. The swords clashed with deafening force and the echoes rained all about them; Faramir fared poorly at first because of the laughter that weakened his arm, but he regained his ground later, foot by foot, and seemed even to be winning. Bit by bit, Éowyn gave ground, laughing with each step; bit by bit her husband forced her into an empty corner, until at length she stood with her back to the wall, their swords crossed and trembling slightly between them.

She held his eyes and raised her eyebrows; she leaned suddenly over the crossed blades glinting in the sun and pressed her lips against his. She then pulled away, and suddenly, with a low, deceptively yielding laugh, her smile shifted from inviting to feral. She jerked her blade free, there were a few confused moments of swords and shouts, and Faramir found himself flat against the cold stone, his own sword skittering away across the ground and his wife’s at his throat. She loomed above him, silhouetted against the falling water and the setting sun, and though he could not see it he felt her smile.

And then his eyes shifted to the glow behind her, the gilded and jeweled curtain of the Window on the West, and after she let him brush her blade aside he leapt to his feet and turned her to face the sunset.

“You have never seen a day end at Henneth Annûn,” he whispered, resting his hands on her shoulders. She drew a deep, marveling breath, and leaned back against him.

“No, I have not.”

Faramir settled his arms around her waist and she laid her hands across them; they stood wordless until the last glimmer fade into the soft dusk, until the sheet of gems and molten gold became only a silvery-purple shroud, a wisp of cloud floating downward. Faramir breathed in slowly and bent his lips to Éowyn’s shoulder.

“What says my lady to sunset over Henneth Annûn?”

She reached up without turning to brush the hair back from his temples, and sighed.

“The lady says that the hour grows late, and it is a long walk back to the camp.”

He captured her hand in his and held it close.

“And what says Éowyn?”

She twisted in his arms and smiled into his eyes; the last vestiges of the day lingered in the glint of her hair.

“Éowyn says that Boromir and Theodwyn are safe and well with Bergil and Beregrond, and that moonlight over Henneth Annûn, too, would be a new sight to her. Perhaps even dawn.”

He laughed, a warm, welcome laugh one with the fading sunset and the woman in his arms, and dusk fell softly around them as he took her in his arms until not even Elvish eyes could have told one from the other. The shadows that veiled them were old friends and trusted shields, and in the warmth of their kiss and their smile the shadows of the past fled far away until the morning.