Revenge is Sweet

None of the three looked particularly repentant. Théoden met the thinned lips and glaring eyes of his heir and the two young cousins with a quelling stare.

"They said I was a cow and tied me up in the barn all day yesterday," Éowyn said.

"Kine," Théodred mumbled. "Great aurochs. Fierce."

"It was not all day," Éomer contributed.

"I missed lunch and almost missed dinner, too! And not because you remembered where I was. You never came back!"

Théodred, who was certainly too old to have countenanced such neglect, had the grace to look abashed, but Éomer rounded on his sister. "Béma hunted the kine. You said you wanted to play, too. And we let you!"

"Kine isn't the only thing Béma hunted," Éowyn said with the supercilious satisfaction only a wronged seven-year-old could muster. "He chased the creeping shadow from Beleriand all down the Misty Mountains, and he never caught nor subdued her."

Théodred clutched at his hair, which stuck to his fingers and stayed oddly sideways from his head when he tried to release it.

"I am going to have to cut it off," Théodred moaned. Éomer looked glum.

"Why glue, Éowyn?" Théoden asked.

"Spider webs are sticky."

(200 words)