The Price of Freedom

By Erin Lasgalen

FORWARD AND WARNINGS: R for content. This story is an AU. With the exception of the first chapter it is set post-ROTK. It will contain heavy violence, the mention of rape though no actual depictions, and sexual content—again, no gory details. DISCLAIMER: This story was written solely for the purpose of non-profit entertainment. All canon characters and places therein are the property of Tolkien Estates and New Line Cinema.

Chapter II: Fear of Darkness

Eowyn knelt in the Queen’s Hall after finishing her curt, emotionless report of all that had happened at the South Pass. The heat of midday hung oppressively in the air around them as Hurin of Gondor and Gimli told their side of the tale. Beside her, looking as uncomfortable as it was possible for a Dwarf to be, sat Gimli son of Gloin. At the beginning of the interview, he had tried manfully to remain perched atop his pillow but nature had not fashioned his legs with enough length for the task and he kept sliding off to one side. He fought with it valiantly for a while before setting it aside, with a muttered apology to Indassa. Now, he sat cross-legged in Dwarvish fashion, his ruddy face cramped with unslept worry. He had only agreed to leave Legolas’ side after Fallah had sworn upon the souls of her ancestors that the Elf was out of danger.

"Tell me," Indassa had asked them, her child’s face a blank slate that gave away nothing. "How came soldiers of Gondor to march upon my kingdom at the side of their ancient enemies, a hundred and fifty leagues from the borders of Elessar’s realm?" If one did not notice how her hands trembled in her lap one would have thought the Queen perfectly composed.

"The Emperor of Harad came to the court of King Elessar for the first time several months ago," Hurin told her. "He came to sue for an official accord of peace between his nation and ours---something that has never existed. Elessar was suspicious, naturally, particularly in light of the fact that Haradoun has spent the last two years butchering his way to supremacy of all the lands that lie South and East of Gondor. He has united all the peoples who once followed Sauron under his own flag. But when the King pressed him, he told us a tale that made his intentions seem far more coldly practical than a simple wish for peace. He said his northernmost borders were beset by morgul beasts. Blood drinkers that preyed upon armed men, shepherds and babes in the cradle without distinction. He told us they were spreading like a contagion through his lands, changing their captives into their own kind and increasing their numbers, wiping out entire villages."

"Saah!" Indassa swore softly in Haradrim.

Hurin took her meaning without any need of translation. "Our king was much of the same opinion, Highness. This kind of beast has not been seen since the Second Age according to the Wise. But Haradoun was persistent. Months of careful negotiations passed between Haradoun and the King of Gondor, making slow headway toward a workable treaty. Then the Blood Drinkers began attacking Gondor’s outermost North-Eastern borders in Emyn Muil."

Eowyn started, feeling a cold thrill of terror. Emyn Muil was more than a hundred leagues away. How, by all that was holy, could the Hunters have spread so far?!

"Again," Hurin went on, "Haradoun came in person to Minas Tirith, this time nearly begging for aid. He was very eloquent, telling our king that, to his mind, a unified Empire of Harad that encompassed the entire East was a grand and glorious thing. But a unified empire of the walking dead he did not wish. The King was moved by his plea, but more moved by the plight of Haradoun’s people and the citizens of Gondor who had been trying to rebuild Emyn Muil. The Emperor told us that he believed the Blood Drinkers had spread outward from a central Nest. He said legend held that such creatures dwelt in the Dhak-Dir Mountain that surrounded the valley kingdom of Rhunballa. He told us that the people of Rhunballa were witches who had enslaved the Dhak-Dir long ago, and were feared by even the Easterling tribes of the Rhun Sea. Haradoun seemed to think that, as with many things in the Dark Lord’s former realm, the balance of power in Rhunballa had been upset by Sauron’s fall. That the witches no longer controlled their former pets. Without the implicit threat of Mordor keeping the Blood Drinkers in check, they were now out of control, spreading like vermin whose natural predators have departed."

"The Queen of Gondor believed there was some truth in this wild tale," Gimli said. "Her father was an ancient and learned Elf Lord, and had written in his books of lore and history that rumor had persisted for millennia of something terrible---a surviving horror of the First Age---that dwelt in the red mountains south of the Rhun Sea."

"And so," Indassa asked coolly, "You joined my noble husband on his brave quest to rid the world of the Nighthunters?"

Eowyn watched her closely, seeing signs she knew well after two years of judging the girl’s moods and reactions. Indassa had become a consummate actress, skilled in hiding her thoughts from her ministers with little or no effort. But beneath that controlled surface, the Queen was coiled like a spring wound too tight, ready to snap any second.

"No, Highness," Hurin replied. "Haradoun led a force of a thousand men to learn the truth of Rhunballa. Elessar matched that number. In addition, at Haradoun’s request, he sent two of his most trusted advisors along, so that Elessar might believe the report of what was found there without hesitation.

If we did indeed find what we sought, the word of Lord Gimli and the Prince of Mirkwood would be enough to convince Elessar to send aid to the East to help exterminate the Blood Drinkers."

"In plainest truth, Highness," Gimli added, "I think Aragorn smelled a rat. He’s a great one for spotting lies and half-truths. But he also knew that the main Nest---wherever it lay---must be routed out."

"Aye," agreed Hurin. His stern gray eyes bored into Indassa’s. "There was some truth to what he told us. This dawn did not come an instant too soon for myself and my men."

"We have always known what haunts the mountains," Indassa said. She tilted her chin upwards, refusing to flinch under that piercing accusatory stare. "You may liken us to a house that stands in a city of bandits and slavers. A housed ringed with a mote infested with water vipers. It is not what we would wish for in a perfect world, but the ‘vipers’ have kept this valley free of enslavement to Mordor for centuries."

Hurin regarded her steadily with the closed face of a long-time soldier who knows the sound of a lie by omission when he hears one. Indassa began to look as though she was fighting not to squirm under that steel-colored gaze.

"Was Haradoun with you?" The Queen finally asked into the heavy silence of the Hall.

"He was, Highness," Hurin said. "He led the way into the Pass. We were a merry band of fools, thinking ourselves safe because the sun had begun to rise on the south side of the mountains. He was one of the first to be taken. I saw them tear him from his saddle before he could even draw his scimitar."

The Queen drew in a little gasp of breath, laying one hand against her chest as though her heart pained her. She sat frozen for a moment, suspended in limbo between realization and reaction. Then she began to wail like a broken-hearted child.

Eowyn was one her feet, gathering up the sobbing girl in her arms. Gimli and Lord Hurin gazed on with that uncomprehending, helpless dismay kind-hearted men always display in the face of unheralded female hysterics.

"He is gone! He is gone!" Indassa sobbed, repeating the words like a prayer. "Oh, Eowyn, he is dead! I am free of him! He is dead!"

"My Lord," Gimli’s gruff voice said quietly. "Let us withdraw a bit. If I am not mistaken, this interview of over for the moment."

Eowyn gave them a small, thankful nod over the top of Indassa’s head.

It took a long time to coax the girl up from her throne of silken cushions and into her own chambers. After a solid hour of heart-rending tears, the little Queen collapsed into the spent silence of exhaustion.

"It is not over," Indassa whispered tonelessly as Eowyn tucked her into bed. "The---the Hunters stopped him, but---but you said they attacked the Watch. Eowyn---what will happed tonight?"

"I do not know," Eowyn said. Her heart was rent in half for the girl’s pain, but there were a hundred things that needed doing and not enough daylight left. It was already high noon. "We should prepare for the worst," she told Indassa. "If they decide to attack the city outright---" She closed her eyes against the tension headache building there. She tried to see any plan of defense where the people of Rhunballa might emerge victorious if the Hunters attacked in force. The harrowing images of the slaughter at the South Pass, the monstrous, inhuman strength she had felt as she hung helpless in Morsul’s arms, the speed with which to creatures had moved---

"I commanded the Watch to move every living soul to the shelter of the city," she told the Queen. "Ikako is seeing to it, but I must go and help her. We exhausted all of Fallah’s store of fire weapons last night and she cannot build more in half a day. I would ask you as Queen’s Guard to come to allow me to escort you to the Watch House this evening before dusk. We can better protect you there that at the Royal Villa." She smiled grimly, brushing the disarraying black curls from Indassa’s face. She had seen something they feared last night. Something that burned them with nothing more than a flickering touch of its silvery light. She held onto the image of the shimmering orb Legolas had used to shield the survivors of last night’s massacre. It was her one solid hope at this point. "We are not without weapons against their darkness, Highness." She had to speak to Gimli immediately.

"Protect my people," Indassa sighed, a breath away from sleep. "Do whatever you must."

"On my life, I swear it," Eowyn whispered.

"---lowborn grand-daughter of a Sabadi goat herd!" Obari the Wineseller’s wife was spitting viscously into Suni’s face. "Do not think that being a royal by-blow’s brat gives you any special license with me! You will not bar me from my queen!"

"No one may enter the Queen’s household for the duration of this emergency with the express leave of the Captain of the Watch," Suni said in a bored tone that did not match the smug half-smile on her lips.

Eowyn caught sight of Gimli and Lord Hurin standing a little aside from the scene on the front steps of the Royal Villa. Obari and Sharadi had gathered a crown of nearly a hundred. Eowyn was a little relived. They were influential, well-respected women. The little mob might have been much larger. There were not quite enough of them to brave an outright assault on the guard set about Indassa’s Villa.

"You!" Obari snarled, rounding on Eowyn as she saw her approaching.
"This is your fault, you barbarian trull! You commanded your ‘soldiers’ to turn those---those fire arrows upon the Hunters. Now, we will be lucky if we are not gutted in our beds this night!"

"They killed the Haradrim as they came through the Pass," Eowyn told them in a carrying voice. "Then they began to kill the Watch as well---your daughters and sisters." She fixed a cold eye upon the Wineseller’s wife. "If we had not fired the instant we did, they would have torn your firstborn to pieces."

Obari paled, whether with concern for Shaeri or rage at having her daughter’s allegiance to the Watch publicly proclaimed Eowyn could not tell. But the angry babble of voices dropped to a frightened murmur.

"And Haradoun?" A woman in the crowd asked.

"Haradoun is dead," Eowyn said simply.

A little cheer went up, though it was far from whole-hearted. The threat of Haradoun was far less frightening than an end to peaceful relations with the Hunters.

"We do not know what will happen tonight," Eowyn told them. "But those of you with large estates, prepare yourselves and your households to receive many visitors. Upon the authority of the Queen, we are withdrawing every croft and farmstead to the confines of the city. They will need to be quartered for the duration."

"We have only your word on that," Sharadi said mulishly. "Indassa must make a public statement, or failing that, she must at least receive her ministers." Mutters of agreement rippled through the crowd.

"She did not sleep this last night waiting for word from the South Pass," Eowyn told them. "She was understandably distraught when she learned all that happened there. Give her two hours of rest, my ladies. Then I will open her doors to you." She eyes Obari, her gaze hard and implacable. "I am sure you do not wish to have contention among our own while it still remains to be seen whether we are now at open war with the Hunters. That would be a very dangerous thing to do."

The older woman stalked up the stairs, uncowed by the warning in Eowyn’s words. "You dare the threaten me, you---"

"I warn you," Eowyn said softly, her voice a harsh whisper. "I am Captain of the Watch and Rhunballa is in a state of emergency. I you hamstring the defense of the Queen or people of this land I will lock you in the gaol until all is done." The Wineseller’s wife drew breath to utter an ear-splitting screech, but Eowyn cut her off short. "Do not force me to shame you in front of all these people, Obari," she told the red-faced woman. She edged closer, speaking too softly to be heard by anyone other that the enraged woman before her. "Everyone you have ever known will be in mortal danger come sunset---"

"Because of your failure to---!"

"Help me help you people!" Eowyn said. "Blame me for everything when there is time for such luxuries. I beg you, Obari! Help me! We must work as one if we are to survive this!"

Obari’s lined, tension-ridden face was still a tight mask of suppressed rage, but the word ‘beg’ seemed to have mollified her pride in some small way. She was silent a long moment. "Two hours," she agreed. "I will wait not an instant longer to my Queen. And you will not quarter so much as a single filthy farmer’s brat in my house until I hear the command from Indassa’s own lips!" She whirled in a flurry of verdant silks and pushed her way rudely through the press of her own supporters, swatting them out of her way with sharp, angry little slaps.

"What a miserable, selfish woman," Eowyn muttered under her breath as the crowd began to dissipate.

"Cold-hearted beast," Suni said in disgust. "She did not even ask about her own child’s wounds."

Eowyn cocked an eye at her. "What did she mean by royal by-blow?"

The tall, coppery-skinned archer seemed amused. "It is common knowledge. You should listen to gossip more readily. My father was a Sabadi goatherd. My mother was the child of old King Udam in his youth by a farm girl from South Springs."

"Then you are Indassa’s---niece?"

Suni shook her head, eyeing Eowyn fondly. "No, my naïve sister. I am Commander of Bent Bow Watch House and Indassa’s faithful servant."

Of course, Eowyn thought sadly, had Udam’s illegitimate child been a boy, the King might have acknowledged him proudly. But a bastard girl-child was of no worth at all in the East. "Stand guard another two hours," Eowyn told her. "I will return before that time to rouse Indassa. Send a runner to me at Queen’s Guard Watch House is another crowd forms."

"Beware," Suni said solemnly. "My two little ones are already in the commons hall. You may come upon the Watch House to find a smoking ruin if they have been left unattended for long." Eowyn stifled an answering grin.

She turned back to find Gimli and Hurin watching her with great interest.

"I am sorry---" She began.

"Nay, my Lady," Hurin shook his head graciously. "Do not apologize when matters of state beckon. Lord Gimli and I have spoken and we are in accord here."

"Aye, Lass," Gimli said. "Give us a task to help secure this city."

"Gladly," she said with feeling. "Come with me, my Lords. Queen’s Guard House is just across the square."

Eowyn shielded her eyes as they followed her across the Fountain Square. It was already an hour past midday.

"We have less than seven hours of daylight left," Gimli said, speaking her thoughts aloud.

Queen’s Guard Watch House had begun life as a bakery, the largest in the city. The outer commons hall still bore the comforting phantom smell of fresh bread at times. The commons was strangely empty for being an hour past midday. Except for Suni’s two little sons, mercifully asleep for their afternoon nap in one of the main barracks cots, the House was all but deserted. Eowyn had charged every House commander with bringing in their own territory, sending them racing to the four points of the map before their horses had even cooled down after the long ride back from the South Pass.

She led them thought the inner barracks where Fallah and Rumashi midwife, had set up a recovery ward for the Watch, the wounded soldiers of Gondor and the Haradrim who were too injured for the gaol. Mothers and children of Watch members were hovering over their loved ones, and less anxious relatives were waiting upon the men of Gondor and Harad.

As they passed, a dozen separate conversations broke down into curious murmurs of little gasps from those who were seeing Gimli for the first time. The Rhunballani rarely saw foreigners, let along foreigners who were not of the race of Man. The stares were not frightened or hostile, but there was a sharp interest, an avid curiosity that folk usually reserved for travelling mummers. That reaction had been Eowyn’s chief concern when she had ordered Legolas placed in her rooms instead of the main barracks with the other wounded. They entered Eowyn’s bedchamber to find Fallah nodding off in the uncomfortable, high-backed chair beside the bed.

Fallah started awake as Eowyn touched her lightly on the arm. Eowyn saw that her friend’s eye were red with weeping. Fallah had spent every ounce of her strength and skill to keep the wounded alive on the trip back from the South Pass. Not a single man or woman who had left the Pass alive had died today because of her. But the knowledge of what her hands had wrought, the memory of that smoking pile of dismembered human remains, must be eating a hole in her physician’s heart.

"How is he?" Eowyn asked in a hushed voice.

"Better," Fallah said tiredly. She gazed over at her sleeping patient, frowning muzzily. "Unnaturally so. He heals too fast."

"He is not a Man, Fallah," Eowyn said.

Gimli had moved to stand beside Eowyn, his face an etched mold of worry as he gazed down at the Elf’s pale face. Legolas was lying face down beneath a cotton bed sheet that covered a weight of burn salve compresses. The wound the arrow of Bent Bow Watch House had torn in his right thigh was clean and bandaged. Fallah stood, and observing the faces of Gimli and Eowyn, lifted the edge of the compress on the Elf’s back. She groped about on the bedside table for her spectacles before she realized they were atop her head.

"Look," Fallah said. "This is just short of miraculous to my mind. There are too places on his back that were true deep flesh burns. The rest is just nasty blistering. But the redness and swelling are already subsiding. He may very well walk away from this without a scar to show for his hurts. The arrow wound was the worst of it."

Gimli chuckled. "I’ll wager he’ll tell you having his hair burnt off is the worst of it! He’ll be in a state of mourning when he wakes to find he’s lost most of it!"

Eowyn stared down at the angry, red blisters that marred to pale, perfect skin of the Elf’s bare back, feeling a lump of terrible guilt rise up and seize her throat shut. "You and he befriended me when I was in desperate need of friends," she told the Dwarf in a small voice. "And I have repaid your kindness in your own blood---"

"Hush that nonsense this moment, girl!" Gimli said sternly. "You don’t deserve the blame for this, and even if you did, you don’t have time to wallow in it!"

She blinked at him in surprise.

"I think," he said, "between what you’ve told us and things your little Queen let slip, that we have a pretty fair picture of what happened. And where the blame lies."

"Haradoun’s treachery was aptly rewarded, at least," Hurin said grimly.

"Haradoun is dead?" Fallah asked, a tiny exhausted smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

"Lord Hurin saw them take him," Eowyn said. She turned her eyes from Legolas’ too-pale face, back to Gimli. She saw Fallah’s neat stitchwork across his brow where the gash had been. "My Lords, it is very possible we will be under siege come dusk. I would not say these words in the hearing of any save Fallah, but our chances are slim to none if we fight them with sword and bow. Fallah—"

"I know what you would ask, my friend," Fallah said, wiping the sleep from her strained eyes. "I will go to my shop and take inventory of all my supplies there. Though our ‘armory’ was all but exhausted in last night’s battle. I will see what manner of incendiaries I can conjure with what is left.

Tell Rumashi to change the salve compresses of those who are burned every three hours. I will be back two hours before sunset." She left quietly, meeting Hurin’s eyes briefly as she passed. "For what my hands have wrought, I owe you a debt of blood, my Lord," she said softly. "Trust that I will repay it if we live through this."

Hurin’s steel gray eyes followed her as she departed. "That," he said slowly, "is possibly the most dangerous woman I have ever met. Those fire weapons---" He shuddered. "Eru! If such a thing ever fell into the hands of an evil man---"

"It was my idea," Eowyn said heavily. "I thought her skylighters---if enlarged and strengthened---would make fine kindling of the Hunters. We have been conspiring, she and I, to fashion a kind of armory that would wipe them out altogether." She shook away the drowning sense of guilt. She could flay herself alive later. As Gimli had said, there was no time for such things now.

"Master Gimli," she said, sinking down into the bedside chair Fallah had deserted. "Legolas had a crystal sphere of light in his hand when you rode out of the Pass. It was what shielded you and the soldiers of Gondor from the Hunters."

"Aye," Gimli nodded. "Those fell things that came too close to the light it emitted in their presence caught fire as though they had been doused with hot oil." Slowly, almost reverently, he withdrew the orb from the leather pouch at his waist. It looked like a simple glass ball, hewn into a perfect sphere. It was about the size of a man’s fist.

"What is it?" Eowyn asked. "Is it some holy Elvish thing?"

"I think so," Gimli replied. "The Queen gave it to Legolas when we took our leave of Minas Tirith. Arwen had great misgivings about this little fact-finding mission of ours. She is the daughter of Elrond of Rivendell and also the granddaughter of the Lady Galadriel of Lothlorien. She had a touch of their foresight still, even though she is now mortal. She had a terrible feeling of foreboding about our safety. She said this would ward off certain kinds of unnatural evil."

Eowyn touched the flawless crystal thing, lifting it in one hand. As she did so, it divided in half, opening on invisible hinges like a clamshell. The interior was hollow, a perfect answering sphere within. She shook her head, feeling a sinking swell of hopelessness wash over her again.

"It is miraculous," she said, rubbing at her temples. Her head was pounding. "But it is not enough. Even on open ground, it shielded less than a hundred men. There are more than ten thousand women and children in this valley. You saw how fast the Hunters moved, how strong they are. They will fall upon us tonight and---"

"Break it."

The music of his voice was weak and laced with pain. Eowyn stared into the inhuman brilliance of Legolas’ dark gray eyes. He lay on his stomach, his face turned toward her, his eyes open and aware. She leaned forward, hearing Gimli’s happy, relieved chuckle at her shoulder. An instant later the Dwarf began to berate his friends furiously for a careless fool. Eowyn found herself smiling as Legolas endured the tongue-lashing patiently. Four years had done nothing to dim the sweet radiance of the Elf’s smile and she suddenly felt hope where there had only been swelling despair. Gods, it was good to see the two of them again, whatever the circumstances!

"I am glad you are awake," she told him. She could think of nothing else to say.

"I am glad to see you again," he said. "I have wondered often over the last years if you were well, my Lady. I have prayed that you found happiness."

"A measure of it," she replied with a small answering smile. "You said to break it," she asked intently. "Will that not destroy its power?"

"No," he said softly. "It belonged to Elwing of Doriath. It was wrought by Earendil as a kind of jewel case for the Silmaril that was Luthien Tinuviel’s bride price, long and long ago. Arwen, the Queen of Gondor, is Elwing’s granddaughter. She said the crystal must have absorbed some of the light and power of the Silmaril it housed for many a year. Every ounce of it is suffused with power. Arwen said it would be needed to safeguard the lives of many innocents. Break it, Eowyn, into as many small pieces as you may. You may use the shards to shelter every house in this city."

She wondered how he knew where he was and the exact nature of their peril. Perhaps Elves never completely lost consciousness, remaining on some level aware of their surroundings even when sorely hurt. She did not ask. She only watched as Gimli withdrew a hand sized hammer from his belt, his mouth pulled into a frown as every Dwarvish instinct in his body rebelled against destroying so beautiful and precious a thing.

He struck true, shattering the orb into a thousand pieces.

Obari was fit to be tied when Indassa upheld Eowyn’s decision to commandeer all of the largest villas in the city for the vale farmers and shepherds who continued to stream into Rhunballa City throughout the blessedly long afternoon. All that long day, Eowyn sent up repeated thanks to the Valar that it was the week of Mid Summer, the longest days of the year.

The Watch quartered the majority of these people in the great dining halls of the wealthy, places where they would be confined, cramped too tightly into a single space for sleep. This made for generalized grousing among guests and hostesses alike, but the halls were safest. They were large indoor areas where the light of the crystal shards could be contained without having to bend around corners.

Indassa threw open the doors of the Royal Villa to the people, emerging from her rooms composed, calm and every inch the strong monarch her people needed to see at the moment. Eowyn open the commons halls of the city’s five Watch Houses to the refugees. And still the overflow numbered in the thousands. Shaeri opened the doors of the wineries, much to her mother’s dismay, crowding hundreds into the storehouses and grape presses. The bakeries, the dyers, the laundries and the smithhouse did the same. Three hours before sunset, when it became apparent that every large building in the city was full, the common people stepped forward and began to offer the hospitality of their homes to the stragglers.

Into every standing structure that housed a living soul, Eowyn sent a soldier of the Watch with a shard of Elwing’s orb. An hour before dusk, Eowyn arrived at the Royal Villa to escort Indassa to Queen’s Guard Watch House. Earlier in the day, Obari and Sharadi might have throw apoplectic fits over this, but with the shadows lengthening, the bluster of the Councilwomen had turned to real fear. The Watch Houses would every bit the target the Royal Villa was, but at the least Queen’s Guard was fortified.

Night fell upon Rhunballa with the warm, peaceful laziness of summer. Every living soul in the city held its breath, each praying to their own gods. In the center of the commons hall of Queen’s Guard, Suni stood straight and watchful, a shard of Elwing’s orb held aloft in either hand.

And nothing happened.

By midnight, Eowyn strode through the crowded Watch House, marveling at the at the human capacity to adapt to any situation. The first hour after sunset, the commons hall had been silent as a tomb. Fear had been a thick and tangible thing. Mothers held their children tightly, the Watch had stood, swords drawn and torches blazing. After some thought, Eowyn had released the dozen surviving Haradrim from the gaol, informing them bluntly that their Emperor was dead. She had offered them the choice of defending Rhunballa from the shelter of the Watch House or taking their chances outside. Not surprisingly, they had been very eager to wield their scimitars in the service of Indassa.

"It is only fitting, after all," the young chieftain’s son, Moussah, had told her. "The Lady Indassa is first wife to our Emperor. We owe her our allegiance in her lord’s absence." Moussah could not quite bring himself to believe that Haradoun was dead.

For an hour, they all stood shoulder to shoulder---Rhunballani, Haradrim and soldiers of Gondor---keeping vigil in the deafening silence.

"Even the babes do not cry," Moussah had said in hushed tones to Marsil of Gondor. Marsil had only nodded, his Numenorian gray eyes pale with fear.

But the one merciful thing about jaw-breaking tension was that it could not sustain itself for very long. After nearly two hours of nothing, the smaller children began to fret and fuss to be allowed to play. Quiet conversations began here and there. Brock the Miller, formerly of Laketown, struck up a game of dice with Somal and some wounded soldiers of Gondor. Though far from a party atmosphere, the general hub of voices now sounded more like village folk gathered in their lord’s hall to weather a hard storm than a siege.

"This is better than the other," Hurin told her quietly. He, like Eowyn, had not relaxed or dropping his guard. "Let them turn their minds away from the danger as much as they may. As long as we stand alert they are as safe as they can be."

Eowyn nodded absently. By the commons’ great stone fireplace, Shaeri was once more telling the story of how the Hunter had swept her up into the air only to be burned to ash by Fallah’s rocket. The Wineseller’s daughter had her splinted leg propped up in the lap of a bandaged Gondorian soldier. Her younger sister Insis sat beside her, batting her eyes at a young warrior of Harad. Shaeri had been given in marriage at fifteen to an ill-tempered domineering man thrice her age. She had wept few tears two years later to find herself a widow. In the last four years, she had learned to revel in her newfound freedom. And to revel in handsome young men.

"Saa!" Suni swore as she handed off the two Shards to Ikako, relinquishing her watch to the weapons’ smith. "That one has used up her allotted share of luck for the next ten years."

"Her cat will surely die," Ikako agreed in her dry way. "For she has stolen all of its lives."

On one of the larger cushions beside the fire, Fallah lay profoundly asleep, snoring softly. She had come to Eowyn the a terrible scenario that envisioned the entire city of Rhunballa burned to the ground if they were to be so foolish as to try using skylighters or any of Fallah’s burning weapons with closed doors. She had spent the latter half of the day building new fire rockets, laying by in store for later.

"You’ve yet to learn one of the most valuable skills of warfare, Lass," Gimli told her as she approached him. He stood at the back end of the hall, in the arch of the main barracks door. The Dwarf seemed completely as his ease. He leaned casually upon his axe handle as though it was a walking stick.

"What is that?" Eowyn asked him, her eyes running across the beams of the commons ceiling, picturing clawed hands tearing them away, dark forms bearing away the well-loved faces in this room.

"To relax until the hour is upon you," he said.

She gazed down into his smiling, bearded face and felt a surge of warm joy in the simple fact of his presence. She felt a sudden urge to kiss his cheek.

"Eowyn!" Indassa appeared through the arch of the barracks doors, flanked by two soldiers of the Watch. Her deep olive complexion was a rosy shade of pink. The commons was brimming with people, but the barracks was so crowded one had to step over sleeping bodies to get from here to there. Had Indassa been visiting the wounded there?

"Well, little Highness?" Gimli cocked an eye at Indassa’s blushing face. "Was he all you imagined?"

"I talked to the Elf Prince, Eowyn!" Indassa told her excitedly. "Master Gimli said I might visit with him a few moments. Master Gimli has told me all about his people in the Iron Hills, but I wanted to see the Elf as well." She sighed. "Oh, he is wondrous fair! Morsul is like a ruined shadow compared to a true Elf. He was kind as well, and told me I was very strong and courageous to have led my people from such a young age."

Gimli let himself be dragged away by Suni’s two little sons and several other small children, all of them clamoring to hear more tales of heroic Halflings. Eowyn listened to the Queen continue to babble, extolling the virtues of Legolas, as she guided Indassa to a little sleeping pallet she had set up in the west corner of the hall. In twenty minutes of speech with the Elf, Indassa had developed a crush---a real, full-blown, giggling girl’s crush. And in spite of everything, Eowyn’s heart sang. Indassa’s reaction to Legolas was not that of a woman of nineteen. It was the fluttery sighing of a fourteen-year-old girl. The fourteen-year-old maid Indassa had been before Haradoun’s arrival in Rhunballa. This sudden infatuation was the first shred of interest Indassa had shown in any man in four years, and it spoke more of true healing than a thousand eloquent words. Perhaps now that Haradoun was dead, Indassa could live again.

Eowyn arranged the light cover over Indassa, tucking the girl into the makeshift bed amid the Queen’s feeble protests. "I should stay awake for my people," she said plaintively.

"Your people are falling asleep around you, my Queen," Eowyn told her. "Lie here a bit and rest your eyes. We will keep watch."

Indassa nodded, yawning hugely. "Poppa told me that the Men of Gondor and the North were so white-skinned because they bred with non-human creatures such as Elves. Do you have any Elf blood, Eowyn?"

"Perhaps a drop or two," Eowyn said. "My grandmother was a noblewoman of Gondor."

"Hmm," Indassa mused. "I always wondered how a woman---even a Westron---could take such a creature to her bed. But I think---I think I should like to kiss him."

Eowyn laughed softly, trying to picture the look on Legolas’ face if Indassa were to make such a request of him.

"He is fair and kind," the Queen sighed sleepily. "And he does not scare me…."

Ewoyn tucked the coverlet in at the sleeping girl’s chin. "Sleep well, little sister," she whispered. "And dream of sweet kisses from Elvish Princes."

Eowyn left the Queen asleep with two women of the Watch attending her. A measure of the noise level in the hall waned as mothers put children down for the night. The Watch and the motley assortment of foreign soldiers remained wakeful and alert. Not attack came as the hours pushed past midnight and toward the dawn.

"Perhaps they are not angry with us," a woman’s hushed voice suggested tentatively.

Or perhaps, Eowyn thought, they could sense the power of the Shards of Elwing’s orb and were simply biding their time. Perhaps they would wait weeks, or even months, to have their revenge. Until most of the folk had breathed a collective sigh of relief. Until the Queen’s Council began to stir up dissatisfaction in the people born of the strain of sleeping ten to a bed in the homes and halls of strangers. Until no one believed there was any danger at all.

"Do not dare to ask her that to her face!" Shaeri told her younger sister, glancing over at Eowyn guiltily.

"Ask me what?" Eowyn said suspiciously, stopping before the hearth where both young women had gathered a little court of admirers about them.

Shaeri tossed her head of black curls and gazed irritably at her sister. "Amrod here," Shaeri gestured to the Gondorian soldier she was using as a foot rest, "says that you are a queen in your own lands, and that you slew the Lord of the Nazgul in single combat at the Battle of Pellennor Fields."

Eowyn sighed. "I am not a queen. And I did slay the Witchking, but I was not alone. Another warrior fought at my side and I would have fallen had he not hamstrung the Nazgul an instant before I struck."

"Aye!" Amrod said. "That was one of the Halflings princes I spoke of."

"And Udin says," Insis said, frowning defiantly at her elder sister, her hand upon the arm of the beardless Haradrim youth at her side, "that you were the lover of King Elessar and fled his lands when he wed his Elf Queen. Amrod says they say the same in Gondor."

"What?!" Eowyn screeched. Heads turned at the sound of her raised voice, and both Insis and Udin flinched visibly. She stalked away, feeling as though every eye in the hall was fastened on her, not trusting herself to answer. Her face, she knew, would be blazing red. She passed Gimli, who regarded her with raised eyebrows. She beat of cowardly retreat from the commons, and back through the barracks, telling herself she was not fleeing.

She gave a cursory nod to Sokorra of Bent Bow Watch House, who stood in the center of the barracks room, Shard held aloft in one hand. It had been necessary to place at least one Shard in every large room where people were gathered together. Gimli had left a solitary Shard lying on the study table of Eowyn’s bedchamber to guard Legolas as he slept.

She shut the door to her rooms as gently as her mood would allow. Outside, through the slats of her barricaded bedchamber window, the heavy pall of complete darkness had brightened. It was perhaps half an hour until true dawn. Eowyn gave Legolas sleeping form a brief glance. His eyes were still shut, a sign of deep healing sleep in his kind, Gimli had said. She sat in her bedside armchair, fuming silently, her stomach in knots. She rummaged in her little study’s top drawers for her journal, hunting for an unbroken plume. One of her earliest tutors had caned her knuckles to break her of the habit of bearing down so hard she snapped a feather at nearly every lesson of penmanship. She smiled. Eomer, thirteen at the time, and tall as a man, had thrashed the tutor when he learned of this. She rooted around fruitlessly in the drawer another moment or two before concluding she was far too agitated to write a coherent thought.

When she glanced back at the bed, Legolas eyes were open, regarding her with gentle curiosity.

"What is wrong?" He asked softly.

"Aside from the obvious?" She laughed unevenly.

He smiled faintly. "Aside from that."

She realized she was gripping both the armrests of her chair so tightly her knuckles were white. She made a face with effort, trying to relax. Until the hour is upon you, Gimli had said. "It is nearly dawn," she said. "The Hunters did not come. I think---I think they will not come tomorrow, or the next night. Perhaps not for weeks."

"And yet, eventually, they will come," he murmured. "You are right, I think. Great patience is a constant among immortals. They will wait until the folk have returned to their own homes. Even if we safeguard every household in this valley with a Shard, eventually the people of this land will become complacent."

"I know what must be done now," she said. "Fallah and I have been quietly preparing for it for months. She will need ten days, she estimates, with the help of as many people as we can find with the proper set of skills, to fashion all that I have asked of her. But the Rhunballani cut their teeth sleeping cheek and jowl with these beasts, Legolas. In a week, they will begin to rebel against the command to quarter and be quartered. I do not know if I can hold this martial law together long enough to build the weapons we need. I do not know if I can lead my friends, my sisters, to the Crags, knowing that many of them will not survive a direct assault on the Nests of the Hunters. I do not know---" She buried her face in her hands. "I do not know if I can save these people whom I love as though they were my own kin!"

He did not answer for a moment. "You and Aragorn might almost be brother and sister." She raised her head, her face a picture of tired confusion. She had no mental strength left for Elvish riddles. "You need not rest the weight of the world on your back alone," he said. "Others may help you shoulder it."

"Yes," she agreed softly. She frowned. "I have an improper and unladylike question of ask of you."

"Ask," he said.

"Does all of Gondor whisper that I was Aragorn’s lover while he was in Rohan?"

Legolas shifted a bit on his stomach and winced, regretting that small movement. "I am growing tired already of lying on my face. I wish I could sit. Mistress Fallah tells me I shall find sitting quite uncomfortable for some time yet." He stilled and seemed to sigh. "Men often accuse women of being gossipmongers and rumor-bearers. I sometimes think it is to take attention away from their own failing in that arena."

"So, it is true," she said tightly.

"It may have begun as a romantic notion of the warriors of Rohan, who observed the friendship between you and Aragorn and assumed their beloved Lady had captured the heart of Isuldur’s heir. Loving you as they do, how could they imagine that he could do less. Your tale, my Lady, became the stuff of which legends are spun when you slew Angmar. From such fame, every aspect of your tale grew taller with each new retelling. And when you vanished without a trace and Estel wed another---"

"It is a dirty lie!" She said harshly. "Aragorn would never have betrayed his beloved. And I could not have---" She clamped her mouth shut.

"It is a lie," he agreed without heat. "But is it not such a tale as you have read in the histories of Beleriand. Brave deeds, tragic love, and the hero---or heroine---who vanished into the mists after winning the day?"

Eowyn only glowered at him.

"Though personally," he went on thoughtfully, "I think the tale-spinners leave off at the most interesting part of the story. I would find the heroic maid’s travels after the Great War a better tale. ‘The Shieldmaiden of Rohan’s Adventures in Middle Earth.’ If Bilbo Baggins were still with us, he would find that a wonderful title for a book!"

Eowyn snorted indelicately. "I traveled north," she told him. "To the sunless lands of Forodwaith, all the way to the ice that does not melt."

"Ah!" He said, his eyes glowing with interest. "The sons of Elrond have been there, though I know of no one else who has. They told me the Sun does not find those lands six months of the years."

Eowyn smiled, thinking back. "The Men there are tall, yellow and red haired like the Rohirrim, though their features are different, heavier. They are a wild folk almost. On Mid Summer’s Eve, the Sun does not set until midnight and they have many festivals. But in the dead of winter, the nights are eighteen hours long and, thus, many a fell thing has made its home in their lands. The women fight beside their men, relying on them for protection only while they are carrying."

She grew silent, thinking of the faces of the men and women she had known in the village of Skovielsk. They lived every winter on the edge of annihilation. She wondered if they were even still alive. "I dwelt among them for a year before their high chieftain offered me his bed. When I refused, he told me he would put aside his wife and wed me. He was put out that I did not consider this a great honor. I left before my refusal of their lord caused trouble for my friends there. I skirted Mirkwood by the Eastern rode and wondered the Brown Lands. I shore my hair and traveled as a boy, riding with the Horseclans of the Eastern Steppe for a short time. But they believe that horses are made in the image of the gods. It is sacrilege among them that a woman or a slave should touch a horse. I journeyed south to the Sea of Rhun and took a contract from a foundering caravan of Laketown tradesmen to be their hired sword and protect them from Easterling bandits as the traveled to Rhunballa. That was two years ago. A smattering of all the peoples of the earth are gathered here in Rhunballa, I think. Knowing them as I do now, it is sad and terrible to me that we in the West lump them all together. We call them Easterlings and Southrons as though they were all one people, and we are taught that they were all faithful servants of Sauron. The truth of the matter is that Mordor enslaved nine-tenths of Middle Earth and we did not know it. Somala, the land of Fallah and Somal’s fathers, is a thousand leagues south of Gondor. They were conquered five generations ago and kept their learning, their mathematics and science, by passing it down orally, parent to child. Ikako’s grandfather came from a land called Nihon, a land so far east it is called the Cradle of the Sun. He passed down to her father, and so to her, the skill of folding the steel of a sword in such a way that it is as strong and light as pure mithril. The West, Legolas, was the last tiny sliver of lands and people Sauron failed to conquer. Some Men, the Haradrim and the tribes of Khand, served him willingly, worshipping him as their god. But most did not. I look back on the Battle of Pellennor now and I wonder how many of the Men we slew that day were forcibly conscripted like the Men of Rhunballa. The world of Men---Middle Earth itself---is so much wider and wonderfully varied than I imagined as a girl. And most of it is people by good folk."

"I wish I could see it all," he said. She glanced at him, wondering why he sounded so sorrowful.

"There is time to do so," she said. One corner of her mouth turned up. "It is not as though you are getting any older."

"Time can run short of need and want," he replied, soft as a mourning dirge. "Even for immortals." He seemed to shake himself, though he did not move a muscle. He eyed her searchingly. She had to fight not to squirm under that piercing, too-keen gaze. She wondered if he banked the full force of his Elvish gaze at times, turning it upon those around him only when he was as intently curious as he seemed now. "Time is such as odd thing when dealing with mortals. Eighty years ago, on a visit to Rivendell, I met a mortal child named Estel. He shot me with a toy sling as I rode into the vale and told me he was guardian of these lands. That I must declare myself and my errand or he would thrash me insensible."

"What a horrible brat," she said.

He laughed aloud. "Aye, he was that. I spent the summer teaching him to use a bow instead of a sling. He had no natural skill for archery whatsoever. I left Rivendell in the fall of that year, and after what only seemed to me a season or three, I met with Estel again. His true name was Aragorn, I learned, and he was traveling with his kinsmen, the Dunedain. Twenty years had passed in the blink of an eye and it seemed to me that little Estel had grown from boy to man while a glanced way. You were a woman in years when I knew you in Rohan, but in many ways, you have grown and changed as much as Aragorn did in the those two short decades. It never fails to astound me how swiftly your folk change."

She could think of no reply to that, simple mortal girl that she was. So, instead, she asked, "Is my brother well?"

"He is well," Legolas said. "He web this last year with the daughter of the Prince of Dol Amroth. You will soon be an aunt."

She smiled tentatively, picturing her brother’s face.

"He grieves for you as for one who is lost forever," Legolas told her softly. "As do all you people."

She closed her stinging eyes, nodding.

"One day," he said. "When you are ready, you should journey homeward to make amends. When Gimli and I depart, I will bear letters to Eomer and others if you wish." He paused, as though considering whether to speak or not. "The Lord Faramir is well, also. Though, unlike your brother, he remains unwed." And again, she felt her face burning under that all-seeing Elvish gaze. "He and I spoke of you not long ago," Legolas told her. "He said he dreams of you sometimes. In his visions you are happy and free."

She smiled sadly.

"And Aragorn?"

"He is a new father," Legolas grinned. "The boy takes after his sire in looks, poor little thing."

"That is good," she sighed. She wished for Aragorn all the happiness and joy in the world. She eyed him critically after a moment’s thought. "How soon will you be healed of your hurts? Can you tell? Even Gimli says he does not know. He says he has never seen you so much as nicked in battle."

"A week," he said. "Perhaps more. I am sleeping the deep healing sleep. It is excelerating the speed of my recovery."

"Are you---?" She leaned forward, fascinated. "Are you willing this healing sleep upon yourself?" She knew next to nothing of Elves, she realized, other than the histories she had read of the First and Second Ages. And those tales read like myth in many ways.

He smiled in answer. "I am useless to you as I am now."

She shook her head. "Never that."

"Sleep," he told her. His own eyes were already drooping. "I will do the same. Dawn is here."

She leaned back in her chair, resting her head, willing herself to let go of the coiled tension that was making every inch of her body ache after more than thirty-six full hours of wakefulness. She shifted restlessly, trying to get comfortable. The face of Morsul flitting briefly past her mind’s eye, his cold beauty bleeding into Grima’s sallow visage. "Bad dreams," she whispered, shivering, fighting the sleep that was tugging at her tired mind.

"I will sing them away if they come," he told her. He shifted the pillow beneath his head and murmured sleepily. "This pillow smells of flowers and sunshine. I do not recognize the bloom."

"Sinisi," she sighed. "It is blended into all the soaps."

"Sinisi," he repeated. "That is the floral scent." His breath was slowing. His eyes were closed. "But the sunshine, I think, is you…."

Something in her stomach fluttered unaccountably, sending warmth upward into her chest. She sighed once more and followed him down into good dreams.

A week passed. Time slowed to a ponderous trundle. On the afternoon of the seventh day, Eowyn arrived in her quarters to find Legolas had bathed and risen. He was standing unsteadily, half-dressed before her mirror, wearing only a pair of wide-breached Sabadi trousers. Fallah was gently stripping away the last of the bandages from his back. Gimli upon the black oak chest at the foot of her bed, anxious as a mother bird, ready to catch his friend should he fall.

"Gods of Light, your people are amazing folk!" Fallah said. She glanced back at Eowyn. "I do not think he will even scar from this!"

Legolas extended both arms at his sides and slowly brought them together before his chest. His breath caught in his throat as the still-tender skin on his back stretched with this movement. The flesh was still a bit red in places, but the deep blisters were gone. Healed as though they had never been.

"The salve I have you will ease the last of the discomfort," Fallah told him.

Eowyn moved to stand beside him as he pulled on the soft white cotton tunic Fallah handed him. He smiled at her in the mirror. "I will move into the outer barracks tonight and give you back the use of your rooms."

"She’ll have to boil the sheets to get out the smell of roasted Elf," Gimli grunted.

Legolas touched his hair, his smile fading a bit. Fallah had evened it up for him, but it now fell just above his chin. "I suppose there is no help for this," he said sadly.

"It will grow back in a year of three," Fallah said, seeing his mournful expression.

"Nay, Mistress," Legolas sighed. "You will be a grandmother before it grows to its former length."

"That is interesting!" Fallah’s almond eyes were suddenly sparkling with curiosity. "Tell me, how many years does it take one of your people to grow from babe to man?" She began rummaging around in her physician’s bag and found her book of notes. "You would not eat the stewed hare I gave you because it was a living thing. Is that custom among your folk or is meat physically disagreeable to you? And I noticed while treating you that you have no hair on your arms and legs, or---"

"Fallah!" Eowyn exclaimed plaintively. "He is not some new species of butterfly!"

"Oh!" Fallah closed her book with a snap. She looked mortified. "I am as bad as Shaeri in my own way! I am sorry!" But Legolas was laughing merrily.

"Shaeri?" Eowyn asked, frowning suspiciously.

"Daiyo!" Fallah said, her eyes narrowing. "I came from our little fireworks shop for an hour ago to check up on the wounded here. I found Shaeri, her sister and two other trollops from Deep Wells gathered around the bed, asking him if he would like help bathing?"

"Were they indeed?" Eowyn asked dangerously.

Legolas only continued chuckling. It was a curiously male sound. "The ladies of Gondor are more subtle," he told them. "They usually begin a conversation with an inquiry as to whether my skill as an archer is as great as tales say."

Gimli laughed aloud.

"They meant no harm," the Elf said, observing Eowyn’s baleful expression. "They were gracious when I gave them a variation of the little speech I use when I am in Minas Tirith. I told them Elves do not accept ‘baths’ from women unless they are first joined in wedlock."

"Pah!" Fallah said. "You were too kind to them!" But even she was fighting laughter now. "That will only earn you a slew of marriage proposals."

Eowyn was very glad the three of them had a sense of humor about the whole matter, for she had none. She made a mental note to assign Shaeri to guard her own mother’s villa tonight. An entire night spent trapped in her mother’s nagging, over-bearing company would be fitting punishment for creeping into Legolas’ sickroom and---and peeping at her while he lay hurt and unaware!

Another two days sped by in a never-ending fury of work and preparation. Eowyn had let Fallah hand pick her helpers in the little weapons smithy they had made of the great pressroom in Obari’s largest winery at the northern edge of the city. Most of those working there were either apothecaries or healers themselves, with some experience in combining and mixing delicate substances. Even so, Eowyn had decided to use the presshouse because it contained many metal cauldrons the shield the blast of any mishaps, and, more important, it did not lie in a residential neighborhood.

On the morning of the tenth day, after a private conversation with Indassa, Hurin, Legolas and Gimli the night before, Eowyn formally announced in open Council her intention to lead an assault upon the Nests of the Hunters in two days time.

The meeting did not go well.

All of Eowyn’s predictions about the slow landslide of political stability were proving true. The session degenerated into a shouting match even before Eowyn took the floor. Obari wanted Indassa to move back to the Royal Villa, or better, to her own villa. The older woman made a lengthy speech, making much of the fact that the Queen was still of tender years, and should not be subjected to the sullying influences of common rice farmers and foreign soldiers. Sharadi, no friend to Eowyn, but ever the hard-headed pragmatist, had cut her off in mid-oration. She had proclaimed bluntly that a slightly sullied Queen was infinitely preferable to a dead one.

In the wake of that spitting cat fight, Eowyn made her announcement to dead silence, carefully outlining the plan of attack. She surveyed the pale faces of these women with whom she would have never willing shared company, and felt a brief tug of sympathy at the fear she saw there. Surprisingly, it was Imshada the Laundress who finally voiced the question Eowyn dreaded.

"It is ten full days now and still they have not attacked," the heavy-set woman said. "I am beginning to worry that we court our own doom in this attack. It is by no means assured that an attack will come at all from the Crags. But if we dare to make open war upon them---"

And again, Sharadi surprised Eowyn. "What will you do if we all go back to our lives and they fall upon us in a month, or three months? Or next year?" The Treasurer’s Wife gave Eowyn a cold accusatory eye. "We have shed their blood, and blood, above all things, they do not forget. Or forgive. It is all or nothing now. Either we wipe them from the face of the earth or they will devour us, be it sooner or later."

"And when they are gone," another woman asked in despair. "What

then? Harad and the tribes of Khand will fall upon us like ravening wolves!"

"Not if Gondor extends its hand in alliance," Indassa said clearly.

Shocked silence greeted her words.

"The Lords of Gondor and I have spoken at length," the Queen told them slowly. "If Elessar agrees to a pact of friendship with Rhunballa, and his two ministers---Lord Gimli and Lord Legolas---seem certain he will, the implicit threat of Gondor’s wrath will deter any future attacks upon our lands." She smiled ever-so-slightly. "Especially in light of my recent widowhood. Harad will be in chaos, its chieftains fighting among themselves for the throne. Khand cannot unify its warring tribes to mount a large assault, and all potential raiding parties will be greeted by the Watch, in any case."

"You would except the hand of the Westron King who slew our men at Pellennor, my Queen?" Obari asked. She seemed to be teetering on the threshold of another shrieking rage.

"I excepted the hand of blood-drinking monsters to rid myself of Haradoun," Indassa replied coldly. "Shall I flinch at a treaty with a mere mortal man if it will protect my kingdom?" The Queen leveled a chilly gaze at the lot of them, and for the first time, Eowyn saw that it was not an act. Indassa was not playing Queen. She was sure and calm, holding her court beneath her hand with true monarch’s authority. Eowyn fought to hide the proud smile that welled up in her heart. "We are under martial law as long as I deem necessary," Indassa went on in a tone that brooked no argument.

The Wineseller’s Wife whirled on Eowyn. "This is all of you, Eowyn of Rohan!"

"What is all of me?" Eowyn smiled at her blandly. "Indassa is mistress here. I am not. Nor are you. Perhaps that is what grieves you most."

"I will not suffer such insolence from the barbarian whore of Gondor’s brigand King!" Obari spat, her black eyes bright with malice. How fast rumor travels, Eowyn marveled. The other women were all favoring her with the kind of speculative avidity that women display when they have just heard a particularly juicy bit of gossip about someone they dislike intensely.

"I," said Eowyn softly, "am still a maid. Which is more than can be said for either of your daughters."

The council ended with the other members of Queen’s Council physically restraining the red-faced Obari from leaping at Eowyn.

The following day, an hour after midday, a dance broke out in the Square of the Fountain. It was not a planned thing. It simply happened, coming together in the space of half an hour. Somalani drummers and Laketown pipers began to play in the square in an attempt to relieve general tension. A brace of Sabadi bows joined them and someone brought out a stringed Gondorian lyre. People gathered and the Bakers set up little stalls of fry bread and carob-dipped apples and sugar-cured dates and jerky. A short time later, Eowyn found herself watching Fallah spin round in the arms of Marsil of Gondor as the young man tried to lead her through some sort of Westron reel. Fallah was giggling like a young girl.

The strange and wonderful thing was that there seemed to theme here. Everyone was dancing the dances of their native lands, or the lands of their fathers. Many of the young women of Haradrim descent was dancing the Sa-Samanis in a kind of wild defiance of old custom. Sa-samanis was a dance of seduction, hips swiveling, arms held high in such a way that thrust the breasts up and outward, and extended in open invitation. Among the Haradrim, it was only danced in the privacy of the bedchamber, a woman’s powerful weapon to wind her husband round her little finger.

 Shaeri and a dozen women of the Watch moved through the sinuous paces of this dance. Eowyn reflected sourly that a leg broken in three places below the knee had not slowed the Commander of Deep Wells Watch House down one wit. The little knot of surviving Haradrim soldiers was watching in open-mouthed shock.

"Nay, young Chieftain!" An older man was telling Moussah as Eowyn passed within earshot. "These witches will not brook a second wife! They will wither your manhood and cast you out of doors to the Dhak-Dir you if do not keep solely to their bed. That is no way to live!"

"One beautiful wife and a dozen fine horses is no way to live?" Moussah chuckled. His gaze was upon Shaeri as she moved past, his eyes burning with interest. "Your blood runs cold with age, Hatab!"

"Sah, boy!" Hatab spat out a mouthful of chew weed. "You did not say that! A dozen horses? One good horse is worth a dozen women!"

Moussah eyed him critically. "A man cannot take a good horse to his bed, old uncle. Or at least, he should not try!" The raucous laughter of the others followed.

Eru, but this land had a wondrous magic about it, to have very nearly absorbed the remnants of its own invaders in less than two weeks time!

Eowyn found Indassa sitting on the stone circle that ringed the fountain. Her head was bent forward, deep in conversation with Fallah. She quickened her pace toward them, wondering what had gone amiss, what still had yet to be made ready for the attack on the morrow. Fallah’s rich laughter rang out, responding to something the Queen had said.

"Eowyn!" Indassa told her brightly. "I did it!"

"Did what?"

"I kissed the Elf!"

Eowyn stared at her, hoping her mouth was not hanging open like that of a hooked trout. "He kissed you?"

"No!" Indassa shook her head. "I kissed him. He was very surprised!"

Behind her, Eowyn heard Gimli’s deep, hearty chuckle. The Dwarf had come upon them just in time to hear Indassa’s last words. "I am sure he was, little Highness!"

Indassa sighed then, and that sigh seemed to dispel the childlike giggles. For the first time to Eowyn’s eyes, the little Queen seemed to have the physical appearance of a woman of nearly nineteen. The look in Indassa’s eyes was both wise and a little sad. "He spoke me fair and told me I was a lovely young woman," she said. "He said that one day I should meet a kind and handsome Man who would love me all the days of my life." She sighed again, this time very softly. "I knew I could not have one such as he for my own. But I am happy he was my first kiss." Her lips bowed mischievously.

"Even if the kiss was stolen."

"Come, my Queen!" Fallah said kindly, taking Indassa’s hand. "You said you wanted to see my shop of exploding wonders. I will take you on an official royal armory inspection."

"That is my call to arms as well," Gimli said. "I will go along as your royal body guard if the Lady Eowyn does not mind. Though I will warn you, Highness, Mistress Fallah’s particular recipe for what we Dwarves call mining powder is not a pretty scent."

"I have a kerchief to cover my nose," Indassa said cheerfully.

Eowyn watched them go. She had tensed reflexively at the thought of allowing Indassa within blast range of the fireworks armory, but the combination of Gimli and Fallah’s supervision would keep her safe from mishaps. She sat on the fountainside bench, running her mind over the nearly endless list of all that could go amiss tomorrow. The most vexing part of the entire battle plan was that the Crags were half a day’s hard ride east of the city. Half a day’s sunlight lost before battle was even joined. She told herself that the Elvish Shards would see them through, even if dusk caught them, but---

It must be a clean, quick and merciless strike. Twenty barrels of lamp oil combined with Fallah’s firecraft should burn them out, ensuring that Queen’s Guard Watch House and the sixty or so hand-picked members of other Houses, along with the full compliment of the foreign soldiers of Gondor and Harad should not even be called upon to fight in any true sense.

And if the liquid fire they meant to pour into their viper holes only stirred up a hornet’s nest among the survivors, the Hunters would reckon with Fallah’s skylighters and the Shards of Elwing’s orb.

All was in readiness, she told herself. As ready as mortals could be to beard monsters in their own dens. She wondered over Satti the Baker’s stall and bought a piece of honey-covered fry bread, trying to remember the last time she had eaten. Trying, for at least half an hour, not to think of tomorrow.

"I am sorry, my sister."

Shaeri was standing before her, her hands clasped before her like a penitent child.

"For what?" Eowyn asked, a bit ungraciously.

"For trying to steal your Elf warrior out of your own bed," Shaeri said. "That was ill done." The head of the Wineseller’s daughter was covered in a fine spray of water from the fountain and her clothes were soaked through with her own sweat from her exertions, but this only added to the aura of dark-eyed allure she carried about her like a second skin. Shaeri’s free way with men and her dark olive beauty always left Eowyn feeling awkward and colorless.

"He is not my Elf," Eowyn told her. She wished fervently everyone would stop imagining lovers for her. She frowned guiltily, remembering her ugly words for Shaeri’s mother in Council the day before. She had all but publicly proclaimed Obari’s daughters harlots. "I have said words in anger to your mother that have touched upon your honor," she said humbly. "I am sorry for that."

Shaeri’s face bloomed into a delighted grin. "Anything that sends my mother into a frothing rage is well-spoken, my Captain!"

She whirled away, using the unevenness of gait the splint on her leg gave her to accent the sway of her hips. She beckoned Moussah to join her as she danced. He obeyed, but slowly, striding toward her with an arrogant grace that made Eowyn wonder if Shaeri would conquer or be conquered here. Eowyn caught sight of Obari, veiled in matronly silks, watching this with a slightly pleased expression on her normally glowering face. The older woman would be awash in joy if her daughter settled upon a man of pure Haradrim blood, a Chieftain’s son, no less.

Eowyn watched the couples square off, their bodies in time with the pounding rhythm of the drums, their bodies in time with each other. It was odd how the aura of what one might daintily refer to as ‘romantic need’ had steadily increased around her in the last few days. One day, she would ask Fallah if there was some direct physical correlation between nerve-wracking tension and desire. Moussah and Shaeri moved together, their bodies in perfect sync, an inch from a kiss, each taunting the other with their nearness, suspended on the edge of almost.

Eowyn felt the amused half-smile fade from her lips. Perhaps she knew why Shaeri irritated her so at times. Eowyn never joined the revelers, never took a partner. She never felt that burning rhythm in her veins, the call to dance the oldest dance of man and woman. Indassa’s girlish attraction to Legolas had given her hope for herself as well the Queen. That one day they might both be healed and whole. Perhaps Haradoun, in his crude brutality, had done less damage ultimately than Grima. Haradoun had not made Indassa enjoy what he did to her.

"Have you seen Gimli?"

Eowyn started out of her own thoughts. Legolas was still favoring his right leg, but otherwise, he seemed completely recovered.

"He is with Fallah and Indassa at the presshouse," she said. She felt her body grow suddenly tense at the worry she saw in his face. "What has happened?"

"Nothing," he said, still frowning worriedly. "Or I hope it is nothing. I was with Hurin in the corrals below the city, helping him decide which horses would be least prone to panic. Gimli had said he would join me. I---I felt a sudden chill when I realized he was late." He shook his head as though to dispel the feeling. "It is probably nothing."

"Let us go to the presshouse," she suggested. "It is not far and I need to ask Fallah some questions about the new ‘fire bottles’ she is working on anyway."

They set off at an unhurried pace. Eowyn consciously slowed her stride to keep the Elf from overtaxing his leg wound. "Are you well enough to ride with us on the morrow?" She asked tentatively.

"I am well enough for this fight," he said briefly.

She took him at his word. She hated to be coddled after an injury or illness and had a suspicion he was much the same.

"Thank you," she said as they turned the corner onto Bright Street. "For you kindness to Indassa."

"She is a sweet child." He said with a brief, sad smile. "Though, I will confess, she startled me. She was grieved when I would not let her kiss me a second time and asked if I found her unpretty."

"Oh," she said softly.

"I wish---" He stopped walking and turned to face her, his beautiful face wistful and sad. "I wish I could let mortals see themselves with Elvish sight, that sees the flesh as the imperfect shell which encases true beauty. I wish I could let your folk see how beautiful they truly are, how their spirits burn like candles lit at both ends. You are like falling stars---brilliant and beautiful and so very, very brief sometimes I almost weep when I look at you."

Gazing into his eyes, Eowyn felt a thrill of wonder and unease. There were years beyond counting reflected there and an inner light of vision and perception that was beyond her. Utterly beyond. It so was easy to forget what he was at times, how uncanny and different his nature was from hers, even from Gimli’s. The familiarity of friendship let her forget too often.

"Fallah told me Indassa’s tale," he said softly. "If I could, I would give her all that she desires of me. She deserves as many sweet kisses as her young heart can withstand. But I cannot. In the Firstborn, desire only follows love. Or else, they bloom as one in the heart. Want does not kindle in our bodies unless first we have given our hearts. Your Indassa is a dear child, for whom I wish all the happiness in the world, but I do not love her."

"If the nature of Mankind were fashioned so, it would be a happier world," she told him.

A blinded surge of heat and force tore down the narrow corridor of the street and knocked them off their feet.

Eowyn climbed to her feet, staring stupidly at the hail of burning wood shards falling all about them like incandescent rain. "Do not mix the green canisters with the blue, Sommi," Fallah’s voice echoed in her head. "Unless you want to be blown sky high."

She began running, her heart in her mouth, praying aloud in a raw, hysterical voice that somehow, some way, the three occupants of the presshouse had not been inside when it blew. She was aware of Legolas sprinting ahead of her, but of nothing else. Not Legolas voice crying out Gimli’s name, his voice as broken with fear as her own. Not the laundry maids running from the laundry next door as it caught fire, sending up the cry to bring water to douse the blaze.

She stumbled into the burning rubble where the presshouse had stood only moments ago. She began turning over everything she could find that was bigger than a cupboard, ignoring the blistering heat and the noxious fumes. The one mercy seemed to be that the explosion had been to violent it had snuffed out its own fire for the most part. After several torturous minutes of searching, she literally ran into Legolas.

She gripped his arms. "Where are they? Where are they?!"

"They could not have been----been blown to nothing!" He said. His gray eyes widened, standing out starkly in his pale face. "There is a cellar, Gimli said! If they were down there---!"

Eowyn made a soft noise of renewed hope. They dug through the smoking wreckage and found the trap door. Eowyn wrenched it open, taking no notice of the hot metal handle that scalded her hand. She slid down the ladder, batting away the smoke, shielding her watering eyes. She moved forward and stumbled over something, barely aware that Legolas had leapt lightly to the ground beside her. She knelt down, and saw what she had stumbled over.

It was Fallah.

She lay one shaking hand before her friend’s mouth and exhaled sharply in relief as she felt breath there. She lay one hand aside the physician’s head and it came away damp and sticky with blood.

"She must have been hit by a falling beam," Eowyn said. "She is unconscious but she lives! We must—"

"Eowyn."

She turned her head, all of her hope dying in the quiet, terrible sadness she heard in his voice. She began shaking her head in denial even as she crawled across the dirt floor of the cellar. No! No! No!

She scrambled beneath the smoke-wreathed shaft of sunlight that shot through the open door above them, following his voice to the far end of the cellar. It was chill and dank as a cave down here and nearly as dark. She stopped, staring down at what he had found, frozen in time. Her mind was trying desperately to reject what her eyes were seeing.

Indassa lay on her back, dead eyes open in innocent surprise. Her head was tilted at an odd angle. This had not been a falling ceiling beam. Something----something had broken her little neck and cast her aside like a piece of rubbish.

Eowyn did not feeling Legolas’ hand threading through hers. His voice was only a distant buzzing in her ears. He was saying something about Fallah needing help, about finding Gimli. She knew what he was saying was important. Indassa’s body was bereft of life, an empty house that no amount of help could fill again. She knew she should stand and act quickly. She knew that a Healer’s attention might mean the difference between life and death to Fallah now, but---

She could not move. She could not act. She could see nothing but the boundless promise of the future that had stretched out before Indassa---love and long life and freedom for herself and her people. And all of those sweet promises would never be fulfilled. All of Indassa’s possible futures terminated in this dank hole in the ground. How long had she let the girl out of her sight. And hour? Surely it had not been a full hour since Indassa and Fallah had left the Square, the Queen and the apothecary’s daughter, walking hand in hand like sisters. She shook her head again, knowing no amount of denial could ever make it right again.

"I am sorry," she whispered, touch the girl’s beautiful face. The skin was already growing cool to the touch.

Eowyn’s eyes widened. Her lungs filled with smoky air as she inhaled. She sat for an instant, motionless, poised on the edge of a scream as the irrevocable impact finally struck her with full force, like a sword thrust through the heart.

She screamed.

She doubled over, wailing like a houseless soul, digging nails into her palms. And dry-eyed. Always barren of tears, even now. She could not cry, so she simply keened.

Legolas gently raised her up by her shoulders, unbending her body and wrapping his arms around her. After a space of time, her cries tapered down to a low soft moan. He lay a hand against the back of her head. "Cry, mellon-nin! You must weep!"

"I cannot!" She moaned. "Oh, Eru! I wish I could!" She twisted out of his gentle embrace. She did not want comfort. She did not deserve it. She pushed him back and shook her head again. She shoved feeling and pain down into a well of still cold water, deep inside the bower of her heart. She must move and think. She could not feel now. Fallah needed her! Fallah needed her and was not beyond all help!

"Fallah," she said aloud. She met his gaze and closed her heart to the unshed tears standing in his eyes, the sympathy and answering grief she saw there. "And---and Gimli?

He began to shake his head in bewilderment. Then he froze, every muscle in tensing with sudden fear. "Run," he hissed.

"What---?"

He did not wait for an answer. He grabbed her around the waist and hurled her with all his might toward the bright shaft of light below the cellar’s open hatch.

"Run!" He cried. She heard the ring of his long knives clearing their scabbards. "Do not---!" A dull, meaty thud cut off his words.

She drew her sword, standing wild-eyed in the swirling dust motes of sunshine from above, hearing the sound of running feet, of Ikako’s voice shouting commands. Again, the cold draft of cave smell filled her nostrils.

Had they burrowed up through the cellar floor in the night and lain in wait, she wondered? Or had they simply slipped last night under cover of darkness? And of course, in broad daylight, no one would be carrying a Shard with them. But how had they gotten past the two Shards she had left here in the presshouse out of sheer paranoia as the day of the attack grew closer? For the moment it did not matter. She would not run and leave her surviving friends to their mercies. She would be damned to eternal torment if she let one of Indassa’s murderers leave this cellar alive.

If she moved out of the shaft of light she was a dead woman. Fallah, she could see, lying just a few feet from the base of the ladder. Legolas and Gimli---the could not be dead!

"Show yourself!" She commanded the shifting darkness around her.

He moved out of shadow, emerging in a gust of cold, rancid air with casual unhurried contempt.

"Morsul," she breathed.

"Give me a kiss," he said with a mocking smile. "And perhaps I shall not

bid my brothers tear out the Elf’s throat."

She returned his gaze blankly. She could feel herself sinking deeper into that cold quiet place of fearless, terrible rage that cared nothing for life, that welcomed death like a lover’s fond embrace if in dying she could slay the one before her. It was from this bleak cell of icy, merciless purpose that she had slain Angmar.

"You will kill him regardless," she said indifferently. The utter absence of any feeling in her voice gave him pause. "As you killed Indassa," she said. "Was it you who wrung her neck, Morsul?"

He nodded slowly. He smiled, regaining his arrogant composure, baring razored incisors. His teeth were tipped with blood. Was it Gimli’s, she wondered. Or Legolas’? She could feel the others encircling her like gusts of dark winds, laughing softly among themselves.

"My Queen commanded her death," he said. "For the defiance of the Watch at the South Pass. For the plot to burn us out of our happy home. The apothecary’s daughter lives, but I have stove in her skull. Her brain swells with her own blood. She will die soon, or better yet, she will live on in mindless idiocy. A fitting punishment for such a clever little firebug."

Eowyn drew her long knife, holding it low and ready as she held her sword in her right hand. "And Legolas and Gimli?"

"They shall have a private audience with my Queen," Morsul said. "She has spun many tales and webs to bring them within her reach."

"So, then," Eowyn smiled cold death into the monster’s face. "They live still. That is all I wished to know." She whipped up both sword and knife, holding them at an angle to the sunlight above her, reflecting it into his face with her sword blade. Her knife cast a beam of borrowed sun at the obsidian shape the loomed up on her left. Morsul blurred backwards with a startled angry howl of pain, but the others were not so fast. She spun, casting sunlight with the twin mirrors of her blades, feeling an icy, vicious satisfaction at their high, witchy shrieks of pain. The sickening scent of burnt flesh filled the room.

"Clever bitch," Morsul chuckled thickly.

Something bowled out of the blackness and struck her like a falling boulder. She flew back, falling out of the light. The hard-packed dirt of the cellar floor struck the wind out of her lungs. She had one fleeting instant to realize that the ‘boulder’ Morsul had lobbed at her was Gimli’s unconscious body.

"Even a naugrim is good for something," Morsul’s voice said in her ear.

Then he gripped her by the hair and dragged her into the darkness. Morsul wrenched her to her feet like a rag doll and spun her around to face him. His hand whipped out like a snake striking and locked around her throat in a choke hold. The hand around her neck was no longer the hand of an Elf. It had shifted to a taloned clawed thing. He was burned, one side of his face charred and still smoking. She watched in horror as the dark Elf’s beautiful face twisted, the bones rippling sickly beneath the skin, threatening to morph into some unimaginable monstrosity. He uttered a low, snarling growl as he fought for control. Slowly, he seemed to gather himself, to reign his temper with a supreme act of will. His face settled back into its normal ivory planes, perfect and unburned once more. He eyed her thoughtfully.

Here was the end. One way or another she was lost. She did not think or stop to consider. She turned the knife in her clenched hand upon herself and trust it upward toward her own heart. But even this was denied her. He caught her hand casually, as though he had known what she would do. He stopped the blade a half instant before it pierced her breast.

"None of that," he told her softly. "You will not escape us so easily."

She watched, paralyzed like a mouse gazing down the open maw of a kingsnake, as he bared his fangs and quite deliberately pierced his own tongue. He smiled, like a man savoring a long awaited banquet, as his mouth filled with blood.

The hand around her throat flexed, strangling her. And when she opened her mouth, desperate for air, he pulled her to him, pressing his foul mouth against hers. He thrust his tongue forward, forcing the blood down her throat in an obscene perversion of a kiss.

She could not twist free or even wretch. She could feel the poison of his blood burning inside her, down to her belly, all the way to her fingertips. She did not know how long this went on, though if it had continued much longer than it did she was sure her mind would have simply come unhinged from its anchor to sanity. He withdrew, planting a gentle kiss on her forehead, smiling with delight.

The darkness bled away to a crimson-tinted blur. She sagged forward, falling against him, her knees buckling. "No," she whimpered, feeling terribly small, terribly lost. Fear, mortal terror such as she had never known, flooded through her with the burning, tingling taint of his blood.

Not this! her mind screamed. Let him tear her breastbone asunder and feast on her heart! Let him drain away every drop of blood in her body and gnaw upon her bones! But not this! Not this!

"Shh, my sunflower," he said gently, stoking her hair. "Do not fear. I have not changed you. Not completely. I have simply made you more pliant. And a bit less fragile. It would go ill for me with my mistress if I let you take your own life. She has great plans for you and your fellow heroes of Sauron’s ill-fated Great War." He swept her up in his arms and her head lolled back in lethargic horror.

"Come!" He cried.

She could see now, as though her eyes had suddenly altered to accommodate the darkness. There were half a dozen night things crouched in the farthest corner of the cellar, nursing the sizzling burn wounds she had dealt them.

Legolas was conscious, his face bloodied. Two of them held him pinned. One had a filthy, bone-colored hand clamped over his mouth as he writhed in their immovable grips like a madman. Morsul knelt before him, still holding her limp body in his arms. He gripping the other Elf’s pale hair roughly, raising Legolas head up he could peer into his prisoner’s face.

Legolas spat out a string of fluent curses in his own tongue and the dark Elf only shook his head in disgust. "Silvan features and Sindarin coloring. You are a right mongrel, are you not, boy? And sworn brother to one of the stinking naugrim, no less. I knew you grandsire in Doriath, son of Thranduil. How fallen is the House of Oropher!"

The sound of running feet, clattering over the rubble above, familiar voices calling her name. Eowyn tried to answer, tried to scream, but no sound would come forth.

"Come!" Morsul said again "Bring them!"

The cellar shifted and wheeled about her as Morsul leapt to his feet, still holding her close, like a father carrying an ailing child. He led them to a ragged hole in the earthen floor. It gave forth of the cool dank breath the vast caverns that lay beneath. The world upended as Morsul dove head first into the open maw of the sinkhole he and his fellows had torn beneath the cellar. Then they were falling downward into a bottomless sea of night.

(Coming Soon: Chapter III---The Nest of the Hunters)