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.

Author’s Note: This is NOT the last chapter, I fear. Initially, I had intended to post the last two chapters together, but in the interest of posting a little sooner, I give you this penultimate chapter. I have finished the first draft of chapter 6 and expect to have it ready to roll very soon.

THANKS SO MUCH to all the kind people who have reviewed this fic and been patient through an extremely long lag between updates. School and work have beat the author down the last few months. With the last chapter, I will post personal thanks to everyone individually. Now, on to chapter 5.

Chapter 5 --- Night and Madness

Eowyn woke from her warm half dose to the sound of her brother’s voice. She was soaking in a bath of warm, soapy water. She smiled and stretched, a sweet burn of pleasure rolling through her at nothing more than the memory of Legolas’ hands threading through her hair as he sat curled behind her in old King Udam’s bath. He had washed her hair and bathed her with slow, exquisite thoroughness before allowing her to return the favor.

"She is awake," Legolas’ voice drifted in from the adjoining bedchamber, "but she is not yet finished bathing. I would give her a few moments before you enter."

"Would you indeed?" Eomer’s voice said caustically. "I should think you would find nothing strange about viewing my sister naked!"

Eowyn sat up with a wince, wringing the water from her hair. She spied a fresh change of clothing and saw that it was her own; black Sabadi trousers, her linen Captain’s tunic with light leather guard vest. Her vest bore the crest of the house of Rhunballa’s kings, the badge that marked her as Queen’s Guard. She removed the seal and kissed it lovingly. And then she tucked it away for later, along with her grief for Indassa. Fallah must have brought the clothing to the Villa at some point. She eased out of the great iron tub and began dressing hurriedly, listening to the low-key, tense exchange on the other side of the door. Legolas seemed to have declined to answer Eomer’s last comment. As her brother began to speak again after the little silence, she felt her temper begin to rise with each word he uttered.

"Aragorn shall answer to me for locking the two of you in a bedchamber, that even now reeks our your scent and hers, as part of some obscure Elvish remedy! You are not to blame for this dishonor upon her," her brother said this , as though he were fighting for calm. He seemed to be trying to reign in his knee jerk anger and remember that Legolas was a friend who had just suffered a horrific ordeal. "But by Eorl’s bones, you will marry her, Legolas!"

"With joy, my lord," Legolas said without any ire. "We have spoken of this, she and I, and I have set the decision in her hands. If she will have me, I will exchange vows with her in the mortal fashion. I bade her think a while upon the matter, and we have agreed to wait at least until the coming battle is won to speak of it again."

"She will agree," Eomer said firmly. "I shall see to that!"

Eowyn bit back a soft growl of old, too-familiar anger, pulling on her boots with a violent jerk.

"How?" Legolas asked softly.

"What do you mean?!" Eowyn could almost see the scowl on her brother’s face deepen.

"She might have heeded Theoden’s commands," Legolas said, "for he was as a father to you both. But you are a brother and she has not been your charge for several years. In truth, she never was. If you command her to do ought as though she were your chattel to bid wed where and who you desire, she will box your ears."

"She would not---" Eomer broke off and went silent. Then he gave a short little bark of laughter. "Aye. That is true." He sighed heavily, and as he did, seemed to exhale the better part of his unthinking anger. After a moment, he spoke again. "I have endured four years of hearing her sweet valiant name besmirched by the filthy rumors of idle fools, Legolas! This is another bucket of oil cast upon that fire. The soldiers of Gondor and my Riders saw too much at that cottage, and now they are all a-chatter about the two of you. I knocked out the teeth of one of Aragorn’s men this morning when I came upon him speculating to his fellows as to whether the Lady of Rohan would soon bear a half-elven child! I---" He growled, low and angry, like a young bear awakened early from his winter’s sleep.

"She is not with child," Legolas said with complete surety. And upon hearing those words, Eowyn felt a little hitch inside her chest, a strange, incongruous mix of relief and sadness. "Eomer," he went on in a gentle voice. "Speak with her. It is not my place to say, I know, but you and she should reconcile before the coming struggle is upon us. Even in victory, all of us may not live to see tomorrow’s sunrise. It is a perilous time to leave ought unsaid between yourself and one you love so dearly."

"Aye," Eomer agreed, his voice a grave, soft rumble. He sounded very like their uncle in this mood. "Aye. And let us make peace as well, my friend. I---I will be happy to call you brother if we live through this, Legolas!"

She waited, hearing Legolas take his leave quietly, not trusting herself to fling open the bedchamber door that separated her from her brother. She sat in the little chair beside the bath, trying to gather her thoughts, trying to imagine what she was going to say to him. She was a coward, she knew, waiting for him to come to her, but---

The light tap on the bathing room door made her jump. "Sister? May I enter?"

He entered the bath slowly, as though he thought he might spook her if he offered any sudden movement. His beard was fuller, she thought foolishly. It was the only noticeable difference from the picture she had kept lovingly preserved in her mind for four years. The sight of him, standing before her, his big hands clenched with worry for her, with love, with anger and with indecision as to what he should do or say now that they were face to face in the waking light of day broke down all her feeble pretensions of composure.

She flung herself into his arm, sobbing. He returned her embrace with backbreaking strength, his great chest trembling with suppressed tears. They said nothing for several long minutes; they could only hold each other and weep.

"I searched the whole of Middle Earth for you!" He said hoarsely. "I followed every rumor, gave ear to every fool and charlatan who claimed to have heard tale of you. When I set out to this land at Aragorn's side, we began to hear rumors from the Rhunland caravaners and the Laketown tradesmen of a golden-haired Northwoman who commanded the women soldiers of Rhunballa. To have my hope kindled again, only to learn from your shield maidens that you had been taken by those monstrosities was almost more than I could bear. We had not been in the City a day when my scouts came upon Gimli wandering in the Eastward wastelands of this valley. Aragorn had to threaten to tie me to a stump to keep me from riding to your rescue when Gimli recovered his senses and told us that you were alive and still there captive. And then, the Crags, the entire mountain the women of this land call Dhak-Dir, seemed to explode. Smoke and earth darkened the sky for two days, and Gimli laughed and told me they must have made the mistake of angering you."

Eowyn began to laugh weakly.

"We began searching the rubble of the mountain and the Dustlands," Eomer went on, "but we found no trace of either of you. Aragorn preserved my hope, telling me it was more than possible that you and Legolas had escaped the fall of the mountain. And then, a farmer of the Deep Wells village came to us, confessing he had taken to sneaking to his croft just before dusk and helping himself to the possessions of his neighbors. He told us night had caught him out of doors and he had nearly fallen prey to a pair of Hunters. He described both of you in great detail." Eowyn's ribs creaked as he tightened his embrace. "When we found you, it seemed the cruelest joke imaginable that you had destroyed a host of monsters, only to---to---"

"I am myself again," she said softly, gently disengaging herself from his arms. "And Gimli was wrong, there in the cottage. Even in that haze of hunger and darkness, I knew you. I knew my brother and would not have slain him!"

He studied her a moment in silence, heedless of the tears streaking his face.

"Why, Eowyn?"

"Why?" She repeated, though she knew already the gist of his question.

"Why did you leave your people?" His voice was laced with sorrow, but there was anger there as well, now. "Why did you leave me, without so much as a word? You are all that is left of our family. Theodred was dead, Theoden was dead, and you were gone---dropped, it seemed, from the face of Middle Earth. You left me alone, bereft of all those I loved most!"

Each word, half-wounded, half-angered, was like a knife thrust in her breast. She met his eyes, knowing there were no sufficient words of apology for what she had done to him. Elbereth, she wished he would shout and rail at her. The uncomprehending hurt in his dear eyes was more than she could bear. And she could not tell him why. The knowledge of what had befallen her, the fact that she had been enspelled and ill-used under his very nose, would deal him a blow that would never truly heal. She gazed up at him mutely with no idea of how she would answer him.

He spoke first. "Was it Wormtongue, sister?" Eomer asked slowly, his face terrible. "Did he---did he hurt you after I was banished?"

Nothing he could have said could have shocked her more. She opened her mouth to lie, to tell him his suspicions were unfounded madness. But no words came forth. She stared back at him, her face drained of all color. She could not speak of this to him. She had never been able to give voice to what had been done to her. She began to tremble, her treacherous eyes filling. He covered her smaller hands with his, gently, as though he feared his touch would fright her.

"Nay, do not speak," he said softly. "I have my answer. I saw the changes in you when we met again after the Battle of the Hornburg. I knew something was horribly amiss. But, Sweet Lady, sister! The whole world was burning down and---"

"And my wounds were nothing compared to that," she finished. "That was my thought as well."

"I turned my memories of that time over in my head a thousand times after you vanished. I examined and rehashed your every movement and word. It came to me, the why of it, a year ago, when I rescued a dozen women taken captive by brigands in a raid. The look in their eyes was the same. I am sorry, sister! I should have been there to save you!"

"He---" He throat began to close. She cleared it and tried to speak. "You could have done nothing, Eomer. There was dark magic involved, the same sort he used on Theoden. He---he---" She clenched her teeth shut, fighting angrily against the tearing sobs rose up in her chest. After a moment, she managed to steady her breath once more. "After the War," she told him quietly, "while I lingered in the Houses of Healing, I came to believe I would never be whole again unless I forsook the rule and protection of everyone and everything I had ever known. I cannot explain it in words that make sense. I only knew that if I returned home with you or wed the Lord Faramir, I would never feel safe or strong again. But that is no excuse for abandoning you utterly. I could have sent letters. I could have let you know I was alive and eased your mind. I am sorry! I am so sorry!"

He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. "I love you, Eowyn," was all he said by way of forgiveness. She supposed, in the end, that was all that needed to be said. "How is it with you, now?" He asked tentatively.

"The Hunters' poison still dirties my blood," she said, and immediately regretted it when she saw his face. She wondered how much Aragorn had told him. "Legolas, Gimli and I will not be free of this evil until their Queen is dead." She met his eyes, her gaze growing cold and steely. "I am going to kill her."

"Aye," he said with an odd little chuckle. Whatever he had seen in her face must have unnerved him. "You seem to have made a life's work slaying monsters." He paused and eyed her. "I meant to ask if you are well otherwise. Did you find your healing?"

"I did," she replied softly. "Though I was not wholly healed until I took Legolas as my lover."

His brow furrowed at this blunt statement. His hands clenched reflexively, perhaps imagining themselves wrapped around an Elvish neck. "It was not the Hunter's blood then?" He asked too quietly.

"No," she said. "The madness came after. Do not be angered, brother, with him or with me. He loves me and I love him." Eomer growled something nonverbal and displeased, and she took his hand. "Among his people, to become lovers is to be wed. There is no dishonorable middle ground. He will wed me in the mortal fashion and love me all my days if I say yes to his suit. But I cannot think of the future right now, not with this filthy malady still fouling my blood and body."

As he listened to her words, Eomer seemed to relax marginally. Finally he snorted and laughed. "There was a great stir when I married the daughter of Prince Imrahil three years ago. The sons of Numenor seemed to think a wild Northman, even a King, was too lowborn to marry into the line of Dol Amroth. The noblewomen of Minas Tirith, in particular, will be seeking your head when they learn you and Legolas are betrothed." He spoke as though the question of her consent to marriage was a forgone conclusion. "His father will be aggrieved as well."

"Aggrieved or angered?" Eowyn asked.

"It is often difficult to tell one from the other with Thranduil," Eomer grunted. "I met him once, when Aragorn convened a Council of Kings two years ago. He is very like Erkenbrand, if you take my meaning. He is a good man---or Elf, rather. He is also a right bastard. He has little use for mortals."

Eowyn shook her head, feeling a faint pressure in her chest, the ghost of that sense of being compressed between two great slabs of stone. "That is not something to worry over now," she said firmly. Inwardly, she turned her mind from the volatile subjects of marriage and enraged elvenkings. They were, in effect, under siege according to what little Legolas had gleaned during their painful illness of withdrawal. "Has Aragorn taken command of the City," she asked abruptly. "What has the Rhunballani Watch done during all the furor of the last two weeks?"

A rap on the bedchamber door silenced Eomer's reply.

"My Lord King!" O Sweet Lady, was that Gambold's voice?

"Come!" Eomer said.

Gambold son of Gamling strode into the room, his face tense of worried. His eyes fell on her and his face broke into full wide grin. He took her hand reverently and kissed it.

"My Lady," was all he said.

He had roughhoused with Eomer since they were tiny boys together, and shown no concern whatsoever when he broke Theodred's royal nose in sword practice. But he has always treated her as though she fell just shy of Elbereth and Varda in his personal pantheon. The simple joy this good strong man of few words put into that short greeting made Eowyn's eyes itch to cry.

"My Lord Gambold," she said, taking his huge scarred hand in hers, "It is good to see you again."

"What has happened?" Eomer asked quietly. No one would have interrupted their reunion for something unimportant.

"Elessar sends word that your sister is desperately needed in Queen's Council. The two factions have been shouting at each other for an hour now and may soon come to blows. A wise man would lay money on the shield maidens of the Watch, but that would be, in effect, a military coup against the ministers."

Of course. The Watch must have squared off against Obari and her ministers, vying for control of the kingdom.

"Let us go!" Eowyn said. She had begun moving before she even finished speaking.

Getting through the Royal Villa to the Council Hall was easier said than done. The corridors just beyond the royal wing were so crowded with people they could not pass. The whole of the kingdom was gathered in the Villa and the Fountain Square outside, Gambold told her quietly as he led them along a winding route through the servants’ hidden passageways to the foyer just outside the Hall. The press of bodies was just as great here, but they began to part a few seconds after Eowyn heard someone say her name. A choral symphony of gasps followed. Fingers pointed and every eye turned. The faces of these simple people, who stood waiting while the deliberations of the great decided their fates and the fates of their children were awestruck and a little frightened. Eowyn supposed it was not every day they saw a woman return from the dead. They parted like a wheat field pressed aside by a twister’s tale. Eowyn realized belatedly that she was now leading the way. It felt strange that her brother, her elder by four years and a King, should defer to her, even in this.

The outer rim and doorways of the Council Hall were packed to overflowing, but whatever mystique she had gained by emerging from the Nest alive held sway here as well. The throng divided, making a path for her. Eowyn could hear the shouting even above the rising murmur generated by her presence. She strode into the Queen’s Council Chamber and stopped, taking in the changes, a terrible lump rising in her throat.

All of Indassa’s pretty cushions had been replaced by Westron-style hard-backed chairs set in a ring. Eowyn set her mouth in a hard line to keep it from trembling as she realized she was instinctively searching for her little Queen, her charge, her sister. Indassa was not here and never would she return.

The acidic tones of Obari’s harsh voice, robbed of all its studied culture by rage, broke through Eowyn’s sad reverie. "Who has called this traitor, this bringer of doom, to my Council?!"

Eowyn took a few steps forward, trying to get her bearings, to discern who stood where. She advanced slowly into the center of the ring of chairs where the Councilwomen and Watch sat or stood, ranged against one another in two distinct half circles, like two opposing armies readied for battle. Before she could say ought, Shaeri spoke from where she stood, just behind the Suni’s chair.

"You must pardon our Captain, Mother," Shaeri said coolly. "She was detained from these proceedings because she was otherwise occupied with burning out the Nest of the Hunters and tearing down the Crags."

The entire assembly began to titter. But it was a nervous laughter, tempered by each individual’s fear of Obari’s long and vindictive memory. And, Eowyn realized sadly, fear of Eowyn herself and what she had done.

"Aye!" Obari said loudly, staring venom at her firstborn. "It was the least she could do after failing her charge as Queen’s Guard in the worst way imaginable!"

Eowyn kept her face blank and stony, but inside she quailed as the older woman’s words cut her to the bone. She had failed Indassa. She had failed her.

She ruthlessly pushed aside her grief and guilt, continuing to survey the Council Chamber silently. Aragorn, flanked by Legolas and Gimli, stood to one side of the Circle, hands clasped before him, watching the volley of threats and accusations as though he were a voiceless spectator. Eowyn forced her gaze past Legolas, barely touching on him. At the center of the Watch’s side of the Council Ring, sat Suni. Shaeri was on her left hand, Ikako and Fallah on her right. Behind Suni’s chair were gathered the commanders of every Watch House in Rhunballa, fanned out like an honor guard behind the---the throne.

Suni was sitting upon the throne of Rhunballa.

And once more, Eowyn thought, "Of course." The Council would have tried to seize power in the void left by Indassa’s death. The Watch must have countered by thrusting Suni upon the throne as the last living member of the royal house, albeit an illegitimate line. And now, Rhunballa stood poised on the edge of disaster, unable to prepare a defense or make any decision at all because it now had two contending governments, neither of which recognized the other’s authority. And knowing Suni’s cool pragmatism as she did, Eowyn knew this impasse would be put to rest one way or another today.

Eowyn hardened her face, and turned back to Obari, eyeing her expressionlessly. "Unless I am much mistaken, this is not your council."

Obari rose and stalked across the space that separated them, into the no man's land that lay dead center of the ring of council chairs. Eowyn moved forward slowly, back straight, head high, projecting what she fervently hoped was an aura of effortless authority. It stood in harsh contrast to the older woman's pose of hunched tension and barely contained rage. Whatever the circumstances, Obari always managed to look like nothing so much as the tyrannical mistress of her dead husband’s household, raging at her children and servants. Eowyn stared into the face of the Wineseller’s Wife and saw with shock that Obari seemed to have aged twenty years in less than three weeks. Her face was harrowed with fear and rage and something else, something terrible Eowyn could not define.

"You have no place here any longer, Eowyn of Rohan," Obari proclaimed in a voice loud enough to fill the Hall. "Our beloved Queen is dead through your own negligence! Yonder---" She stabbed a finger in Aragorn’s general direction. "---stands he who cast you off as firstwife for another. Go with him and serve as handmaid to his Queen, if he will allow it. Or follow you new lover to his Elvish haunts and bear his non-human, pale-skinned brats---"

Something whipped out of the corner of Eowyn’s eye and Obari’s tirade, her spiteful public revenge for Eowyn unkind words about her daughters’ virtue, was cut off with a loud crack. Shaeri stood beside Eowyn, holding the stinging hand she had just used to slap her mother.

The entire Hall held its breath as Obari paled with shock. No one else could have done it. If Eowyn or any of the other women of the Watch had silenced Obari so, it would have meant a brawl, had the Council’s supporters been so foolish as to rush the Watch. And then they would be trapped in a military regime that Suni ruled through force of arms alone. But because it was mother and daughter who had come to blows, no one felt inclined---or indeed, brave enough---to interfere.

"Be silent, Mother!" Shaeri whispered fiercely. "We have listened to you rail for over an hour to no good purpose. The Captain has the floor now. You may rebut her words, but you will stay your vicious defamation of her honor or I will drag you bodily from this Hall myself!"

"You little viper---!"

"Be silent but a moment, Obari," Eowyn said softly. She was not aware of anything in her voice or manner that had seemed threatening. But as Obari gazed into her face, the Wineseller’s Wife seemed to see something that frightened her more than a host of Hunters. Or perhaps, Eowyn thought with a chill, Obari saw just that---the flat, merciless stare of a Hunter shadowed behind Eowyn’s eyes. The older woman’s bright, spiteful presence flickered with a cold swirl of fear. Obari back away and resumed her seat, slowly, as though retreating from a dangerous animal. Beside Eowyn, Shaeri was gazing at her with a kind of still watchfulness. Whatever Obari had seen in Eowyn’s face, Shaeri had seen it too. And it had scared her.

"Obari is correct," Eowyn told the assembly at large. "Indassa is slain. I am no longer Queen’s Guard. And my rank of Captain of the Watch is no more."

"You are hereby reinstated," Suni said firmly.

Eowyn met the eyes of the erstwhile commander of Bent Bow Watch House and her heart smiled at the light of joyful welcome she saw in Suni’s normally inexpressive face. Suni looked distinctly uncomfortable in the rich silks Shaeri and Ikako must have forced her to don at sword point.

"And I accept with all my heart, my Queen!" Eowyn was startled at the ringing cheer that rose in the wake of her words.

"This is well and good," Sharadi said, rising from her chair on the Council’s side of the circle. She gave Suni a cold, polite bow. "Though Eowyn is not my friend, I at least, recognize the need for a unified fighting force for the duration of this emergency." There was a begrudging murmur of agreement from all the Council members except Obari, who sat taught as a mummy, eyeing Eowyn with a pinched mixture of fear and hatred. "Let us not," Sharadi went on coolly, "fight over the tea cosy while the house burns down around us." She eyed Eowyn with the flat practicality of a fishmonger’s wife gutting a trout. "We have many questions. Let us hear your tale, Eowyn of Rohan. Elessar has refused to take the floor, and the Elf has told us the news is better told from your lips."

"They ambushed us in the presshouse cellar," Eowyn said evenly. "Their leader had already slain Indassa and wound Master Gimli by the time Legolas and I arrived. They took us to the Nest. I will not speak of what passed there for I can barely think on the memory without---" She stopped speaking a moment. You could have heard a feather drop in the great Hall. "We escaped after finding a cache of Mistress Fallah’s fire bottles on the---the bodies of the Watch who were taken at South Pass." She gaze around at the stricken faces of the Watch, many of whom had known and loved those taken. "They all died very quickly and none of them were changed. We escaped, Legolas and I, thinking at the time that Gimli son of Gloin has leapt to his death. We used the last of the fire bottles to burn out the Nest as we left." She closed her eyes at the little cheer that followed her words. "Do not rejoice! We set their Queen ablaze and left her there to burn. As we fled, she pulled the mountain down upon us." And it suddenly occurred to Eowyn why Simiasha had done this. There has been cold purpose in the Huntress’ penultimate fit of rage. "I think, now, that she did this to smother the flames that were consuming her. She is not dead. And worse, she has called all of her children home, from Near Harad and the borderlands of Gondor. They are coming. They will attack. It is only a matter of time. We must prepare to fight them!"

"They are coming because of you!" Obari said stridently. "Do you think yourself a heroine, girl? Your escape has doomed us all!"

Sharadi gave Obari a measuring look that said, at this point, she was nearly ready to back Shaeri’s threat to expel Obari physically from the Hall. "The morning after you were taken, Captain," Sharadi said, "Mistress Obari found a---a note from the Queen of the Hunters. It was placed upon Indassa’s body as she lay in state, and addressed to the Council. It said our ‘treachery and defiance’ at South Pass must be repaid in blood. The Hunters’ Queen assured us that with the murder of Indassa and your capture the debt was paid in full. She let us know that there would be a renewed peace between her folk and ours." Sharadi shot Obari a venomous glance of contempt. "There were those on the Council to whom this seemed good tidings."

"But for most Rhunballani," Suni continued coldly, "the butchering of our beloved Queen was an evil that we were not willing to bear. In this state of renewed peace, the Watch began to rebuild Fallah’s arsenal and let the Council think what it wished. That one---" Suni pointed with icy precision, straight at Aragorn. "---came to the City a week ago, alone and disguised as a messenger and a physician. He put our Fallah to rights and delivered to Lord Hurin the news that five thousand Men of Gondor now traveled east from the Western Gap. He declined to mention that he had led these Men hither, and did not reveal his true identity until two days past when he bore you and Legolas back to Rhunballa City, still ailing from the wounds you took in the Nest." She said this with delicate tact, as though treading on thin, unstable ground. Eowyn suddenly realized that Suni knew, everyone knew, what had befallen her. That she had been wrenched back from the brink of the Change. Did they know or suspect that she was still unclean? If so, even Obari feared to say it aloud. "Now," Suni went on, "Elessar, the glorious hero of the Pelennor Fields, sits encamped upon our doorstep. He offers his aid."

"But before we accept or refuse his suit," Sharadi snapped, "we must decide who shall treat with him. The Council, or this self-proclaimed pretender."

Eowyn was silent a moment. "My Ladies," she said, "The Huntress will not wait for us to resolve our differences. We cannot afford such an impasse. Someone must bend."

Sharadi smiled unpleasantly. Eowyn could almost see the gears in the older woman’s mind turning and weighing her options. "We have offered a compromise that was summarily rejected."

"To take my eldest son as King," Suni said tightly. "Under the joint custody of myself and the Council. I would have one vote in twelve in how my little Aram is raised and how this land is ruled." She shook her head adamantly. "No! They would have us back to the first days of Indassa’s rule, when the Council bickered over how best to further their own financial interests and let the kingdom fall to rot!"

"There will be no kingdom if we do not decide on a course of action soon," Sharadi said harshly.

"There is another alternative!" Obari strode forward, raising her voice like a mummer mounting the stage. "An alternative to battle and bloodshed. One that has always served Rhunballa well in the past."

"And what, pray, would that be?" Sharadi asked coolly.

"We can give the Huntress what she wishes," Obari said.

Dead silence.

"She will crave revenge upon those who wounded her!" Obari cried. "If we give her Eowyn of Rohan, the Elf and the Dwarf, she will be appeased. And if we give her the great prize she has sought all along, the King of the West, she may very well reward us!"

"Madam," Sharadi said derisively, "I seriously doubt that Elessar will allow himself to be trussed up like a game foul and handed over to the Hunters. And the Watch will gut you if you raise a hand to their Captain." Her lips curled into a wry smile. "If she does not slay you herself for threatening violence upon her King and her Elf."

"We need only eject them from the City!" Obari said. She turned in a slow, wide circle, speaking to the crown at large. "All shall be as it was! The Hunters shall guard our mountains against invaders and we shall live free of fear once more!"

There was a quiet murmur from the crowd. Distantly, Eowyn was aware of a deep, quiet disappointment that bordered on heartbreak that any of the women in the crowd would even consider such a thing. But as Sharadi and Suni both rose from their chairs shouting, allied for the moment against the mere thought of another era of enslavement to the Hunters, Eowyn stood silent, making no sense of their words. All the world was quiet and cold as she closed her eyes and saw the empty chink in the presshouse crossbeam where she had placed the shard that should have guarded Fallah’s workshop and her work. It had been blasted from her mind be all the terrible events that had followed that discovery, but now it seemed to obscure all else.

"Obari," Eowyn’s too-calm voice cut through Sharadi’s deeper tones and silenced them. "How did you know that the Huntress’ true prey was Aragorn? Was that demand in the letter the Hunters left with Indassa’s body?"

Sharadi frowned impatiently. "There was no such demand in the letter. They---"

Sharadi was quick and Suni no less so. Eowyn watched in the corner of her eye as their momentary confusion bled away into shock. An instant later, the shock was replace by rage.

"You stupid cow!" Sharadi hissed.

Obari stared around at the three women who now stood in a rough circle about her. The crowd and the lesser Council members shifted nervously, straining to hear the lowered voices of the quartet of women in the center of the Audience Hall. Obari's face was pulled back in a skull-like mask of anger, fear and----and guilt. Guilt. Finally, Eowyn saw it and understood all too well whence it came.

"You thought to sell us to the Hunters," Eowyn said gently. "Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn and myself. Did Morsul come to you, Obari, and offer peace if you removed the Shard from the presshouse?"

No one in the Hall made a sound for a moment.

"Mother!" Insis' voice, crying from where she stood with the ranks of the Watch. The girl sounded terribly young suddenly. "You could not do such a thing! Tell her you did not do it!"

"Yes, Obari," Suni said coldly. "Tell her."

"I---I---" Obari seemed to be crumbling in upon herself. Then she fixed her eyes on Eowyn and seemed to rally a bit, finding strength in the focus the woman she saw as the source of all her woes. She glared at Eowyn, her face full of hateful, ratty fear. "The fiasco at South Pass was your fault! You deserved to die, you barbarian beast! And the King of Gondor? Pah! He is an enemy. The other two were strangers and not even human! And I thought---I thought, why not renew faith with our protectors. And in the same stroke, be rid of the woman who has turned Rhunballa upon its head and the King who slew my husband and my three beautiful sons! They---they were not supposed to harm Indassa! I---I never meant for that to happen!"

Eowyn stepped forward with slow, cold deliberation. She saw Indassa's pretty eyes wide open in death. She saw Legolas screaming as Simiasha thrust her mind into his. She saw Gimli's good, strong face smeared with blood and tears an instant before he jumped from the Crags. She saw herself, hanging limply in Morsul's arms as he drank her life away. Eowyn's hand never strayed to her sword as she stepped forward. Obari deserved the same fate as Haradoun. Eowyn would kill her with her bare hands.

Shaeri's face suddenly appeared before her, blocking her way to Obari.

"Eowyn, please," her friend said softly.

Eowyn stared at her, her own face blank and cold. "Do you know what she gave us over to?" She whispered. "Shall I describe what they did to us in the Nest?"

But Shaeri only bowed her head, her hands clasped before her as though in prayer. "Eowyn," she said softly. "Please do not kill my mother."

Eowyn stopped, staring into her friend's stricken face.

Obari cried out suddenly and Eowyn turned to see Sharadi and the Wineseller's Wife struggling for the mastery of a blood-tipped dagger.

"That is for our Indassa, you stupid, treasonous bitch!" Sharadi shrieked.

It took Suni, Shaeri and Eowyn together to pull the two older women apart. The audience chamber was in an uproar.

"Keep your seats!" Suni rapped out in a strident voice that brooked no disobedience.

"Momma! Momma!" Insis had broken ranks with the Watch and was running to where Shaeri was gently easing their mother to the floor.

Eowyn barely heard Suni's harsh command, bidding Ikako take Sharadi to the gaol. She was too busy watching the two sisters who had made an art form of disobedience to this the spiteful, mean-spirited woman who had born them. And now, they knelt weeping over their dying mother. Sharadi had sunk her blade deep into Obari's belly. Eowyn knew from hard experience that such a wound to the liver was almost always fatal.

"Momma!" Shaeri whispered, kissing her mother's ash-gray face. "Please do not die."

"It is just," Obari said in a dry rattling voice, barely audible. "I betrayed my queen, though I did not intend it."

Eowyn watched mutely as Fallah and Aragorn converged upon the stricken woman at the same time and knelt to tend her. Insis' muffled little sobs brought a lump to Eowyn's throat. She swallowed it along with the tears that were pricking at her eyes. Eru knew she would have cheerfully slain Obari herself five minutes ago. And now...

And now, it was impossible to rejoice in the wretched woman's death without mocking her children's grief. "Always remember," Theoden had told her long ago, "Be he vile as a Morgul wraith, there will be someone somewhere who will weep for the Man you slay."

"We must remove her from this circus tent, O King." Fallah spoke to Aragorn as a journeyman healer would address his beloved schoolmaster, Eowyn thought. She would like to learn at some point what had evoked this change in her friend, who had, until a month ago, spat on the ground whenever Elessar's name was mentioned. The grim look the Apothecary's Daughter had exchanged with Aragorn told Eowyn all she needed to know about Obari's chances. "For her daughters' sake," Fallah continued, "they should all have privacy."

"I will carry her," Aragorn agreed.

"Let Somal bear her," Suni said quietly. It was not a request. "You are needed here a little longer."

Aragorn regarded her steadily, then bowed slightly in silent, courteous assent.

"Die and be accursed, you faithless betrayer!" Someone cried from the upper gallery.

"Be silent!" Eowyn shouted. "The next one of you who treads upon the grief of the Wineseller's Daughters shall deal with me!" The Hall became went still quite suddenly.

They watched in silence as Somal came forward and bore Obari away from the gawking gazes of the assembly, to die in peace with her daughter's attending her. Eowyn's head began to throb with strain. Shaeri and Insis deserved to see their mother die painlessly, even if Obari did not deserve such a thing herself.

There was a long space of quiet, filled only with the shuffling of so many bodies pressed into the Hall. No one ventured to speak again. Suni kept her face impassive, regarding what was left of the Council with watch full tense eyes. Bereft of their two most powerful leaders, they were not an imposing lot. Matab the Weaver's Wife looked as though she might burst into tears.

"Eowyn," Suni said softly. "Perhaps I am a fool, but I am not quite sure what I need to do next."

"The Council has turned upon itself," Eowyn told her. "They are publicly dishonored and discredited. Take the throne, my Queen."

Suni's handsome bronze face remained still but her eyes were windows to the fear and strain within. "I did not wish to have this thrust upon me."

"The Wise would say that such a sentiment makes for a good ruler, Highness," Aragorn murmured.

Suni regarded him coldly and seemed to gather herself. She raised her head and surveyed the crowd. "When, my people," she said in a ringing voice, "have we ever lived free of fear? When have we lived free at all? We put our trust in vipers, in carrion beasts---in monsters! Such creatures cannot be befriended or tamed! They are death incarnate. They are utterly evil and will devour us the instant it strikes their fancy." She turned a cold eye upon Aragorn. She was a tall, coppery-skinned spear of a woman, of an age with Eowyn, and every inch the natural warrior. And Eowyn saw now, every inch the woman who should be queen. "All things being equal," Suni said, "I would joyfully sink my sword into the heart of this son of Numenor, for he slew my father, my brothers, and my husband." Eowyn marveled at how Aragorn stood apparently unmoved by the tangible pall of hatred directed at him. "But if the Huntress takes him, I believe that we will have served our purpose in her eyes. She will gorge herself upon our blood and upon our children's blood. And if we are lucky we will die. Moreover," she turned, addressing Aragorn directly. "You could have taken this City at your whim any time in the last week. Yet you did not. You have tended those you came hither to rescue and kept your silence in our Councils. We shall never call you friend, but we would be hard put to find a better ally under siege." She turned back to the crowd. "Let Elessar pay a portion of the blood debt he owes every woman in Rhunballa by shedding his blood to defend this kingdom!"

The shouts of 'Aye!' were deafening.

"So then," Suni spoke to Aragorn with chilly courtesy. "We accept your offer, son of Arathorn. But you must set yourself under the command of my Watch."

Aragorn bowed low. "I do so without reservation, O Queen."

Eowyn kept her face blank, hiding the fact that her mouth had just run dry of spit. She could not command Aragorn! Every instinct she possessed would balk at taking charge in any situation where he stood present. But to refuse the command would be to cast doubt upon Suni's first decision as Queen. And in truth, the Rhunballani would rather die than let Aragorn lead them into battle. Eowyn inhaled slowly, meeting Aragorn's eyes. And as she did, it seemed he bequeathed her a measure of his own personal magic. It steadied her mind, her hands, her voice. It told her in a tone she could not imagine defying that she had the strength, the will, the leadership to do this.

Her eyes smiled thanks into his though her lips did not move, and she felt an odd tug at her heart, the ghost of her old hero-worship. Though she did not desire him as husband or lover, she would always love him, perhaps in the same way Legolas and Gimli loved him.

A rumble from the crowd, rolling from the back to the fore like the voice of an approaching earthquake, shook her out of her reverie. The sound of so many questioning voices and so many jostling bodies nearly drowned out Suni's words.

"What has happened?" She called. "Pass the word forward!"

"A company of Men, my Queen!" Someone called a few seconds later. A pause. "Warriors of Harad. The soldiers of Gondor have just born them to the square. There are less than three score and some are badly wounded."

Eowyn started to speak, started to move forward purposefully. But she checked herself sharply, turning her gaze to the new queen of Rhunballa. Suni was not Indassa. Like Aragorn, Suni would lead her soldiers, both figuratively and literally. Eowyn spared one heartbeat to swallow a fresh surge of grief that Indassa had not lived long enough to grow so bold. Then she fell into step just behind Suni's right shoulder and followed the queen to the Square. The crowd parted for Suni as she moved through them, bowing low.

The morning sunlight cut down in a harsh, glaring angle, but Eowyn did not shield her eyes. With so many eyes on her it would not do to seem overly sensitive to sunlight. The throng in the Square fell back from the ring that had formed around the wounded Men. Sarabi the Midwife and her new husband, Brock the Miller of Laketown had begun tending them already, sorting the wounded from the dying, stemming the flow of blood for those whose hurts were not beyond repair. In the East, it was considered a cruelty to prolong the life of the mortally wounded in any way.

"My Lord!" Lord Hurin bowed politely to Suni, his eyes were on Aragorn. "Their leader is gravely wounded, but he demands to speak with Emperor Haradoun. He says he bears urgent news of the blood drinkers' movements east of the mountain passes."

"Tarosh!" Moussah cried, leaping forward, out of the crowd. He beat Aragorn to the injured man’s side.

"Haradoun!" The old man was drenched in a gory smear of his own blood. His right leg looked like it had been nearly ripped from his body. But somehow, he was still awake. He gripped the arms of the younger Haradrim tightly. "Where is the Emperor, boy?"

"He---" Moussah paused, his face set and hard as though he were bricking up tears behind a stony façade. "He is slain, Uncle."

The older man Moussah had called Tarosh paled, but he did not seem surprised. "When he sent no word for so long after leaving Gondor we knew something was amiss. You father called a meeting of chieftains to decide what should be done. As we supped and argued amongst ourselves on at the Khizg Oasis, the Dhak-Dir fell upon us. None survived save myself."

Moussah’s face might have been made of granite for all the reaction he showed. He nodded carefully and spoke in the flat, emotionless voice. "My father is dead?"

"Aye," Tarosh whispered. "And every chieftain of the Thirteen Greater Tribes! And a great part of their folk who were encamped about the oasis. By sunrise, there was no elder left alive save myself. So, I followed the plan your father and I had proposed." He fumbled for a black swathed bundle that lay on the ground beside him. "I have brought that which I meant to give to Haradoun. I give it to you, young Emperor, now that your cousin and father are dead." Tarosh sighed dryly and swooned at last. He had been hanging onto consciousness by sheer force of will alone.

And still, Moussah’s face did not alter one whit, though all his color slowly drained away. Emperor, Tarosh had called him.

"By your leave, Hajila-dai," Aragorn said formally. He had been kneeling beside the prone man, examining him as he told his tale.

Moussah’s head snapped up at the Haradrim words that fell fluidly from Aragorn’s lips. Hajila-dai…Honored Emperor.

"If your uncle’s honor will bear it," Aragorn said, "I think his life may be saved."

Moussah frowned, caught between his grief at Tarosh’s tale and a cold pragmatism that was no less horrified that an enemy king now knew that Harad was in disarray, its most powerful chieftains slain. "Can his leg be saved?"

Aragorn’s face was as blank as that of the young man before him. "No."

"He is a warrior of the Shil Dassi," Moussah said, as though that explained everything.

"The Wolf Tribe," Aragorn murmured.

"You will not dishonor a brave man’s death by letting him live on as a worthless cripple!" Moussah said flatly. He drew the long, curved dagger at his side, and began to pray. Eowyn winced, recognizing the Black Speech.

The sound of the tongue was unmistakable, like long, witchy fingernails drawn down a graphite slate.

"It seems to me," Aragorn said, softly interrupting the harsh tones of Moussah’s chant, "that a seasoned warrior would not be wasted as war councilor to a Chief of Chieftains. And he may still fight from the saddle with one leg. But it is not for me to say."

"No, it is not," Moussah snapped. He gazed down at his uncle’s unconscious face, his eyes burning with furious indecision. "Old custom demands I slay him as his closest kinsman. But---" He took a deep slow breath and was silent for a long tense moment. Too much change, too quickly, Eowyn thought. She knew what Moussah was feeling all too well. "It occurs to me," Moussah said finally, "that the Hajila-dai may make his own custom. Tarosh is wise and cunning and steeped in warcraft. I shall have need of such a man." He sheathed his dagger with a nearly invisible sigh. "Save him if you can, Elessar. But you shall have a rich reward, for I will not live in your debt!"

"Save your gold," Aragorn told him grimly. "If we are to live through the next few nights, we shall all owe one another our lives a dozen times over."

Moussah nodded, his mouth turning upward in a mirthless smile. "You speak the truth."

The next hour passed in a blur as they bundled the wounded men into the Royal Villa on Suni’s command. The audience chamber made for the best sort of open-aired surgery ward. Fallah arrived at some point with the solemn news that she had sequestered Obari in one of the Villa’s guestrooms and given her something to make her last hours more comfortable.

Eowyn took the hands of the Apothecary’s Daughter and clasped them tightly. "I thought the Hunter’s had killed you, my friend!" She said.

"They proved my father right in that," Fallah said blandly. "He was ever telling the world that his daughter had an uncommonly hard head."

Eowyn stood in the archway of the Queen’s Hall, and watched as her friend left to see to the skylighter armory Suni had set up on the outskirts of the City.

"Eowyn!" Aragorn was striding toward her, his hands and tunic stained red, his face grim. "Eomer has gone down to the fallow soy fields west of the City where the bulk of my men and his Riders are encamped. I do not need to warn you that it will take a large lever to prize your brother and your countrymen from their horses in this battle."

Eowyn nearly groaned aloud. She had not even thought of that.

"How would you have us marshal our men?" Aragorn said in a gentler voice, watching her face closely. Again she felt the wheeling vertigo of unreality at the thought of Aragorn asking her for orders. "Eowyn." Her eyes snapped open at the note of command in his voice. "You know this land’s defenses better than anyone. You built them."

"I did," she agreed. She smiled warm thanks and told him the general gist of her fortifications and battle plan. He nodded in silent approval and they set to work.

Every pair of hands in Rhunballa was put to work, laboring with feverish fear, their eyes turning constantly to the inexorable Westerly progression of the Sun. Every building in the City that would house the young and the old had already been whitewashed in a mix of water and bakery powder. There was huge assembly party, hundreds strong, of folk fletching arrows and dipping each finished product in oil.

There was one tense moment in the Westron camp when Eomer nearly balked at her command that his Riders leave their horses corralled below the City, just as Aragorn had warned her he would. She walked with him a little ways from the main encampment toward the lean-to hay sheds his Riders had erected at the base of the earthen stairways that led upward to the City. She led Eomer apart from their folk on the pretense of asking his opinion on a weighty tactical matter. In truth, she did not want to argue with him in front of his men.

When she made her own mind known, her brother favored her with a mulish expression she remembered well from their childhood.

"Even if her were not fighting in close quarters within a city of narrow streets and alleyways," she told him, "a man on horseback is an easy target for these creatures. Our people will be as defenseless against an aerial assault from the Hunters as their were against the Nazgul at Pelennor." Her words caught in her throat as she remembered the horror of the Witchking bearing down on Theoden from above. "Brother, I do not wish to see you or any of our warriors slain like Theoden, horse and Rider together."

His face softened at these words. It was perhaps the only thing she could have said that would have moved him when cold logic had no effect. Eomer was a good man. He was clever and strong and he had never wanted for bravery. But, as ever, he thought with his gut and his heart. These he followed in the heat of the moment and the only thing that save him from disaster what that his heart was so great and pure. But the cold fact remained that he was at his best as Gondor’s cavalry marshal and sword arm, leaving Aragorn to make the hard decisions.

"You had best not command your husband to be as you do your hapless brother," he said huffily in the end, with a brief glance over her shoulder. "Or he may rethink his suit."

Eowyn swallowed an angry and probably very loud response to that parting jibe, watching her brother stride away. She turned on his heel and nearly ran into Legolas. She regarded him a second or two, feeling a tug of guilt that she had not spared him a glance, or in truth, more than a stray thought, all morning.

"Legolas," she sighed his name like a far traveler speaks the name of his home.

A smile bright as the Sun above them bloomed on his beautiful face. "He is wrong," Legolas murmured. "You may command me in any way you see fit, my lady."

She felt her cheeks burn as a rush of desire swept through her body at nothing more than the subtle innuendo in his innocent words. She stared at him foolishly, trying to remember what she had been about to say.

"I can barely think straight when you smile as me so," she said finally.

"It is strange and wonderful, is it not?" He was standing a good four feet from her, his hands clasped lightly behind his back. Nothing in his face or bearing suggested anything other than casual conversation. But his gray eyes reflected the same heat raging inside her. "Before, we were blind and deaf to all such things. Now, it is as though some damned flood has been loosed inside us both. And I am swept away on its swift current."

She nodded mutely, not trusting herself to speak.

"We should use every hour of daylight to our advantage," he went on. "There is too much work to be done. But at every turn I think of you. And looking at you now, I would like nothing more than to lie beside you in a bed of summer wildflowers and see their blossoms tangled in your hair as we---" He stopped speaking and drew a shaky, steadying breath. She was glad he could do so for she seemed to have temporarily lost the ability to breathe. "I questioned Aragorn about this, for I was worried such an overwhelming craving might be an aspect of the Change. He only laughed and told me this is normal when love is so new."

"It---" Eowyn swallowed hard. "It is good to know that we are not losing our senses." She did not want to think of Aragorn and Legolas discussing the nature of desire or what else Legolas might have asked of or confided to his married friend. If she did, she would never again be capable of looking Aragorn in the face without cringing in embarrassment.

"I have kept my distance all this morn," Legolas told her, "so that the two of us could go about our work undistracted. And also, for your sake and Eomer’s, I did not wish to set tongues wagging more than they already are."

"We are lucky Eomer did not kill Obari himself for her words this morning," Eowyn said. "It only angers me, the rumors and half-truths that have been bandied about. But it hurts Eomer terribly because he loves me so."

"Aye," he said quietly. "But the great will ever be subject to the breath of tale-bearers. Rumor and legend a-bourning follow Estel like the caribou of the North follow the summer winds to greener fields. Since taking the throne, all of Aragorn’s closest friends have had to suffer false tales and accusations."

She frowned curiously. "Such as?"

"They say that Gimli coaxed Aragorn to pressure your brother to declare the Glittering Caves beneath Helm’s Deep and Helm’s Deep itself Dwarvish property," Legolas told her, "thus robbing your people of their ancient fortress. The truth is that your brother bequeathed Gimli’s folk all the caverns below the Hornburg in return for a portion of the metals and gems their mines would yield. Gimli’s folk are building a Dwarvish city beneath the surface of your homeland. Some Men whisper that Aragorn sent Mithrandir from his side because he feared his great power, when in truth, he departed into the West whence he came. And they say of me---" He pause, laughing silently.

"What?"

"When Lord Elrond brought Arwen to take Aragorn’s hand at his coronation," Leoglas said, his eyes sparkling with mirth, "I led the procession of Fair Folk. There are many in Minas Tirith who say that when I stepped aside for Estel’s bride to approach, I did so in more ways than one."

Eowyn’s eyes grew wide. "They say you were the Queen’s lover?"

"Oh, no!" He said merrily. "They say I was Aragorn’s lover." And he laughed aloud at the look on her face.

"Oh my," was all she could think to say to that.

Legolas shook his head. "That story is a mark of the waning lore of Gondor, I think. Which remembers that Elves have neither law nor customer forbidding such love, but forgets---" His lips twitched, "---that not all Elves are thus inclined."

She could not help it. She began to laugh like a little girl. All of his warm, infectious humor seemed to have spilled into her, loosening, if only for a moment, the tight knots of stress in her back and chest."

"That is how you should always laugh," he said sobering a bit. "Bright and free of care, with the Sun on your face."

"That would be nice," she said a little wistfully.

"That day will come, meleth-nin," he told her softly. "I swear it."

His eyes caught hers and it was all she could do not to touch him, not to fly to his arms.

"Give me a task, Eowyn," he said with sudden, quiet intensity. "Give me a task and let me be about it this instant, or in another moment, I will carry you into the hay shed behind us and neither of us will do a thing to prepare for battle this eve!"

She started guiltily. Now was not the time to dissolve into a giggling, love besotted girl. "There is something I would ask you and Gimli to do," she said steadying her voice. "There are many Shards which are twice the size of the smallest slivers of Elwing’s Orb, Legolas, but all were proof against the Hunters. We will need two, perhaps three times as many Shards tonight."

"Aye," he nodded. "We must still cloister all the young and old as before, but we will also need Shards to protect the soldiers who will be fighting in the open."

"I need you and Gimli to find every Shard and break them again," she said. "We must distribute the new slivers to every company of men and women who will fight tonight."

"I will do it as quickly as I may!" He smiled briefly, all the wealth of his love for her in his eyes, and turned on his heel, sprinting back up the earthen stair to the City.

She watched him go, her feet frozen to the ground. He reached the top of the hewn pathway and turned to wave quickly. Her heart contracted in her breast and a cold shiver of dread crept up her spine, dimming the golden Sun above her.

Though they had met at Helm’s Deep more than four years ago, it suddenly occurred to her that, all told, they had spent less than a month in each other’s presence. And yet, she felt as though she had known him her entire life, as though he were as much a part of her, heart, soul and flesh, as Eomer.

If he died tonight, it would destroy her, as surely as a sword thrust through her heart.

A terrible cramp of fear swept over her as she began to scale the same path Legolas had taken, veering left at on of the winding forks that led behind the laundries. This was not the fear she had felt for Theoden and Eomer. This was not the anxiety she knew every time she had led another warrior into battle. It was a desperate, selfish terror that had no thought for anything or anyone except Legolas. She topped the clay stairway and quickened her pace though the busy streets of the city she had called home for twenty-eight months now. She took a mental inventory of the soldiers and weapons at their disposal for the hundredth time. In truth, the bulk of the labor of readiness was already done. She had laid these battle plans in preparation for a full out attack from the Hunters more than a year ago. The only real adjustments were positive in the extreme, to allow for a greater number of defenders. And with the added wild card of the Shards, which she had never anticipated, they actually might stand a fighting chance.

She moved past the trade houses of the Dyers and the Laundries, where women were still coating the largest buildings with a milky mixture of water and baker’s powder. Before nightfall, the entire city would be encased in white goo, but it would go a long way toward saving Rhunballa from burning to the ground once the skylighters began to fly. As she crossed Physician’s Street she saw a steady stream of men and women running from the new weapon’s shop carrying armfuls of fireworks. Fallah would have handpicked them nearly a month ago. As she reached the Fountain Square, she watched in fascination as Fallah’s fireworks corp spread out in orderly sync, dispersing themselves among the companies of the Watch and Rhunballa’s foreign defenders who were already taking up positions in their captain’s quarter of the City. It only remained to protect them with the Shards Legolas and Gimli would bring. Eowyn caught sight of Suni and went to see to the organization of the northern wing of Rhunballa City’s defenders.

By early evening, still a good five hours from sunset, Eowyn found herself standing in the center of a fortified city, bristling with armed soldiers. As the Sun dipped ever lower in the sky, the constant low din of talk grew quieter. The City’s defenders were fearful, but still, Eowyn thought grimly, most of them did not truly know what they faced.

"Lass!" Gimli hurried toward her, his face pained and angry above the thick red sweep of his beard. "We have a situation brewing in the Queen’s Library!"

Eowyn followed him back to the Villa. Her face hurt from the strain of frowning with concentration and tension. Gimli led her to the Library that had been old King Udam’s private study. In the four years of Indassa’s reign, the young queen had filled the large room with every book and tome she could beg or buy from every merchant who crossed her borders. Suni sat in the black cushioned chair that Indassa had claimed was her father’s favorite place in Middle Earth. The new Queen’s face was a curious mixture of worry and supreme annoyance. To one side of Suni’s chair stood Moussah of Harad, his back rigid, his nose tilted upward as he favored Eomer with impassive contempt. In his hands, he held a black-clothed bundle close to his breast as though it were a precious child.

On the Queen’s right hand, Eomer stood between Aragorn and Legolas, his large shoulders fairly quivering with restrained rage.

"Can no man here give me a simple answer now that the lady in question is present?" Moussah said, glancing briefly in her direction.

"I have told you plainly," Aragorn said with a deadly, quiet courtesy that sent a chill down Eowyn’s spine. Aragorn was as close as she had ever seen him to losing his temper and it was a frightening thing to see. "The Lady Eowyn is not now, nor has she ever been, my wife or my beloved."

Moussah nodded shortly. He turned back to Eomer and Legolas. "It falls to one of you then. If the Elf claims her not as firstwife, the King of Rohan is still her lord. Will you speak, Elf, now that the woman stands before us?"

Legolas regarded him coolly. "Do you ask if we are wed according to the customs of my people or of hers?

Moussah growled softly. He looked as though he were fighting to keep from grinding his teeth in anger. "In Harad, Men know that Elves are fair-seeming deceivers and tricksters of the unwary. You have replied to my simple question five times in the last quarter hour and each time you have failed to give me anything resembling an answer. Are you incapable of speaking plainly?! Let me be blunt, so there may be no misunderstanding between us. Westron marriage oaths and effete, mindless ceremonies cannot seal man and woman in wedlock! Answer me! Did you take her maidenhead or not?!"

"You stinking sand rat!" Eomer would have leapt forward, sword in hand, had Aragorn not grabbed his right arm in a grip that made the younger man’s face blanch.

Eowyn had already leapt before her brother, opening her mouth to berate him loudly. An instant later, she heard a dull thud behind her. Moussah lay on his back, glaring up coldly at the long knife Legolas held pressed against his throat.

"Can you tell me," Legolas asked him gently, "why I should not cut your throat for having so disrespected my lady?"

"Then she belongs to you---" Moussah finished that sentence with a strangled gasp as Legolas pressed the blade a little tighter against his jugular.

"She belongs to herself," Legolas said softly.

"Legolas," Eowyn said quietly. "Please do not kill him. He is a brave warrior and we shall need his sword tonight."

Very slowly, Legolas removed the knife from the young Man’s throat. Eowyn watched him, slightly shocked by this mercurial burst of cold rage on her behalf, however justified. It occurred to her once again that, though she loved him without reservation, in many ways, she barely knew him.

There was a cold angry silence as Moussah climbed to his feet.

"What is it you with to ask of me that you must know to whom I belong?" Eowyn asked.

Moussah frowned uncomfortably, meeting her eyes for a half second before glancing away. And Eowyn suddenly understood the odd change in his behavior toward her. In Harad, widows with no male kinsmen to claim them were free to govern their own affairs so that their children might not starve. Upon his arrival in Rhunballa, Moussah had assumed that Eowyn, like nearly every other woman in this land, was a widow of the War. But in light of recent revelations and the fact that she was an unwed woman of royal birth, his ingrained good manners has reasserted themselves. In the East, a man did not directly address a lady without the leave of her husband or father. He did not look her directly in the eye unless he was her kinsman. Eomer and Legolas had both flown into a rage at Moussah’s indelicate question, but without their leave, it would have been an unforgivable insult to Eowyn and to them had he addressed her directly.

Eowyn sighed. "I do not belong to my brother, or to Legolas or Aragorn," she said to the air, turning away from the young Emperor so as not to embarrass him further. "But I am a woman of the West and Aragorn is my King. And my lord."

Moussah nodded almost imperceptibly, still not looking at her. No one but Aragorn seemed to recognize this for the gesture of respect that it was. Moussah turned back to Aragorn, his black eyes full of pride. Slowly, he unwrapped the treasure he held swaddled in black silk. It was two chunks of obsidian stone, one small, one large. It was flat black, yet….

It seemed to glow dully with some sort of inverse radiance. It was as though the two stones were----were lamps that shone darkness instead of light. Beside her, Eowyn heard Legolas hiss softly and step back, almost as though the stones were painful for him to look upon.

"What is that?" Aragorn asked tightly.

"It is called the Daegond," Moussah said reverently. "My forefather, Herumor, brought it from Numenor to the Lands of the Sun. His mother was a concubine, a Haradrim chief’s daughter, brought to Andor as tribute to the last king of that land."

"That would have made him the bastard son of Ar-Pharazon," Aragorn said coldly.

"Aye, cousin," Moussah replied with a sly smile. "From the firstborn line of Elros, unbroken. If Numenor still stood, my claim to the throne would supercede your own."

"If Numenor still stood," Aragorn ground out, "the Valar would plunge it again into the abyss rather than see one such as yourself sit upon the throne."

"We shall never know," Moussah shrugged. "The Daegond was a gift to Herumor from the Dark God himself. It is a shard of Grond that Sauron rescued from the wreck of Angband."

"And why," Aragorn asked in soft anger, "would you seek to set such an evil thing in this Lady’s hands?"

Eowyn started, turning from Aragorn to Moussah in confusion. She felt at a distinct disadvantage here, having arrived late.

"It cloaks the radiance of Elvish magic and masks the power of even the Westron gods’ relics," Moussah replied. "It’s metal is not of this earth. Legend says Morgoth wrought his mighty hammer from a dead star that fell from the heavens. It is diamond hard in its inert state, but heat will smith it into any shape we wish. During the Battle of Gorgoroth, we used it against the magic of Gil-Galad and his minions. I had thought that we might fashion the ore into small encasements. We might hide several of the Elvish Shards until the Dhak-Dir are upon us and then spring some manner of trap."

Gimli’s eyes grew wide. "If this cursed metal can hide the Shards’ power until we have lured them in close, we might be able to kill them in far greater numbers!"

"Aye," Moussah agreed with a grim smile. "Take it, cousin." He held the larger of the two fragments out to Aragorn, smiling coldly at the King’s unfriendly glance, for Moussah knew well the that his ‘cousin’ was displeased to be reminded of the common ancestry he shared with the Black Numenorians. "We have no smiths among my warriors."

Aragorn eyed the stone gingerly. He was coldly pragmatic enough to recognize the Daegond’s tactical value, but he was still loath to even touch it. "I will have none of it," he said finally. Legolas breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

"Then give it to me!" Suni said, rising from her chair. "My folk will make use of it to save themselves, even if yours will not."

"It is yours, Highness," Aragorn said gravely. "Though I would council you strongly against using it. Such things absorb the malice of their masters over time and may turn upon you like a serpent."

"A serpent," Suni said, "cannot turn upon me if I do not deem it tame or friendly. We will use it with caution."

Moussah gave Suni the larger chunk of the stone. Still holding the smaller piece of the shadowy metal in one hand, he glanced once more at Aragorn. "A thousand years ago, this piece broke apart from the greater stone. It was prophesied by our seers that it must find its way into the hands of a Golden Lioness who would save Harad and its people from the Queen of Blood and Darkness."

Eowyn felt a chill crawl up her spine though she did not react outwardly.

"I believe," Moussah said intently, "that the hour of that foretelling is come, for my kinsmen have told me that all of Near Harad is besieged by the Dhak- Dir. If this little kingdom falls, so fall both the East and the West. We will never be friends, Elessar. Nor shall we have peace between our kingdoms if we survive this fight. You are a mad people, who have rejected the immortality Sauron would have granted to Men had his greatest designs been realized." He gestured to Eowyn briefly, glaring at both Aragorn and Eomer. "It makes my blood run cold to see that you would so blithely give this strong and beautiful woman in marriage to a---a creature such as that one." He stabbed a finger in Legolas' general direction, his lips twisting in revulsion as he cut his eyes back to Aragorn. "But then you have taken one of them to wife, so---"

"Stop!" Aragorn said sharply. His voice was still calm, still controlled, but his face had gone white with rage. "I have heard enough of your Haradrim heresy. I will hear no more. And if you refer to my wife or this my brother in love as a 'creature' once more, you will see me angry."

Moussah seemed about to say something unwise, but reason prevailed. He clenched his jaw and nodded. "Aye. Aye, there is no present profit in this old debate. You name us slaves and wardogs of a monster and we say that you are traitors to Mankind. But the Dhak-Dir do not care if we are Westron of sons of Harad. Let us, for the moment, agree to disagree. The lion, Elessar, is the ancient emblem of the warrior in the East. I ask your leave, as the Lady Eowyn's sovereign lord, to give her this part of the Daegond. I believe she is destined to wield it in our defense."

Aragorn was silent a long moment. "If she will take it from your hand, she has my leave to use it as she sees fit."

Moussah bowed coldly. "I would speak with the Lady as well. Again, by your leave."

"As you wish," Aragorn said curtly.

Moussah offered Eowyn the stone, holding it before him like a bride price, still modestly refusing to meet her eyes. "Take this, Lady. And may you truly be our savior, for we are poor in hope as it stands, even with the Elvish Shards and your clever fire weapons."

She felt rather than saw Legolas tense beside her as she took the black bundle wordlessly.

Moussah hesitated, as though he were considering his next words with great care. "I have a question to ask of you, my Lady."

"Ask," Eowyn said, holding the black stone away from her body. It was unwholesomely warm to the touch, like a living thing. It’s very proximity was beginning to make her want to shudder.

"I cannot imagine how terrible it was for you in the Nest," Moussah said softly. "If you do not wish to answer, I understand. But I must ask. While you were their prisoner, did you see ought of Haradoun? Did---did they change him into one of them as they tried to change you?"

The raw grief in his voice shocked her more than she would have thought possible. "Be he vile as a Morgul wraith," Theoden’s ghostly voice whispered once more in her mind, "there will be someone somewhere who will weep for the Man you slay." The image of Obari’s deathly pale face, of Shaeri and Insis weeping over their mother’s stricken body, flitted briefly through her mind.

"They did not change him," Eowyn told him, her voice strangely gentle to her own ears. "Nor did they feed upon him. He died as a mortal Man. It was very quick."

Moussah stood motionless, his handsome face unmoved, his eyes dry. But still Eowyn could have wept for the silent grief that poured out of him. "Did you slay him, my Lady?" He asked very quietly.

Eowyn was suddenly conscious of Legolas’ presence at her right shoulder and Aragorn’s just to her left. Eomer had strode almost casually around to the young Haradrim’s side, flanking him. If Moussah made any sudden moves, Harad would have to look elsewhere for its next Emperor.

"With my own hands," Eowyn replied in an equally soft voice. There were no words of apology or condolence she could give him that would not be lies.

Moussah did not speak for a long moment. "I thank you, my Lady, for saving my kinsman from the Dhak-Dir. And for gifting him with a warrior’s death."

It would have meant eternal shame to Haradoun’s name had he died a captive or thrall of Simiasha. By giving him death at the hands of an enemy, she had spared his honor among his people. In Moussah’s eyes, she had done Haradoun a kindness.

Eowyn accepted his thanks stoically, thinking to herself that Haradoun had no honor to salvage. The only thing that she had spared were the feelings of the young man before her who had loved his cousin as a brother. She eyed this new Emperor of Harad closely as he bowed low to her. Moussah had been raised to be a faithful servant of Mordor. He believed implicitly that Sauron and Morgoth before him had waged war against the tyranny of the Valar and the Eldar’s usurpation of Man’s immorality and rightful place in the affections of Eru. He would make a cunning and deadly antagonist for Aragorn if he survived their present peril. But he had not asked her why she had killed his kinsman. He knew, and more importantly, understood the why of it. And that, at least to Eowyn’s mind, was an immeasurable step upwards from Haradoun.

"My countrymen stand ready among the Watch of Rhunballa," he told her. A small grin tugged at his lips. "I gave them the choice of standing shoulder to shoulder with the warriors of Elessar or fighting along side women."

Eomer snorted angrily, recognizing the insult for what it was. Aragorn only smiled grimly. "Do you fear to fight among us?" Eomer asked sardonically.

"The widows of this land are my kin, though far removed," Moussah said. "They have cast off their mourning sackcloth and taken up arms to defend their children. We fight in far nobler company than you." He eyed Aragorn coldly. "Twilight is almost upon us. What will you do if our defenses are overrun?"

Aragorn was silent.

"I am a Man," Moussah continued, "and shall be a lord of Men should we win the day. But you have been touched by your arrogant gods in some fashion, Elessar. For though you are wrong-headed and sworn brother to the Eldar, you are a King among kings. If she takes you for her minion, she will sweep across Middle Earth like an unstoppable plague."

"I will not be taken alive," Aragorn said flatly. "If the moment comes when I am too injured to deny the Queen the prize she seeks, these three who stand beside me, my brothers in arms, have sworn to end my life rather than let her take me."

Moussah nodded slowly. "So do I also swear."

"And I," Eowyn said. But the ill-omened oath tasted like funeral ashes in her mouth.

She stood in numb stillness as, one by one, the others took their leave of each other and of her. Later, she found she could not recall the exact words she exchanged with Argorn, Gimli, Suni, or even Eomer. She stood locked in place after they all departed, staring down at the battle plans strewn across old Udam’s desk that were nothing more than an orderly division of the City among its respective defenders. She lay the black wrapped stone Moussah had bequeathed her on the dark wood of the table, for its touch was making her skin crawl. She should go and take her place in the Square at Suni’s side. She should see how Fallah’s distribution of the arsenal had progressed. But as she felt Legolas’ hands gently descend upon her taught shoulders, her heart shuddered in her breast once more.

"With the addition of Aragorn’s men and Eomer’s Riders," she told him, "there are more than seventeen thousand lives at stake. And the only thing in my mind at this moment is the terror that I might see you slain tonight."

"Aye," he agreed shakily. He stepped closer behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist, his breath in her hair. "I have never truly understood, until now, the old custom among my people that forbids warriors who are lovers to fight in the same company. I am torn between wishing to guard your back and---"

"Aragorn is more important that me," she said firmly.

"In my heart, you and he are equal," he murmured. He turned her in his arms to face him and she nearly wept for how her whole being leapt with happiness, even now, at nothing more than the sight of his face. Was she mad? Influenced by the dark blood still coursing through her veins? Or was love in its essential makeup a form of madness? She had no frame of reference for these feelings. She could not compare what she felt now to the crippled, needy yearnings she had felt for Aragorn. Aragorn had seemed to her like a beacon in a sea of hopeless night, a life raft to a drowning soul foundering in dark waters. Legolas was---he was her flesh and blood, the other half of her heart.

"I am so afraid," she said. Her chest felt as though a vise had been clamped around it, restraining its natural rise and fall as she breathed.

"What are your fears?" He asked softly, kissing her face.

"I am afraid that we will be destroyed and Middle Earth overrun by Simiasha and her brood!" Eowyn said. "I am afraid that everyone in the valley will die tonight. I am afraid of losing my brother when I have only just found him again. I am afraid of losing you!" She wiped her face angrily with the back of her hand. She was not sure when she had begun crying. "You healed me, or at least helped me to heal myself. But Legolas, I have never faced battle without some part of my heart frozen! I am thankful beyond words to be whole again, but---but I am afraid this unfettered ability to feel will overwhelm me when I must act!"

He brushed her damps cheeks dry of tears. "In this long litany of all your cares, not one word of fear do you spare for yourself. The bravest always save their fears for those they love. You will not falter. The fear for those around you will only strengthen you and sustain your resolve to defeat our enemy." He spoke with such utter surety, such calm strength. She stared into his eyes and saw the phantom memories of battles and skirmishes beyond count, of millennia standing toe to toe against the foul things that had sheltered beneath the dark wings of Dol Goldur and the Shadow that had polluted the great forest of his homeland. As Prince of a beleaguered realm he must have learned to judge a warrior’s metal to a hair’s breadth. And she knew, beyond questioning, that he would never lie to her.

"I pray that it is so," she said.

He kissed her once more, like a soft whisper of hope breathed into her lungs. "I must stand by Aragorn and you must fight at the Queen’s side. I love you, Eowyn of Rohan! And I will see you again come the dawn."

He turned and was gone. For another long moment she did not move, standing in silent prayer. She raised her head, then, and set her right hand upon the pommel of her sword. Almost as an afterthought, she scooped up the black bundle on the table and strode out into the afternoon Sun to set the last of her preparations in motion.

An hour before dusk, Ikako presented Suni with half a dozen small clam shell cases she had wrought from the Daegond and the Queen of Rhunballa parsed them out among the Watch. Each one held a Shard, and was to be opened only if the Hunters gathered in mass.

Ikako frowned at she watched Suni send one of her own Bent Bow archers running with the last of the black ‘jewel cases’. "It is not wholesome or natural metal," she told Eowyn. "Nothing I have even worked has smithed into such precise, small specifications in less than three hours time. It is as though the ore flowed into shape of its own accord."

Eowyn shivered. "I have spoken to her, but she will not be turned aside." She had little room to criticize, remembering the heart-sized lump of the same metal she had shoved into her pack simply because she did not know what else to do with it. She could not say why she had not put the stone aside, but despite her own misgivings and the crawling sense of darkness that seem to seep from the stone, she had did not want to discount any potential weapon.

"I have a surprise, my Captain," Ikako said without any preamble. "Come."

Eowyn followed her from the square, through the mob of men and women rushing through last minute tasks. She caught sight of Gambold politely ushering another family into the Royal Villa. The little Nihon-jin smith said nothing as they walked and Eowyn’s curiosity became almost unbearable before they reached Ikako’s smithy on Craft Street.

"I found your Westron broad sword broken on the floor of the presshouse cellar after the Hunters took you," Ikako said in her curt way. "I also found the Elf’s long knifes---beautiful workmanship those. He was very happy to have them back when I gave returned them to him this afternoon. When they brought you back to Rhunballa alive, I began forging your sword anew. I stole some materials from your rooms in Queen’s Guard for the remaking of this weapon."

She unwrapped the shimmering katana from a silk sheath on her worktable. "It is not finished. I must put strength into the blade now or it will be too brittle to survive more than one battle, but it is nearly done."

The metal gleamed like silver in moonlight. The sheen was more than the glint of mortal steel, or even mithril. Eowyn took the sword, testing its balance. It was perfect and beautiful, a deadly masterpiece.

"What have you done, my friend?" Eowyn asked, quietly awestruck.

"How---?"

Ikako smiled, a mere upward twist of her lips, and told Eowyn what she had done, how she had wrought this shining thing. "It is a weapon fit to slay a queen among monsters, it is not?"

Eowyn began to smile slowly, nodding her head. "Aye, it is. You may well have wrought our salvation in this, Ikako."

"I would have given it to Suni had you not survived the healing," Ikako murmured. "But archers are only good with short blades. You are the better swordswoman."

"There is one addition that is needed," Eowyn whispered. "Simiasha is fearfully strong, but I have found that most evil things are craven when they perceive a true threat."

"You have but to ask, Captain-sama." Ikako’s exotic, angular eyes were bright with pride, though her face did not change at all as Eowyn told her what was needed. "It will take all night," the smith said after a moment’s calculation. She grinned wickedly.

"I will send you a Shard for protection," Eowyn told her, "so that you may work unhindered tonight."

Ikako nodded and set to her work. Eowyn left her to her great task. As she left the smithy, emerging into the ever-lengthening shadows of evening, she stopped suddenly. The world around her was growing brighter, more vivid. The ache in her muscles and bones, the feeling that her entire body was one giant bruise inside and out after the ordeal of purging her blood, was gone. She felt strong and full of boundless energy, more awake than she had felt all day. As she walked the streets with weightless ease, heading back to the square, the men and women hurrying past were firebrand sparks of light and life, each with its own delightful shade of color and feeling. The Sun would set soon, in less than an hour. And the part of Eowyn that was still a Hunter was waking.

The Sun slipped below the Western peaks with little ceremony. From the vantagepoint on the flat roof of the Royal Villa’s guest wing, Eowyn watched the City breathe a collective sigh. Somehow, everyone had suspected a terrible onslaught the instant the Sun set. It did not come.

Eowyn frowned in bleak apprehension. In another hour, the City’s defenders would begin to speculate whether Simiasha meant to give them another week of siege or attack head on? The people of the valley had remained indoors, shielded by the Shards, in a limbo of watchful fear after Eowyn had been taken. Rhunballa had been spared until tonight by Simiasha’s wounds, and later by her need to recall her forces and her command to decimate the council of Harad’s most powerful chieftains. But without a word of warning, without a shred of proof, Eowyn simply knew it would be tonight. She knew in her blood.

Beside Eowyn, Suni stood tall and impassive, fingering her quiver full of oil-soaked arrows. Fallah sat nearby, lighting chip wood fires in the small tin flower pots they would use to fuel their fire bottles, arrows and skylighters.

"Your countrymen were laying bets against anyone surviving the night," Suni told her blandly, her cool, calm gaze sweeping across the tiled rooftops of the City, many of which held similar groups of archers and members of what Fallah had dubbed the ‘rocket corp’. All throughout the City, atop and surrounding every large structure that housed Rhunballa’s people, the warriors of Rhunballa, Rohan, Gondor and Harad stood ready.

Eowyn grinned. "What were the odds?"

"Twelve to one against," Suni replied.

"The Riders believe it is good luck to bet with the odds, even when they are against you," Eowyn told her. "Either way, you win."

Suni chuckled softly. "I saw their speed and strength at South Pass, my Captain," she said, her brief smile fading. "You have seen more of them than any living soul should have to see. Can we win?"

"If we last through this night," Eowyn told her steadily, "we can defeat them. Of that, I am sure."

Suni eyed her levelly. "I will trust your word in this, Eowyn, and keep my hope. You have never lied to me."

Eowyn grimaced. "I have lied well and often by omission."

"By neglecting to tell us your life’s story?" Shaeri was hobbling toward them on her splint, her father’s antique scimitar unsheathed, held lightly in one hand. "That you are granddaughter, niece and sister to kings? That you are dear friend to Dwarf Lords and Elf Princes and Elessar himself? Or that you slew the Lord of the Nine in single combat?" Shaeri snorted. "We would have collapsed with laughter and bid you take you wild fancies to another country." The Wineseller’s Daughter smiled sadly at the questioning, hesitant gazes of the other three women. "My mother is passed. She told Insis and I that we were terrible, disrespectful and shameful daughters. And that she loved us more than the Earth and Sky." Shaeri laughed, her eyes bright, free of tears. "She was nothing if not consistent, my mother. I told her Moussah would be Emperor of Harad and he has said he will take me as firstwife if I will have him. Momma died smiling."

"I am sorry for your grief," Eowyn said.

"And I," said Suni and Fallah as one.

Shaeri never had a chance to reply. A cry came from the chandler’s workshop, carried from housetop to housetop. "To the West! They come from the West!"

Eowyn stared hard and gasped. Her night vision made the blue-black of late twilight clear as day. A black cloud had detached itself from Western peaks and risen into the darkening sky. It grew in size as it gathered speed. It was not a cloud, she saw, cursing and blessing the clarity of sight Morsul’s blood had given her. It was a teeming murder of black-winged Hunters, thousands strong. The humming sound of their wings and the shrill cackle of their cruel laughter came to the City, and on all sides Eowyn heard the answering wails of Rhunballa’s human defenders, quailing in fear.

"Torches!" Eowyn cried. "Do not---I say again, do not---light the skylighters until the enemy is directly overhead and in range!"

Distantly, from atop the roof of the Carpenter’s Guildhouse south of the Square, she heard Aragorn’s strong voice commanding his archers and rocket corp to hold, to bide their time. The City, it had been agreed, was too segmented, to sprawling, to be defensible under a single commander. And thus, they had partitioned Rhunballa City into quarters. Aragorn, having the greatest number of soldiers under his banner, had taken the entire southern half of the city, commanding the southeast himself, setting the southwest quarter in Lord Hurin’s hands. Eomer and his Riders defended the northeast. The Watch and Moussah’s warriors had taken the northwest wherein lay the Royal Villa and the Square. Into the ranks of each defending army, Eowyn had sent Fallah’s rocket corp and Shards to protect them.

All across the wide expanse of the City, torches burst to life, like a thousand fireflies taking wing. They waited in frozen silence as the din of the enemy’s cawing cries grew to deafening proportions. Closer and closer they came, bearing down upon the living like a ravening storm of carrion birds.

"One thing I must know before we die," Shaeri said.

"What is that?" Eowyn asked tensely.

"Your Elf Prince----was he wondrous sweet?"

"Beyond words," Eowyn whispered. Oh gods, she had not told him she loved him before they parted. And now, she might never have another chance.

Shaeri cocked at eye at her and grinned, hefting her scimitar in both hands.

"Lucky wench! I knew he would be so!"

"Mother of Day!" Fallah said in a choked voice beside her. "Here they come!"

The Hunters reached the City and swept over it, hovering overhead, blotting out the stars with their numbers. And then they descended. Eowyn had one brief moment to think to herself that this was wrong, too easy. The attack was either mad arrogance of suicidal stupidity.

"Fire!" She screamed, drawing the spare sword she had taken from Queen’s Guard Watch House. Its weight was unfamiliar, but it would serve.

The skylighters tore into the air, turning night into day wherever they burst.

It had not been madness, she saw now, gazing upward at the falling charred shreds of the lowest wave of Hunters. Simiasha had sacrificed half her army with cold deliberation. The upper half of the undead host had hovered higher, just out of range, using their fellows as fodder to spend Fallah’s rockets.

"Light your arrows!" Suni cried to her bevy of archers, bending her own bow. The Shard clenched in the hand of Damri of Bent Bow Watch House roared to life, bathing the rooftop in silver light.

The Hunters fell upon them.

One night thing, and then another, swept downward and burst into flame as it careened inside the halo of light. Eowyn had a quick, half-second image of Shaeri tossing a lit fire bottle into the air. A third Hunter bore down on her from above and he struck the bottle with one foot, kicking it back down to the rooftop. The night exploded around her. Eowyn was hurled twenty feet through the air by the blast. She rolled to her feet coughing, sword in hand. A yellow-eyed, leering face veered toward her in the smoke and she cut it in half almost absently.

"Suni!" She cried.

"Throw your fire bottle higher next time, you hussy!" Suni’s voice was saying somewhere off to her left.

"Did it singe the royal backside, O Queen?" Shaeri snickered.

"Eowyn!" Fallah’s voice called.

"I am here!" Eowyn said.

A flaming arrow whizzed just by her head, followed by a guttural snarl of pain. Eowyn wheeled and began to hew the monsters that clambered over their fallen fellow. She ran through the fire bursts and screams, staying just out of the Shard’s light, homing to the scent of death that hung about Simiasha’s children. She tore a path of carnage through the dozen Hunters who had been so foolish as to light upon the Villa’s roof. Their lightning speed seemed to have slowed to something more manageable, something less daunting. But as she clove a clawed beast that loomed up at Shaeri’s shoulder, Eowyn realized that she was wrong. They were as swift and deadly as ever. It was Eowyn who had changed. The burning, poison draught of Morsul’s blood, roused from slumber by nightfall, was coursing through her veins again, lending inhuman speed and strength to her every move.

Eowyn smile grimly. She rolled beneath another clumsy swing of a Hunter and swung her sword. The beast’s head went flying, his body crumbling to ashes.

"Suni!" She heard Shaeri’s voice call out in fear.

Eowyn sprinted forward, out of the smoke shroud that surrounded them, and met the bent bow of Rhunballa’s queen, almost falling upon the arrow’s head in her haste. Suni met her eyes and Eowyn saw the fear in them as her friend slowly lowered her bow. Fear of the monsters around them, certainly.

But also fear of Eowyn.

"Your eyes," Suni said hesitantly, her hands still clenching the readied bow.

"I am still your Captain, Suni," Eowyn said grimly. "I am not yet one of them."

"Eowyn! Suni!" Fallah’s voice cried. "Come and see!"

"Stay within the light for your life’s sake!" Suni commanded the score of women still huddled in the shimmering light of the Shard.

Eowyn ducked back, seeing two stragglers, young girls from Deep Wells.

She pulled them forward, closer to the light, an instant before the silent thing behind them would have snatched them to their deaths.

"….have not yet lost a single woman," Shaeri was saying at Suni’s side.

Eowyn reached the edge of the roof where the others were standing in silent shock, looking down upon Rhunballa. At first glance, it seemed the entire city was ablaze. Every structure was radiating silver light as though filled to the brim with luminescent moss. The Shards within were blazing, deterring any Hunters that might feel inclined to venture indoors for toothless prey. There were fires everywhere, but it was impossible to tell whether it was the City or the Hunters burning throughout the panorama. Everywhere were the sound of voices screaming in pain, fear, rage and triumph. Everywhere were the brilliant concussion flares of fire bottles. The night sky was still raining writhing balls of fire as archers hit their marks from the shelter of their company’s Shards.

Directly across the Square, swords drawn and bows singing, were Moussah and his men atop Queen’s Guard Watch House. They were fighting in an outward-facing ring of warriors, a shining Shard in their center. And they were singing in their own tongue. Eowyn knew the song. The Watch had burst into a slightly altered version of it during the first skirmish of the Eastern Gap six months ago. As she listened, she heard the rest of the Watch take it up again, following Moussah’s clear-voiced lead.

"Tonight, my brothers, we fight and die,

  Under a black and star-strewn sky.

  Brave and strong, we slay the foe,

  No better end a Man can know!"

In the distance, south toward Craft Street, she could hear snippets of some ancient Numenorian air. And to the east of the Square, she caught a strain or two of a Rohirric battle song. She could picture her brother swinging his sword, Gambold at his side, laughing in the face of the winged horrors around them, bidding his Riders sing louder so as not to be outdone by the Haradrim or even the sons of Gondor.

"We are winning!" One of the younger girls exclaimed. "We are killing them!"

"For the moment," Eowyn said darkly. She was straining her eyes upward, peering with her unnatural sight to see what the cluster of dark forms still hovering directly above the Square were about. "They are more clever than this, trust me!"

"Then let us kill as many as we may while they are still spending their lives like fools!" Suni muttered.

Eowyn nodded, her gaze still ranging above them, a terrible sense of foreboding swelling in her chest.

They did not have to wait long for the other boot to fall, as Eomer would have said. As Eowyn swung through the flailing, blinded body of another Hunter who had come too close, a black shower of thick sludge spilled out of the air above them. She brushed the clumps off her shoulder, peering down at what covered her hand in slow horror. It was a thick pudding of black oil and wood shavings.

O Sweet Lady!

A chorus of shrieks sounded around her as every woman holding a torch or flaming arrow began to wail as the fire leapt to their oil-splattered clothing and hair. Another Hunter, swooping in just out of range of the Shard, dropped his burden directly upon Damri, the young woman who bore their Shard. The black mixture covered her from head to toe and the girl burst into flame like an oil-doused rag. Shrieking, her skin burning like candle wax, Damri stumbled off the roof of the Villa and was gone.

"Taora!" Suni shouted without missing a beat. "Open the black casement Ikako made."

The girl was already struggling to open the ‘jewel case’ Ikako had made for the spare Shards. It had been meant to be used as a spring trap, to open should a large number of Hunters rush them at once. But now they needed it simply to stay alive. Taora was prizing the clamshell shaped case with all her might. And it would not open. Just as Aragorn had warned, Eowyn thought, the Daegond had turned upon them. As Fallah ran to help her, a wicked-looking little mallet in one hand, a Hunter dove downward and bore Taora upward, shrieking.

There was no time for horror, for the Hunters were upon them. Back to back in a circular turtle shell formation, they fought now just to stay alive. Eowyn stalked in a close circle, darting here and there in a deadly blur of motion, determined she would not see another woman in this company die. She tore the beasts from her fellows and hewed them limb from limb. She would not let them win the Villa or the Square for they were the City’s heart.

There was no way to see now what was happening elsewhere. The night and sky were a world of flame and smoke and screams. The only thing she could directly protect at this point was the lives of the women in her company and people crammed into the guest wings of the Villa below them.

Dimly, she could hear Aragorn’s voice. "If Amrod falls, another take up the Shard!" Good advice. But it had not saved Damri or Taora.

"The roof!" Fallah’s voice shrieked off the Eowyn’s right. "Eowyn, they are tearing through the roof!"

She flew toward the sound of Fallah’s voice and skidded to a halt beside her friend. The Apothecary’s Daughter was on her knees, out of breath, kneeling in the center of a widening pool of light. In one small hand, she held a Shard. It was not until several hours later that Eowyn realized Fallah---brave, foolish, beloved Fallah---had climbed down the gutter pipe and retrieved their single Shard from Damri’s burnt body on the ground. Eowyn arrived beside her friend just in time to see two Hunters, tall bone-white Men, pouring a barrel of their oily sludge down into the gaping hole they had torn in the Villa’s roof, just above the main Guest Hall. Just above the shrieking children and old women that were packed inside. With a long-toothed smile, the larger of the two let fall the torch he was holding just over the hole.

"Go!" Cried Fallah. "We have the Shard again to protect us up here! Stop them! Stop the fire!"

It would have to be enough, Eowyn thought as she leapt forward and plunged down through the hole. The two Hunters had alighted. They had only to wait for the fire to spread and force the helpless ones inside to flee the Villa. And then they would feed.

Eowyn fell headfirst. She had taken no care as she leapt. She spun in the air like a cat and slammed to the floor in a burning hell of wailing cries. If she thought she had known horror before this moment she had been a fool.

The black shower had splattered over young and old and the fire that followed had shown no mercy. Those who were burning were being stripping of their clothes, the flames beaten out if they were not completely engulfed in fire. But the paint on the walls and ceiling had caught fire. There was no saving the Villa now. Eowyn glanced upward and saw Suni and Fallah’s faces peering down through the tear in the roof.

"The fire is cutting across the ceiling!" She cried. "Follow me down from outside. I will wrench the doors open from here, but we must be there to guard them as they flee!

"We will come as quickly as we may!" Suni shouted through the cloud of smoke between them and was gone.

Eowyn surveyed the screaming mob. They were already piled up against the barricaded doors that lead to the Fountain Square. Those in front were being crushed by those behind as everyone pressed forward in blind, unreasoning panic. Eowyn sought and found the old woman, Madgar the Headsman’s Wife, to whom she had given the Shard that was shielding the Villa’s interior from the Hunters. The thin, bird-eyed old woman stood unperturbed by the terror on every side, holding up her Shard as though the room was not quickly burning down around her.

"Mistress Madgar!" She cried. "I am going to open the doors! Call as many to you as you can when we are outside and command them not to flee away from the Shard’s light!"

The old woman nodded grimly. Eowyn forced her way forward until she could go no further. The doors----oh Elbereth, the doors opened inward and the crushing weight of all those trying to reach the exit was only growing worse. She stopped, closing her eyes for a brief second, shivering with horror at what she was about to do. She reached deep within, finding the whole of the terrible strength Morsul, her father in darkness, had bequeathed her.

Eowyn sprang, leaping through the air above the heads of those that strove and wailed against the unyielding doors. She struck the foot-thick, black oak doors, firsts first, and crashed through them. They shattered into kindling with the force of her impact. Eowyn rolled to her feet just in time to avoid the stampede of panicking women and children.

"Stay in the Square!" She shouted at the top of her lungs to those who were now stumbling past her into the open air. She could not tell if anyone heard her words, but it was obvious they saw the light of the Shard old Madgar held aloft in her hand. They streamed out of the smoke-filled Villa and huddled around the old woman in a growing throng. Eowyn stayed about the edge of the crowd, wild-eyed, tearing to one side and then the other whenever the sound of wings alerted her to the Hunters’ presence. Where were Suni and the others?!

A cry sounded from the far side of the crowd as one of the undead, brighter than his fellows, sheathed his wings and simply strode up to a small girl cringing on the outer edge of the crowd and swept her up in his arms. He fell with the snarl before he got ten feet into the air, a burning arrow protruding from her shoulder blades. The girl’s screaming mother snatched her from the burning body. Eowyn glanced up and saw the white flash of Moussah’s teeth from atop Queen’s Guard on the other side of the Square.

Another flight of arrows whipped above her head, finding their targets with vicious accuracy. Eowyn peered in the direction of that particular volley. At first she saw no one. She frowned, trying to remember who, if anyone, should be fighting atop New Bakery. Queen’s Guard was between the Square and the tall, box-shaped Bakery, obscuring much of her line of vision. A moment later, she could just make out the shadowy forms rising up here and there. First one, then another, leapt from the roof of New Bakery, landing lightly on the ground. But it was a thirty-foot drop---

"We are here!" Fallah cried, pelting toward her. Suni and her archers were hurrying after her, firing as they ran. Fallah tore around the other side of the crowd, finding the place farthest from old Madgar and her Shard so that her own Shard could give those on the outskirts better protection.

Another storm of arrows, burning like a score of tiny dragons, flew from Queen’s Guard. A cry and an angry Haradrim oath sounded as a man pitched from the top of Queen’s Guard, falling headfirst. Eowyn suddenly saw why. The Hunters were still hovering, just out of Shard and arrow shot range. And now they were pelting Moussah’s men with stones the size of a man’s head.

"Down the ropes!" The young Emperor shouted. "Stay close to Udin and the Shard. We are indefensible here!"

Above the Square, the Hunters were massing. The lure of so many screaming humans and the sure knowledge that there were too many people in the Square to be defended had drawn them like flies to honey.

Eowyn hurled herself at Fallah, knocking her friend aside before a bolder the size of a dray horse crashed down upon her. The Shard she bore went flying as Eowyn pushed her to safety and its light went out abruptly. Eowyn stood and rushed toward the giant stone that was now sitting on top of Fallah’s Shard, obscuring its light.

A booted heel crashed into her head from above, knocking her onto her back. She sprang to her feet again dizzily, spitting blood, and saw the Hunter who had kicked her standing before her, Taora’s Daegond jewel case dangling in one hand. She launched herself forward and up when he would have taken to the air again and caught him by the heel. She slammed him back to the cobbles with all her might and he crashed to the ground in a tangle of broken wings, swearing fluently in the Common Tongue. He rolled to his feet, barely avoiding the sweep of her sword. Shouts everywhere, all around her, and the cries of human and Hunter voices told her there would be no fire arrows spared to help her. The Watch and Moussah’s men were hard pressed to do anything but keep the enemy from carrying off themselves and everyone in the Square.

The Hunter, a tall Man of Gondor, grinned, bouncing the jewel case in one hand. "It this something important, little sister?"

She spat an ugly oath at him and blurred forward. The Hunter dodged aside, but only just. And as he did, a second dark form veered in from above, striking her in the head once more. Another black-winged shape touched down upon the ground beside him, then another, then a dozen more. They closed in a circle around her, grinning with cruel mockery, staying just out of reach of her sword arm. She turned in a slow circle, holding her sword before her unsteadily. The world was spinning drunkenly now. She became aware suddenly that she was growling low in her throat like a cornered cat.

"The Mistress has commanded we take you alive," the Gondorian Man said.

One of his fellows, a blunt-faced soldier in tattered Haradrim garb, chuckled harshly. "When all the others are dead, you will be slave to the Queen’s most favored sons. But we will taste you first---" His words ended in a gurgle as Eowyn’s sword clove his head in two neat halves.

"Come then, you pack of craven jackals!" She shouted. Her words came out in a harsh, inhuman snarl. "Come every man of you who thinks he can best me. I am daughter to Morsul, the Queen’s Consort, and I wield every ounce of strength he bequeathed me now that night is upon us! Come!!!"

Her countenance must have been truly terrible for they flinched to the man. She did not wait for them to recover. She flung herself to one side and slid her blade through the neck of the nearest of them. But an instant later, they rushed her as one, clutching at her sword arm, pressing on her with the weight of numbers, using their combined might in a valiant attempt to immobilize her. She felt herself being lifted off the ground and the sound of their leathery wings filled her ears. Cold hands snaked across her breasts and loins greedily, tearing at her clothing.

Much later, Eowyn would try to remember exactly what happened next, but the memories were blurred, red-rimmed images. Something inside her---whether it was the woman or the monster, she was not sure---uttered a bone-chilling howl of rage.

She seized one of the hands pawing at her and simply tore the Hunter’s arm from its shoulder socket. She spun and whirled as her startled captures fell heavily to the ground. Everywhere, she heard the sound of human voices crying out when they scrambled out of the way just before Eowyn and the score of monsters about her slammed down on the unyielding cobbles in the middle of the crowd.

Where was the bloody Shard she had given Moussah? Or the one old Madgar held? Were they all too beleaguered and spread out now to keep the entire body of people in the Square covered in the light of their Shards? Or were young Udin and Madgar crushed under falling stones Shards and all, as Fallah would have been?

Those brief questions flitted through her mind in a fraction of an instant. Then the beast inside her reared and howled her fury once more. She tore and slashed, ripping them to bloody pieces with her razored nails, laughing as she slew. The last one, the broken-winged Westron man who had slain Toara, who still carried her jewel case, stumbled away, trying to take flight.

Eowyn leapt upward, sheering his one good wing off his back. When he fell back to earth once more, she took his head in both hands and tore it from his shoulders. He dissolved into a pile of black ash, and she hunted through the silt of his remains desperately, searching for the Daegond case. With a growl of triumph, she found it.

"Open up, you treacherous bitch!" She hissed. She slammed the jewel case onto the stone street of the Square and it broke in two halves.

Salvation, pale silver and beautiful, bathed the entire Square, washing into every dark nook and cranny, finding the dead ones wherever they were. It was as though Shard’s light had been stored up inside the Daegond case, gaining power during the time it was constrained in its darkness, and then rushing outward like a dammed river when it was finally released. The Hunter’s high caws of agony sounded everywhere in the Square, on the ground and above, as the holy light burned them to dust.

Very slowly, after some unknown space of time, Eowyn became aware of voice, shouts, the flare of torchlight. She gradually began to emerge from the blood-smeared haze that swam before her eyes. She managed to focus on a strange object, shiny and metallic, that was less than four inches from her nose. She frowned at it in exhausted confusion. Her head hurt terribly.

It was a needle-sharp arrowhead. It was attached, she finally saw, to an arrow that sat drawn in an ash longbow. She was sitting in a circle of drawn bows, all of them trained upon her.

"One side, Elandor!" A deep musical voice said impatiently.

"My lord, she is a----"

"Now!" An Elf’s face suddenly replaced the arrowhead that had been aimed directly between her eyes. "Can you understand me, child?" He asked gently.

He voice was so beautiful she found herself smiling weakly. She nodded mutely, trying to find her words again. It was as though she was once more fighting her way out of the non-verbal fog the Change had induced.

"Alive….me alive…." She managed to say. "Not….not like them."

The Elf glanced about at the wreckage she had made of her enemies and grinned wryly. "Of that, I am sure." His smile slid away. "How many others, besides yourself, are infected?"

"Myself,’ she said with effort. "Gimli Gloin’s son. And Legolas of Mirkwood."

She watched the blood slowly drain from the Elf’s perfect features, though he did not seem surprised. "Where is he?"

Eowyn did not have to ask whether he meant Legolas or Gimli. "Southeast quarter. He is fighting….Aragorn’s side."

The Elf warrior’s face darkened, his mouth settling into a thin, hard line. "Of course. He would be."

She studied his face, thinking that he looked very unlike Legolas except for his golden hair. He was taller, well muscled, a swordsman rather than an archer. He appeared five to ten years Legolas’ elder to mortal eyes. His face was harder, his eyes less bright and open, shadowed with old griefs and not a little bitterness.

"You are Thranduil," she said with another wan smile. She felt fuzzy and light-headed and so weak she would have toppled over had he not been bracing her with one strong hand on her shoulder. "You have come to rescue your son. He will be happy to see you!" She spoke in a warbling voice, completely unlike her own. But as she spoke, his face softened. He hooked one arm around her waist with the ease of a veteran battlefield physician, easing her to her feet while still bracing her legs.

"One would hope," he said dryly. "Come, glorfinniel. The fighting is over for now. The sky is growing light. Guide me from this rabble of ungrateful wenches to my son."

"My friends---" Eowyn turned about, searching for Fallah, for Suni and Shaeri, in the crowd of familiar faces. She finally caught sight of Fallah and saw why Thranduil had been trying to gently guide her from the Square.

Fallah was uninjured. Behind her and a little to the right stood Suni and Shaeri. Moussah’s tall, black-clad form hovered just behind Shaeri protectively. Their faces were soot smeared and tired but it was the fear and pity in their faces that broke Eowyn’s heart. They had seen her fighting the Hunters at the end, watched her lose herself to the dark madness of the Change. It was one thing to know Eowyn was infected with the Hunter’s blood. It was quite another thing altogether to see her hands change to claws, her teeth to fangs. She wondered if, even now, her eyes were blue, or the golden slit-eyes of a Hunter. The stares of her friends could not have been more horrified and sorrowful if she had come to them fully changed, clambering for a taste of their blood.

"Fallah?" Eowyn said softly. She tried to take a step toward her friend. As she did, the Apothecary’s Daughter unconsciously flinched back. Eowyn made a small, weak noise of wordless hurt and would have fallen had Legolas’ father not caught her.

He swept them all with a withering gaze of cold contempt. "How faithless is the loyalty of Men to those who defend their lives!" He told the crowd. "As ever!"

Thranduil lifted Eowyn up in his arms without another word and bore her away, pushing his way rudely through the crowd, his warriors at his heels.
The sudden movement utterly disrupted Eowyn’s fragile equilibrium and she closed her eyes, her head spinning, her stomach twisting ominously.

She wondered if the King of Mirkwood would be terribly wroth if she vomited on his beautiful mithril mail shirt. After a moment or two, she adjusted to his long striding gait. She wiped her face irritably, brushing away tears she did not remember shedding. She was feeling stronger, more lucid but the moment. Overhead, the sky was growing steadily brighter, indigo lightening toward reddish near-dawn.

"You said the southeast quarter of this city?" He asked calmly.

"Aye," she said. "I can stand, my Lord."

"You can," he agreed darkly. "But you cannot run or fight those who might take it into their heads to put you down like a lame colt. I would not trust a soul in that crowd with your life until they have had time to master their fear of what they saw." He glanced down as she bit back a weak little sob, and again, his cold beautiful face softened. "Weep if you need to, glorfinniel. Elves do not equate tears with weakness. Even in shield maidens of the Rohirrim." He gave her a crooked half-smile that seemed very un-Elvish. "I heard the others in the Square calling out your name."

"Who goes?!" Called a young Man’s voice. It sounded like Marsil.

Thranduil stopped and gazed down the length of his nose at the bloodied, battle-weary youth before him. "I am Thranduil of Eryn Lasgalen," he said, his voice dripping with arrogant impatience. "Let me pass!"

Someone tossed a torch that landed five feet from the Elvenking’s doe skin boots. It illuminated the glowering face of Legolas’ father. Marsil stepped into the light, lowering his bow.

"You pardon, my Lord," said the young Man humbly. "We had to be sure. I will take you to the King."

"I care not to see your King, boy!" Thrunduil snapped ungraciously. "Take me to my son!"

Marsil jumped visibly and bowed again. "Follow me, my Lord."

The clay brick stair that led to the north end of Craft Street and the Carpenter’s Guild House wheeled by dizzily. Men and women and children ran back and forth, bearing sloshing bucket after bucket of water. The red glaring light of the flames that were greedily engulfing the Guild House hurt Eowyn’s eyes.

"You are very rude for an Elf," she said muzzily.

The Elvenking gave a brief bark of laughter. "Aye, child! My manners, or lack thereof, have become legend among the sons of Gondor now that---"

"Stand down!" Aragorn’s voice roared angrily. "Stand down, I say! Back away from him! I will deal personally with the man who harms him!"

Some instinct sent a tremor of apprehension through Thranduil’s broad chest and he quickened his pace. They rounded the north corner of the burning Guild House to the ivory shrouded edge of Bright Street. A low, snarling cry of a wounded animal, Legolas’ voice, confirmed Eowyn’s fear of what they would find. Thranduil halted and what he saw froze him in place.

Legolas knelt in a half-crouch, bent double, his lean frame trembling helplessly. His hands terminated in gore-covered claws. As he raised his head, perhaps in response to something Aragorn had just whispered to him, Eowyn saw his eyes were glowing amber and slitted like cat’s eyes. Aragorn knelt beside him fearlessly, one hand clasping the Elf’s clawed hand. Aragorn’s men hovered about them anxiously, obeying their king’s command to leave Legolas be, but terrified the Elf might rend their lord asunder at any moment.

"Come back, Legolas!" Aragorn was saying softly. "Come back to yourself!"

Legolas shuddered and uttered another feral howl of despair. He teeth were distended, the long sharp incisors of a predator.

Thranduil dumped Eowyn on her feet in one fluid motion and moved forward, his face a portrait of sorrow and rage. Eowyn tottered after him to the corner alcove where Legolas and Aragorn knelt, ringed by dozen a soldiers of Gondor. Thranduil pushed his way through the human gauntlet and caught Aragorn’s eye before approaching slowly. Aragorn looked stunned and relieved at the sight of the King of Mirkwood. He beckoned Legolas’ father forward. Carefully, making no sudden motions, Thranduil knelt beside his son’s quaking form. Eowyn stood in the circle of soldiers surrounding them, her heart in her mouth, as Thranduil lay a hand upon his son’s cheek and spoke so softly she could not hear the words.

Legolas’ yellow gaze focused on his father’s face for a moment in uncomprehending anguish, a low warning growl rumbling in his chest. And then a shaft of sunlight, the first weak light of dawn, brushed over his face and he gasped. He entire body convulsed and sweet, blessed lucidity flowed back into his eyes.

"A---a---ada?" He faltered, sagging weakly to one side.

Thranduil made a noise that lay somewhere between a sob and an oath. He drew his son into his strong embrace and held him close as Legolas’ body slowly shifted back to normal, wracked with pain and silent sobs.

Eowyn moved forward as though drawn by a Dwarvish magnet. She knelt awkwardly beside Aragorn, clasping her hands together to stop herself from reaching out, from flying to Legolas’ side. She knew that, for the moment, Legolas needed comfort only Thranduil could give. However many decades or centuries passed since the nightmares of childhood, Poppa was always Poppa.

A warm hand pressed against her forehead. Aragorn was peering at her closely with a healer’s assessing eye.

"I am all right," she lied softly.

"I am a fool!" His iron gray eyes were full of apology. "I should have foreseen what would happen if the three of you faced bloodshed and battle!"

Her eyes widened. "Is Gimli---?"

"He is well,’ Aragorn smiled without mirth. "He left in the midst of the fighting to bear an extra Shard to Eomer’s company. Your brother saw what was happening to Gimli as the fighting grew fiercer. Eomer cold-cocked him. He will wake in an hour or two with a terrible head ache, but he took less harm than you or Legolas." He shook his head. "We were nearly overwhelmed here. They began dousing us with oil and lobbed stones at our Shard-bearer’s from on high. We broke open the doors of the Guild House when the fire got out of hand, but they did not attack the women and children. They came for me. Legolas---" Aragorn grimaced. "He beat them off of me when they would have carried me away to their queen. He used his long knives at first, but then he…." Aragorn sighed tiredly.

"He changed," Thranduil said in a flat, cold voice. "You threw my son, the Dwarf and this maid of the Rohirrim into the mix of battle and they succumbed to bloodlust. Your ignorance has re-envoked the Change in all of them!"

"Adar," Legolas said weakly. "Please, do not." He was struggling to sit, easing himself reluctantly out of his father’s arms. "It was Aragorn’s healing that drew us back from the abyss. But for him, you would have arrived to find us as cold and dead as the monsters we fought tonight. There is precious little lore to be had on this malady for those who have not seen it first hand." He eyed his father pointedly. "As you saw it first hand long ago. Adar, how did not know to come?"

"I heard your soul cry out when she broke your will," Thranduil said softly. He touched his son’s face, almost reflexively, when Legolas shuddered at that memory. "I saw a flash of her face in your mind an instant before her darkness descended upon you. Thuringwethil!" He glanced back at Aragorn, grudging apology in his proud gaze. "In plainest truth, I am to blame for your ignorance, for I fought these creatures when they plagued us at the Havens of Sirion. Elrond, your tutor in lore, remembered bits of it, but he was only a child at the time. Your foster-father pestered me for centuries to tell him all I knew so that he might write it down for posterity, but the memories were so evil I could not bring myself to speak of them. Now, it seems, I shall pay dearly for my weakness." He shook his head angrily, one hand still unconsciously resting on Legolas’ shoulder as though he feared to let him out of arm’s reach. "She and her scions preyed mostly on the Edain who dwelt side by side with our folk at the Havens, Lord Tuor’s distant kinsmen. She tried many times to change an Elf into one of her kind, but the breaking of their minds always killed her captives." His eyes turned to Legolas. "I can scarcely believe you are still alive, my son, though I will sing hymns of praise that it is so for all my days!"

Legolas’ hand sought Eowyn’s and she took it without thinking. "Eowyn saved me, Adar," he told his father. "She has an immunity to Simiasha---Thuringwethil---that Mithrandir set in her mind. She imparted that immunity to me, and in doing so, freed me."

Thranduil had gone very still, his gaze boring into his son’s, seeing many things that were unsaid behind the windows of Legolas’ eyes. Even indirectly, Eowyn winced at the blinding power in that stare.

"You took her blood," Thranduil said, terrible suspicion growing in his face.

"Aye," Legolas answered simply. "I was Thuringwethil’s creature for a time, Adar, bound to her will, drowning inside her evil. She would have made me her slave and consort. I took Eowyn’s blood when I lost myself in the first madness of thirst. She saved my soul."

Thranduil swallowed, his features so drawn with apprehension he looked old. The Elvenking turned the unrelenting power of his faze upon Eowyn and what little Legolas might have hidden from his father’s all-seeing vision must have been pathetically evident in Eowyn’s eyes, her face, her translucent mortal heart. He pinned her in place with his eyes like a butterfly in one of Fallah’s insect collections. He seemed to be sifting through every facet of her inner self, weighing and judging, searching for flaws and weaknesses. She held his eyes, refusing to be cowed.

"And what did you give her in return?" Thranduil asked of his son, not taking his eyes from Eowyn.

"All that was mine to give," Legolas whispered.

Thranduil was silent. He did not seemed enraged as she had feared he would be. "I understand," he said heavily. His eyes were full of sorrow and pity as he regarded Eowyn and his son. "And I grieve for you both."

Eowyn wondered foggily what he meant by that as Aragorn lay one hand upon the back of her aching head and brought it away bloody. She remembered nothing else before consciousness deserted her.

Eowyn woke with a start to the sound of pouring rain and the babble of many voices. She was lying on a pallet in the main warehouse storeroom of New Bakery. She sat slowly and saw that the main floor had been converted into a makeshift recovery ward and surgery. Fallah was sitting beside her, her large almond eyes red-rimmed with weeping. The Apothecary’s Daughter held a cup of vinegar water and began silently dabbing at a cut over Eowyn’s left brow, silent tears rolling down her dirty face.

"Your head wound has healed almost completely in the last few hours," she sniffled. "I have been sitting here trying to understand why this little nick on your face has not." She met Eowyn’s eyes. "Eowyn, I am s-sorry---!"

"Do not," Eowyn stopped her gently. She took her friend’s trembling hands in her own. "There is nothing to apologize for. I scared you all half to death." O Sweet Lady, she wished she did not have to ask this next question. "Fallah, how many have we lost?"

"A third of the Watch is slain," Fallah whispered. "Suni is well and Shaeri. Little Insis was sorely wounded, but she will recover. Your brother is well. He came to check on you while you were sleeping and he does not have a scratch on him. But he lost nearly half his men last night and---and we have not found most of the bodies. Master Gimli has recovered. He came with Legolas when he carried you here four hours ago." She sighed, a tired little sob. "Good Lord Hurin is dead. Camah and Sokkora of Queen’s Guard. The boy Timhad of Moussah’s folk and old Hatab the Horsetrainer." She paused and inhaled, her breast shaking with the sobs caught in her throat. "Somal is slain, Eowyn! I---I tried to save him! Elessar used all the healing lore and Elvish magic he knew. But---but he just died. It is not fair that he survived Pelennor Fields at thirteen years of age, one of forty men who returned home of the thousands who were taken. He---he should have live long and had many children and died with a dozen grandsons and daughters. And now, all my family is gone. I am the last of the children of Somala north of the Earth’s Girdle and the last of my family in all the world!" Her face was so full of wretched sorrow that Eowyn began to weep as well. "And---and Ikako…she still lives, but---but all of Craft Street went up in the fire that took the Carpenter’s Guildhouse. I do not know why she did not leave her workshop while there was still time!"

"Show me," Eowyn said hoarsely.

Ikako was lying apart from the general ward of wounded in a quiet anteroom that had been a storage room for cane sugar until recently. Now, it was a quiet wing for the dying. The air hung heavy with the sickening scent of sweet cane syrup and burnt flesh. And Ikako---

Eowyn knelt woodenly beside the smith’s deathbed. Ikako was alive, but in truth, Eowyn could not see how she still clung to life. Half of her body was whole and strong as ever. The other half was burned, her flesh melted to the bone in some places. Suni sat by the cot, her face a blank study of stoic grief. Ikako and Suni, Eowyn knew, had been the fastest of friends all their lives. Eowyn saw to her shock that Ikako was awake and aware.

"She refused Fallah’s opiate," Suni said quietly. "She tarries for you, my Captain." She squeezed Ikako’s good hand in her own. "She is here, sister. Eowyn has come."

"Done," Ikako rasped, turned her head minutely in Eowyn’s direction. "It is done."

Clasped in the dying smith’s ruined hand was the last thing Eowyn has asked of her friend, the final piece of the weapon Eowyn had conceived to destroy the mother of the blood drinkers.

"She would not release it to any save you," Suni said.

Eowyn took the precious gift of metal work that had surely cost Ikako her life as she labored upon her task, heedless of Craft Street was burning down around her. "The katana…" Ikako whispered. "Lying in my shop…finished also." Somehow, she managed a small wicked smile, the same she had given Eowyn when she had confided her plan to the smith. "Wish I could see her face…." Her voice was fading as she released her failing hold upon life. "….when you kill her…." Her words ended in a soft weaze as her half melted lungs released her final breath in a rattling sigh that sounded like a dry chuckle.

Ikako was dead.

Eowyn watched as Suni bent forward and kissed the burned cheek of the empty shell on the pallet. "So begins my second day as Queen," she said brokenly. Fallah lowered her face into her hands and wept once more.

Ikako had dwelt on Craft Street all her life, caring for her widower father, a respectable spinster at thirty years of age when she met her husband a year before the Great War. Will of Laketown had taken a partnership in her father’s smithy after he met and wed the love of his life, only to be conscripted by Haradoun’s pressgang four months later. He had died at Pelennor Fields and Suni had confided to Eowyn that she was sure the greatest part of Ikako had died with him.

"He will greet you wither you go, my friend," Eowyn whispered.

She stumbled out of the thick stench of that closed room, taking her leave of her friends with numb words of apology. Across the broad span of the warehouse floor, Eowyn saw Aragorn bent over a wounded soldier, frowning with concentration. Aragorn had most likely not slept a wink since dawn. He must have set up this healing ward with Fallah’s help, she thought distantly.

A faint song, so soft and beautiful it might have been a sweet memory of Legolas’ voice as he sang to her in their bamboo cottage, reached her ears. She followed it out the porter’s entrance to the awning-veiled Shopman’s Street. It was miraculously untouched by fire. The flower boxes that had always decorated every other storefront were bright and cheerful, the shops unmarred by flame or violence. It made the house of wounded and dying inside seem like a nightmare.

The song had ended. A small group of Elves were lifting the lifeless body of their comrade, bearing him away. She watched them silently. They were so sunk in their own quiet sorrow they did not seem to notice her presence.

"A Wood Elf should not breathe his last indoors," a voice remarked solemnly.

Thranduil of Eryn Lasgalen was sitting in one of Osha the Baker’s black oak rocking chairs. In his hand, he held a small bird. It lay in the gentle cup of his palm, breathing shallowly. He whispered something soft to the tiny stunned creature and its eyes fluttered, wings stirring.

"Could Aragorn not save him?" She asked, staring out at the hanging baskets of petunias that were straining upward, greeting the fall of summer rain like a lover’s embrace.

"His beloved was slain as we made our way from the Bakery to the Square," Thranduil murmured. "Of the five score warriors in my company, only two were slain outright. But three more are missing." He sighed wearily. "Gilros and Sirluin were inseparable since they were boys together. When he learned Sirluin had fallen, Gilros began to fade. Our tie to the flesh is more fragile than that of the Edain. When our hearts are broken, when they shatter beyond all repair, we simply----" He opened his hand and the dazed bird took flight, winging its way down the covered street. He stood and faced her. And once again, it was as though his eyes held her in place, as though he physically restrained her from looking away. She met his eyes with effort, her vision blurred, her frame trembling with the strain of simply staying upright. But she could not, in truth, have said whether it was physical weakness or her own grief that was to blame. "It was selfish folly on my part to spend five lives and risk a hundred to save one warrior. It was a father’s decision, not a king’s."

She swallowed. "Where is Legolas?"

"I know not," he said. "We had words an hour ago, he and I."

She began to turn away, thinking coldly that this was the last thing in Middle Earth that should claim even a minute of the precious hours of daylight left to them. "I must go to Craft Street," she said woodenly. "Forgive me, my Lord, but this conversation must wait until there is time for such luxuries!"

She stepped off the boarded porter’s ramp that the millers used to wheel in large deliveries. She stumbled, her knees turned to jelly. Thranduil moved forward with easy grace and caught her. She fought a wave of anger and hot shame as he eased her into the rocking chair, kneeling before her. He passed one smooth hand over her brow. "Your skin is like ice, child. You should not be on your feet."

"I am sliding downward into death and damnation!" She said in an agonized whisper. "I will not meet it lying down." She met his eyes sharply, suddenly remembering his words about the Havens of Sirion. "You know more of their secrets than Aragorn, or anyone still living. Will we be free of her darkness once Simiasha is dead?" She steeled herself for the answer.

He frowned as though the simple act of sifting through those memories was still painful, even millennia later. "The Lady Galadriel treated the few we found still living in those nests. If they had been taken by one of Thuringwethil’s scions---beasts she had granted leave to begin their own bloodlines in the days when she dwelt with Sauron on Tol-in-Gaurhoth---they recovered fully after their sire was slain. Were all of you forced to sup her blood directly?"

"Only Legolas," she said quietly. "She---she---I could not save him!"

He took her hand. "You need not speak of it. He told me the full tale." He smiled. "Your metal is the stuff of which legends are forged, Eowyn of Rohan. And I do not speak with only a father’s pride I say the same is true of my son. The Elvish Hunter must have been one of her oldest and strongest get, for you are as deeply infected as Legolas, though your contagion is a generation removed from the source."

"He made me drink more than once," she said dully. "I do not remember how many times. His name was Morsul." She said the name softly. Elbereth, how could she feel so much sorrow for one who had done her so much evil?

He saw it as well and gripped her hand a little tighter. "The affection you are feeling when you think of him is not real, glorfinniel," he told her adamantly. "It is because, for the moment, he is still a part of you. It will fade when your blood is finally cleansed of his poison."

"No," she said softly. "No, I pitied him when he told me his tale. He was Captain of Thingol Graycloak’s guard and later the protector of the Lady Elwing. He went tearing off into the wild to rescue the children of his mistress from the sons of---"

"Laersul," Thranduil said. He was staring into her face, but his eyes had turned inward. She was startled to see tears gathering there. "His name was Laersul," Thranduil whispered.

"Summer Wind," Eowyn repeated the name. She stared helplessly as silent tears began to trail down the Elvenking’s face. "He took my blood and so remembered himself at the end," she told him gently. "He died fighting to free us. With his last words, he told me how I might free Legolas from her control."

"I have thought him at peace in Mandos for two long ages of the world," Thranduil said in a stricken voice. "He was my father’s dearest friend. He taught me to wield a sword."

"He is at peace now," Eowyn said.

"Aye," Thranduil said gruffly after a moment. "I would pay much to know what manner of protection spell Mithrandir set in your mind, child. You freed Legolas from Thuringwethil’s control in the same way you freed Laersul---by usurping her rule of blood, I think. It is as I thought at first. You and Legolas our bound together in the same way Thuringwethil and her offspring are bound. I wondered when we first met how you came to speak such flawless Sindarin."

"I do not speak---"

"Not one word of the Common Tongue have you spoken since we began talking," he said gently. She could only gape at him. "For the moment, you and my son are as two parts of one whole. It is as though he is the child of your own dark bloodline, bound to you by the blood you share, mind and heart." He spoke with such deep, wilting relief she frowned, puzzling over the true meaning of his words.

"What do you mean by that, my Lord?" She asked slowly.

He regarded her steadily. "We need not discuss this until you are feeling better---"

"I am as well as I am likely to feel until sunset," she said bluntly. "Tell me what is in your mind!"

"If Simiasha is slain," he said after a moment’s hesitation, "the poison in your veins with wither and depart once its ultimate source is abolished. And as it does, the bond of feeling between you and my son may fade as well."

She stared back at him, blanched and weak, feeling as though the earth had just opened up to swallow her. "Is that your belief, my Lord?" She asked in a cold, brittle voice. "Or your hope?"

"Both," he said in quiet resignation. His Elven-gray eyes were full of compassion, yet underneath she saw something else. Something fearful and almost desperate. "Do not mistake me, daughter of Eorl. I do not look down upon you or deem you baseborn and too lowly to be my daughter."

"I know your mind, my Lord," she said. "You fear, as do I, that he will grieve forever when I pass from this world."

"Nay, glorfinniel," the Elvenking said, his deep voice grave, like a death knell to all her tenuous, selfish hopes. "It is my fear that when your days are spent, he will lie down beside you and die."

Her chest seemed to have shrunken in on itself. She could not breathe. "Like Gilros?"

"Not so fortunate as Gilros," Thranduil said relentlessly. "For he shall be reunited with his beloved by and by, as will I. Do you know the history of Beren and Luthien?"

She nodded mutely.

"It is not history to me, but memory," he said. "When Carcharoth came harrying to the borders of Doriath, the Silmaril burning him alive from the inside, I was part of the King’s hunting party that went forth to slay him. We bore Beren back to fair Luthien, clinging to life so that he might breathe his dying breath against his lover’s lips. We all watched, weeping helplessly, as he died in Luthien’s arms. She followed him by less than a quarter hour. Do you know why, glorfinniel?"

"Because she believed Beren had passed beyond the veil of this world," Eowyn said numbly. Her throat felt raw. "To the hidden fate that is prepared for Men. Because, in death, the Edain and the Eldar are parted beyond the ending of the world. Forever. I know this, my Lord. Or I knew it. Perhaps my own selfishness let me forget. If I could unmake his love for his sake, I would do so. I would rather see him alive and happy than have him as my own, knowing what must come. I love him so much my heart seizes at the thought of him in pain, so much I can well believe this is some part of the influence of our shared blood. For it came upon me suddenly and it seems like a madness at times, overwhelming me with its power. I am terrified to hold his heart in my hands, for I know his heart is his life. I fear for my death for his sake more than my own." She clenched her hands at her sides, trying to stay her body’s trembling. She recalled suddenly, as though it were a piece of a sweet dream, how during their last days in the cottage, all language had begun to desert them. And yet they had communicated with absolute clarity. She had known his every thought, every nuance of emotion and impulse. There had been moments during love when it had seemed their minds, the very essence of his soul and hers, swam together, so that she could not tell where she ended and he began.

Had any of it been real?

"I cannot think what I should do," she said tonelessly. "You are older and far wiser, my Lord. Tell me what I should do! If his love fades with Simiasha’s power, I will kiss him goodbye and take comfort in the knowledge that he is better off without his love for me. But---but if he loves me in truth---"

"Then…." He sighed sadly. "Then love him, glorfinniel. Love him all your days, for he will not stop loving you, even should you leave him. That is the best council I can give, for though I have lived long, I have never been numbered among the Wise. I am a warrior and the son of a warrior, who became a king because all of his betters were slain. If your love proves true, child, do not let fear of what shall come sully your joy in him. And as for the afterworld….we must trust in Eru’s benevolence, in all that we hold to be good and holy. Have faith, and believe that your song will not end upon a despairing note."

"You are wrong to eschew the name ‘Wise’, my Lord," she said. In spite of their peril and the weight of her grief for the dead that sat on her heart like a millstone, she was able to smile at him through the tears and rain on her face.

He helped her to Craft Street, guiding her still-weak steps to the charred husk of Ikako’s smithy. He helped her sift through the ruins, digging through ash and charred wood made muddy by the steady downpour.

Finally, she found what she sought. She drew it from the black sludge and the filth fell away from it as though fearful of the shining, deadly blade. It was Ikako’s masterpiece, and now, there would never be another. She held it in her right hand, whispering in silent prayer.

"Legend, indeed," Thranduil said softly.

"She will come for Aragorn tonight," Eowyn told him fiercely. She stood, clutching both pieces of her weapon, one in each hand. "She will find a way through our defenses and try to take him. I shall greet her with this when she arrives!"

The King of Eryn Lasgalen smiled wolfishly and nodded.