I do not own LOTR but I love the Rohan siblings so much that I wish I did. My first LOTR fic.
AURUM ET GLACIES
- Gold and Ice -
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In the autumn, Rohan comes to life. The people spill out of doors and pool in groups in the fields as trees redden and abscise, and to Eowyn it seems as if the whole world is in a frenzy of celebration. Even the horses dance and flick their tails as they trot alongside their masters.
She is five years old and excitement thrills down to her toes at the bustle of skirts in the palace halls and the strains of joyous singing that come floating through windows thrown wide open. She is five years old and right now her world is full of sunlight and pleasant commotion. It is bright and joyous and the worst thing she has ever known is missing out on hot rolls and honey from the kitchens.
When the sun sets, the royal hall lights up with a hundred candles. The evening meal is bountiful, for the maids tell her that the harvest has been a great one and everyone around the whole kingdom was tucking into grandiose meals every night. Eowyn is full of smiles and so is her brother Eomer, who comes running out of the kitchen with hot biscuits in his pockets flavoured deliciously with the thrill of thievery. They sneak on padded toes - her dress keeps bunching around her knees but she follows her brother down to the banquet hall without stopping, her hand clasping the thick fabric of his shirtsleeves.
Their mother sits splendid in white and gold on the table for the royal family, her blonde locks piled high on top of her head and in thin braids that look like golden ribbon snaking down the snow of her dress-front. Their father, Lord Eomund, brother of the King, sits beside his wife in dark emerald vest. Like the King he talks and laughs aloud and praises the Home of the Horse-lords.
"They always say the same things," Eomer remarks. "Are they going to eat or what?"
"Old men must never be hungry then. Doesn't mother look beautiful?"
"She looks like a fairy or an elf from those traveller's stories. Oh look Eowyn! They're making a toast."
They watch as liquid is poured into ornately carved mugs and refilled again quickly. Tonight is a celebration, so special is the season of harvesting that their mother only winks at their small shapes from behind the pillar instead of insisting the two of them go to bed.
Eowyn goes to bed when the moon is high in the sky. She dreams of autumn and feasts and white and gold dresses.
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xXx
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Her horse she names Eo, just for the fun of it. Calling a horse "horse" is the most hilarious thing she'd ever come up with herself and she likes the way both of them turn at the name when called.
Four years her senior, Eomer is the most grown up person she knows and her hero. She is his shadow and partner-in-crime and the only one who can soothe/talk sense/persuade the other. Eomer thinks his small sister is a fairy and can stroke her white-gold hair for hours on end.
She is six and plays with the village children. He is ten and always knows the right words to say to get nothing less than a compromise. They are everything they need.
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xXx
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The sight of Chief Marshal Eomund riding home battle-weary and tattered armour became a familiar sight. He is known for his reckless style of combat and their mother often warns him his luck won't last forever when he boasts of riding against a hundred with only a few men.
And one autumn, it did run out.
There was a horse, and then a grave and then dresses of unfamiliar stormy black that stood out blaringly against the reds and browns of the surrounding foliage. The world became dark and cold and even when the Summer came back again Eowyn knew she wouldn't - couldn't - ever feel warm again. Ice had steeped into her veins and chilled the skin it ran underneath, leaving her pale and cold.
Their childhoods had slipped through their fingers and disappeared, taking the summer, the spring and the beautiful autumn with it.
That night they lay awake and watched the ceiling. Eowyn dreamed of cold and black and understanding what the toasts they had watched before as children were all about.
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xXx
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Their Uncle the King musters an attack in retaliation. The royal hall is full of men, all of them horse-masters, and all of them willing to fight. Eomer is eleven and demands to join them.
"I will avenge my father!" he cries, holding a sword that trails on the floor behind him with trembling hands. "It is my duty as his son!"
Their mother says nothing. No one says yes, but no one refuses either. Grief is lifeblood they all share. Eowyn runs to her brother before he can say anything more, standing between him and the open doorway.
"Eomer," she says, while the rest of the court looks on with dead eyes. "…You aren't needed there yet. You should stay here." She looks at their mother whose cheekbones now seem to be trying to get out of her face and hasn't said a word in three days. With me. Help me. Don't leave me alone.
Her brother's brown eyes search her face. Then he nods, and the sword falls with a dull clatter.
Their mother becomes a feather of bones. People whisper of the Lady Theodwyn who lies on her bed unmoving, willing herself to die.
The last of her life slips through the open windows and they wear black again for another month.
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xXx
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There was once a boy and a girl, her nurse tells the two children as her shadow dances around the room to the tune of the flickering candle flame. A big brother and his little sister who were the heirs of a kingdom.
But as fate would have had it, they lived in a time when the world was uneasy and there was talk of a great evil, a great evil that would engulf them all and destroy them. They were all alone in the world and had no one on their side.
But this brother and sister were courageous, you see. True warriors, as brave and honourable as any hero would be. When the time came, they fought against the evil and united their kingdom. The two children grew up into strong and beautiful warriors and together they fought side by side.
Oh yes it was possible, young master Eomer. It's as true as the disbelief on your bonny face, it is. Of course the sister fought alongside her brother (in fact, when the two of them fought together, they were unstoppable) and only because they worked together did they succeed in bringing peace to their kingdom.
Their names? Oh it was ever so long ago the names have slipped out my memory. But the deeds of that brother and sister went down in history, and in legend.
Now sleep, you two children, and dream of tomorrow.
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xXx
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Theodred only ever looked like a prince when he wore the right clothes. Their cousin was one of those people who seemed to live off air and mild excitement and it was his favourite pastime to dress up in servant garb and join the rest of the children playing in the grass.
Without their mother, Eomer and Eowyn become close with their cousin, the crown prince of Rohan. Theodred regarded their loss with the air of a seasoned veteran having lost his own mother during his childbirth. Eomer is sober and Eowyn is downright grave, so it falls to Theodred's lot to pull the solemn pair outside with him for the day.
They are no longer children anymore so their days are spent preparing to become adults.
It is in the afternoons following their respective, gender-elected studies the three are free to roam.
One spring day Theodred passes Eowyn a wooden sword.
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xXx
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Men have power – physical force, authority, the capricious illusions of importance. In Rohan the men are the breadwinners and warriors, and the women are the same and more.
Eowyn knows this because she has felt hard bumps beneath rolled-up sleeves and seen eyes remain desert dry as they follow the diminishing group of riders dip over the horizons even as they say aloud how much they will miss their boys.
War is a reality of their world. The children of the Eorlingas grow up to become horse-lords who orc armies fear when the thundering of hooves are heard, just as they have since the days of Eorl. Weilding broad swords and horse banners, warriors follow its mortiferous call.
Brothers and sweethearts hold swords that are forged and sharpened by young women in the smithy, on the hilts gold horses and ornate spirals imbued with hopes and promises. In the absence of fathers and sons, mothers bend the earth to their will to provide food and clothing for their growing families.
Some of the women chatter like birds and host festivities that are so lively one can almost forget the King has not left his royal hall for weeks now, their roseate demeanours never wavering. They continue to sing, even when draped in the muted tones of grey and navy.
Eowyn has forgotten how to be cheerful. Sometimes she looks at these women who still smile, who live their small lives merrily, and feels a twinge of envy.
Eomer and Theodred leave her to go to with the rest of the warriors to ride through the rest of the kingdom of Rohan, and maybe to the lands beyond. Eowyn is morose for the rest of the day until one of the swordmakers – a girl of twenty summers with dark blonde hair cut short to her head for the heat of the forges - comes to her room and hands the girl a sword of her own.
"Because those without swords can still die upon them. And her highness is good with swords, I've heard."
The maids, the cooks, the girls who work at the stables are the ones who come to watch her practice. From the doorways they watch and cheer her on and sometimes they join in. They hold the swords and move like they are dancing, graceful and lithe.
There are no dictionaries or big bookcases in the palace for the Eorlingas are a people of speech and pictures, designs and poetry. The definitions of abstract nouns are not limited to strokes on paper; strength is a word that makes her think of fifteen different things that all seem to contradict each other, all of the definitons comprised of the women she has grown up observing.
Strength and women go hand in hand, Eowyn thinks. She will spend her life proving it.
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xXx
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When Eomer came home again especially for his sister's fourteenth birthday, he stopped at the bottom of the stairs, surprise clear in his eyes, before bowing dignifedly. She asked him to knock it off and punched him on the shoulder when he asked her permission to hug her.
Eomer had grown up quickly, his quiet demeanour as a child matured into thoughtfulness, his shyness into reserve. The other girls he had once played around with were pretty damsels in long skirts now, although he only treated them with distant courtesy.
Eomer's shoulders grow strong and broad, his voice begins to deepen. One day Eowyn doesn't recognise his voice among the conversation in the royal hall, only noticing her brother when she walked in and saw him among the company of returned men before the King.
She is growing, becoming a woman like her ladies in waiting. And the young marshal understands that his sister's beauty will be a double-edged sword. He notices the prolonged looks in his sister's direction. He notices the black cloak slinking around corners whenever Eowyn walks past.
Eomer has never been one for temporary solutions, so he does not expend energy shadowing his sister. Instead he takes it upon himself to train twice as relentlessly with her whenever he is home, laying bare his natural weaknesses as a man so that she can use them to her advantage.
Eowyn soaks the lessons in, but not for the reason her brother has. Long, long ago have the seeds of desire for recognition in battle been sowed in her, and in the closed life running the palace while the King wanes, it colours her dreams and makes her fearless.
The moon is low in the sky when she finally falls asleep. She dreams of burning castles and defeating whole orc battalions and hearing her name in the songs of battlefield heroes.
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xXx
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Eomer wakes up in a cold sweat. Then he drops on his knees on the floor, hands searching frantically in the dark before finally just grasping sheets and promptly vomiting violently into them. He is shaking and crying (crying?) and all he thinks is redREDREDred.
Screaming. The ragged gasps echo in the room, but at the edges of consciousness are the cries of dying men and screaming orcs and he can't breathe. He's gulping air but he can't breathe.
The door opens and there is an urge to flee but it's Eowyn - only Eowyn, it's only Eowyn and he can breathe - and her arms are pulling him away from the bed and to the middle of the room.
"Hush, brother! Calm yourself before others hear!"
It is a long time before her brother is taking even breaths and even longer still that his eyes are longer shifting, pupils contracting. He shouts when she begins to light a fire so she opens the windows instead and she's clasping her brother in the dim light, trying to calm him down.
"Breathe, Eomer. The dead are dead and there is nothing for us to do but leave them behind. Please Eomer, breathe!"
The sky is turning navy when her brother has recovered and then she only stands up and helps her brother to prepare for another muster. She watches Theodred and Eomer disappear over the ridge of a hill and wonders why she'd never noticed how much her mother must have hated to be the one left behind.
Rohan is so far away from Gondor, from the forests of Mirkwood, from the dark plains of Mordor, from the other places she only knows about from maps curling at the edges.
Eomer is broken and stitched together. Eowyn is slowly cracking from inside. She decapitates straw dummies and stabs bales of hay to pass the time and she hopes that when the evil of the time comes, she and her brother will be ready.
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xXx
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"You don't smile anymore." Eomer tells her.
The comment is so sudden that for three heartbeats she can only look at her brother in wonderment. Then she feels as if she's never seen him before, this young man who now fits into armour that once hung loosely, this young man with sad eyes others misinterpret as composure who's gripping her hand. He's suddenly not the brother she'd grown up following and the world is far, far too big.
Regaining her composure, she lifted and dropped a shoulder. "Perhaps I have less reason to."
The answer seems to pierce her brother because suddenly he is hugging her to himself hard, his fingers shaking at her shoulders.
"I'm so sorry Eowyn. I'm so sorry." he says, pleads. His sister is a shadow, a feather of a clipped wing walking the palace halls waiting, existing in his absence. He wants to take her with him and wants to keep her away and somewhere down the line Eowyn has crystallized into hard opal, beryllonite that did not soften for anyone, even him. Somewhere in the months he had been away from home, his sister had lost her warmth. She is ice now, and burning to the touch.
"Enough." She tells him. Even her voice has changed. "I am perfectly fine where I am and you have done nothing wrong."
"I have failed as a brother if I can't even make my little sister happy."
Eowyn turns her head, her long plait swinging behind her before landing heavily on her back. "You are mistaken." She tells him, like he's a fool for even thinking he didn't make her happy. And then she turns back to her brother, the only brother she's ever had and her last link to sanity, to remembering why people had to breathe and says sincerely.
"You are the best brother I could ever have hoped to have and I'd much rather spend my life here in this prison of a palace than lose you. So please, Eomer, I am fine. We have no choice but to be."
She puts her head on his chest and the world shrinks back into its normal size.
"We have no choice but to be," she repeats.
"That is true." Eomer says, sorrowfully. "I'm sorry, Eowyn."
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xXx
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Lord Eomer and the Lady Eowyn make a solemn pair, standing like proud marble statues on the high porch of the Edoras palace. Her pearly-gold tresses compliments rather than contrasts with his flaxen hair. Eomer speaks in a ringing voice that compels obedience while his sister sweeps her eyes over the kingdom, nothing missing her notice.
They are perpetually reserved and seldom does a trace of emotion ever flicker across their sculpted features.
But when they do, such as the times when Eomer is home again and they are alone together, the change is beautiful. Subtle, but beautiful. Shoulders relax and eyes smile radiantly and there is an aura of wholeness that everyone can feel – like a breath of autumn air.
Sometimes they share the same dream. It is one in which they are both smiling and Rohan is blooming under a bright and heady summer. Dreams are all they have, now.
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xXx
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The wall feels so rough behind her back. From the bars of the door a hundred leering, salivating faces hover atop grotesque bodies holding rusty scimitars and iron bars.
Her fingers only grasp fabric and an embroidered handkerchief in her pocket. There is nowhere to run. With an ear-splitting screech the barred walls fall down, and they come. Like a wave, like horse warriors down a slope, they come.
She gasps and the dream shatters into a million shards of bloodstained metal.
Her nightmares are becoming more frequent.
There is a sword underneath her pillow. The thick steel feels like a friends touch underneath her hand.
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xXx
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She presses a knife to the nape of his neck, watches the tip draw a crimson bead from taut, bleached skin.
"I am the King's niece. You would do well to remember that."
Grima let out a sound between a snarl and a whimper and Eowyn was tempted to press the blade in. But the man is a worm and not worth her time. He is not worth anything to her. And something she recognises later as instinct tells her that it would hurt him most, burn and keep the brand longest, to know that.
"Speak to me alone again and I will push the blade in further." Then she pushes him away and walks off like she has just swatted a fly away.
Grima looks at her with eyes both full of hate and desire as he spits, "As you say, my fair lady."
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xXx
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My Lord, will you not see your kingdom?
Can you remember the last time we wore colours instead of shade?
We weep behind closed doors.
Joy has long since fled these halls.
There are more swords than there are warriors to wield them.
Your son is dying, Uncle.
My Lord, will you not see your kingdom?
Uncle?
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xXx
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It hurts to see boys riding alongside their fathers, carrying nothing more than an objective and hand-me-down swords and two months of training. The new recruits are seedlings, the battles are winter frosts, and they are broken forms on the ground the next morning.
She has a better chance than they do in surviving, in killing anything at all, but she is left behind. Like the big sisters who are sword-makers, the women of the stables who know how to make a tired steed run another hundred miles, the women of the armoury who know everything about the strengths and weaknesses their men wear as battle garb. Like the rest of the women who have spent their long hours of waiting training themselves for battles that exist only in the tales of soldiers who made it home.
Eowyn writes down the numbers of the dead and wounded with bitterness mixed in the ink. Lives are hard to create. Weak blades break like splinters while strong ones in the cupboards rust.
"There are others who can fight, Eomer. Others who won't die so easily." She thinks of how instinctive her moves have become, how ready she is to put her training to use.
"Not all of the men wish for battle like you, Eowyn, to throw his life away for the sake of duty. We leave you here so you do not pay the price for wars started by foolish men."
"It would be easier to die on the battlefield than spend weeks, months in anxious waiting; or to live the rest of your life mourning the dead."
"Eowyn," her brother sighs and she almost feels guilty because he looks so tired, so spent.
"I just think you should know that we too are prepared to throw our lives away for those we love..." she finishes, putting her sword back into its scabbard. "I wish you wouldn't doubt our strength."
"I do not doubt the strength of women, Eowyn. I just do not think it fair for women to fight and die in the name of wars that she had no part in starting."
Both in the right, they cannot agree and nothing changes.
She dreams of saving the boys who did not know how to fight, who did not know enough about repressing emotion to curb fear. She dreams of broad shields and joining swords with her brother, and the sun rises to another empty day.
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xXx
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The room smelt of copper and despair. Stooped figures walk leadenly past Prince Theodred's room, while the wretched keening of female voices colour the air.
He asked for his father. In his last minutes, with the last of his petering will, Theodred turned to the pale face of his cousin and begged. He clenched her hand so hard the fingers turned bluish when she told him - lied to him - to just hold on while Uncle came from his visit to the West Fold.
Her cousin held on with shuddering breaths between painfully long pauses for his father sitting in bewitched stupor in the royal hall, waiting for his father who never came.
She saw Theodred's chest exhale and never rise again. And for the first time in more than ten years Eowyn cried, and the tears were cold.
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xXx
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The fates work in strange ways. Those who live in places of peace are the ones who come to end the wars, those who don't seek adventure are the ones who find it. Always, it is the least likely and the least prepared ones who are involved in the momentous events. Fate is ironic that way.
But what about those who spend their lives waiting for the adventure? What happens to those who wish for danger?
What about those who are ready?
What happens to them?
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xXx
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There is an old man in white robes, an elf in forest green, a dwarf with a beard like pulled wool and a dark Ranger with promising eyes.
She watches the strange group on Eored horses galloping across the plains, coming closer. Her grey eyes follow them until they come to the bottom of the hilly rise on which the city sits and are hidden by the houses.
The flag her father once rode with has flown from its pole, pulled by the same wind that bears these strange travellers.
Eowyn sighs.
They won't change anything.
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- FIN-
AUTHORS NOTE:
Thanks NoeticSky, for everything.
Please read and review!
Alatariele C.