Balancing the Books
Ithilien, 3006 T.A.
In between everything else, it turned out that the Captain was teaching one of the older men to read. Half-an-hour, every other day, sitting patiently beside a grizzled old soldier, hearing him stumble over his letters, judging when to guide and when simply to listen.
"Don't you have enough on your plate?" said Mablung.
"He wants to own an inn one day."
"An inn?"
"Yes. When the war's over."
Mablung snorted. The war over. One of those pleasant fictions that they indulged in every so often. Not too often, mind. That way lay madness.
"A man must have dreams," said the Captain, mildly.
And the Captain, it seemed, was good at getting other people to tell him what theirs were. I bet that rarely cuts both ways. "Dreams, eh? So what would you do, Captain?"
The Captain, momentarily wrongfooted, sat back in his chair to ponder the matter. "I have some land on the coast in Belfalas," he said, at last. "I'd go there, shut the doors, and write."
Mablung surveyed the overloaded desk, the endless stack of reports, the young man's ink-stained fingers and tired eyes. He looked at his Captain as if he'd lost his mind. "Write?"
"Well, not this kind of thing!"
"What then? Poetry?"
The slight flush on the young man's cheeks suggested he'd hit his mark. "You may mock," said the Captain, with dignity, "but all this hard work pays off. Have a look at this, lieutenant."
He passed over some parchment, weighed down with the Steward's seal. "Write," Mablung muttered, shaking his head as he read through the missive. When he was done, he gave his commanding officer a sharp look. The Captain was swinging back on his chair, looking very pleased for someone who had just secured immediate better pay for all the company's senior staff except himself.
"You don't have to thank me," said the Captain. Smug bastard.
"Huh," Mablung said. "You persuaded the Steward of this?"
"So it seems."
Still, the extra money wouldn't do any harm… "And did you write your petition in verse, sir?"
"Not on this occasion, no."
"Ah. That must have been what made the difference."
The Captain was studying the letter again. "I imagine so."
Minas Tirith, 3019 T.A.
He'd had his suspicions at the time that Boromir had played some part, but it wasn't until the war was over that he learned exactly what. Shortly before the world didn't end, Faramir unexpectedly found himself one of the most senior nobles in the kingdom. And when the war was indeed over, the honours – plus their numerous obligations – kept on coming. Steward of Gondor. Prince of Ithilien. Lord of Emyn Arnen.
Besides inheriting a pile of ruins in a garden country ravaged from a century of war, he also received the doubtful pleasure of working through the family accounts. To his relief, he turned out to be considerably less impecunious than he'd feared. The income from his assets alone would support one Ranger Captain and a wife blessedly uninterested in fripperies in the style to which they were accustomed. Then there were dower lands in Belfalas from his mother, of which his own small estate formed a part, properties in Minas Tirith that would soon come into their own… Cautiously, he began to see how Ithilien's repair might be financed. He might not have to ask her to live in a tent.
His father, of course, had never spent a penny. Their allowances, his and his brother's, had been the same in their thirties as they'd been in their teens. But Boromir's affairs turned out to be a different matter. These he went through meticulously, since there would one day, he sincerely hoped, be another son and heir. For years, all was straightforward enough, if occasionally haphazard in the record-keeping, until suddenly his brother's outgoings dramatically increased. A whole set of new horrors crossed his mind: A lover? A bastard?
Faramir stalked through the paperwork like a hunter chasing prey. And at last the pieces came together. There'd been clues at the time, he saw now – sudden economies on his brother's part; a book misplaced on a library shelf; his father's irritation when cautiously pressed about the limits of these new funds… Don't expect more, he'd snapped. There isn't any more.
He sat back in his chair, tracing a fingertip over the figures of his brother's exhausted assets. He found to his surprise that he could not bring himself to be angry with his father. There had been other and worse hurts. As for his brother… What could be said? Yet another sacrifice – on his account, on Gondor's account. Generous to a fault. Generous to the end. Spent, he thought, as he tried yet again to close the book on the past.
Altariel, 3rd August 2018
