Belfalas, West of Nan Requian
I have a fever when I awake, but I say nothing of it. My arm is tender and feels like a lead weight, but there's no sign of infection when Calahdra changes the bandages.
"She's no Legolas," Éomer tells me from over the Shieldmaiden's shoulder, "but her field dressings keep,"
Calahdra shoots him such a viciously ascorbic look that even I wither a bit, but when she turns back to me her face is placid and focused.
"Is there pain, Lothiriel?"
"A little, but I can manage,"
"Take whiskey, but only enough – today's ride will be long,"
It was – we were slowed by our lost horses, and our prisoner on foot too. I shared a saddle with Éomer, and Ellerocco and Frost were given over to temporary riders. Calahdra walked, as did Azrubên, who took turns prodding the bandit along.
"What's to be done with him?" I asked Éomer timidly, peeking out from the folds of his thick cloak when the poor man began hissing violently at Calahdra.
When Éomer spoke, his voice was low and thick with resentment. "We will drag him to Nan Requian, where your Aunt's justice can be done according to the laws of this country,"
It is clear that he would prefer that that justice had already been done. I gulp. "And how would justice be done in Rohan, in his case?"
I cannot see his face, but I know Éomer is smiling wryly. "Intended horse thievery? Death. A deadly assault on anyone, royal or not? Death. But Calahdra is my better angel – she advises against it while we are on foreign lands,"
I consider this. Is Belfalas really so different from Rohan? Dol Amroth, as the capital, certainly was not. Cosmopolitanism and urbanity necessitated a firm fist, my father might have said. There could be no harmony in such close quarters without the threat of harsh justice.
But in the countryside, I wasn't sure. Of course, who among us would object? Perhaps the twins, Beren and Belden. And maybe Fingon. But then I realized – as princess, I was the hand of justice in these far reaches of the land.
"I will levy the sentence," I tell Éomer, and there is a raw edge of emotion in my voice that I did not expect.
I am rebuked. "No. No, Lothíriel. I would not put that blood on your hands,"
"It already is!"
Eldric and Herubald, on other side of Firefleet, turn at the sound of my shrill squeak and share a look of concern, and then annoyance. My pulse skipped – ah, so I was a nuisance and a burden. Lovely.
I sighed and lowered my voice. "I contributed to the deaths of his compatriots. And just as they, he would have killed me, or worse…," I shudder, and Éomer instinctively squeezes me tighter against him. "And I – I am Princess of this land, and a future Queen of Rohan. Justice is my right and also my responsibility,"
Éomer does not respond, but he pulls Firefleet short and raises his hand for a halt.
Éomer turns us around to Calahdra, who has the prisoner's arms pinned back and one long knife pressed to his side. I had not realized how dire their struggle had become.
With kingly authority, and tone I had not heard him take with his friend and Shieldmaiden, Eomer summons them both: "Bring him forward,"
There was steel in her gaze, but Calahdra did as he bade. Though the bandit had thrown his head back and was dragging his feet with boyish stubbornness, he was no match for Calahdra's understated strength. I realize that he is no older than the twins – perhaps even as young as 15. This could not deter me, only haunt me.
Éomer dismounts, leaving me astride Firefleet, but his stature commands the attention of all his men regardless. "The Princess Lothíriel has decided – she will have her revenge. And her justice. This man will be put to death like the remainder of his… syndicate,"
The effect is instantaneous. The Rohirrim mumble in agreement, save Calahdra, but the Amrothions double back. Even Fingon makes a strangled, contemptuous noise.
My mouth opens once and closes, like a fish's, before I am able to make my decree. "This prisoner hampers our mission, which is to reach my brother Elphir in Gondor as soon as possible. And the punishment for murder is plain in our laws – execution,"
"I am no murderer!" the man calls to me, and then looks wildly to his fellow countrymen. Though they do not meet his gaze, their sympathies are clear.
"It may be true, princess," Azrubên chimes, and then gulps as more than a dozen northern eyes fall on him unkindly. "None of us can claim that we saw this one join the fight in earnest. It could be that he is a coward – and it could be that you are right, and he intended murder though we did not see it. But only a trial could make sense of that,"
"A trial?!" This was Eldric, scoffing as he rounds his steed towards the unhorsed Amrothian. "If your trials are anything like ours, it is nothing but an opportunity for old men to roll out their best barrels, and for the housewives to gather for petty gossip. This man ran with thieves – his intentions and guilt are clear,"
"Liar!" the bandit calls, but his words are scarcely discernable. Argument is breaking out, and the horses grow restless in the tension too.
"Silence!" Éomer calls, and he is heeded. "It is the Lady's judgment, let her make it,"
I would lie if I said I did not waver for a moment. Perhaps it was the fever growing within me, or perhaps it was the prospect of having my first sentence laid down and carried out so primitively. Perhaps, too, it was some strange and adverse desire to please my betrothed by carrying out would I thought would have been his desire, were we in his country and not mine. But the moment did pass – I could not show weakness when my men - no, my father's men - clearly had very little confidence in this decision already.
"He is sentenced to death. Azrubên, will you carry out the sentence as my countryman?"
The man blinks, shakes his head just once, but turns to Calahdra. She has said nothing in all this time, I realize, but she proceeds to ram the man in the Achilles tendon with her steel-toed boots, and he falls with a quiet yelp.
Azrubên draws his longsword and holds it aloft, and then turns his gaze to mine, prepared for my signal.
'Ulmo, do not let me go astray,' I plead softly. Éomer has put his hand on my thigh and squeezes, and I give the slow and reluctant nod.
The blade falls, the bandit screams, and a spray of red paints the air between myself and him before all the world goes black again.
Ellerocco was not born in Rohan, but Calahdra suspected that her tall black stallion had some of the Mearas' blood within him all the same. And a great deal of hot, Haradrim blood too. He flew faster now than he had as a yearling, when she had first purchased him from a young cripple boy in Minas Tirith. Calahdra had been far sicker then than Lothíriel was now, though the princess rattled listless and unconscious between her arms.
Calahdra could not blame Lothíriel for fainting, not really. The thing the princess had felt compelled to do was wicked, but not evil. And the poison within her – well, Calahdra had no notion of it until she had probed into the princess' fevered mind, and further still into the vessels and capillaries of her body. She found it quickly once she suspected its presence – a fungal thing, spreading in artistic plumes throughout the soft spaces between ligament and flesh.
Calahdra had faith that Lothíriel's aunt would have ample medicine for this, as the highwaymen had likely derived it from a native plant. But Éomer - knowing that Calahdra and Ellerocco were both the lightest and quickest pair among his Rohirrim - bid her make haste regardless.
It was wise that Calahdra carried the princess away from the hornet's nest she had kicked, too. The Amrothions were not pleased with the impromptu execution they had witnessed, no matter how right Lothíriel was to do it. The young woman was royal, yes, but she was also a woman. Calahdra was realizing that the roots of misogyny in Belfalas were deeper and wider than she first suspected.
It takes two brutal days and nights of riding to reach Nan Requian, and in that time Lothíriel is rarely conscious. Calahdra is more motherly than she thought herself capable - she spoons small but regular drips of water into the girl's mouth, and cleans her when she soils herself. Occasionally Lothíriel is wracked with volatile, noisy nightmares – always of her mother's death, and her brothers' – and Calahdra soothes her with Sindarin that Lothíriel might recognize. And rarely, because Calahdra does not want to set the precedent of invading the new Queen's privacy, she presses into Lothíriel's mind and reroutes the frenetic, fevered energy there towards healing as opposed to pain and chaos. When she does this, she catches glimpses of Lothíriel's fears – falling from a great height, which her mother selected as her manner of suicide, or being taken captive like Elphir. That fear nearly undoes Calahdra too, as it opens a door she usually keeps barred shut.
Calahdra does wonder what they will find when Elphir is returned to his family. It is likely that he is exquisitely cared for in the Houses of Healing, and likely ample attention from Aragorn himself given his status as heir to a southern fiefdom. What Calahdra would give herself for some of the new King's gentle power, which seemed to be capable of undoing even the deepest of devastation in the human body and spirit. Elphir had probably endured darker tortures, and far more of it, than Calahdra ever had at the hands of the enemy's servants. Lothíriel would likely not be reunited with the same older brother she had so fervently revered in her youth.
The Lady Thaliel is of course surprised to find her niece in the arms of a half-elven, half-Rohirric warrioress at midday and without warning, but she is also a practical woman – she holds the larger questions of circumstance for later, and bombards Calahdra only with the objective inquiries. Calahdra would have liked to have stayed with Lothíriel, at a minimum so as to learn what poison was used and how to treat it, but she is escorted away from the physician's quarters as soon as the necessary details are extracted from her. When Calahdra is taken to the guest wing, and deposited in a small but richly dressed room, she is struck with a sense of utter loneliness. She had held the princess between her limbs for more than 48 hours, so desperately clinging to Éomer's expectation that she keep the girl alive, no matter what, please Calahdra, please I know ask too much of you too often…. Now her hands and feet feel weightless. Her heart feels bereft.
She makes her way back to the stable, following scent rather than any concept of space. Ellerocco will be exhausted and ornery – though his concept of ornery was not a typical stallion's version of ornery. Indeed, when Calahdra finds her horse, he is irritating the grooms that very graciously took him on in the courtyard despite their own surprise – they were not expecting an influx of war horses for another three or five days, and here was quite a big one, huffing and stomping despondently despite an ample supply of oats and fresh water.
"I will manage him," Calahdra states simply, and the three young men give over the reigns and tack hastily, but linger in curiosity. She does not mind this – when she is with Elen in their minds, all the world melts away.
"Thank you, my friend, for your quick feet and inimitable spirit,"
The horse is too disappointed in himself to let the compliment inflate his ego. "I wished I could have run harder, Calahdra, I really do, but my legs – they ache. Is this old age? Is it arthritis?"
Calahdra laughs aloud, and this raises eyebrows among the grooms. To assuage them – or perhaps to confound them further, she continues speaking in Sindarin with both her voice and her mind.
"This is mortality, Elen. A difference between you and I, but I promise you that even I am sore in the nether parts and desperate for some suitable food,"
Ellerocco stomps again but obliges her in letting his martingale and breastplate be undone. "Nether parts. Hmph. No, only my joints,"
"Well that is good then, because joints I will rub down, but not the former,"
Elen chortles horsishly and proceeds to snatch hay from the nearest pile. This pleases Calahdra – if his appetite had returned, so too would his spirits.
The grooms assist with the rest of the tack, a bath, and then assessing the state of the stallion's hooves. They are worse for wear, and Calahdra is assured a farrier will be out the next day for re-shoeing. She thinks she will try to supervise this, if Lothíriel is well – the stable is only half-full, and mostly with carthorses and palfreys. Belfalas lost most of its good riding stock during the war, and Calahdra would not be surprised if the farrier was rusty in handling horses of Elen's size and manner.
"If there was ever a subject upon whom to relearn, it would be you, friend,"
Calahdra receives no response; her horse is already asleep, mouth still half-full of hay.
Calahdra takes super alone – the Lady Thaliel is too preoccupied with her niece's recovery to hold a proper dinner. But Calahdra is reassured by the young servant that delivers the plate that Lothíriel is on the mend and deep in a comfortable slumber. The Shieldmaiden needed no reassurances of that – she had tested for Lothíriel's mind an hour prior and found it as the servant girl had said, but that was her own secret.
In her chamber, Calahdra finds that her saddle bags have arrived, but her dirty clothes and bedroll were extracted for cleaning. She is surprised, then, when she finds a pair of man's clothes laid upon her bed. Well, perhaps boy's clothes, given their size. She would have expected the Amrothions here to be as traditionalist as their urban counterparts, if not more so, but she will not protest this. Surreptitiously, as she strips her own filthy and tattered clothing away, two more servants arrive carrying a wash bin. One, she notes, is far better dressed than the other. When the woman catches her staring, she straightens herself.
"Thaleste, my lady. Daughter to Lady Thaliel,"
Calahdra quirks a brow – there is very little resemblance, and this girl is far darker in complexion. "And cousin to her highness?"
Thaleste shakes her head a little. "Half. I am not recognized among the royal family,"
"Ah,"
Thaleste points to the tub, which is half-filled with tepid water. Calahdra obliges in stripping her remaining things, which the second servant captures and whisks away presumably to the same fate as the rest.
Calahdra is a little surprised when her Ladyship's illegitimate daughter does not leave – Calahdra was not waited on in Dol Amroth, though she'd made it explicitly clear that she did not desire that. Instead, Thaleste moves forward with a cake of soap and a sponge and takes to washing her without preamble. The touch is so gentle and soothing after such a hard ride that Calahdra cannot protest. And Thaleste's demeanor is calming, lovely, soft like Lothíriel's…
"You've given me a man's clothing to change into," Calahdra points out neutrally, though her eyes have drifted closed.
"Will that be a problem, milady?" Thaleste asks, equally ambivalent.
"Not at all. I was merely curious,"
Thaleste lays Calahdra's right arm back in the water and lifts the left.
"My mother has good sense to not offend her guests – she saw what you arrived in, and its good quality. She presumed you would prefer the like,"
"She is sensible, your mother,"
"To a fault," Thaleste retorts.
Calahdra blinks her eyes open. For her status, this woman spoke stunningly freely.
"Have you met your cousin Lothíriel before?"
"I have, but she would not know we met as cousins,"
'A mystery to untangle before Éomer arrives, so we have something to speak about over whisky and wine. Conversations for when Lothíriel is pried away from him after dark for propriety's sake,'
Though perhaps propriety was less of a concern in this manor than Calahdra had assumed.
"You were recently recognized by your mother, then? I hope you do not mind me asking,"
Thaleste shrugs and moves on to Calahdra's shins and feet.
"His Lordship passed away in the war, and at last the veil of silence needed not be so heavy. It is better, I think, for we half-bloods to live our lives freely and as we are even if the world would not prefer it. Ticklish?"
Calahdra has kicked her foot spastically at the use of the phrase "we half-bloods". Her lineage was no secret, and indeed it seemed that a good deal of her reputation had proceeded her to this southern fiefdom. But Thaleste is clearly not like her typically tight-lipped, ascetic countrymen and women.
"No," Calahdra replies simply, and Thaleste resumes her scrubbing. The water is a disturbing grey-black by now, but the woman is seemingly unperturbed.
"What do you cherish most about your freedom, now that you have it?" Calahdra asks, genuinely curious. Thaleste pauses her ministrations and meets her gaze – the Amrothion's eyes are a dark chestnut, with hints of flame. Though her hair is bound up in a top knot and a house scarf, curls peak out around her ears beguilingly. Calahdra notes that there is plum rouge on her full lips, too – she'd not seen that on the palace servants in the capital.
The lips part. "That in my freedom, I can also be unseen. That the spectacle of my 'true' identity also serves as a shield, so that I can move in the shadows and be the woman who I am truly born to be,"
Calahdra's skin is tingling, and there is an airiness building in her stiff joints. Had she somehow ingested Lothíriel's poison too? No, no, that was silly. A silly thought to shield her mind from, what? Attraction?
Yes, it was attraction clouding her vision now. Thaleste was moving 'round the tub again, and then bent to stroke her sponge gently along Calahdra's upper thigh.
The Shieldmaiden maintains a steel shell of composure, but on the inside, she is at war with herself. She had warded off Eldric's approaches for weeks, fueled by the memory of Legolas' phantom voice that night at the inn. Her body had desperately wanted companionship, but she knew Eldric was a drug that only filled a fraction of the void, and could never shrink it. And the thought of Lothíriel's soft, ample body atop hers on the beach outside Dol Amroth – she dreamt of that in her Elvish vigils more often than she could admit, even to the phantom Legolas.
And Thaleste – she was a stranger, in a strange land, who emitted peculiar vibrations. Calahdra sensed that Thaleste was cogent enough to notice if there was a gentle tap upon her conscious, and the Shieldmaiden was too tempted by the thought of having the Amrothion to risk this.
So Calahdra yielded. When the sponge was replaced by Thaleste's slender hand on her thigh, and then by the woman's sharp nails, she merely sunk further into the tub.
"Tell me, Thaleste. Who is the woman you are meant to be?"
The Amrothion's laughter is low and haughty – brimming with confidence. "Shieldmaiden of Rohan, don't you know? It is better to show, not tell,"