Chapter XXIV: Heathen's Homily

'Since it all begun

To its reckoning

There the reason comes on

To the common tongue of you loving me.'

~ Hozier, Common Tongue

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Erchirion, the second son of the Dol Amroth Duke, came to Rohan on Yuletide Eve, and Éomer took a quick liking to the man.

Like his sister, he had Imrahil's height and knife-slim slenderness. And the dark hair and brows, with the sheen of a blue-black lance. Yet there was more of his mother in Erchirion than any child of Imrahil's Éomer had yet seen. His eyes were not grey, but the dangerous blue of summer storm clouds. His movements were quick, sharp, almost terse, without the cold-blooded, languid grace of his siblings.

His face was not beautiful, but nonetheless, it was a face men would follow and women would love. It was a face a stranger would spill his darkest secrets to, a face troubled men would seek advice from. And Erchirion would offer no cants nor soothing syrups to them. His counsels would always be cold, and his laugh would always be dry.

He had watched Lothíriel's hands tremble like frightened butterflies when she had asked, "And how fares Dol Amroth, brother mine?"

There had been no pause, no consideration, no careful choosing of words. That, Éomer was soon to learn, was not Erchirion's way. He had said, in his dry, calm voice, "Dol Amroth grieves for what it has lost, I think."

He had watched Lothíriel sitting there, sad-eyed in her leaf-green grown, and felt a curious emptiness. She had folded her hands in her lap, and said softly, "That is a pity." Then she had glanced over at him. A smile had brushed her lips, and he had felt peace take the place of hollowness.

"Yes," Erchirion had said thoughtfully, looking at his sister with his strange eyes, eyes the dangerous blue of a summer sky when a storm is at hand. "Yes, it is a pity."

He had also learned that comfort was not a dish Lothíriel loved to sup on, moreover when it was served cold, as all his comforting was.

And, as he had warned her, there were many matters of moment on hand. First and foremost, there was Unferth.

While Ceorl Lionlimb, who had ridden like a knight to win back the White City, sat in a cold and lonely broch, playing watchman in a time of peace for the most heavily fortified of Rohan's bulwarks, Unferth had become Third Marshal of the Mark.

It had been an adept move, a wise decision, and one that Éomer found entirely distasteful, for Unferth was a swaggering, blustering bullyrook of a man. He let ale make most of his promises and could not brook the thought that there was a better man than him. His father had been Ecglaf of the Long Arm, a mighty man who had sued for his livery with valiant deeds, and whose fiefdom constituted the bulk of the Folde. But Ecglaf had passed through first dotage, then death, leaving both his noble name-and enough land to make a small kingdom-to a vain and swaggering son.

So he would sit alone, watching the sky turn grey and the snow fall. The glimmering flakes would spin into the light the windows cast, and then out again, tumbling to obscure the world. He drew up treaties, and counted coin, and rode to meet the athelings, and forgave the outlaws who had gone against the old crown.

Then he would sit once more alone, watching the sky turn grey and the snow fall. He would think of Orthanc, rearing arrogant, black and gleaming hard, and in the owl-light, the voice of the White Wizard would ask, what is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor?

He had no wish to return to Isengard. He had heard tidings that the White Wizard had fled, and Wormtongue besides, but that was not enough.

Yet Isengard must be cleansed, and that old deep-eyed Ent must be told.

The snow would cease its tumbling patterns, and the stars would come out, diamond dust and crushed sapphire, spears of light stabbing down from the frozen sky, and he would sit, painfully exhausted from the day's labor, and wonder what he could say to the old Ent.

How could he say the last of the Ent-wives had gone to walk forever in the willow-meads of a bygone age, alone in a topaz-hued spring that was no more than a dream Men had dreamed before they were ever born? How could he ride up to the green-twined gates of Isengard, arrogant in the first bloom of his Kingship, reckless in the ruddy light of a new age, and tell creatures older than death or desire that their time was over?

And the moon would leach the darkness away from the night, and he would still sit-or sleep-and think-or dream-of what he could say.

That winter, the last full winter the Third Age would ever see, was a kind one. Snow fell in soft, heavy flakes until March, and then it ceased. The moot for the Charming of the Plow was held, and men were happy, and the white world suddenly vanished. It seemed to Éomer that one morning, he rose from his straw pallet, and glanced out the window, and saw that the world had, of a sudden, become leaf-colored and gold-colored and honey-colored and cream-colored. The air tasted of spring rains and meadow flowers. The young grass grew like spears, green javelins that overtook the yellow stalks of yesteryears and leaped for the sky. The wind came now from the sundewed heart of the South, and hawks took to the air with a crash of wings and keened out their sharp dark delight.

All the doors and windows of Meduseld were flung wide, and in the new light, the stones set in the floor and on the doors flamed like eyes of living light. The White Horse ran eternally on the green field, and below the flapping pennants, children ran also, like yellow lilies in the grass sea, and the Mark woke with eyes of blither blue and hair of brighter gold.

And when, one morning, as he stood outside the stables and smelled a scent that was like the wind as dawn turns to day, he knew it was time.

When the Mark had fully kissed the lips of June, a great moot would be held in the aisles of hawthorn that surrounded Sweet Freya and her Seven Sisters. It would be a feast of lovers and new times, for those who pledged love beneath the Elf-planted hawthorn tree would never wish to break that love.

Lovers might go and visit Sweet Freya at other times, and tryst by her side in the owl-light, but to go alone was forbidden.

Erchirion remained behind that day. He took a careless view of his duties as an honor guard, and whenever Lothíriel was away from the Golden Hall, he would wander far and wide, with a pack of hounds trailing behind him. All the dogs of Meduseld loved him better than they loved their own masters.

For a long while, the two of them rode in silence. Even now, with spring still young, the grass was waist-high, and all there was to be heard in the whole world was the gentle swish as their horses made a path through the great plains, cresting the softly swelling hills.

"Where are you taking me, Éomer?" Lothíriel asked at last. She had passed through the winter to become a fair rider, although he knew in his heart, she could never outride a child of his land. She wore. She wore a gold-colored vest, and leggings, and overall a bright-tinted mantle of green, plaited fivefold on its upper border. Her hair was still longer, and she wore it like the women of Rohan now, in two thick plaits.

He smiled, although he kept his gaze ahead. "To a place that is as beautiful as your eyes."

"I thought you could not string together pretty sentences," she said, gently mocking.

"I suppose that love is as fine a teacher as any," he answered.

It was high noon when they crested the last hill and saw the grove. Some creeping finger of the Entwood that had lingered behind while the rest of forest had retreated, perhaps, but the Men of Rohan who had walked its paths believed, in their hearts, that it had been Elf-planted and Elf-tended. That young hands, with years carved like scrimshaw and driftwood in the bones beneath, had drawn the sapling from the seed, bade it send its roots down in the black loam, bade it seek for sunlight in the sky above.

The hawthorn trees were beginning to blossom now. Old trees, black and gnarled, but the flowers fountained up on those ancient branches, flaming for the spring sun like pale fire, rolling like the white crest of surging waves.

They dismounted and picketed their steeds in the soft grass a little way off from the grove. Then they approached it on foot.

The air was cool inside the grove, and there was a shaded path that wound inside, carpeted with greensward and pale pretty flowers. The light that came through was stained gold and green by the hawthorn leaves, and Éomer thought himself in the feylands, where heroes ride forever. But perhaps not in the feylands. Perhaps in the far-ago forests that shimmered in their topaz-hued spring-now a gentle gold, now a pale silver, now a soft and silent amethyst, and the flowers were a plain of many-colored stars set in a green firmament.

They paused to let a butterfly glimmer past them, winding through the streams of greenlitten sunlight, its wings the color of mother-of-pearl.

Lothíriel's hand was holding his tightly. Thoughts seemed easier, sweeter, than speech, here in the silence, so he thought, Fear is the relinquishment of sense. The forsaking of familiar patterns. But so is love. And one can never meet halfway. You must walk the whole path, from your own door to whatever waits for you, or it would be better if you had never begun at all.

The ring on her finger was warm. He could feel the glyphs graven on it being writ into his own flesh. He wondered what he would see if he took his hand away. A sheaf of wheat, a spray of leaves and blossoms. Lines that came together and sprang apart to form a running horse, a sailing swan.

They were Elf-touched, dream-smitten, alive to love. Now a flock of butterflies sailed up, disturbed by their feet, like a flight of rose-leaves fluttering in mist. When he looked at Lothíriel, he almost feared to touch her. She was his dream, and when a dream is touched, it vanishes.

But she held him tight, close to her, the side of her breast brushing him as they walked deeper into the grove.

The grove thickened about them. Ingots of sunshine lay on the blossom-pale floor, green and gold. And then, they come to an opening in the hawthorn trees, a glade filled with old leaves and moss. And rising out of that moss, five times as high as any knight's spear, were seven standing stones. They were grey rhyolite, flecked white, and they were wide enough so that if a man stood on one side and a maid on another, their outstretched hands could just clasp.

But in the center of the circle, girdled by her sisters, stood Sweet Freya, and she was made from strange things indeed. She stood five rods high, white as moonlight on milk, and deep inside, flecks of silver glinted and glimmered.

A set of winding stairs, with a narrow tread, had been chiseled into her, and her head was flat and smooth, whereas her sisters pointed their own brows, egg-like, towards the sky.

It seemed, somehow, that Sweet Freya had come from the moon, so pale was she, so white. Her luster was the luster of opaque opals and pale pearls, her color the cool light of wan selenites.

The Men of the Mark had many tales for Sweet Freya and her Seven Sisters. Some said that Sweet Freya was the daughter of the moon. Freya had grown sad and weary of the dim valleys and pale moonstones, and her heart longed for crimson and rose and ember-glows. In secret, she had stolen her father's crystal key, and she had woven a stairway from her argent hair, and flitted lightly down it, down to the earth below.

At midnight, she had fled, and for a happy few hours, she had wandered the world, and seen the seas of blue, and the plains of living green. She had peeped in through windows where the red fires blazed and kissed the purple hyacinths.

And then the sun had rose, a burgeoning of crimson on the eastern horizon, and its golden rays had found her.

Then never more did Freya walk the silver forests of the moon, nor dance to the moonbeam music, for she was turned to stone.

Then Máni Moon-Lord had mourned as only a father may mourn. And he took from the sky seven stars and set them on the earth to keep his daughter company. And only when the sun turns cold will Freya wake from her endless vigil, and open her wood-smoke blue eyes, and shake her long silver hair.

But others said that Freya had come down her stairway with her hair shorn short to tryst with the burning-bearded son of the Sun. And they had loved each other, and kissed, and in their kiss, she had been turned to stone, and he had become smoke. And not until the end of time, until the ruin of the sun and the burning of the moon, would the two lovers meet again, and kiss once more and forever in the endless fields.

But however Sweet Freya had come to be, and however the seven stones had been set about her, this was a place of lovers. It was a place of magic. The world smelled different here, looked different, and that was because it was different.

Life was sharper here. There was a tang and a tinge to it, something to relish and to delight in. It was a place that stood on the boundary of a dream. It was, in a far-off way, almost frightening, because Éomer knew that even death could be beautiful here, and death should never be beautiful.

Lothíriel had been standing very still. Now, she started forward, slipping in between two of the sisters. "May we climb it?" Her voice was almost a prayer.

"Yes."

He walked behind her. The tread of the spiraling stairs was very narrow, and the stone was very smooth, almost glassy. If the woman slipped, the man would reach out his hand to catch her back, and they would both fall, a tumble of limbs, to lie in the leaf mold below. The ground was soft and springy, and no hurt would befall either, but he wondered how many women had let their hems down before they came to the hawthorn grove, so they could see whether the sweetheart loved himself better.

But Lothíriel did not slip or stumble, and she was standing on the flat white crown when he joined her.

They were above the hawthorn trees now, and the air was clear as silence. The pale blossoms foamed away beneath them, rushing to meet the grassy plains. And then the plains too rolled away, a vast sea that was lovely beyond any singing of it. And high and far away, there was a glimmer of gold, and dazzled laverrocks climbed the grassy swell.

And the sky was blue, and the grass was green, and the hawthorns were white beneath the sun, and the years rolled away, and the dead returned, and the wind blew fresh from the homeland heart.

He knelt, and with the sleeve of his jerkin, brushed at the pale stone. Curious, Lothíriel bent her head over him. He saw the pale skin, the black hair that sprang away from her brow like wings, as rich and dark as polished night.

He pointed with his fingers, traced the words carved into the stone. No moss grew on the moonstone, but age is relentless, and the letters were dull and rough.

When roses are faded, when gold turns to grey

I'll hold you yet tighter and sing you my lay.

"Do you love me, Lothíriel?" he asked.

"Yes." She said it almost primly.

He looked up at her again, and she smiled at him. "Of course I do, Éomer."

"Well enough to leave your home behind?"

"That, and ten times over." She took his hand, pulling him to his feet. "I shall be your Queen. I'll be your helpmeet and your lover."

There was no epiphany in her words: no flood of honey or drip of diamonds. It was calm, stone-chiseled truth, and he thought, Each day the end of the world encroaches, and each day it is thwarted, because one heart wants to pave the streets of the world with their love.

And in that secret, sacred glade of great dignity and sharp beauty, Lothíriel Eiphonnen became the bride-to-be of Éomer Éadig.