A/N: Warning: short chapter! This is almost all Gilraen's thoughts. I had originally planned to have the plot advance in this chapter, but Gilraen asserted herself in my mind so loudly that I couldn't ignore her, and this chapter began and ended before I could get a word in edgewise. Very sorry.
Disclaimer: *showing a disturbing level of sarcasm* Yeah, it's mine. All of it. Right down to the last bit character. Tolkien? Who the f**k is Tolkien?
One Afternoon By The River
By Thalia Weaver
Chapter Four: Thoughts
The sun was still shining on the villager's roofs when Arathorn and I reached it. The memory of Ethnahor's killing was still very vivid, and I shuddered. It had been long since Orcs had come to our village, and I had never seen anyone killed before.
Women had died in childbirth before, of course, and every year there were a few that perished from sickness in the winter- but that was one thing, and hearing a murder scant feet from me another.
Arathorn felt my shudder, and gently pressured my hand with his for a moment. His hand was large and strong, and fit mine well; but all of a sudden, I grew ashamed of the calluses and scars on mine. I thought of my mother, and the long lessons she had sought to give me in the arts of womanhood. Now I wished I had not rebelled quite so strongly against them, for what hope had I to use the womanly arts and make him fall in love with me?
My voice was no sweeter than that of a frog's; I could not sew; all I knew was how to deliver a screaming, fighting baby into the world, and how to use a bow and arrow well. How could the spinster Gilraen, the unladylike old midwife, compete with some lovely maiden that would capture his heart? For that matter, how did I know that Arathorn was unmarried? It was not unusual for Rangers to rescue women; was I a foolish girl, then, to think that we could be more? I felt sick at the thought of Arathorn embracing, kissing, loving another.
I glanced up at him-he was taller than me- just as his eyes met mine. My heart beat faster.
Arathorn, I thought, my eyes filling with tears that came unbidden. Horrified, I blinked them away. What was I doing, crying like one of the babies I had delivered?
"Gilraen? Wh-what's the matter?" Arathorn asked, sounding bewildered and hesitant, as though unsure how to deal with a woman's tears.
I tried to speak, but the words would not come. A rock seemed to have settled itself in my throat. More tears slid down my face, and I closed my eyes.
Images flashed through my head- my father dying, the first baby I had delivered stillborn, white and perfect in every manner except for its lack of breath, the first mother that had died in childbirth while I looked on, helpless, Ethnahor sliding his hand down my thigh- and then, Arathorn with his lips on mine, his eyes as he told me to run, his chest against my back in the tiny cave, me crying in his arms like a child. I opened my eyes.
"Arathorn…" I said softly, and looked up into his face. There was a look of great tenderness there, and in his eyes something that stirred my heart. I had seen that same look before, from husbands standing by bedsides or sitting on piles of dirty straw, watching their wives as they writhed on childbed. Never had I thought that someone would ever look at me that way- not I, the spinster Gilraen, the one destined to live alone and take care of her agéd mother until she died.
"Come with me," I told him, the tears gone. "I have something to show you."
He looked mystified still; but now there was joy in his face. I smiled, and pulled him towards the gold-roofed town.