Author's Note: After some research, a certain element of this story may or may not be possible. So please don't yell at me that "Eowyn was not stupid!" : I never said she was.
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He reads to her at dusk, when there is still light to see by, but not enough to work beneath. Outside, hands are laid to rest and plows and shovels are thrown down as the moon eases in. They usher in the twilight together, and at times she must hold the night at bay, waiting until he has come home with the last of the light clinging to the edges of his windswept cloak.
She listens to him read, and finds she understands him best when his words are not his own; when his voice speaks through the tongues of men long-dead; men forgotten and forlorn. She thinks he knows them better then he knows himself, but she herself is not sure of this thought, and remains quiet, trying to understand the man she's claimed for her own.
"Read to me," he whispers one evening, as the world cries goodbye to the sun. Sore are his eyes; he cannot read the script.
She takes the tome out of his hands, and holds it desperately. His eyes are closed: he waits for her to speak. She watches him, and a feeling of utter unease clings to her shoulders; they droop, first one, then the other, until she is bent over and shrunken to what she used to be and will one day become again.
The volume falls from her quivering grasp, and the sound clings to the walls and floor and nestles into stone and mortar.
In her shame, she turns from him:
She cannot read.
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He teaches her now, and sits patiently beside her, watching her cheeks grow bright with pride. He resists the urge to crook one finger and trace the droop of her lips, to lift the head and let it fall back down again, if only to see a flicker of balm within her eyes.
She will not have him think that her people are ignorant; she rather be set low in his eyes then have the men and women of the land behind her be debased. She tries to tell him with fluttering fingers and thick, unsure wrists of the call of the grass, and of how it felt to first gallop upon a stead and breathe in the smell of sweat. She recalls both wind and sweeping flame; she's kindling herself alive again.
In telling him, she loses herself, and remembers again what it felt to ride free: what it was like to answer to no man.
He does not acknowledge her words, and as she speaks he spells out onto a clean parchment the few objects about the room: table, chair, vase, bed. He listens to her, and imagines her a daughter of the plains and of the fields, flaxen and fair as only the young are wont to be.
He tells himself that his daughters will be taught, that both wind and grass will have to wait.
And so they pass the months. It does not draw them close.
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Shame fills her eyes; shame so threadbare that she thinks he can see the blush upon her heart.
Alone at night, she struggles by candlelight.
She knows not that he is awake, and that he lies in the shadows with eyes closed, straining to hear her as she speaks softly to herself, discovering words with unnatural pauses that guide him off into sleep, only to have him brought back to the present with each slow-strung word that stumbles across her tongue.
She hesitates over a word, and he bites down on lips he's forgotten how to use.
"Stronghold," he corrects her, whispering into the warm rug about him. "Longhorn. Thistledown. Amethyst."
By morning the volumes have been placed back upon waiting shelves, and he counts them, wondering which one she has now lost herself within.
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His eyes grow thoughtful as the days pass. He tells her their studies can wait, and asks her to once more walk beside him in the gardens of green. He speaks to her of flowers grown rampant and of the churning of the Anduin and of the speckled rocks beneath the clear waters. He tells her of the moss, grown thick enough now to be a bed:
"For the nannies and the billies," he tells her, "a bed too sweet to only dream upon." His hands she absently pushes away; or maybe not, for she is aware of more then his hands, and she looks away, so close to giving in.
But she is set, and pours over the manuscripts by day and by night, and the seasons change and murmur beyond the windows of their home. The rains come first, then the snow, followed by petals both white and now amber hued. The sun returns last, and pours itself out against the walls, but she's not there to count the rays.
He sees the first snow, and touches the first shoot; but she remains inside, where words and rhetoric encroach the room in which she sits. She's weaving spells now, and she does not need his help.
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She reads to him at last, but there is no joy for either of them.
He watches the shadows grow and shrink. She listens to her voice turn still and small. And now she wonders what there is left for her to do. He takes her hand into his own, and winds his fingers through hers until the clasp is so tight that she's not sure if their entwined hands are one or two separate selves.
"Come see the iris-bells," he urges.
She finds the sun is bright beyond the stone walls, and she holds a hand to the lining of her face. She's forgotten much, she realizes.
"Tell me of the horses," he says to her in a hidden vale where the branches are limbs and the leaves lady's gloves, "Tell me of the grass beneath your feet once again." But she's still unsure, and she watches him silently. Equal at last, they stand before each other, but there's nothing for her to read now, no words, no thoughts in this green room with walls both close and free--- save his.
"Do you remember the nannies and the billy goats?" He asks softly. She smiles at last.
They discover the meadow together, and she is surprised to find that the earth breathes deeply, even as she does now, with soil and grass beneath her arched back, and that it too can moan.
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