(Eh, I should probably put this in: great deal of blood in this chapter, and I hope I handled it within the PG-13 limits. Please tell me if otherwise.)

Chapter X

Years past slowly at Edoras. I still do not know what I officially was. The King was a sort of grandfather figure in my life. I grew and matured under his watchful gaze, with Éowyn becoming much like an older sister to me, a good companion when Morwyn was not involved. And the longer I stayed, the more I hated it.

Everything around me was a lie. The prejudices and bigotries were all too common as I discovered. And I did not care for any of it one bit. Why did not I speak up about it, you ask? Why would I? Nobody really cared, not even Krane who turned out to be the most liberal person in Edoras, which was not very liberal at all. Nobody cared about change and progress. To everyone else, Edoras was perfectly fine; there was no reason to change, to improve.

Rourn had his right hand cut off on charges of treachery and deceit to the king, as well as disobeying the anti-slavery laws, plus a good five years imprisoned. Findulwyn was sentenced to six years in prison for assisting him. I did not attend either trial. They are both waiting in cold dank cells for what end I cannot now imagine.

As I grew older, I became a pseudo-child to Théoden, the daughter that he never had. He insisted that I refer to him as Father, much to Théodred's dislike (I did not blame him). When he told me, I wanted to scream and run away into a corner and cry for eternity, but instead, I held my tongue and then asked him a question, using Father as a direct address.

Shortly before my fifteenth birthday ("Father" had proclaimed my birthday to be the Midyear since no one really knew it), I finally admitted to Krane that I could not read, which although very common among the ladies, I did not want to be left out of any of the books in the library. Over the course of the next few weeks, I began to learn how to read and write Rohirric; Krane also began to tutor me in Westron, the Common Tongue, which he said might prove useful to know. It made no real difference to me, but I followed his instructions.

I saw little of Morwyn. Her mother continued to linger on, more of a wraith than a real woman, so frail and white she was. I only saw her twice, but each time she looked like she was dying, yet she continued to wake each morning, much to many people's dismay, as well as ask for food and use the bedpan. Her muscles, on her legs had whithered to almost nothing, I could very well see through the covers under which she lay. Sticks. Nothing more than sticks covered with skin under those coverlets. It was so awful to see her lingering on. You could see it in the woman's eyes that she begged for death everyday, but had not the courage to starve herself as the rest of the royal court would have preferred. It was so heartwrenching, but nothing could be done about it, or at least, nothing I could do.

It was not long after my fifteenth birthday that the trouble started.

The day finally came when the king's sister Mlandra, Morwyn's mother, died. I sneaked up to her room and watched with horror and a morbid fascination as a maid, trembling like there was no tomorrow, covered her face with a white sheet and that the maid's pocket was unusually lumpy looking. I noticed that a strand of garnets that had always been about Mlandra's neck was missing. Mlandra's dark hair was slightly damp, I could tell, from the way that it clung to her face. Oh skies her face: it was whiter than anything I had seen, not a single spark of life. I felt so ill but I continued watching her from behind the thick curtains along the wall. The white sheet covered her face, leaving a vague silhouette, waiting for the coffin. The body looked almost diseased. I watched Morwyn as she sat by her mother's dead body weeping with so many tears that I wondered if anyone ever wept that much in their entire lifetime. She held her mother's white hand from under the sheet, probably now long cold. I shuddered at the thought of holding a cold lifeless hand, let alone touching a dead body. It was sickening, but I could not help but watch. The maid, still trembling, half ran out of the room, probably the fear of a dead body, or maybe fearing that Morwyn would notice what looked like a necklace of garnets in her pocket, or even the fear that Mlandra's phantom would come back to haunt her for disturbing the dead. I did not know. Even from behind, Morwyn looked dangerously thin. I think she had known her mother was going to die soon. She had ceased to be cheerful and stopped earting, for the most part, as well; Morwyn had not eaten a full meal in a month.

"Morwyn?" I said as a stepped toward her.

"Ar-Ardeas? I-i-is th-th-that y-you?" she managed to choke out.

"It's me, Morwyn. I-" Words failed me, but I knew what to do. I put hand on her shoulder. "Don't cry, Morwyn. It will be fine. Please, Morwyn listen-"

She cut me off, standing, and turning around harshly.

"No, it won't be fine, Ardeas! My mother is dead, Ardeas! Can't you see?" Her face was sallow and wan. I don't think she had been out of doors in weeks. The Morwyn's blanched face was almost as white and pale as her dead mother's. It made me feel nauseous to look at her like that.

I tried to swallow the growing lump in my throat. "I can see," I said falteringly, tears stinging my own eyes.

"No!" she said, half screaming and half weeping, "No, you can't see! They're going to be rid of me now! They don't want me here! They're going to smile happily as they send me away. They're going to remove me." I knew of removing. In fact, I knew someone that had been removed previously. A maid who was pregnant with a nobleman's child was removed. They sent her out on the streets with nothing, while pregnant, and nobody was allowed to take her in because she was under the King's curse. I saw her body the next day of that winter, frozen to death against a frost covered house, a shadow of a smile gracing her cheeks that were rosy from the cold. The maid looked vaguely peaceful in death. That was what removing was. All of it was done by the King's order.

"Morwyn, I won't let that happen. I can convince Father or..."

"See?" she said, "You've already fallen under their wing! You're calling him 'Father'!"

She stepped away from way, making her way to the other side of the bed across from me, with the dead body of her mother in between.

"But-"

She interrupted me for the last time. "They're aren't any 'buts' anymore, Ardeas. I am not going to wait for them to remove me out of their lives. I will not give them that last satisfaction or getting rid of me themselves." She took a deep breath and then looked at me with one sorrow-filled smile, and I was frozen with shock. Morwyn reached inside the deep pocket of her dress and withdrew a thin twist of iron by its hilt, shining inimically in the candle light, which had gone from a warm golden to glow to a sickly ashen yellow with the mood of the room.

"Morwyn, don't!" I tried to step around to her.

Her face was emotionless, but her eyes were bursting with feeling: seething with self-hatred, guilt, and sorrow.

She took the dagger and slit her own throat. I was petrified.

She shrieked with pain and tried to stem the blood flow with her hands, having decided too late that she did not want to die. Morwyn slumped to the floor her eyes moving wildly with fear. I immediately raced to her side, bending my knees and sitting on my feet. I held her head in my lap.

"Morwyn," I cried as my tears landed on her face as her eyes stop moving and stared blankly at the ceiling, the blood pouring from her neck. "Don't leave me, Morwyn." There was no response from her person. I did not feel her wrists for a heartbeat because I knew there would not be one, and I did not want to feel a wrist that did not have the lifeblood surging through it.

"Morwyn! Wake up, please!" My tears were trickling over my face like raindrops. "Don't leave me alone; please, Morwyn!"

But she did not wake when called.

I set her body down on the floor and closed her eyes. As despondent as I was, I did not have like the feeling of her blood on my dress. It was like Morwyn's life was all over my dress.

Morwyn's face was blanched, but looked strangely content. A ghost of a smile graced her lips where an expression had not been, just as the maid had looked frozen to death that morning.

I do not know how I did not manage to get sick. Maybe it was because it was not about all of the blood. Maybe it was because it was a life that was passing away, forever out of reach, out of touch. I had been holding a body with no more spirit, a body that had been very much alive only a few moments before; a body that was still warm with fading life that would never return to this earth, a life that would never return to me with that friendly smile to throw things back into perspective again.

I did not care about the queer looks people gave myself as I walked through Meduseld to my room. They could think all they wanted about my bloodsoaked skirt and tearstained face. I did not give a shit about what any of them thought. Nothing mattered anymore.

Éowyn saw me coming down the hall to my room and panicked at my appearance, though concern overrode the fear that I saw in her eyes at my ghastly appearance.

"Child! What on Arda has happened?"

My eyes were blank, and I think that frightened her more.

I remember looking up at her seeming so worthless and stupid and lonely on the edge of a cliff in a the bright light of a full moon.

"Morwyn's dead."

She visibly stiffened at the mentioned of Morwyn, but looked very surprised, though not sorrowful at all.

"Dead?"

I looked straight forward, all of the tears drying in my eyes.

"She killed herself."

I woke in my bed a little while later, a funny smell on my nostrils. It was night, and I saw the remains of my bloodstained dress burning in the fireplace. It was in shreds. Somebody had taken the time to rip it piece by piece and feed it into the fire so that it did not quench the fire when thrown onto it all at once. I sickened at the thought of any hands touching blood. Morwyn's blood.

Morwyn's suicide.

The door suddenly opened to reveal someone, bearing something on a wooden tray.

"Ah! You're awake!"

Krane stepped into the light of the fire carrying what now looked like food and drink.

"Yes. I'm awake."

He smiled brightly and set the tray down onto the table beside me. He pulled up a chair next to my bedside.

"How fairs the one so ill?" he said in a mock-dramatic voice.

"Ill?" I asked, perplexed.

"Éowyn said that passed out while talking to her and that you had been a ghostly white before that."

Oh that might have something to do with the fact that I had a friend of mine slit her throat in front of me next to her dead mother's body and die in my arms today. Nothing to worry about Krane. Nothing at all.

"I sh-should imagine so."

Krane turned a trained eye on me. "Great stars, child! What has happened?"

There was a long pause.

His voice was softer, and after studying me for a moment said, "What did you see?"

That was too much for me. I burst into tears and cried and cried and cried.

"I s-saw M-M-Morwyn k-kill h-herself! Sh-she s-slit h-h-her throat in-in front of m-me!"

He sat back in his chair, mulling over the news. I would have thought there would have been mass celebrations that their public enemy was dead and gone and never returning. Maybe Father for some reason had decided to keep things on the hush-hush. Father! I cannot believe I just thought that! After what Morwyn told me! I just can't-

My thoughts were interrupted by Krane. "What do you think about it?"

I wiped my tears on the sleeve of my nightgown. "I don't know what to think."

Krane's eyes showed understanding and consideration.

"Was she your friend?"

I looked up at him accusingly and sharply. No one knew of my friendship with Morwyn; we had made sure of that. She did not want me to suffer because of my friendship with her. "No," I lied, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world, and that I never was friends with that little snip of a king's niece.

He merely raised an eyebrow and by the look in his eye, I knew that he knew.

"Well, I'm sure the shock of seeing a young woman kill herself would be very traumatic. Though I can't seem to think of an explanation for the blood on your dress." He looked a me reproachfully, for my falsehood I guess. I chewed on my bottom lip and hoped he would know that I did not want to pursue the matter any further. He abruptly stood. "I'm sure you must be hungry. Be sure to eat something. We wouldn't want you turning into a wraith."

I nodded meekly and sat back against the pillows, my face lowered. I heard his footsteps, then the door opened. More footsteps, and it closed with a heavy dull thud, like the end of an eon. The sound of that door closing echoed in my mind for years to come.

AN: I will be taking a creative license over Grima, unless someone can give me reliable information about him from any book by the Professor. I do not really know anything about him other that what is in The Two Towers and how somewhere I remember hearing that he was with Théoden for five years. I have not read anything other than the trio, The Hobbit, the Silmarillion, and parts of Unfinished Tales as well as parts of the Tolkien Reader. I can't remember anything about Grima that I read, though perhaps there is something in UT or something else that I have not read. PLEASE. if anyone knows about Grima, tell me. And as always, please review and tell me what's good and what's not, in a very respectful way please. And note, some of the past review may not make sense, notably because I have revised this story big time. Thanks again to reviewers who make my day.