Rath Aurost - Ending A
At Altariel's request, I'm filling out a bit of ending A before we go onto ending B. Because Altariel requested a companion piece to "One song to the tune of another," and having supplied me with that wonderful gif of Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman (see comments section on AO3), what Altariel wants, Altariel gets...(possibly because she has "made me an offer I can't refuse" - she will cut off my supply of gifs if I don't provide happy endings all round).
So here it is – Rath Aurost. With apologies to non-Radio-4-listeners, because this probably won't make any sense. But I promise there will be hay-lofts, and the activities traditionally associated with hay-lofts, in the next chapter. (For the Sindarin buffs among you, I suppose strictly speaking it should be Cû Aurost, but that doesn't roll off the tongue as well.)
~o~O~o~
Two days after the kiss on the walls, Éowyn, accompanied by a young Rohir whose broken left arm did not prevent him wielding a sword with his right, walked through the streets of Minas Tirith to the Steward's palace. Marshal Elfhelm had made it clear that he did not like the idea of the sister of his king wandering the city on her own. Although it was late morning, there was no real warmth in the sun as yet. The day was sunny but cold; a wind blew from the north and rustled buds and early blossom on the trees. The brightly coloured pennants the people had hung in celebration fluttered on the sharp breeze. Éowyn pulled the blue mantle tight around her.
Leaving her bodyguard with some of the off-duty soldiers of the city, enjoying a warming drink by the brazier in the guard house, she allowed the house keeper to show her up to Faramir's study. As soon as Dame Haleth had withdrawn, Faramir pulled her into his arms and kissed her. She felt the now-familiar spark of homecoming, and the warm surge of desire which seemed to form the constant background to her life now, ebbing and flowing like the tide, but never entirely absent. For a moment they stood, he breathing in the scent of her hair, she content to hear the beating of his heart through his tunic. Then he released her and she took half a step back, brushing his dark hair from his cheek.
"You look tired, my love," she said, taking in the dark smudges beneath his eyes and the crease between his brows, which somehow she knew meant he had a headache. "Dreams?" The word was really more of a statement than a question.
"Aye, last night was a bad one. How did you fare?"
"The same."
He led her over to the low couch, then rang the bell for food and drink to be brought to them.
"What duties have you today?" Éowyn asked.
"None that need take me away from the palace; legal papers to be prepared for tomorrow's council meeting, a visit from the city architects to discuss repairs to the walls and water supply, discussions with the harbour master from Pelargir about the requisitioning of ships in order to bring food to the city, a meeting with Marshal Elfhelm regarding provisioning of the Rohirrim. Will you be content to sit upon the couch, or at a small table, and entertain yourself? I can offer books, drawing materials… I am sure Dame Haleth could find the wherewithal for embroidery if you so chose."
Éowyn laughed. "There speaks a man who has never seen my needlework." She paused for a moment. "Is there nothing useful I can do?"
"Well," Faramir spoke, thoughtfully. "I haven't managed to broach this with Elfhelm yet, but there's also the matter of… what's the Rohirric word? Weregild. So many of your countrymen fell in the defence of my land. Gondor owes them a debt too great for words, but let it not be said we shirk our obligations. Their families must be provided for. Elfhelm has sent some lists of the fallen, and their estates and dependent families. But it's in Cirth, and in Rohirric – a summary would be most useful to me."
"Of course."
Faramir fetched a wooden case with several untidily written scrolls and sheets of parchment, and set them down beside a small table in the oriel window. "Here… You have no idea how grateful I am. I cannot make head nor tail of Elfhelm's hand."
Thus the afternoon passed. Faramir made his summary notes of the legal volumes, Éowyn condensed Elfhelm's hastily scratched records into a more systematic list, and between times, the architects, the harbour master, and finally Elfhelm were met with.
In snatched moments when they were alone, Faramir and Éowyn would retire to the couch and kiss.
"These meetings function as quite an effective chaperone," Éowyn remarked, as Beregond rapped on the door again to announce yet another visitor.
As Faramir jumped to his feet and Éowyn smoothed her dress down, Faramir paused for a moment, as if struck by a thought. He said, hastily, "Oh Elbereth, I should have got Dame Haleth to sit in with us."
"Don't be silly, my love. I am old enough not to need a chaperone, and, having survived the hell that was the Pelennor fields, as you did, such petty rules now seem to me just foolish. Besides, I like kissing you. No, I love kissing you," she corrected herself. "I could happily spend a whole afternoon doing nothing else. And a chaperone would very much interfere with this."
Before Faramir could reply, the door was opened to reveal the last of Faramir's visitors for the day, Lord Húrin, come to discuss the legal cases. However, after he was gone, Faramir decided that his love was, on the subject of kissing (as on all matters), clearly right, and the two of them returned to the couch.
~o~O~o~
"Mmm, I dreamed of doing this to you..."
"In my dreams you liked this… oh, you do like this. Good."
"I thought you would like this..."
"I knew you would love it if I were to…"
"I knew you liked…"
"I know you like it when I…"
And somehow, neither of them noticed the subtle shifts of tense and mood and possibility, swept away as they were on a strong current of desire, albeit desire tempered by a comfortable familiarity, so comfortable neither of them even thought to interrogate the source of it.
"I was right… they do fit perfectly within my hands…"
"Not so fast…"
A slightly sad sigh, as the hands were removed.
"No, no, you misunderstand… I meant, do not be so fast to form a judgement. After all, you may not be conducting the right experiment. Have you taken into account the thickness of my bodice and blouse?"
A deep chuckle as the hands were replaced, then shifted to the laces on the bodice. A pause.
"May I?" A twinkle of amusement. "In the spirit of scientific enquiry, you understand." The twinkle was replaced by a look of pure, unadulterated desire.
A sigh of answering desire. "Yes, oh, yes."
Her fingers wound through dark hair. His lips brushed soft skin, face nestling where he had dreamed of, a place he felt as if he remembered from a previous, happier life, a happy hum of contentment rumbling from deep within him.
"That tune… Is it an invitation?" Though why she should have thought this, of just a wordless fragment of a tune, she could not begin to imagine.
But Faramir's words answered her anyway. "Yes. Please, yes…"
And then he took her by the hand and led her down the passageway to his bed chamber.
Many, many hours later, as the first grey light of dawn crept through the window, Éowyn lay in Faramir's arms, completely sated and – this struck her as just as important – warm and safe and comfortable for the first time in nearly two years, since that half-remembered trek through Anorien. She was dimly aware that just about every moral code of their world – both his country and hers – said they should not have done this, but it felt so completely right that she found she did not care a fig for moral codes. And as well as right, there was this feeling that it had always been right, that this night had merely set things back to how they ought to be.
Later still, as they broke their fast in the small parlour that overlooked the private courtyard in the centre of the palace, Faramir said, "Your guard – will he be discreet?"
"I think so – his family are tenant farmers on what was my mother's dower land, land which now belongs to me. They have always been loyal to a fault."
"I think my cousins will help to cover for me. The house of Dol Amroth has its city palace but a stone's throw away. I think Elphir and his wife will be prepared to agree to a small subterfuge and let it be known that you are 'staying' with them. My servants, I know, will all be the embodiment of discretion. All of which seems rather foolish, for we are to be married, and have only done what the Eldar do in times of strife and unrest, bound ourselves to one another without need for ceremony..."
Then he paused for a moment, looking at her as if to confirm how she felt about this.
She simply smiled and reached out across the table, and covered his hands with her own.
"I am yours, with or without a ceremony," she said, simply.
"I am yours, now and forever more… in fact, I have always been yours, I think, even when I did not know you fully."
~o~O~o~
And so the next month or so, before Éowyn's return to Rohan, passed, blissfully happily. Their domestic arrangements were something of an open secret, but were politely not talked of. The Prince of Dol Amroth and his family cheerfully maintained the pretence that Éowyn was their house guest, Elessar affected not to notice anything at all, and Éomer, on his return from Cormallen, perhaps surprisingly simply took his sister to one side and said "He's a good man, and you have chosen well, at last, but do try not to fall with child if you can manage it – though I suppose with your betrothal happening at harvest-time it would not be too much of a disaster even if you did."
Their handfasting, in Edoras, was a joyous affair. And according to the laws and customs of the Mark, they were expected to live together and share their bed after the handfasting had taken place, so the further ceremony in Minas Tirith, at which they actually married, did not really change anything of importance. It took place the day after Mettarë, which struck both Faramir and Éowyn as deeply appropriate, though they couldn't have said why.
~o~O~o~
Some three years later, Aragorn settled into an armchair by the fire. The public duties of celebrating Mettarë, the turn of the year, in Minas Tirith had been completed. As was beginning to become something of a custom – if two years could be accounted enough to establish a custom – he and the queen had arrived at Emyn Arnen. Last night when they arrived, a grand feast had been laid on in the banqueting hall. In Rohirric style, all the inhabitants of the estate, and the soldiers (and the King's retinue) not on guard duty, were catered for. Tonight however, it had been a small, intimate dinner in the family's private dining room: Éowyn and Faramir had entertained the king and the queen, and also Faramir's able young administrator, Lord Úron, and his wife Lady Siliveth.
They had now retired to the parlour and were sitting in the warm glow of the fire. The whole house was admirably warm – as comfortable as a hobbit-hole, in fact. His Steward's wife had turned out to have something of a genius for domestic engineering, odd, coming as she did, from Rohan. Not only had she insisted upon chimneys (most un-Rohirric), but she had also designed, with the help of Faramir's architects and engineers, a plumbing system which delivered hot water to the bath house through a network of terracotta pipes (one of the engineers had suggested lead as more malleable and easily worked, but she had insisted that this would not be healthy, which the engineer thought a strange superstition, but his employer was not to budged on the issue).
The furnace which heated the water did double duty: all the rooms on the ground floor were perched a couple of feet above the ground on brick piers, and hot air from the furnace was channelled beneath the floors. A hypocaust, Éowyn called it, though how she had come up with this name Aragorn could not guess – it sounded like no language he was acquainted with, and as Thorongil he had travelled very widely indeed. She had also (at considerable expense, but significant improvement to the comfort of the house) insisted on double casements on all the windows, one set opening outwards, and a second set opening inwards. Combined with shutters on the outside and thick curtains within, this had to be the most comfortable palace in Gondor (and Arwen was already commissioning architects as part of her plan for several of these features to be incorporated into the royal palace in Minas Tirith).
He took another sip of wine. The latest part of the evening's entertainment, he had to confess, left him somewhat unmoved. They had begun by taking turns to read aloud – from poetry, history or fables, as took the reader's fancy, and Aragorn would happily have continued in this vein. But Lady Siliveth had suggested a parlour game, Faramir's favourite apparently. They would, Siliveth and Faramir assured them, pick up the rules as they went along.
He wasn't.
"Let me see… the Houses of Healing. Well, with it being Mettarë, I suppose I can use Barahir's gambit, and move along the diagonal to… Merethrond." Faramir's voice superficially carried the same seriousness it did when he played chess, but Aragorn could hear the mirth bubbling just under the surface.
"Well played, my Lord," said Úron, seemingly seriously – at least it didn't sound too much like sycophancy.
"Barahir's gambit! A bold move." said the Queen, deadpan.
Contrary to Elessar, she seemed to be getting into the spirit of things. There was a faint hiss of breath drawn in through her white and even teeth. "I think I must counter with… No, first let me check. Are we playing the Fëanorian rules?"
"In deference to your Majesty's heritage, I think we should," Siliveth said.
"In that case, the White Tree."
"And you accused me of boldness," said the Steward, appreciatively.
"Your Majesty..." Aragorn started. He had not noticed Éowyn come to his side.
"Would I be right in thinking you would perhaps prefer a game of chess?"
"Very much so," said her King. "Unless you have any other suggestions? Perhaps a game from your land?"
For some reason, Éowyn suddenly thought of the game she and Éomer had played in private moments in Edoras, remembered (she presumed) from their teenage years in Anorien: Assassinate, fornicate, hand-fast? Oh dear, that really would not do in the current circumstances. She battled against the flush she felt rising in her cheeks.
"Chess will do perfectly."
"Without wishing to cast aspersions, may I offer the sincere hope that you do not play as well as your husband?"
"No-one plays as well as my husband. Well, except possibly the ambassador from Khand."
Éowyn took two pieces, one black, one white, in her hands and put them behind her back. Aragorn tapped her left wrist lightly, and found that he had drawn black. They lapsed into silence for a few moments while each set up their pieces on the board, then they moved to the opening. Aragorn was not particularly surprised to discover that where her husband favoured a considered, deeply thought out game, the White Lady launched into the attack from the outset. Pieces were traded freely, neither particularly establishing an edge over the other, but as a strategy it did have the advantage that it opened up the board nicely, a situation Aragorn much preferred for the middle game.
His concentration was interrupted by Úron's voice.
"In that case I have no alternative but to use Turgon's Tactic, and bore everyone to death while I make good my escape to… The Main Gate."
There was much raucous laughter at the idea of Turgon's Tactic.
"A hit, my Lord. Firmly in the gold," Arwen said.
Aragorn looked at the four of them, his wife and Lady Siliveth curled comfortably on either end of a luxuriously upholstered sofa, Úron sprawling in a carved chair with deep cushions, a goblet of wine at his elbow, and the Steward lying comfortably stretched out upon the hearth rug, head and torso propped up on a heap of pillows and his wolfhound snoozing contentedly across his feet. Utterly relaxed, the trials and tribulations of statecraft completely forgotten. Silly parlour games notwithstanding, this was why he came here.
"Do you know," he said, conspiratorially, to Éowyn, "I must be singularly slow witted this evening, for I am still trying to work out whether that game has rules which I am just too simple to grasp, or whether the point of the game is that it has no rules."
There was another gale of laughter from the four players.
"Having been similarly slow-witted for many years now," said Éowyn, "I have decided it's the latter. What puzzles me is why they find it so funny." She paused. "It's a real Rupert's game."
"Rupert?" Aragorn asked, with a lift of his brows.
Éowyn grinned. "I think it's a dialect word from my youth in Anorien. An officer and a gentleman," she added, in a passable imitation of Faramir's cultured tones.
Aragorn raised his eyebrows still further, a faint smile playing about his lips. "You make it sound as if there's something wrong with being an officer and a gentleman."
"Well, the sort of person who, because of his family and upbringing, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Has had opportunities others wouldn't have had. Not to say he hasn't lived up to the faith shown in him, and all that… But still, the initial opportunity to show his quality was handed to him on a plate."
Aragorn was fascinated by this turn of events. "You say this… and yet, you are the sister of a king."
"Thrust upon me rather late in life," said Éowyn, with a grin. "I think you know that our grandmother hid Éomer and myself in Anorien after our parents' deaths, fearing some conspiracy or plot in Edoras. I think I had a really quite lowly upbringing, until I was pitched into court life rather abruptly. So yes, Faramir is a Rupert, and I am not, I think. And this game is definitely a Rupert's game."
"And this difference matters?" Really, Aragorn was annoyingly shrewd.
Éowyn laughed and shook her head. "Not really. For Faramir is a good man, a just, courageous, and honourable man. And he'd still be all that no matter what his upbringing had been – that is the man he is. And..." Her voice took on a slightly fierce note. "I love him for it. But I'm still allowed to laugh at how ridiculously posh he is."
She moved a rook into the centre of the board, as Aragorn puzzled over this latest piece of Anorien dialect.
"Check."
Suddenly from behind her, Arwen said "Well, in that case, I'm going to use Castamir's counter-clockwise counter-stratagem, stab my enemies in the front and my friends in the back… Rath Aurost!"
The Steward propped himself up on one elbow and reached out to shake her hand. "Well played, your Majesty."
"See, I told you you'd pick it up as we went along," Siliveth beamed.
"And now, perhaps a game of One song to the tune of another," said Úron, getting to his feet and fetching a lute that was propped up in the corner.
~o~O~o~
Later that night, feeling the glow that comes from friendship and relaxation, Faramir and Éowyn finally tumbled into their bedchamber. One of many things to be said for such a warm house, Faramir reflected, was that there was no need to divest oneself of clothes and dive under the covers as rapidly as possible. It might be mid-winter, but it was plenty warm enough for Éowyn to lie upon the bed, clad only in a lace shift, allowing him to admire her beauteous curves. Though the lace shift, in Faramir's considered opinion, was still one item of clothing too many.
Stripping off his own clothes, he climbed onto the bed with the intention of rectifying this situation as soon as possible, only to stop short. He ran his hand over Éowyn's hips and round her middle, then pressed his cheek to the same place. Then murmured, a tone of wonder in his voice, "Do I miss my guess, my love, or is Elboron to have a brother?"
"Or perhaps a sister," Éowyn said, with a laugh. "I have been waiting for the right moment to tell you."
Faramir wriggled up the mattress to lie beside her. She tangled her fingers in his hair and pulled him in for a kiss.
"No regrets about the choices we have made?"
"None."