The messenger swung himself rather stiffly down from his horse. It had taken two and a half hard day's riding to get here, to this lonely outpost midway between the garrison at Cair Andros and the hidden stronghold of Henneth Annun. He handed the sealed parchment to Damrod, who broke the wax, then frowned.

"Thanks, lad. Go and see to your horse then come inside for a bite of something to eat."

Gesturing to Mablung to follow him, Damrod hurried through the postern gate to the interior of the small guard tower. Éowyn gave Anborn a puzzled look; he shrugged, as if to say How should I know?

Inside the chamber which took up the whole width of the small tower, Damrod sat down with the message, a scrap of blank parchment, a quill, and a small, leather-bound folio. Mablung looked at the message and frowned. He wasn't a scholar by any stretch of the imagination, but he did know his letters. Yet the message looked like complete gibberish to him. He watched, fascinated, as Damrod wrote down each letter, checked in the leather folio, and wrote a second letter below. Gradually, a message which was comprehensible emerged beneath the gibberish. However, as the meaning became clear, Mablung wasn't sure he was any the happier for knowing. An imminent threat of attack on Minas Tirith, a desperate plan (unspecified) for defence, a low likelihood of the captain surviving, that seemed to be the gist of it. And the Rangers were to stay put and not get involved – that rankled even more.

The message deciphered, Damrod sat back and rubbed his eyes.

"Bloody hell, that's the worst news I could have imagined. In fact, even in my nightmares I don't think I've imagined anything that bad. And we just have to sit here and do n'owt." He picked the original message up. "Hang on, there's another scrap of parchment here, all sealed up. Oh fuck, it's for the lady..." Damrod eyed the sealed letter. Mablung felt his lieutenant's foreboding spread to him, like some sort of coughing sickness. This was not likely to be a happy, carefree love billet, not by any stretch of the imagination. Damrod held it out to his second-in-command. "You'd best go and take her this."

With a sinking feeling, Mablung took the parchment and headed out to Éowyn. He hated this – he'd always had a soft spot for her, and (after Damrod forced him to spend an evening drinking beer with her and offering a brotherly shoulder to cry on) had really become quite close to her in the last few days. He just bloody well hoped this letter gave her some sort of hope. It occurred to him that if the captain couldn't bring himself to write something nice, he wouldn't need to die in a hopeless defence of the bridge – Mablung would run him through himself.

Éowyn disappeared to find some peace and quiet to read the letter. When she returned some time later, her face was pale and drawn, and her eyes looked a little red.

"Where's Damrod? Faramir's letter said he'd fill me in on the details he couldn't put in this letter." Her voice was uncharacteristically unsteady.

"I can probably do that," Mablung answered. "I was there when he worked out what was in it." He told her the content, pausing for a moment over how to phrase the final bit. He decided there was no real way of sugaring the pill, and explained that Faramir didn't rate his chances of coming back as particularly high. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he could have kicked himself for an utter fool. She looked completely stricken. Why hadn't he just left that bit out?

She stood staring down at the parchment in her hands. Eventually she spoke.

"The messenger. Presumably he couldn't come over the bridge, not if there are troops mustering in large numbers on the eastern side."

"No," answered Mablung. "He'll have come across at Cair Andros."

Éowyn nodded – she had a good idea of the lie of the land at least as far as the river, though the western bank and the land running south towards Minas Tirith was something of an unknown quantity as far as she was concerned. "Would the troops at the garrison let me cross there? And how long a ride is it to Osgiliath?"

"Well, if they won't, there's a ferry man plies his trade there too. For enough silver, he'd take you across. From here to there, two days' ride at least, I'd say. Though Windfola's a better steed than that nag the messenger arrived on."

"Shit, I haven't any silver at all. Spent my last month's pay on repairs to my saddle." Éowyn's brows knitted together.

"You know the captain's orders are to stay here, don't you?"

"Bugger that for a game of soldiers. Do you really think I'm going to stay here?" asked Éowyn. It was clearly a rhetorical question.

"Hang on, I'll help you get some stuff together," said Mablung.

~o~O~o~

Faramir was directing the engineers when a lone horseman came careening across the bridge, throwing up a cloud of dust as he reined the horse to a standstill.

"Five companies of Haradrim and another three of Easterlings, backed up by several large troops of orcs – on the move this way. Won't take more than a few hours to reach the eastern bank, Sir. And that's just the van – many more following."

Faramir nodded to the man. "Rub your horse down, and grab some food and an hour's rest, then join the company here on the west bank. Borlas – inform the Captain General of the troop movements and ask him to meet me here with the defence force. Hatholdir – do you think you can finish up weakening the supports and get the ropes attached within the hour?"

Hatholdir stood to attention, and indicated that he could. "As for when we'll be confident that we can take the bridge out completely, that may take longer. Can you hold them till I give the signal?"

"We can do no more than try, but we will try with every last ounce of our strength."

Faramir walked to the middle of the bridge, seemingly to take stock of the situation, but actually to buy himself a few moments alone to think, and to try to shake off the fey mood which had seized him. He had felt unsettled since waking in a sweat in the early hours of the morning, his rest disturbed by the strange dream. "Seek for the sword that is broken... The halfling forth shall stand." What manner of premonition was it? He was fairly sure that he dreamt truly. This was not the first time he had had these prophetic dreams. But it was also possible that his mind played him falsely – that this close to the stronghold of the enemy some sort of witchcraft was at work. It was with a sense of relief that he finally saw his brother approach at the head of the main troop.

Several hours later, Faramir felt as though he had stepped into the fires of Angband. Boromir had set his defences very cleverly, making the most of rubble and ruined walls, and the approach to the eastern end of the bridge was very well defended. But it was a war of attrition. Every man they lost sold his life dear: a score or more of the enemy would go first. But the enemy had men a plenty and did not care whether their lives were spent like pouring water onto desert sands.

Then a dark foreboding took him. Looking round, he saw the fear on the faces of his comrades, and a grim realisation dawned. This was not a continuation of his earlier fey mood: this was something they all felt. He moved forward to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his brother.

The enemy troops drew to the side, seeming to shrink in stature. Whatever darkness was abroad, even the servants of the dark one felt it. Then, through the smokes of battle, figures on horseback loomed, black-cloaked on black steeds, and Faramir felt as though his heart had been seized by a hand of ice encased in a gauntlet of steel. Boromir faced them, sword held in a guard position before them.

"Do you come to parley, or to continue your unprovoked attack?" Boromir spoke, his voice ringing out, and Faramir wondered at his brother's strength, that he could speak so levelly in the face of such terror. Only long years together told him that beneath the surface, Boromir too felt fear such as he had never known.

The lead horseman drew his own sword from its scabbard with a smooth, silent gesture.

"Foolish sons of a foolish old man, guarding an empty throne. Thrice foolish – the two of you for seeking to defend the crossing when all is lost, and he for sending his sons to certain death. Die, and despair, knowing that Gondor falls."

Almost involuntarily, Faramir cast a glance over his shoulder towards the land of his birth. It was as well he did, for fortune favoured them at least with some tiny measure of hope – out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hatholdir signalling that the teams of heavy horses were ready to pull the bridge supports away. As his brother took another step forward Faramir turned and gave the answering signal. The ropes jerked tight, and for a moment Faramir thought that all their effort had been for naught and that the bridge would remain intact. Then, with a creaking, groaning noise, several of the crucial supports came free from their places and the deck of the bridge behind them began to buckle as the wooden towers holding it up crumpled.

"Boromir," Faramir cried. His brother turned and realised what had happened. Instantly, he raised the great horn to his lips and sounded the retreat. The troops ran from their positions, hastened on their way by a hail of arrows from the enemy, and jumped headlong into the water. Faramir and Boromir lingered just long enough to see that all of the men had either hit the water or died trying, then both ran to the brink of the bridge and dived.

The cold water closed over Faramir's head, swallowing him up into a reedy green darkness. He kicked out, trying to put as much distance between himself and the archers before surfacing. For a moment, weighted down by the chain mail, he thought he had stayed under too long. As his lungs came close to bursting, all he could think of was a woman's beautiful laughing face, and hair the colour of the sun. If I must die here, then at least I will die thinking of her... Then with a gasp, he broke the surface. An arrow splashed harmlessly just to his left, and he struck out towards the western shore, feeling every last pound of the armour, straining his muscles as much to stay afloat as to make forward progress.

~o~O~o~

"Where the bloody hell's the shieldmaiden got to?" Damrod stomped into the tiny mess hall in the guard tower. "We move out in half an hour, up to Henneth Annun, and I haven't seen hide nor hair of her for the last couple of hours."

Mablung braced himself for the impending explosion. "She's gone to Cair Andros, to the river crossing. She's going down the west bank to Osgiliath to be with the captain."

"WHAT?" bellowed Damrod. "You told her what was in that message? What if she gets captured on the way. You could have compromised the whole bloody thing. You..." He jabbed his finger against Mablung's breastbone, "You fucking stupid fuck-witted fucking fuckwit, you could be responsible for the fall of Minas Tirith."

Anborn stood quietly to one side, trying to blend in with the scenery. He couldn't help but be impressed. He didn't think he'd ever heard the word "fuck" used so many times in the space of a single breath.

Mablung answered quietly and evenly. "As could we all, if we get intercepted on the way to Henneth Annun."

"Fucking hell, if I catch up with her, I'll have her flogged for desertion."

"C'mon, Damrod, give the girl a break. You know what was in that letter from the Captain."

"No, because I didn't see the bloody thing, did I? Go on, enlighten me, what was in it."

"Well, I didn't see it either. What I mean is you and I can both take a pretty shrewd guess at what he wrote." Mablung's voice changed as he tried to mimic, rather less than successfully, the cultured tones of the captain. "My darling dear heart, I'm probably going to die, I love you, I'm sorry I behaved like an idiot, remember me kindly. There wasn't a chance in hell that she was going to stay here after getting that letter, was there?"

Damrod grunted, the way he did when he knew you were right but was damned if he was going to say so in as many words. In any case, Mablung had to concede, he was only half right: Damrod was spot on about the additional danger posed by Éowyn heading off to Cair Andros. It doubled the chances that someone who knew something of note might be captured: someone who knew that Boromir was now on to the enemy's imminent plans of attack.

"I'm sorry, I should have thought about the risk of capture before I told her. I probably deserve to be flogged along side her."

"Too bloody right. You do. Aiding and abetting desertion. You're on latrine duty for the first two weeks we're up at Henneth Annun." Mablung gulped. The worst duty by far – carrying pails of shit for miles to dispose of them far enough away from the caves that no-one would work out where they'd come from. And doubly demeaning since NCOs usually weren't expected to do that duty.

However, the thought of his sergeant carting buckets of shit round the landscape seemed to mellow Damrod slightly. He continued, "But I'm trusting that the captain's shrewd enough that he hasn't told us everything. He'll have told us what we need to know, not the exact details of what he's up to down there."

"Which makes me think you can guess."

"Probably, but I'm not telling you, not now you've demonstrated that..." Damrod paused, then enunciated each word separately, though fortunately with a reasonable lack of venom, "You're... a... complete... fucking... idiot."

Mablung took a deep breath. He let his shoulders slump as some of the tension drained out of him.

Anborn (who really didn't have much instinct for self preservation) decided to make a somewhat ill-advised attempt to lighten the mood.

"At least we know that the bet's done and dusted, one way or the other. Either he dies and... well, I guess in that case we just retrieve our stakes. Or he survives, they shag..." He counted on his fingers... "Four weeks, that means I've won."

Mablung turned to Anborn, a gleam of cold triumph in his eye. "You're not collecting anything, mate. Éowyn needed money to pay the ferry man at the crossing. I gave the whole pot to her."

"You did what? Aiding and abetting, and you gave her our money to do it?" Damrod's wrath returned. "Make that – oh, four weeks seems to be the nice round number of choice in these parts right now – four weeks of shovelling shit."

Thank for all the reviews - including the guest ones which I can't reply to by PM. As for the plot suggestion... well, I may be winging it to some extent, but I do know the ending. Suffice it to say, that's for me to know and you to find out. ;-) Maybe it'll happen that way, maybe it won't.

Thanks to TMI Fairy for the helpful discussion about whether it is possible to swim in chain mail (it is, apparently, but you have to be a bloody strong swimmer).