Chapter twenty: Shards
From Remaking the Window, byHannith of Tharbad, F.A. 926
Some events take place in the public eye, and there is barely a person alive who has not heard of them. Such was the case with the attempted assassination of King Elessar in F.A. 12. By the end of the month, everyone in Gondor had heard about it, and we can read about it in a thousand different sources.
Other events take place in private, and nobody outside ever knows. Sometimes they are deliberately kept secret: the agents of Umbar plotting in their darkened rooms, or Elessar and Samir meeting in a wain to shape the future of the region. We will never know what was said between them. We know what came out of these private meetings, of course, but we will never know what words were spoken. We will never know what emotions filled the hearts of the men who said them.
Sometimes events are not meant to be secret, but no record of them has survived the passage of years. At the time, perhaps, everybody knew about them, but for some reason, few of them wrote them down, or the letters that they wrote have not survived.
Such is the case with the infiltration of the Citadel by an agent of Umbar less than three weeks after the attempted assassination of the king. For centuries, it has gone unknown. It is only thanks to a chance discovery last year that we know about it at all. Was it always secret, or was it once widely known? Surely it was, since the results of his infiltration were so dramatic. With death and violence in the Citadel itself, surely it could not have gone unnoticed!
With only one scant record available to us, all we have now is questions. How did the agent enter the Citadel? How did he hide himself once he was inside? What did he feel, knowing that his accomplice languished in prison? Did anyone come close to discovering him before he made his move?
For a historian, the greatest sorrow is knowing that so much of the past will never be known. Most people leave no trace that outlives the loved ones they leave behind. Even the great ones, who stride across history like giants, leave so much of themselves unknown. They live a public life, these men and women, but behind the mask, their true self is often lost to us.
The past is like a beautiful, painted window, now shattered into shards. History is those broken shards, and we historians try to piece the shards together again, but the window will never again be whole.
The world had shattered into shards of glass. Sometimes they pierced him, and Mínir moaned aloud with the fierce pain of it. Sometimes they showed him reflections, and he lost himself in them. He wandered in the streets of his childhood, as angry stall-holders cuffed him for stealing apples. He stood alone in an empty city and knew that he was sick. He was chasing an army across a barren plain, desperate to catch up with it. He was a rat, scuttling through the shadows as tall men laughed with booming voices.
He opened his eyes. The pain was there again, stabbing him. Dreams, he thought. The other shards are dreams. He woke to pain, slipped into a dream, and woke again. Again and again, he passed between the two. It felt as if mere hours had passed. It felt as if he had been here for weeks.
"What…?" he managed. He saw a window, a shape, a hand.
People had been talking. He remembered voices. "…couldn't stop it," someone had said. "I'm sorry." Someone had patted him awkwardly on the hand. "…the weaver," another voice had said. "If it hadn't been for him…" Other voices had spoken softly and came with hands that smelled sweetly of herbs. Far louder than those voices were the voices that must surely have come from the dreams. He had seen strange things: the world turned upside-down and shadows talking.
"Where…?" he asked, but he knew where he was. This was a healing house. He was not important enough for the Houses of Healing on the sixth level, but one of the lesser houses, perhaps. He remembered leaving his dwelling. He remembered entering the garden, and then…
No. Before that. They had been celebrating because an enemy agent had been taken. Why had he been attacked? Revenge? Not because he had been getting too close to discovering something, because that was over now. Too late for that.
"The weaver," he murmured. "Lainor. I was going to see him, and then…"
"It wasn't me," someone said. There was too much light from the window. The face was a shadowed one. "You have to believe me. It wasn't me."
Who? Mínir wondered, but thinking was too hard for him. He closed his eyes, and let the reflections take him.
Éowyn's first thought was that somebody was there. A sound, perhaps? A scent of something that did not belong in the room? Motes of dust in a sunbeam, as if somebody had moved through the room just before her, and the dust of their passage had not yet settled?
She said nothing, just breathed in and out again, and took a careful step forward. Scrolls were piled up on the shelves, and from one of them a red ribbon dangled, a broken seal still attached. It was swinging slightly, as if somebody had touched it.
Almost she wished for her sword, but when she had taken another step, she knew that she was alone. The window was not quite shut; perhaps that was what it was. There was little breeze, and the papers on the desk lay still, but perhaps one of them had rustled when she had opened the door. Perhaps somebody had opened a door on the far side of the building, and the draught was what had set the ribbon swinging.
There was nobody in the space behind the door. There was nothing underneath the desk except for a hidden pile of books, and the sight of them brought a smile to her lips. Faramir liked to have books around him as he worked. Sometimes, when the day's work had come to an end, he would pick up a book, meaning to read just a few pages, and end up losing himself in it for hours. At home in Emyn Arnen, his private study was a mess of scrolls and books, although his public office was tidy to the point of being too bare. When people came to see him, they saw the composed, self-possessed Steward of Gondor, but she and her children saw the man behind the mask.
But he was not here. This was not one of those days when she would find him lost in reading; when she had to remind him that everyone was waiting for him before they could eat. The papers on the desk bore yesterday's date. The pen was dry and the chair was cold.
"Faramir?" She found herself saying his name, even so. She felt a shiver run down the back of her neck. It was being here in his private space, she thought, when he was away from it. There was such a sense of him here, from the ordered scrolls and papers, to the hidden books below the desk. It looked as if he had been here a moment before, and was just about to come back. There was even a flagon of wine ready for him to drink, with a bowl beside it, covered with a lid.
She moved round to the far side of the desk, but did not sit down in his chair. Raising the lid, she saw that the bowl contained brightly-coloured confits, and she wrinkled her nose at the intense sweet smell. They were not to her taste, but someone in the kitchen had clearly decided that Faramir needed a treat to cheer him up. They older servants liked to mother him like that in Emyn Arnen, too.
"Éowyn?" She heard Merry calling her name from the hallway outside.
Placing the lid back on the bowl, she walked to the door. One more look back, and then she was outside, closing the door quietly behind her. "He isn't there," she said, "but he might be soon. There's food and wine laid out for him."
"Food and wine?" Merry said eagerly, but then he laughed, and she knew that once again, he was poking gentle fun at his perceived fondness for such things. The laughter faded, and he frowned. "It's strange, though. I met a servant who was sure that she had seen him walking down this corridor just a few minutes ago. Mind you, she only saw him from a distance, so I suppose it could have been someone else. After all," he said, as he laughed again, "from behind, these Men of Gondor all look the same to us, just as we hobbits doubtless look the same to them. There's one kitchen maid here who still can't tell the difference between me and Pippin. Can you believe that?"
Éowyn shook her head gravely. "I would have thought she would have learnt by now. You both pay so many unofficial visits there in search of food and drink, after all."
"Indeed," said Merry, apparently entirely unoffended, and Éowyn laughed.
She had laughed more today than she had laughed in days, she realised. She only wished that she could find Faramir, so he could share the laughter, too. He needed it more than any of them.
He should probably leave, Lainor thought. What was he doing here? It wasn't as if Mínir would derive any comfort if he awoke and found him here. They weren't friends. Mínir either distrusted him or pitied him, and you couldn't build a friendship out of that. Even if it had been possible, it wasn't any more. Mínir had been attacked when coming to see him. He wouldn't want anything to do with him after that.
Yes, he thought, I should go. But somehow he kept on sitting there, quiet beside the bed. He had nowhere else to go, not really. He would stay until someone else came, someone with a better claim to be here.
But no-one came. Time passed slowly. A healer came, fussed round Mínir's bed for a while, then turned her attention to Lainor himself. He tried to flap her away, tried to say that he was nobody, that he didn't need her, but she was insistent. His arm hurt less after she had gone.
He wandered to the window. The sun was shining again, but the last of the rain had not quite burned away, and shone like silver on the leaves of the trees. Dappled shadows in the grass made him think of patterns woven in cloth. He thought of his loom, languished untouched. He wished…
Mínir stirred again, and his eyes blinked open. Lainor stayed in the window, steadying himself with a hand on the sill. Mínir frowned towards him. "Who is it?"
The light behind him. Ah, yes. Lainor returned to the bedside and sat down. "Lainor," he said. "I was there. I think you were coming to see me. I'd asked you to, anyway. I think I'd turned it into a test. If you came… If you could find me, then… Well, then I would…" He couldn't finish it. He shook his head. "So I waited in that garden, and evening was coming on. And someone attacked you. I heard a noise and I ran to see what was happening. I tried to stop it, honestly I did. I grappled him and stopped him from landing the killing blow. Got this arm, doing that. But I couldn't… He ran away. I didn't…"
"Who?" Mínir asked. His voice was scratchy and his lips were cracked and dry.
"Lainor," Lainor said again. "I know what it looks like, but it wasn't anything to do with me. You have to believe me. I'm sorry. It's my fault because you were coming to see me. My fault because I was hiding in a deserted garden. My fault, but not because I meant it to happen. I'm not…"
"Who?" Mínir asked. "Who was it? Who hit me? Why?"
He hadn't heard a word of it, Lainor realised. Lainor had babbled everything too fast, while Mínir had been blinking in the first confusion of waking. He wanted to say it all over again, but clenched his fist, driving his nails into his palm, and forced himself to stop. Selfish! he chided himself. Selfish and self-absorbed, just like Rosseth had said. Mínir was the one who had almost died. What did it matter if Lainor had to go a few more days without hearing the words, 'I know. I know it wasn't you.'
What did it matter if he never heard them?
The very thought made him want to moan, but he took a deep breath, and managed to speak quietly. "He ran away," he told Mínir. "But when I got there, he was rummaging in your pouch and taking something from it. He was just a common thief, I think."
"My pouch," Mínir rasped. "Where is my pouch?"
"I wonder where Pippin is," Merry said. "Not sleeping any more, anyway. I checked." He was swinging his legs to and fro as he sat on the stone bench, and his toes were brushing the tips of the blades of long grass. "I wonder if he's been trying to find me."
Elboron shrieked with laughter. Watched by his patient nurse, he and Eldarion were busy chasing butterflies through the flower beds. More than one plant was getting unfortunately squashed by childish feet. Éowyn hoped that Arwen would not mind. Elboron was used to playing freely in the gardens of Emyn Arnen, but she didn't know if Eldarion had the same freedom. But as Elboron had led, Eldarion had been quick to follow, and now each was as joyfully messy as the other.
Would Elboron one day be Steward to Eldarion? Or would Elboron live, grow old and die before Eldarion became king? The people of Númenor had long lives, and unless illness or injury took either of them, she knew that she would die before Faramir, even though she was younger than him. Aragorn would live for longer than either of them, and it was likely that the unborn child in her womb would never know a world in which King Elessar was not king of Gondor.
"If he has been looking for us," she said, "I don't think he would have found it hard to find us. They will hear those two even in the Court of the Fountain."
"True," said Merry. His feet grew still. "So where is he? I know I shouldn't worry." He grasped a trailing tendril and began to coil it around his finger.
"But you do," Éowyn finished for him.
"Yes," said Merry. "No." He shook his head. "It's not that. It's just… We lived together when we got back from the War. Did you know that? We shared a house for several years. We were good friends before we left with Frodo, but our journey made us best friends. When we got back, nobody at home had seen what we'd seen. Nobody knew what it felt like to return to the home you longed for, but at the same time, to feel as if you'd left part of your heart somewhere else. Frodo had his own problems, of course, and Sam… Sam had Rosie, and Sam's concern mostly lay with Frodo. So Pippin and I… We understood each other. We were the only two who ever would."
"Yes," said Éowyn, because there was nothing else that she could say. Faramir loved her, but she had never known anyone who had lived through the same things she had lived through, and who had felt what she had felt, both the longing and the despair.
Elboron bounded past them, leaping after a pair of yellow butterflies. Eldarion was following him, far quieter than Elboron, his steps making little sound. Merry watched them until they disappeared behind a cluster of shrubs. She wondered if he wished that he, too, could chase butterflies without a care in the world.
"And now he's married," Merry said, "and has a son. I'm Master of Buckland, with the responsibilities it brings. I should probably be in Buckland now, not here. But I wanted to come. I can see our lives taking us in different directions: duties, family, children. I wanted one last journey together."
"Last?" said Éowyn. "It won't be the last."
"No," said Merry, "but…" He sighed. "And now we're here, sometimes Pippin and I spend whole days together, but sometimes I just want to sit inside and read. Sometimes we go our separate ways. I talk to the healers, or spend time with you, and he appears to have become friendly with the queen. When did that happen? And he's made a friend in the City Watch: Sergon, or something. And it's good. It's good."
"Yes," said Éowyn. As a child, she had known little of friendship, but as an adult, she had come to learn something of its ways. She loved Faramir, but she was glad to see the friendship that had grown up between him and Aragorn and Éomer, just as Faramir was pleased to see her growing friendship with Lothíriel.
But sometimes, sometimes, she just wanted him, and him alone.
I wish he were here, she thought.
Merry gave a wry laugh. "I'm sorry. Listen to me prattle!" He cocked his head, listening. "Everything's gone suspiciously quiet. I wonder what those boys are up to?"
"Let's find out, shall we?" Éowyn called her son's name, but there was no answer, only silence. She called again, and saw something moving behind the shrubs. She started to run, calling, but once again, silence was her only answer.
His feet were shockingly loud in the restful silence. A healer looked up and glared at him, but Lainor smiled a quick apology, dodged past the man, and carried on running. Another glare, almost a shout, and Lainor forced his steps to slow. Better to walk briskly and draw no attention, than to run and have everyone stare at him, or, worse, try to stop him.
The door warden watched him as he went past, but made no move. Outside, a few people were moving around, but nobody paid him any attention. He was desperate to start running again, but was afraid to do so. A running man drew the eye. It made people wonder just what he was running from.
A pair of guards from the City Watch were standing on a corner. Did they recognise him? Lainor had no idea how many people knew that he was the owner of the loft that had hidden the assassin. Perhaps the whole city was full of people who were just waiting for him to trip up and reveal his true treachery.
Slow, he urged himself. Walk slowly. They were looking at his bandaged arm, he thought, and wondering what had happened to him. Or maybe they knew. Maybe everybody knew everything.
It doesn't matter, he told himself. His errand mattered, or mattered to Mínir, anyway. He had become almost frantic, desperate to get up and rush into the streets himself. It had taken two healers to stop him in the end: one to make him lie down again, and one to deal with the damage that he had done to himself by trying to get up too soon. "You'll go?" he had begged Lainor. "You'll tell them?"
"Yes," Lainor had vowed. "Yes, I will."
So here he was, heading to a place he had never been before; a place he had never thought to go. The Citadel Gate was reached through a tunnel through the rock. Guards from the City Watch manned the entrance to the tunnel, but the gate at the far end, Lainor knew, was guarded by members of the Citadel Guard itself. "I have very important tidings," Lainor said, when they challenged him at the tunnel's entrance. "I know you won't let me in. I'm not expecting you to let me in. I just need someone to listen to me. Someone trustworthy. Someone who can take a message to Lord Faramir."
"We're trustworthy," said the guardsman. "Tell it to us."
Lainor shook his head. Inside, he was trembling. Mínir had been most insistent. "Tell the City Watch," he had said, but then he had shaken his head, frowning. "No, not them. It must have been…" He had shaken his head again. "Not them. The Citadel Guard. Get the news to them."
"I need to talk to the Citadel Guard," Lainor said now. Please, he wanted to beg them. Please. "Watch me from a distance, if you like. I'm unarmed. My right arm's useless. I just need to talk to someone. A message. A warning. It's important."
A token had been stolen, Mínir had discovered. No coins, no keepsakes, just that one thing. "It was marked with the king's seal,' Mínir had told him. 'He gave it to me to show at the gate if I had really important news, something that the Steward himself had to hear. And now they've got it. What will they be using it for? I don't know. I just… He needs to know. The Steward needs to know."
"Please let me through," Lainor begged them now. "Arrest me afterwards if I do anything you don't like, but please just let me through."
She found him at last in the Court of the Fountain, sitting beside the White Tree. "Faramir." She said his name, and he looked up slowly, wearily. Behind him, the sun was caught in the branches of the tree, and he was speckled with the shadows of its leaves. "I have been looking for you," she said.
"I was in the prison," he said, "and then with the guard captains, and then…" The words trailed away, and he yawned.
"Arwen says that the danger is past," Éowyn told him, although it was mid-afternoon now, and he must surely know already. "That must surely mean that the king has met with this Lord Samir, and that it has unfolded the way he wished. I wanted…"
He yawned again. I just wanted to see you, she could have said. They had spent the last few days imprisoned by their anxieties, and now that the worst was past, she just wanted a few snatched moments with him. This was not Emyn Arnen, and he was the Steward of Gondor, charged with the rule of the kingdom while the king was away. She had known that she could have no more than moments of his time, but she had wanted those moments. She still did.
If anything, he needed them more than she did, she thought. He had spent the day in a dark cell below the ground, and in making decisions that would affect the future of the realm. She had spent it with Merry and the children. Sometimes she longed for a life that was more like his and wished that she could make a difference to the world's affairs. But sometimes, she knew, he longed for a quiet life that was more like hers. At times, he longed to do nothing with his day but idle the hours away in a garden reading, while his children chased butterflies in the sun.
She could give him a taste of that, if only in words. "After lunch, Merry and I got the boys and we spent a while in the garden. The boys had fun chasing butterflies. I almost lost them for a while." And had almost been afraid for a while, too. She had tried to still that fear. What harm could come to them in the garden of the Citadel of Minas Tirith? "When I found them, they had their heads together, plotting something. They said they hadn't heard me call."
Eldarion had said something about a man watching them from behind the bushes, but when she had looked for him, there was nobody there. The soft earth showed no footprints, and she was no Ranger, to find footprints in the grass. It was just a blackbird, Elboron declared, and not a man at all. He had seen it, so there!
"And after that…" She trailed away. Faramir was yawning again. "You should try to sleep for a while," she said. "Pippin went back to bed this morning."
Faramir shook his head. "I cannot…" Another yawn.
Éowyn took his hand. "Remember the night that Aragorn healed us?" It was a difficult memory for her, but for Faramir's sake, she would speak of it. "Afterwards, he went out and healed many others, but he paused to eat first, and when he healed as many as he could, he retired to sleep. There were many others who needed healing, and the greatest decisions of our time were waiting to be made, but he stopped and slept, because he needed it. You need it. There is no shame in that."
"I… Yes," said Faramir. He let her pull him to his feet. As they walked past the Citadel Guards, she tried to release his hand, to avoid giving them the sight of the Steward of Gondor being led away by a woman, but he would not let her, and held her hand tight.
Hand in hand, they went inside. The climbed the stairs, and walked along the hallway that led to their chambers. "Only for an hour or two," Faramir said. "Then I must…"
"I know," she said sadly, because although she didn't know what it was, she had known that there would be something: some decision to make, some demand on his time. But even an hour or two would help. Even if he could not sleep, perhaps he could read a little, shielded from the world by a closed door. She would make sure that he wasn't disturbed. Perhaps, if he wanted it, she would join him.
As he entered the outer chamber, he unbuckled his sword and placed it on the table. He made no other move to undress, but he sat down heavily and began to remove his shoes. A servant had placed a flagon of wine on the dresser, and she walked over to it and poured him a glass. It was a rich dark red with a sharp scent. She swirled it round in the glass, watching as it caught the light, then offered it to him. He took it, but did not drink.
Moving to the window, she closed the first of the shutters. As she did so, Faramir opened the door that led into their private bed chamber. She reached for the second shutter, but paused for a moment to look out at the wide blue sky. She remembered how desperate Faramir had been for the sight of that sky, after his first day spent in the cells. Perhaps she would-
There was a noise from the bedchamber: a shout, a cry. She heard the sound of shattering glass. She ran into the room, and saw Faramir backed against the wall, held there by another man. The other man had a sword, and its blade was already stained with blood. There was blood on Faramir's sleeve; blood on his shirt. His stockinged feet crunched on broken glass, and he cried out, unable to stop himself. His hand gripped the other man's right hand, desperately trying to drive the sword away. The other man was tall, and there was a knife in his left hand. He lunged for Faramir with the knife, but Faramir's arm darted in under the blow, and came up again, striking the man on the forearm and deflecting the knife.
Pursuing his advantage, Faramir surged forward, pushing himself away from the wall, driving the man back against the bed. The curtain around the bed was almost closed, open only far enough to let someone in. The man got tangled in it, and Faramir almost had him, but then his feet found another shard of broken glass, and he stumbled, he fell…
All the while she had been watching it, Éowyn had been moving. With every fibre of her being, she wanted to scream Faramir's name, but she kept it in. Silent, unseen, she moved to the chest at the foot of the bed. Silent, she opened it, and drew out her sword.
When she had it, she steadied her grip, then rushed forward. As she neared them, her shoe crunched on a piece of broken glass, and they both turned round and saw her. No! She saw the cry in Faramir's eyes; saw his fear for her. But the attacker just laughed. He saw her, and he laughed.
He was still laughing as she brought her sword down upon him. He parried it, catching it with his own sword, and he was strong, strong enough to send a shock wave up her arm. But she had slain a Nazgûl. She stood her ground, and dodged backwards when he came at her with his knife. He was still laughed, still deriding her. He glanced at her briefly, then back to Faramir, always to Faramir, discounting her.
She feinted left, and he brought his sword up casually, disdainfully, as his knife lunged towards Faramir's breast. Beneath his blade her sword slithered, and her aim was true.
He was still laughing as she ran him through, but when he died, he died without a sound.
Faramir was down, still conscious, but bleeding profusely. Kicking away the shards of glass, she threw herself down beside him, and tried to examine him. A deep cut across the upper arm. A slash across the ribs, but when she eased the torn edges of the shirt apart, she thought that it was but shallow. His foot was bleeding badly, but when she touched his face with a trembling hand, she saw that some of the dark red pools around him were wine.
Amazingly, ridiculously, she almost laughed. Faramir grasped her wrist. She whirled round, but the attacker was still dead beside her. Even so, she took his sword and cast it away, and threw his knife across the bed. She swept the glass away with a fold of her skirt, but she kept her own sword close.
"Help!" she shouted. "The Steward is wounded. Bring help!"
But footsteps were already sounding in the hallway, and people were already shouting, even before she had made a sound.
"Nothing bad," Faramir said, smiling faintly. He pushed himself upright, until he was sitting erect, his back to the wall. Éowyn wanted to help him, but she drew back, knowing that there were things that men like Faramir had to do by themselves. She was the same, of course.
"Lord Faramir!" someone shouted. "Lady Éowyn?"
"Here," she said, and it was strange how faint her voice sounded. She turned to the man she had killed. He had the look of Númenor about him. It was too much to say that he could have been Faramir's brother, but the colouring was the same, and something about the face. She wondered who he was, and why he had been hiding behind the curtains of their bed. Then she laughed at herself, because the why was obvious. He had come here to kill.
"Lord Faramir!" A pair of Citadel Guards came rushing in. One of them stopped, took in the scene before him, and turned immediately and rushed away, doubtless summoning healers and help. The other drew his sword and approached the dead attacker cautiously, as if ready for him to come back to life and attack.
"He is dead," Éowyn said wearily. There was no exhilaration after battle. Years ago, when she had longed to ride to war, she had expected to feel exhilaration after a fight, but she never had. All she had felt was sorrow and weariness. "Why were you coming here?" she asked.
"A fellow brought news," he said. "A warning." He turned to Faramir, who was now standing on one foot, supporting himself with a hand on the back of a chair. "My Lord Steward…"
As he spoke, Éowyn looked at the man she had killed; at his waxen face; at the killing wound that no longer bled. Who was he? From Umbar, of course. That, too, was obvious. A slash from a knife had half severed his pouch from his belt, and she touched it, feeling it come apart in her hand.
"An imposter is at large in the Citadel," the guard was saying. "He came in this morning. He had a token with the king's seal."
Her hand closed around it. She brought it up, and uncurled her fingers. The white tree gleamed in the afternoon sun, but now it was stained with blood.