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shieldofrohanMarriage has been far from her mind for a long time. What time has there been for such things, such planning for the future, when there is no future to plan against? There is only the endless drudgery of the now; of stolid duty, of the daily running of the city and the tending to her uncle's ailing health, of bitter shadows and dark dreams as the stormclouds gather. How is she to think of marriage, then? How could she even think of wedding someone, of being a bride in some foreign city, when all her duty and all her life is here? No, marriage has not been on her mind; but only the quiet grind of life when all that she would live for is fading around her.
This changed all at once, when it changed. Two matters precipitated the change: the first, the death of her cousin, so dear to her heart. All of a sudden, she and her exiled brother are all that remains of the dwindling line of Eorl; all of a sudden, that abstracted future is shorter than ever. It is her uncle, her King, who speaks of marriage then; who clasps her hands where he lies in his sickbed, and tells her through tears that he would see her wed, that ere he dies he must see her happy.
And this might not have changed things so deeply - for she will not rush to wed, when there is no man she would call worthy of turning her from duty - were it not for the second matter. Word that comes in dribs and drabs, tangled by distance; letters that capture her, that she returns in kind. They are, to begin with, a distraction; a fantasy, to sustain her through dark days. A lost prince, wrongfully kept from his throne; an ancient line, a terrible wrong, the promise of a right reclaimed. She has visions of her place in this tale, of the glory that has eluded her in these shadowed halls: how there will come a day when, at full strength, the Eorlingas ride to the aid of another kingdom, as once they rode to Gondor's aid so long ago; and she will be at their head, and she will be Queen, and who then will overlook her in the shadows? Who then will turn away, ashamed, from her pain and sorrow? Then will all be restored, and she will linger no more in hollow darkness, but smile again, and be loved.
It is a fantasy. In her heart, she knows this; in her truest mind, she knows that she can promise nothing but an already-embattled army that will not leave its posts, and a king without a throne can promise nothing but more war. But there is glory in war, too, and there is romance in what she has been told; and she is young, for all her hardness, and her blood has ever run too hot. It is a fantasy, but one she sorely needs; and she has come to love the king whose face she has never seen, whose tragedy is the stuff of songs.
And still it might not have changed anything. It is the confluence of the two, the quirk of timing - that the offer of marriage comes so near on the heels of Théodred's loss and Éomer's exile - that turns the tide. How can she do otherwise? She writes in answer, and seals it with her uncle's ring. Come. To wed, to stay, to await the turning of the tide. And what she does not write: Come, and marry me, and make of my life a song. Come: I have waited too long in dreary duty.
And the days pass, and there is a future to await; there is something to hope for, at last, and even her uncle's continued ill-health will not deter her from the strange blossoming of hope in her breast. The war drags on, and the darkness lingers, and all is not well in Edoras; and yet, there is change on the horizon, and she will not always be alone. She will not always be a ghost in her own halls, the White Lady whose beauty and sorrow are all that are known of her. She will be a queen, even if she is a queen in exile; and she will not be alone.
The king, she has heard, has a sister too. This is another spark that brightens her darkness while she waits; for she has never had a sister of her own, and for all the love she bears towards her brother and her departed cousin, for all her fierce devotion to her kinsmen, how fine a thing it seems to have another woman in her life! She has written again to Magister Illyrio; assured him that the Lady Daenerys will be most welcome, and as dear to her as a true sister; and every word of it she has meant. Excited as she is to be wed, to be loved, to be Queen, she is almost as excited again to have some woman in her life who is neither maid nor servant. She imagines a woman like herself, lonely and chafing against the weight of grief; a woman who will understand, as no man ever has, the burden of womanhood. They will sit together, she imagines, and comb and braid one another's hair, and weave and sew and work, and they will laugh, and they will find a companionship that Éowyn, who for so long has been the sole lady of the hall, has craved since her childhood.
She will have a sister. She will have a husband. She will have a purpose, one more glorious than simple house-stewardry. She will be a queen.
It is a heady thought. It fuels her, and her already industrious days are fuller than ever; she still nurses Théoden through his illness, still oversees the business of the city and the kingdom as she must, but her mind is more thoroughly on the preparations for Viserys' arrival: the feasts to be thrown, and the guests to be called, and how she must be her most regal and her most beautiful, ready for the war to come.
It is, then, a grander hall than ever that greets the Pentosi travellers. She is glad to know that it is a sunny day when they arrive: that they will see from afar how the roof of Meduseld gleams like gold in the autumn light, that the wind that stirs the long grass of the plains and sets the green banners fluttering is not too cold or too harsh. The city bustles with activity; there is music for the first time since the prince's body was borne homewards, and an air of (still muted) festivity; and through the green and white of Rohan's colours, she has contrived to work patches of red and black, a reminder of the union to come.
She awaits them outside the hall itself, and even the presence of Gríma Wormtongue beside her, glowering, will not sink her spirits. Soon, she thinks, you will be nothing to me. Soon, I will see you driven out. When I am queen.
She looks, in truth, like a queen already. She has made sure of it. Her waist-length golden hair is bound back by a silver circlet, her white gown embroidered richly in green and gold, her head held high and her smile both sweet and noble. There is a sorrow in her still, but it is for the moment held at bay, a dim shadow in clear grey eyes. She steps forwards to greet her betrothed, and for a moment, the fantasy seems to hold. He is, perhaps, shorter than she had dreamed, gaunt with hardship, sharp-edged and pinched; but there is a fire in his violet eyes, and he holds himself well enough, and he is handsome in his way. She is not displeased, she decides; he is no Eorl nor Isildur, but he is king enough in his heart, she will not doubt that. She smiles and welcomes him inside, where the firelight plays on carved wood and ancient tapestries, where the tables are set and the lamps are lit, and where her uncle sits (not so tall as once he did; not so kingly now the light has left his eyes) upon the high throne.
It is enough. She will not allow it to be otherwise. Rohan gains by this marriage; there is a bride-price to exchange for her dowry of fine horses and good armour, and there is the promise, too, of renown to come. She gains by this marriage most of all. It is a joy; she will not allow it to be otherwise. Even with her brother gone, it is a joy.
And perhaps, in all of this, she blinds herself to the things that will not fit the tale she wishes to tell. Perhaps there are things she excuses, which she might not otherwise: he is not the most polite, but he is a stranger in a foreign land, and he does not know the customs; he is not the tallest or strongest man she has known, but he is a king; he is a trifle vain, but is she not also too much aware of her looks in this moment? It will be easier, she tells herself, after the wedding. When he comes to know her and her people more fully, to see all the beauty that Rohan has to offer, then it will be easier; and songs are not often sung of these strange early days, when things are between this and that.
His sister is not so impolite. In truth, his sister feels barely present, to Éowyn's admitted grief: a quiet, shy thing, delicate as a bird, too often hastened away. But this, too, will pass - must pass. Daenerys' furtiveness, no doubt a result of that same alien land which brings out her brother's scorn, will pass in time. This will be a home to them, until their own home - her new home - is restored. She will see to it, she determines, with a stubbornness that has seen her through so many trials before; she will not relent, and when the wedding is done, they will know that they are kin here.
The wedding comes soon enough, only a few days later; and she stands before her uncle, dressed again in his robes of state, and she thinks she almost sees him smile through his grief as he blesses their union; thinks, for a moment, that she sees the old spirit return to him. Any doubt is gone. She can only smile, and look at her new husband from beneath modestly-lowered lashes, and think with a thrill of excitement: Queen. I am queen. And they will sing songs of how we reclaimed the throne.
This changed all at once, when it changed. Two matters precipitated the change: the first, the death of her cousin, so dear to her heart. All of a sudden, she and her exiled brother are all that remains of the dwindling line of Eorl; all of a sudden, that abstracted future is shorter than ever. It is her uncle, her King, who speaks of marriage then; who clasps her hands where he lies in his sickbed, and tells her through tears that he would see her wed, that ere he dies he must see her happy.
And this might not have changed things so deeply - for she will not rush to wed, when there is no man she would call worthy of turning her from duty - were it not for the second matter. Word that comes in dribs and drabs, tangled by distance; letters that capture her, that she returns in kind. They are, to begin with, a distraction; a fantasy, to sustain her through dark days. A lost prince, wrongfully kept from his throne; an ancient line, a terrible wrong, the promise of a right reclaimed. She has visions of her place in this tale, of the glory that has eluded her in these shadowed halls: how there will come a day when, at full strength, the Eorlingas ride to the aid of another kingdom, as once they rode to Gondor's aid so long ago; and she will be at their head, and she will be Queen, and who then will overlook her in the shadows? Who then will turn away, ashamed, from her pain and sorrow? Then will all be restored, and she will linger no more in hollow darkness, but smile again, and be loved.
It is a fantasy. In her heart, she knows this; in her truest mind, she knows that she can promise nothing but an already-embattled army that will not leave its posts, and a king without a throne can promise nothing but more war. But there is glory in war, too, and there is romance in what she has been told; and she is young, for all her hardness, and her blood has ever run too hot. It is a fantasy, but one she sorely needs; and she has come to love the king whose face she has never seen, whose tragedy is the stuff of songs.
And still it might not have changed anything. It is the confluence of the two, the quirk of timing - that the offer of marriage comes so near on the heels of Théodred's loss and Éomer's exile - that turns the tide. How can she do otherwise? She writes in answer, and seals it with her uncle's ring. Come. To wed, to stay, to await the turning of the tide. And what she does not write: Come, and marry me, and make of my life a song. Come: I have waited too long in dreary duty.
And the days pass, and there is a future to await; there is something to hope for, at last, and even her uncle's continued ill-health will not deter her from the strange blossoming of hope in her breast. The war drags on, and the darkness lingers, and all is not well in Edoras; and yet, there is change on the horizon, and she will not always be alone. She will not always be a ghost in her own halls, the White Lady whose beauty and sorrow are all that are known of her. She will be a queen, even if she is a queen in exile; and she will not be alone.
The king, she has heard, has a sister too. This is another spark that brightens her darkness while she waits; for she has never had a sister of her own, and for all the love she bears towards her brother and her departed cousin, for all her fierce devotion to her kinsmen, how fine a thing it seems to have another woman in her life! She has written again to Magister Illyrio; assured him that the Lady Daenerys will be most welcome, and as dear to her as a true sister; and every word of it she has meant. Excited as she is to be wed, to be loved, to be Queen, she is almost as excited again to have some woman in her life who is neither maid nor servant. She imagines a woman like herself, lonely and chafing against the weight of grief; a woman who will understand, as no man ever has, the burden of womanhood. They will sit together, she imagines, and comb and braid one another's hair, and weave and sew and work, and they will laugh, and they will find a companionship that Éowyn, who for so long has been the sole lady of the hall, has craved since her childhood.
She will have a sister. She will have a husband. She will have a purpose, one more glorious than simple house-stewardry. She will be a queen.
It is a heady thought. It fuels her, and her already industrious days are fuller than ever; she still nurses Théoden through his illness, still oversees the business of the city and the kingdom as she must, but her mind is more thoroughly on the preparations for Viserys' arrival: the feasts to be thrown, and the guests to be called, and how she must be her most regal and her most beautiful, ready for the war to come.
It is, then, a grander hall than ever that greets the Pentosi travellers. She is glad to know that it is a sunny day when they arrive: that they will see from afar how the roof of Meduseld gleams like gold in the autumn light, that the wind that stirs the long grass of the plains and sets the green banners fluttering is not too cold or too harsh. The city bustles with activity; there is music for the first time since the prince's body was borne homewards, and an air of (still muted) festivity; and through the green and white of Rohan's colours, she has contrived to work patches of red and black, a reminder of the union to come.
She awaits them outside the hall itself, and even the presence of Gríma Wormtongue beside her, glowering, will not sink her spirits. Soon, she thinks, you will be nothing to me. Soon, I will see you driven out. When I am queen.
She looks, in truth, like a queen already. She has made sure of it. Her waist-length golden hair is bound back by a silver circlet, her white gown embroidered richly in green and gold, her head held high and her smile both sweet and noble. There is a sorrow in her still, but it is for the moment held at bay, a dim shadow in clear grey eyes. She steps forwards to greet her betrothed, and for a moment, the fantasy seems to hold. He is, perhaps, shorter than she had dreamed, gaunt with hardship, sharp-edged and pinched; but there is a fire in his violet eyes, and he holds himself well enough, and he is handsome in his way. She is not displeased, she decides; he is no Eorl nor Isildur, but he is king enough in his heart, she will not doubt that. She smiles and welcomes him inside, where the firelight plays on carved wood and ancient tapestries, where the tables are set and the lamps are lit, and where her uncle sits (not so tall as once he did; not so kingly now the light has left his eyes) upon the high throne.
It is enough. She will not allow it to be otherwise. Rohan gains by this marriage; there is a bride-price to exchange for her dowry of fine horses and good armour, and there is the promise, too, of renown to come. She gains by this marriage most of all. It is a joy; she will not allow it to be otherwise. Even with her brother gone, it is a joy.
And perhaps, in all of this, she blinds herself to the things that will not fit the tale she wishes to tell. Perhaps there are things she excuses, which she might not otherwise: he is not the most polite, but he is a stranger in a foreign land, and he does not know the customs; he is not the tallest or strongest man she has known, but he is a king; he is a trifle vain, but is she not also too much aware of her looks in this moment? It will be easier, she tells herself, after the wedding. When he comes to know her and her people more fully, to see all the beauty that Rohan has to offer, then it will be easier; and songs are not often sung of these strange early days, when things are between this and that.
His sister is not so impolite. In truth, his sister feels barely present, to Éowyn's admitted grief: a quiet, shy thing, delicate as a bird, too often hastened away. But this, too, will pass - must pass. Daenerys' furtiveness, no doubt a result of that same alien land which brings out her brother's scorn, will pass in time. This will be a home to them, until their own home - her new home - is restored. She will see to it, she determines, with a stubbornness that has seen her through so many trials before; she will not relent, and when the wedding is done, they will know that they are kin here.
The wedding comes soon enough, only a few days later; and she stands before her uncle, dressed again in his robes of state, and she thinks she almost sees him smile through his grief as he blesses their union; thinks, for a moment, that she sees the old spirit return to him. Any doubt is gone. She can only smile, and look at her new husband from beneath modestly-lowered lashes, and think with a thrill of excitement: Queen. I am queen. And they will sing songs of how we reclaimed the throne.
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Date: 2022-01-27 11:06 pm (UTC)He would not, however, entrust to the magister matters of beauty. A king ought to have a beautiful wife, and if he was going to take beside him a woman of so foreign a name, she must possess a face which did not disappoint the discerning eye. The White Lady, the magister promises, is beautiful. Her breeding is rather exquisite, her temperament in the hall docile, and her face so fair that the moon itself kneels before her, bathing her in jeweled light. Golden-haired, of able build; the sort of woman crafted for the sitting of thrones. She would flicker like a ready ember at his side, ever eager to burst into full flame at his pleasure, or to rest, banked and unassuming, when his work lay before him. Very well; this woman would do.
And she would, in her reverence of so fortunate a union, present to him horses, armies, prestige. With all three he would forge the fury needed to win back his father's throne, to tear asunder at last the treason that has seated there gloating imposters. He would enthrone himself upon that seat of bristling steel, would feel within it still the fire of the dragons' dominion, and perhaps after holding court and severing heads from traitorous throats, he would take upon his lap his lady of Rohan. She would skim her maiden's fingers along his collar and plead for him to demonstrate again the dragon's ferocity.
He writes her letters, and when he describes for her the extravagance of their reign, he cannot help but think of his vanquished brother. A man of song and poetry, it was said; a man who kept company with quill and tome the way other men kept company with squealing whores. Is this what it felt like, the penning of poetry? Are these the sort of visions that kept his valiant brother locked in his chambers, swayed more by fantasy than a true taste for blood? The difference, of course, is that Viserys does not write of fantasy. Where Rhaegar wrote of unrealized wishes and weeping dreams, Viserys writes to his wife of truths only. They read like poetry, he does not doubt, so lurid is his anticipation: they will seize justice like the hilt of a blade; he will cloak his new bride in a love as radiant as living flames. Together they will paint color again into sky and vale too long dashed gray by war. She will be his queen, and they will wait on nothing. Come, she writes. Swords and hearts shall tremble at our joining, he vows in return.
He goes, and he has grown impatient with the magister's dull instruction, the reciting of histories and explaining of those details which count for nothing in the dawn of this rising era. He need not concern himself with past or ongoing difficulties, the failures of men undeserving of wartime command. All would be different once these armies were his. He is thinking not at all of Rohan's recent chastenings when he arrives. His eyes alight upon his betrothed, and he is disappointed: she is golden haired, and it is only golden. It is not the diamond silver-gold of his own hair, of true renown, and while he had known this, still it seems to him that claims of her beauty were terribly exaggerated. Or maybe it is only that her hair is the easiest of the insults to face.
The rest is unbearably egregious: she is no maiden of slim build, budding where it matters. She is built, he disdains, very much like a man: she is not wispy, and she does not wear a lady's demure fear like lace. She does not look like someone made to appeal to him. And she is tall, she stands taller than he, and she must spend more hours astride a horse than she does with needlework in hand. It does not matter what he has been told of her, of the prestige of her country and its name; it matters only that she is not the beautiful wife he was promised. She is fair enough of face, but she is not the queen he envisioned draping herself across his lap the eve he took his throne. She is too tall for that.
And her people - these are not the people who thundered through his visions of laying siege to King's Landing. These are dour folk, apparently partial to plain cloth and leather over proper armor, and they have taken for their sigil only a common nag. Their feast is meager, when he had expected a spread fit for a king; this is rustic fare, with nowhere a true delicacy. Their hall is simple wood and thatch, as if they are people who have taken a particular liking to straw and never dreamed of more, and her uncle (they call this man king?) seems a body for whom a quick blade to the ailing gut would do.
His sister has come to this place as if she'd stepped directly into an illustrated fable, and her undiscerning delight only aggravates him all the more. She is taken first by the rolling sea of green which carried them here, the simplicity of a humble, picturesque kingdom, and then she is taken by the chivalry with which they are greeted. She is taken by their queer accents, and she is taken by their inferior horses, and she is taken too by his own bride, marveling aloud at how noble a lady she seems to be. She is taken even by the paltry dishes placed before them, as if there were something there to be savored, and he chases her from him when she seems to be hoping rather too desperately that they will stay in this place. She is far too willing to call the first ramshackle den they duck into a home.
But they must stay upon this unassuming hill for a time, and the days are decidedly meandering leading up to his wedding. All ought to be hurried, as urgent as he himself feels for motion, and thus vengeance. That flagging half-king of this place sees them wed, and he must again look upon his wife. She who is smiling, looking as warm as if she were a lovely maiden in truth, a queen born for nothing less. She is, to look at her and her home, born for mucking the royal stables and nothing more.
By his own command his sister is not seated at his wife's side, where it seems she would have liked best to be, for such ease of girlish conversation and vapid cheer is best severed. It is his own wedding, after all, and he will have his wife's appreciation affixed to himself alone. The merriment of this place seems to him no better than the celebrations of those rabid hordes on the eastern plains, rejoicing in something as scant as the light of the moon. How these people have earned the reputation of fearsome warriors, he cannot fathom. His critical eye has not overlooked the red and black stitched among the drab green, as if his House's colors were no more than flecks of blood, waiting to be swallowed in a sea of grass and fool's-gold thatch.
At her table his displeasure is undisguised, his disappointment in food and festivity both. He speaks to the future awaiting them, awaiting them all: the fires which will consume and then see born again the world as it was meant to be. This shall be accomplished with the loyalty of Rohan, and perhaps then they will be esteemed as a country of repute. They will fly banners which bear the splendor of dragons, and they will celebrate no day more ecstatically than the day their White Lady was wed to the rightful heir to the iron throne.
He insists, then, on having her to himself before the feasting can waste away into a show of true savagery, refusing to let his wedding be reduced to nothing more than the trite carousing of peasants. He will have no man strip her bare for the bedding, though it seems they honor here no such custom. For all that she is not, she is his, before gods and men. He will not be denied that.
He takes her by the elbow, and his stride is proud and hard, striving to hold him tall; his voice has, by his own estimation, long held at bay the insult inflicted by her people's reception of him, and of their mundane ceremony. If he is a bit tart, she is fortune to be subjected to his tone only, and to his guiding fingers, though this is not his home.
"It is a glad thing our guests were informed beforehand that it was a wedding they were attending. How difficult it would have been to tell otherwise, when the ceremony and feasting were so ordinary." There is laughter, too, in his voice, and it is not merry. "It is almost as if it is not clear to you who I am."
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Date: 2022-01-28 12:10 am (UTC)She will not heed it. What sense in that? It is done; they are wed, and it cannot be undone, even as she sees her uncle's face darken with anger and hears the murmurs of discontent among the guests. If it is a mistake, it is one that cannot easily be taken back. The only way is forwards.
Still, in truth, she is glad to leave the hall which she so carefully arranged; she is glad to leave the ringing of harps and the songs of love that have been struck up; she is glad, most of all, to leave the regard of her uncle, of Gríma, and of the men who she called here to be insulted to their faces. And the hollow absence of the man she most expected to stand at her side, too: Éomer is still far away in the Eastfold, and was not permitted to return to the city, and that aches in her heart almost as much as the sudden doubt she feels. Let matters proceed, then: let her be taken away, and face a readier trial, where she at least cannot be expected to know how to handle herself, and let it be done privately, where his clumsiness cannot change how the Mark sees them. She goes readily enough with her new husband; pauses only to offer Théoden the due courtesy of a smile and a curtsey, and to murmur a few words in her own tongue to the servant who stands by with the wine.
Viserys' hand is tight at her elbow. She cannot help but note it, as she lengthens her own strides to match his, as she draws herself upright and pulls her grace around her like armour. His laughter is sharp as the ring of steel, but she finds no thrill in it; it is cold, she thinks. He is cold, as no man should be on his wedding night; as he was not in his letters, and as he was not in her imaginings. And is she to warm him; she who has thought these many years that all the fire in her has died to embers, and left nothing but icy duty? She bites the inside of her cheek as he speaks, and tries to banish such morbid thoughts.
And yet, he seems determined to spark them anew. It is becoming clearer who you are, she thinks bitterly. I would that I had seen it sooner.
"You are my lord husband." Her tone, at least, is even and gentle; her expression betrays nothing. If there is one lesson that has come to her through these years of her uncle's sickness, it is to veil her doubts and tamp down on the fury that still at times rises in her blood. "And you are of royal blood, and yours will be the crown of the Seven Kingdoms. I have not forgotten it." And there it might safely be left, conciliatory and simple; save that for all her restraint, she is still of Eorl's blood, and her pride is still rankled by his shameless speech in the hall. There is, then, a flicker of steel in her cloud-grey eyes, and a flash of sharpness in her own voice. "Nor have I forgotten that we are at war, nor that Théoden King still mourns his son, whom I too loved well. It grieves me if you are not pleased, my lord, but there are limits to what ceremony and feasting our lords will gladly stand; for fire and blood are more than words to them."
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Date: 2022-01-28 01:10 am (UTC)He scours her with a sideways glance, deciding if she is ignorant or arrogant, and coming to the judgment that she must be both. Too ignorant to appreciate the injustice yoked upon his claim, and too arrogant to perceive that she should, by all rights, be on her knees begging forgiveness for the affront of her home's miserly welcome. But she does not hold her tongue once she has named him, however inadequately; she dares blindly on. There is, he decides, chiding in her tone, as if he were simply being peevish, but it is when she anoints her uncle with the title of 'king' that his eyes turn the light in a way that is not merely a haughty flash, but a nick of violent danger.
His stride comes to an abrupt stop, and the fingers at the bend of her arm ensure that she turns to face him.
"I will not hear you name your uncle king, not ever again." Whatever courtesies it was her habit to keep, whatever fashions her people kept in the addressing of their betters - it ended here. They have only one king to bow before. "Fire and blood are more than words, and I will do them the kindness of assuming they've the wits to remember that, if nothing else. Do not tell me of the woes your people have suffered under the hand of an inept commander, my lady, for I have no wish to hear it. That you have lost men to war and toiled for causes long lost is no excuse for what was laid on your table tonight, nor for the way you look upon me now."
In her own tone was a surly shifting, as of a horse bracing against the bit, contemplating a sudden disobedience. As they do on the reins, his hands harden now.
"You do not speak to your king of limits. Fire and blood know none. Show me now to the chambers we will share, and pray that they please me more than your hall."
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Date: 2022-01-28 01:52 am (UTC)If he were not her husband, she would strike him. It comes to her in an instant. If she had not been fool enough to fall for pretty words and dreams; if she had seen him with clear eyes from the first; if she had not been stupid enough to marry him, then she would strike him down where he stands, and cast him from the halls of Edoras, and she would be justified. Not only for her uncle's sake, either: for the sake of Théodred, who was Marshal of the Westfold when he fell, and for Éomer, who commands a good portion of the kingdom's men, and for her own father, perished in this unending fight; for all the men of Rohan who have fought to protect their land and their people since before she or this exile-king were born. If he were not her husband, she would raise her hand and strike him down, and let him wonder at his limits from his backside.
He is her husband. She must remember it. She does not raise her hand to him; but she does draw herself taller still, and fixes him with a steady glare, unflinching. Her tone is sharp and taut, and there is in her breast a sudden tightening of fury, a too-familiar frustration at needing to settle with words what might so easily be settled at a warrior's hand.
"In the King's hall, my lord, will I name Théoden King; for king has he been these six-and-thirty years, and king he will remain long after the simbelmynë covers his tomb; and wedded or not, you are a guest beneath his roof. Perhaps had others spoken to you of limits first, you might not embarrass yourself and me this way."
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Date: 2022-01-28 04:57 am (UTC)Delectable is the justice in the strike, a flicker of retribution for all he has so far been made to suffer. There will be no further mockeries. She will know, before the night is through, who is her king. He steps forward, refusing to be cowed by her incisive gray eyes or her boorish nobility, and when he speaks again, his voice is lower, made smooth with the pleasure of having, he thinks, impressed upon her a valuable lesson.
"I will have no dying men touting themselves as heroes in my realm. They will be put out to die with the other corpses, and there they may hold court with the crows." That is the only place such feeble men belong. She will learn this, when she sits by his side; there will be no question of whose generosity grants the people their lives. There will be no crowding of simple heathens into homely halls, and there will be one king, and one king only. He is a guest in no man's crumbling keep; all doors will open for the privilege of his company. What dragon, having razed the sky, would ever tolerate the imposition of limits? There is no hall anywhere which is not already his. His reign will begin in King's Landing, perhaps, but its reach will not be halted. Rohan's own armies will see to to that.
"Do I shame you, wife? Better that you concern yourself with what shames me, for I could have done with it all. I am tempted to burn your straw hall, and to remove your doddering uncle from my sight for good. They displease me. I will be true to my word, and reduce this hovel to ashes so that something proud might rise where once it stood. Are you so anxious to see it done?"
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Date: 2022-01-29 01:52 am (UTC)Not since she was a little girl has a hand been raised against her in such a way: for who would dare strike the ward of the King? Not since Éomer grew old enough to find shame has anyone struck her in anger. Even Gríma, who at times has looked upon her as though he believes it might do her some good, has not raised a hand to her. She is a daughter of kings, a noblewoman whose blood is twice over that of Eorl's line; she is the Lady of Edoras, and she holds so iron a grip on her nobility that many here would quail before her anger.
He hit her. Slapped her, like a wayward child. Here, on her wedding night, beneath her own roof.
To her own surprise, when the shock begins to fade, what rushes in to fill the void is not hot, righteous fury, but a sudden and crushing grief. Grief for what she has allowed herself to do, in innocent self-delusion; grief for how that innocence itself, that last flicker of hope, is crushed before the understanding of her foolishness. Grief for her uncle, whose sickness and ailing mind are so clear that even a fool can see them; grief for her brother and her cousin, who should have been here to prevent this stupidity on her part; grief for the Mark, which she has condemned. Grief, most of all, for the dream lost; for the thunderous understanding that there is no waiting throne, no glory, no songs of her valour. If they sing of her, it will be of the fool who tied herself to a madman, who put aside reason and nobility for the sake of a children's story. She will not be Queen. She will not even be the White Lady. Only a broken, stupid child, who blinded herself to what she would not see.
She will not weep. The tears sting at her eyes, burn at the back of her throat. She will not weep. She defies it; swallows hard, draws armour around herself as she straightens, her hand coming up to her stinging cheek. He will not have her tears. He will not have her screaming fury. He will have nothing.
"You will not." Her traitorous voice trembles a little, tight with emotion; and now the fury comes, cold and bitter. "This hall has stood as long as your iron throne, my lord, and we are as proud a people as yours. It displeases you. Very well; have no more of it." She lets her hand fall from her face; grabs instead at his wrist, with the same gentleness he has shown her, to try and yank his hand from her arm. "Find yourself another queen; find a bride who will simper and cower and flatter your blind arrogance. Take back your magister's gifts and the letters you wrote, and begone back to Pentos, and do not touch me." Her voice has risen, despite herself, her face hard and her eyes glinting in the torchlight. "Go and sleep in the kennels, for all I care; it is a better place for you! But we will not be wedded this night or any other; no, not though I should die a maid. Do not touch me!"
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Date: 2022-01-29 05:48 pm (UTC)Too well-mannered is anyone in this hall, he has sneered to find, to parry a blow with a blow. He can sneer at it because there is no personal esteem in their reserve - it is not in deference of his name that they are so tolerant and yielding. It is because they are weak, because they are ignorant, because they are not conquerors. It is well that she does not fly at him, for then he must destroy her, and war in this place would be a distraction from the true war which awaits him. It would be a sorry waste of men who are better arranged fighting his enemies in King's Landing.
Would they come to her aid, if she called for them? Or would their temperate breeding keep them from turning against a guest beneath their roof? At this his baleful smile only narrows, sharpening, and when she meets his eyes again, they are clear of tears. She will not weep, then. Her honor, of course, would not allow it.
But there is a place where finally that honor frays, and her hand does enliven, though not in retaliation at his face. It grabs instead at his wrist, and in answer his fingers only tighten, reeling her in roughly against him. Her words proudly revoke all that was promised between them - gifts, letters, allegiances - as if he had thought for a single moment there was any worthy bargain ever struck. He will have nothing from her destitute table and partake in none of her peasant's frivolity and he will, should one exist, one day take a bride of true beauty. But he will not leave this hall empty-handed - he will not, in any case, be cast from it - and he will not have it be said that it was her own fervent wish that sundered this wedding.
"Your uncle must plead for death every night, knowing that if it does not come, he must wake to yet another morning poisoned by your voice. You have spoken too freely for far too long." She should have been reminded of her station long before now, by a father or an uncle or a brother or any passing lord not yet unmanned by so much nobility.
Now when he pushes forward, it is no longer with a precise destination in mind. There was to be little enough sanctity in the wedding bed before she'd revealed her insolent nature, and there need be none now. Now he is intent only on finding the nearest empty room, no matter how modest or inappropriate a chamber, and he means to drag her alongside with his hand as a biting shackle at her elbow. With his shoulder he shoves against the first door that gives, swinging her around before him.
The smirk has gone from his face, and there is now the curling sneer with which he had looked upon her hall, and her stables, and upon her. There is now, instead of wholly repulsed disdain, something else flickering at its edges - a determination not to be rid of what so insults him, but to reduce it by his own hand to ashes.
"You shall not die a maid, my lady, and you shall not die without giving to me the repentance I am owed. I wonder which you will plead against most ardently."
no subject
Date: 2022-01-29 06:53 pm (UTC)But she cannot find her voice now. She dares not speak; if she does, her voice will be shrill and unsteady with fury, and he will laugh at her womanish hysteria, and any who hear her will know that she has lost command of herself. She will not lose command of herself. He will not have that satisfaction so easily; he will not unman her with a slap and a sharp word. She bites down on the inside of her cheek until she tastes salt, and digs in her heels, and holds her head high.
There is a strength she had not wholly anticipated in his gaunt and bony frame. His grip is steel, and she cannot budge his hand from her arm, only succeeds in deepening the bruises that she is now sure will rise by morning. For all his braggart and immoderate talk, there is a fervent, crazed strength; and she finds herself dragged along with him, and all of a sudden it comes to her what should have come to her long before: he is mad. He is mad, and it is the madness of a beast driven to bay, and it has left him no man at all.
And then, amid the grief and the fury and the righteous scorn: fear.
She is not given to fear. Not of the immediate, not for herself. Her fears are slower-moving things: stagnation and darkness, and the slow eternity of the forgotten. She is a shieldmaiden of Rohan, and she fears neither pain nor death; she fears no battle; she fears no man.
He is no man. He is a rabid beast, he is something she does not understand, and he will give no regard to the ways of men, he knows no honour and no law and he respects no limits, and he hauls her bodily into the room where by day the women weave their cloth, and his sneer is an animal's snarl, and she is afraid. She can feel her pulse hammering against the thin skin of her throat, her breath catching in her chest. Give me armour! she pleads against a world that will give her nothing at all. Give me a sword, a shield, a spear! Give me battle, and let me stand my ground!
There is no armour here, and there are no weapons in the king's hall, and she is no warrior. Her gown tangles around her legs, makes her ungainly in her shock and her uncertainty, and she is a maid, and he will not offer her death. She understands that, with a sick horror. He will give her no such respect, offer her no such neatness in her end.
If she screams, they will come. She believes this, at least. If she screams for help, if she raises her voice to the men who love her, they will come; the guards of Edoras will drag him from her, and tear his hand from her arm, and cast him from the city. And they will look upon her ever after with pity, and half-shrouded scorn, for this is a beast she has invited into her own home, and a doom she has laid upon herself, and she has failed in her duty.
She does not scream. She looses her grip on his wrist, ceases trying to pull herself free from the snare; instead, with as much speed and strength as he brought to bear against her, she flashes out her arm to backhand him across the face.
"You will have all that you are owed, worm." Her voice shakes. It cannot be helped. "And if you do not take your hands off me, I will cut them off."
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Date: 2022-01-29 10:30 pm (UTC)If her cow's courage deserts her and she does call out, what will her men come to her defense armed with? Wooden spoons and splintered chairs? His is the only blade, so far as he could tell, which caught any lantern-light in this place. Courtesy kept the men of this country unarmed in their ailing king's hall. Would they rush to her aid with their bare hands? Would they raise booming voices to command him to stop, invoking whichever impotent gods they worshipped here? Or would they beseech him to do her no harm? This strikes him as their way. They would beg him to call off his violence against her, and to take instead their groveling remorse. What shape would those gifts take?
None could appeal to him more than what he already has in hand, however. She is built of crude muscle, as his appraising eye had deduced by the strength of her stride and her proud carriage, but she cannot refuse the weasel-quick fangs of his rage. Thin and light as his fingers might appear at a casual glance, they are commanded to a noose's work now, and he knows she will bruise. He was not built in Rhaegar's likeness - he does not command with the breadth of his chest and the wolfish vigor in the cut of his jaw and the flex of his calf. But leaner dogs often outlive the more robust. The madness of their hunger sees them fed where the more noble beasts balk. Men die when they balk.
He has her crowded into the dark, and he needs only a flat surface to lay her upon, something to bear the brunt of the force with which he means to chastise her. A table, a wall, though he abandons the notion of the latter when he thinks again of the inch or two she stands above him. She will look up at him; never the other way around. So it is toward the silent table that he begins to steer her, fingers pinching into the flesh beneath her gown, and before he understands what has happened, he is knocked back a step, in what feels to his disgust like retreat.
It is retreat, retreat from the force of a blow, and the bar of burning pain that yawns suddenly across his face tells all. With the backward force of arm and hand she has struck him, and it costs him a moment to focus his vision again, the riled sight of her resolving once more before him. The shock is momentary. With the manic energy of flames striving to build themselves high, he lunges forward, one hand seizing her by the hair, the other taking her by the throat. Quickly must she be trapped beneath him; his is the desperate fury of a man grabbing at sparks, insistent that none shall escape his grasp and catch elsewhere. It is at the table's edge that he would have her, bent first before him, as if she were the beast who belonged wailing in the kennels.
"I will leave both your hands at your table before we go, since they will never be put to better work. Your tongue will no doubt join them. Strike me again, you horse's whore, and see what pieces of you I do not leave scattered about this place."
no subject
Date: 2022-01-29 11:15 pm (UTC)She does not. She is too slow, in the breach; she is too off-balance already, and reeling too heavily from the shock of all that has crashed down around her in so short a time. He recovers before she does, and there is a sharp, yawing pain in her scalp as he grabs the golden fall of her hair, and his hand closes on her white throat, a clawing and choking grip. She staggers back a step, then two; the edge of the table bruises sharply against the backs of her thighs, and she cannot catch her balance, and there is nowhere to go. She claws at the hand that grips her throat, her nails raking against the steel-taut cables of his tendons, her teeth bared like a snarling wildcat as, for want of any better weapon, she kicks out hard at the inside of his kneecap.
"Do it!" It is hard to speak around the grip he has on her throat; her voice, for all its venom, is strangled and strained. "Craven! Do it! Tear me to shreds for all I care!" She kicks out again, blindly, cursing the soft cloth of the shoes she wears; wishing for riding boots whose heel might shatter bone. To her shame, panic has risen like a tide, and she barely thinks any more, only fights against his grip, writhing against the press of his body. "I am not afraid of you!"
It is a lie. It is a bitter, bitter lie.
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Date: 2022-01-31 06:42 am (UTC)"I am not going to kill you. That is how I know you are afraid." If he had not known it by the collapse of her pride into frantic, animal flailing, he would have known it in this: her people are cast too cleanly in iron to be afraid of death. Renowned warriors that they are, why should they ever cower before the threat of bodily pain? Death would come as an honor, or at least as a guest not turned away at the door. An agreed upon exchange for the gift of life. They did not fear its repayment. Iron does not fear the work it is made for.
But she was not made for this. He releases her throat, but only so that the hand knotted into her hair can wrest her over, presenting for his pleasure her back. Her gown shields her still, but it, like her virtue, will give easily enough. There is a wink of pain at his knee, he thinks, where her reckless foot has caught him, but he is so adamantly braced that the pain has nowhere to sink. He is lean, but every lean muscle strains forward now to hold her pinned. His nails bite into her scalp, holding her head to the table as if he were holding a detested head beneath a drowning tide. His free hand dives for her skirts, snatching a hurried handful so that he might bare her properly.
"Every mark you leave upon me will be counted, and that will be the number of days that we keep your brother alive once he is mine. When he, too, is realizing what it means to be afraid, wishing for death." Should she be too indignant to perform her own suffering, she might be provoked by vicious threats against those she holds dear. And she does, from what he'd been told and only half cared to hear, love her absent brother. Another man who will not be enlisted to come charging to her aid. His fingers close like rabid jaws around the meat of her thigh, wrenching one leg from the other as he shoves forward between them, eyes aglow like a pyromancer's accidental concoction.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-31 11:55 pm (UTC)The cool, polished wood of the tabletop is ground against her cheek, her head pinned down like that of a calf brought to slaughter, and the moment is lost. Perhaps there never was a moment; perhaps there was never a warrior in her to meet it. One arm is trapped under her, twisted at an awkward angle beneath the unwelcome weight of her own body. The other claws blindly, raking her nails at the hand in her hair - anything to make him let go, to free herself from this defeat he has too easily thrust on her. The air is cool on the bare skin of her thighs as he drags up the skirts of her queenly gown, and she is bare now below the waist; and even when she twists and bucks against his grip, still fiercely trying to break loose or at least disentangle her other arm from her bodice, the whorishness of her predicament makes even this feel cheap and false. Her face feels hot, most of all where his hand caught her; the tears still burn in the back of her throat, unshed.
"My brother would kill you where you stood," she snarls, her voice muffled against the wood; and it is only then that it strikes her that this is true, and that at all costs it must be avoided. There would be a weight to killing him now, when he has undeniably cast off all remnants of guest-right; but if he is successful, if she cannot sunder herself from him...
Éomer must never know. If someone must pay for her blind hope and her hasty mistakes, then it must be her and her alone. If it should come to it, there is a weight her brother must never carry, a knowledge her uncle should never bear. If he succeeds...
She cannot think on it. She cannot afford to. She can only focus on what little there is to be done, which is to wrestle with all her might to keep her legs closed, clenching well-honed muscle against the raking, bruising pressure of his grip. She can only remember that if he succeeds in this, then all is lost; then they are married against all better judgement, and against all challenge to that union. Her thighs are well-muscled and strong, and they strain for what feels like an eternity against his depredations; but she is poorly-placed, and she must choose between fighting him and catching her balance, such as it is, and his thin fingers dig into her inner thigh, scrape bloody rills against her scalp, and she cannot breathe; and she knows she has lost an instant before her hold gives way, and then it is all at once: her legs torn apart, sharply enough that something clicks in her hip, and her cunt bared and spread beneath the tangle of her wedding dress, and he forces himself against her, his lean weight crushing her hips painfully into the edge of the table, and a low cry escapes her, and she has lost. She has lost.
"I will kill you." It is choked, not shouted. There is a dull, hard hatred in her voice. It is all she has left, her voice, raw and throaty from his attack as it may be. Empty threat is all she has. "If you do this, I will kill you, though I be cursed. Let me go!"
no subject
Date: 2022-02-01 03:41 am (UTC)The beggar king, the cart king, the barefoot king; too many years of his life had been spent already scrounging through kennels, more cur than prince. Desperate for scraps, cowering in any shelter, no matter how destitute. Never again. From the mires of the Free Cities he had risen, winning the esteem and patronage of a powerful magister, only awaiting the moment to deliver proper justice to those who coveted his throne. He will not be reminded of the years which came before. Once the dragon's shadow falls, those caught within it do not wonder at how long it has taken him to grow.
She is wild as a trout caught in his hands, thrashing and aiming to slip from his grasp, but he makes his hand a fist in her hair, clubbing her head roughly to the table. And she is strong, just as he'd deduced from first looking upon her, displeased by so much contoured muscle and uncouth strength. It is unbecoming in a woman. It is also an annoyance now, as he pares her thighs, but for all of the vigor lent her by horror, he rides still the gathering wave of spite. A spite given full range of the dark, beholden to no man or law, and he knows too well the indignity of letting his possessions slip from his hands. His fingers have all but tapered into talons, dedicated only to losing her in pieces if he must lose her at all.
But he will not. They are alone here while the festivities unfurl still in her simple, merry hall. Her dress he shovels coarsely to her back, and there is nothing then left between him and her open legs. No gods-blessed humility, no pristine honor, no defiance to bare its teeth and chase him away. With one hand twisted in her hair, the other goes to unbuckling and unfastening at his hips. The black breeches are too fine to ever have been worn to so middling an affair, he thinks. His laughter is a thin whip on the back of her words, and he is breathless with the certainty of his victory. Anxious to see it done before it can be taken from him. Determined, at the same time, to savor what is the single delicacy which has been placed before him.
"You are my wife," he reminds her with relish, jerking his body forward to curve above her, to furrow the livid strain of his cock within her, bringing his mouth to her ear with a hot gust of breath. The words which follow catch on a beastly grunt, a shuddering pleasure to feel her body so tellingly tight around him. "And you will not kill me, for you could not live with yourself if you did."
His free hand coils at her hip, forcing that smooth arch of bone up off the table to meet him when next he rams forward against her. His voice curls with velvet-warm mockery, a refashioning of words meant to be spoken in a truer love. "As your avowed husband, I promise that I shall never let you go. Though I may take a dozen whores a day, it will be you I return to each and every night."
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Date: 2022-02-01 09:47 pm (UTC)But nothing she has imagined has been like this. She did not have it in her, even in her bleakest moments, to imagine this. Her head swims where he has slammed it against the table, but the pain cuts through as the hard spear of his cock impales her, rough and sudden and without preamble. It is a sharp pain, and deep; a stabbing, tearing feeling that seems to jolt all the way into her chest. Behind it is a duller ache, the bruising force of a blow. Bruises inside, to match the bruises without. Her breath catches in her sore, abused throat, only to escape at last in a low, coughing sob.
I will kill you. She could not say it again if she wanted to; she could not drag it out past the tears and bitter bile that block her throat, but she thinks it all the same, with desperate grief and furious despair. I do not care what happens to me after. I will kill you.
But it does not matter how defiantly she swears vengeance, to him or to herself. In this moment, there is no vengeance; and there is no end, either, as he ruts into her again, her dry entrance stretching around him until she feels as though he will tear her entirely in two. There is no nobility in this pain. There is only a terrible shame, that wraps its wings around her and shrouds her in the hot mockery of his breath against her ear, tears into her chest with each thrust that drives her down against the polished wood. There is blood on her thighs now, though it is not immediately clear whether it is entirely from the sundering of her maidenhead, or whether it is the raking of his nails against her skin that has drawn crimson onto the white. Sweat prickles under the dishevelled mess of her gown, cold even as the heat of him drives against her; and she closes her eyes tightly, as tightly as she can, and bites her tongue to keep from sobbing, to keep from screaming aloud.
It does not end, but it is over. She knows it, and so does he; for he reminds her of it with such glee, names her his wife with more enthusiasm than he did at the altar, and this vow of his, she believes. She believes, with a cold and horrible certainty, that he means it; that he will take his whores, yes, but that he will come back to her, too. Not because she is fair, which might at least be some cold comfort, not because she is his queen, but because to do so will hurt her, and he wants her to hurt.
Why do you hate me so? It comes to her mind unbidden, the wail of a petulant child who does not understand, and she loathes that piteousness, that weak and trailing heart that pinned all its dreams on a lie, that even now wishes on some level that he would relent and care for her. It does not matter why he hates her. It does not matter why any of this is happening. In this moment, it only matters that she does not scream, and she does not cry, and she does not let him see how easily she breaks.
And yet: why? He did not hate her in letters. He did not scorn her kin in letters. On parchment, he was noble, bold, a man worthy of great deeds. It might have been a tale for the poets. It might have ended in so many ways, but instead they are here, and she is bent over a table with skirts flung over bodice, and he has never loved her, and the pain is so intimate and so humiliating that she feels her eyes water despite all her efforts.
She does not try to escape him any more. Even panicked as she is, she has passed that point. There is nothing to escape to; there is no return from where he has brought her. But her body still fights him, without the conscious intervention of thought; her battered thighs flex and tense as though to push him out, and the instinctive squeeze of her cunt, trying to rid itself of this painful intrusion, is no doubt making matters worse rather than better. Her hand still gropes blindly at his arm, but more weakly, without such violent intent. The table strikes bluntly against her with each movement he makes, a silent accomplice to his brutal intent.
She has dreamed, from girlhood, of her wedding night. She had not thought it would hurt in any way she could not bear.
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Date: 2022-02-01 11:19 pm (UTC)Now, maybe, she will scream - now that their oaths to one another are made true, now that she has paid the irrevocable price with her body, now that she will never be as she was; but she does not. Neither does she wail, and neither does she plainly quiver with unspent tears, as was his sister's habit when darkness began to gather in earnest. He does not doubt that it hurts: he can feel her skin break beneath the aggression of his nails, and he can feel how her body balks at the demand thrust within it. Only briefly, and then that breaks too, and there is promptly the tacky smear of blood. She will never be as she was, and he grins as he hauls forward against her, making it true again and again. He wonders how gracefully she will wear her shame. In the sounds that are ripped from her, he suspects there may be the tears of defeat after all.
She does not declare again her vow against his life, does not maintain a proud and vain struggle against him. Her body repeats its same tried and failed refusals: her hand argues against his arm, and the muscles of her thighs glint like ready blades, but they only glint, and cannot be drawn against him. It feels, in fact, as if her cunt is not entirely opposed to the idea of urging him closer - it closes like a mouth around him, seizing the prying length of his cock like an eager tongue, and his laughter spills again, smooth and easy, as if the whole fact of her were little more than an idle amusement.
"How many noble knights made your cunt weep in your dreams before this day?" It is not weeping now, that is for certain - every stab into the dry give between her thighs makes evident how unwelcome he is, which only drives him to rougher excitement on the next plunge - but he wants to believe she has dreamt of being taken not so differently from this. That he is, without her consent, the answer to that desire, though she will never confess it.
And he is thinking too of how very much the opposite she is of any fantasy he has ever summoned before him, his fingers spanning in her hair to open his hand against her skull, gripping her there with a violent distaste. Golden is her hair, and not displeasing to the eye, but there is nothing to make palatable her cool courtesy. Regal had been her bearing, but in a way that must clothe only cobwebbed reserve, not a slinking seduction. And she spoke too boldly, thought far too highly of herself, and esteemed him not half as much as he was owed.
His voice grits between his teeth, his jaw tense with rough satisfaction or impatient hatred or both. She does have a fair face, it's true, though that need not be so when he has her held flat against the table, when all semblance of beauty can be stripped from her as easily as her maidenhead. She is, like this, only what he says she is.
"Gods, you are vile. I hope never to see you fully naked. You've probably only dreamt of being mounted by horses."
no subject
Date: 2022-02-02 12:02 am (UTC)She is the White Lady. She is a daughter of kings, high and valiant; she is beloved of her people, and there are a hundred men who would want her; songs are sung of her beauty, in tongues he will - she is now certain - never trouble himself to know. She is Éowyn, Éomund's daughter; and in her sorrow and her despair, in all her grief and uncertainty, she has always known herself. She has always known her worth.
In this moment, splayed out on a weaving table in the dark with a rutting animal panting against her ear, bleeding and bared as he claws the last of her honour still sticky from between her thighs, she knows nothing. She is nothing. She is nothing to him, and when she recoils from the prison of her own body, when she is faced with the knowledge of how she pants and sobs and how her body jolts like a sack of feed with each savage thrust... when she sees herself from outside, she is nothing to herself, either. This is not Éowyn. This is no shieldmaiden of the Riddermark; there are no dreams of martial glory here; there is no nobility and no composure. There is a choking, bloodied girl, strangled by her fear, red-faced and white-lipped; there is a parody of womanhood in spread legs and tangled skirts; there is victory, and it will never be hers. Nobody has ever written songs of this.
"Still..." Her voice is not her own, either. It is thick and muffled, and it shakes so much that she can hardly force out the words through a taut and aching jaw. She cannot draw breath enough to speak clearly; his weight above her crushes the air from her lungs, the force of his assault drives the breath from her body. "You still. Married me." A whooping, aching inhale; the scent of beeswax polish in her nostrils. Even this room, she cleaned for the wedding. In her joy, in her dreams of the future, she had wanted everything to be perfect. A traitorous tear squeezes out from her tight-shut eyelids, and bursts on the shining wood. "...Your mistake. You knew what you bought. Sott."
And if it is snarled at him (snarled through thick tears, snarled as a beast in a snare), then it is echoed so easily back at herself. You knew. In your heart, you knew it would be so. There is no place for joy in these halls, not any more.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-02 04:56 am (UTC)She had been nothing to him then, and she is nothing to him now. There had been, of course, the initial novelty - there had been the curious excitement of blazing a romance upon parchment. She existed then as a portrait commissioned by his imagination, painted to his pleasure. To speak of love when the work of love did not yet demand his hand; to revel in their imminent victories just as he reveled in her beauty, not yet blemished by the sight of real flesh; those had been sweet diversions. But now he has been made to see her, to behold her hall and her brutish people, to sit at her paltry table, and he will suffer no more slights.
Her voice wavers, made ugly with what can only be thickening tears, and he does not recognize the name she pins to him. He knows only that it is her insolence speaking still, and he answers with a heavy grunt. The raking of his cock within her deserts its task in an abrupt drag, enough so that he can lift his weight from her hips. His hand wrenches free from the gold of her hair, and he takes her by the arms to twist her onto her back. She will not have the cowardly honor of enduring this ceremony blind.
"I bought armies and allegiance. You factor into it a deal less than you think." She was the emblem of their union, perhaps, her breeding and titles meant to give this wedding more distinction than it could rightly claim. Hers was the body which would make of the agreement a blood oath.
His hands rip now at her bodice. While he is enraptured by no lover's desire to see her laid bare, he will leave no piece of her unaccosted by his incising eye. She will know how thoroughly her supposed beauty has failed to take root here. She will not forget that her glorious titles and prestigious heritage count for nothing in his shadow. His claws are cruel and nimble, shredding at her silks with a heedless, mindless fury. He will bare her breasts, and he will skewer her while she lies on her back, too, lunging forward once more between her legs to sheathe there his angry, undisciplined sword.
His teeth gleam in the sudden gaping of a smile, though in place of humor or mirth there is only a gluttonous scorn.
"You carried yourself so proudly in your dingy halls, my lady. Where is your pride now? Look at me. Your king commands it."
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Date: 2022-02-02 09:38 pm (UTC)Her gown is one of the finest she has ever worn, woven silk and golden thread, worked to fit her slender form perfectly, embroidered by patient hands that must have bled to work so finely. He offers, of course, no regard for any of that; he claws like a wild animal at the laces, and she hears the ripping of a seam, the tearing of the mist-light shift beneath, and she thinks distantly That might have paid for provisioning tenscore men, and then she almost laughs in her despair. It should have paid for that. The gown, the feast, the ring, the dowry; all that thought and all that wealth, gone to waste, and he would be gentler with a whore who cost him pennies.
But the gown is torn and pulled and dragged away, ripped from her; and it is strange to find that some part of her still feels the urge to shield herself with her hands, to hide the pert swell of her breasts from a man who has buried himself root-deep in her bloodied cunt. It is strange to find that he can drag more shame onto her, still.
She does not try to cover herself. Her hands have clenched into fists, short fingernails digging deep into the palms. Her face, beneath the tangled veil of hair, is a mask of fury and pain; livid bruises are already visible on her high cheekbone, where his hand struck her, and across her temple and her brow where her head was thrown against the tabletop. She cries out again as he ruts into a body that has just begun to believe his absence; the pain is searing and raw, and it seems to run all through her, digging sharp teeth into her.
But she will not be a coward. She will not have him call her a coward. She will not, even now, gladly give over her pride. There are tears on her cheeks and shining in her eyes - but not so many as there might be; she is not weeping openly, and although the eyes that meet his glisten, they burn, too, with a ferocity that has not yet given way. There is blood in the spittle that she aims at his face, spitting squarely for his eye. That, she supposes, answers the question of what salt she tasted.
"Þú nysse!" Her hands, she at last realises, are not now so thoroughly limited, and she cannot think beyond the moment, cannot think of the consequences beyond this room. She claws for his throat in turn, her teeth bared. "You are not my king."
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Date: 2022-02-02 10:11 pm (UTC)There is little pleasure to be had in this revealing; she is not the first woman he has seen undressed, and there is nothing remarkable about her. More satisfying than the naked swell of her breasts is the burgeoning bruise on her cheek, and on her brow, at her temple, all tales written of how she was thrown down from so lofty and unearned a height. What grace will she summon to explain away these blemishes? He does not have time to humor fantasies of the shame she will invite upon herself with the humble lies she must tell. He does not have time to gloat in wondering who might now hear the arch of her cry through these walls, in those moments when she cannot refuse her pain.
Her spit is a small, hot punch into his unsuspecting eye, and he grimaces at the melting sensation of it. Then he is enraged anew, a dog whose tail has just been swiped at, and her nails bite into his throat, her damned hands left unguarded in his haste to loom above her. Now he does, and he has bullied his way once more between her thighs, jerking in a frenzy which mounts nearly to a sort of hysteria at this hail of insults.
One hand dives across his face to rid himself of her wet blood, the other parries the hands at his throat, and he snarls his own black frustration. The greatest insult comes, once again, in the name she spits at him that he does not know, and then instead of combatting her hand for hand, he grabs at her breast, twisting the tender bud of her nipple when he finds it. The other grasping fingers go again for her own throat, while he strains to keep himself out of her reach, curling where he would shake the words from her if he could. His hips strive to deliver a punishment of their own, making each thrust a gutting blow, if she were a body to be killed.
"I am your king. I am your lord husband, and you love me, and you will say it."
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Date: 2022-02-02 10:39 pm (UTC)There is no question of replying, at least in words. But she shakes her head in stubborn negation, and she does not weep. There are tears flowing freely from her eyes now, and he will say that she wept, he will believe that she wept - but she does not weep. They are tears of pain and of breathless exertion, that is all. She does not weep, and she will not let herself grieve, and she will not give him anything so easily.
And yet: I dreamed it so. That he was King, that they were wed, that they loved one another. For weeks and months, she lived in a world where it could be so. She loved him, from afar; and she might have loved him still, if only he had kept back the truth of himself a while longer. If, perhaps, she had let him; if she had not angered him, if she had not been proud enough to strike him. If she had been more meek and less desperate. If, and if, and if.
Her breath comes in choked, soundless sobs and gasps, through bloodied, parted lips. Her hands still claw for his neck, his face, anything she can reach. Sweat and sex reek on the air. She cannot reply.
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Date: 2022-02-02 11:14 pm (UTC)She shakes her head, even in the narrow vice of his fingers, but she relinquishes, if nothing else, her tears. They make unsteady stars in her eyes, and they burn in what little light is frittered away in this room, and he knows already that she will deny these were ever tears. She will say her body had no choice but to bleed this way beneath his attack, as if she had not beckoned him forward to see it done. Hadn't she, with the back of her hand against his hard-edged cheek, and her ongoing insubordination? All she has received, she has asked for.
He mauls the fresh canvas of her breasts, twisting and pinching so that pleasure must pale before pain, should there be any wayward delights lingering beneath her skin. His hand slides up to fit beneath her jaw, to press against the give of virgin-soft skin, to confront slim bone, and the poison of his fury blazes instead into the poison of ridicule, of laughter. The greedy rutting of his cock has begun to reward him with a swelling anticipation, a hard fist of pleasure that grips tighter and tighter, and for a moment his eyes flutter against the extravagant promise of it. When her own nails do slash into his own skin, it is only spice in the wine, embers hissing.
"Honor me, wife. Tell me you love me, as you so fondly wrote. Say the words, if you are anything at all."
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Date: 2022-02-02 11:38 pm (UTC)"If..." His hand has moved enough to allow her a little breath, between the battering waves of blood-red pain and aching struggle. Her voice is rough and tense, muffled where his grip restrains her jaw. She does not know whether she should wish for this to be over, or hope that he never gets the satisfaction of finishing it. The thought of his seed inside her, mingling with the blood he has drawn, makes her stomach lurch and twist anew; the thought of the pleasure he draws from her pain is worse than the pain itself. It could all have been so different. Somehow. It could.
She tries and fails to swallow around his grip, to marshal her swimming thoughts against the tidal surge of each fresh pain. She tries to find some solid ground to stand on. She will not lie. She will not say she loves him now, though only this morning she did. She cannot shake, though, the knowledge of those letters, fondly written; she cannot un-know that it was by her word that he came here, with his jackal's smile and his dragon's hunger; she cannot pretend that he has not bested her. "If..." she croaks again, breathless, words made staccato by the force with which he drives into her, "...If I was anything, I would not honour a man who is less than nothing."
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Date: 2022-02-03 12:08 am (UTC)Her own life is not what she holds most dear, then. No, it will be the lives of those she serves, those to whom she is bound - it is for them that she has any notion of honor or nobility at all. For her uncle, or for the brother he has not yet met, or any of the dumb and solemn lords in her hall. It is for their sake that she might be reminded that submission is serviceable. Perhaps then she will bear the heavy cloak of honor, when it belongs to someone else. When it is not her own life she wields so recklessly, but any of those fools that her word and deed presumably protect.
She speaks only her callow ifs, and she hardly has breath enough for that. A luxuriating growl unknots in his chest, and he rips himself back out of her, springing forward so that when his seed spills in a hot, careless spurt, it brands her belly and breasts. This visceral excitement is punctuated with his own wad of spit aimed point-blank at her face, exhilarating and exulting. He does not yet uncinch his fingers from her throat, his hand a rough spasm where it holds her; pleasure is a knot that wrings crudely through him, leaving her amply marked. His words come through gritted teeth, humid, and rife with righteousness.
"Your mistakes this night will be repaid tenfold, my lady. Pride is a costly thing. Your kin will be paying your debts for generations to come."
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Date: 2022-02-03 12:54 am (UTC)She cannot laugh, either, in the face of his threat. She has no doubt at all that he means it; and it would frighten her - does frighten her - except that there are no generations to come. In this moment, in this black despair, that horror that has dogged her for years has become a comfort. There are no generations to come. There is no future to threaten. If there is one thing she clings to, in all of this bitter hurt, it is that he has been sold a poor parcel of goods, too; that when she thinks of the future, she sees only blackness and shadow and death, and the inevitability that for a time she held at bay is only hastened in this moment, in the choking grip of his hand and the bone-deep throbbing ache between her thighs. What generations to come?
But it is not a hollow threat, even so. The future is empty; the past is beyond saving; but the present is neither. She had thought it was. She thought she knew what despair was. She knows better now.
Do not let go, she wills him, even as her body, spurred by animal instinct, raises its hands to pull weakly at his wrist; even as her swollen, bloody lips open to gasp for air that will not come. Do not let go. Sooner let me die; and then I will not know what I have lost.
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Date: 2022-02-03 01:20 am (UTC)Glowing with the certainty of this nearby future in his head, he unlocks his fingers from beneath her jaw. To refuse her the grace of an untimely death, more than anything else. He studies her face, eyes flicking over the fine and regal make of jaw and nose and brow, admiring her much more earnestly than he had at their first meeting, or when she'd stood before him at the altar, sworn to be his. She is fairer, he thinks, for the glistening of his saliva on her cheek, more beautiful in her silence than she was in her railing heroics against him. The sea-strong sweep and ebb of pleasure writes a new smile across his face, one which is appreciative of the marvel before him, as if he is seeing her only for the first time, with every expectation met.
Because this is, now, how she should be: laid flat before him, wearing his spit and his seed and his blood, he's sure, where she'd raked him, and her own blood, where he'd rent her flesh with a devil's scrabbling claws. The plum bruises which will dapple her skin, the furious flush where blood has been driven delirious beneath the skin: this does make a pretty picture. He would be pleased to see her this way often.
Lifting himself from her, trusting entirely that she will lack the energy or the purpose to fling herself at him in any sort of troublesome way, he straightens the ceremonious blacks he wears, his eyes roving her body still, as if she were a mangled stag stumbled upon in the woods, grotesque and strangely thrilling.
"I owe you a compliment. It was not true earlier, but it is true now: you are quite ravishing. I do believe this is the life the gods made you for."
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Date: 2022-02-03 01:51 am (UTC)She sees, through the blurring of tears, the way he looks upon her; the way she had thought he would look on her so many times before now. She sees, with sick horror, that he is handsome when he smiles that way; that in this moment, he looks closer to the lordly warrior she had hoped for. He is sharper and stronger than she had given him credit for, and he is a king, and he smiles, and he praises her beauty; and is this not all what she asked for, in the darkness of her long nights? Is this not the measure of her hopes?
In the back of her throat, beneath the metallic tang, is a sharper bite of bile. Her stomach heaves vainly. She lets her aching head fall back against the tabletop, feeling from a distance how her scalp still stings where he has torn at her hair. The torn remains of her gown are hardly a cushion against the cold press of the wood. She can smell blood, and she wonders, when the sun rises on this familiar chamber, how much there will be to show for it. Will the ladies weaving wonder at the scratches on the wood, at new and unfamiliar stains? Will they know?
"And now?" It is all she can think to ask, and her voice is a rasping hiss, her throat too sore to force anything louder.
Now, she supposes, he must find the bed he did not have the patience to seek, for the night still passes, and the morning must come. And she must, at some point, return to this place to clean what he has done; to hide what he has made of her, and bury what he has slain. And now she must rise, and face towards the future that she has wrought for herself; and now she must wash the blood and sweat and sticky seed from her skin, and crawl into bed herself, and lie in those sleepless shadows between the hours wondering whether she can kill him as he sleeps. There is still work to do. There is always work to do.
She does not move, not even to close her legs. She cannot find it in herself. And now, now grinds onwards into another now, and the darkness deepens, and why should she move, when there is no escaping it?
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Date: 2022-02-03 03:50 am (UTC)"Now?" It is mused aloud, almost amiably, as if this were one of many quiet evenings shared, a routine of peace to be played out however they like. "Now I expect you will wash yourself, and I, having suffered a day of so few gifts and blessings, will take pleasure at least in a restful sleep, if I can find pleasure nowhere else." At this the appraisal he gives her takes on a flippant edge, discards her from ankle to throat as he takes in the sight of her spent body, and he lifts both hands to perfect the lay of the collar at his throat, as if he has taken from her no pleasure at all.
She does have much to scour from herself - blood, seed, tears, sweat. He would not tolerate lying beside her in this state, if she'd been of a bedraggled mind to stumble into bed beside him. His perusing gaze is honed into a blade once more as he tallies every blemish she has acquired since being introduced to the table.
There is an enveloping heaviness in the muscles of his arms, and in the stretch of his back; this is what it feels like, he decides with a twinge of pride, to have exerted oneself. Having ridden into no true battle as of yet, he cannot say what the burning and subsequent drunken relief of a rigorous victory feels like. But this has been a victory, and his body basks in its savoring, and once he has had his fill of surveying her ruin, he turns on his heel, striding for the door.
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Date: 2022-02-03 07:50 pm (UTC)Then it is that the tears come; then the dam breaks, and she weeps openly, her whole body wracked with the force of sobs, her hands pressing down over her mouth to muffle the howls that want to escape. At some point, she slides from the sullied surface of the weaving table, finds herself kneeling on the cold stone floor, curled in on herself and shaking from head to toe. There is blood on the flagstones. There is a sticky, clinging filth on her belly and breast. Pain claws like a starving beast inside her, scrabbles over her skin. In the feasting hall, muffled through wooden walls, people are laughing.
At some point, too, she stands. She is still weeping then, but it has ebbed a little, and although she still trembles, her legs will hold her. She stands, and with unsteady hands she pulls her ruined dress back around herself, wincing as it presses against welts and rising bruises; and she fastens it as best she can, and pushes her tangled and sweat-dark hair back from her face, and heaves a deep, shuddering breath.
And now?
She must ask it again, if not aloud. The world will not stop for her. It never has before, and it never will, no matter how she might dream of such power. There is blood on the flagstones, and sweat smeared on the waxed wood of the table, and her bruises ache, and the world still turns. And no matter what he may say or think, she is still the lady of this hall; she is still Théoden's sister-daughter, and the people of the Mark will look to her still when the sun rises on another day. Maiden or not, she is a shield still to her people; and it must be all the more so now, against an enemy she herself brought into the fold.
There is, as always, a tinderbox on the hearth of this room; there are lanterns for the women who weave into the night. She has never struggled so much to steady her hands, to spark a flame. The dress will serve for a cleaning rag, for all its finery; there is no saving it. She cannot go to the well for water, not when she will surely be seen; but in the shuttered window casement is a vase of wildflowers, set there to cheer the room: emptying the flowers into the hearth, she heaves another raw and shaking breath, pours out a little of the water onto the table, and sets about undoing what mess can still be undone.
The world will not stop for her. The sun, dim and dark as it is, will rise. The thought fills her with a cold and familiar horror, sharper now than it has ever been. She cleans mechanically, by candlelight. Blood drips thick and cloying down the inside of her bruised thigh. Her breath still rasps in her aching throat. It is hard to move, around that burning knot of pain. She moves anyway, because there is no choice.
There are, she reflects, some small blessings. That the floor is stone, and the blood on it is only a little. That she is alone. That, with the feasting in full swing, there are ways that she can go where she will not be seen.
The place that she goes, the high point on the eastern ramparts of the hill-fort, is one such way. She limps out into the courtyard: a white and ghostly figure in the growing darkness, moving awkwardly in her torn, dark-stained gown. Across by the stables, where the horses whicker and snort in their sleep. Up onto the walls, where she has so often come before. The mountains rise like jagged teeth on the horizon, and a cold wind catches her tangled hair, brushes against the aching skin of her face. She looks out to the east. Somewhere in that direction, she thinks with a pang of grief, her brother rides; he does not know what she has done. Behind her, the hall glows with torchlight; and therein is her uncle, and he does not yet know, either, that she has betrayed them all in her naiveté. And if they know? When they know?
She has stood here before, on the high rampart above the scree of steep hillside, and thought of how it would be to jump. She has wondered whether it might not be best to see an end to all her restless grief. This is the first time, in all these years, that she has climbed up onto the stones of the wall itself, where there is nothing between her and the void. It is a clumsy movement, with none of her usual grace. Her legs will not obey her; the pain squatting ugly between her hips claws afresh with every step and strain. She sways a little as she stands, and the wind chills the hot tears as they run down her face.
They will find her, she thinks, in the morning; and they will weep, and then they will wonder; they will see in her broken body the marks of hands at her throat and the torn state of her gown; and though Viserys cannot rightly be slain, still he may be cast out. If the king's nephew can be banished, then her widower can be likewise driven away in shame. And he will have no armies of Rohan, and he will take no throne, and in her absence, the whole dire mistake may be forgotten. They will sing no songs of her. Very well; they will sing no songs of him, either. There is only so long left, in any case, for songs that are not dirges; she looks to the East, and sees the teeth of Mordor's jaws, and it is not as though there is so very much to save.
They will find her in the morning, at the bottom of the hill, and the barrows of her forefathers will not hold her broken corpse; and Théoden will weep, who loves her as his daughter. Théoden, who ails still under her care; and whose son is so lately lost; and who without her will be alone and left to only the poisonous words of his advisor. Grief sits on him like a cloak, these days; and for a moment, as she swore herself away, she thought she saw him smile. Will he survive her death, she wonders, sick as he is? And if Éomer, hearing of it, rides back in a fury, will his banishment be broken, or will it doom him, too? In her absence, who will speak sense to the King's ear, so poisoned by Gríma? Will she leave Edoras to two serpents, to let them battle for the poison that will kill the Mark?
She does not know how long she has been standing here, on legs that shake, at the edge of a choice. The wind is cold. Her fingers, still marked with his blood beneath the nails, are numb. She did not think she would die this way.
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Date: 2022-02-03 08:58 pm (UTC)And they make, as do horses wherever she has happened to pass, for kind company. The men of this foreign hall have been gentle, she had been relieved to find: there seemed to be in them no undue bawdiness or carousing. They are a valiant people, so far as she can tell by a relatively slight introduction. That is her brother's preference, as she had known it would be: there is little practical place for her here, where it is his wedding that it is to be celebrated, and the calling to war, the rallying of his new armies, which will follow. Sometimes it is best to be sent from his side, for he can be difficult to read, a sea tossed by a dark storm: either he is rankled by how she lingers, or he is affronted by how she does not often enough praise him, or he sneers at how decidedly unsuited she is to their family name.
His general disappoint in her is ever preferable to his furious efforts to correct her, however, and so she is not terribly subdued by shame when they come. He is occupied by his blustering appraisal of his new allies, of course, and so she has enjoyed a relative freedom in partaking of this storybook kingdom. It is beautiful, though her brother seems to have missed it: its rolling plains, and its strange golden hall which feasts upon the light, and its gentle and open-handed people. Their fare is unlike what she is accustomed to, although in the years spent fleeing one city for the next, before the magister's generous endorsement of her brother, there were a number of dinners made of queer foods. This table, however, was clearly arranged with careful intent, and by a talented hand. The banners flown, the tapestries displayed, the well-kept rooms they borrow; all has been tended, she thinks, with a certain joy.
A wedding ought to be heralded with the people's joy, and indeed the lady her brother weds is one of high breeding, a treasure of this place. It is warming to see, how her people look upon her: with pride and with certainty, the trust of a people for their queen. It crosses her mind, though she would never dream of saying so aloud, that this woman does not need her brother to call herself a queen. She is already queen of this hall; one needs only glance at the faces of the men within it to know that is true. Even the ailing king, for whom she feels a particular sorrow, for it is clear to her too how the White Lady loves her uncle. Surely Viserys can appreciate the lasting loyalty of his new wife's kin, but as she stands in witness at the ceremony, she knows better. There is a humiliated heat atop her own cheeks to know how he looks upon that proud king and sees only a man dying, to know that he looks upon the bounty at the board and sees a peasant's feast, and to know that he looks upon his wife as a woman underserving of his esteem.
She had not, then, despite her habit of lingering quietly, kept herself long at the edges of the feast. The merriment is a sort of salve for these people, she thinks, when they have been long at war, with eyes aching for the beauty of a wedding and throats empty of laughter. Now they shall have at least one night of it, to celebrate their lady's ascension to the dragon's side. Maybe they will, for one night, drink and indulge their cheer and forget that this, too, is only a bridge to the next war.
The true reason she cannot bear to partake any longer is because she sees how unkindly her brother takes his new bride by the elbow when they go, and she knows, with bruises long faded on her own arms, what that unkindness means. He is no master of his temper, and he will not bow to what he perceives as a great indignity. But whereas he would not squander his sister's virtue in his madness, there is no such shield for his bride to flinch behind. She takes no comfort in the certainty that that woman would not flinch, either. This dread only hastens her from the hall all the faster.
To keep with the horses for a while, to steady herself with their warm, whuffling company, and to remind herself that it is no concern of hers. She need not think of it, because there is never anything she can say of it. That this proud lady will be her sister, and her blooming delight at that prospect - it does not matter. Éowyn will always be a wife first. If there is any respite to be found in that, she does not find it. But she is broken from the pang of wondering when a glimpse of motion beyond the stables catches her eye.
A figure walking, though absent the grace and purpose which seems to mark most bodies here. A figure strangely garbed, too, in what looks like ribboning rags more than a proper dress. The golden hair is already familiar to her, and she follows in as careful a silence as she can manage. Up onto the walls they go, and the figure - this figure who is, she is stung to see, the White Lady - looks one direction and then the other, searching. For what? But she cannot pretend not to know this, either. This is the way a person looks upon the horizon when they have begun to accept that no one is going to come riding across it. It is the look of someone who has turned their gaze down and understood that the rocks below are a more faithful answer.
"My lady?" It is tentative, lilting with uncertainty at its end, though there is no mistaking now the stranger before her. There is no mistaking, either, how she came to be this way.
The height of the wall is not so alarming - she has climbed upon high stone walls before, rather thrilled by the fantasy of soaring, however briefly - and it seems a grave injustice that her own gown, hushed blues and whites, is finer now than the bride's own. The wind has teeth here in a way that it does not in the Free Cities, and it chases a chill up her spine when it lifts her hair off her shoulders, cutting where the breezes off the sea only kissed.
"You're hurt. This is no place for you."
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Date: 2022-02-03 10:05 pm (UTC)If anyone is to see her this way, she supposes, this may be the best she could have hoped for. Daenerys, at least, is still a stranger here; is not a subject of the Mark, does not need so sorely to see the house of Eorl stand strong. She is also, so Éowyn hopes, unlikely to gossip, having nobody of the city to gossip to. If anyone is to see how the Lady of Edoras has fallen into shame, then at least it is not one of her people.
Still, the shame is sharper than the pain, a twisting, writhing thing that coils around her heart and crushes her lungs. She is all too aware of how pathetic she must seem. Her cheeks are tearstained, her eyes swollen with crying; her knees shake beneath her weight, under the stained skirt, and her hair was a bird's-nest even before the wind dragged at it. Does she smell? She supposes that she must: that the dried seed on her skin must leave its musky proof, that the sweat and the blood must hang on the wind. Never, in all her life, has she looked so little like a lady. Never has she looked - or felt - so weak.
"What other place is there?" Her voice does not sound like her own. It is hoarse and strained, both from crying and from the ache in her throat, and her tongue catches against a split and swollen lip. But for all her bleak question implies, she cannot believe it; and that is no comfort. There is no other place, no bed to crawl into where she can weep unseen, no infirmary where she will not have to face the pity and the grief of her people, nowhere that is better; but Daenerys is right, too. This is no place for her. Duty, that heavy chain, will not allow it.
Slowly, painfully, she turns; looks at her sister-in-law for the first time since this new life began; steps back, just a half-pace, from the edge. What other place is there? It does not matter; it is not this one.
"He will never be king. You must know that." She does not know what she will say until she has said it; but it is true, and it is said with truth behind it, for all its hoarseness. And she should guard her words more closely, here with the woman most likely to share them with her enemy, but she cannot guard herself. Not now. "Not if his blood were ten times more noble; not if he were a greater warrior than Beren or Fram. He will never have what he desires. And he knows it."
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Date: 2022-02-05 10:04 pm (UTC)And is it so different now? As she steps forward, a hand extended to offset the balance her unannounced arrival might have cost, she looks over her brother's newest work. He would claim that this is the nature of dragons: to leave nothing standing in his wake. The bride's silks are razed, moonlight catches on fair skin and the dark blossoms of bruises, and golden hair has been torn to glimmering rags. She should have written.
But what words would she have found? What would not read as cowardice and dishonor? And had she not hoped, in the cellar of her heart, that she would arrive at this place in her brother's shadow and see his eyes brighten with a new light? Hadn't she hoped against hope that he would behold this hall and these people and his resplendent bride and think, this is nobility? Wouldn't he feel in his own heart a warmth to devour the cold rot? Wouldn't he be, as heroes always were in the songs, overtaken by such love that not even madness could prevail?
Tears gather in her eyes now to witness what such whimsy has cost her, and she comes another step forward, reaching to brush a steadying hand at Éowyn's elbow, trying not to see all the ways she has been so crudely spurned.
For a moment she can only shake her head; there is nowhere to go, and her brother will never be king. He will be killed or he will be consumed by the same madness which laid siege to their father. But her father had once been a good and just king, hadn't he? A man of ambition and laughter? The soil of his mind had been rich and fruitful, generous and beautiful, before the worms had come. Yet it is not the same; her brother has never been anything but worms.
She knows this, and so does he. His blood was never once noble, and he is less a warrior than any stableboy provoked to defend himself with a rusty blade. He will never sit a throne or wear a crown or command an army or be worthy of this woman on the wall. Contrition comes suddenly and too late, her heart a bird with an arrow buried in its breast.
"I am so sorry, my lady. I had prayed that he would see you and forget all the rest. I should have - I should have written, I should have prayed for the gods to stop his heart instead of save it."
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Date: 2022-02-06 03:33 am (UTC)"He is your brother still." She moves another step, to safer ground. Red pain aches in the pit of her belly, clawing at her thighs. She wonders what she would do, if she thought Éomer capable of such brutality: if his fury on the battlefield were turned against those in the corridors of peace, what would she do, and would he not be her brother still? Would she turn against him, if he turned against honour? She wants to believe that she would, that the needs of her people would outweigh those of her heart; but does she not still keep her loyalty to Théoden, even as his honour falters? Would she not always remember her mother's tears, her father's blood and split-wide skull, the pain that binds them as sister and brother? Would she have written?
"He is your brother," she says again, and her hand comes up to touch the other woman's, and her smile is pained, her eyes tearing up afresh; and she makes of the thought something else, which is less sharp against the bone; "and so you are my sister, and I am not your lady. Please. I am so tired of the White Lady, and all her ways; I am so tired of a lady's duty. If there is one kindness you would do for me, then let me be Éowyn, and nothing more."
She will bear herself as the White Lady, she thinks with bitter understanding, against all the travails this wedding has doomed her to. She must. She will be noble and forbearing, and she will hide her pain and stifle her pride where she must, and she will keep her people always in mind, and she will be in all things a lady. It is what her blood demands; it is what her people need. She must, then, step down from the parapet this night and every night thereafter. She must hide the bruises, and wash away the blood and stains, and swallow the pain of memory; she must be his wife, as long as it is demanded, and where she can, as she has done with Gríma all this time, she must move in small and womanly ways to counter the harm he will do. The White Lady will be married to the beggar king, and she will be stone in the face of his fury, and she will do what a lady must.
But not here, and not now. She does not have the strength. She cannot find the courage. Slowly, painfully, wincing at each movement, she sinks down to sit uncomfortably at the edge of the stone, her head in her hands.
"It was not your duty to warn me," she says, after a moment longer. Her voice has thickened again, tears building in her throat. "It was not your duty to kill hope. It was my duty that I failed, to need no such warning; to temper my own hope with sense. I built my own road here."