The Wind Would Whisper

“Mother!”


Dead she was, although Éowyn still whispered her name from
her shallow, restless sleep. Shadow comes without light, like a night, but an
utter night when there is not the slightest ray of moon or star. And in her deathlike
sleep she saw her mother, weak and fragile although once she was strong, cloaked
in ailment she was, her beautiful face growing pallid, her very nose and mouth
growing red and swollen, her hair an ashy, lusterless thing, her eyes steep
with a lifeless shade of white. And between the shadows she saw no hope, because
her mother’s ailing face was thick with death, muffled was her voice by a demon
in her throat, clouded were her eyes—her eyes—


Then she knew not, save that someone had come, and saved
her.


~

There was an grandeur about the White City that not even the
gilt hall of Edoras could match, Éowyn thought as she paced in its gardens, a
great and gracious thing that came only with a layer of age; elegant, in a way.
But alongside that grandeur, a forsaken air filled the city, this tower of
guard, fortress of the sun. Perhaps it was the marble smooth statues in tall,
empty halls where the spirits dwelt—the spirits of the Númenórian kings of old that
still lingered here, watching on from their bright thrones, the affairs of the
living—or perhaps it was the echoing rooms with floors of stone, barren and
forlornly prideful.


She yearned for the fields whose vast expanse would be
strewn with red and yellow, all those days she spent in the House, and on whose
stormy land would run selfwilled horses, their nigh neighs echoing rough in the
wind, wild and lively and tempestuous; and then as if some wild dreaming she
would flutter away from her bonds like a winged bird to forsaken the
lonesomeness. They’re but dreams, the wind had said; yet she was sure that the
wind would save her feverous dreams and whisper it back to her years later,
when she had yet to forget the memory of greatness, when she would be worn and
weary and no longer young.

She was in the hands of strange people, noble though they
were, she knew them little. And it discomforted her to think that, for it made
her feel unsafe somehow, standing in an unfamiliar place that she did not grow
up with, whose gardens are beautiful but eerie, whose sun shone bright but ghostlike;
whose soldiers wore helms adorned with wings of birds she’d never seen. Yet all
were the handworks of Men, Men who loved different things, and so it came to
be, that they loved the sea more than land.


The sheer thought of the sea filled her with dread, for it
was much too unfamiliar to understand. The elves sang of a Sea Lord, the old
men of Rohan would say when she was little, whose beard was the lace of the
waves and whose eyes were the very vortexes of the waters and whose words were
embedded between the drone of the ocean. And at night, when all was quiet she
would think that the terrible Sea Lord had come to take her away into his
kingdom beneath the water.


So in her most secret thoughts, the sea was a name for
death—a fate that her mother suffered right before her eyes—a fate of all of
the races of Men. So her brave heart had betrayed her into grief and had grown
hard, and she was afraid of the water, of a silent and unnoticed death. Death
she sought for, death she feared.

~

“Have you even seen the sea?”


“Yes, but only once.”

“Tell me of it, for high mountains lie between Rohan and the
Bay and I have heard of it only in tales.”

“The sea is a great and terrible thing, if angered; yet when
it is calm, when gulls cry lovingly over the waves, it is a sight to most
magnificent to behold.”

And yet she now desired to see it and hear the gulls’ songs,
ever since Faramir told her of the Númenor that now lie deep in the ocean,
beneath the crests and currents, a great and glorious city that once were.
They’re but dreams, the wind had said.

And in her dreams she still dreamt of her mother. Still the
coldness of her body, still the death.

Two years had passed since the Shadow, two splendid years. Among
green fields of Ithilien she now dwelt, and time in prosperity passed all but
too quickly. She remembered days when one hour passed like an entire year, when
she was caged in the wooden confines of her room in Edoras, mountless and wingless,
always looking outwards toward the open fields, whence she was forbidden. And shadows
in those lonely days were murkier and darker than any to her eyes save for the Great
Shadow alone, for her and she was overtaken by frustration. She dreamt then of
greatness and glory and that she might, likes the heroes in tales of old, pass
into legends yet to come and live for
ever.

She did not dream of love then—for what was love, but
another episode in a great man’s life, another traffic in a fleeting heart; yet
for a woman, for a maiden, love was all that the world expected of her—but she
dreamt of sweet lips on her own, though she knew not to whom they belonged to.

Then she saw Aragorn, whose valor and greatness had
surpassed anything she’d known, whose blood was nobler than her own and whose heart
was that of a king; and she imagined that it was his lips on her own—but it was
Faramir, not Aragorn, who had looked at her with soft and gentle eyes that she
could not read into, and told her that she was beautiful. And when he kissed
her, it was sweeter than anything she’d tasted.

Indeed it was of Faramir that she learned of rest.

~

Summer brought froth Ithilien from its springtime dreams.

Still she could not forget it, not the cold of her mother’s
hands or the way her lips moved as she mumbled deliriously or the sweat that
trickled down her delicate neckline; but what had ever haunted the darkest of
her dreams was the death that washed over in her mother’s eyes, like an
inexorable shadow swiftly sweeping all life away until there was no more save
an empty shell of what it had been. But when she woke in the cold of the night
she would remember that her mother had gone back to the earth whence she came,
in a grasséd field between high, snow peaked mountains, along the good earth;
in a stony mound amid the swaying grass and the clasping roots of Simbelmynë,
in a green meadow that the horses of later days would tread on.

Éowyn, Lady of Ithilien, no more a shieldmaiden, no longer
afraid of death, smiled and knew what peace was. It was the Emyn Arnen when it
was summer already, when the sun would be bright and air warm and the fields a
shade of green almost golden and grasses rolling to and fro in idle wind; it
was seeing the King of the West and his Queen Evenstar and feeling not envy,
but love for them both; it was the sound of the laughter of Faramir teaching
their children to read, and the familiar fields of Rohan, of the sight of
Edoras perched majestically between the golden plains.

And would come a day when Edoras itself will fall, and
nothing will be there but the passing wind blowing on the grasses and
whispering of the horselords who had once roamed the lands. And the wind would
not forget, the dreams and tales of a girl who was their princess.