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When the Lord of Imladris first entered the royal stables at dawn, Éowyn of Rohan neither expected him nor particularly relished his uninvited presence.
It was the day of Aragorn and Arwen's wedding ceremony-and-reception, held incongruously in Edoras because Éomer had very little stomach for funerals and wished to throw a party as a palate cleanser, demanding that it was his newfound diplomatic duty to felicitate the royal couple. The sky had just given up its fitful, convulsive spasm of repeated showers when Éowyn crept into the stables, determined to acquaint herself with the war-horse belonging to that elven lord, Glorfindel, who had looked too irritating for her to want to ask him for permission to do such a thing. It was a delightful creature, which had only just begun to acquaint itself with her when Elrond appeared in the doorway with a lantern of his own and an expression so miserable she had to resist mimicking it back to him.
Éowyn had never spoken to him, and had only even seen the lord once: three days ago as he and the Imladris party had been welcomed into Rohan, and she had not been even slightly impressed, as her betrothed recounted to her brother later.
“Is that the famed Lord of Imladris, then?” she'd elbowed Faramir subtly as the train of horses approached, speaking through the corner of her mouth. “Strange, I thought he would look more noble than he truly does.”
“Does he… not?” Faramir winced as he raised his injured arm to scratch his head.
"Hmm. No. Not in the slightest."
He looked over at her because the sun had been setting as the company rode in and Faramir had developed a habit of looking over at her every time something beautiful happened, and the sunset counted. Leaves and dusks and fireflies, the sight of most resplendent things would call some aspect of Éowyn to his mind, so he would look at her, just to check his answers. That did not mean he agreed with her most fervently held opinions.
“Éowyn, you do not get many Edain who, speaking quite literally, glow in the dark," he hissed back at her. "And he has to part from his daughter this week. It is understandable that he looks, well…"
“Like a wet hen? Certain species of cave-dwelling insects also glow in the dark, as do several strains of plankton and fungi. That alone does not make them divine. Being fair of face and glowing in the dark are the Eldar equivalent to having ten toes and two nostrils,” Éowyn shrugged, sighing, giving the passing lord a rather despairing glance. “It’s a shame, I had thought he would look a little like the Valar in my old book of children’s stories. You know, with the shining faces and all."
“And… I am certain I will regret asking you this, beloved, but… what does he look like now?”
“It isn’t that the lord isn’t fair and noble, far from it. It is more that he has the kind of bearing which makes one think of immortality as an incurable illness. He looks a little like an animal that has lived off a diet of its own organs for a very long time. Does that explain it?”
When Faramir said nothing, she continued glumly, paying no heed to his confusion: “I used to draw little pictures of him, you know, when I was eight or nine, gave him an outright halo. Stuck little pins in his elbows and knees so he could move about like a puppet. Took me hours, just ask Éomer. Elrond was my favourite of all my paper doll elves. That little girl is very unhappy today.”
Faramir had chosen to ignore the fact that he was currently betrothed to someone who was once a child strange enough to make paper dolls of Lord Elrond. He had also attempted to ignore how she now seemed to be a woman strange enough to muse aloud as to whether it was possible to “take back a halo” from a grieving lord who Faramir was certain had very little reason to know that Éowyn even existed, because he apparently did not look enough like the aforementioned paper dolls in the face of an unimaginable bereavement.
Éowyn, however, was not the sort of person who ignored things.
"Did you come in here to make sure we have not eaten your horses, my lord?" she asked him cheerily, waving him into the stables, despite her minor irritation at being disturbed. "Come, lay your mind at rest, they are all very alive. We don't cook them until after the reception. We'll save you a leg."
"I did wish to check on the horses, yes," Elrond nodded, choosing to ignore the commentary on the horse-eating in the way the Eldar tended to do with things that might cause cultural offence. Éowyn realised at that moment that the lord was now newly uncertain as to whether or not the people of Rohan ate horses, and in turn chose to not relieve him of said suspicion. Not out of spite, but in the hopes he might make a reference to such practices in a public situation and embarass himself in a mildly amusing manner.
"I am glad to see they are under your care, Lady Éowyn," the lord continued awkwardly, waving at the brush she was running through Asfaloth's mane. "I will take your leave now, then."
"Oh, you can stay, and mind you, I'm not in the habit of looking after Elven steeds," she corrected him, brandishing the tack brush at him and waving him closer. She bit back a grin at his slow approach, like a man who has just discovered a hitherto-uncontacted hill tribe and is unsure whether they were shooting poisoned arrows or regular arrows. "I just liked this horse, the stablemasters can see to the other ones. Oh yes, we have stablemasters here, in case you were wondering. And it's not good to lie."
"Pardon me?" Elrond bristled. "Lie?"
"Oh, as if you were coming in here to check on the horses," she rubbed Asfaloth's nose, as though the horse were in agreement with her. "You, with your train of serving boys and stablehands. You came here only to weep in secret before the ceremony. Don't deny it, my lord, there is no shame in it. These reeking floors have been wept upon by men and women both greater and lesser than yourself for causes greater than and lesser than yours.”
Elrond looked caught, blinking like a deer gazing at an arrow-tip, unsure as to whether to chastise her for her unnerving overfamiliarity or commend her for her bravery. And then even the confusion drained from his body, replacing itself with a general air of defeat that he seemed to be strangely familiar with, one which left him shrugging tiredly. "Yes, you're right. That was indeed my intention. It seemed as good a place as any."
“And not for joy, I assume?”
“No, not quite.”
Éowyn sighed, feeling her most irritating personality trait rise up within her: the swell of tenderness and compassion for the disconsolate, and a sense of righteous anger against the unfairness of things. The compassion came and went but the anger was unwavering, even when it came to things which were nominally irrelevant to her own life, such as the Lord of Imladris.
“Well, you can’t,” she told him, matter-of-fact. “I don’t know you well enough. It would be the most awkward moment of both our lives, and would almost certainly colour my relationship with your children. Though I do feel for you, my lord. Perhaps brushing the horse down might help. His tail needs doing, and it's the end I favour least."
"You wish for me to… spend the morning of my daughter's wedding brushing Glorfindel's horse?"
"A horse's bottom a day keeps catastrophic grief away," she made up on the spot, hoping he would believe it to be an old adage. "Have you not heard of the saying?"
“Normally, grief sits deep down and it keeps its head down,” he sat heavily upon a haybale, avoiding any mention of or inclination to complete the task she set him to, in a way reminiscent of her own brother. “Old stone, cobwebbed. Perhaps thumb-sized or thereabouts. I don’t normally feel this sorry for myself, I will have you know."
Éowyn looked across at him, chin in a hand propped on his knee and the Éomer resemblance grew so much as to be almost eerie, for all they looked so different. Éomer was a brash adult, a fierce rider, but when they were younger he had been more of a small robin redbreast than a vast, noble eagle. Little things would send him into spirals of melancholy, and any time he lost a button or a wooden horse leg from his box of wooden horses he would sit out in the garden looking devastated, contemplative. As if it were his own leg that was missing. He felt things too deeply, built very large graves for very small things: ants, sparrows, caterpillars. Memorably, a mausoleum for a mouse. When he once accidentally nudged Éowyn and caused her to fall down the stairs, he cried himself to sleep. The day after his uncle's funeral, he decided to throw a wedding party.
Perhaps all brothers are the same, she thought, looking at Elrond. I suppose I’ve always known he had a twin, but only just now did I realise it. Not because he looks like a brother, but because he looks like mine. Like someone who builds mausoleums for mice.
Perhaps that was what small, pointless memories, like the image of little Éomer and his three-legged wooden horses, did: twitch every now and then, to remind one of lost lives and connect them to each other. She would never have thought of the Lord Elrond and her brother Éomer in the same breath, had the lord not been sitting just so, his weary chin in a nail-bitten hand.
“Do you believe them already lost to you?” she asked him, her fingers working at a small snarl in the horse’s mane. “Aragorn and Arwen, I mean. Are they gone?”
Elrond shrugged, a strangely down-to-earth gesture for an elf and one that reminded her he was not all-elven. “They might as well be. Though I fear that is partly of my own doing. When they pledged their troth, I began thinking of Arwen as one destined to be lost. Though she was not lost, of course, not for these three decades. She lived in Imladris, we ate together almost every day, and yet belief is a powerful thing. It makes things happen. I thought my daughter was lost to me, even as I still had her. And so she spent thirty years by my side, irrefutably my living daughter, and I spent those thirty years losing her. So I am not blameless.”
“You are not the only person in that equation, Lord Elrond,” Éowyn pointed out, looking over at him. “And in that fact lies the silver lining, does it not?”
“Does it?”
“It does. Those thirty years you spent losing her, she has spent loving you. Even as you built that mausoleum in your head, she stayed and watched you do such a thing. You have to love someone tremendously to be able to watch them mourn you in your presence. Is that not a thing that comforts you?” she declared, wondering momentarily where she found the audacity to say such things without the slightest clue as to their veracity. She had only spoken to Arwen a grand total of thrice, after all.
“It is,” Elrond nodded slightly, before looking upwards at her, a curious expression on his face. “That is oddly wise.”
“Odd? Do I look feeble minded to you?” she raised her eyebrows at him. “Your own sons having a combined vocabulary of eight words, three of them various terms for orcs, and fourteen grunts, does not mean that all the world’s offspring must follow suit.”
Elrond actually chuckled this time, his face momentarily almost as dazzling as her doll’s: “I beg your pardon, my lady. I mean no offence. I only meant that you were very young. And yet you put things into perspective in a way I hadn’t thought to do.”
“Yes, well, that is more of an issue with you using yourself as a benchmark for intellect,” she quipped, before sighing and sinking down next to him on the haybale. The sun was beginning to rise, and a breeze straight from the slim red line it left in the sky blew into the stable, stirring their hair. Some sort of boundary between them slunk out of the room and dissolved in the dusk, and strangely, Éowyn and Elrond felt suddenly grateful for the presence of the other.
“And perspective isn’t something one gains voluntarily,” Éowyn continued, quieter now. “It is either forged in fire or scraped out of ash.”
“What was it for you?” asked Elrond. “Fire or ash?”
She wondered whether to be true with him. She was right, earlier, she did not know him well enough to watch his sorrow, let alone share her own. Still, Elrond looked somewhat more cheery than he had when he first dragged his way into the stable, and Éowyn was not necessarily an advocate for fixing men without receiving something in turn. Selflessness without reciprocation was a caging convention, and the expectation of being such a person was closer to a binding rope than a virtue. And to speak freely without restraint was the greatest emancipation of them all.
“Both, I think,” she told him. “Out of despair at first, then out of defiance. Or perhaps the combination of the two — desperation. Perspective is difficult to achieve in a land as flat as Edoras. I am no hunter, I only found it because there was nothing else. Men eat rats when there is no grain, and it was similar for me. I found a way to look at this world, and it was all I had for a very long time, so I decided it would do.”
Elrond only stared at her, and in the staring he felt a small nip he reluctantly named envy. Immortality was incurable indeed and all he had done was accept the terminality of the diagnosis he chose at sixty-odd. Lived for an optimist’s ideal of the world without truly believing in it, wrapping himself each night with the vast shadows of his losses, the fabric lengthening and widening but never enough to consume him because he was inconsumable. Perspective was something he had never sought, having assumed he would receive it as a reward for the length of his years. And yet, this child.
Asfaloth snorted as if to complain about not being attended to every moment he spent in their presence, and Elrond held out an apple to the creature.
“My wife used to call it hunting the invisible,” he said, gingerly watching the horse take delicate bites out of the fruit, too-used as it was to being hand fed by Glorfindel. “It is a very, well, Eldar way of putting things, but Celebrían was always immovably elven in certain ways. She used to say the most important things were quiet, invisible, hidden amongst the many irrelevant and over-tangible obstructions brought about by life. She had meant love, hope, that sort of thing. And perspective too, perhaps, belongs on that list.”
Éowyn had heard of Elrond’s wife — of what had happened to her. And what happened to Elrond’s wife was the reason most women in Rohan carried a small capsule of nightshade on their necklaces. These days, it was all anyone knew of the Lady of Imladris — what happened to her, instead of what she had made happen. So to hear this little snippet of what she must have been like moved her in a way she did not expect to be moved, not by a cautionary tale who had left these shores close to five hundred years before her own birth.
Éowyn was a woman of Rohan and so she knew intimately the air of inadequacy that songs and stories draped across women of the past. As if they should have done more if they wished to be remembered as more, or as if their story should have bent another way. Celebrían of Imladris, the reason why noblewomens’ escorts were tripled four hundred years ago and set the standard for the day. She must have been remarkable, this woman, but not enough for her name to turn into anything but a whispered warning. Théoden himself had invoked Celebrían’s name the last time she had complained of her escort being too large, all the generations who came after her making demands the woman herself could no longer answer. As if the failure had been hers. As if they had not swallowed her whole.
And here beside Éowyn sat the husband of Lady Celebrían, who had been married to her since what to her seemed time immemorial, sharing a casual snippet from her life. She didn’t tell him that it was the first thing she’d ever heard of her, that anyone in Rohan had ever heard of her, beyond the fact that she had traversed a Pass without turning over her shoulder. Éowyn had never been a cruel woman, and to tell him such a thing would be nothing but cruelty.
“You were married for a very long time, weren’t you?” she asked instead. Elrond nodded, smiling slightly.
“Three thousand years,” he said. “Or thereabouts.”
She whistled, low. “I love Faramir, and can see no future with anyone but him. Still, I am certain that after the, oh, four hundredth year or so, I would probably beat him to death with a shovel. Probably that shovel right there.”
Elrond blinked once, and then began to laugh outright. Éowyn tamped down an intrusive urge to count his teeth, because Éomer had once told her elves had very pointy molars, and she still wasn’t sure whether he had been joking.
“Well, I think Celebrían had many a time where she wanted to beat me to death with a shovel, and not undeservingly so,” he was still laughing, in a surprised way, like someone who was caught by surprise that mirth still existed in the world. “Well, at least more deserving of it than your poor betrothed.”
“How is it like?” she asked curiously, turning properly towards him. “I — I’ve never seen it. A man and woman living together for so long, sharing everything between them. I have dreamed of it, hoped, yes, but now I have the dream firmly in hand I begin to wonder about the… architectural aspects of it. Would you bicker? Or fight?”
“Oh, over everything,” he said lightly, resting back on his elbows in the haybale, looking more mannish than ever. The last shred of belief in her paper dolls went up in smoke with the action, but she said naught of it. “There was a time she did not speak to me for a full fortnight, for I kept interrupting her, it seemed. Once, when Arwen was very small — three or four years old, I allowed her to take something sticky to bed. Some honey-coated thing, and Arwen, as she did, put her arms around her in the morning and a hunk of Cel’s hair stuck fast and had to be cut off. For the next two or three months I would find the very same sticky hunk in odd places — my writing desk, under the pillow, in a book I was reading at the time. To remind me of the great wrong I had done, you see.”
He told her a few more stories, and Éowyn began to realise what the songs and dreams meant without saying it, about unending love. Each day melding into the other, indistinguishable yet starkly remembered, and how each is carried in the other when apart and together. No day is worthy of especial rememberence and so they are are. Laughter is doubled and sorrows are shared, children are corralled and tended to, nits pulled out of hair and tooth cleaning supervised strictly. Memories and days accruing like a great ball of snow rushing down a mountain, and though Elrond did not speak of the moment it had stopped — no matter how temporarily — Éowyn could sense the despair in the loss, though the lord’s face was calm and voice as steady as always.
You were phenomenal, Lady C, she thought irreverently, at an anecdote about a glass slipper being thrown at the arrogant owner of the beautiful horse she had been brushing. You would have beaten our friend Aragorn into shape long before the world did, you and your glass slipper.
“Are you looking forward to it, then?” asked Elrond suddenly, snapping her out of her reverie. The sun had risen almost fully as he told those stories, and she had been so enthralled by them she never stopped him. “Your own marriage, I mean. If I may ask, that is.”
“I am,” Éowyn blushed slightly, looking away. “More so now."
She was. She had always been a believer in the power of love, certainly, but not so much a believer in its permanence. It had terrified her, even yesterday, the sudden thought that Faramir may perish. An enemy arrow, a flooded city, even a slippery floor. But now, in that stable, she saw what it could withstand: bending and cracking under a cruel world for three thousand years. That even when it seemed to be shattered, it did not disappear, did not even sweep itself up.
"It must have been difficult," she said truly. "Five hundred years."
"There is an element of getting used to it," Elrond began, before shaking his head. "Well, not getting used to it, not really. No, there's an element of ritual , I suppose. Walking the world and staring like a fool at anything that bore a slight resemblance even, to her. Still, you don't stop wanting to. Because there could be a chance — that one of those faces, even if impossible…"
"And that makes the looking worth it," she finished for him. "Makes it almost pleasant, the prospect of waiting, knowing what lies at the end. Yes. I understand now. Yes, Lord Elrond, I am looking forward to it. I only wish that…"
"Théoden," Elrond nodded, placing a hand on hers. "Yes. Of course."
Éowyn blinked away tears, because the loss was still so fresh that even her uncle's jokes burned in her throat. "He used to say he'd humiliate me at my wedding. That he would find some inopportune moment, and begin howling. Can you believe that?"
"Frankly, no," Elrond winced at even trying to picture the old king doing such a thing. "But I suppose even the idea of it kept you from marrying too young."
"I'd let him do it," she ran a finger under her eyes absently. "Howl away, if it meant he could be here for it. He used to call it a father's prerogative — weeping ostentatiously at his daughter's wedding. He said it was his moment, you see, for all the pains of raising me. So like a man! Still, I would have let him do it. He could have howled all day long."
When Théoden would sit her on his lap and threaten to howl at her wedding if she didn't pack away her dolls, or eat a proper dinner, it had seemed like a dream – the idea of a wedding, a marriage, a life. Far removed from reality yet amazing and vivid in her mind, and as she sat here with Elrond, Éowyn wondered if it was truly the wedding she had dreamed about, or the idea of making the man who raised her shed tears of pride. It seemed to have turned on its head, this dream, to the point that the Éowyn who sat in the stable longed more now for that moment Théoden sat her on his knee and threatened to howl at her wedding, than the wedding itself. Faramir, she knew, would understand. It was why she loved him so.
The clouds hung in the sky, the daybreak-pink almost leaving them, draining slowly. The horse had fallen asleep where it stood, its heavy breathing stirring up handfuls of dust, and Elrond sat unmoving beside her. Éowyn felt strangely at peace — the kind of peace she had felt, sitting by Éomer as he mourned for his mice, or on Théoden's knee as he made up wicked ways to weep at her wedding. Fathers and brothers, she realised, seem to not lose their fundamental qualities, even after fatherhood and brotherhood is taken from them.
She thought, only for a second and for no discernible cause, of the Lady Celebrían. A pity mothers and daughters are not afforded such permanence.
"A father's prerogative, hm?" Elrond repeated the phrase slowly, and then sighed, the old defeat brushing by his shoulders. "He wasn't wrong. Though such prerogatives are not given to all of us."
Day had broken outright, and Éowyn refused to entertain misery in sunlight.
“In another world,” she put to Elrond instead, jumping up from the haybale. “A better world. What would you have wept over, at this wedding?"
"That is a rather intimate question, considering we have only just gotten acquainted, Lady Éowyn."
"You've been sat on your behind in a stable that smells of horse-droppings for the last three hours, talking to me about some of the worst and best moments of your life. You cannot pretend we are not fast friends now, my lord," Éowyn reached out a hand, snapped her fingers infront of his bemused face. "Come, tell me. What would it have been? Your daughter's dress? Perhaps a mother's circlet, or even the song? Théoden used to claim it would be the first line of the reaffirmed betrothal vows that would set him off."
"In another world, hm?"
"A better one."
“Utter nonsense,” Elrond admitted, shrugging. He ran a hand through his hair tiredly, smiling. He did not rise, though she was standing, bridling the horse for the morning walk. “I had mastered sorrow very early on in my life, a mastery I like to think I maintain to this day, but I used to be comically swift to tears of joy, or laughter. Celebrían and my children found it extremely amusing — this was before, of course. It is not so any longer. But back then, ha, I once wept when Arwen, oh, six years old or thereabouts, read out the first song she ever wrote. It was, of course, terrible. Something about a mouse, or something equally ridiculous.”
“I had started out laughing, because it was so… well. Bad. But in those years, joy and tears went hand in hand — to the point poor Arwen herself had seemed confused, as if she too knew that my reaction was somewhat over the top considering the quality of her work. To this day, I am certain Elrohir walks the earth with a misshapen rib for the one he broke laughing at me that morning. But that is what I would have done at Arwen's wedding. Wept at something preposterous.”
“Preposterous,” she nodded, repeating the word, liking the sound of it. A mouthful. Prerogative. Preposterous. Preposterous paternal prerogatives. There are fathers and there are fathers and there are fathers and there will always be fathers.
“Only in that other world, though,” Elrond corrected, a touch of bleakness landing back in his voice, cracking it at the very edges. “In this one, even the memory of that damnable mouse… feels enough to unseat me wholly. Even a mouse is a reminder of what is lost, or will be. Even if she would recite the mouse song, right at the altar. It would not be for joy. Not truly, and perhaps not at all."
A mausoleum for a mouse, she thought, somewhat absurdly.
She looked around at the stable, the slats, the horses, and in them found all the years she had spent attempting to look anywhere else. The sagging tack, the cobwebbed beams, the dusty air, light slipping through in thin, slicing and stifling threads. Everything hemming her in like a ribcage. Perhaps she too, had been building mausoleums for mice. And then Éowyn looked to Elrond, who was dutifully making all the ridiculous faces men made when trying to cling on to dignity in the face of emotional upheaval.
Three thousand years, Lady C, and you couldn’t glass-slipper this trait out of him?
"It's morning," she said ungraciously. "If you wanted to start all that, you should have started it three hours ago. Nobody said that you could only grieve in my stable, you know. I need to go dress, and you need to go draw a bath, lest your daughter come after me for being the reason you attend her wedding smelling of horse. Up you get and off we go."
"You really are just as stubborn as she can get, you know?" Elrond rubbed his face, glanced up at her and laughed despite himself, shaking his head. He got up smoothly and Éowyn was glad for that, because had he rested on his knees or gave one of those Théoden-esque grunts while rising, she would have marched into the manor, grabbed her old paper dolls, and made the elf eat them. As it was, they were drifting atop very thin ice.
Still, he looked happier, for all that he spent hours in a stable crouching on a haybale, talking about lost things and to-be-lost things. An overactive imagination led to foreboding, and foreboding lived up to its name, had a tendency to speed forward to come true, and often did. Edoras was a flat land, one prone to meadow-fires. Éowyn had reason to know that a line of crop burnt off in advance could stop any meadow-fire in its tracks. Perhaps giving the preposterous paternal prerogatives a little farewell in the stable, might remove the sting of never truly experiencing it.
"What will you wear?" she asked him, as they walked out of the stable together, stopping to wash their hands at an ice cold spigot in the wall.
"Wear?" he shook his head, unused to anyone related to him asking such questions, let alone a veritable stranger. "I am… I don't know. Possibly what I wore the first evening, as we were welcomed in."
Éowyn shuddered, and Elrond quirked his head like a bird. And he is Éomer again , she thought, stifling a snort.
"Is there anything… wrong with that?"
"No, aside from you looking terrible in it," she grimaced, shaking her hands dry and letting him have a go under the tap. She considered bringing up the dolls, and then remembered there were plans in her future regarding said dolls. "Green washed you out like nothing else, I'm afraid. If you know you're miserable, you shouldn't wear colours that make you look even more miserable. I almost told Faramir to prepare for a second funeral. You looked like a plant overtaken by a cobweb, Lord Elrond."
Elrond wiped his hands on his tunic and looked at her in utter confusion, before deciding not to say anything at all. The two of them turned from the stable, shivering slightly in the morning cold. Had they turned back for a moment, they would have seen the dark wood drawing away behind them, the air thick with warm hay and damp chaff and old stories. Instead, as they walked quietly up to the manor, Elrond revelled in the hush as the world resumed, as daylight struck his face as though for the first time in a long time — blinding, unfiltered, or perhaps just viewed from another angle — the flat fields spinning gold in the sudden rush of birdsong. And all around him, stretching endless and wild, lay field after field of tall grasses and scattered flowers, heads nodding in the wind, all lunging and swaying like a vast, waving sea — viewed through a mariner's spyglass instead of the wide-open eyes of a drowning thing.
Elrond did not wear green to the wedding. Nor did Éowyn.
What Éowyn did do, however, was nearly cause the very first diplomatic incident of the Fourth Age, by not letting Faramir and Éomer anywhere near the wedding present for the royal couple, insisting all day that she had it handled.
"I may have put in the wrong present," she shrugged. "Oh, no harm done, I'm certain."
"You said it was a bracelet! Éowyn, only you would do such a thing – didn't you look ?" Faramir exclaimed when the box was duly opened by the long-suffering royal couple in question, and Éowyn had at the back of her mind heaved a sigh of relief that Faramir was now comfortable enough around both her and Éomer to start bickering with her. She thought vaguely of the shovel in the stable, watching both the men rush up to the high table and deliver a hundred apologies to both Aragorn and Arwen, as if the two of them, and Elrond's hulking sons, were chomping at the bit for a new war instead of being extremely confused.
You'd think I'd given them a lump of horseshite, the way they're all carrying on, she thought, tucking into another honey-cake. It wasn't horseshite, mind you, but a lovely silver box with a pair of rearing stallions twined about the top, the diamonds in their eyes glittering in the white afternoon light. It was when the box was opened, unfortunately, that the problem had arisen: instead of the bracelet Éowyn had sworn up and down that she had put in there, the box contained something else altogether.
They contained fifteen paper dolls of varying artistic effort and capability, all of them clearly made by a nine-year-old girl's admiring hands and all of them depicting the Lord of Imladris with various hairstyles, sequined brooches and — as a horrified Faramir realised when Elladan slowly peeled the overcoat off one of them with the air of uncovering a corpse — in various states of undress facilitating the dressing-up aspect that the adolescent girl had so enjoyed. She had even included all the costumes with their little notches so Faramir could have, instead of losing a good five years of his life in that precise moment, just put another set of dazzling robes on the thing.
Like I sent them a declaration of war, Éowyn rolled her eyes, unapologetic and unmoving from her own seat, devoting herself to the glazing of a third cake. It was not the kind of thing a noblewoman should do, she knew, and nor was it something the old Éowyn would have done, certainly not to a six thousand year elven lord.
It was, however, the kind of thing that this Éowyn did, and would continue to do. Not through paper dolls, perhaps not, but in other, less ephemeral ways, like the penning of a series of enduring childrens' songs-and-stories about the elvishly whimsical antics of Lady C and her Handy Glass Slipper , which took the place of cautionary tales across the next few centuries. It was the kind of thing that could only be done by someone brave enough to drag in a new world in place of that which she lived in — an obscenely hopeful world in which greatness is not measured in individual deeds but in what people can be for each other. Another world, a better world.
And it was only when Elrond himself, sitting right beside his daughter, bright pink in the face and shaking in silent, uncontrollable laughter, his cheeks as glazed with tears as her dessert was with honey, met her eyes across the hall, that Éowyn grinned at last.
Preposterous!, she mouthed across to him, and winked.