for perforo

[shieldofrohan]

In the long grass, they found him: a host of Rohirric riders, the éored of the Fenmark, tall and martial men who carry spear and shield and sword, and whose steeds are fleet and quick to answer to their rider's calls. They rode him down, then, with ease; and in battle, he was overcome.

Their questions are curt, and they show no interest nor amusement in his quips. They are not cruel, but neither are they gentle; the stranger is bound and stripped of his armour, and (at length, when it is clear that he does not take well to quiet) gagged with a strip of torn cloth from a green cloak, but he is not ill-treated beyond that. His wounds are washed and wrapped, if none too gently; he is settled under guard with two spears at his throat; and then they begin to discuss what is to be done with him.

He is not an Orc, that much is clear - and to his benefit, for they are not in the habit of treating Orcs with such restrained decency. Nor is he one of the Dunlendings, the wild men of the North; he is as blonde as the children of Eorl, and his armour more like that of Gondor. But he is not of Gondor, they are quickly assured; nor Southron, nor Easterling, nor any other of the peoples who assail or ally with the Riddermark. He is a stranger, and he comes with blade bared, armed against a nation already so much harried, and he will not tell them why.

To Edoras, then. It is Dúnhere, the captain of the host, who decides it, and who orders the prisoner onto horseback, wrists bound. To Edoras, to an audience with the King, and let Théoden King decide what will be done with this new threat.

The mountains rise behind them, and the long cut of the valley opens green and amber. For half a day they ride, before the hill of Edoras comes clear in the distance, and atop it the gleam of gold in the autumn sunlight: the great hall of Meduseld, shining as though cast of gold itself. It is only as the éothed rides closer, through the rows of ancient barrows, that it is clear that the gleam is more simple in its origin: carved wooden walls, and golden thatch, catching the sun. Still, the hall is a breathtaking sight.

He is not taken there. He is taken, instead, inside the walls of the city-fort; taken to a stone building some distance from the royal halls, and bound to its standing-post, where at last he is freed of his gag. It is there, at last, that he is visited by someone who does not point a spear at him, and who bears no sword or shield.

She is tall, and stately, and her face is hard and grave, with a shadow in her eyes and a grimness in her jaw that belies her youth. She wears a simple gown of white and blue, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, scissors and keys hanging at her woven belt; her hair is braided back from her face, but falls in a golden cascade down her back. She comes almost alone; is accompanied only by Dúnhere, who at her word falls back to the doorway, between the two guards stationed there.

For a moment, she looks down at the prisoner, her grey eyes distant, giving away nothing. She is troubled, deeply so, by his presence here. Already, the problems that face this court have mounted beyond all managing: her uncle's sickness, her brother's half-exile, her cousin far away and hard-pressed in the fighting. Gríma counsels inaction in all things, drips his poison in the king's ear, feeds every hesitation and doubt. They are set upon from east, from north, from within. Must they now reckon with other foes again?

"We have perhaps an hour," she tells him, her voice sharp and her Westron lightly accented, "before Háma can no longer keep Gríma distracted. I will tell you now what Gríma's judgement will be; that we should kill you, and think no more on the questions of your presence. If you value your life, then, I would counsel that you deal rather with me, that you convince me that I should petition the King on your behalf." Whether such a petition will be enough, she cannot say; and it eats at her that her power is so limited, that she must humble herself to compromise with Gríma Wormtongue's ill-counsel. But he need not know that, need not know that she is more helpless than her stern and unyielding words suggest. "Who are you, and why did you come here?"

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[perforo]

Never has he been ridden down before. But neither has he ever watched dumbfounded as a dozen horses swifter and stronger than his own swept upon him like a thundering tide. And they were a tide, those horses and their riders, for the grass was an undulating sea. He knew, with great casual indifference, of the Great Grass Sea which the Dothraki purportedly called home, but what need had he to imagine a sea of grass when he'd had, outside his window at Casterly Rock, a true sea? Vast and violent, and far more fearsome than any quiet meadow could hope to be. Nothing else was worthy of the name sea. Yet that is what he had ridden into, and it can be no wonder that he had so quickly fumbled and drowned.

There was shame first in losing his seat, in being so effortlessly outridden, and by men not even in full armor. They were too many and, he would not admit aloud, too fierce. They fought as soldiers, even with their piteous lack of proud plate, at least insofar as it compared to his own. Not a glittering, gilded helm in sight. They seemed to have little trouble with him at all. He who had slaughtered the proud vanities of men in the lists for years; he whose name would be whispered in trembling admiration throughout the kingdoms, if it was not already; he who would be esteemed as Aegon, as the Sword of the Morning, as any of the heroes who would one day be swallowed by the shadow of his own name. He is ridden down without grand spectacle, as any pedestrian soldier would be, as if he were no more than a green boy jarred in his saddle, bumbling for his sword.

He has never been vanquished so soundly. There will be no redeeming this loss, no undoing of that cringing pursuit and the fight which came after, which could hardly be called a fight at all. He must make a jest of it, then, when it can be made nothing else. Surely this was only a tremendous misstep on the part of the gods, and they would laugh as drunken men at the dinner table before returning to him his pride, and arming him for vengeance. For the nonce, however, he laughs alone, and his good cheer goes awfully unappreciated.

The considerable man who seems to do the speaking for the rest, a man brusquely introduced as Dúnhere, is made to suffer the brunt of his humor. Ser Dúnhere, I implore you, are we done here? It is a shame that he is the only one who delights in so fitting a name.

They bind him, a preening stroke to his own ego, though they also take his armor, and he regrets seeing it lost. It was, after all, the sole decoration kept in such gruff and disinterested company. Their hands, when they tend his rather cosmetic wounds, neither curse him nor bless him. They are, these men, as stolidly impartial to him as a plow horse would be to all the world while under the yoke. They do their duty, and by the gods, they do it grimly; not a soul among them is jabbed to laughter when he asks whether they might arrange for his stallion an hour alone with one of those fair, fleet mares, for a steed ought to be granted a final roll in the hay before he is made to stand trial for crimes most neighfarious—

He finds himself promptly gagged, and he is silenced this way even upon horseback, though he can still summon a mangled sort of humming when the atmosphere grows too somber for his liking. Whether that somber mood will lift when he finds himself led up to a waiting gibbet, he is not certain. But for now he rides, and he has answered no question sincerely, has not made his makeshift imprisonment the least bit tolerable, and there is no reason why he should not have been parted from his head. They have gleaned some purpose for keeping him alive, evidently, and they ride him into a valley of gold and green.

Gold, he spots with no small relief - are the tales he has heard of Rohan, then, not as bland as they'd sounded? Farmers and villagers milled about this verdant countryside, he'd surmised, though their mounted warriors were of some renown. A country ripe for prospective glories, all the more so for how it had been weakened by war. No tale would suffice, of course; he must behold this faraway place for himself, ascertain by which means it might be taken. Take it for himself, alone, his bold spirit had suggested. A fool's notion, and a fool's errand, but he had ridden in all the same, unaccompanied, all in gold, spoiling for a fight. He hadn't found one.

He'd simply been batted down like a rude hound, and now he was going to be chastised in this golden hall - no, he is not deposited there. It is not even golden, in truth; it is wood and thatch, and his proper cage is one made of stone. Despairingly unbecoming of a knight of his caliber, and it is there that he waits, stripped at last of the gag which had been for so many leagues his only companion, the witness to so many muffled jests. He awaits now, he supposes, a hulking guard who will harangue him with a spear leveled at his throat, demanding to know the manner of his madness.

It is not so. He is graced instead with the company of a woman, though her face is as dour as all the rest. She comes before him without a spear, however, and without any blade that he can see. She is adorned instead with shears and keys - a woman gaoler? He cannot help but smirk, imagining so many tortured men - and her eyes seem to him just as empty of malice as they are of humor. Who are these people, who pledge their allegiance to neither cruelty nor mercy?

We have perhaps an hour - is she as much a prisoner as he is, then? By her dress and her halfway regal bearing, he doubts this very much. As she goes on, her station becomes no clearer to him. Who must they keep distracted? Why should she petition anyone on his behalf? He studies her, this woman who presents herself as if she commands far more authority than he does, but then speaks of those who may or may not heed her. He laughs, a sound that has lost none of its luster, much to the chagrin, apparently, of folk who utter phrases such as if you value your life. He likes, despite this, her peppery accent.

"I shall make the same bid for my honor as I made on behalf of my horse," he decides, falsely solemn in tone, though he had never mastered the art of completely erasing the smirk that waits at the corner of his lips. "Allow me my one hour to convince you, my lady, and you will beg your king not to have me gelded." Or beheaded, as it might be, but he has done nothing so egregiously wrong, his own crimes hardly so nefarious, as it were. He blithely disregards her questions, regarding her with a pinched expression and supplying his own.

"Are you a lady? Or are you the grim kitchen wench of this grim hovel who has come grimly to serve me a last, grim meal? You don't look as if you often eat among the royals." She looks the part, he might allow - her finely-kept golden hair, her... well, maybe it was purely an effect of her golden hair. Outside of that, she looks like one who glances furtively down the length of the table, hungrier for scraps of eavesdropped conversation than a plate of honeyfingers.

[shieldofrohan]

Dúnhere, who is well aware of what bid had been made, starts forward at that, a whisper of steel as he half-draws his sword. "You will hold your tongue," he begins to say; but she raises a hand, gesturing calm.

"Peace, my lord Dúnhere. He shames himself, not me. Or should I be shamed by the howl of wind between the stones, as well, which is as empty?" She turns away from the captive, then, looks more fully at Dúnhere, and one hand comes up to touch the older man's shoulder as he sheathes his sword again. "Efthweorf restan Meduseld, Dúnhere. Edwyrpe þu, edcwica þu. Ic mundiġe selv min ar."

"Ac, hlǣfdīġe..."

"Go," she says, softly, and shakes her head. "Shall I fear a man bound and unarmed, with no weapon but words to turn against me? You have suffered his prattle long enough, I do not doubt, my lord. You need not linger."

There is a gleam in her eyes - one not of amusement or of pleasure but of a deeply-held anger, the embers of a fire that is tamped down hard - as she turns back to the bound man. Her chin is lifted again again, her face hardening anew, and one might almost miss the slight hint of colour in her cheeks. How weary she is of such regard! How tired of those who would look upon her and see only a woman! She half-wonders, then, if she might leave too; for she has other work to do, and she owes this man nothing at all, and he does not want her help.

But he is a mystery, and now, of all times, mysteries cannot be countenanced. There are too many known dangers; the unknown cannot be allowed to linger. She presses her lips more tightly together, and her tone is sharp.

"I will forgive you your uncouthness," she decides, "and grant your ignorance, which may not be helped. Éowyn, I am called, sister-daughter to King Théoden, and lady of these halls. The King is... indisposed." Her hesitation is barely a split second, but it is there. Indisposed. He is asleep, as he often is these days, under the influence of the drugs that take his pain and the fatigue that plagues him; his golden hair has gone to grey and his eyes have dulled; and he is not himself. The tendons in her neck tense for a moment, her fingers curling against the apron of her gown. She cannot dwell on her uncle's ailments, not when there are other matters at hand. She cannot show weakness. "You may deal, then, with me; or, as I said, you may await my uncle's counsel, who does not prefer to face troubles when they come, but to bury them. Perhaps you would sooner be buried?"

[perforo]

If he cannot bandy with steel, he will bandy with words, and he is delighted to see that he has provoked her proud, surly guard. What further unlordly ire he might have won from the man is lost, for the lady present among them imposes peace with a touch to her protector's shoulder. Jaime rolls unspoken across his tongue the jest he might have badgered her with: the wind which howls between the stones would find greater purchase, I imagine, than anything that has reached between your thighs. Empty, empty as all these people seem to be, but he waits for so many noble, foreign words to be exchanged, tipping his head so golden hair falls away from his brow.

His restraint is a symptom, for the most part, of his wish not to be gagged again. His voice is the only one which has brought him any pleasure since he'd made the doomed mistake of riding into such inviting hills.

A proud thing, she is, and entirely ignorant of who he is, otherwise she might have been clever enough to know to fear him. Even bound, even unarmed. Eyes of mischievous jade study her, noting the haughty lift of her chin, the glum solemnity which her people seem to favor. Her eyes, though, are not wholly bereft of life, to his relief - how morose it would have been to deal with a court of corpses.

He tilts his head then to the opposite side, sure that he must have mistaken what he has seen, that it must be a trick of the light: is there a dab of color at her cheeks? She has just proclaimed herself to be unafraid, so it cannot be the rosiness of fear. Has he struck upon some dishonor deeper than the jest made of her body, the allegiance it might swear him in exchange for an hour of his attentions? He wears a jackal's grin to think this might be so.

Here is a show of some mercy, then: her forgiveness, her tolerance of his supposed ignorance. She grants him her name, one he has never heard among ladies of breeding before, and he cannot help a bark of laughter at the title which binds her to her family. "Sister-daughter? Mustn't you be one or the other?" He squints one eye as if striving to recall to mind a piece of arithmetic taught by his maester. "To be his sister you must share a mother, but to be his daughter, your mother must be his wife, or his whore, at the least. Am I to gather that you have fucked the king, my lady, or your father? I confess I am a bit confused." What answer can there be for her prim composure but vulgarity? They have left him little else.

Indisposed, she says, a word chosen for its shapelessness and its tact. Does this mean the king is ill? Mad? Dead? He flicks his tongue to the corner of his mouth, catches a smear of blood from a blow he seems to have taken to the face, and he is encouraged onward by that thin thread of uncertainty in her voice, something precariously close to hesitation. He watches her fingers curl, the bow of her neck drawn tight. There is more to her weariness, he thinks, than the inconvenience of a prisoner and the tedium of war.

"My body will be hacked and trampled into too many pieces, my lady, to ever be buried." He prefers to think that his eventual death will know no such tired customs as burial or pyre. He climbs her once more with liquid feline eyes, given to no sobering. "How do you mean to kill me?"

[shieldofrohan]

He is mocking her, hoping to rile her to reaction. She knows this, fights it, and yet it works nonetheless; she feels the irritation like a gall in her throat, bitter bile on the back of her tongue.

"The daughter of his sister, dullard." She cannot keep it from her voice, that brittle anger that gives her away. She remembers her mother, recollection dimmed by the years; how she had grown pale and thin from weeping, how the lustre had left her golden hair, how old and frail she had seemed when at last they buried her. She remembers her uncle before he was so afflicted, how he had dandled her on his knee as a child and walked with her among the stables, told her the stories of old battles and kings gone by until they were as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. The prisoner's vulgarity tears open old wounds, rubs salt into the raw edges of her heart; if she bore a sword, it would have leapt too easily to her hand. She thinks, with grim amusement, that she must compliment Dúnhere later on the restraint it must have taken to do no more than gag the man.

She presses her lips together again, and wishes that she were not so fair of skin, that the colour on her cheeks might not be visible when it deepens. That he might not take her flush of anger for one of embarrassment, or worse. But she must not hesitate. She is the blood of Eorl; she is, with Théodred and Éomer both away and fighting their own battles, the closest kin remaining to the King; she is the White Lady of Edoras, and she will not falter. Not in front of him, and not in front of the guards who still wait at the doorway.

"Éomund was my father; Théodwyn my mother; and she was the sister of Théoden, who sits now upon the high throne of Meduseld." Or, as the case may be, lies in a stupor in his bed, in a room which she cannot find a way to guard from the dangers that lurk within his own walls. "And we might while away the hours on my lineage, and trace lines back to Eorl the Young and Fram Dragon-Slayer and the first men of Rhovanion; but I have other duties, and if you have nothing to tell me, and no desire to spare your head, then I may as well return to them. I ask you again, and for the last time: who are you?"

[perforo]

She is not scandalized by his accusation, yields no ground in order to retreat from such impudence. She merely corrects him, as if he were truly too dull to have known, but his gambit does not go unrewarded. There is in her voice a spitting venom, though she may fancy herself too ladylike to spit. She is angry or hurt, likely both, though of course he knows nothing of her mother, nothing of her father, and nothing of what depravity she might have stooped to in order to achieve her current title. What was it, exactly? Lady of these halls? An unconvinced roll of his eyes takes in the scope of the room, deeming it still to be as ordinary as any room of stone, though an improvement over a dank dungeon cell, a fate he is grateful not to suffer.

There is that unfading color high on her cheeks, and his laughter is a breath to himself as he rests back, beginning to ache for having been so long bound. A minor annoyance, relatively, a pesky nipping in his body when he would rather have been standing at his full height, sword at his hip, armor gleaming as hard as golden bone. Maybe she is a lady after all, to be so unsettled by his crass strikes. Maybe that is a woman's embarrassment she wears. Or does she only burn with aggravation? It is a blemish, one way or the other; it is a chink in whichever paltry armor she thinks herself clad in. It is proof that he has antagonized her to something, even if he cannot be certain what it is. He doesn't care; it is better than nothing, better than silence.

Set proudly before him are names he does not know, titles that orient her among the figures of authority this kingdom boasts. He does not know them, and commits none of them to a memory that could never have recalled those unspeakable names, anyway. Her father, her mother, the king, and the name of this cursed place. Meduseld? He spends a moment placing this upon the map he does not carry, but she notes the imperative duties which await her, and makes of him the primary suspect in disrupting that itinerary. He has no interest in having her lineage recited for him, and he will not hear of her heroes.

He gives her a baleful glare, his amusement at being held prisoner as fickle as the sea in a storm.

"Too much of my life already has been lost listening to the names of Houses far inferior to my own." This is, he has learned, an objective fact. There is no House which commands more tremendous wealth, no House which sees even the proudest of men bow their heads in admiration and in fear. "I am Jaime Lannister, son of Tywin Lannister, who will pay you handsomely for my return. More handsomely if all my pieces are intact," he has the wits to add, rolling the hard muscle of his jaw.

"You have named your kin, but to whom are you wed? You cannot be a maid still, unless you suffer some gruesome affliction?" He seems to brighten at the prospect, at the infinite possibilities therein. Other possibilities, too, unrelated - "Or is that your husband is a disgrace to you? A coward or a drunk? Is he the grotesque?"

[shieldofrohan]

Do you hunger so much for death, she wonders, that you cannot bridle your tongue even for a moment? It is not impossible. She knows well how death can lose its sting and its fear, lose any power it might have had; and if that is true, then this is a doomed endeavour, for he does not seem that he will respond to a plea to his honour, either. He does not seem, to her, a man with much of it to reach.

Pride, though - pride, he has in abundance. Pride in what, she cannot say. In the shine of the gaudy and too-weighty armour she is told he wore? In the martial prowess that could not keep him from an easy capture? Or in this House of his, in a name she does not know or care for? Lannister. She has studied, as a princess must, the names of the great lines of Gondor and Rhovanion, and of course of Rohan; she has not heard this name, and it does not impress her. Nor does his assurance of ransom.

"We are not mercenaries, or bandits on the road," she tells him, her voice level again. His jibe about her supposed husband, she ignores; there is no wound there to reopen, for she is not self-conscious in her maidenhood, does not consider her spinsterhood a mistake or a slight. An inconvenience, perhaps, at times, but no more; she knows she is fair, just as she knows that there is no time for her to be wedded, when her people need her more than any husband could. "We do not want your gold, or your father's. You were taken because you trespassed with steel drawn on lands that you had no right to tread; and you will be returned if and when we are assured that you mean no threat against the Mark."

Gold would not be of use now, in any case. It is not gold that the Mark lacks, but leadership; a firm hand to steady the people and rally against the onslaught that assails from every side. Gold will not bring King Théoden back to himself, or drive Gríma from his ever-present place at the king's side; gold will not push back the Dunlendings, or keep the Orcish hordes from harrying the land. Gold is nothing but an investment against a future that cannot exist, a gleam that will not hold back the Shadow.

But it does worry her, for Gríma is a dishonourable man, and gold still has lustre for him. Now she must contend with a greater fear than that this prisoner will be killed before he tells what they must know: now she must worry that he will be freed before he tells them, at Gríma's command, and return in fuller force against their borders. She does her best not to show this worry on her face, to keep it smooth and hard as polished stone.

"You were found alone. Did you truly ride so far into the Fenmark with no men at your back? Did you think thus to pass unnoticed, even in armour that shines in the sun like a beacon?"

[perforo]

Every man is a mercenary, of course. And every woman, whether she be a starving wench with no pride to complicate her, or a lady with the luxury still of shame. Every head could be turned by the promise of gold, it was merely a matter of how much gold it would take to turn the head. It was gold, after all, that set the stage for war, that determined which pawns were placed where, and how reliably. It was gold that both drove and stayed swords, and it was gold that made the difference between a lasting loyalty and an alliance that would be broken without a thought for a higher bidder. She would find it conveniently easy to forget her honor and her virtues if coffers deep and rich were opened to her. She would be given pause, at the least. A great majority of the victory, he knew, came in that hesitation. It was as when a man glanced back in battle; that was when his defeat was made true.

But it is only the suggestion of his father's gold that would do this work; he has not a coin of it close at hand, nothing but his name, which she seems not to know, to make good of his word. Far too sanctimonious is she to betray her human avarice with an animal gleam in her eye. Are these a godly people, then? She has taken more warmly to calling into question his honor, which might have struck a nobler man to offense, or to a defense, as it were. But a nobler man would not have found himself captured, would never have risked so uncertain a mission. He has not once been praised for his stunning nobility - when he was praised, it tended to be for the gilding of his steel and his lethal talent with a sword - and he will not begin collecting such valorous praises now.

"All we claim are lines drawn upon a map, and you'll note that maps are not made in stone." Because maps could change - because boundaries and realms and names of taken holdfasts might well be impermanent. What, beside the proud laws of this land and the swords that defend it, made it theirs? If a greater man with a greater sword rode forth to claim it, would the later maps not be made to reflect the name he gave it?

He doubts sincerely that this is a philosophical discourse she will care to engage in and, not being one with the patience for discourse of any nature himself, he does not hesitate to let it go. They would know whose lands these were when all of the wars at last met their ends. Then, he vows in spiteful silence, he will have structures of true gold erected. Thatch will be for barns and peasants, no crude stone where there ought to be the artistry of construction.

Her face is made of stone, held that way in the defiance of one who has something costly to hide, and thus costly to lose. Is it only her pride? The absent fretting of a long war? Or is her appearance here at all an indication of something amiss? Amiss for her - the whole of his present circumstances are, one might rightly label, amiss - and he cocks his head as he pairs the commanding, decidedly no-nonsense tone of her voice with the performance of her face, which is a glorious attempt at no performance at all. The artifice of indifference seems to be a bit more trying than the artifice of a spectacular outburst. He wonders, an absent speculation as she in turn wonders at the arrogance of his ride, whether she has ever before enjoyed a spectacular outburst. They are, in his opinion, good for both body and soul.

"More men would have been even more conspicuous, don't you think? None of them would have worn gold, though, that's so. No, the truth is that I was not interested in commanding a formal detachment. I would not have commanded them to ride with me into territory that may well be hostile." Not into a land so foreign as this, and for so little gain. There would have had to be a mentionable reward. A ransom for the risk. Alone, he needed no such incentive.

"You can also be certain that I would wear no armor but my own, no matter how it might offend you. I came to take the measure of your people, though all I have encountered are stone walls."

[shieldofrohan]

A small smile comes to her lips then, a twist of dry humour, bitter and cold as an autumn wind from the mountains. There is no gentleness in it, no softness, but it is a smile, even so.

"It may strike you, then, that you have the measure of my people. Against such encroachment, what else should we be but stone?" She looks, for a moment, more distant; looks past him and through him as though she sees him not at all. "You would not be the first to break against those stones, Jaime Lannister, nor the last. Stone and steel are harder than gold, and they do not bend."

But they do erode. They break, and wear, and are chipped away by the years and the storms. She feels it in herself, how the stone has begun to winnow into sand, how the wind runs through her. Still, she is stone, and she is harder than he is, and he will not prevail in this fight of wills she finds herself entangled in. He gleams and glitters and jokes, but it is shine, not substance; she knows that, even if he does not.

"But maps are drawn by oaths, and oaths may be stronger than stone. Those borders have been set for five hundred years, and the Mark stands not alone in guarding them." She is not sure she believes that, truly. Gondor has not come to their aid before; why believe that the age-old pact will be honoured against another foe? Gondor will bestir itself to fight only when the war reaches their own borders. "Do not claim, then, that you came hither unknowing; but tell me, and tell me truly, what you hoped to gain by it."

He will not tell her truly, she is sure. He will tell nothing truly that must not be pulled from him with tortuous effort, and it does come to her again that it would be simpler to see him dead. There, then, would pass the threat of gold-hunger, there would pass the threat of knowledge escaping with him, there would pass the burden of his keep.

There would pass peace, if his father is as powerful as he seems to think, and knows where his son has gone. And there would pass honour, for despite her threats, he has committed no dire crime worthy of execution, and they are not Orcs, to take prisoners only to slay at leisure.

"Where are your lands? Under what banner? How far did you ride?"

[perforo]

To his genuine bewilderment, she seems to take pride in being made of stone, in belonging to a people who command the personalities of raw ore. That smile of hers is, he thinks, one of resignation - is she like the drear folk of the North, cursed to their intolerable, grim brooding because they cannot be bothered to learn another way? Because they have made of cheerless survival their own legacy, a tasteless heritage?

What else should we be but stone? For this he has only laughter, and a disdainful refusal to see in her any bravery. They could have been fire, or a swallowing sea, or wildly wrathful or stupidly resplendent; instead they would be almost nothing at all? A slew of gray mountains hunched against the wind, committed to a duty they feel nothing for? If they would consign him to the same fate, he would sooner beg a swift death.

"Aye, stone does not bend, but it dies the slowest and the most unbearably dull of all deaths." It took generations for those skulking mountains to be chipped to dust, and no songs were written of them. Five hundred years her country may have claimed its borders, and long may its oaths have stood, but was that due only to the reluctance of her people to venture from where they stood? In his own experience, impatient and foolhardy as it tended to be, wars and oaths were never still. A great many of his gambits were made with a dire lack of forethought.

But she does not know this; she seems to think him the cunning sort, a man who had ridden abroad with a painstaking and calculated scheme in mind. Had she never been taken by the urge to swing astride her horse and leap into the uncharted dark? To judge by her solemn bearing, it must have been long years since she had.

She asks after his lands, his banner, and the distance his steed had carried him; a toss of his head flicks away stray gold that has fallen across his eyes, and he heaves a sigh as if her insistence is both rude and troubling. Surely she does not expect obedience and honesty.

"My lands are far, my banner far more fetching than your own, and as I told Ser Fun-Fear, my horse is exhausted from our travels and deserving of some kindly company tonight. I might say the same for myself."

[shieldofrohan]

He cannot know, she tells herself, how his words will skewer her; how he reaches deep inside her and draws her greatest fears into the light, to writhe and claw at her. She is stone. For the duty of her station, she has made herself stone; for the love of her kin, she has made herself stone; she is cold, and hard, and unyielding, and all that is cast against her she will weather; and grey and unmoving she will linger in slow and inglorious death, beneath the banners of men who lived and felt their blood race in their veins. She will be ground to dust beneath the weight of her duty, and no songs will be written for the walls that stood their place, no child will wonder open-mouthed at the feats of the mountainside; she will wither, and linger, and be forgotten.

He cannot know how she fears it. He cannot know how she has resigned herself to it. He cannot know how, even now, the scream coils in her belly at the thought; how she must choke down the dread of a thousand long nights staring blind into the darkness, knowing that all that awaits is the drudgery of a woman's duty; to tend the wounded and bury the dead, and watch other men ride to glory, and see nothing but the shadows of a silent hall.

In that moment, she hates the man before her as she has hated few others - hates him for being, in his smug and cheerful insolence, all that she is not; and for knowing, somehow, how to hurt her, when she had thought herself numbed to the words of men. How dare he remind her of all that she fears, and knows is inescapable? How dare he do battle with words, when no man will meet her with a blade, or give her leave to fight? She does not wish him dead, she finds; she wishes worse for him. She wishes that he must stay here, bound by rope as she is bound by duty, and feeling his blood grow sluggish and cold in his veins; that he must know the same shadows that haunt her, and come to fear old age and emptiness as she must, and know in his heart that there will be no songs sung of his deeds, no stories told. She wants him to be stone, too; to be driven so hard that he has no choice but to hold his ground and root in place, until armour is all that remains of him, and greater valour is forgotten.

"Dúnhere is a lord, not a knight." It is all she can think to say. A hollow reply, from a hollow stone, through which the wind still howls. She hates him the more for eliciting such a blandness from her. "As for your horse, which is more comely than you and not to blame for his rider, he is well-stabled and brushed down; but when you ride him weighed down with so much armour and make a packhorse of a palfrey, you cannot expect me to judge distance from his weariness. More than company, I deem he desired to be free of the dead weight in his saddle." She folds her arms across her chest, tilting her head a little as she looks down at him. "But if he seeks kindly company, he will find that the mares of this land are both fleeter and fiercer than he is, and gain nothing for his trouble but bloodied hocks. Do you have men awaiting you in some half-hidden place, or did you think to bring them later?"

[perforo]

She is not a woman who has come uncomplaining to this hall, is she? As he watches her, as he studies the face she has carved from stone, the body she holds as imperturbable as marble or granite, as smooth as any flint which lives its like unflinching but also unfeeling, he knows this is not the way she would have it. She is too familiar with those men who had brought him here, too appreciative of their valor to be a woman who has had no taste of it. She would pose herself as a lady should, as the matron of a steaming kitchen might, the reach of her reign small, but more or less her own. A great many woman are satisfied with that lot, he thinks, which is more than the great many more women who will never know such fortune. To keep a hall, or a castle; to be entrusted with the hospitality which must be shown to a lord's leal companions - that is a feat still, however small. Any woman might rightly forfeit all she was born into if it meant the chance to taste even that pale flavor of command. And for other women, that would never be enough.

He knows nothing of her, and that is owed exclusively to the fact that he has not cared to learn anything of her. He had not cared to burden himself with cautious studies and even more cautious preparations before cantering into those mountain vales. He knows only what he had heard in crumbling fritters of conversation, just savory enough to capture his attention. He knows only that it is a land still of unmined glories, so far as his House is concerned. He knew he would be the first to lay it low, the first lion to climb to the top of the proud hill and proclaim it beholden to the name of Lannister. He has found himself bound before this stoic maid of stone, instead, but it is only a slight disruption to his idea of how his victory will unfurl. He has overcome worse blows.

All she has in return is a correction of her frightful lord's title, and he laughs as she assures him of the care taken of his most trustworthy ally, the horse that had carried him here. He will not believe the beast more comely than himself, and he shakes his golden hair as if to remind her of it, knowing it surely must be catching only weak glints of light in this hollow heart of stone. She folds her arms, pins him with another question pertinent to the logistics of his assault, which had amounted to no assault at all. He cannot answer her this, more puzzled by the unsubstantiated claim she has made.

"There is nothing any of us wants more than company, my lady. My horse, myself and you included. What is freedom without company but a solitary cell? A large cell, yes, but a prison all the same." He offers up at her an endearing smile - no, it is given whether she will have it or not - and he knows without having to press the issue that she is without a doubt aligned with her mares in this regard. She will have only the company she deems necessary, and would sooner die alone, stalwart and frozen, with only the wind to run its fingers through her hair, than admit that perhaps her heart felt barren of joy. A horse, at least, has the privilege of running itself to death in pursuit of companionship. A lady must tend her halls at the cost of all else.

He knocks his arms about, the muscles irritated to be bound so ignobly and for what has felt like so long, rolling his head on his neck to emphasize his discomfort at being made to suffer her pleasure in so shoddy a position.

"You are mightily insistent that I came with a company, or will soon be reliant upon one. I assure you, it is only me, and I am beginning to feel it as a personal insult that you think me so inept at riding alone." Disregarding the fact that he is presently captured, of course. A wrinkle to be smoothed out as soon as his hands are free.

[shieldofrohan]

"You ride alone, and seek to flee our men, and will not make parley. And yet, there is nothing you want more than company, ne rihte?" There creeps into her tone a hint of sardonicism. She is not sure, in this moment, how much of what he says is mockery. It all feels mocking to her, for how neatly it cuts to the darkness that haunts her, how with such unnerving ease he has looked through her façade of steel and stone to catch out the nightmares locked beneath the skin. Alone, ignoble, and forgotten; is it so obvious what she fears?

She sighs, and glances over her shoulder, out of the doorway. This is no use, she thinks. There is nothing to be gained from him but foolish jokes and pointed jibes, and any moment now, in any case, word will reach Gríma that he has not been told of this prisoner, and then there will be another problem to solve. And she does not much relish the idea of remaining here when he comes, to be caught between the prisoner's jovial insincerity and the advisor's hungry eyes and silvered tongue. She should leave, now that she has gained what little there is to gain, and put her mind to what will be done next, how she can come to Théoden with convincing enough words to counter his advisor's.

She does not leave. And it is, she will grant - if only to herself, and if only grudgingly - for the worst of reasons; he is right. She craves company, craves anything that is not the dull and grinding shadows of the Golden Hall, craves someone whom she can openly disdain. What is freedom without company? he asks, and she could almost laugh at it. Freedom is nothing at all. She has been a prisoner of her own duty too long to remember the open air.

"You are lucky that it was we who found you," she tells him, aware that her silence has been a little too long. "You might as easily have been set upon by Orcs, or by the Dunlendings, and neither would have treated you as kindly as Lord Dúnhere. If anything would be an insult, it would be to suppose that you were fool enough to ride unbacked into territory where the Riders of the Mark are the least of the dangers." She sighs, and rubs the bridge of her nose; and for a moment, her weariness is apparent, making her look a good deal older than three-and-twenty. "If we were to set you loose now, you might well find as much, for between here and where you were found are many dangers. None of which, it seems, you were prepared to meet. So I will ask once more: if you did not come for war, and you did not come to parley, and you did not even come knowing what terrain you might face, why did you come?"

[perforo]

There is more he craves than company, to be sure; that whimsical, heartfelt desire for affable companionship is blindsided by needs much more compelling: glory, renown, fear and praise. He does not worry that he will ever find himself wanting for company; he is too revered a hero in his own lands, to respected a knight and a man. He will never be without admirers, though if by some farce he did find himself robbed of that far-flung retinue, he would be well-surrounded by detractors. If he should not have the company of men who wish to be him, he would still have the company of men who wished to kill him, and in its way, to be the target of that focus is just as satisfying, if not more so. He did not require a squadron of riders at his back to make him feel a worthy conqueror, and he did not need to engage her men to feel himself a capable warrior. He had not needed, clearly, the benefit of copious forethought on any point of his jaunt.

He decides that she will not understand this, and also that she would not care to hear it, for how she peers back over her shoulder, how she sighs, tiring of this circular charade she has found herself in. It is no matter to him - he would sooner pester her with philosophical chatterings and jabs at her morose bearing than be hurried along to his decisive fate. She is quiet for a time - thinking of ways she herself might like to see him silenced for good, perhaps? - and he wonders why she does not rejoice in her right to simply hand him off to someone who would not entertain his jesting. Someone who would see him promptly dealt with, someone surly enough not to regret the riches lost in such a wasteful death.

She grants him nothing illuminating, choosing instead to maintain her trust in her noble Lord Done Here, impressing upon him the generosity he presently enjoys when he could have been captured by any other lurking hill-fiend. An Orc? A Dingledun? His eyes travel the lines of her face, the weary way her fingers slip across the bridge of her nose, the miserable air that seems to weigh upon her like a rain-drenched shawl of wool. She looks like she could have lived a half dozen lifetimes already, and found in none of them even an accidental brush of joy.

"It would seem I owe you a debt, then. I thank you kindly for sparing me the atrocities of your Orcs and Dungledongs, though I can scarce imagine their sullen faces to be more frightening than what I have found here." Maybe they would have been kind enough to at least pit him in some sort of honest combat rather than leave him bound. Maybe they would have returned his banter, or at least struck him for it, rather than glare down sanctimoniously. He would have preferred the outright danger.

"You would have made a most effective septa, I think." This is not a compliment, and his eyes do not make it one as they crawl down and then back up her stiff body, returning after a moment to her incessant questioning. "I came because I wished to see. I came because I wanted to know for myself what sort of friend or foe we might find here. I came because I was hungry for a fight, or, if I found none, then I had hoped to find something which would make me feel my blood. I came without asking myself why. If you haven't looked into a mirror lately, I would advise that you cautiously take a glance so that you will know what berating yourself with too many questions will do to a body."

[shieldofrohan]

She does not know, in truth, what a septa is; it is enough to know from his tone that it is an insult. It is enough to feel how his eyes creep over her, with less intent hunger than certain other eyes, but uncomfortably searching nonetheless. It is enough that he has, truthfully or otherwise, finally given her an answer.

"I know well enough," she tells him, her tone curt, "but we cannot all have the luxury of following where the stir of our blood leads us." Or else she would not be here; would be a hundred miles hence, with her breasts bound and her face disguised, to ride with sword bared and shield raised against the foes that harry her people; would be feeling the wind in her face and the cry of a warrior's rage boiling from her throat; would not still suffer herself to be caught among these dark shadows and hungry eyes. But she has duty, and she has love, and both are chains that bind her here; and she envies him, in all his stupidity, almost as much as she envies her brother or her cousin. "As for you, if you had thought to ask why, then you might not now be bound and fearful of my sullen face, and I might not have to spend more time with Lord Gríma to settle this matter. Berating yourself a little more, then, might have spared us both a good deal of trouble."

Her tone is cold, but her blood is not, and there is a faint flush of anger on her cheeks. What right, after all, does he have to judge her? What right to speak of the weight of questions, when she feels that weight day and night? Will he hold himself in any way lovelier for his recklessness than she is in her crushing honour? And will he keep wandering in his gaze, worse in judgement than in hunger, until she feels herself almost naked before him?

[perforo]

Bound and fearful, she declares, and his laughter is a condescending bark. Upon no page in the history of his life will it ever be written that he was bound and fearful. It is an annoyance that he has been captured, indeed, and his tale would have been unacceptably short if her people had proven to be as cruel as they were dull. As it is, it would seem that they are only dull. No one has overtly threatened him, no one has challenged him on his merit as a knight or a soldier. They would sooner hold him bound, assault him with drear demands upon the direction and purpose of his ride, and hesitate to see him beheaded for his trespass. They will evidently hesitate, too, before reaching greedily for the ransom they might have. He does not sit in fear of her sullen face, and he had not ridden in fear when her loyal lord had delivered him to her.

He does not sit in fear of any man she names - he can, he is quite certain, best any of them who might rally the bravery to confront him in the combat of justice - and he is not quaking in the shadow of so many unfathomable atrocities that might befall him within the walls of this place. He is beginning to think there is not a soul here that would have the stomach to see it done. This is bewildering; he would have known what to do with a blundering, violent adversary. He has little experience in negotiating with those who are so unfamiliar with his face and his name that they would rather waste these hours of holding him hostage with such miserable, doubtful questioning. They do not provoke him, do not esteem him; they give him nothing which he might have fashioned into a weapon. There is only her sullen face, and the threat of what he assumes will be another sullen face to come.

"Begging your pardon, my lady, but I do not fear you, and I do not fear anyone above you." Who would it be? Men more likely to see him maimed or returned or at least tossed into a pit to prove his mettle? He cocks his head as he studies her, a twitch of thought at his lips, and a gleam in the liquid motion of his feline eyes. If he had feared the possibility of trouble, he would never have ridden.

He reaches again with his tongue for another dab of the blood that seems to have beaded along a cut at his cheek, considering, and cannot stop himself from sallying blindly on even now, without horse or armor or sword. But there is nothing of him that is cold or reflecting or careful.

"Why spend any time with this Grim Gríma at all? I am your captive, to do with as you please. It is for you to decide if I am beaten or turned loose or given contest against any man of your choosing." Then, with a dashing smile that bares his teeth, "Or a moonlight ride, if that is more to your liking, as I am not convinced any man here would give you that."

[shieldofrohan]

"You are not my captive," she corrects him, sharply. It is made sharper still by that smile, by all that it holds and all that his words import. There is at least one man here who would give her that, and she would sooner strip off her own skin than endure his company; alas, then, that he is the very man whose arrival they await. "You are in the halls of Théoden King, of whom I am but an emissary; and you are his captive, not mine; and it is his pleasure you await." And so she must, for all its bitterness, stomach the presence of his advisor, when he comes. She will not be made traitorous for the sake of his pride - or her own.

And yet, the thought lingers, another echo of those late nights and whispered doubts. Why spend any time with this Grim Gríma at all? Why, indeed? Why linger on his pleasure, when she knows that it is no more true to her uncle's will than anything she herself could say? Why wait, and agonise in the waiting, and bow to the falsely-gained power of a vile and crawling man?

She presses her lips together, and it is her own brow now which creases with thought. For a moment, her grey eyes meet green ones, and they are intent and searching.

"And what would you do, in my place?" she demands, at last - but there is a genuine question there, not merely a stubborn refutation. "It is not, I think, a custom in your lands or any other for a court at war to rearm trespassers and send them on their way with a hearty go-ye-well. What, then, did you hope for, when you came? How would you treat a man in your place?"

[perforo]

He laughs, for it cannot be helped; whose captive is he, if not the woman who stands so resolutely before him, holding his life in her hands, if she would only take it? Oh, yes, it was her lord - her grunting guard, her brooding knight who would sooner be Done Here? - who had captured him, and they must answer, the both of them, to a man higher still. There is a king, that much is obvious; yet it is to the advisor of this erstwhile king that she must defer? Such tangled webs the customs of court demand. How much simpler all would be if justice were served by the blade, as it was always meant to be.

He rolls his eyes, made to face, once again, the futility of striking her like a flint, hoping she will catch an unwise spark. She is devoted to her honor, to cold nobility. Perhaps she is a relation of the Starks. "A fine bitch you must make in your master's kennels," he concedes with all the charm he figures a lord of his own caliber ought to muster, dipping his head as if in sincere recognition. The smirk at his lips is still curdled.

But is that her brow etched in thought, her grim lips pressed in reluctant appreciation for what he has said? Do her gray eyes not meet his own in something like negotiation?

Her question rings with a note of curiosity which is not churlish, which is not accusatory and readily dismissing. He tilts his head, paying back the thought the question is owed, weighing what he might indeed have done if he had captured a man such as himself, a captive to display or to punish or to entertain as he pleased. There is much to consider, and he filters none of it for propriety's sake.

"That depends, my lady. Were I you, a fair and able woman, who had captured me, a fair and able man, why, I might have thrown me down and demanded that we flaunt wars and gods all and made passionate love among the sweeping flowers of your lovely moors. I have no doubt that I would have consented most enthusiastically." A rakish smile to punctuate this opportunity lost before he continues, finding his stride in fantasy.

"Were I a knight capturing another knight, I would have killed him outright for his unending impudence, or else I would have invited him to my table to lighten the dour spirits of the men whose company I am made to suffer. Then, once he had been properly fed, I would challenge him to the combat he is owed, to determine his worth for myself. If he won back his freedom justly, he would be welcome to it, of course. And should he prove an inept fool, well, no one would need ever endure his japes again."

Coming at last to the question nestled within the other, he makes his answer one which bites, giving it a flash of teeth. "I had hoped to find warriors of spirit still in the world, and not only fishermen who know not what to do with the handsome specimens they catch."

[shieldofrohan]

He means to bait her, to prod her to anger. She knows this; knows, too, that she must not be so weak, so petty, as to give him that satisfaction; knows that nothing he says should matter in the slightest, for he has given her no reason to think his opinions worthwhile. All this she knows, and yet she feels her teeth grind, her fingers curling briefly into fists as the dry tinder of her frustration and fury sparks to flame.

"You overstate your own fairness and ability both. Not for anything would I lie with you, passionately or otherwise." She manages, at least, to keep her voice level, though anger thrums behind it - anger aimed not entirely at him, but at everything. At his disregard, and his scorn for her honour, and the trouble he has made for her. At every man who would sooner fuck her than think her worthy of equal regard; at her own helplessness; at the shadows that are cast in these halls, at Gríma Wormtongue and how he has captured her uncle's ear, at her uncle himself for how he ails and leaves her to this fate; at Éomer and Théodred, for being gone, and at the mockery of chance that means she cannot go with them. There is so much fuel to that fire, once it is lit. It is all she can do to hold herself in check; and her fingernails bite against her palms, her grey eyes flashing with rage, before she draws herself back from the brink.

Stone. She must be stone, and iron, and cold and unyielding steel. But even those things may crack, at times; and she is so very tired.

She takes a deep breath in. Holds it a moment. Lets it slowly out. Will you be bested by a bound fool? When she speaks again, her voice is once again cold, matter-of-fact, though the anger has not receded more than a little way.

"If you believe combat is what you are owed, then you shall have it. And if you win, then you shall be accompanied to the borders of our lands, and there set loose, to trouble some other court; and I shall ask no further questions of you. Is that just?"