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.