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shieldofrohanShe had been prepared for the end. She had been ready to die with sword in hand, to watch Edoras burn and bring her down with it, while the Shadow covered the land and all that they clung to was swept away. She had done all that she could, and even doing it, she had known it would not be enough. She had been ready.
She had not been ready to survive it. Every day since, she has wished with all her heart that she did not.
He had tried to woo her, at first. If it had not been so terrible to see, it would almost have been funny: the sheer clumsy stupidity of it, to think that power was enough, that a grief-stricken captive would flee to the architect of her misery. He had brought her flowers, and tried to make himself a confidant. She had spat in his face, and bidden him to kill her too, or else she would kill him.
Even Gríma's foolishness had its limits, but his covetousness did not. He would have her, he told her, and she would be his wife and kneel for him, and she would know her place. At the time, she had laughed openly, certain that nothing he could do would break her will, knowing that she had resigned herself to pain and death, believing that there was nothing left for him to turn against her. Éomer was dead. Théodred was dead. The only leverage he had over her was Théoden, who lingered half-conscious and no longer himself; and he needed the King more than he needed his desires met.
She had been so innocent, back then. Even in what had seemed to her the darkest possible hour, with everything lost and all that she loved ripped from her, she had still been so naïve.
The first time he had tried to bed her, she had clawed her nails across his face, snarling and spitting like a wildcat; and Gríma would not have overcome her alone, being both smaller and weaker than his unwilling bride, but he was not alone. She had been held down by his new guard, muscular men of Dunlending stock, and her maidenhead was lost to her most loathed enemy beneath the eyes and hands of three uncaring strangers, and she had wept as bitterly as ever a woman wept - not for her lost virginity, nor even for its circumstances, but because that was the moment at which she understood fully how utterly helpless she had become.
She tried to rally. She tried to find some strength, some pride to carry her forward. At every turn, it was ripped from her.
She had not given way easily. She had made him fight for every inch: made him drag her by her hair sooner than go where she was told; met his demands with stony, proud silence; watched for any weakness. She had left her mark on him more than once, biting and scratching and kicking and punching, and in time, it seemed, he had changed his aim. If he had once seemed to hope that she would love him, he soon sought only to see her broken, like a horse to the bridle; if he had once intended to make her his wife, now he was content to make her his whore. Anything, it seemed, to make her crawl.
She tried to escape, more than once. She knew the King's hall better than anyone still living, and they could not guard her all the time. Her second attempt, in hindsight, had come close to success - would have been successful, in all likelihood, if she had simply fled. But she could not bear to flee and leave him living, and she had managed to come so close, had had the knife almost to his throat, when the men he hired had heard his screams and dragged her off. That she had been soundly beaten did nothing to dissuade her; that thereafter she was locked away for over a week without light or food only hardened her resolve. But then there had been the prisoners.
Gríma needed the King alive. He needed Éowyn alive. The other Men of Rohan, those who had survived his takeover... he needed them far less. He had brought her out of her captivity, weak with hunger and grief, to see the ends of the men who had tried to help her. Háma, Ceolfrith, Harbeorn, and the rest, all men she had known since her childhood, bloodied and beaten and trying to remain strong; he had made her stand there as they were hanged, and their bodies thrown onto the dungheap, and all she could do for them was to give them the honour of not looking away.
And then he had turned to her, and said in a tone low enough for her, Their wives, their children. And when the guards released her arms, and Gríma told her to kneel, she had knelt.
That was a year ago. She has rebelled since, in smaller ways; twice more she attempted escape, alone in her planning, but that made no difference to the deaths that came from it. The second time she came close to killing him, wrapping her hands around his throat so that he could not call for help, was the last time he was alone with her. He was still alive, and she was still a slave, and all that she had accomplished was that her humiliations were more public.
Little by little, he broke her down. She rarely spoke, rarely moved without being ordered to. For a time, she tried to kill herself: refused food and water, until they forced it down her throat anyway; sought any weapon to end things, without success; tried to break her skull against the walls of her room, until they bound her helpless to a bed. In the end, with even that escape blocked to her, she surrendered. She hated herself for surrendering. She hated Théoden, in his sickness and his weakness, for surrendering them. She hated everything, with a ferocity that was the only thing she could still feel, and she had no recourse.
When he told her to kneel, now, she knelt. When he told her to stand, she stood. When he told her to open her legs, or her mouth, or any other part of her, she did. She stood behind his seat, beside the empty throne, and she was a shell: she said not one word, nor shed one tear, nor moved a muscle unless she was told. She had spoken against him perhaps a dozen times since the winter, never for her own sake: to denounce some political cruelty, to refuse him some right that was not his to claim, to say aloud You are not King. Each time, she had been made to pay. Each time, her people had been made to pay. She would never allow herself to close her eyes, as the bodies were brought before her. She would never give their lives lightly, and so she surrendered, over and over again, and hated herself more every moment.
And then, the King died.
She did not weep, finding Théoden cold and stiff in his bed when she came to bring his breakfast. She felt no sorrow, only a dull ache where her feelings had once been. She thought, without the horror she should feel: I would that you had died two years sooner, and spared us all this end. She closed his eyes, and settled his withered hands upon his counterpane, and, despite it all, she kissed his brow.
If he was dead, then Gríma was King. He was King by her hand, by her claim. He was King because he had married the Queen, and so long as she surrendered to him, who was to dispute it? And in time, she knew, his attempts would bear fruit, and she would fall pregnant with his son, and then the line of Eorl would be reduced to a whore's get, and what remained of Rohan would mean less than the dirt.
They had ceased to watch her so closely, now. It had been months since she had made any attempt at escape or rebellion. She had no contact with her own people, those who were loyal to the line of Eorl; she had no weapon and no horse. She had only one thing to aid her: the last scraps of Éowyn, Éomund's daughter, who had once sworn that she would never bend.
She would die, she swore, there in the dead man's room. She would die, before she lived a day as King Wormtongue's queen.
And she hurled herself at the guardsman, and as he stumbled back, taken by surprise, she scrabbled the eating-knife from his belt, and drove it into his eye, and then his throat, and she ran. There were few windows in the living-quarters of the hall, and fewer still large enough to climb through; she ran for the nearest door, a headlong and desperate dash which had no chance of success, no hope of escape...
And out into the summer sunlight, so dazzlingly bright after months almost entirely spend inside. She staggered at the heat of it like a hammer-blow, and tried to catch herself, looking back into the shadows of the hall and out into a city that was no longer hers, and wondered why they were not yet upon her; but there was no virtue in wondering, or in pause. She held the knife white-knuckled, turning toward the stables. It would do nothing to defend her, if armoured men came to reclaim her. It would not save her from capture - but it could save her from once again surviving it.
They did not come.
She did not discover why until she was outside the city. She had taken, of all among them, the King's own horse: Snowmane knew her well, and he had almost smashed down the door of his stall when she called to him. He charged through the street and down the Barrow-Road, and she clung bareback to his mane, almost flat against his back, the bloody knife still in her hand; and as the gates were closed to bar her leaving, the guards at last moving to prevent her, she dug her heels into the stallion's flanks and urged him on, with all the swiftness that only Rohan's horses could claim, and the guards were Men of Rohan, and they hesitated a split second to recognise the King's horse, and then he was upon them, and bursting out onto the open hillside, and he did not stop until the strength left him, and then he settled from a gallop to a trot, his white flanks heaving and dark with sweat.
And it was then, and only then, that she found she was not alone.
That was two weeks ago. Now, she and her strange rescuers are far from Edoras, outside the borders of the Mark, farther than she has ever been. She has spoken to them, by now: enough to know that they were sent to retrieve her, that their rulers seek an alliance, and that they will see her returned to the throne. It should be a hopeful thing, but it fills her with a terrible dread to think of it. Will she be Queen, who has already betrayed her people a thousand times, and surrendered them and herself to the man who would destroy them? Will she take up their cause, only to fail them anew?
She should have died, she thinks. She should have died in the escape. She should have died in the imprisonment. She should have died a year and a half ago, when she saw her people fall. But she is alive, and she cannot pretend that she has no duty to them, and even in the direst moments of her imprisonment, she has never been so afraid.
They brought clothing and supplies, and at last she is permitted some of the things she has been denied: she is given a knife to eat with, and a belt, and riding-gear. She looks, as they ride into the courtyard, almost the woman she was before the war: she is tall and fair and she sits upright in the saddle of a milk-white warhorse, her chin raised and her long golden hair fluttering in the August breeze. But there is an emptiness behind the grey eyes that fix themselves on some imagined point, and her hand clutches tightly to the horn of her saddle, the mark of a shackle half-visible on her wrist, and, inside, she is nothing the same.
She does not dismount when they draw to a halt. She barely seems to have realised that they have stopped at all. It is with the slowness of one moving through a dream that at last she turns her head, looking uncomprehendingly at the small party who have left the palace to meet them.
"They will follow me here, as like as not." Her voice feels rusty, alien on her tongue. It is the voice of the old Éowyn, who had never knelt with her head bowed and called herself whore and slave. It is the voice of a woman who expects to be taken seriously, coming from the mouth of one who has grown to expect mocking laughter. It is the voice of a Queen, and she is not Queen; she is not sure she is even human any more.
She wants to scream. She wants to say: Kill me or leave me to the wolves, but do not ask me to be Éomund's daughter now. She is dead, the Lady Éowyn is dead, and all is lost. Do not look at me as though I carry hope; I have none even for myself. She wants to say: I cannot offer you alliance, I cannot offer you help, I can offer you nothing at all. But there is no other Lady Éowyn, and she is needed, all the same.
"They will follow me," she repeats, and her hand winds tighter in the reins, her nails digging into her palm. They are longer nails than she would choose. It has been a long time since she has been trusted with either work to keep them short for, or with scissors. "Are you ready, if they come?"
She had not been ready to survive it. Every day since, she has wished with all her heart that she did not.
He had tried to woo her, at first. If it had not been so terrible to see, it would almost have been funny: the sheer clumsy stupidity of it, to think that power was enough, that a grief-stricken captive would flee to the architect of her misery. He had brought her flowers, and tried to make himself a confidant. She had spat in his face, and bidden him to kill her too, or else she would kill him.
Even Gríma's foolishness had its limits, but his covetousness did not. He would have her, he told her, and she would be his wife and kneel for him, and she would know her place. At the time, she had laughed openly, certain that nothing he could do would break her will, knowing that she had resigned herself to pain and death, believing that there was nothing left for him to turn against her. Éomer was dead. Théodred was dead. The only leverage he had over her was Théoden, who lingered half-conscious and no longer himself; and he needed the King more than he needed his desires met.
She had been so innocent, back then. Even in what had seemed to her the darkest possible hour, with everything lost and all that she loved ripped from her, she had still been so naïve.
The first time he had tried to bed her, she had clawed her nails across his face, snarling and spitting like a wildcat; and Gríma would not have overcome her alone, being both smaller and weaker than his unwilling bride, but he was not alone. She had been held down by his new guard, muscular men of Dunlending stock, and her maidenhead was lost to her most loathed enemy beneath the eyes and hands of three uncaring strangers, and she had wept as bitterly as ever a woman wept - not for her lost virginity, nor even for its circumstances, but because that was the moment at which she understood fully how utterly helpless she had become.
She tried to rally. She tried to find some strength, some pride to carry her forward. At every turn, it was ripped from her.
She had not given way easily. She had made him fight for every inch: made him drag her by her hair sooner than go where she was told; met his demands with stony, proud silence; watched for any weakness. She had left her mark on him more than once, biting and scratching and kicking and punching, and in time, it seemed, he had changed his aim. If he had once seemed to hope that she would love him, he soon sought only to see her broken, like a horse to the bridle; if he had once intended to make her his wife, now he was content to make her his whore. Anything, it seemed, to make her crawl.
She tried to escape, more than once. She knew the King's hall better than anyone still living, and they could not guard her all the time. Her second attempt, in hindsight, had come close to success - would have been successful, in all likelihood, if she had simply fled. But she could not bear to flee and leave him living, and she had managed to come so close, had had the knife almost to his throat, when the men he hired had heard his screams and dragged her off. That she had been soundly beaten did nothing to dissuade her; that thereafter she was locked away for over a week without light or food only hardened her resolve. But then there had been the prisoners.
Gríma needed the King alive. He needed Éowyn alive. The other Men of Rohan, those who had survived his takeover... he needed them far less. He had brought her out of her captivity, weak with hunger and grief, to see the ends of the men who had tried to help her. Háma, Ceolfrith, Harbeorn, and the rest, all men she had known since her childhood, bloodied and beaten and trying to remain strong; he had made her stand there as they were hanged, and their bodies thrown onto the dungheap, and all she could do for them was to give them the honour of not looking away.
And then he had turned to her, and said in a tone low enough for her, Their wives, their children. And when the guards released her arms, and Gríma told her to kneel, she had knelt.
That was a year ago. She has rebelled since, in smaller ways; twice more she attempted escape, alone in her planning, but that made no difference to the deaths that came from it. The second time she came close to killing him, wrapping her hands around his throat so that he could not call for help, was the last time he was alone with her. He was still alive, and she was still a slave, and all that she had accomplished was that her humiliations were more public.
Little by little, he broke her down. She rarely spoke, rarely moved without being ordered to. For a time, she tried to kill herself: refused food and water, until they forced it down her throat anyway; sought any weapon to end things, without success; tried to break her skull against the walls of her room, until they bound her helpless to a bed. In the end, with even that escape blocked to her, she surrendered. She hated herself for surrendering. She hated Théoden, in his sickness and his weakness, for surrendering them. She hated everything, with a ferocity that was the only thing she could still feel, and she had no recourse.
When he told her to kneel, now, she knelt. When he told her to stand, she stood. When he told her to open her legs, or her mouth, or any other part of her, she did. She stood behind his seat, beside the empty throne, and she was a shell: she said not one word, nor shed one tear, nor moved a muscle unless she was told. She had spoken against him perhaps a dozen times since the winter, never for her own sake: to denounce some political cruelty, to refuse him some right that was not his to claim, to say aloud You are not King. Each time, she had been made to pay. Each time, her people had been made to pay. She would never allow herself to close her eyes, as the bodies were brought before her. She would never give their lives lightly, and so she surrendered, over and over again, and hated herself more every moment.
And then, the King died.
She did not weep, finding Théoden cold and stiff in his bed when she came to bring his breakfast. She felt no sorrow, only a dull ache where her feelings had once been. She thought, without the horror she should feel: I would that you had died two years sooner, and spared us all this end. She closed his eyes, and settled his withered hands upon his counterpane, and, despite it all, she kissed his brow.
If he was dead, then Gríma was King. He was King by her hand, by her claim. He was King because he had married the Queen, and so long as she surrendered to him, who was to dispute it? And in time, she knew, his attempts would bear fruit, and she would fall pregnant with his son, and then the line of Eorl would be reduced to a whore's get, and what remained of Rohan would mean less than the dirt.
They had ceased to watch her so closely, now. It had been months since she had made any attempt at escape or rebellion. She had no contact with her own people, those who were loyal to the line of Eorl; she had no weapon and no horse. She had only one thing to aid her: the last scraps of Éowyn, Éomund's daughter, who had once sworn that she would never bend.
She would die, she swore, there in the dead man's room. She would die, before she lived a day as King Wormtongue's queen.
And she hurled herself at the guardsman, and as he stumbled back, taken by surprise, she scrabbled the eating-knife from his belt, and drove it into his eye, and then his throat, and she ran. There were few windows in the living-quarters of the hall, and fewer still large enough to climb through; she ran for the nearest door, a headlong and desperate dash which had no chance of success, no hope of escape...
And out into the summer sunlight, so dazzlingly bright after months almost entirely spend inside. She staggered at the heat of it like a hammer-blow, and tried to catch herself, looking back into the shadows of the hall and out into a city that was no longer hers, and wondered why they were not yet upon her; but there was no virtue in wondering, or in pause. She held the knife white-knuckled, turning toward the stables. It would do nothing to defend her, if armoured men came to reclaim her. It would not save her from capture - but it could save her from once again surviving it.
They did not come.
She did not discover why until she was outside the city. She had taken, of all among them, the King's own horse: Snowmane knew her well, and he had almost smashed down the door of his stall when she called to him. He charged through the street and down the Barrow-Road, and she clung bareback to his mane, almost flat against his back, the bloody knife still in her hand; and as the gates were closed to bar her leaving, the guards at last moving to prevent her, she dug her heels into the stallion's flanks and urged him on, with all the swiftness that only Rohan's horses could claim, and the guards were Men of Rohan, and they hesitated a split second to recognise the King's horse, and then he was upon them, and bursting out onto the open hillside, and he did not stop until the strength left him, and then he settled from a gallop to a trot, his white flanks heaving and dark with sweat.
And it was then, and only then, that she found she was not alone.
That was two weeks ago. Now, she and her strange rescuers are far from Edoras, outside the borders of the Mark, farther than she has ever been. She has spoken to them, by now: enough to know that they were sent to retrieve her, that their rulers seek an alliance, and that they will see her returned to the throne. It should be a hopeful thing, but it fills her with a terrible dread to think of it. Will she be Queen, who has already betrayed her people a thousand times, and surrendered them and herself to the man who would destroy them? Will she take up their cause, only to fail them anew?
She should have died, she thinks. She should have died in the escape. She should have died in the imprisonment. She should have died a year and a half ago, when she saw her people fall. But she is alive, and she cannot pretend that she has no duty to them, and even in the direst moments of her imprisonment, she has never been so afraid.
They brought clothing and supplies, and at last she is permitted some of the things she has been denied: she is given a knife to eat with, and a belt, and riding-gear. She looks, as they ride into the courtyard, almost the woman she was before the war: she is tall and fair and she sits upright in the saddle of a milk-white warhorse, her chin raised and her long golden hair fluttering in the August breeze. But there is an emptiness behind the grey eyes that fix themselves on some imagined point, and her hand clutches tightly to the horn of her saddle, the mark of a shackle half-visible on her wrist, and, inside, she is nothing the same.
She does not dismount when they draw to a halt. She barely seems to have realised that they have stopped at all. It is with the slowness of one moving through a dream that at last she turns her head, looking uncomprehendingly at the small party who have left the palace to meet them.
"They will follow me here, as like as not." Her voice feels rusty, alien on her tongue. It is the voice of the old Éowyn, who had never knelt with her head bowed and called herself whore and slave. It is the voice of a woman who expects to be taken seriously, coming from the mouth of one who has grown to expect mocking laughter. It is the voice of a Queen, and she is not Queen; she is not sure she is even human any more.
She wants to scream. She wants to say: Kill me or leave me to the wolves, but do not ask me to be Éomund's daughter now. She is dead, the Lady Éowyn is dead, and all is lost. Do not look at me as though I carry hope; I have none even for myself. She wants to say: I cannot offer you alliance, I cannot offer you help, I can offer you nothing at all. But there is no other Lady Éowyn, and she is needed, all the same.
"They will follow me," she repeats, and her hand winds tighter in the reins, her nails digging into her palm. They are longer nails than she would choose. It has been a long time since she has been trusted with either work to keep them short for, or with scissors. "Are you ready, if they come?"
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Date: 2025-09-26 12:55 am (UTC)Éowyn's fingers tighten, gripping Glinda's hand until her fingertips dig into the skin between the knuckles, so tight it must begin to hurt. She whimpers softly against Glinda's mouth, and there is nothing else, there was never anything else, but this moment: this press of tongue on tongue and skin on skin, this warm and writhing comfort, this wildness underneath. She must forget that there was ever any other moment, any other hand tracing her cheek, any other mouth devouring hers. She must forget that anyone else has ever called her beautiful.
Her eyes, which have screwed tightly closed, open again, seeking Glinda's face at far too close a distance. Her hand keep moving between her thighs, mechanical in its work, ruthless in its intent: stoking the fire in her belly, raising the ghost of a fearless woman. But fear has returned, creeping in through the space between ragged breaths: an old fear, the one that consumed her when they first met, that all this is only a dream. She squeezes Glinda's hand tightly, and tries to remember the solidity of the moment as the cliff-edge rises inexorably up to meet her.
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Date: 2025-09-27 11:21 am (UTC)It takes an effort to draw away, but Glinda does, trying to control her breathing and the desire leaping inside her. She wants to kiss Éowyn again - oh, how she wants to! - and she wants to touch her lover, too, to explore her body with hands and mouth. It is almost painful to resist, but if it is what she ought to do for Éowyn's sake -
"I am here, dearest," she murmurs instead, smoothing her thumb across the arch of Éowyn's cheekbone. "Look: it is only me." It feels as though her body is almost vibrating with the effort of not pressing herself against Éowyn, not kissing her, not letting her hand slide down to caress her lover's shoulder or breast or stomach. The heat coiling inside her is becoming insistent once again; she wants Éowyn to touch her almost as badly as she wants to touch Éowyn. But more than anything else, she wants to see Éowyn find her own pleasure - to have a moment entirely relaxed, full of nothing but bliss. And so she keeps her gaze on the other woman's eyes, and stays just where she is, and even manages a smile.
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Date: 2025-10-03 01:12 pm (UTC)She can say none of it. All that comes out is a low, shaking moan, and the sinews of her neck stand out like whipcords as she arches her head back, her eyes still fixing on Glinda. The need inside her is a separate thing, both alien and familiar, shivering and pulsing like a lightning-storm, sending tendrils of tight need up through her chest and down into curling toes.
Only you. Glinda is here, sliding in and out of focus, kind blue eyes and parted lips, and her hand is warm against Éowyn's cheek. There is need in her look, a tension that cries out for touch; but she does not touch, for Éowyn's sake. She holds herself in abeyance, and it is enough to prove that Éowyn is not helpless here, that Glinda is hers as much as she is Glinda's. Only you. Only me. Only us.
She comes with a strangled, raw-edged cry, shaking like grass in the wind, bucking and arching and, at last, falling back against the covers panting and flushed. Her hand slackens in Glinda's, but does not let go. For a moment, just a moment, the tension lifts from her face, all else forgotten, and she is young again: a woman of five-and-twenty, whose face is soft if not gentle, robbed of its armour.
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Date: 2025-10-06 06:53 pm (UTC)It is the next moment that utterly takes her breath away: the sight of Éowyn relaxed, content, allowing herself to enjoy something fully even if only for a very little time. Even asleep she has not looked so vulnerable, so young and tender, and Glinda finds herself near to tears. She blinks them back hard, bites at her own lip - but she is smiling again by the time Éowyn seems able to focus on her once more.
"Sweet Éowyn," she says softly, "oh, my dearest," which means very little but carries a world of warmth and affection in the tone. Gently she reaches out to smooth back the hair plastered to Éowyn's forehead with sweat; gently she traces her fingertips down her lover's neck to her collarbone, careful not to stray too far. Her other hand is still in Éowyn's grasp, and Glinda is not about to let go; instead she squeezes Éowyn's hand, and offers her another smile, and marvels at what she has just witnessed.
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Date: 2025-10-16 06:55 pm (UTC)"You are a wonder," she whispers, her voice still raw-edged and hoarse, and sinks back against the pillow. Her eyes close, despite herself, warm comfort opening the gates for the months - years - of built-up weariness. Her free hand, still slick with her arousal, fumbles clumsily to draw Glinda down against her, pulling her close. "You are a salvation."
And if that does not make perfect sense, or if it is too big a claim to place on a woman who - in truth - she still knows so little, then she is past caring. For this moment, at least.