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In the year 3018 of the Third Age, Arwen Undomiel, the Evenstar of her people, sailed to the Undying Lands. In the year 3019, the One Ring was destroyed, and Aragorn, son of Arathorn was crowned King Elessar Telcontar outside the gates of Minas Tirith, reuniting the great kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor. In the year 3020, he wed Lady Éowyn, the Wraithslayer, younger sister of King Éomer of Rohan. Faramir, son of Denethor II, was made Prince of Ithilien and retained the Stewardship of Gondor, becoming an invaluable ally to Elessar as he worked to establish himself as ruler.
The early years of the reign of King Elessar were glorious. The receding of the Shadow in the East brought brightness into lands marred by darkness for centuries. The people of Gondor, who had for so long cried out for the return of their King, were blessed with a good and decent man to rule them. He worked hard to restore the Kingdom to a level of glory befitting such an ancient and beloved land, and was aided in his efforts by his Steward, loved by all, and his Queen, loved by the people.
Soon, Elessar’s ambitions turned to the East and to the South. The lands that had once been Gondor’s by right had been stolen by tribes of barbarous men, men who had allied themselves with the Enemy in the War of the Ring. Desiring to give Gondor all that it deserved, the good King elected to ride forth to these lands and reclaim them for their rightful owners.
The King was beloved and trusted for his acts of valour in the struggle against the Enemy, and so was unopposed in his imperial ambitions. Unopposed by all except one.
The Lord Steward, Prince Faramir of Ithilien, was a man for whom war had little allure. In his past life, he had fought not for a love of war but for a love of Gondor, and saw that Gondor’s problems—lessened though they were by the labours of the King—would not be improved by the expansion of her territory. Privately, he expressed his concerns to the King, but privately he stood alone. In the first year of the Fourth Age, King Elessar and the Army of the Reunited Kingdoms rode forth to Harondor, intending not to return until the desert land was reclaimed in full.
Prince Faramir, whose flaws laid in his imprudent idealism and a predilection for self-enforced isolation, harboured a terrible secret. Since the moment Lady Éowyn of Rohan had stood before him in those uncertain days after the Pelennor, her arm bound in a sling and her face bruised and battered, demanding a room that faced Eastwards, he had been hopelessly, desperately in love with her. She had, for however unaware of it she may have been, been crucial to his healing. When he had learned the truth of his father’s betrayal, it had been by her stern and unwavering hand that he was pulled back from the brink. Thereafter, it was by her grace and her grace alone that he had maintained his connection to the world around him.
When she wed King Elessar, he swore that he would never marry. He was the last, broken son of a broken house, and he would not prolong his ancestral misery by postponing the end of his line. He would fulfil his duty to the King until the end of his days, and then he would pass to the Halls of Mandos hoping that he had restored some dignity to his kin.
In Minas Tirith, now Minas Anor, the Queen of Gondor (who did not hold power in her husband’s absence, for it passed instead to the Lord Steward) began her long months of solitude. Éowyn of Rohan was a woman not unaccustomed to the pain of loneliness and had, in her youth, been condemned to the miserable fate of watching her King uncle and country fall into a mean dotage at the hands of a servant of the fallen wizard. Éowyn of Gondor, older and more powerful, was no less a stranger to loneliness than her past self.
Her love for then-Lord Aragorn had been an earnest love, and it was her desolation at his rejection that sent her forth to the Pelennor Fields where she slew the Lord of the Nazgûl, and the promise of his love that had drawn her from her sickbed in the Houses of Healing and into the light of the new day. Their wedding had been a joyous occasion, a moment of triumphant happiness among many others at the end of the War. But Éowyn soon found that she had desired the love of Aragorn, not King Elessar, and that the life of a Queen was not the life she desired.
She was well loved by her people, who saw her courage and her strength and took comfort in it. In turn, she took comfort in them and became their champion, which was well for she lacked friends and allies elsewhere. The court of Minas Tirith did not take well to the young Rohir interloper, seeing her slaying of the Black Captain not as the single greatest martial act of the Ring War, but as an unwomanly and unseemly abdication of her duty to her people. They could not shun her, for she was the Queen, but they did not elect to make her as welcome among them as they did her husband. Her drawing rooms, when they were filled, were filled not by friends but by those who sought to curry political favour with her husband by appeasing her. She, who had grown up in the shadow of the fell manipulations of a snake, knew all too well what it was they aimed to do, but could do naught to prevent it, so weak was her power.
Her sole friend, the first friend she had made upon waking from her cry for death in the War, was Prince Faramir. When Elessar ruled from the White City, the fair Prince resided at the home of his forefathers across Anduin in wild Ithilien. In those days, she dwelt in seclusion in the Palace of Kings. When Elessar rode out to Harondor, the Prince returned by law to Minas Tirith, taking up the white rod and ruling on behalf of his King. Upon his arrival, the Queen’s life became, however briefly, less desolate.
Their friendship was based, beyond having a shared healer, on mutual admiration and respect. It was not in the ways of those of Gondor to argue with those who outranked them (and oftentimes those who did not) but Queen Éowyn had had little time for such mores, even when she had been simply Lady Éowyn. For Prince Faramir, who was little impressed by simpering acquiescence, the Queen was company unparalleled by any in the Kingdom, particularly since the death of his beloved elder brother.
They found many things to argue about: she, a true daughter of the Rohirrim, saw little of concern in what the Prince labelled the King’s ‘reckless expansionism’, while he, a son of Númenor, was slow to recognise the merits of the simpler lives led in Rohan. In the first few months of Elessar’s reign, their arguments were just that: arguments. As the months passed into years, their arguments, though rarely changed in topic, became something more. When the Queen argued for the single bed-chamber arrangements of the Royal Apartments in Meduseld, her words were not about efficiency or aesthetics, but a confession that it had been many months since the King had last visited her bed. When Prince Faramir complained about the valorisation of war, he was admitting that he wished that his character had stood up in her eyes to the character of the King.
King Elessar remained in Harondor for half a year. During those six months, the Queen and the Steward forged a harmonious accord in the White City. She told him she had grown bored with the indolence of a Queen’s duties, and he had taken it upon himself to show her how to manage the running of the City. It was, they both reasoned when challenged on it, just good sense. The Steward could hardly be expected to maintain the affairs of the City, the Kingdom, and his own princedom to a high standard of excellence if he could not accept assistance. The Queen took well to her new portfolio, enjoying it all the more for the opportunity it gave her to escape the oppressive walls of the Citadel and be amongst people who loved her for her bravery, not hated her for her foreignness. When, in the evenings, she returned to the uppermost echelons of the City, she was greeted with good conversation by the Lord Steward, who, with each passing day, pursued her counsel with greater and greater frequency.
In time, their conversations turned from the political to the personal. Both had been raised in homes where candour had been a liability, and so were equally restrained in what they revealed. At first, their speech lingered in the shallow: complaints about especially egregious lords, jibes about their pernicious wives. One month before the return of the King, when the Queen had been subjected to a particularly nasty castigation for her failure to yet produce an heir, she had sought out Prince Faramir to bear witness to her righteous and desolate anger.
The King returned and all was well. The City and realm had been well maintained in his absence, and Prince Faramir once again crossed the Anduin to his home in Emyn Arnen. In the daytime, the Queen returned to her solar, and in the nighttime, to her empty bed.
For a year, the King remained in Minas Anor, the southern border having been secured with some success. For a year, Queen Éowyn foundered, alone yet again but now haunted by the memory of the days when she had felt not quite so lonely and inert. The whispers in the court worsened. She was barren, they said, because she had been touched by the Black Captain. A suitable punishment for a deserter, but not a punishment deserved by the people of Gondor, and not at the hands of the northern barbarian.
For months she endured the gossip with the silent temerity that had kept her alive under the tyranny of the Worm. Then the news came, at the second Mettarë of the Fourth Age, that conflict had broken out in Harondor once more. The Haradrim had pushed through to the River Poros and now threatened the south of Ithilien. The King, eager to establish the might of his crown, prepared to ride to war once more.
The Queen, who had been told enough times that she was nearing the end of her child-bearing years to believe it, but not enough to pin her self-worth to it, swallowed her pride for her duty to her country. She sought out a private audience with her husband, and spoke the words to him that she had hoped she would never need speak aloud. She did not ask for his love, she did not ask him to turn away from Undomiel, but she did ask him to give her the life she deserved. She could be his Queen and his wife without having his love — that, she had made her peace with long ago — but she could not bear to live a life marked out as a failure.
King Elessar, who was ever a good and honourable man, and who loved his Queen as he loved his people, saw sense in her logic. In the warm spring evening, he took her to bed, and did so every night until, a fortnight later, he marched through the gates of Minas Anor to the far south.
The Prince returned, and with unpracticed elegance they fell into their old routine, she managing the City and he managing the realm. She listened with pleasure of the progress of the rebuilding of Ithilien, imagining (for she had never seen it) the great green glades and verdant fens, the cool, clear burns and the ancient, soaring trees. The house at Emyn Arnen, finally completed, now had a guest house fit for the Queen and King, should they ever desire to pass through. With her hand on her belly — a belly that had not grown or curved since the King’s departure — she teased Prince Faramir about the emptiness of his house, how he ought to fill such a magnificent place with a doting wife and lively children. He demurred, dodging the question with an artful grace whose implication she knew well.
The war persisted, and Steward and Queen did their duty to their King. In spite of the acute demands of yet another extended conflict, Queen Éowyn found herself happy. She rose early and well rested, spent her day among her people, making tangible impacts on the lives of those who she had sworn herself to protect, and returned each evening to the care and company of Prince Faramir. They had made a habit of meeting on neutral ground, taking their dinner and their late night conversation within the state rooms of the Tower of Ecthelion to safeguard against any accusations of impropriety. As the weeks passed and the strength of their working relationship was reestablished, they met instead in the Queen’s apartments, which were both more comfortable and more private.
There, as a levee breaking after a terrible storm, the personal flooded out. She admitted her desperation to fulfil her duty and bear the King’s heir; he confessed his indignant anger that the King had provoked a war with the Harardrim it now seemed they could not win. She spoke of missing her brother, of her guilt at her actions in the war, he spoke of the night terrors that plagued him, of the knife and of the blaze.
In the third month of the King’s campaign in the south, when Éowyn could deny no longer that she had not yet fallen pregnant, and found that the thought filled her with relief, not desolation as she expected, she knew there was something more she needed to admit to herself. It had been a long time since she desired to be a Queen, but now she desired another man’s love.
She did not retreat from their friendship, wary though she was of her feelings, she would not deny herself that small glimmer of happiness. Instead, she proceeded with care, reminding herself that her highest duty was to her King, and that nothing would ever get in the way of that. They continued to work together, they continued to break bread together, they continued to rely on one another to chase away the sorrows they could not reveal to the rest of the world.
By the sixth month of the southern campaign, when resources were running thin, energy thinnest of them all, her self-restraint began to slip. After far too many glasses of wine, she told him, in grave and breathlessly honest detail, of the dreams she had of the Worm, of the untameable terror she felt waking alone to a cold bed and a silent room. He told her that his nights were the same, but that he burned inside and out, subjugated by the memory of his father’s pyre. The fire was warm, the drink was strong, and her duties tiring. Without meaning to, she fell asleep in his arms.
For the next few weeks, he conspicuously kept his distance, claiming immovable commitments in the evening and locking himself away in the office of the Steward in the day. At first, she understood and respected his choice, it was better for them both that her indiscretion be forgotten. She was the Queen, he the Steward, her marriage, though unhappy, was not loveless, and it was certainly not to him.
As the weeks passed, she felt his absence like the loss of a limb. Her duties weighed heavily on her shoulders, her sorrows even more so. If he did not love her, then she would survive: she had learned to live without the love of men; but if he did not wish to be her friend, she was not sure she could carry on.
In the eighth month of the King’s campaign, she confronted his Steward. She found him, with little concern for the rules of propriety, in his private apartments in the Palace of the Stewards. Her lapse in etiquette she refused to apologise for, he ought, she insisted, to view it as an endorsement of their friendship and her trust in him that she felt comfortable enough to make mistakes, when she had not, since the day she arrived in Gondor as its Queen, countenanced social errors on her behalf. Their friendship was borne of their unique circumstances, but that did not mean it was based on circumstances alone, she told him. Their friendship existed because his companionship made her life better, and because she knew that he also yearned for a friend to ease the passage of his days.
Standing in front of the crackling fireplace, her hands placed firmly on her hips, she stared him down until he responded. For the stretch of a small eternity she awaited his answer, neither blanching nor shying away from her challenge. She had faced down death, she had faced down life, nothing could scare her.
Except he found a way. He always found a way. He was the sole man for whom her expectations never applied. No matter how many long hours she spent with him, he always surprised her. Instead of apologising to her and begging for her forgiveness, or announcing sombrely and in his self-martyring tone that their companionship could continue no longer, he looked at her long and hard.
And then he told her he loved her.
She had hoped for it — hoped in the dark and wild part of her heart that could never belong entirely to Gondor, entirely to the life of a Queen. She had hoped for it, but never expected it.
He returned immediately to the self-sacrificial nobility that had defined his entire life. He insisted that he would not do anything to bring disgrace to his King, that he would not bring disgrace upon her. He listed excuse after weak excuse, even as she pulled loose the fastenings on her gown, letting it fall to the floor beneath her, before lifting her shift up and over her body, letting that too fall to the ground.
His mouth was hot and desperate on hers, and when he fell to his knees before her as if in prayer, she was no longer the Queen of Gondor, becoming instead the blissful Lady of Ithilien. In his arms and in his bed, they chased away her sorrow and her loneliness, until her voice came hoarse for her joy.
In the morning, she shed tears for the mistakes of her life, and he dried them with soft kisses and softer hands. She returned to her life, and he to his, but in the silent watches of the dark night, in those hours that belonged to none but them, their lives became one. For two months they shared a life in those stolen moments, and for two months there was happiness.
When the King returned, the bitter sea of reality crashed like a tidal wave upon them. That failure that had haunted her for so long returned to haunt her with a vengeance, and the realm of Ithilien, which had been neglected for nearly a year, at long last saw its Prince returned to his seat. The Queen visited nightly her King’s chambers, and thereafter returned to her own, shedding undried tears into her bower-prison.
In the spring, the King received an invitation to visit Emyn Arnen, finally completed after many long, difficult years of construction. The King and Queen set out from Minas Tirith on a warm, sunny morning, so very different and yet so very similar to the one that had played a starring role in the Queen’s dreams since the end of the war.
Ithilien felt to her like the freedom she had never known, and in its rebuilt roads and homes, its protected forests and scoured hills, now almost entirely free of Orcs, she saw the love she wished for herself. In a different life, in a different time, she might have been like Ithilien: loved and brought back to life once more, as unrestrained as the breeze and the warmth of the sun that caressed her skin. Emyn Arnen was beautiful, and within minutes she felt the penetrating sting of her advice to its lord from many months ago. It did deserve to be filled with a doting wife and happy children, but the thought that it might happen and that she would not be the doting wife and the children not her happy children felt as if it could kill her.
The guest apartments at Emyn Arnen had but one bed chamber, and the King and Queen, unused to the arrangement, shared their bed; Éowyn stayed her tears, assuring herself that it only provided more opportunity to ensure she fulfilled her duty to King and Kingdom. On the third day of their scheduled fortnight visit, the King was urgently recalled to Minas Tirith. The Queen, in whispered tones, expressed that she did not wish to snub their host and the second most powerful man in the realm, and so offered to remain to see out the duration of their trip. The King, who was no fool but would not deny his wife the happiness that had been denied to him, assented.
The guest apartments at Emyn Arnen went empty for the trip, and the Queen knew happiness once more.
In the autumn, at an extravagant feast that welcomed the King of the Riddermark back to Gondor after a very long absence, it was announced that the King and Queen of Gondor expected an heir. The Queen had, against the expectations of her detractors, proved her worth. She was radiant in those hours, a woman coming into her beauty and her power, holding the future of not one, but two kingdoms within her very soul.
The child was born hale and healthy with tufts of raven hair, after a labour that saw the King not half as anxious as his expectations, and the Steward twice his. The King saw his heir, and loved him as he loved all his subjects, and loved the mother of his heir as a captain loves his soldiers. In the evening, when all had been shooed from the Queen’s chambers, the fair Prince of Ithilien found her and wept, for he loved his son and he loved the wife who would never be with a strength that could not be weakened by all the ages of men.