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If only a King had come, she says, loud and clear, raising her head to look straight into Mithrandir’s face.
Ioreth usually keeps her eyes downcast, focused on the dirt just a step ahead of her. They think that old age has made her blind, that her face is perpetually wrinkled from squinting. Their gentle pity and her nurse’s uniform are a perfect combination to make her invisible. Except that now she is pushing herself into the spotlight, fully aware of what it may cost.
Ioreth’s fellow healers look at her with surprise. All their lives she has been unremarkable, if, perhaps, a little more reclusive than most, preferring to spend her time in their chambers on the fifth level, in charge of keeping the apothecary well stocked. She is not their chief healer, and has never been the first choice of any nobleman – too old, too deeply steeped in lore of herbs and potions instead of surgeries and incantations. But when the war broke through their gate, she was the one to drag them onto the battlefield.
The others tried to refuse, to argue that their place was in the Houses of Healing, and their patients could be brought in from the field. She looked over her shoulder and spoke quietly, almost in a whisper, her accent stronger than ever. Our place is with the hurt and the dying.
They call her the Old Woman, and she answers. That is what Ioreth means in their tongue. It is similar enough to Sindarin that she did not find it difficult to learn. When they ask of her family, it is easy to mention a sister all the way in Imloth Melui. Her hand bears an old burn scar, she tells them that a kettle had tipped over and scalded her when she was just a girl, and they all cluck in sympathy. Sometimes she almost believes it herself.
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She had only slipped once before. It was the fault of the younger son of the lord of Minas Tirith, the one who was too clever by half and kept coming over to their Houses after his mother had died, and his father turned to stone, and his brother was sent away to learn the arts of war in Riddermark.
The boy used to study with Mithrandir every morning, but in the evenings he crept towards her apothecary, where a cup of herbal tea, liberally dosed with honey, awaited him on the fireplace, and his small hands were just right for sorting out the plants.
Ioreth always gave him work to do. She knew that burning need to feel useful, to feel like you belonged. It had once driven her to knock on the door of this very fortress when it had been little more than a low barrack encased in scaffolding. She had guessed that the Númenóreans had been more used to fighting than to masonry, so there would be no shortage of pulled muscles to treat, not to mention an occasional fall. Plenty of work for a traveling healer. They looked at her white hair and her wrinkled face, and called her Ioreth, and the name had stuck.
The boy eventually figured out who she was. One evening he came running towards her with an old manuscript in hand, where the exact likeness of her face had been drawn in the margin by Isildur himself, next to his words of gratitude for healing an infected stab wound. With a note that the face was that of Ioreth, the oldest of the healers of Minas Tirith. And a mention that the only thing for which she had asked him in return was a touch of the Ring.
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Ioreth held the Ring tight until she could no longer stand the smell that reminded her of the piles of corpses they had to burn back in the North. She put salve on her blackened skin and walked the battlements in moonlight, watching it slowly turn into a scar, pouring a little wine on the stones as a kind of remembrance. For Isildur, whom she had grown to respect, who did not have long to live, not since he had claimed the Ring for himself. For everyone killed in the war of the Last Alliance that made the lands barren for generations, and yet could not compare with the time when the iron fortress had been broken and the ground had run slick with blood of everyone Ioreth had ever loved.
She was not killed during the fall of Thangorodrim only because she had been away, coming back from a long journey to trade in secret with the Doriathrim. Those Elven refugees needed her plants and promised to teach their healing spells in return. Even though their lords had been at war, the healers had always had more in common with each other than with armies and generals, and Ioreth was by far the best at languages despite being one of the youngest healers in their House.
After Ioreth returned, nobody could call her young anymore. Her hair turned white on the long slow walk through the courtyards, moving every corpse on its back, looking for her parents, her sister, her fellow healers. She found them all. The wrinkles were permanently etched into her face during the night that she spent building the funeral pyres.
She still wonders if they would judge her as a traitor.
Ioreth had stumbled upon her first settlement of Men shortly afterwards, and was planning only to beg for food, but then she heard the moans of a woman in labor. She could not stop herself from knocking on the door.
The next day there was a line of townsfolk outside. They did not seem to care about her being half-blind, her glasses lost somewhere in the ruins of her former home, nor about her misshapen body. After all, they rarely survived to see the signs of old age.
Traveling from one village to another, slowly making her way East, Ioreth grew to love the Men, so fleeting, so short-lived, and yet so full of hope. Dedicating their lives to building kingdoms that only their grandchildren would get to rule, they were always so assured of the future, and she needed that assurance, after everything she had lost.
She did not come back. Not even when her old Lieutenant raised and broke empire after empire. Not even when he went to war with the country that now was her new home.
Yet Ioreth remembered all that she had learned in his operating theaters in Angband, and she heard his old inflections in her voice as she reminded her healers that in battle you always treat both sides, right after ordering them to follow her through the gate.
They could not save the King of Rohan, nor many others, but they could at least hold their hands and reassure them that they were not alone, in the end. Not like Ioreth’s family.
---
Now they may be celebrating victory, but the battle is still not over for her, not while the wounded are lying in the Houses of Healing, and there is one whose death would break her heart.
Ioreth remembers how Faramir guessed her true origin and slunk off to his chambers when she admitted that he was right. She had sworn to never lie to the kid, he needed one trustworthy adult in his life, so she told him of her past, thinking that she was dooming herself to torture and death with every word.
When the next morning Ioreth heard a knock on her door, she was expecting the Steward’s chief torturer, or simply a soldier with a sharp axe, if her life was not deemed to be worth an official sentence. But it was only Faramir, his arms full of linden flowers and a defiant smile plastered across his face. Ioreth took the flowers and told the boy to make an infusion against fever, and they have never mentioned it again.
Ioreth knows the herb they need to heal him, a weed that is quite common in these parts, but used to be so rare back in the North that it was worth its weight in gold. But Faramir is running out of time, and Ioreth cannot find any kingsfoil in her stores. She knows that they will have to send the soldiers searching for it, but what is the chance that they would listen to a doddering old woman? At least, Ioreth hopes, Elrond must have taught something of healing to his foster-son, who is now calling himself a King.
The hands of a King are the hands of a healer, she tells Mithrandir. He startles at some inflection of her voice. Could he be reading her mind? You can burn me later, but save him now, she thinks at him as hard as she can. Tell this King of yours to make his armies search for kingsfoil all across the bloody battlefield.
Only after Faramir’s fever is long gone does Ioreth realize that her accent could hardly have been the reason why Mithrandir looked so surprised. He must have known that the saying, before it became a proverb used by the country folk, had once referred to a Maia, not a King, and had been a common refrain among the Angband divisions.