Work Text:
Emyn Arnen, Ithilien
March 3020
In early March, the rain finally abates. Sunlight, new and clean, pours through the thin canopies of the trees, where the lacquered leaves have yet to unfurl themselves. Éowyn begins to walk abroad from the hall at Emyn Arnen. At first she ventures not far from home; she walks only among the empty plots and terraces that Faramir has declared will become their garden. For now, though, they lie fallow, sodden from the winter rains and empty, save for a few unruly weeds. Éowyn turns quickly and returns to the hall. The empty gardens daunt her: how will her ungentle hands transform that dormant landscape into something flourishing; a place of life, and abundance, and color, and growth? She does not know.
The next day, she walks in a different direction. She crosses the low bridge to the south and traces the course of the creek for a while. She stares into the water, admiring its clarity, and the way it flows like translucent silk over the gray stones of the creekbed. She takes a deep breath and remembers to un-clench her jaw, just as Fauriel, healer of Minas Tirith, taught her to do. Then she wanders a while longer. When the sun approaches its zenith, she returns home.
The next few days proceed thus. Eventually, Faramir returns from his business in the White City. He brings with him a packet of seeds, a gift sent from Samwise of the Shire. He tells Éowyn that the seeds will beget a wine-colored variety of yarrow. Éowyn wracks her brain for knowledge of the plant; it has some medicinal use, she knows, but its precise purpose now escapes her. She doesn’t tell Faramir this, though. Instead, she nods gracefully and promises to write Sam a note of thanks. That night, she tucks the seeds into a box upon her dresser; she buries them beneath a tangle of unused embroidery floss. They rest there, secreted away beneath the multicolored strands. Thereafter, she forgets about them for a while.
By the end of March, the weather has warmed significantly, and rain, for the most part, remains scarce. Yet, Éowyn still avoids the garden beds, though she knows now that the growing season is full underway, and she ought to at least sow some seeds, before the soil dries and hardens under the warm sun of the south. Even so, she allows her feet to instead carry her father and father away from the hall; farther to the south and east, away from the empty gardens. She busies herself among the fair meadows, still in their springtime green, and among the ever waxing displays of wildflowers that sprout therein. She walks at length along the stream, gathering blossoms in the pockets of her dress; though, almost always, they are crushed and wilted by the time she returns home.
Another month passes much the same, until one day while taking their evening meal, Faramir asks her about the seeds. Had she planted them? Have they sprouted? He has not seen yarrow in the garden, he says, although perhaps the variety from the northwest might be different than those kinds which grow naturally in these hills, and it is possible that he missed it. He has not missed it, Éowyn confirms quietly. In fact, she has not planted it– or much of anything– at all.
He does not ask why, but the next morning, he rises from their bed early, and when she looks for him, she finds him walking quietly among the still-barren beds and empty terraces. The space is yet uncultivated, save for the few fruit trees which Faramir himself has ordered planted, and he himself tends. They offer sparse shade to the quickly drying earth. With shame, she informs him that the green shoots pushing up from the remaining plots are not of her sowing, but wild weeds, come of their own accord, without her intervention. She looks down at the inhospitable dirt; it is packed hard now, and dry, and will not willingly take new seed. She mumbles some apology, that she has missed the planting window. She tells him she knows he hoped for her to make a garden, and this she has failed to do.
But he takes her face in his hands and stills her words. There is no shame, no failure. The garden was never hers to make alone. The spring has been busy, with the moving of their household to Emyn Arnen; and with his business in the City, of which he is now mostly absolved. The spring rains may have gone, but the creek is perennial, and its clear waters can be diverted; the earth may be hard-packed, but even solid earth can be tilled; the equinox may have passed, but it is still only May, and many bright weeks of burgeoning sunlight yet lay ahead, under which any number of plants will grow to fullness.
And so they go together to Éowyn’s dresser, and they exhume the yarrow seeds from beneath the snarls of embroidery floss, and they have water brought from the stream, and they till unwilling earth until it unfolds into freshly corrugated lines and it is no longer inhospitable, but ready to accept something new. And then they tuck the seeds gently into the ground, and, together, they wait.