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When she first raises sword to bleed, she is seven summers old and her mother has been dead for two.
When first she raises sword to maim, the Orcs have bled her sister and her one comfort is dying in her arms. Father, gone with his grandfather’s sword, has yet to return, and her sister is dying.
The black-bleeding sword of Orcish make is heavy and crude in her small hand, and she had hesitated for but a moment, but the moment had been enough and her sister had dug the kitchen knife deep into the Orc’s eye. Deep enough, that he plunges his own deep within her chest.
Her sister is dying in her arms and she wants to scream, but screaming will draw the army’s attention, and she has not enough ire left but for the one that is dead in her kitchen.
“Father will come, do not worry,” she says and she is too young to know such words; to keep worry from her sister’s cooling brow, and her sister is weeping and so very frightened, and she can do nothing. The sister who has never been frightened, now weeps and bleeds in her arms, and she can only scream.
Her hands are slick with Orcish blood, slick with her sister’s blood, and she cannot aid her; cannot halt the blood and her sister is long dead when her father enters and she has yet to let her go. Her small hand is cold in hers and the Orc smells foul, and yet still she does not let her go, not until Father kneels and holds her sister’s face in his hands.
She does not let go until Father tells her, until he pries her fingers from hers, and until he beckons her onward with only a glance.
“She will be laid at rest, my daughter, and we shall move onward to Minas Tirith; we shall remember her and cherish her, yet we will wander on.” He says and his finger is at her chin and he grieves.
“I do not wish to go,” she whispers, her hands clasped in his larger one, to keep her from grasping at her sister’s.
“I know; yet go we must. The borders have fallen; the Orcs have claimed all with their fire, and we must go.” He says, and he holds her sister in his arms as if she were but a babe still, and he wanders out the door. He does not wait. He does not turn, and she runs on bare feet to lay her eyes upon the devastation of home.
Torches and fire-arrows have set the cottages alight, and they burn as blazing beacons in the gloom, and the walls have fallen as splinters about the gates; their home has not survived, yet has not quite caught fire yet, yet burn it will, for the fire is fast and she is so very young.
“Father! Where do we go?” She calls after him, but he does not answer; he marches with her sister in his arms toward the gaps made by the fiends, and he steps past them as if though they were mere roots upon the earth. As if the dead of their home are mere bones and not ones who once danced and loved and sang beneath the sun.
Father marches, and she can do little but follow.
~
They enter Minas Tirith as haggard ghosts; her nightdress torn and dirtied from days upon the road and the soles of her father’s shoes worn down. Her father does, perhaps, seem better, with a soldier’s brow and a bitten scowl, yet the fires have aged him greatly and his feet are as bare as a babe’s.
He had, once she had sat down by a stream and not moved, washed her feet and kissed her face, urging his last daughter to go further, to wander past the borders of home, yet, instead, she had wept and wailed into his neck until the sun had passed its course and the moon stayed. He had carried her, this last daughter of his, in his arms toward the White City; toward where so many others fled and has yet to weep himself.
He wanders still when she falls asleep and wakes up, when she wipes her dry tears upon her nightdress and curls her fingers into his hair. He does not let her go until they rest; until they reach the city to where they march, and she wonders, tired and young, if perhaps this is as soldiers march; if they march as stoic pillars of stone and salt.
When they enter the city, she walks through the gates unaided; with only her teeth still bloodstained and her clothes being the last she has of home. Her father is greeted; known and respected, and she follows as his little ghost; the last reminder he has of home, and they are, all too soon to her, before the Steward.
She has only heard of him; of the good and the just. Of his wife, the lady of his heart, who was fair and kind before her end.
She had heard less of his sons; of the two boys who stand by his side, with the elder’s back as rigid as a young tree, while the younger crouches as a whispering bloom by the riverbed.
She is dirty; shrouded in a thin layer of dust and blood, yet still she stands before the Steward because her father is known, and his daughter has no one else and only follows as a dog, and the Steward does not look upon her.
The younger of the sons, while their fathers speak of honour and blood, spares her nary a glance, glancing to the high walls and the carved ceilings with boredom in his face; the elder, however, at first looked to only her father and payed her little mind, until her father speaks her name and he has now only eyes for her.
She is seven summers; he cannot be much older, yet there are handsome features soon to grow upon his face. His eyes on her casts the doubts from her mind, for he seems so sure yet unafraid; proud, yet regal. His eyes, grey as stone, soften perhaps when greeted by a tired and dirty child, or it is simply a trick of the light; and, rather than meeting his eyes, her own are drawn to the silver and white horn upon his side.
The boy, not yet a man grown, is all too proud to jut the hip forward and allowing the silvered horn to catch the light, and she has nary seen such beauty in all her life! For it is truly beautiful! White bone and wood and the purest of silvers she has ever seen!
The look upon her face must surely show her awe, for when she looks upon his face he is laughing and she finds that it is a good laugh.
~
There is a large bronze tub prepared for her; larger and hotter than any she has bathed in before, and she almost cannot climb over the side had it not been for the stool. The water smells of rose and clover; the maids aiding her changes the water thrice, as it grows dark by filth and grime and runs red with blood; her hair, tangled as bramble, falls as a wet blanket upon her back.
When she is dry and her hair is combed, her father brings her a tunic of green and black, hastily prepared for a girl of her size, and her hair trails wet about the stone floors.
“How long shall we stay?” She asks, when he cinches a belt about her waist and he, for a moment, does not speak; “when will we go on?”
“We remain here, within the White City, for I have sworn my pledge before the Steward and unto our people.” He says when he looks upon her, and she brushes wet hair from her cheek; “then I shall pledge as well.”
“No, my daughter; you shall not.”
“Yes! I shall!” He grasps her shoulder to lead her to the beds, where he seats himself before her to braid the tangles by her temples; “you, my fierce star, will remain within, and you shall wait for the day when you can hold the sword without cutting your fingers to the bone.”
“But, I have! I wielded the blade as you had shown me! My hands have held blood!”
(“i have killed,” she does not say.”)
Father pauses, the length of a braid in his palm. He ties it off, curling the braid to the crown of her head; ”when you can carry grandfather’s sword above the stone unaided, then I shall grant you leave to wield a blade in battle.”
She hops off the chair with her borrowed tunic and her half-done hair, and she grabs for the sword leaned against Father’s bed; Father smiles, the very same one he wielded when first he granted her a simple iron sword and she had struck the blunt edge against her sister’s shins and laughed as loud as a Wolf.
The sword, much too long and much too heavy for her growing body, tips precariously as she grasps the pommel with her young hands; she dares a look upon Father, who only nods.
She cannot quite stand as she has been taught, but she grasps the sword with both hands and carries it upward with a bend to her back.
The sword, old and sharp, lifts but little above the ground, barely passing the bend of her toes. She bends further; Father smiles wider.
”Very well then, my fierce star; on the morrow.”
She almost stabs through her toes.
~
Her helm is much too large for her, yet it was the smallest the armoury had and so Father ties the straps tight beneath her chin and she grumbles in response, while trying to fit her hands around the pommel of her blunt sword and finding them much too small.
Father’s eyes are serious; grieving for the daughter that grows up before him, yet there is the faintest curve of a smile, and his palm easily cradles the side of her face as if she were still a babe and not near a woman grown.
The Steward’s son laughs; his armour is a bit too small, as if he is between growths, and he leans his sword carelessly against the sand, leaning against it, as she approaches them; he is not their trainer, and neither is Father, but she still stares, hard-eyed, upon the young tree that sways before her.
The sword is light, yet short and her shield is but a barrel-lid, and she tilts her head as she stares upon him; there is a fierce pride, even now, behind his silver-grey eyes, yet more of it is mirth for she must look ridiculous. Even she would admit it herself.
Lifting a foot, leaned against her blunt sword, she kicks out; the boy’s sword disappears beneath the force of her kick, landing him on his arse in the dirt. His fellows laugh; she laughs.
He wipes his hands on his chest, before he too, laughs.
~
For days upon weeks upon months, she wields Grandfather's sword as a warrior born; even as she shatters a vase and trips Father into the beds; even as awakens in the nights with blood upon her hands that only she can see.
Grandfather’s sword; Father’s sword; forged by the blood of untold evils, gleams in the dark as the very last star, and yet still she weeps into Father’s arms; yet still, she glowers at Boromir as he boasts and grasps his sword as though he were born with it.
Perhaps she is envious; perhaps there is something dark even within her, yet she finds that it all pales when she tries to remember her sister’s face and finds that it falls away as simply as any distant dream and her drawings of coal and soot fall short.
Her sister dies a second time.
~
She holds nary a memory to Mother’s death but that of fury, and her faceless sister visit her every night, and so perhaps it would not be quite so surprising that Father’s death is not so silent; is not elderberries and streaked silver; that he falls so very far from home that his corpse does not return to Gondor; that he lays beneath a starless sky of endless dark, fore’er enshrouded without that which he told her so many stories of.
When the men return with only Grandfather’s sword and Father’s emblem, they bury him with the wrap of braids of her sister’s and hers and Mother’s. They bury him, and leave her behind.
It is Faramir that finds her in a grove beyond when the mourning horns sound and the rains fall heavy; dragging Boromir behind as a petulant child, yet it is Boromir whom she allows closest; it is Boromir that untangles the last braid Father ever did, and it is Faramir that allows her to smile, and it is Boromir that twists her hair into Father’s braid.
She weeps then, deep into Boromir’s neck. They never again speak of it.
~
“Shield up! Shield up, Faramir!” He calls from across the field from where she herself spars, and even when she does not spare a glance toward them, Boromir’s steps are fast and hard against the earth, nonetheless. Unmistakable, and the very sounds that she attunes herself to.
“Shield up,” he says again, raising the boy’s shield up to his breastbone, almost to his cheek, and Faramir, young and none too experienced, stares with his wide eyes.
She thanks her partner, wiping her hair from her face as she stares toward the brothers, where Boromir has grasped Faramir about the head, looking at the boy with a gentleness never yielded to soldiers.
“Keep your shield up, or I’ll ring your head like a bell,” he says, and taps the side of Faramir’s too-large helm with his training sword, tousling his hair as he steps back. Faramir, fierce as a fox, bites his tongue and nods.
She does not quite know when her eyes upon Boromir, as the elder boy now shrugs his arms loose and parts his legs, turned from the need to prove herself into the buckling of her knees; she does not know when every moment was spent attuned to her oldest friend; to the boy who had taught her to drink ale so that matron never wondered, or who raced her through the stream into the glade beyond.
When, o when, such things did turn far from simple, she could not truly say, yet regret them she did not.
~
“Why would you not have me?”
He raises his head from where she comes; dusk turns the air cold, and the light through the branches of the apple tree filters upon her face; she is ethereal.
To him, she has always been ethereal; even as a sweated recruit, as a biting child. To him, she holds all that Gondor could one day be.
“I would have you here,” he returns, and she steels her jaw, her eyes sharp as flint. Her father’s sword hangs as a reminder upon her hip; yet in her slip she looks but a girl.
“Why? Would it not be better, were I by your side?” He raises to her, his hands raised as if she were but an agitated hound, but she does not relent; “neither you or I are unaccustomed to battle! Have we not fought countless battles together? Have we not battered the Orcs times innumerable? Why would you not then have me by your side, when that is where I belong?”
She steps closer to him; “I would follow you into the deepest Shadow itself, yet you would cast me aside now? Now, when we have but mere battles before we drive the Shadow out? The great host is gone; these are but stragglers.”
“Which is why I would keep you here! The battles have been fierce, yet now they are but stragglers; I will gather the men, and the Shadow will be removed from our corner of this large a world!”
“Then let me aid you! Let me follow you!” She is close now, bending her knees to look further into his face; “no,” he says, his head shaking. She shakes her own in turn, incredulous.
Her beauty is devastating.
“You are precious to this keep; I would not remove you from it now, when—,”
He pauses, something fierce churning in his gut, as he turns away from her; his hand finds his hair. The apple blossoms sail as snow; as something promised.
“What then are not you to me?”
It is but a whisper; sharp, yet numbed, and she looks almost frightened when he turns back to her; when his eyes find hers and hers are welled with tears.
Her lips tremble, opening and closing as she searches for words that will not come; “I beg forgiveness,” she says, once all else has failed her.
“For what?”
“For what I wish to say; you need not answer. You need not acknowledge my words, for I would but follow you long past the age of Men.”
The apple blossom gathers in her hair; upon the hem of her tunic, stitched by her careful hand. She no longer weeps; the tears had been but bitter.
“I love you.”
The words are spoken, not whispered, as if rehearsed for a long time, and she meets his eyes as staunchly as she would meet her foe, yet he is not her foe. Her words punch the breath from his lungs and the thoughts from his head, and he can but stare at her.
“You need not answer; for I will leave and ne’er again speak of this; yet should your pride prove your fall, then I would but have you know my truth; that I love you. Devastatingly, wholly; and I will not take them back, for they are as true as the stars above and the deepest roots below.”
He breathes, at last, before a choked laugh escapes; “that is why I would have you remain.”
“Because I love you?” She asks, her voice thickening in grief; he approaches, shaking his head. He grasps her hand, even as she despairs and moves, and he presses the back of it to his lips. Something akin to a sob escapes her.
“Nay; because I love you.”
“Truly?” Her eyes are wide and bright.
“Ne’er have I lied to you, and ne’er shall I.”
“Then why may I not aid you? These foes are but stragglers; gone before the setting of the sun.”
“You, I would have at my back through every battle; yet for this I would have you here, with those that cannot fight; guard them, as you would guard my back.”
“Then swear; that you will return to me unscathed; that I did not bare my heart to lose you.”
The kiss is chaste; a firm press of lips to the corner of her mouth, that she turns to return before he draws back, yet she looks breathless. He presses his forehead to hers.
“I need not swear; for to you, I would always return.”
~
The host returns; battered and bruised and bleeding, and she flees the sanctity of the healers when first the horns of the gates sound.
She is fast; quick upon the pale stone as she runs toward the bailey, where the returned gather and where all others from the wards head; to heal, to reassure. All others gather to aid, yet her eyes search only for him.
She passes throngs of people; bleeding, weeping, hands clasped and kisses pressed and the enemy pushed back; for now, the Shadow does not loom quite so large and she quickens her pace with her hand still on Father’s sword and another grasping at the cloak about her shoulders. The moon gleams as polished silver, and her blood is loud in her ears.
He stands, hands clasped upon shoulders and a rueful smile upon his face, when she rounds the bend; his hair blows to the wind as the bough of a great tree, and his back is rigid with the unnamed.
“Boromir!” She calls, and he turns at her call; he smiles and it splits the young night as the first rays of sunlight through a great storm; she rushes forward, hopping past the last steps leading down to the outer courtyard and he barely has to take another step before she has him embraced within her arms.
Her speed lets her leap, and she knocks her forehead into his cheek with far too much force, yet Boromir only laughs as he catches her; as he wraps his arms about her and allows her leap to let him step away; in their force, he spins them upon the gravel as she presses herself within the warmth of his body; this body that she has known longer than the sun’s warmth.
“Boromir; Boromir; Boromir!” She says, his name fairer than any prayer she has ever spoken, and he responds in kind; her name uttered as grace; as truth. He smells of sweat and war and mud; the foul stench of Orc upon his armour, and the copper of their kinsmen, yet it is him, and she can but press herself closer to him as she turns her nose into his hair as she speaks his name into nothing but breath.
“Did I not tell that I would return? That I would not leave you here?” He says into her hair, as the din of tired soldiers fades to a soft hum; as his nose is but filled with her scent of clover and rose; of blood and herbs.
She does not answer, only speaking; “I love you; I love you; I love you,” as if perhaps the words could disappear into the night, and he laughs again; soft and rumbling, as he presses his nose further into her hair to whisper; “I love you; I love you.”
When they part; when she laughs past tears of relief and grasps his face between her hands, he can but return her gaze with the ferocity of the sun and press a kiss to her lips.
It is not the kiss beneath the apple blossoms anew; it is not naïve; not a quick press of lips against the corner of her mouth as if afraid of what is to come. The kiss, pressed to her salt-stained lips as his are chapped and dry, is any and all where, within, rests naught but promise.
~
”Have you come to my aid?” She asks, bending her head against the tub to look upon him. He approaches, upside down, with a shadowed smile upon his face.
“Or have you come to share? Beware, the water has cooled.”
“Nay.” He says, even when he dips his hands below the surface of the water; the grime of road-dust and sword oil. He pinches the flesh of her breast, and she jolts in the water.
“Then begone, you foul Man!” She jests, and he laughs as she throws the washcloth toward him; it misses, barely, and the suds collect about his hair as flakes of snow. She, too, smiles, as he soon enough catches her chin between his fingers, drawing her toward him for a kiss.
“A kiss will not make me forgive thee,” she says against his lips, and he smiles before stealing another.
“Then I shall have to try harder, for here I am to, yet again, bid thee farewell!”
She draws back with a frown; “farewell? What do you mean?”
Boromir is silent for a moment, the suds dampening the hair of his scalp; “I leave for Osgiliath, and from there I shall follow the dream.”
“The dream? My Boromir, you said you would not!”
“And yet Faramir has had the dream times again.”
“Then, why not send Faramir?”
“My heart; Faramir is yet still young.”
“Young? He is but five years younger.”
“And thus, I would bid him stay in Osgiliath; I ride to persuade him thus.”
“And what can I say and do to persuade you to not go? To remain here with me?” Boromir catches the wet hair at her temple, soothing it as he does not look into her eyes.
“There is naught to say or do; I shall go to Osgiliath and onward to Imladris – Rivendell as Father tells it – and I shall find the sword that was broken.”
“There is never simply naught; all has cause, what then would mine be if not to tell you not to go? If to tell you that where’er you wander I shall follow?”
“The journey is long.”
“And my father is dead; naught else but thee bind me to these walls! I will go where you go!” She says, and now she stands, bare and soaked by rose-scented water. She steps out, deliberately soaking the tunic of his armour, and he aims to catch her hand yet she is faster, snaking an arm around him to the towel upon the bench.
“And would I not walk freer, knowing that you are safe? Here, where the Shadow has no hold?”
She turns to him, the towel to her front; “the Shadow has claimed so many of our kith and kin; I would have it take no more. I would have it hold no dominion here, and if you follow the dream to Sauron’s bane, then follow you I shall!”
His hands, again, fall upon her face, his thumb tracing the slope of her nose and the sweep of her brow; “what would befall me, were you not with me,” he murmurs and she walks forward into his space, claiming his hands with hers; “you would be long gone beyond where I can follow; had you left without telling, I would have yet still followed. The distance means little.” She presses a kiss to the side of his nose, and he smiles as he closes his eyes.
“Then, on the morrow, we ride for the seat of the Elven lord; for now,” he says as he kisses her with fervor, “I shall have thee.”
She laughs into the kiss.
~
Faramir does not take their leave with gentleness, even when the dream has festered as an old wound. Even promises of return does not sate the flaring anger, and they leave as such; as all the Shadow claims.
(when his men bring forth the cloven horn, Faramir, brother of Boromir, tucks the pieces to his breast and weeps.)
~
Aragorn does not look much as the king of old she had so long imagined, yet he stands as tall and rigid as an elder tree; frightened to the bone, yet refusing to bend, when far too much is asked.
Boromir glowers, as is his wont; one of the hobbits laugh into their fist as she presses her thumb to the skin between his brows.
~
She is yet still upon the pebbled shore of the river when the world entire stops; silent but for a heavy, lonesome note for aid.
Drawing her sword, she crashes into the treeline, torn from that which she had long ago sworn herself to – that she swore herself she would never part from – and her call of his name rings out amidst the trees.
“Boromir! Where have you gone?!”
The mournful sound of the horn sounds again, and she crashes further into the brush, Aragorn and Gimli and Legolas following as harried shadows.
When, at last, she finds the place from where the horn sounds, Boromir – commander and captain, lover and friend – kneels upon the ground with the black-winged arrows as beacons from his breast, and the great Orc with its raised bow aiming another at his failing body and yet still he kneels amidst a fallen army of twenty Orcs.
With a cry, a shout of rage and defiance and all that she has learnt of her years, she cleaves the arm of the Orc, the bow clattering as brushwood into the earth, and the roar from the creature blends with hers.
She backsteps, twisting her hand until she draws up her sword into the Orc’s body, cutting into the thick bone of its leg, where fat and muscle and black blood traps it within itself, forcing her to take another step as the Orc swings a massive hand toward her; there are shouts behind her, Gimli’s axe arching toward the beast’s other side, catching its torso; tearing open the side of its ribs.
She falls with the Orc, her sword trapped in its body, but her name, softly whispered and choked, tears her away from it, the sword slippery by the blood of the Orc. She twists on the ground, her hair as wild as twisted bramble without her helm, and her name, again, falls from fast-paling lips.
She all but crawls upon her hands and knees until she falls back on her feet to run the last steps; to fall beside that which seemed so immortal.
Aragorn, grief-eyed and solemn, leans above him; above Boromir who has eyes only for her; for her, as she twists and falls with her hands about his face. The pallid skin, the thin sheen of cold sweat upon his brow that collects in his hair.
“Boromir; my Boromir.” She can only whisper, as his mouth says hers in turn, and he seems not entirely content, for his eyes fall away from her, to fall upon Aragorn, as his eyes fight to look upon them both.
And Aragorn, lost king, has such grief upon his face that she cannot help the pleas that fall from her mouth, and her hands skim the blood upon his breast; the arrows tipped with death, and he sucks the air through his teeth yet has only eyes for Aragorn. Has only words for Aragorn, and she is all but desperate for his eyes upon her. For her to see that which she has selfishly claimed to herself, as he had so selfishly claimed her to him.
She, in this moment, is yet still selfish, whereas her Boromir is pleading for the safety of their kin and kith; for the safety of Minas Tirith. Where she presses torn cloth of her tunics, of her sleeves, of the few bandages left in her pack, to his wounds; Boromir – her Boromir; for he does not belong to the rest, may he be hers eternal – speaks to Aragorn; of that hidden pleading of protection, of aid, of home, yet grasps her fraying fingers to his, bracing her fingers against his throat, where the steady thrum of his heart falls away into the silence and the dark.
(“i will follow you and thine for time eternal; to protect those that we cannot aid from the borders with our swords sheathed.” she says, when they are yet still young and the apple blossoms falls as snow; the same tree where first she tasted the fruit of youth and love. where first she loved.
“then so may it be.” he says, and his hand upon hers and his lips to her brow.)
“Return to me; my Boromir.” She says, when his lips still and Aragorn has kissed his brow and fallen back as a mournful and sworn shadow; that shadow which has followed her since first they met.
“My fierce love; Boromir. Do not. No.” She whispers, her mouth but whispers from his face, from the cooling skin of his chin, where the stubble of his beard scratches her lips.
“I beg you, do not.” She says, swiping the blood off his chest, staining her hands further with the red blood of that which is too dark and too late.
Half-lidded and silent, his eyes behold her; his eyes as silver, as a gull’s wing, as the glint of the sun upon the sea. She presses desperate kisses to his stubbled cheek, to that slow trail of blood from his mouth, and she presses her nose into the place beneath his eye as she whispers desperate prayers into his cooling skin.
“Do not go; stay! I beg you; do not leave me here alone; we swore to brave this Age as one! Do not leave me here.” She says, her desperate grief the only heat within the space between them, as Aragorn’s heavy hand falls upon her shoulder. He does not pull, he does not move her, yet still he stays and she cannot shrug his hand from her, as she begs and begs and begs.
When, at last, she spreads the cloak about his body, when her helm rests by his sword and shield; she wipes the blood, she presses a final, cold kiss to his brow and the river-fare is paid in blood.
She simply wishes that it did not have to be his.
The road goes ever on its winding path; where then, o then, falls the Age of Men?