Title And not to yield Author Lady Marshy Beta The matchless Half Elf Lost Pairing Faramir / Eomer Rating R (for violence and death) Warning Character deaths Feedback Would be welcomed Disclaimer Characters and settings borrowed from the late Professor Tolkien, in whose debt we all stand Archive I'm unlikely to say No, but please ask first Notes Dedicated to the "Oxford Posse", Brigantine, Fawsley, and Zoe, with thanks for their help, support, and friendship. One day I'll write something more cheerful for you, I promise. Summary What if somebody did take the Ring at Amon Hen? What if the King did return to the White City, but the Ring came with him? And what can one man do when all hope has gone? They had taken the Third Marshal at last, yesterday, at dawn... They had taken the Third Marshal at last, yesterday, at dawn. Third Marshal, King, Captain, Steward - titles mattered to neither of them any more. Éomer had fought to the end, summoning his last reserves as the guards paused for a bare moment to form a square about him. Even now, weakened by poor food and untreated wounds, a pure, blazing rage gave him enough strength to knock one to the flagstones with his bound hands, and, screaming defiance, gain ten yards on his captors, before one of the mounted guards spurred almost casually forward and sent him flying with a blow from the flat of a sword. Faramir watched. He’d had to watch, after being hobbled with chains and dragged to a balcony with a fine view of the courtyard moments after Éomer’s shouts and curses had faded at the end of the corridor. Not that the chains were needed, except to humiliate him, to drive home the victory of the enemy. The dart wound in his shoulder had been crudely treated, had healed, after a fashion, but the whole of his left side was weak, grew weaker by the day, and he could barely lift his left arm above waist height. He knew there were guards behind him, and underneath the balcony, but there was nothing they could do to him now that he cared about. They had forced him to come out here and witness this, and he knew that they wouldn’t kill him today, that they were keeping him for another day, for one last act in the drama. So Faramir yelled Éomer’s name at the top of his voice to carry over the rhythmic thumping of the guards’ pikes on the stones of the courtyard. Called out again and again, until his throat was raw, until he saw the dirty blonde head rise as Éomer, stunned and bloodied, was dragged up the steps of a square platform built in the centre of the courtyard. Ignored the slash of a guard captain’s staff across his back, as he shouted to Éomer, somehow made the young king’s eyes flare with life for the last time before he saw him thrown down at the feet of a massive Haradrim swordsman. The thumping of the pikestaves stopped, abruptly. The Haradrim took a step back, swinging the curved sword out and across his body, above his head, bracing his legs for the downstroke. His eyes snapped to another balcony, across the corner of the courtyard from Faramir’s, waiting for a signal. His voice almost gone, Faramir willed Éomer to look up again while he still could. He knew that Éomer could not see him, but that he knew where he was. In the last moment, as a golden silk handkerchief waved from the King’s balcony, Faramir cried out into the silence “For the Mark, Éomer! And for Gondor!” The sword swept. Faramir saw no more that day. He heard the thumping of staves begin again, the jeering and cat-calling from the invited crowd of Dunlendings and Corsairs over behind the barriers. And before his guards pulled him back through the balcony doors, he thought he heard a ripple of exotic laughter drift across the morning air. *************************** He would not weep for Éomer, for his friend, his fellow-warrior, his lover. Would they ever have come together, if the Ring had been destroyed? If Faramir, leading the surviving rangers despite his injuries, had not fought his way to where Éomer and the remains of the royal éored were making a last stand as the Rohirrim died in their thousands on the Pelennor? If by some bitter miracle they hadn’t somehow escaped into Ithilien and held out for month after month there, raiding supply columns before disappearing into the wilderness again? Until the last time, when they’d been betrayed, and the column knew they were coming. On his very first patrol in Ithilien, Faramir’s captain had told him that Henneth Annûn could be held by a handful of men against an army. So they ran, in pairs and small groups, for the hidden fastness. Less than a score of men, mostly rangers, made it back there, and when they did, they found the wells and streams poisoned, the shelters wrecked, the stores trampled and befouled. But still they fought for days, climbing higher, going further back into the caves, until they were trapped against a bare rock wall with no weapons, starving and weak with thirst, and the black tide broke over them. Faramir saw Éomer weep only once, when they were dragged out of the caves, and a Haradrim trooper had kicked one of the last Rohirrim to die out of their way like so much rubbish. Back in Minas Tirith their captors had with grudging mercies assured themselves that their prizes would not die, and then penned them up not in dungeons, but in separate bleak chambers hard against the outside wall of the city, with a bare stone corridor between them and a wide courtyard. Faramir didn’t know for certain that Éomer was still alive, until one morning he was roused from a fitful sleep by the sounds of a violent scuffle seemingly only yards from his door, and Éomer shouting his name and cursing his assailants as they beat him back into his cell. From then on, they called to each other whenever they could, risking a beating or a day without food. Not all their guards were brutes. An older, smiling Haradrim commander would come to see Faramir every few days, bringing good food and clean linens, and promising more if only Steward and King would swear public allegiance to the new King and his consort. Faramir would eat the food and don the fresh linen, but stay stubbornly mute until the Haradrim’s temper frayed, while in the next room, Éomer stood close to the wall and sang obscene Rohirric drinking songs at the top of his lungs, until the guards burst in, knocked him down and beat him bloody. Once the new King and his consort returned to the city, Faramir knew that they wouldn’t have long, that they’d perhaps be offered one last chance to swear allegiance. When the Haradrim commander made his own final effort at persuasion, Faramir laughed out loud, and Éomer spat at the man’s feet. After that, they were left alone. They heard the guard change more frequently, sounds of public commotion, of sawing and banging and hammering distantly in the courtyard. And then one morning trumpets blared from the tower rooftops and lookouts. In the course of that day, the guards dragged them each out of their cells for the rooms to be scoured clean, and when they were returned, there was water to wash in, and soap, and clean linens and breeches. And a little later, food better than they’d had for months, and even a flagon of decent ale. Faramir knew what this meant, that they might have no more than a day left. That night, when he heard the faint sounds of carousing from the guard room nearby, he risked calling out to Éomer. “Are we still agreed, my friend? They will ask you to swear one last time and then -….” Faramir stood pressed to the stone, next to an old fireplace where the wall seemed to be thinnest, and spoke as loudly as he dared. There was a long pause. “Yes, we are agreed. I will never swear allegiance to this traitor king and his whore of a consort. Faramir?” “Yes?” “I would be forsworn if I said I’d never been afraid in battle. But then I was a free man, on my feet, on Firefoot’s back. I had a sword or a spear in hand, and I could fight. What if the terror overmasters me now, at the end, when I can’t fight? I would not give their lying scribes the merest excuse to say that the last King of the Mark died a coward.” Faramir swallowed hard. “Éomer King, they will come for you first. They know you will not be forsworn. They will want me to see you at the last, in the hope that I’ll sign the declaration to save your life. My body is failing, Éomer, I cannot fight, but I will not sign. I will never sign, I will never promise, I will not betray you, or our people. Fight them, Éomer, if you can, fight them to the end!” And he dug his teeth hard into his lip to stop the shake in his voice. He wrapped himself in the cell’s thin blanket, and whispered and sang words of love and courage to his last lover through the stone until the dawn broke. *************************** One more dawn. While it was still more dark than light, he heard the bolts and locks of his cell rattle open. It was the Haradrim commander, still holding quill and ink, and the declaration ready for Faramir to sign. Faramir shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. The commander paused and nodded, pushing declaration, quill, and ink together into a pouch at his waist. Another guard clattered at the door and servants came forward with bread and ale, and a ewer of water for washing. “They told us you were cowards,” he said, looking steadily at Faramir. The commander’s voice, already low, dropped further. “The Horse-lord died bravely. You are no cowards.” He turned and took from his personal servant a folded shirt, putting it firmly into Faramir’s hands. And then he made a deep and sincere gesture of respect, his hand passing from brow to lips to breast, coming to rest on Faramir’s hands under the linen again, and pressing them firmly. “May your gods be with you this day,” the commander said at last. “Make your peace here, and quickly, for they will let you have none out there.” And he turned abruptly and was gone. The morning was cold. Faramir wondered if some of the surviving citizens of Minas Tirith would be allowed into the courtyard to witness their treacherous Steward go to his death. Perhaps that was why the commander had brought him a second shirt, that he would not shiver in the early light, and be scoffed at for a weakling and a coward? He threw the new shirt on the bed where he had lain unsleeping most of the night, stripped to the waist to dash the cold water over his face and neck and chest. Using the miserable blanket, he dried himself, pulled the old shirt over his head, and then reached for the new one, good thick plain linen. He shook it out to find the fastenings. Something small and bright clattered to the floor. Faramir was startled, halfway into the shirt before he realised something had fallen from its folds. He trod on it, blindly, and dropped to his knees, hands searching all around. It was a knife. Small, silver, beautiful, and quite lethal. Closed, it fit into the palm of his hand – with the press of a tiny boss on the handle it sprang open, a slender blade like the misericorde dagger Faramir had carried for years as a ranger in Ithilien, perfectly balanced and razor-sharp. The Haradrim commander had given him the means to make an end here, now – to avoid whatever horror and humiliation was waiting for him in the courtyard – for he knew that the knife was too small and light for him to make an effective weapon of it. It was an assassin’s blade, for the stab in the back, the slash to the throat. But what grudge did he have against the soldiers who guarded him? None. His hatred was for the creature who gave the orders, the one who had betrayed Minas Tirith, Gondor, Ithilien, Rohan – all of Arda. The commander had said he did not have long. He pulled the new shirt into place and laced it up, dragged the worst snarls out of his hair with his fingers, pushed his feet into the half-boots which were the last things left from his old ranger pack. Took a single swallow of the sour, thin ale in the flagon to rinse his dry mouth and spat it into the straw in the far corner. The knife was still on the blanket. He would not use it, neither on himself nor on the one unfortunate guard who might get close enough. But he would not leave it for the King’s creatures to find and trace back to the Haradrim commander who had at least treated them with harsh dignity. He pushed it down the inside of his right boot, where there had once been a concealed scabbard for a hunting blade. Now all he had to do was wait. Faramir could remember how he and his brother used to watch their father sit in judgement in the courts of Minas Tirith. He’d thought then how terrible it was even for a man guilty of a crime such as murder to be taken out and hanged before he saw the next new moon rise. But Boromir had asked him to try and imagine how much worse it would be for a man to wait and never know whether he had another day to live, or a month, or a year. And now he had to wait, for a few minutes, for an hour or two at most. His strength was waning: he could not fight like Éomer. There would be no-one to call his name and give him courage at the last. *************************** The trumpets blare. His last escort arrives. The guard closes about him, but the commander doesn’t tie his hands, and only at the foot of the winding stairs does Faramir understand why. Just outside the doorway, a deputation of councillors of Gondor are waiting, all in their robes of office, with the King’s new blue and gold badge gleaming upon their left shoulders. Faramir distantly hears their spokesman urge him to sign the declaration of allegiance, and kneel before the king and beg his pardon. Look, here is the document. Sign, for Eru’s sake! Éomer of Rohan was stubborn and misguided. Would you follow him? Sign, Faramir - look, we even have your councillor’s robes waiting, the king wants to forgive you. All you have to do is sign. Faramir hesitates for a moment when the sunlight blinds him. The councillor takes it for assent, and with a snap of his fingers, there is a chair and a little writing desk, and a scribe unrolling a declaration made brave with blue and gold initials and flourishes. He makes Faramir sit down, and pushes a quill into his hand. For a moment his hand hovers over the parchment. Then he stops. The councillor starts to nag again, but Faramir doesn’t hear him. All he hears is his brother roaring with laughter in the bloody ruins of Osgiliath - the halfling with the lovely voice screaming with grief as he found his friend dying on Pelennor and refused to leave him - Éomer whispering in the bracken in Ithilien. The last sounding of the horn of Gondor. Faramir looks up. The King’s balcony is draped with blue and gold banners, and when the sluggish breeze stirs them, he can see two figures there. It is time. The councillor is still talking when Faramir stands and drops the quill. He takes hold of the declaration, tears it across once, twice, throws the pieces to the ground and spits on them. There is a second’s silence, then the councillor flings himself away, his face contorted with fear for his own skin, calling out to save himself. “You were right, your highness, a traitor! Away with him!” The guards do not need to drag him. Faramir walks ahead of them, up the stairs of the platform. I did not sign, I did not promise, I did not betray you, any of you. He looks up, one last time. The king and his creature are half-veiled in the banners. They can hardly see him here, but they will hear him, they must hear him. “For the Mark! And for Gondor! For Gondor! For Gondor!” Before the echoes have even begun to fade, Faramir kneels, head bowed, arms flung out behind, and the sword sweeps down. *************************** On the King’s balcony there is a rustle of blue silk and a flicker of blonde hair. “I’m sorry, melethen, I really thought he would sign, at the last. I know you liked him once, but he would always have been a hindrance to us. And after all, Gondor hardly needs a steward with the return of the king, does it?” “I suppose not,” says Aragorn, with an air of bored puzzlement, as if he’s finally given up the struggle to remember something that was once important to him. “Will you come in to breakfast now?” “Soon, melethen, soon.” Aragorn turns and leaves, the death of the last steward already forgotten. But the prince consort, the indestructible beauty with the silver-gilt hair, stays on the balcony, watching the labourers as they sluice blood from the flagstones. Only then does Legolas turn his face to the sun and smile, while the light glints off the heavy gold Ring on the chain about his slender neck. End.