Rick, Cot and Tree
Late lunch break on a super busy day, why not just post my “burning of the Westfold” fic? Enjoy Grimbold and, more to the point, his family! On AO3 here.
“…they are burning as they come, rick, cot, and tree. This was a rich vale and had many homesteads. Alas for my folk!” — Théoden King
It almost looked like her life, if she squinted at it just enough. There was a swift flowing river, though it was icy and clear when it should have been the color of a steel grey sky. There were rows of neat little houses built in the style of the Éothéod, even if they were roofed with thatch from the plains rather than birch bark and sod. Familiar words and phrases rang out everywhere, quick calls to passing neighbors or sharp cautions to a wandering child, but they were rendered in a clipped, flat accent that made them sound foreign all the same.
Edoras was home now, but to walk its paths and hills was not to feel at home for Stillerith. It wasn’t Grimslade, and it never could be. Grimslade had burned, and at times Stillerith wished she’d burned with it.
**********
The warning had come in the night. A tiny skiff rowed across the Isen, a single girl at the oars. Her name was Carata, the only daughter of the Dunlendish chief on the opposite riverbank. She still had the scrawny, straight body and the high, clear voice of a child, but she had pulled herself over the churning current all alone and stumbled onto shore with a desperate message gasped out in broken Rohirric. Not our clan, but others. Already on your side of the river. You must flee.
The bell was rung and all of Grimslade raised from sleep. Mothers and children, elders, the injured and the sick, all that remained after the men had ridden out to the Fords not a full day before. Amidst tears, confusion, anger and disbelief, frantic hands filled bags and loaded carts. It was maddeningly difficult to know what to take. What was most urgently needed or what would be most difficult to replace if lost? But in the end, the decisions had been made by the sudden appearance of torchlight on the northern ridge. A line of orange and yellow pinpricks bobbed and swirled in the dark, deadly fireflies that grew larger and more distinct with each passing minute. The time for deliberation was gone, and they ran with only what they wore and each other.
All night Stillerith and her mother lay hidden in the moss and leaf litter of the little woods nearby, burrowed in like hares that had caught the baying of hounds on the wind. Umawíf looked small and fragile among the tree roots and thorns, her long white hair tangled in the undergrowth and the papery skin of her veined hands reddening in the cold that trimmed their clothes with a lace of frost. They passed a water skin wordlessly back and forth, stifling coughs and shrinking from the wind, too exhausted to cry and too frightened to sleep. Stillerith watched an owl in flight instead, its long wings spread against the moonlit sky as it circled in calm, unhurried loops far above the perils of the forest floor.
The air soon brought tidings of Grimslade’s fate. The smoky, resinous scent of burning wood rolled in like a fog, followed by a deep glow at the horizon line as brilliant heat shimmered in the inky dark. Umawíf took her hand, squeezed it between her own. Her mother could be a hard woman, rarely moved to outward emotion, but tears shone on her cheeks now. It’ll all be gone, she whispered. A lifetime turned to ash in minutes, reduced to colorless dust that would be washed away by rain or carried off by a breeze until no evidence of that life would yet stand in Middle Earth.
Not all, Stillerith answered. Not us. Not Grimbold. That last addition she hoped was true, though whether her brother and his éored fared any better than his village was a matter not yet then decided. The army that would challenge him did not linger in Grimslade to loot or to occupy. They kept moving through the night, cutting a trail of fire toward the Fords and leaving nothing behind but the crackle of sparks in the smoke-choked sky and the screaming of panicked horses struggling their way out of flaming barns and paddocks.
Rain came before dawn, a blessing for the fires but another source of misery to the villagers who emerged slowly from hiding at the first light of day. In twos and threes they appeared from the trees and the brush, ghostly apparitions covered in mud and twigs and now soaked to the bone from a late winter storm. Cold silence gripped them all, even the babies and young ones, as they trudged slowly back up the road down which they’d fled.
Stillerith could feel the village before she reached it. A smoldering warmth radiated from its charred remains, like a dying patient whose fever could be felt from across the room, and the reek of blackened wood stung her eyes and throat. They saw a few bodies on the final stretch of road, those who hadn’t given sufficient heed to the warning or those who were caught still wavering over how best to pack up their personal treasures when the first enemy torches arrived. Umawíf tsk’ed as they passed the corpses, her old, hard mask back in place again. Weighing possessions over lives and then losing both, she sighed. What foolishness.
The devastation in the village was far beyond what Stillerith had imagined in the darkest hours of the night. Little still stood beyond a few stone fireplaces and chimneys, and beloved homes were hard to recognize once stripped of all context in the flattened field of burned debris. It no longer mattered whose door had once been painted a cheerful red or whose roof had an extra peak where a sleeping loft had been added for a growing family. It all looked the same now, reduced to splintered and shriveled heaps in which were buried wedding dresses and cradles, a grandmother’s handed down cast iron pan or a brother’s favorite fishing rod, canes and boots, harps and toys and hairbrushes. All the props and tools of life, the items that played their appointed parts in the unfolding of each day, no matter how momentous or insignificant.
Umawíf turned from the tangled wreckage of their home, going to sit in stubborn silence some distance away, but Stillerith stared hard at the pile of jumbled remains. A delicately carved spindle jutted out of the mess that had once been her bedroom. It came from the rocking chair where she had sat in the lap of her father to hear stories in the evenings when she was young. He had been as soft and pliant as Umawíf was unyielding, and Stillerith had kept the chair for herself after his death, sitting in it at night and remembering her smaller self draped over him like a blanket and being rocked slowly to sleep by the gentle rhythm of the chair’s motion and the beating of his heart against her cheek. She reached out to touch the spindle now, but the blistered gray wood crumbled to dust beneath her fingers and disappeared into the wind like chaff after threshing.
A short walk from the house was the river’s edge, lined with small docks and slips, and she went to peer across the river to Dunland. More smoke rose in the hazy distance from the bank where Carata’s clan lived. Stillerith wondered how deep a price they had paid for the warning sent in panicked haste to the foreigners they called neighbors, more similar to them than countrymen half a kingdom away. She wondered if Carata made it back again before the fires were lit at her own home or if she watched it all from that little skiff, surrounded by swift running water while her village hissed and sputtered in flame. There was no way to know now.
The Isen was empty in the dreary rain but for the little fleet of small boats tied up along the eelgrass and rocks of the riverbank. Once they had bobbed in a gentle arc, stretched at the end of tethers while waiting for the fishermen and traders who plied the river each day, but most now had been hacked with axes and sunk, only half visible at rest in the shallows. The bow of Grimbold’s boat poked up awkwardly from the water, the carved horse on its prow galloping toward the sky. It was within reach of the shore, and she stooped down to retrieve an oar that poked through the gaping wound in its hull. Hewn of rough ash wood, the oar’s handle had grown smooth to the touch, worn by many years of use and fitted to the particular shape of her brother’s palm and fingers.
Umawíf eyed the oar with disdain when she returned with it from the riverbank, preparing to take it with them as part of the column of people that was forming to walk to rescue. An oar is no use when we lack both boat and boatman, her mother scoffed, though her palsied hand went right to the smooth, worn handle and the phantom grip of her absent son. Stillerith knew she was right, but she would carry it anyway for all the many miles of their journey to come, through the dry fields and forests and inland villages and towns. Leaving it behind was unthinkable. Of all that their family had ever made or bought or grown or built or raised over the long history of the Mark, the oar was all that remained.
**********
The long line of the displaced stretched out over the countryside as they made their way south like birds fleeing the desolation of a barren winter to find shelter and food in warmer climes. Those who had found their horses wandering in the ash traveled first, scouting ahead for signs of danger and hoping to reach help that could be sent back for the others. Then came the hale and the able bodied, advancing steadily by foot, packs lashed to their backs with whatever had been salvaged from Grimslade. Stillerith stayed in the rear among the elderly and the infirm, slowing her own steps so that Umawíf might lean on her arm as she alternated between plodding forward and stopping to catch breath and rest stiff limbs and joints.
They kept company with a small group that could maintain the same pace, including a heavily pregnant woman and a brawny young man who hobbled on a leg that had broken in an accident weeks before and was still healing. He talked incessantly through the first day of his desire to be back with the éored and of the damage he would surely have wrought among the invaders if only they had come when he was in fighting form. But his enthusiasm for boastful talk dimmed along with the prospects of prompt relief as each village in their path proved emptied and burned, licked clean from the land by tongues of fire just as Grimslade had been.
Two more days they spent on the road, or off it when they wandered astray without benefit of maps or a cloudless night sky by which to navigate. What had been wet stayed that way, unable to ever dry out when they so often had to rest on the muddied ground, and the constant damp drew in the cold and held it tight against their skin. Water for drinking, at least, was never in short supply, but the only real food came from foraged mushrooms and a few hastily roasted songbirds that a clever young woman had knocked from the tree branches with well aimed stones. Stillerith gave her portions over to the pregnant woman and to Umawíf, who was too exhausted to argue as she might once have done. Stillerith chewed instead on clovers or tree bark to fool her mind into thinking she had eaten.
When they could go no further each day, they bedded down for the night in small copses of trees or in the gullies that followed the edge of the road. People who kept their composure in the daylight seemed to crack somehow once the sun disappeared, overwhelmed in the quiet of the dark by feelings that crept up on them unexpectedly. Some cried while others laughed, not a cheerful sound of merriment but scornful, bitter cackles, and by quiet agreement they gave each other distance even if huddling together would have proved warmer.
Few among them slept. The broken legged man insisted on sitting up to keep watch on the darkened fields that surrounded them. An old fisherman, someone Stillerith had known all her life, glowered at the faces around him, an arm wrapped covetously around the bag of things he’d pried from the wreckage of his home as though his cold, hungry neighbors would now rob him of his silver candlesticks and fine whittling knife. Snuffling murmurs came from children and a quiet groan every now and then from the pregnant woman, who lay awkwardly on her side like a horse in distress.
Stillerith only dozed at night, nodding off for a few minutes at a time in between monitoring Umawíf’s increasingly labored breathing. When she did sleep, her dreams were filled with images of home. Grimbold tussling playfully at the hearth with the big hounds that followed him everywhere. Umawíf over her shoulder, teaching her how to weave and knot corded flax into the nets that brought in the daily catch. The warm kitchen that always smelled of baked bread, the squeaky floorboard that let her know Grimbold was back from duties with the éored, even the carved wooden simbelmynë at the pier that marked where her father and three other men had been lost in a sudden flood all those years ago. To imagine it all gone now was to cut the anchor that kept her life fixed in place, leaving her floating and rudderless in a swift current that might now carry her to the haven of a sheltered harbor or out into the vast, thrashing sea.
She wondered what Grimbold would think on hearing the news and hoped no one would burden him with it until he was out of harm’s way. She gripped his oar in the dark, the humble treasure she would present to him when they found each other again. I saved what I could.
**********
On the evening of the third day, help arrived at last. Torches appeared in the distance, but this time they brought wagons and cloaks and strong hands sent out from the lord of the Westfold to bring his people to safety. Stillerith helped the others from her little group into the back of an old brewer’s cart. She felt strangely bound to them all now, as though to be separated would be yet another act of violence. The man with the broken leg kept an arm around the pregnant woman to steady her from the cart’s bounces and jostles, and the old man who had guarded his bundle of goods with such suspicion shared water with Umawíf, whose flushed face was beaded with sweat despite the chill of the air.
The further from the river they traveled, the greener the land became, untouched for now by enemy boots or torches. But the news conveyed by the cart’s driver snuffed out any lightening of hearts that the sight of neat orchards or tilled fields might have stirred. Nearly every village burned in the Gap as far south as the Fords. Saruman a traitor and Prince Théodred dead. One battle lost and more on the way. Lord Erkenbrand gathers all to the refuge of the Hornburg.
When they drew within sight of the fortress, people emerged from its keep and many halls to see the sufferers arrive. Most of those who stood waiting at Helm’s Gate were from the inland villages, those who had come as a precaution in response to the army that had swept down to the Fords and now seemed certain to invade in full. They stared at the bedraggled, limping newcomers with open curiosity, but none approached or asked the questions that could be read on their faces. Was it as bad as they say? How did you escape? A few looked at them with open hostility, as though the riverside villagers had now brought their bad luck here to dwell with the rest of the Westfold. Stillerith tried to shrug off those sharp looks, seeing them for the unspoken fear behind them. This could be me next time.
Inside the Hornburg, brisk, efficient women directed them to line after line. One for food, which Stillerith ate with embarrassing greed after three days of a hollow stomach. One for blankets. One for dry socks. One to be checked over by a healer. The last proved no obstacle for Stillerith, though Umawíf was looked at with concern. She expected her mother to shrug off the healer’s attentions, or at least to complain about them. I may be old, but I haven’t forgotten how to take care of myself, she’d always grumbled to Grimslade’s lone healer. But she submitted to the pokes and prods now, obediently swallowing a fever tea and answering questions in the dull, affectless tone she’d acquired somewhere on the road eastward. She roused herself to excitement only when an armored rider of the right height and build passed by on his way to some duty post. Grimbold? She would catch their arms and study the eyes that looked back at her, sympathetic or confused, from behind the metal plating of their face guards. No number of disappointments deterred her from hoping again and again, until eventually a well informed captain recognized the name and gave them the news. Unharmed, when last reported, but still out at the Fords to strengthen the border defenses.
The last of the lines led into the caves, which were to be their home until the danger passed. The graceful, vaulted caverns were already full near to bursting with people and provisions. Plain wooden cartons of turnips and apples were stacked haphazardly beside carved walls veined with brilliant, sparkling ores, and livestock clustered together incongruously under ceilings cut from glittering crystal. They were given bedrolls and directed to an empty patch of sandy floor, and if it was crowded, noisy and ripe with the smells of unwashed masses, it was also warm, dry and safely buried away below the strongest keep in the land.
The next days passed in watchful disquiet. Markers of time blurred in the unchanging light of the caves until night and day became one long, continuous stretch, broken only by the serving of rations, which came regularly. Stillerith sat with her companions, trading aimless stories and songs to use up the hours and watching over Umawíf, who still shivered with fever despite the healer’s intermittent visits. Sometimes when her mother slept, she walked loops through the underground halls and passages, marveling at the sheer variety of life on open display for all to see. With little unoccupied space and even less privacy, all the things a body needed to do were done in front of one another. Sleeping, bathing, crying, vomiting, squatting awkwardly at the rough troughs that served as privies. Everyone averted their eyes from the worst of it when possible, a tacit attempt to protect each other’s dignity, but dignity ran in short supply nonetheless. Several babies were born, including a round cheeked little boy to the pregnant woman who had walked from Grimslade at her side. He was named after the man with the broken leg, who had sat, wide eyed with fear and awe, to catch the glistening newborn while Stillerith sought in vain for a healer.
Much energy was spent each day on ascertaining news of what was unfolding elsewhere. Will the border hold? Why has the king not yet sent reinforcements? How long will we be kept away from fields that need to be prepared for spring planting or boats that require repair or orchards in need of pruning? With few answers on offer, what passed for news often consisted instead of worries and conjecture. Will the Mark survive? The question was on everyone’s lips, always carefully framed around the kingdom itself, but Stillerith knew that behind every invocation of the Mark was the unspoken name of a beloved father or husband or brother or son.
She thought often of Grimbold and his lopsided grin. He’d grown up their mother’s favorite, doted on for his troubled lungs even as Umawíf spared no coddling for anyone else, and there were times when Stillerith had envied him to the point of dislike. But he was a good brother, loyal and kind, and she would have given anything to hear his raspy snoring again as she lay awake at night contemplating the shimmering crystals overhead.
Sleeping hours in the caves were fraught. There were always tears, both full throated wails from babies and children and stifled sobs from overwhelmed adults. Everyone seemed to have a cough. There were occasional fights as bad tempers found easy outlet in the cramped conditions, and sometimes soft moans and muffled grunts could be heard emanating from corners where the momentary comfort of a furtive coupling was indulged. Stillerith kept close to Umawíf, who murmured Grimbold’s name in her fitful sleep, and took shifts rocking the newborn boy in her arms so that his mother could rest. She tried to imagine him years from now, a tall, strapping man with a Rohirrim’s full beard telling his own children how he’d been born into a crisis, nursed by strangers, taken into the hearts of people who had lost all they had but could still rejoice just for the thought of him. People who had been reborn alongside him into the new life of a survivor. She also tried to imagine those children then shaking their heads in bewildered wonder at the very idea of battle and death and frightened flight, things unknown in the peaceful Mark of their day. It was a harder image to conjure, but she clung to it with the same stubborn grip that yet carried that solitary oar. Two foolish little hopes, if only she could keep them.
**********
On the fourth day came word that the border was lost. Those who hadn’t already seen their homes destroyed wept now to know that nothing stood between those homes and the massive army that raced through the Westfold like a wildfire across a drought-stricken plain.
Rumors worked their way around the caves about conditions outside. The daylight sky is dimmed with smoke. The wind is more ash than air. It covers the roads and walls like a fine gray snow. Stillerith wondered if any of that ash had come from Grimslade, if perhaps the wood that had once made her roof or kitchen table or the bed on which she slept had now followed them all the way to Helm’s Deep. She would have gone out to run a hand through it, let it coat her fingers with memories, but there was no leaving the fortress now.
Soldiers poured into the Hornburg all day, summoned by Erkenbrand or brought from Edoras by the king at last, but always accompanied by whispers. It’s still not enough. Captains made their way through the caves, culling out the youngest of the old men or the oldest of the young boys to be handed a weapon and sent to the Deeping Wall. This went ill with the wives and, especially, the mothers, whose furious screaming echoed off the bejeweled ceilings as thin-limbed teenagers with only the finest down on their upper lips were pried from the iron grips of women who swore and spat and kicked to keep them. Every man and strong lad, they were told. It is the will of the king himself.
Night drew on swiftly, and the entrance to the main caves was sealed with a heavy grate of iron over a massive wooden door. The next time it opened, either victory or death would be waiting on the threshold. Torches cast shadows over anxious faces who looked from one to another for reassurance as tense minutes ticked away with agonizing slowness.
Even from the depths of an underground cavern, it wasn’t hard to tell when the battle finally began. Sound carried clearly through the rock and stone of the caves, and the chanting of the enemy army and their beating of weapons against shields reverberated in Stillerith’s ear as she leaned against a wall beside Umawíf. They had moved to the far back chamber, where the oldest, youngest and sickest would have the greatest security. The new mother who had walked with them from Grimslade was with them, clutching onto her baby as though she would absorb him back into the womb if she could, sheltered in the safety of a larger, stronger body.
Have we reached the end? murmured Umawíf, her head lolled on Stillerith’s shoulder. She didn’t sound entirely displeased by the prospect. I cannot say, Stillerith answered.
The fighting raged for what felt like many hours. Clanging metal, shattered stone, screams and urgent shouting in a cacophony of languages both foreign and familiar all made their way through gaps in the door and the fissures of the rock walls designed to let in fresh air. Three times the retreat horn was sounded as men fell back from the wall to the gate, the gate to the court, and the court to the keep. By the earliest hours of morning, shouts could be heard just on the other side of their door and then the clash of weapons, some so close as to ring against the iron grating that shielded the entryway. Axe blows began to land on the door itself, which creaked as its hinges were tested, and Stillerith flinched at each one. Small fragments of wood splintered inward, and a cry came through a small breach near the top. It won’t hold much longer.
Cold dread washed through the caves’ chambers and halls like a suddenly undammed river, and even the torches seemed to flicker in fear. But somewhere above the horn of Helm Hammerhand sounded, echoing through the valley with its rich, deep call. It roused something in their hearts, the stubborn determination that was as native to the Mark as its air, earth or water. It was in the blood and bones of its people, the only true marker of a Rohirrim no matter what color their hair or language of their tongue. Even the most hopeless of battles must be contested. It stirred them to their feet, ready to mount a last stand worthy of the name.
Stillerith left Umawíf in the care of the new mother and joined the ragged lines forming at the door, makeshift weapons in hand. The man with the broken leg stood awkwardly while brandishing a knife lashed to the end of a walking stick, and women of all ages held pans of iron or broken pieces of crate with nails still protruding from the ends. Some looked dazed, as though they couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe what was happening, while others shook out stiff muscles and set themselves in readiness with the terrified joy of a house cat let loose for the first time to hunt the birds and mice only ever seen through a window pane. The names of Hild and Eorl and Marhwini were uttered in solemnity, and Stillerith silently added her brother’s name to the list, gripping his oar as a bludgeon between whitened knuckles.
More horns rang in the distance, and the blows on the door came to a sudden end. A new noise swelled up from afar, faint at first and then growing in volume and intensity. It was cheering, though none could say at first which side was celebrating, until a face appeared in one of the deep clefts carved into the door — a face that wore a helm of the Mark. Morning has come, he cried. The darkness has been defeated.
The grate and door were thrown open, and soldiers streamed in, battered and bloodied but smiling. Stillerith embraced each one as he passed, being lifted off her feet again and again by those whose exhausted arms could barely lift a sword just minutes before. And suddenly, amidst the torrent of armored bodies and whooping faces, the singing and the tears, a familiar rasping wheeze reached her ear, and she turned to find the lopsided grin that perfectly matched her own.
Well met, sister, he laughed. Is that my oar?
**********
The days just after the battle were happy ones for Stillerith. It was easy enough to push the worst from her mind, both the fearsome memories of the recent past and the terrifying uncertainty of what was still to come, when there was much to celebrate. A victory for the Mark, a reunion with Grimbold, even an unexpected improvement in Umawíf, who seemed to come to life again the moment her son arrived to take her hand and kiss her brow. My spirit knew there was something worth staying for, she beamed up at him, and even the sting of her dismissal couldn’t dampen Stillerith’s mood.
But it proved a fool’s spring, barely long enough to enjoy the warmth before winter’s chill came roaring back to remind them all that one battle doesn’t end a war. Grimbold was called away again, this time to muster all the men of the Westfold, and their parting was grievous.
Scouts sent back to the villages that lined the Isen returned to confirm that the marches were free of the enemy but would be unlivable for perhaps years to come, until the scorched and barren earth could be coaxed back to fruitfulness and the river cleansed of the foul contaminants that leaked downstream from the wreckage of Isengard. Those in the caves had decisions to make yet again — when to leave, where to go, how to manage. There will be a day for Grimslade again, Grimbold had told her as his éored prepared to ride out. In the meantime, it lives with us, wherever we are.
Stillerith and Umawíf joined a new column of people who would walk the miles to Edoras as soon as the way was deemed safe. They had been offered shelter in the home of Marshal Elfhelm, a favor granted on Grimbold’s behalf after the two had forged an unshakeable friendship at the Fords, though neither man would ever speak of the shared horrors that sealed their bond. Stillerith bid a tearful farewell to the man with the broken leg, who would stay with Erkenbrand and make himself useful until he could sit a horse once again, and to the new mother, who had family in the mountains to take her in and help raise her baby among the eagles and snow of the peaks rather than the fish and reeds of the river.
The battle scarred vales of the Deeping Coomb grew ever fainter as they walked away, leaving yet another home, no matter how temporary, at their backs. As Stillerith put one tired foot ahead of another, she told herself it was just the latest in a long line of great journeys for their people. Eastward to Rhovanion under the Northmen kings of old, exile to the marshes of the Great River under Marhwini, wanderings northward to the traditional holds of the Éothéod and then south to the Mark behind the banner of Eorl himself. Each time they had proven their resilience, and she hoped it would be proved yet again.
They were welcomed on arrival by Elfhelm’s wife, Hyhtgife, and given run of his generous home. The sheer number of things in it overwhelmed Stillerith at first, though none of it would have seemed remarkable to her only a month before. There were spoons enough for all to eat without need for sharing, a second pair of socks any time a draft was in the air, bracelets for arms and ribbons for braids. She had the urge to touch it all, to revel in the decadent bounty of a lifetime’s worth of normal possessions accumulated without notice, taken for granted unless they suddenly vanished. In her lesser moments, she watched Hyhtgife bustle around the house, surrounded by more than she could ever need, and seethed with envy. Then the kindly older woman would press a warm new shawl into her hands — or boots without a broken lace or a fine yew wood cane for Umawíf — and she would feel shame instead.
She did as much for Hyhtgife as she could, washing and cooking and mending even as Hyhtgife insisted that she was a guest and needn’t earn her keep. How are we to ever feel at home, Umawíf griped, if we’re kept as idle visitors? It was only one of many complaints Umawíf had about Edoras, and at times Stillerith felt as though it was full time work just to follow around behind her mother to apologize for ungrateful grousing or unnecessarily sharp words. Umawíf’s food never had quite the right flavor, and the clothes given to her in the fashion of the city were impractical. People in the streets always seemed to be in a rush, and the local children were impertinent, lacking respect for their elders. She went out less and less, spending long stretches dozing alone in her room, and picked fights with Stillerith when she was awake, refusing to accept her daughter’s explanations for why they couldn’t simply return to Grimslade and take up their old lives.
Other displaced women of the Westfold met each market day in the center of the city, and Stillerith took the opportunity to get both time apart from Umawíf and time together with others who knew what it was to be suddenly rootless, held in place by only the loosest top soil. Few of the women were from Grimslade itself, but that didn’t matter anymore. In normal times, the western villages thought of themselves as each very distinct, with their own customs and sayings and attitudes, but here they had a kinship with one another that the city dwellers couldn’t hope to match. They rarely spoke of their former homes directly, though they were always on their minds, a constant hum in the background of their thoughts just as the lapping of the Isen against its shores had been the everyday accompaniment to their lives in those homes. Instead, they traded advice on navigating Edoras and news and rumors about the progress of the war, standing together to hear the formal pronouncements given at the marketplace whenever a royal messenger was received.
Here they heard about an invasion repelled in the Eastfold, a major battle fought on the fields outside of Gondor’s capital and another that followed at the gates of the Black Land itself. They also stood together the day the first losses were detailed, long lists of men who for weeks had been at once both dead in Gondor and alive in Rohan, at least as far as the minds of those who loved them knew. Grimbold’s was just the second name listed out of many dozens, announced so quickly that Stillerith had not yet had time to steel herself for the possibility of hearing it before it was already spoken. The village women flocked to her, holding her hands and stroking her hair and shaking their heads in sorrow. I wasn’t ready, she sobbed, as though it would have been possible to blunt the pain if only his name had been further down the list. No one ever is, they said.
Later, when she’d calmed herself, she gave the news to Umawíf. You always thought his lungs would take him quietly, she said. But he died a hero. Her mother made no answer, and Stillerith didn’t tell her any more. How he had been struck by a huge tusked beast and his body knocked into the Anduin. How his men thought he’d put himself in the beast’s path on purpose, accepting death for himself to give them a better chance at survival. How they’d searched for him in the battle’s aftermath, but the current had already pulled his body out of Mundburg’s port and on to some unknown harborage further downstream. He would have found satisfaction in that, she thought. To go to his rest in a river.
They were far from alone in their grief. Death touched nearly every household in Edoras, some with a firm grip and others only a glancing blow but practically no one entirely unscathed. It was almost comforting in its universality at times. She never lacked for the company of others who could understand her feelings. But neither could she escape those feelings when they were everywhere at once, so common that no one bothered to ask about them anymore. Instead there was just a questioning cock of a brow, a grim shake of the head in response, and then the quiet tsk of regret, a sound that became ubiquitous around the Mark and substituted itself for any of the normal range of condolences. I’m so sorry, it said. He was a good man, it said. I don’t have the words for this anymore, it said.
Stillerith spent more of her time with Umawíf, who unexpectedly softened in the wake of her son’s death, as though the tenderness she’d always held for him was now available, at long last, to others. Whatever the cause, Stillerith accepted it with gratitude, one final gift her brother bestowed upon her at a time when she needed it most. She missed him sharply, and though his name was held in honor all over the Mark, the valiant, selfless hero others spoke of already felt more like a mythic figure from history than the brother she knew. The one who loved his dogs and early mornings on the river, who always misremembered the endings of jokes but never forgot to sing for her birthday, who collected colorful stones or interesting bits of pottery he plucked from the silt of the Isen and brought home like a bowerbird decorating its nest. She shared the mythic hero with all of Rohan now, but the beloved brother was still hers alone.
The days rolled on, as they must, and the return of the victorious army swelled the streets and houses of Edoras. Elfhelm’s home grew crowded, for the Marshal was famously sociable and never more so now that he had survived a cataclysm to return home in triumph. There was a constant stream of brash young men, smiling women, giggling children, and even, at times, a holbytla, who sat in his own half-sized chair and spun out long, spirited tales of walking trees and flying beasts. Stillerith preferred instead the company of a sad eyed archer, often invited for dinner, who had lost his great love on the same field of battle that had claimed Grimbold. Umawíf raised a skeptical brow at this man who loved another man as she had loved her husband, but Stillerith liked his quiet dignity. He didn’t speak much nor make her feel awkward when she couldn’t muster idle chat herself, and they often sat in sadness together, at ease in their shared grief for a captain and a banner bearer of the Mark.
The seasons changed, bright spring becoming humid summer and then brisk autumn. A little home was finally finished for her and Umawíf, a space all their own on the edges of the city where they could look down on the Snowbourn as it flowed swiftly by. The house was neat and tidy, its thatch a fresh golden color and its few rooms well stocked with furniture and housewares and clothes that had been collected by Hyhtgife to start them anew. Some were just made, straight from the stalls and shelves of Edoras’s merchants, and some were donated, still bearing the marks and sigils of other families. All were clean and ordered, ready for use, but they weren’t familiar. They didn’t have the look and smell and feel of home. That came only from Grimbold’s oar, hung with a few hooks onto a bare wall where it would always be the first thing seen each morning and the last before bed at night.
One day Stillerith would bring that oar back to Grimslade. She would fix the ache in her heart that would never subside until she once again stood under the red and gold canopy of its orchards or waded in the sun dappled shallows of its river. She would re-carve the memorial marker to her father, adding another simbelmynë to it for Grimbold and one for Umawíf, when the time came. She would use that oar and paddle herself across the water to leave a marker for Carata as well, by whose sacrifice Stillerith and scores of others still lived to dream of their communal home. Some day she would return to Grimslade and feel its embrace, for she was certain that the land remembered her and knew she belonged to it. Grimslade couldn’t fix all her ills, restore her losses, undo the pain that she’d lived with ever since that warning bell rang in the quiet of a cold February night. But it would be hers once again, and that was a start.
That’s it! If you got this far, thanks for reading! The lovely @/quillofspirit made the dividers! ♥️
