The Hands of the Healer

The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known.

            Aragorn wrapped the grey cloak of Lorien around his mail, concealing both its sheen and the stains and scratches of long, hard use.

            Strider, Aragorn, Elessar, captain of the Dúnedain of Arnor; he had many names, but this night the one he claimed was Estel, meaning hope. For even though he knew full well that the day’s victory, however hard-won, did not mean that the war was over, still he found in his heart hope for the wounded men, hope for the devastated city, and hope that a final victory, the greatest of all, was now within his grasp.  And yet there was one hope he could barely acknowledge to himself, let alone to any of his companions. Perhaps, on this cool spring evening, he could at last answer the question that had haunted him for many years now, even if the answer was, with simple finality, that no answer was possible.

            And yet his question seemed a small one, now, when he was summoned to greater duty than that to his own memories. The hands of the king, it was said, could heal as well as slay. And he had slain enough that day. He had slain, if the truth of his heart be revealed, enough for one life. Even if for this night only, it was time to heal, and no matter if his own wounds could never be mended.

            Unnoticed in his elvish cloak, Aragorn stepped through the shattered gates into the white city, and walked beside Gandalf up the avenue which was both familiar and changed forever. For it had been a generation of men since he had last visited Minas Tirith, on a cold winter’s day.

***

            Then, the air had cut like iron, giving Aragorn the perfect excuse to pull the hood of his travel-worn cloak well over his head. Not that the guards at the great gates would recognize him, not when he was in a guise so very different from the one they might remember.

            Once he had been Thorongil, who had come to Minas Tirith from Rohan and yet was not Rohirrim but a stranger from the north. Once he had served as a captain of Gondor’s rangers, scouting the byways of Ithilien to within sight of the evil flowers of the Morgul vale and defeating the corsairs of Umbar.

            During those years he would stand before Ecthelion as he sat in his small chair below the throne of long-dead kings, and study both the uses and abuses of power. No man of the Steward’s long line had ever sought to set himself in place of a king; all had remained true to their trust. Aragorn, the heir to those same kings, knew that while he might never come into his own, still honor demanded he carry himself as though he would. Therefore, in manner like to Ecthelion, he never sought to take the place of the Steward’s son, Denethor. And yet voices whispered in the streets that Ecthelion placed this stranger higher in his esteem than his own flesh and blood. Aragorn had at last not only thought it prudent to give up his position, he also yearned for the open air and solitude of the Wild. So had he disappeared from the eyes, if not from the minds, of the men of Gondor.

            Now, on a dark winter’s day two years after his departure, he returned to the white city nestling at the foot of Mount Mindolluin as a weary traveler curious about the musty books of lore in the city’s libraries. The archivist who showed him into a small room lined with book-laden shelves did not ask him the nature of his quest, and Aragorn, who could perhaps have ended his quest much more quickly by asking the archivist for what he sought, kept his own counsel.

            He threw back his cloak and held his cold hands before his face, warming them with his breath. Then, clasping his pen as easily as his sword, began to read through the long lists of library holdings. Gandalf wanted to know whether any scrolls yet existed that dated back to the days of Elendil, Isildur, and the Great War. Gandalf had not, of course, told Aragorn just why he wanted to know this, the wizard being only too accomplished at keeping his own counsel.

            Neither had Gandalf told Aragorn why he hadn’t come himself to Minas Tirith, but that answer Aragorn knew without the telling. While Ecthelion trusted Gandalf’s advice, Denethor, who grew tall and forceful and ever more proud as his father’s strength ebbed, did not.

            Aragorn saw before his eyes not the crabbed handwriting of a scribe long gone to dust, perhaps the dust covering this very scroll, but the sharply-carved face of Denethor. It was like seeing himself in a mirror, albeit a discolored and distorted one. They were much alike, far-sighted and learned in lore, save that Denethor wore that lore like a great helm, and gazed suspiciously out from beneath its visor.

            By the time Aragorn had wrung what he could from the old texts, the lamps were burning down within and the day was failing without the narrow windows of the room. Distant shouts and hoofbeats echoed from the street. The archivist appeared in the doorway, every wrinkle in his face askew. “Evil news! The lord Denethor has been killed in a skirmish at Umbar!”

            Aragorn was not certain which part of the man’s statement surprised him more, that Denethor was dead, or that he had been fighting at Umbar. Aragorn–Thorongil–himself had vanquished the corsairs only two years since. He rolled the last scroll, and tied it up, and only then spoke, carefully. “That is indeed evil news.”

            “A punitive expedition, he said,” the man gabbled on. “He convinced my lord Ecthelion that the pirates were not effectively defeated, that another battle was needed to teach them their place. But the corsairs drew him into an ambush. And now he is dead, and Ecthelion’s heir a four-year-old child. Dreadful days we live in. Dreadful days.” His hands fluttering, the man vanished into another room like a crow seeking carrion.

            Dreadful days indeed, when a noble man like Denethor could sting himself to death with his own pride, Aragorn thought sadly, even as he knew that Denethor, in his place, would have felt nothing but scorn for such sorrow.

            Packing away his pen and paper, he wended his way through the cluttered rooms with their stale air to the street. Should he leave the city as quietly as he had entered it, supping and sleeping at a drover’s inn outside the walls? Or should he reveal himself to Ecthelion and offer his service? And yet, would he not then prove the suspicions of Denethor, that he had sought all this time to supplant him?

            Citizens of the city hurried up and down the curving streets, moving like wraiths from lamplit doorways to the heavy shadows of evening. Messengers hastened from the Citadel in the topmost tier down to the gates and back. An odor of smoke and ash hung upon the icy air–no, he was mistaken, he smelled only baking bread and horses.

            He could not, Aragorn decided, flatter himself that he alone could heal the woes of the kingdom of Gondor. He turned his face toward the lower city and the gate, took two paces, and stopped.

            A woman stood outside a shop opposite, caught in a pool of torchlight, one small, pale hand pressed to her breast. She wore a blue mantle of the color of deep summer night, set with silver stars about hem and throat. Her long golden-red hair seemed to have drawn all the color from her face, like a plant drawing water from the soil; her skin was alabaster white, and her gray eyes did indeed resemble ash. What she saw with those eyes Aragorn could not say, but he could guess.

            Finduilas, the daughter of Adrahil of Dol Amroth, Denethor’s wife and mother of his heir, stood alone except for a serving-woman half-concealed in the shadows at her side, her face upturned as though she felt her doom rain upon her like pellets of hail beating down from a stormy sky.

            A four-year-old child, the archivist had said, meaning Ecthelion’s grandson Boromir. Aragorn had himself lost his father in battle at such an early age. But what he remembered now was not his own bewilderment that only in time had become grief. He remembered his mother’s shock and horror and, later, the depth of her despair. I have given Hope to the Dunedain. I have kept no hope for myself.

            Finduilas had been his friend. Seating him beside her at evening meals, she had asked him for tales of far countries, and for Elvish poetry and song, civilizing influences that this city of guard had in many ways forgotten. With him she had smiled as her tiny son struggled with grim determination to walk, stumbling, falling, and pulling himself upright again. Until one day when Denethor turned from guiding Boromir’s steps and his stern face fell upon Thorongil seated next to Finduilas, and he frowned.

            Aragorn had no desire to supplant Denethor in his wife’s affections, either. He had pitied her, the daughter of the seaward vales now confined in the great stone city. But his pity then was but a hillock compared to the mountain of his pity for her now. He started toward her, then stopped with the second thought; do not flatter yourself....

            In that instant her eyes blinked away the horror they beheld, and saw his face. “Thorongil,” she said, her voice falling upon his ears more clearly than any shout or hoofbeat. “Thorongil.”

            He could hardly make a swift and subtle departure now. Setting his face in grave lines, he crossed the street and bowed to her. “My lady Finduilas.”

            “You’ve come back,” she said.

            “Only for a few hours. I did not intend to encounter anyone of my acquaintance.”

            Her hand fell from her breast toward him, palm up and empty. “You have heard the news,” she said.

            “Yes. I am sorry, my lady.” He grasped her hand, cold and delicate as glass, in his own. Fiercely she returned his grip. He had succored dying men on the battlefield whose clasp had not been as sharp, and as needful.

            The servant, a plump and comfortable woman resembling a turtledove, said, “My lady should not have heard this in the streets. Messengers should have come respectfully to her chambers. Or the Lord Ecthelion himself, summoning her to his side....”

            “Peace, Ioreth,” said Finduilas. “My husband’s father has no doubt sent messengers to my door, not knowing that we chose this ill-favored moment to shop for dried fruits and spices. I had thought to prepare a fair wheaten cake for my husband’s return...” Her voice broke, her lashes fluttered, and she swayed.

            Swiftly Ioreth hitched her basket up her arm and clasped her mistress around the waist. Aragorn released Finduilas’s hand, his own hands upraised, both distancing himself from her and yet ready to catch her should she fall. The blue mantle billowed out like a storm cloud overtaking them all, and for one quick moment Aragorn smelled the quick, fresh fragrance released from its folds.

            “Had a nasty shock, she has,” Ioreth said. “All these people running about like bees from an overturned hive. She needs her own chambers, peace and privacy. You, sir, you help me to get her home.” Her face showed no sign of recognition. She must have come to the city only recently.

            “Yes, of course. Allow me, my lady.” He crooked his arm and Finduilas leaned heavily on it. Her breath came raggedly, as though filled with sobs she could not release, and her slender body beneath the mantle trembled against his side.

            He and Ioreth guided the woman’s faltering steps up the winding street until at last they came to the gate and a narrow passage on the sixth circle of the city. Beyond the passage opened a courtyard, one side overlooking the plains below the city, where all but the shining thread of the river was lost in a murky dusk that grew very dark indeed on the eastern rim of sight. Several white sea-birds flew up against the shadow, and then disappeared into night.

            On the other side of the courtyard stood Denethor’s house, close beneath the Citadel, the seat of his family’s power, and yet not part of it. A guard in the livery of the Citadel, a torch flickering in his hand, waited by the door. Taking a deep breath, Finduilas straightened, shedding her supporters but not her dignity. Ioreth walked on into the house even as Aragorn slipped back into the shadows of the gate. “Baranor,” said Finduilas, “you bring word from my lord Ecthelion about–my husband’s death.”

            “Yes, my lady,” returned the guard. A slight easing of his features revealed his relief that the most difficult part of his message was no longer necessary. “If you please, the Steward has sent men to speak with the survivors of the raid, and is taking counsel, and will visit you in the morning, after you have rested.”

            “Very good. And is my son with his nurse?”

            “Yes, my lady. She will care for him until the Steward feels it is time to tell him the grim news.”

            “Until I feel it is time,” Finduilas corrected.

            Baranor bowed. “My son is near the same age, my lady. Beregond, his name is. If your lad should need a playmate to distract him from–this terrible event....”

            “Thank you,” she told him. “You may go.”

            He brushed by Aragorn with a brief glance in which curiosity was submerged by grief, and was gone.

            Lamplight sprung up inside the house, and Ioreth called from the doorway. “My lady. Here.”

            “Thank you,” Finduilas told her. “Go to my son, Ioreth. Prepare his dinner with your own hands, that his stomach may be warm and full for tomorrow’s....” She struggled for a moment to control her voice. “...for tomorrow’s duties.”

            “Very good, my lady. And I shall bring you a posset to drink, so you may sleep.”

            “I wish for nothing, Ioreth, that you can offer me. Come back to me tomorrow morning.”

            “Very good,” the woman replied. And, to Aragorn, “Thank you, sir, for your assistance.”

            Nodding politely, he followed her toward the street. But even as her footsteps continued on through the passageway and out into the avenue his slowed and stopped. From the shadows he looked back into the courtyard, where Finduilas still stood, head bowed, wringing her pale hands, alone. She was fair, he thought, fair and cold as an evening in gray autumn, when the last sunlight fades to chill winter gloom, and the stars grow hard as ice in a darkened sky.

            Turning, he walked back into the courtyard. “My lady....”

            “He loved me,” Finduilas said, her voice making the statement crisp as hoarfrost.

            “He did,” said Aragorn, doing her the courtesy of not adding, in his own way.

            “He looked after me with  courtesy and respect.”

            “Yes.”

            “He was besotted by our child, our son, his heir. And now he is gone, but the child lives on, after him.” She looked up. “Thorongil. Come inside. Sit with me. Your stories of lands beyond this one, and of cares greater than mine, will help me to pass the hours of darkness that lie before me, this night and many nights to come.”

            For just a moment doubt touched Aragorn’s mind, telling him he should go on his way. But his heart bade him not to abandon Finduilas in her hour of need. As Gandalf was fond of saying, no one could see all ends. With another bow, he followed her toward the house and paused on the threshold to glance back, away from the city and over the Pelennor Fields.

            A sullen red smear, like blood oozing from a mortal wound, flowed over the eastern horizon and then vanished. Aragorn’s brows knit. What deviltry was brewing in Mordor? He turned toward the west to see the sky beyond the mountains blushing a clear, rosy red. Even as he watched the color faded into shadow, leaving naught but the memory and the hope of that light.

            Finduilas was waiting. He went into the lamplit room, shut the door behind him, and set his sword and bow aside. After the icy blast outside, the air inside seemed warm and still. It was scented less with the leather and cold iron that would have reminded him of Denethor as with the same clean fragrance as Finduilas’s mantel.

            She cast the cloak toward a couch, its stars winking like snowflakes in the flicker of lamplight, and revealed a dress as simple as that of her maidservant. With her own hands she set out bread, cheese, apples, and small beer. “Men must eat, even in the midst of despair,” she murmured, but Aragorn suspected she advised herself, not him.

            Shedding his own cloak, he sat down beside her and ate of her food, even though it tasted like ashes in his mouth, hoping she, too, would eat. But she managed only a few bites. He tried telling her the tales she had requested, choosing not stories of battles and fell deeds but of great rivers and tall mountains and elves walking silently beneath the ageless trees.

            But every tale he began trailed away into silence. She wasn’t listening to his words but to his voice, velvet brushed against the grain, and to the distant strains of a song that echoed as much from the stony face of Mindolluin as from the streets of the city. The music was plaintive, a mourning chant not unlike those Aragorn had heard among the Rohirrim, sad and defiant at once. It fell strangely on his ear, accustomed as he was to the gentle yearning of elvish music, in which sorrow was muted by distance.

             Raised as he had been among elves, when Aragorn first ventured among his own kin he had been bewildered and disturbed by the intensity of emotion, anger and joy both sharp as swords. Now, though, he saw why. The white city, that great work of men’s hands, was crowned not only by the brave tower of Ecthelion, but by the tombs of the kings and the stewards, always warning, always reminding, that unlike elves, men succumbed to death. Tonight the silent street of tombs stirred uneasily, as servants prepared a place for Denethor, taken untimely, while his wife tarried a short time, their only immortality their child.

            Aragorn had never before thought that yes, while Minas Tirith was the city of guard, any abode of man was a city of guard. The elves might live their lives at a slow, measured pace, but men’s lives were short and seldom sweet. 

            He had been silent too long. Finduilas glanced up from her plate. “I bought dried fruit and spices, perhaps they can tempt your tongue....” She reached for her basket and began searching through the contents, her delicate hands shifting the small parcels around but not finding any reassurance within.

            Aragorn opened his mouth to speak, and found that he had no reassurance to offer, either to her or to himself. His race lived longer lives than those of any other man, and yet, in time, they, too, came to death. Compared to the lives of elves, the lives of even the Dunadain flickered like the flame in the lamp and were gone. He knew that. He felt the grief of it.

            Finduilas clasped the basket, her trembling hands making the osiers creak and the tiny parcels whisper against each other, and turned her clear gray eyes toward Aragorn. For just a moment he saw Arwen’s eyes, steady as the starlight in the night skies of Lorien. Arwen, who had plighted her troth to him two years since, upon the green mound of Cerin Amroth, where no shadow lay. If he never came into his own, then Arwen would never be able to fulfill her vow, but would go into the West with her kin. If he did, if she fulfilled her vow and chose a mortal life, then she would die, the long years of that life utterly spent, for before her death would come his own.

            It was then that he tasted the bitterness not just of death, both the gift and the doom of men, but that of his own death. And like his dream of a great dark wave rising high over Westernesse and then crashing down, obliterating all, fear took him.

            Here upon the mound of Minas Tirith, the shadows of the eastern mountains lay heavy as the shadow of the grave. Finduilas sat next to him, her eyes pleading with him for consolation he could not offer. His stories weren’t enough. Elves could live upon tales and music, but Finduilas was a woman.

            He took  her trembling hands, even colder than they had been in the street, and stroked them gently, afraid he would hear her bones breaking between his fingers that were calloused with sword and bow. She began to weep, slow tears slipping down the hollows of her cheek and glistening in the lamplight like silver waterfalls of Dimrill Dale.

            What choice did she have, did he have, other than to accept the bitter with the sweet?  He lifted her hands to his lips, breathed on them, and then turned her hands over and kissed each palm in turn. He was moved with pity for her, yes, and yet he was moved by much more than pity. For what consolation could either of them ever find, other than to enjoy the sweet with the bitter?

            The flesh that had been chill in his hands suddenly warmed against his mouth. With a sudden intake of breath, she blushed, a rosy color like that of the sunset leaping into her pale cheeks. “Thorongil,” she whispered, his name–one of his names–both a caution and a prayer upon her lips. Her hands closed upon his, and she stood up, drawing him to his feet.

            For a long moment they stood, hands clasped together and pressed close between the curve of her bodice and his leather jerkin, her face tilted back so that she could gaze searchingly into his eyes. Then she released her hands so that she could stroke his hair back from his face and trace his beard with her fingertips, so lightly the touch puckered his shoulder blades with delight. Gently he took her into his arms, and his nostrils filled with an aroma like that of the roses of Imloth Melui. More, like the fresh scent of athelas mingled with the salt-spice smell of white flowers on a mountainside above the sea, flowers that bloomed briefly and then faded away.

            He thought again of Arwen, the evenstar that did not wax or wane. But it was Finduilas, with autumn in her countenance, who was all quivering intensity against his chest, so that his leather jerkin felt gossamer-thin. In her he sensed a need as deep as his own, a raw wound of loneliness needing healing, and a chill of mortality that could, however briefly, be thawed.

            “Thorongil.” Again the tears slid down her cheeks.

            How often on his solitary travels had he longed for the laughter of Rivendell or the lights of Lorien, to realize only now that it was not the place that mattered, but who was there, at his side or in his arms. With careful deliberation he set his vow to Arwen, made inside an elf-realm and so out of time, aside.

            Here, in the wilderness  of the wider world, he bent his head toward Finduilas, cupped her cheek in his hand, and kissed her, tasting first the salt-sweet of her tears, then the depths of her mouth with its flavor of fruit and spice. And she returned his kiss, with an eagerness that hinted of desperation, and wound her arms around him, the better to press her body against his.

            His hand moved to her hair and released the clips that held it tied back, and let its waves, golden-red as ripe apples, slide smooth and fine between his fingers.

            For a long moment they stood, not as still and silent as statues but alert, between breaths. Then she took his hand firmly in hers, picked up the lamp, and led him toward her bedchamber. And he went willingly beside her.

            There, with a shy boldness that made his breath catch in his throat, she removed each item of his clothing, searching for the man beneath the shell of the jerkin, beneath the belts and straps of his many weapons. And when she had exposed that man, with all his doubts and fears, she drew his hands to the lacings on her own garments so that she would in turn be revealed to his gaze.

            No darkness could touch the circle of lamplit in which they lay enlaced, first quietly, then struggling, breaths racing unevenly, then quietly again, sated, so that this time her tears mingled with the sweat of their coupling, and were those of a joy made sharper by its brevity. When at last Aragorn slipped into sleep he dreamed he was warm in the circle of her arms, his right hand, the hand that had killed and maimed, spread open and trusting on the silken skin of her belly.

            The dream became jumbled and dark, and he woke suddenly, tensing, at some change in the air. He saw nothing except the lamp burned into ash and the chill gray light of dawn leaking around the shutters into the bedchamber. He heard nothing but the slow, peaceful breath of Finduilas at his side.

            Raising himself on one elbow, he gazed down at her lashes making soft crescents on her glowing cheeks and her bright hair tumbled as though by a gale. She seemed even more fragile this morning than she had when he’d seen her on the street the evening before. And yet she was manifestly not fragile at all. Like a warrior she had made her decision, swift and sure, and thrown herself into the struggle with a resilient strength that, he noted with an indulgent lift of his brow, had left more than one faint purplish bruise upon his arms and shoulders.

            He drew the coverlet up over her own slender shoulders, let his fingertips trail up the side of her face, and kissed her forehead, inhaling deeply of her scent as he did so. She murmured, “This is a dream”

            “Then it is a good dream,” he whispered.

            He had given himself over to the moment, letting eternity see to itself. But now he was one step closer to eternity, a faint odor of smoke hung upon the chill air, and hoofbeats echoed like an almost imperceptible heartbeat from the sides of Mindolluin.

            He collected his clothing, dressed himself, and with one lingering glance back at Finduilas’s sleeping face, walked through the outer room, claimed his weapons, and went out into the thin, pale light of morning, beneath a sky smeared with gray.

            He could not stay with her. He could not leave her. She knew him by a name that was not false, but was not quite true. The words they had exchanged in the dark watches of the night, while as healing as their embraces, were not those that could be uttered in the glare of day. He felt no regret, and could only hope that when she awoke, neither would she. And yet....

            He heard footsteps racing up the street toward the house and ducked quickly into a corner of the courtyard, into the shadow cast by a trellis hung with a withered vine. His booted toe scraped against several empty flowerpots stacked for the winter.

            Ioreth, the ends of her cloak flying, ran through the passageway and across the yard to the door. Before she was quite inside, Baranor came pounding behind her, his armor clanking and his breath making wreaths of frost upon the still air.

            Ioreth made an admonitory gesture at Baranor. He clashed to a stop just outside the open door. Beyond him, in the translucent shadows of the house, Aragorn glimpsed Ioreth running into the bedchamber and heard her voice urging Finduilas to awake.

            Backing against the icy stone wall, the foundations of the Citadel, he watched through the tangled brown stalks as Finduilas came to the door. She was wrapped once again in her blue mantel, her hair cascading down over her shoulders. Ioreth tried to bind it up and Finduilas shook her away impatiently. “Baranor,” she said. “What is this? What message?”       

            Her gray eyes cast wildly around the courtyard, saw not what they sought, and returned to Baranor’s face.

            “My lady,” he said. “Several of my lord Denethor’s men have returned from Umbar with the dawn. He is not dead, he was wounded but lives still, and is strong enough to bring his men in orderly fashion back to the city. He will return by midday.”

            Her eyes widened and the glow in her face flared into a hectic flush, then faded. The hand clasping the mantel at her breast, the mantel covering the nakedness that Aragorn had explored as a miniature of the world itself, her hand tightened, shook briefly, then stilled. “Thank you, Baranor. Ioreth, my son....”

            “His nurse is bringing him here now,” said Ioreth.

            Once again Finduilas darted a sharp glance around the courtyard. Aragorn felt certain that this time she saw past the withered vines, saw him brought to bay against the foundations of the Citadel. But she said nothing, made no gesture, only drew herself erect like a warrior encasing himself in armor.

            With a salute Baranor turned and paced from the courtyard, his face no less set with duty than was Finduilas’s as she turned back into the house. No less set with love, for Denethor was Baranor’s captain, as he was Finduilas’s wedded lord.

            This time Aragorn did not look back. He slipped out into the street and walked briskly away from the Citadel until he reached an intersection several doors away from Finduilas’s, from Denethor’s, house. There he stopped, covered his face with his hands, and allowed himself one long ragged breath of pain. Her scent lingered like a caress on his palms and his fingertips, the fragrance of the sea, and of autumn, ever-changing. Even after her scent faded from his hands, he knew it would stay in his senses forever.

            He squared his shoulders, and looked up, and saw a young woman and a little boy walking toward him. The child was a taller, sturdier version of the lad he remembered, if  not yet as tall as a hobbit. He stamped his small feet upon the cobblestones and thrust and parried with miniature sword and shield, as though hacking his way through an enemy force that stood between him and his home. Boromir, Aragorn thought, would grow into a man like unto his father in intelligence and courage, if perhaps not in imagination.

            The child stopped, staring up at the tall man, his mouth set and his sword raised in challenge. Aragorn went down on one knee before the lad, looked deep into the gray eyes set in a face flushed with health, and quickly kissed the smooth salt-sweet forehead. “Be at peace, son of Gondor,” he said, with only the thinnest hope that his wish, his command, would be fulfilled. “Be at peace.”

            Aragorn walked away, alone, for to be a man or a woman was to be alone. He passed down through the circles of the city and out of the massive gates. After he had strode on down the road for a way, the charcoal and ash mountains of Mordor looming on his right hand, he turned and looked back, wondering whether he would ever see Minas Tirith again, and if so, under what circumstances.

            His keen eyes discerned a night-blue mantle, high upon the battlements, leaning slightly toward the south and Umbar, although it could just as well be leaning toward Dol Amroth and the free horizons of the sea.

            A snowflake whirled into his face, planting an icy kiss on his cheek. With a heavy sigh of both resignation and gratitude, Aragorn turned away and set his face toward Rivendell and his trothplighted elven princess, who was not another man’s widow, and who was most certainly not another man’s wife.

***

            Just outside the door of the Houses of Healing stood two guards in the livery of the Citadel, one scarce the height of a boy. “Strider!” he exclaimed.

            With a broad smile that cracked the stern gravity from his face like the shell from a nut, Aragorn took the small proffered hand in his large, well-worn one. “Well met, Pippin,” he said, and added, “Strider shall be the name of my house if that be ever established. In the high tongue it will not sound so ill, and Telcontar I will be and all the heirs of my body.”

            And with that they walked into the House, Gandalf gravely telling of the courage of Eowyn, White Lady of Rohan, and of Meriadoc Brandybuck of the Shire, and of Faramir, captain of the rangers of Ithilien and beloved of the people of Minas Tirith. Faramir, who was now Steward of Gondor.

            The first face Aragorn saw was Ioreth’s, now so wrinkled with age that he was reminded sharply how he himself had many years yet to live and to serve. He tilted his head at her, cautiously, but she did not recognize the solitary traveler of so long ago in this man who came bearing the sword, the Flame of the West, at the head of armies both living and dead. “You have store in this house of the herbs of healing?” he asked her.

            “Yes, lord,” she replied, and proceeded to babble on of this and that.

            “Time for speech is short,” he interrupted. “Have you athelas, or, as it is also called, kingsfoil?”

            Again her tongue ran quickly on, until he at last sent her to find kingsfoil, if any leaf be in the city, and went on into the first small room.

            There he found the hobbit Merry, a grayness of age and hard use in his face beneath the brown curls. Aragorn stroked his forehead, and sent his thought winging swift as any arrow toward Merry’s kinsman, now encompassed by deep shadow: We shall not fail you, Frodo.

            In the second room he found Eowyn, that white flower wrought of steel and frost, fair to see and yet stricken with wounds in both body and heart, the latter of which laid heavily upon his own. Something in her still face reminded him of  Finduilas, and yet this daughter of Rohan had never known the sea.

            In the last room lay Faramir, Finduilas’s younger son, a man in the full flower of maturity. He was laid out on the bed as though on a bier, his hands folded on his breast. And yet, according to Gandalf’s evil tale, he had narrowly avoided the pyre that Denethor in his last paroxysm of madness had set to claim them both.

            Aragorn sat down heavily by the bed. Faramir’s breath was labored, the fair waves of his hair were drenched with sweat, and his face, flushed not with health but with fever, twitched to and fro on the linen pillowcase. Gently Aragorn touched the man’s forehead. The skin seemed to sizzle beneath his fingertips, as though in escaping the fire he had brought some portion of it with him.

            In his despair Denethor meant to kill his heir. He meant for his line to end. Perhaps, though, it already had.

            At Aragorn’s side, Gandalf murmured, “Because he is my friend, Denethor named Faramir a wizard’s pupil. I think, however, he is not, for when I told him not to throw his life away, that his father would remember he loved him ere the end, still he, too, despaired. For of all things, precious as any ring, Faramir has desired his father’s love. But the love Denethor remembered there, at the end, was twisted by madness.”

            Aragorn looked up and met Gandalf’s piercing eyes, and saw the corner of his mouth lifted in a half-smile. Very delicately-phrased, that statement had been. Gandalf’s perspicacity could at times be quite unnerving, but still, he could not know the truth, if indeed, truth there was to know.

            Aragorn had heard, within a year of his quick visit to Gondor, that Finduilas had borne another son. It was then the question appeared in his mind, and there wove webs as smooth as her hair slipping between his fingers. But when next he had tidings from the south, they were of her death. She had wasted away, a fair flower unable to grow on a barren rock beneath the mountain of shadow. His sorrow became one with his question, untouchable.

            Then Boromir the man had come to Rivendell, long years after Aragorn had taken leave of Boromir the child. He had wondered whether this grim warrior remembered that evil day when his father had died in rumor and been restored to life in fact, but he could not ask, any more than he could ask if Boromir remembered the man who had stopped him on the street that morning, and wished him a peace he had never really known.

            When the Fellowship left Rivendell, it was Arwen’s kiss that lingered on Aragorn’s mouth, and her scent that he carried through ice and flame and stone. Still, though, he remembered the bittersweet scent of Finduilas, all the more clearly for her older son being part of the company.

            Then, during the long journey south, he had discovered one more reason to be fond of hobbits. With their unceasing curiosity about family, they unashamedly asked many questions of Boromir, if not the one Aragorn most wanted answered. And Boromir, in his brave, blunt way, spoke affectionately of his brother, Faramir. Of how he indulged the younger man’s taste for literature and music, of his gentility, like our mother’s. But Aragorn could see little of her in Boromir’s love for weapons and war and great deeds, save for that one moment in Lorien, when Boromir, shaken, had described his native city with eyes the shining silver-gray of Finduilas’s. "Have you ever seen it, Aragorn? The White Tower of Ecthelion, glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver, its banners caught high in the morning breeze. Have you ever been called home by the clear ringing of silver trumpets?”

            Aragorn could only respond, softly, “I have seen the White City, long ago.”

            “One day, our paths will lead us there and the tower guard will take up the call: The Lords of Gondor have returned!”

             In that moment, Aragorn had wished with all his heart that Boromir’s words would be prophetic. But it was not to be. That terrible day on Amon Hen, when the Fellowship was broken, it fell to Aragorn to kiss Boromir’s forehead once again, his mouth filled the taste of blood, tears, and sweat that were as much his own as the dying man’s. Be at peace, son of Gondor. And he had sent a silent prayer to the gentle spirit of Finduilas:  I should have saved him, forgive me.

            Faramir’s face even in uneasy repose was drawn with the same strength as Boromir’s, and the same keen edge as Finduilas’s, now drained by weariness, grief and pain. And Aragorn knew with dread certainty that the young man was suffering from more than his mortal wound, but also from the Black Breath of the wraiths of Sauron. Soon his fever would subside, and he would grow cold, and slip into shadow.

            Like the shadow that had claimed Denethor. Aragorn had grieved to hear that Boromir’s affection for his brother was not shared by his father. Gandalf had once wondered if Denethor, in perusing his books of lore, had realized the true lineage of Thorongil. When talking to Boromir, Aragorn wondered if some subtle insight, coupled, perhaps, with a servants’ tongue, had planted in Denethor a suspicion about Faramir’s lineage as well.  Much depended on how badly Denethor had been wounded, whether he returned to Finduilas’s bed while the imprint of Aragorn’s head remained upon the pillow. Had Denethor suspected the course of events, whatever their outcome, his pride would have kept him from admitting it, even to himself. And yet what canker might have grown in his mind with that denial, until the very sight of Faramir drove him further into the madness cultivated to such great effect by the enemy.

            Why Denethor had treated Faramir so unkindly did not matter, not now. Now, Aragorn would not fail Finduilas’s other son. He turned to Gandalf. “Here I must put forth all such skill as is given to me. Would that Elrond were here, for he is the eldest of our race and has the greater power. And yet time is running out for Eowyn, and Merry, and most of all for Faramir.”

            Gandalf nodded gravely, his white beard glinting like new-fallen snow. He did not have to say, You must do this yourself, alone.

            Leaning over Faramir, Aragorn took a deep breath, placed his left hand on Faramir’s hands and his right hand on Faramir’s forehead. And that breath caught in his throat. The young man smelled of smoke, and sour sweat, and something else, an elusive scent like that of Finduilas’s blue mantle. His body quivered beneath Aragorn’s hand, revealing his desperation and fear. Ah, Finduilas.

            “Faramir,” he murmured, as though calling one who wandered in some dark vale and was lost. “Faramir!”

            The young man’s quivering stilled, as even in the midst of evil visions, he heard.

            Clenching his teeth, Aragorn summoned the almost-forgotten powers of Westernesse that flowed in his veins, flickers of light and warmth beyond the weariness and the cares of this world, like the glow of sunset over an unsullied west. He leaned his own forehead against Faramir’s and called, silently, Return to the light.

            And then he felt, and heard, and saw the great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness inescapable. It was his dream. It was Faramir’s. Here was his acknowledgment, his recognition, from dream to flesh, from spirit to spirit. Here was his answer. How else to respond, than with a heartfelt,  Your father, Faramir, has never forgotten that he loves you. Come with me, now, to the light.

            And faintly he heard the reply, I come.

            No, Faramir would not yet pass into shadow, for he had been purged by fire and sword, freed from despair, and from fear. The day would come when Faramir, when Aragorn himself, must accept the gift of men and go down to death, but it was not this day. Today Aragorn, and Faramir with him, would fight for life. For what would life be, without love, and hope of love?

            Aragorn raised his head, blinking at the lamplight, and saw where he was. A boy with strangely familiar features stood holding a cloth and six withered leaves of kingsfoil, and behind him Ioreth waited, a bowl of steaming water between her aged but still capable hands.

            Aragorn took two leaves, laid them on his hands and breathed on them, a shuddering exhalation from the depths of his being. Then he crushed them and cast them into the bowl. The fragrance of a dewy morning filled the room, air fresh and clean and young, new made from shores of silver far away washed by seas of foam, tingling with joy beneath an unshadowed sun. He inhaled, and was refreshed as though by hours of peaceful sleep. But his heart was already light.

            Smiling, he held the bowl before Faramir’s dreaming face. The young man’s nostrils flared, recognizing, perhaps, his mother’s scent. His chest rose and fell and he stirred.

            Opening his eyes, Finduilas’s eyes, Faramir looked on Aragorn who bent over him, and he spoke softly, in a voice like velvet brushed against the grain. “My lord, you called me. I come. What does the king command?”

            “Walk no more in shadows, but awake!” said Aragorn. “You are weary. Rest awhile, and take food, and be ready when I return.”

            “I will, lord,” said Faramir. “For who could lie idle when the king has returned. When my...” His words trailed away, and his features crumpled in puzzlement.

            Aragorn gazed down at this man, scholar and warrior both, his son, as Faramir gazed back up at him. Then the puzzlement receded, the hectic flush ebbed, and the light of knowledge and of love kindled in Faramir’s face, and he smiled. Meeting that smile with one of his own, Aragorn kissed Faramir’s forehead and savored one last time the bittersweet taste of Finduilas. “Farewell then for a while. I must go to others who need me.”

            As Aragorn left the room, he glanced back, and Faramir sent his smile, weak as yet, but promising full health and fuller understanding, after him. And in that hour, Aragorn could not believe that any darkness would endure.

            Faramir would found a new line, of men who would not hold the king’s place, but who would stand by his side. And the people of Gondor and of the north would not fail, for the king was indeed come among them, and after war he brought healing. For himself as well as for others.

            Telcontar I will be, and all the heirs of my body. All save one.