A candle looses nothing by lighting another candle.

- proverb

Éowyn clutched her cousin’s hand – a cousin so close he was practically a brother. She could feel him slipping away oh-so-slowly. She had seen enough death in her short life to know when it was knocking at the door; but she would not let it in yet. Théodred breathed still, though weakly, his wounds open and festering, the sound of his breathing harsh and liquid. She could smell it on him, the battlefield and the rot, the sickness and the stagnation… the darkness itself.

A single candle cast an aureole of light around the room, but it was not much. There was no one around, with Éomer cast out and Théoden useless with age and illness. But still… at the door she could hear breathing, she thought, or sense a presence, but she was not certain – she often felt like she was being watched, as if there were a ghost stalking her.

Gríma, she thought, it must be Gríma, watching me.

She would show him then.

She gave Théodred’s hand a squeeze and stood, sweeping about the room with her head held high as any queen who had ever wandered the halls of Meduseld. She opened the window wide unto the night, and breathed of the fresh air, allowing the cold Rohan wind to enter the room, letting the sweet smell of drying hay and the moonlight to spill about the little sickroom. Then she opened the drawer next to the bed and took out several candles. Singing an old lullaby her mother and Théodred’s mother had sung, in the old tongue of Rohan, one they had both learned as children, as their parents, who were brother and sister, had learned it while sitting together in bed as their mother sung it, Éowyn went about the room setting the candles on any surface she could – tea plates, lids from containers of leather polish, the top of her little mirror – and lighting them all from the same single candle she started with.

Quickly the room lit up, revealing all the dark little corners to be just ordinary corners, the shadows in the curtains to be nothing as the wind blew them into the room, driving the shade from them. Her song grew stronger, and after covering Théodred in another blanket, she sat next to him again, feeling braver now, with light and air and song, though it was meagre defence against death and darkness that hung like a heavy fog over all of Edoras. Still, it was enough to make Gríma creep away, back to where he grovelled at Théoden’s feet. And it was enough for this one night, for her lonely vigil over Théodred.

Sin, sin, ‘tis done.