17. A Question Of Honor

Two long hours of backtracking found them nestled in a small hollow well away from the water’s edge.  Exhausted and despondent, they had curled tightly against each other and dozed fitfully as the moon faded and the pale gold of dawn streamed down to dance on the water.  Turning sleepily in his arms, Estella buried her face against his chest, and her innocent movements in seeking his warmth sent a delicious heat rushing through him from ear tip to tiptoe.  Merry was suddenly terrifyingly aware of her every inch and breath:  each perfect finger light upon his chest, her round knee against his thigh, the slow rise and fall of her back under his hand.  One delicate toe shifted against his bare ankle in guileless torture more maddening than any calculated stroke could be.  A thousand nights of half-remembered dreams urged him to gather her closer still, to press her every curve against him and to be lost in the dark heat rising from her skin.  It went against everything he’d ever been taught about the respect owed a lady, and he heaved a frustrated sigh.

“Oh, to be married already…” he murmured aloud.

“Hmm?” Estella inquired softly, raising her sleepy eyes to search his face.

“Just thinking I should have stolen you away months ago, tradition and propriety be damned,” he muttered, pressing a kiss into her tangled curls.

“What a deliciously wicked idea…” she replied, eyes half closed, and stretched slowly against the full length of his body.

All notions of gentle restraint fled from his head, indeed all thought drowned beneath the rushing sound of his heartbeat loud in his ears, and he leaned down to capture her mouth in a long breathless kiss.  Her hot little tongue flicked and twirled against his own and nothing else existed but the taste of her.  He broke at last from the kiss to press his face into her neck, needing to feel her skin under his lips, and he could barely hear her words past her harsh breath whistling in his ear.

“Steal me now.”

Merry pulled away to stare into her face.  She was wide awake, full of fire and sadness in the half-light of the cave, and he thought he could see looming in her eyes the meaning behind her words.

“What…?”

One small hand pressed against his cheek as she spoke, voice trembling and hollow.

“We both know what Tengo wants from me, Merry, but I’ve no intention of indulging his illusions that I’d have him of my own free will.”

“He cannot…”

“He will!” she whispered harshly, ruthlessly shoving the dark reality in his face.  “If he can leave you here to die, he’s lost all sense and honor.  Why should he stop there?”  She brushed soft fingertips against his lips, delicately tracing their curve and stilling his protest.  “Give me some place to go to when the inevitable comes…” she murmured.

He drew her tight against him, tears falling unchecked into her hair.

“I will not let this happen!  I will not!  I cannot…”

“It is past our choosing.  I will bear it if I know you are alive and looking for me.”

“I will have to kill him, whatever happens else, I will kill him, you know that, and then I will be banished too…  But that will not matter, dishonor or no, we’ll leave, we’ll go… away…”

“No!  Listen to me!” she cried, holding his face close to hers, hands on his cheeks.  “No one will deny a husband’s right to avenge that kind of slight.  There will be no dishonor.”

Her fingers slipped between his own to lace their hands together and he felt her breath warm on his face as she spoke into the semidark.

“For every day and every night, for every year in wealth or blight, I bind my life, my heart, my soul, to make our halves forever whole.”

He looked long into her eyes, unable to speak, to move, in the face of the nightmare to come where so long dreams had had their place.  He nodded finally and lay his cheek against hers.  They were past choosing, but not past hope.

“As long as sun and stars may shine, I vow to treat your heart as mine, to share the joys and come what may for every night and every day…” he finished the simple couplet, unchanged for generations without count, that should have marked the first day of their common lives.  Forever, shortened so soon, was more bitter than never could have been. 

“I have no bride gift for you, love,” he murmured, tracing the sharp curve of her ear to its point.

“No one will care…” she whispered, pressing a kiss in the hollow of his throat.

***   ***   ***

“Just out of curiosity, my love,” she asked, absently smoothing his curls where he lay, head upon her breast.  “Where would you have taken us?”

“Well, Rohan I suppose, or maybe Gondor…”

“So far?”

“I’d rather offer you a life in a king’s hall than a woodcutter’s shed if I can.”

“Good point…  Can we still go?  To visit, I mean.”

“We may still have to,” he said, laying a gentle hand on her flat belly, only half-hoping nothing more would come of their fateful choice.  “But Eomer has made it plain we are welcome anytime, and it’s not much further to Minas Tirith and Ithilien…  But I’m surprised you’d willingly go so far from home.” 

“Positively scandalous, isn’t it?  My father would fall out of his chair.  Now I think on it, we must absolutely make the trip!”

“Alright, then, but we’ll need a proper escort…” he said, glad to hear her speak with hope of their future.

“Do you think Freddy would come?”

Merry’s clear laugh rang out again.  “I think your brother has no intention of leaving home and board for a long time yet, if ever.”

“Just as well, I suppose, he’d never live down the sight of me in trousers.”

“Trousers?”

“You don’t honestly think I’ll ride sidesaddle in lacy skirts for weeks on end do you?  Out in the wild there’ll be no one to talk and I’d rather be steady in a proper saddle.”

“And here I thought I’d married a proper and demure young lady of unimpeachable character and deportment!” he teased.

“Ha!  If you’d rather I simper and faint at the sight of a mouse, I know a few empty-headed waifs that would suit you better!”

“No, thank you, I rather like the little firebrand I’ve found under those manners…” he murmured, pushing up to kiss her with a smile.  “Besides, I have no problem with you riding properly in trousers or skirts or your Sunday bathrobe for that matter.  I rode to war with a woman in man’s gear and survived to tell of it.”

“Now this I must hear.”

“Oh, there isn’t much to tell…” Merry replied, pulling away awkwardly.  He sat up beside her, eyes fixed on the small buttons in the faint light as he closed his shirt.

“You guard your past so jealously, Merry, yet I cannot imagine you’ve done anything so shameful you need hide it so well.”

“Not shameful…  Just…  Dark.  Too dark, too awful,” he said softly and turned to look at her. “I don’t want it to touch us, to touch you.  War twists things, brings evils you should not have to see or even hear of.”

“I have seen enough to know that things unspoken can lay hard between people and their happiness.  As for war…  Do you not know how many lads died in my care, half of them Brandybucks, Bolgers and Burrowses?  Every new broken body could have been yours or my brother’s, and most of them I knew…” She paused, laying a gentle hand on his shoulder.  “Did nothing good come of your journey?”

“I…  A lot of good, in fact the greatest possible good.”

“Was it worth it?”

“Most days I’d say yes.  But there was so much lost, so many dead…”

“Do you think you honor them by forgetting how and why they died?”

The slow trickle of the sunken river filled the long silence that followed.

“No.”

Estella waited quietly, watching the tension in his back slowly seep away, and his head rise as he looked off across the dark expanse of their prison.  He soon turned back, the ghost of a smile barely visible with the pale light behind him.  Merry reached for her hand and she leaned her head against his shoulder.

“So, did she always walk about in men’s clothes?”

“What?”

“This woman you rode to war with…”

“Oh no!” he chuckled, “though I can’t say she’d never borrowed her brother’s trews in the past, and most likely she steals her husband’s on occasion today.  No, she couldn’t very well do that in the house of the king, being his niece after all.”

“Did all their women follow their mates to war?”

“No, it was very rare, but she was not the usual sort of woman either.”

“Why did she go?”

“I’m not sure I ever understood it fully, save that she went out seeking death and honor in battle the way some look for forgetfulness in drink.  Perhaps she felt she had little left to lose…”

“How tragic…  But you begin the tale by its end, my heart.  Tell me about…  what was her name?”

“Eowyn.”

“Tell me about the Lady Eowyn, who rode one day to war,” she said, in the tone she often used when beginning the grand legends of which they were both so fond.  Merry smiled.  Perhaps that was the way to tell it, like a story found in a book…

He sighed deeply, and for a moment Estella thought he might again withdraw, but he gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze and his words filled the silent space about them.

“Tall and fair as morning she was, and ever so sad and strong, like a lonely tree in a meadow that wishes for its brothers.  The first time I saw her, she was armed and astride her great gray horse, long blond braid over her shoulder, and it seemed appropriate somehow, though I didn’t yet know how right I was about that…”