*The third and final installment in my aftermath of Helms Deep series; the shieldmaiden's story. Éowyn was forgotten in the battle of Helms Deep, but here is a look at her thoughts both during and after the battle, and evidence perhaps, that women do not have an easy role in the business of war.

*Movie-canon. Takes place just as TTT ends.

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"How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer." -Sam

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She came from below as one blind, for long, dark, and maddening had the hours been in the caves. The rising sun was vicious in her eyes, and she could not yet meet it, was forced to shield her face with her hand and wait for the first cruel rays to stop piercing her eager, searching gaze.

Whatever met her, when she was able to look upon it, she promised herself, she would remember that it was victory. Rohan had survived. Rohan's children had survived. And Rohan's King had survived. Whatever else, there was that to hold to.

In the night it had seemed that the death of all would come to pass. Any life at all was reason for comfort, even though joy was unlikely.

But if her most desperate prayer was answered, and she was determined to find out very soon if it had been, the life of one in particular would have been spared.

********** The Evening Before****************

The earth shifted below the women's feet as the invaders approached, and the trembling increased as the enemy drew closer, until the rocky ground seemed to roll and pitch with the coming of the dark army, as an unruly sea. The women quivered with the world, wondering in ignorance and agony what would happen to the men they loved, somewhere above. What would happen to them, and the children they clutched to them, children that despite the terror all around were hushed with awe and an understanding of what was to take place, to even the youngest babe.

An orc call sounded, eerily reaching into the caves, echoing there before it died away into an unnatural quiet. For unbearable moments, there was silence. Silence as terrible and full of danger as the loudest battle cry. And then a great snarling, growing, growing ever louder and the earth tilted again as the army presumably charged for the walls.

And the quiet of night was forever shattered.

Éowyn listened to the battle helplessly with the other women, even as her hands gripped the hilt of her sword. Pointlessly. They were corralled in the caves like valued stock, she thought with the bitterness that would last through the night. The horses, after all, were housed nearby as well.

Only the order of her king kept her there. Giving comfort to the very old, the very young, and the women who had sent their men to die. She watched the entrance fiercely, but none came, not friend, not enemy. They were forgotten in the deep.

As the others did, she turned her eyes upward, as if trying to pierce with her gaze the glittering roofs of the caverns, as if trying to see and know what happened above. There were screams of men, shrieks of the Uruk-hai. Even so far below, Éowyn could hear the ringing of steel upon steel, and she longed to be up there with them, to feel the shock of impact run up her arm as she drove her sword home in the enemy.

At one point the entire fortress, and the caves below it, violently shook and swayed on the heels of a sound more massive and terrible than any they had ever heard. The torches on the cave walls had flickered and danced obscenely, as if in time to some unheard and horrible music while the world went on shuddering. There had been wild screams and deafening crashes from above, then a split second of such quiet that Éowyn wondered if the world above had simply collapsed.

Then came the sound of fleeing feet above and the heavier strides of those who pursued them. Éowyn knew it was a retreat for the keep, and she also knew that the enemy would accept no terms of defeat but death. Rohan would be ended. Helms Deep was falling.

Finally, Éowyn decided it was a torture too unjust to bear, waiting to live or die in the darkness with no say in her own fate. She started toward the mouth of the caves and the entrance into the fortress, willing to defy Theoden, her uncle and her king, so that she might meet her end in honor.

Theoden's knight, Gamling, with four other weary men, met her at the exit to the caves. Her breath hitched in her throat, and it was almost impossible to force words past. "What is happening? Is this all that is left of Rohan? Only five soldiers?"

"No Lady, but there are not many more who stand. The fortress has fallen. All is lost. You are to lead the women and children through the caves, to the mountain pass. Make for Gondor, for they are the last of the race of men and the only hope. Go at once. There is no time!"

"Does the King live?" Éowyn asked, an icy fist of fear closing around her heart. She was not willing to let him go after so recently regaining him from Wormtongue's poison. "For I will fight with him! I will not leave him here. I will not run from my King!"

"Lady, all hope has fled! We will fail. There is nothing left to do but to give you and the other women a chance to flee for life with the babes! You must go now!"

"Lord Aragorn. Does he still stand?" Éowyn demanded breathlessly, the first beginnings of despair stirring in her heart. She swallowed hard, forced down the feeling of loss, and gathered her courage around her shoulders like a warming cloak. Aragorn must still be alive. He was destined for great things. She saw it in his eyes, felt it in her heart when she looked into them.

And Rohan was destined for other things. They would not end like this, she decided. She simply would set all of her will against it and it would have to be enough.

And even if they would end so, then she would meet it with fight and love of the people and the land that were hers, not loss of faith.

"He lives yet. It is his order to send you through the caves and into the mountains, for King Theoden has given over to defeat, though Aragorn still fights for victory. Go now, and leave us to barricade the entrance of the caves. We will defend you as long as there is life in us, Lady. Our hope is gone, but we will fight for yours! Go quickly!"

"I will do as Lord Aragorn has asked of me. But do not be mistaken. If he lives, and if he fights, there is still hope for man! And for Rohan!"

And so it was that she turned back and shouted for the women to gain their feet. She stood at the narrow passage toward the mountain road and waited as the refugees of Rohan filed through, eyes blank with shock and cheeks streaked with their loss. She gave them what encouragement she could, but despite her determination, even her own sureness began to fail as she comprehended what the leaving meant.

They were in retreat. They were running for their lives and leaving the men above to spend their last strength so that they could do so.

She chose a brave young woman to lead the way, and herself waited as the endless line of them passed into the darkness, with only the faint glimmer of the leading torch to guide them. Many had lost hope, had resigned themselves to death, stubbornly holding to the caves, refusing to leave a man or child above.

Éowyn pleaded, and when that failed, ordered them to move, and at last had to give up on some to move to others with similar arguments.

And just as she was ready to take the passage and guard the rear of the line, there came a new sound. A ringing that any man or woman of Rohan would recognize. The sound of metal shod hooves on the stone of the causeway. They were riding out into the field, mounted again on the horses they knew how to fight upon.

She closed her eyes and paused, grasping cold stone for support. For the horses were so few, and the enemy's thunder was still deafening. This was it then. The final charge of the Riders of the Mark. And the heir of Gondor.

She could not suffer herself to go then, could not make herself turn and flee while the King, and Lord Aragorn, and the others that remained, went to their deaths.

She left the women and children to their fleeing, ran as one maddened past the souls who had chosen to wait for death, and came to a great barricade between her and the men above, constructed by Gamling's faithful hands. It had been designed to hold the enemy out, but it was victorious in holding her in as well. Balling her hands into fists, she struck at the heavy beams, again and again, until splinters of wood embedded in the sides of her palms and they were numbed with the beating.

Again above, a silence, a dying of the screams of men and orcs, raised the skin upon her arms in chills, and she was stilled by it, resting open palms against the wood with her head bowed low.

And then, against all possibility, against all she dared to hope, there was a great cry and the earth rolled again, but not as under the feet of orcs, but as with the hooves of the fine horses of the Mark. Thousands of them.

Reinforcements had come at last, and she forced herself to believe that it was not too late.

Her hands were roughened and bloodied, and she had been unable to make any progress against Gamling's cursed wall. At last, good sense prevailed and she slid down by the barricade and waited for the men to remember the women. Above, the sounds of the massive retreat had abated and there were hurried footsteps, but the light footsteps of men they seemed, and a promising number of them given that she'd feared Gamling and his four companions had been the only remaining men in her world not so long ago.

She heard several individuals approaching at last, and she swiftly rose.

"Who approaches?" she called out fiercely and touched her sword, wary but optimistic. "Make yourselves known!"

"She never follows an order but ever does she give them," a muffled voice floated through the barrier they were slowly knocking down. A voice familiar and dear and unexpected.

"Éomer?" Éowyn cried out, disbelief leaving her jaw hanging low as the beams level with her head were removed and she saw her brother, looking exhausted and dirty, but whole, standing there on the other side.

"Yes, young sister. And I shall skin you for not taking the path you were told to take by Aragorn! Why are you not leading the people to the mountains?"

"Try to skin me, brother, and see how short a man's life is," Éowyn returned as the obstacle was taken down low enough for her to clear. She needn't have worried about her own ability to do so though, for her brother caught her up and swept her over, crushing her into his arms so tightly that she could scarce draw breath.

She did not mind, and put her arms about him in return, inhaling deeply the smell of sweat, leather, and horse beneath the foulness of the orc blood, the scent that had always been part of the men she loved in life. It was an unexpected gift to have him here to greet her after a night of such fear and blindness.

"I thought I would arrive too late and find you had perished!" Éomer whispered, voice raw and full of the fear that remained in him at such a thought.

"And I thought you had abandoned us all! What became of you, Éomer?"

"You have been fed the poison of Wormtongue for too long if you believe I would have willingly left you, Éowyn. I believe we have many tales that we should share, but there is need for us above now."

Éowyn put her hand in her brother's, and Éomer, pulling back at the rough feeling of it, took her wrist and examined her palm. Éowyn watched him eye the many splinters she had suffered in the beating of the barrier.

"You have a heart of fire, sister," he said, shaking his head as he smiled, and leaned down to place a kiss first on her palm and then on her forehead. "Had they but set you loose as you wished, perhaps the army of Isengard would have fled ere an arrow flew."

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Now, she grew accustomed to the sunlight and moved her hand away, and the carnage met her eyes, and all that she had not seen was revealed to her in a sudden, sweeping scene of desperate ruin.

She had not taken enough care to prepare herself, she thought. It was somehow worse than she expected, though she had thought she feared the worst. She had seen battles, and their aftermath, but before her were the spoils of war; hatred unleashed and unchecked, and it had very nearly swept Rohan from the face of the ravaged earth.

Éomer stood quietly beside her, even as she felt the blood drain from her face and toward her feet, and she fought to keep her body from following. She had never in her life felt that she might faint and she would absolutely not show such weakness now. The look her brother gave her told her that he knew this, and he did not put out a hand to steady her, even as her knees suddenly ran to water.

She could not stand to look upon the dead littering the rocks, the ground, the flats beyond the refuge that would never be refuge again, but would remain from all days forward, graveyard.

She clenched her teeth hard then. If her men had borne the battle, it was a small thing to stand and look upon the price they had paid in the winning of it.

And they had won, she reminded herself. Whether they could do so again was beyond her knowledge or concern for the moment. They had won the right to another day on Middle-Earth.

She would not spend it without hope.

Squaring her shoulders, she looked at her brother. "Where are the wounded?"

"Everywhere, sister. To the ends of the world." he replied darkly, then shook his head. "Forgive me. It is a bitter sight, though, is it not? Probably more so for the ones who spent the night fighting the battle. I have been here but a short while."

She nodded and started tending to the wounded that were there, sitting in a row on what remained of the wall. She moved from one to the next swiftly, doing what she could, which in many cases, was not much, and it was a bitter feeling to walk away from dying men after doing what little there was to do to make them comfortable.

Always, her eyes swept the field, and with terror, the men that were carried past to the field where they were burying the dead. She searched for him desperately. As time passed and she did not find what she was looking for, her heart plummeted lower and lower and dread coiled like a snake in her belly, waiting for just a word of confirmation before striking.

But finally, there came a glint of sunlight off steel and it drew her eye to him at last.

Aragorn was walking straight toward her, sun catching hilt of sword, but seemingly leaving the rest of him untouched. For in his face was no joy, only great weariness and sorrow, and he walked with a slight limp and shortened steps, not with the untiring strides she had always seen him take, even as he had come alone into Helms Deep after the attack of Isengard's wolves.

He mounted the stairs with his head lowered, and to either side, soldiers sat and wept into their hands. Below him, still on the field, she saw that the elf and the dwarf watched his going, looking at a loss of what to do without him, or perhaps what to do for him…she wasn't sure of which.

And still he was kingly, she thought. For there was a peasant boy there, younger than most, who leaned against the stone and cried alone, and he paused and lowered himself on one knee before the child, though it cost him pain to do so. He placed his hand upon the boy's filthy cheek, giving him some words of comfort that were lost to Éowyn. But the child looked up, dazed, into his eyes, and it seemed that whatever he saw there gave him strength and his tears slowed. Aragorn nodded, as if to confirm his words, and straightening, continued.

He slowed as his eyes fell upon her, and she thought that some of the mask fell away and she could see more clearly his pain, pain that went beyond the wounds he'd suffered or the heaviness of his feet. Pain that went down in the deep parts of him, the very places he had stirred within her since he'd stood below her sword and had spoken of her worth.

She stopped and waited for him at the top of the stair, and there was such overwhelming gratitude in her for his life that she smiled, incredulously, even in the midst of the destruction. Joy rushed over her like a stiff warm wind of the West.

And all who saw their Lady's happiness in that moment took heart from it, save the one that it was meant for.

He stopped before her and bowed his head, and a slight smile curled his lips in seeing her well, but there was no humor in it, no real joy, and it never reached into his eyes. Still, tears rose in hers, and she was somewhat shamed to realize, but couldn't deny, that his life meant more to her than those of her own people.

"Bless you, Lord Aragorn," she whispered fiercely as she tentatively touched the hard line of his cheekbone, heedless of the dried dirt and blood there. It was her first contact with him, the first time flesh had met flesh, and she was surprised at the leaping of her heart and pulse. He gave off such warmth, she thought. As one always burning, always a source of hope and heat.

Joy and relief to have this evidence of his vitality, his life, threw propriety from her shoulders and she moved to embrace him. He opened and closed his arms around her, holding hard for a moment, bending his head into her hair. The feeling was so right to Éowyn that she clung for a moment longer than was necessary, not wanting to let him go.

He stepped back first and she saw that his eyes were more troubled than before. Still, he gave her another bow and went forth to the infirmary, and she followed, thinking as she did so that she would willingly follow him to the ends of the very earth.

And knowing that he would never let her do so.

Éomer watched her speculatively as she passed him, and she raised her eyes to him in challenge and defiance, but he said nothing. He only watched with regret that she did not care to contemplate.

*

Would they ever stop bleeding? Éowyn wondered. She felt as if she was up to her elbows in the blood of Rohan, as if there was no escape from it. It smeared her dress and her skin; the ends of her tangled hair trailed through it.

It was maybe even more frustrating than waiting below, she thought, walking among these men and not being able to do a thing to save their lives. She wanted to scream at them to stop their dying. Wanted to flee from the chamber where they were packed together, overlapping at the elbows, and never return. She wanted to find a place to lay down and let the tears come, where no one could see.

In the end, she went from one to the next, and laid her hand in theirs, or upon their brows, and spoke softly to them. Telling them they fought bravely, and with honor, and that they had done Rohan proud. Telling them, when they knew what was coming, that they died a noble death.

She did not say what she thought next. Yes, they died a noble death. And a pointless one. They had been attacked with such hatred, such irrational, unfounded hatred that she couldn't even begin to understand why so many had to perish. And for what? The hatred was still there, this morning, boiling anew in the East.

Despite her determination to remember the victory, her hope began to wane.

At the passing of a young boy, one she did not even know but who had died calling for a mother too deep in the mountain passage to return in time, Éowyn recognized she was reaching the end of her courage.

Feeling the trembling of her lower lip and the burning at the back of her eyes, she left the healing room suddenly and turned down a dark corridor before putting her face in her hands and giving over to her tears. They came violently and silently, until her shoulders shook hard even as she made no sound.

She never heard the whisper of footsteps approaching her. But suddenly, Aragorn's tired voice came to her, full of concern as he stopped before her.

"Are you unwell, my Lady?'

It started her so that she flung her head up, and he saw her tears, though she would not have had him do so. Face flaming into embarrassment, she started to dash at them with her hands, before noticing in dismay that they were still covered in blood.

"Forgive me, Lord Aragorn," she said, straightening her spine and leaving her tears upon her face because she had no other choice.

"What injury have you done to me that you should have need to ask my pardon, Lady?" Aragorn asked gently, cocking his head slightly to the side as he studied her.

"I cannot bear to see Rohan dying." She said simply. "The men have fought the battles and I have not the strength to see them suffer for it. I am weak."

"Nay, Lady. It would be the very weak of heart indeed who could bear to look upon such a sight and not feel sorrow," he murmured, and sighed heavily.

She looked up at him, doubt and wonder warring for control of her heart. He could ease her soul with a word, a look. Even when his own was in peril.

"No, Éowyn," he murmured, addressing her familiarly for the first time, and speaking almost as if to himself. "You have a spine of iron. You are stronger than us all."

"No, My Lord, I am not. But I would put on a brave face for these men, as you have done. As you still do." She hesitated, then looked into his haunted eyes. "I would wear that face for you as well."

"It is a dear face," Aragorn told her, and reached out as if to touch her cheek. His hand paused in midair when he saw that it too was covered in blood, both his own dried blood and fresher blood from the wounded. Éowyn felt her heart, which had surged in anticipation of a touch from him, plummet in disappointment when he lowered the hand again. She dropped her gaze so he would not see her thoughts.

"Don't cause yourself more pain, Lady. Go now, and rest. The wounded will be well cared for."

Éowyn raised her eyes to his. "Would you take rest now? When the men in that room wait for you?"

Aragorn shook his head and gave her a look that told her he knew what she would say next. "Nay."

"And neither shall I," Éowyn said, and won a small smile of admiration from him.

"As you wish, Lady. Your men do love you. The sight of your face gives them hope. I shall leave you, then, to your thoughts, if you need nothing else of me."

Éowyn had stopped her tears as they spoke, harnessing her grief with her will, but as she watched him walk away, so bent, so hurt, so lost, even though he had followed her and tried to encourage her, her tears betrayed her and blurred the sight of him.

She would have given anything to ease him. But he did not want comfort from her, did not need it. She knew he respected her and cared for her. But only as he cared for all men and women of the world.

That was hard to bear.

As he turned the corner, she saw his fingers go to the jewel at his throat.

And that was bitter too.

*