You are eighteen when you volunteer to go out into the wilds with your father and your brother. You could have stayed home, followed in your mother’s footsteps as a constable. Had a comfortable life and kept a small portion of the world safe. You had to go. Something in your blood cried out for open skies and roads unseen.
He takes you to Esteldin, where you swear an oath to your Chieftain and to the rest of Eriador. You’re not alone, there are at least a dozen others your age, young men and women. They laugh at you behind your back. You grew up comfortably, away from the worst of it. You’ve inherited the pride of the Dunedain and their War and pain as well. Half your world lies in ruins and you wander down the roads which once held a kingdom together, no more than a sparse band of cobblestones swallowed by grass.
I belong. You fiercely remind yourself. I belong.
They test your strength, sending you into the Ettenmoors to fight. You make in back, with a troll’s stone finger in your belt and cracked ribs. Every breath tears through your chest. You are lucky. Several of those who swore the oath with you are dead, slain in the first opening salvo. Several more will spend the rest of their lives as cripples, bound to their books and to the duties of a healer.
For the first time, you realize that your childhood world existed in a protective cocoon. The horrors of the outside world would have long ago razed everything you knew to the ground.
You fight better now. Your footsteps are scarcely heard. You can lose and arrow faster than some people can think and follow trails that are little more than bent twigs. Your face becomes sharp and your eyes wary. You volunteer for anything, no matter how dangerous or how hopeless.
I will go, though I do not know the way.
It is not always so hard. There are nights spent laughing by a campfire, passing a flask from hand to hand. There’s a song on your lips and an open road ahead. There is the quiet contentment of solitude and the wild beauty of Eriador. The moment you walk up the steps of Ost Elendil, your heart skips a beat and a sort of fierce pride fills your chest. This is where you belong, in the footsteps of kings at the side your brothers and sisters. You take a keen interest in history and in language and once spend three days in the library of Imladris cobbling together a translation.
Sometimes, every once in a while, you come home to your mother and younger siblings. Your mother always gives you tea and a slice of pie. Blueberry, your favorite. She never asks you about what you do, what you’ve done. You lie. You say everything is fine, but she can see the tired slope of your shoulders. If everything was fine, you wouldn’t be back here, with the smell of wood polish and baking and flowers in the window boxes.
You are just like your father, she says. Always worryin’ about things he can’t change. Your siblings think you’re a hero and you tell them about all the times Aldor fell into Lake Evendim or all the horrible puns Halbarad keeps up his sleeves when times get tough. You tell them how you fought a horrible mob of goblins armed with only a stick and your wits.
People now spit at you when you walk by. Mothers pull their children close. Every move of yours is met with suspicion or hostility. They don’t know what you’ve sacrificed. They don’t know about that you fight so they can live in peace.
By the blood of my people are your lands kept safe!
When you are four and twenty, the war comes and it feels like a relief. No more stabbing at shadows. No more half-hinted suggestions of something dark stirring in the East. You have a foe, something you can face head on. You are half sick of shadows.
Your Chieftain goes to Rivendell, to a council. Halbarad rallies the Dunedain. He calls for any able-bodied man to march South. There might be a king in Gondor and Arnor if all those secret councils bore fruit. If the Company can make it through the Gap of Isengard. If the Chieftain even makes it that far. If… there are too many ifs. A fool’s errand, your uncle says and refuses the call. Others say that Angmar is their concern and the restless dead walking out of their graves. Let the Gondor care for itself, they never helped us in our time of need.
In the end, only sixty men heed the call and go south with Halbarad. You are one of the youngest and the only woman. You fight your way south over roads which are becoming increasingly hostile.
Then come the Paths of the Dead and the Pelennor and the Black Gates. You keep moving, keep fighting. Halbarad dies on the Pelennor along with so many others. The blood lingers under your nails for weeks and you can still hear the screams, smell the blood every time you close your eyes. Sometimes you wake up and sit alone in the dark with your arms wrapped around your knees staring off into space. So many gone. Of all who went South with the Company, only thirty remain.
They crown your chieftain king and the world, for the first time in a long while, feels at peace. It’s as though a weight’s been lifted off your chest. All those sacrifices, all the pain and grief and blood meant something in the end. For a little while, you feel as though your work is done.
Nevertheless, you (and most of the Company) take your leave and return to the North. Saerdan has a family. Belith has a farm. Lothrandir misses the sharp cold of Forochel. And you, you just want to go home to a small house in Bree with white-washed walls, flowers in the window boxes, and worn-down furniture. You miss your gossiping aunts and the smallness of Bree. You want to hear the chatter of the market and smell bread baking again. You want solitude and ruins and time to sort out the thoughts rattling through your head.
So you return home and start to write. Putting things down on paper is difficult and even painful, but you can feel the cracks the War left fading. The scars remain, in your skin and in your heart, until the day you lay down your life and pass beyond the world. Sometimes they ache, but there are Aldor’s hands around yours and the wind off Lake Evendim running through your hair.
You end your book like this: Well, in the end, all I can say is that she lived. Happily ever after? That remains to be seen.
