Found:
Proof that I'm not quite as selfish as I like to claim.
Yanna.
Bloody Yanna!
As a child she was a self-serving ball of envy and conceit. As an adult, she's deranged, self-pitying, self-involved, utterly lacking in compassion or empathy and entirely too quick to lay blame at everyone else's door. It's never her fault! Oh no, of course not. Everything that happens to her is but more in a long line of malices perpetrated by others.
No wonder her husband won't poke her.
I took Eithwyn there, some small part of me hoping that she might have bloody well grown up in the last twenty years, that she might have changed for the better. But no. She's every part the highly strung dramatist that she was and then some! It would seem that she's only perfected her act in the time since my leaving.
One cart load of accusations and more theatrics than can be found in a band of traveling minstrels later and the arrogant bitch turned us away!
Eithwyn is her niece, for goodness sake! The only daughter, and only surviving child, of her dead brother and still she refused. Claims of poverty and hardship were beyond ridiculous considering the opulence of her home. That house, in a town so recently rebuilt from a burning, is larger and better furnished than the one in which we grew up! If her decor and clothing is anything to go by then coin is one thing she most certainly doesn't lack! And if her faithless wastrel of a husband is even half as neglectful as she whined, then one would only assume that having a little girl to care for would, at the very least, offer the woman some company!
Eithwyn is better off without her.
And I am so very glad that I never stuck around to marry that man!
"Why don't you take her in?" she demanded of me.
Why don't I?
Would it be so bad? I want a child and the likelihood of me having one of my own is growing ever more slim by the day. She's a good girl. Pleasant, polite, well-mannered. She's quiet right now, but that's to be expected. Given time to overcome her tragedy, she'll come out of her shell more. She needs someone to care for her and I... I already do, don't I?
So what if she's Randir's daughter? So what if her father and I never liked one another? She's blood and, more than that, she's in need. Wasn't I in need once? Can't I understand her plight, at least in part? Can't I give her a good life? A safe life?
I want to.
But can I? Can I really?
I've no wish to stay here in Rohan. I've people and things awaiting my return in the north. It's a long trek and I would be taking her away from all that she has ever known and loved so soon after she lost her family and home. But if ever there was a time to do so, it would be now, wouldn't it? Take her away from all the pain, offer her a new life, a new future, not on a farm as a beaten down wife but as a woman in her own right, tall and proud and able to stride the world with my experience and teaching to help pave her way...
It's something to consider, at least.
