Filigereth has not slept since Mirkwood.
Not really, at least -- all the times she’s dozed off sitting on a pile of hay or slumped against a wall, too exhausted to keep upright, don’t leave her feeling any better than she had before.
She should not feel this bad. She doesn’t deserve to. Compared to the rest, she had come out relatively unscathed, had lost nothing of any particular value. There is no concrete reason for her to feel the way she does. Thinking this, of course, does nothing to improve anything, but she cannot stop thinking it anyways.
She tries drinking -- it does not put her to sleep, but she does not have to think -- until three days into the experiment, the resulting headache makes her want to hit her face against a wall to make it stop. In the same vein, two different sleeping draughts do nothing -- one makes her so sick she thinks her stomach will come up through her throat and the other makes her eyes heavy but does nothing for her mind, and so she simply lays awake watching colors burn across the back of her eyelids. It is simply not a problem with the body, and though she can medicate her body into oblivion, nothing quiets her mind, and nothing solves the odd numb feeling in the bottom of her gut that makes everything feel futile.
It is not about what had happened in Mirkwood at all, so much as what had not happened, she realizes with a jolt, becoming aware at the same time that she has been scraping the same hoof for five minutes without thinking and poor Breigalph is politely trying to put his weight back down without knocking her over.
She thinks she would have described the feeling as the fact that although she did not want to die - did not want the dirty work of it or the guilt that she would make problems for someone else - she would not avert her own death, either, if it were staring her in the face. Joining the Order, being a hero or a guardian of something bigger than herself - these had been an easy way to pretty up such a feeling in new armor and fancy words, to express it to someone else without then being removed ever after from high places and sharp objects and furniture light enough to kick over. Someone else’s cause would have been an easy way out, and one that left no complications for anyone.
Unfortunately, it had not worked out that way, because she had lived.
The rest of them had been fighting for something. They had all been willing to die if it came to that, but all of them, too, had people or things they wanted to return for. She, on the other hand, had not planned anything past the part where she died in combat (which had been easier to passively think about than it was to achieve, since being stabbed or speared or shot had become less appealing the closer she got to it happening).
It is an unpleasant conclusion to come to, especially in broad daylight sometime after lunch but before dinner, while picking the shit out of a horse’s foot. She hadn’t really wanted to live. It would have made a more satisfying story if she had not -- the daughter who righted the cowardice of her father, had the courage he did not, and died where he had fled. A closed circle. A poetic ending.
Was it really courage, if it was a taunt to fate to come and get her, that she did not care and refused to care any longer?
At any rate, her present reality is not a story worth telling to anyone, by poets (even of the mediocre kind) or otherwise, and so it does not matter.
A thought floats to the surface amid the murky swirl of everything else in her head vying for attention. If she had not come back, who would have remembered that she always fed Breigalph three times a day or else the grain would make him ill? Who besides her knew that if you placed the shallow metal bowl for his feed in the wrong corner of his box, he would flip its contents onto the ground and refuse to eat? They would think he was being bad. It is this - the thought that her horse might be neglected should she die, and he would not understand why his food had stopped coming as he expected it -- that makes the weight ever-present in her chest feel ever-so-slightly more manageable.
It may not be the most noble reason to hold onto (and she is sure the rest would laugh at it if they knew), but for now, it is the only reason she can think of, and so it will have to suffice.
Breigalph bobs his head as if to ask why she has not finished his back feet, and Fil laughs to herself as she moves on.
A sparrow hops along the roof of the stable and begins its warbling song to herald the lengthening shadows and setting sun, and for a few moments, all is well in Rohan.
