Dol Amroth

She knew nothing of suffering. She was excessively rich, for a woman of Bree. She dressed too lavishly. She relied too much on her moods and was bad at hiding them. She should live on the streets with the working women, selling herself for coin.

All of these thoughts came to her in the days following the events of the previous days. They were not originally her own thoughts, but rather, things that had been said to and of her over the past week, and even before that. Flashes of what had happened over those days came to her, and she clenched the fist of her uninjured hand.

The crowd clapped uproariously. Usually the approbation of the crowd was more subtle, dimmed down by the soft sounds of the harp. But tonight, at the Harpers Court, the harpists were not there at all. Instead, it was a band of merry fiddle players, playing the score for a small opera, which was performed by a few women in rather profuse costume makeup, as well as some gentlemen in excessive robes.

Clad in a satin and taffeta dress of fancy make, Isulril leaned against the door of the physician's practice for a long moment, breathing heavily, as though she might be asthmatic. She knew that she was not, and she had not physically exerted herself to such a point. Indeed, the hyperventilation coming from her had nothing to do with any medical or physical anomaly. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remarked upon this, and, shakily climbing down the stairs, she laughed. Not loudly, not cheerfully, but she laughed.

It had been another evening in the company of the physician, after her work in the garden. She had found it difficult to extract from herself her reasons for staying, long after her work had finished. It was becoming something of a companionable habit for her. She felt some guilt on the matter, and had told him so, but she could not express why, to him, or even to herself.

The patter of the rain hit the roof with a relaxing, soothing sound. Isulril sat, once more, at work on a text. These Breelanders, she thought, They do not understand the grammar in Sindarin, nor the particularly Gondorian manner of grammar. She sighed to herself. Even a scholar in Bree was, she thought, not truly a scholar--at least, not to her mind. But then, she had come from a city where grand libraries were quite a sight to behold, and had a wealth of knowledge at her fingertips.

Her gaze, she had been told, was bold, especially for someone so young. When she had been a maiden of no more than twenty years of age, a certain Lord Handrynhad had found it so.

"Your eyes, they are like water icing up in the North. I fear they may weep or freeze me to death in turn," he had said all those years ago. She had thought little of it at the time. She was vainglorious and proud as a peacock then. When she had found his attentions, it made her feel less the farm girl and more the sophisticated woman of Dol Amroth.

“I am a soldier of Gondor, and I will act as such. And so I will be judged.” Confident as she had been on the long road south, the heavy wooden doors of the Captain’s office still felt like the gates of judgment. The salt-tinged air of Dol Amroth filled her lungs, a sharp contrast to the pine and damp earth of the Trollshaws she had grown accustomed to. She was finally home.

"You have returned."

A cry of a gull. The crashing of waves against weathered stone. The pit-pattering of rain. The sounds of her homeland accompanied her as she departed the shining city of Dol Amroth.

"Come on, strong friend. Carry me swiftly and do not falter," she whispers to the black stallion that would take her far across the lands of the world.

The Captain and the young Ranger stood behind the heavy oak doors of his office. Though the rhythmic clanging of swords and the shouting of trainees echoed from the courtyard below, the air inside the room was thick with a suffocating, quiet dread.

The Captain paced behind his long wooden desk, a deep frown carved into his weathered face. Every few moments, he would pause, cast a heavy glance at his daughter, and resume his pacing.