Chapter Text
For a while, there was only the sound of hooves.
Jane held to it because there was nothing else she trusted enough to hold. Wídfara's stride was smooth beneath her, longer than she had expected from a mare built so compactly, and each movement carried Jane down from Edoras and away from the man standing beneath the House of Gold as if the hill itself had fastened him there. The road curved. The roof of Meduseld vanished behind the slope. The torches disappeared one by one. By the time the first pale seam of dawn found the edge of the world, Rohan had become a shadow behind her and the ring on her hand had warmed against her skin.
She did not look back again.
Not because she did not want to.
Because she had already looked once, and once had nearly broken her.
Ahead, Shadowfax moved like something the road had agreed to obey. He did not run so much as lengthen himself into speed, pale and tireless in the grey before morning, his mane streaming back around Gandalf's knees. Pippin sat before the wizard, too small beneath the great cloak, his hands locked tightly around anything he could hold. Every now and then his head dipped forward as if exhaustion had tried to claim him, but then he would jerk upright again, wide-eyed, breathing hard, pulled back by memory before sleep could do anything merciful.
Jane knew the feeling.
Wídfara kept her place a little behind and to the side. She did not fight the pace. Jane felt that within the first mile. The mare had a mind as steady as stone under the saddle, but not dull. She chose her ground carefully where the road dipped or broke, spared herself on the climbs, and opened only when the land gave her leave. Jane found herself grateful that Théodred had given her a horse that did not need her to be fearless.
Her ribs began aching before the sun had fully risen.
At first it was only a dull pull beneath the bindings, the sort of discomfort she could fold away somewhere behind breath and balance. She had ridden through worse, though not in a borrowed dress under an ancient cloak after watching a hobbit get used as a door by Sauron. By midmorning the ache had sharpened, spreading from her side into her back each time Wídfara moved down a slope. Jane adjusted without thinking, shifting her weight, letting her thighs take what her torso could not, keeping her hands soft because punishing the mare for her own pain would have been unfair and stupid.
Of course Gandalf noticed anyway.
He drew Shadowfax back after the sun rose above the grasslands, not enough to stop, only enough that Wídfara came level for several long strides. His face looked carved by the night. Pippin did not turn around.
"You ride well for someone who looks as if she would rather fall off and be done with it," Gandalf said.
Jane glanced at him. "That almost sounded like a compliment."
"It was meant as one."
"You may want to practise your complimenting skills."
His mouth twitched beneath his beard, but there was little humour in his eyes. "Pain?"
"Yes, but duty calls."
Gandalf looked at her for a moment, then back to the road. "You have been spending too much time among kings."
Jane's hand tightened briefly around the reins. The ring pressed cold beneath the strip of leather Théodred had wrapped around it. "I have spent too much time everywhere."
Pippin shifted at that. He had been silent so long Jane had begun to wonder whether he had folded entirely into shock. His shoulders were tight beneath the cloak. When he spoke, his voice came smaller than she was used to hearing it.
"I'm sorry."
Gandalf's jaw tightened at once. "Peregrin."
"No, don't Peregrin me." Pippin turned his head just enough that Jane could see the edge of his face, pale and miserable in the morning light. "I am sorry. I know everyone keeps saying not to say it, which is very kind and very annoying, but I am still sorry. He saw you because of me."
"He saw something because he was looking for it," Jane said.
Pippin gave a short, broken laugh. "That is not better."
He turned more fully then, though Gandalf held him firmly with one arm as Shadowfax kept moving. Pippin's eyes were red-rimmed, and there was something bruised in his face that made him look younger than he had ever looked around the fire at Helm's Deep. Not a fool. Not comic relief. A boy from a green country being dragged by the collar into the machinery of the end of the world.
"I thought of Frodo," he said quietly. "Only for a second. But I thought of him."
"I know."
"He could have—"
"He didn't. He saw what he saw and it wasn't enough." Jane watched Shadowfax's mane moving in the wind ahead of them. "That's the only part that matters right now."
Pippin was quiet for a moment.
"Did he get inside your head?" He said it plainly, without softening it, which was somehow worse than if he'd tried to wrap it in something gentle.
Jane felt Gandalf's attention shift toward her.
"Not the same way," she said. "Saruman got further. But no, not the same way."
"Oh."
It was not pity, exactly. It was the sound of someone recognising a shape they hadn't expected to find in another person. That was somehow more uncomfortable than pity.
Jane looked back at the road. "So no, Pippin. I am not angry with you for being used by something that knew how to hurt you. I am angry with the thing that used you."
Pippin absorbed that. Outside, the grasslands rolled, wide and indifferent in the early light.
"Merry's angry with me," he said, very small.
"Merry is terrified."
"That too, probably."
"People are not at their best when they're being torn in half before breakfast."
A sound came out of Pippin that might have been a laugh, in better circumstances. Gandalf said nothing, but his hand settled more firmly over Pippin's shoulder, and that seemed to be enough.
They rode on.
The land changed slowly around them as the day lengthened. The green of Rohan stretched wide under a hard bright sky, rolling and wind-torn, beautiful in a way that felt careless with them. Villages lay at a distance, smoke rising thin from roofs. Once, far off, Jane saw riders moving along a ridge, small dark shapes against the light. Messengers, perhaps. Scouts. Men with orders already forming beneath their tongues. Rohan was waking behind them, but not as a household woke. As a country woke when war had laid a hand upon its door.
Jane thought about Théodred turning her scraps of knowledge over in his hands in the dark, working out what to make of them. About his face when she'd described the beacons, Gondor's call, Snowmane, the things she'd tried to say without quite saying. She'd given him both too much and not enough, the way she always did, because that was the trap of knowing a story that had turned into a road: every word was either cowardice or interference, every silence either mercy or betrayal.
By noon Gandalf allowed a stop near a shallow stream. Wídfara drank with neat efficiency, ears moving constantly. Jane dismounted with more care than she liked, one hand finding the saddle when her boots hit the ground and her ribs registered a sharp, white-bright objection to the movement. She kept her face still. Gandalf was watching. Pippin was watching and looking guilty about it, which was the worst of the three.
"I'm fine," she said, before any of them could speak.
She lowered herself onto the grass away from the water and ate what Gandalf gave her because Théodred would have been furious if she hadn't, and because collapsing on a war road would be an embarrassing footnote on her list of contributions to the Third Age.
The ring caught the light when she moved her hand.
It looked different in daylight. Less like a secret. The gold was warm and old and deliberate, the little markings around it turning clearly in the sun. Hearth. Kin. Oath. Road. Return.
"Is that from him?"
Pippin had settled on a nearby stone. He asked it with the directness of someone who noticed things people consistently underestimated him for noticing, and then immediately looked as if he wanted to retract it. "Sorry. None of my business."
"No, it's all right." Jane turned it on her finger.
"Yes."
"Is it—" He hesitated, clearly running through and discarding several versions of the question. "Is it a marriage ring?"
The bread stuck in her throat.
Gandalf, who had been performing the world's least convincing impression of someone not listening, produced a sound from beneath his beard that was definitely not a cough.
"No," Jane said. "Not exactly. It's a pledge ring."
"What does that mean?"
She thought about it. "That I'm apparently carrying his house with me."
Pippin considered this with the sincere, slightly alarming concentration he brought to things people assumed he wasn't taking seriously.
"That sounds rather a lot like being married," he said eventually, "just with more horses and fewer meals than I would like."
Jane laughed at that. It hurt, and she pressed a hand carefully to her side. "That is not the worst description."
Gandalf looked at the ring, then at the cloak around her shoulders. His face had gone unreadable in the way that meant he was reading more than anyone had given him permission to read.
"In Rohan," he said, "a gift given before witnesses may open one door. A gift given in private may open another. A thing from a man's house is not a trinket, and Théodred son of Théoden is not careless."
Jane looked at him. "That is a very Gandalf way of saying I may have accidentally become politically important."
"You did not accidentally do anything," Gandalf said.
"I just went to sleep."
"And woke wearing a dead queen's cloak and a prince's ring." He crouched near the stream and rinsed one hand, which she suspected had nothing to do with cleanliness and everything to do with having somewhere to put his expression. "He gave you protection, yes. But he gave you Gondor's attention too. A woman arriving under the House of Eorl is not invisible here."
Jane turned the ring in the light and thought of Théodred's face when he wrapped the leather strip around it. Careful. Deliberate. Nothing about that man was accidental. She'd understood it at the time as personal. She wondered, now, how much of it had been practical, whether some part of him had been thinking she will need something to stand behind when she walks into a city that does not know her, and had given her the most authoritative thing he had.
The thought made her chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with her ribs.
She cleared her throat. "Denethor."
Gandalf looked at her.
"He's not just difficult," she said. "I know you know him better than I do. I'm not trying to explain your own enemy back to you. But he isn't only cruel, and he isn't stupid, which would honestly be easier. He sees things. He just arranges them in the darkest possible order and calls that truth."
Gandalf's face did not change much, but his attention sharpened.
Jane looked down at the water. "He loves Gondor. That's the problem. He loves it like something he has already decided he will have to bury."
"Yes," Gandalf said dryly. "I had gathered."
"There's something else." She looked at Pippin, who had gone very still. "Faramir. His son. If he comes back wounded and fevered, if it gets bad, someone needs to stay close to Denethor. To watch him and not let fire near him."
Pippin's eyes went wide. "Fire?"
"A pyre." She said it plainly. "Not in the open. In the tombs, I think. Rath Dínen, if that is the name here. The Silent Street." She swallowed. "It may not happen. Things are different now. But if Faramir is brought back badly hurt and Denethor has been sitting with a palantír and a mind that's been turning toward defeat for years, someone needs to be paying attention when he stops sounding like a ruler and starts sounding like a man who has already buried everyone in his head."
Gandalf had gone very still.
"That is a grave thing to say."
"Everything I know is grave." Jane looked at the stream. "That's the problem. Every time I open one door, three more crack open behind it, and I can't see which ones matter yet and which ones I'll change by talking about them. If I tell Théodred everything, all he hears is his father and Éowyn and a field. If I tell you everything, you start arranging people to stop one disaster and walk them into another."
Gandalf's eyes sharpened. "You think so little of me?"
"I think too much of the story." She met his gaze. "That's worse."
The stream moved on. Shadowfax lifted his head, water falling silver from his mouth. Wídfara shifted one hind leg and flicked an ear toward the east.
Jane exhaled. "Athelas."
Gandalf's expression shifted at once, something alert and watchful replacing the irritation.
"Kingsfoil," she said. "In Minas Tirith they'll treat it like an old weed with a nice smell. They won't understand it until it's almost too late. It needs to be gathered now and fresh if possible, dried if not, washed and stored near the Houses of Healing. Don't wait for it to be asked for."
"Aragorn," Gandalf said quietly.
"Among others."
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the water. "That herb has not been forgotten entirely. Its heritage is known in the lore of Númenor, for those who still read it."
"Then use that. Tell them it's royal, tell them it's ancient, tell them it'll make them look wise and learned. I genuinely don't care. Just get it gathered."
Pippin had been listening with the focused attention of someone mentally writing things down. "Could I help?" He flushed when they both looked at him. "I mean…if I'm going to be there. If I'm meant to be doing something instead of being decorative."
"You are not decorative," Jane said.
He didn't quite seem to believe her.
"Ask for the Houses of Healing when we arrive. There may be a woman there called Ioreth. I have rea-", she caught herself, "heard, she talks a great deal, you'll recognise her. Find her, or find whoever manages the herb stores. Kingsfoil. Athelas. Make them start gathering it before they understand why."
Pippin repeated it back with the intensity of someone staking something on getting it right. "Kingsfoil. Athelas. Houses of Healing. Ioreth. Before they know why."
"Yep."
Gandalf rose. "And now we move."
Jane looked up at him. "That was a very short break."
The afternoon wore on, bright and cool. Jane let herself fall into the rhythm of the ride and tried not to think too directly about what waited at the end of it. Wídfara was good company in the way that honest, competent creatures were good company. She asked nothing of Jane except to be ridden well, and in return she was steady and careful and entirely focused on the road.
Jane thought about Théodred probably already in the yard below Meduseld, turning everything they'd said into action because that was what he did with feeling. She thought about what he'd tell Théoden. Whether he'd say her name. Whether Théoden would look toward the road she'd taken and understand that the woman wearing his wife's clasp had handed his son a warning shaped like a departure.
She hoped he would change the horse. Especially if Théoden raged. Especially then.
That was the danger of loving people in a world like this. She hoped too much. She knew that. It was a habit she couldn't seem to break.
By evening her body had translated the ride into a sustained argument it was losing. Wídfara stayed steady beneath her, patient as stone. Gandalf slowed only when he had to. They rested in fragments, ate without tasting, moved again before warmth could become a reason to stop. Pippin slept in snatches against Gandalf's cloak and woke from each one with his hand reaching for something that wasn't there. Once, in the small hours of the second night, Jane heard him say Frodo's name.
Gandalf heard too.
Neither of them mentioned it.
On the third morning, the land began to change.
Jane felt it before she could name it. The air seemed different, sharper somehow, as if stone lay ahead in such great quantity that even the wind had been forced to remember it. The road rose and fell. Distant mountains cut the sky. The world no longer seemed wide in the way Rohan had been wide. It began to gather itself toward something.
Gandalf stopped on a ridge after dawn broke pale and cold.
Wídfara halted beside Shadowfax without being asked. Jane heard Pippin breathe in.
Minas Tirith.
Even knowing, even having seen it in films and illustrations and dreams she had never admitted were dreams, Jane was not prepared for the first sight of it. The city seemed less built than carved out of the mountain's will, white walls climbing tier upon tier until they met the high citadel under the shadow of Mindolluin. It caught the morning strangely, not bright with joy but pale with endurance, a city too old to be innocent and too proud to kneel. Behind it the mountains stood silent, and before it lay the wide fields of the
The Pelennor lay beneath it, quiet and wide.
Just fields.
Jane's hands tightened on the reins.
There. It would happen there.
No siege towers. No black sails. No screaming in the sky above the walls. No woman in armour standing where everyone had told her not to stand. Just grass moving in the wind and a road running straight toward a gate that did not yet know what was coming.
That was the cruelty of it. Places didn't look like what they were going to become.
"Is that it?" Pippin's voice was barely above a whisper.
"Minas Tirith," Gandalf said. "The Tower of Guard."
"It's beautiful."
Gandalf's silence lasted a half-beat too long. "It is."
Jane heard what he didn't say. And it's afraid.
She looked at the gate below, the long road descending, and arranged her face.
Gandalf turned his head toward her. "When we enter, speak carefully."
Jane gave him a sidelong look.
"I mean it. Denethor will see more than you wish him to."
"Wonderful."
Jane looked at the White City, at the dark line where the gate waited.
Pippin turned around as much as Shadowfax allowed. "Should I speak carefully?"
Gandalf gave him a look of particular gravity.
"Right, obviously." Pippin sighed. "Foolish question."
"No," Jane said. "It's a good question." She waited until Pippin looked at her properly.
"Speak honestly. Obviously not everything that comes into your head, but honestly. Denethor will notice the difference."
"I'm not usually accused of being dishonest," Pippin said. "Or clever."
"Then you have nothing to perform. That's an advantage."
He considered that. "That is either very encouraging or extremely backhanded."
Pippin looked briefly uncertain, then something settled in him, or at least squared its shoulders.
Gandalf's face softened a fraction, though his eyes remained fixed on the city. "You are to be yourselves, as much as war permits. That is often more use than people think."
They descended toward the Pelennor.
The outer lands were not empty. Farmers, carts, livestock, soldiers, women with bundled goods and the tight faces of people who had done the arithmetic. Children being moved toward the gates with more urgency than explanation. Men turned as Shadowfax passed. Some bowed for Gandalf. Others looked at Jane, then at Wídfara, then at the cloak, and she felt attention sharpen on her like something being picked up and weighed.
Rohan was visible on her. She understood that now in a way she hadn't in Edoras, where Elfhild's cloak had belonged to the hall. Here, outside the walls of Gondor, it was something else - a declaration she hadn't written but was apparently committed to. The horse clasp at her throat. The dark mare trained to the Mark. The gold ring on her hand, which she'd wrapped in leather but could not make invisible.
At the lower gate a guard's eyes moved from Gandalf to Pippin and then settled on Jane with the particular quality of a man formulating a question he was not sure he had authority to ask.
Gandalf spared him the work.
"Mithrandir comes to the Steward. With Peregrin Took of the Shire, and Lady Jane under the protection of the House of Eorl."
The guard looked at the cloak.
Under the protection of the House of Eorl.
The gate opened and they entered Minas Tirith.
The city smelled of metal and cold ash and bread and too many people pushed inside walls that had been built for strength and were now being asked to hold fear. Hooves rang on the paved ways. Every circle of the climb revealed another life in motion. Spear shafts being carried, boys running messages, women in doorways not quite pretending they weren't watching the road. Old men on benches with faces that had seen enough wars to hear the next one coming before it arrived.
Pippin stared at everything. His fear was still there but wonder had temporarily outrun it, and Jane found that she was glad of it, that brightness in him, even if she knew what was coming.
It was real. That was the thought she couldn't get past. Not a rendering, not a backdrop, not a set built to suggest scale. Real stone under Wídfara's hooves. Real windows. Real people moving out of the way, real fear tucked into every corner where the city had decided to keep its dignity in front.
And above them all, Denethor.
The hall of the Steward was vast and cold and very old, its silence the kind that had been accumulating for centuries. Stone kings lined the walls, their faces carrying the specific authority of the long dead. Every step on the marble floor returned altered, as if the room itself was listening to what it gave back.
At the far end, beneath an empty throne, Denethor sat.
Jane's first thought was that he looked nothing like what she'd been bracing for.
Her second was that this was exactly the problem.
Denethor was old, yes, but not diminished. Grief had not hollowed him. It had sharpened him. His face was severe, lined deeply, but the eyes beneath his brows were bright and assessing with a force that made Jane think of knives kept polished in a drawer. He wore black and silver without softness. One hand rested on the arm of his chair. The other lay still in his lap. Nothing about him looked accidental.
Beside Jane, Pippin went very quiet.
Gandalf bowed, respectfully, but with the fraction of restraint that said I am not subject to you.
"Lord Denethor."
"Mithrandir." Denethor's voice was dry and measured and cold in the way that made warmth seem like an affectation. "You arrive with dawn and an unusual party. I have begun to think discomfort is simply how you travel."
"It often arrives before me. I merely follow it where it leads."
Denethor's mouth moved slightly. It was not quite a smile. "So you have said in many houses, I imagine."
His gaze moved to Pippin.
The change was small and terrible. A recognition that went deeper than identifying what he was. A halfling. Something small and alive where his son was not.
"One of the periannath," he said.
Pippin bowed so sharply he nearly overbalanced. "Peregrin Took, son of Paladin, of the Shire."
"Far from home."
"Yes, my lord."
A pause. "Many are."
Pippin didn't know what to do with that, and Jane felt an almost physical pull to step between them. She didn't.
Then Denethor's gaze moved to her, and she felt it the way you felt a door being opened in a room you thought was sealed.
"Rohan sends me a lady in the cloak of its dead queen."
The hall went very quiet. Gandalf's eyes moved to her with warning, and permission.
Jane inclined her head. Enough. Not more.
"Rohan didn't send me," she said.
"No?" His gaze moved to the clasp at her throat. "Then it has become careless with its honours."
She recognised the trap under it. Agree and she'd accepted the slight. Deny it directly and she'd be arguing with the Steward of Gondor three sentences in.
"Rohan has been generous with its protection," she said.
Something shifted in Denethor's eyes. Sharp, and paying attention.
"Since Cirion gave Calenardhon to Eorl, Gondor has known that the horse lords do not choose such words by accident."
"I didn't choose the cost."
"But you accepted it."
"Yes."
His gaze dropped to her hand. The ring caught the light despite the leather wrap and she did not move her hand away.
"More than protection, perhaps."
"That's between me and Rohan."
Denethor considered her. "Few things remain private when war enters a room."
"No," Jane said. "I'm learning that."
He looked at her for a long moment, with the expression of someone who had just encountered an answer worth examining. Then, without transition, he turned back to Gandalf.
"You bring me riddles dressed in horse-hide and hobbit-cloth, Mithrandir. Is this what passes for counsel now, or merely your preference for every road being crooked?"
"I bring warning. The Enemy moved through Saruman's stone. A halfling was seen where Sauron did not expect one, and his thought may be turning in ways that misread what he found."
Denethor's eyes went back to Pippin.
Pippin held still.
"Seen," Denethor said. "In the palantír of Orthanc."
"Yes."
"And now that stone is in whose keeping?"
"Mine," Gandalf said.
A pause. Denethor leaned back slightly. "You come to tell me the Enemy looks west. Gondor has known that since before your halfling had hair on his feet."
"The Enemy has seen less than he believes," Gandalf said. "That particular mistake may prove useful."
"Use." The word landed flat. "You speak always of use. Men, cities, grief. Sons." He let it sit there.
There it was. Boromir, present in every syllable, still unnamed.
Pippin stepped forward.
Gandalf's hand moved, a fraction too late.
"My lord." Pippin's voice shook and he didn't retreat from it. "Boromir was with us. He defended us. He—" He stopped, and started again more carefully. "He died trying to save us. I want you to know that. I was taken before he fell, but I know what he did."
Denethor went absolutely still.
Jane felt the air in the room change.
The Steward's eyes fixed on Pippin with a force that should have knocked him backward. "You saw my son."
"I saw what he chose to do."
"Because of you." Not a question.
Gandalf said, "Denethor—"
"No." Pippin's voice was small and fierce and entirely sincere. "He can say it. I've said worse to myself."
The silence that followed had weight.
Then Denethor said, very quietly, "What do you offer for my son's blood, Peregrin Took?"
Pippin drew himself up. "My service, if you'll have it."
Jane watched Gandalf close his eyes for a half-second.
She had known this was coming. It still felt unbearable to watch it happen. This small person offering himself up because guilt had finally found a shape to wear.
Denethor studied him. "You understand little of what you offer."
"That's never stopped anyone in this war," Pippin said, and then looked immediately horrified at himself.
For one suspended moment, nobody moved.
Then Denethor laughed. Once, short, with no warmth in it and yet - human. Real. The most human sound the hall had made.
"No," he said. "I suppose it has not."
The oath that followed was close enough in shape to what Jane had read that her skin prickled. Pippin knelt without being told. Pledged his service to Gondor in her need. The words passed between them like thread tied too tight around a small wrist, and when Pippin rose he looked both proud and slightly sick, which seemed exactly right.
Denethor turned to Jane.
"And you, Lady of No Stated House? Have you come to pledge service as well?"
"Jane," Gandalf said quietly.
Jane looked at Denethor. "I don't belong to Gondor. I won't swear what I can't keep."
"How honest." A pause. "And how unhelpful."
"I didn't say I wouldn't help."
"With what? Rohan's secrets? Mithrandir's riddles? The scraps of foreknowledge that rumour has apparently begun attaching to your name?"
Jane went cold.
Gandalf's face darkened. "Denethor."
"You look offended, Mithrandir. Did you believe news travels only by roads you approved?" Denethor's eyes stayed on Jane.
"Théodred alive. Helm's Deep differently finished. Saruman cast down in his own tower. A woman in strange clothes seen among the Rohirrim, and again at Isengard. Men speak. Frightened men especially."
She held his gaze and understood: he had pieces. Not the whole picture, not nearly, but enough pieces to be dangerous - the way a man who was still this sharp with this much grief was always dangerous.
"I have knowledge," she said. "Some of it may be wrong. Some of it would do more harm than good if I spoke it plainly. But there is one thing I can tell you that costs nothing to act on."
Denethor's eyes narrowed.
"The Houses of Healing will need kingsfoil," Jane said. "Athelas. Fresh if possible, dried if not. Gather it now and keep it ready. Don't wait until there are wounded in the beds."
Silence.
Then Denethor said, "You arrive in the city of my fathers while Mordor gathers beyond the river, and your first counsel is to collect weeds."
Pippin made a small sound. Jane didn't look at him.
"Yes," she said.
For the first time, Gandalf's mouth moved toward something that was not quite a smile.
Denethor noticed. "You find this amusing?"
"No," Gandalf said. "I find it old."
Denethor's irritation didn't diminish, but his attention sharpened.
Jane pressed on, before he could file it away and forget it. "Call it old lore. Call it women's work. Call it whatever will persuade men to carry baskets without feeling foolish. I don't care what you call it. But gather it, wash it, dry what needs drying, keep some near the Houses of Healing and some near the Citadel. If I'm wrong, you've lost nothing but an afternoon and a little dignity among gardeners. If I'm right, you may save lives that matter."
"Whose lives."
Her throat tightened.
Denethor saw it immediately.
"Ah," he said, very softly. "There is the shape of it."
Gandalf stepped forward before she could answer. "Many lives. That should be sufficient for any ruler not yet dead from the neck down."
The hall seemed to contract.
Denethor looked at Gandalf with old, very focused dislike. "You presume far in my hall, Mithrandir."
"I have come far to do it."
Into the silence, Pippin said, "I can help gather it."
Everyone looked at him.
He reddened slightly but held his ground. "I mean... if I'm in service now. I know herbs a bit. Hobbits generally do. Not this one specifically, but I can ask. I can carry things. I can be laughed at if someone needs to laugh at someone." He glanced at Jane. "She said there might be someone called Ioreth."
Jane stared at him.
Brave. Foolish. Dear.
Denethor looked down at Pippin with a long, unreadable silence.
"Very well," he said finally. "My new soldier will begin his service among leaves. There is a kind of poetry in that, for those who appreciate mockery."
Pippin bowed. "Yes, my lord. No, my lord. As you command, my lord."
Somewhere behind Jane, a guard suppressed something. Denethor's eyes flicked toward the sound with surgical precision, and the room went silent again instantly.
He turned back to Jane. "You will be given leave to speak with the healers. Under escort."
"Thank you."
"Do not thank me. I have not yet decided whether you are useful or merely another of Mithrandir's weather signs." He sat again, and the movement closed the audience as effectively as a door. "Go, then. Gather your weeds. Dress my halfling in black and silver. Warn the walls. Gondor has survived many strange mornings."
They left.
The air outside felt different. Cleaner, or at least without Denethor's attention in it. Pippin did not speak until they were well out of earshot and moving down from the Citadel toward the sixth level, where a guard had been ordered to escort them to quarters and then to the Houses of Healing.
Then he let out a breath so enormous Jane wondered how he had kept it in.
"I think I may have joined the army."
Gandalf rounded on him.
"I did say may," Pippin said quickly.
"You swore service to the Steward of Gondor."
"Yes. I was there for that part."
"After looking into a palantír. After being seen by Sauron. After riding half the night."
"When you list them like that it does sound badly timed."
Gandalf looked at the sky as if searching it for patience that had not been restocked recently.
"Peregrin Took—"
"Boromir died for us." Pippin said it simply, with all the brightness gone from his voice. "I know it doesn't fix it. I know I don't understand what I offered. But I couldn't stand there in front of his father with empty hands."
The anger left Gandalf's face.
Pippin looked down at his hands, then back up.
"Also," he said, with the ghost of his usual manner, "I'm apparently to become an expert in important weeds."
"Athelas," Jane said.
"Right. Does it look distinctive?"
She paused. "I have absolutely no idea."
Pippin stared at her.
"I know what it does. I've never had to identify it in a garden."
"Oh, brilliant."
"That is why we're finding people who know the storerooms."
Gandalf made a sound. Jane suspected he knew exactly who she meant and was deciding whether to be impressed or alarmed.
The Houses of Healing were not quiet, which she should have expected. No place preparing for a war was quiet. The buildings were clean and high-windowed, pale stone, but inside there was movement everywhere: beds being prepared, shelves being counted, water being heated, two women arguing with great efficiency about something Jane couldn't hear from the doorway. The wounded had not yet come in numbers. The empty beds said everything about that.
A woman with grey hair and quick hands and the expression of someone who had been interrupted by incompetent people all morning appeared in the corridor. She looked at Gandalf, then Pippin, then Jane, and seemed to conclude that none of them had arrived at a convenient time.
"Mithrandir," she said. "If you've brought more wounded, they're invisible, which would be a mercy."
"No wounded yet, Mistress Ioreth."
Jane's head turned sharply.
So she was already here.
Ioreth noticed the movement. She looked Jane up and down with the efficiency of a woman who had spent a career determining whether people were about to faint, lie, or bleed on a clean floor, and made her assessment in under three seconds.
"And this one?"
"Lady Jane," Gandalf said. "She has counsel for the Houses."
Ioreth's brows rose fractionally. "Does she."
Jane stepped forward before anyone could have further opinions about her. "Kingsfoil. Athelas. How much do you have?"
Ioreth looked at her with the expression of someone who had been handed an answer before they'd finished formulating the question.
"Kingsfoil?"
"Yes."
"For what?"
"The wounded."
A pause. Ioreth glanced at Gandalf. "Wizard business?"
"Most things are, when one lacks a better word for them," Gandalf said.
Ioreth sniffed. "We use kingsfoil for sweetening the air, sometimes, when there's any to be had. Old folk speak well of it, but old folk speak well of many things that grow where one trips over them."
"It will matter," Jane said.
Something in her voice, or maybe the cloak, or maybe the fact that she looked like a woman who had ridden too far and was still standing upright by decision rather than ease, something made Ioreth look at her properly.
"You speak as though you've seen the wounded before they've arrived."
Jane held her gaze.
"I know what it's better to have and not need."
A beat.
"Hm," Ioreth said. "That sounds like something a man says when he wants five women to do the work before he's decided if it's necessary."
"Then hear it from a woman who doesn't want to be right too late."
Ioreth studied her for one more breath. Then: "Bergil!"
A boy materialised from a side room with the speed of someone who had definitely been listening. Dark hair, bright eyes, trying extremely hard to appear more useful than he was years old.
"Yes, Mistress Ioreth?"
"Find out who in the lower circles has kingsfoil. Fresh, dried, half-dead in a pot - I don't care. Herb sellers first, then the women who keep too many jars, then the gardeners near the sixth gate. And take the little lord with you."
Pippin blinked. "Little lord?"
"You're wearing important misery and standing next to Mithrandir. If you're not a little lord, that's not my fault."
Pippin looked at Jane.
Jane gave him a small shrug because there was no dignified way to explain that the weed mattered more than half the room understood.
"Right," he said, faintly.
Ioreth had continued. "And don't let anyone charge wartime prices for leaves they were ignoring yesterday. Tell them the Houses require it. If that fails, tell them the Steward requires it. If all else fails, look hungry. People are soft-hearted about hungry boys."
"I am not a boy," Pippin said, on reflex.
Ioreth looked at him.
Pippin reconsidered. "For purposes of herb collection, I can be a boy."
"Good."
Bergil grinned, and Jane liked him immediately, which meant she was going to spend the rest of the day worrying about him.
As Bergil towed Pippin toward the corridor, Pippin looked back once. The fear was still there, tucked under the task, but there was something else now too, something small and purposeful that hadn't been there in the hall.
Jane watched him go and felt something loosen in her chest, some knot that had been there since Edoras.
"You," Ioreth said, returning her gaze to Jane. "Sit."
"I'm fine."
"You're standing upright on spite. Sit before you fall. I have no interest in explaining to anyone that Mithrandir delivered me a farsighted woman and I broke her before lunch."
"I'm not a farsighted woman."
"Then sit like an ordinary one."
Jane sat. Not because she was told. Because her knees had been quietly registering their opinions for some time and Ioreth had simply noticed what they were saying.
Gandalf remained standing near the window while Ioreth disappeared into a storage room and began making a tremendous amount of noise. From outside came the sound of the city moving, metal on stone, voices calling across levels, a cart wheel grinding somewhere below.
Gandalf looked out toward the east.
""What happens now?" Jane asked him.
Gandalf looked east rather than at her. "Now Denethor considers what he's been told and decides which parts offend him least."
"Efficient."
"Pride rarely is."
"The beacons." She said it carefully. "He needs to call Rohan."
"He knows that."
"Knowing is not the same as doing. Not for him."
Gandalf said nothing.
She looked at him. "Gandalf. If Gondor waits too long, Rohan doesn't have time to ride from Edoras."
"I know."
"Then what are we—"
"We are doing," he said, with an edge she hadn't heard from him before, "what can be done. Which is keeping a city from eating itself, keeping an old man's despair from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, keeping a halfling alive, making your knowledge useful rather than catastrophic, and attempting to prevent the west from destroying itself before Mordor arrives to complete the work." He stopped. After a moment, he said, "Forgive me."
"No," Jane said. "You're right."
"I am also very tired."
"I know."
He looked out the window at the sky and for a moment he looked like none of the things people needed him to be: not Mithrandir, not the White, not the arrival that fixed things. Just old. Just tired. Just someone who had been carrying this for longer than Jane could properly imagine.
She touched the ring under its leather strip.
"I told him," she said. "Théodred. When the beacons are lit, don't waste time deciding whether Gondor deserves it. That it will be tempting and it will be the wrong question."
Gandalf looked at her.
"He'll remember," she said. Not asking.
"Yes," Gandalf said. "I believe he will."
The certainty of it hurt in ways she hadn't expected.
Ioreth returned with three jars, two bundles of dried leaves, and an expression suggesting that everyone before Jane had been incompetent about kingsfoil in particular and life in general.
"This," she said, setting them down, "is what the Houses have. Pitiful, if suddenly everyone has decided it matters."
Jane reached for one of the bundles. The leaves were dry and grey-green, ordinary enough to be insulting.
This was it.
This small, brittle thing. This was supposed to wait for kings and breath and black shadow and wounds that were more than wounds.
She stared at it too long.
Ioreth noticed. "You do know what you are asking for."
Jane looked up.
"I know what it may be needed for."
"Hm." Ioreth pushed one jar closer. "Then we had better make certain there is more."
Outside, somewhere high above the city, a horn sounded.
Not alarm. Not yet. Something closer to a reminder: pay attention, the world is still moving, it has not stopped to wait for you.
The sound faded. Around them, the Houses continued their work.
Jane stood, more carefully than before.
Gandalf watched her. "Where are you going?"
"To see the beacon."
Ioreth looked at her as if she had suggested climbing onto the roof with a soup pot. "You have only just sat down."
"I know."
"You are a foolish woman."
"Apparently not a farsighted one, though."
Ioreth made a sound that was trying very hard not to be a laugh and nearly succeeding. "Go then. Fall somewhere I don't have to clean up."
Gandalf walked with her.
They climbed until the air grew colder and the city opened beneath them in white tiers and dark lines of shadow. Jane moved more slowly than she wanted to, one hand beneath the cloak, fingers pressed lightly against her ribs. Gandalf said nothing about it. That was kind of him, or perhaps he had finally learned that saying something would only make her more stubborn.
At last they came to a place from which the mountain road could be seen, and above it the high path toward the beacon. It was unlit.
Cold stone. Cold wood. Men standing beside it with the posture of people who had been ordered to be ready and not given permission to be ready yet.
Jane looked at it for a long time.
She thought of Théodred in the darkness outside Meduseld, taking her fragmentary warnings and building them into something he could work with. She thought of Théoden saying return if you can. Try while you cannot. She thought of Éowyn's hand, too tight, and Éomer's voice behind her saying come back anyway in a tone that hadn't quite finished deciding it was not affection.
Then she looked east, toward the edge of everything.
"That has to burn," she said.
"It will."
"Because Denethor orders it?"
Gandalf did not answer quickly enough.
Jane shut her eyes for a second. "Right."
"There are men in this city who still remember why the beacons were built."
"Then find one," she said. "Fast."
Below them, Minas Tirith moved inside its walls, proud and frightened and still standing. Above, the beacon waited against a pale sky, cold and ready. Beyond the Pelennor, beyond the river, beyond sight, Mordor was gathering itself.
Jane closed her hand around the ring until the old gold pressed into her palm.
Believe the call, she thought.
She knew he couldn't hear her.
She thought it anyway.
Then she turned back toward the city, toward Ioreth's storerooms and Pippin with his armful of leaves and Denethor waiting in his hall with his bright, dangerous eyes, toward all the small, necessary, possible things that still needed doing before the great ones arrived.
The road had brought her to Gondor.
Time to make herself useful.
Far behind her, Edoras had not slept again.
By the time the sun lowered over the plains of Rohan, Théodred had already sent riders west and south with orders that sounded cautious enough to be obeyed and urgent enough to make men run once they were out of the king's hearing. Grain was counted. Spare tack was brought down from storage. Farriers were called. Healers were told to make ready for a road not yet named. No man was told that Gondor had called, because Gondor had not called. At least not yet.
That did not matter.
In the stables below Meduseld, Snowmane stood bright and restless in his stall, white as winter in the fading light. Théodred stopped before him with one hand on the half-door and said nothing for a long while.
The horse stretched his neck and breathed against his sleeve.
Théodred thought of Jane in the dark outside the hall, tired and stubborn and afraid of saying too much.
On the day they reach the fields before Minas Tirith, do not let him ride the white horse.
He had asked for a wall.
She had given him pieces.
A groom appeared at the end of the aisle and stopped when he saw him. "My lord?"
Théodred looked past Snowmane to the darker horses standing quiet in the stalls beyond.
"Bring me the records of every battle-trained horse in the king's lines," he said. "Every one with a steady head under smoke, press, and screaming. Tonight."
The groom bowed and went quickly.
Snowmane tossed his head as if insulted by a conversation he had not been allowed to understand.
Théodred set his hand briefly against the white face.
"Not yet," he said.
Then he turned away, and the muster of Rohan continued.
End of chapter twenty one