“Well, what if I were to marry you?”
For once, Filigereth has absolutely no response at all.
A thousand thoughts come tumbling through her head all at once, some of them coherent but many of them fragmented and panicked. She is saying something, and so is he, though she neither hears nor understands them…stalling for time, she thinks.
He is a good man – she knows that, has known that for some time. He is decent enough to look at, has lands and a position. He honors his promises to a fault. She likes him – or, she thinks she likes him, in the few times she has been able to see what the man is really like.
The marriage would solve the dilemma of returning home. She would not need to settle for whoever would have her with her reputation. Laugon had shown fewer qualms about propriety than most men would – she has better hope with him than with many others that he would allow her to carry on as she always had, would not forbid her a horse or a sword or the freedom to go where she pleases. There was, of course, the fear that he would change, that he would begin to care now that she was actually, substantially, connected to him. There was the temper that she knows not how to quell, and the fear that he could not stop himself from turning it on her in due time.
And yet, she knows this man a good deal more than she would any other suitor from home. She has seen him in battle and at rest and ill and injured, and that is far more than she would have glimpsed of any other man to whom she was not married. He can neither cook nor dance, only wears sea-blue, is a passable sailor, knows some small amount of poetry and the names of the stars. He is a capable swordsman, though a reckless one. His name is not Laugon.
There was no mention of love, but perhaps it was better that there was not. If he had spoken of love, she would have assumed him insincere for it. They do not love each other, but when they are not fighting, there is some genuine affection that might, in time, become something more substantial.
As a girl, her mother’s depiction of marriage had made her imagine that the decision would not be hers to make – the arrangements would be made with her father, and her assent was only needed as a cursory sort of formality. And so she had fled it as a fox runs from the hounds, fearing the trap that would one day become inevitable. Filigereth has made many of her life’s decisions in the same headlong manner – in anger or in fear, or in some burning combination of the two, terrified of what would catch her if she let anything or anyone get close. She has finally failed in that regard, has finally tripped the snare, and yet she finds it does not frighten her as it had in the past. This is not a trap, she realizes, but a door – one that she, not her father or mother or even Laugon can open or shut.
She is acutely aware that the offer would likely not be repeated if she refuses the man now. He had thought on it for a few weeks, he had said, and in a few more weeks he might no longer find the proposition appealing. In a few more weeks, she might have lost her nerve, and she would be returning home worse off than she had left. No, she must choose now, now that the man has finished talking and she cannot think of anything else to fill the silence with.
At her back, stretched out beyond the windy prow of Minas Tirith, lies the road behind to Rohan and ahead to Dol Amroth – things left undone and unspoken, regrets and sorrows and ambitions and the overwhelming fear of making promises that men would forget and she alone would have to keep. What if there was a second path? If there is, she thinks, it would be one on which she was not alone, for if nothing else, she can trust that Laugon’s words will bind himself as securely as they do her. This she knows as surely as she knows that the sun will rise.
This one sure thing is assurance enough. Though she feels as though she is no longer standing but falling from the peak, she fixes on this point as a mariner on the Sickle and the North-Star, and runs, not away, but towards it.
“I accept.”
She had expected to feel different after saying the words, as if the thing she had been told her life hinged on would make her different, and is strangely relieved to find that the only immediate reaction is being squashed into an embrace. That, she thinks, she can live with.
