Thatβs a strange custom they have in Rohan, and not one Iβm the least bit familiar with, his sister had mentioned lightly, airily, as if it were no more than a passing thought, as if it were of no lasting concern. When pressed, she had given him even less, smiling as if sheβd remembered half a hidden jest. There is, to his exceedingly shallow knowledge of his wifeβs homeland, no custom which is particularly remarkable. Nothing which ought to have caught his sisterβs attention, at the least; she had made a concerted effort to give his wife, as well as those distant lands where her heroism was fond fable, absolutely none of her attention. This is meant, he assumes, to usher the vision of Γowyn out of their daily lives, which had gone on relatively undisturbed until heβd been informed that he was to be wed. He had assumed then that, even given this inconvenient development, his wife would be a trinket to be kept out of sight on a high shelf. He need only endure her at feasts, at the gatherings which would require them together as Lord and Lady of the Rock. She would not divert the course of his life as he knew it.
And yet, somehow, he finds himself on a path most violently diverted. He does not have a wife who had been bred to humbly see herself into a slant of sun with knitting needles in hand, mild of hand and mild of tongue. He has a wife who had not balked to unhorse him the day of their own wedding, and who had laid him on his back with success a number of times thereafter. A wife whom he had seen onto her own back just as frequently, and with an enthusiasm he had never imagined he would feel for a lady imposed upon him. βWifeβ had implied only cold, unfeeling duty, and what he had discovered was its glaring opposite. His appetite for doing what must in the light of the gods be done was matched only by his endless yearning to pitch steel against steel.
He must wonder, then, which custom it is that his sister finds so strange, an observation which had evidently given her pause, and roosted in her thoughts long enough to be carried to and shared with him. She is evasive in speaking with any more enticing detail upon what she might have seen or heard - pleased, it seems, to taunt him with the suggestion that his wife keeps secrets. If thatβs true, and she is hiding from him furtive hours, then it can only be because she would prefer that he never know how she is spending them. What would she undertake to do alone that she would be too ashamed to share with him? Nothing; she would not venture into her lone escapades in cowardice. She would not do so in shadow. She would do as he would: don her armor in the full gleam of sunlight, take up her arms, and defy anyone to challenge her.
No, this secret must be one because she is keeping it in anotherβs company, and he is so inflamed by this realization that he demands to know with whom she is spending her time, with whom she is practicing this unspecified custom. It is a game to draw it from his sister, one she delights in playing, having as she does the strings neatly looped about her own fingers. She feeds him only pieces, flitting and chirping and risking divulging nothing at all if he is too coarse in capturing and wringing what he would from her. At last: his wife has sought the attentions of a foreign swordmaster, her yearning for blood and fine, tempered steel unsatisfied. (He hears in this, naturally, only what has been designed to prick him: his wife has sought the attention of someone who is distinctly not himself to satisfy a need of hers which he has not met.) A swordmaster who is youthful and comely, his sister clarifies, a man who has won a great many of his noble wifeβs hours already. And where are these hours spent? How has such a rendezvous been accomplished over and over without his ever knowing? Out in the gardens, she says, where the lustful couple knows the golden knight is not like to frequent. Under a complicit blue sky, against the low humming of the sea.
It is a peculiar trait of her people that they match every kiss of steel with one upon the lips, his sister reflects aloud, and both slim brows raise in innocence when she goes on, and a thorough lesson in sheathing, too, if the servants are to be believed. The expression on her face leaves no doubt that the eavesdropping and voyeuristic servants are to be believed. Why should they not crow at such a scandal?
He will hear no more of it, denies in vicious aggravation that his wife would dare. His wife who is, when she must be, cool and placid, and made of kindling when she has had enough. Has she finally had enough? He grits his teeth like a snapping wolf, is prepared to defend his lady against such libel, and is in the same instant so mastered by his jealousy and his curiosity that he cannot summon the honor to kill the rumor by simply refusing to acknowledge it. He will know the truth of it, and not in blindness. Go see for yourself, then, his sister shrugs, all narrow, careless, silk-slipped shoulder, an indifferent toss of loose golden hair. She seems to prefer having him at midday, when you happen to be at your busiest. Perhaps she likes him cast in a warriorβs sweat.
So it is to the gardens he goes at midday, his stride long and heavy, visibly agitated, dressed in leathers with a sword at his hip. He knows what he will find: nothing, a garden empty save for the trite splendor of flowers overflowing their walls, with not a note of steel to be found. This is not what he finds, as he wends his way deep, as instructed by his sister. There he does find himself recognizing the chime of a spar, and his heart does then make itself nothing less than a bear, massively angry and bristling. And when he does come upon the scene, it is to spot a woman fair, as heβd been warned, and her hired partner, absent his shirt, and it seems to him that the man is graceful indeed, stepping forward with a blade in his hand, and then sliding forward like a flicker of sunlight, a kiss upon his lips that he delivers to a woman who is most unmistakably the Lady of the Rock.
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