Victory over sleeplessness comes slowly, after hours of lying beside Faramir in a too-small bed, smelling in his hair the smoke from a pipe she recognizes. Eowyn has only met one man who smoked such a pipe -- a stranger to Gondor like herself. The others prefer coarser pipeweed, easily found in the fields of Ithilien.
Her husband has been with the King again.
She does not begrudge him any pleasure he may take from such visits. It is harder to accept the fact that Aragorn will never want her as she wants him, but she realized long ago that it would always be so. It is not as if Faramir truly possesses Aragorn's heart, nor does Aragorn own Faramir's. There will always be another between them -- a man Eowyn knows only from portraits and stories.
She wonders how the Queen must feel about her husband's former companion, whom Arwen must have met in Rivendell before the Fellowship of the Ring set out together on their quest. Did Aragorn love Boromir even then? Or is this a passion born of loss, like her own suffering over Theodred, whose death brought Eowyn to such despair? Aragorn saved her life and Faramir's, yet just as she had been unable to save her cousin, the King had been unable to save the one dearest to him.
Not even her brother, now the King of Rohan, can compete with the legend of the Captain of the White Tower. Eomer bears great friendship for Aragorn and they ride together in war and in peace defending their lands. Yet Eomer cannot replace Boromir as the King's cherished one any more than Faramir can outshine the King's image of the Steward who might have been.
It is a strange fate that they should suffer so much fear and doubt over a man who died so long ago, before any of them understood how much the world would change. Eowyn wonders whether she would have liked Boromir of Gondor -- if she would have found him to be much like his brother, his cousin, the King who still loves him, or more akin to his dark-hearted father, whose memory still gives Faramir nightmares. So much of Eowyn's life has been shaped by Boromir's death. Yet she will never know the man, except as a dream, in curses and in wishes.
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