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Manawyth held the Eorl's blue gaze with all his mind's strength. His lips trembled slightly, and his knuckles were paler than they ought to be, but he did not intend to surrender. He might be forced to come to abide among the Rohirrim, but he would not put up with insults, not if they came from the King himself. The Dunlanders also had pride, not the golden, supreme arrogance of the Horse-lords, but a dull, dark, smouldering flame of their own. It burned all the more fiercely for the threats it had faced. The Rohirrim held themselves a hardy and valiant race, because they had defended a wide land and lost it but once.
But the Dunlanders knew that they had held a land that was no land at all for hundreds of years. To live on the scrapings of rock, and still to remember to live as your ancestors did, and to so die. That was the way of the Dunlendings.
The Eorl asked his second for advise; the same veteran warrior who had sized Manawyth up before. But the Dunlending saw little reason to hope for a reprieve from that direction. He continued to stare at the lord of the Hall.
He knew that whatever humanity his bedraggled entrance had stirred was squandered now. But he believed it was right that it was so. And the Eorl and his men were now committed to pit their wheat-fattened tongues 'gainst his.
The fearful look of the pale wench who had earlier offered him tea alarmed him somewhat, however. What was he, an Orc bringing fire to the bales?
He would be refused, and he would ride back to strive and die in Dunland, in all likelihood. But he would not leave the horse-lords with a memory of a small dark ape who had submitted and fawned.
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