Most days I am trying to put on a brave face for the world, and I have been for three years now. The Thane sent me into the wild, and I just nodded, strapped on the sword he gave me, and rode off into the unknown. I met people with strange customs and baffling demands, and I squared my shoulders and pretended that I could help them until they would help me, and just plodded forward. I ventured into lands of unknown perils -- literally, since I did not know what dangers I was being saved from by people around me I did not see, like the Beornings, or the elves that watch the paths in the Mirkwood -- and just kept riding forward, as if I knew where I was going. Now that I'm in Bree, and am training in four different things at once (ostlery, swordplay, longbow, and reading), and trying to ready for a long and perilous journey back, I'm putting on that brave face, and pretending I know where I'm going, more and more. So much that the illusion is failing; people are seeing through it. Especially me.
I pretend that somehow I will be able to return to the Mark, and then, as if that were not enough, that I'll be able to come back afterwards to Bree. I even play at the idea that I can call on the elves of Imladris in the company of Miss Adri and later the Witch of the Golden Wood, and maybe they'll have some answers for me about the lantern. But while I'm off buying a blanket for Kestrel from Miss Sareva and earning coin for the Beorning's tolls, I'm blind to the simple fact that this journey is utterly beyond me. At the rate I keep losing coin, and how rarely I get paying jobs, I'll never have enough to pay for the tolls; breaking my bow was a huge setback that I pretended was just a minor misfortune. I don't know the first thing of how to speak to elves; the one elf-maid of Mirkwood that spoke to me in Esgaroth did so out of pity. I have no means of getting a horse for the return trip, nor even a sword. I have no reason to think the Thane will take my failure with grace and then give me leave to march back to Bree with no further duty imposed on me. And with only a few months of bow and sword training, as slowly as I am learning, I have little hope of surviving as far as the High Pass, let alone all the way to the Mark and back, however encouragingly people wish to speak of it. I haven't even worked out how to use a bow properly; my efforts to correct myself only led to a broken bowstring, and making a further fool of myself in front of Cutwil and a hunter of Bree-land when I showed that I didn't even know how bowstrings are made or mended.
I was never the right person to be sent on this undertaking. How I survived this long I cannot fathom; it clearly needed someone brave and strong, trained and skilled in survival and battle and healing, clad in armor and equipped with far more than a loaned sword. Ideally someone with knowledge of travel and the ways of the world, of letters and ancient history, of what to expect from people from faraway lands. And someone who might have some wisdom in finding things like this lantern; the vague reassurance that I had "keen eyes that could see what others missed" has rung more hollow with every passing day. Indeed, do I not keep discovering that anyone can lie to me and I never know?
And in the middle of this, I managed somehow to convince myself I could be a man for a woman, a father for a family, a protector for the helpless, and if that wasn't enough, a guide that could bring back to the straight path one who had chosen to stray. Not one of these is a thing I can do. Not one. I can't provide for myself, let alone a family. I cannot guide a lost soul back to truth if I am myself lost. I can't protect myself, let alone a woman in peril, threatened for reasons I cannot understand, about things I don't know about, by forces I cannot recognize.
She called me a lamb. She says she didn't mean it in a bad way. I'm sure she didn't. But it's true. I am no pillar of strength she could come to in need, nor a beacon of wisdom to shine light into darkness, nor a star that guides the way home. I am that little lost lamb that doesn't answer the kulning and instead pretends everything is as it should be, out in the darkened hillside, heedless of the baying of the wolves.
