The cold is inside me now. Though I wear the beautiful cloak he gifted to me, I am a numb thing. An icemaiden. The night is old, moves its weary way to its inevitable end. I have no pity for it and no interest.
He is gone to his own solitude and I am encased in mine. I tried to sleep, a pain in my chest awoke me, an icicle as sharp as a betrayal. I see it now he is gone, what I have done. The first steps of the oathbreaker. I am horrified at myself, look at my own hands writing, loathing them as they move and record my own folly.
There are times when it is the space he makes that is the danger, not his words. Spaces when he waits and looks, saying nothing while his eyes form the trap. Unreadable when he wishes it, yet they ask not to be disappointed. The weariness in them when one's own fear turns one away from filling the space. The need in me to fill them, to answer some own hunger in him to be trusted.
And so. Not an excuse. An explanation. I find I have told him more of my reason for being in the north. And so I have told what I was admonished not to tell. Just so.
Tell me, my own betraying hands, recording this so coolly, how could I not fill that space? And how, as the words of my orders took shape in my steamy breath, could they have sounded different, when my ears heard them afresh so many leagues from Gondor? Betraying ears, hearing my lord-given task through the filter of Amlarad's response.
He tells me - all I do is a lost cause.That my lord Steward is powerful, but no lord, to send me on such an errand. A man fallen to folly, a man without grace or compassion, a man entangled in himself, a man, in truth then - and no more than a man.
And, forgive me, but I hear it. I hear it, and were it from any other than him my sword would be out and satisfaction demanded. And yet, I cannot. Even though I see in my mind the white stones of the city sway under Amlarad's onslaught, as though he rocks a wall of child's bricks. I still hear, and in that I betray again.
What is he then, that my own hands will not act as they should, my own lips not defend my lord, my own ears not shut tight? Worse, what is he that I should have my orders drawn from me as slick as poison from a wound. That I should offer them up, and what was once an honour feel for a moment like the lifting of rocks from my back.
Anything, forgive me, anything now I would offer up, to extinguish the heat in his eyes as he burns the City inside me. What is Olwing, sworn to Gondor, if Gondor is tumbled down and what is sworn is broken?
