My body is heavy and languid, yesterday's journey settled in my limbs. I am careful not to spill ink on the furs, but I am too content in my warmth to move. We scouted the northern route from here towards the ice wall. I would know what I face before we move on properly.
A hard day, the journey did not start well with a strong wind and the snow restricting visibility. Hard too taking on this mummery for him, feeling my responsibility for him settle on my shoulders with the weight of a sodden fur. He will not tell me why I must pretend to these people that he is only a follower, and not a companion. It is clear that they look from one of us to the other, and that this goes against the natural weave of the world. Increases suspicion, I would wager, rather than allays it. However, I know that he walks here of his own free will, and if this is some recompense I can give for his companionship, then I will pay it, even though it wearies me.
Most of the night he has spent pacing back and forth, in and out of the light of the fire, or standing a little away, looking out over the valley. I know him well enough now, when his hood is up and he sweeps his cloak about him, he is swathed in fabric and thoughts. I am too tired to ask what he ponders, though I sense the items he found in the snow are woven there. I am too tired to even be curious.
We did not reach the ice wall, too far to reach and return in a day. But I have seen a little more of what we face. And I admit, coming out of the valley, how tender and generous the valley seems to me now ... we crested the pass ... sun and stars! ... I had never envisaged... what words are there for me to describe such a wasteland, dunes of snow, rivers locked in perpetual ice - rivers of ice! And blue. A blue that shines with its own light, I could believe that I am surrounded by water .. I am a strange fish swimming in a solid sea.
And in that moment of wonder and awe, his disapproval buffets me as hard as the blizzard winds earlier. I have no choice, I thought I had made it plain. I am oathsworn and I have been given my duties. And this must be borne, even to the frozen sea. Who can countermand the desires of the lord steward? .. not I, bound, and not him, a northman with no concept of the city and the land. I have no other course of action, I must trust to the farseeing wisdom of my lord. All who see him feel it, his long sight, his great knowledge, his care. He will spend his coin as he must, even to his sons and captains, to keep the land - the world- safe. His gaze roves even to the ice shores - and me with it.
Can Amlarad counter such a thing? He is here and now, beside me daily. See him, against the dawn sky, watching. He is immobile, a stone finger in the snow, yet there is always a fluidity of life about him. Life .. flows... about him, rock in the river. He is here, so very here that the beasts and birds are fearless, believing him to be a natural form of the earth. They do not see his predator eyes, catching each tiny flick of a wing, his ears alert to any misplaced sound. I begin to sense the depth of the world he walks in.
And .. he is here. Sun and stars, he is here, as unexpected and as welcome as shade in the heat, a bridge over a river in spate, a fire in the hearth. His counsel, his concerns, are alive to me; I hover over knowledge that I am likely to die cold for my oath, I hover over the truth that right here and now, I would claim all that lies in this camp as home. Fasten the hut against the elements, of ice and snow, of command and duty. Close it all away in the damp warmth of the hut, heap the furs and burrow into them, shut my eyes and rest.
The sun and fruits of the south - to the bitter ice wall. Has any woman been so far, would any doubt that I have tried to fulfil my orders? This is what he insinuates, to claim I have tried but could not win through... he wanted to show me the ice wall, the distance to the bay, the failure awaiting me. He would have me turn back, I sense it, but how could I then stand before my lord and lie? If I can only prove my faithfulness by my death, then - so be it. If there is only a bitter grain of chance that I might succeed, then I must swallow it, and attempt it. This is how it is to be oathbound. How can the misgivings of a man of the northern wilds be set against the one who rightly commands all our defences?
