The air was not so frigid as to demand that she huddle against the ribs of the towering man. The sun was low in the sky, and its beams weaker than in spring or summer, but there was warmth still. Enough that she could have sat up and not been overcome by the chill. But it was not the cold that drove her to nestle into his side and to intermittently rest her head against his shoulder.
Always, she had made this pilgrimage alone. Her brother had accompanied her once or twice in their youth. But then his devotion was less and less towards his family, either living or dead, and was slowly drawn away to the seduction of liquid spirits. And it had never returned.
In years past, she had journeyed to the graveyard just northwest of Bree-town with a heavy heart, but her determination had never faltered. Even when it was necessary to clutch her old walking-stick in one hand, her hobbled leg did not sway the conviction that a daughter must pay homage to those who gave her life.
But now, she felt fragile. Small. Weak. The need for endless strength and dogged endurance against a world that would tear away a father and mother, and rob a young woman of her own ability to move about with dignity, was no longer sat solely upon her shoulders. Now, there was a pillar of might and gentle, grim calm at hand. His voice was never raised in anger like her brother’s. He was not aged and vulnerable to illness as her parents had been, when the Great Fever swept through Bree-town many years before. He was not restless and flighty as some young men were prone to be; here one day, and gone the next.
And so, as they drove together on the seat of the small wagon, under a blue-washed winter sky, it was more than simply the weight of her body that was leaned against the man. She felt the burdens of her heart, her mind, and her soul, being buoyed by his presence, and the incarnate reality of his figure beside hers. Like a delicate, wearied wanderer, flung down upon the peak of a mountain after a long and exhaustive climb, she gave it all up for him to bear. Whether he felt more than the gravity of her physical being, whether he sensed the load of her loneliness, her infirmity, her loss, her insecurity; she could not know. But just as a mountain would not flinch nor waver under the withered climber, so he would not be shaken by any frailty of hers. Steady he sat, large and stolid and sure. His breast rose and fell with each breath. His hands carried the reins so that she could rest, and mind the little hand-plucked bunch of winter greenery and dried flowers she had brought with her to lay upon the graves. He talked when she did, and offered simple remarks on the sky and the horse and the weather; words to carry her mind with gentle ease, and not to weigh it down with thoughts that demanded effort.
“I am here,” he said quietly, when the wagon was drawn up to the cemetery, and it was time to disembark. He did not need to say these words. She knew he was there, more surely than she knew anything in the world. Yet there was a surge of bittersweet gratitude for hearing them, for knowing that he wished to reassure her. He was there.
It was strange to her, how weak she felt when she took his hand and placed her foot on the wagon step, to begin the climb down. She had never felt so, when she had made this journey before. She could not seem to muster the old strength she had clung to for her twenty-odd years.
As she looked to the chiseled, somber face of the man beside her, she knew that he had made her so. He was the reason for her weakness. And she could not find it within herself to mind.
