It is difficult to write by moonlight alone. I am having to squint closely at the page. However, it is necessary for there are bandits in these hills and a campfire would bring us unwanted attention.
It has been many days now since we left Bree. Currently, it is my turn to stand guard whilst Aakusti sleeps. Although I keep telling him to wake me halfway through the night that we might share lookout duty between us, he never wakes me until only a few hours before first light. I think he does it on purpose.
Each evening when we stop to rest, he creates a shelter out of fallen branches or anything he finds that might prove suitable, hunts for meat and then cooks it for us both. I find this to be strange and yet somehow welcome. It seems that he is trying to take care of me - and with the exceptions of Bearn and, in some other ways, Davick - I do not recall anyone ever doing that for me before. It is odd. Whilst not entirely unwelcome, I can not quite settle into it. I have spent too long being self-sufficient to feel entirely comfortable with this.
That aside, it has been eventful enough. Our walk out of Bree was filled with talk, mostly his observations on the ways of life in these lands and me trying to explain that it is not bad or truly weak to live this way, it is simply different to what he knows and everything is less urgent here than it is in the north. I do not think that he quite understands yet, and with luck he shall never really have to.
Having chosen the western path, we had cause to enter the Shire before turning north. He likens the hobbits to children, barely listening when I insist that they are indeed adults, just of a shorter stature to us. He mocked them incessantly, much to my annoyance, even going so far as to make a fool out of us both when we stopped for lunch at the tavern in Brokenborings.
I was utterly mortified when he refused to observe the local customs, standing instead of sitting and knocking a pile of books from a nearby shelf, proclaiming loudly that he would use it as a table of proper height. The looks we recieved from the resident halflings only became worse when he began to eat with his fingers, stuffing the food into his mouth as if it was the last meal he would ever see. I managed to coax him into using a fork, but even then he simply picked up an entire steak on the end of it and worked on shoving that down his gullet in one go. The sight alone was enough to put me off my own dinner.
Still, we left that place without incident and travelled on through Evendim. He was stunned into silence by the majesty of the High Kings Crossing, and again sometime later when I showed him the lake itself. He did not comment much on them, but I think he found the sights beautiful, perhaps even touching. After living for the entirety of his life in the barren darkness of Angmar, I find it hard to believe that such things could not move even his stoic spirit.
We camp now on the border of Evendim and Forochel, part way up the mountain trail beyond the gate. Thus far, with the exception of his rude words about the lives of others and his antics in the Shire, he has been a perfect gentleman. He has respected my privacy when I have asked for it, kept his distance and not tried to lay his hands upon me and even, in his own way, tried to observe local formalities when I have protested his actions enough.
I know why he is doing these things, of course. I have not changed my mind about returning to Aughaire to marry him, nor have I let my guard down. He will not fool me into complacency only to take advantage of my trust.
Besides, my mind drifts to the east and south in the pre-dawn hours when I stand watch. It travels along far away paths to the man that walks there, even now making his way toward the dangerous depths of the pit beneath the mountains. I worry for him and hope that we meet again one day; Cyfier, my conflicted warrior. If only I could tell you the truth...
