Ease returns. We walked out northwards to the ice wall with the misunderstandings fresh between us. We came back to the hearth with them set aside.
There is a space to the right of me that is his. The furs keep his great shape, a hollowing pressed into the lie of each hair. I run my hand lightly over that cold form as he stands brooding over the quiet valley.
I welcome the return to a form of normality. There is a familiarity to this place now, even though it is layered with the night's unspoken happenings. When he took both my hands and leaned close, I stepped into uncertainty - fool that I am I believed that I knew what was to come - and that I, Olwing, sworn to the great city, was the captain.
His hands are warm and rough. The calluses of his bow and his sword show how his life is printed upon him, shaping him as he in turn shapes our sleeping-furs. Hand in his, I realised - just as one print tells him all he needs to know of his prey - from my hands alone he knows me.
His thumb rakes over mine, taking in pen and sword, hand over palm, dismembering my hand, myself, stripping away layers of me with the sureness of his fingers. I become aware of my own flesh and bone, hidden in me like secrets, as he reveals them for himself - drawing them out and giving them to me as gifts. I feel my own flesh, soft in comparison, betray me as it gives up itself to this determined scrutiny of his touch. If his hands see all this - what of his eyes?
I am rendered into components; each familiar, tired, forgotton arrangement of muscle and joint, thought and concept, seperated and turned over, examined anew, reassembled. I am unable to fathom his touch; his face intent, serene, accepting, amused as he deconstructs me.
I see the hunter ... the true hunter that sees both form and formlessness. With a shock I know that the captain is impotent here. A wild territory, there is hunter, and there is prey. Civilisation peels away, a fabrication. I am left devoid of names and he is in the ascendant. He looks at me and I gather my stories around me, trying to hide in all the corners I have made for myself. I snatch ragged cloak after cloak. His steady grey eyes are relentless hounds, taking into their teeth wordless and silent each thing I make of myself. Olwing sworn to Gondor, Olwing of the south... I can scent the last trace of oranges in my hair, bleeding into the cold as the final parts of what I say I am sit in the snow, looking back. I fear that he will see the truth of me - I do not want to see it for myself, reflected in the pools of his eyes.
When he leaned in closer - what would I expect, what would any woman expect? There is only one familiar course. And I thought, a Soldier's Solace. When a man stands too long on the edge of life and death. I have seen it before, who would fail to see it when they live amongst soldiers? When life is so precious and so easily spent.
Wondering who will fall tomorrow. The guilt of rejoicing secretly that it was someone else who died today and not I. When the lust and joy in life and the need to place the aching lonliness aside both rise and intersect - then I have seen it - the Soldier's Solace it is called in the south. An animal celebration of being alive. Who cares what her name is, but she is warm and female.
There are no questions and no promises - beasts know this. Hunter and his prey know this, even as they are drawn together by invisible lines of cause and effect. No questions or promises, a putting aside of time and place, a falling into one glorious moment after moment for the duration of one firelit night.
But even as I thought, I know how this ends - it did not. No common soldier then. I am grateful - that he is no common soldier. I am ashamed - for thinking that he might be.
