((neatly penned in Lumi-kieli))
Today is too lovely a day to stay in, though B might want me to, but the sun is bright and the air is warm. Not that it has ever been cold, but after a year away from Lumi-mâ I wonder if I have acclimated and would find even summer there too chilling and winter impossible to bear, like some etelä-vieras.
I spent the night in Bright-Eye's room despite it being warm and dry last night, at B's insistence. It is really not so bad in that room. It is larger than the part of the ghoati that was mine, and I cannot mind too much that there are no windows, for no ghoati ever had windows. It just seems such a shame to be caught indoors when the lands are so welcoming. Most of my life I had to stay carefully inside as much as possible to avoid the frost, and here I can be outside all day and all night without even discomfort, let alone danger, and I am still trapped inside.
But at least Koira is with me. Mister Egfor made her a collar and I even spoke to Miss Tessa, the guard who had told me to keep her out, and it is all clear now. Koira is not liking the collar; whenever she is off alert she scratches at it as if to try to take it off. But she is on alert almost all the time, except when we are alone, and much of that time is in that small room which she does not like at all. She paces and sometimes she whines at the door. But she will get used to it.
I have spent some of this morning walking around the town looking at all its corners, and asking about rooms I could rent for pennies (and not that many of them). I hope to find one safe enough that I can also hide my gold penny there, and other things of value, without worrying about being robbed. B offered to let me stay in his house, but I do not think it wise to entangle so much with him so soon. Maybe here in Bree I am better at making friends and not being 'too much' and making people dislike me, but maybe it just has not yet started. And wooing is always uncertain.
Especially since I had to reveal to him some of what I learned from Inurawen. Or rather just that I had learned something of how to defend myself, but I did not say much. Inurawen always told me that, as a woman who would never be a warrior or a captain like her, my best strategy for ensuring my own safety was to be underestimated, and I have thus told no one in the city of the bridge, nor in Bree, of the tricks she taught me, nor ever suggested I was anything but a nearly helpless serving-girl and soap-maker. Now I have had to reveal to B that I was being deceptive, and perhaps I am not who he was hoping to woo. There was never time to find out how he felt, or even for him to think of it himself. Maybe last night on his own he was thinking about this, and maybe today he will have difficult things to say to me. If he does, I will try to make it easier for him to say them.
How did I end up involved in any of this? I bring a man dirty, old water as a jape for some woman. And now I have a gold penny to fear having stolen, and the woman proves to be a wanted murderer, and the man now makes thinly veiled threats -- though even this thin a veil is enough to fool the city's watch, which is sad to see, for his looking directly at me while speaking threats about what could happen out in the hills, after he listened to B telling me not to stay in the hills. Are the Bree-väki so dull-witted that such fumbling trickery fools them? Or is pretending to be fooled part of the same game as pretending to have not made the threats? I did not pretend to be fooled. I simply insisted I would not be a rabbit in his trap, even if it might have seemed more of a bluff than it was, because I do not want to be part of this. I want to just make friends and work for Mister Butterbur and enjoy the peace of Bree.
So now I have had to tell B that I know how to defend myself. Last night, he gripped the wrist I broke in the tumble, and I was full of thoughts of protecting myself so without thinking I used one of Inurawen's techniques to apply pressure to weak and sensitive points on his wrist to force his hand off me, even though he is much stronger. So he has seen it. And I will no longer try to hide it from him. I bought slender knives from Mister Dem's friend Oser (and her precious little girl Rusvä!) which I now have hidden within my sleeves, and I will show him. Koira is now with me at all times, and she can feel that I am ill at ease, not knowing if and when the threats against me will be acted upon. Mister Dem and Mister Egfor and Miss Oser also learned that I have had some training; I had to ask to find help getting knives. I suppose I will not keep secrets from them anymore.
(If some Bree-girl had been taken in chains away from her home, escaped, spent a season amongst the Rangers of the risen lake, and then planned to make her own way in the world, would she really not have tried to learn a little bit from the Rangers about how to defend herself first? It seems so obvious that I thought at first that no one would ever be fooled by me playing at being helpless. I suppose if that man's feeble denials are enough to fool the Watch, then so much have been my play-acting.)
Oh, and threatening to call him Kivi convinced B to stop calling me Tina!
Reminders:
spend time reassuring Koira so she gets used to the collar
keep trying to find a safe home in Bree that costs little ,and has a window that opens
look for useful things to spend my gold penny on
(jewelry is too easy to steal just as the penny is)
practice the harp every day even with all these other things happening
practice getting quickly to the knives
practice the throws, pinches, unbalances, and grapples that Inurawen taught me
find time to spend alone with B so he can figure out how he feels about me
try singing to Yulphe's crystal once I have mastered this harp
