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I have long since given up on sleep. Even in the barracks, where I was not shackled at night, my shoulder kept me stiff and restless. Now, though I'm allowed my rest only after days of splitting wood and wandering the forest (for more purposes than one, for all my guards don't know it) I lie with my arms folded over my chest and count Russandol's sighs until they even into stupor. Never peace.
Like me, I do not think he'll ever find peace.
Unlike me, there's still good in him.
You think that curiosity is a thing driven from you, but I feel a gruesome twinge of it return when I try to parse the random cruelty of some of his hurts as compared to the precision of the rest. Why one shoulder flayed and cauterized, but not the other? Why the knotted burn scars across his ribs, but the curse above his hips cut clean? Why the scarlet thumb-print of a brand at the exact center of his breastbone?
Of course, I would rather tear my own tongue out than plague him with such questions. He's only a boy, after all. Between the beast-wild agony of so much pain, between his stretches of grim resolve, I see him. I'll not add to the boy's troubles unless I must. I've no way to repay my many debts and sins, and I know that. He isn't my salvation, but his salvation might still be possible, if only we succeed in our fool plan.
Gwindor, I tell myself, as gruff as I ever was when I clawed my way back from the mad hell of grief, you're moving too quickly.
Russandol can scarcely walk yet. Even if everything goes smoothly, which I know it shan't, we haven't a solution for Gothmog and his deadly long pistol. We haven't an answer to how Russandol shall join me and the rest. More than that, more than the boy does--I know the cowardice of men's hearts. I've seen it in my own. We can't depend, absent a miracle, on the alliance of all my fellows.
If I prayed, I would pray for time. In truth, the nearest I've seen to an angel is the grey-eyed lad with the proper manners that have somehow survived torture worse than any I've known since Belle, since--since. I wouldn't weigh him with my wishes.
He's enough to carry on his own.
Tomorrow, we belong to Gothmog again. I think of all that could go wrong, and do not sleep.