"And I won't tell you," Sam replied, and his voice was just as heavy. "If you don't want to hear. It's a bleak tale, anyway, and one that I don't know I'd have the strength to tell." With a glance up-- "Perhaps a Sam come from an earlier page in the book, as it were, could tell you something more hopeful; but, as it is..." He trails off. (The book is still the way he organizes this strange idea of time to himself-- it's the clearest picture he can form in his own head, not knowing as he does that to some folk in the Capitol, he is come out of a book.)

It's been a few days since he's recounted, even to himself, what he saw in his last moments in Middle-earth. He'd driven himself half-mad with remembering in his first few days, spent hours curled up alone and wracked with guilt, and woken in the night many times calling Frodo's name. A Hobbit's resilience only goes so far, and now he's saving it for the Arenas. If he's to get back-- to where he was, to where he might yet do some good-- then he's got to do the best he can here, and he hopes in himself that Frodo might understand that, and forgive him if there are moments when Sam doesn't think of him.

"Now-- I wasn't at Parth Galen," he adds, "So perhaps I shouldn't speak to what happened. But I think there's a good deal you couldn't have known of, til it happened. What B-- that is. What sent Frodo away, for instance."