Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (12)
Mar. 27th, 2009 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air 12
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: R
Warnings: Sexual assault.
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: This is part twelve, obviously, and this is also the first WIP I've posted since 2006. (And that WIP was abandoned, so one can see I'm understandably nervous about posting another one.) The structure of this lends it to being posted in sections, though, so that's how it's going up. Because of this, however, it's not getting posted to any comms until the whole thing is done.
From her window, Susan can see Cair Paravel.
Or her ruins, rather, bare and gleaming white like polished bone against the wide green spread of the island. From this height the men climbing over the tumbled wreckage are nothing more than miniature doll people, barely the height of her thumbnail. There’s some kind of wooden framework built up over the remnants of the throne room, half-built construction of some sort. Mutilation of a corpse – icing on the goddamned cake.
The choice of view is deliberate, of course. Back in her day, they’d done much the same thing by putting the defeated and disgraced captains of the Masongnongese navy up in tower cells where they could see the broken hulls of what remained of their once substantial fleet. They’d been able to see the four unscathed Narnian ships as well – all it had taken, along with Peter’s military genius and a sea force cobbled together out of hastily-convened squabbling saltwater Narnians, to defeat the greatest nautical power on the Eastern Ocean.
Oh, but they’d been something back then! It had been a golden age built out of fire and blood, all that Susan and her siblings had been able to give given in Narnia’s service. By the time they’d been snatched away all those years ago they’d been burned away to nothing except the very cores of themselves, all bones and steel and muscle. And all of it’s lost now, forgotten but for half-grasped memories – all that work, all that blood, all those lives, and for this. Sometimes she wonders why they’d even bothered, if this is what they’d accomplished and what they’ve become. She’d give anything to see those four ships in the harbor today – Osumare Seaworth’s three pirate ships and the one Narnian aerial carrier. But even the coastline is different now; that harbor is long gone.
Susan rises and turns away from the window, crossing to the dressing table. She’s been bathed and changed, her wounds tended to, and neatly imprisoned in a small, handsomely appointed room in one of the towers of Caspian’s castle. She hadn’t expected any of it, but either Prince Bahadur is taking her at her word or he’s trying to call her bluff. Either way, she’s glad for the bath, at least; she feels clean for the first time in weeks now. She’d been spoiled that way even before England; Cair Paravel had had fabulous baths, and she hadn’t been on campaign with Peter nearly as often as Edmund or Lucy, where she would have had to adjust to not having regular baths for extended periods of time. And then there had been England, of course. The baths hadn’t been nearly up to par, but they’d been regular, at least.
She sits down at the dressing table and regards her reflection thoughtfully. Mirrors are something else she’s missed at Arn Abedin – everything else Lucy’s said aside, the bits of her rants about Susan being vain and interested in her own comfort are true enough, after their fashion. It’s just nice being clean and having proper clothes and jewelry when possible.
The nereids who’d tended to her, silent when Susan tried to speak to them, had put three stitches in her cheek where Inzamum had torn the skin and covered up the cuts and bruises on her face with paint. They’re barely noticeable in the mirror; she almost looks presentable. She almost looks like the old Susan, the woman whose beauty had brought hundreds of suitors to Cair Paravel, all of whom had gone away disappointed. But even that woman had been only a figment of the imaginations of men all across the continent; she’d never existed outside of court gossip and barracks-room gossip. Susan hates that woman.
If that’s who Bahadur thinks she is, then all the better.
She reaches up to adjust the net in her hair an incremental degree, then tilts her head up and touches the tip of one finger – her nails are painted gold to match the net and the trimming on her dress – to the old scar on her chin. The naiads had missed that when they’d painted her face, but Susan’s used to it, and it’s familiar – something that other Susan, the Queen Susan of old, had had too. She’d lost it when she’d been sent back to England, of course, but it’s here now – one of her idiot ex-boyfriends had hit her. Once.
She’d sent him to the hospital with six broken bones.
After that, Susan hadn’t gotten a date for a while.
She and her siblings had already had their falling out by then, but Peter had heard about it, of course – Tom had been in the same RAF squadron as Peter. He’d shown up at her door the day afterwards, pale from his climb up the stairs; he’d still been on crutches from injuries he’d sustained when the plane he’d been test-flying crash-landed. Susan still regrets throwing him out of her flat.
“I hope you’re here somewhere, Peter,” she whispers, and doesn’t get up from the dressing table when the door opens behind her.
She watches Prince Bahadur of Calormen approach in the mirror. He’s a handsome enough man, she supposes – swarthy and dark-haired, with a close-cropped beard and a narrow, clever face. There’s a gold ring in one ear that matches the gold circlet on his brow. Behind him, servants begin bringing in trays of covered dishes and setting the low table in the center of the room.
“Queen Susan,” he says, “you’ll dine with me.”
“Is that a request, Prince Bahadur?” Susan inquires, her attention still on the mirror.
“It is not.”
“Very well.” She tucks an invisible strand of hair into the golden net and turns around, rising to take a seat at the table across from the Calormene prince, tucking her legs primly beneath her skirts.
The servants – all Narnians – finish setting the table, bow to Bahadur, bow lower to Susan, and then leave. Only a slim oceanid remains behind, standing quietly by the door.
“Do try the plum liquor,” Bahadur says, motioning towards the purple stuff in her glass. “It’s quite good. And the strawberries. It’s not the season for them yet, but we have them imported from Galma, where spring comes more quickly.”
“Yes, I remember,” Susan murmurs. She does try the strawberries, and gods, but they’re good; it’s easy to forget, eating scanty and makeshift as they have been, that Narnian food is a thousand times better than anything in England. Richer, more flavorful, more filling – taken from the backs of Narnian labor or not, she doesn’t stint on eating; she’s bloody starving, not having eaten more than a few mouthfuls over the past few days. There’s some kind of white fish covered in a rich brandy sauce, big clamshells filled with chopped mussels and yellow rice, a chilled green salad with slivers of oranges adorning it, a clear, fragrant broth, jasmine tea with mint and honey. Last of all is a platter full of small cakes, no two the same; Susan carefully transfers two to her own plate and eats them in small bites, savoring the sweetness of the frosting and the way the huckleberries on the second cake seem to burst in her mouth. If Bahadur is importing his fruit, then she might as well take advantage of it.
About halfway through the meal, a man knocks on the door and comes in at Bahadur’s call, bending his head to whisper in his ear. The prince waves him away. “Lord Prejun is only trying to bait me,” he says. “Whatever it is can wait until after I’m done here.”
The man bows and leaves.
“Trouble, Prince Bahadur?” Susan asks, sipping at the tea. She prefers it plain, but the Calormenes drink it this way. The taste of it in the back of her mouth reminds her uncomfortably of the last time she’d been in Tashbaan, of Rabadash’s swarthy face and the way his gaze had always lingered on her body too long.
“Nothing of importance.” He watches her for a moment, his gaze cool and calculating, and adds, “The governance of the city has been given over to the natives. Some of them feel the need to come to me with every little disturbance. I had not thought that the Lord Provost was one of them, but even I can be mistaken. This is the second time today he has thought to overstep his bounds.”
“Perhaps they seek to test you,” Susan says. “Cair Paravel is the heart of Narnia; the man who does not truly hold her can never control Narnia. The Telmarines never learned that, to their doom.” She’s no idea what kind of game Bahadur is playing her, and as much as it pains her to give political advice to this tyrant, the real question is how he’ll react to it – to her. What can he possibly want from her that he thinks he can get more easily with sweet words and good food than with torture and imprisonment?
Perhaps it’s only that she’s a woman, and he feels that she’ll weaken more quickly here than in harsher conditions.
“The Telmarines were fools,” Bahadur says. “Nearly five hundred years and they never realized what it was they held in the palm of their hand. Narnia was only land to them, nothing more, and they were too terrified of what they called demons to comprehend the rest of their riches. They never even touched the salt mines in the north!”
“Narnia can be a fearsome land for those that have no place here,” Susan says. She sets her teacup down. “What is to you, Prince Bahadur?"
“A fruit ripe for the picking,” he says without hesitation. “And for you, lady?”
She answers him honestly. These may well be the last true words she says this night. “Home.”
They finish the rest of their meal in silence.
“No more?” Bahadur questions as Susan finally sits back against a round pillow, cupping her goblet of plum liquor between her hands.
“I am quite full, thank you,” Susan says. “My compliments to the cook; everything was delicious,” she adds to the oceanid as he begins to clear the dishes away, leaving only a bowl of fruit for each of them and one long covered tray – almost four feet long.
He bows his head slightly and murmurs, “She will be honored by your kindness, your majesty,” before taking the dishes out into the hall.
Susan eats another strawberry, watching Bahadur lean back on one elbow. He sips at his goblet, eating small red grapes one by one.
“You say,” he says at last, in accented Narnian, “that you are Queen Susan of old – the one the Narnians call the Queen of Spring.”
“Yes,” Susan says. “I am.”
“One of those demon godlings of these deluded peasants, who does the bidding of the Great Lion as the fingers obey the hand. The Queen of Spring’s embrace is said to tear a man’s member off at the root, should he attempt to take her unwilling.”
Susan just smiles and eats another strawberry in small neat bites.
Bahadur watches her with steady eyes, unblinking. His gaze is dark and inscrutable – a cold man, and a hard one, she thinks. He’s not as much a fool as Rabadash or his brother Mashda had been. “They say as well,” he continues, “that the Queen of Spring’s arrows can come in the day or the night, striking the life and soul from a living being and giving him over to the hands of King of Evening, the Shadowmaster, who guides the newly-deceased on the paths of the dead to the summerlands, where the King of Summer receives them into eternity. They say the Queen of Spring can hit a target the size of a man’s thumbnail at three leagues.”
“Do they?”
“I know that the Narnians light candles to the Queen of Spring in both the lower and the upper cities. I know that they make charms to invoke her and her siblings against my countrymen. The name of the Queen of Spring has done them no good; here I sit, secure in Caspian’s castle, with all of Narnia under my command. I can stretch out a hand,” he says, doing so, “and squeeze, and all Narnia will know it, from the High Reaches to the Archen Mountains, from the Great Eastern Ocean to the Western Waste.” He crushes a peach in his fist, and the juice runs down between his fingers and drips onto the table. He drops the desiccated remains of the fruit and wipes his fingers clean with a napkin. “All of Narnia trembles at my name and the thunder of my horses’ hooves. They sit in their hovels and pray to their four gods that my eye will not fall on them tonight.”
“They pray to me,” Susan replies softly. “And here I am, Prince Bahadur, so I would best begin praying to your god Tash that I and my siblings grant you the mercy to retire unharmed to your own home – dry, hot, sandy hell that it is.”
“You are here,” Bahadur allows, “or at least, a woman who claims to be the Queen of Spring is here, sitting before me now and eating my food. You carry a bow and red-feathered arrows and a horn, all of which were stolen from this very palace barely a month previous. You say you are the Queen of Spring and you expect me to believe you.”
“Whether you believe me or not is immaterial,” Susan says. “I am who I am. You cannot change that.”
“No,” he agrees, “it does not matter if I believe that you are the Queen of Spring. It matters what they believe.” He gestures with one hand toward the window, indicating the city below and the sprawl of Narnia beyond. “If they think that their four gods are walking amongst them once more, then they will rise against me, and that will not end well for them. They think that they suffered when I first set foot on these shores? They do not know suffering; Calormen does not brook resistance. I will kill every eighth man and woman in this country, human or nonhuman. I will remove every Narnian from this country and resettle them amongst Calormen’s lands, bring men and women here who have never heard the names of the King of Summer and his siblings. Even the memory of the country of Narnia will cease to exist.”
Calormene bastard. Susan clenches her fist around the metal goblet but keeps her voice calm when she says, “You are very confident that you would be triumphant in such a rebellion. I believe King Miraz thought the same thing three hundred years ago.”
Bahadur waves one hand. “Miraz was a fool, and his little enclave of Telmarines was not the empire of Calormen. Your comparison is inaccurate.”
“Very well,” Susan allows. “Have you ever heard of the empire of Masongnong?”
He raises his eyebrows. “No.”
“Sixteen hundred years ago,” Susan says, “Masongnong was the greatest power on the continent. It ruled from the Strait of Audunsgift in the south to the marshes of Feaduden in the north for a thousand years – it rivaled Calormen then. In the first year of our reign they sailed against Narnia – the greatest fleet in the Eastern Ocean, more than three hundred ships and forty thousand men, never before defeated on the open sea. Narnia couldn’t have mustered a tenth of that if we called up every man, woman, and child, and half of our soldiers we couldn’t put to sea. Do you know what happened to the Masongnongese Navy? We sank a hundred and twenty-seven ships and left them to rot on the ocean floor. The ocean stank of the dead – not even when we defeated the White Witch was there such a slaughter. My brother came to me with Masongnongese blood so thick on him that I could taste it when I kissed him for days afterwards, even after a thousand baths. This is Narnia, Prince Bahadur, and my brother Peter is the High King. You don’t want to go to war against us. Do you think that Narnia’s people are the only force we can raise? It was the sea itself that swallowed half the Masongnongese Navy, and sixteen thousand dead left behind no bodies for their families to claim. Land on her shores while the High King walks here and the earth itself will rise against you; a force of ten thousand can enter her forests and never emerge again. Do you want my only warning, Prince Bahadur? You and yours leave Narnia now and never set foot on these shores again and you may yet live.”
For a moment Bahadur is silent, then he sets his empty goblet down and gestures to the oceanid, who hurries forward with the pitcher to refill it, ghosting over to Susan afterwards. She holds out her palm over the top of her empty goblet – no more – and he bows and retires again to his position.
“What happened to Masongnong?” Bahadur asks, sounding idly curious
“Ten years later it made a try for Feaduden, a tribute state of the empire of Edan. They lost a hundred thousand men in the swamps. Four years later Calormen defeated them at sea, killing the Emperor and five of his sons. Masongnong broke up amidst internal feuding as the rest of the Emperor’s relatives all tried to seize power. My brother was fifteen when he defeated Masongnong, and they never recovered from the shame. Masongnong could throw away a million soldiers and not even flinch. Can Calormen?”
“Yes,” Bahadur says. “And if it takes two million to pacify Narnia, then so be it. Calormen has wanted this land for three thousand years, and I will not fail my ancestors’ ghosts at the whisperings of a woman.”
“It’s your funeral,” Susan says. She eats the last strawberry in the bowl. “Don’t expect me to weep.”
“You will be dead by the time I go to the pyres.”
“So will you.”
That makes him smile. “True enough, I suppose. But there is no King of Summer, no King of Evening or Queen of Morning – no Queen of Spring. Calormen has stories too, you know. The kings and queens of summer died sixteen hundred years ago, murdered by their own people, and they were only human. It was these Narnian fools who called them gods – they are not such, and were never so. Your empty threats mean nothing to me.” He stands up, coming around the edge of the table towards her, and Susan barely keeps from shivering as he kneels down behind her, his arm brushing hers as he leans forward and curls his fingers around the handle of the lid of the long dish. “Do you know why?”
“I believe it’s called overconfidence and pride, and both go before a fall.”
Bahadur lifts the lid and sets it aside.
Susan stops breathing.
Only for a moment, then she gasps, a rough sound that tears at her throat as she reaches forward. Bahadur’s hand closes hard on her wrist, holding her away. “What have you done to my brother?” she demands, tears pricking her eyes as Bahadur twists her arm. “What have done to my brother, you sick fucking bastard –”
His short nails dig into the flesh of her arm. “Thieves and rebels both die ugly deaths,” he snarls. “If you want to give him a clean one, you’ll answer every question I ask, and honestly.”
“Go to hell,” Susan spits, and smashes her empty goblet into his face with her left hand. He shouts and lets go of her, clutching at his face with both hands, and Susan jerks forward and snatches up Rhindon, swinging two-handed at him. The blade goes three inches into the table as Bahadur rolls aside, snatching up the dish lid like a shield. Little good it does him; Rhindon slices through the thin metal like a knife through butter and kisses his cheek before Bahadur throws the shield aside.
Susan nearly loses Rhindon then, the blade tangled up in the lid, but she keeps her hold on the sword and turns her wild stab into a butterfly swing that tears the front of Bahadur’s shirt open as he jumps back, grabbing at the oceanid as the boy makes to flee. He pulls the oceanid in front of him, an arm across the Narnian’s throat, and Susan hastily aborts her attack, standing back warily with Rhindon held out in front of her.
“I’m surprised,” Bahadur says, breathing hard. He licks absently at the blood that’s run down his cheek and gathered at the edge of his mouth. “I thought you wouldn’t hesitate at hurting a Narnian.”
The oceanid is pale with panic, ocean water dampening his clothes and dripping down his legs to gather in puddles on the stone floor. There are tears in his eyes as he stares at Rhindon with a kind of fascinated horror on his face. He’s not even looking at Susan, just the sword.
“I’m a queen of Narnia,” she says slowly, her gaze flicking towards the door as three Calormene guards crowd in, their crossbows raised. “Unlike you Calormenes, we won’t murder our own people in order to get at an enemy.”
Still, she doesn’t put Rhindon down, just stares at Bahadur and feels her breath tear ragged at her throat as two of the Calormen crossbowmen come towards her. She could probably kill at least one of them before the other fired. She couldn’t get at Bahadur before he chokes the life out of the oceanid. He doesn’t need air to breathe, but in lieu of that he needs water, salt water, and there’s none of that here – God! Bahadur has her well and truly trapped now.
She thinks too long. Both crossbow quarrels are too close to her now for Susan to risk trying anything, and she swallows and holds up her empty left hand as she bends slowly to put Rhindon down on the remains of the table. She’ll get it back for Peter later. Somehow. If Peter’s still alive. Aslan, he has to still be alive! Susan can’t keep her fingers from lingering on the hilt before she straightens again, both hands empty now. Putting Rhindon back in Calormene hands is very nearly profane; it goes against everything she believes and that she’s had banged into her head over the years, because it’s not just a sword, it’s a symbol, and if it’s not in the hands of a king of Narnia – if it’s in enemy hands –
Just a sword. Just let her think of it as a sword, if only for these few moments. Getting herself killed won’t accomplish anything, but oh, it seems like such a good idea right now.
Bahadur lets the oceanid go, the boy scrambling aside quickly, and steps around the wreckage of the table to approach Susan. He grabs her chin in one hand. “You can watch your brother die tomorrow,” he says, digging his fingers into her skin.
Susan spits in his face.
His backhand splits her lip before he shoves her back against the dressing table, slamming her head into the mirror. Glass cracks. His hands are rough on her breasts through her dress and Susan turns her face aside, catching at the sides of the table to brace herself. She’s gripping so hard that she can feel the splinters digging into her palms. Bahadur pushes her legs apart with his knees and Susan scrabbles at him with her feet, but from this position she doesn’t have any kind of leverage, no way to –
She claws at him one-handed, across the back of his head and the side of his neck, and it only makes him check a moment, but that’s long enough for Susan to jab the heel of her hand up against the base of his jaw – not enough power to break the neck, but –
Bahadur punches her in the face, then grabs her hair and drags her around, shoving her down onto the floor hard enough that Susan’s vision swims, flashing red and green as he kneels on her back. She claws at the stone blocks beneath her, trying to get the leverage to throw him off as fear pools low and fast in the pit of her stomach. No, no, no, not like this, not here, not in Narnia –
“Narnian bitch,” he snarls in her ear as Susan’s breath rasps in her throat. She concentrates on a knot in the floor, trying to make her eyes focus. He runs a hand down her back, stopping at her arse and kneading it steadily. His other hand is twisted painfully in her hair, holding her head against the floor. “Who is he? Your brother? Your lover? What’s his real name? What’s yours?”
She just shakes her head mutely, pressing her forehead to the cool wood and trying not to cry.
“The man I took that sword off of is in my dungeons right now,” Bahadur presses. “Maybe if I take you down there and have you in front of him he’ll tell me what I want to know. What do you think?”
“He won’t, he won’t say anything,” Susan whispers. “He won’t. Not for me, not for anyone. He won’t.” Peter loves her – she has to believe he does – but he loves Narnia more and always has. He won’t give up his country for her. None of them will. None of them should.
“I think you’re lying,” Bahadur says against her ear. “I think if I take you down there he’ll tell me whatever I want to know. One look at all the blood on your pretty face and he’ll tell me anything, everything.”
“He’ll kill himself first,” Susan says rawly. She tastes blood in her mouth, and one tooth is loose when she touches it with her tongue.
“Some men will do anything for their women. And it will be…entertaining.” He squeezes her arse and Susan puts her head down, tears leaking out despite her efforts.
There’s a rap on the door, and Bahadur says lazily, “Yes?”
“There’s a message from the Lord Provost, your majesty,” a man’s voice says in unaccented Narnian.
“At this hour it can wait,” Bahadur says, running his thumbnail idly over the back of Susan’s neck and making her shudder.
“Very well, your majesty.” She can just barely hear the speaker’s boot steps fade away down the hall, then Bahadur bends his head to hers again, his teeth closing sharp on her ear.
Susan flinches, scratching at the floor again, trying to gain the leverage she needs to throw him off, but Bahadur’s weight and position is too much of an advantage to him. I can take it, she mouths silently against the floor. Whatever it is, I can –
“Where were we?” Bahadur murmurs.
“You were threatening to rape me in front of my brother,” Susan says, trying hard to keep her voice from shaking. “Did you want to carry on with that?”
The prince nuzzles her neck. “Mmm,” he says. “Choices, choices.”
“Yours,” Susan says. Relax. Take control of the situation. Easier said than done. “You said it yourself, what I can do. I hope you’re not too fond of your cock.”
“Don’t throw my own words back into my face,” Bahadur says. “You’re not the Queen of Spring, and even if you were, Tash will protect his chosen son.”
Susan swallows, but she still manages to say gamely, “Try it, then. See if you can get my brother to talk – or if you can get me to.”
“Tempting,” he muses, and shifts the pressure on her, dragging her up to her feet by her hair. Susan pivots on the balls of her feet, trying to keep her balance, and realizes what position she’s put herself in.
Bahadur isn’t trained in the same kind of fighting Susan is. He’s left her hands free.
She hammers her right fist up into his groin, grabbing at the back of his shirt with her left hand as his grip on her hair loosens. She catches his shoulder with her right hand as he’s still bent over, gasping for pain, and knees him twice in the belly before the two Calormene guards catch her, dragging her backwards and away from him.
“Bitch!” Bahadur gasps in Calormene – that word hasn’t changed particularly much over the years.
Susan’s stopped fighting under the guards’ hands, hanging limply in their grip as she tries to get her breath back. Even without Bahadur trying to decide whether or not to rape her, she’s had a long day; she’s bloody tired.
Bahadur gets himself back up, walking bent over and straddle-legged as he comes over to her. Susan stares at him defiantly, the cuts on her face throbbing in time with her heartbeat. “Anything else you’d like to grab?” she demands.
Bahadur backhands her across the face; the rings he’s wearing cut her lip. Susan spits the blood back at him.
“You put your hands on me again,” she says, “and I’ll kill you.”
“Narnian bitch,” he snarls. “Your country will burn, if I have to light the torches myself.”
“You’re the idiot that touched a queen of Narnia,” Susan says, and he hits her again. This time she’s ready for the blow; she turns her head with it and snaps her foot up into his groin.
The next thing she knows is the stone of the wall against her cheek, the guards’ hands hard as they hold her there, the sharp edge of a crossbow quarrel pricking the back of her neck. One of them asks a question in Calormene.
There’s a groan from behind her, then Bahadur’s voice, high-pitched and pained as he speaks in the same language. They manhandle her around, scraping her abraded skin against the stone as they do so, and force her down onto her knees.
“That’s a good look for you,” Bahadur rasps. He’s gone dead white even with his darker Calormene skin and she smiles a little grimly.
“You had some questions you wanted to ask?”
“I’ll ask them in front of your brother,” the prince says dangerously. “Even if you won’t answer, maybe he will – anything to stop watching you get hurt.”
“He’ll like the show,” Susan says. “You’re just funny to watch.”
He scowls horribly at her and starts towards the door, wincing with every bow-legged step. Before he can reach it, there’s a knock.
“What?” he snaps.
“Majesty, it’s the Lord Provost,” someone calls.
“Another message? That creature needs to learn how to do its damned job –”
“No, your majesty. Lord Prejun is here to see you. He says it’s urgent. Some kind of problem down in the city.”
Bahadur turns to glare at Susan. “If this is any of your doing –”
“Why, Prince Bahadur,” Susan says, “I thought you didn’t think I was a witch or a goddess. How could I do anything in the city when I’ve been locked up here since Inzamum Tarkaan brought me in this morning?”
His scowl deepens. “Put her in with the other one,” he snaps to the guards. “And you!” he shouts at the door. “Tell Prejun I’ll be with him shortly. This had best not be some kind of wild goose chase. As for you –” He turns around the room, looking for someone. Susan doesn’t understand who until her gaze falls on the table, sliced to shreds and with the silver scattered wildly about.
“Rhindon,” she whispers.
“Where’s the sword?” Bahadur bellows. “Where’s the damned sword?”
The sword isn’t the only thing that’s missing. The oceanid is too. Bahadur’s so furious that he forgets his pain for a minute, grabbing the one unoccupied guard by the throat and slamming up him against the wall, snarling threats in Calormene. He finally lets him go when it’s clear that no one had seen the ocean spirit leave and Susan grins in triumph, tasting blood in her mouth.
“Scour this castle!” he orders. “Find him, and find the sword! I don’t care if that ocean brat is alive or dead, but I want that sword. And get her out of here.”
Susan doesn’t bother putting up a struggle as they take her down the stairs and out into a dimly lit courtyard, a few spring blossoms soft in the moonlight. It’s freezing outside, a cold wind coming in from the ocean, and she shivers, tasting sea salt on her lips. Into another building, which at least has the benefit of being warmer – Calormenes can’t stand the cold; disadvantages of living in a desert, she supposes – and then down set after set of stairs, which doesn’t have any wind but is still freezing nonetheless. It’s a damp kind of cold; Susan wonders at that until she realizes that they’re going down into the cliff-face and it’s the ocean seeping through, chilling the stone walls and everything within them. There are lanterns lighting the hallways, bright enough that she can see the carvings on the walls – elaborate friezes of Narnian and Telmarine history, some of which she recognizes from having lived it, most of which she doesn’t.
She’s cold to the lips and shivering by the time the floor levels off beneath her feet, the Calormenes hauling her forward. There’s a sudden burst of voices, Narnian and otherwise, washing over her like a wave.
“Hey! Hey, you Calormene bastards, what about some blankets down here, huh?”
“Who’s the broad, you lousy sandworm?”
“What, Bahadur cleaning house again?”
And some madman, laughing hysterically, shouting, “I know, I know! It’ll be like the duke beneath the tower! First we train the rats –”
“Shut it, Belet! We’ve had enough of your shit!”
“How ‘bout taking him away, hmm? Or is this just one more pathetic Calormene attempt at torture?”
One of the Calormene guards rattles his sword hilt against the bars. “Be silent, you Narnian filth!”
“That’s no way to talk to some nice Narnian loyalists,” Susan says. There’s blood in her mouth; the words gurgle oddly.
Her voice gets some welcome attention. “Susan?” she hears Peter’s voice call from up ahead. “Susan!”
“Peter!” she shouts back. “Remember Gilwaine Crossing!” Which had been a right royal mess, but memorable, to say the very least; Peter will know what she’s talking about.
“Shut up, you Narnian slut!” one of the Calormene snaps, cuffing the back of her head.
“What’s this?” asks a faun hanging on the bars of his cell door. “You didn’t actually manage to capture a couple of madmen claiming to be the King of Summer and the Queen of Spring, did you? There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing Bahadur chase his tail all around Narnia.”
Susan smiles sweetly at him and spits a shard of broken tooth aside. She immediately regrets it when she sees Peter’s horrified face a moment later. He’s resting his arms on the bars of his cell, and his face is bruised, an ugly cut high on his left cheek, but not nearly so badly as hers must be. “No one ever told you not to hit a woman?” he snarls at the Calormenes.
One of them lets go of Susan to bang his sword hilt against the bars. “Silent, scum,” he says.
Peter doesn’t move away. “That’s my sister, you asshole,” he says, and his hands shoot out between the bars, catching the Calormene’s wrist and twisting until he drops the sword. There’s a crack as the bone breaks, a second as Peter drags the man forward and snaps his arm bone between two bars, and while he’s screaming, Peter slams his head forward against the bars, catching the man before he falls so that he can get at the keys on his belt.
“Idiot,” Susan says lightly, pivoting on the balls of her feet to get one hand on the Calormene guard’s shoulder and the other on his tricep, breaking his grip. She slams her knee up into his stomach, then his face, hearing bone shatter and feeling the shock reverberate up along her body. He collapses without another word, moaning and clutching at himself, and Susan takes a few careful steps backwards, her fists raised before her face.
Peter, out of his cell now and with the first guard’s scimitar in his fist, kills him without a moment’s hesitation. He steps around the body and gathers her into a short hug with his free arm. “Are you all right?”
She wipes the back of her hand across her mouth, glancing at the smear of blood briefly before she pulls away from Peter and crouches down to pick up a crossbow and quiver of quarrels. “The sooner we get out of here the sooner I will be. Get down!”
Peter drops to the floor without a moment’s hesitation and Susan shoots over his head; the turnkey falls gracelessly before the open iron gate and a satyr stretches an arm out through the bars of his cell door to grope for his keys, but they’re just out of reach. Susan spans a second crossbow bolt as quickly as she can, but no other guards come through the door.
Peter straightens up again and turns her face gently up to his with his free hand. “You’re hurt,” he says.
Susan turns her face away, wincing a little. “It looks worse than it is. Peter, we’ve got to get out of here –”
“Hey,” one of the Narnian prisoners says, thrusting his arms through the bars of the door. “Hey, lovebirds, what about the rest of us, hmm? Give a brother a hand!”
Peter hesitates, and Susan glances back and forth between her brother and the other prisoners, all clamoring at the doors of their cells. “Peter, they’re all Narnians!” she exclaims. “Narnian loyalists –”
“Yeah, we are!” a wolf exclaims, jumping up on its rear legs with his front paws on the bars. “Good Narnians, down here because we refuse to scrape and bow at Bahadur’s toes. You’re the High King! Let us go!”
Still Peter hesitates, and Susan says urgently, “Peter!” before she gives up on convincing him and makes to snatch the keys from her hand. He holds them away from her, expression a little distant, and steps over to a man who’d yelled out at the Calormenes earlier.
“What are you in for?” he asks, casual as if they’re sitting in the pub back in England.
The stranger stares at the keys with the mad look of a starving man who’s just had a steak dangled before his face. “I refused to bend the knee to Prince bloody sandfucking Bahadur, what do you think?”
Peter puts his head to one side, his expression vaguely curious, and makes a “carry on” gesture with one hand.
He sighs. “I have the honor to be Sir Gavilan of Littlehill, younger brother of Lord Morayta of Littlehill.”
“Where’s the honor in that?” someone jeers. “Littlehill’s a bootlicking coward, he is.”
Gavilan’s expression contorts and turns ugly. “Morayta’s choice was not mine – why do you think I’m bloody well in here with the lot of you, hmm? Certainly not for the company. I’d like to kill the bastard myself.”
Peter snaps his fingers to get his attention. “Do you love Narnia, Sir Gavilan?” he asks.
The knight regards him warily. “With all my life.”
Peter crouches down and puts the keys down on the stone floor, just within Gavilan’s reach. “Wait two hundred counts after we’ve left before you let yourself and the others here out,” he says. “And if you make it out of Cair Paravel and want to find us, you’ll find us in the Western Wild, at the ruins in the rosewood.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” a faun in the next cell asks warily.
Peter’s smile is a little grim. “We’re the ones who are going to free Narnia,” he says. He turns attention back to Gavilan. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” the knight says without hesitation.
“Two hundred counts,” Peter says again, straightening, and Gavilan nods.
They’re halfway down the hallway, Narnians hanging on their cell doors and staring at them, when Gavilan calls after them, “High King Peter!”
Peter turns. “What?”
He smiles a little crookedly. “I just wanted to see if you’d answer.”
Peter’s laugh warms them all the way down the hallway, and as soon as they reach the stairs Gavilan starts counting out loud. Susan starts upwards, but Peter catches her hand and pulls her down, plucking a torch from a sconce as soon as he lets go of her. There’s another gate a few levels below them, and Peter frowns at it for a few moments before he slams the basket hilt of the scimitar down on the lock. It’s old and rusted, fragile, and falls apart in a shower of rust fragments. He shoves the door open and goes through, the remnants of the lock crunching under his boots. Susan follows.
“Where are we going?” she asks. “The way out is up.”
“There’s another passage through the lowest level of the dungeons,” Peter says. “Tirian told me – he says it hasn’t been used in years, but Rilian wrote about it in one of his diaries. It’s not on any of the plans, but –”
“Has Tirian ever seen it?” Susan demands.
“He said he did once, around fifteen years ago. It leads out into a park in the city.”
“I hope he’s right,” she says anxiously.
“So do I,” Peter says, and doesn’t say anything else. They go lower and lower, the chill gathering around them until Susan’s half-convinced they’ve left the cliff-face entirely and passed beneath the ocean, then Peter makes a grunt of satisfaction and reaches back to snag her sleeve with two fingers. She sways aside from his sword blade, then steps forward, frowning at what seems to be a dead end. The wall in front of them is blank; there are three doors on the walls around them, all barred and shut.
“What is it?”
He scuffs at the floor with the toe of his boots. There’s a mosaic of colored stone inset there, a green serpent fighting a golden lion over a compass rose. It’s faded from the long passage of time, but Peter looks as pleased to see it as if it had been bright and new.
“Here.” He hands the torch to her and crouches down, sweeping away the thick layer of dust and a few scattered rocks with his arm. He wipes his fingers clean absently on his trousers and presses the snake’s dark eyes, then the lion’s, and at last the northernmost stone of the compass rose. They sink into the earth with a grinding sound and a moment later, sounding rusty and out of use, a dark space barely large enough for a dwarf to pass opens on the blank wall in front of them.
“There actually is something here,” Susan says, a little surprised. She glances around at the doors in the room. “What’s behind those?”
“Something unpleasant, no doubt,” Peter says. “Caspian’s son Rilian built all these tunnels beneath the castle; Tirian says there’s almost as much space below the earth as above. This is the lowest level of the dungeons, reserved for those who’ve already been tried and convicted of heinous crimes. Or it was, anyway; apparently it hasn’t been used for more than a century.”
Susan hands the torch back to him, shuddering a little as she looks at the barred doors again. Cair Paravel had had more than its share of secret passageways – the palace had nearly been a living thing, and it had liked to open new hallways and rooms at random intervals, especially if one of them had needed it. More than one would-be assassin or conspirator had starved to death within her walls before Cair Paravel opened them up again, like a cat presenting her master with a dead bird.
Peter has to get down on hands and knees to crawl through the passage; Susan swings the crossbow onto her back and follows, wincing a little as she hears the delicate silk of her dress tear. Well, at least it’s ruined anyway; she’s got blood all over it.
“Look for another mosaic on the wall,” Peter says over his shoulder, his voice oddly muffled by the tunnel. “That should shut the door.”
There’s a black shield with a green serpent on it set in the wall by her head. “I’ve found it,” Susan says. “Now what?”
“Twist the serpent’s head.”
She does, and the door shuts behind her with a heavy, reluctant grinding sound, leaving them stranded in the darkness. It’s like being buried alive. Susan shudders, concentrating on the glow of the torch ahead of her, illuminating Peter’s bright head.
“Hold onto my ankle,” Peter says.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Susan mutters. The leather of his boot is smooth from use and time beneath her fingers, and she clings to it like a lifeline. “How far does this go?” she asks suddenly, wary.
Peter coughs. “About a mile.”
“Oh, for the love of –”
“Tirian says that it widens out later,” he adds hastily. “We should be able to stand upright after a bit.”
“Well, good,” Susan says testily. “Because otherwise I’d be forced to kill him.” But Tirian’s name reminds her of something, and she says, “Where are Tirian and Eustace?”
“I’ve no idea,” Peter says. “All I know is that Bahadur hasn’t got them. The Calormenes searched the inn we’d been staying at, but they’d already left by then. I can’t think where they might have gone.”
“At least Tirian’s familiar with the city,” Susan says. It’s little consolation, but it’s something at least. “So how did you get yourself into this mess?” she asks, because if she doesn’t have something to think about aside from the fact they’re in a tunnel barely big enough to squeeze through, being hunted by some very angry Calormenes in a country that’s been overrun and conquered – she needs a distraction, to say the very least.
“Eustace killed someone,” Peter says blandly. “I got blamed.”
“I see.”
“I’ll tell you about it later,” he adds.
“Now’s all right,” Susan says, trying not to put too much of her hope into her voice, but it spills through anyway, and Peter laughs a little and tells her the story.
“Only you, Peter,” she says afterwards. “Only you. What are the others going to say?”
He groans. “Ed will have a field day with all the things that have gone wrong on this bloody jaunt. Next time he can be the one who gets drugged, arrested, and knocked around, hmm? And what happened to you?” he adds, and his voice is sharp, a little angry and a little concerned.
“I did something stupid,” Susan allows. “Something like you would do, actually.”
“Do tell.”
She tells him – everything, from when she’d left Arn Abedin to get away from the hundreds of people there for a few hours, to finding Pole and the Calormenes, to the failed interrogation and the fight afterwards, to waking up tied to the saddle and on her way to Cair Paravel.
“Not much happened after that,” she adds, frowning a little. “There was a raven, a Narnian – Tarkaan Inzamum was angry at him, but he wouldn’t shoot him. He said he answered to someone too high up for Inzamum to kill him. And he took one of my arrows!”
“Was the raven’s name Crackclaw?” Peter asks, sounding suspicious.
“How did you know?”
“We’ve met,” Peter says shortly. “Eustace said something about him reporting to the Calormenes, but –” He shrugs awkwardly. “Go on.”
Susan tells him the rest, trying to skim over the parts with Bahadur as much as she can, but Peter snarls a curse and, “At least I’d already planned to kill the bastard.”
“Yes, I’d hate to have to put you out by adding someone else to that list,” Susan says dryly.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, sounding a little hurt.
She tightens her grip on his ankle, trying to signal reassurance, and says, “I know. That’s not what I meant –”
They’re silent for a long few minutes, long enough for the tunnel walls to start closing in on them again. Susan swallows hard and says uncertainly, “Peter?”
“The tunnel’s widening out,” he says. “And the torch is going out.”
“Oh, God,” she says fervently, but a moment later he straightens up, turning to reach a hand to her and help her to her feet. His face is grim and dirty in the last flickering flames of the torch.
“How far do you think we’ve come?” Susan asks, trying in vain to wipe some of the dirt from the front of her dress. Her palms and knees are torn and bloody; she raises her right hand to her mouth and bites off a loose flap of skin, spitting it aside.
Peter’s only slightly better off; his trousers are better, but he’s been switching the torch back and forth between his hands, and putting most of his weight on only one at a time. “Three-quarters of a mile,” he says, absolutely certain. “And we’ve been sloping upward for most of it, did you notice? We can’t be far off now. Come on, let’s use the last of the light for as long as we can.” He starts forward again, his strides long and determined, and Susan hurries to catch up with him, tangling her fingers in the back of his stolen Calormene belt.
“How do you know?”
“It’s a trick I learned from a Yank I knew during the War,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Although it’s not actually that different from what the Red Company uses – used, I mean. When I was with them in Natare. So here and there, I suppose.” He coughs, then adds apologetically, “Sorry, Su, I’m losing my voice. They weren’t really keeping us well-watered there.”
“It’s all right,” she says, but with only the sound of Peter’s harsh breathing meshing awkwardly with her own, the tunnel seems even emptier than it did before. Her legs are sore from so much crawling and she stumbles a little; Peter steadies her automatically.
A few minutes later the torch goes out, and Susan whimpers a little. There’s a thump as Peter tosses it aside. “It’s all right,” he says, reaching back for her hand. The tunnel’s barely wide enough for them to continue side by side, but even though she’s scraping the side of it with every step and her abraded palms are pained by the pressure, she’s glad of Peter’s callused grip tight on hers.
They stop by running into a wall.
“Whoa!” Peter says, sounding startled, and he and Susan both grope at it. She shoves down her anxiety that Tirian’s memory was wrong and they’ve trapped themselves here in this tomb; that there’s no way out but back – if they can even go back.
“There are hand- and foot-holds carved into the stone,” Peter says, guiding her hand to one of them. “I guess we go up now,” he adds brightly.
“That’s something,” Susan says. “You go first.”
“I’ll catch you if you fall,” Peter says, which means, no, you.
Susan sighs and starts climbing, feeling carefully for each hold as she does. They’re little niches a knuckle or so deep, worn nearly soap smooth by the passage of time, and she calls over her shoulder to Peter, “Be careful, it’s slippery.”
His reply is muffled but in the positive; Susan swallows and keeps climbing, clinging to the stone as tightly as she can. The slippers the Calormenes put her in are slippery, barely more than a few scraps of silk, and she finds herself wishing she’d just ditched them and climbed barefoot, freezing or not. About three hundred steps up – dear gods, what did the idiot who built this use it for? – she touches metal instead of stone.
“Stop,” she calls down to Peter.
“What is it?” he asks.
Susan feels around with one hand until she finds a catch. “I think it’s the way out!” she exclaims. It seems like a door that opens upwards, and Susan wrenches the catch around until something shudders, sending dirt and shards of rust showering down over her head and stories. Below her, Peter curses absently. She shoves the door upwards, relieved to see stars pricking the sky above her, and clambers out with a little difficulty, hauling herself over the edge of the hole and landing on something hard.
“Ow,” she says faintly, but she grins up at Peter when he follows her out. He gives her a hand up, and they both look at the door, which proves to be an upended statue of a dragon-headed ship with a lion’s head on the sails. Peter rights it after a moment, and with it back on its base, only the scattering of rust around it proves that there’s something more beneath it.
“Now what?” Susan asks, brushing primly at the front of her dress. It’s more or less in tatters around her legs; she’s barely decent. The front of it is torn as well; Peter’s eyes linger briefly on the curve of one breast before he looks back at her face.
“I think we’d better find you some clothes,” he says.
“Good idea,” Susan says dryly. “What were you planning to do, rob a tailor?”
“If one presents himself, I shall certainly consider the option,” Peter says. “But I actually had another idea.” He gestures behind her and Susan turns, curious.
They’re standing in the middle of a narrow expanse of pale green, a grassy strip with cobblestone streets on either side of it. There’s a clutch of trees not far away from where Susan’s standing, and another few statues off in the distance. Peter’s pointing at a squat, brightly lit building a ways down the strip of lawn, music spilling out of it along with the sound of laughter. There’s an ironwork balcony on the second floor, where a white-haired swan-maid dressed in slightly more clothing than Susan is having her breasts fondled by a satyr.
Susan turns back to Peter. “What was your plan again?”
He grins at her and leans over to kiss her cheek, taking the net out of her hair with quick fingers. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Try not to get in any trouble.”
Susan sits down on the base of the statue, pulling the remains of her skirt primly around her knees. “I’ll endeavor not to get picked up by anyone who thinks I’m a prostitute, since that’s apparently what goes on in Cair Paravel these days.”
“Yeah, apparently,” Peter says, and then starts off across the grass towards the tavern.
She swings the crossbow around from her back to her front, resting it on her knees as she leans her head back against the ship. Long day. Long fucking day. Long fucking three days, actually; that’s about how long it’s been since she left Arn Abedin. Susan stares up at the stars, picking out the constellations she knows – the Griffin, the Lord of Chaos, the Shipwright, the Centaur. They’ve shifted a little since the last time she was here, but not so much she can’t recognize them anymore. After a moment she closes her eyes, just to rest them, and falls asleep.
Peter’s hand on her shoulder wakes her, and he dances back from the right hook she throws at him automatically. “Sorry,” Susan says after a moment, blinking the sleep from her eyes. “Long day.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “I get it.” He holds out a shapeless mass of crimson fabric towards her and Susan puts the crossbow down before she gets up, trying the dress against herself. Peter remembers her size, it seems; he’s certainly taken her out of enough dresses.
“Do I want to ask where this came from?” she asks, taking herself and the dress into a clutch of trees that more or less shelter her from sight.
“Probably not,” Peter says.
“Do I have to worry about you having gotten some kind of VD?” Susan calls, wriggling out of the shreds of her dress, which more or less just come apart in her hands.
Peter coughs. “Not this time,” he says.
The new dress smells rather strongly of the previous occupant, as well as spilled wine and some less pleasant things, and it’s a little loose in the waist and tight in the bust. “Come here and do up my laces,” Susan says, and Peter obligingly steps up behind her, his breath warm on her bare shoulders – the dress is far too low cut for her usual tastes, but she supposes beggars can’t be choosers – as he laces her tightly into the dress. His touch is light and familiar; he’s no lady’s maid, but she’d managed to train into him the proper way to do up laces, at least. Even if most of their clothes in Narnia had had buttons.
She turns around, shivering a little in the chill, and Peter says apologetically, “I might have tried for a cloak, but I don’t think she…had one.” He raises one hand to wipe some of the dried blood off her face, and Susan turns her face up towards his obligingly, trying not to wince as he jars her bruises.
“Do you remember that time we were in Tashbaan?” she asks. That was before Rabadash, about – six years? No, seven – before that mess.
Peter gives her a suddenly wary look. “I try not to,” he says.
She grins at him. “Oh, right!” she says, as if she’s just remembered. “That was the time you got the clap from that tarkaan with the huge –”
“Susan,” he protests.
She doesn’t miss a beat. “– sword, and Lucy nearly spilled her cordial laughing when she had to dose you.”
“I miss the days when you said you didn’t remember Narnia,” Peter says, but he’s laughing when he says it, and so Susan’s a little less indignant than she might be otherwise, though it doesn’t stop her from slapping him upside the head.
She hangs the heavy oiled leather case of barbed quarrels off the belt that came with the dress and goes to pick up the crossbow again, slinging it over her shoulder. “Now what?” she asks, and Peter looks a little lost for a moment.
“Now I suppose we go and try to find Tirian and Eustace,” he says. “Although I have no idea where they are. Or where we are, for that matter. Though,” he adds, and holds up a full leather pouch that jingles a little, “we do have money, at least.”
“Did you steal it or –”
“I sold that thing that was in your hair,” Peter says. “It went for quite a bit, actually. You didn’t want it, did you?” he adds, sounding a little anxious.
Susan shudders. “No.”
They stare at each other for a few minutes, and then Susan says, “Well, we can hardly stay here all night –”
“No,” Peter says, then sighs and looks from one side of the street to the other. Looking now, Susan can see there’s a clear difference between the two neighborhoods; the castle is visible in the distance behind one, and this is the one that looks considerably higher class. She remembers riding through it with Inzamum and his men. The other neighborhood seems somewhat less well-to-do; the buildings are taller and closer together, and the construction is a little different.
Peter hesitates briefly, his indecision clear on his face.
“What is it?” Susan asks. “I can tell you have an idea.”
“You’re not going to like it,” he warns.
“Probably not, but I don’t have any ideas, so you might as well spit it out.”
He sighs. “Bencivenni Maresti,” he says.
“You’re right,” Susan says promptly. “I don’t like it. Do you have any other ideas?”
Peter shakes his head. “It’s not as though we can exactly wander around Cair Paravel and ask if anyone’s seen the King of Narnia. Not without being arrested, anyway. Look, Su, I don’t like it either; Maresti drugged me and threatened Eustace –”
“I should think you’d be glad of that part,” Susan says.
He shrugs. “Not under the circumstances. Anyway, the man knows what’s going on around Cair Paravel. Even if he doesn’t know whether Tirian’s taken himself off to, I’d bet you anything he knows a way to get word to him. And he knows who I am.”
“He’s a criminal,” she points out primly. “And you trust him?”
“Not within an inch of my life,” Peter says firmly.
“Just so long as we’re clear on that,” Susan says. “Now, can you find him?”
He gestures northward. “Head towards the river.”
She sighs and starts walking. “You could have gotten me shoes, too,” she says as Peter falls into step beside her.
“I would have, but her feet looked about three sizes bigger than yours,” he says.
“Point taken,” Susan allows.
Even this late at night – it must be after midnight – there are people on the streets, most of them drunk and some of them high. Rather like certain streets in England Susan’s been on, actually, including the one she and Peter had been on when they’d been arrested for drunk and disorderly, and assault on Peter’s part. They don’t garner as many looks as she’d expected, but there are other women out on the street in dresses that are equally as low-cut. Susan gets propositioned more times than she can count and Peter scowls horribly and touches the hilt of his sword.
“I think we could be making rather a lot of money, actually,” Susan murmurs to him, amused.
“Over my dead body,” Peter says through clenched teeth.
She smiles a little. “Jealous, brother-mine?”
“Do I need to be?”
“Hardly.” She sways away from a man in seaman’s clothes who reaches drunkenly for her, avoiding his grip adroitly.
“Come near her again and I’ll break your neck,” Peter snaps.
“Enough for all of us to go around!” the seaman slurs, waving a bottle of wine in their direction. “When you’re done with him, love, come and find me; I’ll give you a good time.”
“The lady’s not interested, Nat; back off,” snarls a white tiger that seems to come up out of nowhere, interposing itself between Susan and the sailor.
The seaman squints at it. “Didn’t think she was your type, Mayor,” he says, and splashes wine in the general direction of his mouth; most of it misses and goes over his face.
“She’s not yours,” the tiger says. “Bugger off and find someone more to your taste, or I’ll go to Wavewalker and you’ll regret it.”
“Over a whore?” Nat says, but he raises the wine in a kind of salute and says, “Sorry, love; I hope Goldilocks there has you well in hand,” and wanders off.
The tiger turns its attention back to Susan and Peter and dips in a slight bow. “This isn’t the place for you just now, your majesties,” it – he – says. “My name is May Your Life Be Long And Your Enemies Honorable; most men call me Mayor. Come with me if you want to see your friends again.”
----------
The war with Masongnong appears in In a Dry Month and The White City.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: R
Warnings: Sexual assault.
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: This is part twelve, obviously, and this is also the first WIP I've posted since 2006. (And that WIP was abandoned, so one can see I'm understandably nervous about posting another one.) The structure of this lends it to being posted in sections, though, so that's how it's going up. Because of this, however, it's not getting posted to any comms until the whole thing is done.
From her window, Susan can see Cair Paravel.
Or her ruins, rather, bare and gleaming white like polished bone against the wide green spread of the island. From this height the men climbing over the tumbled wreckage are nothing more than miniature doll people, barely the height of her thumbnail. There’s some kind of wooden framework built up over the remnants of the throne room, half-built construction of some sort. Mutilation of a corpse – icing on the goddamned cake.
The choice of view is deliberate, of course. Back in her day, they’d done much the same thing by putting the defeated and disgraced captains of the Masongnongese navy up in tower cells where they could see the broken hulls of what remained of their once substantial fleet. They’d been able to see the four unscathed Narnian ships as well – all it had taken, along with Peter’s military genius and a sea force cobbled together out of hastily-convened squabbling saltwater Narnians, to defeat the greatest nautical power on the Eastern Ocean.
Oh, but they’d been something back then! It had been a golden age built out of fire and blood, all that Susan and her siblings had been able to give given in Narnia’s service. By the time they’d been snatched away all those years ago they’d been burned away to nothing except the very cores of themselves, all bones and steel and muscle. And all of it’s lost now, forgotten but for half-grasped memories – all that work, all that blood, all those lives, and for this. Sometimes she wonders why they’d even bothered, if this is what they’d accomplished and what they’ve become. She’d give anything to see those four ships in the harbor today – Osumare Seaworth’s three pirate ships and the one Narnian aerial carrier. But even the coastline is different now; that harbor is long gone.
Susan rises and turns away from the window, crossing to the dressing table. She’s been bathed and changed, her wounds tended to, and neatly imprisoned in a small, handsomely appointed room in one of the towers of Caspian’s castle. She hadn’t expected any of it, but either Prince Bahadur is taking her at her word or he’s trying to call her bluff. Either way, she’s glad for the bath, at least; she feels clean for the first time in weeks now. She’d been spoiled that way even before England; Cair Paravel had had fabulous baths, and she hadn’t been on campaign with Peter nearly as often as Edmund or Lucy, where she would have had to adjust to not having regular baths for extended periods of time. And then there had been England, of course. The baths hadn’t been nearly up to par, but they’d been regular, at least.
She sits down at the dressing table and regards her reflection thoughtfully. Mirrors are something else she’s missed at Arn Abedin – everything else Lucy’s said aside, the bits of her rants about Susan being vain and interested in her own comfort are true enough, after their fashion. It’s just nice being clean and having proper clothes and jewelry when possible.
The nereids who’d tended to her, silent when Susan tried to speak to them, had put three stitches in her cheek where Inzamum had torn the skin and covered up the cuts and bruises on her face with paint. They’re barely noticeable in the mirror; she almost looks presentable. She almost looks like the old Susan, the woman whose beauty had brought hundreds of suitors to Cair Paravel, all of whom had gone away disappointed. But even that woman had been only a figment of the imaginations of men all across the continent; she’d never existed outside of court gossip and barracks-room gossip. Susan hates that woman.
If that’s who Bahadur thinks she is, then all the better.
She reaches up to adjust the net in her hair an incremental degree, then tilts her head up and touches the tip of one finger – her nails are painted gold to match the net and the trimming on her dress – to the old scar on her chin. The naiads had missed that when they’d painted her face, but Susan’s used to it, and it’s familiar – something that other Susan, the Queen Susan of old, had had too. She’d lost it when she’d been sent back to England, of course, but it’s here now – one of her idiot ex-boyfriends had hit her. Once.
She’d sent him to the hospital with six broken bones.
After that, Susan hadn’t gotten a date for a while.
She and her siblings had already had their falling out by then, but Peter had heard about it, of course – Tom had been in the same RAF squadron as Peter. He’d shown up at her door the day afterwards, pale from his climb up the stairs; he’d still been on crutches from injuries he’d sustained when the plane he’d been test-flying crash-landed. Susan still regrets throwing him out of her flat.
“I hope you’re here somewhere, Peter,” she whispers, and doesn’t get up from the dressing table when the door opens behind her.
She watches Prince Bahadur of Calormen approach in the mirror. He’s a handsome enough man, she supposes – swarthy and dark-haired, with a close-cropped beard and a narrow, clever face. There’s a gold ring in one ear that matches the gold circlet on his brow. Behind him, servants begin bringing in trays of covered dishes and setting the low table in the center of the room.
“Queen Susan,” he says, “you’ll dine with me.”
“Is that a request, Prince Bahadur?” Susan inquires, her attention still on the mirror.
“It is not.”
“Very well.” She tucks an invisible strand of hair into the golden net and turns around, rising to take a seat at the table across from the Calormene prince, tucking her legs primly beneath her skirts.
The servants – all Narnians – finish setting the table, bow to Bahadur, bow lower to Susan, and then leave. Only a slim oceanid remains behind, standing quietly by the door.
“Do try the plum liquor,” Bahadur says, motioning towards the purple stuff in her glass. “It’s quite good. And the strawberries. It’s not the season for them yet, but we have them imported from Galma, where spring comes more quickly.”
“Yes, I remember,” Susan murmurs. She does try the strawberries, and gods, but they’re good; it’s easy to forget, eating scanty and makeshift as they have been, that Narnian food is a thousand times better than anything in England. Richer, more flavorful, more filling – taken from the backs of Narnian labor or not, she doesn’t stint on eating; she’s bloody starving, not having eaten more than a few mouthfuls over the past few days. There’s some kind of white fish covered in a rich brandy sauce, big clamshells filled with chopped mussels and yellow rice, a chilled green salad with slivers of oranges adorning it, a clear, fragrant broth, jasmine tea with mint and honey. Last of all is a platter full of small cakes, no two the same; Susan carefully transfers two to her own plate and eats them in small bites, savoring the sweetness of the frosting and the way the huckleberries on the second cake seem to burst in her mouth. If Bahadur is importing his fruit, then she might as well take advantage of it.
About halfway through the meal, a man knocks on the door and comes in at Bahadur’s call, bending his head to whisper in his ear. The prince waves him away. “Lord Prejun is only trying to bait me,” he says. “Whatever it is can wait until after I’m done here.”
The man bows and leaves.
“Trouble, Prince Bahadur?” Susan asks, sipping at the tea. She prefers it plain, but the Calormenes drink it this way. The taste of it in the back of her mouth reminds her uncomfortably of the last time she’d been in Tashbaan, of Rabadash’s swarthy face and the way his gaze had always lingered on her body too long.
“Nothing of importance.” He watches her for a moment, his gaze cool and calculating, and adds, “The governance of the city has been given over to the natives. Some of them feel the need to come to me with every little disturbance. I had not thought that the Lord Provost was one of them, but even I can be mistaken. This is the second time today he has thought to overstep his bounds.”
“Perhaps they seek to test you,” Susan says. “Cair Paravel is the heart of Narnia; the man who does not truly hold her can never control Narnia. The Telmarines never learned that, to their doom.” She’s no idea what kind of game Bahadur is playing her, and as much as it pains her to give political advice to this tyrant, the real question is how he’ll react to it – to her. What can he possibly want from her that he thinks he can get more easily with sweet words and good food than with torture and imprisonment?
Perhaps it’s only that she’s a woman, and he feels that she’ll weaken more quickly here than in harsher conditions.
“The Telmarines were fools,” Bahadur says. “Nearly five hundred years and they never realized what it was they held in the palm of their hand. Narnia was only land to them, nothing more, and they were too terrified of what they called demons to comprehend the rest of their riches. They never even touched the salt mines in the north!”
“Narnia can be a fearsome land for those that have no place here,” Susan says. She sets her teacup down. “What is to you, Prince Bahadur?"
“A fruit ripe for the picking,” he says without hesitation. “And for you, lady?”
She answers him honestly. These may well be the last true words she says this night. “Home.”
They finish the rest of their meal in silence.
“No more?” Bahadur questions as Susan finally sits back against a round pillow, cupping her goblet of plum liquor between her hands.
“I am quite full, thank you,” Susan says. “My compliments to the cook; everything was delicious,” she adds to the oceanid as he begins to clear the dishes away, leaving only a bowl of fruit for each of them and one long covered tray – almost four feet long.
He bows his head slightly and murmurs, “She will be honored by your kindness, your majesty,” before taking the dishes out into the hall.
Susan eats another strawberry, watching Bahadur lean back on one elbow. He sips at his goblet, eating small red grapes one by one.
“You say,” he says at last, in accented Narnian, “that you are Queen Susan of old – the one the Narnians call the Queen of Spring.”
“Yes,” Susan says. “I am.”
“One of those demon godlings of these deluded peasants, who does the bidding of the Great Lion as the fingers obey the hand. The Queen of Spring’s embrace is said to tear a man’s member off at the root, should he attempt to take her unwilling.”
Susan just smiles and eats another strawberry in small neat bites.
Bahadur watches her with steady eyes, unblinking. His gaze is dark and inscrutable – a cold man, and a hard one, she thinks. He’s not as much a fool as Rabadash or his brother Mashda had been. “They say as well,” he continues, “that the Queen of Spring’s arrows can come in the day or the night, striking the life and soul from a living being and giving him over to the hands of King of Evening, the Shadowmaster, who guides the newly-deceased on the paths of the dead to the summerlands, where the King of Summer receives them into eternity. They say the Queen of Spring can hit a target the size of a man’s thumbnail at three leagues.”
“Do they?”
“I know that the Narnians light candles to the Queen of Spring in both the lower and the upper cities. I know that they make charms to invoke her and her siblings against my countrymen. The name of the Queen of Spring has done them no good; here I sit, secure in Caspian’s castle, with all of Narnia under my command. I can stretch out a hand,” he says, doing so, “and squeeze, and all Narnia will know it, from the High Reaches to the Archen Mountains, from the Great Eastern Ocean to the Western Waste.” He crushes a peach in his fist, and the juice runs down between his fingers and drips onto the table. He drops the desiccated remains of the fruit and wipes his fingers clean with a napkin. “All of Narnia trembles at my name and the thunder of my horses’ hooves. They sit in their hovels and pray to their four gods that my eye will not fall on them tonight.”
“They pray to me,” Susan replies softly. “And here I am, Prince Bahadur, so I would best begin praying to your god Tash that I and my siblings grant you the mercy to retire unharmed to your own home – dry, hot, sandy hell that it is.”
“You are here,” Bahadur allows, “or at least, a woman who claims to be the Queen of Spring is here, sitting before me now and eating my food. You carry a bow and red-feathered arrows and a horn, all of which were stolen from this very palace barely a month previous. You say you are the Queen of Spring and you expect me to believe you.”
“Whether you believe me or not is immaterial,” Susan says. “I am who I am. You cannot change that.”
“No,” he agrees, “it does not matter if I believe that you are the Queen of Spring. It matters what they believe.” He gestures with one hand toward the window, indicating the city below and the sprawl of Narnia beyond. “If they think that their four gods are walking amongst them once more, then they will rise against me, and that will not end well for them. They think that they suffered when I first set foot on these shores? They do not know suffering; Calormen does not brook resistance. I will kill every eighth man and woman in this country, human or nonhuman. I will remove every Narnian from this country and resettle them amongst Calormen’s lands, bring men and women here who have never heard the names of the King of Summer and his siblings. Even the memory of the country of Narnia will cease to exist.”
Calormene bastard. Susan clenches her fist around the metal goblet but keeps her voice calm when she says, “You are very confident that you would be triumphant in such a rebellion. I believe King Miraz thought the same thing three hundred years ago.”
Bahadur waves one hand. “Miraz was a fool, and his little enclave of Telmarines was not the empire of Calormen. Your comparison is inaccurate.”
“Very well,” Susan allows. “Have you ever heard of the empire of Masongnong?”
He raises his eyebrows. “No.”
“Sixteen hundred years ago,” Susan says, “Masongnong was the greatest power on the continent. It ruled from the Strait of Audunsgift in the south to the marshes of Feaduden in the north for a thousand years – it rivaled Calormen then. In the first year of our reign they sailed against Narnia – the greatest fleet in the Eastern Ocean, more than three hundred ships and forty thousand men, never before defeated on the open sea. Narnia couldn’t have mustered a tenth of that if we called up every man, woman, and child, and half of our soldiers we couldn’t put to sea. Do you know what happened to the Masongnongese Navy? We sank a hundred and twenty-seven ships and left them to rot on the ocean floor. The ocean stank of the dead – not even when we defeated the White Witch was there such a slaughter. My brother came to me with Masongnongese blood so thick on him that I could taste it when I kissed him for days afterwards, even after a thousand baths. This is Narnia, Prince Bahadur, and my brother Peter is the High King. You don’t want to go to war against us. Do you think that Narnia’s people are the only force we can raise? It was the sea itself that swallowed half the Masongnongese Navy, and sixteen thousand dead left behind no bodies for their families to claim. Land on her shores while the High King walks here and the earth itself will rise against you; a force of ten thousand can enter her forests and never emerge again. Do you want my only warning, Prince Bahadur? You and yours leave Narnia now and never set foot on these shores again and you may yet live.”
For a moment Bahadur is silent, then he sets his empty goblet down and gestures to the oceanid, who hurries forward with the pitcher to refill it, ghosting over to Susan afterwards. She holds out her palm over the top of her empty goblet – no more – and he bows and retires again to his position.
“What happened to Masongnong?” Bahadur asks, sounding idly curious
“Ten years later it made a try for Feaduden, a tribute state of the empire of Edan. They lost a hundred thousand men in the swamps. Four years later Calormen defeated them at sea, killing the Emperor and five of his sons. Masongnong broke up amidst internal feuding as the rest of the Emperor’s relatives all tried to seize power. My brother was fifteen when he defeated Masongnong, and they never recovered from the shame. Masongnong could throw away a million soldiers and not even flinch. Can Calormen?”
“Yes,” Bahadur says. “And if it takes two million to pacify Narnia, then so be it. Calormen has wanted this land for three thousand years, and I will not fail my ancestors’ ghosts at the whisperings of a woman.”
“It’s your funeral,” Susan says. She eats the last strawberry in the bowl. “Don’t expect me to weep.”
“You will be dead by the time I go to the pyres.”
“So will you.”
That makes him smile. “True enough, I suppose. But there is no King of Summer, no King of Evening or Queen of Morning – no Queen of Spring. Calormen has stories too, you know. The kings and queens of summer died sixteen hundred years ago, murdered by their own people, and they were only human. It was these Narnian fools who called them gods – they are not such, and were never so. Your empty threats mean nothing to me.” He stands up, coming around the edge of the table towards her, and Susan barely keeps from shivering as he kneels down behind her, his arm brushing hers as he leans forward and curls his fingers around the handle of the lid of the long dish. “Do you know why?”
“I believe it’s called overconfidence and pride, and both go before a fall.”
Bahadur lifts the lid and sets it aside.
Susan stops breathing.
Only for a moment, then she gasps, a rough sound that tears at her throat as she reaches forward. Bahadur’s hand closes hard on her wrist, holding her away. “What have you done to my brother?” she demands, tears pricking her eyes as Bahadur twists her arm. “What have done to my brother, you sick fucking bastard –”
His short nails dig into the flesh of her arm. “Thieves and rebels both die ugly deaths,” he snarls. “If you want to give him a clean one, you’ll answer every question I ask, and honestly.”
“Go to hell,” Susan spits, and smashes her empty goblet into his face with her left hand. He shouts and lets go of her, clutching at his face with both hands, and Susan jerks forward and snatches up Rhindon, swinging two-handed at him. The blade goes three inches into the table as Bahadur rolls aside, snatching up the dish lid like a shield. Little good it does him; Rhindon slices through the thin metal like a knife through butter and kisses his cheek before Bahadur throws the shield aside.
Susan nearly loses Rhindon then, the blade tangled up in the lid, but she keeps her hold on the sword and turns her wild stab into a butterfly swing that tears the front of Bahadur’s shirt open as he jumps back, grabbing at the oceanid as the boy makes to flee. He pulls the oceanid in front of him, an arm across the Narnian’s throat, and Susan hastily aborts her attack, standing back warily with Rhindon held out in front of her.
“I’m surprised,” Bahadur says, breathing hard. He licks absently at the blood that’s run down his cheek and gathered at the edge of his mouth. “I thought you wouldn’t hesitate at hurting a Narnian.”
The oceanid is pale with panic, ocean water dampening his clothes and dripping down his legs to gather in puddles on the stone floor. There are tears in his eyes as he stares at Rhindon with a kind of fascinated horror on his face. He’s not even looking at Susan, just the sword.
“I’m a queen of Narnia,” she says slowly, her gaze flicking towards the door as three Calormene guards crowd in, their crossbows raised. “Unlike you Calormenes, we won’t murder our own people in order to get at an enemy.”
Still, she doesn’t put Rhindon down, just stares at Bahadur and feels her breath tear ragged at her throat as two of the Calormen crossbowmen come towards her. She could probably kill at least one of them before the other fired. She couldn’t get at Bahadur before he chokes the life out of the oceanid. He doesn’t need air to breathe, but in lieu of that he needs water, salt water, and there’s none of that here – God! Bahadur has her well and truly trapped now.
She thinks too long. Both crossbow quarrels are too close to her now for Susan to risk trying anything, and she swallows and holds up her empty left hand as she bends slowly to put Rhindon down on the remains of the table. She’ll get it back for Peter later. Somehow. If Peter’s still alive. Aslan, he has to still be alive! Susan can’t keep her fingers from lingering on the hilt before she straightens again, both hands empty now. Putting Rhindon back in Calormene hands is very nearly profane; it goes against everything she believes and that she’s had banged into her head over the years, because it’s not just a sword, it’s a symbol, and if it’s not in the hands of a king of Narnia – if it’s in enemy hands –
Just a sword. Just let her think of it as a sword, if only for these few moments. Getting herself killed won’t accomplish anything, but oh, it seems like such a good idea right now.
Bahadur lets the oceanid go, the boy scrambling aside quickly, and steps around the wreckage of the table to approach Susan. He grabs her chin in one hand. “You can watch your brother die tomorrow,” he says, digging his fingers into her skin.
Susan spits in his face.
His backhand splits her lip before he shoves her back against the dressing table, slamming her head into the mirror. Glass cracks. His hands are rough on her breasts through her dress and Susan turns her face aside, catching at the sides of the table to brace herself. She’s gripping so hard that she can feel the splinters digging into her palms. Bahadur pushes her legs apart with his knees and Susan scrabbles at him with her feet, but from this position she doesn’t have any kind of leverage, no way to –
She claws at him one-handed, across the back of his head and the side of his neck, and it only makes him check a moment, but that’s long enough for Susan to jab the heel of her hand up against the base of his jaw – not enough power to break the neck, but –
Bahadur punches her in the face, then grabs her hair and drags her around, shoving her down onto the floor hard enough that Susan’s vision swims, flashing red and green as he kneels on her back. She claws at the stone blocks beneath her, trying to get the leverage to throw him off as fear pools low and fast in the pit of her stomach. No, no, no, not like this, not here, not in Narnia –
“Narnian bitch,” he snarls in her ear as Susan’s breath rasps in her throat. She concentrates on a knot in the floor, trying to make her eyes focus. He runs a hand down her back, stopping at her arse and kneading it steadily. His other hand is twisted painfully in her hair, holding her head against the floor. “Who is he? Your brother? Your lover? What’s his real name? What’s yours?”
She just shakes her head mutely, pressing her forehead to the cool wood and trying not to cry.
“The man I took that sword off of is in my dungeons right now,” Bahadur presses. “Maybe if I take you down there and have you in front of him he’ll tell me what I want to know. What do you think?”
“He won’t, he won’t say anything,” Susan whispers. “He won’t. Not for me, not for anyone. He won’t.” Peter loves her – she has to believe he does – but he loves Narnia more and always has. He won’t give up his country for her. None of them will. None of them should.
“I think you’re lying,” Bahadur says against her ear. “I think if I take you down there he’ll tell me whatever I want to know. One look at all the blood on your pretty face and he’ll tell me anything, everything.”
“He’ll kill himself first,” Susan says rawly. She tastes blood in her mouth, and one tooth is loose when she touches it with her tongue.
“Some men will do anything for their women. And it will be…entertaining.” He squeezes her arse and Susan puts her head down, tears leaking out despite her efforts.
There’s a rap on the door, and Bahadur says lazily, “Yes?”
“There’s a message from the Lord Provost, your majesty,” a man’s voice says in unaccented Narnian.
“At this hour it can wait,” Bahadur says, running his thumbnail idly over the back of Susan’s neck and making her shudder.
“Very well, your majesty.” She can just barely hear the speaker’s boot steps fade away down the hall, then Bahadur bends his head to hers again, his teeth closing sharp on her ear.
Susan flinches, scratching at the floor again, trying to gain the leverage she needs to throw him off, but Bahadur’s weight and position is too much of an advantage to him. I can take it, she mouths silently against the floor. Whatever it is, I can –
“Where were we?” Bahadur murmurs.
“You were threatening to rape me in front of my brother,” Susan says, trying hard to keep her voice from shaking. “Did you want to carry on with that?”
The prince nuzzles her neck. “Mmm,” he says. “Choices, choices.”
“Yours,” Susan says. Relax. Take control of the situation. Easier said than done. “You said it yourself, what I can do. I hope you’re not too fond of your cock.”
“Don’t throw my own words back into my face,” Bahadur says. “You’re not the Queen of Spring, and even if you were, Tash will protect his chosen son.”
Susan swallows, but she still manages to say gamely, “Try it, then. See if you can get my brother to talk – or if you can get me to.”
“Tempting,” he muses, and shifts the pressure on her, dragging her up to her feet by her hair. Susan pivots on the balls of her feet, trying to keep her balance, and realizes what position she’s put herself in.
Bahadur isn’t trained in the same kind of fighting Susan is. He’s left her hands free.
She hammers her right fist up into his groin, grabbing at the back of his shirt with her left hand as his grip on her hair loosens. She catches his shoulder with her right hand as he’s still bent over, gasping for pain, and knees him twice in the belly before the two Calormene guards catch her, dragging her backwards and away from him.
“Bitch!” Bahadur gasps in Calormene – that word hasn’t changed particularly much over the years.
Susan’s stopped fighting under the guards’ hands, hanging limply in their grip as she tries to get her breath back. Even without Bahadur trying to decide whether or not to rape her, she’s had a long day; she’s bloody tired.
Bahadur gets himself back up, walking bent over and straddle-legged as he comes over to her. Susan stares at him defiantly, the cuts on her face throbbing in time with her heartbeat. “Anything else you’d like to grab?” she demands.
Bahadur backhands her across the face; the rings he’s wearing cut her lip. Susan spits the blood back at him.
“You put your hands on me again,” she says, “and I’ll kill you.”
“Narnian bitch,” he snarls. “Your country will burn, if I have to light the torches myself.”
“You’re the idiot that touched a queen of Narnia,” Susan says, and he hits her again. This time she’s ready for the blow; she turns her head with it and snaps her foot up into his groin.
The next thing she knows is the stone of the wall against her cheek, the guards’ hands hard as they hold her there, the sharp edge of a crossbow quarrel pricking the back of her neck. One of them asks a question in Calormene.
There’s a groan from behind her, then Bahadur’s voice, high-pitched and pained as he speaks in the same language. They manhandle her around, scraping her abraded skin against the stone as they do so, and force her down onto her knees.
“That’s a good look for you,” Bahadur rasps. He’s gone dead white even with his darker Calormene skin and she smiles a little grimly.
“You had some questions you wanted to ask?”
“I’ll ask them in front of your brother,” the prince says dangerously. “Even if you won’t answer, maybe he will – anything to stop watching you get hurt.”
“He’ll like the show,” Susan says. “You’re just funny to watch.”
He scowls horribly at her and starts towards the door, wincing with every bow-legged step. Before he can reach it, there’s a knock.
“What?” he snaps.
“Majesty, it’s the Lord Provost,” someone calls.
“Another message? That creature needs to learn how to do its damned job –”
“No, your majesty. Lord Prejun is here to see you. He says it’s urgent. Some kind of problem down in the city.”
Bahadur turns to glare at Susan. “If this is any of your doing –”
“Why, Prince Bahadur,” Susan says, “I thought you didn’t think I was a witch or a goddess. How could I do anything in the city when I’ve been locked up here since Inzamum Tarkaan brought me in this morning?”
His scowl deepens. “Put her in with the other one,” he snaps to the guards. “And you!” he shouts at the door. “Tell Prejun I’ll be with him shortly. This had best not be some kind of wild goose chase. As for you –” He turns around the room, looking for someone. Susan doesn’t understand who until her gaze falls on the table, sliced to shreds and with the silver scattered wildly about.
“Rhindon,” she whispers.
“Where’s the sword?” Bahadur bellows. “Where’s the damned sword?”
The sword isn’t the only thing that’s missing. The oceanid is too. Bahadur’s so furious that he forgets his pain for a minute, grabbing the one unoccupied guard by the throat and slamming up him against the wall, snarling threats in Calormene. He finally lets him go when it’s clear that no one had seen the ocean spirit leave and Susan grins in triumph, tasting blood in her mouth.
“Scour this castle!” he orders. “Find him, and find the sword! I don’t care if that ocean brat is alive or dead, but I want that sword. And get her out of here.”
Susan doesn’t bother putting up a struggle as they take her down the stairs and out into a dimly lit courtyard, a few spring blossoms soft in the moonlight. It’s freezing outside, a cold wind coming in from the ocean, and she shivers, tasting sea salt on her lips. Into another building, which at least has the benefit of being warmer – Calormenes can’t stand the cold; disadvantages of living in a desert, she supposes – and then down set after set of stairs, which doesn’t have any wind but is still freezing nonetheless. It’s a damp kind of cold; Susan wonders at that until she realizes that they’re going down into the cliff-face and it’s the ocean seeping through, chilling the stone walls and everything within them. There are lanterns lighting the hallways, bright enough that she can see the carvings on the walls – elaborate friezes of Narnian and Telmarine history, some of which she recognizes from having lived it, most of which she doesn’t.
She’s cold to the lips and shivering by the time the floor levels off beneath her feet, the Calormenes hauling her forward. There’s a sudden burst of voices, Narnian and otherwise, washing over her like a wave.
“Hey! Hey, you Calormene bastards, what about some blankets down here, huh?”
“Who’s the broad, you lousy sandworm?”
“What, Bahadur cleaning house again?”
And some madman, laughing hysterically, shouting, “I know, I know! It’ll be like the duke beneath the tower! First we train the rats –”
“Shut it, Belet! We’ve had enough of your shit!”
“How ‘bout taking him away, hmm? Or is this just one more pathetic Calormene attempt at torture?”
One of the Calormene guards rattles his sword hilt against the bars. “Be silent, you Narnian filth!”
“That’s no way to talk to some nice Narnian loyalists,” Susan says. There’s blood in her mouth; the words gurgle oddly.
Her voice gets some welcome attention. “Susan?” she hears Peter’s voice call from up ahead. “Susan!”
“Peter!” she shouts back. “Remember Gilwaine Crossing!” Which had been a right royal mess, but memorable, to say the very least; Peter will know what she’s talking about.
“Shut up, you Narnian slut!” one of the Calormene snaps, cuffing the back of her head.
“What’s this?” asks a faun hanging on the bars of his cell door. “You didn’t actually manage to capture a couple of madmen claiming to be the King of Summer and the Queen of Spring, did you? There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing Bahadur chase his tail all around Narnia.”
Susan smiles sweetly at him and spits a shard of broken tooth aside. She immediately regrets it when she sees Peter’s horrified face a moment later. He’s resting his arms on the bars of his cell, and his face is bruised, an ugly cut high on his left cheek, but not nearly so badly as hers must be. “No one ever told you not to hit a woman?” he snarls at the Calormenes.
One of them lets go of Susan to bang his sword hilt against the bars. “Silent, scum,” he says.
Peter doesn’t move away. “That’s my sister, you asshole,” he says, and his hands shoot out between the bars, catching the Calormene’s wrist and twisting until he drops the sword. There’s a crack as the bone breaks, a second as Peter drags the man forward and snaps his arm bone between two bars, and while he’s screaming, Peter slams his head forward against the bars, catching the man before he falls so that he can get at the keys on his belt.
“Idiot,” Susan says lightly, pivoting on the balls of her feet to get one hand on the Calormene guard’s shoulder and the other on his tricep, breaking his grip. She slams her knee up into his stomach, then his face, hearing bone shatter and feeling the shock reverberate up along her body. He collapses without another word, moaning and clutching at himself, and Susan takes a few careful steps backwards, her fists raised before her face.
Peter, out of his cell now and with the first guard’s scimitar in his fist, kills him without a moment’s hesitation. He steps around the body and gathers her into a short hug with his free arm. “Are you all right?”
She wipes the back of her hand across her mouth, glancing at the smear of blood briefly before she pulls away from Peter and crouches down to pick up a crossbow and quiver of quarrels. “The sooner we get out of here the sooner I will be. Get down!”
Peter drops to the floor without a moment’s hesitation and Susan shoots over his head; the turnkey falls gracelessly before the open iron gate and a satyr stretches an arm out through the bars of his cell door to grope for his keys, but they’re just out of reach. Susan spans a second crossbow bolt as quickly as she can, but no other guards come through the door.
Peter straightens up again and turns her face gently up to his with his free hand. “You’re hurt,” he says.
Susan turns her face away, wincing a little. “It looks worse than it is. Peter, we’ve got to get out of here –”
“Hey,” one of the Narnian prisoners says, thrusting his arms through the bars of the door. “Hey, lovebirds, what about the rest of us, hmm? Give a brother a hand!”
Peter hesitates, and Susan glances back and forth between her brother and the other prisoners, all clamoring at the doors of their cells. “Peter, they’re all Narnians!” she exclaims. “Narnian loyalists –”
“Yeah, we are!” a wolf exclaims, jumping up on its rear legs with his front paws on the bars. “Good Narnians, down here because we refuse to scrape and bow at Bahadur’s toes. You’re the High King! Let us go!”
Still Peter hesitates, and Susan says urgently, “Peter!” before she gives up on convincing him and makes to snatch the keys from her hand. He holds them away from her, expression a little distant, and steps over to a man who’d yelled out at the Calormenes earlier.
“What are you in for?” he asks, casual as if they’re sitting in the pub back in England.
The stranger stares at the keys with the mad look of a starving man who’s just had a steak dangled before his face. “I refused to bend the knee to Prince bloody sandfucking Bahadur, what do you think?”
Peter puts his head to one side, his expression vaguely curious, and makes a “carry on” gesture with one hand.
He sighs. “I have the honor to be Sir Gavilan of Littlehill, younger brother of Lord Morayta of Littlehill.”
“Where’s the honor in that?” someone jeers. “Littlehill’s a bootlicking coward, he is.”
Gavilan’s expression contorts and turns ugly. “Morayta’s choice was not mine – why do you think I’m bloody well in here with the lot of you, hmm? Certainly not for the company. I’d like to kill the bastard myself.”
Peter snaps his fingers to get his attention. “Do you love Narnia, Sir Gavilan?” he asks.
The knight regards him warily. “With all my life.”
Peter crouches down and puts the keys down on the stone floor, just within Gavilan’s reach. “Wait two hundred counts after we’ve left before you let yourself and the others here out,” he says. “And if you make it out of Cair Paravel and want to find us, you’ll find us in the Western Wild, at the ruins in the rosewood.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” a faun in the next cell asks warily.
Peter’s smile is a little grim. “We’re the ones who are going to free Narnia,” he says. He turns attention back to Gavilan. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” the knight says without hesitation.
“Two hundred counts,” Peter says again, straightening, and Gavilan nods.
They’re halfway down the hallway, Narnians hanging on their cell doors and staring at them, when Gavilan calls after them, “High King Peter!”
Peter turns. “What?”
He smiles a little crookedly. “I just wanted to see if you’d answer.”
Peter’s laugh warms them all the way down the hallway, and as soon as they reach the stairs Gavilan starts counting out loud. Susan starts upwards, but Peter catches her hand and pulls her down, plucking a torch from a sconce as soon as he lets go of her. There’s another gate a few levels below them, and Peter frowns at it for a few moments before he slams the basket hilt of the scimitar down on the lock. It’s old and rusted, fragile, and falls apart in a shower of rust fragments. He shoves the door open and goes through, the remnants of the lock crunching under his boots. Susan follows.
“Where are we going?” she asks. “The way out is up.”
“There’s another passage through the lowest level of the dungeons,” Peter says. “Tirian told me – he says it hasn’t been used in years, but Rilian wrote about it in one of his diaries. It’s not on any of the plans, but –”
“Has Tirian ever seen it?” Susan demands.
“He said he did once, around fifteen years ago. It leads out into a park in the city.”
“I hope he’s right,” she says anxiously.
“So do I,” Peter says, and doesn’t say anything else. They go lower and lower, the chill gathering around them until Susan’s half-convinced they’ve left the cliff-face entirely and passed beneath the ocean, then Peter makes a grunt of satisfaction and reaches back to snag her sleeve with two fingers. She sways aside from his sword blade, then steps forward, frowning at what seems to be a dead end. The wall in front of them is blank; there are three doors on the walls around them, all barred and shut.
“What is it?”
He scuffs at the floor with the toe of his boots. There’s a mosaic of colored stone inset there, a green serpent fighting a golden lion over a compass rose. It’s faded from the long passage of time, but Peter looks as pleased to see it as if it had been bright and new.
“Here.” He hands the torch to her and crouches down, sweeping away the thick layer of dust and a few scattered rocks with his arm. He wipes his fingers clean absently on his trousers and presses the snake’s dark eyes, then the lion’s, and at last the northernmost stone of the compass rose. They sink into the earth with a grinding sound and a moment later, sounding rusty and out of use, a dark space barely large enough for a dwarf to pass opens on the blank wall in front of them.
“There actually is something here,” Susan says, a little surprised. She glances around at the doors in the room. “What’s behind those?”
“Something unpleasant, no doubt,” Peter says. “Caspian’s son Rilian built all these tunnels beneath the castle; Tirian says there’s almost as much space below the earth as above. This is the lowest level of the dungeons, reserved for those who’ve already been tried and convicted of heinous crimes. Or it was, anyway; apparently it hasn’t been used for more than a century.”
Susan hands the torch back to him, shuddering a little as she looks at the barred doors again. Cair Paravel had had more than its share of secret passageways – the palace had nearly been a living thing, and it had liked to open new hallways and rooms at random intervals, especially if one of them had needed it. More than one would-be assassin or conspirator had starved to death within her walls before Cair Paravel opened them up again, like a cat presenting her master with a dead bird.
Peter has to get down on hands and knees to crawl through the passage; Susan swings the crossbow onto her back and follows, wincing a little as she hears the delicate silk of her dress tear. Well, at least it’s ruined anyway; she’s got blood all over it.
“Look for another mosaic on the wall,” Peter says over his shoulder, his voice oddly muffled by the tunnel. “That should shut the door.”
There’s a black shield with a green serpent on it set in the wall by her head. “I’ve found it,” Susan says. “Now what?”
“Twist the serpent’s head.”
She does, and the door shuts behind her with a heavy, reluctant grinding sound, leaving them stranded in the darkness. It’s like being buried alive. Susan shudders, concentrating on the glow of the torch ahead of her, illuminating Peter’s bright head.
“Hold onto my ankle,” Peter says.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Susan mutters. The leather of his boot is smooth from use and time beneath her fingers, and she clings to it like a lifeline. “How far does this go?” she asks suddenly, wary.
Peter coughs. “About a mile.”
“Oh, for the love of –”
“Tirian says that it widens out later,” he adds hastily. “We should be able to stand upright after a bit.”
“Well, good,” Susan says testily. “Because otherwise I’d be forced to kill him.” But Tirian’s name reminds her of something, and she says, “Where are Tirian and Eustace?”
“I’ve no idea,” Peter says. “All I know is that Bahadur hasn’t got them. The Calormenes searched the inn we’d been staying at, but they’d already left by then. I can’t think where they might have gone.”
“At least Tirian’s familiar with the city,” Susan says. It’s little consolation, but it’s something at least. “So how did you get yourself into this mess?” she asks, because if she doesn’t have something to think about aside from the fact they’re in a tunnel barely big enough to squeeze through, being hunted by some very angry Calormenes in a country that’s been overrun and conquered – she needs a distraction, to say the very least.
“Eustace killed someone,” Peter says blandly. “I got blamed.”
“I see.”
“I’ll tell you about it later,” he adds.
“Now’s all right,” Susan says, trying not to put too much of her hope into her voice, but it spills through anyway, and Peter laughs a little and tells her the story.
“Only you, Peter,” she says afterwards. “Only you. What are the others going to say?”
He groans. “Ed will have a field day with all the things that have gone wrong on this bloody jaunt. Next time he can be the one who gets drugged, arrested, and knocked around, hmm? And what happened to you?” he adds, and his voice is sharp, a little angry and a little concerned.
“I did something stupid,” Susan allows. “Something like you would do, actually.”
“Do tell.”
She tells him – everything, from when she’d left Arn Abedin to get away from the hundreds of people there for a few hours, to finding Pole and the Calormenes, to the failed interrogation and the fight afterwards, to waking up tied to the saddle and on her way to Cair Paravel.
“Not much happened after that,” she adds, frowning a little. “There was a raven, a Narnian – Tarkaan Inzamum was angry at him, but he wouldn’t shoot him. He said he answered to someone too high up for Inzamum to kill him. And he took one of my arrows!”
“Was the raven’s name Crackclaw?” Peter asks, sounding suspicious.
“How did you know?”
“We’ve met,” Peter says shortly. “Eustace said something about him reporting to the Calormenes, but –” He shrugs awkwardly. “Go on.”
Susan tells him the rest, trying to skim over the parts with Bahadur as much as she can, but Peter snarls a curse and, “At least I’d already planned to kill the bastard.”
“Yes, I’d hate to have to put you out by adding someone else to that list,” Susan says dryly.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, sounding a little hurt.
She tightens her grip on his ankle, trying to signal reassurance, and says, “I know. That’s not what I meant –”
They’re silent for a long few minutes, long enough for the tunnel walls to start closing in on them again. Susan swallows hard and says uncertainly, “Peter?”
“The tunnel’s widening out,” he says. “And the torch is going out.”
“Oh, God,” she says fervently, but a moment later he straightens up, turning to reach a hand to her and help her to her feet. His face is grim and dirty in the last flickering flames of the torch.
“How far do you think we’ve come?” Susan asks, trying in vain to wipe some of the dirt from the front of her dress. Her palms and knees are torn and bloody; she raises her right hand to her mouth and bites off a loose flap of skin, spitting it aside.
Peter’s only slightly better off; his trousers are better, but he’s been switching the torch back and forth between his hands, and putting most of his weight on only one at a time. “Three-quarters of a mile,” he says, absolutely certain. “And we’ve been sloping upward for most of it, did you notice? We can’t be far off now. Come on, let’s use the last of the light for as long as we can.” He starts forward again, his strides long and determined, and Susan hurries to catch up with him, tangling her fingers in the back of his stolen Calormene belt.
“How do you know?”
“It’s a trick I learned from a Yank I knew during the War,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Although it’s not actually that different from what the Red Company uses – used, I mean. When I was with them in Natare. So here and there, I suppose.” He coughs, then adds apologetically, “Sorry, Su, I’m losing my voice. They weren’t really keeping us well-watered there.”
“It’s all right,” she says, but with only the sound of Peter’s harsh breathing meshing awkwardly with her own, the tunnel seems even emptier than it did before. Her legs are sore from so much crawling and she stumbles a little; Peter steadies her automatically.
A few minutes later the torch goes out, and Susan whimpers a little. There’s a thump as Peter tosses it aside. “It’s all right,” he says, reaching back for her hand. The tunnel’s barely wide enough for them to continue side by side, but even though she’s scraping the side of it with every step and her abraded palms are pained by the pressure, she’s glad of Peter’s callused grip tight on hers.
They stop by running into a wall.
“Whoa!” Peter says, sounding startled, and he and Susan both grope at it. She shoves down her anxiety that Tirian’s memory was wrong and they’ve trapped themselves here in this tomb; that there’s no way out but back – if they can even go back.
“There are hand- and foot-holds carved into the stone,” Peter says, guiding her hand to one of them. “I guess we go up now,” he adds brightly.
“That’s something,” Susan says. “You go first.”
“I’ll catch you if you fall,” Peter says, which means, no, you.
Susan sighs and starts climbing, feeling carefully for each hold as she does. They’re little niches a knuckle or so deep, worn nearly soap smooth by the passage of time, and she calls over her shoulder to Peter, “Be careful, it’s slippery.”
His reply is muffled but in the positive; Susan swallows and keeps climbing, clinging to the stone as tightly as she can. The slippers the Calormenes put her in are slippery, barely more than a few scraps of silk, and she finds herself wishing she’d just ditched them and climbed barefoot, freezing or not. About three hundred steps up – dear gods, what did the idiot who built this use it for? – she touches metal instead of stone.
“Stop,” she calls down to Peter.
“What is it?” he asks.
Susan feels around with one hand until she finds a catch. “I think it’s the way out!” she exclaims. It seems like a door that opens upwards, and Susan wrenches the catch around until something shudders, sending dirt and shards of rust showering down over her head and stories. Below her, Peter curses absently. She shoves the door upwards, relieved to see stars pricking the sky above her, and clambers out with a little difficulty, hauling herself over the edge of the hole and landing on something hard.
“Ow,” she says faintly, but she grins up at Peter when he follows her out. He gives her a hand up, and they both look at the door, which proves to be an upended statue of a dragon-headed ship with a lion’s head on the sails. Peter rights it after a moment, and with it back on its base, only the scattering of rust around it proves that there’s something more beneath it.
“Now what?” Susan asks, brushing primly at the front of her dress. It’s more or less in tatters around her legs; she’s barely decent. The front of it is torn as well; Peter’s eyes linger briefly on the curve of one breast before he looks back at her face.
“I think we’d better find you some clothes,” he says.
“Good idea,” Susan says dryly. “What were you planning to do, rob a tailor?”
“If one presents himself, I shall certainly consider the option,” Peter says. “But I actually had another idea.” He gestures behind her and Susan turns, curious.
They’re standing in the middle of a narrow expanse of pale green, a grassy strip with cobblestone streets on either side of it. There’s a clutch of trees not far away from where Susan’s standing, and another few statues off in the distance. Peter’s pointing at a squat, brightly lit building a ways down the strip of lawn, music spilling out of it along with the sound of laughter. There’s an ironwork balcony on the second floor, where a white-haired swan-maid dressed in slightly more clothing than Susan is having her breasts fondled by a satyr.
Susan turns back to Peter. “What was your plan again?”
He grins at her and leans over to kiss her cheek, taking the net out of her hair with quick fingers. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Try not to get in any trouble.”
Susan sits down on the base of the statue, pulling the remains of her skirt primly around her knees. “I’ll endeavor not to get picked up by anyone who thinks I’m a prostitute, since that’s apparently what goes on in Cair Paravel these days.”
“Yeah, apparently,” Peter says, and then starts off across the grass towards the tavern.
She swings the crossbow around from her back to her front, resting it on her knees as she leans her head back against the ship. Long day. Long fucking day. Long fucking three days, actually; that’s about how long it’s been since she left Arn Abedin. Susan stares up at the stars, picking out the constellations she knows – the Griffin, the Lord of Chaos, the Shipwright, the Centaur. They’ve shifted a little since the last time she was here, but not so much she can’t recognize them anymore. After a moment she closes her eyes, just to rest them, and falls asleep.
Peter’s hand on her shoulder wakes her, and he dances back from the right hook she throws at him automatically. “Sorry,” Susan says after a moment, blinking the sleep from her eyes. “Long day.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “I get it.” He holds out a shapeless mass of crimson fabric towards her and Susan puts the crossbow down before she gets up, trying the dress against herself. Peter remembers her size, it seems; he’s certainly taken her out of enough dresses.
“Do I want to ask where this came from?” she asks, taking herself and the dress into a clutch of trees that more or less shelter her from sight.
“Probably not,” Peter says.
“Do I have to worry about you having gotten some kind of VD?” Susan calls, wriggling out of the shreds of her dress, which more or less just come apart in her hands.
Peter coughs. “Not this time,” he says.
The new dress smells rather strongly of the previous occupant, as well as spilled wine and some less pleasant things, and it’s a little loose in the waist and tight in the bust. “Come here and do up my laces,” Susan says, and Peter obligingly steps up behind her, his breath warm on her bare shoulders – the dress is far too low cut for her usual tastes, but she supposes beggars can’t be choosers – as he laces her tightly into the dress. His touch is light and familiar; he’s no lady’s maid, but she’d managed to train into him the proper way to do up laces, at least. Even if most of their clothes in Narnia had had buttons.
She turns around, shivering a little in the chill, and Peter says apologetically, “I might have tried for a cloak, but I don’t think she…had one.” He raises one hand to wipe some of the dried blood off her face, and Susan turns her face up towards his obligingly, trying not to wince as he jars her bruises.
“Do you remember that time we were in Tashbaan?” she asks. That was before Rabadash, about – six years? No, seven – before that mess.
Peter gives her a suddenly wary look. “I try not to,” he says.
She grins at him. “Oh, right!” she says, as if she’s just remembered. “That was the time you got the clap from that tarkaan with the huge –”
“Susan,” he protests.
She doesn’t miss a beat. “– sword, and Lucy nearly spilled her cordial laughing when she had to dose you.”
“I miss the days when you said you didn’t remember Narnia,” Peter says, but he’s laughing when he says it, and so Susan’s a little less indignant than she might be otherwise, though it doesn’t stop her from slapping him upside the head.
She hangs the heavy oiled leather case of barbed quarrels off the belt that came with the dress and goes to pick up the crossbow again, slinging it over her shoulder. “Now what?” she asks, and Peter looks a little lost for a moment.
“Now I suppose we go and try to find Tirian and Eustace,” he says. “Although I have no idea where they are. Or where we are, for that matter. Though,” he adds, and holds up a full leather pouch that jingles a little, “we do have money, at least.”
“Did you steal it or –”
“I sold that thing that was in your hair,” Peter says. “It went for quite a bit, actually. You didn’t want it, did you?” he adds, sounding a little anxious.
Susan shudders. “No.”
They stare at each other for a few minutes, and then Susan says, “Well, we can hardly stay here all night –”
“No,” Peter says, then sighs and looks from one side of the street to the other. Looking now, Susan can see there’s a clear difference between the two neighborhoods; the castle is visible in the distance behind one, and this is the one that looks considerably higher class. She remembers riding through it with Inzamum and his men. The other neighborhood seems somewhat less well-to-do; the buildings are taller and closer together, and the construction is a little different.
Peter hesitates briefly, his indecision clear on his face.
“What is it?” Susan asks. “I can tell you have an idea.”
“You’re not going to like it,” he warns.
“Probably not, but I don’t have any ideas, so you might as well spit it out.”
He sighs. “Bencivenni Maresti,” he says.
“You’re right,” Susan says promptly. “I don’t like it. Do you have any other ideas?”
Peter shakes his head. “It’s not as though we can exactly wander around Cair Paravel and ask if anyone’s seen the King of Narnia. Not without being arrested, anyway. Look, Su, I don’t like it either; Maresti drugged me and threatened Eustace –”
“I should think you’d be glad of that part,” Susan says.
He shrugs. “Not under the circumstances. Anyway, the man knows what’s going on around Cair Paravel. Even if he doesn’t know whether Tirian’s taken himself off to, I’d bet you anything he knows a way to get word to him. And he knows who I am.”
“He’s a criminal,” she points out primly. “And you trust him?”
“Not within an inch of my life,” Peter says firmly.
“Just so long as we’re clear on that,” Susan says. “Now, can you find him?”
He gestures northward. “Head towards the river.”
She sighs and starts walking. “You could have gotten me shoes, too,” she says as Peter falls into step beside her.
“I would have, but her feet looked about three sizes bigger than yours,” he says.
“Point taken,” Susan allows.
Even this late at night – it must be after midnight – there are people on the streets, most of them drunk and some of them high. Rather like certain streets in England Susan’s been on, actually, including the one she and Peter had been on when they’d been arrested for drunk and disorderly, and assault on Peter’s part. They don’t garner as many looks as she’d expected, but there are other women out on the street in dresses that are equally as low-cut. Susan gets propositioned more times than she can count and Peter scowls horribly and touches the hilt of his sword.
“I think we could be making rather a lot of money, actually,” Susan murmurs to him, amused.
“Over my dead body,” Peter says through clenched teeth.
She smiles a little. “Jealous, brother-mine?”
“Do I need to be?”
“Hardly.” She sways away from a man in seaman’s clothes who reaches drunkenly for her, avoiding his grip adroitly.
“Come near her again and I’ll break your neck,” Peter snaps.
“Enough for all of us to go around!” the seaman slurs, waving a bottle of wine in their direction. “When you’re done with him, love, come and find me; I’ll give you a good time.”
“The lady’s not interested, Nat; back off,” snarls a white tiger that seems to come up out of nowhere, interposing itself between Susan and the sailor.
The seaman squints at it. “Didn’t think she was your type, Mayor,” he says, and splashes wine in the general direction of his mouth; most of it misses and goes over his face.
“She’s not yours,” the tiger says. “Bugger off and find someone more to your taste, or I’ll go to Wavewalker and you’ll regret it.”
“Over a whore?” Nat says, but he raises the wine in a kind of salute and says, “Sorry, love; I hope Goldilocks there has you well in hand,” and wanders off.
The tiger turns its attention back to Susan and Peter and dips in a slight bow. “This isn’t the place for you just now, your majesties,” it – he – says. “My name is May Your Life Be Long And Your Enemies Honorable; most men call me Mayor. Come with me if you want to see your friends again.”
----------
The war with Masongnong appears in In a Dry Month and The White City.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-28 04:26 pm (UTC)Wow, yes, quite traumatic there, but oh god, I love her. I loved the reunion with Peter and the awesome sibling banter, and nice funny bits slipped in. I got a nice sense of momentum from this part, even when it was just conversation, but you had some great action here too.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-28 05:02 pm (UTC)So are you, for that matter.
Also Peter. And haha the tiger's name! And Susan being all prim and proper even when she's wearing practically nothing. Poor Pevensies, being all claustrophobic in tunnels.
Good for you for getting it done! I can see why this chapter caused you lots of trouble - but you pulled it off really really well. Really nice.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:03 pm (UTC)Oh, man, I have been planning Mayor's name since I introduced him in Dust 11. Which...doesn't seem like all that long, only it's been more than a month, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-28 06:50 pm (UTC)Susan is so kickass awesome!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:04 pm (UTC)...now I'm hungry.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-29 03:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-29 04:16 am (UTC)Also, the description of the Cair as a cat bringing a brid with the dead bodies of assassins. The sort of sapience that provides such a grisly sweet gesture is a little shiver inspiring.
blood so thick on him that I could taste it when I kissed him for days afterwards
Is it common historical knowledge/legend that the Pevensies and/or Peter and Susan were sleeping together? Because from a mythological standpoint I can totally see that happening. Imagine the potential for demigod babies!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:17 pm (UTC)Common historical knowledge? No. There's very little genuine historical knowledge left from the Golden Age -- Tumnus's diary, the majority of Peter's campaign journals, a few scattered remnants of other court documents (Royal Guard reports? Maybe), some important documents preserved by other countries (Calormen keeps good records, as do Archenland and Shoushan, and some of the islands may have stuff stored away) -- and of the legends, most of what remains is hearsay and rumor, mostly coming from the ballads and plays and whatnot, which doesn't really bring up whether the Pevensies were sleeping with each other. Though, to be fair, those rumors were going around for a long time before they actually were. Now, for the King of Summer and Queen of Spring, on the other hand -- the demigods -- that's something else entirely.
And the really funny thing is that in that specific instance, Susan's making stuff up: she and Peter didn't start sleeping together until ten years later.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:27 pm (UTC)Still, it's one thing for her to be scary and presumptive of godhood, it's another for her to be lying while she's at it.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:36 pm (UTC)Working it into the narrative is a little awkward in this chapter, but there's a possibility it may come out later that Susan was lying through her teeth about that, at least.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-29 06:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:18 pm (UTC)Another good one. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:29 pm (UTC)Being a woman and a prisoner is...not a fun time.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 12:30 am (UTC)And to mine :D
At the opening - the Calormene's wooden framework over the throne room of Cair Paravel intrigues me. I wonder if they haven't discovered how to get into all the treasure rooms even yet. And how the hell they captured all the four's legendary equipages. where were they kept before the Calormenes came & how were they seized... your fic.. it makes me look at all the details because I just *know* you have an explanation thought out consciously or unconsciously for every little thing. You SO do, don't deny it.
Heh. the servants bow lower to Susan. Take that! I'm glad that none of Narnians really know about Susan's issues with her siblings, that she gets their respect too.
Oh! Prejun will be in SUCH BIG trouble if Bahadur finds out that he's tryng to rescue peter, not just preserve his jurisdiction!
What can he possibly want from her that he thinks he can get more easily with sweet words and good food than with torture and imprisonment?
Nothing good Susan! Nothing good!
Every eighth man? iinteresting... not a Roman decimation. Calormene system of counting implications. Or just him wanting to kill more people.
If Bahadur's threat of diaspora was carried out then I would expect a Narnian Zionist movement. These hypothetical Narnians' longing for a never-forgotten homeland parallels with the Pevensies longing for their Narnia, ether like Susan at the beginning of the chapter or as they did while in England.
“Bitch!” Bahadur gasps in Calormene – that word hasn’t changed particularly much over the years.
I just think it'd be so cool if Susan were ever to speak before a group of Calormenes in her Old Calormene. It'd be so impressive! Like speaking in King James English or something. 'twould be very demi-goddess of her.
“You’re the idiot that touched a queen of Narnia,” Susan says, and he hits her again.
This time she’s ready for the blow; she turns her head with it and snaps her foot up into HER groin.
Typo? :P
OH, wait, the oceanid didn't take Peter his sword? huh, on first read-through I sorta assumed he had. Hurrah for further complications!
LOVE Cair Paravel presenting peter with the dead assassins. <3
“That was the time you got the clap from that tarkaan with the huge –”
“Susan,” he protests.
She doesn’t miss a beat. “– sword, and Lucy nearly spilled her cordial laughing when she had to dose you.”
LOL. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 05:26 pm (UTC)As for what Prejun was doing, well...Prejun's not stupid enough to bother Bahadur in the middle of the night with complaints about jurisdiction, let me just put it that way. *smirks*
As for Narnians longing for a never-seen homeland, there's the Red Company coming up, and that's fairly similar.
Thre are a lot of complications in Cair Paravel, a lot of factions -- and we've only met a few of them.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-30 06:52 pm (UTC)Great chapter! You have a very pleasing mixture of talking and action in each chapter, and all the little details you include about surroundings and such help create a very 'cinematic' visualization in my mind, if you will. Are Edmund and Lucy ever going to take a level in badass to match their older siblings? That would be pretty awesome.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-31 06:52 pm (UTC)I'm glad you liked it!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 05:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 06:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 06:16 pm (UTC)Lol, Watchmen, I love it. Did you read the comic first, or are you a 'new viewer', so to speak?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 06:19 pm (UTC)New viewer -- I still haven't read the comic. I'll get around to that when I go home for break this summer.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 06:21 pm (UTC)What did you think of it as a new viewer? I always want to know what it's like from that other perspective.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 06:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 07:28 pm (UTC)I did like the action scenes, mostly because yay, violence! but maybe not the one at the beginning, because I just felt it was a bit too long.
I've always thought of Batman as a very deeply fucked-up person, thought that's more through fandom interpretations/writing about the character that brought it to my attention.
I love things with massive world building behind them so much (which is why I like your writing so much I think). It's something I also think I need to do more of in my own writing.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 07:45 pm (UTC)They were really excellent action scenes, because there's actual blood there; it's not just play. And I'm still immensely fond of the alley scene, because yes, oh my god. Dan and Laurie and the little smile they share before they start, and how well they work together, and the fact that they practically invited it.
I think I got it through fandom before I saw the movie, but he very much is.
Worldbuilding is made of joy.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 07:48 pm (UTC)I'm so glad it was an R rating. (Although I don't generally like the way the MPAA ratings system works either way.) It wouldn't have been the same without the blood.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 07:50 pm (UTC)So am I. It just wouldn't have cut it as a PG-13.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-16 08:18 pm (UTC)