Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (13)
May. 11th, 2009 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air 13
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
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 thirteen, 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.
“You smell like wet goat,” a wolf named Graynor complains as Orci lowers himself into the hollow where they’re waiting.
The faun makes a rude sign in his direction. “And you smell like wet dog, but you don’t hear me saying anything about that, do you? It’s bloody pouring out, and you know what that means.”
“Yeah, you smell like wet goat.”
“Wet bow strings,” Jill says, and they all look at her. She coughs. “Be careful of your bow strings.”
“Well, we know that,” says an archer who came in with the wolfswood camp, caressing his bow between his hands. He hasn’t strung it yet, protecting the string in a scrap of oiled silk.
Jill tests her own bow string as inconspicuously as she can, relieved to find that it still has its proper tension. She curls warm against Jewel’s side, listening to Graynor and Orci squabble, nearly drowning out the sound of the pouring rain outside.
There are six of them, crowded cheek to jowl in a hollow by the side of the road. Jill’s not even sure how they’ll be able to hear the Calormenes coming, between the rain and the wind. No, thunder though, not yet. And thank God for that; even though she’s done this a hundred times before, they always call it off around lightning. The sky is the only place where neither Narnia nor Calormen hold any power, and the sky has no pity for anyone on the earth below.
They’d wondered, early on, if the Calormenes would continue running their caravans and supply trains in foul weather, but they’d quickly found that nothing stopped them. The work gangs kept working even when they were hip deep in mud and dropping from exhaustion, kept working when it was hot enough outside to fry an egg on a chunk of rock, and kept working when it was too dark to an inch pas their noses. There’s hardly a question of whether the Calormenes are coming or not, there’s just a question of how far off schedule they’re going to be. They’re already late; Jill had developed a more-or-less accurate internal clock when she’d been in the north with Puddleglum and Eustace, and she’d never quite lost the knack of it, even in England. The Calormenes could be here any minute now, and she’s got to be ready. They’ve all got to be ready.
It’s hard to attack one of the work gangs, though Tirian had insisted on doing so every time the opportunity had presented itself. There are too many guards, too many prisoners, too many people to deal with as quickly and efficiently as they do the supply trains, when they don’t have to worry about civilian casualties, and some of the Narnians at Haven had protested the extra mouths. These orders come down from their king and queen of legend, though, and people don’t argue with Edmund and Lucy Pevensie the way they do with Tirian. Jill’s given up on trying to understand it; Tirian may be Narnia’s rightful king, but everyone in the country falls to their knees in front of the Pevensies. Superstitions are impossible to argue with; five years here and months with Puddleglum has taught her that it’s easier just to not bother, and garners about the same result.
A squirrel comes by, scampering down the hollow and saying, “The king says they’re coming,” before he takes off again.
The wolfswood archer strings his bow in one smooth motion and reaches down to the quiver beneath his knees, untying the top of the oiled silk bag he keeps his arrows in to protect them from the rain. He slings the quiver back over his shoulder, fastening the straps that keep it from shifting when he moves.
Jill does the same, rubbing her fingers together to see how the damp is affecting her grip. The other archers check their bows and quivers as well and Graynor stands up, grinning like a madman, his tongue very red as it hangs out of his mouth.
“Always a good day to kill Calormenes,” he says brightly.
Jill scoots away from Jewel, giving the unicorn as much space as she can. This will be very fast.
She hears the Calormenes pass by, a kind of heavy squishing sound as they march through the mud, and holds her breath, twisting her fingers on the shaft of her bow before she draws an arrow and puts it to the string.
She’s listening for the horns, and when they come, they’re brassy and bright, followed a moment later by the scream of the Red Company oliphants, silver horns with a double curve and the Red Company symbol stamped into the metal. She’s seen them; they’re big, looping around a horseman’s arm so that he can swing a weapon or draw a bow if need be. The Red Company is apparently very practical about such things.
The horns are the signal they’ve been waiting for; Graynor throws back his head and howls as the rest of them scramble out of the hollow and into the ditch at the side of the road, where water’s swirling ankle deep and freezing through Jill’s leather boots. The other archers spread out along the edge of the road, picking their targets and firing, seemingly heedless of the sounds of battle from the rear guard and the point guard. Narnians in front; the Red Company behind; archers and more Narnians to the side. They have the Calormenes trapped.
It’s the same confused mess of blood and screaming as fighting always is. Jill hates it, has always hated it, but as much as she hates it at least she’s gotten used enough to it not to throw up afterwards. Most of the time. She picks her targets carefully, letting her eyes go out of focus in between. At one point she sees Graynor go past, or thinks she does, and wishes the wolf luck in his killing spree. She knows him a little, though not well; he’s a Haven refugee, his pack lost to the Calormenes, and sometimes the rage consumes him. She’s been in battle long enough to that sometimes the rage consumes her, too.
It’s not like that this time. This is plain killing, practically target shooting, though the wind makes it near-impossible to hit an accurate target. None of the Calormenes get near her; Jewel stays with Jill, horn and hooves making mincemeat of any Calormene who comes close, and for that Jill’s grateful. She’s more likely to take her own knife to her throat than let herself be taken prisoner again, not after the last time. Never again. She’ll kill herself first.
The fight is over very quickly, though it doesn’t seem it. Jill unstrings her bow and slips it into the straps on the side of her quiver, checking herself for a moment before she gets the sense of her balance again. Her bow is a longbow, simply and easily made out of a single piece of yew, with horn nocks on the ends, strung with flax; it’s been hard to get silk lately, even though it makes better bow strings. It’s the same kind of bow she’d learned how to shoot on, all those years ago on the moors in the north. This isn’t her bow, not her good one; she’d lost her own bow in the failed ambush where they’d been captured.
She touches the hilt of the long knife on her hip as she clambers up onto the road, sliding in the mud that makes up the steep slope of the ditch and reaching for Jewel to balance herself. The unicorn’s fur is sticky and matted with blood beneath her palm, but the rain is already starting to wash it away.
“Very neat,” he says critically, looking around at the carnage – as soon as they’d realized what was going on, a number of the Narnian prisoners had turned on their captors. “I hadn’t thought that King Edmund would have had much of a knack at these sorts of things.”
Graynor comes back to them, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and blood staining the short fur of his muzzle. “What, you doubt the King of Evening, Jewel? And you from Cair Paravel, too.”
“Keep your country superstitions to yourself, Graynor,” Jewel says, staring down his long nose at the wolf.
Jill smiles to herself, a little pleased. Not everyone in Narnia believes that the Pevensies are gods – not Jewel, at least, and that’s what counts; Jewel is Jill’s friend. It’s not that she doesn’t like them, because she does – some of them, at least; Peter scares her and Susan disgusts her, or at least she had back in England; Jill’s not sure what to make of the older girl now. It’s just that they’re people, and the way that some of the Narnians treat them is nothing short of ridiculous. At least they don’t seem to believe it themselves.
Graynor laughs. “Like you city boys don’t light candles to the four little gods as well as us in the country. It’s suns to moons there’s even one or two of you who sacrifice dumb animals on festival nights.”
“There are fools everywhere,” Jewel says, his voice sharp with annoyance. “Farmbred yokel.”
“Cityborn snob.”
It’s nothing that hasn’t been said before and with more heat, so Jill clears her throat and points out, “There has just been a fight, you know,” and pushes between the two of them to get onto the road, where some of the Narnians are occupied with making sure all the Calormenes are dead and others with striking the chains off the prisoners. Most of them are gaunt from starvation and overwork; a few of them look quite mad. There’s been a lot of that going around in Narnia these days, especially among those freed for the work gangs. Perhaps it’s kinder for them; they don’t tend to live long, and it saves those in the camps the trouble of feeding the people who are incapable of doing any kind of work. Jill’s used to burying bodies.
Jewel and Graynor break off their bickering hastily to follow her. Jewel’s all she has left, of course, and Graynor – Graynor’s practically a stranger, but one on terms of some sort with Eustace; he’d come to her after Edmund had brought her back from the Calormene camp and Lucy had left her sitting on one of the huge roots of a homewood tree that lightning had split down the center at some point, crying hysterically as soon as the other girl had left her alone with only Jewel for company. Eustace owes me money, he’d said. Might be he’ll be more inclined to pay it if you’re alive. She doesn’t remember why Eustace owes him money, or maybe Eustace just hadn’t told her – they share most things, but not everything – but this is Narnia; she’ll take her company where she can get it.
Some of the newly freed Narnians are very weak indeed; the Calormenes work their prisoners to the death. Some are criminals, political or otherwise; most are just unlucky. Many of them are weeping, others are defiant, a few are looking around at their rescuers, trying to find friends or family. One gaunt faun comes up to Jill, his blue eyes huge in his thin face, and says, “Do you know a minotaur named Laresca? Or a stag, his name is Choudburry –”
She racks her brain, just in case – she knows a lot of people – but no one comes to mind, and Jill says apologetically, “No, I don’t, I’m sorry – let me get you off the road – come with me, here, you don’t want to stay here.”
Over his shoulder, she sees the wolfswood archer she’d been with in the hollow rush past, throwing up gouts of mud with every step, and fling his arms around a pale, pretty woman with the faint greenish tinge of dryad blood in her skin and red marks on her wrists and neck. She puts her face into his shoulder and sobs.
Jill has to smile at that, because it’s not often that happens. Everything in Narnia is just too big; it’s next to impossible to find what you’re looking for here. She puts the faun off on someone else and plunges back into the muck to do what she can, trying to get people off the road and into the woods as quickly as possible. They can’t stay here.
The wind snaps at her tightly braided hair and Jewel’s mane, driving the rain practically sideways and making her stagger into Graynor’s side. She’ll be surprised if she can find any of her arrows stuck in Calormene bodies; even the Narnian archer goddess couldn’t shoot straight in this. Only the Narnian archer goddess is the Queen of Spring – she’s seen a few of the shrines – and the Queen of Spring is apparently Susan Pevensie, and Jill’s met Susan Pevensie. No goddess she; she’s as human as Jill – or is she, there’s something exceedingly complicated about the whole mess, and thinking about it hurts Jill’s head. And Susan Pevensie isn’t even here, for that matter, so whether or not she could shoot in this mess is just plain irrelevant.
Only Jill knows why Susan isn’t here, and it’s nothing nearly so reassuring as simply being put off by the wretched weather. After all, Jill’s seen not only the worst winter Narnia’s had in generations, but an Ettinsmoor snowstorm without any kind of cover. Susan’s had English winters and a Narnian summer that lasted fifteen years; one of them is better suited for this. Still, she thinks that even Susan Pevensie might prefer being outside in a Narnian spring storm to being inside Cair Paravel in a Calormene prison. Jill wouldn’t set foot in Cair Paravel if her life depended on it.
She trips over something – someone – half-buried in the mud and goes tumbling down, catching herself on the heel of her hand and her elbow, getting herself all over mud and wrenching her arm painfully. She spits out mud that tastes unpleasantly of blood and gets back up, slipping and clinging to Jewel as leverage. God, it’s a miracle that this ambush didn’t end in disaster, between the mud and the rain and the wind. Storms aren’t usually so generous to them; usually something goes very wrong.
“Jill!” she hears Lucy say, shouting over the sound of the wind. Jill looks up to see the other girl bent over the neck of her little Calormene horse. She’s in trousers and boiled leather like Jill, a sword banging against her knee and her formerly tightly-braided hair completely free and plastered against one side of her face. “We’ve gotten everyone accounted for. Go find Ourente and the others; we have to get out of here before this gets worse.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” she replies, but the words are lost in the wind and Lucy turns her horse away without a reply, the creature slipping in the mud and going down nearly to its hindquarters before it can scramble back up.
Jill puts an arm over Jewel’s neck for support and balance, the world going briefly red and green as the wind drives rain into her eyes, and starts toward the opposite side of the road, the western side. She winces when she sees the ditch there already half-filled with water and rising fast, but at this point, what of it? She’s already soaked to the skin.
There’s a loud cracking sound that Jill can hear over the storm as an oak tree’s roots pull free of the waterlogged soil. She sees the tree fall, branches snapping as it hits the ground, and feels the vibrations spread up her legs through her boot soles. The tree spans the entirety of the road and Jill stares at it, a little awe-struck by the size of the thing. The trees in Narnia –
“Jill!” Jewel gasps. “The water’s too deep – get on my back –”
Jill takes one look at the rapidly-filling ditch and doesn’t argue. She hoists herself up onto Jewel’s back, clinging to the unicorn’s mane, and closes her eyes as he plunges forward into the ditch, hooves slipping and sliding in the mud. The water’s up to her hips and Jewel’s chest, cold enough to make her gasp. It must not all be rainwater; there must be snowmelt off the mountains somewhere in the bottom in the ditch as well. Graynor jumps in after them.
There’s a current in the water, strong enough that Jewel has to fight for his footing even before he starts moving. If it wasn’t raining, he could have jumped the ditch easily – Jill’s seen him do twice this length without breaking a sweat – but as slippery as the round is now, there’s no way for him to get any kind of footing on either side of the ditch. He’d break a leg for sure – or his neck.
He finally makes it up onto solid ground, soaking wet and so dirty it’s impossible to tell there’s a white unicorn beneath all the muck. Graynor climbs up beside them, too worn out even to curse, and Jill can’t even think what crossing a river might be like in this mess. Fortunately they don’t have to worry about that; it’s only half a day’s walk worth of rain-soaked forest between them and Arn Abedin. No rivers. As far as she remembers, not even any streams larger than a trickle of water here and there, but that had been this morning, when it hadn’t begun raining yet and the sky was just a dull, imposing block of solid gray. At least winter’s over. This would be considerably more unpleasant in a snowstorm, and then they leave behind a trail a blind mouse could follow, let alone a Calormene scout who can track a fly forty miles through the desert with a few sandstorms thrown in for good measure. If it wasn’t for the horrible things the Calormenes do to Narnians, Jill would admire them for that, at least.
“You may as well stay mounted,” Jewel says to her as they rejoin the main group of Narnians, all of whom look as bad as Jill feels and some of whom look worse. “It will be better for you, I think.”
“Are you sure?” Jill asks, because if there’s one thing she’s learned in Narnia aside from always keeping a knife on her person no else knows about, it’s that Narnians aren’t meant to be treated like regular beasts. They’re people. And you just don’t ride people. Lucy and Edmund seem surprised by this fact, like it’s some kind of revelation; Jill can’t think where they might have gotten the idea that riding a talking horse is all right, because it’s just absurd. She’s ridden Jewel before, once or twice, but only in the most dire of circumstances. She wouldn’t dream of it otherwise, and she’d certainly never suggest it.
“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t,” Jewel says. Jill has to strain to hear the words, because Jewel’s head is hanging down with exhaustion. The pure white of his horn is the only part of him that’s clean; the rain’s washed the mud and blood off the spirals there much more easily than it has his coat, which is still spattered in mud. His horn seems somehow unreal, like it doesn’t belong here, amidst the dirtiness of this place.
“Thank you,” Jill says politely, rubbing a hand down the side of his neck. Nothing as soft as a unicorn’s fur, not in all the known world. There’s nothing she likes better than lying out on a summer night with her head on Jewel’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of wildflowers and staring up at the Narnian stars. There are peaceful moments in Narnia, she supposes, rare and stolen from the usual stretch of death-defying terror. Still, they don’t make up for the rest of the mess.
It takes longer to get back to Arn Abedin than it took to get to the road in the first place, partially because there are so many people who can’t keep the pace they’d taken when they left this morning and partially because it doesn’t stop raining the entire time, although at least the wind dies down some after a few hours. Jill’s ridiculously relieved that she’s riding rather than on foot; Jewel’s the only thing keeping her warm. They actually end up sustaining more injuries on the way back to Arn Abedin than in the actual fight, short as it was; Jill watches Lucy treat half a dozen broken bones from people who have slipped in the mud and fallen badly. One of the Red Company horses slips, steps in a hole, breaks a leg, and has to be put down; she sees the mercenary flinch like he’s just lost a friend rather than a dumb animal. Regular horses are just animals, she’s found. Boring, mindless, time-consuming – they don’t keep dumb animals in the camps. They’re a liability. People get killed for that sort of thing.
They make it back to Arn Abedin in the pale light of early morning, soaked to the skin and exhausted to the bone. Jill slides off Jewel’s back into calf-deep mud, spitting her hair out of her mouth, and looks around. It’s still bloody raining. She lifts one foot out of the mud with a heavy squelching sound and stares at it in dismay. The mud will take hours to get out, and she doesn’t have an extra pair of boots to wear in the meantime.
Jill puts her foot back down when she starts to lose her balance, grabbing at Jewel’s shoulder when she wavers precariously in mid-air for a moment. “What I wouldn’t give for a hot bath,” she says wistfully once she’s gotten her footing again, pushing her hair out of her eyes with both hands.
Jewel’s blue eyes go huge and dreamy. “Oh, that would be lovely,” he says. “I miss Cair Paravel. Not the Cair Paravel now,” he adds hastily. “The Cair Paravel I used to know, King Erlian’s Cair Paravel. And Tirian’s.”
Jill’s never been to Cair Paravel, not in this Narnia. She has a vague memory of Caspian’s Cair Paravel, all bright lights and brightly-colored banners, smiling faces and music like a faun’s pipe dream, but that’s not real. Maybe it’s never been real. It’s hard to know these things here.
The sound of shouting draws her attention and Jill looks around for the source, unsurprised to find Arnau and Edmund Pevensie yelling at each other. They’d be nose to nose if Arnau had Edmund’s height. There’s been a lot of yelling lately, mostly between Edmund and Arnau, though sometimes it’s Edmund and Lucy or Arnau and Ourente, though she remembers seeing Lucy and Arnau screaming at each other once. Most of it doesn’t make sense to Jill; as far as she can ascertain, the main bone of contention seems to be about who’s been left in charge of Arn Abedin now that Tirian is gone. Personally, she doesn’t see any reason why Edmund and Lucy should be; she doesn’t much like Arnau, but Edmund and Lucy don’t know Narnia, don’t know Narnians, and don’t know the Calormenes in Narnia. If Jill had any choice in the matter, she’d vote for Ourente – at least she knows him; he’s a good…not a man, he’s a good centaur – but she apparently doesn’t have a choice in the matter. Apparently no one else does either.
She sees Edmund throw up his hands in frustration, then turn away and shout for his sister and Tirian’s cousin Vespasian. He sees Jewel and shouts for him too.
Jewel sighs, long-suffering, and says, “Why don’t you go and clean up, Lady Jill? I doubt that whatever it is, it’s of any kind of interest to you, and I’m sure you’d like to get dry and warm.”
Jill stares over Jewel’s shoulder at Edmund’s dark head, torn between – dear God in heaven – going and finding a fire and getting her wet things off, or going with Jewel and representing Tirian’s best interests, because she has a sneaking suspicion that no one’s considering what Tirian might do in whatever new piece of trouble Arnau’s brought the Pevensies. Sheer physical comfort wins out; the last thing she needs is to catch pneumonia, and someone has to keep an eye on Edmund and Lucy, given the fact that the Narnians worship them like they might the Savior come down on Earth again. Just not now.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no fire lit in the homewood tree she shares with Eustace and Tirian. Jill doesn’t bother lighting a precious candle in the close darkness of the space once she’s closed the door behind her, just builds up a little pyramid of kindling by touch and strikes a light on a tinderbox, cupping one hand around the base of the pyramid and blowing gently until she’s sure the spark’s caught. That done, she begins to peel herself out of her wet things, looking around for something to towel her hair dry on before she puts on something new.
It’s not that Eustace and Tirian had left in a hurry, but their things are still strewn around the interior of the tree, and Jill hasn’t been able to bring herself to pick them up and order them, which isn’t something she’s any particular skill at anyway. There’s not much need for tidiness when you’re busy fighting for your life; none of them have ever picked up the habit. She has vague memories of Puddleglum trying to install the notion of proper packing in her and Eustace when they’d been in the north, but none of it had stuck; he’d had a neatly ordered pack, and Jill and Eustace had had things sticking out of their bags and odd lumps in even odder places. Finding dry clothes had turned into a sort of nightmare then, because hers invariably migrated down to the lowest places of her pack, and that was even if she had something dry left in the first place; that had been an especially uncommon occurrence, especially as autumn wore on into winter and they’d started trekking through snow. After that…Jill remembers a span of days or weeks where she’d never been completely warm or dry. That had ended when they reached Harfang, of course.
She eventually ends up toweling her hair dry on a shirt of Eustace’s that she distinctly remembers being dirty when he’d left, so it’s not like the streaks of mud she leaves across it will make much difference, and heats a pan of water over the now-crackling fire to give herself a sponge bath before she dresses in dry things. They’re patched and threadbare, not particularly warm, but at least they’re dry. This completed, and her wet things hung up before the fire – on the next dry day she’ll go down to the river and do laundry; she’s certainly got enough things to make it worthwhile – she wraps herself in a blanket and curls up by the fire, warming her hands and trying to take the chill out of them. Normally she’d be doing something – fletching arrows, mending armor, knitting socks – but her fingers are still frozen, and she thinks it’s surely all right if she takes a little bit of a break, just for this day. She’s been busying herself with work since Edmund brought her back from the Calormene camp; it keeps her from thinking about things she’d rather never think of again in her life.
Naturally, as she’s had more than enough occasion to learn, the things she doesn’t want to think of are the first things that spring to mind whenever she has the space to think. Perhaps it might be better to have something to occupy her mind with after all.
Tirian has the ability to find books in the most unlikely of places; there are a few leather-bound volumes lying on the low, roughly made table in the other chamber. Jill gets up to fetch them over, the blanket trailing behind her as she does, and returns to her spot by the fire. The light is bad for reading by, but at least that means she’ll have something to concentrate on.
The first is some kind of history; Jill considers it, then discards it. She has quite enough of history in her everyday life, thank you very much, and that’s even counting the fact that the Pevensies may not be who everyone says they are. The second one is the script of a play called The Three Sisters of the Shuddering Wood, written in some arcane form of Narnian Jill’s not even going to pretend to know how to read for the benefit of her own sanity. She sets that one aside too, and opens the third book.
This one is slim, bound in green leather with faded gold letters stamped on the side; most of the gold has peeled away, and the light’s not good enough for her to make out the title. She opens it up to the title page, blinking in astonishment to see the neat copperplate handwriting there.
To my dear Lucy, on her seventeenth birthday,
When we first met seven years ago, snow was still thick on the ground and the White Witch ruled in Narnia. Well, my dear, it is winter again, but the White Witch has long since left Narnia, praise Aslan, and now we can celebrate as we have done time immemorial. I remember that I told you once that my father had been a writer before the White Witch came, when I was only a small faun. I remember now that this is not strictly true. My father had wanted to be a writer, yes, but he had no talent for it, and so he contented himself with collecting the works of those who did have the gift. This is one of those collections, published the year before I was born (or so it seems, from the inscription). I give it to you with the same words that my father inscribed in it: because hope is a pretty thing, and a fine thing, but it is nothing without substance; that substance we call faith.
All my love,
Your friend, Tumnus
This was Lucy’s. Jill runs her fingers lightly over the words, trying to distinguish something of the writer, but there’s nothing there but ink. How did Tirian manage to get his hands on this? When he gets nervous he starts going on about some rare book or another, and this certainly seems as if it might fit the bill, but where on earth did he get it? This is the sort of book she’d expect to see in a rare book shop back in London. If this is genuine, it surely must be thousands of years old; the White Witch is so much ancient history she’s practically faded into legend, just another ghost of the past the kings and queens of summer are said to have exorcised from Narnia.
She turns pages curiously. It’s all handwritten, but the script is beautiful and easily read; Jill snuggles against a piece of the homewood tree carved to exactly fit someone’s back and tilts the book towards the fire for better light.
She’s so tired that it doesn’t take her long to fall asleep, enjoying the play of the firelight over her face. She’s only vaguely aware of Jewel coming in at some point, bringing in a draft of cold air and the strong scent of wet unicorn, which is nothing nearly so pleasant as clean, well-washed unicorn.
Jewel is still there when Jill wakes up, curled up surprisingly small on the other side of the fire, which by this point has died down to glowing coals. She leans over to stir the coals with a stick of wood, careful not to let any sparks escape – homewood trees are, unsurprisingly, vulnerable to fire – and catches the poetry book when it starts to fall from her lap, smoothing out the wrinkles she’d left in the pages before she closes it and sets it aside.
Her boots are by no means clean – there’s mud up to the tops of them – but they’ve more or less dried out by now. Emphasis on the less rather than the more, but Jill doesn’t have another pair; she puts on two pairs of stockings to compensate and takes one of Eustace’s jackets, since hers is still damp enough to wring out, before she opens the door and steps outside.
The rain’s turned into the kind of cold, wet drizzle she’s used to from England; Jill makes a face and soldiers on bravely, the mud threatening to suck her down at every step. There seem to be more people around than usual, but it’s hard to tell; there’s always someone new arriving at Arn Abedin. She hadn’t realized that so many people had escaped the Calormenes; she’s been aware of most of the camps, but there are any number of Narnians that have been living in the woods in ones or twos, or somewhat larger groups – not quite big enough to make one of the camps. It’s hard enough to survive in the camps; the notion of living with a group smaller than thirty or fifty or even a hundred – or more, some of the camps are bigger, though too big and it draws the Calormenes’ attention – seems unreal. How can you even survive?
Eustace’s jacket is too big on her, but it’s warm and it smells like him; Jill does up the buttons down the front while she can still feel her fingers and sticks her hands in the pockets, finding a handful of charm stones in one and a broken pencil in the other. She smoothes her fingers over one of the stones, trying to make out what the engraving on its surface might be from touch, then reaches up and draws the hood further down over her face as her stomach rumbles. There’s bound to be food somewhere – or at least something that passes for a reasonable facsimile of it. If there’s nothing to eat – and that’s a valid concern at any time in the Western Wild, let alone when there are so many people in one place at a time – she’ll settle for something hot to drink, but something, at least.
She nods hello to a pair of satyrs she knows from one of the Lantern Waste camps as she passes them, and again to a doe and her faun. The faun is painfully thin, nearly as much as its mother, and Jill feels a stab of pain at the sight. The children – but then again, if mothers want their children to be able to eat properly, all they have to do is leave the Western Wild and head eastwards towards the sea; surely they’ll be able to find a place in one of the Narnian villages. Granted, that leaves them privy to the whims of the Calormenes, but at least they’ll be fed. If they’re lucky.
She sees a cougar lurking ‘round the tumbled remains of what might once have been a wall – sixteen hundred years ago, if what Edmund had said can be believed. It sees her and snarls a little, before turning and bounding off in the opposite direction. Jill sets her teeth in her lower lip, frowning, before she lets the incident pass. There are plenty of Narnians who aren’t fond of her and Eustace – of what they represent. What they hadn’t succeeded in. One might even say failed.
She wonders if the Pevensies realize that they’re the backup. Pole and Scrubb couldn’t do one little thing, so Aslan has felt the need to bring in the big guns – well, the point here isn’t who wins, it’s that they win at all, and at this point Jill doesn’t care at all who kills Bahadur and frees Narnia so long as she gets to go home.
Thunder rumbles again, closer now, and Jill turns her face up the sky in time to see lightning flash across it, so bright it nearly blinds her. She stumbles over a rock – some part of the ruined castle – and someone catches her arm, steadying her.
“Thanks,” she says, turning towards him.
For a moment she thinks it’s a boy, but no; he’s about her own age, or a few years older, with short dark hair and olive-colored skin. He’s just very short, barely an inch or so taller than her own gangly five foot five. Jill opens her mouth to introduce herself, but another peel of thunder cuts her off, and she starts counting the seconds between the thunder and the lightning instead.
“One, two, three, four –”
Lightning snaps across the sky; she blinks the stars from her vision and starts to say, “I don’t think we’ve –”
More thunder; this time she only gets to two. She doesn’t even get a chance to try a third time, because this time the lightning precludes the thunder, so close she can smell the ozone in the air. “God!” she exclaims, and then the rain starts again in earnest, pouring down on them like some god in the heavens above has upended a bathtub. She lets the hood of her jacket fall back because it’s just no bloody use, not when it’s raining this much, and feels the water run down her face and through her still-damp hair, gathering in the hollows of her collarbones before it spills down the front of her shirt.
There’s another lightning strike, then another and another, the air crackling with the sound and the smell and the sight of it. Each one makes Jill jump, flinching at every belated thunderclap, so much so that she barely notices when the stranger catches at her elbow and starts to drag her along.
“Come on!” he shouts in her ear. “We should get under cover!”
Jill starts to yell back, My place is closer!, but then she considers that inside a homewood tree may not necessarily be the best idea in the midst of a lightning storm and lets herself be pulled along with him. By the time they reach the edge of the castle grounds, they’re well and truly soaked, and she’s rethinking her decision not to take the lead. After all, he’s a stranger; she’s certainly been here longer.
It takes her a few minutes to realize that they’re now in the northwest field, outside the bounds, and that the northwest field isn’t empty anymore. They’ve been using the area for military training, which seems to Jill to be a ridiculous waste of space since they could just put people there; too many people want to be within the bounds of Arn Abedin and some days it seems like they’re crammed together cheek to jowl. Now it’s filled with tents in neat rows, all a uniform color of drab olive-green; Jill stares at them in disbelief and thinks, what in blazes – before she sees the banners in front of three of the larger tents. Or rather, doesn’t see the banners; they’re there all right, but they’re wrapped limp around their flagpoles, the only part of them visible a lot of limp green and orange cloth.
The stranger thrusts aside the tent flap of the largest of the tents and pulls her in.
Jill jerks away from him, completely soaked through now, and stares at him. He’s just as short as he’d been before, though less unprepossessing than she’d thought at first, all high cheekbones and huge green eyes, which are now narrowed at her in consideration. He probably looks even better dry, she thinks; then looks at him again and rethinks that proposition. Perhaps if she wasn’t wet as well…
“What are you doing here, Jill?” Lucy’s voice says, sounding friendly enough, and Jill turns sharply on her heel to see the other girl regarding her calmly, her head cocked to one side in curiosity.
Edmund Pevensie is with her, and Vespasian of Glasswater, and Ourente – thank God – and three people she doesn’t know, all gathered around a wooden table that looks neat and well-constructed and has a few unexpected flourishes around the legs.
“I –” she begins, and can’t quite think of a good way to end that. I follow random strangers around Narnia? Well, that would certainly sum up most of her experience here.
“I brought her here,” the stranger declares. “Out of the rain.” He removes his wet cloak and hangs it up on – of all the absurd things – a coat rack, then holds out his hands for Eustace’s coat, which she removes slowly, a little reluctant to reveal the threadbare clothes underneath. Lucy and Edmund are in their old-fashioned splendor – perhaps it’s practical enough, but it still seems to Jill more like period costuming than anything else, pretty but useless – and Vespasian has, as Tirian said, somehow managed to keep up to date with the latest Cair Paravel fashions and carried his entire wardrobe with him from Archenland. The strangers are all dressed in unfamiliar style, but Jill knows enough to be able to tell that the quality of the cloth is very fine indeed; no one in the camps has anything like this.
She sees Edmund and Lucy exchange one of those looks which seems to pass for an entire conversation among the Pevensies, and then Edmund says slowly, “I suppose you might as well stay; there’s nothing here I expect you won’t find out at some point anyway.”
That means there was an option that they were going to throw her back out into the rain, which surprises Jill not at all – it certainly seems like the sort of thing Edmund Pevensie would do without thinking twice about it; she’d liked him well enough in England, and even nourished the beginnings of a crush on him for a few years, but here, in Narnia, he’s someone else entirely, someone she’s not entirely sure she likes or even recognizes. She resists the urge to stick her tongue out at him and turns to her unknown rescuer.
“I’m Jill Pole,” she says, holding her hand out to him.
He takes her forearm in a warrior’s clasp, not the handshake she’d expected, and says, “I’m Caspian.”
King Caspian of Narnia is several hundred years dead. She knows that much, at least. “No, you’re not,” Jill corrects, because honestly now, it’s not like anyone else from the distant past can be expected to show up, and she certainly wouldn’t expect him to be so short. Eustace had always spoken admiringly of him, after all, and she has the vague memory of him being a kind of magnificent figure, though that's as blurred as all her other memories of Aslan's country. She thinks he may not be meant to remember that.
There’s a choked sound behind her that might come from Edmund or might come from someone else; the stranger looks indignant and exclaims, “Yes, I am! I’m Don Caspian di Paolucci, of Greater Shoushan. At your service,” he adds as an afterthought.
Jill draws back from him automatically, flinching and reaching for the dagger on her belt. Foreigners. This lot is all foreigners – and foreigners have never done Narnia any good; you only have to look at the damned Calormenes for an example.
Edmund sighs, and Lucy says patiently, “These are Tirian’s cousins, Jill. They’re here to help – they were called by the horn just like everyone who’s already here.”
“Everyone except Tirian, Eustace, and I,” Jill corrects. “We weren’t summoned like dogs. And these are foreigners!” She takes a step back towards the door, not liking the way that Vespasian’s too-handsome face breaks into a bemused smile.
“Foreigners and friends of Narnia,” the slight woman standing by one of the strange men says. She’s got a definite accent to her words, something delicate and curling; it’s the same accent the stranger – Caspian di Paolucci, a Shoushani – has. “My mother is the Grand Duchessa Susiania di Paolucci, who was Susiania of Anvard in Archenland, niece to the Dowager Queen Altagracia of Narnia – grandmother to King Tirian. My brothers and I were all born in Narnia.”
“Besides, Pole,” Edmund says, sounding bored, “we need allies; Narnia can’t win this alone, not in a straight-up fight. Not against Calormen.” There’s something else in his tone, something that Jill’s heard far too many times before from far too many people: besides, you don’t get a choice in the matter, so you might as well learn to live with it. She’d heard it from her parents as a child, at Experiment House, from Eustace, from countless Narnians since she’s come here – all anyone seems to want to do is condescend to her.
She regards the four foreigners warily. “If you’re such great friends of Narnia,” she asks, “why haven’t you helped before? Sometime when it might actually have proved useful.”
Lucy frowns sharply, but doesn’t say anything; the taller stranger with dark, curly hair like a Telmarine Narnian says easily, “Greater Shoushan has her own interests at heart as well, Lady Jill. Calormen is a threat to the empire and always has been; if we had offered aid before, it would have done nothing to help Narnia and much to hurt Shoushan. It would have drawn this Tisroc’s eye to Cuore-d’Or, and that is something the Emperor would not have stood for. Now we have a chance.”
“And we haven’t actually told the Emperor yet,” Caspian adds.
“That should go splendidly,” Vespasian murmurs, looking more bemused with every second that passes.
“Well, it’s not like he can exactly bring us back,” the girl insists.
“If I was a betting man – and I am – I wouldn’t put money on that wager,” Vespasian says. “You don’t exactly go about telling monarchs what they can and cannot do; I grew up with Tirian. I know.”
“That’s why you do things without telling them,” the girl says, “which if any of the stories Mama tells us from her letters are true, you have rather a lot of experience with.”
Vespasian raises one finger. “Yes,” he agrees, “but taking the crown prince of Narnia out to the new money parties in Goldhouse Row is rather a different matter than bringing an army to another country. Even you’ll have to agree with me on that one, Lady Siusiana.”
Siusiana? Now they’re naming people after Susan Pevensie? Jill bites her lip and shoves down the urge to swell up in indignation like a marsh-wiggle, because of all the ridiculous things – nice enough as she may seem to be here, and that’s not very, Susan Pevensie had been so hated in England for something she’d done in Narnia that Edmund and Lucy wouldn’t even speak her name, and why, in the name of God and Aslan, the Narnians might consider her worthy enough to be a namesake – there’s just so much that she doesn’t know, that the Narnians don’t know –
But these aren’t Narnians, they’re Shoushani. Maybe they can be forgiven for being severely misinformed – and surely naming people after the Pevensies isn’t as bad as thinking they’re gods, the way the Narnians do. If she stays in Narnia a hundred years – and the idea makes her shudder; she just wants to go home – Jill will never understand Narnians. And she’ll definitely never understand the Pevensie siblings.
Still, Lucy sounds friendly enough when she murmurs in Jill’s ear, “That’s Donna Siusiana di Paolucci, and the tall one is Don Glozelle di Paolucci.” Jill hadn’t even seen her come ‘round the side of the table. “The dark one is Colonnello Ulisse Arkwright, of Paolucci’s household troops.”
Arkwright isn’t a Shoushani name – it sounds more like a Narnian one than anything else, but Jill holds her tongue on the question. She glares at Siusiana di Paolucci instead. Shoushanis. In Narnia. Surely they don’t need foreign help to solve their own problems; there are more than enough Narnians to challenge the Calormenes, and aren’t Aslan’s chosen saviors here as well? How do they intend to justify this and still claim to be the same people who freed Narnia from the White Witch and from the tyrant king Miraz without help? Tirian will not be pleased, Jill thinks with some satisfaction. Even if they are his relatives.
Vespasian and Siusiana have apparently finished their bickering, because Glozelle is saying, his voice steady and calm, “I would think that Eian of Archenland would be happy to help. After all, he has blood ties to the throne of Narnia as much as we do – more, if my memory serves me correctly.”
“Eian of Archenland has the Calormenes squatting on his doorstep and in his castle,” Vespasian says briskly. “There may be more Calormenes in Archenland than there are Archenlanders. The Tisroc holds Archenland in all but name. No, cousin, Eian won’t help, not until he’s had his own country secured, and that will come hard: the Tisroc knows that Archenland is the gateway to Narnia, and it will take the next thing to a miracle to free that country from his grasp.”
“We have the gods themselves,” Ourente says, his voice quiet but steady, and Jill nearly strains something, she jerks around to glare at him so quickly. She likes Ourente! She’d thought he was sensible!
Edmund and Lucy share an unreadable look, the kind of look where a whole conversation can be exchanged in a heartbeat. “Well,” Edmund says at last, “you’re not the one who’s going to go convince the King of Archenland to take a stand against the Calormenes. You may be the only person I know who’s actually worse at this kind of diplomacy than Peter.”
“Ha,” Lucy says, a world of scorn in that one syllable. “That’s because convincing someone to go to war is the only kind of diplomacy Peter can do without losing his temper and threatening to unleash the army.”
“He did get us that marriage treaty that one time.”
“Yes, and then my husband-to-be poisoned Peter and I had to kill him at the altar. That went so well, I recall.”
Jill’s more or less used to the two of them sharing this kind of reminiscence, but there’s something else beneath it, something that hadn’t been there in England. The heat is in Lucy’s cheeks and she looks warmly amused, smiling a little in remembrance; even Edmund looks bemused, and it takes a lot to make his rare smiles genuine. Jill regards them curiously, trying to puzzle out what the new layer to their reminiscences is, and then realizes what it is they’re actually talking about.
“You want to bring Archenlanders into Narnia?” she bursts out. “Archenland is the one that let the Calormenes into Narnia in the first place!”
“No, that would be my uncle’s idiotic decision to disband the navy before King Gerion was even laid in his grave,” Vespasian says dryly. “He thought the navy was a waste of money, and that defending Narnia’s shipping lanes against the Black Fleet was none of the crown’s business. The old king, my grandfather, would never have left things badly enough that a Calormene could have entered the Bight, let alone get close enough to dump twenty thousand Calormene troops on the shore.”
“My mother says that King Erlian was as mad as Baiart the Boneslayer,” Caspian says helpfully, and Glozelle casts his eyes heavenward, as if praying for patience.
Vespasian frowns at him. “What kind of Shoushani fairytale is that?” he demands.
“The kind stolen from the Belgarines,” Edmund says. “They told that story in our time, too – a prince who found that his mistress had been sharing her bed with his brother the king, so he had her killed and baked into a pie that he served his brother and his queen. The queen died of the shock, and Prince Baiart left the castle and fled to the south, where he founded the country of Ransky. Baiart and his brother died on each other’s swords years later.” For a moment he looks briefly pleased. “I believe that was one of the excuses Belgarion used when they invaded Ransky in our second year, even though Baiart and his brother must have lived and died centuries earlier.”
There’s one of those moments of temporary disconnect that Jill’s nearly gotten used to, where the four Shoushanis and the two Narnians go pale and Lucy and Edmund share another one of those long-suffering looks. Jill digs her toe into the carpet-covered floor of the tent, wondering who in the name of God brings a carpet and furniture with them on a military campaign – if that’s what this is, and she supposes it is. It reminds her of something she’d heard about at Experiment House, of a general who used to travel to all his battles with a silver tea set.
After a moment, Vespasian says, “King Erlian wasn’t mad. He was just very – focused – after Tirian’s mother died. And he thought the giants in the north were more of a threat than the Black Fleet or the Calormenes.”
“Well, King Erlian’s dead now,” Edmund says matter-of-factly.
Lucy frowns at Vespasian momentarily, then turns to Edmund, going on as if nothing’s happened at all, “Well, if I can’t go and Peter shouldn’t leave the country – even I know that, Ed, I can do most diplomacy – who do you plan to send? It should be one of us if you want to convince a king of Archenland. Archenland,” she adds with some bitterness. “Which is another reason Peter shouldn’t go; he hates Archenland and Archenlanders.”
“Possibly because Lune spent fifteen years trying to conquer Narnia,” Edmund says dryly. “The last time Peter was in Anvard he and Lune came to blows.” He frowns. “I could go, I suppose.” He doesn’t sound enthusiastic about the notion.
“Your majesties, if I may,” Vespasian offers, and continues at Lucy’s nod, “I have spent the past five years in King Eian’s court, and I know him. He wants Archenland free of the Calormenes as much as Tirian wants Narnia free, but the Tisroc’s hold is tight. Still, he will not act without a certainty of victory, and he has a – weakness – that may make him more willing to respond to one envoy than another.”
Edmund raises his eyebrows.
“Beautiful women,” Vespasian elaborates.
“Well, I’m assuming he’s human –” Edmund begins, but Lucy tramples over him before he’s gotten more than a few syllables out.
“Oh, I know,” she says, looking triumphant. “We’ll send Susan. She’s always been good at playing the whore in order to get something she wants.”
Jill barely notices the momentary pause before Lucy says Susan’s name, or that it’s the first time she’s said it; the only thing she can think is, If she’s still alive.
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Caspian, Glozelle, and Siusiana di Paolucci come fromaella_irene's Dust-inspired ficlet.
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: PG-13
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 thirteen, 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.
“You smell like wet goat,” a wolf named Graynor complains as Orci lowers himself into the hollow where they’re waiting.
The faun makes a rude sign in his direction. “And you smell like wet dog, but you don’t hear me saying anything about that, do you? It’s bloody pouring out, and you know what that means.”
“Yeah, you smell like wet goat.”
“Wet bow strings,” Jill says, and they all look at her. She coughs. “Be careful of your bow strings.”
“Well, we know that,” says an archer who came in with the wolfswood camp, caressing his bow between his hands. He hasn’t strung it yet, protecting the string in a scrap of oiled silk.
Jill tests her own bow string as inconspicuously as she can, relieved to find that it still has its proper tension. She curls warm against Jewel’s side, listening to Graynor and Orci squabble, nearly drowning out the sound of the pouring rain outside.
There are six of them, crowded cheek to jowl in a hollow by the side of the road. Jill’s not even sure how they’ll be able to hear the Calormenes coming, between the rain and the wind. No, thunder though, not yet. And thank God for that; even though she’s done this a hundred times before, they always call it off around lightning. The sky is the only place where neither Narnia nor Calormen hold any power, and the sky has no pity for anyone on the earth below.
They’d wondered, early on, if the Calormenes would continue running their caravans and supply trains in foul weather, but they’d quickly found that nothing stopped them. The work gangs kept working even when they were hip deep in mud and dropping from exhaustion, kept working when it was hot enough outside to fry an egg on a chunk of rock, and kept working when it was too dark to an inch pas their noses. There’s hardly a question of whether the Calormenes are coming or not, there’s just a question of how far off schedule they’re going to be. They’re already late; Jill had developed a more-or-less accurate internal clock when she’d been in the north with Puddleglum and Eustace, and she’d never quite lost the knack of it, even in England. The Calormenes could be here any minute now, and she’s got to be ready. They’ve all got to be ready.
It’s hard to attack one of the work gangs, though Tirian had insisted on doing so every time the opportunity had presented itself. There are too many guards, too many prisoners, too many people to deal with as quickly and efficiently as they do the supply trains, when they don’t have to worry about civilian casualties, and some of the Narnians at Haven had protested the extra mouths. These orders come down from their king and queen of legend, though, and people don’t argue with Edmund and Lucy Pevensie the way they do with Tirian. Jill’s given up on trying to understand it; Tirian may be Narnia’s rightful king, but everyone in the country falls to their knees in front of the Pevensies. Superstitions are impossible to argue with; five years here and months with Puddleglum has taught her that it’s easier just to not bother, and garners about the same result.
A squirrel comes by, scampering down the hollow and saying, “The king says they’re coming,” before he takes off again.
The wolfswood archer strings his bow in one smooth motion and reaches down to the quiver beneath his knees, untying the top of the oiled silk bag he keeps his arrows in to protect them from the rain. He slings the quiver back over his shoulder, fastening the straps that keep it from shifting when he moves.
Jill does the same, rubbing her fingers together to see how the damp is affecting her grip. The other archers check their bows and quivers as well and Graynor stands up, grinning like a madman, his tongue very red as it hangs out of his mouth.
“Always a good day to kill Calormenes,” he says brightly.
Jill scoots away from Jewel, giving the unicorn as much space as she can. This will be very fast.
She hears the Calormenes pass by, a kind of heavy squishing sound as they march through the mud, and holds her breath, twisting her fingers on the shaft of her bow before she draws an arrow and puts it to the string.
She’s listening for the horns, and when they come, they’re brassy and bright, followed a moment later by the scream of the Red Company oliphants, silver horns with a double curve and the Red Company symbol stamped into the metal. She’s seen them; they’re big, looping around a horseman’s arm so that he can swing a weapon or draw a bow if need be. The Red Company is apparently very practical about such things.
The horns are the signal they’ve been waiting for; Graynor throws back his head and howls as the rest of them scramble out of the hollow and into the ditch at the side of the road, where water’s swirling ankle deep and freezing through Jill’s leather boots. The other archers spread out along the edge of the road, picking their targets and firing, seemingly heedless of the sounds of battle from the rear guard and the point guard. Narnians in front; the Red Company behind; archers and more Narnians to the side. They have the Calormenes trapped.
It’s the same confused mess of blood and screaming as fighting always is. Jill hates it, has always hated it, but as much as she hates it at least she’s gotten used enough to it not to throw up afterwards. Most of the time. She picks her targets carefully, letting her eyes go out of focus in between. At one point she sees Graynor go past, or thinks she does, and wishes the wolf luck in his killing spree. She knows him a little, though not well; he’s a Haven refugee, his pack lost to the Calormenes, and sometimes the rage consumes him. She’s been in battle long enough to that sometimes the rage consumes her, too.
It’s not like that this time. This is plain killing, practically target shooting, though the wind makes it near-impossible to hit an accurate target. None of the Calormenes get near her; Jewel stays with Jill, horn and hooves making mincemeat of any Calormene who comes close, and for that Jill’s grateful. She’s more likely to take her own knife to her throat than let herself be taken prisoner again, not after the last time. Never again. She’ll kill herself first.
The fight is over very quickly, though it doesn’t seem it. Jill unstrings her bow and slips it into the straps on the side of her quiver, checking herself for a moment before she gets the sense of her balance again. Her bow is a longbow, simply and easily made out of a single piece of yew, with horn nocks on the ends, strung with flax; it’s been hard to get silk lately, even though it makes better bow strings. It’s the same kind of bow she’d learned how to shoot on, all those years ago on the moors in the north. This isn’t her bow, not her good one; she’d lost her own bow in the failed ambush where they’d been captured.
She touches the hilt of the long knife on her hip as she clambers up onto the road, sliding in the mud that makes up the steep slope of the ditch and reaching for Jewel to balance herself. The unicorn’s fur is sticky and matted with blood beneath her palm, but the rain is already starting to wash it away.
“Very neat,” he says critically, looking around at the carnage – as soon as they’d realized what was going on, a number of the Narnian prisoners had turned on their captors. “I hadn’t thought that King Edmund would have had much of a knack at these sorts of things.”
Graynor comes back to them, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and blood staining the short fur of his muzzle. “What, you doubt the King of Evening, Jewel? And you from Cair Paravel, too.”
“Keep your country superstitions to yourself, Graynor,” Jewel says, staring down his long nose at the wolf.
Jill smiles to herself, a little pleased. Not everyone in Narnia believes that the Pevensies are gods – not Jewel, at least, and that’s what counts; Jewel is Jill’s friend. It’s not that she doesn’t like them, because she does – some of them, at least; Peter scares her and Susan disgusts her, or at least she had back in England; Jill’s not sure what to make of the older girl now. It’s just that they’re people, and the way that some of the Narnians treat them is nothing short of ridiculous. At least they don’t seem to believe it themselves.
Graynor laughs. “Like you city boys don’t light candles to the four little gods as well as us in the country. It’s suns to moons there’s even one or two of you who sacrifice dumb animals on festival nights.”
“There are fools everywhere,” Jewel says, his voice sharp with annoyance. “Farmbred yokel.”
“Cityborn snob.”
It’s nothing that hasn’t been said before and with more heat, so Jill clears her throat and points out, “There has just been a fight, you know,” and pushes between the two of them to get onto the road, where some of the Narnians are occupied with making sure all the Calormenes are dead and others with striking the chains off the prisoners. Most of them are gaunt from starvation and overwork; a few of them look quite mad. There’s been a lot of that going around in Narnia these days, especially among those freed for the work gangs. Perhaps it’s kinder for them; they don’t tend to live long, and it saves those in the camps the trouble of feeding the people who are incapable of doing any kind of work. Jill’s used to burying bodies.
Jewel and Graynor break off their bickering hastily to follow her. Jewel’s all she has left, of course, and Graynor – Graynor’s practically a stranger, but one on terms of some sort with Eustace; he’d come to her after Edmund had brought her back from the Calormene camp and Lucy had left her sitting on one of the huge roots of a homewood tree that lightning had split down the center at some point, crying hysterically as soon as the other girl had left her alone with only Jewel for company. Eustace owes me money, he’d said. Might be he’ll be more inclined to pay it if you’re alive. She doesn’t remember why Eustace owes him money, or maybe Eustace just hadn’t told her – they share most things, but not everything – but this is Narnia; she’ll take her company where she can get it.
Some of the newly freed Narnians are very weak indeed; the Calormenes work their prisoners to the death. Some are criminals, political or otherwise; most are just unlucky. Many of them are weeping, others are defiant, a few are looking around at their rescuers, trying to find friends or family. One gaunt faun comes up to Jill, his blue eyes huge in his thin face, and says, “Do you know a minotaur named Laresca? Or a stag, his name is Choudburry –”
She racks her brain, just in case – she knows a lot of people – but no one comes to mind, and Jill says apologetically, “No, I don’t, I’m sorry – let me get you off the road – come with me, here, you don’t want to stay here.”
Over his shoulder, she sees the wolfswood archer she’d been with in the hollow rush past, throwing up gouts of mud with every step, and fling his arms around a pale, pretty woman with the faint greenish tinge of dryad blood in her skin and red marks on her wrists and neck. She puts her face into his shoulder and sobs.
Jill has to smile at that, because it’s not often that happens. Everything in Narnia is just too big; it’s next to impossible to find what you’re looking for here. She puts the faun off on someone else and plunges back into the muck to do what she can, trying to get people off the road and into the woods as quickly as possible. They can’t stay here.
The wind snaps at her tightly braided hair and Jewel’s mane, driving the rain practically sideways and making her stagger into Graynor’s side. She’ll be surprised if she can find any of her arrows stuck in Calormene bodies; even the Narnian archer goddess couldn’t shoot straight in this. Only the Narnian archer goddess is the Queen of Spring – she’s seen a few of the shrines – and the Queen of Spring is apparently Susan Pevensie, and Jill’s met Susan Pevensie. No goddess she; she’s as human as Jill – or is she, there’s something exceedingly complicated about the whole mess, and thinking about it hurts Jill’s head. And Susan Pevensie isn’t even here, for that matter, so whether or not she could shoot in this mess is just plain irrelevant.
Only Jill knows why Susan isn’t here, and it’s nothing nearly so reassuring as simply being put off by the wretched weather. After all, Jill’s seen not only the worst winter Narnia’s had in generations, but an Ettinsmoor snowstorm without any kind of cover. Susan’s had English winters and a Narnian summer that lasted fifteen years; one of them is better suited for this. Still, she thinks that even Susan Pevensie might prefer being outside in a Narnian spring storm to being inside Cair Paravel in a Calormene prison. Jill wouldn’t set foot in Cair Paravel if her life depended on it.
She trips over something – someone – half-buried in the mud and goes tumbling down, catching herself on the heel of her hand and her elbow, getting herself all over mud and wrenching her arm painfully. She spits out mud that tastes unpleasantly of blood and gets back up, slipping and clinging to Jewel as leverage. God, it’s a miracle that this ambush didn’t end in disaster, between the mud and the rain and the wind. Storms aren’t usually so generous to them; usually something goes very wrong.
“Jill!” she hears Lucy say, shouting over the sound of the wind. Jill looks up to see the other girl bent over the neck of her little Calormene horse. She’s in trousers and boiled leather like Jill, a sword banging against her knee and her formerly tightly-braided hair completely free and plastered against one side of her face. “We’ve gotten everyone accounted for. Go find Ourente and the others; we have to get out of here before this gets worse.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” she replies, but the words are lost in the wind and Lucy turns her horse away without a reply, the creature slipping in the mud and going down nearly to its hindquarters before it can scramble back up.
Jill puts an arm over Jewel’s neck for support and balance, the world going briefly red and green as the wind drives rain into her eyes, and starts toward the opposite side of the road, the western side. She winces when she sees the ditch there already half-filled with water and rising fast, but at this point, what of it? She’s already soaked to the skin.
There’s a loud cracking sound that Jill can hear over the storm as an oak tree’s roots pull free of the waterlogged soil. She sees the tree fall, branches snapping as it hits the ground, and feels the vibrations spread up her legs through her boot soles. The tree spans the entirety of the road and Jill stares at it, a little awe-struck by the size of the thing. The trees in Narnia –
“Jill!” Jewel gasps. “The water’s too deep – get on my back –”
Jill takes one look at the rapidly-filling ditch and doesn’t argue. She hoists herself up onto Jewel’s back, clinging to the unicorn’s mane, and closes her eyes as he plunges forward into the ditch, hooves slipping and sliding in the mud. The water’s up to her hips and Jewel’s chest, cold enough to make her gasp. It must not all be rainwater; there must be snowmelt off the mountains somewhere in the bottom in the ditch as well. Graynor jumps in after them.
There’s a current in the water, strong enough that Jewel has to fight for his footing even before he starts moving. If it wasn’t raining, he could have jumped the ditch easily – Jill’s seen him do twice this length without breaking a sweat – but as slippery as the round is now, there’s no way for him to get any kind of footing on either side of the ditch. He’d break a leg for sure – or his neck.
He finally makes it up onto solid ground, soaking wet and so dirty it’s impossible to tell there’s a white unicorn beneath all the muck. Graynor climbs up beside them, too worn out even to curse, and Jill can’t even think what crossing a river might be like in this mess. Fortunately they don’t have to worry about that; it’s only half a day’s walk worth of rain-soaked forest between them and Arn Abedin. No rivers. As far as she remembers, not even any streams larger than a trickle of water here and there, but that had been this morning, when it hadn’t begun raining yet and the sky was just a dull, imposing block of solid gray. At least winter’s over. This would be considerably more unpleasant in a snowstorm, and then they leave behind a trail a blind mouse could follow, let alone a Calormene scout who can track a fly forty miles through the desert with a few sandstorms thrown in for good measure. If it wasn’t for the horrible things the Calormenes do to Narnians, Jill would admire them for that, at least.
“You may as well stay mounted,” Jewel says to her as they rejoin the main group of Narnians, all of whom look as bad as Jill feels and some of whom look worse. “It will be better for you, I think.”
“Are you sure?” Jill asks, because if there’s one thing she’s learned in Narnia aside from always keeping a knife on her person no else knows about, it’s that Narnians aren’t meant to be treated like regular beasts. They’re people. And you just don’t ride people. Lucy and Edmund seem surprised by this fact, like it’s some kind of revelation; Jill can’t think where they might have gotten the idea that riding a talking horse is all right, because it’s just absurd. She’s ridden Jewel before, once or twice, but only in the most dire of circumstances. She wouldn’t dream of it otherwise, and she’d certainly never suggest it.
“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t,” Jewel says. Jill has to strain to hear the words, because Jewel’s head is hanging down with exhaustion. The pure white of his horn is the only part of him that’s clean; the rain’s washed the mud and blood off the spirals there much more easily than it has his coat, which is still spattered in mud. His horn seems somehow unreal, like it doesn’t belong here, amidst the dirtiness of this place.
“Thank you,” Jill says politely, rubbing a hand down the side of his neck. Nothing as soft as a unicorn’s fur, not in all the known world. There’s nothing she likes better than lying out on a summer night with her head on Jewel’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of wildflowers and staring up at the Narnian stars. There are peaceful moments in Narnia, she supposes, rare and stolen from the usual stretch of death-defying terror. Still, they don’t make up for the rest of the mess.
It takes longer to get back to Arn Abedin than it took to get to the road in the first place, partially because there are so many people who can’t keep the pace they’d taken when they left this morning and partially because it doesn’t stop raining the entire time, although at least the wind dies down some after a few hours. Jill’s ridiculously relieved that she’s riding rather than on foot; Jewel’s the only thing keeping her warm. They actually end up sustaining more injuries on the way back to Arn Abedin than in the actual fight, short as it was; Jill watches Lucy treat half a dozen broken bones from people who have slipped in the mud and fallen badly. One of the Red Company horses slips, steps in a hole, breaks a leg, and has to be put down; she sees the mercenary flinch like he’s just lost a friend rather than a dumb animal. Regular horses are just animals, she’s found. Boring, mindless, time-consuming – they don’t keep dumb animals in the camps. They’re a liability. People get killed for that sort of thing.
They make it back to Arn Abedin in the pale light of early morning, soaked to the skin and exhausted to the bone. Jill slides off Jewel’s back into calf-deep mud, spitting her hair out of her mouth, and looks around. It’s still bloody raining. She lifts one foot out of the mud with a heavy squelching sound and stares at it in dismay. The mud will take hours to get out, and she doesn’t have an extra pair of boots to wear in the meantime.
Jill puts her foot back down when she starts to lose her balance, grabbing at Jewel’s shoulder when she wavers precariously in mid-air for a moment. “What I wouldn’t give for a hot bath,” she says wistfully once she’s gotten her footing again, pushing her hair out of her eyes with both hands.
Jewel’s blue eyes go huge and dreamy. “Oh, that would be lovely,” he says. “I miss Cair Paravel. Not the Cair Paravel now,” he adds hastily. “The Cair Paravel I used to know, King Erlian’s Cair Paravel. And Tirian’s.”
Jill’s never been to Cair Paravel, not in this Narnia. She has a vague memory of Caspian’s Cair Paravel, all bright lights and brightly-colored banners, smiling faces and music like a faun’s pipe dream, but that’s not real. Maybe it’s never been real. It’s hard to know these things here.
The sound of shouting draws her attention and Jill looks around for the source, unsurprised to find Arnau and Edmund Pevensie yelling at each other. They’d be nose to nose if Arnau had Edmund’s height. There’s been a lot of yelling lately, mostly between Edmund and Arnau, though sometimes it’s Edmund and Lucy or Arnau and Ourente, though she remembers seeing Lucy and Arnau screaming at each other once. Most of it doesn’t make sense to Jill; as far as she can ascertain, the main bone of contention seems to be about who’s been left in charge of Arn Abedin now that Tirian is gone. Personally, she doesn’t see any reason why Edmund and Lucy should be; she doesn’t much like Arnau, but Edmund and Lucy don’t know Narnia, don’t know Narnians, and don’t know the Calormenes in Narnia. If Jill had any choice in the matter, she’d vote for Ourente – at least she knows him; he’s a good…not a man, he’s a good centaur – but she apparently doesn’t have a choice in the matter. Apparently no one else does either.
She sees Edmund throw up his hands in frustration, then turn away and shout for his sister and Tirian’s cousin Vespasian. He sees Jewel and shouts for him too.
Jewel sighs, long-suffering, and says, “Why don’t you go and clean up, Lady Jill? I doubt that whatever it is, it’s of any kind of interest to you, and I’m sure you’d like to get dry and warm.”
Jill stares over Jewel’s shoulder at Edmund’s dark head, torn between – dear God in heaven – going and finding a fire and getting her wet things off, or going with Jewel and representing Tirian’s best interests, because she has a sneaking suspicion that no one’s considering what Tirian might do in whatever new piece of trouble Arnau’s brought the Pevensies. Sheer physical comfort wins out; the last thing she needs is to catch pneumonia, and someone has to keep an eye on Edmund and Lucy, given the fact that the Narnians worship them like they might the Savior come down on Earth again. Just not now.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no fire lit in the homewood tree she shares with Eustace and Tirian. Jill doesn’t bother lighting a precious candle in the close darkness of the space once she’s closed the door behind her, just builds up a little pyramid of kindling by touch and strikes a light on a tinderbox, cupping one hand around the base of the pyramid and blowing gently until she’s sure the spark’s caught. That done, she begins to peel herself out of her wet things, looking around for something to towel her hair dry on before she puts on something new.
It’s not that Eustace and Tirian had left in a hurry, but their things are still strewn around the interior of the tree, and Jill hasn’t been able to bring herself to pick them up and order them, which isn’t something she’s any particular skill at anyway. There’s not much need for tidiness when you’re busy fighting for your life; none of them have ever picked up the habit. She has vague memories of Puddleglum trying to install the notion of proper packing in her and Eustace when they’d been in the north, but none of it had stuck; he’d had a neatly ordered pack, and Jill and Eustace had had things sticking out of their bags and odd lumps in even odder places. Finding dry clothes had turned into a sort of nightmare then, because hers invariably migrated down to the lowest places of her pack, and that was even if she had something dry left in the first place; that had been an especially uncommon occurrence, especially as autumn wore on into winter and they’d started trekking through snow. After that…Jill remembers a span of days or weeks where she’d never been completely warm or dry. That had ended when they reached Harfang, of course.
She eventually ends up toweling her hair dry on a shirt of Eustace’s that she distinctly remembers being dirty when he’d left, so it’s not like the streaks of mud she leaves across it will make much difference, and heats a pan of water over the now-crackling fire to give herself a sponge bath before she dresses in dry things. They’re patched and threadbare, not particularly warm, but at least they’re dry. This completed, and her wet things hung up before the fire – on the next dry day she’ll go down to the river and do laundry; she’s certainly got enough things to make it worthwhile – she wraps herself in a blanket and curls up by the fire, warming her hands and trying to take the chill out of them. Normally she’d be doing something – fletching arrows, mending armor, knitting socks – but her fingers are still frozen, and she thinks it’s surely all right if she takes a little bit of a break, just for this day. She’s been busying herself with work since Edmund brought her back from the Calormene camp; it keeps her from thinking about things she’d rather never think of again in her life.
Naturally, as she’s had more than enough occasion to learn, the things she doesn’t want to think of are the first things that spring to mind whenever she has the space to think. Perhaps it might be better to have something to occupy her mind with after all.
Tirian has the ability to find books in the most unlikely of places; there are a few leather-bound volumes lying on the low, roughly made table in the other chamber. Jill gets up to fetch them over, the blanket trailing behind her as she does, and returns to her spot by the fire. The light is bad for reading by, but at least that means she’ll have something to concentrate on.
The first is some kind of history; Jill considers it, then discards it. She has quite enough of history in her everyday life, thank you very much, and that’s even counting the fact that the Pevensies may not be who everyone says they are. The second one is the script of a play called The Three Sisters of the Shuddering Wood, written in some arcane form of Narnian Jill’s not even going to pretend to know how to read for the benefit of her own sanity. She sets that one aside too, and opens the third book.
This one is slim, bound in green leather with faded gold letters stamped on the side; most of the gold has peeled away, and the light’s not good enough for her to make out the title. She opens it up to the title page, blinking in astonishment to see the neat copperplate handwriting there.
To my dear Lucy, on her seventeenth birthday,
When we first met seven years ago, snow was still thick on the ground and the White Witch ruled in Narnia. Well, my dear, it is winter again, but the White Witch has long since left Narnia, praise Aslan, and now we can celebrate as we have done time immemorial. I remember that I told you once that my father had been a writer before the White Witch came, when I was only a small faun. I remember now that this is not strictly true. My father had wanted to be a writer, yes, but he had no talent for it, and so he contented himself with collecting the works of those who did have the gift. This is one of those collections, published the year before I was born (or so it seems, from the inscription). I give it to you with the same words that my father inscribed in it: because hope is a pretty thing, and a fine thing, but it is nothing without substance; that substance we call faith.
All my love,
Your friend, Tumnus
This was Lucy’s. Jill runs her fingers lightly over the words, trying to distinguish something of the writer, but there’s nothing there but ink. How did Tirian manage to get his hands on this? When he gets nervous he starts going on about some rare book or another, and this certainly seems as if it might fit the bill, but where on earth did he get it? This is the sort of book she’d expect to see in a rare book shop back in London. If this is genuine, it surely must be thousands of years old; the White Witch is so much ancient history she’s practically faded into legend, just another ghost of the past the kings and queens of summer are said to have exorcised from Narnia.
She turns pages curiously. It’s all handwritten, but the script is beautiful and easily read; Jill snuggles against a piece of the homewood tree carved to exactly fit someone’s back and tilts the book towards the fire for better light.
She’s so tired that it doesn’t take her long to fall asleep, enjoying the play of the firelight over her face. She’s only vaguely aware of Jewel coming in at some point, bringing in a draft of cold air and the strong scent of wet unicorn, which is nothing nearly so pleasant as clean, well-washed unicorn.
Jewel is still there when Jill wakes up, curled up surprisingly small on the other side of the fire, which by this point has died down to glowing coals. She leans over to stir the coals with a stick of wood, careful not to let any sparks escape – homewood trees are, unsurprisingly, vulnerable to fire – and catches the poetry book when it starts to fall from her lap, smoothing out the wrinkles she’d left in the pages before she closes it and sets it aside.
Her boots are by no means clean – there’s mud up to the tops of them – but they’ve more or less dried out by now. Emphasis on the less rather than the more, but Jill doesn’t have another pair; she puts on two pairs of stockings to compensate and takes one of Eustace’s jackets, since hers is still damp enough to wring out, before she opens the door and steps outside.
The rain’s turned into the kind of cold, wet drizzle she’s used to from England; Jill makes a face and soldiers on bravely, the mud threatening to suck her down at every step. There seem to be more people around than usual, but it’s hard to tell; there’s always someone new arriving at Arn Abedin. She hadn’t realized that so many people had escaped the Calormenes; she’s been aware of most of the camps, but there are any number of Narnians that have been living in the woods in ones or twos, or somewhat larger groups – not quite big enough to make one of the camps. It’s hard enough to survive in the camps; the notion of living with a group smaller than thirty or fifty or even a hundred – or more, some of the camps are bigger, though too big and it draws the Calormenes’ attention – seems unreal. How can you even survive?
Eustace’s jacket is too big on her, but it’s warm and it smells like him; Jill does up the buttons down the front while she can still feel her fingers and sticks her hands in the pockets, finding a handful of charm stones in one and a broken pencil in the other. She smoothes her fingers over one of the stones, trying to make out what the engraving on its surface might be from touch, then reaches up and draws the hood further down over her face as her stomach rumbles. There’s bound to be food somewhere – or at least something that passes for a reasonable facsimile of it. If there’s nothing to eat – and that’s a valid concern at any time in the Western Wild, let alone when there are so many people in one place at a time – she’ll settle for something hot to drink, but something, at least.
She nods hello to a pair of satyrs she knows from one of the Lantern Waste camps as she passes them, and again to a doe and her faun. The faun is painfully thin, nearly as much as its mother, and Jill feels a stab of pain at the sight. The children – but then again, if mothers want their children to be able to eat properly, all they have to do is leave the Western Wild and head eastwards towards the sea; surely they’ll be able to find a place in one of the Narnian villages. Granted, that leaves them privy to the whims of the Calormenes, but at least they’ll be fed. If they’re lucky.
She sees a cougar lurking ‘round the tumbled remains of what might once have been a wall – sixteen hundred years ago, if what Edmund had said can be believed. It sees her and snarls a little, before turning and bounding off in the opposite direction. Jill sets her teeth in her lower lip, frowning, before she lets the incident pass. There are plenty of Narnians who aren’t fond of her and Eustace – of what they represent. What they hadn’t succeeded in. One might even say failed.
She wonders if the Pevensies realize that they’re the backup. Pole and Scrubb couldn’t do one little thing, so Aslan has felt the need to bring in the big guns – well, the point here isn’t who wins, it’s that they win at all, and at this point Jill doesn’t care at all who kills Bahadur and frees Narnia so long as she gets to go home.
Thunder rumbles again, closer now, and Jill turns her face up the sky in time to see lightning flash across it, so bright it nearly blinds her. She stumbles over a rock – some part of the ruined castle – and someone catches her arm, steadying her.
“Thanks,” she says, turning towards him.
For a moment she thinks it’s a boy, but no; he’s about her own age, or a few years older, with short dark hair and olive-colored skin. He’s just very short, barely an inch or so taller than her own gangly five foot five. Jill opens her mouth to introduce herself, but another peel of thunder cuts her off, and she starts counting the seconds between the thunder and the lightning instead.
“One, two, three, four –”
Lightning snaps across the sky; she blinks the stars from her vision and starts to say, “I don’t think we’ve –”
More thunder; this time she only gets to two. She doesn’t even get a chance to try a third time, because this time the lightning precludes the thunder, so close she can smell the ozone in the air. “God!” she exclaims, and then the rain starts again in earnest, pouring down on them like some god in the heavens above has upended a bathtub. She lets the hood of her jacket fall back because it’s just no bloody use, not when it’s raining this much, and feels the water run down her face and through her still-damp hair, gathering in the hollows of her collarbones before it spills down the front of her shirt.
There’s another lightning strike, then another and another, the air crackling with the sound and the smell and the sight of it. Each one makes Jill jump, flinching at every belated thunderclap, so much so that she barely notices when the stranger catches at her elbow and starts to drag her along.
“Come on!” he shouts in her ear. “We should get under cover!”
Jill starts to yell back, My place is closer!, but then she considers that inside a homewood tree may not necessarily be the best idea in the midst of a lightning storm and lets herself be pulled along with him. By the time they reach the edge of the castle grounds, they’re well and truly soaked, and she’s rethinking her decision not to take the lead. After all, he’s a stranger; she’s certainly been here longer.
It takes her a few minutes to realize that they’re now in the northwest field, outside the bounds, and that the northwest field isn’t empty anymore. They’ve been using the area for military training, which seems to Jill to be a ridiculous waste of space since they could just put people there; too many people want to be within the bounds of Arn Abedin and some days it seems like they’re crammed together cheek to jowl. Now it’s filled with tents in neat rows, all a uniform color of drab olive-green; Jill stares at them in disbelief and thinks, what in blazes – before she sees the banners in front of three of the larger tents. Or rather, doesn’t see the banners; they’re there all right, but they’re wrapped limp around their flagpoles, the only part of them visible a lot of limp green and orange cloth.
The stranger thrusts aside the tent flap of the largest of the tents and pulls her in.
Jill jerks away from him, completely soaked through now, and stares at him. He’s just as short as he’d been before, though less unprepossessing than she’d thought at first, all high cheekbones and huge green eyes, which are now narrowed at her in consideration. He probably looks even better dry, she thinks; then looks at him again and rethinks that proposition. Perhaps if she wasn’t wet as well…
“What are you doing here, Jill?” Lucy’s voice says, sounding friendly enough, and Jill turns sharply on her heel to see the other girl regarding her calmly, her head cocked to one side in curiosity.
Edmund Pevensie is with her, and Vespasian of Glasswater, and Ourente – thank God – and three people she doesn’t know, all gathered around a wooden table that looks neat and well-constructed and has a few unexpected flourishes around the legs.
“I –” she begins, and can’t quite think of a good way to end that. I follow random strangers around Narnia? Well, that would certainly sum up most of her experience here.
“I brought her here,” the stranger declares. “Out of the rain.” He removes his wet cloak and hangs it up on – of all the absurd things – a coat rack, then holds out his hands for Eustace’s coat, which she removes slowly, a little reluctant to reveal the threadbare clothes underneath. Lucy and Edmund are in their old-fashioned splendor – perhaps it’s practical enough, but it still seems to Jill more like period costuming than anything else, pretty but useless – and Vespasian has, as Tirian said, somehow managed to keep up to date with the latest Cair Paravel fashions and carried his entire wardrobe with him from Archenland. The strangers are all dressed in unfamiliar style, but Jill knows enough to be able to tell that the quality of the cloth is very fine indeed; no one in the camps has anything like this.
She sees Edmund and Lucy exchange one of those looks which seems to pass for an entire conversation among the Pevensies, and then Edmund says slowly, “I suppose you might as well stay; there’s nothing here I expect you won’t find out at some point anyway.”
That means there was an option that they were going to throw her back out into the rain, which surprises Jill not at all – it certainly seems like the sort of thing Edmund Pevensie would do without thinking twice about it; she’d liked him well enough in England, and even nourished the beginnings of a crush on him for a few years, but here, in Narnia, he’s someone else entirely, someone she’s not entirely sure she likes or even recognizes. She resists the urge to stick her tongue out at him and turns to her unknown rescuer.
“I’m Jill Pole,” she says, holding her hand out to him.
He takes her forearm in a warrior’s clasp, not the handshake she’d expected, and says, “I’m Caspian.”
King Caspian of Narnia is several hundred years dead. She knows that much, at least. “No, you’re not,” Jill corrects, because honestly now, it’s not like anyone else from the distant past can be expected to show up, and she certainly wouldn’t expect him to be so short. Eustace had always spoken admiringly of him, after all, and she has the vague memory of him being a kind of magnificent figure, though that's as blurred as all her other memories of Aslan's country. She thinks he may not be meant to remember that.
There’s a choked sound behind her that might come from Edmund or might come from someone else; the stranger looks indignant and exclaims, “Yes, I am! I’m Don Caspian di Paolucci, of Greater Shoushan. At your service,” he adds as an afterthought.
Jill draws back from him automatically, flinching and reaching for the dagger on her belt. Foreigners. This lot is all foreigners – and foreigners have never done Narnia any good; you only have to look at the damned Calormenes for an example.
Edmund sighs, and Lucy says patiently, “These are Tirian’s cousins, Jill. They’re here to help – they were called by the horn just like everyone who’s already here.”
“Everyone except Tirian, Eustace, and I,” Jill corrects. “We weren’t summoned like dogs. And these are foreigners!” She takes a step back towards the door, not liking the way that Vespasian’s too-handsome face breaks into a bemused smile.
“Foreigners and friends of Narnia,” the slight woman standing by one of the strange men says. She’s got a definite accent to her words, something delicate and curling; it’s the same accent the stranger – Caspian di Paolucci, a Shoushani – has. “My mother is the Grand Duchessa Susiania di Paolucci, who was Susiania of Anvard in Archenland, niece to the Dowager Queen Altagracia of Narnia – grandmother to King Tirian. My brothers and I were all born in Narnia.”
“Besides, Pole,” Edmund says, sounding bored, “we need allies; Narnia can’t win this alone, not in a straight-up fight. Not against Calormen.” There’s something else in his tone, something that Jill’s heard far too many times before from far too many people: besides, you don’t get a choice in the matter, so you might as well learn to live with it. She’d heard it from her parents as a child, at Experiment House, from Eustace, from countless Narnians since she’s come here – all anyone seems to want to do is condescend to her.
She regards the four foreigners warily. “If you’re such great friends of Narnia,” she asks, “why haven’t you helped before? Sometime when it might actually have proved useful.”
Lucy frowns sharply, but doesn’t say anything; the taller stranger with dark, curly hair like a Telmarine Narnian says easily, “Greater Shoushan has her own interests at heart as well, Lady Jill. Calormen is a threat to the empire and always has been; if we had offered aid before, it would have done nothing to help Narnia and much to hurt Shoushan. It would have drawn this Tisroc’s eye to Cuore-d’Or, and that is something the Emperor would not have stood for. Now we have a chance.”
“And we haven’t actually told the Emperor yet,” Caspian adds.
“That should go splendidly,” Vespasian murmurs, looking more bemused with every second that passes.
“Well, it’s not like he can exactly bring us back,” the girl insists.
“If I was a betting man – and I am – I wouldn’t put money on that wager,” Vespasian says. “You don’t exactly go about telling monarchs what they can and cannot do; I grew up with Tirian. I know.”
“That’s why you do things without telling them,” the girl says, “which if any of the stories Mama tells us from her letters are true, you have rather a lot of experience with.”
Vespasian raises one finger. “Yes,” he agrees, “but taking the crown prince of Narnia out to the new money parties in Goldhouse Row is rather a different matter than bringing an army to another country. Even you’ll have to agree with me on that one, Lady Siusiana.”
Siusiana? Now they’re naming people after Susan Pevensie? Jill bites her lip and shoves down the urge to swell up in indignation like a marsh-wiggle, because of all the ridiculous things – nice enough as she may seem to be here, and that’s not very, Susan Pevensie had been so hated in England for something she’d done in Narnia that Edmund and Lucy wouldn’t even speak her name, and why, in the name of God and Aslan, the Narnians might consider her worthy enough to be a namesake – there’s just so much that she doesn’t know, that the Narnians don’t know –
But these aren’t Narnians, they’re Shoushani. Maybe they can be forgiven for being severely misinformed – and surely naming people after the Pevensies isn’t as bad as thinking they’re gods, the way the Narnians do. If she stays in Narnia a hundred years – and the idea makes her shudder; she just wants to go home – Jill will never understand Narnians. And she’ll definitely never understand the Pevensie siblings.
Still, Lucy sounds friendly enough when she murmurs in Jill’s ear, “That’s Donna Siusiana di Paolucci, and the tall one is Don Glozelle di Paolucci.” Jill hadn’t even seen her come ‘round the side of the table. “The dark one is Colonnello Ulisse Arkwright, of Paolucci’s household troops.”
Arkwright isn’t a Shoushani name – it sounds more like a Narnian one than anything else, but Jill holds her tongue on the question. She glares at Siusiana di Paolucci instead. Shoushanis. In Narnia. Surely they don’t need foreign help to solve their own problems; there are more than enough Narnians to challenge the Calormenes, and aren’t Aslan’s chosen saviors here as well? How do they intend to justify this and still claim to be the same people who freed Narnia from the White Witch and from the tyrant king Miraz without help? Tirian will not be pleased, Jill thinks with some satisfaction. Even if they are his relatives.
Vespasian and Siusiana have apparently finished their bickering, because Glozelle is saying, his voice steady and calm, “I would think that Eian of Archenland would be happy to help. After all, he has blood ties to the throne of Narnia as much as we do – more, if my memory serves me correctly.”
“Eian of Archenland has the Calormenes squatting on his doorstep and in his castle,” Vespasian says briskly. “There may be more Calormenes in Archenland than there are Archenlanders. The Tisroc holds Archenland in all but name. No, cousin, Eian won’t help, not until he’s had his own country secured, and that will come hard: the Tisroc knows that Archenland is the gateway to Narnia, and it will take the next thing to a miracle to free that country from his grasp.”
“We have the gods themselves,” Ourente says, his voice quiet but steady, and Jill nearly strains something, she jerks around to glare at him so quickly. She likes Ourente! She’d thought he was sensible!
Edmund and Lucy share an unreadable look, the kind of look where a whole conversation can be exchanged in a heartbeat. “Well,” Edmund says at last, “you’re not the one who’s going to go convince the King of Archenland to take a stand against the Calormenes. You may be the only person I know who’s actually worse at this kind of diplomacy than Peter.”
“Ha,” Lucy says, a world of scorn in that one syllable. “That’s because convincing someone to go to war is the only kind of diplomacy Peter can do without losing his temper and threatening to unleash the army.”
“He did get us that marriage treaty that one time.”
“Yes, and then my husband-to-be poisoned Peter and I had to kill him at the altar. That went so well, I recall.”
Jill’s more or less used to the two of them sharing this kind of reminiscence, but there’s something else beneath it, something that hadn’t been there in England. The heat is in Lucy’s cheeks and she looks warmly amused, smiling a little in remembrance; even Edmund looks bemused, and it takes a lot to make his rare smiles genuine. Jill regards them curiously, trying to puzzle out what the new layer to their reminiscences is, and then realizes what it is they’re actually talking about.
“You want to bring Archenlanders into Narnia?” she bursts out. “Archenland is the one that let the Calormenes into Narnia in the first place!”
“No, that would be my uncle’s idiotic decision to disband the navy before King Gerion was even laid in his grave,” Vespasian says dryly. “He thought the navy was a waste of money, and that defending Narnia’s shipping lanes against the Black Fleet was none of the crown’s business. The old king, my grandfather, would never have left things badly enough that a Calormene could have entered the Bight, let alone get close enough to dump twenty thousand Calormene troops on the shore.”
“My mother says that King Erlian was as mad as Baiart the Boneslayer,” Caspian says helpfully, and Glozelle casts his eyes heavenward, as if praying for patience.
Vespasian frowns at him. “What kind of Shoushani fairytale is that?” he demands.
“The kind stolen from the Belgarines,” Edmund says. “They told that story in our time, too – a prince who found that his mistress had been sharing her bed with his brother the king, so he had her killed and baked into a pie that he served his brother and his queen. The queen died of the shock, and Prince Baiart left the castle and fled to the south, where he founded the country of Ransky. Baiart and his brother died on each other’s swords years later.” For a moment he looks briefly pleased. “I believe that was one of the excuses Belgarion used when they invaded Ransky in our second year, even though Baiart and his brother must have lived and died centuries earlier.”
There’s one of those moments of temporary disconnect that Jill’s nearly gotten used to, where the four Shoushanis and the two Narnians go pale and Lucy and Edmund share another one of those long-suffering looks. Jill digs her toe into the carpet-covered floor of the tent, wondering who in the name of God brings a carpet and furniture with them on a military campaign – if that’s what this is, and she supposes it is. It reminds her of something she’d heard about at Experiment House, of a general who used to travel to all his battles with a silver tea set.
After a moment, Vespasian says, “King Erlian wasn’t mad. He was just very – focused – after Tirian’s mother died. And he thought the giants in the north were more of a threat than the Black Fleet or the Calormenes.”
“Well, King Erlian’s dead now,” Edmund says matter-of-factly.
Lucy frowns at Vespasian momentarily, then turns to Edmund, going on as if nothing’s happened at all, “Well, if I can’t go and Peter shouldn’t leave the country – even I know that, Ed, I can do most diplomacy – who do you plan to send? It should be one of us if you want to convince a king of Archenland. Archenland,” she adds with some bitterness. “Which is another reason Peter shouldn’t go; he hates Archenland and Archenlanders.”
“Possibly because Lune spent fifteen years trying to conquer Narnia,” Edmund says dryly. “The last time Peter was in Anvard he and Lune came to blows.” He frowns. “I could go, I suppose.” He doesn’t sound enthusiastic about the notion.
“Your majesties, if I may,” Vespasian offers, and continues at Lucy’s nod, “I have spent the past five years in King Eian’s court, and I know him. He wants Archenland free of the Calormenes as much as Tirian wants Narnia free, but the Tisroc’s hold is tight. Still, he will not act without a certainty of victory, and he has a – weakness – that may make him more willing to respond to one envoy than another.”
Edmund raises his eyebrows.
“Beautiful women,” Vespasian elaborates.
“Well, I’m assuming he’s human –” Edmund begins, but Lucy tramples over him before he’s gotten more than a few syllables out.
“Oh, I know,” she says, looking triumphant. “We’ll send Susan. She’s always been good at playing the whore in order to get something she wants.”
Jill barely notices the momentary pause before Lucy says Susan’s name, or that it’s the first time she’s said it; the only thing she can think is, If she’s still alive.
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Caspian, Glozelle, and Siusiana di Paolucci come from
aella_irene's Dust-inspired ficlet.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
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-12 09:27 pm (UTC)Well, of course you take furnishings on campaign. There's no point in being uncomfortable unless you have to. Also, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
I sense that they have not made a good impression on Jill, (except for Caspian)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-13 06:35 am (UTC)Jill, at this point, would hate any foreignor that came calling.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-13 06:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-13 06:55 am (UTC)(There aren't as many lady knights in Shoushan as there were once, especially not in Greater Shoushan; she's heard that there are nearly as many women as there are men in the military -- both nobles and commoners -- in Lesser Shoushan, but only because otherwise Lesser Shoushan wouldn't have any military to speak of. It's hardly proper for a Greater Shoushani donna to be involved in any such thing, even one with such close ties to the Red Company. And Siusiana had never been that type of girl, anyway; she'd once gone through a phase where she was absolutely convinced that as soon as she'd reached the proper age she was going to go off and train to be a knight, but her older brother, who was in training to be a knight, beat that out of her head fairly quickly, as soon as he came home.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-13 06:37 pm (UTC)And she's had Temple training, so she can be of use helping Lucy.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-05-13 06:46 pm (UTC)sunlight_brightens
Date: 2013-01-25 07:14 pm (UTC)I do have to say I do not like how she does not like the Pevensies but at least she sees them as human.
Favorite quotes-
( Yes Pevensie mind power and reigning for so long together, of course that can exchange one look and know what the other is thinking)
( Haha thats a story I wish I could see.)
Thank you for the wonderful chapter.