Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (27)
Jan. 4th, 2012 12:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air (27)
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG
Content Notes: language, mention of past sexual assault
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW. Dust in the Air does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). Thank you tosnacky for the beta!
Jill hasn’t had occasion to visit Anvard’s kennels before, but a man-at-arms in the palace livery points the way out to her and she soon finds herself pushing open a door with a stylized pattern of various dogs chasing each other engraved on it. She’s surprised to find that there’s a second door at knee-height, rather like a cat flap, but larger and with a door of heavy canvas instead of wood. It must be for the dogs – well, of course it is, there must be talking dogs or wolves or great cats (do the great cats stay in the kennels? she wonders) that visit the palace occasionally. The steward certainly hadn’t had any trouble deciding where to put Graynor. She hopes that the dogboys aren’t treating him like a dumb dog, but she’s fairly certain that he would have mentioned it if they were. Graynor has never had trouble expressing his likes and dislikes.
It’s the first kennels she’s ever seen, and Jill is surprised to find that it’s wide and airy, with a vaulted ceiling and a frieze of hunting dogs painted on the outer wall. She had been expecting something dark and cramped, but of course not: the palace hunting hounds are probably better treated than some of the servants.
She looks around curiously. To her left at the end of the hall is a closed door; Jill supposes that that must lead to the room where the kennel keeper sleeps. Immediately to the left of it, across from Jill, is another door, this one marked with the image of a dog. Maybe that’s where they keep the dogs’ gear, though Jill can’t imagine what there might be. All along the hallway, which curves around in a complete circle, so that Jill can’t see the end of it, are raised wooden beds with straw strewn on them, interrupted at regular intervals with food dishes and, more rarely, what appear to be stone chimneys, though she can’t see a stove anywhere. A kind of indoor stream runs in a deep groove in the stone down the side of the hallway, burbling cheerfully and disappearing beneath into a grate in the corner between the keeper’s chamber and the closet.
And of course there are the dogs. Most of them are great leggy beasts, with thick wiry hair in shades of gray or brown. Deerhounds or wolfhounds, Jill assumes, walking down the hallway and looking at them, but she finds that there are elegant sighthounds as well, and smaller hounds that look a little like some kind of terrier, even a few long lumpy ones with short legs, like basset hounds, though there are fewer of these. Some of them ignore her, while others thump their tails against the straw. One or two come up to sniff at her, their shoulders of a height with her hips, and Jill carefully folds her hand into a fist for them to smell, then scratches them behind the ears when they deem her acceptable.
She keeps hearing the murmur of voices, somewhere just out of sight, and follows the curve of the round building until it opens abruptly out on open air. There’s a door – a human-size door – propped open with the statue of a dog in full point; Jill follows the line of nose and raised paw and sees Graynor sitting by a huge open-air fireplace, deep in conversation with a lean brown deerhound. Other dogs are taking the air around them, sleeping or playing or gnawing on bones. Jill stares in shock when she realizes that a group of puppies are listening intently to a wolfhound with a grizzled salt-and-pepper muzzle tell stories, a few half-grown hounds listening in. She’d never thought that talking dogs would consent to be housed with dumb ones.
The courtyard is completely enclosed, with a covered peristyle lining the inner wall of the kennels, but the rest of it open to the air. The fireplace is dead center, a kind of brick oven a grate over the currently open door, and now Jill knows where the chimneys inside the kennels had gotten their heat. Underneath the peristyle is a woodstack, and next to it a stone bench with a girl wrapped in a thick cloak against the cold sitting on it, leaning down to scratch the belly of a wiry terrier. She glances up at Jill’s approach, then ignores her.
Jill steps out into the peristyle, tucking her hands – which now smell like dog – into her pockets. Her boots crunch in the snow as she approaches Graynor, not wanting to disturb the story-teller and his audience.
“Hello, Graynor,” she says. Both the wolf and the dog look up at her, the wolf rising slowly up to a standing position and shaking himself. The dog stands up as well, eyeing her with mild curiosity.
“You aren’t Queen Susan,” he observes.
“No, I’m Jill Pole,” she says. “Pleased to make your acquaintance –”
“Broadrib.” He dips his nose a little in something that might have been a bow on a human. “I’m Chief Hound here.”
“I didn’t know that King Eian kept talking dogs,” Jill says awkwardly. Maybe “kept” isn’t the right word. Maybe “employed” would be better. Well, it’s too late now; the cat is out of the bag. Or the dog, considering the circumstances.
“Certainly,” Broadrib says courteously. “My pack has served the Kings of Archenland for more than a thousand years.”
“So you aren’t a Narnian?”
His face darkens. “Not for about three thousand years, and that hardly counts, don’t you think?”
“I – no, I suppose it doesn’t,” Jill says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I just –”
“Haven’t seen any talking beasts outside of Narnia?”
“I – no,” Jill says, and remembers, like something out of a distant memory, Puddleglum pushing his plate away from him at Ettinsmoor and Eustace saying, “So we’ve been eating a talking stag,” with an expression of horror on his face. There are talking beasts outside of Narnia, of course. She’d forgotten.
“That’s all right,” Broadrib says, his expression clearing. “You aren’t the first. There are a surprising amount of Narnians who have forgotten that Narnia and Archenland were pupped from the same bitch. I don’t know where they get that idea, considering that the ones who come here are the ones who think of Archenland as a sanctuary from the ills of Narnia, but there you are.” He shrugs, an elegant little ruffle of his wiry fur.
“But you have dumb dogs in the kennels!” Jill says suddenly, knowing that she’s being terribly rude – even if she’s being terribly rude to a dog, that doesn’t change anything; Broadrib is being so polite – but unable to help herself. “Isn’t that –” Not confusing, that’s not what she means at all, because of course a talking dog can tell itself from a dumb one. “− awkward?” she finishes, struggling for the word.
“We take care of them,” says Broadrib. “We train them. They are –” His mouth quirks slightly in a dog’s smile, “− our pets, if you like.”
“That’s –” Somehow Jill can’t quite picture it. “How interesting,” she says instead weakly.
“Well, you and your quaint customs are fascinating, but I’m sure Jill didn’t come down here just to be bludgeoned into shock by you and yours,” Graynor drawls, though the words are missing their customary edge. “Are you ready to go on that secret mission of yours now? I was expecting you yesterday.”
“Susan made an appointment with a seamstress for me,” Jill says, and sighs. “It took hours. You’re lucky you don’t have to wear clothes.”
“A fact for which I thank the King of Evening on a daily basis,” Graynor says. “Well, let’s get going then.” If he was human he would have clapped his hands, but instead he just stands looking up at her, his tail twitching impatiently. “Daylight’s wasting.”
“It’s the new year,” Jill says, with a distant feeling of relief; Winter’s End marks the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, and there isn’t anything that she particularly wishes to hold onto from the old year. “The days get longer now.”
“The days have been getting longer since Promise of Hope, outlander,” he says dismissively. “Doesn’t mean they can’t be wasted. Come on, then.”
He trots past her, his tail going up.
“Enjoy your excursion,” Broadrib says graciously. “I expect I’ll see you at the hunt for His Highness.”
“So I’ve been informed,” Jill says. “What do you think I was getting fitted for?”
Broadrib lets out a bark of laughter. “You’re a funny one,” he says. “I’ll be sad to see you go when you leave.”
“Thanks,” Jill says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope it will be soon.” She smiles at the hound and follows Graynor back into the warm kennels, where he’s ignoring the dumb dogs lounging about.
“Aren’t they confused by your scent?” she says suddenly. “Since some of them are wolfhounds and you, well, you’re a wolf –”
“It’s a different scent. You’d understand if you had a nose worth speaking of, but you humans, you might as well not have noses at all.”
Jill touches her nose, feeling the crooked places where it had been broken. “I like my nose,” she says.
“You humans,” Graynor sighs, bowling past a wolfhound pup that comes eagerly up to him. It stops where he’s left it, crestfallen with its ears and tail drooping.
“Bye, Graynor,” it – she – says sadly.
“I’m coming back, Tobey!” he barks over his shoulder, and the pup perks up immediately.
“Can I come?” she adds, following them down the hallway with her tail wagging frantically.
Jill’s mouth quirks in involuntary amusement.
“No!” Graynor says indignantly. “This is Narnian business.”
“But you’re coming back?”
“Oh, dear gods,” the wolf sighs, stalking away stiff-legged. Tobey stops in her tracks, tail wagging slowly.
“I’ll save you a spot at dinner!”
Graynor ignores her.
“I see you’ve found an admirer,” Jill says, catching up to him. “Even if it does seem a little star-crossed. You know, wolf, wolfhound –”
“She’s a nice kid,” he allows grudgingly. “And it’s not that weird. The Crown employs wolfpacks, too – use ‘em as foresters, they’re good at catching poachers. Some of them run with the hounds, though it’s not that common. They help with training a lot. There’s just no one here right now.” He turns to grin at her, his tongue hanging out. “You’re letting your Narnian prejudices show!”
“Didn’t Tirian do that?”
“The Telmarines have always preferred using humans wherever they can. Wolves still make Narnians nervous.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Jill says, opening the door for him and following him outside. “You do have all those teeth –”
“It’s because of the White Witch, you idiot. Almost two thousand years and they can’t get over the Secret Police, never mind that since then we’ve practically been paragons of virtue – hullo, then, where are you off to? Top secret augur business?”
Adelchis is waiting at the entrance to the courtyard, wearing a leather vest over his otherwise bare chest. Not for the first time, Jill wonders why he never seems to get cold. He hasn’t made any adjustments in his wardrobe to account for the Archenlanders’ tender sensibilities, she observes with a sigh. The only accoutrements he’s discarded are his weapons; he’s still wearing his necklace of Calormene finger bones. She wonders if anyone in Anvard has commented on them, or if they realize what they are. Archenland seems far too civilized for a centaur to go wandering around nearly naked except for human bones and a few bits of leather, unlike Narnia, which has far better things to worry about.
“I thought I’d accompany you,” he says, addressing this to Jill. “If you have no objection, of course.”
“No,” she says, blinking up at him. “But how did you know where I was going? I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Not even me,” Graynor says pointedly.
“I’m a seer,” Adelchis says blandly. “I see.”
“You saw that I was going to go down to the city to talk to Narnian refugees?” Jill says dubiously. “What, in the stars? I thought you said the stars were blank.”
The centaur raises an eyebrow at her, mysterious for a moment, and then says, “Suatrius told me you asked Graynor to go down to the city with you, and I overheard King Tirian telling you about the Lion’s Paw in Narnia. I guessed.”
“Bloody augurs,” Graynor sighs. “What the hell do you want with Narnian refugees? They abandoned Narnia, end of story. Nothing to say to them.”
“Maybe,” Jill says, “but maybe not. Lord Vespasian has some connections there, and he said that they mainly sit around talking about going back to Narnia to throw the Callies out, but what they really needed was a proper kick in the arse. Anyway,” she shrugs, pushing her hair out of her face, “even if they don’t want to help, then I’ve got some messages to pass on from family members back in the camps.”
Graynor shrugs. “Could be amusing,” he allows. “Well, let’s go.” He starts towards the gate, his tail wagging slightly.
Jill and Adelchis follow him. Despite the chill in the air and the snow on the ground, the sun is shining and Jill raises a hand to shade her eyes, squinting. It’s funny – when they’d arrived, she would have sworn that Archenland was on the edge of spring, lingering on the edge of spring thaw, but in the time that they’ve been here it’s snowed twice, plunging Archenland back into the depths of winter. They’re not that far from Narnia. It shouldn’t be so different, even if Anvard is at a much higher elevation. Queen of Spring, bah, Jill thinks, rather irritated. Ever since Susan arrived it’s been getting more and more like winter.
When they finally reach the town, it’s to find it alive with life, filled fit to burst and bustling with visitors who have arrived for the Crown Prince’s nameday celebrations and who aren’t privileged enough to be lodged in Anvard. It’s chaotic, more than a little overwhelming in a way that the castle isn’t; Jill can barely believe that she used to go into London, which is at least ten times bigger than Anvard Town. She looks at Graynor and Adelchis to see if they’re as uneasy as she is, and finds that while Graynor seems jumpy, Adelchis merely seems impassive, as if the flow of Archenlander life about him has no effect on him.
A wagon rumbles past them, a wildcat draped over the barrels in the back. It raises its head to look at them curiously, eyes gleaming green in the flare of sunlight before it drops its head again, yawning. Jill draws her long coat close around her, playing absently with the fringe of her scarf. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about her and Graynor, but Adelchis is drawing stares, mothers drawing their children aside and men closing their shop doors as he passes by, the finger bones hanging white around his neck. Jill finds herself feeling peculiarly protective of him, though he hardly needs it; the augur is fully capable of defending himself, whether from Calormene soldiers or Archenlander whispers, but how dare they look at him like that, like they have any idea who he is or what he’s gone through. What any of them have gone through.
“I don’t suppose you happen to know where we’re going,” Graynor drawls as they pause as a street corner, watching two knights with their armor slung on packhorses ride by.
“It’s a pub called the Lion’s Paw,” Jill says, briefly blinded by the sheen of sunlight off the steel of the knights’ lances. She scrubs a hand over her eyes to clear the sparks from her vision. “It’s in the Narnian Quarter. I thought it would be easier to find.”
“Hmph.”
Jill glances around quickly, then spies a baker’s stall with the owner standing behind the counter, handing a loaf of seed-encrusted bread to a tall woman with red skirts. Jill hurries up to it as she departs.
“Can I help you, miss?” he asks, when her gaze doesn’t go to the menu chalked on the wall behind him.
“Yes,” Jill says. “Can you tell me how to get to the Lion’s Paw? It’s a pub –”
“What’s a nice girl like you want with a place like the Lion’s Paw?” he says, looking surprised. “It’s in the Narnian Quarter, you know. Full of them Narnians. Between you and me, if you want a good Archenlander pub, go left at the corner, then left again and go to the Twin Peaks. If you tell the barkeep that Darik sent you, you’ll get –”
“I don’t want an Archenlander pub,” Jill says, raising her chin and letting her voice go steely. “And I don’t have a problem with Narnians. Do you?”
The baker’s gaze flickers to Adelchis, standing behind Jill with his long gray braids and the finger-bones white around his neck, then down to Graynor, who looks up at him with clear boredom. Jill watches his gaze run over her again, knowing that this time he’s looking close enough to see something other than a young woman in an expensive coat – the scars on her face and hands, the cant of her hip that means she’s wearing a sword, the muscle of her shoulders even beneath the heavy wool of her jacket. If she spoke like a Narnian, there would be no question about where she’d come from. His face closes up and goes unfriendly.
“Of course not, miss,” he says, not sounding it. “Go right at the corner and keep going straight until you reach Carolanne’s Square. It’s somewhere about there, if I’m not mistaken, but I wouldn’t know for sure.” He gives her a disdainful look. “I’ve never been, of course.”
Jill sneers at him. “Of course. God forbid you catch something. A spine, maybe.”
She turns away, flinging her hair back over her shoulder with one hand, and finds herself wishing she’d tied it back, but her head is warmer with it down. She joins Adelchis and Graynor on the sidewalk and says, loud enough that the baker can hear, “Prejudiced fool.”
“Narnian bitch,” he snaps back at her, and Jill almost laughs, and proud of it and but I’m from Cambridge warring for a moment on the tip of her tongue, before Adelchis tugs her back into the crowd and the moment is lost, leaving her briefly confused about her hesitation. She’s not Narnian, she’ll never be Narnian, and she hardly wants to be either – Narnian with all its strange superstitions and its four gods alongside Aslan, its quaint traditions – but she’d rather be a bitch and Narnian than the nicest girl alive and an Archenlander. For some reason the thought is both warming and discomfiting. It doesn’t matter; she’s neither one and she never will be.
“Why do they hate Narnians so much?” she asks instead as they make their way to the street corner. There’s a roundabout in the center – snow-covered now, but Jill suspects in summer that it may be a riot of grass and flowers. Or maybe it’s just stone. On it are four bronze statues facing the four cardinal points, going green in a few places from oxidation. Jill peers curiously at them as they wait for a cavalcade of knights to ride by, shields hung on their backs and lances grounded at the sides of their saddles.
“Because they’re bastards,” Graynor says. “And they hate being Narnia’s dumping ground.”
“They see the face of both their past and their future in Narnia,” Adelchis says. He nods at the statues. “The one facing westwards – that is King Col, the first king of Archenland, who led his people out of Narnia after feuding his father the King and his brother the Crown Prince. Try as they might, Archenland will never forget that they were Narnian once. The Kings of Archenland can trace their bloodline back to the beginning of the world, which the Narnian kings have not been able to do for almost two thousand years. They are a proud people and with good reason; Archenland has never been conquered and the line of kings is unbroken back to the beginning of all things. They have as many – more, truly – heroes than Narnia. But they have never been Aslan’s favorite.”
“Who wants to be Aslan’s favorite?” Graynor scoffs. “Fat lot of good that’s done Narnia, if you think that’s true and I don’t, by the way. If this is how he treats his favorites, I’d hate to see what he does to his enemies. Give me the Kings and Queens of Summer any day. No, listen to me – Archenlanders hate Narnia because we let them survive out of the goodness of our hearts and because every time something bad happens in Narnia, half our bloody people go pouring over the border because they don’t have the guts to stand and fight. That’s why Archenland’s full of bloody cowards – it’s all the Narnian blood.”
Jill looks around hastily in case any of the passerby have heard this and want to make something of it, but the conversation has gone unheard in the bustle of the crowd. They cross the street, passing by the four statues, and turn left, the way the baker had indicated.
“Who are the other statues?” she asks Adelchis suddenly, even though they’ve already been left far behind.
He seems pleased to be asked, his voice taking on the rhythmic quality of a professor delivering a favorite lesson. “To the east is King Evyn the Clever, King Col’s son, who riddled with the goddess Cybele, the Mother of Mountains, and tricked her into giving up Anvard castle for his own seat. To the south is King Joh, who wed the daughter of the river god of the Winding Arrow and brought all lands north of the river under the crown. And to the north is King Orrin the Unlikely, who wanted more than anything not to be king, but all five of his brothers were killed when the kings of Narnia threatened war, and so he became king in the end. He beat back two kings of Narnia, and Archenland held her borders.”
“They didn’t happen to be Peter and Edmund, did they?” Jill says hopefully.
Graynor snorts. “They were the old kings of Narnia, centuries before even the White Witch. Weak stock.”
“I’ve never heard anyone talk about Narnia before the White Witch,” Jill says, dodging around a fruit-seller with a basket of wizened winter apples.
“We know very little about it,” Adelchis says simply. “Everything from then has been destroyed. There is no written history in Narnia that dates back before the Long Winter and precious little material culture, either. Even Archenland’s records from the period are mostly myth and legend, nothing substantial.”
Graynor gives him a very strange look. “Augur, what the hell did you do before the Occupation?” he demands, head tilted to the side in bewilderment.
Jill looks up at him too, realizing that she doesn’t know. It’s not generally the sort of thing that’s asked; usually it doesn’t do any good to know, and sometimes it can do a great deal of harm.
“I was a professor of archaeology at the University of Beaversdam,” Adelchis says.
She feels her mouth form into a round “O” as she tries to imagine solemn Adelchis, with his prophecies and his finger-bones and his cursed arrows, as a university professor like the ones from Cambridge that her father used to have over for dinner. “But you’re a centaur! And archaeologists…dig,” she finishes, rather lamely.
His mouth quirks slightly in a smile. “I didn’t say it was easy.”
“I’d imagine not,” Jill says faintly. “Ah – which one do you think is Carolanne’s Square?”
Anvard Town appears to be made up with a series of squares, each with its statues, fountains, and other monuments. Jill would not put money on her ability to find one out of the dozen she’d seen on the map in the castle.
“The one with Queen Carolanne in it,” Graynor drawls. “Let’s just hope they haven’t set up a bloody great fence around the Narnian Quarter here, like they have in Tashbaan.”
“When did you go to Tashbaan?”
Graynor draws up short, his hackles rising. “I don’t talk about it,” he snaps.
“All right,” Jill says quickly. She strides forward, peering at the statues as they pass them, pausing at each one that might be a woman and waiting for Adelchis to tell her yes or no. In the end, she doesn’t find Carolanne’s Square – or rather, she does, but the first thing she sees is the sign of the Lion’s Paw, not the marble statue of Queen Carolanne, who turns out to be a small, graceful looking woman holding a sword nearly as big as she is. Jill resolves to look her up as soon as she gets back to Anvard, since she seems like an interesting woman, at least judging by her statue.
Walking into the Lion’s Paw feels like coming home. Jill can’t put her finger on what it is, but her shoulders loosen immediately, her chin coming up as she sighs a little, the tension leeching out of her. Their entrance apparently doesn’t merit comment, although a few people look around as the door opens and they come in, then go back to their drinks.
Jill looks around curiously. It looks like the building might originally have been a warehouse of some sort, a big open room with tall tables and high barstools so that centaurs and other large creatures can stand at head height with sitting humans or nonhumans of a similar size. In a few places small sets of box stairs have been pushed close to the stools so that dwarves or talking beasts can climb up. Along the walls are floor tables, separated from each other by removable screens, their occupants sitting or lying on cushions. There’s more seating in a loft above, Jill finds when a shout from above draws her attention; it seems to take up half the width of the building, with a railing to keep its occupants from falling over. A winding staircase is tucked near the bar, which also boasts a display kitchen and an enormous brick oven with flames roaring merrily away. Jill finds her mouth beginning to water at the smell.
The clientele is of a sort decidedly more familiar to her than the occupants of the castle. According to the books Jill has been reading, the population of Archenland is approximately two-fifths nonhuman, but she’s found, somewhat to her shock, that nonhuman doesn’t necessarily mean Narnian. This, though, this feels right. It’s not that the occupants of the Lion’s Paw aren’t human, because at least a third of them are, at least so far as Jill can tell from her quick once-over. They look right, they sound right, it even smells right – some kind of tiny, nearly indistinguishable difference from the Archenlanders that Jill has been seeing and hearing day-in and day-out since they arrived. She’s damned if she can put her finger on what it is, but it’s there.
Adelchis and Graynor feel it too. Graynor’s tail starts wagging like a dog’s and he gives her a canine grin, teeth gleaming in the lantern-light. “Now this is more like it!” he says. “Damme, if I’d known this was here, I’d have spent less time cooped up in the palace, listening to Broadrib tell me one bloody hunting story after another.”
Adelchis doesn’t smile. He glances around coolly as they start forward, his hooves clopping against the wooden floor, and says, “Enjoy it if you must, but don’t forget the reason for its existence – and who its patrons are.”
“Stormcrow,” Graynor says, but his face darkens and his tail stops wagging. He glances around, swinging his head from side to side as if searching for a familiar scent. Perhaps he is. There are certainly enough Narnians that have fled to Archenland; Jill knows a few herself.
She finds an empty table, one of the high ones with a spot for Adelchis, and drapes her coat over the back of a chair to save it for them. “I’ve got money if you want to get food and drinks,” she says. Glancing at the big oven, where a minoboar is drawing forth some kind of flatbread on a big wooden paddle, she adds, “I know I do.”
“Yes,” Graynor says, loping over to the bar and leaping up a set of short stairs provided for smaller Narnians to speak on equal standing with the bartender and the cook.
Jill and Adelchis follow more slowly, Jill reading the chalked menu on the wall behind the bar, behind the racked bottles of liquor. The bartender smiles at them as they approach, replacing a bottle of blue liquor on the rack behind her as the satisfied customer departs. She’s a tall, willowy huldra with her yellow hair in elaborate braids around her ears and tattoos on her knuckles. Her cow’s tail flicks idly as she talks.
“I haven’t seen you around here before,” she says. “Here for the Prince’s tournament?”
“Something like that,” Jill says, wondering how to broach the question. She covers up her hesitation by gesturing at the menu and asking, “What’s good here?”
“Oh, everything,” says the huldra. “Steintor here used to cook at Kingsrest Manor in the Barrows. If you ask for it, he can make it, as long as we have the ingredients in the pantry.”
The minoboar turns his head at the mention of his name and smiles at them, which isn’t a particularly pretty expression. Jill returns it anyway.
Adelchis solemnly orders a bottle of pear cider and a plate of beer-battered fish and chips for his human half and a large salad of winter greens for the horse half. Graynor, apparently spotting some kind of familiar Narnian specialty on the menu, immediately commences fawning over it like a puppy, his tail wagging so hard that he nearly tips over off the stairs. Jill has never seen him so pleased and the huldra looks amused by his enthusiasm, calling the order over to Steintor.
“What was he pulling out of the oven a minute ago?” she finally asks wistfully.
“Baked flatbread with caramelized onions and winter squash,” the huldra says immediately. “We’ve another with lemons and smoked salmons, but it’s more expensive, since the lemons are shipped in from Terebinthia or Calormen.”
Jill can’t tell if her expression darkens at the mention of Calormen or not. “I’ll have the first one,” she says. “And a glass of white wine.”
The huldra starts rattling off the vintages and years.
“Um –” Jill says, looking at Adelchis for help, but the centaur has already gone back to the table. “That one,” she says, stopping the huldra when she finally recognizes a location and hoping it’s not too expensive. “I’ll have that one.”
She counts out the money that Susan had given her – one silver dar and a handful of copper rams, which makes a welcome change from Calormene crescents and minims. There are three gold cols nestled in her purse, but she doesn’t need them yet. She hesitates for a minute over the gold suns with Peter Pevensie’s head on them, wondering if they mean anything to the huldra besides a nice tip. She hesitates for so long that the huldra collects the dar and the rams and says, “That’s it, you’ve paid in full,” smiling at her.
Jill closes her purse with a snap, tucking it back into her waistcoat. “Thanks,” she says, collecting her wineglass, and chews on her lip for a minute before giving into cowardice and going back to the table. She’ll ask about Vespasian of Glasswater’s supposed loyal Narnians later.
Adelchis seems interested by her wine. “Castlejoy?” he asks. “Interesting choice. This must be from before the Occupation; I don’t know there’s any of the family left now. Unless the Calormenes have installed someone else, I think the land must have been left to go fallow. It’s a pity.”
“Don’t be depressing,” Graynor snaps, raising his muzzle from his bowl of honey beer.
Jill turns her wine glass in precise half-circles on the table in front of her, thinking. She’s sure that Tirian and Vespasian must have told Susan the same thing that they’d told her, so it’s possible that she might have come here already and walked away empty-handed. But she hadn’t mentioned it yesterday, when she’d finally decided to grace Jill with her council, and Jill can’t really imagine Susan Pevensie walking into a place like this, not while she’s still playing Queen of Spring. Peter, yes; according to Eustace, he’d done just that when they’d gone to Cair Paravel. But not Susan. She strikes Jill as the kind of woman who’d call the Lion’s Paw a den of ill repute and immigrant rabble and declare that no good could ever come of it. If any help for Narnia is going to come from here, then Jill’s got to be the one to do it, because Susan Pevensie won’t.
That decides her. She straightens up, taking a sip of wine to fortify her, and lets her gaze skim along the lines of the pub, taking in everyone in sight. They’re not the unlikely lot of cowards that she might have expected before she’d known people who left Narnia, the ones who just couldn’t take it anymore and decided that it was better to risk getting caught running the border than living on the edge of a broken country with the fear of death a constant companion. Jill knows what that’s like. She and Eustace had tried to find a way to leave once too, during those interminable weeks when they’d been certain that Tirian had been killed and this had all been for naught. Sometimes she wonders if the real reason that she and Eustace hadn’t run isn’t because Tirian had come back, but because there’s nowhere to run to. There’s no sanctuary for them in Archenland or Terebinthia, Galma or Seven Isles or anywhere else that Narnia’s citizens have fled to. The answer that the honey-seers, Susan’s naiads, had given her flutters in her chest like a small bird trying to break out of a cage, a painful secret that she holds as close as a toothache. She hasn’t told Eustace yet. She doesn’t know if she can.
“Do you see anyone you know?” she asks Graynor and Adelchis, looking around again. She doesn’t crane her neck to see who’s in the loft above; that’s too obvious, and she doesn’t feel like drawing attention to herself just yet.
“No,” Graynor says shortly. Adelchis doesn’t answer, pondering the occupants of the pub.
The huldra from behind the bar comes towards them, carrying a large round tray with their plates on it. She’s smiling as she does so, laughing at something one of her other customers has said.
“Excuse me,” Jill says as she starts laying out the plates in front of them.
“Yes, love?”
Jill clears her throat, taking a sip of the wine to fortify herself. “We’re friends of Lord Vespasian of Glasswater. He said that this was the place to come if we wanted to find people who were willing to come back to Narnia – willing to fight.”
“Under the banners of the Kings and Queens of Summer,” Adelchis puts his, his gaze sharp as an arrowhead.
The huldra’s hands clench on the tray, even her tail going still. “Oh, sweet Aslan,” she says, and Jill hears it, as familiar as an old lover – the sound of utter despair. “You’re from Narnia.”
“I’d think that would be obvious,” Graynor says.
Under the combined weight of their three stares, the huldra seems to shrink, drawing in on herself. “Why are you here?” she pleads. “We can’t help you! You know that –”
“We’re here for Narnia, you silly twit,” Graynor says. “You and your lot aren’t totally beyond redemption; the Kings and Queens are in a forgiving mood of late. We need everyone, even sorry sods like you. If you were ever really a Narnian, now’s the time to prove it.”
“I cannot,” the huldra pleads, her face white and set with terror. “If you had any idea what they did to me, to my family –”
“What makes you so special, princess?” Graynor sneers. “My pack’s dead or sold for slaves in Tashbaan. I was one of them and I crossed the Great Southern Desert on my own four paws on my way back. King Tirian lost his crown and his country. Jill here came from another world to fight for Narnia. What makes you so damned special?”
Jill whips around to stare at Graynor, her lips parting in surprise. So he’d been one of the Narnians sold south into slavery in Calormen – and he’d escaped, and still come back to Narnia despite everything. Jill can’t even imagine what that must have been like.
The huldra snuffles, her face tearful, but before she can reply, there’s a cry of surprise and recognition from the winding staircase, where a young knight has just emerged. “Professor?” he demands, diverting his path from the bar to their table. The huldra takes the opportunity to scurry away, empty tray held in front of her like a shield.
The knight, a young Telmarine man with rumpled black curls and a rapier on his belt, advances on their table. “Professor Adelchis?” he demands. “Is that really you?”
“Chandany Drinkwater?” Adelchis says, his face lighting up.
The knight nods, grinning. “Damme, but it’s good to see you! Even if you did fail me in Methods and Theory. I thought you were dead.”
“I assumed the same about you,” says Adelchis.
Drinkwater gives him a bemused onceover, taking in the bone necklace and the scars. “So you’ve come to Archenland with the rest of us, have you? I thought you’d still be at The University, unless the Callies decided that so much free thinking must be a danger to the regime, but it looks like you’ve had a more interesting time of it. Listen, if you don’t get a better offer – hell, even Anvard won’t turn down a Beaversdam professor if you show up there – I’ll give you a job as a tutor, if you like.” He grins happily at Adelchis, and Jill revises her estimation of his age up by a few years, taking in the crow’s feet at the corners of his laughing blue eyes.
Adelchis gives him a solemn look. “I’m not in Archenland to stay,” he says.
The knight frowns a little, looking from Adelchis to Jill and Graynor until she sees his mouth tighten in understanding. “Oh,” he says softly. “It’s come to that.”
“Yes,” Adelchis says, reaching forward to grasp his forearm with his big, callused archer’s hands. “You are a knight of Narnia, Chandany Drinkwater. Your king, your country, your gods need you.”
“My family needs me,” Drinkwater says, his eyes pleading, but he doesn’t pull away from Adelchis.
“Your family is Narnian. They need a home.” His gaze flickers upwards. “Tell your friends. The Queen of Spring is at Anvard Castle and she will be returning to Narnia soon. She would prefer to return with an army.”
Drinkwater looks slightly sick, but he bows a little once Adelchis releases him. “I – I’ll see what I can do,” he says. He glances at Jill and Graynor, apparently not recognizing either of them, and bows again in compromise before backing away.
Adelchis’s hooves clop slightly on the wooden floor as he turns to address the rest of the pub. “The Kings and Queens of Summer are in Narnia,” he announces, his voice pitched to carry. All around the pub, Narnians turn to look at them, hands stilling on dice and drinks lowered to the table. Jill raises her chin, looking back.
“All of you heard Queen Susan’s horn,” Adelchis goes on. “The High King Peter summons all true Narnians to answer to his levy in Lantern Waste to drive out the Calormenes from Narnia. He moves against Prince Bahadur. The Queen of Spring is at Anvard now. She would prefer to return to Narnia with an army.”
“Augur!” someone at one of the floor tables yells. “What do you see in the stars?”
There is nothing, Jill remembers him saying that day by the rivers, with the honey-seers standing before them. We look to the future and there is nothing. I cannot tell if that is because the slate is blank or because there is no future.
“I see nothing,” says Adelchis, and she feels her heart drop before he goes, “unless all true Narnians rally before the High King. There is no future for Narnians without her people.”
The dwarf who’d shouted goes quiet, looking rather pale behind his black beard.
Adelchis looks around at all of them. “You are Narnians,” he says. “The Tisroc cannot take that from you. Archenland cannot take that from you. You are the Lion’s children from the day you are born to the day you die. Remember what you are and prove worthy of it.”
“You have a week to decide,” Jill says, trying not to flinch as the looks turn from the augur to her. “Make your decisions by the end of Prince Gareth’s tournament. When it’s over, we all go back to Narnia.”
She looks out at all the faces, trying to decide who will and who won’t come. The knights who have taken over the loft must have come for the tournament, and that’s who’ll be the most help back in Narnia, but they really need everyone they can get, even if they aren’t fighters. The Calormenes still outnumber them.
Adelchis turns away from the crowd, his attention back on his meal. Murmurs start in the pub, soft first, and then louder, growing into harried and angry conversations, arguments. Jill swallows and looks down at her plate. She doesn’t have much appetite now, but five years on the run has taught her to eat whenever possible, so she picks up fork and knife and starts slicing the flatbread into neat squares. It takes several bites before her appetite returns, around which Jill realizes that she’s too hungry to really do the flatbread justice because she’s eating it too quickly. The huldra had been right about one thing, at least: the minoboar cook is a wizard in the kitchen.
She finishes the rest of the flatbread quickly and drains the rest of her now warm wine. She can remember seeing the sign of a butcher’s shop across the square; there’s no way to know if it’s the one that Susan had visited except going in and asking, which is exactly what Jill is going to do, especially now that her blood’s up. If she was back in Narnia, now would be a good time to go after Calormene patrols.
“I’m going to look around,” she says, climbing down off the high chair and pulling her coat back on. “This is the Narnian Quarter, isn’t it? Maybe there’s someone else we can speak to.”
Licking his chops, Graynor leaps down. “I’ll go with you,” he says. “What about you, augur?”
“I’ll stay,” Adelchis says calmly, still stolidly working his way through the last of his chips. “I will see you back at the castle.”
It has started snowing again when they emerge from the Lion’s Paw, a light dusting of white flakes that makes Jill pull up the hood of her coat and tuck her hands back into her pockets, starting across the square towards the butcher’s shop. A bell tinkles as she pushes the door open, Graynor padding behind her on silent paws.
Inside it smells of herbs, not meat. Jill looks for the source of the scent, intrigued, and finds that the fair-haired faun behind the counter is mashing up herbs in a large mortar, the pestle dwarfed by his big hands. He looks up at her approach and smiles.
“What can I do for you?”
“Are you Glabius?” Jill asks. At his nod, she goes on, “I’m Jill Pole and this is Graynor; we came with the Narnian embassy. You spoke with Susan – Queen Susan – last week?”
“Yes,” says the faun, setting the pestle down in the mortar and pushing them both to the side. He wipes his hands clean on his apron and leans on the counter, looking intrigued. “Did Her Majesty send you, then?”
Jill makes a gesture that might be assent, or might not. “I’m a representative of King Tirian,” she says instead, which isn’t strictly true except in all the ways that matter. Susan only cares about Narnia, if she cares about anything at all, which Jill frankly doubts sometimes. Jill cares about Tirian and his interests.
Glabius looks cautious. “Do you have a sign of that?”
Jill puts her hand into the pocket of her waistcoat, wondering if there’s a way she can fudge that, and remembers the small ring that Tirian had given her before they left in case of emergencies, the one with two lionesses chasing each other around an inset ruby, each devouring the tail of the other. She’d forgotten that she’d hung it on its chain around her neck this morning before she’d left her room for breakfast. She withdraws it from her collar and shows it to Glabius, unsure if it will mean anything to him.
He nods, and she tucks it back away, ignoring Graynor’s fascinated look. Glabius comes around the corner of the counter and flips the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED. “What can I do for the King?” he asks, turning back towards her.
“What help can you offer Narnia?” Jill asks bluntly. “What can you really do, up here in the mountains? On your own? Are you even Narnian up here?”
Adelchis, she thinks distantly, would not approve. Tirian probably wouldn’t either.
“Did Tirian send you to ask that?” Glabius says, with a strange look on his face.
“Since when is a craven butcher on a first name basis with the King of Narnia?” Jill asks, putting her back against the counter. She unbuttons her coat, twitching it back just enough to show off the hilt of her sword.
“Craven,” says the butcher, and sighs. “Yes. I am a coward, I admit it. I fled Narnia when the Calormenes came. I fled my country, forswore my oaths. I fought for her first, the King must understand that. But I left my home.”
“And you hide up here in Archenland,” Jill says coldly; what she couldn’t say back in the Lion’s Paw, not with Adelchis giving his spiel. “Why do you even care anymore?”
“I am a knight of Narnia,” says Glabius, to her shock. “I swore oaths; I broke them.” He looks down at his butcher’s apron with a rueful look on his face. “I changed my name and I came here, where no one knows who I was once. But I know every occupant of the Narnian Quarter – the nobles don’t come here, you see. Not if they can help it. And if they do, my partner can help them as well as I can. I know who is still true to Narnia – who can give gold, who can send supplies, who dares to return of their own body.”
“And are you?” Jill says. “Are you still true to Narnia? Who are you, Glabius the butcher? Who are you really?”
He closes his eyes for a moment, one hand going to the medal around his neck. Jill can just make out the crowned sword of the High King on it – the sign of the King of Summer. “My name,” he says, “was Bardelys of Castlejoy. I fought beside Tirian in the war against the northern giants, when his father Erlian was king and he was still Prince Tirian, in the years before the Calormenes came. If you are in contact with the King, you can ask him, and he will know who I am.”
“I will,” Jill assures him. “Is that all you can do? Name names? I thought you had some top-secret group of Narnian loyalists.”
“You despise me,” says Glabius – or Bardelys, whatever he calls himself. “You, who fought at Tirian’s side, who never deserted Narnia, you despise me, what I am, what I stand for.”
“You don’t stand for anything,” Graynor says, with the hint of a growl behind the words. “Coward.”
Glabius gives him a look of infinite sadness, his brown goat’s eyes filled with grief. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“You call yourself a knight? You couldn’t even fight for your own home! You couldn’t even defend your own people.”
“I know,” the faun says sadly. “I wish I could explain it. It was as if all the fight had gone out of me at once.”
Sneering, Graynor opens his mouth to reply, and then stops, a strange look coming over his face. “What kind of butcher shop are you running here?” he demands.
But Glabius doesn’t answer, an expression of utter horror coming over his face. Jill claps a hand over her mouth and nose, smelling what Graynor, with his canine nose, had smelled first. Death and rot – it might have been a cure gone wrong, some of the meat in the shop going rotten. But it’s not. They would have smelled it earlier.
Jill knows that smell.
She feels her hands begin to shake, despair crowding in and driving every other thought out of her mind, so that all she wants to do is to sink to her knees and weep unending tears. Glabius falls to the floor, grasping at his hair, and Graynor scratches at his muzzle with his paws, whining in the back of his throat – the first uncertain sound Jill has ever heard him make. The room seems to shrink around them, like a cell, like the Calormene cells in Narnia, so that for a heartbeat all she can taste is rotten straw and her own blood choking her mouth, the heavy weight of another body on hers. In the distance, someone is sobbing. It might be her.
You are the Lion’s children, she hears Adelchis – is it Adelchis? She can’t tell – whisper in the back of her mind, and with the last of her strength Jill uses the back of the counter to push herself to her feet and strides to the door of the butcher shop, throwing it open and drawing her sword. The worn leather of the hilt steadies her further. So does the cold steel of the blade before her, like a shield between her and the thing in the square.
She has seen it before. It, him, whichever; it does not matter. He’s more insubstantial here than he had been the last time that Jill had seen him in Narnia, a cloud of darkness like smoke through which she can see the buildings in the square behind him, the statue of Queen Carolanne with her sword point down in front of her. Except – no. Her sword is raised.
He has the head of some cruel bird of prey, beak slightly open with a sharp, pointed tongue. He is twice again the height of a man, with four arms that have something bird-like about them, each one ending in long dark hands with curved talons that claw and scratch at the air before him. His feet are clawed as well; although he doesn’t touch the ground, the snow melts in every spot where his footsteps would fall. His eyes are red and mad; Jill, looking at them, feels herself drawn towards them, feels infinity stretch out before her. She takes one step forward, boots crunching in the snow, and the sound breaks her out of it. She averts her gaze hastily, gasping, and grabs at the doorframe to keep herself from falling.
“Tash,” she whispers.
It’s the wrong thing to do. The sound draws his attention on her, and he smiles, a bird’s cruel mocking smile. He turns towards her, beak opening in a laugh, or perhaps to speak. Jill’s pulse is pounding very hard, like a bomb about to explode, but her grip is steady on her sword.
When a woman speaks, Jill thinks at first that she’s gone mad. The stranger’s voice is deeper than any woman she’s ever heard, with a note like the roar of a rockfall and the soft rumble of a mountain growing. She says, Get out! This land is not yours yet, cousin, and I will not have you here while I call it mine.
Tash laughs. It’s a horrible sound, like the shriek of metal on metal, of dying men and horses in battle, and Jill screams when she hears it, clapping her free hand against her ear but still keeping hold of her sword with the other.
You are not Aslan, he says. You cannot keep me out for long, mother of mountains. You do not have the power.
Get out! the woman orders. Leave now, before I make you.
Tash seems to – dissipate, almost, becoming even mistier before he draws the shreds of himself back together. For half a heartbeat, he is substantial enough that Jill can’t see through him, and then he’s gone. The yawning emptiness inside her head vanishes abruptly and she staggers forward, grabbing at the doorframe again. Behind her, she can hear Glabius weeping.
The door of the Lion’s Paw bursts open, Adelchis rearing out of it. He meets Jill’s eyes across the square, and they share the same silent horror. She turns her head quickly at a flicker of movement and watches the marble statue of Queen Carolanne ground the point of her sword in her statue’s base again, still as stone.
Jill sheathes her sword with a whisper of steel and runs.
“Where are you going!” Graynor shrieks from behind her, skidding out of the butcher shop.
“Anvard!” Jill shouts, scrabbling across the slippery cobbles before she gets her footing back and breaks into her full stride. She’d been a good runner even before she’d come to Narnia and she’s even better now with five years’ experience; running for her life is better than any gym class she’d ever had, especially at Experiment House.
She careens through the streets of the town, slipping and sliding occasionally and nearly falling more than once, pushing herself up or catching herself on statuary or passerby. The streets are still full, but movement is only just starting to return to the inhabitants, though they don’t seem to understand what’s caused it. She can hear them talking to each other, voices full of puzzlement and fear. Why, they ask, what has happened? Jill is running too quickly to hear if anyone has an answer.
The effect is decidedly less the further away she gets from the Narnian Quarter, so that by the time she sprints through the castle gates, ignoring the startled shouts of the guards, everything seems to be normal. She wrenches open the nearest door and dashes through the halls of Anvard, making servants and guests alike jump aside, staring at the unexpected sight of a young woman running as if the very jackals of Tash are on her heels. She takes the stairs two at a time, ignoring the puddles of melted snow she’s leaving in her wake, until at last she’s skidding to a stop in front of the door of Susan Pevensie’s room, grabbing at the door handle to steady her. The castle is a long way from Carolanne’s Square, the room even further up, and Jill gives herself half a heartbeat to fight for steadiness. She’s panting, sweat plastering her hair to her face, her breath tearing ragged strips at her throat. The abrupt change in temperature between outside and indoors is making her nose run and Jill swipes her wrist over it, irritated, before rapping sharply on the door.
There’s no answer.
Jill takes a deep breath and tries the knob. It opens under her hand and she thrusts the door open. “Susan? Susan, it’s me.”
At first she thinks the room is empty, and then she sees that the sprawl of golden silk on the carpet isn’t a fallen dress, but Susan Pevensie. Jill swears and runs to her, falling to her knees beside Susan. She looks as if she had been just turning towards the window when she collapsed, knocking over a small end table as she did so, spilling its contents onto the carpet. Her hair is loose around her, a dark fan that covers her face, and her left hand is outstretched, reaching towards her ivory horn, fallen just beyond the reach of her fingers. A china teacup has shattered on the floor beside her, leaving a dark stain on the carpet.
Jill rolls Susan over gently, pressing two fingers against the other woman’s neck and breathing a sigh of relief when she feels a pulse there. “Susan? It’s Jill. Wake up, please –”
Susan’s eyelashes flutter, and a moment later she’s looking up at Jill, her cheeks almost as pale as the snow falling outside the window. “There was a shadow,” she whispers. “What happened?”
“Tash,” Jill says, and a shiver racks her entire body at the word. She doesn’t know why she’d come to Susan; she doesn’t even like Susan. “Tash is in Archenland.”
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
Content Notes: language, mention of past sexual assault
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW. Dust in the Air does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). Thank you to
snacky for the beta!Jill hasn’t had occasion to visit Anvard’s kennels before, but a man-at-arms in the palace livery points the way out to her and she soon finds herself pushing open a door with a stylized pattern of various dogs chasing each other engraved on it. She’s surprised to find that there’s a second door at knee-height, rather like a cat flap, but larger and with a door of heavy canvas instead of wood. It must be for the dogs – well, of course it is, there must be talking dogs or wolves or great cats (do the great cats stay in the kennels? she wonders) that visit the palace occasionally. The steward certainly hadn’t had any trouble deciding where to put Graynor. She hopes that the dogboys aren’t treating him like a dumb dog, but she’s fairly certain that he would have mentioned it if they were. Graynor has never had trouble expressing his likes and dislikes.
It’s the first kennels she’s ever seen, and Jill is surprised to find that it’s wide and airy, with a vaulted ceiling and a frieze of hunting dogs painted on the outer wall. She had been expecting something dark and cramped, but of course not: the palace hunting hounds are probably better treated than some of the servants.
She looks around curiously. To her left at the end of the hall is a closed door; Jill supposes that that must lead to the room where the kennel keeper sleeps. Immediately to the left of it, across from Jill, is another door, this one marked with the image of a dog. Maybe that’s where they keep the dogs’ gear, though Jill can’t imagine what there might be. All along the hallway, which curves around in a complete circle, so that Jill can’t see the end of it, are raised wooden beds with straw strewn on them, interrupted at regular intervals with food dishes and, more rarely, what appear to be stone chimneys, though she can’t see a stove anywhere. A kind of indoor stream runs in a deep groove in the stone down the side of the hallway, burbling cheerfully and disappearing beneath into a grate in the corner between the keeper’s chamber and the closet.
And of course there are the dogs. Most of them are great leggy beasts, with thick wiry hair in shades of gray or brown. Deerhounds or wolfhounds, Jill assumes, walking down the hallway and looking at them, but she finds that there are elegant sighthounds as well, and smaller hounds that look a little like some kind of terrier, even a few long lumpy ones with short legs, like basset hounds, though there are fewer of these. Some of them ignore her, while others thump their tails against the straw. One or two come up to sniff at her, their shoulders of a height with her hips, and Jill carefully folds her hand into a fist for them to smell, then scratches them behind the ears when they deem her acceptable.
She keeps hearing the murmur of voices, somewhere just out of sight, and follows the curve of the round building until it opens abruptly out on open air. There’s a door – a human-size door – propped open with the statue of a dog in full point; Jill follows the line of nose and raised paw and sees Graynor sitting by a huge open-air fireplace, deep in conversation with a lean brown deerhound. Other dogs are taking the air around them, sleeping or playing or gnawing on bones. Jill stares in shock when she realizes that a group of puppies are listening intently to a wolfhound with a grizzled salt-and-pepper muzzle tell stories, a few half-grown hounds listening in. She’d never thought that talking dogs would consent to be housed with dumb ones.
The courtyard is completely enclosed, with a covered peristyle lining the inner wall of the kennels, but the rest of it open to the air. The fireplace is dead center, a kind of brick oven a grate over the currently open door, and now Jill knows where the chimneys inside the kennels had gotten their heat. Underneath the peristyle is a woodstack, and next to it a stone bench with a girl wrapped in a thick cloak against the cold sitting on it, leaning down to scratch the belly of a wiry terrier. She glances up at Jill’s approach, then ignores her.
Jill steps out into the peristyle, tucking her hands – which now smell like dog – into her pockets. Her boots crunch in the snow as she approaches Graynor, not wanting to disturb the story-teller and his audience.
“Hello, Graynor,” she says. Both the wolf and the dog look up at her, the wolf rising slowly up to a standing position and shaking himself. The dog stands up as well, eyeing her with mild curiosity.
“You aren’t Queen Susan,” he observes.
“No, I’m Jill Pole,” she says. “Pleased to make your acquaintance –”
“Broadrib.” He dips his nose a little in something that might have been a bow on a human. “I’m Chief Hound here.”
“I didn’t know that King Eian kept talking dogs,” Jill says awkwardly. Maybe “kept” isn’t the right word. Maybe “employed” would be better. Well, it’s too late now; the cat is out of the bag. Or the dog, considering the circumstances.
“Certainly,” Broadrib says courteously. “My pack has served the Kings of Archenland for more than a thousand years.”
“So you aren’t a Narnian?”
His face darkens. “Not for about three thousand years, and that hardly counts, don’t you think?”
“I – no, I suppose it doesn’t,” Jill says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I just –”
“Haven’t seen any talking beasts outside of Narnia?”
“I – no,” Jill says, and remembers, like something out of a distant memory, Puddleglum pushing his plate away from him at Ettinsmoor and Eustace saying, “So we’ve been eating a talking stag,” with an expression of horror on his face. There are talking beasts outside of Narnia, of course. She’d forgotten.
“That’s all right,” Broadrib says, his expression clearing. “You aren’t the first. There are a surprising amount of Narnians who have forgotten that Narnia and Archenland were pupped from the same bitch. I don’t know where they get that idea, considering that the ones who come here are the ones who think of Archenland as a sanctuary from the ills of Narnia, but there you are.” He shrugs, an elegant little ruffle of his wiry fur.
“But you have dumb dogs in the kennels!” Jill says suddenly, knowing that she’s being terribly rude – even if she’s being terribly rude to a dog, that doesn’t change anything; Broadrib is being so polite – but unable to help herself. “Isn’t that –” Not confusing, that’s not what she means at all, because of course a talking dog can tell itself from a dumb one. “− awkward?” she finishes, struggling for the word.
“We take care of them,” says Broadrib. “We train them. They are –” His mouth quirks slightly in a dog’s smile, “− our pets, if you like.”
“That’s –” Somehow Jill can’t quite picture it. “How interesting,” she says instead weakly.
“Well, you and your quaint customs are fascinating, but I’m sure Jill didn’t come down here just to be bludgeoned into shock by you and yours,” Graynor drawls, though the words are missing their customary edge. “Are you ready to go on that secret mission of yours now? I was expecting you yesterday.”
“Susan made an appointment with a seamstress for me,” Jill says, and sighs. “It took hours. You’re lucky you don’t have to wear clothes.”
“A fact for which I thank the King of Evening on a daily basis,” Graynor says. “Well, let’s get going then.” If he was human he would have clapped his hands, but instead he just stands looking up at her, his tail twitching impatiently. “Daylight’s wasting.”
“It’s the new year,” Jill says, with a distant feeling of relief; Winter’s End marks the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, and there isn’t anything that she particularly wishes to hold onto from the old year. “The days get longer now.”
“The days have been getting longer since Promise of Hope, outlander,” he says dismissively. “Doesn’t mean they can’t be wasted. Come on, then.”
He trots past her, his tail going up.
“Enjoy your excursion,” Broadrib says graciously. “I expect I’ll see you at the hunt for His Highness.”
“So I’ve been informed,” Jill says. “What do you think I was getting fitted for?”
Broadrib lets out a bark of laughter. “You’re a funny one,” he says. “I’ll be sad to see you go when you leave.”
“Thanks,” Jill says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope it will be soon.” She smiles at the hound and follows Graynor back into the warm kennels, where he’s ignoring the dumb dogs lounging about.
“Aren’t they confused by your scent?” she says suddenly. “Since some of them are wolfhounds and you, well, you’re a wolf –”
“It’s a different scent. You’d understand if you had a nose worth speaking of, but you humans, you might as well not have noses at all.”
Jill touches her nose, feeling the crooked places where it had been broken. “I like my nose,” she says.
“You humans,” Graynor sighs, bowling past a wolfhound pup that comes eagerly up to him. It stops where he’s left it, crestfallen with its ears and tail drooping.
“Bye, Graynor,” it – she – says sadly.
“I’m coming back, Tobey!” he barks over his shoulder, and the pup perks up immediately.
“Can I come?” she adds, following them down the hallway with her tail wagging frantically.
Jill’s mouth quirks in involuntary amusement.
“No!” Graynor says indignantly. “This is Narnian business.”
“But you’re coming back?”
“Oh, dear gods,” the wolf sighs, stalking away stiff-legged. Tobey stops in her tracks, tail wagging slowly.
“I’ll save you a spot at dinner!”
Graynor ignores her.
“I see you’ve found an admirer,” Jill says, catching up to him. “Even if it does seem a little star-crossed. You know, wolf, wolfhound –”
“She’s a nice kid,” he allows grudgingly. “And it’s not that weird. The Crown employs wolfpacks, too – use ‘em as foresters, they’re good at catching poachers. Some of them run with the hounds, though it’s not that common. They help with training a lot. There’s just no one here right now.” He turns to grin at her, his tongue hanging out. “You’re letting your Narnian prejudices show!”
“Didn’t Tirian do that?”
“The Telmarines have always preferred using humans wherever they can. Wolves still make Narnians nervous.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Jill says, opening the door for him and following him outside. “You do have all those teeth –”
“It’s because of the White Witch, you idiot. Almost two thousand years and they can’t get over the Secret Police, never mind that since then we’ve practically been paragons of virtue – hullo, then, where are you off to? Top secret augur business?”
Adelchis is waiting at the entrance to the courtyard, wearing a leather vest over his otherwise bare chest. Not for the first time, Jill wonders why he never seems to get cold. He hasn’t made any adjustments in his wardrobe to account for the Archenlanders’ tender sensibilities, she observes with a sigh. The only accoutrements he’s discarded are his weapons; he’s still wearing his necklace of Calormene finger bones. She wonders if anyone in Anvard has commented on them, or if they realize what they are. Archenland seems far too civilized for a centaur to go wandering around nearly naked except for human bones and a few bits of leather, unlike Narnia, which has far better things to worry about.
“I thought I’d accompany you,” he says, addressing this to Jill. “If you have no objection, of course.”
“No,” she says, blinking up at him. “But how did you know where I was going? I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Not even me,” Graynor says pointedly.
“I’m a seer,” Adelchis says blandly. “I see.”
“You saw that I was going to go down to the city to talk to Narnian refugees?” Jill says dubiously. “What, in the stars? I thought you said the stars were blank.”
The centaur raises an eyebrow at her, mysterious for a moment, and then says, “Suatrius told me you asked Graynor to go down to the city with you, and I overheard King Tirian telling you about the Lion’s Paw in Narnia. I guessed.”
“Bloody augurs,” Graynor sighs. “What the hell do you want with Narnian refugees? They abandoned Narnia, end of story. Nothing to say to them.”
“Maybe,” Jill says, “but maybe not. Lord Vespasian has some connections there, and he said that they mainly sit around talking about going back to Narnia to throw the Callies out, but what they really needed was a proper kick in the arse. Anyway,” she shrugs, pushing her hair out of her face, “even if they don’t want to help, then I’ve got some messages to pass on from family members back in the camps.”
Graynor shrugs. “Could be amusing,” he allows. “Well, let’s go.” He starts towards the gate, his tail wagging slightly.
Jill and Adelchis follow him. Despite the chill in the air and the snow on the ground, the sun is shining and Jill raises a hand to shade her eyes, squinting. It’s funny – when they’d arrived, she would have sworn that Archenland was on the edge of spring, lingering on the edge of spring thaw, but in the time that they’ve been here it’s snowed twice, plunging Archenland back into the depths of winter. They’re not that far from Narnia. It shouldn’t be so different, even if Anvard is at a much higher elevation. Queen of Spring, bah, Jill thinks, rather irritated. Ever since Susan arrived it’s been getting more and more like winter.
When they finally reach the town, it’s to find it alive with life, filled fit to burst and bustling with visitors who have arrived for the Crown Prince’s nameday celebrations and who aren’t privileged enough to be lodged in Anvard. It’s chaotic, more than a little overwhelming in a way that the castle isn’t; Jill can barely believe that she used to go into London, which is at least ten times bigger than Anvard Town. She looks at Graynor and Adelchis to see if they’re as uneasy as she is, and finds that while Graynor seems jumpy, Adelchis merely seems impassive, as if the flow of Archenlander life about him has no effect on him.
A wagon rumbles past them, a wildcat draped over the barrels in the back. It raises its head to look at them curiously, eyes gleaming green in the flare of sunlight before it drops its head again, yawning. Jill draws her long coat close around her, playing absently with the fringe of her scarf. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about her and Graynor, but Adelchis is drawing stares, mothers drawing their children aside and men closing their shop doors as he passes by, the finger bones hanging white around his neck. Jill finds herself feeling peculiarly protective of him, though he hardly needs it; the augur is fully capable of defending himself, whether from Calormene soldiers or Archenlander whispers, but how dare they look at him like that, like they have any idea who he is or what he’s gone through. What any of them have gone through.
“I don’t suppose you happen to know where we’re going,” Graynor drawls as they pause as a street corner, watching two knights with their armor slung on packhorses ride by.
“It’s a pub called the Lion’s Paw,” Jill says, briefly blinded by the sheen of sunlight off the steel of the knights’ lances. She scrubs a hand over her eyes to clear the sparks from her vision. “It’s in the Narnian Quarter. I thought it would be easier to find.”
“Hmph.”
Jill glances around quickly, then spies a baker’s stall with the owner standing behind the counter, handing a loaf of seed-encrusted bread to a tall woman with red skirts. Jill hurries up to it as she departs.
“Can I help you, miss?” he asks, when her gaze doesn’t go to the menu chalked on the wall behind him.
“Yes,” Jill says. “Can you tell me how to get to the Lion’s Paw? It’s a pub –”
“What’s a nice girl like you want with a place like the Lion’s Paw?” he says, looking surprised. “It’s in the Narnian Quarter, you know. Full of them Narnians. Between you and me, if you want a good Archenlander pub, go left at the corner, then left again and go to the Twin Peaks. If you tell the barkeep that Darik sent you, you’ll get –”
“I don’t want an Archenlander pub,” Jill says, raising her chin and letting her voice go steely. “And I don’t have a problem with Narnians. Do you?”
The baker’s gaze flickers to Adelchis, standing behind Jill with his long gray braids and the finger-bones white around his neck, then down to Graynor, who looks up at him with clear boredom. Jill watches his gaze run over her again, knowing that this time he’s looking close enough to see something other than a young woman in an expensive coat – the scars on her face and hands, the cant of her hip that means she’s wearing a sword, the muscle of her shoulders even beneath the heavy wool of her jacket. If she spoke like a Narnian, there would be no question about where she’d come from. His face closes up and goes unfriendly.
“Of course not, miss,” he says, not sounding it. “Go right at the corner and keep going straight until you reach Carolanne’s Square. It’s somewhere about there, if I’m not mistaken, but I wouldn’t know for sure.” He gives her a disdainful look. “I’ve never been, of course.”
Jill sneers at him. “Of course. God forbid you catch something. A spine, maybe.”
She turns away, flinging her hair back over her shoulder with one hand, and finds herself wishing she’d tied it back, but her head is warmer with it down. She joins Adelchis and Graynor on the sidewalk and says, loud enough that the baker can hear, “Prejudiced fool.”
“Narnian bitch,” he snaps back at her, and Jill almost laughs, and proud of it and but I’m from Cambridge warring for a moment on the tip of her tongue, before Adelchis tugs her back into the crowd and the moment is lost, leaving her briefly confused about her hesitation. She’s not Narnian, she’ll never be Narnian, and she hardly wants to be either – Narnian with all its strange superstitions and its four gods alongside Aslan, its quaint traditions – but she’d rather be a bitch and Narnian than the nicest girl alive and an Archenlander. For some reason the thought is both warming and discomfiting. It doesn’t matter; she’s neither one and she never will be.
“Why do they hate Narnians so much?” she asks instead as they make their way to the street corner. There’s a roundabout in the center – snow-covered now, but Jill suspects in summer that it may be a riot of grass and flowers. Or maybe it’s just stone. On it are four bronze statues facing the four cardinal points, going green in a few places from oxidation. Jill peers curiously at them as they wait for a cavalcade of knights to ride by, shields hung on their backs and lances grounded at the sides of their saddles.
“Because they’re bastards,” Graynor says. “And they hate being Narnia’s dumping ground.”
“They see the face of both their past and their future in Narnia,” Adelchis says. He nods at the statues. “The one facing westwards – that is King Col, the first king of Archenland, who led his people out of Narnia after feuding his father the King and his brother the Crown Prince. Try as they might, Archenland will never forget that they were Narnian once. The Kings of Archenland can trace their bloodline back to the beginning of the world, which the Narnian kings have not been able to do for almost two thousand years. They are a proud people and with good reason; Archenland has never been conquered and the line of kings is unbroken back to the beginning of all things. They have as many – more, truly – heroes than Narnia. But they have never been Aslan’s favorite.”
“Who wants to be Aslan’s favorite?” Graynor scoffs. “Fat lot of good that’s done Narnia, if you think that’s true and I don’t, by the way. If this is how he treats his favorites, I’d hate to see what he does to his enemies. Give me the Kings and Queens of Summer any day. No, listen to me – Archenlanders hate Narnia because we let them survive out of the goodness of our hearts and because every time something bad happens in Narnia, half our bloody people go pouring over the border because they don’t have the guts to stand and fight. That’s why Archenland’s full of bloody cowards – it’s all the Narnian blood.”
Jill looks around hastily in case any of the passerby have heard this and want to make something of it, but the conversation has gone unheard in the bustle of the crowd. They cross the street, passing by the four statues, and turn left, the way the baker had indicated.
“Who are the other statues?” she asks Adelchis suddenly, even though they’ve already been left far behind.
He seems pleased to be asked, his voice taking on the rhythmic quality of a professor delivering a favorite lesson. “To the east is King Evyn the Clever, King Col’s son, who riddled with the goddess Cybele, the Mother of Mountains, and tricked her into giving up Anvard castle for his own seat. To the south is King Joh, who wed the daughter of the river god of the Winding Arrow and brought all lands north of the river under the crown. And to the north is King Orrin the Unlikely, who wanted more than anything not to be king, but all five of his brothers were killed when the kings of Narnia threatened war, and so he became king in the end. He beat back two kings of Narnia, and Archenland held her borders.”
“They didn’t happen to be Peter and Edmund, did they?” Jill says hopefully.
Graynor snorts. “They were the old kings of Narnia, centuries before even the White Witch. Weak stock.”
“I’ve never heard anyone talk about Narnia before the White Witch,” Jill says, dodging around a fruit-seller with a basket of wizened winter apples.
“We know very little about it,” Adelchis says simply. “Everything from then has been destroyed. There is no written history in Narnia that dates back before the Long Winter and precious little material culture, either. Even Archenland’s records from the period are mostly myth and legend, nothing substantial.”
Graynor gives him a very strange look. “Augur, what the hell did you do before the Occupation?” he demands, head tilted to the side in bewilderment.
Jill looks up at him too, realizing that she doesn’t know. It’s not generally the sort of thing that’s asked; usually it doesn’t do any good to know, and sometimes it can do a great deal of harm.
“I was a professor of archaeology at the University of Beaversdam,” Adelchis says.
She feels her mouth form into a round “O” as she tries to imagine solemn Adelchis, with his prophecies and his finger-bones and his cursed arrows, as a university professor like the ones from Cambridge that her father used to have over for dinner. “But you’re a centaur! And archaeologists…dig,” she finishes, rather lamely.
His mouth quirks slightly in a smile. “I didn’t say it was easy.”
“I’d imagine not,” Jill says faintly. “Ah – which one do you think is Carolanne’s Square?”
Anvard Town appears to be made up with a series of squares, each with its statues, fountains, and other monuments. Jill would not put money on her ability to find one out of the dozen she’d seen on the map in the castle.
“The one with Queen Carolanne in it,” Graynor drawls. “Let’s just hope they haven’t set up a bloody great fence around the Narnian Quarter here, like they have in Tashbaan.”
“When did you go to Tashbaan?”
Graynor draws up short, his hackles rising. “I don’t talk about it,” he snaps.
“All right,” Jill says quickly. She strides forward, peering at the statues as they pass them, pausing at each one that might be a woman and waiting for Adelchis to tell her yes or no. In the end, she doesn’t find Carolanne’s Square – or rather, she does, but the first thing she sees is the sign of the Lion’s Paw, not the marble statue of Queen Carolanne, who turns out to be a small, graceful looking woman holding a sword nearly as big as she is. Jill resolves to look her up as soon as she gets back to Anvard, since she seems like an interesting woman, at least judging by her statue.
Walking into the Lion’s Paw feels like coming home. Jill can’t put her finger on what it is, but her shoulders loosen immediately, her chin coming up as she sighs a little, the tension leeching out of her. Their entrance apparently doesn’t merit comment, although a few people look around as the door opens and they come in, then go back to their drinks.
Jill looks around curiously. It looks like the building might originally have been a warehouse of some sort, a big open room with tall tables and high barstools so that centaurs and other large creatures can stand at head height with sitting humans or nonhumans of a similar size. In a few places small sets of box stairs have been pushed close to the stools so that dwarves or talking beasts can climb up. Along the walls are floor tables, separated from each other by removable screens, their occupants sitting or lying on cushions. There’s more seating in a loft above, Jill finds when a shout from above draws her attention; it seems to take up half the width of the building, with a railing to keep its occupants from falling over. A winding staircase is tucked near the bar, which also boasts a display kitchen and an enormous brick oven with flames roaring merrily away. Jill finds her mouth beginning to water at the smell.
The clientele is of a sort decidedly more familiar to her than the occupants of the castle. According to the books Jill has been reading, the population of Archenland is approximately two-fifths nonhuman, but she’s found, somewhat to her shock, that nonhuman doesn’t necessarily mean Narnian. This, though, this feels right. It’s not that the occupants of the Lion’s Paw aren’t human, because at least a third of them are, at least so far as Jill can tell from her quick once-over. They look right, they sound right, it even smells right – some kind of tiny, nearly indistinguishable difference from the Archenlanders that Jill has been seeing and hearing day-in and day-out since they arrived. She’s damned if she can put her finger on what it is, but it’s there.
Adelchis and Graynor feel it too. Graynor’s tail starts wagging like a dog’s and he gives her a canine grin, teeth gleaming in the lantern-light. “Now this is more like it!” he says. “Damme, if I’d known this was here, I’d have spent less time cooped up in the palace, listening to Broadrib tell me one bloody hunting story after another.”
Adelchis doesn’t smile. He glances around coolly as they start forward, his hooves clopping against the wooden floor, and says, “Enjoy it if you must, but don’t forget the reason for its existence – and who its patrons are.”
“Stormcrow,” Graynor says, but his face darkens and his tail stops wagging. He glances around, swinging his head from side to side as if searching for a familiar scent. Perhaps he is. There are certainly enough Narnians that have fled to Archenland; Jill knows a few herself.
She finds an empty table, one of the high ones with a spot for Adelchis, and drapes her coat over the back of a chair to save it for them. “I’ve got money if you want to get food and drinks,” she says. Glancing at the big oven, where a minoboar is drawing forth some kind of flatbread on a big wooden paddle, she adds, “I know I do.”
“Yes,” Graynor says, loping over to the bar and leaping up a set of short stairs provided for smaller Narnians to speak on equal standing with the bartender and the cook.
Jill and Adelchis follow more slowly, Jill reading the chalked menu on the wall behind the bar, behind the racked bottles of liquor. The bartender smiles at them as they approach, replacing a bottle of blue liquor on the rack behind her as the satisfied customer departs. She’s a tall, willowy huldra with her yellow hair in elaborate braids around her ears and tattoos on her knuckles. Her cow’s tail flicks idly as she talks.
“I haven’t seen you around here before,” she says. “Here for the Prince’s tournament?”
“Something like that,” Jill says, wondering how to broach the question. She covers up her hesitation by gesturing at the menu and asking, “What’s good here?”
“Oh, everything,” says the huldra. “Steintor here used to cook at Kingsrest Manor in the Barrows. If you ask for it, he can make it, as long as we have the ingredients in the pantry.”
The minoboar turns his head at the mention of his name and smiles at them, which isn’t a particularly pretty expression. Jill returns it anyway.
Adelchis solemnly orders a bottle of pear cider and a plate of beer-battered fish and chips for his human half and a large salad of winter greens for the horse half. Graynor, apparently spotting some kind of familiar Narnian specialty on the menu, immediately commences fawning over it like a puppy, his tail wagging so hard that he nearly tips over off the stairs. Jill has never seen him so pleased and the huldra looks amused by his enthusiasm, calling the order over to Steintor.
“What was he pulling out of the oven a minute ago?” she finally asks wistfully.
“Baked flatbread with caramelized onions and winter squash,” the huldra says immediately. “We’ve another with lemons and smoked salmons, but it’s more expensive, since the lemons are shipped in from Terebinthia or Calormen.”
Jill can’t tell if her expression darkens at the mention of Calormen or not. “I’ll have the first one,” she says. “And a glass of white wine.”
The huldra starts rattling off the vintages and years.
“Um –” Jill says, looking at Adelchis for help, but the centaur has already gone back to the table. “That one,” she says, stopping the huldra when she finally recognizes a location and hoping it’s not too expensive. “I’ll have that one.”
She counts out the money that Susan had given her – one silver dar and a handful of copper rams, which makes a welcome change from Calormene crescents and minims. There are three gold cols nestled in her purse, but she doesn’t need them yet. She hesitates for a minute over the gold suns with Peter Pevensie’s head on them, wondering if they mean anything to the huldra besides a nice tip. She hesitates for so long that the huldra collects the dar and the rams and says, “That’s it, you’ve paid in full,” smiling at her.
Jill closes her purse with a snap, tucking it back into her waistcoat. “Thanks,” she says, collecting her wineglass, and chews on her lip for a minute before giving into cowardice and going back to the table. She’ll ask about Vespasian of Glasswater’s supposed loyal Narnians later.
Adelchis seems interested by her wine. “Castlejoy?” he asks. “Interesting choice. This must be from before the Occupation; I don’t know there’s any of the family left now. Unless the Calormenes have installed someone else, I think the land must have been left to go fallow. It’s a pity.”
“Don’t be depressing,” Graynor snaps, raising his muzzle from his bowl of honey beer.
Jill turns her wine glass in precise half-circles on the table in front of her, thinking. She’s sure that Tirian and Vespasian must have told Susan the same thing that they’d told her, so it’s possible that she might have come here already and walked away empty-handed. But she hadn’t mentioned it yesterday, when she’d finally decided to grace Jill with her council, and Jill can’t really imagine Susan Pevensie walking into a place like this, not while she’s still playing Queen of Spring. Peter, yes; according to Eustace, he’d done just that when they’d gone to Cair Paravel. But not Susan. She strikes Jill as the kind of woman who’d call the Lion’s Paw a den of ill repute and immigrant rabble and declare that no good could ever come of it. If any help for Narnia is going to come from here, then Jill’s got to be the one to do it, because Susan Pevensie won’t.
That decides her. She straightens up, taking a sip of wine to fortify her, and lets her gaze skim along the lines of the pub, taking in everyone in sight. They’re not the unlikely lot of cowards that she might have expected before she’d known people who left Narnia, the ones who just couldn’t take it anymore and decided that it was better to risk getting caught running the border than living on the edge of a broken country with the fear of death a constant companion. Jill knows what that’s like. She and Eustace had tried to find a way to leave once too, during those interminable weeks when they’d been certain that Tirian had been killed and this had all been for naught. Sometimes she wonders if the real reason that she and Eustace hadn’t run isn’t because Tirian had come back, but because there’s nowhere to run to. There’s no sanctuary for them in Archenland or Terebinthia, Galma or Seven Isles or anywhere else that Narnia’s citizens have fled to. The answer that the honey-seers, Susan’s naiads, had given her flutters in her chest like a small bird trying to break out of a cage, a painful secret that she holds as close as a toothache. She hasn’t told Eustace yet. She doesn’t know if she can.
“Do you see anyone you know?” she asks Graynor and Adelchis, looking around again. She doesn’t crane her neck to see who’s in the loft above; that’s too obvious, and she doesn’t feel like drawing attention to herself just yet.
“No,” Graynor says shortly. Adelchis doesn’t answer, pondering the occupants of the pub.
The huldra from behind the bar comes towards them, carrying a large round tray with their plates on it. She’s smiling as she does so, laughing at something one of her other customers has said.
“Excuse me,” Jill says as she starts laying out the plates in front of them.
“Yes, love?”
Jill clears her throat, taking a sip of the wine to fortify herself. “We’re friends of Lord Vespasian of Glasswater. He said that this was the place to come if we wanted to find people who were willing to come back to Narnia – willing to fight.”
“Under the banners of the Kings and Queens of Summer,” Adelchis puts his, his gaze sharp as an arrowhead.
The huldra’s hands clench on the tray, even her tail going still. “Oh, sweet Aslan,” she says, and Jill hears it, as familiar as an old lover – the sound of utter despair. “You’re from Narnia.”
“I’d think that would be obvious,” Graynor says.
Under the combined weight of their three stares, the huldra seems to shrink, drawing in on herself. “Why are you here?” she pleads. “We can’t help you! You know that –”
“We’re here for Narnia, you silly twit,” Graynor says. “You and your lot aren’t totally beyond redemption; the Kings and Queens are in a forgiving mood of late. We need everyone, even sorry sods like you. If you were ever really a Narnian, now’s the time to prove it.”
“I cannot,” the huldra pleads, her face white and set with terror. “If you had any idea what they did to me, to my family –”
“What makes you so special, princess?” Graynor sneers. “My pack’s dead or sold for slaves in Tashbaan. I was one of them and I crossed the Great Southern Desert on my own four paws on my way back. King Tirian lost his crown and his country. Jill here came from another world to fight for Narnia. What makes you so damned special?”
Jill whips around to stare at Graynor, her lips parting in surprise. So he’d been one of the Narnians sold south into slavery in Calormen – and he’d escaped, and still come back to Narnia despite everything. Jill can’t even imagine what that must have been like.
The huldra snuffles, her face tearful, but before she can reply, there’s a cry of surprise and recognition from the winding staircase, where a young knight has just emerged. “Professor?” he demands, diverting his path from the bar to their table. The huldra takes the opportunity to scurry away, empty tray held in front of her like a shield.
The knight, a young Telmarine man with rumpled black curls and a rapier on his belt, advances on their table. “Professor Adelchis?” he demands. “Is that really you?”
“Chandany Drinkwater?” Adelchis says, his face lighting up.
The knight nods, grinning. “Damme, but it’s good to see you! Even if you did fail me in Methods and Theory. I thought you were dead.”
“I assumed the same about you,” says Adelchis.
Drinkwater gives him a bemused onceover, taking in the bone necklace and the scars. “So you’ve come to Archenland with the rest of us, have you? I thought you’d still be at The University, unless the Callies decided that so much free thinking must be a danger to the regime, but it looks like you’ve had a more interesting time of it. Listen, if you don’t get a better offer – hell, even Anvard won’t turn down a Beaversdam professor if you show up there – I’ll give you a job as a tutor, if you like.” He grins happily at Adelchis, and Jill revises her estimation of his age up by a few years, taking in the crow’s feet at the corners of his laughing blue eyes.
Adelchis gives him a solemn look. “I’m not in Archenland to stay,” he says.
The knight frowns a little, looking from Adelchis to Jill and Graynor until she sees his mouth tighten in understanding. “Oh,” he says softly. “It’s come to that.”
“Yes,” Adelchis says, reaching forward to grasp his forearm with his big, callused archer’s hands. “You are a knight of Narnia, Chandany Drinkwater. Your king, your country, your gods need you.”
“My family needs me,” Drinkwater says, his eyes pleading, but he doesn’t pull away from Adelchis.
“Your family is Narnian. They need a home.” His gaze flickers upwards. “Tell your friends. The Queen of Spring is at Anvard Castle and she will be returning to Narnia soon. She would prefer to return with an army.”
Drinkwater looks slightly sick, but he bows a little once Adelchis releases him. “I – I’ll see what I can do,” he says. He glances at Jill and Graynor, apparently not recognizing either of them, and bows again in compromise before backing away.
Adelchis’s hooves clop slightly on the wooden floor as he turns to address the rest of the pub. “The Kings and Queens of Summer are in Narnia,” he announces, his voice pitched to carry. All around the pub, Narnians turn to look at them, hands stilling on dice and drinks lowered to the table. Jill raises her chin, looking back.
“All of you heard Queen Susan’s horn,” Adelchis goes on. “The High King Peter summons all true Narnians to answer to his levy in Lantern Waste to drive out the Calormenes from Narnia. He moves against Prince Bahadur. The Queen of Spring is at Anvard now. She would prefer to return to Narnia with an army.”
“Augur!” someone at one of the floor tables yells. “What do you see in the stars?”
There is nothing, Jill remembers him saying that day by the rivers, with the honey-seers standing before them. We look to the future and there is nothing. I cannot tell if that is because the slate is blank or because there is no future.
“I see nothing,” says Adelchis, and she feels her heart drop before he goes, “unless all true Narnians rally before the High King. There is no future for Narnians without her people.”
The dwarf who’d shouted goes quiet, looking rather pale behind his black beard.
Adelchis looks around at all of them. “You are Narnians,” he says. “The Tisroc cannot take that from you. Archenland cannot take that from you. You are the Lion’s children from the day you are born to the day you die. Remember what you are and prove worthy of it.”
“You have a week to decide,” Jill says, trying not to flinch as the looks turn from the augur to her. “Make your decisions by the end of Prince Gareth’s tournament. When it’s over, we all go back to Narnia.”
She looks out at all the faces, trying to decide who will and who won’t come. The knights who have taken over the loft must have come for the tournament, and that’s who’ll be the most help back in Narnia, but they really need everyone they can get, even if they aren’t fighters. The Calormenes still outnumber them.
Adelchis turns away from the crowd, his attention back on his meal. Murmurs start in the pub, soft first, and then louder, growing into harried and angry conversations, arguments. Jill swallows and looks down at her plate. She doesn’t have much appetite now, but five years on the run has taught her to eat whenever possible, so she picks up fork and knife and starts slicing the flatbread into neat squares. It takes several bites before her appetite returns, around which Jill realizes that she’s too hungry to really do the flatbread justice because she’s eating it too quickly. The huldra had been right about one thing, at least: the minoboar cook is a wizard in the kitchen.
She finishes the rest of the flatbread quickly and drains the rest of her now warm wine. She can remember seeing the sign of a butcher’s shop across the square; there’s no way to know if it’s the one that Susan had visited except going in and asking, which is exactly what Jill is going to do, especially now that her blood’s up. If she was back in Narnia, now would be a good time to go after Calormene patrols.
“I’m going to look around,” she says, climbing down off the high chair and pulling her coat back on. “This is the Narnian Quarter, isn’t it? Maybe there’s someone else we can speak to.”
Licking his chops, Graynor leaps down. “I’ll go with you,” he says. “What about you, augur?”
“I’ll stay,” Adelchis says calmly, still stolidly working his way through the last of his chips. “I will see you back at the castle.”
It has started snowing again when they emerge from the Lion’s Paw, a light dusting of white flakes that makes Jill pull up the hood of her coat and tuck her hands back into her pockets, starting across the square towards the butcher’s shop. A bell tinkles as she pushes the door open, Graynor padding behind her on silent paws.
Inside it smells of herbs, not meat. Jill looks for the source of the scent, intrigued, and finds that the fair-haired faun behind the counter is mashing up herbs in a large mortar, the pestle dwarfed by his big hands. He looks up at her approach and smiles.
“What can I do for you?”
“Are you Glabius?” Jill asks. At his nod, she goes on, “I’m Jill Pole and this is Graynor; we came with the Narnian embassy. You spoke with Susan – Queen Susan – last week?”
“Yes,” says the faun, setting the pestle down in the mortar and pushing them both to the side. He wipes his hands clean on his apron and leans on the counter, looking intrigued. “Did Her Majesty send you, then?”
Jill makes a gesture that might be assent, or might not. “I’m a representative of King Tirian,” she says instead, which isn’t strictly true except in all the ways that matter. Susan only cares about Narnia, if she cares about anything at all, which Jill frankly doubts sometimes. Jill cares about Tirian and his interests.
Glabius looks cautious. “Do you have a sign of that?”
Jill puts her hand into the pocket of her waistcoat, wondering if there’s a way she can fudge that, and remembers the small ring that Tirian had given her before they left in case of emergencies, the one with two lionesses chasing each other around an inset ruby, each devouring the tail of the other. She’d forgotten that she’d hung it on its chain around her neck this morning before she’d left her room for breakfast. She withdraws it from her collar and shows it to Glabius, unsure if it will mean anything to him.
He nods, and she tucks it back away, ignoring Graynor’s fascinated look. Glabius comes around the corner of the counter and flips the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED. “What can I do for the King?” he asks, turning back towards her.
“What help can you offer Narnia?” Jill asks bluntly. “What can you really do, up here in the mountains? On your own? Are you even Narnian up here?”
Adelchis, she thinks distantly, would not approve. Tirian probably wouldn’t either.
“Did Tirian send you to ask that?” Glabius says, with a strange look on his face.
“Since when is a craven butcher on a first name basis with the King of Narnia?” Jill asks, putting her back against the counter. She unbuttons her coat, twitching it back just enough to show off the hilt of her sword.
“Craven,” says the butcher, and sighs. “Yes. I am a coward, I admit it. I fled Narnia when the Calormenes came. I fled my country, forswore my oaths. I fought for her first, the King must understand that. But I left my home.”
“And you hide up here in Archenland,” Jill says coldly; what she couldn’t say back in the Lion’s Paw, not with Adelchis giving his spiel. “Why do you even care anymore?”
“I am a knight of Narnia,” says Glabius, to her shock. “I swore oaths; I broke them.” He looks down at his butcher’s apron with a rueful look on his face. “I changed my name and I came here, where no one knows who I was once. But I know every occupant of the Narnian Quarter – the nobles don’t come here, you see. Not if they can help it. And if they do, my partner can help them as well as I can. I know who is still true to Narnia – who can give gold, who can send supplies, who dares to return of their own body.”
“And are you?” Jill says. “Are you still true to Narnia? Who are you, Glabius the butcher? Who are you really?”
He closes his eyes for a moment, one hand going to the medal around his neck. Jill can just make out the crowned sword of the High King on it – the sign of the King of Summer. “My name,” he says, “was Bardelys of Castlejoy. I fought beside Tirian in the war against the northern giants, when his father Erlian was king and he was still Prince Tirian, in the years before the Calormenes came. If you are in contact with the King, you can ask him, and he will know who I am.”
“I will,” Jill assures him. “Is that all you can do? Name names? I thought you had some top-secret group of Narnian loyalists.”
“You despise me,” says Glabius – or Bardelys, whatever he calls himself. “You, who fought at Tirian’s side, who never deserted Narnia, you despise me, what I am, what I stand for.”
“You don’t stand for anything,” Graynor says, with the hint of a growl behind the words. “Coward.”
Glabius gives him a look of infinite sadness, his brown goat’s eyes filled with grief. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“You call yourself a knight? You couldn’t even fight for your own home! You couldn’t even defend your own people.”
“I know,” the faun says sadly. “I wish I could explain it. It was as if all the fight had gone out of me at once.”
Sneering, Graynor opens his mouth to reply, and then stops, a strange look coming over his face. “What kind of butcher shop are you running here?” he demands.
But Glabius doesn’t answer, an expression of utter horror coming over his face. Jill claps a hand over her mouth and nose, smelling what Graynor, with his canine nose, had smelled first. Death and rot – it might have been a cure gone wrong, some of the meat in the shop going rotten. But it’s not. They would have smelled it earlier.
Jill knows that smell.
She feels her hands begin to shake, despair crowding in and driving every other thought out of her mind, so that all she wants to do is to sink to her knees and weep unending tears. Glabius falls to the floor, grasping at his hair, and Graynor scratches at his muzzle with his paws, whining in the back of his throat – the first uncertain sound Jill has ever heard him make. The room seems to shrink around them, like a cell, like the Calormene cells in Narnia, so that for a heartbeat all she can taste is rotten straw and her own blood choking her mouth, the heavy weight of another body on hers. In the distance, someone is sobbing. It might be her.
You are the Lion’s children, she hears Adelchis – is it Adelchis? She can’t tell – whisper in the back of her mind, and with the last of her strength Jill uses the back of the counter to push herself to her feet and strides to the door of the butcher shop, throwing it open and drawing her sword. The worn leather of the hilt steadies her further. So does the cold steel of the blade before her, like a shield between her and the thing in the square.
She has seen it before. It, him, whichever; it does not matter. He’s more insubstantial here than he had been the last time that Jill had seen him in Narnia, a cloud of darkness like smoke through which she can see the buildings in the square behind him, the statue of Queen Carolanne with her sword point down in front of her. Except – no. Her sword is raised.
He has the head of some cruel bird of prey, beak slightly open with a sharp, pointed tongue. He is twice again the height of a man, with four arms that have something bird-like about them, each one ending in long dark hands with curved talons that claw and scratch at the air before him. His feet are clawed as well; although he doesn’t touch the ground, the snow melts in every spot where his footsteps would fall. His eyes are red and mad; Jill, looking at them, feels herself drawn towards them, feels infinity stretch out before her. She takes one step forward, boots crunching in the snow, and the sound breaks her out of it. She averts her gaze hastily, gasping, and grabs at the doorframe to keep herself from falling.
“Tash,” she whispers.
It’s the wrong thing to do. The sound draws his attention on her, and he smiles, a bird’s cruel mocking smile. He turns towards her, beak opening in a laugh, or perhaps to speak. Jill’s pulse is pounding very hard, like a bomb about to explode, but her grip is steady on her sword.
When a woman speaks, Jill thinks at first that she’s gone mad. The stranger’s voice is deeper than any woman she’s ever heard, with a note like the roar of a rockfall and the soft rumble of a mountain growing. She says, Get out! This land is not yours yet, cousin, and I will not have you here while I call it mine.
Tash laughs. It’s a horrible sound, like the shriek of metal on metal, of dying men and horses in battle, and Jill screams when she hears it, clapping her free hand against her ear but still keeping hold of her sword with the other.
You are not Aslan, he says. You cannot keep me out for long, mother of mountains. You do not have the power.
Get out! the woman orders. Leave now, before I make you.
Tash seems to – dissipate, almost, becoming even mistier before he draws the shreds of himself back together. For half a heartbeat, he is substantial enough that Jill can’t see through him, and then he’s gone. The yawning emptiness inside her head vanishes abruptly and she staggers forward, grabbing at the doorframe again. Behind her, she can hear Glabius weeping.
The door of the Lion’s Paw bursts open, Adelchis rearing out of it. He meets Jill’s eyes across the square, and they share the same silent horror. She turns her head quickly at a flicker of movement and watches the marble statue of Queen Carolanne ground the point of her sword in her statue’s base again, still as stone.
Jill sheathes her sword with a whisper of steel and runs.
“Where are you going!” Graynor shrieks from behind her, skidding out of the butcher shop.
“Anvard!” Jill shouts, scrabbling across the slippery cobbles before she gets her footing back and breaks into her full stride. She’d been a good runner even before she’d come to Narnia and she’s even better now with five years’ experience; running for her life is better than any gym class she’d ever had, especially at Experiment House.
She careens through the streets of the town, slipping and sliding occasionally and nearly falling more than once, pushing herself up or catching herself on statuary or passerby. The streets are still full, but movement is only just starting to return to the inhabitants, though they don’t seem to understand what’s caused it. She can hear them talking to each other, voices full of puzzlement and fear. Why, they ask, what has happened? Jill is running too quickly to hear if anyone has an answer.
The effect is decidedly less the further away she gets from the Narnian Quarter, so that by the time she sprints through the castle gates, ignoring the startled shouts of the guards, everything seems to be normal. She wrenches open the nearest door and dashes through the halls of Anvard, making servants and guests alike jump aside, staring at the unexpected sight of a young woman running as if the very jackals of Tash are on her heels. She takes the stairs two at a time, ignoring the puddles of melted snow she’s leaving in her wake, until at last she’s skidding to a stop in front of the door of Susan Pevensie’s room, grabbing at the door handle to steady her. The castle is a long way from Carolanne’s Square, the room even further up, and Jill gives herself half a heartbeat to fight for steadiness. She’s panting, sweat plastering her hair to her face, her breath tearing ragged strips at her throat. The abrupt change in temperature between outside and indoors is making her nose run and Jill swipes her wrist over it, irritated, before rapping sharply on the door.
There’s no answer.
Jill takes a deep breath and tries the knob. It opens under her hand and she thrusts the door open. “Susan? Susan, it’s me.”
At first she thinks the room is empty, and then she sees that the sprawl of golden silk on the carpet isn’t a fallen dress, but Susan Pevensie. Jill swears and runs to her, falling to her knees beside Susan. She looks as if she had been just turning towards the window when she collapsed, knocking over a small end table as she did so, spilling its contents onto the carpet. Her hair is loose around her, a dark fan that covers her face, and her left hand is outstretched, reaching towards her ivory horn, fallen just beyond the reach of her fingers. A china teacup has shattered on the floor beside her, leaving a dark stain on the carpet.
Jill rolls Susan over gently, pressing two fingers against the other woman’s neck and breathing a sigh of relief when she feels a pulse there. “Susan? It’s Jill. Wake up, please –”
Susan’s eyelashes flutter, and a moment later she’s looking up at Jill, her cheeks almost as pale as the snow falling outside the window. “There was a shadow,” she whispers. “What happened?”
“Tash,” Jill says, and a shiver racks her entire body at the word. She doesn’t know why she’d come to Susan; she doesn’t even like Susan. “Tash is in Archenland.”
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: 2012-01-04 02:12 pm (UTC)Terrific chapter!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-06 01:16 am (UTC)Oh, gosh, I never considered that the butcher shop might be read as selling Talking beasts! They do not do that in Archenland, which has a nonhuman population of about the same percentage as Narnia and much better integrated, besides. (Trivia: the faun was originally a minotaur, and I believe at one point, a minoboar. I also considered making him a wer-wolf.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-04 06:34 pm (UTC)I love Adelchis and how one of his students recognized him. Oh my beating heart. And Queen Carolanne's statue moving! Was that some interesting Archenland magic, their kings and queens protecting them or was that Cybele, Queen of Mountains? Oh, Tash, you terrible, awful smelling yet interesting thing, you.
Graynor, the returned slave, oh my heart. My poor broken heart. Slaves in Narnia it is just...heartbreaking.
So how does Tash affect the Pevensies, seeing as they're worshipped as small gods in Narnia? Or is it just the same kind of effect that Tash had on all the rest of them?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-06 01:27 am (UTC)The idea of making Adelchis a university prof was one of the backstory bits in this chapter that made me leap up and down in glee when I worked it out, because it's so unexpected. As is Graynor's backstory.
Originally Queen Carolanne wasn't going to move, but I loved the idea of moving statues, so...well... *grins*
As far as Tash and the Pevensies, well -- Jill says that up at the castle, no one else seemed to have noticed his appearance. *grins*
(no subject)
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Date: 2012-01-05 02:29 am (UTC)Graynor has an admirer, how cute! It reminds me a little of the scene between Mayor and the girl in the mine a few chapters back. :-) So he was sold into slavery by the Calormenes and made it back to Narnia. Definitely a true Narnian there. And Adelchis was a university professor. You know, I could see that, at least in this setting. His speech in the Lion's Paw was a little like lecturing a group of wayward students, I suppose. But of course, what he says here is far more important than teaching students at the moment. At any rate, I love that you've given us a bit of backstory on these two characters.
And the butcher is a Narnian knight as well! From the very place that made the wine Jill enjoyed at the pub. :-) I hope perhaps he will change his mind and return with them to Narnia. With the Pevensies here, maybe that will help convince him to return and take a stand and fight for his home once more (not to mention redeeming himself for fleeing).
So Cybele makes an appearance here, driving Tash out of the city. Would I be wrong in assuming she was the one that Susan heard not so long ago over breakfast when that Tarkaan interrupted? And what exactly IS Tash doing here? Very, very interesting... Would his appearance now affect any of the politics going on in Anvard and will it alter Susan's plans of hoping to bring home an army in any way at all?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-06 03:25 am (UTC)Er, in Broadrib's defense, he actually is an Archenlander native; his ancestors came over from Narnia along with the first kings of Archenland, which is why he says "not for about three thousand years." Calling him a Narnian is like calling a modern Spaniard a German because his ancestors were Visigoths.
It was Cybele that Susan heard in an earlier chapter, yes. As for whether his appearance will affect the politics...well, we'll see. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-05 06:05 am (UTC)This was great. I loved the look at the Dogs hanging with the dogs, and Jill's awkwardness with both the Archenlanders and the expat Narnians. And, as Ruth said, the physicality of the whole thing--the kennels at the castle, the bar full of Narnians, the discomfort of the refugees.
Also, YIKES TASH!!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-06 03:29 am (UTC)I think one of my favorite things in this chapter was the Dogs and the dogs, so I'm glad that worked for you.
Chapter 27 Review
Date: 2012-01-29 03:26 pm (UTC)I have noticed though, Jill has an extraordinary amount of hate/dislike for people who are different to her/not loyal to Tirian. It's a strange perspective of her, but it totally fits the image of Jill in canon as a strong-willed and brash person.
I can't wait until your nest update!
Re: Chapter 27 Review
Date: 2012-01-29 06:22 pm (UTC)As far as Jill goes, one thing that I keep in mind about Jill when I write her is that she's been in Narnia for a long time and she's been through a lot with Tirian, Eustace, and Jewel. It's not so much that she dislikes people that are different from her, but that she doubts their loyalty -- where have they been while she and the others have been fighting for Narnia? I hope that helps!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-08 10:37 pm (UTC)Tash isn't fighting fair, is he, now or five years ago.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-12 11:36 pm (UTC)Why fight fair if you don't have to? :)