Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (2)
Oct. 11th, 2008 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air 2
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: This is part two, obviously, and this is also the first WIP I've posted since 2006. (And that WIP was abandoned, so one can see I'm understandably nervous about posting another one.) The structure of this lends it to being posted in sections, though, so that's how it's going up. Because of this, however, it's not getting posted to any comms until the whole thing is done.
He wakes to the familiar symptoms of a major healing: aching bones and muscles, dry mouth, faint headache, ravenous hunger, and a dull ache where the wound was. It’s been a while since he’s been here, but it’s not something he can easily forget.
He opens his eyes.
The ceiling above is roughhewn wood, dark and smoke-stained. He’s lying on a bed of thick woven blankets and rushes that rustle when he moves. When he pushes himself up, it’s to see Peter asleep on the floor beside the bed, head pillowed on his arms.
“You look like a butcher,” Edmund says. His voice is a raw croak, and he clears his throat as Peter raises his head, blinking bleary, bloodshot eyes. “Have you considered changing your clothes? Because dried blood is a bitch to clean up.”
“The thought didn’t cross my mind,” Peter says, yawning. He glances down at himself and brushes a hand down the front of his surcoat, dried blood flaking off the leather. “Although you may have a point.”
“Since a surprising percentage of our wardrobe is here –” Edmund says. He presses two fingers to each of the holes in his surcoat and makes a face. “And this was good leather, too.”
“I’ll have someone fix it,” Peter says, levering himself up off the floor with one hand on the wall. He undoes the buckles on his surcoat and lets it fall to the floor, eyeing the bloodstained sleeves of the green shirt he’s wearing beneath grimly. “There has to be a leatherworker here somewhere. Caspian had one.”
“Glenstorm had one, you mean,” Edmund corrects, dredging up the intimate details of their time at Aslan’s How from distant, disconnected memory. The details of Telmarine Narnia he remembers. “Sidereese, wasn’t it?”
Peter shrugs. “How do you feel?” he calls over his shoulder as he leaves the bedroom. There’s a rustle of fabric; Arnau must have ordered their chests carried in.
“Like I’ve been shot,” Edmund says. “Grab me another shirt too, will you? I think this one’s well and truly dead.” He sheds his surcoat too. Beneath, the brown shirt he’s wearing his stained dark with blood; he sticks a finger through the hole left by one of the arrows and wiggles it, touching the slight rise of new scar tissue on his skin. As if he needs more scars. He pulls his shirt off over his head to see the extent of the damage.
Bad, bad, and they cluster between heart and lungs. One, at least, had definitely punctured his lungs; he licks the corners of his mouth and tastes dried blood before scrubbing it away with the back of his hand. Lazy, Pevensie, he scolds himself, and looks down ruefully to see the scars these new ones have joined, a fine spread across his left ribs and hip, and the deeper gouge in his skin in his right shoulder. Thoughtfully, Edmund rubs his thumb over that, expecting the familiar ache, the stab of pain that’s come every day since he woke up in an army hospital in Malaya, Peter dozing in the chair beside his bed.
It doesn’t come, and Edmund has to grin. This is the good thing about Lucy’s cordial – it heals old wounds as well as new ones.
Peter comes back in, ducking his head to miss the top of the door – typical woodland Narnian dwelling, so far as Edmund can tell, though with less decoration than he saw in his own time – and tosses a tunic and undershirt at Edmund. Edmund catches them – the undershirt’s plain unembroidered wool, and the tunic’s dark gray velvet, with green embroidery picking out a pattern of leaves and vines on the collar and cuffs. He can’t remember the last time he wore it, or maybe it’s Peter’s.
“I’m out of practice,” Peter says abruptly, voice muffled by fabric as he pulls the stained shirt off over his head.
“What, at swordplay? Because no one noticed that, especially all those dead Calormenes. They might feel inclined to argue that point. Just a thought.” Nice to be in a shirt not thick with blood; Edmund leaves the tunic off for a moment to shift his shoulders in the undershirt, enjoying the feel of the soft fabric against his bare skin, then pulls the tunic on too, letting his fingers linger on the carved wooden buttons, warm against his fingers.
“No,” Peter says, and Edmund glances up at the tone of his voice. It gives him a good look at Peter’s new scars, the ones from the war. They’re – not far from the places his old scars had been, surprisingly; he doesn’t remember for sure, but he thinks they might actually be in the same places. There’s a scar by his eyebrow that Peter says he got when his plane went down; Edmund remembers that scar from the battle with the White Witch, and again from Peter’s duel with Miraz.
“No,” Peter says again, softer, and ducks his head. The movement makes him look younger than he is – or should be – and Edmund has to smile slightly, because they’ve always been younger than they should be. “At watching my family get hurt.”
“Yeah,” Edmund says, with a pang, “I guess they don’t exactly encourage that in the RAF. Look, if you want to get back in practice, I just want to let you know I’m not volunteering; I’ve been volunteered more times than I’d like in the past six months, and we’re not even going to war together anymore. Well. Except –”
Peter quirks a smile, tunic hanging from his hand before he starts shrugging it on. “Really, I’d rather none of you did,” he says. “It’s not like I encourage it. It’s just that – I reacted badly –”
“As I remember,” Edmund says, “not that I remember much, since I’m pretty sure I was dying at the time –”
“You can phrase it some other way than that, you know.”
Edmund ignores him. “You charged straight at the enemy screaming like a banshee. One might say that’s rather an appropriate response; I’d prefer you do that than freeze up and get shot yourself. What do you mean, ‘reacted badly’? I remember you doing that exact same thing a hundred times before.”
Peter shrugs. “That was different. That was –”
“Does it matter?”
He’s silent, fastening the last leather-covered buttons on his tunic closed. “Maybe not,” he says at last, and reaches for his swordbelt. “I’d like to think it does.”
“Why?” Edmund asks, and all Peter does is shrug again.
“Do you want to stay here?” he says, changing the subject. “There’s food.”
“Which I am extremely excited about, you have no idea,” Edmund tells him solemnly, unfolding his legs from the lotus he’s been sitting in and testing his footing. He remembers that Lucy’s cordial can fuck with balance sometimes.
Peter or Lucy must have taken his boots off, because he’s bare-footed, the wooden flooring smooth and cool beneath his toes. He takes a few experimental steps towards Peter, his brother watching him like a hawk.
“You all right?” Peter asks, and Edmund nods.
“Socks?”
Peter tosses them to him. Edmund catches the rolled up pair with both hands. Soft brown wool – Narnian wool, by the Telmarine little gods. He’s forgotten just how soft Narnian wool is. He resists the urge to rub them against his face and balances on one leg to put them on one after the other.
“You remember making those?” Peter asks casually, his attention seemingly on the dried blood beneath his nails.
Edmund glances up. “No,” he says shortly, and could probably soften the harshness there with one excuse or another, but there’s no excuse except the fast theft of magic and the slow erosion of time.
He pulls his boots on, then looks up to see Peter holding out his sword to him, hilt-first, his fingers wrapped around the scabbarded blade. “Want to go see what’s going on here?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Edmund says, reaching for his sword. “Yeah, I really do.”
They’re farther north here than they were in what should have been the bearswood (They are burning the woods, Tumnus had written almost two thousand years ago, and Edmund had held his soot-blackened, timeworn, bloodstained diary in his hands not eight years ago (three hundred years past) and tried to imagine it. The sky is dark with smoke, and we can hear the dryads screaming as they die), and the Western Wild’s at a higher elevation than the rest of Narnia anyway. Their boots crunch in the snow, and the cold breeze stirs their hair and the leaves above them. Spring in Narnia.
At least there’s no drought this time. The snow’s evidence enough of that, and both the River Hliwe and the Great River had been running high.
A raven lands on one of the many ridges of broken stone, peering at them with first one eye, then the other. “My kings,” it says at last as Peter stops and raises his eyebrows, then mantles its wings and takes to the air.
“You get the feeling there’s something weird going on around here?” Edmund asks Peter softly.
“You too?” Peter says.
“Beyond the obvious, I mean.” He rubs his thumb over his sword-pommel, wishing for his old sword. This one is good – dwarf-work from the Golden Age, of course it’s good – but his hand aches for the familiar grip of the sword he’d carried for fifteen years, the one he’d broken the White Witch’s wand with.
Don’t be an idiot, Pevensie. A blade’s a blade. And there have been plenty of times when he’s fought with a sword other than the one Oreius had given him all those years ago; he’s just getting sentimental in his old age. His ripe old age of twenty, or maybe thirty-six. Or sixteen hundred and thirty-six. Hell if he knows at this point.
“Caspian’s Narnians never looked at us like this,” he says abruptly. Gloves. He should have looked for gloves before they left their quarters; it’s freezing out here.
Peter’s mouth twists, but he doesn’t say anything. “You’ve been out for a few hours,” he says instead after a few minutes where the only sound is the crunch of their boots in the snow, the calls of birds in the trees, some doe scolding her fawns in the distance.
“And thinking about that makes me ravenous,” Edmund assures him. A healing takes energy and sleep’s restored some of what he’s expended, but food’s generally a good thing to have too.
There’s a ghost of a grin on Peter’s face before he looks away. A squirrel freezes briefly in his sightline before it scampers off, leaping from tree to tree. “There’s food back at our quarters,” he says, tilting his head in the direction they’ve just come from. “But if you’d rather –”
“No, by all means, carry on with whatever grand plan it is you have in the works,” Edmund says genially. “Just so long as I get fed sometime during its execution.”
This time Peter really does grin, eyes glinting in bemusement. “I’ll arrange it with Arnau,” he says. “You want to go find King Tirian and our wayward cousin and his friend? We’ll meet at the old henge in the heartwood.”
Despite the phrasing, it’s not a request, and Edmund nods, hand falling to his sword-hilt again. “I’ll see you there,” he says. “You want Lu too?”
Peter glances at him sharply. “And Su,” he says, voice even, then turns and walks away, a brilliant splash of brown and scarlet against the dirty white snow and drooping trees.
Edmund presses his lips together tightly, but goes off in the opposite direction without saying anything else. The camp is bounded by the ruins, quarters built up beneath the huge, arching roots of the homewood trees and in their sturdy branches. It’s something Edmund had been used to seeing once – but not so many so close to each other; besides some of the clans, Narnians tend to be loners in nature. Or had tended to be, anyway; evidently that’s changed, because this feels like nothing so much as a village. Except for the people; he catches glimpses of them out of the corners of his eyes, but they scatter before he can ask questions or call a greeting. It sets his teeth on edge, raises the hair on the back of his neck, and he finds himself resting a hand on his sword-hilt. He doesn’t like being watched; if he has a choice, he’d prefer to be the one doing the watching.
It’s been almost ten years, but he still knows the castle’s boundaries, and he doesn’t need the markers to make sure he doesn’t stray beyond them in his search. He finds King Tirian sitting with Eustace and Jill on a low rise of wall, staring at the slight ditch that used to be a moat.
“What is this place?” Tirian asks.
“How am I supposed to know?” Eustace asks irritably as Edmund approaches silently, muffling the crunch of the snow beneath his boots. Malaya was jungle work, but this he knows by heart. He and Peter have played this game during winters in Narnia and England alike; knowing how to move without being heard is a good skill no matter where you are.
“This was the fortress of Arn Abedin,” Edmund says, probably more pleased than he should be to see the trio jump. “Built on the foundations of an older keep in the first years of the Golden Age to guard against incursions on the southwestern border – mostly Telmar and Shoushan, this far south. It was destroyed during the Dying Times when Belgarion and Natare invaded.”
“How do you know that?” Eustace demands, sounding deeply suspicious, as Tirian gets to his feet and tries to look graceful doing it.
Edmund raises an eyebrow. “Well, I was here for the first part of it. The second bit I found out when we came back and put Caspian on the throne. I don’t think we’ve been introduced yet,” he says to Tirian. “I’m King Edmund.”
“I am King Tirian of Narnia,” Tirian says, looking at Edmund’s outstretched hand as if he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do – kiss it or take his wrist in a warrior’s clasp. It strikes Edmund that maybe he’s been in England too long; he lets his hand drop. “Or what is left of it.”
Yeah, I’d say that, Edmund thinks uncharitably, stifling the words. The army had done pretty well at turning the brain to mouth filter he’d left off after he left Narnia back on; he has that to say for them. He tilts his head back in the direction he’s just come from. “Peter wants you,” he says. “All of you.”
Jill makes a faintly frantic motion with her hands as she scrambles upright. “You – Edmund – you’re all right,” she says. “But –”
“Thanks to Lu’s cordial,” Edmund says. “Could have used that a few months ago,” he adds, then shrugs it off. Malaya’s past, and the wound’s healed now; there’s nothing he can do to change it.
“The High King –” Tirian begins uncertainly.
“Is short on sleep, patience, and good temper,” Edmund supplies, “which I suppose is a little like finding air convenient, but more so than usual.” And for good reason; Edmund had been hoping that returning to the camp would prove first impressions wrong, but all being here is doing is making him more and more sure that something has gone very, very wrong in Narnia. And he’d so been hoping that Tirian wasn’t nearly as incompetent as rumor and Narnian bitterness made him out to be, but so far he has yet to be impressed. At least Caspian had managed something; this king of Narnia has gotten himself turned over to Narnia’s conqueror by his own people.
He starts off toward where Arn Abedin’s heartwood had been once, expecting – and getting – the others to follow him. They’re surprisingly quiet in the snow, and he grins: that might get them somewhere. Not totally incompetent, then.
“I thought you were forbidden from coming back to Narnia,” Eustace says, catching up to him.
Edmund glances at him. Five years have added breadth and muscle to Eustace’s shoulders; there’s still a trace of puppy fat on his round face and there’s something about the set of his mouth that still makes him look thirteen and petulant if Edmund squints, but he hasn’t turned out badly at all. He’s wearing a Narnian longsword on his hip, still self-conscious of having it there like he’d been the entire time he’d been on the Dawn Treader -- once they’d trusted him with a blade, of course – but he shifts to accommodate it automatically when he walks, as he had when he’d been sitting a moment ago. “So did I,” he says, “but apparently the answer to that is no, since we’re all four of us here.”
Eustace scowls. Edmund knows him well enough, after the better part of a year on the Dawn Treader and intermittent meetings in the seven years following, to know that Eustace doesn’t like to have his orderly view of the world upset. Rules are rules as far as he’s concerned, and their returning to Narnia has upset those rules.
And knowing Peter, those rules are going to be even more upset once he gets going. Eustace will have to cope.
“Hasn’t any time passed in England?” Jill asks from behind Eustace. “You don’t – I mean, you don’t look any older.”
“Train stations are good for my complexion,” Edmund drawls. “Pete and I were still on the platform waiting for you to come in when we heard Su’s – the horn of Narnia.”
“Queen Susan’s horn?” Tirian blurts out. “But – that’s locked in the treasury at Cair Paravel. Or destroyed by the Calormenes.”
“No, Susan has it,” Edmund corrects. “We didn’t really have a chance to ask questions like that when we got here; I’m expecting answers in a few minutes.” He steps over a wall that used to be the western side of the armory, pacing down a corridor that doesn’t even have stone to mark its boundaries anymore. He’d led handpicked troops out of that armory and over the border to sneak refugees out of Telmar more times than he can count. He knows this castle the way he knows Narnia and Cair Paravel, buried so deep within him that it would kill him to take it out, and it’s a relief to be back here. Blindfold him and he’d walk these corridors unerringly, castle or ruins. Whatever the crisis of the moment is, coming home is coming home, and he’s been an exile long enough to savor the feel of it for however long he has it.
He opens his eyes abruptly when he realizes he is walking with his eyes closed – God, probably just to see if he can – and sees Eustace staring at him suspiciously. Edmund raises his eyebrows.
“So what are we going to do now?” Eustace asks, looking away hastily.
“Find out about the foothold situation in Narnia, get the rest of the free Narnians in one spot, and win back Narnia,” Edmund says.
“Is that it?”
“What, the getting Narnia back part isn’t enough?” Edmund says crabbily as a minotaur sees them coming and lumbers away through the trees. A leopard crouches behind a ridge of wall, watching him with huge golden eyes, and a raven takes to the air.
“Aren’t you going to launch an attack or something?” Eustace demands. “A big one? I mean, isn’t that what you do?”
“Well,” Edmund drawls, “there was that one time we ruled the country, but apparently that’s been forgotten after sixteen hundred years – oh, for the love of Aslan,” he snarls as a rabbit trips over its feet in its hurry to leave the path ahead of them. “This is fucking ridiculous, I’m not going to fucking eat you.”
“S-s-sorry, y-y-your m-maj-j-j-esty,” the rabbit stutters, then flees.
It’s the last straw. Edmund turns in a circle and shouts, “What the fuck is wrong with you people? We’re on your side! You summoned us here! Is there some pertinent part of history that’s been forgotten? We’re the ones that save Narnia like it’s in our sodding job description!”
There’s no answer. A dryad steps out of her tree and takes off running, vanishing behind a huge homewood tree.
Edmund doesn’t – quite – stomp his foot like a petulant girl, but turns back to Tirian, Eustace, and Jill and spits through clenched teeth, “What the fuck is going on here?”
Eustace looks at him like he’s a maniac and Jill like she wants to hide, but Tirian raises his chin after a moment and says, “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
For an answer, Tirian steps away, towards what Edmund’s taken to be a birdhouse or something of the sort nestled in the hollow bore of an oak tree. Edmund follows, bitterly cursing the snow beneath his feet with every step – the snow and the combination of the Narnians running scared reminds him too much of the Long Winter.
It’s a tiny building, carved out of carefully polished limewood, a rough approximation of what’s probably supposed to be Cair Paravel. There are four figurines inside, each the height of Edmund’s thumb, two male and two female. Before them are the melted ends of candles, little offerings of nuts and berries and a scrap of ribbon, bookending a wooden bowl filled with what look like charms.
Tirian glances at Edmund, visibly disconcerted, and then crosses himself, four fingers to forehead, left shoulder, right shoulder, and heart, before reaching into the model Cair Paravel and thumbing through the bowl, finally coming out with four charms. He holds them out to Edmund.
Edmund turns them over in his hand. They’re roughly forged iron, each about a knuckles-width in length – a cross with a point at one end and a circle at the top, a straight length with two unevenly spaced angled ribs coming off either side near the top, a curve that might be a cornucopia or a horn, a disk with a bulge at the top. “What in seven hells is this?” he asks. These are meaningless to him; he’s never seen them before.
“Charms,” Tirian says, “to call upon the four little gods.”
“Last I heard there were a thousand,” Edmund says, baffled, because the thousand little gods are Telmarine deities, and this is Narnia. They shouldn’t be calling on anyone but Aslan.
Tirian looks confused. “The four little gods,” he repeats. “The hands of Aslan, who work his will in Narnia when summoned by a true Narnian. The King of Summer, the Queen of Spring, the King of Evening, and the Queen of Morning.”
Edmund drops the charms.
He takes a step backwards, staring at the – God, there’s no other word for it – the shrine, and snarls, “We’re not fucking gods.”
“Wait, since when are they talking about you?” Eustace says, sounding startled. “Who says they are talking about you?”
“Worship Aslan,” Edmund says to Tirian, his voice shaking. “Not us.” He turns furiously on his heel, storming off towards the heartwood at the castle’s center.
There are no woods in the heartwood, not anymore, but the ancient stones of the henge – maybe the only things in all Narnia older than them – still stand, untouched by war or time. Peter, standing over the altar at the center, looks up at his approach, then straightens.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
Edmund catches his wrist with one hand and pulls him close, ignoring Susan and Lucy and a few of the newer-than-the-last-set-of-New-Narnians behind him. “What’s wrong?” he snarls. “Lion’s mane, Pete, they’re fucking worshipping us --”
“What?” Peter says blankly.
“They called on the King of Summer, not the High King of Narnia. The King of Summer, their pet demigod! There are shrines here, to us, like we’re – like Aslan’s –” His voice is shaking.
Peter looks at him with alarm, making no attempt to free himself, and says, “Ed, calm down, I don’t understand –”
“We are their gods,” Edmund snaps. “We’re not their heroes, we’re their fucking gods. They didn’t summon Bittersteel or Breakneck or fucking High King Peter the Magnificent, they summoned the King of Summer. They didn’t expect us to actually show up --”
Peter turns on his heel to stare at Arnau, his eyes wide, then back to Edmund, eyes focusing on a point over his shoulder. Tirian must have come in. “Explain this,” he says, voice flat and utterly cold. “Explain this right now.”
Edmund lets go of his wrist to turn and stare at Tirian, who’s flanked by Eustace and Jill. “I don’t understand,” Tirian says, still sounding confused. “The kings and queens of summer – the four little gods – have been worshipped in Narnia for time out of mind –”
“Wrong answer,” Peter snaps. He glances back over his shoulder at Arnau, shaking his head as the dwarf opens his mouth. “You I don’t trust.” His attention settles on Eustace. “Coz, you’re not Narnian. Explain this in such a way that it makes sense.”
“Sense?” Eustace says, looking dumbfounded. “None of this makes sense!”
“Finally, he says something reasonable,” Susan mutters under her breath.
“It’s a silly Narnian superstition!” Eustace declares, getting into it. “And it’s very conceited of you, which is so typical, to think they’re talking about you. No one’s actually called you the King of Summer or the Queen of Morning or all that –”
“Narnians started calling us that the first year of our reign,” Lucy interrupts, suddenly pale. “Sixteen hundred years ago. I’ve been the Queen of Morning for over a thousand years now, but I’ve never been a goddess. This is Narnia! This is Aslan’s chosen land! How dare you –”
“Aslan left us,” Arnau says flatly.
“He would never --”
“Or died, take your pick. Ask him about the false Aslan the Calormenes set up.” The dwarf points at Tirian, whose face has gone white. “If Aslan gave a damn about us, would he let a lying snake of a monkey parade around an ass in a lion skin and call him Aslan? Let the Calormenes hide behind the veil of Aslan and sneak into Narnia, steal our country out from under our noses, make us slaves and refugees and criminals in our own country, rape our women and murder our sons?”
Peter swings around to look incredulously at Tirian, but the king doesn’t meet his eyes. Edmund clenches fists against his sides. They’re not supposed to be here. They’re barred from Narnia by Aslan. If Aslan is gone – and they’re here –
“Aslan is gone, King of Summer,” Arnau continues. “We’ve called to him for five years now and watched Narnia die a little more each day. Her life’s blood is spilling away thanks to the Calormenes. You’ve seen it – our forests burned, our dryads murdered, the rivers harnessed, our earth scorched bare. We don’t call to Aslan anymore. We call to you – and you came.”
Peter’s white-faced with horror; he looks like he’s, for the first time in a very long time, at a loss for words.
“Peter, we shouldn’t be here,” Lucy bursts out. “We’re forbidden from Narnia by Aslan’s word! We shouldn’t be here, we can’t be here, we can’t stay.” She’s practically in tears, staring at Peter in entreaty, and Edmund feels his heart twist. They shouldn’t be here – but they are. That has to mean something.
“I mean,” Lucy adds after a moment, her voice shaking, “Eustace and Jill are here, and there’s Tirian – we’re not –”
“Majesty, all due respect,” interrupts a centauress whose name Edmund doesn’t know, “but we called on the kings and queens of summer, not two children who have been in Narnia for half a decade and done nothing. And Tirian of Telmar is no king of Narnia; he has lost his throne and all right to call himself son of Adam or man of Narnia.”
Shit. Edmund swings around to look at Tirian, who looks like he’s been hit across the face, but not really particularly surprised. It had been pretty obvious that Tirian wasn’t well-liked when they’d arrived, but Edmund hadn’t realized he was this unpopular until now. No matter what he does, he’s never going to sit the throne of Narnia again. He’d seen enough deposed kings in his own time to know that.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says to the centauress. She is crying now, the tears running down her cheeks. “But we can’t, we’ve been forbidden --”
“We’re here now,” Susan says softly. “Doesn’t that mean something?”
“Shut up,” Lucy snaps at her. “Shut up, just shut up, you don’t know anything --”
“Lucy!” Peter barks, and she falls silent.
“My king, we beg you,” Arnau says, and kneels in the snow. The other Narnians follow suit, all except for Tirian, who goes very still. “Save us as you saved Narnia from the Telmarines, as you saved Narnia from the White Witch. We called you here – give us vengeance, give us peace, give us summer. Give us Narnia.”
Peter’s expression is stricken. He looks wildly from one face to another – the kneeling Narnians, Lucy in tears, Susan’s composed features, Eustace and Jill, at Edmund, at Tirian. The Telmarine king is the only Narnian still standing.
“I –” he says, and then stops.
Edmund can read the indecision on his face. Narnia is Peter’s more than she is the rest of theirs; this is the country he’ll call home until the day he dies. He can’t stand by and watch her suffer, watch his people suffer. But they’re bound by Aslan --
But you’re here, aren’t you, Pevensie? a small voice whispers. It sounds an awful lot like the White Witch. You’re all here.
It’s Tirian who speaks, to his surprise. “When Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone sit at Cair Paravel in throne, the evil time will be over and done,” he recites, and Edmund feels a chill go down that has nothing to do with the spring snow. They could be back in the Beavers’ dam all those years ago, his own treachery still a distant glimmer in the near future.
Peter recognizes the rhyme, because he goes a shade paler, which Edmund hadn’t even thought was possible, and he’s known Peter a long time. “That –” he begins, but Tirian’s not done yet.
The king drops to both knees, heedless of the snow, and bows his head, baring his neck. “In the name of my ancestor King Caspian the Seafarer, whom you entrusted with the stewardship of Narnia in your absence, I beg you for your aid once more. I am the last of his blood; I alone bear the burden of failure. Let me pay for all crimes committed in Narnia since last I sat enthroned at Cair Paravel; do not force Narnia to suffer needlessly for my evils. I beg you, Peter, High King over all Kings of Narnia, King of Summer –”
“Stop,” Peter says. “Just – stop. Let me think.” He turns away from them, hand clenching on the hilt of his sword, and then turns back. “Ed. Lucy says go, Susan says stay. What do you say?”
Since when are we a democracy? Edmund is on the edge of asking, but he holds his tongue and thinks. Aslan’s word – but they’re here. They’re back in Narnia, despite all odds. And Narnia is theirs. Once a king or queen of Narnia…
“We’re here,” he says slowly. “That has to mean something. Aslan doesn’t let things happen by chance. If we’re here, it’s because he wants us to be here. So – I say we stay. And end this once and for all.”
Lucy looks at him like he’s betrayed her, but Edmund meets her eyes calmly, testing what he’s just said, turning it over in his mind.
Peter rubs his thumb over the lion’s head pommel of his sword. His signet ring gleams on his right hand, rubies catching the sunlight filtering through the forest canopy. He looks around at all of them, utterly expressionless, blue eyes cool and blank. “We stay,” he says at last. “We’ll win you back Narnia.”
“Or die trying,” Eustace mutters.
Peter laughs, short and sharp. “Dying is for losers,” he says. “I expect to win.”
“Thank you,” Arnau says fervently, looking up with sudden hope on his face. “Thank you, King of Summer, thank you --”
“We haven’t won yet,” Edmund points out, ignoring the sour taste in the back of his mouth. They’re only human.
“One more thing,” Peter says flatly, ignoring him. “I’m the High King of Narnia. I’m only the High King of Narnia. They called me King of Summer like they called me Bittersteel or my brother Silvertongue. It’s just a name. See that it remains so.”
Arnau looks like he’s about to speak, but Peter’s already turned away. He strides past Edmund over to Tirian, tilting the other man’s head up with one hand. Next to him, Eustace stirs, opening his mouth to protest, but he closes it when Edmund glares at him.
Tirian’s expression is panicked, for which Edmund doesn’t exactly blame him, but he doesn’t flinch at Peter’s touch. “Whatever your crimes,” Peter says softly, “I withhold judgment until this is ended. Get up.” He turns away, back to the group at the heart of the henge. “We have work to do.”
-----------
The western fortress of Arn Abedin first appears in Ere Yet We Loose the Legions. Peter's signet ring first appears in The Bone's Prayer.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: This is part two, obviously, and this is also the first WIP I've posted since 2006. (And that WIP was abandoned, so one can see I'm understandably nervous about posting another one.) The structure of this lends it to being posted in sections, though, so that's how it's going up. Because of this, however, it's not getting posted to any comms until the whole thing is done.
He wakes to the familiar symptoms of a major healing: aching bones and muscles, dry mouth, faint headache, ravenous hunger, and a dull ache where the wound was. It’s been a while since he’s been here, but it’s not something he can easily forget.
He opens his eyes.
The ceiling above is roughhewn wood, dark and smoke-stained. He’s lying on a bed of thick woven blankets and rushes that rustle when he moves. When he pushes himself up, it’s to see Peter asleep on the floor beside the bed, head pillowed on his arms.
“You look like a butcher,” Edmund says. His voice is a raw croak, and he clears his throat as Peter raises his head, blinking bleary, bloodshot eyes. “Have you considered changing your clothes? Because dried blood is a bitch to clean up.”
“The thought didn’t cross my mind,” Peter says, yawning. He glances down at himself and brushes a hand down the front of his surcoat, dried blood flaking off the leather. “Although you may have a point.”
“Since a surprising percentage of our wardrobe is here –” Edmund says. He presses two fingers to each of the holes in his surcoat and makes a face. “And this was good leather, too.”
“I’ll have someone fix it,” Peter says, levering himself up off the floor with one hand on the wall. He undoes the buckles on his surcoat and lets it fall to the floor, eyeing the bloodstained sleeves of the green shirt he’s wearing beneath grimly. “There has to be a leatherworker here somewhere. Caspian had one.”
“Glenstorm had one, you mean,” Edmund corrects, dredging up the intimate details of their time at Aslan’s How from distant, disconnected memory. The details of Telmarine Narnia he remembers. “Sidereese, wasn’t it?”
Peter shrugs. “How do you feel?” he calls over his shoulder as he leaves the bedroom. There’s a rustle of fabric; Arnau must have ordered their chests carried in.
“Like I’ve been shot,” Edmund says. “Grab me another shirt too, will you? I think this one’s well and truly dead.” He sheds his surcoat too. Beneath, the brown shirt he’s wearing his stained dark with blood; he sticks a finger through the hole left by one of the arrows and wiggles it, touching the slight rise of new scar tissue on his skin. As if he needs more scars. He pulls his shirt off over his head to see the extent of the damage.
Bad, bad, and they cluster between heart and lungs. One, at least, had definitely punctured his lungs; he licks the corners of his mouth and tastes dried blood before scrubbing it away with the back of his hand. Lazy, Pevensie, he scolds himself, and looks down ruefully to see the scars these new ones have joined, a fine spread across his left ribs and hip, and the deeper gouge in his skin in his right shoulder. Thoughtfully, Edmund rubs his thumb over that, expecting the familiar ache, the stab of pain that’s come every day since he woke up in an army hospital in Malaya, Peter dozing in the chair beside his bed.
It doesn’t come, and Edmund has to grin. This is the good thing about Lucy’s cordial – it heals old wounds as well as new ones.
Peter comes back in, ducking his head to miss the top of the door – typical woodland Narnian dwelling, so far as Edmund can tell, though with less decoration than he saw in his own time – and tosses a tunic and undershirt at Edmund. Edmund catches them – the undershirt’s plain unembroidered wool, and the tunic’s dark gray velvet, with green embroidery picking out a pattern of leaves and vines on the collar and cuffs. He can’t remember the last time he wore it, or maybe it’s Peter’s.
“I’m out of practice,” Peter says abruptly, voice muffled by fabric as he pulls the stained shirt off over his head.
“What, at swordplay? Because no one noticed that, especially all those dead Calormenes. They might feel inclined to argue that point. Just a thought.” Nice to be in a shirt not thick with blood; Edmund leaves the tunic off for a moment to shift his shoulders in the undershirt, enjoying the feel of the soft fabric against his bare skin, then pulls the tunic on too, letting his fingers linger on the carved wooden buttons, warm against his fingers.
“No,” Peter says, and Edmund glances up at the tone of his voice. It gives him a good look at Peter’s new scars, the ones from the war. They’re – not far from the places his old scars had been, surprisingly; he doesn’t remember for sure, but he thinks they might actually be in the same places. There’s a scar by his eyebrow that Peter says he got when his plane went down; Edmund remembers that scar from the battle with the White Witch, and again from Peter’s duel with Miraz.
“No,” Peter says again, softer, and ducks his head. The movement makes him look younger than he is – or should be – and Edmund has to smile slightly, because they’ve always been younger than they should be. “At watching my family get hurt.”
“Yeah,” Edmund says, with a pang, “I guess they don’t exactly encourage that in the RAF. Look, if you want to get back in practice, I just want to let you know I’m not volunteering; I’ve been volunteered more times than I’d like in the past six months, and we’re not even going to war together anymore. Well. Except –”
Peter quirks a smile, tunic hanging from his hand before he starts shrugging it on. “Really, I’d rather none of you did,” he says. “It’s not like I encourage it. It’s just that – I reacted badly –”
“As I remember,” Edmund says, “not that I remember much, since I’m pretty sure I was dying at the time –”
“You can phrase it some other way than that, you know.”
Edmund ignores him. “You charged straight at the enemy screaming like a banshee. One might say that’s rather an appropriate response; I’d prefer you do that than freeze up and get shot yourself. What do you mean, ‘reacted badly’? I remember you doing that exact same thing a hundred times before.”
Peter shrugs. “That was different. That was –”
“Does it matter?”
He’s silent, fastening the last leather-covered buttons on his tunic closed. “Maybe not,” he says at last, and reaches for his swordbelt. “I’d like to think it does.”
“Why?” Edmund asks, and all Peter does is shrug again.
“Do you want to stay here?” he says, changing the subject. “There’s food.”
“Which I am extremely excited about, you have no idea,” Edmund tells him solemnly, unfolding his legs from the lotus he’s been sitting in and testing his footing. He remembers that Lucy’s cordial can fuck with balance sometimes.
Peter or Lucy must have taken his boots off, because he’s bare-footed, the wooden flooring smooth and cool beneath his toes. He takes a few experimental steps towards Peter, his brother watching him like a hawk.
“You all right?” Peter asks, and Edmund nods.
“Socks?”
Peter tosses them to him. Edmund catches the rolled up pair with both hands. Soft brown wool – Narnian wool, by the Telmarine little gods. He’s forgotten just how soft Narnian wool is. He resists the urge to rub them against his face and balances on one leg to put them on one after the other.
“You remember making those?” Peter asks casually, his attention seemingly on the dried blood beneath his nails.
Edmund glances up. “No,” he says shortly, and could probably soften the harshness there with one excuse or another, but there’s no excuse except the fast theft of magic and the slow erosion of time.
He pulls his boots on, then looks up to see Peter holding out his sword to him, hilt-first, his fingers wrapped around the scabbarded blade. “Want to go see what’s going on here?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Edmund says, reaching for his sword. “Yeah, I really do.”
They’re farther north here than they were in what should have been the bearswood (They are burning the woods, Tumnus had written almost two thousand years ago, and Edmund had held his soot-blackened, timeworn, bloodstained diary in his hands not eight years ago (three hundred years past) and tried to imagine it. The sky is dark with smoke, and we can hear the dryads screaming as they die), and the Western Wild’s at a higher elevation than the rest of Narnia anyway. Their boots crunch in the snow, and the cold breeze stirs their hair and the leaves above them. Spring in Narnia.
At least there’s no drought this time. The snow’s evidence enough of that, and both the River Hliwe and the Great River had been running high.
A raven lands on one of the many ridges of broken stone, peering at them with first one eye, then the other. “My kings,” it says at last as Peter stops and raises his eyebrows, then mantles its wings and takes to the air.
“You get the feeling there’s something weird going on around here?” Edmund asks Peter softly.
“You too?” Peter says.
“Beyond the obvious, I mean.” He rubs his thumb over his sword-pommel, wishing for his old sword. This one is good – dwarf-work from the Golden Age, of course it’s good – but his hand aches for the familiar grip of the sword he’d carried for fifteen years, the one he’d broken the White Witch’s wand with.
Don’t be an idiot, Pevensie. A blade’s a blade. And there have been plenty of times when he’s fought with a sword other than the one Oreius had given him all those years ago; he’s just getting sentimental in his old age. His ripe old age of twenty, or maybe thirty-six. Or sixteen hundred and thirty-six. Hell if he knows at this point.
“Caspian’s Narnians never looked at us like this,” he says abruptly. Gloves. He should have looked for gloves before they left their quarters; it’s freezing out here.
Peter’s mouth twists, but he doesn’t say anything. “You’ve been out for a few hours,” he says instead after a few minutes where the only sound is the crunch of their boots in the snow, the calls of birds in the trees, some doe scolding her fawns in the distance.
“And thinking about that makes me ravenous,” Edmund assures him. A healing takes energy and sleep’s restored some of what he’s expended, but food’s generally a good thing to have too.
There’s a ghost of a grin on Peter’s face before he looks away. A squirrel freezes briefly in his sightline before it scampers off, leaping from tree to tree. “There’s food back at our quarters,” he says, tilting his head in the direction they’ve just come from. “But if you’d rather –”
“No, by all means, carry on with whatever grand plan it is you have in the works,” Edmund says genially. “Just so long as I get fed sometime during its execution.”
This time Peter really does grin, eyes glinting in bemusement. “I’ll arrange it with Arnau,” he says. “You want to go find King Tirian and our wayward cousin and his friend? We’ll meet at the old henge in the heartwood.”
Despite the phrasing, it’s not a request, and Edmund nods, hand falling to his sword-hilt again. “I’ll see you there,” he says. “You want Lu too?”
Peter glances at him sharply. “And Su,” he says, voice even, then turns and walks away, a brilliant splash of brown and scarlet against the dirty white snow and drooping trees.
Edmund presses his lips together tightly, but goes off in the opposite direction without saying anything else. The camp is bounded by the ruins, quarters built up beneath the huge, arching roots of the homewood trees and in their sturdy branches. It’s something Edmund had been used to seeing once – but not so many so close to each other; besides some of the clans, Narnians tend to be loners in nature. Or had tended to be, anyway; evidently that’s changed, because this feels like nothing so much as a village. Except for the people; he catches glimpses of them out of the corners of his eyes, but they scatter before he can ask questions or call a greeting. It sets his teeth on edge, raises the hair on the back of his neck, and he finds himself resting a hand on his sword-hilt. He doesn’t like being watched; if he has a choice, he’d prefer to be the one doing the watching.
It’s been almost ten years, but he still knows the castle’s boundaries, and he doesn’t need the markers to make sure he doesn’t stray beyond them in his search. He finds King Tirian sitting with Eustace and Jill on a low rise of wall, staring at the slight ditch that used to be a moat.
“What is this place?” Tirian asks.
“How am I supposed to know?” Eustace asks irritably as Edmund approaches silently, muffling the crunch of the snow beneath his boots. Malaya was jungle work, but this he knows by heart. He and Peter have played this game during winters in Narnia and England alike; knowing how to move without being heard is a good skill no matter where you are.
“This was the fortress of Arn Abedin,” Edmund says, probably more pleased than he should be to see the trio jump. “Built on the foundations of an older keep in the first years of the Golden Age to guard against incursions on the southwestern border – mostly Telmar and Shoushan, this far south. It was destroyed during the Dying Times when Belgarion and Natare invaded.”
“How do you know that?” Eustace demands, sounding deeply suspicious, as Tirian gets to his feet and tries to look graceful doing it.
Edmund raises an eyebrow. “Well, I was here for the first part of it. The second bit I found out when we came back and put Caspian on the throne. I don’t think we’ve been introduced yet,” he says to Tirian. “I’m King Edmund.”
“I am King Tirian of Narnia,” Tirian says, looking at Edmund’s outstretched hand as if he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do – kiss it or take his wrist in a warrior’s clasp. It strikes Edmund that maybe he’s been in England too long; he lets his hand drop. “Or what is left of it.”
Yeah, I’d say that, Edmund thinks uncharitably, stifling the words. The army had done pretty well at turning the brain to mouth filter he’d left off after he left Narnia back on; he has that to say for them. He tilts his head back in the direction he’s just come from. “Peter wants you,” he says. “All of you.”
Jill makes a faintly frantic motion with her hands as she scrambles upright. “You – Edmund – you’re all right,” she says. “But –”
“Thanks to Lu’s cordial,” Edmund says. “Could have used that a few months ago,” he adds, then shrugs it off. Malaya’s past, and the wound’s healed now; there’s nothing he can do to change it.
“The High King –” Tirian begins uncertainly.
“Is short on sleep, patience, and good temper,” Edmund supplies, “which I suppose is a little like finding air convenient, but more so than usual.” And for good reason; Edmund had been hoping that returning to the camp would prove first impressions wrong, but all being here is doing is making him more and more sure that something has gone very, very wrong in Narnia. And he’d so been hoping that Tirian wasn’t nearly as incompetent as rumor and Narnian bitterness made him out to be, but so far he has yet to be impressed. At least Caspian had managed something; this king of Narnia has gotten himself turned over to Narnia’s conqueror by his own people.
He starts off toward where Arn Abedin’s heartwood had been once, expecting – and getting – the others to follow him. They’re surprisingly quiet in the snow, and he grins: that might get them somewhere. Not totally incompetent, then.
“I thought you were forbidden from coming back to Narnia,” Eustace says, catching up to him.
Edmund glances at him. Five years have added breadth and muscle to Eustace’s shoulders; there’s still a trace of puppy fat on his round face and there’s something about the set of his mouth that still makes him look thirteen and petulant if Edmund squints, but he hasn’t turned out badly at all. He’s wearing a Narnian longsword on his hip, still self-conscious of having it there like he’d been the entire time he’d been on the Dawn Treader -- once they’d trusted him with a blade, of course – but he shifts to accommodate it automatically when he walks, as he had when he’d been sitting a moment ago. “So did I,” he says, “but apparently the answer to that is no, since we’re all four of us here.”
Eustace scowls. Edmund knows him well enough, after the better part of a year on the Dawn Treader and intermittent meetings in the seven years following, to know that Eustace doesn’t like to have his orderly view of the world upset. Rules are rules as far as he’s concerned, and their returning to Narnia has upset those rules.
And knowing Peter, those rules are going to be even more upset once he gets going. Eustace will have to cope.
“Hasn’t any time passed in England?” Jill asks from behind Eustace. “You don’t – I mean, you don’t look any older.”
“Train stations are good for my complexion,” Edmund drawls. “Pete and I were still on the platform waiting for you to come in when we heard Su’s – the horn of Narnia.”
“Queen Susan’s horn?” Tirian blurts out. “But – that’s locked in the treasury at Cair Paravel. Or destroyed by the Calormenes.”
“No, Susan has it,” Edmund corrects. “We didn’t really have a chance to ask questions like that when we got here; I’m expecting answers in a few minutes.” He steps over a wall that used to be the western side of the armory, pacing down a corridor that doesn’t even have stone to mark its boundaries anymore. He’d led handpicked troops out of that armory and over the border to sneak refugees out of Telmar more times than he can count. He knows this castle the way he knows Narnia and Cair Paravel, buried so deep within him that it would kill him to take it out, and it’s a relief to be back here. Blindfold him and he’d walk these corridors unerringly, castle or ruins. Whatever the crisis of the moment is, coming home is coming home, and he’s been an exile long enough to savor the feel of it for however long he has it.
He opens his eyes abruptly when he realizes he is walking with his eyes closed – God, probably just to see if he can – and sees Eustace staring at him suspiciously. Edmund raises his eyebrows.
“So what are we going to do now?” Eustace asks, looking away hastily.
“Find out about the foothold situation in Narnia, get the rest of the free Narnians in one spot, and win back Narnia,” Edmund says.
“Is that it?”
“What, the getting Narnia back part isn’t enough?” Edmund says crabbily as a minotaur sees them coming and lumbers away through the trees. A leopard crouches behind a ridge of wall, watching him with huge golden eyes, and a raven takes to the air.
“Aren’t you going to launch an attack or something?” Eustace demands. “A big one? I mean, isn’t that what you do?”
“Well,” Edmund drawls, “there was that one time we ruled the country, but apparently that’s been forgotten after sixteen hundred years – oh, for the love of Aslan,” he snarls as a rabbit trips over its feet in its hurry to leave the path ahead of them. “This is fucking ridiculous, I’m not going to fucking eat you.”
“S-s-sorry, y-y-your m-maj-j-j-esty,” the rabbit stutters, then flees.
It’s the last straw. Edmund turns in a circle and shouts, “What the fuck is wrong with you people? We’re on your side! You summoned us here! Is there some pertinent part of history that’s been forgotten? We’re the ones that save Narnia like it’s in our sodding job description!”
There’s no answer. A dryad steps out of her tree and takes off running, vanishing behind a huge homewood tree.
Edmund doesn’t – quite – stomp his foot like a petulant girl, but turns back to Tirian, Eustace, and Jill and spits through clenched teeth, “What the fuck is going on here?”
Eustace looks at him like he’s a maniac and Jill like she wants to hide, but Tirian raises his chin after a moment and says, “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
For an answer, Tirian steps away, towards what Edmund’s taken to be a birdhouse or something of the sort nestled in the hollow bore of an oak tree. Edmund follows, bitterly cursing the snow beneath his feet with every step – the snow and the combination of the Narnians running scared reminds him too much of the Long Winter.
It’s a tiny building, carved out of carefully polished limewood, a rough approximation of what’s probably supposed to be Cair Paravel. There are four figurines inside, each the height of Edmund’s thumb, two male and two female. Before them are the melted ends of candles, little offerings of nuts and berries and a scrap of ribbon, bookending a wooden bowl filled with what look like charms.
Tirian glances at Edmund, visibly disconcerted, and then crosses himself, four fingers to forehead, left shoulder, right shoulder, and heart, before reaching into the model Cair Paravel and thumbing through the bowl, finally coming out with four charms. He holds them out to Edmund.
Edmund turns them over in his hand. They’re roughly forged iron, each about a knuckles-width in length – a cross with a point at one end and a circle at the top, a straight length with two unevenly spaced angled ribs coming off either side near the top, a curve that might be a cornucopia or a horn, a disk with a bulge at the top. “What in seven hells is this?” he asks. These are meaningless to him; he’s never seen them before.
“Charms,” Tirian says, “to call upon the four little gods.”
“Last I heard there were a thousand,” Edmund says, baffled, because the thousand little gods are Telmarine deities, and this is Narnia. They shouldn’t be calling on anyone but Aslan.
Tirian looks confused. “The four little gods,” he repeats. “The hands of Aslan, who work his will in Narnia when summoned by a true Narnian. The King of Summer, the Queen of Spring, the King of Evening, and the Queen of Morning.”
Edmund drops the charms.
He takes a step backwards, staring at the – God, there’s no other word for it – the shrine, and snarls, “We’re not fucking gods.”
“Wait, since when are they talking about you?” Eustace says, sounding startled. “Who says they are talking about you?”
“Worship Aslan,” Edmund says to Tirian, his voice shaking. “Not us.” He turns furiously on his heel, storming off towards the heartwood at the castle’s center.
There are no woods in the heartwood, not anymore, but the ancient stones of the henge – maybe the only things in all Narnia older than them – still stand, untouched by war or time. Peter, standing over the altar at the center, looks up at his approach, then straightens.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
Edmund catches his wrist with one hand and pulls him close, ignoring Susan and Lucy and a few of the newer-than-the-last-set-of-New-Narnians behind him. “What’s wrong?” he snarls. “Lion’s mane, Pete, they’re fucking worshipping us --”
“What?” Peter says blankly.
“They called on the King of Summer, not the High King of Narnia. The King of Summer, their pet demigod! There are shrines here, to us, like we’re – like Aslan’s –” His voice is shaking.
Peter looks at him with alarm, making no attempt to free himself, and says, “Ed, calm down, I don’t understand –”
“We are their gods,” Edmund snaps. “We’re not their heroes, we’re their fucking gods. They didn’t summon Bittersteel or Breakneck or fucking High King Peter the Magnificent, they summoned the King of Summer. They didn’t expect us to actually show up --”
Peter turns on his heel to stare at Arnau, his eyes wide, then back to Edmund, eyes focusing on a point over his shoulder. Tirian must have come in. “Explain this,” he says, voice flat and utterly cold. “Explain this right now.”
Edmund lets go of his wrist to turn and stare at Tirian, who’s flanked by Eustace and Jill. “I don’t understand,” Tirian says, still sounding confused. “The kings and queens of summer – the four little gods – have been worshipped in Narnia for time out of mind –”
“Wrong answer,” Peter snaps. He glances back over his shoulder at Arnau, shaking his head as the dwarf opens his mouth. “You I don’t trust.” His attention settles on Eustace. “Coz, you’re not Narnian. Explain this in such a way that it makes sense.”
“Sense?” Eustace says, looking dumbfounded. “None of this makes sense!”
“Finally, he says something reasonable,” Susan mutters under her breath.
“It’s a silly Narnian superstition!” Eustace declares, getting into it. “And it’s very conceited of you, which is so typical, to think they’re talking about you. No one’s actually called you the King of Summer or the Queen of Morning or all that –”
“Narnians started calling us that the first year of our reign,” Lucy interrupts, suddenly pale. “Sixteen hundred years ago. I’ve been the Queen of Morning for over a thousand years now, but I’ve never been a goddess. This is Narnia! This is Aslan’s chosen land! How dare you –”
“Aslan left us,” Arnau says flatly.
“He would never --”
“Or died, take your pick. Ask him about the false Aslan the Calormenes set up.” The dwarf points at Tirian, whose face has gone white. “If Aslan gave a damn about us, would he let a lying snake of a monkey parade around an ass in a lion skin and call him Aslan? Let the Calormenes hide behind the veil of Aslan and sneak into Narnia, steal our country out from under our noses, make us slaves and refugees and criminals in our own country, rape our women and murder our sons?”
Peter swings around to look incredulously at Tirian, but the king doesn’t meet his eyes. Edmund clenches fists against his sides. They’re not supposed to be here. They’re barred from Narnia by Aslan. If Aslan is gone – and they’re here –
“Aslan is gone, King of Summer,” Arnau continues. “We’ve called to him for five years now and watched Narnia die a little more each day. Her life’s blood is spilling away thanks to the Calormenes. You’ve seen it – our forests burned, our dryads murdered, the rivers harnessed, our earth scorched bare. We don’t call to Aslan anymore. We call to you – and you came.”
Peter’s white-faced with horror; he looks like he’s, for the first time in a very long time, at a loss for words.
“Peter, we shouldn’t be here,” Lucy bursts out. “We’re forbidden from Narnia by Aslan’s word! We shouldn’t be here, we can’t be here, we can’t stay.” She’s practically in tears, staring at Peter in entreaty, and Edmund feels his heart twist. They shouldn’t be here – but they are. That has to mean something.
“I mean,” Lucy adds after a moment, her voice shaking, “Eustace and Jill are here, and there’s Tirian – we’re not –”
“Majesty, all due respect,” interrupts a centauress whose name Edmund doesn’t know, “but we called on the kings and queens of summer, not two children who have been in Narnia for half a decade and done nothing. And Tirian of Telmar is no king of Narnia; he has lost his throne and all right to call himself son of Adam or man of Narnia.”
Shit. Edmund swings around to look at Tirian, who looks like he’s been hit across the face, but not really particularly surprised. It had been pretty obvious that Tirian wasn’t well-liked when they’d arrived, but Edmund hadn’t realized he was this unpopular until now. No matter what he does, he’s never going to sit the throne of Narnia again. He’d seen enough deposed kings in his own time to know that.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says to the centauress. She is crying now, the tears running down her cheeks. “But we can’t, we’ve been forbidden --”
“We’re here now,” Susan says softly. “Doesn’t that mean something?”
“Shut up,” Lucy snaps at her. “Shut up, just shut up, you don’t know anything --”
“Lucy!” Peter barks, and she falls silent.
“My king, we beg you,” Arnau says, and kneels in the snow. The other Narnians follow suit, all except for Tirian, who goes very still. “Save us as you saved Narnia from the Telmarines, as you saved Narnia from the White Witch. We called you here – give us vengeance, give us peace, give us summer. Give us Narnia.”
Peter’s expression is stricken. He looks wildly from one face to another – the kneeling Narnians, Lucy in tears, Susan’s composed features, Eustace and Jill, at Edmund, at Tirian. The Telmarine king is the only Narnian still standing.
“I –” he says, and then stops.
Edmund can read the indecision on his face. Narnia is Peter’s more than she is the rest of theirs; this is the country he’ll call home until the day he dies. He can’t stand by and watch her suffer, watch his people suffer. But they’re bound by Aslan --
But you’re here, aren’t you, Pevensie? a small voice whispers. It sounds an awful lot like the White Witch. You’re all here.
It’s Tirian who speaks, to his surprise. “When Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone sit at Cair Paravel in throne, the evil time will be over and done,” he recites, and Edmund feels a chill go down that has nothing to do with the spring snow. They could be back in the Beavers’ dam all those years ago, his own treachery still a distant glimmer in the near future.
Peter recognizes the rhyme, because he goes a shade paler, which Edmund hadn’t even thought was possible, and he’s known Peter a long time. “That –” he begins, but Tirian’s not done yet.
The king drops to both knees, heedless of the snow, and bows his head, baring his neck. “In the name of my ancestor King Caspian the Seafarer, whom you entrusted with the stewardship of Narnia in your absence, I beg you for your aid once more. I am the last of his blood; I alone bear the burden of failure. Let me pay for all crimes committed in Narnia since last I sat enthroned at Cair Paravel; do not force Narnia to suffer needlessly for my evils. I beg you, Peter, High King over all Kings of Narnia, King of Summer –”
“Stop,” Peter says. “Just – stop. Let me think.” He turns away from them, hand clenching on the hilt of his sword, and then turns back. “Ed. Lucy says go, Susan says stay. What do you say?”
Since when are we a democracy? Edmund is on the edge of asking, but he holds his tongue and thinks. Aslan’s word – but they’re here. They’re back in Narnia, despite all odds. And Narnia is theirs. Once a king or queen of Narnia…
“We’re here,” he says slowly. “That has to mean something. Aslan doesn’t let things happen by chance. If we’re here, it’s because he wants us to be here. So – I say we stay. And end this once and for all.”
Lucy looks at him like he’s betrayed her, but Edmund meets her eyes calmly, testing what he’s just said, turning it over in his mind.
Peter rubs his thumb over the lion’s head pommel of his sword. His signet ring gleams on his right hand, rubies catching the sunlight filtering through the forest canopy. He looks around at all of them, utterly expressionless, blue eyes cool and blank. “We stay,” he says at last. “We’ll win you back Narnia.”
“Or die trying,” Eustace mutters.
Peter laughs, short and sharp. “Dying is for losers,” he says. “I expect to win.”
“Thank you,” Arnau says fervently, looking up with sudden hope on his face. “Thank you, King of Summer, thank you --”
“We haven’t won yet,” Edmund points out, ignoring the sour taste in the back of his mouth. They’re only human.
“One more thing,” Peter says flatly, ignoring him. “I’m the High King of Narnia. I’m only the High King of Narnia. They called me King of Summer like they called me Bittersteel or my brother Silvertongue. It’s just a name. See that it remains so.”
Arnau looks like he’s about to speak, but Peter’s already turned away. He strides past Edmund over to Tirian, tilting the other man’s head up with one hand. Next to him, Eustace stirs, opening his mouth to protest, but he closes it when Edmund glares at him.
Tirian’s expression is panicked, for which Edmund doesn’t exactly blame him, but he doesn’t flinch at Peter’s touch. “Whatever your crimes,” Peter says softly, “I withhold judgment until this is ended. Get up.” He turns away, back to the group at the heart of the henge. “We have work to do.”
-----------
The western fortress of Arn Abedin first appears in Ere Yet We Loose the Legions. Peter's signet ring first appears in The Bone's Prayer.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 09:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 10:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 09:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 10:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 10:05 am (UTC)And of course they stay! Lucy must feel like the other three are all against her. *snickers*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 10:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 02:57 pm (UTC)I love it that this chapter is from Edmund's point of view. I loved his outburst too. And when he told Peter there were shrines? So good! And you have corrupted me so bad on the subject of Aslan so now I do realize while reading that he had nothing to do with them being there. Was it the horn that summoned them? Does that mean that Father Christmas has some power Aslan can't intercept? And that begs the question, did Aslan want them to have their gifts in the first place?
Lucy's reaction was very good, and realistic. Also Edmund's conflicting emotions, but ultimately using logic and siding with Peter. Oh and the democracy line? So funny. Susan was also really good, me thinks.
And still, the swearing makes me happy. It gives the feel that the Pevensie's are finally the age they should be.
This is so good!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 04:38 pm (UTC)I have always thought that the sword and shield Aslan can live with, but the horn, especially a horn that could summon the Pevensies, not what he likes at all.
And democracy, well, there was once in a time, where Peter said "you three all go home and I stay", and the other three went "no, they need us all so we all stay", and Peter conceded. So, er, there was once. And actually, I sort of always feel that Peter listens to them more often than they realize, or admit. *snickers*
(no subject)
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Date: 2008-10-11 10:13 pm (UTC)Of course, everyone knows my conspiracy theories...
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Date: 2008-10-11 07:26 pm (UTC)But omg, I love Edmund, so much. I love his POV. I want all Edmund, all the time. Except when I want Peter. And Lucy. And Susan. OMG SUSAN. More please.
Caspian's not getting resurrected, is he? ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 10:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-10-12 04:22 am (UTC)I am on a Narnia high. I blame this on re-watching PC.(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 07:51 pm (UTC):whistles: withholding judgement : Tirian's still not off the hook. though rather intrigued that he's willing to offer himself up for sacrifice.
Loving Edmund's freakout and Lucy's incapability of going against Aslan. Also Eustace. But then I always love Eustace no matter what.
Edmund, you did notice that Aslan was never the one responsible for you getting *into* Narnia, right? He was just the one to chuck you out. :muses: So essentially it's the Deep Magic (include Father Christmas as part of that) and Narnia itself that calls on the Pevensies as its avatars. Which makes you wonder just how long those prophecies have been around, waiting for them. And whether it ever counted the house of Helen and Frank as part of it.
Do we get to see more of Jill?
Hmm. On the titles : what's the chance that those were ancient prophecy too, if they got given so early in their reigns? Silvertongue and Breakneck and Heartsbane are nicknames, but King of Summer sounds almost like a title that's been lying in wait to be bestowed.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 10:23 pm (UTC)Tirian has good instincts, and he knows what he should be doing; he's just very, very unlucky, and he doesn't really have the charisma he needs to pull off anything. And he's also read Caspian's memoirs, so he's probably got the clearest view of the Pevensies of any of the Narnians, but even that's not really all that clear.
Er, we will see more of Jill, I just haven't figured out what everyone's doing yet. And there's a slight problem in that I don't remember all that much of her characterization from the books.
*beams* Can I just add how thrilled I am that y'all are finding stuff in here that's not really text? Because it makes me happy. I mean, y'all are so certain that Aslan had nothing to do with the Pevensies being in Narnia...or possibly you just know me too well, I don't know. *pleased*
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Date: 2008-10-12 02:30 am (UTC)And then there's the shallow part of me that went "Twenty? Finally in my age range and fair play!"
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-12 03:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-12 03:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2008-10-12 04:20 am (UTC)I SWEAR, THIS IS SO FREAKIN' EPIC. I LOVE THE EDMUND P.O.V. IT IS WONDERFUL :DD
It gives me SHIVERS to think of Tirian worshipping the Pevensies. It's, like, gross.
Kinda like overcomplimenting someone.LAWDY, YOU NEED TO CONTINUE ASAP. I AM IN UTTER AWE OF THIS.
a;sjf 8suf lasj;fa8s9duf lsdjf♥ *loves*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-12 05:06 am (UTC)To be fair, Tirian never really worshipped the Pevensies; he's aware of the four little gods, but more as Aslan's helpers, the hands of Aslan, a country superstition. The royal family tends toward Aslan and Aslan alone.
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Date: 2008-10-12 04:36 am (UTC)Omg Peter is *awesome*! And the girls of course. I love how Susan is there and she's doing what needs to be done and there's this *undercurrent*. But they do work well together, the four of them, they're freaking scary. And Tirian, um, thank you for writing this because he is so USELESS as a king! (Rilian's not much better, come to think of it.) And it is so nice to have him called on it, because in the book Peter's just like, "Hm, well, nice to meet you, Susan sucks," and no one says anything about how Tirian completely destroyed Narnia.
Um, wait, but if the Pevensies got there by the horn (it was the horn, right?), then how would they get home again? I mean, even if Lucy convinced the others--how are they going to go home? Unless they used the rings? But that would only take them to the Wood, it's not like they'd know which pool was Earth...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-12 05:09 am (UTC)...I, uh, forgot they had the rings on them. Um. Must...do something about that. Or mention it. At some point. How they'd get home is one of those things that Lucy hasn't thought through; I think she was vaguely thinking of the wardrobe door in Lantern Waste. Either Edmund or Peter would have called her on it, but the scene took a different turn when Tirian got down on his knees.
...that came out wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-16 05:29 am (UTC)I was pointed your way rather abstractedly. I was reading some Dark is Rising fics over at kestrelsan's lj and saw a mention of your LotR / Narnia crossover and followed that link and then just got sucked into your Narnia. Like you have totally owned my life for the last 2 days as I have read and re-read all of your stories and then went looking for all of the Narnia AU's you instigated and ... and ... and ... lolololol
This is an awesome installment to all of your stories and really the way you were going in the stories it was the only way to have the Four end back up in Narnia. * sigh* can I just say that even batshit nutso I love your Peter and your Edmund. I hope you don't mind me friending you. Not only do I enjoy reading your stories but most of the time that I spent on your lj was reading the comments and the world builiding that you and some of your lj friends indulged in. (All of which make so much sense that you want to find and shake Lewis and ask him why the HELL didn't he do the world building that Tolkein did. and then you realise that if wouldn't be Narnia if he had did that lol) Thank you for such amazing stories and I can't wait for more!
Shade and Sweet Water
MistWalker
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-16 01:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 02:20 am (UTC)THINGS:
eyebrow scars are hot
tirian not knowing whether to clasp or kiss ed's hand! <3
“What in seven hells is this?” haha <33 kinda reminds me of, like, or it could be said by the catankerous uncle at family reunions, the one prone to drink and bewilderment. or like, a grandfather, saying something strange and archaic and awesome.
and when arnau mentioned them raping their women. MIND IN THE GUTTER i was like, "sooo... bestiality?"
susan being a fuckin badass in the background <333
Dying is for losers. lolololol
<3333333333
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-17 03:09 am (UTC)the seven natarene hells! because sometimes edmund picks up peter's quirks too. and the seven have been forgotten for a thousand years...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-23 11:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-25 12:34 am (UTC)