Dust deleted/missing scene: Dust 11.5
Mar. 15th, 2009 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardI was debating whether to hold off on posting this now or after Dust 12 comes out, but at the rate I write, that could be tomorrow or three weeks from now, which isn't exactly a good window.
This was originally the first half of Dust 12, which is a Susan POV. It's been cut for several reasons, the majority of which boil down to it being unnecessary (it breaks one of my cardinal rules of multiple POVs in a single story) and far too cluttered. Standard disclaimer here applies: this is NOT part of Dust, parts of this can and will be reused in future chapters, nothing here is considered to be Dust backstory or canon.
All things considered, the pounding headache that greets Susan when she drifts back to consciousness is probably to be expected. She groans low in the back of her throat. She’s – moving. She’s on horseback – tied into the saddle; she can tell from the pressure of the straps around her waist. That’s at least an improvement from just being slung over a saddlebow, she supposes. Around her, she can hear the steady clop of hooves on a heavily traveled road – rather a lot of horses; it’s hard to tell how many exactly without looking. Several have heavier treads than the others; are they bigger horses or just more heavily laden? Experimentally and without opening her eyes, Susan raises her hands and pulls them apart. Clink of chains, pressure on her wrists, and yes, they’re heavier than they should be otherwise. Well, isn’t this just brilliant, then. Even before she opens her eyes, Susan can tell this isn’t going to be good.
She winces a little at the stab of light, the world blurry around her for a minute before her eyes focus again. Susan stares down at her manacled hands, the chain between the cuffs passed through the loop of the pommel of the Calormene saddle she’s sitting on. The cuffs aren’t so tight that they’re cutting off the flow of blood to her hands, but they’re not loose enough she can pull her hands free either. They’re just loose enough to rub the skin away from her wrists with every movement, and isn’t that just a treat on top of the rest of this bloody mess?
The rest of the question is, perhaps, what is the rest of this bloody mess, and Susan raises her head to look around. Seven Calormenes, all mounted, spread out single file except for the man riding next to her. He rides with his crossbow balanced across his saddlebow, a quarrel spanned and ready to fire. The man directly in front of her is riding a warhorse, not a smaller Calormene barb – a tarkaan, then. She can just barely see the figure of two more riders in front of the tarkaan. Hoofbeats behind her, multiple sets; that means riders and the string of remounts. At their cores, the Calormenes are still a people of the saddle; their wealth is in their horses, and in her day she’d seen Calormenes go to war with two, three, even four horses each.
She turns her head to look at the rider next to her just as he does the same. His eyes narrow as he looks at her, then he calls, “Tarkaan!” followed by a string of almost-intelligible Calormene syllables. If Susan concentrates, she can get the general gist of it, though she’d let her Calormene lapse after the fiasco with Rabadash, and beyond that there’s nine years for her and sixteen hundred years for them. Not particularly conducive to remembering the language. The rider’s words are, however, something along the lines of The Narnian witch is awake.
The tarkaan turns around in his saddle and frowns at her. Susan stares at him flatly, her chin up and her expression cold. You don’t scare me, it says. And he doesn’t. If he’s brought her this far, he’s not going to kill her, and anything else he does to her will vanish the moment they leave Narnia. She learned a long time ago that nothing that happens here lasts.
The tarkaan turns his horse around and motions the rider beside her up to take his place. When he speaks, it’s in Narnian, his Calormene accent adding a faint guttural undertone to the words. “Do you know who I am?” he asks.
She doesn’t look at him. “No.”
“I am Inzamum Tarkaan of Calormen, in the service of the Tisroc, may he live forever, and of Prince Bahadur of Calormen.” He looks at her and waits.
“And who,” Susan says, after his silence has settled into something uncomfortable, “do you think I am?”
“You bleed like a woman,” says the tarkaan.
That would explain the headache, then. Susan finally turns to look at him, smiling pleasantly. “Do I?” she inquires.
The Narnians think she’s a goddess. Time to see what the Calormenes think.
To her credit, the tarkaan looks unsettled, although he replies steadily enough, “You are being taken to Cair Paravel on the orders of Prince Bahadur of Calormen, regent of Narnia, to answer questions regarding certain stolen items found in your possession.”
“How charming,” Susan drawls. Peter’s in Cair Paravel; that’s something. She turns her head away from Tarkaan Inzamum in deliberate disinterest, studying the landscape around her and trying to figure out how far they are from Arn Abedin.
The sight nearly makes her curse out loud, though Susan bites her tongue at the instant before the words leave her lips. When she’d been here last, three hundred years ago by Narnia’s time, this whole area had been heavily forested; she remembers passing through it with the army on their way to Miraz’s castle. The shape of the land is the same, familiar – she knows it, deep in her bones, the same way she’d known it was her horn and her country calling her home when she’d been standing in her kitchen doing the dishes she’d left to soak the night before, wearing Peter’s uniform shirt and not much else – but Aslan in the east, what the Calormenes have done to it! Her fists clench on the saddle horn in front of her; she’s utterly rigid with anger, and it’s lucky for the Calormenes that she’s strapped into the saddle, because this is a killing rage. Susan can tell that in a distant sort of way; it’s been a long time, a very long time, since she’s been here, but she’s seen the same thing in Peter more times than she can count, and she and her brother aren’t so very different as all that.
Susan closes her eyes, steadies her breathing the way the dryads and naiads had taught her all those years ago. Ground and center, they’d murmured to her. Feel the earth, put down your roots and brace yourself. Things come and things go: we remain. Let it pass through you. She keeps her eyes closed until she finds that place of calm in the center of her chest, steadying herself the same way she would at an archery butt, or while focusing her aim on a target that’s only barely within the range of her vision.
She opens her eyes.
The Calormenes have been clearcutting the forests here; nothing remains, not even the stumps. All there is for miles around them is the raw earth of Narnia, some of it turned up where the stumps have been dragged out of the ground – they must have used horses and harness, or maybe oxen. Or Narnians – minotaurs, centaurs, talking beasts, all in harness and enslaved, something not even the White Witch would ever have dreamed of. Despite the fact that she’d held Narnia in thrall for a hundred years, she would never have – may the ghosts of the Narnian dead forgive her for admitting it, but the White Witch had respected the Narnians well enough; she and they had both been flesh and blood and magic, she’d never have considered it, not for a moment. For all the other horrors she’d wreaked, she would never have done what the Calormenes have done to Narnia. For just a moment, Susan can understand why Nikabrik would have wanted the White Witch brought back; at least she’d respected Narnia for what it was. Then she shoves the thought away like the blasphemy it is and stares out at the barren land around her, her heart breaking.
The Calormene, Inzamum, doesn’t question her further. Susan rides in silent misery, refusing to let her anger turn into fear the way it wants to. They’re farther away from Arn Abedin than she’s been in this Narnia yet; a day’s ride, maybe two, even. How long has she been unconscious?
She’d woken up in the camp briefly, her head pounding white death from the blow she’d been struck. She’d been bound hand and foot on the bare ground, with Jill Pole beside her, pale and unconscious and bleeding. A tarkaan – not this one, she thought, though there had been a similarity about the features – had grabbed her by the hair and pulled her upright; Susan had been too dazed from the blow she’d gotten back in the clearing to do more than struggle weakly in his grasp before another man had forced her mouth open and given her –
They’d drugged her! Those bloody Calormene bastards had damn well drugged her! It had been sweetsleep; she remembers the taste – she’d never had it forcibly administered to her, thank Aslan, but Peter had, and she’d tasted it in the dregs of his winecup all those years ago when he’d been sprawled out unconscious on her lap, his fingers curled in a death grip on the fabric of her skirt. He’d been unconscious for the better part of a day; heaven only knows how long she’s been out. Sweetsleep is strong stuff. A better use for it is in painkillers, and the few times Susan’s had it then she hadn’t been conscious enough to remember drinking it. The Calormenes use it for far less pleasant matters – she’d only realized on the Splendor Hyaline that it had been Rabadash who’d dosed Peter in Cair Paravel.
Susan straightens slowly in her saddle, glancing around again. “Where’s Pole?” she asks, looking to her right, where Tarkaan Inzamum is riding in silence.
He raises his eyebrows. “Who?”
“Jill Pole,” Susan says. “The girl with me.”
Pole had been injured the last time Susan had seen her – bad but not fatal; from what Susan had seen, in that brief interval between Pole getting shot and the Calormene attack, the worst that might happen without medical care will be that Pole will lose the use of the arm. Unless it develops sepsis, of course. Then she might lose the arm entirely.
“My son will bring her to Cair Paravel with the rest of the Narnian prisoners,” Inzamum says dismissively.
“What other Narnian prisoners?” Susan asks, her voice calm and steady, a little impersonal.
The tarkaan looks at her with dismissal clear on his face. “You Narnian rebels,” he says. “You cannot fight the weight of Calormen; surely you have learned that by now. The more you fight, the worse your punishment shall be in the end.”
“Whatever it might be, I hardly expect that it can be any worse than living under Calormene rule,” Susan says. “You might be surprised to find what people will do for freedom, Inzamum Tarkaan. What they’ll give up.”
“Your people can fight all they want, zanheela,” Inzamum says, using the same title he would for a nobly-born Calormene woman. “They will not withstand the might of the Tisroc and of Tash.”
“Funny you should say that,” Susan replies. “I believe that’s what both Rabadash and Miraz thought, and look what that got them.” She looks ahead at the back of the rider in front of her before she can catch the look Inzamum shoots her, but she’s sure she can guess the general gist of it – who in the name of God are you? Or possibly, what the bloody hell is wrong with you?
They ride on in silence until their shadows stretch out long ahead of them. The land’s changed now; there are no trees, but there’s been enough time passed since the logging that a crop of pale spring grass and a few scraggy bushes have sprung up. Inzamum finally calls his men to a halt, one of them with the lead-rope on Susan’s horse tied to his saddle, and they dismount, Susan stumbling a little after they unchain her hands from the saddle and pull the straps free. God, it’s been a long time since she’s done this much riding, and for so long! She can feel the burn in her thighs in neat counterpoint to her aching arms and shoulders, a result of all the shooting she’d done; she’s been at Arn Abedin’s archery butts as often as she can manage it, but there’s so much to do; there would have to be thirty hours in a day for her to spend as much time there as she wants. And practice can’t quite reproduce the kind of sustained shooting strain that accompanies actual combat; she hurts.
They chain her hands together again and two of the Calormenes catch Susan by her elbows at a few words from Inzamum, slinging their crossbows back over their shoulders. Their grips are less firm than they might be; they lean away from her like they’re afraid, and Susan hides her smirk. They’re afraid of her. Well, isn’t that nice, then?
She glances back at Inzamum and the rest of his men. They’re switching the saddles over from their riding horses to the remounts, and Susan understands why they’ve stopped now. If they switch out horses, they won’t have to stop for long; they can ride straight through the night until they reach Cair Paravel. It’s three days ride from Arn Abedin to Cair Paravel with good roads and clear weather, traveling from sunrise to sunset; if a traveler cuts out the hours between sunset and sunrise, then the journey can be shortened by nearly half. Inzamum wants them at Cair Paravel as soon as possible. Susan is not remotely reassured her; the closer they get to Cair Paravel, the farther away they get from Arn Abedin. She’d blown her horn; Edmund’s closest and he should have come – surely he’d come. He’s good enough to find Pole, if not her.
The two Calormene soldiers pull Susan away, giving her the bare cover of one of the small bushes before they let go of her. Their meaning is clear.
“You could at least turn your backs,” Susan says archly, but neither of them moves, and she sighs and squats, lifting her skirts out of the way before she rises again, moving away from the damp patch of earth.
They make no move to walk her back to the road. One of them leaves and goes back to the the group, digging in a saddlebag as he talks quietly with his companions. The second one unslings his crossbow and points it at her.
Susan watches him patiently, stretching out her arms and legs as best she can with manacles on her wrists. She feels discreetly for all the other weapons she should have at her. It’s certain that the Calormenes patted her down; there are no knives in their bootsheaths or at the small of her back, and they’ve taken the small triangle-shaped blade she usually keeps tucked inside her bodice – of course they’ve taken advantage of the opportunity to feel her up. She’s still wearing her leather and metal backed vambrace on her left forearm, though, and she runs her fingers against the edge of it, finding the slight rise of the thin sheathed knife there. Good. There’s about a foot of chain between her wrists; well, she supposes with a kind of grim resignation, it could be worse.
“How far are we from Cair Paravel?” she asks the remaining Calormene politely, drifting towards him inch by tantalizing inch.
He looks at her uneasily and makes the Calormene sign against evil with one hand. “Sometime after the dawn,” he says in thickly accented Narnian. “We ride through the night.”
“That’s good to know,” Susan says, her voice low and husky, and grabs his crossbow with both hands, the bolt going wild as he depresses the trigger. She snaps a kick into his kneecap; her boots are steel-toed beneath the leather and bone shatters with a sound like a watermelon hitting concrete. He goes down screaming and clutching at his injured knee, letting go of his crossbow, and Susan has to forego the follow-through stamp kick to his throat as a Calormene rushes at her from behind. She slams the crossbow up into his face and her foot into his crotch; the boiled leather of the cup he’s wearing has nothing on her steel-toed boots and he clutches himself, gone completely white with pain. Susan hits him with the crossbow again, which knocks him over, and turns on her heel to hit another Calormene with the crossbow.
“Don’t shoot her!” Inzamum bellows, although he has his scimitar unsheathed in his hand, and his remaining men drop their crossbows.
Susan throws the one she’s holding aside and snatches the knife free of her vambrace, throwing it into the throat of the Calormene next to Inzamum. She doesn’t stop to watch the results; the rest of the Calormenes are coming at her, and they’re not kind enough to come at her one at a time.
It’s a confused mess of fighting and Susan’s losing; she knows it even before Inzamum’s scimitar kisses her throat and she freezes. There’s another Calormene groaning on the ground, one with blood streaming down his face; she’s strangling a third with the chain on her manacles.
“Let him go,” Inzamum says, and Susan sighs and loosens her grip on the chain she’s holding in her fists, allowing the Calormene to slip free, coughing as he stumbles around and fumbles for his sword. There’s a lovely red mark on his throat; another few minutes and she would have had him for sure. Pity she hadn’t had the time.
Susan raises her hands and turns toward Inzamum. “Surely you can’t blame me for trying,” she says, her smile cracking a little around the edges.
“You are a very dedicated woman,” Inzamum says, nudging her away from the injured men with the blade of his sword. “And yet I have to wonder,” he adds as two of his men grab Susan and push her down onto the grass, spattered with a fine spray of blood, “is your loyalty to Tirian the Woodsman or to someone else?”
They undo her manacles and pull her arms tightly around to her back, tying her hands so tightly that she knows they’ll be numb when they untie her. “My loyalty is to Narnia,” she says, spitting out a mouthful of blood from her split lip where someone was lucky enough to land a blow, “and to the High King Peter.”
Something breaks on Inzamum’s face, but all he says is, “Make sure she can’t run,” before he strides off to check on his wounded.
Susan doesn’t struggle or protest when they drag her off; there’s no point to it now. They push her down onto the scrubby grass and tie her back over a saddle on the ground, awkward and uncomfortable – there’s no way for her to run now. She stares at the body on the ground a few feet from her, blood drying in the setting sun. Her knife is still in the man’s throat – only a few feet, so close, but it’s so far away that it might as well be on bloody Mars.
It’s too early in the year for there to be flies out, not in this weather. Susan watches his blood congeal on his skin as the sun goes down, the chill from the ground soaking into her aching body. Eventually a raven lands on the body and jabs his beak into an eyeball.
It takes Inzamum a few minutes to notice; he’s too busy helping his wounded. When he does see the raven, he jerks up, reaching for the crossbow on the ground beside him. “Get away from him, vermin,” he snaps, raising the crossbow.
The raven eats the other eyeball. “What’s all this, Tarkaan?” he asks. “Did your men trip and break their necks, or did some Narnian get the drop on you?”
Susan flinches automatically – Narnians don’t eat enemy dead, only their own dead. She’d thought it was just another animal, gods –
“Get away from him, Crackclaw,” Inzamum snarls. “Despoil your own dead, but not the Tisroc’s, may Tash take your soul.”
“Food’s scarce, Inzamum,” the raven – Crackclaw – returns. “And when you leave your dead lying out here, you have to expect someone to come and eat them. This is still Narnia.”
“Not for long,” a Calormene soldier mutters.
Inzamum shushes him absently.
Crackclaw turns his head to regard Susan thoughtfully. “Who is she?” he demands. “I know Prince Bahadur is accustomed to taking his women in chains, but this seems excessive even for him.”
“She’s none of your concern. Get you gone before I put a quarrel through you.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Crackclaw says confidently. “You don’t rank high enough. I go above you.”
Inzamum’s face twists a little, but he doesn’t protest the raven’s statement. “Get away from my man,” he orders.
Crackclaw flaps his wings a few times, lazily, enough to rise up off the corpse and settle on the saddle of Inzamum’s war horse, which turns its head and snorts at him but makes no move to buck him off. “What has happened here?” he says again. “I know you Calormenes are clumsy, but this seems excessive even for you, Inzamum – after all, you were outnumbered during that mess in the marshes, which has to count for something, given that the Tisroc didn’t have you killed out of hand. This just looks like one woman.”
Inzamum scowls at him viciously, but doesn’t contradict him. Susan watches the raven and works at her bonds experimentally, but she’s tied tightly enough that she’s got no wiggle room at all – that on top of the manacles, of course, which are digging painfully into her flesh.
Crackclaw toys with the ties on Inzamum’s saddlebags, talons nimble as he picks the knots apart.
“Get away from there!” Inzamum exclaims, starting up again with crossbow in hand.
“You’ve been saying that a lot today,” Crackclaw observes. “What are you – Spring and Summer!”
He’s gotten the flap open. Susan cranes her neck up to see whatever it is he’s found, but from this angle all she can see is a hint of familiar red feathers. She smiles a little, grimly.
“Death comes on red wings,” says Crackclaw, the air of a proverb haunting the words, and darts upwards with one of Susan’s arrows clutched in his talons. “Your days in Narnia are numbered, Calormene!” he calls down, voice distant from on high. “The High King is back in Narnia!”
“No!” Inzamum shouts, firing into the air, but Crackclaw avoids the bolt easily before it starts to fall back down to earth, one of the Calormenes jerking his comrade out of the way just in time.
Susan laughs. The sound is raw and sudden even to her ears, but she can’t help it. She laughs, because it’s that or cry, and this is a better option given the circumstances. And isn’t that just what she’s always been good at judging?
“Are you afraid yet?” she inquires of Inzamum as he snarls and approaches her, his unloaded crossbow raised. “Because you should be.”
“You are hardly in a position to speak,” he says, staring down at her, his crossbow raised over her. She thinks he’s going to hit her – is positive of it, up until the moment when he turns away and starts barking orders to his men in Calormene.
They get their wounded into their saddles – a few of them tied in, white-faced with pain but unprotesting. There are few things that can faze a Calormene soldier; Susan remembers that from unfortunate experience. The man whose kneecap Susan broke is unconscious, dosed with sweetsleep or some other sedative. There’s one dead man; Inzamum covers him with a cloak and ties him over his saddle. Susan is the last person they see to; by the time they finally untie her and shove her onto the back of a horse, she’s numb, sore and aching and with all the blood gone beneath her wrists.
The ride seems longer than it actually is; Susan’s tired enough that she dozes a little in the saddle, waking up to the riotous shouts of thousands of people in the early hours of the day. She raises her head and stares around in some strange combination of exhaustion and disbelief, because this isn’t – this can’t be –
But it is, of course, and she should have seen this coming from the moment she stooped and picked up a golden chess piece all those years ago. Things change. Everything changes. Narnia changes. The land changes, the people change, everything changes – everything except what matters, because in the end, no matter what has happened to the country, to its inhabitants, no matter the years, the centuries, that have passed, this is still Narnia. Still her country. It takes her a moment, but Susan raises her chin and stares around at the bustling metropolis around her, at the walls of Cair Paravel rising before her, at the mass of people, with all the grace of a queen returning home.
“Make way!” one of Inzamum’s soldiers bellows, riding out ahead of the party. “Make way for Inzamum Tarkaan! Make way!”
Susan’s Narnians would have laughed in his face; they’d cleared off the roads for the royal party out of respect, but anyone else would have to bully their way through a crowd, royalty or not. Not that Narnia had tended towards crowds in her day; she’s never seen so many Narnians gathered in one spot outside of a festival or an army camp. Even the Shifting Market had been largely foreigners, not Narnians.
Half of them seem to be trying to get into the city; the other half appear to be trying to get out. Susan regards them curiously for a moment before deciding that the best thing to do is probably to treat Cair Paravel the same way she’d treat London back in England – full of different people, different cultures, and liable to cut her throat if she’s not too careful. Better if she doesn’t think of this city as Cair Paravel, because that will just make her sloppy. It’s not Cair Paravel.
There are two queus lined up outside the gates – one that’s wagons and carts, and the other that’s people, either on foot or on horseback. Both of them are undergoing questioning by groups of Calormene guards outside the gates; the wagons and carts, as well as any packs or bags, are being searched, and there are a few dogs sniffing around as well, collared in black and gold leather. Calormene dogs, she thinks, at least until one hound sits back on its haunches and says, “This one’s got silvermist on him,” and two Calormenes descend on the hapless faun, forcing him off the road and into a small building in front of the walls.
“Out of the way for Inzamum Tarkaan and the prisoner,” the tarkaan’s man says roughly, bullying his horse past the Narnians waiting to enter the city; they all scatter quickly to the sides of the road, watching the Calormenes and Susan pass without interest. She twists in her saddle to look back at them, but they’ve already been forgotten; the Narnians are jostling to regain their places in line, a few of them arguing fiercely with each other before a crossbow-armed Calormene soldier forces them apart.
“What news from the west, Tarkaan?” a Calormene officer calls down from the top of the walls. “Are the rumors true?”
Inzamum twists his head up to look at him. “The Tisroc holds all of Narnia in Tash’s name, cousin, as he was meant to,” he says, and Susan smirks. That’s just a good way of saying nothing at all.
She looks around the wide street as they advance down it, detouring around a dry fountain in the center – there’s a bronze-cast statue in the center of it, and Susan stares at it for a moment, caught between amusement and sadness, because that statue is herself and her siblings as they’d been in Caspian’s day. That day, those people, are long gone now. Then they pass the empty fountain, and that’s gone too.
Inside the city, the streets are even more crowded than the road outside the walls, a mixture of humans and nonhumans alike, a constant press of sound and seething life on all sides of her. It’s harder to pick out specific words and phrases of conversation than Susan might have thought – it’s not that there are so many languages being spoken, although there’s a little of that too, but that she doesn’t recognize the accents. Back at Arn Abedin, there’s not much variation – a kind of long, slow Narnian, each word carefully enunciated, from most of the Narnians there, and a quicker, sharper Narnian, the ends of words dropped occasionally, from the few noblemen present. But here – here it’s such a mix, everyone talking so quickly, that even without the mess of voices surrounding her it’s nearly impossible to understand.
The people here clear aside without much prompting from the Calormene soldiers, giving the lances and crossbows uneasy looks and muttering under their breaths. Susan lets her gaze flicker around a little curiously, doing her best to keep track of the buildings and street signs as they pass. She may have to find her way out again sometime – preferably soon.
They’ve been in the city for almost half an hour now when a rusalka steps out onto a balcony overhead and says very clearly, “Calormene scum! Go back to the rocks you crawled out from under!” before she throws something.
It’s a piece of broken crockery and it smashes into the face of the soldier in front of Susan. He shouts in pain, pressing the back of his hand to his cheek, and another Calormene raises his crossbow, finger depressing the trigger as Susan screams, “No!”
The bolt passes through the elegant ironwork of the balcony and takes the rusalka in the stomach. For a moment the entire street is frozen, the Narnians staring in horror as blood bubbles up from the rusalka’s mouth, then she loses her grip on the balcony and falls forward, hitting the cobblestones with a terrible sound as blood spatters the faces of the onlookers. Susan flinches, her fists clenching on the saddle horn as she wishes desperately for a weapon, but the Calormenes have taken her last one from her and there’s nothing she can do, nothing at all – not from here.
Tarkaan Inzamum barks an order in Calormene, and the soldier who shot methodically spans another bolt, clicking his tongue to his horse as their little cavalcade starts moving again. The soldier struck in the face wipes the blood away and leans over to spit on the body as he passes it.
“You can’t just leave her!” Susan exclaims. “She’s –”
“Silence, you damned Narnian witch!” a soldier snaps at her, but his voice is drowned out by a woman’s scream.
“Murderer!” she shouts, yanking the crossbow bolt free of the dead rusalka’s body. “Calormene murderer!” She raises the crossbow bolt like a short, stubby spear and rushes at the Calormene crossbowman.
He raises his crossbow lazily, almost leisurely, and Susan digs her knees into her horse’s side, sending it reeling sideways into the crossbowman’s horse. The lead rope on her horse’s harness is being held by a Calormene in front of her, and the movement sends him jerking out of the saddle, down onto the street in front of her horse’s hooves. She leans forward to grab for the trailing lead rope, but can’t reach it, not with her hands chained to the saddle. And by then it’s too late; the Calormenes are pressed close around her and there’s no way out.
The Narnians are screaming and shouting, pressing in on the Calormene party, a few with broken pieces of wood or knives, some with nothing more than their fists.
“Murderers!” someone screams, and the crowd takes up the cry, bellowing curses and bitter invective as the Calormenes fight for control of their horses. A thin satyr with curling horns dashes forward with a curved fisherman’s knife clutched in his fist and slashes at the Calormene at the ground, who’s trying to clamber back into his saddle. The loose horses in the back are screaming in fear and some of the other Calormenes are too busy trying to control them to look to their own safety; Susan hears a sudden shout of pain from one of them.
Inzamum shouts an order in Calormene, then, in Narnian, “End this now and you will not be harmed!”
“Calormene murderers!”
“Sandfuckers!”
Some Calormene releases a crossbow bolt and there’s a scream that’s lost in the shouting. A few of the Calormenes lower their lances; the rest already have their crossbows in hand, crowding in around Susan, Inzamum, and the wounded.
More Narnians are following the satyr’s example, beating at the horses and the armored Calormenes with their makeshift weapons. Susan jerks futilely at the chain binding her hands to the saddle, but both the metal of the manacles and the wood of the pommel hold; she’s trapped. From far off there’s a faint, high whistling; she hears it and dismisses it as irrelevant.
“End this!” Inzamum bellows again. “We are on the business of the Tisroc!”
“The Tisroc can go bugger himself on a spear!” screams a fox, crouched on the balcony where the rusalka fell. “This is Narnia!”
Oh, Aslan, Susan thinks absently, because if this turns into a full-fledged riot the Narnians aren’t likely to spare her, and she has no way to escape.
Then someone cuts through the ropes holding her in the saddle and jerks her back, arms screaming in protest as she nearly falls. The cool steel of a Calormene scimitar bites into her neck.
“Back!” he snarls – not Inzamum, who’s shouting in Calormene, but some other soldier. “Or she dies!”
“They don’t know who I am, you bloody idiot,” Susan gasps, and slams her head backwards into the bridge of his nose, hearing cartilage crack and driving shards of bone up into his brain. He dies nearly instantly and for one terrifying moment Susan’s falling with no way to catch herself, the ground rushing up at her terrifyingly fast. Then she jerks herself back into the saddle with a terrific wrench of her thigh muscles, shaking with the effort of it as she grabs at the pommel with aching fingers. The back of her head aches; she’ll have a lump the size of her hand there tomorrow. She’s more concerned with the attention she’s attracted from the members of the mob, a few of whom are staring at her in surprise.
“What’s this, Tarkaan?” a familiar voice jeers as Crackclaw the raven swoops down and lands on the balcony, strutting a few feet as he tucks his wings in against his body. “Gotten yourself into a bit of trouble, have you? Don’t worry,” he adds, “I suppose you’ll have your arse pulled out of the fire at the last minute, more’s the pity.”
He turns his attention down towards the distracted Narnians. “Get out of here, you fools! The Provost’s Guard is on its way, and Prejun will have you all in cages before the hour’s out if you haven’t cleared away by the time they arrive.”
“Why should we listen to you?” the fox snarls at him, her face sharp with anger. “You’re taking their damned gold!”
“Because hope is in Narnia again!” Crackclaw snaps. “Do you think the Calormenes go about the countryside kidnapping Narnian women at random? Well – they do –”
Susan’s laugh escapes without conscious thought, because gods, but it’s been a long few days, and there’s just something about the tone of Crackclaw’s voice that gets to her. She laughs and she laughs and she keeps laughing, like a madwoman, and there’s blood running down her neck where the Calormene’s scimitar cut her and her sister isn’t speaking to her and she isn’t even supposed to be in bloody Narnia, not again, not after what Aslan said eight years ago –
Susan laughs, and laughs, and laughs, even after the Narnians finally decide to take Crackclaw’s advice and edge away, just barely ahead of a dozen mounted humans and centaurs in black leather jerkins with silver badges on their chests arrive on either end of the street, crowding in around the Calormenes.
“What’s going on here?” a man with gold edging the silver of his badge asks, edging his horse up in front of Inzamum. He glances at Susan and raises his eyebrows.
It takes Susan a moment to get herself back under control, but she manages it while Inzamum explains to the Narnian what’s happened, his voice short and clipped, bored. She stares down at the body on the cobblestones. There’s a bootprint on the rusalka’s dress, and more of them in the blood around her broken body.
“Sir, she’s dead,” says one of the guardsmen, who’s dismounted to kneel down in the street and check the rusalka’s pulse. He raises his head to glare at the Calormenes, one hand falling to the nightstick at his side. A Calormene soldier, watching him, shifts his grip on his crossbow and the Narnian reluctantly drops his hand, scowling.
“Who killed her?” the guardsman speaking to Inzamum asks.
“She fell,” the tarkaan says coolly. “We are on the business of the Tisroc, Sergeant; we must be about that.”
There’s a flash of irritation on the Guard Sergeant’s face, but he clenches his fists on his reins and turns his attention to Susan. She raises her chin and makes herself see what he must be seeing: a tall woman – not a girl, not anymore; at least they’ve passed that now – with pale skin and dark hair, a still-fresh wound on the side of her face, old scars on her face and hands, eyes that are too old for her age. Aslan alone knows what it is they’ve been hearing in Cair Paravel.
“Who are you?” the sergeant asks slowly, his eyes fixed on her.
She smiles at him warmly. “My name is Susan,” she says. “Some men call me Widowmaker.”
The sergeant gapes, and even Inzamum blanches. He’s always assumed, she supposes, but she’s never actually confirmed it before. Susan transfers her smile to him and draws back her lips, showing her teeth for a moment. She’s not her brother, but there’s still a trace of the old bloodthirst there, because above all, the kings and queens of the Golden Age have always been warriors, and when you take the trappings away, a warrior is just a killer with a cause.
Inzamum recovers from his surprise before the Narnian does, tightening his grip on her horse’s lead rope. “We must be about the Tisroc’s business,” he announces, pressing his horse forward until the sergeant has no choice but to move his horse out of the way, scowling a little. But his eyes are wide as he looks at Susan; there’s something on his face that she supposes she might call hope.
From here, even with flagging men and lagging horses, it’s not far to the castle. It rises on a hill above the city, all gray stone and tall towers, capped with pointed roofs like witch’s hats. Pretty, Susan supposes, after a fashion; there’s a little of Miraz’s castle in it and a little of Cair Paravel – something about the line of the buildings she can see beyond the walls. Caspian must have looked at the few illustrations that remained thirteen hundred years after Cair Paravel had been reduced to bones and rubble. There wouldn’t have been any plans to look at, of course; Cair Paravel grew out of the very stone of Narnia in a day and a night a hundred years before Lucy set foot in Narnia the first time.
Susan stares up at the walls as they approach, automatically marking out the guards walking their rounds. She smells burning oil as she passes through the gates and glances up to see the apertures in the walls where it can be poured down during a siege. There are more guards on the inner walls of the castle and at even intervals around the edge of the courtyard, a space that’s probably wide and airy in summer but is now just muddy and dirty with the spring melt.
Inzamum dismisses most of his men, catching his second by the arm and reminding him to find a healer for the wounded, and dismounts. He unchains Susan’s hands from the saddle and helps her down, then replaces the manacles and picks up the saddlebag with her bow and horn inside.
Susan doesn’t fight him as he directs her forward, past a pair of Calormene guards, and inside the big stone building in front of them. The gray stone is dull and colorless, nothing like the brilliant white marble of Cair Paravel, and Susan stares at with a sinking feeling of grim resignation in the pit of her stomach. This isn’t her Narnia, of course.
The big hall is filled with people, mostly humans but with a few Narnian nonhumans scattered throughout. The walls are bright with banners – Susan recognizes a few of the devices from her time at Arn Abedin. The red spear of the Northfalls, the three diamonds of the Heartscrowns – there are empty spaces left along the walls, and Susan can guess what at least two of those are waiting for. The wolf and waves of Glasswater, and the lion and compass rose of the royal family. She allows herself a small, tight smile. Bahadur doesn’t have everyone in Narnia yet.
Inzamum guides her along the edge of the walls, where the crowd blocks Susan’s view of the throne. She looks up at the balconies overhead instead; they’re filled with Calormene crossbowmen. Bahadur is taking his cues from Miraz’s book, it seems. Bastard. If they shut and bar the main doors, this room is going to turn into a death trap. She wonders if Caspian had constructed it that way, or if Bahadur had made modifications as insurance.
Inzamum settles into a position within a knot of other tarkaans, who give Susan curious looks but don’t speak. She still can’t see the throne, but at least she’s close enough she can hear what’s being said now.
The speaker’s voice is deep and guttural – probably, though she won’t put money on the notion, nonhuman. A minotaur or a centaur, most likely.
“My lord Bahadur, I can no less fault your right to take a prisoner who poses a significant threat to the security of Narnia than I can your right to keep me in my position, it is true. Yet to take such a prisoner without even a word of explanation undermines my authority as Lord Provost and the Provost’s Guard’s authority as the peacekeeprs of Cair Paravel. News of this has already spread throughout Cair Paravel; the criminals within this city begin to act, seeing that the Provost’s Guard may have little authority in domestic matters, which is what this man’s crime was. A murder is not an offense that has been taken on by the government since the first year of the conquest, my lord, and this is not an event where your interference can be easily explained away. The victim was not a tarkaan or a Calormene soldier or even a Calormene citizen – not even a foreigner! Eberle was a natural-born Narnian satyr and I have no explanation for why his murderer has been taken away by the Calormene government.”
“Your point, Lord Prejun?” a heavily accented voice says, sounding bored.
“My point, my lord, is that this unprecedented action by the Calormene government has alarmed the citizenry of Cair Paravel. Surely you understand that we Narnians have a – shall we call it – a certain fear of seeing Calormene soldiers on our city streets? Now they are seeing Calormene soldiers take Narnian prisoners from within a Narnian guardhouse. Now guardsmen are seeing Calormene soldiers override their authority with a word and take a prisoner away without explanation – a man they had good reason to arrest. My lord, this greatly undermines the power of the Provost’s Guard. You have given the sanctity of Cair Paravel back to Narnia, but you do not allow us to enforce it. Surely your wisdom –”
“You are arrogant, minotaur,” Bahadur – because it must be Prince Bahadur of Calormen speaking – says.
“My lord,” Prejun says, “I have only the good of Cair Paravel at heart –”
“You forget that there is no such thing as a Narnian citizen anymore, Lord Prejun,” Bahadur continues, interrupting him. “Only Calormene citizens, rebels, and foreigners.”
There’s a moment of silence, then Prejun says smoothly, “Forgive me, my lord; I merely forgot and did not mean to offend. Still, to take a prisoner from within a guardhouse, within the jurisdiction of the Provost’s Guard – it raises questions, my lord. Perhaps if the prisoner was to be returned to custody of the Guard, and then the proper channels were followed –”
“Impossible. This man Breakneck is now in my personal custody.” The prince’s voice goes low and threatening. “Why are you so desperate to get him back?”
“As I said, my lord, the fact that he was taken without explanation has led to questions regarding the efficacy of the Provost’s Guard. Since my lord has entrusted the governance of Cair Paravel to its original governors, I wish only to ensure that there is no uncertainty regarding the extent of our power.”
A long pause, and then Bahadur says, “Your paperwork will be completed, never fear, Lord Prejun. This man is wanted for crimes that occurred within the boundaries of this castle, which is out of your jurisdiction.”
“Of course, my lord,” Prejun murmurs. “My thanks for your generosity.”
“Of course we wish Calormen’s new state to be welcome to the empire,” Bahadur says; it sounds like a stock phrase. Louder: “You were seen entering, Inzamum Tarkaan. Since your orders place you in the west, acting against the Narnian rebels, this had best be important.”
“It is, your highness,” Inzamum says, stepping out of the crowd and drawing Susan with him. She looks up at the man in the throne without fear: a slight, dark man, his thick hair bound by a golden circlet, a beard cut short against his jaw. Above him, silk banners in Calormene black and gold frame a familiar silver shield with a scarlet lion rampant and the initials “PP” on it.
Prince Bahadur of Calormen looks at Susan with curiosity. “What is this?”
“Your highness,” Inzamum says, and throws the saddlebag down onto the ground. It spills forth Susan’s bow, her quiver and a flurry of arrows, and her horn. “I give you the Queen of Spring.”
This was originally the first half of Dust 12, which is a Susan POV. It's been cut for several reasons, the majority of which boil down to it being unnecessary (it breaks one of my cardinal rules of multiple POVs in a single story) and far too cluttered. Standard disclaimer here applies: this is NOT part of Dust, parts of this can and will be reused in future chapters, nothing here is considered to be Dust backstory or canon.
All things considered, the pounding headache that greets Susan when she drifts back to consciousness is probably to be expected. She groans low in the back of her throat. She’s – moving. She’s on horseback – tied into the saddle; she can tell from the pressure of the straps around her waist. That’s at least an improvement from just being slung over a saddlebow, she supposes. Around her, she can hear the steady clop of hooves on a heavily traveled road – rather a lot of horses; it’s hard to tell how many exactly without looking. Several have heavier treads than the others; are they bigger horses or just more heavily laden? Experimentally and without opening her eyes, Susan raises her hands and pulls them apart. Clink of chains, pressure on her wrists, and yes, they’re heavier than they should be otherwise. Well, isn’t this just brilliant, then. Even before she opens her eyes, Susan can tell this isn’t going to be good.
She winces a little at the stab of light, the world blurry around her for a minute before her eyes focus again. Susan stares down at her manacled hands, the chain between the cuffs passed through the loop of the pommel of the Calormene saddle she’s sitting on. The cuffs aren’t so tight that they’re cutting off the flow of blood to her hands, but they’re not loose enough she can pull her hands free either. They’re just loose enough to rub the skin away from her wrists with every movement, and isn’t that just a treat on top of the rest of this bloody mess?
The rest of the question is, perhaps, what is the rest of this bloody mess, and Susan raises her head to look around. Seven Calormenes, all mounted, spread out single file except for the man riding next to her. He rides with his crossbow balanced across his saddlebow, a quarrel spanned and ready to fire. The man directly in front of her is riding a warhorse, not a smaller Calormene barb – a tarkaan, then. She can just barely see the figure of two more riders in front of the tarkaan. Hoofbeats behind her, multiple sets; that means riders and the string of remounts. At their cores, the Calormenes are still a people of the saddle; their wealth is in their horses, and in her day she’d seen Calormenes go to war with two, three, even four horses each.
She turns her head to look at the rider next to her just as he does the same. His eyes narrow as he looks at her, then he calls, “Tarkaan!” followed by a string of almost-intelligible Calormene syllables. If Susan concentrates, she can get the general gist of it, though she’d let her Calormene lapse after the fiasco with Rabadash, and beyond that there’s nine years for her and sixteen hundred years for them. Not particularly conducive to remembering the language. The rider’s words are, however, something along the lines of The Narnian witch is awake.
The tarkaan turns around in his saddle and frowns at her. Susan stares at him flatly, her chin up and her expression cold. You don’t scare me, it says. And he doesn’t. If he’s brought her this far, he’s not going to kill her, and anything else he does to her will vanish the moment they leave Narnia. She learned a long time ago that nothing that happens here lasts.
The tarkaan turns his horse around and motions the rider beside her up to take his place. When he speaks, it’s in Narnian, his Calormene accent adding a faint guttural undertone to the words. “Do you know who I am?” he asks.
She doesn’t look at him. “No.”
“I am Inzamum Tarkaan of Calormen, in the service of the Tisroc, may he live forever, and of Prince Bahadur of Calormen.” He looks at her and waits.
“And who,” Susan says, after his silence has settled into something uncomfortable, “do you think I am?”
“You bleed like a woman,” says the tarkaan.
That would explain the headache, then. Susan finally turns to look at him, smiling pleasantly. “Do I?” she inquires.
The Narnians think she’s a goddess. Time to see what the Calormenes think.
To her credit, the tarkaan looks unsettled, although he replies steadily enough, “You are being taken to Cair Paravel on the orders of Prince Bahadur of Calormen, regent of Narnia, to answer questions regarding certain stolen items found in your possession.”
“How charming,” Susan drawls. Peter’s in Cair Paravel; that’s something. She turns her head away from Tarkaan Inzamum in deliberate disinterest, studying the landscape around her and trying to figure out how far they are from Arn Abedin.
The sight nearly makes her curse out loud, though Susan bites her tongue at the instant before the words leave her lips. When she’d been here last, three hundred years ago by Narnia’s time, this whole area had been heavily forested; she remembers passing through it with the army on their way to Miraz’s castle. The shape of the land is the same, familiar – she knows it, deep in her bones, the same way she’d known it was her horn and her country calling her home when she’d been standing in her kitchen doing the dishes she’d left to soak the night before, wearing Peter’s uniform shirt and not much else – but Aslan in the east, what the Calormenes have done to it! Her fists clench on the saddle horn in front of her; she’s utterly rigid with anger, and it’s lucky for the Calormenes that she’s strapped into the saddle, because this is a killing rage. Susan can tell that in a distant sort of way; it’s been a long time, a very long time, since she’s been here, but she’s seen the same thing in Peter more times than she can count, and she and her brother aren’t so very different as all that.
Susan closes her eyes, steadies her breathing the way the dryads and naiads had taught her all those years ago. Ground and center, they’d murmured to her. Feel the earth, put down your roots and brace yourself. Things come and things go: we remain. Let it pass through you. She keeps her eyes closed until she finds that place of calm in the center of her chest, steadying herself the same way she would at an archery butt, or while focusing her aim on a target that’s only barely within the range of her vision.
She opens her eyes.
The Calormenes have been clearcutting the forests here; nothing remains, not even the stumps. All there is for miles around them is the raw earth of Narnia, some of it turned up where the stumps have been dragged out of the ground – they must have used horses and harness, or maybe oxen. Or Narnians – minotaurs, centaurs, talking beasts, all in harness and enslaved, something not even the White Witch would ever have dreamed of. Despite the fact that she’d held Narnia in thrall for a hundred years, she would never have – may the ghosts of the Narnian dead forgive her for admitting it, but the White Witch had respected the Narnians well enough; she and they had both been flesh and blood and magic, she’d never have considered it, not for a moment. For all the other horrors she’d wreaked, she would never have done what the Calormenes have done to Narnia. For just a moment, Susan can understand why Nikabrik would have wanted the White Witch brought back; at least she’d respected Narnia for what it was. Then she shoves the thought away like the blasphemy it is and stares out at the barren land around her, her heart breaking.
The Calormene, Inzamum, doesn’t question her further. Susan rides in silent misery, refusing to let her anger turn into fear the way it wants to. They’re farther away from Arn Abedin than she’s been in this Narnia yet; a day’s ride, maybe two, even. How long has she been unconscious?
She’d woken up in the camp briefly, her head pounding white death from the blow she’d been struck. She’d been bound hand and foot on the bare ground, with Jill Pole beside her, pale and unconscious and bleeding. A tarkaan – not this one, she thought, though there had been a similarity about the features – had grabbed her by the hair and pulled her upright; Susan had been too dazed from the blow she’d gotten back in the clearing to do more than struggle weakly in his grasp before another man had forced her mouth open and given her –
They’d drugged her! Those bloody Calormene bastards had damn well drugged her! It had been sweetsleep; she remembers the taste – she’d never had it forcibly administered to her, thank Aslan, but Peter had, and she’d tasted it in the dregs of his winecup all those years ago when he’d been sprawled out unconscious on her lap, his fingers curled in a death grip on the fabric of her skirt. He’d been unconscious for the better part of a day; heaven only knows how long she’s been out. Sweetsleep is strong stuff. A better use for it is in painkillers, and the few times Susan’s had it then she hadn’t been conscious enough to remember drinking it. The Calormenes use it for far less pleasant matters – she’d only realized on the Splendor Hyaline that it had been Rabadash who’d dosed Peter in Cair Paravel.
Susan straightens slowly in her saddle, glancing around again. “Where’s Pole?” she asks, looking to her right, where Tarkaan Inzamum is riding in silence.
He raises his eyebrows. “Who?”
“Jill Pole,” Susan says. “The girl with me.”
Pole had been injured the last time Susan had seen her – bad but not fatal; from what Susan had seen, in that brief interval between Pole getting shot and the Calormene attack, the worst that might happen without medical care will be that Pole will lose the use of the arm. Unless it develops sepsis, of course. Then she might lose the arm entirely.
“My son will bring her to Cair Paravel with the rest of the Narnian prisoners,” Inzamum says dismissively.
“What other Narnian prisoners?” Susan asks, her voice calm and steady, a little impersonal.
The tarkaan looks at her with dismissal clear on his face. “You Narnian rebels,” he says. “You cannot fight the weight of Calormen; surely you have learned that by now. The more you fight, the worse your punishment shall be in the end.”
“Whatever it might be, I hardly expect that it can be any worse than living under Calormene rule,” Susan says. “You might be surprised to find what people will do for freedom, Inzamum Tarkaan. What they’ll give up.”
“Your people can fight all they want, zanheela,” Inzamum says, using the same title he would for a nobly-born Calormene woman. “They will not withstand the might of the Tisroc and of Tash.”
“Funny you should say that,” Susan replies. “I believe that’s what both Rabadash and Miraz thought, and look what that got them.” She looks ahead at the back of the rider in front of her before she can catch the look Inzamum shoots her, but she’s sure she can guess the general gist of it – who in the name of God are you? Or possibly, what the bloody hell is wrong with you?
They ride on in silence until their shadows stretch out long ahead of them. The land’s changed now; there are no trees, but there’s been enough time passed since the logging that a crop of pale spring grass and a few scraggy bushes have sprung up. Inzamum finally calls his men to a halt, one of them with the lead-rope on Susan’s horse tied to his saddle, and they dismount, Susan stumbling a little after they unchain her hands from the saddle and pull the straps free. God, it’s been a long time since she’s done this much riding, and for so long! She can feel the burn in her thighs in neat counterpoint to her aching arms and shoulders, a result of all the shooting she’d done; she’s been at Arn Abedin’s archery butts as often as she can manage it, but there’s so much to do; there would have to be thirty hours in a day for her to spend as much time there as she wants. And practice can’t quite reproduce the kind of sustained shooting strain that accompanies actual combat; she hurts.
They chain her hands together again and two of the Calormenes catch Susan by her elbows at a few words from Inzamum, slinging their crossbows back over their shoulders. Their grips are less firm than they might be; they lean away from her like they’re afraid, and Susan hides her smirk. They’re afraid of her. Well, isn’t that nice, then?
She glances back at Inzamum and the rest of his men. They’re switching the saddles over from their riding horses to the remounts, and Susan understands why they’ve stopped now. If they switch out horses, they won’t have to stop for long; they can ride straight through the night until they reach Cair Paravel. It’s three days ride from Arn Abedin to Cair Paravel with good roads and clear weather, traveling from sunrise to sunset; if a traveler cuts out the hours between sunset and sunrise, then the journey can be shortened by nearly half. Inzamum wants them at Cair Paravel as soon as possible. Susan is not remotely reassured her; the closer they get to Cair Paravel, the farther away they get from Arn Abedin. She’d blown her horn; Edmund’s closest and he should have come – surely he’d come. He’s good enough to find Pole, if not her.
The two Calormene soldiers pull Susan away, giving her the bare cover of one of the small bushes before they let go of her. Their meaning is clear.
“You could at least turn your backs,” Susan says archly, but neither of them moves, and she sighs and squats, lifting her skirts out of the way before she rises again, moving away from the damp patch of earth.
They make no move to walk her back to the road. One of them leaves and goes back to the the group, digging in a saddlebag as he talks quietly with his companions. The second one unslings his crossbow and points it at her.
Susan watches him patiently, stretching out her arms and legs as best she can with manacles on her wrists. She feels discreetly for all the other weapons she should have at her. It’s certain that the Calormenes patted her down; there are no knives in their bootsheaths or at the small of her back, and they’ve taken the small triangle-shaped blade she usually keeps tucked inside her bodice – of course they’ve taken advantage of the opportunity to feel her up. She’s still wearing her leather and metal backed vambrace on her left forearm, though, and she runs her fingers against the edge of it, finding the slight rise of the thin sheathed knife there. Good. There’s about a foot of chain between her wrists; well, she supposes with a kind of grim resignation, it could be worse.
“How far are we from Cair Paravel?” she asks the remaining Calormene politely, drifting towards him inch by tantalizing inch.
He looks at her uneasily and makes the Calormene sign against evil with one hand. “Sometime after the dawn,” he says in thickly accented Narnian. “We ride through the night.”
“That’s good to know,” Susan says, her voice low and husky, and grabs his crossbow with both hands, the bolt going wild as he depresses the trigger. She snaps a kick into his kneecap; her boots are steel-toed beneath the leather and bone shatters with a sound like a watermelon hitting concrete. He goes down screaming and clutching at his injured knee, letting go of his crossbow, and Susan has to forego the follow-through stamp kick to his throat as a Calormene rushes at her from behind. She slams the crossbow up into his face and her foot into his crotch; the boiled leather of the cup he’s wearing has nothing on her steel-toed boots and he clutches himself, gone completely white with pain. Susan hits him with the crossbow again, which knocks him over, and turns on her heel to hit another Calormene with the crossbow.
“Don’t shoot her!” Inzamum bellows, although he has his scimitar unsheathed in his hand, and his remaining men drop their crossbows.
Susan throws the one she’s holding aside and snatches the knife free of her vambrace, throwing it into the throat of the Calormene next to Inzamum. She doesn’t stop to watch the results; the rest of the Calormenes are coming at her, and they’re not kind enough to come at her one at a time.
It’s a confused mess of fighting and Susan’s losing; she knows it even before Inzamum’s scimitar kisses her throat and she freezes. There’s another Calormene groaning on the ground, one with blood streaming down his face; she’s strangling a third with the chain on her manacles.
“Let him go,” Inzamum says, and Susan sighs and loosens her grip on the chain she’s holding in her fists, allowing the Calormene to slip free, coughing as he stumbles around and fumbles for his sword. There’s a lovely red mark on his throat; another few minutes and she would have had him for sure. Pity she hadn’t had the time.
Susan raises her hands and turns toward Inzamum. “Surely you can’t blame me for trying,” she says, her smile cracking a little around the edges.
“You are a very dedicated woman,” Inzamum says, nudging her away from the injured men with the blade of his sword. “And yet I have to wonder,” he adds as two of his men grab Susan and push her down onto the grass, spattered with a fine spray of blood, “is your loyalty to Tirian the Woodsman or to someone else?”
They undo her manacles and pull her arms tightly around to her back, tying her hands so tightly that she knows they’ll be numb when they untie her. “My loyalty is to Narnia,” she says, spitting out a mouthful of blood from her split lip where someone was lucky enough to land a blow, “and to the High King Peter.”
Something breaks on Inzamum’s face, but all he says is, “Make sure she can’t run,” before he strides off to check on his wounded.
Susan doesn’t struggle or protest when they drag her off; there’s no point to it now. They push her down onto the scrubby grass and tie her back over a saddle on the ground, awkward and uncomfortable – there’s no way for her to run now. She stares at the body on the ground a few feet from her, blood drying in the setting sun. Her knife is still in the man’s throat – only a few feet, so close, but it’s so far away that it might as well be on bloody Mars.
It’s too early in the year for there to be flies out, not in this weather. Susan watches his blood congeal on his skin as the sun goes down, the chill from the ground soaking into her aching body. Eventually a raven lands on the body and jabs his beak into an eyeball.
It takes Inzamum a few minutes to notice; he’s too busy helping his wounded. When he does see the raven, he jerks up, reaching for the crossbow on the ground beside him. “Get away from him, vermin,” he snaps, raising the crossbow.
The raven eats the other eyeball. “What’s all this, Tarkaan?” he asks. “Did your men trip and break their necks, or did some Narnian get the drop on you?”
Susan flinches automatically – Narnians don’t eat enemy dead, only their own dead. She’d thought it was just another animal, gods –
“Get away from him, Crackclaw,” Inzamum snarls. “Despoil your own dead, but not the Tisroc’s, may Tash take your soul.”
“Food’s scarce, Inzamum,” the raven – Crackclaw – returns. “And when you leave your dead lying out here, you have to expect someone to come and eat them. This is still Narnia.”
“Not for long,” a Calormene soldier mutters.
Inzamum shushes him absently.
Crackclaw turns his head to regard Susan thoughtfully. “Who is she?” he demands. “I know Prince Bahadur is accustomed to taking his women in chains, but this seems excessive even for him.”
“She’s none of your concern. Get you gone before I put a quarrel through you.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Crackclaw says confidently. “You don’t rank high enough. I go above you.”
Inzamum’s face twists a little, but he doesn’t protest the raven’s statement. “Get away from my man,” he orders.
Crackclaw flaps his wings a few times, lazily, enough to rise up off the corpse and settle on the saddle of Inzamum’s war horse, which turns its head and snorts at him but makes no move to buck him off. “What has happened here?” he says again. “I know you Calormenes are clumsy, but this seems excessive even for you, Inzamum – after all, you were outnumbered during that mess in the marshes, which has to count for something, given that the Tisroc didn’t have you killed out of hand. This just looks like one woman.”
Inzamum scowls at him viciously, but doesn’t contradict him. Susan watches the raven and works at her bonds experimentally, but she’s tied tightly enough that she’s got no wiggle room at all – that on top of the manacles, of course, which are digging painfully into her flesh.
Crackclaw toys with the ties on Inzamum’s saddlebags, talons nimble as he picks the knots apart.
“Get away from there!” Inzamum exclaims, starting up again with crossbow in hand.
“You’ve been saying that a lot today,” Crackclaw observes. “What are you – Spring and Summer!”
He’s gotten the flap open. Susan cranes her neck up to see whatever it is he’s found, but from this angle all she can see is a hint of familiar red feathers. She smiles a little, grimly.
“Death comes on red wings,” says Crackclaw, the air of a proverb haunting the words, and darts upwards with one of Susan’s arrows clutched in his talons. “Your days in Narnia are numbered, Calormene!” he calls down, voice distant from on high. “The High King is back in Narnia!”
“No!” Inzamum shouts, firing into the air, but Crackclaw avoids the bolt easily before it starts to fall back down to earth, one of the Calormenes jerking his comrade out of the way just in time.
Susan laughs. The sound is raw and sudden even to her ears, but she can’t help it. She laughs, because it’s that or cry, and this is a better option given the circumstances. And isn’t that just what she’s always been good at judging?
“Are you afraid yet?” she inquires of Inzamum as he snarls and approaches her, his unloaded crossbow raised. “Because you should be.”
“You are hardly in a position to speak,” he says, staring down at her, his crossbow raised over her. She thinks he’s going to hit her – is positive of it, up until the moment when he turns away and starts barking orders to his men in Calormene.
They get their wounded into their saddles – a few of them tied in, white-faced with pain but unprotesting. There are few things that can faze a Calormene soldier; Susan remembers that from unfortunate experience. The man whose kneecap Susan broke is unconscious, dosed with sweetsleep or some other sedative. There’s one dead man; Inzamum covers him with a cloak and ties him over his saddle. Susan is the last person they see to; by the time they finally untie her and shove her onto the back of a horse, she’s numb, sore and aching and with all the blood gone beneath her wrists.
The ride seems longer than it actually is; Susan’s tired enough that she dozes a little in the saddle, waking up to the riotous shouts of thousands of people in the early hours of the day. She raises her head and stares around in some strange combination of exhaustion and disbelief, because this isn’t – this can’t be –
But it is, of course, and she should have seen this coming from the moment she stooped and picked up a golden chess piece all those years ago. Things change. Everything changes. Narnia changes. The land changes, the people change, everything changes – everything except what matters, because in the end, no matter what has happened to the country, to its inhabitants, no matter the years, the centuries, that have passed, this is still Narnia. Still her country. It takes her a moment, but Susan raises her chin and stares around at the bustling metropolis around her, at the walls of Cair Paravel rising before her, at the mass of people, with all the grace of a queen returning home.
“Make way!” one of Inzamum’s soldiers bellows, riding out ahead of the party. “Make way for Inzamum Tarkaan! Make way!”
Susan’s Narnians would have laughed in his face; they’d cleared off the roads for the royal party out of respect, but anyone else would have to bully their way through a crowd, royalty or not. Not that Narnia had tended towards crowds in her day; she’s never seen so many Narnians gathered in one spot outside of a festival or an army camp. Even the Shifting Market had been largely foreigners, not Narnians.
Half of them seem to be trying to get into the city; the other half appear to be trying to get out. Susan regards them curiously for a moment before deciding that the best thing to do is probably to treat Cair Paravel the same way she’d treat London back in England – full of different people, different cultures, and liable to cut her throat if she’s not too careful. Better if she doesn’t think of this city as Cair Paravel, because that will just make her sloppy. It’s not Cair Paravel.
There are two queus lined up outside the gates – one that’s wagons and carts, and the other that’s people, either on foot or on horseback. Both of them are undergoing questioning by groups of Calormene guards outside the gates; the wagons and carts, as well as any packs or bags, are being searched, and there are a few dogs sniffing around as well, collared in black and gold leather. Calormene dogs, she thinks, at least until one hound sits back on its haunches and says, “This one’s got silvermist on him,” and two Calormenes descend on the hapless faun, forcing him off the road and into a small building in front of the walls.
“Out of the way for Inzamum Tarkaan and the prisoner,” the tarkaan’s man says roughly, bullying his horse past the Narnians waiting to enter the city; they all scatter quickly to the sides of the road, watching the Calormenes and Susan pass without interest. She twists in her saddle to look back at them, but they’ve already been forgotten; the Narnians are jostling to regain their places in line, a few of them arguing fiercely with each other before a crossbow-armed Calormene soldier forces them apart.
“What news from the west, Tarkaan?” a Calormene officer calls down from the top of the walls. “Are the rumors true?”
Inzamum twists his head up to look at him. “The Tisroc holds all of Narnia in Tash’s name, cousin, as he was meant to,” he says, and Susan smirks. That’s just a good way of saying nothing at all.
She looks around the wide street as they advance down it, detouring around a dry fountain in the center – there’s a bronze-cast statue in the center of it, and Susan stares at it for a moment, caught between amusement and sadness, because that statue is herself and her siblings as they’d been in Caspian’s day. That day, those people, are long gone now. Then they pass the empty fountain, and that’s gone too.
Inside the city, the streets are even more crowded than the road outside the walls, a mixture of humans and nonhumans alike, a constant press of sound and seething life on all sides of her. It’s harder to pick out specific words and phrases of conversation than Susan might have thought – it’s not that there are so many languages being spoken, although there’s a little of that too, but that she doesn’t recognize the accents. Back at Arn Abedin, there’s not much variation – a kind of long, slow Narnian, each word carefully enunciated, from most of the Narnians there, and a quicker, sharper Narnian, the ends of words dropped occasionally, from the few noblemen present. But here – here it’s such a mix, everyone talking so quickly, that even without the mess of voices surrounding her it’s nearly impossible to understand.
The people here clear aside without much prompting from the Calormene soldiers, giving the lances and crossbows uneasy looks and muttering under their breaths. Susan lets her gaze flicker around a little curiously, doing her best to keep track of the buildings and street signs as they pass. She may have to find her way out again sometime – preferably soon.
They’ve been in the city for almost half an hour now when a rusalka steps out onto a balcony overhead and says very clearly, “Calormene scum! Go back to the rocks you crawled out from under!” before she throws something.
It’s a piece of broken crockery and it smashes into the face of the soldier in front of Susan. He shouts in pain, pressing the back of his hand to his cheek, and another Calormene raises his crossbow, finger depressing the trigger as Susan screams, “No!”
The bolt passes through the elegant ironwork of the balcony and takes the rusalka in the stomach. For a moment the entire street is frozen, the Narnians staring in horror as blood bubbles up from the rusalka’s mouth, then she loses her grip on the balcony and falls forward, hitting the cobblestones with a terrible sound as blood spatters the faces of the onlookers. Susan flinches, her fists clenching on the saddle horn as she wishes desperately for a weapon, but the Calormenes have taken her last one from her and there’s nothing she can do, nothing at all – not from here.
Tarkaan Inzamum barks an order in Calormene, and the soldier who shot methodically spans another bolt, clicking his tongue to his horse as their little cavalcade starts moving again. The soldier struck in the face wipes the blood away and leans over to spit on the body as he passes it.
“You can’t just leave her!” Susan exclaims. “She’s –”
“Silence, you damned Narnian witch!” a soldier snaps at her, but his voice is drowned out by a woman’s scream.
“Murderer!” she shouts, yanking the crossbow bolt free of the dead rusalka’s body. “Calormene murderer!” She raises the crossbow bolt like a short, stubby spear and rushes at the Calormene crossbowman.
He raises his crossbow lazily, almost leisurely, and Susan digs her knees into her horse’s side, sending it reeling sideways into the crossbowman’s horse. The lead rope on her horse’s harness is being held by a Calormene in front of her, and the movement sends him jerking out of the saddle, down onto the street in front of her horse’s hooves. She leans forward to grab for the trailing lead rope, but can’t reach it, not with her hands chained to the saddle. And by then it’s too late; the Calormenes are pressed close around her and there’s no way out.
The Narnians are screaming and shouting, pressing in on the Calormene party, a few with broken pieces of wood or knives, some with nothing more than their fists.
“Murderers!” someone screams, and the crowd takes up the cry, bellowing curses and bitter invective as the Calormenes fight for control of their horses. A thin satyr with curling horns dashes forward with a curved fisherman’s knife clutched in his fist and slashes at the Calormene at the ground, who’s trying to clamber back into his saddle. The loose horses in the back are screaming in fear and some of the other Calormenes are too busy trying to control them to look to their own safety; Susan hears a sudden shout of pain from one of them.
Inzamum shouts an order in Calormene, then, in Narnian, “End this now and you will not be harmed!”
“Calormene murderers!”
“Sandfuckers!”
Some Calormene releases a crossbow bolt and there’s a scream that’s lost in the shouting. A few of the Calormenes lower their lances; the rest already have their crossbows in hand, crowding in around Susan, Inzamum, and the wounded.
More Narnians are following the satyr’s example, beating at the horses and the armored Calormenes with their makeshift weapons. Susan jerks futilely at the chain binding her hands to the saddle, but both the metal of the manacles and the wood of the pommel hold; she’s trapped. From far off there’s a faint, high whistling; she hears it and dismisses it as irrelevant.
“End this!” Inzamum bellows again. “We are on the business of the Tisroc!”
“The Tisroc can go bugger himself on a spear!” screams a fox, crouched on the balcony where the rusalka fell. “This is Narnia!”
Oh, Aslan, Susan thinks absently, because if this turns into a full-fledged riot the Narnians aren’t likely to spare her, and she has no way to escape.
Then someone cuts through the ropes holding her in the saddle and jerks her back, arms screaming in protest as she nearly falls. The cool steel of a Calormene scimitar bites into her neck.
“Back!” he snarls – not Inzamum, who’s shouting in Calormene, but some other soldier. “Or she dies!”
“They don’t know who I am, you bloody idiot,” Susan gasps, and slams her head backwards into the bridge of his nose, hearing cartilage crack and driving shards of bone up into his brain. He dies nearly instantly and for one terrifying moment Susan’s falling with no way to catch herself, the ground rushing up at her terrifyingly fast. Then she jerks herself back into the saddle with a terrific wrench of her thigh muscles, shaking with the effort of it as she grabs at the pommel with aching fingers. The back of her head aches; she’ll have a lump the size of her hand there tomorrow. She’s more concerned with the attention she’s attracted from the members of the mob, a few of whom are staring at her in surprise.
“What’s this, Tarkaan?” a familiar voice jeers as Crackclaw the raven swoops down and lands on the balcony, strutting a few feet as he tucks his wings in against his body. “Gotten yourself into a bit of trouble, have you? Don’t worry,” he adds, “I suppose you’ll have your arse pulled out of the fire at the last minute, more’s the pity.”
He turns his attention down towards the distracted Narnians. “Get out of here, you fools! The Provost’s Guard is on its way, and Prejun will have you all in cages before the hour’s out if you haven’t cleared away by the time they arrive.”
“Why should we listen to you?” the fox snarls at him, her face sharp with anger. “You’re taking their damned gold!”
“Because hope is in Narnia again!” Crackclaw snaps. “Do you think the Calormenes go about the countryside kidnapping Narnian women at random? Well – they do –”
Susan’s laugh escapes without conscious thought, because gods, but it’s been a long few days, and there’s just something about the tone of Crackclaw’s voice that gets to her. She laughs and she laughs and she keeps laughing, like a madwoman, and there’s blood running down her neck where the Calormene’s scimitar cut her and her sister isn’t speaking to her and she isn’t even supposed to be in bloody Narnia, not again, not after what Aslan said eight years ago –
Susan laughs, and laughs, and laughs, even after the Narnians finally decide to take Crackclaw’s advice and edge away, just barely ahead of a dozen mounted humans and centaurs in black leather jerkins with silver badges on their chests arrive on either end of the street, crowding in around the Calormenes.
“What’s going on here?” a man with gold edging the silver of his badge asks, edging his horse up in front of Inzamum. He glances at Susan and raises his eyebrows.
It takes Susan a moment to get herself back under control, but she manages it while Inzamum explains to the Narnian what’s happened, his voice short and clipped, bored. She stares down at the body on the cobblestones. There’s a bootprint on the rusalka’s dress, and more of them in the blood around her broken body.
“Sir, she’s dead,” says one of the guardsmen, who’s dismounted to kneel down in the street and check the rusalka’s pulse. He raises his head to glare at the Calormenes, one hand falling to the nightstick at his side. A Calormene soldier, watching him, shifts his grip on his crossbow and the Narnian reluctantly drops his hand, scowling.
“Who killed her?” the guardsman speaking to Inzamum asks.
“She fell,” the tarkaan says coolly. “We are on the business of the Tisroc, Sergeant; we must be about that.”
There’s a flash of irritation on the Guard Sergeant’s face, but he clenches his fists on his reins and turns his attention to Susan. She raises her chin and makes herself see what he must be seeing: a tall woman – not a girl, not anymore; at least they’ve passed that now – with pale skin and dark hair, a still-fresh wound on the side of her face, old scars on her face and hands, eyes that are too old for her age. Aslan alone knows what it is they’ve been hearing in Cair Paravel.
“Who are you?” the sergeant asks slowly, his eyes fixed on her.
She smiles at him warmly. “My name is Susan,” she says. “Some men call me Widowmaker.”
The sergeant gapes, and even Inzamum blanches. He’s always assumed, she supposes, but she’s never actually confirmed it before. Susan transfers her smile to him and draws back her lips, showing her teeth for a moment. She’s not her brother, but there’s still a trace of the old bloodthirst there, because above all, the kings and queens of the Golden Age have always been warriors, and when you take the trappings away, a warrior is just a killer with a cause.
Inzamum recovers from his surprise before the Narnian does, tightening his grip on her horse’s lead rope. “We must be about the Tisroc’s business,” he announces, pressing his horse forward until the sergeant has no choice but to move his horse out of the way, scowling a little. But his eyes are wide as he looks at Susan; there’s something on his face that she supposes she might call hope.
From here, even with flagging men and lagging horses, it’s not far to the castle. It rises on a hill above the city, all gray stone and tall towers, capped with pointed roofs like witch’s hats. Pretty, Susan supposes, after a fashion; there’s a little of Miraz’s castle in it and a little of Cair Paravel – something about the line of the buildings she can see beyond the walls. Caspian must have looked at the few illustrations that remained thirteen hundred years after Cair Paravel had been reduced to bones and rubble. There wouldn’t have been any plans to look at, of course; Cair Paravel grew out of the very stone of Narnia in a day and a night a hundred years before Lucy set foot in Narnia the first time.
Susan stares up at the walls as they approach, automatically marking out the guards walking their rounds. She smells burning oil as she passes through the gates and glances up to see the apertures in the walls where it can be poured down during a siege. There are more guards on the inner walls of the castle and at even intervals around the edge of the courtyard, a space that’s probably wide and airy in summer but is now just muddy and dirty with the spring melt.
Inzamum dismisses most of his men, catching his second by the arm and reminding him to find a healer for the wounded, and dismounts. He unchains Susan’s hands from the saddle and helps her down, then replaces the manacles and picks up the saddlebag with her bow and horn inside.
Susan doesn’t fight him as he directs her forward, past a pair of Calormene guards, and inside the big stone building in front of them. The gray stone is dull and colorless, nothing like the brilliant white marble of Cair Paravel, and Susan stares at with a sinking feeling of grim resignation in the pit of her stomach. This isn’t her Narnia, of course.
The big hall is filled with people, mostly humans but with a few Narnian nonhumans scattered throughout. The walls are bright with banners – Susan recognizes a few of the devices from her time at Arn Abedin. The red spear of the Northfalls, the three diamonds of the Heartscrowns – there are empty spaces left along the walls, and Susan can guess what at least two of those are waiting for. The wolf and waves of Glasswater, and the lion and compass rose of the royal family. She allows herself a small, tight smile. Bahadur doesn’t have everyone in Narnia yet.
Inzamum guides her along the edge of the walls, where the crowd blocks Susan’s view of the throne. She looks up at the balconies overhead instead; they’re filled with Calormene crossbowmen. Bahadur is taking his cues from Miraz’s book, it seems. Bastard. If they shut and bar the main doors, this room is going to turn into a death trap. She wonders if Caspian had constructed it that way, or if Bahadur had made modifications as insurance.
Inzamum settles into a position within a knot of other tarkaans, who give Susan curious looks but don’t speak. She still can’t see the throne, but at least she’s close enough she can hear what’s being said now.
The speaker’s voice is deep and guttural – probably, though she won’t put money on the notion, nonhuman. A minotaur or a centaur, most likely.
“My lord Bahadur, I can no less fault your right to take a prisoner who poses a significant threat to the security of Narnia than I can your right to keep me in my position, it is true. Yet to take such a prisoner without even a word of explanation undermines my authority as Lord Provost and the Provost’s Guard’s authority as the peacekeeprs of Cair Paravel. News of this has already spread throughout Cair Paravel; the criminals within this city begin to act, seeing that the Provost’s Guard may have little authority in domestic matters, which is what this man’s crime was. A murder is not an offense that has been taken on by the government since the first year of the conquest, my lord, and this is not an event where your interference can be easily explained away. The victim was not a tarkaan or a Calormene soldier or even a Calormene citizen – not even a foreigner! Eberle was a natural-born Narnian satyr and I have no explanation for why his murderer has been taken away by the Calormene government.”
“Your point, Lord Prejun?” a heavily accented voice says, sounding bored.
“My point, my lord, is that this unprecedented action by the Calormene government has alarmed the citizenry of Cair Paravel. Surely you understand that we Narnians have a – shall we call it – a certain fear of seeing Calormene soldiers on our city streets? Now they are seeing Calormene soldiers take Narnian prisoners from within a Narnian guardhouse. Now guardsmen are seeing Calormene soldiers override their authority with a word and take a prisoner away without explanation – a man they had good reason to arrest. My lord, this greatly undermines the power of the Provost’s Guard. You have given the sanctity of Cair Paravel back to Narnia, but you do not allow us to enforce it. Surely your wisdom –”
“You are arrogant, minotaur,” Bahadur – because it must be Prince Bahadur of Calormen speaking – says.
“My lord,” Prejun says, “I have only the good of Cair Paravel at heart –”
“You forget that there is no such thing as a Narnian citizen anymore, Lord Prejun,” Bahadur continues, interrupting him. “Only Calormene citizens, rebels, and foreigners.”
There’s a moment of silence, then Prejun says smoothly, “Forgive me, my lord; I merely forgot and did not mean to offend. Still, to take a prisoner from within a guardhouse, within the jurisdiction of the Provost’s Guard – it raises questions, my lord. Perhaps if the prisoner was to be returned to custody of the Guard, and then the proper channels were followed –”
“Impossible. This man Breakneck is now in my personal custody.” The prince’s voice goes low and threatening. “Why are you so desperate to get him back?”
“As I said, my lord, the fact that he was taken without explanation has led to questions regarding the efficacy of the Provost’s Guard. Since my lord has entrusted the governance of Cair Paravel to its original governors, I wish only to ensure that there is no uncertainty regarding the extent of our power.”
A long pause, and then Bahadur says, “Your paperwork will be completed, never fear, Lord Prejun. This man is wanted for crimes that occurred within the boundaries of this castle, which is out of your jurisdiction.”
“Of course, my lord,” Prejun murmurs. “My thanks for your generosity.”
“Of course we wish Calormen’s new state to be welcome to the empire,” Bahadur says; it sounds like a stock phrase. Louder: “You were seen entering, Inzamum Tarkaan. Since your orders place you in the west, acting against the Narnian rebels, this had best be important.”
“It is, your highness,” Inzamum says, stepping out of the crowd and drawing Susan with him. She looks up at the man in the throne without fear: a slight, dark man, his thick hair bound by a golden circlet, a beard cut short against his jaw. Above him, silk banners in Calormene black and gold frame a familiar silver shield with a scarlet lion rampant and the initials “PP” on it.
Prince Bahadur of Calormen looks at Susan with curiosity. “What is this?”
“Your highness,” Inzamum says, and throws the saddlebag down onto the ground. It spills forth Susan’s bow, her quiver and a flurry of arrows, and her horn. “I give you the Queen of Spring.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-15 08:16 pm (UTC)I would just like to mention that you have corrupted me. I now find it difficult to write in anything but present tense, after reading several of your fics and writing a few in present tense myself.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad, because I find myself really liking present tense... hm.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-17 06:43 pm (UTC)Present tense is weird. *grins* I started out writing in past tense, but most of the time I'm writing in present because I'm mostly writing fic now, although when I go back to originals I'll go back to past, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-15 10:33 pm (UTC)I really hope that you keep the theatrics of the throne room in place, because I think it gives a real sense of the political situation without going out of the way. And reminds everyone where Peter is, because I'd totally forgotten.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-17 06:47 pm (UTC)I'm ninety-nine percent sure we're losing the throne room, which I really regret, because Dust 12 starts significantly after this bit ends, but trust me -- everyone's going to get a sharp reminder where Peter is.
(Although this brings up one of my major problems about writing chapters and then cutting them -- I tend to introduce a lot of relatively important characters in scenes that later end up being cut, and sometimes, the subtext makes it in without the context. Vespasian, for one; it took a long time for him to actually make it into the story after I initially introduced him in a cut scene. Another one is Finch, who's mentioned in Dust 11 but was originally introduced in the cut Peter chapter.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-16 12:56 am (UTC)I hope we'll get to see more Calormenes spooked. Did I mention I like it when the pevensies scares people? Yeah.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-17 06:49 pm (UTC)The Pevensies are slightly more likely to scare Narnians than they are to scare Calormenes, but they scare plenty of Calormenes too...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-16 11:07 am (UTC)Susan = scary shit.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-17 06:49 pm (UTC)That's what you get when you put someone in a situation where they have nothing to lose. And not that much to gain, either...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-16 08:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-17 06:50 pm (UTC)You have no idea how sad I am to lose the steel-capped boots.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-18 01:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-18 04:25 am (UTC)*sadly* Although it doesn't have quite the same impact when it's not from that character's POV. Lucy in the next few chapters of Dust, perhaps.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-16 08:44 pm (UTC)SUSAN.
Seriously, I just love her to bits.
This was awesome, bed. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-17 06:51 pm (UTC)