Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (5)
Nov. 19th, 2008 03:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air 5
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 five, 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.
Morning in Narnia, and the air is still cold, but there’s a hint of something that might be warmth, might be the promise of spring. The braziers in the treehouse have burned down to faintly glowing coals in the night, and Susan shivers a little as she squirms out from the blankets as quickly and quietly as she can, pulling her shift down around her thighs from where it’s been rucked up around her waist as she pads barefoot across the wooden floor to lift the lid of her trunk. Behind her, Peter makes a faint sound of inquiry as her movement rouses him.
“Su?”
“Go back to sleep,” she says, turning towards him. Her smile is soft and genuine, lingering warmly, and the knowledge of that is a balm to her soul. To be here again, with Peter, with Edmund and Lucy, in Narnia – that’s worth all the trouble that always heralds and surrounds their arrival here. “It’s still early.”
“Mmm,” Peter says, still blurry, and then drops abruptly back into sleep.
Susan keeps smiling to herself as she turns over piles of fabric, trying to decide what will be most practical. Sixteen hundred years in the Arn Abedin vaults hasn’t done more than fade the colors on her clothes – on any of their clothes – and every gown she picks up brings back memories. This she wore at the hunt with Lune of Archenland dogging her steps, this when his son Corin sought to win her instead, this when the desperate band of Salican refugees had come stumbling over the border, this at the summer festival a few days before Peter had gone missing the first time, this the year Peter had –
Susan pulls that dress out and measures it against herself carefully, her smile growing. It will do. Not too fancy, but cut and designed to make an impression; it’s practical enough (she’d worn it on the hunt that began the harvest fest) that it will do well here. And the memories attached to it are good ones.
She dresses quickly, braiding her hair and pulling it into a knot at the back of her neck to get it out of her way. She hangs her dagger off her belt, slings her quiver and her bow over her back – almost any other time she might dispense with both entirely, but here, in this place, the fear in the air is nearly palpable, and threat hangs heavy over Arn Abedin. Wild beasts in the forests, angry Calormenes seeking revenge for the slaughter done yesterday, other dangers that no one has seen fit to inform them of yet – she’ll take her caution where she can find it, and the consequences be damned. Besides, political repercussions are hardly an issue now.
It’s far cooler outside and Susan shivers a little, glad that she’s chosen this dress. It had been made in the days of Narnia’s wildcard seasons, when the winters had been long and cold and the summers short and hot, spring and fall both wildly wet, storms worse than anything ever seen in England at any and all times, a result of Narnia’s weather patterns trying to return to normal in the years after the Long Winter ended. The dress is a good choice now; this Narnia is not that Narnia or her Narnia, but the thick fabric is well-suited for the weather, and it reminds her of the woman Queen Susan of Narnia had been, the woman she has to try to be again. And as for Peter – well, she won’t give her brother too much credit for remembering her clothes, but maybe Peter will remember this dress too.
On solid ground again, her boots crunching into the soft snow (still cold enough for it to linger, warm enough for it to begin to turn from snow to slush, and hopefully to snowmelt soon), she smoothes her palms down the sides of her skirts and flexes her wrists thoughtfully before pulling a pair of soft leather gloves out of the pouch on her belt and slipping them on. She fastens the three softly gleaming buttons on the side of each glove, the ivory warm even though the leather, and flexes her fingers again, testing her draw with an invisible bow and arrow. Well enough; she shouldn’t be hindered too much, if at all.
Susan turns back to the homewood tree to regard the door cradled between its huge roots thoughtfully. It’s shut and probably bolted, though she’s certain the bolt would pull itself back at the right touch on the knob – not hers, perhaps, but Peter’s for certain. This is Narnia, and one of the things that is certain about Narnia is that the earth itself, and all its creatures and creations, love him unconditionally.
Edmund and Lucy are behind that door, probably wise enough to still be sleeping off the exertions of the previous day. There’s a sharp pang of hurt that accompanies the thought, but Susan’s getting used to that now; you can get used to anything if you live with it long enough, even pain, and betrayal, and abandonment. She got used to those long ago; it’s only a matter of transferring the causes to her siblings now. Not so very different than it had been then.
Except in all the ways that it is, of course. She had loved Aslan; she loves her siblings more.
Determinedly, Susan turns away from the homewood tree, setting her path toward one of the better-preserved parts of Arn Abedin. Most of the kitchen is long gone, but the hearth is still there, and a little corner of wall around it. No roof, but Arnau’s Narnians have accounted for that by dragging roughly cut boards over the high tops of the shattered walls around the hearth, enough shelter to protect the fire from the elements. The coals of this fire they keep hot at all times, sometimes banked, sometimes burning brightly, and for those that would rather take their meals with others than alone, or prefer not to fix their food themselves, there is always something here to eat. Not everything these new Narnians do is either wise or ill-advised, but this Susan approves of; it’s a good set-up, and it means that there will be something hot for breakfast now. There will be company too, perhaps; some Narnian tending the fire who may be willing to relax his superstitions enough to speak to her. There are things about this Narnia that she needs to know, that Peter needs to know, and he won’t think to ask; he never does. Some of that she may be able to find out.
When she approaches, delicately sidestepping a hound dragging in a huge chunk of wood from the forest – it drops the wood and bows to her, and Susan inclines her head in the way that comes naturally to her now, as it had been once – it’s to find three mice and a badger sharing out little wooden bowls of porridge and a tin of fresh-baked bread, cradling cups of milk in their paws.
“Good morning,” Susan calls.
There’s a short edge of wall that remains of the kitchen, unconnected to the corner that houses the hearth; it is high on one side, nearly its full height, and then the stone crumbles away abruptly, leaving the rest of the wall at sitting-level. Susan approaches on the high side, and she doesn’t see the figure sitting on the low-side until Edmund swings his legs off the wall and onto the ground, leaning forward with his own bowl in his hands.
“Susan,” he says shortly.
She stops where she is, and the mice and the badger look back and forth between the two of them anxiously. They don’t leave, and Susan stores that piece of knowledge away absently: perhaps they are too frightened, as any number of the Narnians (especially those that hale from Arn Abedin rather than Haven; she hasn’t met any of the other Narnians, those new-arrived from other refugee camps, yet) are, or perhaps they merely want to see the show (as her Narnians would have done once; she and Peter had disapproved of the bets they’d put on who would win the fights they’d used to have, but Edmund and Lucy had laughed and put coin down themselves; some days they’d even won).
“Edmund,” Susan says quietly in reply to her brother, and tilts her chin up. She’d been in the wrong before, and more than so, but hasn’t she proven herself now, at least?
Edmund’s glare is sharp and angry. He stands up, moving to leave, but Susan puts out a hand to catch his shoulder as he starts past her. “Edmund,” she says again.
He jerks his arm free of her grip. “I’m a little busy, Susan,” he says flatly.
“Yes, I can see that,” she snaps, her temper getting the better of her for a moment, and then she adds, “For Aslan’s sake, Edmund, can’t we just –”
He has his hand around her throat before she can finish the sentence, his gaze boring into hers as he snarls, “Don’t say his name.”
Susan takes one shaky breath, listening to the mice and the badger squeak behind Edmund. “Take your hands off me,” she says.
“Or what?” Edmund says, squeezing just tightly enough to make her gasp. “You’ll set Peter on me? I don’t think so.”
“Or you will be a very surprised eunuch,” Susan says, “and Peter will probably be rather annoyed with me.”
Edmund’s eyes flicker downwards, then go wide in surprise when he sees the dagger she has pressed to his groin. Slowly, he takes his hand away from her and steps back, raising both his hands, and Susan raises her own hands before she sheathes her dagger.
“So you remember that, at least,” Edmund says.
“Given that the circumstances seem to call for it,” Susan says, “yes, I do. Although I can’t say I ever really forgot.”
“You did a damn good job at pretending to it, then,” he snaps. “What do you want, Susan? We’re over and done with; anything we ever had is six years dead and gone. You shouldn’t even be here.”
She flinches; she can’t help it, but there are reasons and reasons for everything she’s ever done, and she doesn’t expect her brother to understand that. She had once – but he hadn’t, and she’s come to accept that. These things happen. “Well,” Susan says, “I am here, so you and Lucy have no choice but to deal with that. You didn’t ask for it, Lu didn’t ask for it, Peter didn’t ask for it, I certainly didn’t ask for it – but I am here.”
“Bully for you,” Edmund says rudely. “Clearly Aslan had taken leave of his senses when he made that particular decision.”
“If he has a plan,” Susan says, “it’s for all four of us. There’s a reason that we’re all here; there’s always a reason.”
“Is there?” he snaps, his fists clenching. “We don’t need you here, Susan. Pete, Lu, and I have it well in hand. So why don’t you just take one of those rings that Peter’s hiding –”
“The rings are gone,” Susan says.
His eyes go wide and he blinks at her in surprise, his anger briefly overwhelmed by surprise. “What?”
She repeats, “The rings are gone.”
“What do you – how do you even know about the rings?”
“Peter told me,” she says, and resists the urge to add, because at least one of my siblings still trusts me, and it’s the last one that should. “He showed me; there’s nothing but dust and ash left in that box.”
Edmund curses, his distraction lasting only for another heartbeat before he turns his anger back on her. “That must really disappoint you,” he says. “That means no way to get back to your lipsticks and nylons and those boys you like –”
Her hand itches to slap him, but she keeps her temper in check, just barely. “If Aslan brought us here,” she says, barely aware that she’s running the edge of her thumb over the carvings on the horn on her hip, “then surely he’ll send us back, and we don’t need any rings.” She raises her eyebrows.
Edmund scowls. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish here, Susan, or what game you’re playing with Peter that he’s forgiven you for what you did, but you aren’t fooling me now and you aren’t going to start any time soon.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to, then,” she snaps. “Edmund, for the love of Aslan –”
“No,” he says, and steps close to her again. Susan forces her hand away from her dagger; he’s too damn close for comfort, and she’s fast, but she’s not as fast as Peter, not as fast as Lucy – if he tries something – but he won’t, of course he won’t, because whatever’s passed between them he’s still her brother and she can’t let him think that she thinks he might –
“I should tell you to stay away from Peter,” he breathes, and she can feel his warm breath on her face.
“He’s my brother too,” Susan says, trying to keep her trembling in check. Don’t step back. Edmund’s right up against her, only a bare breath of empty air between them, and there’s not much space behind her between her back and the trunk of a slim ash tree; there’s nowhere to run. She knows his body well enough that she doesn’t have to wonder what he’d feel like against her, because she knows from two worlds, two – three – timelines. Edmund doesn’t have Peter’s bulk; he’s all wiry muscle, slim hands, deceptive strength shuttered beneath lowered lashes. He and she have always been alike in that.
Right now Edmund is all threat, the same man who could slaughter a roomful of people and walk away calmly to eat a steak, and he knows that. It’s been a long time since she’s faced down her brother in one of his rages, and not so very long ago she wouldn’t have dared; just turned her back and walked away. But that was in another country, another world, and Susan of Narnia is a different woman than Susan Pevensie; she chokes down her fear and lets the trembling turn to tension, tilts her head up to meet her brother’s eyes.
Edmund’s glare is sharp, angry, not the flat ice blue she knows from Peter. Edmund’s glare is all emotion. “Yes,” he says. “And you’re damned lucky for that.”
“I know,” Susan says. “Edmund – you are my brother, and I –”
“There’s nothing you can say that can change what you did,” he says.
“I know,” Susan says again. “Edmund – please –”
He continues on like she hasn’t spoken. “You betrayed Narnia,” he says, “you betrayed us, you betrayed me, you betrayed him –”
“I know,” Susan says for a third time. “And Edmund, I’m sorry for it, but you have to –”
“Oh, Susan,” he says, “I don’t have to do anything.” He reaches out and puts his hand flat against her collarbone, just above her breasts and just beneath her neck.
She draws in a sharp breath. “Edmund,” she says.
“You took an arrow here once,” he says, leaning in so that she can feel the words flutter against her skin. “It should have killed you. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” she says. “I remember.”
“We’d all be better off if it had,” he murmurs against her ear and then steps back. “Stay away from Peter,” he says.
Susan draws in a sharp breath, her heart hammering in her throat. “Tell him that yourself,” she says. “If you can.”
She sees the anger flare fast and hot across his face. “Fine,” he says. “I will.”
He’ll go to Peter and Peter will say – Aslan in the east, what will Peter say? She wants to believe that Peter will tell Edmund to go to hell, that he’ll do what he wants, but Peter trusts Edmund’s judgment, trusts Edmund, and does her thanks mean as much to him as the regard of his brother? Because her betrayal isn’t what Edmund’s was, but it’s betrayal nonetheless, and how can Peter forgive her so easily as he has?
Susan steps forward, her mouth opening, her hand stretching out to catch Edmund’s sleeve as he turns away, but before she can speak screams break the still morning air, a horn trumpeting warning a split second later. Both are close.
Edmund glances over his shoulder at her, eyes suddenly wide with alarm, and then his sword is in his hand and Susan’s bow is in hers, and they’re both running towards the screams.
There’s a lessening of magic in the air as they leave the Arn Abedin bounds; for a moment, Susan’s breath catches in her throat, but her feet don’t stumble and she drops neither bow nor arrow. The remnants of the roseroad are overtaken by screaming civilians, humans and nonhumans alike; she recognizes some of the Haven Narnians trying to keep them calm, keep them in check and moving towards the bounds, but the Arn Abedin Narnians are watching with grim disinterest from inside the bounds.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Edmund barks – and then shouts in surprise as something strikes at the tangle of Narnians from above, screaming rage as it dives down in a streak of red and catches a half-grown faun in its talons.
Susan draws, aims, and looses in the same breath; she has another arrow on the string a heartbeat later, but she holds it back as she sees the hippogriff begin to fall, the child tumbling from its claws into the waiting arms of a centaur that rears up on his hind legs to catch it. A moment later the hippogriff wings its way up again, turning its head to yank the arrow out of its flank with its beak, and Susan aims again.
“Wait!” Edmund shouts in her ear, striking down her arm; the arrow goes wild into the woods and Susan turns on him, furious, because if there was anyone there –
“That was a hippogriff!” he snaps.
“That was a child!” she snarls back, drawing a third arrow from her quiver and setting it on the string of her bow. She pulls back to her ear, aiming at the circling hippogriff above them, and lets fly, snatching a fourth arrow from her quiver in the same motion.
The arrow catches the hippogriff in the muscle of one broad red wing and it dips in the air, struggling to regain its former height as Susan aims and shoots again.
The second hippogriff comes out of nowhere to snap her arrow between its beak.
She has the next arrow on the string, is ready to loose, and then a woman screams in terror.
“That’s my daughter!” she shouts, and Susan sees the child clutched between the second hippogriff’s talons, hanging there as limply as a doll. Dead, maybe – but she knows hippogriffs, and they like their prey living. If they’re snatching them from the earth and not eating them where they sit –
A nest. They’re taking the children to their nest to feed their own chicks.
“Edmund!” she shouts, but he’s already off at a dead run, sword pumping in his fist as he sprints towards the treeline. Susan follows, seeing Tirian and Eustace out of the corner of her eye as they leave the Arn Abedin bounds.
“Stay here!” she orders as Tirian’s lips form her name. “Get them within the bounds, and get my sister for the wounded!”
And then he’s gone from view as the trees overtake them. She looks up to see the hippogriffs overhead – seven of them, flying in an arrowhead formation with five Narnian children hanging from their claws, one of them supporting the wounded hippogriff. Before her, Edmund is a shadow in the trees, running flat-out, leaping over the obstacles he can and dodging the ones he can’t, light glinting off the blade of his unsheathed sword.
Branches rip at her hair and skirts, slashing across her face as snow crunches beneath her boots, but Susan doesn’t slow. Her mind is working furiously as she glances up from time to time to make sure that they’re still following the hippogriffs. Where will they go, where – current maps of the area are shockingly bad, but she’d known maps of her Narnia once, and where –
There’s an avian scream of rage up ahead and Edmund’s answering shout, wordless in anger. Susan crashes into a snowy clearing with her bow up. She doesn’t stop to aim, just shoots and trusts in the bow Father Christmas put in her hands all those years ago.
The arrow takes the wounded hippogriff in the neck, and it sweeps its great head around and opens its beak to scream again, its eyes red with rage. The falcon half is that of a red kite – red body, wings striped in red, white, and black. It rears up on its hooves, wings mantling in the limited space of the clearing as it sweeps one great claw around towards Edmund, who’s already moving to bury his sword beneath Susan’s arrow, just below the breastbone.
She shoots over his head, lets the arrow take the hippogriff in the eye, and Edmund grunts in exertion as he pulls his sword free and swings again, hacking at its neck as it strikes at him with one claw, sending him sprawling on the forest floor, his sword still stuck in its flesh. He comes up with his dagger clenched in his fist, and Susan shoots again, and once more, and again, as the hippogriff mantles in pain and anger. It stumbles wildly in the snow, its screams growing weaker as Edmund strides toward it and drops down to bury his dagger in its breast, easily avoiding the last snap of the huge beak.
He draws his sword free and cleans both weapons in the snow before sheathing the dagger and looking up. “Sodding hell,” he curses at the empty sky, blue and scattered with cumulus clouds. “We’ve lost them –”
“No,” Susan says, striding forward to pull free the arrows that haven’t been broken in the hippogriff’s death throes. “They have to go somewhere, and their nest must be close. I think –”
“Down!” Edmund shouts, throwing himself forward to catch her around the waist and send them both tumbling to the snow.
She sees her bow go spinning away from her hand, her quiver spilling arrows out. Edmund rolls off her and up to his feet, and Susan scrambles for her bow as a second hippogriff lands in the clearing, shrieking in rage as it mantles its huge gray wings. It’s half-again the size of the first hippogriff, and it overwhelms the clearing, fills it to overflowing, and Edmund is a tiny figure before it as he raises his sword in two hands, staring it down.
Susan gets up on her knees, her bow in her hands, and reaches for an arrow. Her fingers close on empty ivory and she bites her tongue on the curse that rises to her lips, turning instead to grope for her scattered arrows in the snow.
“What the hell’s wrong with you people?” Edmund shouts at the hippogriff, but it doesn’t say anything back, just screams at him again. It puts one foot on the neck of the dead hippogriff, surprisingly gentle, and dips its head to the side in seeming confusion.
“Edmund –” Susan begins, the leather of her gloves now damp, slippery enough to make it hard to fumble an arrow onto her bow. “Edmund –”
“You bent the knee to us,” Edmund insists, lowering his sword slightly. “Whatever the Telmarines have done to you, I swear in my brother the High King’s name that we will make it right, just listen to me –”
“Edmund,” Susan says again, the arrow slipping out from between her leatherclad fingers. She drops her bow to strip her gloves off and then snatches bow and arrow up again, her fingers numbing as soon as they touch the snow. “Edmund, they’re feral, they’ve gone wild, they can’t –”
“O ye of little faith,” he says without turning his head, and then he sheathes his sword, holding up empty palms. “I’m sorry for what’s happened here, but listen to me –”
She draws the arrow back to her ear, aiming at one of the hippogriff’s great golden eyes.
“Susan,” Edmund snaps, “just because you turned your back on Narnia doesn’t mean that everyone has –”
The hippogriff screams and leaps into the air, kicking out at Edmund with its hooves. He dives to the side and Susan shoots, but the hippogriff twists and the arrow nicks its flank as it dives down, snatching Edmund up in its talons and then winging upward.
“No!” Susan screams, diving for another of her fallen arrows. “Edmund!”
She sees Edmund’s sword flash in the sunlight as she draws back her arrow, but the hippogriff’s too far up already; at this distance, she runs as much risk of hitting her brother as she does the hippogriff. With a snarl of frustration, she lowers her bow and lets the string go loose, the arrow hanging between her fingers.
“Oh, Aslan,” she whispers, and feels the words flutter against her throat as she tilts her head back. Edmund and the hippogriff are nothing but a distant spot of darkness in the sky; they’ll be gone from sight soon and she’ll be – she’ll be –
Go back to Arn Abedin without Edmund and Peter won’t kill her, but he’ll look at her with disappointment in his eyes, betrayal there because she hasn’t done all that she could have once, all those years ago. If she does that, there will be no going back: there will only be Susan Pevensie, not Queen Susan of Narnia called Heartsbane and Widowmaker, the Queen of Spring. And she’ll be damned if she’ll let Edmund’s accusations be proven right. She’s a queen of Narnia; she’s no coward, and this is her land and her brother, her creatures that have done the people of Narnia wrong. This is her duty, her gift and her curse, and there won’t be a day that dawns that finds her running to her brother for help, not when she can do as much herself.
Her hand falls to the cool ivory of the horn at her hip, thoughtful, and then she shakes her head and starts to gather up her fallen arrows. She doesn’t need Peter’s help.
There’s no easy way to track an animal through the air – there’s not even a hard way, because it’s near impossible to follow scents, and if they’re not wounded, they won’t leave a blood trail – but there’s only one place in the immediate area that has all the characteristics that hippogriffs like for their nests. It’s been more than ten years since she’s been here, but it’s not so hard as all that to forget. She only hopes that Giantkiller Ridge hasn’t changed too much in the past sixteen hundred years.
Susan looks up at the sun, guessing at how far she is from Arn Abedin and how far from Giantkiller, which is only a few miles to the south of the castle, where once upon a time the border had dipped close enough that they could see the Telmarine fortifications from the top of the cliff. Then Peter and Lucy had pushed the Telmarines back and won twenty leagues of land in a single decisive battle; that had ended their excellent overlook of the border. Aslan alone knows where the border is now.
She starts walking, shivering a little as the cold begins to soak into her skin, and keeps an arrow on her bow. A ravage of hippogriffs stealing children from outside Arn Abedin itself, Calormenes loose in Narnia – who knows what else might be lurking in the rosewood? They’re not so very far north from the wolfswood, which has long been a harbor to the worst of Narnia’s creatures; she doubts this has changed even in sixteen hundred years. Not if what she’s heard from these New Narnians is true.
The undergrowth is thick, and sometimes Susan finds herself having to fight her way through it; by the time she breaks from the deep woods onto somewhat more open ground – there is more space between the trees here – sometime later, her hands and face are scratched from the branches of unbending trees, her skirts ripped and her sleeve torn. She’s had to put her bow aside just to keep her hands free for the path ahead of her.
Giantkiller Ridge rises to the west of her position, and Susan eyes the river running between her and it with distaste. Snowmelt has made it run fast and high, and crossing will be less than pleasant. It runs closer to the base of Giantkiller now than it had sixteen hundred years ago.
There’s an aquiline scream in the distance, and Susan raises her head to see a hippogriff launch itself from the top of Giantkiller, wings spreading to catch the wind currents as it leaps into empty air. It’s a beautiful, heartbreakingly melancholy sight, and it’s such a damn waste that they’ve gone feral sometime in the preceding centuries, because the largest fliers they have at Arn Abedin are a pair of eagles. No griffins, no hippogriffs, no phoenixes or firebirds, no Stymphalian birds, no sirens or harpies – although those are both saltwater Narnians anyway, and unlikely to be found so far inland – no rocs, no wyverns, certainly no dragons – next to no air support at all, as Peter would say. Has said, though not in quite so many words; his grim expression every time he looks around at the Arn Abedin Narnians is speech enough.
“Now,” a voice says from behind her, “I know we’re in Narnia.”
Susan whirls, bow drawn and an arrow on the string, to find herself face to face with a centaur that regards her calmly. Out of the corners of her eyes, she’s aware of more centaurs, as well as mounted horsemen, moving to surround her, bows in their hands. These aren’t Narnians, or at least not the rebels she’s began to grow used to. Their armor and weapons are good, and well-matched, and there’s some sort of badge over their breasts that she can’t quite identify, but which nags at her memory like a sore tooth.
“It would seem so,” says a horseman, nudging his horse up besides the centaur. He leans forward on his saddlehorn, regarding her thoughtfully.
Susan switches her aim from the centaur to him. “Who are you and what are you doing in these lands?” she asks.
“I could ask the same of you,” says the horseman – young, she notes absently and automatically, maybe only a few years older than Peter is now. “Last I’d heard, these lands weren’t occupied.”
There’s something familiar about the shape of his face, about his cap of dark curls and his cool green eyes. Susan can’t put her finger on it, and can’t think what it might be anyway. Sixteen hundred years.
She tilts her head up. “I am Queen Susan of Narnia,” she says, and her bow doesn’t waver. She can still put an arrow through his eye before his archers take her down.
She expects him to challenge that, but all he does is blink slowly before he straightens. “So it’s true, then,” he says, and raises his hand.
The circle of centaurs and horsemen who’ve surrounded her lower their bows – horseman’s recurves, small and strong – but Susan doesn’t. “Who are you?” she says again.
“My name is Alleyne Seaworth,” says the man. “I’m a lieutenant with the –”
“The Red Company,” Susan finishes. She recognizes the badge now, and even sixteen hundred years later there’s still something of Osumare Seaworth in his descendant’s face. The resemblance isn’t strong, but something lingers.
Seaworth blinks. “Yes,” he says. “You’ve heard of us?”
“Not recently,” Susan says. “What are you doing in Narnia?”
“The same thing as you, Queen Susan,” Seaworth says, his gaze falling to the horn on her hip. “The core of the Red Company is Narnian-born, and has been for a thousand years. We are the oldest mercenary company in Greater Shoushan. It’s been foretold that one day we would be summoned back to Narnia, and every one of us with a drop of Narnian blood heard the sound of a horn in the air not six nights since. My captain is concluding our contract in Greater Shoushan, and then the entirety of the Red Company will be here within the month.”
“You’ve never seen the sea, have you?” Susan asks.
Seaworth blinks. “No,” he says. “How did you know that?”
“Because Osumare Seaworth rode a horse like a sack of potatoes,” Susan says, and lowers her bow. “I’d love to show you to my brother Peter, and listen to an excellent explanation of how the Red Company is still around after sixteen hundred years, but right now I have other concerns. And if you’re here to take orders from me and my family, then here are a few: I need a horse. And a light, strong rope.”
Appearances aside, Alleyne Seaworth is nothing like Osumare Seaworth; he and his squadron accompany her to the base of Giantkiller. Osumare would have handed over the horse and the rope and left immediately to follow the rest of her orders, which hadn’t included him and his men being here with her. Granted, Osumare probably would have been more use at this point of the juncture; seamen tend to be good at rock-climbing.
Susan tilts her head back to eye the cliff-face before her. It’s rough, with good handholds; she hadn’t climbed it in her own day, but she knows that her siblings had. It will certainly be easier than scaling a castle wall, and that she’s done. She can just barely see the tips of the scraggly evergreens at the top of the cliff; above them a good dozen hippogriffs are flying, circling uneasily and screaming outrage. She looks down as she toes the whitened, scattered bones that litter the snow in front in front of her. Most of them are shattered and broken, snapped between strong, deadly beaks; there’s not a scrap of flesh left on one of them.
The good news, so far, is that the hippogriffs seem too distracted to notice the humans and centaurs gathered at the base of their home. What makes that even better news is that it means there’s something there to distract them, and since they’re in the air – the full-grown hippogriffs she’d seen back at Arn Abedin, as well as a few half-grown yearlings and one gangly foal whose all big wings and knobby legs – she’s hoping that’s Edmund, and that he has the children.
Approaching from the west, she’d seen the caves in the cliff, high up near the top, and the hippogriff that took off from the shallow ledge in front, trailing blood as it took to the air. She hopes to God that means Edmund’s all right and more or less safe – as safe as he can be at this juncture, at least.
“Back,” she says to Seaworth, and they turn their horses around to make their way back to the space just before the river where the rest of his squadron is waiting.
The rope Seaworth has given her is slim and strong, spidersilk from Edan – which isn’t a country anymore, just a province under the control of Greater Shoushan, and won’t that be a story to get? – and she fastens it around the shaft of her arrow, looping and knotting it so it won’t slip free. There are arrows made especially for this kind of work, but she doesn’t have any of them in her quiver, so she’ll have to trust to Father Christmas’s arrows, her own memory, and the will of Aslan.
Susan rests her bow on her saddlehorn and turns to Seaworth. “I need you to listen to me,” she says.
“Of course,” Seaworth says without hesitation, and her mouth twists a little in amusement. Osumare Seaworth had never listened to her with that kind of intensity – Peter, yes, her, no.
“A mile from here there’s a way up to the top of the ridge,” Susan says, pointing. “Take some of your men and find it; I need you to draw the hippogriffs away, and getting down may not be as easy as getting up. I need you to keep mounted archers here to distract the hippogriffs if need be. And I need you to send your fastest rider to Arn Abedin, about a league and a half from here. They’re to find my brother Peter the High King – only my brother Peter, not Queen Lucy or King Tirian or anyone else – and tell him what’s happened, where I am. They need to give him this message, in exactly these words: O misguided fool, what riddles are these? For in Narnia, justice is won by the blade of a sword, not with gold and silver. Do you understand?”
Seaworth blinks, a little startled, but nods steadily. “O misguided fool, what riddles are these? For in Narnia, justice is won by the blade of a sword, not with gold and silver,” he quotes back.
“Good,” Susan says, and then raises her bow. She aims carefully; she may only have the one chance at this.
One hippogriff darts down to land on the ledge outside the caves above, hooves slipping on the stone before it gets its footing. A moment later it’s in the air again, screaming in anger, and as soon as it clears the cliff-side Susan shoots.
The long coil of rope plays out foot after foot, slipping off her saddlehorn, then stops. She allows herself a small smile of satisfaction as she tugs on it. Above her head, her arrow is buried deep in the trunk of one of the scraggly evergreen trees that finds a home on such barren rock-faces, and even after Susan puts all her weight on the rope neither the arrow, nor the rope, nor the tree breaks.
Seaworth watches uneasily as she loops the rope around her waist, along with the extra coil he’s given her. “Are you sure this is wise?” he asks.
This is the sort of idiot plan that Susan generally attributes to Peter, but it’s the sort of idiot plan that usually works through sheer audacity. She smiles at Seaworth. He’s younger than Osumare had been when he pledged his ships to Cair Paravel all those centuries ago. “Do you have a better plan, Lieutenant?” she asks, with just a hint of threat under the words. It comes easily to her now; everything comes easier to her in Narnia. Are you challenging my authority?
The mercenary returns her smile. He has Osumare’s trick of charm, that easy, uneven quirk of his lips that had coaxed Peter and God alone knew who else into bed with him. Susan is rather hoping that this Seaworth doesn’t have the same gift, because that’s the last thing they need right now.
He turns from her to start giving orders to his men, and Susan blows on her hands to warm them up. Gloves would be useful just now, but she’d left hers back in the clearing with the dead hippogriff, and she’ll have to make do with bare hands. Aslan help her, that stone is going to be cold, and she’ll have to climb fast, before her fingers numb up.
“Who are you leaving?” Susan asks Seaworth, and he points out the archers – three centaurs, one human woman.
Susan smiles at them. “I would deeply appreciate not having the misfortune to be picked off the rock by an angry hippogriff,” she says, and one of the centaurs paws the ground in front of him, dipping his head shyly.
“Don’t worry, your majesty,” the woman grins. “We’ll keep them well away from you.”
“I would also appreciate not being shot,” Susan adds, still smiling to add some humor beneath the seriousness, and the woman laughs.
“We’re the best in the squad,” she assures her.
“Which is why I’m putting them here,” Seaworth adds. His grin is fond and amused, a little indulgent, and Susan approves. “Good luck, Queen Susan,” he says.
“Luck is for losers,” Susan says, because it’s the sort of thing that Peter might say, and starts climbing.
Almost immediately she can feel her hands start to numb; the stone is as cold as ice beneath her fingers, and she grits her teeth and thinks of the sticky-hot summers of Narnia, the dry heat of Tashbaan, the warmth of her brothers’ arms and the play of flames on her face, soft Narnian wool against her bare skin. She doesn’t look up; she doesn’t look down. All she’s doing is trusting to muscle memory, because she may not have done this in the better part of a decade, but she has done it and she has to do it again, for Edmund’s sake.
She doesn’t know how long she’s been climbing when she starts to feel the burn in her arms, but it coincides with the too-close scream of a hippogriff. Her automatic instinct is to grab for her bow, but that’s a death sentence, or at the very least a long drop and a short stop. She’s miscalculated something here. And you did this for fun, Lu? she thinks absurdly, clinging to the rock-face, and then continues dragging herself up foot by agonizing foot.
The closer to the top Susan gets, the louder the screams of the hippogriffs, angry and frustrated, the adults’ voices deep, the yearlings’ less so, and then above it all a terrified cheeping – chicks who haven’t fledged yet. What in Aslan’s name is Edmund doing –
She nearly knocks herself out on the ledge as it looms up suddenly above her, and at that point Susan has to stop and cling to the cliff-face, trying to figure out how to get onto it. It pushes out too far for her to dare climbing directly, because her fingers are numb enough that if she tries, she’ll fall, and if she falls, she’ll die.
This is an utterly idiotic plan. Why did she think this was a good idea again? This is the sort of idiotic plan that seldom even works for Peter; it’s the sort of plan that Peter comes up with when he’s drunk, because even he’s not foolhardy enough to come up with something like this sober.
Carefully, crablike, Susan starts moving sideways, her booted foot slipping free of the toehold she’s got. She grabs for the rope in front of her face as she starts to fall and barely stifles her scream as she loses her grip on the wall, dangling in mid-air.
“Oh, God,” she says breathlessly, the words stolen from her lips by the cold wind that chaps her cheeks, lifts her bundled hair from her neck, sends her spinning. “Oh, God.”
Her hands are numb; her grip is slipping. She should have knotted the damned rope; it would give her something to cling to. She has the choice of climbing up as quickly as she can or sliding down to the ground, which is a long, long fall, and if she doesn’t lose her grip on the rope and fall to her death, she’ll have the worst rope-burn she’s ever had in her life, and she’s had some bad rope-burn. Neither of the latter options are attractive prospects, so –
She starts climbing – or tries to, at least. The spidersilk is slippery beneath her palms, and instead of moving upwards, Susan slips down a foot or so, biting down on the inside of her cheek to muffle her gasp as one of her palms rips open, her grip suddenly slick with blood. Bad, bad idea.
I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish here, Susan, she hears in memory, Edmund’s voice bitter and angry just this morning, and then, in even more distant memory, What the hell’s wrong with you? This is us, this is Peter, you can’t honestly think you can turn your back on this just because it suits you –
“Oh, go to hell, Ed,” she hisses under her breath, and starts to drag herself up the rope, slipping down an inch for every three she gains. It’s only a few feet until she can get her hands on the ledge, and she can do that, she can –
She’s eyelevel with the ledge when her grip slips again, blood spraying out from her shredded palms in the wind, and then Edmund’s strong hands close on her wrists.
He drags her up over the edge of the ledge until they’re both on solid stone, and sits down heavily, Susan sprawling out across his lap.
“That was your brilliant idea?” he says when he’s got his breath back. “For the love of God, Su –”
Susan puts her head down against his stomach, her breath tearing raggedly in her throat. “I suppose I could have just left you here,” she suggests. “That was the other option.”
She can feel him hesitate before one hand settles lightly on her hair, his thumb stroking against the curve of her skull. “I would have figured something out eventually,” he says.
“I wasn’t really planning on waiting that long,” Susan says, and Edmund snorts.
“Apparently not,” he says. “Jesus, Su, your hands –”
She levers herself up, wincing at the movement, and looks into Edmund’s worried face. “It’s good to know you care,” she says, and he flinches.
“I didn’t mean throw yourself off a cliff,” he points out.
“Well, I didn’t really throw myself off a cliff,” Susan says. “Or throw myself at all, really.” She looks down at her shredded palms grimly, then shrugs. “Ed, the children –”
He waves a hand behind him. “They’re here, they’re safe. They’re scared out of their fucking minds, but hey, who blames them for that? They’re sharing cave-space with a bunch of hungry hippogriff chicks who think baby satyr tastes like dinner.”
Susan winces. Edmund helps her to her feet, looking with interest at the rope trailing from around her waist, and adds, “The chicks are penned up in a corner of the cave anyway. That wasn’t hard; mama and papa hippogriff weren’t too fond of the idea of letting their babies accidentally fall off a cliff before they could fly. It’s the grown ones that have been most of the trouble; they’re not used to dinner fighting back.”
“This close to Arn Abedin, I wouldn’t think they’re used to dinner at all,” Susan muses, thinking of what Arnau and the centauress Baldesca had said. “At least not of the Narnian type. There are animal bones down below – deer, fox, otter –”
“Yeah, baby faun is apparently a real delicacy,” Edmund says, leading her into the cave. “So’s ‘ancient king.’”
She blinks a little at the wide eyes of the Narnian children huddled in a corner of the cave, watching her warily. Two fauns, a human, a satyr, and a minotaur. The satyr is the oldest of them; she’d put his age somewhere in his early teens. He has Edmund’s dagger in his hand.
“They’re from a camp up around Lantern Waste,” Edmund whispers in her ear. “Not the one that came in last night, but a different one. Most of the camp was wiped out by Calormenes; the survivors packed up and headed to Arn Abedin when they heard the horn.” Louder, “This is my sister Susan,” he says, and smiles disarmingly. “She’s got a way out.”
The children burst into a babble of excited voices that overlap and blend together. Susan smiles wryly as Edmund’s voice breathes against her ear, “You do, don’t you?”
Susan touches the rope around her waist with the raw, red tips of her fingers. “We’re not far from the top,” she says. “How are your climbing skills?”
For a moment, Edmund frowns at her, then he breaks into a grin. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks.
“It will probably traumatize the children,” Susan warns.
He raises his eyebrows. “Susan,” he says, “after their country got conquered, they’ve spent the last five years living in trees –”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Narnians were doing that of their own free will sixteen hundred years ago –”
“– and just this week, they’ve watched people they know get slaughtered by Calormenes, been uprooted from the only home they’ve ever known, and been kidnapped by giant monsters that were planning on feeding them still alive to a bunch of baby monsters. And you think hanging them off a cliff is going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Susan says, and unties the extra coil of rope from around her waist.
Edmund explains their plan in slow, careful words. Susan expects protest, but none of the children do so; the only one who speaks is the satyr boy – his name is Gilmar – and he says, “I’d jump off the cliff if it meant getting out of here faster.”
“That’s not going to be necessary,” Susan assures him. There’s a second cave in the back of this one, its entrance blocked by a large boulder that covers most of the doorway; she can hear the baby hippogriffs cheeping in fear. Occasionally, she catches sight of a huge golden eye, watching her anxiously.
They transfer the rope from her waist to Edmund’s, looping it in a kind of rough harness to get rid of some of the slack, and just before he starts climbing, Edmund glances down, blanches a little, and says, “So who do you have down there distracting the hippogriffs? Just out of curiosity.”
Susan doesn’t bother trying to hide her smirk. “The Red Company,” she says.
Edmund’s eyebrows go up. “I’m going to have to survive just to hear this story,” he says, and then starts climbing.
Susan cranes her head up to watch him. Soon enough he’s pulling himself up over the edge of the cliff, and a few minutes later the end of the rope drops to pool at her feet. Susan snatches it up and turns back to the cave, saying cheerfully, “All right, then! We’ll have you out of here in no time!” as she kneels to rope up the youngest of the children.
They all gather on the ledge to watch anxiously as Susan tugs sharply three times on the rope, then the faun begins ascending, clinging to the rope in front of him as Edmund pulls him up. The faun vanishes above them; the rope falls again and Susan turns to the next youngest.
The third child is in the air when one of the hippogriffs notices that their dinner is escaping and dives at them, shrieking in fury, and Susan has her bow and an arrow in hand before she can do more than process the sight. Her bowstring kisses her cheek and snaps as she puts an arrow into the hippogriff’s feathered underbelly and a second into the space where eagle-body meets horse-body, a third taking it between the eyes. The human girl rushes to the edge of the ledge to watch the hippogriff fall, wings spreading out around it as it claws futilely at the air, and Gilmar catches her collar and pulls her back, hissing, “Do you have a death-wish, Luzdivina? Do you know how high we are?”
Susan lowers her bow, pain washing through her hands and up her arms. The grip of her bow is covered in blood from her torn hands, and she wipes her palms unobtrusively on her skirt as she replaces her bow on her back.
After Luzdivina has gone up, when she turns and holds the rope out to Gilmar, the satyr tells her solemnly, “You should be the one to go up.”
“No,” Susan says, smiling. “We came here for you and your friends. Don’t worry,” she adds, “I’ll follow.”
“But you’re the queen,” he says. “You shouldn’t sacrifice yourself for me. That’s our job.”
“Not in Narnia,” Susan assures him, and kneels down to tie the rope around his waist. She tugs it to let Edmund know to pull him up.
Alone on the ledge, she looks at her ruined palms, sticky with blood. The cuts reopen every time she uses her hands, and she’s left red-brown fingerprints all over the children she’s helped. She rather doubts that Lucy will be quite so eager to heal her hands as she was to heal Peter’s broken fingers.
The sharp cry of a hippogriff makes her look up. The ravage is circling high overhead, their number noticeably fewer, and she thanks Alleyne Seaworth’s archers silently. Behind her, the cheeping of the baby hippogriffs is nearly unbearable, high-pitched and terrified, and she turns her head to look into the darkness of the cave. Sometimes their cries sound almost like words, and she wonders if maybe they can civilize them again. They must still have the capacity for it somewhere, unless Aslan has turned his back on them, and she doesn’t think he would have done that. Surely not.
She looks back as the rope drops at her feet. Slowly, every muscle in her body screaming protest, Susan stoops to pick it up. With only herself to care for now her hands are fumbling the necessary knots, slow and clumsy even as she strives to pull them as tight as they must be, looping them in the proper order. It would be a shame to come so far and fall at the last moment.
“Don’t make me come down there, Su.” Edmund’s voice is ghostly from above, and Susan calls back, “I’m all right,” pulling the last knot as tight as she can get it. She tugs on the rope and forces her eyes open as her feet leave the stone, staring out into open sky. If she looks eastward –
Eight years ago, when she’d been here last – well, three hundred years ago, to be strictly proper about it – Narnia had been choked and overgrown with thick forest up until the coast itself. Now, though, Narnia is stripped bare, abrupt and ugly, and she can see the Calormene encampments that mar her country’s surface alongside the naked earth that should have been forested, beside the cultivated fields from Tirian’s rule. She can feel it in her bones: this is wrong. But also: everything changes.
The rope turns lazily in mid-air, and Susan shuts her eyes as the cliff-face looms up in front of her. The wind pulls her hair free of its ties, sends it spinning around her face and into her mouth, and then she hears Edmund’s voice, sharp with fear when he says, “Susan!”
She realizes something’s wrong when she falls rather than rises, and her eyes snap open, looking down at the dizzying fall below. She’s nearly sick, and more so when she jerks, falling again, and looks up at the fraying rope above her, the plies snapping free one by one.
“Oh, Aslan,” she whispers.
“Susan!” Edmund yells again, and then someone grabs her around the waist just as the rope snaps.
She goes tumbling backwards, landing – oh, thank the Seven – on solid ground. Or on something that’s not empty air, at least.
“Don’t you ever fucking dare do that again,” Peter says breathlessly from beneath her, and then Edmund gasps, voice strained, “Get the hell off me, the both of you, I hear breathing is in fashion this season.”
It’s a miracle and a wonder that Peter doesn’t come back at him with some snappy rejoinder, just rolls them over off Edmund and sits up, pulling Susan into a tight hug. She puts her arms around his shoulders, shuddering all over with the aftershocks.
“What the hell do you think you were doing?” Peter says against her hair, his breath warm against her skin.
She takes a shaky breath and turns her face into his neck, breathing in the scent of him. Steel, leather, something fire-bright and uniquely Peter –
“I just said to myself,” Susan says, feeling each breath he draws in reverberate against her lips, “what would Peter do? And then I did that.”
Edmund laughs, but it’s short and rough with strain. “I guess she’s got you there, Pete,” he says.
Peter cups her face between his palms. He looks terrified, younger than he has in years, and his eyes are shockingly bright in his pale face. “Susan,” he says, “the reason I have you and Ed is so that I have someone to tell me not to do stupid things like that, not to use me as an example. A bad example, maybe, at most. But I need you, I need both of you, so don’t you ever – don’t you ever –”
“Oh, Peter,” she says, and he hugs her again, one big hand cupping the back of her head, the other splayed across her back.
Peter helps her up a few minutes later, his hands gentle on her wrists as he avoids her abraded palms, and over his shoulder she sees Alleyne Seaworth and his squadron, a group of Arn Abedin Narnians with the children they’d rescued wrapped in cloaks, and Edmund. His face is stricken.
“Susan,” he says, and then he stops. He holds out his arms silently, and Susan goes to him. His arms are strong around her body, and he has to tilt his chin up to rest it on her head. After a minute Peter comes up behind her to hug them both, his body still taut with tension as he twists his head to avoid her bow.
“You’re both idiots,” he murmurs fondly. “But you’re my idiots. And don’t you forget it.”
“How could we?” Edmund says. “We’ve practically got ‘Property of Peter Pevensie’ tattooed on our arses.”
Susan snorts softly. “You haven’t seen my arse,” she says. “Recently.”
Peter laughs and lets them go. “Let’s go home,” he says. “I can only handle so much excitement in one day.”
“Lies!” Edmund exclaims, and Susan can’t help but laugh at the grins on her brothers’ faces.
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Osumare Seaworth first appears in In a Dry Month. The Red Company is first mentioned in The Bone's Prayer. The arrow Susan takes in the chest occurs in On a Summer Sunday. Giantkiller Ridge first appears in this ficlet
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: This is part five, 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.
Morning in Narnia, and the air is still cold, but there’s a hint of something that might be warmth, might be the promise of spring. The braziers in the treehouse have burned down to faintly glowing coals in the night, and Susan shivers a little as she squirms out from the blankets as quickly and quietly as she can, pulling her shift down around her thighs from where it’s been rucked up around her waist as she pads barefoot across the wooden floor to lift the lid of her trunk. Behind her, Peter makes a faint sound of inquiry as her movement rouses him.
“Su?”
“Go back to sleep,” she says, turning towards him. Her smile is soft and genuine, lingering warmly, and the knowledge of that is a balm to her soul. To be here again, with Peter, with Edmund and Lucy, in Narnia – that’s worth all the trouble that always heralds and surrounds their arrival here. “It’s still early.”
“Mmm,” Peter says, still blurry, and then drops abruptly back into sleep.
Susan keeps smiling to herself as she turns over piles of fabric, trying to decide what will be most practical. Sixteen hundred years in the Arn Abedin vaults hasn’t done more than fade the colors on her clothes – on any of their clothes – and every gown she picks up brings back memories. This she wore at the hunt with Lune of Archenland dogging her steps, this when his son Corin sought to win her instead, this when the desperate band of Salican refugees had come stumbling over the border, this at the summer festival a few days before Peter had gone missing the first time, this the year Peter had –
Susan pulls that dress out and measures it against herself carefully, her smile growing. It will do. Not too fancy, but cut and designed to make an impression; it’s practical enough (she’d worn it on the hunt that began the harvest fest) that it will do well here. And the memories attached to it are good ones.
She dresses quickly, braiding her hair and pulling it into a knot at the back of her neck to get it out of her way. She hangs her dagger off her belt, slings her quiver and her bow over her back – almost any other time she might dispense with both entirely, but here, in this place, the fear in the air is nearly palpable, and threat hangs heavy over Arn Abedin. Wild beasts in the forests, angry Calormenes seeking revenge for the slaughter done yesterday, other dangers that no one has seen fit to inform them of yet – she’ll take her caution where she can find it, and the consequences be damned. Besides, political repercussions are hardly an issue now.
It’s far cooler outside and Susan shivers a little, glad that she’s chosen this dress. It had been made in the days of Narnia’s wildcard seasons, when the winters had been long and cold and the summers short and hot, spring and fall both wildly wet, storms worse than anything ever seen in England at any and all times, a result of Narnia’s weather patterns trying to return to normal in the years after the Long Winter ended. The dress is a good choice now; this Narnia is not that Narnia or her Narnia, but the thick fabric is well-suited for the weather, and it reminds her of the woman Queen Susan of Narnia had been, the woman she has to try to be again. And as for Peter – well, she won’t give her brother too much credit for remembering her clothes, but maybe Peter will remember this dress too.
On solid ground again, her boots crunching into the soft snow (still cold enough for it to linger, warm enough for it to begin to turn from snow to slush, and hopefully to snowmelt soon), she smoothes her palms down the sides of her skirts and flexes her wrists thoughtfully before pulling a pair of soft leather gloves out of the pouch on her belt and slipping them on. She fastens the three softly gleaming buttons on the side of each glove, the ivory warm even though the leather, and flexes her fingers again, testing her draw with an invisible bow and arrow. Well enough; she shouldn’t be hindered too much, if at all.
Susan turns back to the homewood tree to regard the door cradled between its huge roots thoughtfully. It’s shut and probably bolted, though she’s certain the bolt would pull itself back at the right touch on the knob – not hers, perhaps, but Peter’s for certain. This is Narnia, and one of the things that is certain about Narnia is that the earth itself, and all its creatures and creations, love him unconditionally.
Edmund and Lucy are behind that door, probably wise enough to still be sleeping off the exertions of the previous day. There’s a sharp pang of hurt that accompanies the thought, but Susan’s getting used to that now; you can get used to anything if you live with it long enough, even pain, and betrayal, and abandonment. She got used to those long ago; it’s only a matter of transferring the causes to her siblings now. Not so very different than it had been then.
Except in all the ways that it is, of course. She had loved Aslan; she loves her siblings more.
Determinedly, Susan turns away from the homewood tree, setting her path toward one of the better-preserved parts of Arn Abedin. Most of the kitchen is long gone, but the hearth is still there, and a little corner of wall around it. No roof, but Arnau’s Narnians have accounted for that by dragging roughly cut boards over the high tops of the shattered walls around the hearth, enough shelter to protect the fire from the elements. The coals of this fire they keep hot at all times, sometimes banked, sometimes burning brightly, and for those that would rather take their meals with others than alone, or prefer not to fix their food themselves, there is always something here to eat. Not everything these new Narnians do is either wise or ill-advised, but this Susan approves of; it’s a good set-up, and it means that there will be something hot for breakfast now. There will be company too, perhaps; some Narnian tending the fire who may be willing to relax his superstitions enough to speak to her. There are things about this Narnia that she needs to know, that Peter needs to know, and he won’t think to ask; he never does. Some of that she may be able to find out.
When she approaches, delicately sidestepping a hound dragging in a huge chunk of wood from the forest – it drops the wood and bows to her, and Susan inclines her head in the way that comes naturally to her now, as it had been once – it’s to find three mice and a badger sharing out little wooden bowls of porridge and a tin of fresh-baked bread, cradling cups of milk in their paws.
“Good morning,” Susan calls.
There’s a short edge of wall that remains of the kitchen, unconnected to the corner that houses the hearth; it is high on one side, nearly its full height, and then the stone crumbles away abruptly, leaving the rest of the wall at sitting-level. Susan approaches on the high side, and she doesn’t see the figure sitting on the low-side until Edmund swings his legs off the wall and onto the ground, leaning forward with his own bowl in his hands.
“Susan,” he says shortly.
She stops where she is, and the mice and the badger look back and forth between the two of them anxiously. They don’t leave, and Susan stores that piece of knowledge away absently: perhaps they are too frightened, as any number of the Narnians (especially those that hale from Arn Abedin rather than Haven; she hasn’t met any of the other Narnians, those new-arrived from other refugee camps, yet) are, or perhaps they merely want to see the show (as her Narnians would have done once; she and Peter had disapproved of the bets they’d put on who would win the fights they’d used to have, but Edmund and Lucy had laughed and put coin down themselves; some days they’d even won).
“Edmund,” Susan says quietly in reply to her brother, and tilts her chin up. She’d been in the wrong before, and more than so, but hasn’t she proven herself now, at least?
Edmund’s glare is sharp and angry. He stands up, moving to leave, but Susan puts out a hand to catch his shoulder as he starts past her. “Edmund,” she says again.
He jerks his arm free of her grip. “I’m a little busy, Susan,” he says flatly.
“Yes, I can see that,” she snaps, her temper getting the better of her for a moment, and then she adds, “For Aslan’s sake, Edmund, can’t we just –”
He has his hand around her throat before she can finish the sentence, his gaze boring into hers as he snarls, “Don’t say his name.”
Susan takes one shaky breath, listening to the mice and the badger squeak behind Edmund. “Take your hands off me,” she says.
“Or what?” Edmund says, squeezing just tightly enough to make her gasp. “You’ll set Peter on me? I don’t think so.”
“Or you will be a very surprised eunuch,” Susan says, “and Peter will probably be rather annoyed with me.”
Edmund’s eyes flicker downwards, then go wide in surprise when he sees the dagger she has pressed to his groin. Slowly, he takes his hand away from her and steps back, raising both his hands, and Susan raises her own hands before she sheathes her dagger.
“So you remember that, at least,” Edmund says.
“Given that the circumstances seem to call for it,” Susan says, “yes, I do. Although I can’t say I ever really forgot.”
“You did a damn good job at pretending to it, then,” he snaps. “What do you want, Susan? We’re over and done with; anything we ever had is six years dead and gone. You shouldn’t even be here.”
She flinches; she can’t help it, but there are reasons and reasons for everything she’s ever done, and she doesn’t expect her brother to understand that. She had once – but he hadn’t, and she’s come to accept that. These things happen. “Well,” Susan says, “I am here, so you and Lucy have no choice but to deal with that. You didn’t ask for it, Lu didn’t ask for it, Peter didn’t ask for it, I certainly didn’t ask for it – but I am here.”
“Bully for you,” Edmund says rudely. “Clearly Aslan had taken leave of his senses when he made that particular decision.”
“If he has a plan,” Susan says, “it’s for all four of us. There’s a reason that we’re all here; there’s always a reason.”
“Is there?” he snaps, his fists clenching. “We don’t need you here, Susan. Pete, Lu, and I have it well in hand. So why don’t you just take one of those rings that Peter’s hiding –”
“The rings are gone,” Susan says.
His eyes go wide and he blinks at her in surprise, his anger briefly overwhelmed by surprise. “What?”
She repeats, “The rings are gone.”
“What do you – how do you even know about the rings?”
“Peter told me,” she says, and resists the urge to add, because at least one of my siblings still trusts me, and it’s the last one that should. “He showed me; there’s nothing but dust and ash left in that box.”
Edmund curses, his distraction lasting only for another heartbeat before he turns his anger back on her. “That must really disappoint you,” he says. “That means no way to get back to your lipsticks and nylons and those boys you like –”
Her hand itches to slap him, but she keeps her temper in check, just barely. “If Aslan brought us here,” she says, barely aware that she’s running the edge of her thumb over the carvings on the horn on her hip, “then surely he’ll send us back, and we don’t need any rings.” She raises her eyebrows.
Edmund scowls. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish here, Susan, or what game you’re playing with Peter that he’s forgiven you for what you did, but you aren’t fooling me now and you aren’t going to start any time soon.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to, then,” she snaps. “Edmund, for the love of Aslan –”
“No,” he says, and steps close to her again. Susan forces her hand away from her dagger; he’s too damn close for comfort, and she’s fast, but she’s not as fast as Peter, not as fast as Lucy – if he tries something – but he won’t, of course he won’t, because whatever’s passed between them he’s still her brother and she can’t let him think that she thinks he might –
“I should tell you to stay away from Peter,” he breathes, and she can feel his warm breath on her face.
“He’s my brother too,” Susan says, trying to keep her trembling in check. Don’t step back. Edmund’s right up against her, only a bare breath of empty air between them, and there’s not much space behind her between her back and the trunk of a slim ash tree; there’s nowhere to run. She knows his body well enough that she doesn’t have to wonder what he’d feel like against her, because she knows from two worlds, two – three – timelines. Edmund doesn’t have Peter’s bulk; he’s all wiry muscle, slim hands, deceptive strength shuttered beneath lowered lashes. He and she have always been alike in that.
Right now Edmund is all threat, the same man who could slaughter a roomful of people and walk away calmly to eat a steak, and he knows that. It’s been a long time since she’s faced down her brother in one of his rages, and not so very long ago she wouldn’t have dared; just turned her back and walked away. But that was in another country, another world, and Susan of Narnia is a different woman than Susan Pevensie; she chokes down her fear and lets the trembling turn to tension, tilts her head up to meet her brother’s eyes.
Edmund’s glare is sharp, angry, not the flat ice blue she knows from Peter. Edmund’s glare is all emotion. “Yes,” he says. “And you’re damned lucky for that.”
“I know,” Susan says. “Edmund – you are my brother, and I –”
“There’s nothing you can say that can change what you did,” he says.
“I know,” Susan says again. “Edmund – please –”
He continues on like she hasn’t spoken. “You betrayed Narnia,” he says, “you betrayed us, you betrayed me, you betrayed him –”
“I know,” Susan says for a third time. “And Edmund, I’m sorry for it, but you have to –”
“Oh, Susan,” he says, “I don’t have to do anything.” He reaches out and puts his hand flat against her collarbone, just above her breasts and just beneath her neck.
She draws in a sharp breath. “Edmund,” she says.
“You took an arrow here once,” he says, leaning in so that she can feel the words flutter against her skin. “It should have killed you. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” she says. “I remember.”
“We’d all be better off if it had,” he murmurs against her ear and then steps back. “Stay away from Peter,” he says.
Susan draws in a sharp breath, her heart hammering in her throat. “Tell him that yourself,” she says. “If you can.”
She sees the anger flare fast and hot across his face. “Fine,” he says. “I will.”
He’ll go to Peter and Peter will say – Aslan in the east, what will Peter say? She wants to believe that Peter will tell Edmund to go to hell, that he’ll do what he wants, but Peter trusts Edmund’s judgment, trusts Edmund, and does her thanks mean as much to him as the regard of his brother? Because her betrayal isn’t what Edmund’s was, but it’s betrayal nonetheless, and how can Peter forgive her so easily as he has?
Susan steps forward, her mouth opening, her hand stretching out to catch Edmund’s sleeve as he turns away, but before she can speak screams break the still morning air, a horn trumpeting warning a split second later. Both are close.
Edmund glances over his shoulder at her, eyes suddenly wide with alarm, and then his sword is in his hand and Susan’s bow is in hers, and they’re both running towards the screams.
There’s a lessening of magic in the air as they leave the Arn Abedin bounds; for a moment, Susan’s breath catches in her throat, but her feet don’t stumble and she drops neither bow nor arrow. The remnants of the roseroad are overtaken by screaming civilians, humans and nonhumans alike; she recognizes some of the Haven Narnians trying to keep them calm, keep them in check and moving towards the bounds, but the Arn Abedin Narnians are watching with grim disinterest from inside the bounds.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Edmund barks – and then shouts in surprise as something strikes at the tangle of Narnians from above, screaming rage as it dives down in a streak of red and catches a half-grown faun in its talons.
Susan draws, aims, and looses in the same breath; she has another arrow on the string a heartbeat later, but she holds it back as she sees the hippogriff begin to fall, the child tumbling from its claws into the waiting arms of a centaur that rears up on his hind legs to catch it. A moment later the hippogriff wings its way up again, turning its head to yank the arrow out of its flank with its beak, and Susan aims again.
“Wait!” Edmund shouts in her ear, striking down her arm; the arrow goes wild into the woods and Susan turns on him, furious, because if there was anyone there –
“That was a hippogriff!” he snaps.
“That was a child!” she snarls back, drawing a third arrow from her quiver and setting it on the string of her bow. She pulls back to her ear, aiming at the circling hippogriff above them, and lets fly, snatching a fourth arrow from her quiver in the same motion.
The arrow catches the hippogriff in the muscle of one broad red wing and it dips in the air, struggling to regain its former height as Susan aims and shoots again.
The second hippogriff comes out of nowhere to snap her arrow between its beak.
She has the next arrow on the string, is ready to loose, and then a woman screams in terror.
“That’s my daughter!” she shouts, and Susan sees the child clutched between the second hippogriff’s talons, hanging there as limply as a doll. Dead, maybe – but she knows hippogriffs, and they like their prey living. If they’re snatching them from the earth and not eating them where they sit –
A nest. They’re taking the children to their nest to feed their own chicks.
“Edmund!” she shouts, but he’s already off at a dead run, sword pumping in his fist as he sprints towards the treeline. Susan follows, seeing Tirian and Eustace out of the corner of her eye as they leave the Arn Abedin bounds.
“Stay here!” she orders as Tirian’s lips form her name. “Get them within the bounds, and get my sister for the wounded!”
And then he’s gone from view as the trees overtake them. She looks up to see the hippogriffs overhead – seven of them, flying in an arrowhead formation with five Narnian children hanging from their claws, one of them supporting the wounded hippogriff. Before her, Edmund is a shadow in the trees, running flat-out, leaping over the obstacles he can and dodging the ones he can’t, light glinting off the blade of his unsheathed sword.
Branches rip at her hair and skirts, slashing across her face as snow crunches beneath her boots, but Susan doesn’t slow. Her mind is working furiously as she glances up from time to time to make sure that they’re still following the hippogriffs. Where will they go, where – current maps of the area are shockingly bad, but she’d known maps of her Narnia once, and where –
There’s an avian scream of rage up ahead and Edmund’s answering shout, wordless in anger. Susan crashes into a snowy clearing with her bow up. She doesn’t stop to aim, just shoots and trusts in the bow Father Christmas put in her hands all those years ago.
The arrow takes the wounded hippogriff in the neck, and it sweeps its great head around and opens its beak to scream again, its eyes red with rage. The falcon half is that of a red kite – red body, wings striped in red, white, and black. It rears up on its hooves, wings mantling in the limited space of the clearing as it sweeps one great claw around towards Edmund, who’s already moving to bury his sword beneath Susan’s arrow, just below the breastbone.
She shoots over his head, lets the arrow take the hippogriff in the eye, and Edmund grunts in exertion as he pulls his sword free and swings again, hacking at its neck as it strikes at him with one claw, sending him sprawling on the forest floor, his sword still stuck in its flesh. He comes up with his dagger clenched in his fist, and Susan shoots again, and once more, and again, as the hippogriff mantles in pain and anger. It stumbles wildly in the snow, its screams growing weaker as Edmund strides toward it and drops down to bury his dagger in its breast, easily avoiding the last snap of the huge beak.
He draws his sword free and cleans both weapons in the snow before sheathing the dagger and looking up. “Sodding hell,” he curses at the empty sky, blue and scattered with cumulus clouds. “We’ve lost them –”
“No,” Susan says, striding forward to pull free the arrows that haven’t been broken in the hippogriff’s death throes. “They have to go somewhere, and their nest must be close. I think –”
“Down!” Edmund shouts, throwing himself forward to catch her around the waist and send them both tumbling to the snow.
She sees her bow go spinning away from her hand, her quiver spilling arrows out. Edmund rolls off her and up to his feet, and Susan scrambles for her bow as a second hippogriff lands in the clearing, shrieking in rage as it mantles its huge gray wings. It’s half-again the size of the first hippogriff, and it overwhelms the clearing, fills it to overflowing, and Edmund is a tiny figure before it as he raises his sword in two hands, staring it down.
Susan gets up on her knees, her bow in her hands, and reaches for an arrow. Her fingers close on empty ivory and she bites her tongue on the curse that rises to her lips, turning instead to grope for her scattered arrows in the snow.
“What the hell’s wrong with you people?” Edmund shouts at the hippogriff, but it doesn’t say anything back, just screams at him again. It puts one foot on the neck of the dead hippogriff, surprisingly gentle, and dips its head to the side in seeming confusion.
“Edmund –” Susan begins, the leather of her gloves now damp, slippery enough to make it hard to fumble an arrow onto her bow. “Edmund –”
“You bent the knee to us,” Edmund insists, lowering his sword slightly. “Whatever the Telmarines have done to you, I swear in my brother the High King’s name that we will make it right, just listen to me –”
“Edmund,” Susan says again, the arrow slipping out from between her leatherclad fingers. She drops her bow to strip her gloves off and then snatches bow and arrow up again, her fingers numbing as soon as they touch the snow. “Edmund, they’re feral, they’ve gone wild, they can’t –”
“O ye of little faith,” he says without turning his head, and then he sheathes his sword, holding up empty palms. “I’m sorry for what’s happened here, but listen to me –”
She draws the arrow back to her ear, aiming at one of the hippogriff’s great golden eyes.
“Susan,” Edmund snaps, “just because you turned your back on Narnia doesn’t mean that everyone has –”
The hippogriff screams and leaps into the air, kicking out at Edmund with its hooves. He dives to the side and Susan shoots, but the hippogriff twists and the arrow nicks its flank as it dives down, snatching Edmund up in its talons and then winging upward.
“No!” Susan screams, diving for another of her fallen arrows. “Edmund!”
She sees Edmund’s sword flash in the sunlight as she draws back her arrow, but the hippogriff’s too far up already; at this distance, she runs as much risk of hitting her brother as she does the hippogriff. With a snarl of frustration, she lowers her bow and lets the string go loose, the arrow hanging between her fingers.
“Oh, Aslan,” she whispers, and feels the words flutter against her throat as she tilts her head back. Edmund and the hippogriff are nothing but a distant spot of darkness in the sky; they’ll be gone from sight soon and she’ll be – she’ll be –
Go back to Arn Abedin without Edmund and Peter won’t kill her, but he’ll look at her with disappointment in his eyes, betrayal there because she hasn’t done all that she could have once, all those years ago. If she does that, there will be no going back: there will only be Susan Pevensie, not Queen Susan of Narnia called Heartsbane and Widowmaker, the Queen of Spring. And she’ll be damned if she’ll let Edmund’s accusations be proven right. She’s a queen of Narnia; she’s no coward, and this is her land and her brother, her creatures that have done the people of Narnia wrong. This is her duty, her gift and her curse, and there won’t be a day that dawns that finds her running to her brother for help, not when she can do as much herself.
Her hand falls to the cool ivory of the horn at her hip, thoughtful, and then she shakes her head and starts to gather up her fallen arrows. She doesn’t need Peter’s help.
There’s no easy way to track an animal through the air – there’s not even a hard way, because it’s near impossible to follow scents, and if they’re not wounded, they won’t leave a blood trail – but there’s only one place in the immediate area that has all the characteristics that hippogriffs like for their nests. It’s been more than ten years since she’s been here, but it’s not so hard as all that to forget. She only hopes that Giantkiller Ridge hasn’t changed too much in the past sixteen hundred years.
Susan looks up at the sun, guessing at how far she is from Arn Abedin and how far from Giantkiller, which is only a few miles to the south of the castle, where once upon a time the border had dipped close enough that they could see the Telmarine fortifications from the top of the cliff. Then Peter and Lucy had pushed the Telmarines back and won twenty leagues of land in a single decisive battle; that had ended their excellent overlook of the border. Aslan alone knows where the border is now.
She starts walking, shivering a little as the cold begins to soak into her skin, and keeps an arrow on her bow. A ravage of hippogriffs stealing children from outside Arn Abedin itself, Calormenes loose in Narnia – who knows what else might be lurking in the rosewood? They’re not so very far north from the wolfswood, which has long been a harbor to the worst of Narnia’s creatures; she doubts this has changed even in sixteen hundred years. Not if what she’s heard from these New Narnians is true.
The undergrowth is thick, and sometimes Susan finds herself having to fight her way through it; by the time she breaks from the deep woods onto somewhat more open ground – there is more space between the trees here – sometime later, her hands and face are scratched from the branches of unbending trees, her skirts ripped and her sleeve torn. She’s had to put her bow aside just to keep her hands free for the path ahead of her.
Giantkiller Ridge rises to the west of her position, and Susan eyes the river running between her and it with distaste. Snowmelt has made it run fast and high, and crossing will be less than pleasant. It runs closer to the base of Giantkiller now than it had sixteen hundred years ago.
There’s an aquiline scream in the distance, and Susan raises her head to see a hippogriff launch itself from the top of Giantkiller, wings spreading to catch the wind currents as it leaps into empty air. It’s a beautiful, heartbreakingly melancholy sight, and it’s such a damn waste that they’ve gone feral sometime in the preceding centuries, because the largest fliers they have at Arn Abedin are a pair of eagles. No griffins, no hippogriffs, no phoenixes or firebirds, no Stymphalian birds, no sirens or harpies – although those are both saltwater Narnians anyway, and unlikely to be found so far inland – no rocs, no wyverns, certainly no dragons – next to no air support at all, as Peter would say. Has said, though not in quite so many words; his grim expression every time he looks around at the Arn Abedin Narnians is speech enough.
“Now,” a voice says from behind her, “I know we’re in Narnia.”
Susan whirls, bow drawn and an arrow on the string, to find herself face to face with a centaur that regards her calmly. Out of the corners of her eyes, she’s aware of more centaurs, as well as mounted horsemen, moving to surround her, bows in their hands. These aren’t Narnians, or at least not the rebels she’s began to grow used to. Their armor and weapons are good, and well-matched, and there’s some sort of badge over their breasts that she can’t quite identify, but which nags at her memory like a sore tooth.
“It would seem so,” says a horseman, nudging his horse up besides the centaur. He leans forward on his saddlehorn, regarding her thoughtfully.
Susan switches her aim from the centaur to him. “Who are you and what are you doing in these lands?” she asks.
“I could ask the same of you,” says the horseman – young, she notes absently and automatically, maybe only a few years older than Peter is now. “Last I’d heard, these lands weren’t occupied.”
There’s something familiar about the shape of his face, about his cap of dark curls and his cool green eyes. Susan can’t put her finger on it, and can’t think what it might be anyway. Sixteen hundred years.
She tilts her head up. “I am Queen Susan of Narnia,” she says, and her bow doesn’t waver. She can still put an arrow through his eye before his archers take her down.
She expects him to challenge that, but all he does is blink slowly before he straightens. “So it’s true, then,” he says, and raises his hand.
The circle of centaurs and horsemen who’ve surrounded her lower their bows – horseman’s recurves, small and strong – but Susan doesn’t. “Who are you?” she says again.
“My name is Alleyne Seaworth,” says the man. “I’m a lieutenant with the –”
“The Red Company,” Susan finishes. She recognizes the badge now, and even sixteen hundred years later there’s still something of Osumare Seaworth in his descendant’s face. The resemblance isn’t strong, but something lingers.
Seaworth blinks. “Yes,” he says. “You’ve heard of us?”
“Not recently,” Susan says. “What are you doing in Narnia?”
“The same thing as you, Queen Susan,” Seaworth says, his gaze falling to the horn on her hip. “The core of the Red Company is Narnian-born, and has been for a thousand years. We are the oldest mercenary company in Greater Shoushan. It’s been foretold that one day we would be summoned back to Narnia, and every one of us with a drop of Narnian blood heard the sound of a horn in the air not six nights since. My captain is concluding our contract in Greater Shoushan, and then the entirety of the Red Company will be here within the month.”
“You’ve never seen the sea, have you?” Susan asks.
Seaworth blinks. “No,” he says. “How did you know that?”
“Because Osumare Seaworth rode a horse like a sack of potatoes,” Susan says, and lowers her bow. “I’d love to show you to my brother Peter, and listen to an excellent explanation of how the Red Company is still around after sixteen hundred years, but right now I have other concerns. And if you’re here to take orders from me and my family, then here are a few: I need a horse. And a light, strong rope.”
Appearances aside, Alleyne Seaworth is nothing like Osumare Seaworth; he and his squadron accompany her to the base of Giantkiller. Osumare would have handed over the horse and the rope and left immediately to follow the rest of her orders, which hadn’t included him and his men being here with her. Granted, Osumare probably would have been more use at this point of the juncture; seamen tend to be good at rock-climbing.
Susan tilts her head back to eye the cliff-face before her. It’s rough, with good handholds; she hadn’t climbed it in her own day, but she knows that her siblings had. It will certainly be easier than scaling a castle wall, and that she’s done. She can just barely see the tips of the scraggly evergreens at the top of the cliff; above them a good dozen hippogriffs are flying, circling uneasily and screaming outrage. She looks down as she toes the whitened, scattered bones that litter the snow in front in front of her. Most of them are shattered and broken, snapped between strong, deadly beaks; there’s not a scrap of flesh left on one of them.
The good news, so far, is that the hippogriffs seem too distracted to notice the humans and centaurs gathered at the base of their home. What makes that even better news is that it means there’s something there to distract them, and since they’re in the air – the full-grown hippogriffs she’d seen back at Arn Abedin, as well as a few half-grown yearlings and one gangly foal whose all big wings and knobby legs – she’s hoping that’s Edmund, and that he has the children.
Approaching from the west, she’d seen the caves in the cliff, high up near the top, and the hippogriff that took off from the shallow ledge in front, trailing blood as it took to the air. She hopes to God that means Edmund’s all right and more or less safe – as safe as he can be at this juncture, at least.
“Back,” she says to Seaworth, and they turn their horses around to make their way back to the space just before the river where the rest of his squadron is waiting.
The rope Seaworth has given her is slim and strong, spidersilk from Edan – which isn’t a country anymore, just a province under the control of Greater Shoushan, and won’t that be a story to get? – and she fastens it around the shaft of her arrow, looping and knotting it so it won’t slip free. There are arrows made especially for this kind of work, but she doesn’t have any of them in her quiver, so she’ll have to trust to Father Christmas’s arrows, her own memory, and the will of Aslan.
Susan rests her bow on her saddlehorn and turns to Seaworth. “I need you to listen to me,” she says.
“Of course,” Seaworth says without hesitation, and her mouth twists a little in amusement. Osumare Seaworth had never listened to her with that kind of intensity – Peter, yes, her, no.
“A mile from here there’s a way up to the top of the ridge,” Susan says, pointing. “Take some of your men and find it; I need you to draw the hippogriffs away, and getting down may not be as easy as getting up. I need you to keep mounted archers here to distract the hippogriffs if need be. And I need you to send your fastest rider to Arn Abedin, about a league and a half from here. They’re to find my brother Peter the High King – only my brother Peter, not Queen Lucy or King Tirian or anyone else – and tell him what’s happened, where I am. They need to give him this message, in exactly these words: O misguided fool, what riddles are these? For in Narnia, justice is won by the blade of a sword, not with gold and silver. Do you understand?”
Seaworth blinks, a little startled, but nods steadily. “O misguided fool, what riddles are these? For in Narnia, justice is won by the blade of a sword, not with gold and silver,” he quotes back.
“Good,” Susan says, and then raises her bow. She aims carefully; she may only have the one chance at this.
One hippogriff darts down to land on the ledge outside the caves above, hooves slipping on the stone before it gets its footing. A moment later it’s in the air again, screaming in anger, and as soon as it clears the cliff-side Susan shoots.
The long coil of rope plays out foot after foot, slipping off her saddlehorn, then stops. She allows herself a small smile of satisfaction as she tugs on it. Above her head, her arrow is buried deep in the trunk of one of the scraggly evergreen trees that finds a home on such barren rock-faces, and even after Susan puts all her weight on the rope neither the arrow, nor the rope, nor the tree breaks.
Seaworth watches uneasily as she loops the rope around her waist, along with the extra coil he’s given her. “Are you sure this is wise?” he asks.
This is the sort of idiot plan that Susan generally attributes to Peter, but it’s the sort of idiot plan that usually works through sheer audacity. She smiles at Seaworth. He’s younger than Osumare had been when he pledged his ships to Cair Paravel all those centuries ago. “Do you have a better plan, Lieutenant?” she asks, with just a hint of threat under the words. It comes easily to her now; everything comes easier to her in Narnia. Are you challenging my authority?
The mercenary returns her smile. He has Osumare’s trick of charm, that easy, uneven quirk of his lips that had coaxed Peter and God alone knew who else into bed with him. Susan is rather hoping that this Seaworth doesn’t have the same gift, because that’s the last thing they need right now.
He turns from her to start giving orders to his men, and Susan blows on her hands to warm them up. Gloves would be useful just now, but she’d left hers back in the clearing with the dead hippogriff, and she’ll have to make do with bare hands. Aslan help her, that stone is going to be cold, and she’ll have to climb fast, before her fingers numb up.
“Who are you leaving?” Susan asks Seaworth, and he points out the archers – three centaurs, one human woman.
Susan smiles at them. “I would deeply appreciate not having the misfortune to be picked off the rock by an angry hippogriff,” she says, and one of the centaurs paws the ground in front of him, dipping his head shyly.
“Don’t worry, your majesty,” the woman grins. “We’ll keep them well away from you.”
“I would also appreciate not being shot,” Susan adds, still smiling to add some humor beneath the seriousness, and the woman laughs.
“We’re the best in the squad,” she assures her.
“Which is why I’m putting them here,” Seaworth adds. His grin is fond and amused, a little indulgent, and Susan approves. “Good luck, Queen Susan,” he says.
“Luck is for losers,” Susan says, because it’s the sort of thing that Peter might say, and starts climbing.
Almost immediately she can feel her hands start to numb; the stone is as cold as ice beneath her fingers, and she grits her teeth and thinks of the sticky-hot summers of Narnia, the dry heat of Tashbaan, the warmth of her brothers’ arms and the play of flames on her face, soft Narnian wool against her bare skin. She doesn’t look up; she doesn’t look down. All she’s doing is trusting to muscle memory, because she may not have done this in the better part of a decade, but she has done it and she has to do it again, for Edmund’s sake.
She doesn’t know how long she’s been climbing when she starts to feel the burn in her arms, but it coincides with the too-close scream of a hippogriff. Her automatic instinct is to grab for her bow, but that’s a death sentence, or at the very least a long drop and a short stop. She’s miscalculated something here. And you did this for fun, Lu? she thinks absurdly, clinging to the rock-face, and then continues dragging herself up foot by agonizing foot.
The closer to the top Susan gets, the louder the screams of the hippogriffs, angry and frustrated, the adults’ voices deep, the yearlings’ less so, and then above it all a terrified cheeping – chicks who haven’t fledged yet. What in Aslan’s name is Edmund doing –
She nearly knocks herself out on the ledge as it looms up suddenly above her, and at that point Susan has to stop and cling to the cliff-face, trying to figure out how to get onto it. It pushes out too far for her to dare climbing directly, because her fingers are numb enough that if she tries, she’ll fall, and if she falls, she’ll die.
This is an utterly idiotic plan. Why did she think this was a good idea again? This is the sort of idiotic plan that seldom even works for Peter; it’s the sort of plan that Peter comes up with when he’s drunk, because even he’s not foolhardy enough to come up with something like this sober.
Carefully, crablike, Susan starts moving sideways, her booted foot slipping free of the toehold she’s got. She grabs for the rope in front of her face as she starts to fall and barely stifles her scream as she loses her grip on the wall, dangling in mid-air.
“Oh, God,” she says breathlessly, the words stolen from her lips by the cold wind that chaps her cheeks, lifts her bundled hair from her neck, sends her spinning. “Oh, God.”
Her hands are numb; her grip is slipping. She should have knotted the damned rope; it would give her something to cling to. She has the choice of climbing up as quickly as she can or sliding down to the ground, which is a long, long fall, and if she doesn’t lose her grip on the rope and fall to her death, she’ll have the worst rope-burn she’s ever had in her life, and she’s had some bad rope-burn. Neither of the latter options are attractive prospects, so –
She starts climbing – or tries to, at least. The spidersilk is slippery beneath her palms, and instead of moving upwards, Susan slips down a foot or so, biting down on the inside of her cheek to muffle her gasp as one of her palms rips open, her grip suddenly slick with blood. Bad, bad idea.
I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish here, Susan, she hears in memory, Edmund’s voice bitter and angry just this morning, and then, in even more distant memory, What the hell’s wrong with you? This is us, this is Peter, you can’t honestly think you can turn your back on this just because it suits you –
“Oh, go to hell, Ed,” she hisses under her breath, and starts to drag herself up the rope, slipping down an inch for every three she gains. It’s only a few feet until she can get her hands on the ledge, and she can do that, she can –
She’s eyelevel with the ledge when her grip slips again, blood spraying out from her shredded palms in the wind, and then Edmund’s strong hands close on her wrists.
He drags her up over the edge of the ledge until they’re both on solid stone, and sits down heavily, Susan sprawling out across his lap.
“That was your brilliant idea?” he says when he’s got his breath back. “For the love of God, Su –”
Susan puts her head down against his stomach, her breath tearing raggedly in her throat. “I suppose I could have just left you here,” she suggests. “That was the other option.”
She can feel him hesitate before one hand settles lightly on her hair, his thumb stroking against the curve of her skull. “I would have figured something out eventually,” he says.
“I wasn’t really planning on waiting that long,” Susan says, and Edmund snorts.
“Apparently not,” he says. “Jesus, Su, your hands –”
She levers herself up, wincing at the movement, and looks into Edmund’s worried face. “It’s good to know you care,” she says, and he flinches.
“I didn’t mean throw yourself off a cliff,” he points out.
“Well, I didn’t really throw myself off a cliff,” Susan says. “Or throw myself at all, really.” She looks down at her shredded palms grimly, then shrugs. “Ed, the children –”
He waves a hand behind him. “They’re here, they’re safe. They’re scared out of their fucking minds, but hey, who blames them for that? They’re sharing cave-space with a bunch of hungry hippogriff chicks who think baby satyr tastes like dinner.”
Susan winces. Edmund helps her to her feet, looking with interest at the rope trailing from around her waist, and adds, “The chicks are penned up in a corner of the cave anyway. That wasn’t hard; mama and papa hippogriff weren’t too fond of the idea of letting their babies accidentally fall off a cliff before they could fly. It’s the grown ones that have been most of the trouble; they’re not used to dinner fighting back.”
“This close to Arn Abedin, I wouldn’t think they’re used to dinner at all,” Susan muses, thinking of what Arnau and the centauress Baldesca had said. “At least not of the Narnian type. There are animal bones down below – deer, fox, otter –”
“Yeah, baby faun is apparently a real delicacy,” Edmund says, leading her into the cave. “So’s ‘ancient king.’”
She blinks a little at the wide eyes of the Narnian children huddled in a corner of the cave, watching her warily. Two fauns, a human, a satyr, and a minotaur. The satyr is the oldest of them; she’d put his age somewhere in his early teens. He has Edmund’s dagger in his hand.
“They’re from a camp up around Lantern Waste,” Edmund whispers in her ear. “Not the one that came in last night, but a different one. Most of the camp was wiped out by Calormenes; the survivors packed up and headed to Arn Abedin when they heard the horn.” Louder, “This is my sister Susan,” he says, and smiles disarmingly. “She’s got a way out.”
The children burst into a babble of excited voices that overlap and blend together. Susan smiles wryly as Edmund’s voice breathes against her ear, “You do, don’t you?”
Susan touches the rope around her waist with the raw, red tips of her fingers. “We’re not far from the top,” she says. “How are your climbing skills?”
For a moment, Edmund frowns at her, then he breaks into a grin. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asks.
“It will probably traumatize the children,” Susan warns.
He raises his eyebrows. “Susan,” he says, “after their country got conquered, they’ve spent the last five years living in trees –”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Narnians were doing that of their own free will sixteen hundred years ago –”
“– and just this week, they’ve watched people they know get slaughtered by Calormenes, been uprooted from the only home they’ve ever known, and been kidnapped by giant monsters that were planning on feeding them still alive to a bunch of baby monsters. And you think hanging them off a cliff is going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
“Well, when you put it that way,” Susan says, and unties the extra coil of rope from around her waist.
Edmund explains their plan in slow, careful words. Susan expects protest, but none of the children do so; the only one who speaks is the satyr boy – his name is Gilmar – and he says, “I’d jump off the cliff if it meant getting out of here faster.”
“That’s not going to be necessary,” Susan assures him. There’s a second cave in the back of this one, its entrance blocked by a large boulder that covers most of the doorway; she can hear the baby hippogriffs cheeping in fear. Occasionally, she catches sight of a huge golden eye, watching her anxiously.
They transfer the rope from her waist to Edmund’s, looping it in a kind of rough harness to get rid of some of the slack, and just before he starts climbing, Edmund glances down, blanches a little, and says, “So who do you have down there distracting the hippogriffs? Just out of curiosity.”
Susan doesn’t bother trying to hide her smirk. “The Red Company,” she says.
Edmund’s eyebrows go up. “I’m going to have to survive just to hear this story,” he says, and then starts climbing.
Susan cranes her head up to watch him. Soon enough he’s pulling himself up over the edge of the cliff, and a few minutes later the end of the rope drops to pool at her feet. Susan snatches it up and turns back to the cave, saying cheerfully, “All right, then! We’ll have you out of here in no time!” as she kneels to rope up the youngest of the children.
They all gather on the ledge to watch anxiously as Susan tugs sharply three times on the rope, then the faun begins ascending, clinging to the rope in front of him as Edmund pulls him up. The faun vanishes above them; the rope falls again and Susan turns to the next youngest.
The third child is in the air when one of the hippogriffs notices that their dinner is escaping and dives at them, shrieking in fury, and Susan has her bow and an arrow in hand before she can do more than process the sight. Her bowstring kisses her cheek and snaps as she puts an arrow into the hippogriff’s feathered underbelly and a second into the space where eagle-body meets horse-body, a third taking it between the eyes. The human girl rushes to the edge of the ledge to watch the hippogriff fall, wings spreading out around it as it claws futilely at the air, and Gilmar catches her collar and pulls her back, hissing, “Do you have a death-wish, Luzdivina? Do you know how high we are?”
Susan lowers her bow, pain washing through her hands and up her arms. The grip of her bow is covered in blood from her torn hands, and she wipes her palms unobtrusively on her skirt as she replaces her bow on her back.
After Luzdivina has gone up, when she turns and holds the rope out to Gilmar, the satyr tells her solemnly, “You should be the one to go up.”
“No,” Susan says, smiling. “We came here for you and your friends. Don’t worry,” she adds, “I’ll follow.”
“But you’re the queen,” he says. “You shouldn’t sacrifice yourself for me. That’s our job.”
“Not in Narnia,” Susan assures him, and kneels down to tie the rope around his waist. She tugs it to let Edmund know to pull him up.
Alone on the ledge, she looks at her ruined palms, sticky with blood. The cuts reopen every time she uses her hands, and she’s left red-brown fingerprints all over the children she’s helped. She rather doubts that Lucy will be quite so eager to heal her hands as she was to heal Peter’s broken fingers.
The sharp cry of a hippogriff makes her look up. The ravage is circling high overhead, their number noticeably fewer, and she thanks Alleyne Seaworth’s archers silently. Behind her, the cheeping of the baby hippogriffs is nearly unbearable, high-pitched and terrified, and she turns her head to look into the darkness of the cave. Sometimes their cries sound almost like words, and she wonders if maybe they can civilize them again. They must still have the capacity for it somewhere, unless Aslan has turned his back on them, and she doesn’t think he would have done that. Surely not.
She looks back as the rope drops at her feet. Slowly, every muscle in her body screaming protest, Susan stoops to pick it up. With only herself to care for now her hands are fumbling the necessary knots, slow and clumsy even as she strives to pull them as tight as they must be, looping them in the proper order. It would be a shame to come so far and fall at the last moment.
“Don’t make me come down there, Su.” Edmund’s voice is ghostly from above, and Susan calls back, “I’m all right,” pulling the last knot as tight as she can get it. She tugs on the rope and forces her eyes open as her feet leave the stone, staring out into open sky. If she looks eastward –
Eight years ago, when she’d been here last – well, three hundred years ago, to be strictly proper about it – Narnia had been choked and overgrown with thick forest up until the coast itself. Now, though, Narnia is stripped bare, abrupt and ugly, and she can see the Calormene encampments that mar her country’s surface alongside the naked earth that should have been forested, beside the cultivated fields from Tirian’s rule. She can feel it in her bones: this is wrong. But also: everything changes.
The rope turns lazily in mid-air, and Susan shuts her eyes as the cliff-face looms up in front of her. The wind pulls her hair free of its ties, sends it spinning around her face and into her mouth, and then she hears Edmund’s voice, sharp with fear when he says, “Susan!”
She realizes something’s wrong when she falls rather than rises, and her eyes snap open, looking down at the dizzying fall below. She’s nearly sick, and more so when she jerks, falling again, and looks up at the fraying rope above her, the plies snapping free one by one.
“Oh, Aslan,” she whispers.
“Susan!” Edmund yells again, and then someone grabs her around the waist just as the rope snaps.
She goes tumbling backwards, landing – oh, thank the Seven – on solid ground. Or on something that’s not empty air, at least.
“Don’t you ever fucking dare do that again,” Peter says breathlessly from beneath her, and then Edmund gasps, voice strained, “Get the hell off me, the both of you, I hear breathing is in fashion this season.”
It’s a miracle and a wonder that Peter doesn’t come back at him with some snappy rejoinder, just rolls them over off Edmund and sits up, pulling Susan into a tight hug. She puts her arms around his shoulders, shuddering all over with the aftershocks.
“What the hell do you think you were doing?” Peter says against her hair, his breath warm against her skin.
She takes a shaky breath and turns her face into his neck, breathing in the scent of him. Steel, leather, something fire-bright and uniquely Peter –
“I just said to myself,” Susan says, feeling each breath he draws in reverberate against her lips, “what would Peter do? And then I did that.”
Edmund laughs, but it’s short and rough with strain. “I guess she’s got you there, Pete,” he says.
Peter cups her face between his palms. He looks terrified, younger than he has in years, and his eyes are shockingly bright in his pale face. “Susan,” he says, “the reason I have you and Ed is so that I have someone to tell me not to do stupid things like that, not to use me as an example. A bad example, maybe, at most. But I need you, I need both of you, so don’t you ever – don’t you ever –”
“Oh, Peter,” she says, and he hugs her again, one big hand cupping the back of her head, the other splayed across her back.
Peter helps her up a few minutes later, his hands gentle on her wrists as he avoids her abraded palms, and over his shoulder she sees Alleyne Seaworth and his squadron, a group of Arn Abedin Narnians with the children they’d rescued wrapped in cloaks, and Edmund. His face is stricken.
“Susan,” he says, and then he stops. He holds out his arms silently, and Susan goes to him. His arms are strong around her body, and he has to tilt his chin up to rest it on her head. After a minute Peter comes up behind her to hug them both, his body still taut with tension as he twists his head to avoid her bow.
“You’re both idiots,” he murmurs fondly. “But you’re my idiots. And don’t you forget it.”
“How could we?” Edmund says. “We’ve practically got ‘Property of Peter Pevensie’ tattooed on our arses.”
Susan snorts softly. “You haven’t seen my arse,” she says. “Recently.”
Peter laughs and lets them go. “Let’s go home,” he says. “I can only handle so much excitement in one day.”
“Lies!” Edmund exclaims, and Susan can’t help but laugh at the grins on her brothers’ faces.
----------
Osumare Seaworth first appears in In a Dry Month. The Red Company is first mentioned in The Bone's Prayer. The arrow Susan takes in the chest occurs in On a Summer Sunday. Giantkiller Ridge first appears in this ficlet
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 01:05 pm (UTC)(Also! Thank you for posting so early! It was an awesome break from my bio lab report. :D)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-20 11:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 01:27 pm (UTC)THE YEAR HE WHAAAAAT. OH COME ON.
she loves her siblings more.
FAMILY OVER LIONS WITH GODLY PRETENSIONS KTHX
Edmund and Lucy had laughed and put coin down themselves
AHAHA i have totally just written about ed & lu betting on the outcome of battles. well sort of. it turns the bet is sort of a ruse THIS time, but other times they probably do it. ed and lu! more fun than i usually give them credit for.
SIX YEARS AGOOOOOOO kaslkf';sfd <333
CUBITS?! i was not expecting this word ahahaha
why so angry, edmund?! is this your petaverse edmund bleeding over or something.
he’s all wiry muscle, slim hands, deceptive strength shuttered beneath lowered lashes. He and she have always been alike in that.
yesssssss
re: WWPD
DUDE. i was totally like "ahahaha she's like wwpd" BEFORE susan articulated it, and then i felt vindicated. <33 susan and how she always thinks of peter, and how she idolizes him. (i mean, awesome to have a high king for a brother.) if she didn't before, she does now because how can she not? she's so much invested in him: he was the only one who trusted her and was willing to defend her. she turned her back on narnia all these years and when she finally tries to return to who she used to be and what she used to do (and this is in a manner of speaking only -- you can't really go back because you can only go forward), when she holds out her hand, only peter takes it, and doesn't that show what an awesome high king peter is, because you can only hack and bash for so long before you find yourself in a position of needing to forgive and to be forgiven. of course anger goes both ways, especially in love but not in faith, and if there is one thing the high king has learned over his push&pull relationship with narnia, it is how to be left behind. and susan knows this too: to be left behind, to leave. but of course you only leave so that you can come back. peter's love for and faith in susan fills
mysusan's whole heart, and maybe one thing susan (and edmund) is realizing is that it is a blessing to remember the places, the people, and the loves that have made you strong, howsoever much everything changes. maybe you don't always remember them, maybe you can't always remember them, but if you're lucky they'll come back to you, and if you're even luckier, you'll let them.AND THEN AND THEN, armed with love and hope and faith and the past and the future and the here and now, you become the hero. you get to save the day. you remember how.
ummmm i got A LITTLE CARRIED AWAY THERE. YOU KNOW HOW I GET, WITH THESE PEOPLE.
where was i. OH YES: THE WARMTH OF HER BROTHERS' AAAAAARRRRRRRMS omfg!
the cliff of susanish asskicking and then EDMUND GRABS HER WRISTS AND I WAS LIKE <33333333
edmund and susan!
susan thanks the seven!
this makes me want to play/write in the ot3verse soooooooo badly
WHERE IS THE MISSING SCENE WHERE THERE IS OT3 SEXINGS IN THE HOMEWOOD TREE
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:20 am (UTC)I was not expecting there to be as much Peter as there was in here. I mean, not that there's much actual Peter on the screen, but you know what I mean. And how can there not be? Peter is Peter, high king and older brother, and he's in the business of salvation. Saving Narnia, saving his siblings, saving himself -- his gift is knowing what his weapons are and when to use them, and if you can solve the little problems, then you can solve the big ones.
...wait, this is about Susan. I MEAN. How can he not be the one to forgive her? They've been in Narnia together every step of the way; they're the two oldest, the last ones to come and the first to leave, and they both know what it's like to be left behind when someone else goes to do what should be their duty. And they're in it together. They're all in it together.
IN THIS SCENE count how many times Susan falls on somebody and/or gets knocked over and/or falls off something. *squints* I am trying to figure out how much of that is in relation to the PC bloopers where I was all I NEED PEVENSIES SCREWING UP NOWLIKE and how much of it was just, well, me.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 01:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 03:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 04:02 pm (UTC)Er... a cubit's nearly a foot and a half...
Ooh..... Edmund really scared me in this. And Susan for the win!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:22 am (UTC)EDMUND AND SUSAN. AWESOMENESS INCARNATE.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 04:51 pm (UTC)In fact you get better and better with every story.
At least Edmund made peace with Susan. And high time too. He and Lucy took it personally, didn't they?
I just hope Lucy follows his example. Her hatred seems almost exaggerated, sometimes even out of character. Is it because she considers Susan Aslan's betrayer? She might have become a bit of a fanatic.
I must say Edmund's treatment of Susan surprised me a little. He ought to have been more understanding.
P.S. I am not criticizing your writing here, but his behaviour.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 06:38 pm (UTC)Offscreen secks FTW! Seriously, though, this is fab. Can't wait for the next chapter! :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 10:18 pm (UTC)With Peter just wanting everyone to get on so they can fight.
Changes! geographic changes!
hee. Red company FTW. Though no, peter, stay away from descendants. BAD.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:26 am (UTC)*laughs* There was possibly a point in the writing of this where I went, "Screw Lewis, I'm bringing in my canon."
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-19 11:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-20 01:14 am (UTC)EDMUND FORGIVING SUSAN IS THE BEST. ♥
Oh gawd.....it wasn't even subtext anymore, all this Edmund/Susan/(Peter). IT WAS IMPLIEEEDDDDD. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 01:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 01:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 02:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 02:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 02:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 02:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 02:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 03:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 03:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-20 05:40 am (UTC)-Hands on throat! This should not be sexy! Your Edmund has this whole smoldering thing going on THROUGH TEXT!
-Edmund's comment about Susan's arrow wound worries me, what with the reoccuring wounds thing you've got going on.
-Sexy descendents of past lovers! This is something that has been desperately missing in Narnia fandom! Alleyne Seaworth, I think I'm going to like you just fine.
-"warmrth of her brothers' arms!" "haven't seen my arse recently?" I take it the whole Peter/Susan/Edmund thing is officially cannon for this.
And, out of curiosity, was the adorable hugging at the end at all influenced by the screencaps of the behind the scenes from PC?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:30 am (UTC)Considering that it was about two-thirty in the morning when I wrote the last scenes for this, I don't even know what's to blame for anything in this chapter. (I have high suspicions regarding the number of times Susan falls, trips, or gets knocked over as being blamed on the blooper reels.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-20 05:18 pm (UTC)SUSAN KICKING ASS!!
I really can't think of anything more coherent than that at the moment. Will check back later!
SUSAN/EDMUND/PETER!
(for his siblings Peter is god!) WWPD!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-21 12:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-13 10:40 am (UTC)Susan. Your Susan is damn AWESOME. I need to get my Susan back out of whatever cupboard I've shoved her in and give her a good once-over.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-13 02:47 pm (UTC)