Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (10)
Jan. 22nd, 2009 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air 10
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 ten, 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.
It’s a pity Peter’s not here, Edmund thinks idly, watching Tirian’s cousin Vespasian gallop past, plucking tent stakes out of the ground with the end of his ten foot lance. What’s really a wonder is that Vespasian isn’t digging the lance into the ground and levering himself out of the saddle with every stroke; he and Peter had played this game back in Narnia a decade ago, and they’d been considerably worse at it than Vespasian is. Of course, in their day most Narnian lancers hadn’t been human; Narnia hadn’t had enough humans to train real jousting knights until the last few years of their reign. They’d had a few knights that first decade or so – a pair of cousins from Archenland, a handful from the countries on the western border, a few more from the islands. Not enough to make much of an impression during combat, not until Peter had brought the Red Company into Narnia, and even then the Red Company hadn’t been the kind of fully-armored heavy cavalry that Vespasian of Glasswater is; they’d been light cavalry in mail and leather who favored swords and horse-bows over lances.
This is the sort of thing Peter would love to watch – a trained professional doing the kind of fighting he knows best. He’d probably be out there with Vespasian right now, testing his Natarene training against Vespasian’s Telmarine-Shoushani hybrid style. Of course, if Peter was here he’d also have to deal with the logistics and politics of keeping the twelve hundred and sixty-three Narnians here from killing each other, as well as fed and watered. Arn Abedin’s turned into a shambles of an army camp – one of the things Peter hates more than anything else, which is why he took what should have been Edmund’s job and left with Tirian and Eustace for Cair Paravel. That’s not the only reason Peter went instead of anyone else – he’d wanted to negotiate for supplies and allies, and that would go better working straight from the top of the Narnian command, instead of from a step or two down.
Vespasian pulls the last stake out of the ground and raises his lance in salute before grounding it in the tubular scabbard behind him on the right side of his saddle. He canters over to Edmund and raises the visor on his sallet helm, grinning easily. “Care to have a go, your majesty?” he asks.
“Hell no,” Edmund says, grinning back. “I haven’t touched a lance in almost ten years, and I was always rubbish at this sort of thing anyway. Narnia didn’t really go in for it in our day.”
“No?” Vespasian asks curiously, swinging out of the saddle with only a faint clinking of his armor. He’s been practicing in full plate, armored cap-a-pie – with his visor down the only part of him that can be seen are his eyes. Telmarine Narnia hadn’t had that three hundred years ago – Edmund wonders idly where they’ve picked it up since. “I’m surprised.”
“Not enough humans to make it practical,” Edmund explains. “Most of our cavalry were centaurs – light lancers, not heavy.” He gestures at Vespasian’s rig with one hand.
“So Narnia truly was a land of nonhumans,” Vespasian observes, lifting his helmet off and propping it on his saddle. His big warmblood destrier – seventeen hands if it’s an inch, as big as a centaur’s horse body – lips his hair and he raises a hand to pat its neck, the metal of his gauntlets striking the metal of the stallion’s crinet.
“May I?” Edmund asks, raising a hand to the horse, and Vespasian nods. The stallion whuffles politely at his palm, breath warm on his skin. Next to the stallion, the smaller hotblooded Calormene horses they’ve been using look like ponies. Next to the stallion, Narnian talking horses look like ponies. “You don’t ride talking horses?”
Vespasian snorts in amusement. “Never,” he says. “They won’t stand for it – even before the Calormenes came, they’d never pair with humans that way, and now they’re far worse about it, especially after everything the Calormenes did to them.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that,” Edmund says. Talking horses three hundred years ago were reluctant but willing to let the kings and queens of old ride them; talking horses today are adamant that no human, king or queen of old or not, is getting anywhere near their backs. He pats the stallion’s neck, in the unarmored space between crinet and peytral, and steps back.
Vespasian is a head taller than him, dark-haired and handsome in his mid-thirties. He and Tirian don’t look particularly alike, but there’s some indefinable quality that connects the two of them as kin – something about the way they move, maybe, or something in their blue eyes. He looks like the Telmarines Edmund had known three hundred years ago when he’d been in Narnia with Caspian. His armor is enameled in blue and dark gold, patterns etched into it to strengthen it. Edmund can make out the familiar lion and compass rose pattern on his pauldrons, but the wolf and waves on the vambraces, breastplate, and helmet are strange; they’re both repeated on his horse’s armor in equal measure.
Vespasian turns away from him to start picking up the stakes he’s plucked up and left spread across the clearing. The clearing’s not natural – it is possible to cut down trees in Narnia, though what Edmund and Lucy have been doing is telling the local dryads to encourage the trees to move elsewhere, out to the open plain beneath Giantkiller Ridge a few miles away. They need an open area around here, both so that the Narnians (overflowing Arn Abedin’s bounds) have somewhere to set up camp and somewhere they can train. Aslan knows they need the training; there are barely a handful of soldiers among them. Plenty of highwaymen and raiders; the majority of Narnia’s army has been destroyed by the Calormenes and only a few of the remainder are in the camps. Maybe the Narnians have the army’s failure in defending the country in mind, because getting them to train with the remaining professionals has been like pulling teeth. Watching Vespasian train is a welcome break from trying to talk refugees into becoming pikemen. As soon as Peter gets back from Cair Paravel, he can have that unwelcome task; Edmund will handle logistics. He’s never much liked this sort of thing anyway; he’d always left the army’s training up to Peter, who can out-talk Edmund in exactly one setting: anything to do with war. He’s never had a problem convincing people to fight for him; Edmund’s not nearly as good at arguing people into weapons-training.
Edmund turns away from the clearing and picks up Vespasian’s spare lance, weighing it in his hand. Solid oak, capped with iron with the same wolf and waves as Vespasian’s armor on the end; the point is a further foot of steel blade. Vespasian is handling its twin as lightly as if it’s a baton, going back through his tent-pegging drill. Edmund puts the lance down back against the tree trunk and leans beside it, arms crossed over his chest as he watches the Narnian knight train. Three hundred knights in the Narnian army once, apparently; they have five. Six, when Tirian gets back. The other three were officers in the Narnian army; Lord Berenguer of Northfall, Sir Golarte of Heartscrown, and Sir Pequi of Northfall, the last remnants of an army company that found sanctuary with a camp in the wolfswood that came into Arn Abedin two days ago.
Vespasian tosses the last tent peg up into the air and catches it in his free hand, pushing his visor up to grin at Edmund.
“I couldn’t do it,” Edmund calls, then freezes as a horn sounds. It’s not the bright bugling of the army horns the wolfswood refugees brought with them, the singing of the silver horns of the Red Company – oliphants, they call them – or the huu-huu-huu of the ox horn call that the Arn Abedin Narnians use; it’s Susan’s ivory horn, the one whose sounding heralds danger, danger, come at once, danger! It’s a sharp, familiar scream that goes straight to blood and bones; he clenches his fist hard around the pommel of his sword and breathes in through his mouth. Once, twice, three times, the cold spring air tearing at his lungs – and then Susan’s horn screams again, just once before the sound of it is sharply cut off.
He opens his eyes to see Vespasian staring at him wildly. “What is that?” the Narnian nobleman demands. “I have heard that horn before – that is the same call that drew me back to Narnia –”
“It’s my sister’s horn,” Edmund says, forcing his hand away from his sword and turning away from the clearing. They’re far enough from the main camp that it’s easier to ride out here than walk; his horse is tied to a tree some little ways away, munching delicately at some of the new grass that’s forced its way up between patches of melting snow. He unties its lead rope quickly, swinging into the saddle.
“But you are already here,” Vespasian protests, turning his destrier into the space in front of Edmund. “Who else can be summoned?”
“It’s not a summoning,” Edmund says shortly, his horse throwing its head up a little as his hands tighten on the reins. He forces himself to loosen his grip as he looks up into Vespasian’s handsome face. Exactly Peter’s type; he thinks absurdly, then shoves the thought away. His brother’s proclivities are hardly relevant at the moment. He hesitates to tell Vespasian the other – the real – purpose of Susan’s horn, because it’s obvious that simply calling for help has been forgotten over the centuries in favor of calling home the kings and queens of old, and that’s a card that maybe they want to keep close to their chests.
Vespasian’s expression is curious and a little alarmed. “Then what is it?” he asks.
“I’ll let you know,” Edmund says, nudging his horse around Vespasian’s until he can urge into a gallop, letting it slow to a trot as he gets onto the roseroad. No need to raise alarm in Arn Abedin by galloping in, not when the sentries he’s set are already whispering amongst themselves.
“Your majesty!” a faun calls as he passes between them. “What –”
Edmund ignores him, swinging down from the saddle and wrapping his horse’s reins around his fist as he leads it down paths that haven’t existed for a millennium and a half now.
“Your majesty,” a squirrel chirps, nearly falling off its branch in anxiety as it follows him from tree to tree, but it swallows down its nervousness and continues, “Your majesty, what has happened, has something – is the High King –”
Edmund turns to look at it, and the squirrel – red fur, two black stripes down its back; its name is Chatterleaf, and he has been at Arn Abedin since before they arrived – quavers, but clings determinedly to its branch and presses its questions again.
“Nothing’s happened,” Edmund says slowly. “Spread that, will you? There’s nothing wrong.”
There’s something very wrong; Susan never sounds her horn lightly, and he’s already seen she’s more than capable of taking care of herself in Narnia even after all these years. But he’s not about to send the army into a panic by letting them know that, not when it can be easily avoided.
Chatterleaf blinks, then nods firmly, tail frisking the air anxiously behind him. “Of course, your majesty. It’s good to know. Maybe,” he adds, sounding tentative, “some further explanation might help to – I mean, I don’t want to presume, but people are afraid.”
A squirrel with a shred of common sense? Things have changed in Narnia; squirrels have always been notoriously flighty, although Edmund had known a few good ones in his day. Those were rare, though, and Peter had seized them up eagerly for the army.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Edmund says. “My sister wants a word with me, is all.” He meets the squirrel’s black eyes and raises one eyebrow, watching the animal calmly until Chatterleaf quails and looks away.
“Of course, your majesty,” he murmurs. “I shall proceed with all due haste,” he adds, dipping in an awkward bow before turning and scampering up the tree trunk to disappear among the upper branches.
Cosmetic and cultural differences aside, Tirian’s Narnians are much like all the others Edmund has known in the past, in two lifetimes in Narnia. Well, to be fair, much like all the people he’s known; he’s seen the same phenomenon repeat itself over and over again in Narnia, on the Dawn Treader, in his school, in the army. They like to talk, and rumors will spread quickly. There’s a good chance that Chatterleaf’s story won’t be the predominant one, but at least it will be out there, and that’s something that probably couldn’t have been said otherwise, not with the beliefs these Narnians hold regarding Susan’s horn.
When he reaches their homewood tree, it’s not at all a surprise to find Lucy already there, saddling her horse as it eats grain from a nosebag. Her bow and two extra quivers are propped up against one giant root, along with a short sword and a round shield like the ones the Red Company carries. She looks up as Edmund approaches.
“You heard it too?” she asks, tightening the last strap and stepping away.
“Of course I did,” Edmund says. He tilts his head towards her horse. “But don’t bother, Lu, I don’t want you out there.”
Lucy lifts her chin. “I don’t like her,” she says, “and she deserves everything she gets. But she knows too much to just leave out there alone. If the Calormenes interrogate her and she breaks, then they’ll be able to find Arn Abedin and all of us. And Peter would probably be angry,” she adds as an afterthought.
“Su’s not going to break,” Edmund says, even though that’s a lie. Everyone breaks given the right circumstances. Everyone. Even them. “And we’re not exactly hiding; even in these woods it’s hard to miss twelve hundred Narnians arming for war.”
Lucy stares at him flatly. “Whatever you say, Ed,” she says. “I’m still going out there.”
Edmund drops his horse’s reins. It stands placidly still, eyeing Lucy’s horse’s nosebag, and Edmund pats its neck before he goes over to stand in front of Lucy. “No,” he says again. “You’re not. You’re going to stay here and watch out for the army, make sure no one gets into trouble or tips off the Calormenes, make sure they keep training, make sure no one fights. We can’t all leave at once; one of us has to be here.”
She makes a face, but doesn’t protest that. “So why you and not me?” she demands. “Just because you’re a boy doesn’t mean –”
Edmund’s eyebrows go up. “When has that ever had anything to do with anything?” he demands. “I’m going because I’m better at this than you are, and because I have more recent experience doing this sort of thing than you do. And because I’m your older brother and I say so.”
“That’s not a reason!” Lucy protests.
“It is now,” Edmund says firmly. “And the rest of it stands too.”
Lucy pouts, but doesn’t argue further, just turns back to her horse and starts taking its tack off. Edmund goes to help her.
“Who are you taking?” she asks after a moment, her voice brisk and business-like.
“I’m not,” Edmund says.
Lucy turns on him furiously. “You can’t go by yourself!” she exclaims.
“Can’t?” Edmund repeats, raising his eyebrows again, and she punches him in the arm.
“Stop trying to sound like Peter,” she says. “You don’t do it very well. Edmund, we don’t know who’s out there. Susan’s – she’s, well…she doesn’t scare easily,” she says, drawing the words out reluctantly. “Or use that horn lightly.”
“Which would be why I’m going after her,” Edmund points out. “The fewer people know about this the better. These Narnians, they don’t feel about that horn the same way we do, to them it’s something…sacred. A relic, meant for one thing and one thing only.”
“Summoning help?” Lucy says dryly. “I think I know better than you, Ed. I was there when Father Christmas gave it to her.”
It’s doesn’t hurt anymore – they’d all gotten over Edmund’s betrayal twenty years earlier; they’d had to – but he takes it as the blow it’s intended as and lets that show on his face. “Summoning us,” he corrects. “That’s what these Narnians think, even the educated ones. If they hear it, then they don’t know what to think, because we’re already here.”
“You’re going to make me explain that?” she demands, staring at him with wide eyes and her arms full of the saddle. “Edmund!”
“You’ll come up with something,” Edmund tells her confidently. “You always do. I’m just going to find Susan. Maybe it’s not the Calormenes, maybe it’s more ferals. If I can get her out, I will. If I can’t, I’ll come back here for reinforcements. I’m not going to do anything stupid or rash or absurdly heroic; I’m not Peter.”
“No,” Lucy informs him, draping the saddle over a root and turning back to glare at him, crossing her arms over her chest. “You’re not.”
Edmund doesn’t even bother answering that, just walks past her to pull open the door of the homewood tree. He packs quickly – Susan had left the camp this morning to go hunting on foot, so she can’t have gone far, but that’s no excuse not to prepare for the worst case scenario. Bedroll, food, water skins, one of the basic first aid kits Lucy’s been making up for everyone to carry when they finally do leave the woods and march on Calormene-controlled Narnia. Two quivers of heavy war arrows rather than the one he might take otherwise, along with his unstrung longbow in one of them. He clips those to the side of the saddle, in easy reach, and slings his shield across his back. He won’t bother with armor; boiled leather will do for now, and he adds a few other odd items to his pack as well.
Lucy helps him pack, watching him with eyes that are a little dark with worry. “Edmund, are you sure?” she asks as he swings into the saddle, his horse shifting uneasily.
“Trust Lord Vespasian,” Edmund tells her. “He’s got ambitions, but his priority is always going to be Narnia’s safety. Lieutenant Seaworth and his men don’t have anything in Narnia to fight for but Narnia itself; they don’t have any personal feuds here. Trust Ourente before you trust Arnau; that dwarf is keeping secrets. Jill isn’t one of us; she’s been here five years and we don’t know what’s happened. And Jewel’s loyalty is to Tirian, not to Narnia.”
“They’re Narnians,” Lucy says, her hand on his horse’s reins. “We should be able to trust them without reservation.”
“Things change,” Edmund tells her, and digs his heels into his horse’s sides as Lucy steps back.
Magic leaves no trail for the naked eye to follow, but Susan’s horn is something other than ordinary magic; Edmund stops thinking about where he’s going once he’s beyond the Arn Abedin bounds and lets his horse have its head. It picks its way through the forest without stopping to lip at the new spring growth, turning from a walk to a trot to a canter the farther they get from Arn Abedin, taking him miles away from the camp, farther than Edmund can imagine even Susan would have walked just to hunt. She knows better than to venture so far out alone; the woods are dangerous even without the added threat of the Calormenes.
Then he sees the bodies.
Edmund reins his horse to a halt, and dismounts, letting it stand as he crouches down next to the first body and rolls it over. A Calormene soldier; he’s been stripped of his sword and baldric, as well as his purse. No arrows left in him, but the wounds are obvious.
He smiles a little, grimly. After what happened with Miraz, Susan knows not to leave any evidence behind that it was Queen Susan of Narnia who came calling. Father Christmas’s red-feathered arrows might as well have her name inscribed on the side.
He’s no tracker, but there are signs anyone with an eye for it can read. The Calormenes were on horseback until they were shot, but the horses went on ahead – burdened more lightly, it looks like. Both of them. And there are tracks of two others as well, Narnian cobbling and not Calormene. Both women, from the size. Susan is one of them, of course – her boots are marked with a lion rampant stamped into the heel; all of theirs are – but whose prints are the others? There aren’t more than a handful of human women at Arn Abedin, and few of the ones that Edmund’s met would follow Queen Susan all the way out here, alone, on foot, after two Calormene horsemen.
Lucy would, but Lucy’s been at Arn Abedin all day, and the only thing that might – might – compel her to follow Susan is a Calormene threat. So who else –
Edmund has the horrible feeling he knows, but he doesn’t want to admit it just yet, not until he has solid proof.
“Why can’t you just leave well enough alone, Su?” he mutters under his breath as he mounts up, letting his horse have its head again. Susan’s horn leaves its own kind of trail for those that hear it and answer.
He knows the answer to that question, though. Of course Susan would have followed the Calormenes. They shouldn’t be this far west, and if she’d gone back to Arn Abedin, she would have lost them. Edmund would have done the same thing; so would Lucy or Peter. They all would have.
The woods grow scarcer around him as he rides, shadows growing longer and darker as the sun starts to set, and Edmund grits his teeth. Something’s gone very, very wrong; he can feel it. His horse finally stops in a clearing and Edmund swings down from the saddle, fingering the hilt of his sword and wishing idly for a torch. Then he nearly slaps himself, because oh yes, that’s going to help. He’s just getting soft in England. The moon is high, the stars are bright, his eyes are already adjusted to the dark – he doesn’t need help seeing anything, not now, not when everything’s almost clear around him.
He turns in a slow circle, looking around.
There was a fight here. There are four dead horses; one with a mercy kill up into its heart – the beast has been hamstrung – one with a Calormene arrow in it, and two with red-feathered arrows in them. Edmund pulls those free, cleans the arrowheads, and puts them in his own quiver. Susan will want them back.
Cut ropes by one tree; someone was tied up here. Blood staining the ground and the few remaining patches of dirty snow. There are sword-slashes in a few of the trees, and one deep gouge that goes in almost a foot. Scattered arrows, broken and whole. Edmund collects the few that are Susan’s.
There aren’t any human bodies, Calormene or otherwise.
Edmund turns back to his horse, which is shifting uneasily, unhappy with the scent of blood in its nose, but when he tries to reach for the threads of the trail the horn should have left, they’re gone. This is where Susan blew her horn, but it’s not where she ended up. The horn’s magic doesn’t extend past the initial call for help.
“Sod this,” Edmund murmurs softly. He’s going to have to do this the hard way, step by painstaking step.
Or not so painstaking, maybe, he realizes as he looks around. The Calormenes weren’t worried about hiding their trail, and there had been a lot of them – about as subtle as an elephant charging its way through the woods. Edmund pulls himself into the saddle and turns his horse onto the path the Calormenes left.
He keeps the horse moving at a walk, and not just because he needs to follow the trail. It’s dark; he doesn’t want it to trip and break a leg. He also doesn’t want to let the Calormenes know he’s coming, because that’s just counter-productive. As soon as he sees the glow of several campfires rise up in front of him, Edmund stops and dismounts, tying his horse to the raised root of a homewood sapling. He unslings his shield from his back and hooks it onto the saddle; it’s not going to do him any good where he’s going. As he goes forward, slow and careful and looking around for sentries at every moment, he keeps one hand on his sword hilt. If he needs it, he’s going to need it fast.
The Calormenes are either very good or very wary; they have a perimeter set up, three pairs of guards walking the rounds with spanned crossbows in their hands. Pairs – which means Edmund can’t just take one out and slip through the hole that will leave. He’ll either have to run the gauntlet – and there’s only a span of a minute, maybe a minute and a half, when the guards aren’t in sight of either each other or the camp – or take them both out within seconds of each other. Absently, he wonders if there’s something in specific that brought on this kind of security, or if it’s just basic protocol because the Calormenes lose so many people every time they come this far west. Then Edmund shoves the thought away, because it really doesn’t matter. What matters isn’t how it came about, but that it’s here at all.
He counts soldiers as he prowls the outside of the camp, careful to stay out of the line of sight of the sentries. There are a dozen six-man tents set up, along with one that’s about the same size but made of better material; it’s also the one with the Calormene standard planted in the ground out in front. Commander’s tent, then. But no personal standard just beneath that, which means it’s not a tarkaan commanding. Good news, maybe. Or maybe Calormene customs have changed during the past sixteen hundred years, and tarkaans don’t use personal standards anymore; that would just be his luck. Still, if every one of those tents is full it puts the count at more than seventy, which is far more than Edmund would expect to see in just a scouting party, though also far less than a full-out war party. So what the hell are they doing so far west? This is beyond the Calormene zone and into territory that, though technically Narnian, hasn’t been occupied for hundreds of years. Wild lands, border lands, dangerous to all and sundry, Narnian or Calormene. From what Edmund’s gathered, no one will venture out here willingly except the desperate, and especially not the Calormenes if they can avoid it.
On the other hand, though, their raid on the supply convoy is pretty damn unlikely to have gone unnoticed, and that may have just pushed the Calormenes over the edge into mounting an attack on the Narnians here. And all the refugee camps emptying is also fairly likely to garner some notice – Edmund’s positive there are Narnians in Arn Abedin that are reporting to the Calormenes, although he doesn’t know who and he doesn’t know how. He’s been trying to find out, but it’s slow going; he doesn’t have his old contacts and he doesn’t know everything or everyone involved; he doesn’t have the facts, may Aslan damn it all.
If they’re very lucky, whatever knowledge the Calormenes have doesn’t extend to the location of Arn Abedin and this party will pass by without following the old roseroad straight down to the remains of the front gates. But if they’re not so lucky –
That doesn’t matter right now. What matters is getting Susan out of there, if she’s in there at all. Edmund hasn’t seen any evidence of it so far, but he’s got severe doubts regarding there being two separate groups of Calormenes out wandering around in the woods, and the trail from the clearing had led straight back here.
No, Susan’s here somewhere. She has to be. If she’s not –
If she’s not, she’s dead, but Edmund would know if she was dead. Narnia always knows when her kings and queens are dead.
He fingers his sword hilt. They must be holding her in one of the tents – probably the commander’s tent, and Edmund spares a brief thought to pity the man if he thinks he can lay a hand on Susan of Narnia, because wounded or not, tied up or not, she’ll still kick him through the wall of his tent. She’d been able to do that even in England; Peter had told Edmund about one particular occasion she had, on one idiot airman who’d thought that just because she was a girl she’d happily fall into bed with anyone in uniform. She’d disabused him of that notion fairly quickly, or so Edmund has heard from Peter and his RAF friends.
Edmund turns and goes back to his horse, petting it on the nose and murmuring to it as it turns its head towards him, shifting a little in anxiety at the nearness to its herdmates. “Shh,” he says very softy in its ear. “Bad luck, I’m afraid.” He throws back the flap on one saddlebag and pulls out a blowgun and a small pouch full of darts – quieter and more accurate than a bow at the distances he’s planning to use it at. He hesitates for a moment over his bow and quiver, but finally decides to leave them where they are. He’s not planning on doing much distance work, and a bow is more or less useless as a close-quarters weapon.
“Just a little longer now,” he murmurs to the horse, and fastens the flap on his saddlebag back down before he slips back the way he came.
He fits the pieces of the blowgun together and pushes a dart into the tube, careful to keep it level. Hopefully the poison on them is still good even after sixteen hundred years; if not, well, he’s still aiming to kill or at least debilitate. He’ll have to be fast; he wants all six of the sentries down. A little bit of overkill, maybe, but he’s just playing it safe.
The first pair of guards comes into sight, walking a little ways away from each other. Edmund raises the blowgun to his lips, pursing them around the mouthpiece, and blows. The dart sprouts in the Calormene’s neck and the man stiffens, eyes going wide with surprise as his mouth works silently for a moment before his knees buckle and he falls forward.
His companion turns at the sound. “Gulzar?” he begins, questioningly, and the second dart takes him just beneath the jaw.
“Sha kehir, Calarm,” Edmund murmurs as he steps around their bodies. Good night, Calormene. The next pair of guards should come into sight within a matter of seconds, if his timing is still right.
Moonlight catches a gleam of light off the head of a crossbow bolt up ahead and Edmund steps back behind a tree, raising his blowgun to his lips. These two sentries are talking quietly to each other; one of them has let his crossbow hang from a strap around his shoulders so that his hands are free to gesture in an hourglass shape. The language has changed a little too much over sixteen hundred years for Edmund to be able to read their lips – especially in this light – but Edmund has been a soldier for almost a quarter-century now; it’s not hard to guess. What a stunner! or something along those lines. She goes on and on!
Soldiers and men; they’re the same across countries and worlds. Edmund palms a second dart and blows out the first, pushing the second one in as soon as the first has left the gun. It takes the second Calormene in the big artery in his neck; he turned his head when his companion choked suddenly in the middle of a sentence whose gist was probably something about, You should have seen her tits! The scent of blood is sudden and sharp in the chill night air; Edmund winces, but smell isn’t a strong enough sense to wake a sleeping man – or not most men, anyway. The horses are tethered on the other side of the camp, too far away for the scent to carry without a breeze, and he hasn’t seen any dogs with the Calormenes, talking or otherwise.
He steps around the second set of bodies, watching for the third and final pair of sentries. By now they might have noticed that one of the other pairs hadn’t been where they should have been. Hopefully not – it’s only been a few minutes – but if they have –
This could get very messy, very fast. And Edmund isn’t Peter; he can’t tear through a dozen enemies without even breaking a sweat.
He pushes a fifth dart into the blowgun, running his thumb thoughtfully over the feathers of the remaining darts in the pouch before he picks up another one, curling two fingers around it as he holds the blowgun steady.
The third set of sentries is standing by the horses, and Edmund curses silently. Get away from the damned horses, he thinks at them fiercely. Walk your bloody patrol, you idiots.
If he kills them here, the horses will panic at the sudden scent of death and trumpet their fear, waking the entire camp. That’s entirely counter-productive. Edmund counts off his impatience in Malay; chances are that after they leave Narnia and he gets back to England, he’s going to be shipped back there again soon enough, so he might as well do his best to remember the language.
Finally, finally, after what seems like an age of men but is really more like a few minutes, the two Calormene sentries move on past the horses. Edmund flits from tree to tree behind them, keeping one eye on the horses. Animals can be one of the best warning systems nature invented, sometimes. Other times, not so much. He’s learned by now to always assume the former, though.
Careful, regulating his breathing so that he doesn’t accidentally send the dart somewhere it shouldn’t go – like straight down his throat, if he breathes in instead of out, and wouldn’t that be an exciting end to this day? – Edmund raises the blowgun to his mouth. The dart hits in the back of the Calormene’s neck and the man stiffens, managing to raise one hand to the offending spot before he falls. By the time his comrade turns, raising his crossbow but not crying out, it’s too late for him to avoid the dart that his him at the base of his throat. He falls gracelessly across the body of his partner and Edmund grins a little in triumph as he lowers the blowgun, tucking it through his belt.
There are no sentries in the camp itself, so all he does is stroll in, his hand on his sword hilt but the blade not drawn. He goes straight to the commander’s tent and pushes the flap back, ducking inside and letting it fall shut behind him. It’s black as a hag’s heart inside and Edmund waits for a beat for his eyes to accustom themselves to the little moonlight that comes in through the tent walls.
The commander is wrapped in his blankets, his sheathed scimitar not far from his hand. Not far from him – but out of his reach of his weapons – there’s a girl cuffed to the tent pole, curled in on herself so that Edmund can’t see her face. It’s not Susan, though; her hair is curly and not straight, and she’s not tall enough.
Edmund moves toward her on cat feet, one eye on the commander as he slides a hand over her mouth. Jill’s eyes flare wide in surprise as she wakes up, starting to struggle, and then she recognizes him and goes still. Edmund takes his hand away and brings a finger up to his lips; she nods, and he finds his lock picks in his belt-pouch, bending over the cuffs, so close to her that he can feel her trembling from the strain of keeping herself still. He can smell fresh blood on her, and worse. Poor girl, he thinks absently, then shoves the thought aside. They don’t have time for pity.
There’s a faint click as the lock opens and Jill sheds the cuffs with alacrity, clambering to her feet as Edmund draws her up with one hand on her wrist. He looks around the interior of the tent one last time, but there’s no way in hell that Susan’s here, not unless she’s somehow managed to disguise herself as a pair of saddlebags or a Calormene recurve bow.
No one in the camp is stirring as they make their way past the dead guards and the perimeter, back to the place where Edmund’s horse is waiting. Jill is favoring her right shoulder and there’s a dark stain of fresh blood on her shirt. He can smell it; the wound must have reopened. As soon as they’re back at Edmund’s horse, he pushes her carefully down onto an upraised root, digging in his saddlebags for the first aid kit Lucy made up.
“Where’s Susan?” he asks as he pushes the shoulder of her shirt down. Jill flinches away from him as he does so, but it’s this or rip the whole shirt off, and he hardly thinks she’ll appreciate that. Arrow wound, he notes, one of the ugly barbed Calormene war arrows, designed to destroy flesh going in and coming out. She must have lost a lot of blood. There’s a small flask of pure alcohol in the kit, and he pulls the cork out with the teeth and pours it freely over the wound.
Jill hisses out through her teeth and goes pale, but she doesn’t pass out like Edmund’s been half expecting. “I don’t know,” she says, a short gasp in between the words.
Edmund puts the flask aside and threads a needle, dipping it into the flask once he’s done that. Jill’s eyes go very wide.
“Tell me what happened,” Edmund orders. “It will help with the pain.” Unless you pass out.
She tells him, gasping in between dependent clauses, the sweat standing out on her forehead as Edmund stitches the wound closed as quickly as he can. Once he’s finished, he pours more alcohol over it and wraps layers of bandage around her shoulder as tightly as he can. Overkill, maybe, but that’s a messy wound, and he’s more or less sure that most of it was necessary. If not, well, Lucy can yell at him once he’s gotten Jill back to Arn Abedin.
“Can I drink that?” Jill asks, breaking off in between words and eyeing the flask.
“Not unless you want brain damage,” Edmund says, scrubbing at the blood on his hands and frowning. He packs the first aid kit away and pulls out a silver hip flask the size of his hand, the lion of Narnia engraved on one side and his personal shield on the other. “Try this.”
Jill’s eyebrows go up as she takes a mouthful of it, and Edmund can’t help his brief grin. It’s Glasswater whiskey, twelve years old when they’d put it away in Arn Abedin, and apparently the combination of magical storage and the passing of sixteen hundred years has done really well for it. The brewers he’d known back in his own time would have been pleased to know that their whiskey would still be just as good a millennium and a half later.
Jill takes another mouthful of whiskey, coughs, and passes the flask back. “And then I passed out,” she finishes, and looks at him.
“And?” Edmund says, stowing the flask back away. “You didn’t wake up until a few minutes ago?”
“No, I –” she hesitates, staring at him, and says at last, “I woke up and she was gone. I don’t know what they did with her, but I think she was here, I think they took her away, but –”
She was here; they took her away. Edmund grits his teeth and pulls his dagger out of his belt, handing it to her.
Jill takes it, but her expression is blank. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m going to ask the Calormenes what the hell they did with my sister,” Edmund says. “Stay here. If the Calormenes come after you, take the horse and go; I’ll find my own way out.”
“But you can’t just walk back in there!” Jill exclaims. “They’ll kill you –”
“Possibly,” Edmund agrees, “or possibly not, which is the option I’m hoping for. My sister’s out there somewhere, and I’m not just going to forget about her because I might get hurt in the process.”
Jill gives him a faintly horrified look and mutters under her breath, “You’re all insane.”
“Yes, probably,” Edmund says comfortably, and then slips back through the trees. He hasn’t heard any noise from the Calormene camp, so he’s assuming that the dead guards and the missing girl haven’t been found yet. Hopefully it will stay that way long enough for him to ask questions and get answers.
No joy. There’s a Calormene stumbling out of his tent to the edge of the camp, reaching for the front of his robes. Edmund steps up in front of him, sees the man stare blankly at him, and catches his head in both hands and twists before he can see anything. The man’s bladder lets loose as he dies and Edmund lowers him carefully to the ground, wrinkling his nose.
Could have just shot him, he realizes belatedly. Where the hell is his head right now? If he keeps on like this he’s going to get himself killed; he’s supposed to be better than this. He is better than this.
No one else around. He crosses the camp quickly back to the commander’s tent, drawing his sword as he ducks inside. Should have kept his dagger; he’s not Peter and he doesn’t keep a dozen knives on him at all times. A sword is awkward.
Awkward will have to do. He puts the tip of his sword against the Calormene commander’s Adam’s apple and watches the man wake up.
“No,” he says softly, “don’t shout, unless you feel like dying today.”
The Calormene’s eyes go wide, but he nods. He’s younger than Edmund would have expected to be commanding a force this size in this part of Narnia.
“Do you understand me?” Edmund asks, and the commander nods again. “Good. I’m not sure my Calormene’s up to scratch. You captured two women today. One of them was here. The other one wasn’t. Where is she?”
The Calormene licks his lips. Edmund’s eyes flicker briefly to the tassels on the hilt of his scimitar – black, not red or yellow and certainly not gold. A tarkaan, then, but not a high-ranking one at all. Probably a younger son. “The witch, you mean?” he says.
His accent is very thick. “If you want to call her that,” Edmund says, “feel free. Black hair. Pale skin. Carried a bow and shot arrows with red feathers. She would have had an ivory horn.”
“The witch,” the Calormene affirms. “I am second here to my father, Tarkaan Inzamum. When she fell he recognized what she carried and left me here with the others.”
“Well, that’s very nice,” Edmund says. On one level it is; Tarkaan Inzamum probably has more experience than his teenage son and now he’s not here. On a more pressing note, it means Susan isn’t here. “Where did he take her?”
The Calormene eyes the blade of his sword warily. “To the court of Prince Bahadur in Cair Paravel,” he says, sounding triumphant. “She carries stolen goods; she must account for them. And she is very beautiful,” he adds thoughtfully, “for a Narnian witch. I am sure my father has hopes to make her a slave in his house if the prince’s punishment is not too high.”
Edmund resists the urge to hit him across the face and shout, That’s my sister, you sand-swiving bastard! because that won’t accomplish anything. Instead he presses his sword up a little higher and asks, keeping his voice very calm, “Why not take both women?”
The Calormene closes his eyes briefly, then opens them. His lips move briefly in what Edmund recognizes as an ancient prayer to Tash – something about death to murderers and enemies of the god. “I asked my father that. He did not answer, though there is a warrant out for the girl’s arrest, and a reward. She is an associate of the Narnian king; all men know this.” The Calormene’s eyes bore into his, black with hate. “I will gather the reward for her head myself, and with my father gone, the glory for the capture of the Narnians will be mine.”
“Collecting a reward for her head might be a little hard,” Edmund says, “seeing as you won’t have yours.” He stabs upward, and the Calormene dies on his sword blade with only a faint gasp and a spray of dark blood.
Edmund crouches down to clean his sword on the man’s blankets. He’s straightening up when he thinks, Aslan damn it all, I should have asked what in blazes he was doing here.
He’s losing his edge. He’s losing his gods-damned edge, and it’s going to get someone killed. And right now, it’s not him he has to worry about dying, it’s the twelve hundred Narnians waiting back at Arn Abedin for him to return. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a commander instead of just a foot soldier when you’re not getting it shoved in your face every day, and it’s been nine years since he commanded armies. Edmund could stab himself in the face; Peter wouldn’t make this kind of idiot mistake. Peter doesn’t make mistakes when it comes to anything that goes on in the field. He doesn’t. Hasn’t in years. The one and only mistake Peter’s made that Edmund can think of got a third of the army killed and almost got Peter killed, and that was more than twenty years ago.
May Peter’s seven Natarene gods all damn it. Edmund bends down and starts going through the mess of things in the tent, looking for maps or plans or anything that’s written and might give him some kind of clue what the Calormenes’ plans are for this troop. This Calormene isn’t the original commander, so his father must have left him written instructions, not just verbal ones – and the Calormenes have always been proponents of written orders and record-keeping. Mostly so that they can behead anyone who disobeys orders; it’s hard to argue that you didn’t have any orders when there are copies in triplicate.
Edmund finally finds them in one of the saddlebags, a thick leather folder that he flips open and leafs through quickly, the language drift rendering his translation more or less null and void except for a few words that remain the same. Like “kill.” And “Narnian.” There’s a brace of maps in cylindrical leather carrying cases alongside the folder, and Edmund looks at the man he’s just killed, shrugs, and slings the whole saddlebag over his shoulder, going through the other one quickly in case there’s anything else useful or just interesting. Food and money, an armor repair kit – he takes the food and the money, leaves the rest, and goes back out of the tent, breathing in the cold Narnian air like it’s the sweetest summer wine he’s ever tasted.
Home. For some reason the realization of that strikes now and Edmund’s paralyzed for a minute, standing in the middle of an enemy camp at the very edge of his occupied country with a sword in his hand. Home, may Aslan forgive him, forgive them, for doing what they should never have done, but praise be to every god he’s ever heard of – he’s home.
Funny how it takes killing eight people in cold blood for him to realize that, but they were fucked in the head from the first time they stepped through the wardrobe. It’s all he can do to keep from whistling as he strolls out of the Calormene camp, not a single man waking. He could probably kill every man jack of them without a one of them noticing, but that may bring more trouble down on them. The trick about garnering a reputation is to leave someone alive to tell the tale, and leaving men alive is completely counter to the usual Narnian method of attack.
He wants the Calormenes scared, and killing a few and not all is a good way of doing that. For a moment Edmund considers going into the tents and killing one out of every six men, but that’s just asking to get caught, as impressive of propaganda as it would be. Instead he walks out the perimeter and past a pair of the guards he’s killed, then stops and looks back.
One by one, he goes around the perimeter and pulls out each dart, stowing them back in the pouch. Let the Calormenes wonder how their comrades died; it will just add to the fear.
After a moment, Edmund goes back to the horse string, letting the curious Calormene horses snuffle at his hands as he moves among them, cutting their lines. The one big warhorse there eyes him suspiciously but doesn’t trumpet a warning; Edmund runs a hand down its neck, admiring, and keeps hold of its lead rope as he sends the other horses scattering. If the Calormenes have to chase their horses, then they’ll have more time for their escape. As for the warhorse, well…maybe Peter will want a battle mount; warhorses can carry more weight than their smaller, faster relatives.
He clicks his tongue to it, quietly, and pulls it out of the herd as the horses start to wander free. It doesn’t protest, just follows with its head down like a very large dog. He’s suddenly reminded of one of the stories he’d heard back in their own time, about a Narnian talking horse that had been taken captive by the Calormenes and served as a warhorse to a tarkaan until it broke free and fled for home.
But this warhorse isn’t a talking horse, just one of the magnificent Calormene warhorses, just a dumb beast with some fire left to it after years of slavery. Although that’s not quite fair, Edmund supposes; the Calormenes treat their horses better than they do their slaves. Still, he’s not going to leave the horse here, not when he can take it back to Arn Abedin.
Jill is sitting up on the tree root when Edmund returns, looking around in all directions with his dagger clenched tightly in her hand. She raises her head as he approaches, her eyes big and dark in her pale face.
“Where’s Susan?” she asks, and Edmund resists the urge to turn out his pockets and demand to know if she sees Susan anywhere.
Instead he busies himself with passing the warhorse’s lead rope through a loop on the other horse’s saddle; he doesn’t think Jill will be able to ride long without either passing out or falling out of the saddle. “She’s not here,” he says, facing the saddle as he does up the straps on the saddlebag he’d taken from the commander’s tent. “The gifts – Peter’s sword and shield, Susan’s bow and horn, Lu’s cordial and dagger – they were all stolen from Cair Paravel sometime in the past few months, and the commanding tarkaan recognized them. He’s taking her to Cair Paravel.”
He turns in time to see Jill shudder, blanching even paler. “I’m sorry,” she says, and the way she says it, the words are a death sentence.
Edmund stares at her. “Why?” he says blankly. “Can you mount on your own?” he asks, and Jill gets to her feet, swaying dangerously – that would be a no, then. He boosts her into the saddle and mounts behind her, turning the horse back towards Arn Abedin.
“Well,” Jill says, sounding startled, “no one comes back from Cair Paravel, no one who’s…taken there.”
“Peter’s in Cair Paravel,” Edmund says, and hears the sharpness in his voice. The Calormenes must have half a day’s ride ahead of him at least, and he has to get Jill back to Arn Abedin; he’s not a good enough medic to patch her up and assume she’ll heal without harm. Narnia or not, infection’s always a danger; he has to get her back to Arn Abedin and Lucy. And by then the Calormenes and Susan will be a day’s ride ahead, maybe a day and a half – even two. “Su will be fine. She always is.”
“No one is,” Jill murmurs, her voice starting to slur a little as she lets her guard down. “Not with the Calormenes. No one’s fine. No one’s safe.”
Edmund doesn’t say anything, just nudges the horse up from a walk to a trot and then an amble, moving smoothly through the woods and back towards the ruins of the old border fortress.
“No where’s safe,” Jill says, her head lolling back against his shoulder. “Not in Narnia. I want to go home.”
Home. And isn’t that Aslan’s own joke? We’ll end this, Edmund could – should – say. And then you’ll be back in England.
He doesn’t say anything at all.
----------
Susan, Peter, and the airman occurs in Shine So Bright.
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 ten, 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.
It’s a pity Peter’s not here, Edmund thinks idly, watching Tirian’s cousin Vespasian gallop past, plucking tent stakes out of the ground with the end of his ten foot lance. What’s really a wonder is that Vespasian isn’t digging the lance into the ground and levering himself out of the saddle with every stroke; he and Peter had played this game back in Narnia a decade ago, and they’d been considerably worse at it than Vespasian is. Of course, in their day most Narnian lancers hadn’t been human; Narnia hadn’t had enough humans to train real jousting knights until the last few years of their reign. They’d had a few knights that first decade or so – a pair of cousins from Archenland, a handful from the countries on the western border, a few more from the islands. Not enough to make much of an impression during combat, not until Peter had brought the Red Company into Narnia, and even then the Red Company hadn’t been the kind of fully-armored heavy cavalry that Vespasian of Glasswater is; they’d been light cavalry in mail and leather who favored swords and horse-bows over lances.
This is the sort of thing Peter would love to watch – a trained professional doing the kind of fighting he knows best. He’d probably be out there with Vespasian right now, testing his Natarene training against Vespasian’s Telmarine-Shoushani hybrid style. Of course, if Peter was here he’d also have to deal with the logistics and politics of keeping the twelve hundred and sixty-three Narnians here from killing each other, as well as fed and watered. Arn Abedin’s turned into a shambles of an army camp – one of the things Peter hates more than anything else, which is why he took what should have been Edmund’s job and left with Tirian and Eustace for Cair Paravel. That’s not the only reason Peter went instead of anyone else – he’d wanted to negotiate for supplies and allies, and that would go better working straight from the top of the Narnian command, instead of from a step or two down.
Vespasian pulls the last stake out of the ground and raises his lance in salute before grounding it in the tubular scabbard behind him on the right side of his saddle. He canters over to Edmund and raises the visor on his sallet helm, grinning easily. “Care to have a go, your majesty?” he asks.
“Hell no,” Edmund says, grinning back. “I haven’t touched a lance in almost ten years, and I was always rubbish at this sort of thing anyway. Narnia didn’t really go in for it in our day.”
“No?” Vespasian asks curiously, swinging out of the saddle with only a faint clinking of his armor. He’s been practicing in full plate, armored cap-a-pie – with his visor down the only part of him that can be seen are his eyes. Telmarine Narnia hadn’t had that three hundred years ago – Edmund wonders idly where they’ve picked it up since. “I’m surprised.”
“Not enough humans to make it practical,” Edmund explains. “Most of our cavalry were centaurs – light lancers, not heavy.” He gestures at Vespasian’s rig with one hand.
“So Narnia truly was a land of nonhumans,” Vespasian observes, lifting his helmet off and propping it on his saddle. His big warmblood destrier – seventeen hands if it’s an inch, as big as a centaur’s horse body – lips his hair and he raises a hand to pat its neck, the metal of his gauntlets striking the metal of the stallion’s crinet.
“May I?” Edmund asks, raising a hand to the horse, and Vespasian nods. The stallion whuffles politely at his palm, breath warm on his skin. Next to the stallion, the smaller hotblooded Calormene horses they’ve been using look like ponies. Next to the stallion, Narnian talking horses look like ponies. “You don’t ride talking horses?”
Vespasian snorts in amusement. “Never,” he says. “They won’t stand for it – even before the Calormenes came, they’d never pair with humans that way, and now they’re far worse about it, especially after everything the Calormenes did to them.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that,” Edmund says. Talking horses three hundred years ago were reluctant but willing to let the kings and queens of old ride them; talking horses today are adamant that no human, king or queen of old or not, is getting anywhere near their backs. He pats the stallion’s neck, in the unarmored space between crinet and peytral, and steps back.
Vespasian is a head taller than him, dark-haired and handsome in his mid-thirties. He and Tirian don’t look particularly alike, but there’s some indefinable quality that connects the two of them as kin – something about the way they move, maybe, or something in their blue eyes. He looks like the Telmarines Edmund had known three hundred years ago when he’d been in Narnia with Caspian. His armor is enameled in blue and dark gold, patterns etched into it to strengthen it. Edmund can make out the familiar lion and compass rose pattern on his pauldrons, but the wolf and waves on the vambraces, breastplate, and helmet are strange; they’re both repeated on his horse’s armor in equal measure.
Vespasian turns away from him to start picking up the stakes he’s plucked up and left spread across the clearing. The clearing’s not natural – it is possible to cut down trees in Narnia, though what Edmund and Lucy have been doing is telling the local dryads to encourage the trees to move elsewhere, out to the open plain beneath Giantkiller Ridge a few miles away. They need an open area around here, both so that the Narnians (overflowing Arn Abedin’s bounds) have somewhere to set up camp and somewhere they can train. Aslan knows they need the training; there are barely a handful of soldiers among them. Plenty of highwaymen and raiders; the majority of Narnia’s army has been destroyed by the Calormenes and only a few of the remainder are in the camps. Maybe the Narnians have the army’s failure in defending the country in mind, because getting them to train with the remaining professionals has been like pulling teeth. Watching Vespasian train is a welcome break from trying to talk refugees into becoming pikemen. As soon as Peter gets back from Cair Paravel, he can have that unwelcome task; Edmund will handle logistics. He’s never much liked this sort of thing anyway; he’d always left the army’s training up to Peter, who can out-talk Edmund in exactly one setting: anything to do with war. He’s never had a problem convincing people to fight for him; Edmund’s not nearly as good at arguing people into weapons-training.
Edmund turns away from the clearing and picks up Vespasian’s spare lance, weighing it in his hand. Solid oak, capped with iron with the same wolf and waves as Vespasian’s armor on the end; the point is a further foot of steel blade. Vespasian is handling its twin as lightly as if it’s a baton, going back through his tent-pegging drill. Edmund puts the lance down back against the tree trunk and leans beside it, arms crossed over his chest as he watches the Narnian knight train. Three hundred knights in the Narnian army once, apparently; they have five. Six, when Tirian gets back. The other three were officers in the Narnian army; Lord Berenguer of Northfall, Sir Golarte of Heartscrown, and Sir Pequi of Northfall, the last remnants of an army company that found sanctuary with a camp in the wolfswood that came into Arn Abedin two days ago.
Vespasian tosses the last tent peg up into the air and catches it in his free hand, pushing his visor up to grin at Edmund.
“I couldn’t do it,” Edmund calls, then freezes as a horn sounds. It’s not the bright bugling of the army horns the wolfswood refugees brought with them, the singing of the silver horns of the Red Company – oliphants, they call them – or the huu-huu-huu of the ox horn call that the Arn Abedin Narnians use; it’s Susan’s ivory horn, the one whose sounding heralds danger, danger, come at once, danger! It’s a sharp, familiar scream that goes straight to blood and bones; he clenches his fist hard around the pommel of his sword and breathes in through his mouth. Once, twice, three times, the cold spring air tearing at his lungs – and then Susan’s horn screams again, just once before the sound of it is sharply cut off.
He opens his eyes to see Vespasian staring at him wildly. “What is that?” the Narnian nobleman demands. “I have heard that horn before – that is the same call that drew me back to Narnia –”
“It’s my sister’s horn,” Edmund says, forcing his hand away from his sword and turning away from the clearing. They’re far enough from the main camp that it’s easier to ride out here than walk; his horse is tied to a tree some little ways away, munching delicately at some of the new grass that’s forced its way up between patches of melting snow. He unties its lead rope quickly, swinging into the saddle.
“But you are already here,” Vespasian protests, turning his destrier into the space in front of Edmund. “Who else can be summoned?”
“It’s not a summoning,” Edmund says shortly, his horse throwing its head up a little as his hands tighten on the reins. He forces himself to loosen his grip as he looks up into Vespasian’s handsome face. Exactly Peter’s type; he thinks absurdly, then shoves the thought away. His brother’s proclivities are hardly relevant at the moment. He hesitates to tell Vespasian the other – the real – purpose of Susan’s horn, because it’s obvious that simply calling for help has been forgotten over the centuries in favor of calling home the kings and queens of old, and that’s a card that maybe they want to keep close to their chests.
Vespasian’s expression is curious and a little alarmed. “Then what is it?” he asks.
“I’ll let you know,” Edmund says, nudging his horse around Vespasian’s until he can urge into a gallop, letting it slow to a trot as he gets onto the roseroad. No need to raise alarm in Arn Abedin by galloping in, not when the sentries he’s set are already whispering amongst themselves.
“Your majesty!” a faun calls as he passes between them. “What –”
Edmund ignores him, swinging down from the saddle and wrapping his horse’s reins around his fist as he leads it down paths that haven’t existed for a millennium and a half now.
“Your majesty,” a squirrel chirps, nearly falling off its branch in anxiety as it follows him from tree to tree, but it swallows down its nervousness and continues, “Your majesty, what has happened, has something – is the High King –”
Edmund turns to look at it, and the squirrel – red fur, two black stripes down its back; its name is Chatterleaf, and he has been at Arn Abedin since before they arrived – quavers, but clings determinedly to its branch and presses its questions again.
“Nothing’s happened,” Edmund says slowly. “Spread that, will you? There’s nothing wrong.”
There’s something very wrong; Susan never sounds her horn lightly, and he’s already seen she’s more than capable of taking care of herself in Narnia even after all these years. But he’s not about to send the army into a panic by letting them know that, not when it can be easily avoided.
Chatterleaf blinks, then nods firmly, tail frisking the air anxiously behind him. “Of course, your majesty. It’s good to know. Maybe,” he adds, sounding tentative, “some further explanation might help to – I mean, I don’t want to presume, but people are afraid.”
A squirrel with a shred of common sense? Things have changed in Narnia; squirrels have always been notoriously flighty, although Edmund had known a few good ones in his day. Those were rare, though, and Peter had seized them up eagerly for the army.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Edmund says. “My sister wants a word with me, is all.” He meets the squirrel’s black eyes and raises one eyebrow, watching the animal calmly until Chatterleaf quails and looks away.
“Of course, your majesty,” he murmurs. “I shall proceed with all due haste,” he adds, dipping in an awkward bow before turning and scampering up the tree trunk to disappear among the upper branches.
Cosmetic and cultural differences aside, Tirian’s Narnians are much like all the others Edmund has known in the past, in two lifetimes in Narnia. Well, to be fair, much like all the people he’s known; he’s seen the same phenomenon repeat itself over and over again in Narnia, on the Dawn Treader, in his school, in the army. They like to talk, and rumors will spread quickly. There’s a good chance that Chatterleaf’s story won’t be the predominant one, but at least it will be out there, and that’s something that probably couldn’t have been said otherwise, not with the beliefs these Narnians hold regarding Susan’s horn.
When he reaches their homewood tree, it’s not at all a surprise to find Lucy already there, saddling her horse as it eats grain from a nosebag. Her bow and two extra quivers are propped up against one giant root, along with a short sword and a round shield like the ones the Red Company carries. She looks up as Edmund approaches.
“You heard it too?” she asks, tightening the last strap and stepping away.
“Of course I did,” Edmund says. He tilts his head towards her horse. “But don’t bother, Lu, I don’t want you out there.”
Lucy lifts her chin. “I don’t like her,” she says, “and she deserves everything she gets. But she knows too much to just leave out there alone. If the Calormenes interrogate her and she breaks, then they’ll be able to find Arn Abedin and all of us. And Peter would probably be angry,” she adds as an afterthought.
“Su’s not going to break,” Edmund says, even though that’s a lie. Everyone breaks given the right circumstances. Everyone. Even them. “And we’re not exactly hiding; even in these woods it’s hard to miss twelve hundred Narnians arming for war.”
Lucy stares at him flatly. “Whatever you say, Ed,” she says. “I’m still going out there.”
Edmund drops his horse’s reins. It stands placidly still, eyeing Lucy’s horse’s nosebag, and Edmund pats its neck before he goes over to stand in front of Lucy. “No,” he says again. “You’re not. You’re going to stay here and watch out for the army, make sure no one gets into trouble or tips off the Calormenes, make sure they keep training, make sure no one fights. We can’t all leave at once; one of us has to be here.”
She makes a face, but doesn’t protest that. “So why you and not me?” she demands. “Just because you’re a boy doesn’t mean –”
Edmund’s eyebrows go up. “When has that ever had anything to do with anything?” he demands. “I’m going because I’m better at this than you are, and because I have more recent experience doing this sort of thing than you do. And because I’m your older brother and I say so.”
“That’s not a reason!” Lucy protests.
“It is now,” Edmund says firmly. “And the rest of it stands too.”
Lucy pouts, but doesn’t argue further, just turns back to her horse and starts taking its tack off. Edmund goes to help her.
“Who are you taking?” she asks after a moment, her voice brisk and business-like.
“I’m not,” Edmund says.
Lucy turns on him furiously. “You can’t go by yourself!” she exclaims.
“Can’t?” Edmund repeats, raising his eyebrows again, and she punches him in the arm.
“Stop trying to sound like Peter,” she says. “You don’t do it very well. Edmund, we don’t know who’s out there. Susan’s – she’s, well…she doesn’t scare easily,” she says, drawing the words out reluctantly. “Or use that horn lightly.”
“Which would be why I’m going after her,” Edmund points out. “The fewer people know about this the better. These Narnians, they don’t feel about that horn the same way we do, to them it’s something…sacred. A relic, meant for one thing and one thing only.”
“Summoning help?” Lucy says dryly. “I think I know better than you, Ed. I was there when Father Christmas gave it to her.”
It’s doesn’t hurt anymore – they’d all gotten over Edmund’s betrayal twenty years earlier; they’d had to – but he takes it as the blow it’s intended as and lets that show on his face. “Summoning us,” he corrects. “That’s what these Narnians think, even the educated ones. If they hear it, then they don’t know what to think, because we’re already here.”
“You’re going to make me explain that?” she demands, staring at him with wide eyes and her arms full of the saddle. “Edmund!”
“You’ll come up with something,” Edmund tells her confidently. “You always do. I’m just going to find Susan. Maybe it’s not the Calormenes, maybe it’s more ferals. If I can get her out, I will. If I can’t, I’ll come back here for reinforcements. I’m not going to do anything stupid or rash or absurdly heroic; I’m not Peter.”
“No,” Lucy informs him, draping the saddle over a root and turning back to glare at him, crossing her arms over her chest. “You’re not.”
Edmund doesn’t even bother answering that, just walks past her to pull open the door of the homewood tree. He packs quickly – Susan had left the camp this morning to go hunting on foot, so she can’t have gone far, but that’s no excuse not to prepare for the worst case scenario. Bedroll, food, water skins, one of the basic first aid kits Lucy’s been making up for everyone to carry when they finally do leave the woods and march on Calormene-controlled Narnia. Two quivers of heavy war arrows rather than the one he might take otherwise, along with his unstrung longbow in one of them. He clips those to the side of the saddle, in easy reach, and slings his shield across his back. He won’t bother with armor; boiled leather will do for now, and he adds a few other odd items to his pack as well.
Lucy helps him pack, watching him with eyes that are a little dark with worry. “Edmund, are you sure?” she asks as he swings into the saddle, his horse shifting uneasily.
“Trust Lord Vespasian,” Edmund tells her. “He’s got ambitions, but his priority is always going to be Narnia’s safety. Lieutenant Seaworth and his men don’t have anything in Narnia to fight for but Narnia itself; they don’t have any personal feuds here. Trust Ourente before you trust Arnau; that dwarf is keeping secrets. Jill isn’t one of us; she’s been here five years and we don’t know what’s happened. And Jewel’s loyalty is to Tirian, not to Narnia.”
“They’re Narnians,” Lucy says, her hand on his horse’s reins. “We should be able to trust them without reservation.”
“Things change,” Edmund tells her, and digs his heels into his horse’s sides as Lucy steps back.
Magic leaves no trail for the naked eye to follow, but Susan’s horn is something other than ordinary magic; Edmund stops thinking about where he’s going once he’s beyond the Arn Abedin bounds and lets his horse have its head. It picks its way through the forest without stopping to lip at the new spring growth, turning from a walk to a trot to a canter the farther they get from Arn Abedin, taking him miles away from the camp, farther than Edmund can imagine even Susan would have walked just to hunt. She knows better than to venture so far out alone; the woods are dangerous even without the added threat of the Calormenes.
Then he sees the bodies.
Edmund reins his horse to a halt, and dismounts, letting it stand as he crouches down next to the first body and rolls it over. A Calormene soldier; he’s been stripped of his sword and baldric, as well as his purse. No arrows left in him, but the wounds are obvious.
He smiles a little, grimly. After what happened with Miraz, Susan knows not to leave any evidence behind that it was Queen Susan of Narnia who came calling. Father Christmas’s red-feathered arrows might as well have her name inscribed on the side.
He’s no tracker, but there are signs anyone with an eye for it can read. The Calormenes were on horseback until they were shot, but the horses went on ahead – burdened more lightly, it looks like. Both of them. And there are tracks of two others as well, Narnian cobbling and not Calormene. Both women, from the size. Susan is one of them, of course – her boots are marked with a lion rampant stamped into the heel; all of theirs are – but whose prints are the others? There aren’t more than a handful of human women at Arn Abedin, and few of the ones that Edmund’s met would follow Queen Susan all the way out here, alone, on foot, after two Calormene horsemen.
Lucy would, but Lucy’s been at Arn Abedin all day, and the only thing that might – might – compel her to follow Susan is a Calormene threat. So who else –
Edmund has the horrible feeling he knows, but he doesn’t want to admit it just yet, not until he has solid proof.
“Why can’t you just leave well enough alone, Su?” he mutters under his breath as he mounts up, letting his horse have its head again. Susan’s horn leaves its own kind of trail for those that hear it and answer.
He knows the answer to that question, though. Of course Susan would have followed the Calormenes. They shouldn’t be this far west, and if she’d gone back to Arn Abedin, she would have lost them. Edmund would have done the same thing; so would Lucy or Peter. They all would have.
The woods grow scarcer around him as he rides, shadows growing longer and darker as the sun starts to set, and Edmund grits his teeth. Something’s gone very, very wrong; he can feel it. His horse finally stops in a clearing and Edmund swings down from the saddle, fingering the hilt of his sword and wishing idly for a torch. Then he nearly slaps himself, because oh yes, that’s going to help. He’s just getting soft in England. The moon is high, the stars are bright, his eyes are already adjusted to the dark – he doesn’t need help seeing anything, not now, not when everything’s almost clear around him.
He turns in a slow circle, looking around.
There was a fight here. There are four dead horses; one with a mercy kill up into its heart – the beast has been hamstrung – one with a Calormene arrow in it, and two with red-feathered arrows in them. Edmund pulls those free, cleans the arrowheads, and puts them in his own quiver. Susan will want them back.
Cut ropes by one tree; someone was tied up here. Blood staining the ground and the few remaining patches of dirty snow. There are sword-slashes in a few of the trees, and one deep gouge that goes in almost a foot. Scattered arrows, broken and whole. Edmund collects the few that are Susan’s.
There aren’t any human bodies, Calormene or otherwise.
Edmund turns back to his horse, which is shifting uneasily, unhappy with the scent of blood in its nose, but when he tries to reach for the threads of the trail the horn should have left, they’re gone. This is where Susan blew her horn, but it’s not where she ended up. The horn’s magic doesn’t extend past the initial call for help.
“Sod this,” Edmund murmurs softly. He’s going to have to do this the hard way, step by painstaking step.
Or not so painstaking, maybe, he realizes as he looks around. The Calormenes weren’t worried about hiding their trail, and there had been a lot of them – about as subtle as an elephant charging its way through the woods. Edmund pulls himself into the saddle and turns his horse onto the path the Calormenes left.
He keeps the horse moving at a walk, and not just because he needs to follow the trail. It’s dark; he doesn’t want it to trip and break a leg. He also doesn’t want to let the Calormenes know he’s coming, because that’s just counter-productive. As soon as he sees the glow of several campfires rise up in front of him, Edmund stops and dismounts, tying his horse to the raised root of a homewood sapling. He unslings his shield from his back and hooks it onto the saddle; it’s not going to do him any good where he’s going. As he goes forward, slow and careful and looking around for sentries at every moment, he keeps one hand on his sword hilt. If he needs it, he’s going to need it fast.
The Calormenes are either very good or very wary; they have a perimeter set up, three pairs of guards walking the rounds with spanned crossbows in their hands. Pairs – which means Edmund can’t just take one out and slip through the hole that will leave. He’ll either have to run the gauntlet – and there’s only a span of a minute, maybe a minute and a half, when the guards aren’t in sight of either each other or the camp – or take them both out within seconds of each other. Absently, he wonders if there’s something in specific that brought on this kind of security, or if it’s just basic protocol because the Calormenes lose so many people every time they come this far west. Then Edmund shoves the thought away, because it really doesn’t matter. What matters isn’t how it came about, but that it’s here at all.
He counts soldiers as he prowls the outside of the camp, careful to stay out of the line of sight of the sentries. There are a dozen six-man tents set up, along with one that’s about the same size but made of better material; it’s also the one with the Calormene standard planted in the ground out in front. Commander’s tent, then. But no personal standard just beneath that, which means it’s not a tarkaan commanding. Good news, maybe. Or maybe Calormene customs have changed during the past sixteen hundred years, and tarkaans don’t use personal standards anymore; that would just be his luck. Still, if every one of those tents is full it puts the count at more than seventy, which is far more than Edmund would expect to see in just a scouting party, though also far less than a full-out war party. So what the hell are they doing so far west? This is beyond the Calormene zone and into territory that, though technically Narnian, hasn’t been occupied for hundreds of years. Wild lands, border lands, dangerous to all and sundry, Narnian or Calormene. From what Edmund’s gathered, no one will venture out here willingly except the desperate, and especially not the Calormenes if they can avoid it.
On the other hand, though, their raid on the supply convoy is pretty damn unlikely to have gone unnoticed, and that may have just pushed the Calormenes over the edge into mounting an attack on the Narnians here. And all the refugee camps emptying is also fairly likely to garner some notice – Edmund’s positive there are Narnians in Arn Abedin that are reporting to the Calormenes, although he doesn’t know who and he doesn’t know how. He’s been trying to find out, but it’s slow going; he doesn’t have his old contacts and he doesn’t know everything or everyone involved; he doesn’t have the facts, may Aslan damn it all.
If they’re very lucky, whatever knowledge the Calormenes have doesn’t extend to the location of Arn Abedin and this party will pass by without following the old roseroad straight down to the remains of the front gates. But if they’re not so lucky –
That doesn’t matter right now. What matters is getting Susan out of there, if she’s in there at all. Edmund hasn’t seen any evidence of it so far, but he’s got severe doubts regarding there being two separate groups of Calormenes out wandering around in the woods, and the trail from the clearing had led straight back here.
No, Susan’s here somewhere. She has to be. If she’s not –
If she’s not, she’s dead, but Edmund would know if she was dead. Narnia always knows when her kings and queens are dead.
He fingers his sword hilt. They must be holding her in one of the tents – probably the commander’s tent, and Edmund spares a brief thought to pity the man if he thinks he can lay a hand on Susan of Narnia, because wounded or not, tied up or not, she’ll still kick him through the wall of his tent. She’d been able to do that even in England; Peter had told Edmund about one particular occasion she had, on one idiot airman who’d thought that just because she was a girl she’d happily fall into bed with anyone in uniform. She’d disabused him of that notion fairly quickly, or so Edmund has heard from Peter and his RAF friends.
Edmund turns and goes back to his horse, petting it on the nose and murmuring to it as it turns its head towards him, shifting a little in anxiety at the nearness to its herdmates. “Shh,” he says very softy in its ear. “Bad luck, I’m afraid.” He throws back the flap on one saddlebag and pulls out a blowgun and a small pouch full of darts – quieter and more accurate than a bow at the distances he’s planning to use it at. He hesitates for a moment over his bow and quiver, but finally decides to leave them where they are. He’s not planning on doing much distance work, and a bow is more or less useless as a close-quarters weapon.
“Just a little longer now,” he murmurs to the horse, and fastens the flap on his saddlebag back down before he slips back the way he came.
He fits the pieces of the blowgun together and pushes a dart into the tube, careful to keep it level. Hopefully the poison on them is still good even after sixteen hundred years; if not, well, he’s still aiming to kill or at least debilitate. He’ll have to be fast; he wants all six of the sentries down. A little bit of overkill, maybe, but he’s just playing it safe.
The first pair of guards comes into sight, walking a little ways away from each other. Edmund raises the blowgun to his lips, pursing them around the mouthpiece, and blows. The dart sprouts in the Calormene’s neck and the man stiffens, eyes going wide with surprise as his mouth works silently for a moment before his knees buckle and he falls forward.
His companion turns at the sound. “Gulzar?” he begins, questioningly, and the second dart takes him just beneath the jaw.
“Sha kehir, Calarm,” Edmund murmurs as he steps around their bodies. Good night, Calormene. The next pair of guards should come into sight within a matter of seconds, if his timing is still right.
Moonlight catches a gleam of light off the head of a crossbow bolt up ahead and Edmund steps back behind a tree, raising his blowgun to his lips. These two sentries are talking quietly to each other; one of them has let his crossbow hang from a strap around his shoulders so that his hands are free to gesture in an hourglass shape. The language has changed a little too much over sixteen hundred years for Edmund to be able to read their lips – especially in this light – but Edmund has been a soldier for almost a quarter-century now; it’s not hard to guess. What a stunner! or something along those lines. She goes on and on!
Soldiers and men; they’re the same across countries and worlds. Edmund palms a second dart and blows out the first, pushing the second one in as soon as the first has left the gun. It takes the second Calormene in the big artery in his neck; he turned his head when his companion choked suddenly in the middle of a sentence whose gist was probably something about, You should have seen her tits! The scent of blood is sudden and sharp in the chill night air; Edmund winces, but smell isn’t a strong enough sense to wake a sleeping man – or not most men, anyway. The horses are tethered on the other side of the camp, too far away for the scent to carry without a breeze, and he hasn’t seen any dogs with the Calormenes, talking or otherwise.
He steps around the second set of bodies, watching for the third and final pair of sentries. By now they might have noticed that one of the other pairs hadn’t been where they should have been. Hopefully not – it’s only been a few minutes – but if they have –
This could get very messy, very fast. And Edmund isn’t Peter; he can’t tear through a dozen enemies without even breaking a sweat.
He pushes a fifth dart into the blowgun, running his thumb thoughtfully over the feathers of the remaining darts in the pouch before he picks up another one, curling two fingers around it as he holds the blowgun steady.
The third set of sentries is standing by the horses, and Edmund curses silently. Get away from the damned horses, he thinks at them fiercely. Walk your bloody patrol, you idiots.
If he kills them here, the horses will panic at the sudden scent of death and trumpet their fear, waking the entire camp. That’s entirely counter-productive. Edmund counts off his impatience in Malay; chances are that after they leave Narnia and he gets back to England, he’s going to be shipped back there again soon enough, so he might as well do his best to remember the language.
Finally, finally, after what seems like an age of men but is really more like a few minutes, the two Calormene sentries move on past the horses. Edmund flits from tree to tree behind them, keeping one eye on the horses. Animals can be one of the best warning systems nature invented, sometimes. Other times, not so much. He’s learned by now to always assume the former, though.
Careful, regulating his breathing so that he doesn’t accidentally send the dart somewhere it shouldn’t go – like straight down his throat, if he breathes in instead of out, and wouldn’t that be an exciting end to this day? – Edmund raises the blowgun to his mouth. The dart hits in the back of the Calormene’s neck and the man stiffens, managing to raise one hand to the offending spot before he falls. By the time his comrade turns, raising his crossbow but not crying out, it’s too late for him to avoid the dart that his him at the base of his throat. He falls gracelessly across the body of his partner and Edmund grins a little in triumph as he lowers the blowgun, tucking it through his belt.
There are no sentries in the camp itself, so all he does is stroll in, his hand on his sword hilt but the blade not drawn. He goes straight to the commander’s tent and pushes the flap back, ducking inside and letting it fall shut behind him. It’s black as a hag’s heart inside and Edmund waits for a beat for his eyes to accustom themselves to the little moonlight that comes in through the tent walls.
The commander is wrapped in his blankets, his sheathed scimitar not far from his hand. Not far from him – but out of his reach of his weapons – there’s a girl cuffed to the tent pole, curled in on herself so that Edmund can’t see her face. It’s not Susan, though; her hair is curly and not straight, and she’s not tall enough.
Edmund moves toward her on cat feet, one eye on the commander as he slides a hand over her mouth. Jill’s eyes flare wide in surprise as she wakes up, starting to struggle, and then she recognizes him and goes still. Edmund takes his hand away and brings a finger up to his lips; she nods, and he finds his lock picks in his belt-pouch, bending over the cuffs, so close to her that he can feel her trembling from the strain of keeping herself still. He can smell fresh blood on her, and worse. Poor girl, he thinks absently, then shoves the thought aside. They don’t have time for pity.
There’s a faint click as the lock opens and Jill sheds the cuffs with alacrity, clambering to her feet as Edmund draws her up with one hand on her wrist. He looks around the interior of the tent one last time, but there’s no way in hell that Susan’s here, not unless she’s somehow managed to disguise herself as a pair of saddlebags or a Calormene recurve bow.
No one in the camp is stirring as they make their way past the dead guards and the perimeter, back to the place where Edmund’s horse is waiting. Jill is favoring her right shoulder and there’s a dark stain of fresh blood on her shirt. He can smell it; the wound must have reopened. As soon as they’re back at Edmund’s horse, he pushes her carefully down onto an upraised root, digging in his saddlebags for the first aid kit Lucy made up.
“Where’s Susan?” he asks as he pushes the shoulder of her shirt down. Jill flinches away from him as he does so, but it’s this or rip the whole shirt off, and he hardly thinks she’ll appreciate that. Arrow wound, he notes, one of the ugly barbed Calormene war arrows, designed to destroy flesh going in and coming out. She must have lost a lot of blood. There’s a small flask of pure alcohol in the kit, and he pulls the cork out with the teeth and pours it freely over the wound.
Jill hisses out through her teeth and goes pale, but she doesn’t pass out like Edmund’s been half expecting. “I don’t know,” she says, a short gasp in between the words.
Edmund puts the flask aside and threads a needle, dipping it into the flask once he’s done that. Jill’s eyes go very wide.
“Tell me what happened,” Edmund orders. “It will help with the pain.” Unless you pass out.
She tells him, gasping in between dependent clauses, the sweat standing out on her forehead as Edmund stitches the wound closed as quickly as he can. Once he’s finished, he pours more alcohol over it and wraps layers of bandage around her shoulder as tightly as he can. Overkill, maybe, but that’s a messy wound, and he’s more or less sure that most of it was necessary. If not, well, Lucy can yell at him once he’s gotten Jill back to Arn Abedin.
“Can I drink that?” Jill asks, breaking off in between words and eyeing the flask.
“Not unless you want brain damage,” Edmund says, scrubbing at the blood on his hands and frowning. He packs the first aid kit away and pulls out a silver hip flask the size of his hand, the lion of Narnia engraved on one side and his personal shield on the other. “Try this.”
Jill’s eyebrows go up as she takes a mouthful of it, and Edmund can’t help his brief grin. It’s Glasswater whiskey, twelve years old when they’d put it away in Arn Abedin, and apparently the combination of magical storage and the passing of sixteen hundred years has done really well for it. The brewers he’d known back in his own time would have been pleased to know that their whiskey would still be just as good a millennium and a half later.
Jill takes another mouthful of whiskey, coughs, and passes the flask back. “And then I passed out,” she finishes, and looks at him.
“And?” Edmund says, stowing the flask back away. “You didn’t wake up until a few minutes ago?”
“No, I –” she hesitates, staring at him, and says at last, “I woke up and she was gone. I don’t know what they did with her, but I think she was here, I think they took her away, but –”
She was here; they took her away. Edmund grits his teeth and pulls his dagger out of his belt, handing it to her.
Jill takes it, but her expression is blank. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m going to ask the Calormenes what the hell they did with my sister,” Edmund says. “Stay here. If the Calormenes come after you, take the horse and go; I’ll find my own way out.”
“But you can’t just walk back in there!” Jill exclaims. “They’ll kill you –”
“Possibly,” Edmund agrees, “or possibly not, which is the option I’m hoping for. My sister’s out there somewhere, and I’m not just going to forget about her because I might get hurt in the process.”
Jill gives him a faintly horrified look and mutters under her breath, “You’re all insane.”
“Yes, probably,” Edmund says comfortably, and then slips back through the trees. He hasn’t heard any noise from the Calormene camp, so he’s assuming that the dead guards and the missing girl haven’t been found yet. Hopefully it will stay that way long enough for him to ask questions and get answers.
No joy. There’s a Calormene stumbling out of his tent to the edge of the camp, reaching for the front of his robes. Edmund steps up in front of him, sees the man stare blankly at him, and catches his head in both hands and twists before he can see anything. The man’s bladder lets loose as he dies and Edmund lowers him carefully to the ground, wrinkling his nose.
Could have just shot him, he realizes belatedly. Where the hell is his head right now? If he keeps on like this he’s going to get himself killed; he’s supposed to be better than this. He is better than this.
No one else around. He crosses the camp quickly back to the commander’s tent, drawing his sword as he ducks inside. Should have kept his dagger; he’s not Peter and he doesn’t keep a dozen knives on him at all times. A sword is awkward.
Awkward will have to do. He puts the tip of his sword against the Calormene commander’s Adam’s apple and watches the man wake up.
“No,” he says softly, “don’t shout, unless you feel like dying today.”
The Calormene’s eyes go wide, but he nods. He’s younger than Edmund would have expected to be commanding a force this size in this part of Narnia.
“Do you understand me?” Edmund asks, and the commander nods again. “Good. I’m not sure my Calormene’s up to scratch. You captured two women today. One of them was here. The other one wasn’t. Where is she?”
The Calormene licks his lips. Edmund’s eyes flicker briefly to the tassels on the hilt of his scimitar – black, not red or yellow and certainly not gold. A tarkaan, then, but not a high-ranking one at all. Probably a younger son. “The witch, you mean?” he says.
His accent is very thick. “If you want to call her that,” Edmund says, “feel free. Black hair. Pale skin. Carried a bow and shot arrows with red feathers. She would have had an ivory horn.”
“The witch,” the Calormene affirms. “I am second here to my father, Tarkaan Inzamum. When she fell he recognized what she carried and left me here with the others.”
“Well, that’s very nice,” Edmund says. On one level it is; Tarkaan Inzamum probably has more experience than his teenage son and now he’s not here. On a more pressing note, it means Susan isn’t here. “Where did he take her?”
The Calormene eyes the blade of his sword warily. “To the court of Prince Bahadur in Cair Paravel,” he says, sounding triumphant. “She carries stolen goods; she must account for them. And she is very beautiful,” he adds thoughtfully, “for a Narnian witch. I am sure my father has hopes to make her a slave in his house if the prince’s punishment is not too high.”
Edmund resists the urge to hit him across the face and shout, That’s my sister, you sand-swiving bastard! because that won’t accomplish anything. Instead he presses his sword up a little higher and asks, keeping his voice very calm, “Why not take both women?”
The Calormene closes his eyes briefly, then opens them. His lips move briefly in what Edmund recognizes as an ancient prayer to Tash – something about death to murderers and enemies of the god. “I asked my father that. He did not answer, though there is a warrant out for the girl’s arrest, and a reward. She is an associate of the Narnian king; all men know this.” The Calormene’s eyes bore into his, black with hate. “I will gather the reward for her head myself, and with my father gone, the glory for the capture of the Narnians will be mine.”
“Collecting a reward for her head might be a little hard,” Edmund says, “seeing as you won’t have yours.” He stabs upward, and the Calormene dies on his sword blade with only a faint gasp and a spray of dark blood.
Edmund crouches down to clean his sword on the man’s blankets. He’s straightening up when he thinks, Aslan damn it all, I should have asked what in blazes he was doing here.
He’s losing his edge. He’s losing his gods-damned edge, and it’s going to get someone killed. And right now, it’s not him he has to worry about dying, it’s the twelve hundred Narnians waiting back at Arn Abedin for him to return. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a commander instead of just a foot soldier when you’re not getting it shoved in your face every day, and it’s been nine years since he commanded armies. Edmund could stab himself in the face; Peter wouldn’t make this kind of idiot mistake. Peter doesn’t make mistakes when it comes to anything that goes on in the field. He doesn’t. Hasn’t in years. The one and only mistake Peter’s made that Edmund can think of got a third of the army killed and almost got Peter killed, and that was more than twenty years ago.
May Peter’s seven Natarene gods all damn it. Edmund bends down and starts going through the mess of things in the tent, looking for maps or plans or anything that’s written and might give him some kind of clue what the Calormenes’ plans are for this troop. This Calormene isn’t the original commander, so his father must have left him written instructions, not just verbal ones – and the Calormenes have always been proponents of written orders and record-keeping. Mostly so that they can behead anyone who disobeys orders; it’s hard to argue that you didn’t have any orders when there are copies in triplicate.
Edmund finally finds them in one of the saddlebags, a thick leather folder that he flips open and leafs through quickly, the language drift rendering his translation more or less null and void except for a few words that remain the same. Like “kill.” And “Narnian.” There’s a brace of maps in cylindrical leather carrying cases alongside the folder, and Edmund looks at the man he’s just killed, shrugs, and slings the whole saddlebag over his shoulder, going through the other one quickly in case there’s anything else useful or just interesting. Food and money, an armor repair kit – he takes the food and the money, leaves the rest, and goes back out of the tent, breathing in the cold Narnian air like it’s the sweetest summer wine he’s ever tasted.
Home. For some reason the realization of that strikes now and Edmund’s paralyzed for a minute, standing in the middle of an enemy camp at the very edge of his occupied country with a sword in his hand. Home, may Aslan forgive him, forgive them, for doing what they should never have done, but praise be to every god he’s ever heard of – he’s home.
Funny how it takes killing eight people in cold blood for him to realize that, but they were fucked in the head from the first time they stepped through the wardrobe. It’s all he can do to keep from whistling as he strolls out of the Calormene camp, not a single man waking. He could probably kill every man jack of them without a one of them noticing, but that may bring more trouble down on them. The trick about garnering a reputation is to leave someone alive to tell the tale, and leaving men alive is completely counter to the usual Narnian method of attack.
He wants the Calormenes scared, and killing a few and not all is a good way of doing that. For a moment Edmund considers going into the tents and killing one out of every six men, but that’s just asking to get caught, as impressive of propaganda as it would be. Instead he walks out the perimeter and past a pair of the guards he’s killed, then stops and looks back.
One by one, he goes around the perimeter and pulls out each dart, stowing them back in the pouch. Let the Calormenes wonder how their comrades died; it will just add to the fear.
After a moment, Edmund goes back to the horse string, letting the curious Calormene horses snuffle at his hands as he moves among them, cutting their lines. The one big warhorse there eyes him suspiciously but doesn’t trumpet a warning; Edmund runs a hand down its neck, admiring, and keeps hold of its lead rope as he sends the other horses scattering. If the Calormenes have to chase their horses, then they’ll have more time for their escape. As for the warhorse, well…maybe Peter will want a battle mount; warhorses can carry more weight than their smaller, faster relatives.
He clicks his tongue to it, quietly, and pulls it out of the herd as the horses start to wander free. It doesn’t protest, just follows with its head down like a very large dog. He’s suddenly reminded of one of the stories he’d heard back in their own time, about a Narnian talking horse that had been taken captive by the Calormenes and served as a warhorse to a tarkaan until it broke free and fled for home.
But this warhorse isn’t a talking horse, just one of the magnificent Calormene warhorses, just a dumb beast with some fire left to it after years of slavery. Although that’s not quite fair, Edmund supposes; the Calormenes treat their horses better than they do their slaves. Still, he’s not going to leave the horse here, not when he can take it back to Arn Abedin.
Jill is sitting up on the tree root when Edmund returns, looking around in all directions with his dagger clenched tightly in her hand. She raises her head as he approaches, her eyes big and dark in her pale face.
“Where’s Susan?” she asks, and Edmund resists the urge to turn out his pockets and demand to know if she sees Susan anywhere.
Instead he busies himself with passing the warhorse’s lead rope through a loop on the other horse’s saddle; he doesn’t think Jill will be able to ride long without either passing out or falling out of the saddle. “She’s not here,” he says, facing the saddle as he does up the straps on the saddlebag he’d taken from the commander’s tent. “The gifts – Peter’s sword and shield, Susan’s bow and horn, Lu’s cordial and dagger – they were all stolen from Cair Paravel sometime in the past few months, and the commanding tarkaan recognized them. He’s taking her to Cair Paravel.”
He turns in time to see Jill shudder, blanching even paler. “I’m sorry,” she says, and the way she says it, the words are a death sentence.
Edmund stares at her. “Why?” he says blankly. “Can you mount on your own?” he asks, and Jill gets to her feet, swaying dangerously – that would be a no, then. He boosts her into the saddle and mounts behind her, turning the horse back towards Arn Abedin.
“Well,” Jill says, sounding startled, “no one comes back from Cair Paravel, no one who’s…taken there.”
“Peter’s in Cair Paravel,” Edmund says, and hears the sharpness in his voice. The Calormenes must have half a day’s ride ahead of him at least, and he has to get Jill back to Arn Abedin; he’s not a good enough medic to patch her up and assume she’ll heal without harm. Narnia or not, infection’s always a danger; he has to get her back to Arn Abedin and Lucy. And by then the Calormenes and Susan will be a day’s ride ahead, maybe a day and a half – even two. “Su will be fine. She always is.”
“No one is,” Jill murmurs, her voice starting to slur a little as she lets her guard down. “Not with the Calormenes. No one’s fine. No one’s safe.”
Edmund doesn’t say anything, just nudges the horse up from a walk to a trot and then an amble, moving smoothly through the woods and back towards the ruins of the old border fortress.
“No where’s safe,” Jill says, her head lolling back against his shoulder. “Not in Narnia. I want to go home.”
Home. And isn’t that Aslan’s own joke? We’ll end this, Edmund could – should – say. And then you’ll be back in England.
He doesn’t say anything at all.
----------
Susan, Peter, and the airman occurs in Shine So Bright.
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: 2009-01-22 07:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 03:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-22 11:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 03:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-22 12:02 pm (UTC)and the Calormenes have always been proponents of written orders and record-keeping. Mostly so that they can behead anyone who disobeys orders; it’s hard to argue that you didn’t have any orders when there are copies in triplicate. - LOL! So true!
And poor Jill. She's so in over her head and all she wants is to go home. I really like how to Eustace and Jill Narnia isn't home. It fits, because they were never there long enough to get any deep ties. They were only sent there to help and to take over and rule like the Pevensies did.
Poison darts are the new coolest murder weapon ever! And I'm still strangely in love with the notion of the Pevensies as killers and them not really minding or you know at least think twice of it anymore. Does that make me a little twisted?
Brilliant chapter bedlam. I had actually kinda forgot all about Susan and Jill. I was so caught up with the drama in
CamorrCair Paravel that I forgot that they had gotten themselves kidnapped!(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 03:37 pm (UTC)The thing to remember about Eustace and Jill is that they've never seen Narnia in her glory, never been there when she's healthy. They've only been there when she needed saving, so all they see is the trouble. And it's been about a million times worse this time, because they never solved the problem...
I'm writing it, so if it makes you a little twisted, I hate to think what it makes me. There's a scene in the latest episode of the CBS show The Unit (about a top-secret U.S. Army special forces unit) where one of the operatives' wives sees him execute a couple on orders, and he tells her, "I wish you hadn't seen that." Her reply? "A normal person would have said, 'I wish I hadn't done that.'" Those are my Pevensies.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-22 12:33 pm (UTC)First things first: are you learning a different style of grammar to me? Last I heard there were sentences, and there were clauses: sometimes a sentence could be a single clause, but clauses come in categories like 'dependent', and there was no such thing as a 'sentence clause'. I think you mean gasping between clauses (as opposed to between sentences).
Secondly: FLAAAARGH. You amaze me again. FLAAARGH.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 03:40 pm (UTC)"flaaargh"? *raises eyebrows*
I'm glad you liked it!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 10:53 pm (UTC)FLAAAAARGH.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-24 12:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 12:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 01:06 am (UTC)Edmund needs to brush up on his ninja. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 03:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 03:49 am (UTC)He also doesn’t want to let the Calormenes know he’s coming, because that’s just counter-productive.
If she’s not, she’s dead, but Edmund would know if she was dead. Narnia always knows when her kings and queens are dead. How do they know this? Or is it just one of those bone-deep "knowing" sort of things.
the lion of Narnia engraved on one side and his personal shield on the other. So, Lucy has a magic healing cordial, and Edmund now basically has his personal magic whiskey. They can duke it out over who gets more cool points.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 03:46 pm (UTC)I was thinking of Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, where the forest and its inhabitants always know if the king's dead, and then I very belatedly realized that there's no way that Edmund would know that, since none of the kings or queens of Narnia died while they were there. (Unless it happened during the time he was, uh, thrown back through time. That's a possibility.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 05:03 pm (UTC)That's what we need, a door that opens anywhere! All our problems solved in an instant.
Bless your little snarky Edmund's heart.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-23 05:23 pm (UTC)EVERYONE NEEDS AN EDMUND.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 11:31 pm (UTC)Truly though, I love the differences between each character and the way you even bring that out in the pov's of the chapter. The history you have lurking in the background, the drama and mystery between everyone and their relationships. I'm in awe of you! I can't wait for the next chapter and I will, in the meantime, have to read your other fics.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-06 11:59 pm (UTC)As far as my Pevensies go, I think it makes perfect amounts of sense for all four of them to pull their weight, including battles, politics, actually running the country -- I mean, if you have four of them, then you should use them to the fullest extent of their ability. So that's one of the things I'm always trying to make sure I do when I'm writing.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-01 06:42 am (UTC)Is there a comprehensive list of fics in this verse? I'm a bit confuzzled.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-01 06:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-01 06:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-01 06:03 pm (UTC)The Warsverse timeline/fic round up is here (http://bedlamsbard.livejournal.com/260939.html); it has everything that I consider to take place in canon. (Discounting AUs like the Petaverse, werewolves, O11, etc.)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-18 08:37 am (UTC)I'm going to be rational. Your Edmund is ... unbelievably believable. And I sort of want to hug Jill. No-one seems to trust her, she wants to go home - I imagine I'd feel pretty much the same in her shoes.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-18 04:14 pm (UTC)Poor thing.