Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (20)
Jun. 21st, 2010 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air (20)
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Content Advisory: Includes imagery of flood aftermath in a major urban area
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: Thanks tosnacky for the beta, and to everyone who contributed to the discussion about Narnian prayers. Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW.
Cair Paravel stinks of rotting garbage.
The refuse from the flooding has gathered in the streets and refused to leave; the prisoner crews that usually clean up after a minor disaster like a riot or a festival have been tasked by the Calormenes to clear Goldhouse Row and the Garden District. Only after the gentry and the moneygrubbers have been taken care of will they turn their attention to places like Liberty Park and Bonfire Hill, home of the perfectly respectable; the Black Pearl and the Mare’s Quarter will follow after that, and the North Bank will probably be forgotten entirely. Elizar isn’t even certain they’ll remember the Pearl.
The neighborhood’s inhabitants have been doing what they can to repair the worst of the damage and Elizar’s tasked his own people to do the heavy lifting, but it’s been slow going, hampered by the curfew that’s still in place and the roadblocks the Calormenes have set up to keep people from leaving their districts. Even most of the tunnels beneath the city, that have stood intact for two hundred years, are flooded out. Some people are muttering about the curse of the gods.
Elizar doesn’t much care for gods, real or imagined; Peter and Susan are far from Cair Paravel and presumably have something else on their minds. He’s been grumpy and short-tempered since the night the levees broke. In company, he blames it on the situation in the city, occasionally allows himself to complain about having incompetents do his scut work in Mayor’s absence, berates Symeon for not being as competent as Mayor when he scurries to obey Elizar’s orders. When he’s on his own, he busies himself with paperwork and schemes that vary from simple to elaborate in their planning and execution. He has a bargain to uphold; he’s not going to scant his side of it just because getting around in the city right now is a little difficult.
About two weeks after the day the levees broke – Elizar thinks of it that way, firmly, to keep it from being the day Beka left and took Mayor with her – Elizar comes into the kitchen early one morning to find his mother peeling potatoes with great feeling and Nazca DiTomasso sitting at the breakfast table drinking chicory coffee, leaning her chair back against the wall, the front two legs off the floor. Symeon sulks in a corner; he doesn’t quite have Mayor’s force of personality, which Elizar shouldn’t blame him for but does anyway.
“What the fuck are you doing in my mother’s flat?” Elizar snaps, reaching for the crossbow leaning against the wall. These days it’s impossible to be too careful. Of course, with them “these days” have gone back to his father’s murder. Lior Confesor just used to be better at keeping weapons out of the hands of her children.
“Language, Elizar!” his mother snaps, banging a potato down onto the cutting board.
Nazca smirks. She’s Bencivenni Maresti’s youngest sister, a slimmed down, prettier version of her brother, and Elizar entertains the idea of a crossbow bolt going through her skull with great enthusiasm as she says, “That’s right, Elizar, language. Wouldn’t want to go upsetting young ears now, would we?”
“I’m three,” Symeon snarls. “I’m not a cub!”
“But of course,” Nazca says, tossing her black hair over her shoulder. “How could I have missed your great age and the wisdom that accompanies it? Should I ask over your rheumatism or is that too delicate a subject?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Elizar snarls, jerking the crossbow up. The good thing about crossbows is that you can keep them spanned without weakening their draw over time. “You want polite? What the hell are you doing in my mother’s flat, you two-faced bitch?”
“Put that thing down before you hurt yourself with it,” Nazca says, bringing the front two legs of her chair back down to the floor with a bang. “A little trigger-happy these days, are you? Your big pussy cat was never much of a conscience, but I guess a hair’s worth was better than nothing –”
“I swear on my father’s shade, DiTomasso –”
“Elizar Avram Confesor!” his mother says, turning around with the kitchen knife in her hand. Bits of potato are still sticking to it. In the corner, Symeon stands up, lips skinning back along his teeth in a silent snarl.
Nazca glares at her, her expression dismissive. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot, Confesor,” she says, rising from her seat. She tucks her thumbs into her wide leather sword belt, hitching it up an inch or so. “I’m just here to deliver the mail. You’ve been a little scarce around the town lately.”
“Some of us actually have responsibilities to our neighborhoods,” Elizar says, not letting the crossbow waver. “I’d tell you to ask your brother about that, but he might be the only person in Cair Paravel to have benefited from this fiasco.”
“Same selfish bastard as ever, I see.” She reaches into her jacket – Elizar’s grip tightens on the crossbow – and tosses a packet of letters onto the table. “Might be a little damp. A doyarchu brought them downriver last night.”
“There are no doyarchu in the Great River.”
“There are now.” She flicks her fingers at him in something akin to a farewell. “Thanks for the coffee, Lior. Symeon, you’re as adorable as ever; if they made small stuffed replicas of you I’d buy one for my little girl. Since you happen to be a hyena, they don’t. Confesor, that’s an awful small crossbow; are you trying to send a message?”
“Go to hell.”
“I’m not one for cold,” Nazca says, and breezes out the door before Elizar can tell her in exacting detail what she can do in hell and with whom. Instead he keeps the crossbow on the door until he hears the back door of the shop slam shut and the bodyguards downstairs say their farewells, or insults; he can’t quite hear which. Either way, they shouldn’t have let Nazca into the building.
“Put that down,” his mother says immediately. She’s watching out the window; the kitchen overlooks the narrow alley that runs between this building and the one behind it.
Elizar does. “Mum, you should have yelled as soon as she came in –”
She goes on as if he hadn’t spoken. “We’re running late. Go downstairs and open up the shop; Kari Blanchfort is coming by to pick up a special order for Loris’s birthday and I don’t want her to have to wait on the step.”
“I haven’t even had breakfast yet!” Elizar protests, which is probably one of the less dignified things he’s said. The shop’s been suffering, like most of the other businesses in the Pearl, but it should be back on regular hours now. He’s been helping out here and there, usually in the kitchen, where he hasn’t burnt a batch of pralines since he was fourteen. He makes a habit of working the counter at least a few times a month, to remind people in the neighborhood that he’s a part of the Pearl too, that he’s as normal as the rest of them. He doesn’t want people to forget who he is or think he’s above the regular ebb and flow of life in Cair Paravel.
“Go!” Mum empties the cutting board’s worth of sliced potatoes into a skillet, then bangs the skillet back onto the counter, sending bits of potato flying everywhere. Symeon ducks, expression slightly panicked; he probably didn’t have to put up with this sort of thing in the orphanage where Elizar picked him up.
It’s no good arguing with her now – hasn’t been since Beka left, which is why they’re shorthanded in the shop in the first place, especially with Pirmin gone; he’s been helping with the clean-up – so Elizar goes, snatching the packet up off the table as he passes it. Symeon starts to follow him, but Elizar motions him to stay; he doesn’t feel like company right now and he’ll feel better having someone with Mum, anyway.
Downstairs, the shop is dark and quiet, the windows still shuttered for the night. Elizar puts the packet of letters down on the counter, then ducks into the back room to get out the trays of creamy fudge and pecan-rich pralines, crushed hazelnut truffles and brightly colored marzipan. He shoulders the back door open, balancing a covered tray of salted caramels on his hip, and sees his bodyguards scramble to their feet.
“You want to tell me why you let Nazca DiTomasso waltz right on in and up the stairs?” he says, his voice mild.
“She had the proper countersigns, and this week’s passwords –” Gunderic Leadbeater begins defensively, bristling.
“Have you gone blind or just stupid?” Elizar inquires. “Stupider than usual, I mean. If you can’t recognize Bencivenni Maresti’s sister, I really don’t know what use I have for you.”
Gailamir tenses too. “She had the passwords! It wasn’t Gund’s fault –”
“No, you were responsible too,” Elizar says. “Tell me, if Prince Bahadur himself walked up the street and gave you the countersigns and the passwords, would you let him in?”
They’re both silent a moment too long for comfort, and Elizar makes a disgusted sound. “That sodding lion of yours have mercy, I’m beset by incompetents. If that hadn’t been Nazca DiTomasso, you’d both be dead right now. If it happens again, I’ll kill you both and sell you to the gluemaker, make some profit off your sorry hides. Is that clear?”
The twins grumble reluctant agreement and Elizar pulls back into the room, letting the door bang shut behind him. He carries tray after tray of candy into the front and starts putting in them in the expensive glass display cases – a Promise of Hope gift to his mother six years ago, when he’d still been trying to find ways of apologizing to her for taking up with the Long Table and then lying to her about it. He finds the Blanchfort order tucked in the till and boxes it up carefully, wrapping the candy in layers of softy crinkly paper so that nothing breaks or crumbles. They used to use old newsprint; they can afford better now. He checks the neatly-labeled tins of teas racked on the walls behind the counter, making sure that everything is in its proper place and that they’re not out of anything. A few are low and he ducks into the back to refill them from the barrels they’d originally been packed in, careful not to spill any of the fragrant leaves on the floor. That done and the tins replaced on the rack, Elizar goes to unshutter the windows and turn the sign on the door from CLOSED to OPEN.
It’s bright out, a perfect spring day with just a hint of early morning chill still lingering in the air. Most of the refuse from the flooding has been cleared away on this street and the ones surrounding it; even if Elizar didn’t live here, thus giving it priority, the shop is still in the good part of the Black Pearl. The slightly less well-off neighborhoods in the district are slowly being cleaned street by street. Very slowly; the Pearl’s one of the largest districts in the city and the Calormenes don’t give a damn for it. Elizar may be bitter, but he’s hardly surprised.
There aren't many people in the street this morning. Elizar raises a hand to Thwaite across the way, standing in the door of the bakery and bargaining heatedly with an old fruit seller Elizar’s seen every morning in the Pearl since they moved here from Land’s End twelve years ago. Even in the dead of winter she always has apples so crisp and juicy they might have just come off the tree; he’s never asked, but he strongly suspects she’s got dryad blood. His view is briefly obscured as a cart pulled by a morose-looking donkey rattles by, driven by a dwarf even more bent and scraggy than usual. He flaps a hand at Elizar in what might be a wave; erring on the side of caution, Elizar waves back. Esteban, he thinks his name is. Works at the butcher’s shop ‘round the corner.
For a moment, standing in the door of the shop, Elizar can pretend he’s fifteen again, opening up for Mum before he has to run to school. When he was fifteen, the old king was still on his throne, the capo del’strada and the capo del’perla still ruled their districts with iron hands, and the Calormenes had still been in fucking Calormen. When he’d been fifteen, Elizar hadn’t been mixed up in any of this shit.
The moment passes. Elizar isn’t fifteen anymore and he is mixed up in this shit; he turns around and goes back into the shop, letting the door close behind him.
He goes back behind the counter, eyeing the letters there like they might turn into the beasts of the Lady of the Green Kirtle and strike at him. Not yet, he thinks – it’s still too early in the morning for the kind of anxiety that will cause. He hasn’t even had his tea yet.
The remedy for that is stocked behind him. Elizar takes down one of the centaur blends, Call Up the Sun, then, because he has the feeling it’s going to be one of those days, adds a spoonful of a headache soother that an old badger he knows swears by. He puts two crescents into the cashbox, because Mum won’t take money from him, but money’s still the best way he knows to solve a problem, that or throat-slitting. The latter isn’t exactly an option in this case.
A quick shake of the kettle they keep downstairs for samples and their own use tells him that there’s at least enough water for a cup. Elizar crouches down to kindle the squat pot-bellied stove behind the counter, the same one they’d brought over in a hired dray from Land’s End when they’d moved. He balances the kettle on top, watching it tilt slightly to the right on the unleveled stovetop, and waits patiently for it to boil. When it does, he pours the water over a tea strainer, lifting it away after a few minutes and tapping it on the edge of the chipped mug to get the last of the liquor out before he sets it aside on a small plate. The tea is a greenish brown, with a faint undertone of red; he passes his palm over the top of it to test the temperature, then sighs when he realizes that if he drinks it now, he’ll burn his tongue.
Elizar taps his fingers on the countertop as he waits, looking at the letters, then sighs and reaches out to drag them toward him, shaking loose a knife from his wrist sheath to cut the string binding them together. He replaces the knife and sits back on a tall stool, spreading out the letters in front of him with a flick of his wrist.
There are three of them with Elizar Confesor addressed on the front. He recognizes one hand as Peter’s, the second is unfamiliar, and the third is Beka’s. Her slightly shaky script blocks out their mother’s name on a fourth envelope. Elizar sets that one aside, then uses the edge of his fingernail to open the second letter. Two pieces of paper fall out and he picks up the first.
Dear Master Confesor, it begins. We have arrived safe and sound in the rebel camp, after a not-uneventful journey from Cair Paravel to the Western Wild. I am pleased to say that your sister Beka is a delightful child.
He reads the letter in puzzlement that turns to bemusement when he sees the signature at the end is Leocadia of Newisle’s. So she’s taking her promise seriously! Elizar has to admit he hadn’t expected nearly so much of her, but it seems he’s been proven wrong. He’s not usually so glad to find that he’s not right, but he’s smiling slightly when he puts the letter aside and reaches for the second sheet of paper. It begins with the salutation, Oi, idiot!, which means it has to be from Mayor, when the bells over the door jangle and Kari Blanchfort bundles in, her hooves clicking dully on the wooden floor.
“Elizar!” she exclaims in delighted surprise, hurrying over to the counter in a flurry of skirts. “I hadn’t expected to see you back here so soon.”
He shoves the letters out of sight as discreetly as he can. “Well, Mum needs the help with Beka away,” he says, rising. “Just a moment and I’ll get your order.”
“How is dear Lior getting on?” Kari asks, dimpling at him as he collects the box and puts it on the counter. “I do hope whatever Beka has doesn’t prove to be too serious; it came on so quickly!”
The story they’re putting around is that Beka’s gone to stay with their father’s relatives on Terebinthia, which is still independent, at least for the moment. It’s suitably remote; he doubts anybody is going to check up on the truth of the matter. “I hope so too,” he says, watching as she counts out the payment, then presents the receipt to be signed. “Mum’s coping – I don’t mind helping out. It’s a little soothing, actually.”
“You’re such a good son,” she says, and hesitates a moment, resting her fingers lightly on the top of the big box of candies.
“How are you doing?” Elizar asks, taking the hint. “Do you still live on Canning Street? How is the flood damage there?”
“I suppose it could be worse,” she begins, and Elizar is treated to five minutes of Canning Street’s ups and downs, which he listens to solemnly, making mental notes about what he can and can’t do something about. When she pauses for breath, he says, “I’ll talk to a few people and see what I can do. It’s just terrible that you still have to live with all that, so long after the waters went.”
“Oh, thank you –”
“You know you can feel free to come and talk to me anytime,” Elizar says, giving her his most charming smile, and then adds, “Why don’t you take some peanut brittle for the road?”
“That’s so kind of you.” She takes a jagged piece off the plate he offers, then bundles the box under her arm and bids him farewell. Elizar watches her go, waiting until the door closes before he gets up and goes into the back room, pulling the door open. The two satyrs rise to their feet.
“Capo?” Gailamir says cautiously, like he’s expecting to be told off again.
“One of you go find Comitas and tell him to send a clean-up crew over to Canning Street and get it taken care of,” Elizar says. “A few of the trees went down in the storm and they haven’t been able to get them cleared away. Then go over to Aspar’s place and tell him that if he thinks he can overcharge to haul away debris, he’s got a lesson to learn.”
“Yes, boss,” says Gunderic, grinning at the thought. “That it?”
“For now,” Elizar says.
The Black Pearl is lucky; it sits on relatively high ground and doesn’t directly border the Great River, so most of the flooding is limited to the streets and a week’s worth of unending rain. The levees on the city bank had held strong when the South Bank levees had broken; the worst of the damage is in the South Bank by deliberate engineering. That hadn’t stopped the floodwaters from working their way through weak spots in the city walls – half a mile of wall in Oldcommon had crumbled away beneath the onslaught, letting the deluge into the city. Curfew or no curfew, the Garden District had had its servants out in full throwing up sandbags to keep the flood from spreading into the old city; thwarted, some of the waters had torn through the lower part of the Pearl before they’d had time to try and build a floodwall. Canning Street is one of the worst affected. Elizar’s lucky that the candy shop is on high ground, not far from the neutral ground between the Pearl and Liberty Park. None of the flooding on their street had gone above the top step of the shop.
When he gets back to the shop, his tea has gone lukewarm; Elizar sighs and drinks it anyway, the sweet aftertaste lingering in his mouth as he pulls the letters out again. Mayor’s letter, dictated to and scribed by Leocadia of Newisle, is alternately informative and insulting, more or less like Mayor himself. Elizar closes his eyes for a moment, the page crinkling between his fingers as the sense of loss overwhelms him. He and Mayor have been together for almost twelve years now; they know each other like two halves of the same soul. He isn’t used to Mayor being utterly out of reach.
Elizar pours himself more tea – hot, this time – and reaches for Peter’s letter. The High King’s handwriting is elegant and old-fashioned, flowing across the page without any inkblots. Elizar is perfectly willing to believe that an ink pen would be too terrified of the man to dare blot. The letter begins with the barest formality of greetings – Peter, High King of Narnia, salutes Elizar Confesor, capo del’perla and capo del’strada of the city of Cair Paravel – and then continues with a list of brisk demands half-heartedly disguised as requests. Elizar mulls them thoughtfully, considering their difficulty. Some of them will be easier than others; some are near impossible. He supposes he should be flattered at Peter’s estimation of his abilities.
In the street outside, there’s a fluting bird call, repeated at seemingly random intervals. Elizar’s head jerks up and he snatches the letter off the counter, grabbing the other three and stuffing them under the loose panel behind the tea rack, turning the motion into a stately inspection of the tins of oolong as the door bangs open.
“Can I help you?” he asks in a friendly voice, turning around to see three Provost’s Guards eyeing him with clear dislike. Two of them are regular officers, one human, one a satyr. The one in the lead is a woman with silver epaulettes on her shoulders – a constable. One of Prejun of Newisle’s attack dogs.
She hooks her thumbs into her broad black belt, looking him up and down and evidently coming up short of her expectations. “You can come with us,” she says.
“Mind if I ask why?” Elizar says, keeping his voice exceptionally mild.
“You can ask,” she says, sounding more bored than anything else. She taps one steel-toed boot against the front of the glass case in front of her. “It’d be a pity if anything got out of hand. So many breakable things in here.”
“Hang a bloke for asking,” Elizar says. “Mind if I take a moment to close up and let my mum know I’ve been called away?”
“Yeah, I do, actually,” she says, and when he’s a little too slow coming out from behind the counter, grabs his arm and pulls him towards her. He stumbles a little as she forces him around, cuffing his hands as the satyr bends him over and searches him quickly, divesting him of six knives, his purse, and a pack of playing cards.
“Hey!” he protests as the guardsman empties it into his palm and tosses the pouch away, grinning broadly. It fades a little when the constable makes him hand it over.
“You’ll get your cut later, boys,” she says, and hauls Elizar up, walking him out the door in front of her. He groans as he sees what’s waiting for him – one of the carriages they call a lockbox, four-wheeled and enclosed on all sides, drawn by two horses.
“Lady, come on, I’m a law-abiding citizen –”
“Lord Provost wants a word with you,” she says, as the satyr guardsman opens the door in the back, then helpfully shoves Elizar inside. “And that’s constable to you, Confessor.”
“Constable, come on, this isn’t necessary –”
She shuts the door in his face, and Elizar sits back on the dirty floor with a sigh, testing his handcuffs as an afterthought. He can get out of them, but there doesn’t really seem to be much point in it right now. Fuck, his mother’s going to just love this. He hopes she didn’t see them taking him away.
The lockbox starts moving with a jerk, Elizar’s teeth rattling together as it clatters over the worn cobblestones. There’s no comfortable way to sit in a lockbox – this isn’t the first time he’s been dragged in, though it’s been a while – but he scoots carefully over to the center of the carriage and sits cross-legged, trying not to overbalance and fall into the wall. Some thin sunlight leaks in through the cracks in the wall, enough that Elizar can determine there’s no easy way for him to get out of the lockbox short of the coppers opening the door and hauling him out. A minotaur could probably smash his or her way through the walls, though in theory the Guard had reinforced them with thin iron latticing after the last time that had happened. One of Elizar’s men in the Guard had said that more of the money had gone into the guard-captains’ pockets than to the smithies, so he doubts that the walls of the lockbox are anything more than one thin layer of wood. Still, he has to admit a little curiosity; last he’d heard Piss-for-Gold Prejun was still recuperating after the injuries he’d sustained in the fire that burned down his house. The rest of the Long Table has been hauled in for questioning and released; the route to staying alive in Cair Paravel is staying smart, quick, and clean. He’s surprised no one had come for him sooner.
By the time the lockbox finally stops moving, Elizar has a headache from being jarred around so much. He puts his cuffed hands up to protect his eyes as the doors are thrown open, stumbling a little as the cops pull him out. He gets a look around as they frog-march up through the back courtyard of the Garden District guard-station: almost impossible to tell that there was flooding here at all. Not that there had been much, or maybe even any; the Garden District sits the highest ground in the city besides the palace itself.
“Oh, we’re uptown. Things must be serious,” he drawls, and gets a slap upside his head for the effort.
He gets a few looks from the guards loitering around the guard-station as they take him inside; a few of them smirk, while the woman he has spying for him looks briefly concerned and then turns it into a mocking laugh. Elizar blows her a kiss, then another to a guardsman lingering beside the locker room, bare-chested and with his shirt hanging from his hand. The man recoils; the constable hits him again.
“You know,” he tells her, “there are places in Cair Paravel you can go for that. I know a woman who knows a boy –”
“Shut the fuck up, Confessor,” she snaps, shoving into a dark interrogation room. The guardsmen chain him to the table, then light the lantern in the corner, filling the room with the smell of cheap whale oil. Elizar wrinkles his nose in distaste.
“You can wait for the Lord Provost to have time to bother with you,” the constable tells him, then shuts the door.
Elizar sits back in his chair with a sigh. It’s made of rickety wood, with splinters that poke into his arse and back, but at least it’s a proper chair, which is something better than the floor of the lockbox. He looks around, unsurprised to see that Garden District interrogation rooms are somewhat more hospitable than Black Pearl interrogation rooms, or at least more pleasant to wait in. The last one he’d been in had been plain gray stone; this one is paneled in soft golden wood. There’s even a window, set high up near the ceiling.
Nice to look at or not, an interrogation room is still an interrogation room, and when the Lord Provost doesn’t show after twenty minutes, Elizar folds his arms on the table and puts his head down on them, letting himself doze off. When he opens his eyes again the ray of sunlight on the floor has moved; two hours have passed, and he sighs, pained. Mum’s going to be furious; he hopes Symeon doesn’t do anything stupid. He’s a cub yet, despite his protestations to the contrary. Well, this will be his trial by fire.
He looks around at the door. His throat is dry; the only thing he’s eaten or drank all day has been the two cups of tea from the shop, and it’s been a good three hours since then, maybe more. Still, Elizar hardly thinks the Guard is going to feed or water him, even if they haven’t forgotten about him – and he doubts that – so he puts his head back down and tries to go back to sleep. It’s not like there’s anything else to do, and he hadn’t had his lockpicks on him when they’d taken him.
He dreams in fits and starts, an uncomfortable mélange of words and image that make no sense to him. A tall blonde woman with a stone knife in her hands lit by firelight turns into an ancient oak tree rousing itself and splitting a door in its side and someone whispers, I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms – Elizar seems to tumble downwards through the clear blue waters of the Great Eastern Ocean onto the hard wooden floor of a bedroom; he stands again and finds himself in a snow-covered clearing, light shining down from a lamppost lit by no true fire. He looks into the heart of the lantern and sees seven people sitting at a table, the remains of a meal before them. He hears Peter’s voice as clearly as if the man spoke into his ear, “If you are from Narnia, I charge you in the name of Aslan, speak to me. I am Peter the High King.” Even as he speaks a green serpent rises up from the floor and coils about him, hissing as it covers Peter completely and transforms into a beautiful woman in a green dress who holds her hand out to him and says in a poison-sweet voice, We often meet our friends in strange places when we dream. He opens his mouth to reply and the word spirals away; Elizar closes his eyes to Peter’s face and opens them to ruins huge and ancient beyond all imagination. UNDER ME, they whisper, then twist again, until a great white palace rises up above him, crumbling away into the broken ruins on the Nameless Isle, sixteen hundred years in a heartbeat. Beneath them, a great purple sail spreads against the sunset, a dragon-headed ship racing eastward, against a horizon that raises the empty towering buildings of a dead city. The light is reddish, the air dry and stale as Elizar breathes it in. He knows, abruptly and without real thought, that this is neither Narnia nor any other place in this world. He turns, looking for any sign of life, any sign whatsoever, and finds himself in a forest where the ground is littered with pools of water. He bends over to look more closely at one and sees the most beautiful apple tree he’s ever seen, the leaves a brilliant green and the apples an equally brilliant silver. He reaches down to pluck one, arm passing through the water like air −
A lion roars in his ear and Elizar kicks over his chair as he leaps to his feet, looking around frantically before he remembers that it was all a dream. He flattens his palms against the tabletop and leans against it, panting; he feels like he’s just run from one end of the North Bank to the other. As if he’s lived a thousand years in a heartbeat.
Out of old habit, he tries to bring his right hand up to make the four-point sign that he hasn’t done in years, but the chain binding him to the table jerks him back down, digging painfully into his wrist. The words are still on his lips: O Aslan, who dwelleth over the Great Sea, glory to Thy Name. We fear no evil for You walk beside us, no darkness for You light our path, no winter for You warm our spirit; today, and tomorrow, and every day. Amen.
He chokes back the prayer; there’s nothing more useless than a prayer to a god he doesn’t believe in. His hands are shaking slightly as he turns towards the chair he’d upended; the cuffs prevent him from righting it properly. Elizar hooks one foot around a leg and tries to right it that way, which doesn’t quite succeed in doing anything but dragging it closer to him. He puts his knee on the seat and bears down.
One of the back legs cracks off.
Elizar stares down at it in dismay, his heart pounding in his chest; his thoughts don’t seem to coalesce clearly. All he can do is stare at it.
Eventually, the fog that seems to have seeped into his brain fades away, and he shakes his head, giving up the chair as a lost cause. He doesn’t feel particularly inclined to spend the next who-knows-how-many hours standing, so he perches on the table, both arms drawn awkwardly across his body by the chain passed through a ring on the table. By the sunlight coming in through the window, it hasn’t been more than a half-hour since he last looked at it. It feels like longer.
He wonders how long Newisle expects him to wait. The bloody minotaur may not have anything better to do, but Elizar does, and every minute he’s cooling his heels in the Garden District is a minute he’s not spending doing something that’s actually useful in the Pearl. Or Land’s End, but even he hasn’t been able to get past the roadblocks on the districts, and especially not over the Bridge of Sighs. If this goes on much longer, someone else is going to make a try for his seat in Land’s End, and then there’s going to be fighting.
He deliberately doesn’t think of his dream. Thinking about it gives him a headache, so Elizar doesn’t think about it, just taps his fingers irritably against the side of his knee and hopes that Newisle hurries up and gets this over with.
One of Mayor’s sacred Four is apparently with him today, because he barely has to wait fifteen minutes before the door opens. He gets a look at the constable who’d brought him in, standing in the hallway with her hand on her sword hilt, before the doorway is filled with the bulk of a tall minotaur with salt-and-pepper fur – still more pepper than salt, though Prejun is starting to show his years. Elizar flicks his gaze upwards to study his face, keeping his expression as impassive as possible. Minotaurs are impressive as a general rule of thumb, but Elizar’s from the Black Pearl, where nonhumans outnumber humans six to one. He got over being impressed a long time ago.
The only sign of the injuries the Lord Provost had supposedly sustained in the fire that burnt his house to the ground in the middle of a rainstorm is a swath of white bandage around his sword hand. If the fire singed him at all, Elizar can’t see it.
“Lord Prejun,” he says after the door shuts behind the minotaur, “been a while, hasn’t it? Two years? Or was it three?”
“Get off the table,” Prejun says.
“Two and a half,” Elizar decides. “Right around Long Dusk – I remember now. Your thugs pulled me in when I should have been out building bonfires in the street like everyone else.”
Prejun scowls. “That’s illegal in the city.”
“Nothing’s illegal on festival days. King’s orders – oh, wait. The king’s been deposed. Nice way you have of mourning.” He runs his tongue over his teeth, grinning. “I heard the Callies lost the King of Summer and the Queen of Spring. Right out from under your nose. Aren’t you supposed to keep order in Cair Paravel these days?”
“Shut up, you fool,” Prejun snaps. He crosses his arms over his massive chest. “Where’s your friend the tiger?”
“I know a few tigers. Which one do you mean?” He knows very well who the Lord Provost means; Mayor had told him he’d been fool enough to let himself be seen by Prejun, and there aren’t more than a handful of white tigers in Cair Paravel. Most people think they’re unlucky; they bear the touch of the Queen of Winter, all the color bleached from their fur.
“I think you know which one I mean. Your little pussy-cat.” He sneers. “May Your Life Be Long And Your Enemies Honorable.”
“Mayor?” Elizar drawls. “Mayor was on the last boat to Terebinthia before you lunatics closed off the districts. He went with my sister to visit my dad’s family. This weather’s hell on his bones; he broke a leg and a couple of ribs a few years back, and he feels it every time it rains.”
“You lie!” Prejun snarls. He strikes his good fist down on the table; Elizar feels it jump beneath his thighs, but Prejun doesn’t succeed in unseating him. “I know you conspired with Tirian and his outlander friends to the purpose of aiding the rebels in the west –”
“If you knew anything, I’d be in Bahadur’s dungeons right now, not in interrogation,” Elizar says, and smiles, soft. “You just pulled be in here to jerk me around and fuck up my day. Congratulations, by the way. I’m sure my mum’s real pissed at you. Someone has to work the shop now that B’s on her way to Terebinthia – might even have made it through the Labyrinth by now – and Pirmin’s still picking up after the mess the floods made of Dally Street. Nice going with that. If you had the Guard out there helping with clean-up instead of fucking with innocent civilians, maybe your blokes wouldn’t be getting bottles thrown at their heads every time they go off the main roads.” He lets his inner-city accent grow broader as he speaks, watching Prejun wince in an impression of well-bred disdain. Prejun wasn’t even born in the Black Pearl; he came out of Rustwater on the North Bank, though he’s gone to considerable lengths to pretend that’s not so.
“You and the rest of the Table are up to something,” Prejun says, leaning in so that Elizar can smell the alcohol on his breath. “I know it, and I’ll find out what it is –”
“You must not be in Bahadur’s good graces,” Elizar purrs. “How do you like coming home to an empty bed – oh, wait, you can’t go home. Burned to the ground in a rainstorm, in the middle of the Garden District at that. I bet the fire brigade up here actually puts out fires, too.” He grins. “That has to look bad. I hear the priests are saying that the gods have turned their eyes from you because you collaborated with the Callies.”
Prejun roars in anger, swinging a fist at Elizar’s head. Elizar feels it go over his head as he ducks. “That hit a little too close to the heart? You got any other theories about what I’m up to besides trying to put my neighborhood back together? Because I don’t know what you bastards up here in the Garden District do, but we’ve got actual damage down in the Pearl. I don’t have the time or the money for your conspiracy theories.”
“I will discover what you’ve done,” Prejun says, face so close to Elizar’s that he can feel the minotaur’s warm, slightly fermented exhalations of breath.
“Look as long as you like,” Elizar retorts. “You won’t find anything.”
Prejun scowls and pulls away, throwing open the door. “Get this idiot out of my station,” he orders.
This time a pair of guardsmen, both satyrs, escort him to the front of the station, where he finds Symeon pacing impatiently behind Peneli Balasz as she argues eloquently with a belligerent-looking dwarf behind the counter.
“You can’t hold him here, not without a magistrate’s order –”
“Peneli,” Elizar says, and sees her ruddy head swing around towards him, “I appreciate the sentiment, but you can give it up before all our ears start bleeding.”
“Oh, good, you’re all right,” she says, not sounding it. “I am still getting paid, aren’t I?”
“The indelicacy of the question shocks me, but yes, you’re getting paid.” Elizar rolls his eyes. “Ta, boys,” he says to the guardsmen. “Until next time.”
“The sooner the better, Confesor,” one of them says, and Symeon snarls slightly.
“Grow a pair,” Peneli informs him as the three of them emerge into the sunlight. There’s a pedicab waiting in front of the station, the centaur in its traces one of Elizar’s old school friends.
“Nice vacation, Eli?” he says, raising his head as they climb in.
“Stunning,” Elizar drawls. “I’ll be sure to book rooms for the whole family next time.” He sits back as the cab begins moving, rolling his wrists and listening to them pop. Peneli sits next to him, her expression bored and distracted; Symeon drapes himself across the floor, trying and failing to make his expression mild. Elizar looks down at him. “I get hauled away by the coppers and you call a barrister?”
“Was I supposed to call an undertaker?” Symeon inquires defensively, sitting up.
“You’re supposed to be with my mother!”
“I waited until Tulip and Periwinkle got there before I left!” the hyena protests, the ridge of fur along his spine bristling defensively. “And the Leadbeaters were there. I’m not stupid.”
“Looks aside, he’s not, Elizar,” Peneli says, scribbling on a leather-backed notepad. “He went about the business quite sensibly. Mayor would have been proud.” She rips the paper off and hands it to Elizar. “Here’s your bill.”
He glances at it, then stuff it into a pocket. “Any chance you’ll take it out in trade? They were going to let me go anyway.”
“You honestly can’t expect to pay me in thirty pounds of fudge,” Peneli sniffs. “Remember, you want me to show up the next time Spots comes and batters at my door.”
“I did not –” Symeon says indignantly. “And stop calling me Spots! Nobody calls Sammi Spots.”
“Sammi bites when people try and give him nicknames,” says Peneli. “And everyone takes him seriously. Nobody takes you seriously; you’re still too fuzzy.”
Symeon scowls at her and settles back down on the floor of the pedicab, putting his head on his paws. “I wish you wouldn’t all make fun of me,” he says plaintively.
“Give it up, Peneli,” Elizar says, because Symeon is starting to look strained around the edges. He has a taste for outcasts; hyenas are even more unlucky than white tigers, and Symeon had been persecuted in the Lion’s Den, the orphanage Elizar had pulled him out of two years ago, when Symeon had still been a cub, a small miserable bundle of brown and black fur.
He changes the subject. “I have to admit I’m impressed you managed to talk your way past the roadblocks. I didn’t think even you were that good.”
“I could be,” she suggests, then shakes her head. “They took the roadblocks down about an hour ago. Either the Callies finally caught who they were looking for or they got bored of trying. It’s about damned time, too.”
Elizar blinks in surprise; that’s the last thing he’d expected. “It is about damned time,” he agrees. He glances down at Symeon, who looks up at him expectantly, his ears perking slightly. “How is Mum taking it?”
Symeon shrugs. “She didn’t seem much bothered,” he offers. “She made me send a runner to get Pirmin from Dally Street because she said she couldn’t run the shop on her own.”
Elizar considers this. “Good,” he says finally. “We’re going to Land’s End. Go and send the word ahead that now’s the time for everyone to pay their taxes.”
When they cross the Bridge of Sighs and rattle up through the broken streets of Land’s End half an hour later, it’s to find the doors of the Blackfire Club thrown open, a spill of noise coming from inside. Elizar dismounts the pedicab and pays Villi. “Come in and have a drink,” he invites.
Villi doesn’t even pause to consider it, just twists to unhitch himself with quick, certain movements. “Not like I don’t have the time,” he says.
Elizar strides into the club and throws his arms wide, grinning as the crowd that’s already gathered inside roars a welcome. “Hello, boys and girls,” he says. “Did you miss me?”
He stumbles home to the Black Pearl hours later, long past midnight, more than a little drunk and with his pockets full. Taxes hadn’t been particularly good this week; nobody’s had the time to go out and make money, not when the Bridge of Sighs is closed. There’s nothing to steal in Land’s End.
The bodyguards on the back door nod hello to him as he lets himself inside, locking the door behind him. The shop is dark, and he stumbles for a moment before he remembers that he’s been living here since he was eleven and knows where everything is. He finds his way to the stairs and starts up them, stepping sideways to avoid the creaky spot on the fifth step. He emerges into the kitchen, blinking at the sudden glow of candlelight. His mum is sitting at the kitchen table, absently winding a ball of yarn; she sets it aside as he approaches.
“Mum,” he says, blinking slowly at her. He leans against the doorframe. “What are you doing up?”
“I was worried for you,” she says, pressing her lips together tightly. “You didn’t come home after the Provost’s Guard let you go.”
“Well, I’m fine,” he says defensively. He starts to step away from the doorway, then stumbles before he rights himself, the world spinning briefly in front of him.
“You should have sent word.”
“I was busy.”
“You were in Land’s End, drinking with your friends!” Her voice is a sudden snarl of anger as she rises. The ball of yarn goes rolling away across the table as she jars it and drops onto the floor, unraveling as it goes. “The Guard came and took you away in a lockbox, and you couldn’t see fit to let me know when they let you go!”
“Well, you obviously found out!” Elizar snaps back. “It was a misunderstanding –”
“Do you think I’m stupid? I know what you do! I know what pays for the shop, for this flat, for everything! I know why Beka isn’t here and why Lamentation keeps coming in and asking for her son, and I know it’s because of you!” she screams.
“Beka’s safe, and Mayor’s with her!”
“Because you got them into this – this underworld! You got your sister into trouble! For all I know, you got Lamentation’s son killed!”
“Don’t bring Beka into this!” Elizar bellows. “She has nothing to do with anything I do –”
“Then where is she? Where’s my daughter?”
“She’s my sister too, damnit!”
“Why couldn’t you have been like your father!” Mum shouts at him. “Aryel never would have –”
“Dad’s dead!” He slams his fist into the table. “Damn it, Dad’s dead, and if I were anything like him, I would be dead too. You think you can stay straight in Cair Paravel and survive? Well, you’re fucking wrong. You lie, you cheat, you steal, you murder if you have to, and you stay alive. You’re just too fucking blind to see it.” He storms past her, shoulder bumping roughly against hers as she grabs at him.
“Come back here, Elizar!”
He slams his bedroom door shut, kicking it furiously when it tries to bounce open again. He hears his mother shriek, “Damn you, Aryel!” and slams his fist into the wall, then snatches up the pillow from his bed and screams into it, wordless with rage.
It’s not like it isn’t all true.
----------
Gunderic and Gailamir Leadbeater first appear (in the flesh) in this ficbit.
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
Content Advisory: Includes imagery of flood aftermath in a major urban area
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: Thanks to
snacky for the beta, and to everyone who contributed to the discussion about Narnian prayers. Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW.Cair Paravel stinks of rotting garbage.
The refuse from the flooding has gathered in the streets and refused to leave; the prisoner crews that usually clean up after a minor disaster like a riot or a festival have been tasked by the Calormenes to clear Goldhouse Row and the Garden District. Only after the gentry and the moneygrubbers have been taken care of will they turn their attention to places like Liberty Park and Bonfire Hill, home of the perfectly respectable; the Black Pearl and the Mare’s Quarter will follow after that, and the North Bank will probably be forgotten entirely. Elizar isn’t even certain they’ll remember the Pearl.
The neighborhood’s inhabitants have been doing what they can to repair the worst of the damage and Elizar’s tasked his own people to do the heavy lifting, but it’s been slow going, hampered by the curfew that’s still in place and the roadblocks the Calormenes have set up to keep people from leaving their districts. Even most of the tunnels beneath the city, that have stood intact for two hundred years, are flooded out. Some people are muttering about the curse of the gods.
Elizar doesn’t much care for gods, real or imagined; Peter and Susan are far from Cair Paravel and presumably have something else on their minds. He’s been grumpy and short-tempered since the night the levees broke. In company, he blames it on the situation in the city, occasionally allows himself to complain about having incompetents do his scut work in Mayor’s absence, berates Symeon for not being as competent as Mayor when he scurries to obey Elizar’s orders. When he’s on his own, he busies himself with paperwork and schemes that vary from simple to elaborate in their planning and execution. He has a bargain to uphold; he’s not going to scant his side of it just because getting around in the city right now is a little difficult.
About two weeks after the day the levees broke – Elizar thinks of it that way, firmly, to keep it from being the day Beka left and took Mayor with her – Elizar comes into the kitchen early one morning to find his mother peeling potatoes with great feeling and Nazca DiTomasso sitting at the breakfast table drinking chicory coffee, leaning her chair back against the wall, the front two legs off the floor. Symeon sulks in a corner; he doesn’t quite have Mayor’s force of personality, which Elizar shouldn’t blame him for but does anyway.
“What the fuck are you doing in my mother’s flat?” Elizar snaps, reaching for the crossbow leaning against the wall. These days it’s impossible to be too careful. Of course, with them “these days” have gone back to his father’s murder. Lior Confesor just used to be better at keeping weapons out of the hands of her children.
“Language, Elizar!” his mother snaps, banging a potato down onto the cutting board.
Nazca smirks. She’s Bencivenni Maresti’s youngest sister, a slimmed down, prettier version of her brother, and Elizar entertains the idea of a crossbow bolt going through her skull with great enthusiasm as she says, “That’s right, Elizar, language. Wouldn’t want to go upsetting young ears now, would we?”
“I’m three,” Symeon snarls. “I’m not a cub!”
“But of course,” Nazca says, tossing her black hair over her shoulder. “How could I have missed your great age and the wisdom that accompanies it? Should I ask over your rheumatism or is that too delicate a subject?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Elizar snarls, jerking the crossbow up. The good thing about crossbows is that you can keep them spanned without weakening their draw over time. “You want polite? What the hell are you doing in my mother’s flat, you two-faced bitch?”
“Put that thing down before you hurt yourself with it,” Nazca says, bringing the front two legs of her chair back down to the floor with a bang. “A little trigger-happy these days, are you? Your big pussy cat was never much of a conscience, but I guess a hair’s worth was better than nothing –”
“I swear on my father’s shade, DiTomasso –”
“Elizar Avram Confesor!” his mother says, turning around with the kitchen knife in her hand. Bits of potato are still sticking to it. In the corner, Symeon stands up, lips skinning back along his teeth in a silent snarl.
Nazca glares at her, her expression dismissive. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot, Confesor,” she says, rising from her seat. She tucks her thumbs into her wide leather sword belt, hitching it up an inch or so. “I’m just here to deliver the mail. You’ve been a little scarce around the town lately.”
“Some of us actually have responsibilities to our neighborhoods,” Elizar says, not letting the crossbow waver. “I’d tell you to ask your brother about that, but he might be the only person in Cair Paravel to have benefited from this fiasco.”
“Same selfish bastard as ever, I see.” She reaches into her jacket – Elizar’s grip tightens on the crossbow – and tosses a packet of letters onto the table. “Might be a little damp. A doyarchu brought them downriver last night.”
“There are no doyarchu in the Great River.”
“There are now.” She flicks her fingers at him in something akin to a farewell. “Thanks for the coffee, Lior. Symeon, you’re as adorable as ever; if they made small stuffed replicas of you I’d buy one for my little girl. Since you happen to be a hyena, they don’t. Confesor, that’s an awful small crossbow; are you trying to send a message?”
“Go to hell.”
“I’m not one for cold,” Nazca says, and breezes out the door before Elizar can tell her in exacting detail what she can do in hell and with whom. Instead he keeps the crossbow on the door until he hears the back door of the shop slam shut and the bodyguards downstairs say their farewells, or insults; he can’t quite hear which. Either way, they shouldn’t have let Nazca into the building.
“Put that down,” his mother says immediately. She’s watching out the window; the kitchen overlooks the narrow alley that runs between this building and the one behind it.
Elizar does. “Mum, you should have yelled as soon as she came in –”
She goes on as if he hadn’t spoken. “We’re running late. Go downstairs and open up the shop; Kari Blanchfort is coming by to pick up a special order for Loris’s birthday and I don’t want her to have to wait on the step.”
“I haven’t even had breakfast yet!” Elizar protests, which is probably one of the less dignified things he’s said. The shop’s been suffering, like most of the other businesses in the Pearl, but it should be back on regular hours now. He’s been helping out here and there, usually in the kitchen, where he hasn’t burnt a batch of pralines since he was fourteen. He makes a habit of working the counter at least a few times a month, to remind people in the neighborhood that he’s a part of the Pearl too, that he’s as normal as the rest of them. He doesn’t want people to forget who he is or think he’s above the regular ebb and flow of life in Cair Paravel.
“Go!” Mum empties the cutting board’s worth of sliced potatoes into a skillet, then bangs the skillet back onto the counter, sending bits of potato flying everywhere. Symeon ducks, expression slightly panicked; he probably didn’t have to put up with this sort of thing in the orphanage where Elizar picked him up.
It’s no good arguing with her now – hasn’t been since Beka left, which is why they’re shorthanded in the shop in the first place, especially with Pirmin gone; he’s been helping with the clean-up – so Elizar goes, snatching the packet up off the table as he passes it. Symeon starts to follow him, but Elizar motions him to stay; he doesn’t feel like company right now and he’ll feel better having someone with Mum, anyway.
Downstairs, the shop is dark and quiet, the windows still shuttered for the night. Elizar puts the packet of letters down on the counter, then ducks into the back room to get out the trays of creamy fudge and pecan-rich pralines, crushed hazelnut truffles and brightly colored marzipan. He shoulders the back door open, balancing a covered tray of salted caramels on his hip, and sees his bodyguards scramble to their feet.
“You want to tell me why you let Nazca DiTomasso waltz right on in and up the stairs?” he says, his voice mild.
“She had the proper countersigns, and this week’s passwords –” Gunderic Leadbeater begins defensively, bristling.
“Have you gone blind or just stupid?” Elizar inquires. “Stupider than usual, I mean. If you can’t recognize Bencivenni Maresti’s sister, I really don’t know what use I have for you.”
Gailamir tenses too. “She had the passwords! It wasn’t Gund’s fault –”
“No, you were responsible too,” Elizar says. “Tell me, if Prince Bahadur himself walked up the street and gave you the countersigns and the passwords, would you let him in?”
They’re both silent a moment too long for comfort, and Elizar makes a disgusted sound. “That sodding lion of yours have mercy, I’m beset by incompetents. If that hadn’t been Nazca DiTomasso, you’d both be dead right now. If it happens again, I’ll kill you both and sell you to the gluemaker, make some profit off your sorry hides. Is that clear?”
The twins grumble reluctant agreement and Elizar pulls back into the room, letting the door bang shut behind him. He carries tray after tray of candy into the front and starts putting in them in the expensive glass display cases – a Promise of Hope gift to his mother six years ago, when he’d still been trying to find ways of apologizing to her for taking up with the Long Table and then lying to her about it. He finds the Blanchfort order tucked in the till and boxes it up carefully, wrapping the candy in layers of softy crinkly paper so that nothing breaks or crumbles. They used to use old newsprint; they can afford better now. He checks the neatly-labeled tins of teas racked on the walls behind the counter, making sure that everything is in its proper place and that they’re not out of anything. A few are low and he ducks into the back to refill them from the barrels they’d originally been packed in, careful not to spill any of the fragrant leaves on the floor. That done and the tins replaced on the rack, Elizar goes to unshutter the windows and turn the sign on the door from CLOSED to OPEN.
It’s bright out, a perfect spring day with just a hint of early morning chill still lingering in the air. Most of the refuse from the flooding has been cleared away on this street and the ones surrounding it; even if Elizar didn’t live here, thus giving it priority, the shop is still in the good part of the Black Pearl. The slightly less well-off neighborhoods in the district are slowly being cleaned street by street. Very slowly; the Pearl’s one of the largest districts in the city and the Calormenes don’t give a damn for it. Elizar may be bitter, but he’s hardly surprised.
There aren't many people in the street this morning. Elizar raises a hand to Thwaite across the way, standing in the door of the bakery and bargaining heatedly with an old fruit seller Elizar’s seen every morning in the Pearl since they moved here from Land’s End twelve years ago. Even in the dead of winter she always has apples so crisp and juicy they might have just come off the tree; he’s never asked, but he strongly suspects she’s got dryad blood. His view is briefly obscured as a cart pulled by a morose-looking donkey rattles by, driven by a dwarf even more bent and scraggy than usual. He flaps a hand at Elizar in what might be a wave; erring on the side of caution, Elizar waves back. Esteban, he thinks his name is. Works at the butcher’s shop ‘round the corner.
For a moment, standing in the door of the shop, Elizar can pretend he’s fifteen again, opening up for Mum before he has to run to school. When he was fifteen, the old king was still on his throne, the capo del’strada and the capo del’perla still ruled their districts with iron hands, and the Calormenes had still been in fucking Calormen. When he’d been fifteen, Elizar hadn’t been mixed up in any of this shit.
The moment passes. Elizar isn’t fifteen anymore and he is mixed up in this shit; he turns around and goes back into the shop, letting the door close behind him.
He goes back behind the counter, eyeing the letters there like they might turn into the beasts of the Lady of the Green Kirtle and strike at him. Not yet, he thinks – it’s still too early in the morning for the kind of anxiety that will cause. He hasn’t even had his tea yet.
The remedy for that is stocked behind him. Elizar takes down one of the centaur blends, Call Up the Sun, then, because he has the feeling it’s going to be one of those days, adds a spoonful of a headache soother that an old badger he knows swears by. He puts two crescents into the cashbox, because Mum won’t take money from him, but money’s still the best way he knows to solve a problem, that or throat-slitting. The latter isn’t exactly an option in this case.
A quick shake of the kettle they keep downstairs for samples and their own use tells him that there’s at least enough water for a cup. Elizar crouches down to kindle the squat pot-bellied stove behind the counter, the same one they’d brought over in a hired dray from Land’s End when they’d moved. He balances the kettle on top, watching it tilt slightly to the right on the unleveled stovetop, and waits patiently for it to boil. When it does, he pours the water over a tea strainer, lifting it away after a few minutes and tapping it on the edge of the chipped mug to get the last of the liquor out before he sets it aside on a small plate. The tea is a greenish brown, with a faint undertone of red; he passes his palm over the top of it to test the temperature, then sighs when he realizes that if he drinks it now, he’ll burn his tongue.
Elizar taps his fingers on the countertop as he waits, looking at the letters, then sighs and reaches out to drag them toward him, shaking loose a knife from his wrist sheath to cut the string binding them together. He replaces the knife and sits back on a tall stool, spreading out the letters in front of him with a flick of his wrist.
There are three of them with Elizar Confesor addressed on the front. He recognizes one hand as Peter’s, the second is unfamiliar, and the third is Beka’s. Her slightly shaky script blocks out their mother’s name on a fourth envelope. Elizar sets that one aside, then uses the edge of his fingernail to open the second letter. Two pieces of paper fall out and he picks up the first.
Dear Master Confesor, it begins. We have arrived safe and sound in the rebel camp, after a not-uneventful journey from Cair Paravel to the Western Wild. I am pleased to say that your sister Beka is a delightful child.
He reads the letter in puzzlement that turns to bemusement when he sees the signature at the end is Leocadia of Newisle’s. So she’s taking her promise seriously! Elizar has to admit he hadn’t expected nearly so much of her, but it seems he’s been proven wrong. He’s not usually so glad to find that he’s not right, but he’s smiling slightly when he puts the letter aside and reaches for the second sheet of paper. It begins with the salutation, Oi, idiot!, which means it has to be from Mayor, when the bells over the door jangle and Kari Blanchfort bundles in, her hooves clicking dully on the wooden floor.
“Elizar!” she exclaims in delighted surprise, hurrying over to the counter in a flurry of skirts. “I hadn’t expected to see you back here so soon.”
He shoves the letters out of sight as discreetly as he can. “Well, Mum needs the help with Beka away,” he says, rising. “Just a moment and I’ll get your order.”
“How is dear Lior getting on?” Kari asks, dimpling at him as he collects the box and puts it on the counter. “I do hope whatever Beka has doesn’t prove to be too serious; it came on so quickly!”
The story they’re putting around is that Beka’s gone to stay with their father’s relatives on Terebinthia, which is still independent, at least for the moment. It’s suitably remote; he doubts anybody is going to check up on the truth of the matter. “I hope so too,” he says, watching as she counts out the payment, then presents the receipt to be signed. “Mum’s coping – I don’t mind helping out. It’s a little soothing, actually.”
“You’re such a good son,” she says, and hesitates a moment, resting her fingers lightly on the top of the big box of candies.
“How are you doing?” Elizar asks, taking the hint. “Do you still live on Canning Street? How is the flood damage there?”
“I suppose it could be worse,” she begins, and Elizar is treated to five minutes of Canning Street’s ups and downs, which he listens to solemnly, making mental notes about what he can and can’t do something about. When she pauses for breath, he says, “I’ll talk to a few people and see what I can do. It’s just terrible that you still have to live with all that, so long after the waters went.”
“Oh, thank you –”
“You know you can feel free to come and talk to me anytime,” Elizar says, giving her his most charming smile, and then adds, “Why don’t you take some peanut brittle for the road?”
“That’s so kind of you.” She takes a jagged piece off the plate he offers, then bundles the box under her arm and bids him farewell. Elizar watches her go, waiting until the door closes before he gets up and goes into the back room, pulling the door open. The two satyrs rise to their feet.
“Capo?” Gailamir says cautiously, like he’s expecting to be told off again.
“One of you go find Comitas and tell him to send a clean-up crew over to Canning Street and get it taken care of,” Elizar says. “A few of the trees went down in the storm and they haven’t been able to get them cleared away. Then go over to Aspar’s place and tell him that if he thinks he can overcharge to haul away debris, he’s got a lesson to learn.”
“Yes, boss,” says Gunderic, grinning at the thought. “That it?”
“For now,” Elizar says.
The Black Pearl is lucky; it sits on relatively high ground and doesn’t directly border the Great River, so most of the flooding is limited to the streets and a week’s worth of unending rain. The levees on the city bank had held strong when the South Bank levees had broken; the worst of the damage is in the South Bank by deliberate engineering. That hadn’t stopped the floodwaters from working their way through weak spots in the city walls – half a mile of wall in Oldcommon had crumbled away beneath the onslaught, letting the deluge into the city. Curfew or no curfew, the Garden District had had its servants out in full throwing up sandbags to keep the flood from spreading into the old city; thwarted, some of the waters had torn through the lower part of the Pearl before they’d had time to try and build a floodwall. Canning Street is one of the worst affected. Elizar’s lucky that the candy shop is on high ground, not far from the neutral ground between the Pearl and Liberty Park. None of the flooding on their street had gone above the top step of the shop.
When he gets back to the shop, his tea has gone lukewarm; Elizar sighs and drinks it anyway, the sweet aftertaste lingering in his mouth as he pulls the letters out again. Mayor’s letter, dictated to and scribed by Leocadia of Newisle, is alternately informative and insulting, more or less like Mayor himself. Elizar closes his eyes for a moment, the page crinkling between his fingers as the sense of loss overwhelms him. He and Mayor have been together for almost twelve years now; they know each other like two halves of the same soul. He isn’t used to Mayor being utterly out of reach.
Elizar pours himself more tea – hot, this time – and reaches for Peter’s letter. The High King’s handwriting is elegant and old-fashioned, flowing across the page without any inkblots. Elizar is perfectly willing to believe that an ink pen would be too terrified of the man to dare blot. The letter begins with the barest formality of greetings – Peter, High King of Narnia, salutes Elizar Confesor, capo del’perla and capo del’strada of the city of Cair Paravel – and then continues with a list of brisk demands half-heartedly disguised as requests. Elizar mulls them thoughtfully, considering their difficulty. Some of them will be easier than others; some are near impossible. He supposes he should be flattered at Peter’s estimation of his abilities.
In the street outside, there’s a fluting bird call, repeated at seemingly random intervals. Elizar’s head jerks up and he snatches the letter off the counter, grabbing the other three and stuffing them under the loose panel behind the tea rack, turning the motion into a stately inspection of the tins of oolong as the door bangs open.
“Can I help you?” he asks in a friendly voice, turning around to see three Provost’s Guards eyeing him with clear dislike. Two of them are regular officers, one human, one a satyr. The one in the lead is a woman with silver epaulettes on her shoulders – a constable. One of Prejun of Newisle’s attack dogs.
She hooks her thumbs into her broad black belt, looking him up and down and evidently coming up short of her expectations. “You can come with us,” she says.
“Mind if I ask why?” Elizar says, keeping his voice exceptionally mild.
“You can ask,” she says, sounding more bored than anything else. She taps one steel-toed boot against the front of the glass case in front of her. “It’d be a pity if anything got out of hand. So many breakable things in here.”
“Hang a bloke for asking,” Elizar says. “Mind if I take a moment to close up and let my mum know I’ve been called away?”
“Yeah, I do, actually,” she says, and when he’s a little too slow coming out from behind the counter, grabs his arm and pulls him towards her. He stumbles a little as she forces him around, cuffing his hands as the satyr bends him over and searches him quickly, divesting him of six knives, his purse, and a pack of playing cards.
“Hey!” he protests as the guardsman empties it into his palm and tosses the pouch away, grinning broadly. It fades a little when the constable makes him hand it over.
“You’ll get your cut later, boys,” she says, and hauls Elizar up, walking him out the door in front of her. He groans as he sees what’s waiting for him – one of the carriages they call a lockbox, four-wheeled and enclosed on all sides, drawn by two horses.
“Lady, come on, I’m a law-abiding citizen –”
“Lord Provost wants a word with you,” she says, as the satyr guardsman opens the door in the back, then helpfully shoves Elizar inside. “And that’s constable to you, Confessor.”
“Constable, come on, this isn’t necessary –”
She shuts the door in his face, and Elizar sits back on the dirty floor with a sigh, testing his handcuffs as an afterthought. He can get out of them, but there doesn’t really seem to be much point in it right now. Fuck, his mother’s going to just love this. He hopes she didn’t see them taking him away.
The lockbox starts moving with a jerk, Elizar’s teeth rattling together as it clatters over the worn cobblestones. There’s no comfortable way to sit in a lockbox – this isn’t the first time he’s been dragged in, though it’s been a while – but he scoots carefully over to the center of the carriage and sits cross-legged, trying not to overbalance and fall into the wall. Some thin sunlight leaks in through the cracks in the wall, enough that Elizar can determine there’s no easy way for him to get out of the lockbox short of the coppers opening the door and hauling him out. A minotaur could probably smash his or her way through the walls, though in theory the Guard had reinforced them with thin iron latticing after the last time that had happened. One of Elizar’s men in the Guard had said that more of the money had gone into the guard-captains’ pockets than to the smithies, so he doubts that the walls of the lockbox are anything more than one thin layer of wood. Still, he has to admit a little curiosity; last he’d heard Piss-for-Gold Prejun was still recuperating after the injuries he’d sustained in the fire that burned down his house. The rest of the Long Table has been hauled in for questioning and released; the route to staying alive in Cair Paravel is staying smart, quick, and clean. He’s surprised no one had come for him sooner.
By the time the lockbox finally stops moving, Elizar has a headache from being jarred around so much. He puts his cuffed hands up to protect his eyes as the doors are thrown open, stumbling a little as the cops pull him out. He gets a look around as they frog-march up through the back courtyard of the Garden District guard-station: almost impossible to tell that there was flooding here at all. Not that there had been much, or maybe even any; the Garden District sits the highest ground in the city besides the palace itself.
“Oh, we’re uptown. Things must be serious,” he drawls, and gets a slap upside his head for the effort.
He gets a few looks from the guards loitering around the guard-station as they take him inside; a few of them smirk, while the woman he has spying for him looks briefly concerned and then turns it into a mocking laugh. Elizar blows her a kiss, then another to a guardsman lingering beside the locker room, bare-chested and with his shirt hanging from his hand. The man recoils; the constable hits him again.
“You know,” he tells her, “there are places in Cair Paravel you can go for that. I know a woman who knows a boy –”
“Shut the fuck up, Confessor,” she snaps, shoving into a dark interrogation room. The guardsmen chain him to the table, then light the lantern in the corner, filling the room with the smell of cheap whale oil. Elizar wrinkles his nose in distaste.
“You can wait for the Lord Provost to have time to bother with you,” the constable tells him, then shuts the door.
Elizar sits back in his chair with a sigh. It’s made of rickety wood, with splinters that poke into his arse and back, but at least it’s a proper chair, which is something better than the floor of the lockbox. He looks around, unsurprised to see that Garden District interrogation rooms are somewhat more hospitable than Black Pearl interrogation rooms, or at least more pleasant to wait in. The last one he’d been in had been plain gray stone; this one is paneled in soft golden wood. There’s even a window, set high up near the ceiling.
Nice to look at or not, an interrogation room is still an interrogation room, and when the Lord Provost doesn’t show after twenty minutes, Elizar folds his arms on the table and puts his head down on them, letting himself doze off. When he opens his eyes again the ray of sunlight on the floor has moved; two hours have passed, and he sighs, pained. Mum’s going to be furious; he hopes Symeon doesn’t do anything stupid. He’s a cub yet, despite his protestations to the contrary. Well, this will be his trial by fire.
He looks around at the door. His throat is dry; the only thing he’s eaten or drank all day has been the two cups of tea from the shop, and it’s been a good three hours since then, maybe more. Still, Elizar hardly thinks the Guard is going to feed or water him, even if they haven’t forgotten about him – and he doubts that – so he puts his head back down and tries to go back to sleep. It’s not like there’s anything else to do, and he hadn’t had his lockpicks on him when they’d taken him.
He dreams in fits and starts, an uncomfortable mélange of words and image that make no sense to him. A tall blonde woman with a stone knife in her hands lit by firelight turns into an ancient oak tree rousing itself and splitting a door in its side and someone whispers, I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms – Elizar seems to tumble downwards through the clear blue waters of the Great Eastern Ocean onto the hard wooden floor of a bedroom; he stands again and finds himself in a snow-covered clearing, light shining down from a lamppost lit by no true fire. He looks into the heart of the lantern and sees seven people sitting at a table, the remains of a meal before them. He hears Peter’s voice as clearly as if the man spoke into his ear, “If you are from Narnia, I charge you in the name of Aslan, speak to me. I am Peter the High King.” Even as he speaks a green serpent rises up from the floor and coils about him, hissing as it covers Peter completely and transforms into a beautiful woman in a green dress who holds her hand out to him and says in a poison-sweet voice, We often meet our friends in strange places when we dream. He opens his mouth to reply and the word spirals away; Elizar closes his eyes to Peter’s face and opens them to ruins huge and ancient beyond all imagination. UNDER ME, they whisper, then twist again, until a great white palace rises up above him, crumbling away into the broken ruins on the Nameless Isle, sixteen hundred years in a heartbeat. Beneath them, a great purple sail spreads against the sunset, a dragon-headed ship racing eastward, against a horizon that raises the empty towering buildings of a dead city. The light is reddish, the air dry and stale as Elizar breathes it in. He knows, abruptly and without real thought, that this is neither Narnia nor any other place in this world. He turns, looking for any sign of life, any sign whatsoever, and finds himself in a forest where the ground is littered with pools of water. He bends over to look more closely at one and sees the most beautiful apple tree he’s ever seen, the leaves a brilliant green and the apples an equally brilliant silver. He reaches down to pluck one, arm passing through the water like air −
A lion roars in his ear and Elizar kicks over his chair as he leaps to his feet, looking around frantically before he remembers that it was all a dream. He flattens his palms against the tabletop and leans against it, panting; he feels like he’s just run from one end of the North Bank to the other. As if he’s lived a thousand years in a heartbeat.
Out of old habit, he tries to bring his right hand up to make the four-point sign that he hasn’t done in years, but the chain binding him to the table jerks him back down, digging painfully into his wrist. The words are still on his lips: O Aslan, who dwelleth over the Great Sea, glory to Thy Name. We fear no evil for You walk beside us, no darkness for You light our path, no winter for You warm our spirit; today, and tomorrow, and every day. Amen.
He chokes back the prayer; there’s nothing more useless than a prayer to a god he doesn’t believe in. His hands are shaking slightly as he turns towards the chair he’d upended; the cuffs prevent him from righting it properly. Elizar hooks one foot around a leg and tries to right it that way, which doesn’t quite succeed in doing anything but dragging it closer to him. He puts his knee on the seat and bears down.
One of the back legs cracks off.
Elizar stares down at it in dismay, his heart pounding in his chest; his thoughts don’t seem to coalesce clearly. All he can do is stare at it.
Eventually, the fog that seems to have seeped into his brain fades away, and he shakes his head, giving up the chair as a lost cause. He doesn’t feel particularly inclined to spend the next who-knows-how-many hours standing, so he perches on the table, both arms drawn awkwardly across his body by the chain passed through a ring on the table. By the sunlight coming in through the window, it hasn’t been more than a half-hour since he last looked at it. It feels like longer.
He wonders how long Newisle expects him to wait. The bloody minotaur may not have anything better to do, but Elizar does, and every minute he’s cooling his heels in the Garden District is a minute he’s not spending doing something that’s actually useful in the Pearl. Or Land’s End, but even he hasn’t been able to get past the roadblocks on the districts, and especially not over the Bridge of Sighs. If this goes on much longer, someone else is going to make a try for his seat in Land’s End, and then there’s going to be fighting.
He deliberately doesn’t think of his dream. Thinking about it gives him a headache, so Elizar doesn’t think about it, just taps his fingers irritably against the side of his knee and hopes that Newisle hurries up and gets this over with.
One of Mayor’s sacred Four is apparently with him today, because he barely has to wait fifteen minutes before the door opens. He gets a look at the constable who’d brought him in, standing in the hallway with her hand on her sword hilt, before the doorway is filled with the bulk of a tall minotaur with salt-and-pepper fur – still more pepper than salt, though Prejun is starting to show his years. Elizar flicks his gaze upwards to study his face, keeping his expression as impassive as possible. Minotaurs are impressive as a general rule of thumb, but Elizar’s from the Black Pearl, where nonhumans outnumber humans six to one. He got over being impressed a long time ago.
The only sign of the injuries the Lord Provost had supposedly sustained in the fire that burnt his house to the ground in the middle of a rainstorm is a swath of white bandage around his sword hand. If the fire singed him at all, Elizar can’t see it.
“Lord Prejun,” he says after the door shuts behind the minotaur, “been a while, hasn’t it? Two years? Or was it three?”
“Get off the table,” Prejun says.
“Two and a half,” Elizar decides. “Right around Long Dusk – I remember now. Your thugs pulled me in when I should have been out building bonfires in the street like everyone else.”
Prejun scowls. “That’s illegal in the city.”
“Nothing’s illegal on festival days. King’s orders – oh, wait. The king’s been deposed. Nice way you have of mourning.” He runs his tongue over his teeth, grinning. “I heard the Callies lost the King of Summer and the Queen of Spring. Right out from under your nose. Aren’t you supposed to keep order in Cair Paravel these days?”
“Shut up, you fool,” Prejun snaps. He crosses his arms over his massive chest. “Where’s your friend the tiger?”
“I know a few tigers. Which one do you mean?” He knows very well who the Lord Provost means; Mayor had told him he’d been fool enough to let himself be seen by Prejun, and there aren’t more than a handful of white tigers in Cair Paravel. Most people think they’re unlucky; they bear the touch of the Queen of Winter, all the color bleached from their fur.
“I think you know which one I mean. Your little pussy-cat.” He sneers. “May Your Life Be Long And Your Enemies Honorable.”
“Mayor?” Elizar drawls. “Mayor was on the last boat to Terebinthia before you lunatics closed off the districts. He went with my sister to visit my dad’s family. This weather’s hell on his bones; he broke a leg and a couple of ribs a few years back, and he feels it every time it rains.”
“You lie!” Prejun snarls. He strikes his good fist down on the table; Elizar feels it jump beneath his thighs, but Prejun doesn’t succeed in unseating him. “I know you conspired with Tirian and his outlander friends to the purpose of aiding the rebels in the west –”
“If you knew anything, I’d be in Bahadur’s dungeons right now, not in interrogation,” Elizar says, and smiles, soft. “You just pulled be in here to jerk me around and fuck up my day. Congratulations, by the way. I’m sure my mum’s real pissed at you. Someone has to work the shop now that B’s on her way to Terebinthia – might even have made it through the Labyrinth by now – and Pirmin’s still picking up after the mess the floods made of Dally Street. Nice going with that. If you had the Guard out there helping with clean-up instead of fucking with innocent civilians, maybe your blokes wouldn’t be getting bottles thrown at their heads every time they go off the main roads.” He lets his inner-city accent grow broader as he speaks, watching Prejun wince in an impression of well-bred disdain. Prejun wasn’t even born in the Black Pearl; he came out of Rustwater on the North Bank, though he’s gone to considerable lengths to pretend that’s not so.
“You and the rest of the Table are up to something,” Prejun says, leaning in so that Elizar can smell the alcohol on his breath. “I know it, and I’ll find out what it is –”
“You must not be in Bahadur’s good graces,” Elizar purrs. “How do you like coming home to an empty bed – oh, wait, you can’t go home. Burned to the ground in a rainstorm, in the middle of the Garden District at that. I bet the fire brigade up here actually puts out fires, too.” He grins. “That has to look bad. I hear the priests are saying that the gods have turned their eyes from you because you collaborated with the Callies.”
Prejun roars in anger, swinging a fist at Elizar’s head. Elizar feels it go over his head as he ducks. “That hit a little too close to the heart? You got any other theories about what I’m up to besides trying to put my neighborhood back together? Because I don’t know what you bastards up here in the Garden District do, but we’ve got actual damage down in the Pearl. I don’t have the time or the money for your conspiracy theories.”
“I will discover what you’ve done,” Prejun says, face so close to Elizar’s that he can feel the minotaur’s warm, slightly fermented exhalations of breath.
“Look as long as you like,” Elizar retorts. “You won’t find anything.”
Prejun scowls and pulls away, throwing open the door. “Get this idiot out of my station,” he orders.
This time a pair of guardsmen, both satyrs, escort him to the front of the station, where he finds Symeon pacing impatiently behind Peneli Balasz as she argues eloquently with a belligerent-looking dwarf behind the counter.
“You can’t hold him here, not without a magistrate’s order –”
“Peneli,” Elizar says, and sees her ruddy head swing around towards him, “I appreciate the sentiment, but you can give it up before all our ears start bleeding.”
“Oh, good, you’re all right,” she says, not sounding it. “I am still getting paid, aren’t I?”
“The indelicacy of the question shocks me, but yes, you’re getting paid.” Elizar rolls his eyes. “Ta, boys,” he says to the guardsmen. “Until next time.”
“The sooner the better, Confesor,” one of them says, and Symeon snarls slightly.
“Grow a pair,” Peneli informs him as the three of them emerge into the sunlight. There’s a pedicab waiting in front of the station, the centaur in its traces one of Elizar’s old school friends.
“Nice vacation, Eli?” he says, raising his head as they climb in.
“Stunning,” Elizar drawls. “I’ll be sure to book rooms for the whole family next time.” He sits back as the cab begins moving, rolling his wrists and listening to them pop. Peneli sits next to him, her expression bored and distracted; Symeon drapes himself across the floor, trying and failing to make his expression mild. Elizar looks down at him. “I get hauled away by the coppers and you call a barrister?”
“Was I supposed to call an undertaker?” Symeon inquires defensively, sitting up.
“You’re supposed to be with my mother!”
“I waited until Tulip and Periwinkle got there before I left!” the hyena protests, the ridge of fur along his spine bristling defensively. “And the Leadbeaters were there. I’m not stupid.”
“Looks aside, he’s not, Elizar,” Peneli says, scribbling on a leather-backed notepad. “He went about the business quite sensibly. Mayor would have been proud.” She rips the paper off and hands it to Elizar. “Here’s your bill.”
He glances at it, then stuff it into a pocket. “Any chance you’ll take it out in trade? They were going to let me go anyway.”
“You honestly can’t expect to pay me in thirty pounds of fudge,” Peneli sniffs. “Remember, you want me to show up the next time Spots comes and batters at my door.”
“I did not –” Symeon says indignantly. “And stop calling me Spots! Nobody calls Sammi Spots.”
“Sammi bites when people try and give him nicknames,” says Peneli. “And everyone takes him seriously. Nobody takes you seriously; you’re still too fuzzy.”
Symeon scowls at her and settles back down on the floor of the pedicab, putting his head on his paws. “I wish you wouldn’t all make fun of me,” he says plaintively.
“Give it up, Peneli,” Elizar says, because Symeon is starting to look strained around the edges. He has a taste for outcasts; hyenas are even more unlucky than white tigers, and Symeon had been persecuted in the Lion’s Den, the orphanage Elizar had pulled him out of two years ago, when Symeon had still been a cub, a small miserable bundle of brown and black fur.
He changes the subject. “I have to admit I’m impressed you managed to talk your way past the roadblocks. I didn’t think even you were that good.”
“I could be,” she suggests, then shakes her head. “They took the roadblocks down about an hour ago. Either the Callies finally caught who they were looking for or they got bored of trying. It’s about damned time, too.”
Elizar blinks in surprise; that’s the last thing he’d expected. “It is about damned time,” he agrees. He glances down at Symeon, who looks up at him expectantly, his ears perking slightly. “How is Mum taking it?”
Symeon shrugs. “She didn’t seem much bothered,” he offers. “She made me send a runner to get Pirmin from Dally Street because she said she couldn’t run the shop on her own.”
Elizar considers this. “Good,” he says finally. “We’re going to Land’s End. Go and send the word ahead that now’s the time for everyone to pay their taxes.”
When they cross the Bridge of Sighs and rattle up through the broken streets of Land’s End half an hour later, it’s to find the doors of the Blackfire Club thrown open, a spill of noise coming from inside. Elizar dismounts the pedicab and pays Villi. “Come in and have a drink,” he invites.
Villi doesn’t even pause to consider it, just twists to unhitch himself with quick, certain movements. “Not like I don’t have the time,” he says.
Elizar strides into the club and throws his arms wide, grinning as the crowd that’s already gathered inside roars a welcome. “Hello, boys and girls,” he says. “Did you miss me?”
He stumbles home to the Black Pearl hours later, long past midnight, more than a little drunk and with his pockets full. Taxes hadn’t been particularly good this week; nobody’s had the time to go out and make money, not when the Bridge of Sighs is closed. There’s nothing to steal in Land’s End.
The bodyguards on the back door nod hello to him as he lets himself inside, locking the door behind him. The shop is dark, and he stumbles for a moment before he remembers that he’s been living here since he was eleven and knows where everything is. He finds his way to the stairs and starts up them, stepping sideways to avoid the creaky spot on the fifth step. He emerges into the kitchen, blinking at the sudden glow of candlelight. His mum is sitting at the kitchen table, absently winding a ball of yarn; she sets it aside as he approaches.
“Mum,” he says, blinking slowly at her. He leans against the doorframe. “What are you doing up?”
“I was worried for you,” she says, pressing her lips together tightly. “You didn’t come home after the Provost’s Guard let you go.”
“Well, I’m fine,” he says defensively. He starts to step away from the doorway, then stumbles before he rights himself, the world spinning briefly in front of him.
“You should have sent word.”
“I was busy.”
“You were in Land’s End, drinking with your friends!” Her voice is a sudden snarl of anger as she rises. The ball of yarn goes rolling away across the table as she jars it and drops onto the floor, unraveling as it goes. “The Guard came and took you away in a lockbox, and you couldn’t see fit to let me know when they let you go!”
“Well, you obviously found out!” Elizar snaps back. “It was a misunderstanding –”
“Do you think I’m stupid? I know what you do! I know what pays for the shop, for this flat, for everything! I know why Beka isn’t here and why Lamentation keeps coming in and asking for her son, and I know it’s because of you!” she screams.
“Beka’s safe, and Mayor’s with her!”
“Because you got them into this – this underworld! You got your sister into trouble! For all I know, you got Lamentation’s son killed!”
“Don’t bring Beka into this!” Elizar bellows. “She has nothing to do with anything I do –”
“Then where is she? Where’s my daughter?”
“She’s my sister too, damnit!”
“Why couldn’t you have been like your father!” Mum shouts at him. “Aryel never would have –”
“Dad’s dead!” He slams his fist into the table. “Damn it, Dad’s dead, and if I were anything like him, I would be dead too. You think you can stay straight in Cair Paravel and survive? Well, you’re fucking wrong. You lie, you cheat, you steal, you murder if you have to, and you stay alive. You’re just too fucking blind to see it.” He storms past her, shoulder bumping roughly against hers as she grabs at him.
“Come back here, Elizar!”
He slams his bedroom door shut, kicking it furiously when it tries to bounce open again. He hears his mother shriek, “Damn you, Aryel!” and slams his fist into the wall, then snatches up the pillow from his bed and screams into it, wordless with rage.
It’s not like it isn’t all true.
----------
Gunderic and Gailamir Leadbeater first appear (in the flesh) in this ficbit.
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
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Date: 2010-06-22 07:45 am (UTC)You were posting before about being worried about the lack of canon in this chapter, but I'd say have no fear! It's as totally fabulous as ever, and while I love the canon characters, your OCs and the world building that goes into Cair Paravel are equally awesome.
Speaking of Cair Paravel - I didn't really notice this before, probably because I was dashing through this in a mad catch-up read, but it's very New Orleans, isn't it? When the levees broke...post-PeterandSusan Cair Paravel seems quite post-Katrina Gulf Coast. And, not that I actually know anything about New Orleans beyond bits and pieces from the media and pop culture, but the details about, for example, chicory coffee, and pralines, strike me as New Orleans-y. So that was pretty cool to pick up on.
I sort of love Nazca; just the way she handled everybody and so cheerfully was fantastic. Also much love for Symeon, who leapt out as enormously adorable and slightly deadly, poor little guy.
I really like all the matter-of-fact name dropping of people and places; it really situates me as a reader in the day to day life of the city and also gives such a feel for Elizar's total connection to the city and its people.
Elizar is perfectly willing to believe that an ink pen would be too terrified of the man to dare blot.
I lol'd. If anyone could scare inanimate objects it'd totally be Peter, of course.
I want to know what was in Beka's letters home! I'm so fascinated by her, I think maybe because she's someone who has been (or, attempted to have been) sheltered for most of her life but now is so mixed up right in the middle of the action; in any case, I would love to get her view of the Pevensies and the Narnian resistance camp.
And Elizar's dream! Such a completely gorgeous section. I had to reread it a couple of times; it very much whirls you along in a feeling of what he was getting, and I loved how he sort of got taken on the journey of the books. Was that dead city towards the end Charn, with the reddish, stale air?
And the prayer; it came out really well, I think - you were mostly basing it off of Catholicism, esp the Lord's Prayer, yeah? It totally captured the feeling of that, with the somewhat archaic wording but the timeless idea - both very formal and at the same time rather personal, so I say yay to that.
Lalala what else? (this is sort of long, sorry 'bout that) - I feel quite sorry for Lior, though of course Elizar makes a good point. And Symeon is really adorable.
Moar, pleeez!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 01:37 am (UTC)Dust-era Cair Paravel is heavily New Orleans-influenced; I started working on Dust right after I'd moved to New Orleans for university. New Orleans is so unusual compared to a lot of cities in the U.S. (especially my hometown!) that I really liked the idea of incorporating elements of New Orleans into Cair Paravel, instead of having Cair Paravel be a more generic western European city. Plus, New Orleans is actually the only city I've ever lived in, so anything else really would have been "generic city"! (Random trivia: some of the neigborhoods in Cair Paravel share names with New Orleans neighborhoods (the Garden District and the Black Pearl), while others are inspired by New Orleans neighborhoods (the North Bank, the Mare's Quarter). "Neutral ground" is, to the best of my knowledge, a term only used in New Orleans for what's elsewhere called a median strip.)
The dead city towards the end with Charn. This is the one and only time I have ever had to pull out The Magician's Nephew for reference in two years and more than 300K of writing Narnia fic. I now have to figure out how the hell to incorporate MN into my Narnia mythos, because I've repeatedly stated I don't consider it canon! (...so that was smart.)
I was basing it off of the Lord's Prayer, and looking mainly at Catholic and Orthodox prayers. (Not because I am Catholic or Orthodox myself, but largely because I didn't really know what else to look at for a similar prayer.) I'm glad it worked!
Thank you for your comment! I love getting long comments; I have been thrilled for days now.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-22 09:59 am (UTC)In sum, yay I love how diverse everybody is and your worldbuilding, now have pity on your poor readers and describe them a bit more! I feel totally weird saying that, too, as description and having a visual image of characters is usually at the very bottom of my priority list as a reader (and I frequently get annoyed at writers who do way too much of it), but with this I definitely want to know more, and see how different inter-species interactions play out, please?
Also, you might tack on the word 'again' to the sentence By the sunlight coming in through the window, it hasn’t been more than a half-hour since he fell asleep. Unless I am misunderstanding the significance of two hours having passed before.
I loved loved loved Peter's letter, every bit of it. Maybe having the rest of the chapter be about OCs helped make it stand out? And I want more of Elizar and Mayor being inseparable team and partners in heroic crime; it would be like one of those TV shows I never watch! With Mayor's nutty family as icing on the cake. (I love their names, Lamentation is great.)
And then the ending, with the sudden flaring intense argument, that was powerful. I want so badly to resolve it and hug them and tell them Beka's having the adventure of her life!
The whole chapter is really filled with awesome detail (I keep wanting to use the world vivid but it's more plotty than visual, but that's mostly a good thing!) and the dream sequence was cool, very recognizable even though it's been years since I read the books (I've been meaning to check them out of the library) and I can't wait to see how Elizar manages all Peter's impossible tasks!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 01:47 am (UTC)It is interesting that you bring up the descriptions, because I was considering that myself while I was writing this. Usually I don't do very much description, and most of it throw-away details. (I am, I believe, not the intended audience for many books, as a lot of the time I just don't notice descriptions unless they are beat into my head over and over again. I am not a very visual reader.) There's somewhat less description in this chapter than there would probably be in another chapter because it's an Elizar POV, and it's something that he doesn't really notice, especially with people he's used to interacting with (Kari Blanchfort or Symeon, for example; in the original draft, Symeon was never mentioned as being a hyena until 7K in). Eustace, Jill, the Pevensies, and Tirian would probably notice it to different extents. (Eustace and Jill the greatest, then Tirian (for a couple of reasons), then the Pevensies.) I'm sorry it didn't quite work for you in this chapter.
On that note, it's not mentioned, but Kari Blanchfort's a faun; since the Leadbeater twins were mentioned as satyrs in another chapter, I didn't think it was necessary to mention it upfront.
I do have to admit wondering for possibly far too long if I could pull Elizar and Mayor out of the context of Dust and seeing if they would work in an original novel! *pets them* I'm glad you like it.
Thank you for the comment!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 05:54 am (UTC)Yes, this! I am totally the same way, and I mostly told you all that above because it was what I would want to be told (if I, you know, wrote more). I guess, on further reflection, it's not even just that it's a visual thing, it forms part of who they are as characters.
And if I was reading the whole thing at once, I might even have remembered the twins being satyrs; it was just the chapter-by-chapter thing that got me. I was spending the first bit of the chapter going, 'oh crap, should I remember Symeon from before?' But that worked out all right. It makes sense that Elizar doesn't think much about what, physically, the people he interacts with are, as opposed to Eustace and the rest.
But don't apologize! By now I'm sure I've fussed more about it in commenting than I was bothered by it reading, because there was so much other AWESOME STUFF HAPPENING!
P.S. I would read your original novel. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 07:44 pm (UTC)And now I am just thinking out loud! *coughs* I believe the only two characters in this chapter that have appeared onscreen before are Elizar and Prejun; the others are all new. I think Finch was originally going to show up, but I cut the scene before that happened.
(I am the kind of person who will actually forget what characters look like if left to her own devices. *cough* Interestingly, I have no idea whatsoever what Elizar looks like.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-22 01:20 pm (UTC)(More nuanced comment later, perhaps)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 01:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-22 01:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 01:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-22 02:35 pm (UTC)As I know nothing of Elizar (I assume he's human?), I am nevertheless very intrigued with how he comes to collect protection money and "taxes." He is offering services -- that special ability to make problems go away -- and I wonder how he came to this position. It's very intriguing.
Love Peneli -- a lawyer's first concern is to get paid because if she isn't, and her client dies/disappears/goes to jail/goes bankrupt, she doesn't eat. Just terrific. There is more, but I wanted to let you that I DID read and very much enjoyed it.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 02:00 am (UTC)I'm glad you enjoyed it, despite prior Dust knowledge! (You are not as backwards as all that -- most of my other fic was written before Dust, and all of it is set before Dust; there is no post-Dust fic because some things I hold close to my vest. I shall probably not end the world, but who knows?)
Elizar is human, yes. The story of how he came to power is briefly detailed in Dust 15, in a conversation with Peter. (The short version is that he actually occupies a semi-formal position as a member of the Long Table, the top gangsters in Cair Paravel, and he got it by killing the former occupant.)
Again, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-22 06:29 pm (UTC)Elizar thinks of it that way, firmly, to keep it from being the day Beka left and took Mayor with her
But Elizar dear, you sent them both away. They didn't want to leave, remember?
The doyarchu in the Great River -- is that because the River God is awake now?
Cash or throat-slitting as the best ways to solve a problem! Ahh, such is the life of a gangster, eh?
Can I just say how much I love your description of Elizar making tea? The tea fanatic in me is very, very pleased with this. Ahd he dreams the entire history of Narnia in that interrogation room. And oh.. is that an appearance of Aslan I see there as he dips into one of the pools in the Wood Between the Worlds?
Prejun is still alive, I see. I thought for sure the Long Table would have done him now that Tirian and the others are far away from the city. And nice to see he still has that beautiful token Susan left him in his sword hand. Heh.
And poor Lior! With her daughter gone and her son taken away, it's too much for a mother worried for the safety of her children. Mayor's mum is named "Lamentation"? A short name, considering the length of her own cubs. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 02:03 am (UTC)One might assume that life in the Great River is slowly returning; Things Are Afoot in Narnia. And you caught the cameo!
Lamentation's full name is actually Lamentation For The Necessity Of Evil In The World, but it's such a mouthful that almost no one calls her that. I do hope we get to meet her, though I'm not sure whether or not that will actually happen. I'm glad you liked Lior!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-22 09:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-06-25 02:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-14 02:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-08-14 08:45 pm (UTC)Hungry for more...
Date: 2010-10-13 07:17 pm (UTC)Thanks much for such an absorbing fic. I will admit that there are several things that make me rather uneasy, but your vivid world-building and strong characterisations and all the awesome plotty parts still have me wanting to read more. It's rare to find so much good stuff in one fic -- and a very AU fic at that!
It's the middle of the night for me over here, so I better stop now, but just one comment on the Long Table and your whole vision of Cair Paravel the teeming city. (I think I love the city scenes the best, by the way and Elizar and his whole family are just fabulous!) I know you've said that there are a lot of things picked up from real-life New Orleans, and that Elizar has elements of the young Vito Corleone. But I don't know New Orleans, and watched Godfather way too long ago, so in my head, Cair Paravel has big links with another fictional city -- Terry Pratchett's Ankh Morpork. The same sense of controlled chaos, of distinctive neighbourhoods, and multiple species. And to me, the Long Table is so much like the Guilds in the way they really "rule" the city. (I guess it's no coincidence that I like the City Watch stories best of all the Discworld novels as well -- have you even read Pratchett, by the way? I should have probably asked before rambling on about them!)
Anyway, I really should go now, but will look forward to seeing more.
Priscilla (I comment as priscipixie on both FF.net and livejournal though)
Re: Hungry for more...
Date: 2010-10-14 03:02 am (UTC)I have actually never read Pratchett, which I sometimes worry makes me unique on the Internet. While Cair Paravel is physically constructed with New Orleans in mind (and part of the reason for that is just because New Orleans is the only major city I've ever lived in for an extended period of time and thus can describe really well!), I tend to think of the Long Table and the squabbling gangsters as closer to Scott Lynch's world in The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies, which served as inspiration. (I also went through a phase several fandoms back where I was obsessed with the New York mob, so quite a bit of that has bled through as well.) I'm really pleased with the way Cair Paravel turned out; not being a native urbanite myself, I'm always worried that I've made some kind of really obvious mistake in writing a city, so I'm glad that you enjoyed it!