Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (21)
Dec. 20th, 2010 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air (21)
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW. Dust in the Air does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).
“Give me a light,” Lucy says.
In hindsight, it probably isn’t the best idea to go down into the mines so soon after the battle, when the coals of the burnt fort are still hot and the recently freed Narnian slaves are wandering around looking for their families, shell-shocked from their captivity. But Lucy’s not needed up there; they brought healers enough from Arn Abedin, and Peter’s issued his customary order not to use her cordial on the battlefield except in the very worst cases. They were lucky: there’s no one who needs it that badly. Lucy isn’t any good up there now except as an extra pair of hands – trained hands, of course, but these Narnians don’t think it’s suitable to see a queen getting on her knees with her hands buried in someone else’s guts. Fighting them isn’t worth the trouble.
She’d badly wanted to see the mines, though. Lucy loves mines, loves caves and the deep dark places beneath the earth just as much as she loves the treetops and the highest cliffs where she can feel the wind on her face. There’s beauty in both of them. These are Calormene mines – not a corruption of the earth in and of themselves, but what they’d done down here is. Narnia never put slaves in the mines. Convicts, yes, and free Narnians who worked because they loved the earth and the things she keeps close to her bosom, but never slaves. Lucy had seen a mine in Calormen once, in her own time, and thought it lovely even as she hated what the Calormene slave-drivers did to the poor people who scratched gems out of the dry soil. She wants to see what this mine looks like, what secrets it holds close to its breast, and she has a sneaking feeling trouble might be lurking here. Narnians who hadn’t heard that the fort fell, perhaps, or Calormenes who’d fled here rather than face her people.
Someone passes a torch forward and Lucy takes it, dipping it close to the wall nearest her. The flame strikes sparks from only a few bright spots in the rock, none of them bigger than a single raindrop – if that. Lucy strips the glove off her free hand with her teeth and pries the nearest out of the wall with some difficulty. The stone around it has been worked over some, probably with a hammer and chisel; whoever had been working here must have been very close to getting it out when the riot began. When their chains had been broken, they’d taken their tools with them; Lucy wonders if she’ll find the chisel lodged in a Calormene’s skull somewhere.
The diamond itself is brown and rough, dull except where the light strikes it just right. It’s not a particularly high-quality diamond – Lucy’s seen better, worn better, and pulled better out of the mines in her own time – but it’s still a diamond, and it would go for a fair bit of money in Cair Paravel or Tashbaan, especially if sold in a lot of similar gemstones. At one point during their reign, there had been a fashion in Calormen for wearing dozens or even hundreds of tiny diamonds in a single piece of jewelry – earrings and necklaces that glittered, even whole girdles and belts. When he came to Narnia to court Susan, before everything had gone downhill, Prince Rabadash had worn a sword-sheath covered in yellow diamonds, with belt and cloak-pin to match. Even his shoes had sparkled. The Calormenes must be pulling thousands of the same kind of diamond out of the ground; perhaps the fashion’s come back. Narnia’s diamond mines are no different from any other land’s; she produces a handful of clear diamonds and ones with good, strong color – Lucy had once had a crown set with a pink the size of a badger’s fist – but mostly what comes out of the earth are the cheaper browns and yellows. Attractive enough when cleaned up, but hardly the same value as a pure diamond, or one of the rarer colors.
Lucy runs the diamond between her fingers again, rubbing some of the rock dust off, and slips it into the pouch on her belt. “Do we know how deep the mine goes?” she asks, her voice echoing off the walls around her.
The Calormenes prefer pit mining, or had in her day, but most Narnian mines are webs of tunnels crisscrossing through the vein. Some of them are – were – elaborate to extremes, even ornamental. This isn’t one of them.
“Deep,” says Gjaflaug, a brawny Black Dwarf who’d come from one of the more southerly camps. “This must be just the edge of the vein; they would have had to go in deeper to mine stones of the quality we found in the fort.” She touches one of the support posts, frowning. “This was hasty work. See where they had to come back in and reinforce it? Shoddy construction, poor choice of wood –”
“It’s not the old mine,” Lucy interrupts, absent. She moves forward, deeper into the mine. There aren’t many glimmers of diamonds or indicator minerals like garnets this close to the entrance; everything’s been picked clean, bagged up and shipped overland to Cair Paravel, and then to Tashbaan. “We thought it must have been because of the location, but the maps have changed, and the land –”
They’d never quite worked out how large the kimberlite tunnel on the edge of the High Reaches actually was; the best guess of the dwarves and Narnia’s vague impression to Peter had been “big.” The Calormene mine could be nearly anywhere in a six-mile radius of the old one.
“What are you looking for, your majesty?” Gjaflaug inquires. “We’ve gotten all the people out and the diamonds are all in the fort…” She trails off delicately, leaving an opening for an answer.
“And the view’s crap,” Mayor adds, sneezing. He bats a paw across his nose, his expression irritated. Lucy’s not even sure why he’s down here; maybe he’s just bored back in the camp.
“Nothing,” she says. “Just looking.” She casts a glance at the dark recess of the tunnel as she turns to go, then stops. There was a glimmer of golden mane out of the corner of her vision, gone now, but she saw it, saw him, turning a corner.
“Your majesty?” says Gjaflaug. “Do you see something?”
“No,” Lucy lies, looking after the place where she’d seen something. “You go on, I’ll catch up.”
“There’s no one left in here,” Gjaflaug says. “Everyone’s accounted for, unless it’s a Callie hiding down here – you shouldn’t be here alone, your majesty. We’ll accompany you.”
“There’s no need,” Lucy says, irritated, and turns away from them without waiting for a reply. Her footsteps are soft on the hewn stone floor, muted by the layers of rock and earth on all sides of her. The voices of Gjaflaug and the others who’d come down with her echo oddly through the tunnels, before Lucy turns a corner and they cut out like a bad radio signal.
She raises her torch. Tiny specks of diamonds too small to extract easily gleam from the walls like the staring eyes in a dark forest; the weight of Narnia presses down upon her head, resting on the hastily built supports that the mine slaves had thrown up as they went too deep too fast. They told her that there had been cave-ins recently; the Calormenes wanted the biggest and best diamonds they could get on short notice, and they didn’t care how many Narnians died to get them. They were just slaves, after all. Easily replaceable.
The flame of the torch is a flickering point of warmth not far from her face. Lucy does up the last few buttons of her coat with one hand; she hasn’t yet reached the point in the mine where it will stop being bloody cold and start warming up instead. She’d heard about Eustace and Jill’s adventure in the World Below – only a legend in her Narnia, a tale told around the fireplace to amuse small children; it’s disconcerting to think that it might be real. But not here – they’d broken through the crust far in the south, and the mines in her day had gone far deeper than this one. The World Below, if it still exists, must be deeper yet. She’d like to visit it, someday, if there’s ever another chance for adventures after this one. There probably won’t be.
She raises her head. Something is gleaming besides the diamonds and assorted indicator minerals, something with the warmth of the living – “Aslan?” Lucy says again, moving forward quickly. “Aslan, is that you?”
She goes too fast in her eagerness, not paying attention to the floor beneath her, and trips on an uneven section of rock. When she raises herself up, dusting earth off herself, the gleam is gone, and Lucy sighs in disappointment. He’s still here, though. Somewhere. She can hear his breathing, heavy and deep, like the river purling gently across the rocks in summer. He’s waiting for her.
At the next fork in the tunnels – they’re getting smaller, small enough that she has to duck her head, and she was never a tall woman – Lucy pauses, considering the options. The deeper she goes, the hastier the work is; near the entrance to the mine they’ve had the time to shore up the supports. Lucy hopes that none of the tunnels down here are ready to collapse.
“Aslan?” she asks, her voice echoing eerily through the tunnels. She’s utterly alone now; she doesn’t think there’s another living soul down here beneath the earth, now that the others have returned to the surface. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t come to her here.
“Aslan, are you there? It’s me, Lucy.” Aslan already knows that, of course, but she puts it out there anyway, if only to hear herself saying it. She doesn’t like the way the Narnians in this time treat her and siblings, like they’re something more than just the Pevensie kids or the four kings and queens of Narnia’s Golden Age. She isn’t even entirely convinced they’re Aslan’s chosen anymore: Eustace and Jill were here first, and Aslan had said that Lucy and her siblings were never to come back. But of course, they wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want it. Nothing happens in Narnia without Aslan knowing, she’s sure of it.
She takes a breath, listening closely until she can pinpoint which direction the sound of breathing is coming from, and then a right, positive that she’d seen the tip of Aslan’s tail flicker around it when she’d first come around the corner, and almost runs into a stone wall.
Lucy takes a hasty step back, puzzled about why Aslan would lead her here. It’s not a proper wall, nor an unfinished tunnel, she finds as she raises her torch to inspect it more closely. Her initial thought is that it’s the result of a cave-in, but closer inspection proves that the broken pieces of rock that make it up are laid with too much deliberate care to be accidental. You wouldn’t tell in bad light – whoever had built this up had known what they were doing – but Lucy’s spent a certain amount of time in mines, enough to tell when something’s deliberate, and when it’s not. This is deliberate. The scuff marks on the floor show where one particularly large piece of rock has been removed several times; the wall is built up in such a way that the rest of it won’t come barreling down when the boulder’s removed, which isn’t useful to anyone. With the boulder missing, the space left behind should be large enough to allow passage to a human, faun, or anything smaller than a very short satyr. Anything larger won’t be able to fit.
Lucy crouches down to run her free hand over the rock. There has to be a trick to getting it out. It’s too heavy for any one human to lift, but she doesn’t need to be able to lift it, just get it out of the way – you don’t build a wall like this if you don’t have something to hide, and Aslan led her here for a reason.
She’s so preoccupied with the boulder that she doesn’t hear the approach behind her until the flame of her torch flickers at his step. Lucy jerks aside, not quite in time to avoid the blow entirely; the haft of the pick slides off the left side of her skull as she whirls, slamming the torch up with both hands to ward off the second blow. The flame flickers wildly; she can see through the distortion of it that the stranger’s a faun with grizzled red hair, one horn broken off above his ear. A Narnian.
Lucy doesn’t have time to think through the implications of that, because he swings the pick at her again. She blocks him with the torch; he twists, catching at it with the tip of the pick and shoving sideways, trying to get her to let go. Lucy hangs on grimly, bracing herself as she and the torch slam into the wall of the tunnel. The torch goes out in a shower of sparks, leaving her and the faun in the dark.
For a moment neither of them moves; she can hear her own breath panting out and the slight click of the faun’s hooves on the floor as he shifts. Lucy steps to the side, soft; she might be wearing steel-toed boots, but she still knows how to be quiet underground. She draws her dagger with her left hand; the quarters are too close for sword-work, and besides, she’s not entirely certain she wants her opponent dead. Club and dagger will do for now.
There’s no use trying to see through the darkness. They’re at least half a mile beneath the surface of the earth; no sunlight has ever penetrated down here, and never will. Most fighters couldn’t do it. But Lucy was trained by the best in Narnia, and she can fight anywhere: in pitch dark, underwater, on a ring of oiled glass. She’s out of practice, but a little comes back to her with every moment she’s in Narnia, every heartbeat thudding memory back into her veins.
The sudden darkness had thrown the faun for a moment, but he recovers quickly, gliding sideways. His hooves are silent on the floor, but Lucy feels the air move with his passage and turns to face him, closing her eyes to better concentrate. She hears the slight whistle as his pick moves and parries it aside with her dagger, her arm shuddering with the effort. One steel-toed boot snaps out, meaning to crush a kneecap, but the faun is just as fast as she is, jerking aside so that she stumbles forward instead. The blade of the pick scrapes down her arm, jarred slightly aside by the padded wool of her coat sleeve, but Lucy knows even before she moves it that it’s bruised to the bone. Her left hand is numb enough to be nearly useless, though at least she hasn’t dropped her dagger, much good may that do her.
Both their breaths are scraping out in the cold underground air. Lucy grins, even though she knows the faun can’t see it, and sheathes her dagger, arm screaming pain, so that she doesn’t lose it. She hefts the makeshift club in her good hand. He comes at her again, hooves clattering on the floor this time, and Lucy ducks low, guessing that he’s holding his pick above his head, and drives the club into his belly. He doubles over with an oof, and she swings the club back up into his wrist, hearing something snap. The pick falls to the floor; she hears it land far too close, which means it probably only just missed her skull – no protection on that, since she hadn’t assumed she’d need a helmet or a coif. Lucy takes a moment to thank Aslan silently, then slams one foot into the lower part of the faun’s leg, sending him screaming in pain as the bone shatters. She barrels forward, shoving him over onto his back as she lands on top of him, pressing the club against his throat with both hands.
“I’m a Narnian,” she says fiercely. Somewhere in the background she can hear running – Aslan’s sweet mercy, did Gjaflaug and the others not go on up to the surface the way she’d ordered? – but for now she ignores it. “Do you hear me? Narnian! The Calormenes are gone, the fort burned –”
He curses, bucking beneath her, and Lucy digs a knee into his stomach, talking quickly. “I’m Queen Lucy, I can heal you, they call me the Valiant –” Just in case that will help him recognize her.
She almost doesn’t hear the sound of the boulder moving aside, but she sees the gleam of light, just the faintest glow of it illuminating the vague shape of the faun beneath her. Lucy reaches for her dagger with her left hand, which is still twinging with pain, and turns, using her right hand to keep the club against the faun’s throat.
“Daddy!” says a little girl, scampering out of the opening left by the boulder; Lucy reverses the dagger, hastily, and puts out her arm to knock her back, seeing the panic in the faun’s eyes.
“Don’t hurt her!”
“That depends,” says Mayor, teeth showing as he and Gjaflaug come around the corner. The dwarf woman has a fighting axe in one hand, a lantern in the other. “How stupid are you feeling today? Beyond your first instincts, of course,” he adds generously.
He pads forward and puts one massive paw on the faun’s forehead, making the girl wail in terror, straining against Lucy’s outstretched arm. “Daddy!”
“I won’t –” the faun gasps, face white with pain. “Please don’t –”
“Your majesty, I wouldn’t –” Gjaflaug begins, looking down at him dubiously, but Lucy is already sitting back, removing the club.
“That was stupid,” she tells the faun kindly. “Brave, but stupid. We’re friends, you know. Narnians.”
“Well,” Mayor rumbles, “she’s a friend.”
“Shut up, tiger,” says Gjaflug, her eyes sharp.
Mayor flexes his paw, claws protruding briefly before retracting. The faun goes cross-eyed, so still he’s barely breathing. Lucy lets the girl go, and she scrambles forward, throwing herself down across his chest. She can’t be his daughter by birth; there’s not a trace of nonhuman blood in her, and while it’s hard to tell in the dim light, Lucy has a suspicious feeling that she might be part Calormene. The faun raises one hand to touch her hair, then stops as Mayor growls, the sound reverberating through the tunnel.
“What’s your name?” Lucy asks him gently, sheathing her dagger and reaching for her cordial. “I told you, I’m Lucy. These are Gjaflaug and May Your Life Be –”
“Mayor,” the tiger corrects, glaring at her in irritation.
She ignores him, uncapping her cordial and scooting around the girl to bend over the faun. “Just a drop,” she tells him, smiling. Peter doesn’t have to know about this.
“You shouldn’t waste that on him –” Gjaflaug starts, hefting her axe with intention, then stops as the girl begins to wail again.
The faun starts to turn his face away, but Lucy catches his chin in her hand, holding him steady as she drops the cordial onto his cracked lips. For a moment she thinks he’s not going to swallow, that the precious drop is going to roll down the side of his face and be lost, but then his tongue comes out, swiping at it. His face goes even whiter with pain as his entire body stiffens, the broken bones in his leg reknitting themselves. Lucy knows from experience that that’s one of the more painful things her cordial can do. She sits back as she caps it and replaces it on her belt, watching him.
“I don’t think that’s necessary, Mayor,” she says.
The tiger looks up at her dubiously for a moment, then removes his paw from the faun’s forehead, reluctant. His white teeth gleam for a moment as he breathes into the faun’s face, the sickly sweet scent of a carnivore’s breath making the faun shudder. He sits up, wincing, and puts his arm around his daughter, scooting hastily away from Mayor until his back is at the wall. Lucy doesn’t miss the worried look he gives to the gaping entrance in the constructed wall, still glowing with light; she’d put money on there being someone else back there.
“What’s your name?” she asks again, saving that question for later.
The faun swallows, nervous. “My – my name is Cordylion,” he says. “From Hammersmith.”
“Neighborhood in Cair Paravel,” Mayor interprets for Lucy’s benefit. “Not far from the Pearl, for those nonhumans who think highly of themselves. Who’s the cub, then?”
“My daughter,” says Cordylion quickly, and the little girl presses her face into his shoulder. “And you –” He touches his fingers to his formerly-wounded leg, eyes briefly wide with surprise and a little awe, before they narrow again, suspicion taking over.
“This is the Morningstar, Queen Lucy Wound-binder,” says Gjaflaug, hefting her axe. “You should kneel before her.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Lucy says hastily. Wound-binder is a new one; she stores that one away for further questioning later; she thinks she likes it a little more than some of the other things she’s called these days. “You’re still weak from the cordial. You’ll have to walk out of here; I know you’ll be in a great deal of pain, but after that you’ll be able to rest. We have hot food and drink, and healers –” She won’t go so far as to call them physicians, because they’re mostly the remnants of village midwives and bonebinders. “− and we can take you somewhere you’ll be safe.”
Cordylion looks rather dubious about that.
Lucy smiles reassuringly at him. “Is your daughter hurt at all? I can –”
“No,” he interrupts. “No, she’s well.”
“And the others?” Lucy says. “Are they unhurt?”
“The others –”
“The others you’re hiding,” Lucy says, with a certainty she’s not entirely positive about, but then again – she’s not wrong very often, not about things like this. “There can’t be very many of you; you wouldn’t be able to avoid detection this long, or steal that much food. What happened?” she goes on, gentle. “You, or one of your comrades, or several of you, broke through the wall here, and you found –” She paused for a moment, because they’d found something, a natural pocket of air, a fold in the earth, or – Lucy knew, abruptly, what it was they’d found. “You found the old mine,” she says softly. “Where we found the first diamonds, sixteen hundred years ago, and worked them out of the earth. You found the old tunnels, and you realized you had fresh air, and water, and a place to hide – so you did. You’ve been down here a long time, and you’re deep enough not to have realized when the fort fell.” It was only yesterday, but surely they might have noticed the lack of activity in the mine. Unless they’re further into the old tunnels than she’d thought before.
He stares her, his expression shocked. “How did you know –”
“She’s the Morningstar,” Mayor says, examining his claws to cover up his disconcertion. “Do you really think there’s anything she doesn’t know?”
“Many things,” Lucy says, irritated. “I’m not omniscient, you know. I’m only human. I just know the tunnels – the old tunnels – really well.”
All of them, except for the little girl, look unconvinced.
Lucy sighs. “How many other people are there in there?” she asks Cordylion. “We’ve got to get them out as quickly as possible – we’re not staying here long, though we’ll refortify this area as soon as possible. My brother wants us back for Winter’s End.”
The girl raises her head from her father’s shoulder. “Winter’s End?” she says hopefully.
“That late already,” Cordylion murmurs to himself, soft, then, to her. “There are three others. I can fetch them.”
Lucy nods, and he removes his daughter carefully from his lap. She looks up at him with huge eyes.
“Elin, will you stay here for a few minutes?” he says to her, his voice solemn. “I’ll be back soon, I promise.”
“But,” she says, voice trembling a little, and looks around at the people around her – Lucy sitting as far back from her as she can, Mayor with his big teeth and claws, Gjaflaug leaning on her axe. A little surprisingly, it’s Mayor she inclines towards, after he sheathes his claws. Maybe it’s just because he’s the warmest, but Lucy’s glad that Elin hasn’t decided she’s the friendliest – she’s not very good with children.
Cordylion looks relieved. “Good girl,” he says, his smile cracking a little. “My brave girl.” He looks at Mayor, and Mayor looks back, his chin dipping slightly in solemn promise.
“I’ll go with you,” Lucy says, starting to rise.
“Better if you stay here, your majesty,” Gjaflaug says, stirring. “They might react better to seeing a Narnian face, rather than a human one. No offense meant, majesty.”
“None taken,” Lucy says, considering this. It does make sense, she admits after a moment, and nods. “Very well.”
Gjaflaug seems relieved. She lifts her axe off the floor as if it’s little more than a feather and jerks her chin at the entrance. “You first,” she tells the faun.
Cordylion picks himself up off the floor, wincing a little as he puts his weight on the leg Lucy had broken earlier. She blinks − it can’t even have been ten minutes since he first tried to hit her over the head – and touches her hand to the place where the pick had glanced off. The side of her skull throbs in protest, and her fingers come away a little sticky with blood. Gjaflaug gives her a long-suffering look.
“I’ll leave the lantern, shall I, your majesty?” she says – though by the tone it’s not a question.
“It looks well enough like it’s illuminated in there,” Lucy says. The glow dims abruptly as Cordylion squeezes himself through the whole made by the boulder, then again as Gjaflaug follows him, dropping to hands and knees. Lucy listens to their footsteps recede.
The little girl – Elin, Cordylion had called her – is petting Mayor’s neck and chin, fascinated by his whiteness. She seems to have forgotten her former terror in this new novelty. Lucy supposes she can’t blame the girl; white tigers were rare even in her time, prized as they were by the White Witch for their color. She knows that logically it’s a mutation, a freak birth in a family of ordinary orange tigers, but there’s still a part of her that thrills a little in remembered fear when she sees one, certain that it’s preceding the Witch and her army, ready to come and kill her brothers.
Mayor is bearing the attention with far more grace than Lucy would have expected of him, though perhaps he’s just vain, and likes the attention. When Elin abruptly decides she’s tired and curls up against his paw, head against his shoulder, he just smiles, then covers it up quickly when he sees Lucy’s surprise. “Well, I’ve had worse,” he rumbles, soft as thunder in the distance.
“You’re very good with her,” Lucy says.
“I’ve younger sibs of my own,” he explains. “Four, not counting Elizar and Beka, which I guess I could; I certainly see them more than I see Standfast or Boxer or the twins.”
“Don’t you get along with your family?”
“Summerking have mercy, no,” he says. He eyes her thoughtfully, the claws on his free paw flexing. Lucy doesn’t think it’s threat, just absent instinct.
She raises her chin. “Why did you and Gjaflaug come down after me, when I expressly told you otherwise?”
He shrugs, a brief ripple of fur along shoulders and withers. “I met your brother and sister in Cair Paravel, you know. They didn’t have a squirrel’s sense of self preservation either. That sort of thing tends to run in a family; gods know it runs in Elizar’s. And the dwarf didn’t approve of you going off on your own, of course.”
“You followed me?” Lucy says, accusing. No one would have done that in her Narnia, not if she’d given orders otherwise. Well, just the Guard, but they would have followed at a distance that would have actually been useful when she’d been attacked, and anyway, she would have expected them; she’d lived with them since she was ten.
“Smelled your trail,” he says proudly. “We didn’t expect you to go so deep. What were you looking for, anyway?”
Lucy hesitates a moment before she asks, “Did you smell anyone else, besides me?”
“Everyone that was in these caves yesterday, and that little bugger of a faun. So yeah, quite a few people.”
“Anyone, er, fresher?”
He gives her a curious look, tail whipping behind his haunches. “What, you mean like someone else hiding out down here? Just the faun.”
“Oh,” Lucy says, obscurely disappointed. It’s not as if it doesn’t make sense. Aslan doesn’t have to be seen if he doesn’t want to be seen, and she supposes that extends to being smelled, either. Or heard, if there’d been anything to hear – she hadn’t heard his pawsteps, but he would have been so quiet in the caves, there might not have been anything to hear anyway – Lion’s mane, it’s not as if it matters. He’d led her to what she was meant to find; she hardly needs anymore proof that he was here in the first place. Finally, she knows that something’s gone right – that, at least for this purpose, however small it might be (and it isn’t at all, not to Cordylion and his daughter and their people), they’re meant to be in Narnia. It’s not like she’s been having a crisis of faith, but – it’s good to have the certainty.
Mayor eyes her with fascination. “The eddas do say that the Morningstar sees things,” he says, his voice extremely mild.
“Don’t call me that,” Lucy snaps. “No one called me that in my own time.”
“But you’re out of your own time, aren’t you?”
She can’t say anything to that, but she shakes her head anyway. “I don’t like it. I’m not – we’re not – any of those things they’ve been saying about us. We were kings and queens – we still are, once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia – but not the way people keep putting it about here. Peter and Ed and – they shouldn’t encourage it; it’s not true.”
“Truth is what is believed, not what happens,” Mayor says. His eyes are shadowed.
“Who told you that?”
“No one. It’s in the eddas. The, um, Saga of King Edmund Lawspeaker, or maybe it’s in – no, that’s right.” He takes a moment, squinting in concentration. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“Which is?” Lucy says, frowning and wondering what adventure of Ed’s they’ve made into a tale this time.
“The eddas? It’s – our stories. Our – what our people tell. The stories my mum told me, growing up. The humans – the Telmarines, King Tirian’s people – they make a spectacle out of it, go around searching out pieces of old paper, dead books from the dawn of the world, practically, and tell us it’s the legacy our ancestors left us. Stories about – oh, the Morningstar and the King of the Giants, or the High King and the Great Wolf, or the Witch Queen and the Land of Winter.”
“Fairy tales,” Lucy says slowly.
“No,” Mayor corrects, swift. “Now you sound like the Telmarines. They’re ours, that’s what they are. If you’re what you say – anyway, don’t you have stories where you come from?”
“Like King Arthur and Robin Hood and Scheherazade, that lot, is that what you mean?” Lucy says. The names don’t mean anything to him; he shrugs, and Lucy sits back, shoulders against the cold stone of the diamond tunnel.
Elin stirs a little from her light slumber, maybe teased out of it by the mention of familiar stories. She tugs at Mayor’s fetlock, entreating, “The Witch Queen!”
He looks down at her, expression bemused, and she strokes his jaw with one small hand. It looks absurdly tiny against his face. Lucy smiles, a little; she can remember Edmund’s daughter Saiet doing that to the Guard, in the last days before the very end.
“If Her Majesty agrees,” he says solemnly, canting his head towards Lucy.
“Her Majesty is intrigued,” Lucy agrees. “Pray, tell us your story, Master Mayor,” she goes on, in the voice she used to use when she was asked to visit clans or villages or herds, hearing disputes and kissing babies and blessing wells, that sort of thing.
One of Mayor’s ears flickers towards the opening in the wall, but apparently he doesn’t hear the approach of the others, because he turns back to Elin with some satisfaction. “What story do you want, cub? It’ll have to be a short one; we’ve not got much time before your dad comes back.”
Elin considers this, her brow wrinkling a little. “The Witch Queen and the River Daughters,” she decides finally, her voice very solemn.
“Very well,” Mayor says, pausing to gather himself before he starts. “In the days when Narnia was much younger than it is now, when the Great Autumn was beginning, there was a woman who had come out of the North, a strange woman, and very tall, with an air of strange magic about her. She had been in Narnia for quite some time, and the land was beginning to show the effect of it. The leaves had all fallen from the trees, and the nights grew colder and colder as the year wore on. This might have been no cause for concern if it had been the season for such things, but it was nearly high summer, the time that we would call Heart of Summer, and it should have been growing warmer, not colder.”
Lucy realizes, with something of a start, that she knows this story. It’s not the type of tale that was bandied around lightly during their own time, but it was still told from time to time, often enough that she can remember it nearly word for word. The words have changed a little in the telling, but the story – the story is the tame. No one needed to tell stories of the White Witch in their time; she was fresh in their memory still, and the destruction she’d wrought with it. But they’d needed to remember, and the young who’d been born after the Long Winter had ended had been curious. Still Lucy might have preferred that the stories of the White Witch be forgotten forever, that her taint be wiped from the land even when there was nothing left of her people but memories and bitterness, but Edmund had said that they had to remember, so that nothing like that could ever happen again. And apparently Narnia has remembered it far longer than Lucy ever thought they would, or even could.
“And the daughters of the River said to the Witch, ‘O Lady, thou can’st do this! For what thou seek is beyond all the reach of Man and Living Creature, and even the great gods who govern us would not dare such a crime. No living creature can work against the will of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea –”
“You’re not telling it right,” Elin interjects.
Mayor looks down at her in astonishment. “This is how my mum told me!” he says. He seems a little outraged by the perceived insult.
“You left out the wrath of Aslan!”
“That’s not even in there!”
Lucy leans in to listen, intrigued, but any further argument is broken off by the arrival of Gjaflaug and Cordylion with the other stowaways. Cordylion is pale with exertion; he put too much pressure on his wounded leg too soon, and while Lucy knows that some days you need to walk off a battlefield with two broken legs – or with two formerly broken and freshly healed legs – she doesn’t think he had the adrenaline to sustain the endeavor. He’ll crash if they don’t get to the surface as soon as possible, where he can be taken care of; if not, they’ll have to carry him out. His companions are a wan-looking banshee with a bum leg of her own, leaning on a shovel for support, and a miniature pony and her foal, who bolts for Elin as soon as he sees her. It’s quite the little circus, but she thinks they should be able to get out of here and back up to the surface without any real trouble, as long as someone remembers the way. She checks the oil in Gjaflaug’s lamp; the banshee has brought a lantern of her own, and Cordylion a torch. Lucy lights her own much battered torch from his, putting a hand out to the wall to brace her as she rises. For a moment the world spins dizzyingly, and she reevaluates the severity of the head wound before deciding that it will wait until she gets back to the camp. It would have to, anyway; she’s not wasting valuable cordial on a scratch.
Cordylion reaches for Elin with his free arm, struggling to pick her up one handed.
“Don’t –” Lucy says, putting her hand out to catch the girl as she nearly falls. “You can’t bear the weight on your leg –”
“She’s not big enough to walk out of here on her own,” explains the banshee, who’d given her name as Pengree. “And Cordylion’s not the only one of us with a bad leg.” She gives Lucy a rather dubious look.
Lucy is saved from having to offer to carry the little girl by Mayor, who speaks up, “I’ll take her.”
“You don’t have arms,” says Gjaflaug, frowning. “Or opposable thumbs.”
“She can ride on my back. Beka used to do it, when she was younger, and I was smaller then.”
Elin seems quite excited by this prospect, and Mayor lays down so that she can clamber onto his back, using one paw as a step, with her father’s steadying hand on her back. She takes two handfuls of the thick ruff of fur at the back of his neck; it’s not yet so deep into spring that he’s lost his winter coat yet. The pony foal looks dubiously at Mayor, then at his mother, who watches him anxiously. When Mayor seems disinclined to eat either of them, both of them relax.
“Gods of my ancestors,” the white tiger drawls, “you’d think I was bloody wild, the way you lot act. One of the marozi.”
“You’re hardly a tame tiger,” Lucy says, with a slight shiver of memory.
He doesn’t seem to get the reference. “Civilized, your majesty. A city-dweller, I pay my taxes, I vote at election time – well, I used to, anyway. Back when we still had a proper House of Commons.”
A democratic – or republican, rather, unless Lucy’s confusing them – Narnia is a rather startling thought, and she dwells on this as they start back up to the surface. She spares a moment to cast a wistful look back over her shoulder at the handmade wall, which Gjaflaug and Pengree had blocked up again with the boulder. She’d very much like to go back and look around at the old mine sometime; she’d been the one to find the kimberlite tunnel all those years ago, though of course she hadn’t known what it was called then, and she’d spent a lot of time down in the mines afterwards. The Narnian mines – this mine and the salt mine in the High Reaches, the other gemstone mines in the Southern Marches, the more valuable silver mines in the pocket of the Archen Valley, and all the rest – had been her pet project. She doesn’t have Peter’s eidetic memory, for which she’s usually glad, but she’d spent enough time pouring over maps that the dwarves and moles had made of the countryside to have an idea of the general shape of the land beneath the surface, the wealth of Narnia’s resources there. It can’t have changed much, not that deep, not the way the surface did. Eustace and Jill’s people of the World Below might have made some small alterations, and the Telmarines must have mined some, surely, but not so much as to utterly change the bones of Narnia.
Mayor has gone back to the story he’d been telling earlier, Elin and the foal hanging onto his every word, though Elin is drooping forward with every step, head nearly flat against the back of his neck. Cordylion keeps smiling at her absently, his free hand resting lightly on her back, keeping her in place.
Lucy’s head is spinning, leaving her with a dizzying sense of vertigo. She puts her free hand out against the wall, leaning against that for support with every step. The head wound can’t be that bad, truly; it’s probably just a lack of sleep and proper food, with the knock on the head as a minor inconvenience. She hadn’t slept since before they kept the fort, and that had been hard fighting; if she’d been advising Peter or Edmund, she’d have told them to take an hour or so to nap, but she’s notoriously bad at following her own advice –
She giggles a little, madly, and Gjaflaug gives her an alarmed look. “Nearly back to the top, majesty,” she says. “Maybe you should try some of that cordial yourself?”
Lucy shakes her head. “It wouldn’t do anything,” she says, and watches the dwarf ponder that thought with some distant amusement. Maybe it will add a whole new dimension to their stories, that the cordial doesn’t work on the Queen of Morning herself. It’s only a small exaggeration, after all.
They emerge into the thin pale light of early morning. Lucy stumbles automatically, deep in the pit of the first digging the Calormenes had done – the way they would have built a mine in their own country, a deep layered scar in the earth, with little ramps and a few scattered ladders tying the layers together. The Narnians that had been living in the earth blink at the sunlight, like they can’t quite believe it’s real, right here in front of them. Lucy can’t quite believe it herself, though that she decides she’d like to blame that on the blood loss.
They snuff their torches out in the red earth, then Cordylion tosses his aside and picks up his daughter carefully. Lucy watches him, frowning as his leg wavers a little. He limps slightly as he walks, but she doesn’t think it will fail on him now, and they haven’t far to go. He holds her close, and looks around at the sunlight chasing a few wisps of white cloud away.
“Thank you,” he says to Lucy, his voice faintly wistful. “I – I was beginning to wonder if we would ever see the surface again. My people were not meant to live underground.”
“I knew a faun who lived in a cave once,” Lucy says, smiling. “It was a very civilized cave, though, and he went out quite often. I used to go to the market with him.” She stops, struck by a sharp pang of longing.
She doesn’t let herself think about it often – can’t, or she’d go mad. Can’t think about sixteen hundred years passing by like water in the Great River, washing away everything they’d done, everything they’d fought and killed and worked so hard for. Time passes, she knows; she’s studied history in school. But you’re not supposed to realize it. If she’d known that this was what to come of her Narnia – she wonders if Octavian would have worked so hard to become Augustus if he’d known that the Empire would fall, or if Alfred would have fought the Vikings if he’d known that William would be the one to take England. What was even the use of fighting the White Witch, if the Calormenes were the ones to have Narnia in the end?
Lucy sighs, soft, and strokes the lion’s head on the stopper of her cordial. It wasn’t for the future, she knows. It was about the now: making things better for the people living now, so that there could be a future, whatever that future might hold. Aslan had known that. They’d been too young to think about any kind of future: just children, then. Maybe that’s why Aslan’s so eager to get rid of them once they’ve grown up: they know how to think, then, think and dream and plan.
She can’t be thinking this.
Lucy shakes her head, to clear the thoughts away, and starts up the nearest ramp. She’s distantly aware of the others following, but what she wants isn’t them, it’s Aslan, to come and tell her that she’s being silly. She is a queen of Narnia, once and forevermore, and nothing and no one can take that away.
Sher, Eustace’s huldu friend the healer, comes to see them taken care of, shuffling the refugees off to join the others and making a disgusted noise over Lucy’s head wound. “I thought you could heal,” he says, sitting her firmly down on a convenient rock.
“It’s not worth using my cordial on something this minor,” Lucy says, holding obediently still as he produces a razor and starts to shave away the hair around the wound. She fights back a pang of regret for the loss; she’ll look awkward and unbalanced now, with hair on only one side of her head. “Besides, it – it doesn’t work as well on me, anyway.”
“Well, that’s inconvenient.” He prods the wound with his fingers, making her wince. “Sorry, majesty.” He doesn’t particularly sound it.
Eustace, his head bandaged and his injured eye covered by an extra layer of bandaging – he’s not going to lose the eye, but he won’t be able to see out of it for a while, either – comes over and sits down on the ground in front of her, resting his elbows on his knees. “What was it like down there?”
“Empty,” Lucy says, and surprises herself with the sadness in her voice. “It was empty, except for them.”
----------
The Saga of King Edmund Lawspeaker is first referenced in Charmed Life.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW. Dust in the Air does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010).
“Give me a light,” Lucy says.
In hindsight, it probably isn’t the best idea to go down into the mines so soon after the battle, when the coals of the burnt fort are still hot and the recently freed Narnian slaves are wandering around looking for their families, shell-shocked from their captivity. But Lucy’s not needed up there; they brought healers enough from Arn Abedin, and Peter’s issued his customary order not to use her cordial on the battlefield except in the very worst cases. They were lucky: there’s no one who needs it that badly. Lucy isn’t any good up there now except as an extra pair of hands – trained hands, of course, but these Narnians don’t think it’s suitable to see a queen getting on her knees with her hands buried in someone else’s guts. Fighting them isn’t worth the trouble.
She’d badly wanted to see the mines, though. Lucy loves mines, loves caves and the deep dark places beneath the earth just as much as she loves the treetops and the highest cliffs where she can feel the wind on her face. There’s beauty in both of them. These are Calormene mines – not a corruption of the earth in and of themselves, but what they’d done down here is. Narnia never put slaves in the mines. Convicts, yes, and free Narnians who worked because they loved the earth and the things she keeps close to her bosom, but never slaves. Lucy had seen a mine in Calormen once, in her own time, and thought it lovely even as she hated what the Calormene slave-drivers did to the poor people who scratched gems out of the dry soil. She wants to see what this mine looks like, what secrets it holds close to its breast, and she has a sneaking feeling trouble might be lurking here. Narnians who hadn’t heard that the fort fell, perhaps, or Calormenes who’d fled here rather than face her people.
Someone passes a torch forward and Lucy takes it, dipping it close to the wall nearest her. The flame strikes sparks from only a few bright spots in the rock, none of them bigger than a single raindrop – if that. Lucy strips the glove off her free hand with her teeth and pries the nearest out of the wall with some difficulty. The stone around it has been worked over some, probably with a hammer and chisel; whoever had been working here must have been very close to getting it out when the riot began. When their chains had been broken, they’d taken their tools with them; Lucy wonders if she’ll find the chisel lodged in a Calormene’s skull somewhere.
The diamond itself is brown and rough, dull except where the light strikes it just right. It’s not a particularly high-quality diamond – Lucy’s seen better, worn better, and pulled better out of the mines in her own time – but it’s still a diamond, and it would go for a fair bit of money in Cair Paravel or Tashbaan, especially if sold in a lot of similar gemstones. At one point during their reign, there had been a fashion in Calormen for wearing dozens or even hundreds of tiny diamonds in a single piece of jewelry – earrings and necklaces that glittered, even whole girdles and belts. When he came to Narnia to court Susan, before everything had gone downhill, Prince Rabadash had worn a sword-sheath covered in yellow diamonds, with belt and cloak-pin to match. Even his shoes had sparkled. The Calormenes must be pulling thousands of the same kind of diamond out of the ground; perhaps the fashion’s come back. Narnia’s diamond mines are no different from any other land’s; she produces a handful of clear diamonds and ones with good, strong color – Lucy had once had a crown set with a pink the size of a badger’s fist – but mostly what comes out of the earth are the cheaper browns and yellows. Attractive enough when cleaned up, but hardly the same value as a pure diamond, or one of the rarer colors.
Lucy runs the diamond between her fingers again, rubbing some of the rock dust off, and slips it into the pouch on her belt. “Do we know how deep the mine goes?” she asks, her voice echoing off the walls around her.
The Calormenes prefer pit mining, or had in her day, but most Narnian mines are webs of tunnels crisscrossing through the vein. Some of them are – were – elaborate to extremes, even ornamental. This isn’t one of them.
“Deep,” says Gjaflaug, a brawny Black Dwarf who’d come from one of the more southerly camps. “This must be just the edge of the vein; they would have had to go in deeper to mine stones of the quality we found in the fort.” She touches one of the support posts, frowning. “This was hasty work. See where they had to come back in and reinforce it? Shoddy construction, poor choice of wood –”
“It’s not the old mine,” Lucy interrupts, absent. She moves forward, deeper into the mine. There aren’t many glimmers of diamonds or indicator minerals like garnets this close to the entrance; everything’s been picked clean, bagged up and shipped overland to Cair Paravel, and then to Tashbaan. “We thought it must have been because of the location, but the maps have changed, and the land –”
They’d never quite worked out how large the kimberlite tunnel on the edge of the High Reaches actually was; the best guess of the dwarves and Narnia’s vague impression to Peter had been “big.” The Calormene mine could be nearly anywhere in a six-mile radius of the old one.
“What are you looking for, your majesty?” Gjaflaug inquires. “We’ve gotten all the people out and the diamonds are all in the fort…” She trails off delicately, leaving an opening for an answer.
“And the view’s crap,” Mayor adds, sneezing. He bats a paw across his nose, his expression irritated. Lucy’s not even sure why he’s down here; maybe he’s just bored back in the camp.
“Nothing,” she says. “Just looking.” She casts a glance at the dark recess of the tunnel as she turns to go, then stops. There was a glimmer of golden mane out of the corner of her vision, gone now, but she saw it, saw him, turning a corner.
“Your majesty?” says Gjaflaug. “Do you see something?”
“No,” Lucy lies, looking after the place where she’d seen something. “You go on, I’ll catch up.”
“There’s no one left in here,” Gjaflaug says. “Everyone’s accounted for, unless it’s a Callie hiding down here – you shouldn’t be here alone, your majesty. We’ll accompany you.”
“There’s no need,” Lucy says, irritated, and turns away from them without waiting for a reply. Her footsteps are soft on the hewn stone floor, muted by the layers of rock and earth on all sides of her. The voices of Gjaflaug and the others who’d come down with her echo oddly through the tunnels, before Lucy turns a corner and they cut out like a bad radio signal.
She raises her torch. Tiny specks of diamonds too small to extract easily gleam from the walls like the staring eyes in a dark forest; the weight of Narnia presses down upon her head, resting on the hastily built supports that the mine slaves had thrown up as they went too deep too fast. They told her that there had been cave-ins recently; the Calormenes wanted the biggest and best diamonds they could get on short notice, and they didn’t care how many Narnians died to get them. They were just slaves, after all. Easily replaceable.
The flame of the torch is a flickering point of warmth not far from her face. Lucy does up the last few buttons of her coat with one hand; she hasn’t yet reached the point in the mine where it will stop being bloody cold and start warming up instead. She’d heard about Eustace and Jill’s adventure in the World Below – only a legend in her Narnia, a tale told around the fireplace to amuse small children; it’s disconcerting to think that it might be real. But not here – they’d broken through the crust far in the south, and the mines in her day had gone far deeper than this one. The World Below, if it still exists, must be deeper yet. She’d like to visit it, someday, if there’s ever another chance for adventures after this one. There probably won’t be.
She raises her head. Something is gleaming besides the diamonds and assorted indicator minerals, something with the warmth of the living – “Aslan?” Lucy says again, moving forward quickly. “Aslan, is that you?”
She goes too fast in her eagerness, not paying attention to the floor beneath her, and trips on an uneven section of rock. When she raises herself up, dusting earth off herself, the gleam is gone, and Lucy sighs in disappointment. He’s still here, though. Somewhere. She can hear his breathing, heavy and deep, like the river purling gently across the rocks in summer. He’s waiting for her.
At the next fork in the tunnels – they’re getting smaller, small enough that she has to duck her head, and she was never a tall woman – Lucy pauses, considering the options. The deeper she goes, the hastier the work is; near the entrance to the mine they’ve had the time to shore up the supports. Lucy hopes that none of the tunnels down here are ready to collapse.
“Aslan?” she asks, her voice echoing eerily through the tunnels. She’s utterly alone now; she doesn’t think there’s another living soul down here beneath the earth, now that the others have returned to the surface. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t come to her here.
“Aslan, are you there? It’s me, Lucy.” Aslan already knows that, of course, but she puts it out there anyway, if only to hear herself saying it. She doesn’t like the way the Narnians in this time treat her and siblings, like they’re something more than just the Pevensie kids or the four kings and queens of Narnia’s Golden Age. She isn’t even entirely convinced they’re Aslan’s chosen anymore: Eustace and Jill were here first, and Aslan had said that Lucy and her siblings were never to come back. But of course, they wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want it. Nothing happens in Narnia without Aslan knowing, she’s sure of it.
She takes a breath, listening closely until she can pinpoint which direction the sound of breathing is coming from, and then a right, positive that she’d seen the tip of Aslan’s tail flicker around it when she’d first come around the corner, and almost runs into a stone wall.
Lucy takes a hasty step back, puzzled about why Aslan would lead her here. It’s not a proper wall, nor an unfinished tunnel, she finds as she raises her torch to inspect it more closely. Her initial thought is that it’s the result of a cave-in, but closer inspection proves that the broken pieces of rock that make it up are laid with too much deliberate care to be accidental. You wouldn’t tell in bad light – whoever had built this up had known what they were doing – but Lucy’s spent a certain amount of time in mines, enough to tell when something’s deliberate, and when it’s not. This is deliberate. The scuff marks on the floor show where one particularly large piece of rock has been removed several times; the wall is built up in such a way that the rest of it won’t come barreling down when the boulder’s removed, which isn’t useful to anyone. With the boulder missing, the space left behind should be large enough to allow passage to a human, faun, or anything smaller than a very short satyr. Anything larger won’t be able to fit.
Lucy crouches down to run her free hand over the rock. There has to be a trick to getting it out. It’s too heavy for any one human to lift, but she doesn’t need to be able to lift it, just get it out of the way – you don’t build a wall like this if you don’t have something to hide, and Aslan led her here for a reason.
She’s so preoccupied with the boulder that she doesn’t hear the approach behind her until the flame of her torch flickers at his step. Lucy jerks aside, not quite in time to avoid the blow entirely; the haft of the pick slides off the left side of her skull as she whirls, slamming the torch up with both hands to ward off the second blow. The flame flickers wildly; she can see through the distortion of it that the stranger’s a faun with grizzled red hair, one horn broken off above his ear. A Narnian.
Lucy doesn’t have time to think through the implications of that, because he swings the pick at her again. She blocks him with the torch; he twists, catching at it with the tip of the pick and shoving sideways, trying to get her to let go. Lucy hangs on grimly, bracing herself as she and the torch slam into the wall of the tunnel. The torch goes out in a shower of sparks, leaving her and the faun in the dark.
For a moment neither of them moves; she can hear her own breath panting out and the slight click of the faun’s hooves on the floor as he shifts. Lucy steps to the side, soft; she might be wearing steel-toed boots, but she still knows how to be quiet underground. She draws her dagger with her left hand; the quarters are too close for sword-work, and besides, she’s not entirely certain she wants her opponent dead. Club and dagger will do for now.
There’s no use trying to see through the darkness. They’re at least half a mile beneath the surface of the earth; no sunlight has ever penetrated down here, and never will. Most fighters couldn’t do it. But Lucy was trained by the best in Narnia, and she can fight anywhere: in pitch dark, underwater, on a ring of oiled glass. She’s out of practice, but a little comes back to her with every moment she’s in Narnia, every heartbeat thudding memory back into her veins.
The sudden darkness had thrown the faun for a moment, but he recovers quickly, gliding sideways. His hooves are silent on the floor, but Lucy feels the air move with his passage and turns to face him, closing her eyes to better concentrate. She hears the slight whistle as his pick moves and parries it aside with her dagger, her arm shuddering with the effort. One steel-toed boot snaps out, meaning to crush a kneecap, but the faun is just as fast as she is, jerking aside so that she stumbles forward instead. The blade of the pick scrapes down her arm, jarred slightly aside by the padded wool of her coat sleeve, but Lucy knows even before she moves it that it’s bruised to the bone. Her left hand is numb enough to be nearly useless, though at least she hasn’t dropped her dagger, much good may that do her.
Both their breaths are scraping out in the cold underground air. Lucy grins, even though she knows the faun can’t see it, and sheathes her dagger, arm screaming pain, so that she doesn’t lose it. She hefts the makeshift club in her good hand. He comes at her again, hooves clattering on the floor this time, and Lucy ducks low, guessing that he’s holding his pick above his head, and drives the club into his belly. He doubles over with an oof, and she swings the club back up into his wrist, hearing something snap. The pick falls to the floor; she hears it land far too close, which means it probably only just missed her skull – no protection on that, since she hadn’t assumed she’d need a helmet or a coif. Lucy takes a moment to thank Aslan silently, then slams one foot into the lower part of the faun’s leg, sending him screaming in pain as the bone shatters. She barrels forward, shoving him over onto his back as she lands on top of him, pressing the club against his throat with both hands.
“I’m a Narnian,” she says fiercely. Somewhere in the background she can hear running – Aslan’s sweet mercy, did Gjaflaug and the others not go on up to the surface the way she’d ordered? – but for now she ignores it. “Do you hear me? Narnian! The Calormenes are gone, the fort burned –”
He curses, bucking beneath her, and Lucy digs a knee into his stomach, talking quickly. “I’m Queen Lucy, I can heal you, they call me the Valiant –” Just in case that will help him recognize her.
She almost doesn’t hear the sound of the boulder moving aside, but she sees the gleam of light, just the faintest glow of it illuminating the vague shape of the faun beneath her. Lucy reaches for her dagger with her left hand, which is still twinging with pain, and turns, using her right hand to keep the club against the faun’s throat.
“Daddy!” says a little girl, scampering out of the opening left by the boulder; Lucy reverses the dagger, hastily, and puts out her arm to knock her back, seeing the panic in the faun’s eyes.
“Don’t hurt her!”
“That depends,” says Mayor, teeth showing as he and Gjaflaug come around the corner. The dwarf woman has a fighting axe in one hand, a lantern in the other. “How stupid are you feeling today? Beyond your first instincts, of course,” he adds generously.
He pads forward and puts one massive paw on the faun’s forehead, making the girl wail in terror, straining against Lucy’s outstretched arm. “Daddy!”
“I won’t –” the faun gasps, face white with pain. “Please don’t –”
“Your majesty, I wouldn’t –” Gjaflaug begins, looking down at him dubiously, but Lucy is already sitting back, removing the club.
“That was stupid,” she tells the faun kindly. “Brave, but stupid. We’re friends, you know. Narnians.”
“Well,” Mayor rumbles, “she’s a friend.”
“Shut up, tiger,” says Gjaflug, her eyes sharp.
Mayor flexes his paw, claws protruding briefly before retracting. The faun goes cross-eyed, so still he’s barely breathing. Lucy lets the girl go, and she scrambles forward, throwing herself down across his chest. She can’t be his daughter by birth; there’s not a trace of nonhuman blood in her, and while it’s hard to tell in the dim light, Lucy has a suspicious feeling that she might be part Calormene. The faun raises one hand to touch her hair, then stops as Mayor growls, the sound reverberating through the tunnel.
“What’s your name?” Lucy asks him gently, sheathing her dagger and reaching for her cordial. “I told you, I’m Lucy. These are Gjaflaug and May Your Life Be –”
“Mayor,” the tiger corrects, glaring at her in irritation.
She ignores him, uncapping her cordial and scooting around the girl to bend over the faun. “Just a drop,” she tells him, smiling. Peter doesn’t have to know about this.
“You shouldn’t waste that on him –” Gjaflaug starts, hefting her axe with intention, then stops as the girl begins to wail again.
The faun starts to turn his face away, but Lucy catches his chin in her hand, holding him steady as she drops the cordial onto his cracked lips. For a moment she thinks he’s not going to swallow, that the precious drop is going to roll down the side of his face and be lost, but then his tongue comes out, swiping at it. His face goes even whiter with pain as his entire body stiffens, the broken bones in his leg reknitting themselves. Lucy knows from experience that that’s one of the more painful things her cordial can do. She sits back as she caps it and replaces it on her belt, watching him.
“I don’t think that’s necessary, Mayor,” she says.
The tiger looks up at her dubiously for a moment, then removes his paw from the faun’s forehead, reluctant. His white teeth gleam for a moment as he breathes into the faun’s face, the sickly sweet scent of a carnivore’s breath making the faun shudder. He sits up, wincing, and puts his arm around his daughter, scooting hastily away from Mayor until his back is at the wall. Lucy doesn’t miss the worried look he gives to the gaping entrance in the constructed wall, still glowing with light; she’d put money on there being someone else back there.
“What’s your name?” she asks again, saving that question for later.
The faun swallows, nervous. “My – my name is Cordylion,” he says. “From Hammersmith.”
“Neighborhood in Cair Paravel,” Mayor interprets for Lucy’s benefit. “Not far from the Pearl, for those nonhumans who think highly of themselves. Who’s the cub, then?”
“My daughter,” says Cordylion quickly, and the little girl presses her face into his shoulder. “And you –” He touches his fingers to his formerly-wounded leg, eyes briefly wide with surprise and a little awe, before they narrow again, suspicion taking over.
“This is the Morningstar, Queen Lucy Wound-binder,” says Gjaflaug, hefting her axe. “You should kneel before her.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Lucy says hastily. Wound-binder is a new one; she stores that one away for further questioning later; she thinks she likes it a little more than some of the other things she’s called these days. “You’re still weak from the cordial. You’ll have to walk out of here; I know you’ll be in a great deal of pain, but after that you’ll be able to rest. We have hot food and drink, and healers –” She won’t go so far as to call them physicians, because they’re mostly the remnants of village midwives and bonebinders. “− and we can take you somewhere you’ll be safe.”
Cordylion looks rather dubious about that.
Lucy smiles reassuringly at him. “Is your daughter hurt at all? I can –”
“No,” he interrupts. “No, she’s well.”
“And the others?” Lucy says. “Are they unhurt?”
“The others –”
“The others you’re hiding,” Lucy says, with a certainty she’s not entirely positive about, but then again – she’s not wrong very often, not about things like this. “There can’t be very many of you; you wouldn’t be able to avoid detection this long, or steal that much food. What happened?” she goes on, gentle. “You, or one of your comrades, or several of you, broke through the wall here, and you found –” She paused for a moment, because they’d found something, a natural pocket of air, a fold in the earth, or – Lucy knew, abruptly, what it was they’d found. “You found the old mine,” she says softly. “Where we found the first diamonds, sixteen hundred years ago, and worked them out of the earth. You found the old tunnels, and you realized you had fresh air, and water, and a place to hide – so you did. You’ve been down here a long time, and you’re deep enough not to have realized when the fort fell.” It was only yesterday, but surely they might have noticed the lack of activity in the mine. Unless they’re further into the old tunnels than she’d thought before.
He stares her, his expression shocked. “How did you know –”
“She’s the Morningstar,” Mayor says, examining his claws to cover up his disconcertion. “Do you really think there’s anything she doesn’t know?”
“Many things,” Lucy says, irritated. “I’m not omniscient, you know. I’m only human. I just know the tunnels – the old tunnels – really well.”
All of them, except for the little girl, look unconvinced.
Lucy sighs. “How many other people are there in there?” she asks Cordylion. “We’ve got to get them out as quickly as possible – we’re not staying here long, though we’ll refortify this area as soon as possible. My brother wants us back for Winter’s End.”
The girl raises her head from her father’s shoulder. “Winter’s End?” she says hopefully.
“That late already,” Cordylion murmurs to himself, soft, then, to her. “There are three others. I can fetch them.”
Lucy nods, and he removes his daughter carefully from his lap. She looks up at him with huge eyes.
“Elin, will you stay here for a few minutes?” he says to her, his voice solemn. “I’ll be back soon, I promise.”
“But,” she says, voice trembling a little, and looks around at the people around her – Lucy sitting as far back from her as she can, Mayor with his big teeth and claws, Gjaflaug leaning on her axe. A little surprisingly, it’s Mayor she inclines towards, after he sheathes his claws. Maybe it’s just because he’s the warmest, but Lucy’s glad that Elin hasn’t decided she’s the friendliest – she’s not very good with children.
Cordylion looks relieved. “Good girl,” he says, his smile cracking a little. “My brave girl.” He looks at Mayor, and Mayor looks back, his chin dipping slightly in solemn promise.
“I’ll go with you,” Lucy says, starting to rise.
“Better if you stay here, your majesty,” Gjaflaug says, stirring. “They might react better to seeing a Narnian face, rather than a human one. No offense meant, majesty.”
“None taken,” Lucy says, considering this. It does make sense, she admits after a moment, and nods. “Very well.”
Gjaflaug seems relieved. She lifts her axe off the floor as if it’s little more than a feather and jerks her chin at the entrance. “You first,” she tells the faun.
Cordylion picks himself up off the floor, wincing a little as he puts his weight on the leg Lucy had broken earlier. She blinks − it can’t even have been ten minutes since he first tried to hit her over the head – and touches her hand to the place where the pick had glanced off. The side of her skull throbs in protest, and her fingers come away a little sticky with blood. Gjaflaug gives her a long-suffering look.
“I’ll leave the lantern, shall I, your majesty?” she says – though by the tone it’s not a question.
“It looks well enough like it’s illuminated in there,” Lucy says. The glow dims abruptly as Cordylion squeezes himself through the whole made by the boulder, then again as Gjaflaug follows him, dropping to hands and knees. Lucy listens to their footsteps recede.
The little girl – Elin, Cordylion had called her – is petting Mayor’s neck and chin, fascinated by his whiteness. She seems to have forgotten her former terror in this new novelty. Lucy supposes she can’t blame the girl; white tigers were rare even in her time, prized as they were by the White Witch for their color. She knows that logically it’s a mutation, a freak birth in a family of ordinary orange tigers, but there’s still a part of her that thrills a little in remembered fear when she sees one, certain that it’s preceding the Witch and her army, ready to come and kill her brothers.
Mayor is bearing the attention with far more grace than Lucy would have expected of him, though perhaps he’s just vain, and likes the attention. When Elin abruptly decides she’s tired and curls up against his paw, head against his shoulder, he just smiles, then covers it up quickly when he sees Lucy’s surprise. “Well, I’ve had worse,” he rumbles, soft as thunder in the distance.
“You’re very good with her,” Lucy says.
“I’ve younger sibs of my own,” he explains. “Four, not counting Elizar and Beka, which I guess I could; I certainly see them more than I see Standfast or Boxer or the twins.”
“Don’t you get along with your family?”
“Summerking have mercy, no,” he says. He eyes her thoughtfully, the claws on his free paw flexing. Lucy doesn’t think it’s threat, just absent instinct.
She raises her chin. “Why did you and Gjaflaug come down after me, when I expressly told you otherwise?”
He shrugs, a brief ripple of fur along shoulders and withers. “I met your brother and sister in Cair Paravel, you know. They didn’t have a squirrel’s sense of self preservation either. That sort of thing tends to run in a family; gods know it runs in Elizar’s. And the dwarf didn’t approve of you going off on your own, of course.”
“You followed me?” Lucy says, accusing. No one would have done that in her Narnia, not if she’d given orders otherwise. Well, just the Guard, but they would have followed at a distance that would have actually been useful when she’d been attacked, and anyway, she would have expected them; she’d lived with them since she was ten.
“Smelled your trail,” he says proudly. “We didn’t expect you to go so deep. What were you looking for, anyway?”
Lucy hesitates a moment before she asks, “Did you smell anyone else, besides me?”
“Everyone that was in these caves yesterday, and that little bugger of a faun. So yeah, quite a few people.”
“Anyone, er, fresher?”
He gives her a curious look, tail whipping behind his haunches. “What, you mean like someone else hiding out down here? Just the faun.”
“Oh,” Lucy says, obscurely disappointed. It’s not as if it doesn’t make sense. Aslan doesn’t have to be seen if he doesn’t want to be seen, and she supposes that extends to being smelled, either. Or heard, if there’d been anything to hear – she hadn’t heard his pawsteps, but he would have been so quiet in the caves, there might not have been anything to hear anyway – Lion’s mane, it’s not as if it matters. He’d led her to what she was meant to find; she hardly needs anymore proof that he was here in the first place. Finally, she knows that something’s gone right – that, at least for this purpose, however small it might be (and it isn’t at all, not to Cordylion and his daughter and their people), they’re meant to be in Narnia. It’s not like she’s been having a crisis of faith, but – it’s good to have the certainty.
Mayor eyes her with fascination. “The eddas do say that the Morningstar sees things,” he says, his voice extremely mild.
“Don’t call me that,” Lucy snaps. “No one called me that in my own time.”
“But you’re out of your own time, aren’t you?”
She can’t say anything to that, but she shakes her head anyway. “I don’t like it. I’m not – we’re not – any of those things they’ve been saying about us. We were kings and queens – we still are, once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia – but not the way people keep putting it about here. Peter and Ed and – they shouldn’t encourage it; it’s not true.”
“Truth is what is believed, not what happens,” Mayor says. His eyes are shadowed.
“Who told you that?”
“No one. It’s in the eddas. The, um, Saga of King Edmund Lawspeaker, or maybe it’s in – no, that’s right.” He takes a moment, squinting in concentration. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“Which is?” Lucy says, frowning and wondering what adventure of Ed’s they’ve made into a tale this time.
“The eddas? It’s – our stories. Our – what our people tell. The stories my mum told me, growing up. The humans – the Telmarines, King Tirian’s people – they make a spectacle out of it, go around searching out pieces of old paper, dead books from the dawn of the world, practically, and tell us it’s the legacy our ancestors left us. Stories about – oh, the Morningstar and the King of the Giants, or the High King and the Great Wolf, or the Witch Queen and the Land of Winter.”
“Fairy tales,” Lucy says slowly.
“No,” Mayor corrects, swift. “Now you sound like the Telmarines. They’re ours, that’s what they are. If you’re what you say – anyway, don’t you have stories where you come from?”
“Like King Arthur and Robin Hood and Scheherazade, that lot, is that what you mean?” Lucy says. The names don’t mean anything to him; he shrugs, and Lucy sits back, shoulders against the cold stone of the diamond tunnel.
Elin stirs a little from her light slumber, maybe teased out of it by the mention of familiar stories. She tugs at Mayor’s fetlock, entreating, “The Witch Queen!”
He looks down at her, expression bemused, and she strokes his jaw with one small hand. It looks absurdly tiny against his face. Lucy smiles, a little; she can remember Edmund’s daughter Saiet doing that to the Guard, in the last days before the very end.
“If Her Majesty agrees,” he says solemnly, canting his head towards Lucy.
“Her Majesty is intrigued,” Lucy agrees. “Pray, tell us your story, Master Mayor,” she goes on, in the voice she used to use when she was asked to visit clans or villages or herds, hearing disputes and kissing babies and blessing wells, that sort of thing.
One of Mayor’s ears flickers towards the opening in the wall, but apparently he doesn’t hear the approach of the others, because he turns back to Elin with some satisfaction. “What story do you want, cub? It’ll have to be a short one; we’ve not got much time before your dad comes back.”
Elin considers this, her brow wrinkling a little. “The Witch Queen and the River Daughters,” she decides finally, her voice very solemn.
“Very well,” Mayor says, pausing to gather himself before he starts. “In the days when Narnia was much younger than it is now, when the Great Autumn was beginning, there was a woman who had come out of the North, a strange woman, and very tall, with an air of strange magic about her. She had been in Narnia for quite some time, and the land was beginning to show the effect of it. The leaves had all fallen from the trees, and the nights grew colder and colder as the year wore on. This might have been no cause for concern if it had been the season for such things, but it was nearly high summer, the time that we would call Heart of Summer, and it should have been growing warmer, not colder.”
Lucy realizes, with something of a start, that she knows this story. It’s not the type of tale that was bandied around lightly during their own time, but it was still told from time to time, often enough that she can remember it nearly word for word. The words have changed a little in the telling, but the story – the story is the tame. No one needed to tell stories of the White Witch in their time; she was fresh in their memory still, and the destruction she’d wrought with it. But they’d needed to remember, and the young who’d been born after the Long Winter had ended had been curious. Still Lucy might have preferred that the stories of the White Witch be forgotten forever, that her taint be wiped from the land even when there was nothing left of her people but memories and bitterness, but Edmund had said that they had to remember, so that nothing like that could ever happen again. And apparently Narnia has remembered it far longer than Lucy ever thought they would, or even could.
“And the daughters of the River said to the Witch, ‘O Lady, thou can’st do this! For what thou seek is beyond all the reach of Man and Living Creature, and even the great gods who govern us would not dare such a crime. No living creature can work against the will of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea –”
“You’re not telling it right,” Elin interjects.
Mayor looks down at her in astonishment. “This is how my mum told me!” he says. He seems a little outraged by the perceived insult.
“You left out the wrath of Aslan!”
“That’s not even in there!”
Lucy leans in to listen, intrigued, but any further argument is broken off by the arrival of Gjaflaug and Cordylion with the other stowaways. Cordylion is pale with exertion; he put too much pressure on his wounded leg too soon, and while Lucy knows that some days you need to walk off a battlefield with two broken legs – or with two formerly broken and freshly healed legs – she doesn’t think he had the adrenaline to sustain the endeavor. He’ll crash if they don’t get to the surface as soon as possible, where he can be taken care of; if not, they’ll have to carry him out. His companions are a wan-looking banshee with a bum leg of her own, leaning on a shovel for support, and a miniature pony and her foal, who bolts for Elin as soon as he sees her. It’s quite the little circus, but she thinks they should be able to get out of here and back up to the surface without any real trouble, as long as someone remembers the way. She checks the oil in Gjaflaug’s lamp; the banshee has brought a lantern of her own, and Cordylion a torch. Lucy lights her own much battered torch from his, putting a hand out to the wall to brace her as she rises. For a moment the world spins dizzyingly, and she reevaluates the severity of the head wound before deciding that it will wait until she gets back to the camp. It would have to, anyway; she’s not wasting valuable cordial on a scratch.
Cordylion reaches for Elin with his free arm, struggling to pick her up one handed.
“Don’t –” Lucy says, putting her hand out to catch the girl as she nearly falls. “You can’t bear the weight on your leg –”
“She’s not big enough to walk out of here on her own,” explains the banshee, who’d given her name as Pengree. “And Cordylion’s not the only one of us with a bad leg.” She gives Lucy a rather dubious look.
Lucy is saved from having to offer to carry the little girl by Mayor, who speaks up, “I’ll take her.”
“You don’t have arms,” says Gjaflaug, frowning. “Or opposable thumbs.”
“She can ride on my back. Beka used to do it, when she was younger, and I was smaller then.”
Elin seems quite excited by this prospect, and Mayor lays down so that she can clamber onto his back, using one paw as a step, with her father’s steadying hand on her back. She takes two handfuls of the thick ruff of fur at the back of his neck; it’s not yet so deep into spring that he’s lost his winter coat yet. The pony foal looks dubiously at Mayor, then at his mother, who watches him anxiously. When Mayor seems disinclined to eat either of them, both of them relax.
“Gods of my ancestors,” the white tiger drawls, “you’d think I was bloody wild, the way you lot act. One of the marozi.”
“You’re hardly a tame tiger,” Lucy says, with a slight shiver of memory.
He doesn’t seem to get the reference. “Civilized, your majesty. A city-dweller, I pay my taxes, I vote at election time – well, I used to, anyway. Back when we still had a proper House of Commons.”
A democratic – or republican, rather, unless Lucy’s confusing them – Narnia is a rather startling thought, and she dwells on this as they start back up to the surface. She spares a moment to cast a wistful look back over her shoulder at the handmade wall, which Gjaflaug and Pengree had blocked up again with the boulder. She’d very much like to go back and look around at the old mine sometime; she’d been the one to find the kimberlite tunnel all those years ago, though of course she hadn’t known what it was called then, and she’d spent a lot of time down in the mines afterwards. The Narnian mines – this mine and the salt mine in the High Reaches, the other gemstone mines in the Southern Marches, the more valuable silver mines in the pocket of the Archen Valley, and all the rest – had been her pet project. She doesn’t have Peter’s eidetic memory, for which she’s usually glad, but she’d spent enough time pouring over maps that the dwarves and moles had made of the countryside to have an idea of the general shape of the land beneath the surface, the wealth of Narnia’s resources there. It can’t have changed much, not that deep, not the way the surface did. Eustace and Jill’s people of the World Below might have made some small alterations, and the Telmarines must have mined some, surely, but not so much as to utterly change the bones of Narnia.
Mayor has gone back to the story he’d been telling earlier, Elin and the foal hanging onto his every word, though Elin is drooping forward with every step, head nearly flat against the back of his neck. Cordylion keeps smiling at her absently, his free hand resting lightly on her back, keeping her in place.
Lucy’s head is spinning, leaving her with a dizzying sense of vertigo. She puts her free hand out against the wall, leaning against that for support with every step. The head wound can’t be that bad, truly; it’s probably just a lack of sleep and proper food, with the knock on the head as a minor inconvenience. She hadn’t slept since before they kept the fort, and that had been hard fighting; if she’d been advising Peter or Edmund, she’d have told them to take an hour or so to nap, but she’s notoriously bad at following her own advice –
She giggles a little, madly, and Gjaflaug gives her an alarmed look. “Nearly back to the top, majesty,” she says. “Maybe you should try some of that cordial yourself?”
Lucy shakes her head. “It wouldn’t do anything,” she says, and watches the dwarf ponder that thought with some distant amusement. Maybe it will add a whole new dimension to their stories, that the cordial doesn’t work on the Queen of Morning herself. It’s only a small exaggeration, after all.
They emerge into the thin pale light of early morning. Lucy stumbles automatically, deep in the pit of the first digging the Calormenes had done – the way they would have built a mine in their own country, a deep layered scar in the earth, with little ramps and a few scattered ladders tying the layers together. The Narnians that had been living in the earth blink at the sunlight, like they can’t quite believe it’s real, right here in front of them. Lucy can’t quite believe it herself, though that she decides she’d like to blame that on the blood loss.
They snuff their torches out in the red earth, then Cordylion tosses his aside and picks up his daughter carefully. Lucy watches him, frowning as his leg wavers a little. He limps slightly as he walks, but she doesn’t think it will fail on him now, and they haven’t far to go. He holds her close, and looks around at the sunlight chasing a few wisps of white cloud away.
“Thank you,” he says to Lucy, his voice faintly wistful. “I – I was beginning to wonder if we would ever see the surface again. My people were not meant to live underground.”
“I knew a faun who lived in a cave once,” Lucy says, smiling. “It was a very civilized cave, though, and he went out quite often. I used to go to the market with him.” She stops, struck by a sharp pang of longing.
She doesn’t let herself think about it often – can’t, or she’d go mad. Can’t think about sixteen hundred years passing by like water in the Great River, washing away everything they’d done, everything they’d fought and killed and worked so hard for. Time passes, she knows; she’s studied history in school. But you’re not supposed to realize it. If she’d known that this was what to come of her Narnia – she wonders if Octavian would have worked so hard to become Augustus if he’d known that the Empire would fall, or if Alfred would have fought the Vikings if he’d known that William would be the one to take England. What was even the use of fighting the White Witch, if the Calormenes were the ones to have Narnia in the end?
Lucy sighs, soft, and strokes the lion’s head on the stopper of her cordial. It wasn’t for the future, she knows. It was about the now: making things better for the people living now, so that there could be a future, whatever that future might hold. Aslan had known that. They’d been too young to think about any kind of future: just children, then. Maybe that’s why Aslan’s so eager to get rid of them once they’ve grown up: they know how to think, then, think and dream and plan.
She can’t be thinking this.
Lucy shakes her head, to clear the thoughts away, and starts up the nearest ramp. She’s distantly aware of the others following, but what she wants isn’t them, it’s Aslan, to come and tell her that she’s being silly. She is a queen of Narnia, once and forevermore, and nothing and no one can take that away.
Sher, Eustace’s huldu friend the healer, comes to see them taken care of, shuffling the refugees off to join the others and making a disgusted noise over Lucy’s head wound. “I thought you could heal,” he says, sitting her firmly down on a convenient rock.
“It’s not worth using my cordial on something this minor,” Lucy says, holding obediently still as he produces a razor and starts to shave away the hair around the wound. She fights back a pang of regret for the loss; she’ll look awkward and unbalanced now, with hair on only one side of her head. “Besides, it – it doesn’t work as well on me, anyway.”
“Well, that’s inconvenient.” He prods the wound with his fingers, making her wince. “Sorry, majesty.” He doesn’t particularly sound it.
Eustace, his head bandaged and his injured eye covered by an extra layer of bandaging – he’s not going to lose the eye, but he won’t be able to see out of it for a while, either – comes over and sits down on the ground in front of her, resting his elbows on his knees. “What was it like down there?”
“Empty,” Lucy says, and surprises herself with the sadness in her voice. “It was empty, except for them.”
----------
The Saga of King Edmund Lawspeaker is first referenced in Charmed Life.
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
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-21 05:11 am (UTC)“You’re not telling it right,” Elin interjects.
Mayor looks down at her in astonishment. “This is how my mum told me!” he says. He seems a little outraged by the perceived insult.
“You left out the wrath of Aslan!”
“That’s not even in there!”
Heeeee. Such a cute visual.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-22 04:12 am (UTC)