bedlamsbard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bedlamsbard) wrote2011-04-29 03:10 pm
bedlamsbard) wrote2011-04-29 03:10 pm
UFO: Narnia fic: "Over the Hills and Far Away"
The last of the UFOs for now! I'm reasonably certain this is the most recent, since the last datestamp on it is August 2009. We first saw Fiorenza Paolucci in Four Things Greater, of course; this is another Fiorenza POV, and it was written after aella_irene and I wrote the bulk of the Junior Pevensie verse (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
houseofpevensie), so there are bits and pieces of that in there as well. (Namedropping more than anything else, as this still falls firmly within the limits of the Warsverse rather than the JP 'verse.) In timeline it falls shortly after Landslide. (And, for a change, this one I can date fairly well, since it's right after Peter/Susan becomes fairly quiet common knowledge.)
Stylistically Over the Hills probably would have been most like Four Things Greater and The Coastwise Lights, both of which feature action plots and OC narrators. (And were actually both written within a few months of each other, heh. Though Coastwise was when I started slowing down as a writer, if I remember correctly, because not long after that I believeaella_irene and I started working on our original.) The title is from Over the Hills and Far Away, of course, specifically the version from Sharpe.
Content advisory: very brief mention of background incest.
“Run away from home,” said Kerewyn Wildblood, stamping the Royal Narnian Army’s seal onto the bottom of one dispatch after another, “come to Cair Paravel, join the army, and what do I get? Acres and acres of paperwork. I could have stayed at school if I wanted this lot.”
Commander Fiorenza Paolucci, of His Majesty the High King Peter’s Royal Narnian Army, didn’t bother asking where home happened to be; somewhere around a third of all enlistees in the Narnian Army used false names, and while the recruitment office didn’t ask or distinguish, Fiorenza was virtually certain that Kerewyn was one of that thirty percent. Her accent made her Narnian rather than foreign – somewhere around half of the army came from outside Narnia – although the mention of formal schooling somewhat limited where in the country she was from. She looked human, at least, though with a slightly greenish cast to her skin and long fingers that almost looked webbed in the right light, though Fiorenza had gotten close enough to see that what looked like webbing wasn’t actually so. Nix or finfolk blood, maybe; there were certainly enough of those floating around the eastern seaboard.
“I sympathize,” Fiorenza said instead of commenting. “How’s the leg?”
The reason that Kerewyn was here instead of in the barracks or on a border somewhere was because she’d broken her leg falling down a flight of stairs; she’d been off the crutches for the better part of a week now, but last Fiorenza had heard, the army surgeons hadn’t yet declared her fit for duty.
Kerewyn shrugged negligently. “Bit of a limp, ma’am, but aside from that I’m ready to be back in the field.” She gave Fiorenza a hopeful look, but all Fiorenza could do was smile apologetically; commander in his majesty’s army or not, she had no authority over the surgeons’ decisions. If she had, she wouldn’t be sitting here reading supply lists from the border forts.
Kerewyn gave a great sigh and went back to her stamps, stopping periodically to melt more sealing wax over the candle by her elbow. Another five minutes of this nonsense, Fiorenza told herself, adding her sprawling signature to an order to send six barrels of arrowheads to Fort Yrongard on the southern border, and then she was going to give herself a break and go outside to at least pretend she was still a proper army officer. Kerewyn could come with her; Fiorenza hadn’t spent so much time indoors since she’d been at the Accademia Militare di Shoushan in Guenveuer. It was downright unnatural for a proper soldier.
She was stopped from doing so by the arrival of Liobsynde Fara and Jaisen Ettore, who strolled in through the door as if they’d never left Cair Paravel with Queen Lucy.
“My gods, Fio,” Liobsynde said. “Trapped like this within wooden walls? I’m surprised you haven’t gone mad yet.”
Fiorenza put her pen down and grinned at her, then cracked her knuckles. The sound echoed loudly in the room. “You and I both, ‘Synde,” she said, waving Kerewyn, who’d leapt to her feet when the two officers came in, back to her seat.
“I never did understand why women want to have children,” Liobsynde went on. She was holding her sheathed sword in her hand; she tapped it idly against her leg, fingers tight on the worn leather.
“I still don’t,” Fiorenza admitted, but spared a moment for the thought of Emery, who was up in the Cair Paravel nursery with his nurse. Osumare was in, though, had been since the baby had been born; that was something. He wasn’t the one who’d been pregnant for nine months, though, and he, the lucky bastard, was still on active duty.
“How is the babe?” Jaisen put in, looking at her with polite interest.
“He sleeps, he screams, he eats, he cries,” Fiorenza said. “I have it on good authority that once he starts talking he’ll start to turn into an actual human being. How were the Seven Isles?”
“Boring,” Liobsynde said, leaning negligently on Fiorenza’s desk. “The Navy came looming up over the horizon and the islanders folded like a house of cards. We barely had to step off the boats. Is it true that the High King and Herself are sleeping together?”
Kerewyn choked.
Fiorenza raised an eyebrow at Liobsynde and Jaisen, who was too well-bred to ask but who was obviously just as curious as his partner. She didn’t say anything.
“Huh,” Liobsynde said, admiring, as she took Fiorenza’s silence for assent. Jaisen’s face was carefully blank, without any show of emotion or even life; anyone raised in the snake pit that made up the Natarene ability learned quickly and early to hide both thought and feeling if they wanted to last longer than a day.
“Seems a bit of a pity,” Liobsynde went on, and Jaisen brought himself to stir a little, saying, “Why?” with just a hint of surprise on the edge of the word.
“Such a waste,” she declared, gesturing dramatically with one hand. “Have you seen his majesty, Ettore? I would hit that so hard his children would know I’d taken him to bed. And here I’d been reconciling myself with the thought that at least his majesty’s not at all interested in women, but this is just adding insult to injury now. Don’t you think, Fio?”
“Patriotism forbids me from remarking on the subject,” Fiorenza said dryly, and resolved never to tell Liobsynde she’d once been in bed with Peter, though it hadn’t gone anywhere, not for lack of trying on both their parts.
“It seems like a crude rumor,” Jaisen said primly.
“Fio’s not denying it; it must be true,” Liobsynde said.
“Change the subject, ‘Synde,” Fiorenza said flatly.
“Motherhood hasn’t made you any fun, I see,” she pouted. She picked up one of the requisition forms on Fiorenza’s desk and squinted at it, lips moving as she sounded out the letters. Liobsynde Fara had come to Narnia from the wild Lothaire tribes of the Far North, a runaway who’d fled a man she hadn’t liked and found a home in Narnia and the Royal Narnian Army. The Lothaires didn’t have a written language; she’d only learned to read after she’d come to Cair Paravel, and she still read only slowly and painstakingly. Jaisen watched her with some tension in his shoulders; he was a nobleman’s son from Natare, heir to Barony Queensgrace until his father had abruptly disinherited him and declared him a bastard.
At last Liobsynde put the paper down and said, “What’s this, then? Yrongard’s asking for arrows; are Lune’s people acting up again?” She looked eager at the idea of a fight.
“No such poor luck,” Fiorenza said. “They just want arrows.” She gestured towards the piles upon piles of paperwork she’d been working her way through ever since she’d been confined to desk duty; they seemed to multiply like rabbits. Worse than rabbits. “I may bloody well start a war myself, though, if only to get away from this lot. I swear Peter’s trying to kill me with boredom.”
“Better than trying to kill you with a sword,” said a voice as the door opened again, and this time all of them in the room went to their feet and to attention.
Peter waved a hand. “At ease,” he said, “and for Aslan’s sake, Wildblood, sit down, crutches or not I know that leg of yours isn’t back to full strength yet.”
Kerewyn sat down with a thump, staring. Fiorenza empathized, a little; Kerewyn had probably never met the High King personally and was more than a little in awe of him, the way most of the country and all of the military was.
“Glad to see you’re back from the Lone Islands safely,” Peter said to Liobsynde, who wilted a little, and Jaisen, who looked glad to see him.
“Nothing to worry about, your majesty,” he said. “The Lone Islanders hadn’t expected Narnia to put up a fight.”
“They never do, do they?” Peter mused, thoughtful for a moment. Fiorenza watched him curiously, prompted a little by Liobsynde’s line of questioning; she’d found out about Peter and Susan by accident a few days after the mess with the Guard, but she thought she might have been able to guess even without seeing Queen Susan’s slim pale curves tangled in the sheets of Peter’s bed. He was looking a little sleek, calmer than she was accustomed to after almost ten years in his service; he seemed almost to have mellowed slightly since he’d come back from Archenland with Susan in his arms. It was disconcerting in an odd way.
“Fiorenza,” Peter went on after a moment, and she put her hip against the side of the desk and grinned at him, feeling a little more reckless than usual. “Get me a company, ready to move out within the hour, your choice of who and who commanding. We’ll meet on the gathering ground when the clock strikes ten.”
“Bound for where, sir?” Fiorenza asked.
“The northern marshes. The wiggles and the Bog People are at each other again, and in spades this time."
*
I have notes this time! Mostly on world-building; there's a bit in here that hasn't really made it into the rest of the Warsverse, like Liobsynde Fara's people, the Lothaire tribes of the North. I think they're nomadic, and by the time of Dust they've either moved further west or joined in with the High Reaches tribes. More importantly there's further mention of the Marsh-Wiggles and the Bog People. The Marsh-Wiggles are canon, of course; I believe the Bog People are first mentioned in The Crafting of Narnia as fighting on the White Witch's side, and aren't actually book canon. But I liked the idea of them, so I, er, borrowed them, and they have a running mention throughout the Warsverse as being in constant conflict with the Marsh-Wiggles; the most recent time they've been mentioned was in Dust 24. So at some point we may actually see them. (Over The Hills was going to be that story. Clearly didn't happen.)
Anyway, Over The Hills was going to be one of those stories where there is a lovely action plot and Narnia kicks some ass and the OCs are awesome and there is world-building, which is about all I know. Also now I'm listening to the Sharpe soundtrack and wishing that I could get my hands on the DVDs, or, er, ahem. Wow, my attention span is fragmented right now. I'm going to stop now before I say something even madder.
Oh, hey, as an exercise: there were far fewer italics in here than a lot of my other UFOs. I was improving!
aella_irene and I wrote the bulk of the Junior Pevensie verse (houseofpevensie), so there are bits and pieces of that in there as well. (Namedropping more than anything else, as this still falls firmly within the limits of the Warsverse rather than the JP 'verse.) In timeline it falls shortly after Landslide. (And, for a change, this one I can date fairly well, since it's right after Peter/Susan becomes fairly quiet common knowledge.)Stylistically Over the Hills probably would have been most like Four Things Greater and The Coastwise Lights, both of which feature action plots and OC narrators. (And were actually both written within a few months of each other, heh. Though Coastwise was when I started slowing down as a writer, if I remember correctly, because not long after that I believe
aella_irene and I started working on our original.) The title is from Over the Hills and Far Away, of course, specifically the version from Sharpe.Content advisory: very brief mention of background incest.
“Run away from home,” said Kerewyn Wildblood, stamping the Royal Narnian Army’s seal onto the bottom of one dispatch after another, “come to Cair Paravel, join the army, and what do I get? Acres and acres of paperwork. I could have stayed at school if I wanted this lot.”
Commander Fiorenza Paolucci, of His Majesty the High King Peter’s Royal Narnian Army, didn’t bother asking where home happened to be; somewhere around a third of all enlistees in the Narnian Army used false names, and while the recruitment office didn’t ask or distinguish, Fiorenza was virtually certain that Kerewyn was one of that thirty percent. Her accent made her Narnian rather than foreign – somewhere around half of the army came from outside Narnia – although the mention of formal schooling somewhat limited where in the country she was from. She looked human, at least, though with a slightly greenish cast to her skin and long fingers that almost looked webbed in the right light, though Fiorenza had gotten close enough to see that what looked like webbing wasn’t actually so. Nix or finfolk blood, maybe; there were certainly enough of those floating around the eastern seaboard.
“I sympathize,” Fiorenza said instead of commenting. “How’s the leg?”
The reason that Kerewyn was here instead of in the barracks or on a border somewhere was because she’d broken her leg falling down a flight of stairs; she’d been off the crutches for the better part of a week now, but last Fiorenza had heard, the army surgeons hadn’t yet declared her fit for duty.
Kerewyn shrugged negligently. “Bit of a limp, ma’am, but aside from that I’m ready to be back in the field.” She gave Fiorenza a hopeful look, but all Fiorenza could do was smile apologetically; commander in his majesty’s army or not, she had no authority over the surgeons’ decisions. If she had, she wouldn’t be sitting here reading supply lists from the border forts.
Kerewyn gave a great sigh and went back to her stamps, stopping periodically to melt more sealing wax over the candle by her elbow. Another five minutes of this nonsense, Fiorenza told herself, adding her sprawling signature to an order to send six barrels of arrowheads to Fort Yrongard on the southern border, and then she was going to give herself a break and go outside to at least pretend she was still a proper army officer. Kerewyn could come with her; Fiorenza hadn’t spent so much time indoors since she’d been at the Accademia Militare di Shoushan in Guenveuer. It was downright unnatural for a proper soldier.
She was stopped from doing so by the arrival of Liobsynde Fara and Jaisen Ettore, who strolled in through the door as if they’d never left Cair Paravel with Queen Lucy.
“My gods, Fio,” Liobsynde said. “Trapped like this within wooden walls? I’m surprised you haven’t gone mad yet.”
Fiorenza put her pen down and grinned at her, then cracked her knuckles. The sound echoed loudly in the room. “You and I both, ‘Synde,” she said, waving Kerewyn, who’d leapt to her feet when the two officers came in, back to her seat.
“I never did understand why women want to have children,” Liobsynde went on. She was holding her sheathed sword in her hand; she tapped it idly against her leg, fingers tight on the worn leather.
“I still don’t,” Fiorenza admitted, but spared a moment for the thought of Emery, who was up in the Cair Paravel nursery with his nurse. Osumare was in, though, had been since the baby had been born; that was something. He wasn’t the one who’d been pregnant for nine months, though, and he, the lucky bastard, was still on active duty.
“How is the babe?” Jaisen put in, looking at her with polite interest.
“He sleeps, he screams, he eats, he cries,” Fiorenza said. “I have it on good authority that once he starts talking he’ll start to turn into an actual human being. How were the Seven Isles?”
“Boring,” Liobsynde said, leaning negligently on Fiorenza’s desk. “The Navy came looming up over the horizon and the islanders folded like a house of cards. We barely had to step off the boats. Is it true that the High King and Herself are sleeping together?”
Kerewyn choked.
Fiorenza raised an eyebrow at Liobsynde and Jaisen, who was too well-bred to ask but who was obviously just as curious as his partner. She didn’t say anything.
“Huh,” Liobsynde said, admiring, as she took Fiorenza’s silence for assent. Jaisen’s face was carefully blank, without any show of emotion or even life; anyone raised in the snake pit that made up the Natarene ability learned quickly and early to hide both thought and feeling if they wanted to last longer than a day.
“Seems a bit of a pity,” Liobsynde went on, and Jaisen brought himself to stir a little, saying, “Why?” with just a hint of surprise on the edge of the word.
“Such a waste,” she declared, gesturing dramatically with one hand. “Have you seen his majesty, Ettore? I would hit that so hard his children would know I’d taken him to bed. And here I’d been reconciling myself with the thought that at least his majesty’s not at all interested in women, but this is just adding insult to injury now. Don’t you think, Fio?”
“Patriotism forbids me from remarking on the subject,” Fiorenza said dryly, and resolved never to tell Liobsynde she’d once been in bed with Peter, though it hadn’t gone anywhere, not for lack of trying on both their parts.
“It seems like a crude rumor,” Jaisen said primly.
“Fio’s not denying it; it must be true,” Liobsynde said.
“Change the subject, ‘Synde,” Fiorenza said flatly.
“Motherhood hasn’t made you any fun, I see,” she pouted. She picked up one of the requisition forms on Fiorenza’s desk and squinted at it, lips moving as she sounded out the letters. Liobsynde Fara had come to Narnia from the wild Lothaire tribes of the Far North, a runaway who’d fled a man she hadn’t liked and found a home in Narnia and the Royal Narnian Army. The Lothaires didn’t have a written language; she’d only learned to read after she’d come to Cair Paravel, and she still read only slowly and painstakingly. Jaisen watched her with some tension in his shoulders; he was a nobleman’s son from Natare, heir to Barony Queensgrace until his father had abruptly disinherited him and declared him a bastard.
At last Liobsynde put the paper down and said, “What’s this, then? Yrongard’s asking for arrows; are Lune’s people acting up again?” She looked eager at the idea of a fight.
“No such poor luck,” Fiorenza said. “They just want arrows.” She gestured towards the piles upon piles of paperwork she’d been working her way through ever since she’d been confined to desk duty; they seemed to multiply like rabbits. Worse than rabbits. “I may bloody well start a war myself, though, if only to get away from this lot. I swear Peter’s trying to kill me with boredom.”
“Better than trying to kill you with a sword,” said a voice as the door opened again, and this time all of them in the room went to their feet and to attention.
Peter waved a hand. “At ease,” he said, “and for Aslan’s sake, Wildblood, sit down, crutches or not I know that leg of yours isn’t back to full strength yet.”
Kerewyn sat down with a thump, staring. Fiorenza empathized, a little; Kerewyn had probably never met the High King personally and was more than a little in awe of him, the way most of the country and all of the military was.
“Glad to see you’re back from the Lone Islands safely,” Peter said to Liobsynde, who wilted a little, and Jaisen, who looked glad to see him.
“Nothing to worry about, your majesty,” he said. “The Lone Islanders hadn’t expected Narnia to put up a fight.”
“They never do, do they?” Peter mused, thoughtful for a moment. Fiorenza watched him curiously, prompted a little by Liobsynde’s line of questioning; she’d found out about Peter and Susan by accident a few days after the mess with the Guard, but she thought she might have been able to guess even without seeing Queen Susan’s slim pale curves tangled in the sheets of Peter’s bed. He was looking a little sleek, calmer than she was accustomed to after almost ten years in his service; he seemed almost to have mellowed slightly since he’d come back from Archenland with Susan in his arms. It was disconcerting in an odd way.
“Fiorenza,” Peter went on after a moment, and she put her hip against the side of the desk and grinned at him, feeling a little more reckless than usual. “Get me a company, ready to move out within the hour, your choice of who and who commanding. We’ll meet on the gathering ground when the clock strikes ten.”
“Bound for where, sir?” Fiorenza asked.
“The northern marshes. The wiggles and the Bog People are at each other again, and in spades this time."
*
I have notes this time! Mostly on world-building; there's a bit in here that hasn't really made it into the rest of the Warsverse, like Liobsynde Fara's people, the Lothaire tribes of the North. I think they're nomadic, and by the time of Dust they've either moved further west or joined in with the High Reaches tribes. More importantly there's further mention of the Marsh-Wiggles and the Bog People. The Marsh-Wiggles are canon, of course; I believe the Bog People are first mentioned in The Crafting of Narnia as fighting on the White Witch's side, and aren't actually book canon. But I liked the idea of them, so I, er, borrowed them, and they have a running mention throughout the Warsverse as being in constant conflict with the Marsh-Wiggles; the most recent time they've been mentioned was in Dust 24. So at some point we may actually see them. (Over The Hills was going to be that story. Clearly didn't happen.)
Anyway, Over The Hills was going to be one of those stories where there is a lovely action plot and Narnia kicks some ass and the OCs are awesome and there is world-building, which is about all I know. Also now I'm listening to the Sharpe soundtrack and wishing that I could get my hands on the DVDs, or, er, ahem. Wow, my attention span is fragmented right now. I'm going to stop now before I say something even madder.
Oh, hey, as an exercise: there were far fewer italics in here than a lot of my other UFOs. I was improving!