Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (33)

[bedlamsbard]

Title: Dust in the Air (33)
Author: bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Content Notes: blood, violence, one racially-based epithet
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). Thanks to snacky for the beta!



Something wicked this way comes, Edmund thinks, virtue of a classical education at a public school, and clicks his torch again in case the battery’s just come loose or something. No luck, of course. He tightens his grip on his sword hilt.

“Show yourself!” he demands, hearing Confesor shift beside him.

Thieves, he hears – or feels, rather, because the word is a slither along his bones, a slow glide across the surface of his mind. The murmur of it makes his stomach churn, his heart pounding and the hair on the back of his neck rising. Thieves, murderers, assassins, invaders. Trap them, kill them, let them rot in empty halls, let them die with the rest of the dead.

The voice is so alien, so unexpected, that Edmund almost drops his sword. He can feel the walls pressing close about him, the stone beneath his feet beginning to shift with little crumbling flurries of earth, promising to swallow him whole. Confesor curses.

The torch flies out of his hand as the floor rocks suddenly. Edmund and Confesor both grab at each other for lack of anything else to hang onto; Edmund hears something – one of Confesor’s knives, maybe – hit the ground with a shaky metallic clang.

Thieves, filthy thieves, crack us open and break us to pieces and rob us, rot and die here with your plunder. Lie down with the glorious dead and all the rest of the filth.

The worst thing is that he knows that voice. He hasn’t heard her in more than a thousand years, but he knows that voice. Not like this, though, never like this – and never so clearly. He’s never heard her speak real words before, just emotions and sense-images. Not to him.

“It’s me!” Edmund yells, hoping that something of what he remembers still remains. He clutches at Confesor’s arm, feels the gangster’s fingers digging into his shoulder, sharp as knives. “Edmund Pevensie! It’s Edmund, you know me!”

Filthy, dirty, nasty thieves! The words batter at him like blows, making Edmund rock back with each one. The marble beneath his feet cracks open, sending him staggering against Confesor as they both lose their footing. Edmund smells the richness of turned soil, his booted feet slipping on the now-uneven floor. It’s like a door straight to the heart of the island has opened, and he has no desire to go there. What feel like vines slide over his feet, curling around his ankles and climbing steadily up his legs. Edmund curses in surprise, trying to pull himself free, but they are as strong and immovable as marble – and marble they must be, he realizes a moment later, hearing metal grate off stone as Confesor tries to hack at them with his remaining knife. His curses blister the air.

Edmund raises his sword to strike and hopefully not cut off his foot in the process, then hesitates. If it is stone, from the way it feels and from the sound of Confesor’s knife sliding uselessly off, it won’t do any good anyway. He’s more likely to hurt himself than the castle. But there might be another way. He lowers his sword.

“Cair Paravel!” Edmund shouts; names are power, though not as much as what’s about to come. He lets go of Confesor’s arm and closes his hand around his sword blade, gritting his teeth at the pain. He flings his hand out, letting the drops of blood spray out across the floor. “I am Edmund the Just, King of Narnia! You know me! I swear it by my blood, the blood of my brother Peter the High King of Narnia, Lord of Cair Paravel, the blood of my sister-queens, Susan and Lucy! I swear it by the blood that I shed for Narnia on the last day of winter and the first day of spring!”

The moment his blood hits the floor, the earth hesitates. It doesn’t withdraw, but the stone vines close tight around his legs – they’ve grown up to his thighs now – and hold him in place. Confesor is still cursing, low and fervent.

They broke us, hisses in Edmund’s head, vibrating up from the stone and marble around him. Ripped us open and tore us apart, crack stone and break rock, melt gold and burn wood. They come to rob us of even our bones. Thieves, filthy, dirty, stinking thieves, stay forever.

Confesor yells in pain. Edmund can hear stone grinding against bone, can hear the earth cracking around them as Confesor screams. As Cair Paravel devours him whole.

“Let him go!” he shouts. “He’s with me! You know me! You used to trust me!”

THIEVES! It’s like a physical blow, so that Edmund rocks back. It’s only the pressure of the stone vines that keeps him upright. “We’re not thieves!” he yells again, and because he’s close enough to the floor now and it’s the only thing he can think of, slams his bloody hand palm down against the cracked and rippling marble floor. Immediately the stone springs up to pin him in place, weaving a cage over hand and wrist, working its way up his arm to his shoulder. New vines grow up past his thighs and over his chest and neck. Confesor is still screaming.

“Wait!” Edmund says, feeling the stone close around his throat. One marble vine – Lion’s mane, is it a root? – presses between his lips, forcing his teeth apart. Edmund chokes on it, the stone hard and cold as it swells to fill his mouth. More traces its way across cheeks and nose and eyes; Edmund tries to breathe through his nose before the stone cuts him off completely.

Thieves, murderers, invaders. The words vibrate along his whole body. The stone closes in around him, a vice that promises to crush him to nothing; Edmund has seen the Cair do this before to assassins in their own time. He had never given any thought to what that might feel like. Break us and take us, make us nothing more than dead stone, will they? We are of the Deep Magic. Not even the Old Ones can take us to pieces. We endure!

Edmund gags helplessly, tears trapped beneath the thin layer of marble over his face. The Witch, he thinks madly, this is what it must be like to be turned to stone –

Then he thinks: Lion’s mane, I didn’t think it would end like this.

It hurts, more pain than he could have ever imagined possible. He feels like he’s being ground to a fine paste; hears the earth moving around him, little cracking flurries of stone and marble and a deep groan that seems to come from the foundations of the castle, the very roots of the island. Cair Paravel was never built by mortal hand; the legends say that she grew from Narnia itself, building herself up stone by stone on a white cliff over the sea, in a land frozen in time. Something new, something pure, something that the White Witch could never touch, no matter what armies she threw at the castle’s closed gates and high walls. Four thrones and a promise; that was what Cair Paravel had been for the Narnians of Edmund’s time. And now she’s going to kill him.

The Deep Magic, he thinks, his last coherent thought. The Deep Magic that made Narnia, that made Cair Paravel, that brought us here –

No.

Maybe Aslan can’t keep you out anymore, Confesor had said, in the sea-arch where they had arrived for a second round all those years ago, but that doesn’t make any sense.

Four thrones and a promise. The Kings and Queens of Summer. None of it makes sense.

I don’t understand, Edmund thinks, and Cair Paravel spits him out.

Literally spits him out. Edmund goes flying, hitting a column and sliding down it to lie in a crumpled heap as he gasps for air, his sword hanging limply from his hand. Elsewhere in the treasury his torch blinks on, a thin pale beam of light that illuminates the mess they’d made of the floor, all cracked marble and fallen brick from the ceiling, dust everywhere. Confesor, coughing violently, is on his back in the middle of the floor, waving one hand over his face.

“Are you all right?” Edmund croaks as soon as he’s able.

Confesor turns his head. His face is smeared with dirt and blood, scratches on his hands and his shirt torn. He rolls slowly over and pushes himself up onto hands and knees, then spits out a broken tooth and a mouthful of blood. He wipes the back of his hand over his mouth. “No,” he says bluntly. “You?”

“Not so much,” Edmund agrees. His arms feel so weak that it takes him three tries to sheathe his sword in his shoulder scabbard, and he has to crawl on hands and knees across the treasury floor to pick up his torch, shining it around. Cair Paravel is quiet now, waiting; there’s no murmur of angry voices in his head, nothing at all to show that the castle had once been alive and angry, and utterly mad. It could be any old ruin.

Confesor spits out another mouthful of blood, then manages to drag himself into a sitting position with his back against a broken column as he pulls a flask out of his pocket. He rinses his mouth out and spits, wincing. “Should we really be staying down here?”

“I’m not sure I can stand up,” Edmund says, crawling back to the pediment where he’d left the chest. Remarkably, it doesn’t seem to have moved at all during the – the incident. He finds his bag and flips it open, leaning his shoulder against the pediment as he starts packing the document cases away. It would be easier just to carry the chest out, but that might raise a few unfortunate questions. At least the cases aren’t bulky; most of them are just slim leather packets. It’s what is inside that’s valuable: every treaty and alliance and sovereignty agreement that Narnia had ever made, sealed with blood and earth and magic.

The Deep Magic, he thinks again, uneasily, and shoves the thought aside as he scoops the last case out and closes the flap over it, fastening it securely.

Confesor holds the flask out towards him. “It’s just cold tea,” he says as Edmund crawls over. “My mother owns a tea shop.”

“Ta,” Edmund says, taking it from him. The tea feels good on his tongue, sharp with mint and parsley, softened by a little honey. He passes the flask back and leans against the column next to Confesor.

“The Callies will have heard that,” Confesor says, looking in the direction of the stairs. Edmund shines the torch that way, tilting his head to listen.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think we’re too far down. They’d have shown up by now.”

“Aslan’s own mercy,” Confesor mutters, taking another sip of the tea before he caps the flask and puts it back in his pocket. “Everyone always said this place was haunted. I’m not even going to ask.”

“That wasn’t a ghost,” Edmund says in answer to the unspoken question. “I’m not going to make any promises, but Cair Paravel shouldn’t be haunted, not anymore.”

Confesor turns and stares at him. “And you know this – how?”

Edmund looks at the dirt caked under his nails, picking at it. It has mixed with the blood from his cut palm, forming a muddy kind of plaster; well, at least he’s not still bleeding. “It doesn’t really matter,” he says. He glances around at the treasury, quiet now, with no sign to show that only a few minutes before it had tried to swallow them whole. “Do you think you can walk?”

“Let’s find out,” Confesor says, bracing himself on the column as he levers himself, somewhat shakily, to his feet. He stands still, clutching at the broken stone and breathing like he’s just ran a marathon.

Edmund follows suit. When the world stops spinning around him, he takes a few careful steps in the direction of his chest. “I won’t take a minute,” he says over his shoulder to Confesor, who makes an indistinct noise.

When he thrusts the lid back, it looks little different than it had before, just more messed about, since he hadn’t really put it back in order before they’d left the treasury the last time. Edmund digs through the layers of clothes, weapons, and treasures that he’d left behind sixteen hundred years ago. He doesn’t need the clothes; in this modern Narnia they look hopelessly outdated. There’s no real point in taking anything bulky like a shield or his armor; as far as such things go, Edmund is well equipped for small arms right now. Money and jewelry are both mostly pointless. He shuts the lid with a sigh and stands back, looking around at the treasury in the dim light of the torch. His statue stares back at him impassively. Edmund is nearly the same age now as he had been when it was carved, but he doesn’t think that he has ever felt less like the slim, confident man before him, even in a child’s body back in England. The poor bastard had never seen it coming.

“If you’re quite finished,” says Confesor, leaning against the column as Edmund turns back towards him, “I’d rather not stick around here any longer than we really need to.” He glances around, his fingers twitching. “In case whatever that was comes back.”

“She never left,” Edmund says. “That was the castle. Couldn’t you hear her?”

Confesor’s jaw tightens. “Yes,” he says shortly, and rubs his hands over his arms, as if he’s trying to wipe away the memory of that mad, desperate voice. Edmund supposes that he can’t blame the man, not really. He rather wishes he could dare even try to forget it.

“Come on,” he says, starting back towards the stairs. His legs are a little shaky, but mostly functional as long as he doesn’t have to run for his life or get into any serious fistfights in the immediate future, which if everything goes as planned, he won’t. Not that anything in his life ever really goes as planned, but he’s always hopeful.

It takes them at least three times as long to get back up the stairs as it had to get down them in the first place, and once they’ve reached the top, emerging into the bright spring sunlight, both of them have to sit down after manhandling the door closed. Edmund watches the dark stairwell disappear with a pang, but Confesor seems relieved once the false wall is back in place. He sits down heavily on the grass at the foot of an enormous marble brick, prodding gingerly at his broken tooth.

“Is that it, then?” he asks. “Anywhere else you want to visit that’s also likely to try and eat us whole?”

Edmund shakes his head, sweeping a hand through his rumpled hair as he collapses at the foot of the false wall. The sun is warm and comforting on his skin as he turns his face up towards it, letting his eyes drift closed for a moment. “We’d probably better clean up before we go back,” he says; Confesor’s face and clothes are streaked with dirt and he’s certain that he doesn’t look much better. “I think there’s a stream around here somewhere. And if they haven’t been cut down, there should be some apple trees just over there.”

Confesor runs a hand over his face, which only succeeds in rubbing the dirt in deeper. “Give me a minute,” he says. “I’m really more used to getting arrested than I am nearly getting – er, eaten by buildings.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Edmund says.

“Lion’s mane,” Confesor mutters, pulling his flask out again. “I hope whatever you came for was worth it.”

“So do I,” Edmund admits, his hand going to his bag. He takes the flask when Confesor offers it to him, drinks, and hands it back. “I’d have expected something a little stronger.”

“I didn’t think I’d need anything stronger today,” Confesor says. “Though since the day started off with my uncle coming to town, I probably should have known better.”

Edmund shrugs. He looks up at the sound of voices from over the hill, in the direction of the throne room – the temple site, he supposes he should call it, since it seems that the bulk of the construction is going on there. Although, to be fair, it doesn’t really seem like the construction has gotten very far. He supposes that he would be surprised if it had.

“Who do they have?” he asks. “Working there, I mean. Lady Bracken said they weren’t civilians, and you said –”

“Slaves,” Confesor finishes for him, his mouth twisting a little around the word. “Or prisoners, whichever you prefer, though it amounts to the same thing. They like dwarves for this kind of thing. Some of them are rebels who have been captured and are being kept alive for some reason, others are just unlucky bastards who have been arrested for one crime or another. Or no crime at all. Bahadur’s lot care less than Rahim’s did, and that’s saying something.” He looks bleakly in the direction of the voices. “Some of my people might be there; I’ve had a few of them picked up by the Callies or the coppers recently. None of them were dwarves, though.”

Edmund fights down a surge of cold anger. Slaves in Narnia, gods; he’s heard the stories, but that’s hardly the same thing as seeing it. Which he supposes he hasn’t yet, not really. “Let’s go and have a look after we’ve cleaned up,” he says abruptly. “Maybe there’s something we can do.”

Confesor raises his hands, leaning back from him as if to distance himself from the suggestion. “I’m not getting mixed up with the Callies,” he says, his mouth set. “I’ve done a lot for you people, but I won’t do that; I don’t want to end up with my head on the block or hanging in a cage on the –”

“I don’t mean for you too!” Edmund says hastily. “I just want to have a look, get a feel for the land. It won’t do either of us any good to get caught. I’ve just the one more piece of business to attend to while we’re here; there’s no need for you to trouble yourself with it, if you don’t want to.”

Confesor stares at him, his lips pressed together in a thin line and his expression dubious. “Did you mean what you said to Lady Marcia, back in the city?” he asks finally. “All that about the veil between life and death thinning around festival days.”

Edmund resists the urge to chew a nail, if only because his are still caked with dirt and blood. “Something like that,” he says. “I came here with Caspian once, a few years – three hundred years – ago. Pete and Su and I needed our armor and this was the only place to get it. I volunteered to go, Caspian volunteered to come with me. We got here – we were here past nightfall, for reasons that don’t need to be gotten into right now. When the sun set, the ghosts came out.”

Confesor starts and draws in a sharp breath, his eyes widening.

Edmund holds up a hand to forestall any comment. “They don’t feel time like living creatures do,” he explains quickly, though a chill runs down his spine at the memory. The warm day suddenly feels a little colder; even the memory of the dead casts a shadow over the living. “I don’t think the Cair does either, for that matter. But they do feel it – the weight of years – and they were tired, then. What happened to Narnia after we left doesn’t bear thinking of. Fire and blood and more death than even the White Witch wrought in a hundred years.”

He can remember dreaming about it, those first few months after they’d returned to England. All of them had. He knows it was worse for Peter and Susan because they had been older, and that seems to make a difference, though none of them can say how. For him and Lucy all of it had blurred quickly into mist and memory, but it had been sharper and clearer each time that they had returned. On the Dawn Treader he had been the same age Pete had been the first time they had gone to Narnia. If Pete can remember all of that with the same stunning clarity that Edmund can remember the voyage, then it’s no wonder that his brother had seemed lost and half-mad afterwards. He doesn’t know if Peter had had nightmares after Aslan had barred him from Narnia in Caspian’s time; if he had, he’d had them far more quietly than he had the first time.

He rubs his thumb over his mouth, thinking and tasting the dirt there. “I don’t know much about ghosts,” he says slowly. “I know that they’re real, of course, but I’m not sure that there are rules for them the way there are for us.”

“Are there?” says Confesor. His eyes are sharp. “Rules for you?”

Edmund opens his mouth to reply, then hesitates. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “I thought there were, but I just don’t know anymore.”

“And the ghosts?”

Edmund gives up the fight and chews on his nail anyway, dirt grinding between his teeth before he stops himself with a jerk and folds his hand around the strap of his bag instead. “They were tethered to Cair Paravel,” he says. “They couldn’t leave the castle. I don’t know why. I don’t know how they died, if they died in these halls, or at the gates or on the walls or in the harbor, but they died and they couldn’t leave the castle. And I set them free.”

Confesor’s fingers move reflexively, not in the now-familiar four-point sign, but hooking out the first two fingers of his right hand, with the other two fingers and his thumb curled into a fist. Edmund doesn’t think he’s ever seen it before; it seems distinctive enough that he would remember it. “But if the ghosts are gone, then who is it you want to summon?” he says, his voice bright with forced levity. “Surely you can’t mean to try and speak to the – to the castle again.”

“I said I set them free,” Edmund says, and looks at the blood on his left hand. “Not that they left.”

Confesor actually flinches back, his gaze darting rapidly around as if he expects spirits to close in around them, marring the bright spring sunlight.

“Don’t worry,” Edmund says, failing to resist the urge to smile. “If they were going to come without being called, they would have by now.”

“I should have stayed in Cair Paravel,” Confesor mutters. He scrubs his filthy hands uselessly across his thighs.

“But we’re having so much fun,” Edmund says, and grins at the murderous look the other man shoots him.

“You’re a bastard,” he says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Many, many times,” Edmund says. “Though fortunately never my mother.” He looks up at another shout from over the hill. The throne room is too distant for him to make out words, but the tone is audible: anger, hatred, cruelty. None of that belongs in Narnia, let alone here in Cair Paravel. Not directed at Narnians by strangers. He clenches his hand into a fist, reminding himself that there is very little likelihood that there will be anything he can do for the Narnians in the chain-gang. He’ll go and see, he has to, it’s his duty, but there’s little chance that he can do anything. Maybe if the Cair wasn’t on an island now – but maybes don’t get him anything, and they certainly don’t help the Narnians here.

Edmund looks down, working his left hand experimentally. It had been a shallow cut, but dirt had gotten into it, and it stings when he opens and closes his fist. The likelihood is that he’s going to have to cut himself again, since ghosts are drawn to fresh blood, and the last thing he needs is for either wound to get infected, especially with Lucy on the other side of the country. “Let’s go and find that stream,” he says, getting slowly to his feet. He aches, for once in his life feeling as old as he really is, and totters for a moment before he gets his balance and leans away from the wall, mostly confident that his legs will hold him.

Confesor takes the hand Edmund offers him, wincing as he rises. “I’ll have to go to the baths before I go home,” he says regretfully, brushing uselessly at the dirt on his clothes. “My mum will have a fit.”

“I know the feeling,” Edmund says, hoping the stream is still there as they pick their way through ruins and overgrowth. Looking around, he can see evidence that others have been here before them – paths hacked through the brush, trodden down by the passage of feet, and the empty places where broken stone and marble must have been lying for centuries before being taken away. The Calormenes must be using it to build their temple. It certainly seems like the sort of thing that they’d do.

Somewhat to his surprise, he finds the stream in nearly the same place it had been three hundred years ago, though its path seems to have moved a few feet to the east and widened somewhat. The running water sparkles in the sunlight which filters down through the trees which give them some much-welcome shade. He and Confesor clean themselves up as best they can, splashing water on faces and hands. There isn’t much that they can do about their ruined clothes; Edmund has enough faith in both their abilities to lie convincingly if the Calormenes or Lady Bracken’s sailors ask why they’re all over mud.

He cleans the shallow cut on his hand, trying not to wince, and pulls a roll of bandage out of his bag to wrap it up. Confesor sits back on his heels and watches him. “Is there anything you don’t have in that bag?” he asks.

A grenade, Edmund thinks, and any number of other useful things, but he doesn’t say that out loud. Most of it wouldn’t mean any sense to Confesor anyway. “Lots,” he says instead, tying the bandage off and tucking the roll away.

He sits still for a moment, watching the play of sunlight off the running water, the way it filters down through the bright new growth on the trees, creating strange shadows on the ground. There aren’t many ruins around here, certainly nothing obvious enough to tell Edmund immediately where they are. He might be able to work it out given a few minutes of walking around to get his bearings, but he supposes it doesn’t really matter, not anymore. His Cair Paravel is long gone, half-mad with the passage of time, nothing more than ghosts and the scattered bones of a once-great palace, the hopes and dreams of a people and a nation. Cair Paravel today is that thriving city on the mainland, the urban sprawl that Edmund couldn’t even have imagined in Narnia in his own time. He wonders what Lucy will think when she sees it; she’s the only one of them who hasn’t yet. Peter must have been horrified.

The growing shadows remind him that they don’t have much time left. Trying to summon the ghosts will work best after nightfall, but they can’t stay that long if they want to go back to the mainland today. Edmund has no desire to be stuck on this island longer than he must, not with the Calormene chain-gangs and not with whatever Cair Paravel has become. He doesn’t think that even he wants to be here after dark.

He sits back, prodding at his bandaged hand. Beside him, Confesor leans forward to splash more water on his face. Edmund looks up at just the right moment to see faintly translucent fingers slide out of the water and close around his wrists. Confesor doesn’t even have time to shout before he’s being yanked forward into the stream, legs jerking as his head and shoulders are held down in what had appeared, a minute ago, to be fairly shallow water.

Edmund jerks forward, wrapping his arms around Confesor’s chest and trying to pull him out. “Let him go!” he shouts. Water sprays across his face as the naiad emerges from her stream, still mostly translucent – Edmund can see the trees behind her through her body, and she’s not even wearing the thin excuses for clothes most naiads do in the presence of humans. Icy water sprays across his face as she tosses her hair back, her hands pressing Confesor’s shoulders down. He flails wildly, struggling for air, and the naiad’s face contorts in outrage.

“Let him go!” Edmund repeats. Her gaze flickers towards him, shifting shades of blue and green, no iris at all – she’s not even trying to look like anything other than what she is.

“He’s mine,” she hisses, the words like rain battering against walls and windows. “And you’ll be next, outsider!”

“I don’t think so,” Edmund snarls. He tightens his grip on Confesor’s chest, trying to pull him back, but the naiad’s grip is as strong as his, and she has all the strength of her stream to call on – even if it isn’t a particularly big stream.

Confesor is still struggling, but Edmund can tell that he’s rapidly losing strength. He sees the gleam of the naiad’s sharp teeth as she smiles in satisfaction, her body gaining a little more solidity than it had had a moment ago.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” Edmund snaps, frantic.

“Do you think I care, human?”

Edmund lets go of Confesor with one hand, keeping his other arm wrapped tightly around the man’s chest, and grabs a handful of the naiad’s hair, which threatens to slide through his fingers like waterweed. She snarls at him, teeth snapping like a shark’s as Edmund drags her head around, trying to distract her enough that she lets go of Confesor. Her hair cuts into his fingers the way a human’s wouldn’t, twisting like he’s gripping a handful of snakes, slicing through his flesh like fine wire. He can feel his own blood running hot down his wrist as she tries to pull free.

“Release me!” she barks as Edmund holds doggedly on despite the pain. She jerks forward, all sharp teeth and mad blue-green eyes as she tries to bite him, and Edmund barely gets his wrist out of the way – though he doesn’t let go.

“I said,” he snarls for the third time, feeling the words slide like liquid silver between his lips, “let him go.” Fifteen years of kingship, of power and authority and command, bleed into the words; he meets her eyes and feels curiously light-headed. His own blood falls into the running water drop by drop, vanishing into the stream to be carried onwards into the sea. The naiad flinches when the first drop touches the water.

Her grip loosens. Edmund feels Confesor twitch and releases the naiad immediately, freeing his hand from the mess of her hair. It leaves thin red lines across his unmarked flesh as she tosses her head, water spraying across his face. Confesor comes spluttering up out of the stream, letting Edmund help drag him back onto the dry land.

The naiad leans forward out of the water, half-dissolved into the stream and still slightly translucent, her skin more blue-green than anything else. Her hands leave damp marks behind on the shore as she touches it. “You are not a son of Adam,” she says.

Confesor shakes Edmund off and crawls away to retch. Edmund leans forward, the blood where her hair had cut him dripping down from his fingertips and soaking into the earth. “I am,” he says. “You know what I am. When Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone sits at Cair Paravel in throne –”

“There are no thrones in Cair Paravel anymore,” says the naiad. Her gaze is as dark and unreadable as the sea, and Edmund wonders suddenly what it must be like to be a naiad on an island like this one, unable to reach the mainland or any kind of true river. Naiads are sociable creatures, but this island can’t be large enough to support more than one or two. She must be lonely.

“Maybe not,” Edmund says. “But you know what I am, don’t you? You know who I am, too.” He turns his bloody hand palm-up. There’s a dark stain in her pale hair where he’d grabbed her.

Her gaze flickers down to his hand, then to the spot where the blood had dripped onto the soil. “Impossible,” she whispers.

“No. Truth. You know it to be true.”

Her hand darts out to scoop up a handful of bloody earth. She holds it up to her face, breathing it in or smelling it or even tasting it, Edmund doesn’t know. “Impossible!” she says again.

He spreads his hands. “Here I am,” he says.

“No!” she says, her voice rising, and thrusts herself backwards into her stream, dissolving into a shower of water droplets. But she had been clutching the clod of bloody earth as she went, and Edmund doesn’t see it resurface, even to break apart.

He stares at the water for a few more moments, waiting for the naiad to reappear, and when she doesn’t, goes to see to Confesor. He’s clutching a broken chunk of statuary and coughing up water and the remains of their lunch, his face pale and wan.

Edmund puts a hand on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Confesor says, wincing away from his touch, and retches again. When he comes up, coughing and wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he says, “Does this entire bloody island want to kill us?”

No, Edmund thinks, and opens his mouth to say as much. But then he thinks of the wreck of the little treasury, the stone vines and roots closing around him; thinks of the castle’s voice in his head; thinks of the naiad’s sharp teeth and the way her hair had sliced through his skin like garroting wire. “I don’t know,” he says instead. “It’s not the place I used to know.”

He looks ruefully down at his hand as Confesor slumps down onto the ground, still clutching at the marble, which appears to be the hindquarter of a griffin or a lion, half-buried in the soil and partially covered with moss.

“Are you all right?” Confesor says after a moment, pushing his damp hair out of his face.

Edmund looks up, closes his fist and immediately regrets it as pain sparks through his hand and up his arm. “I’ve been better,” he allows. He goes back to get his bag, dragging the roll of bandage out again.

Confesor casts a nervous glance at the stream. “Ought we really to stick around here?”

“Even if she comes back,” Edmund says, wrapping the bandage around his hand, “I don’t think she’ll hurt us again.”

“Well, not you,” Confesor says bitingly, fumbling his flask out of his jacket.

“Trust me, she hurt me plenty,” Edmund says, tying off the bandage. “And not even the way I like to be hurt by naiads.”

“I’m not even going to touch that,” Confesor says, staying well back from the stream. “Can we just do whatever the hell it is you came here to do so I can go home and drink away this memory? And possibly my memory of this entire day?”

“Right,” Edmund says, stowing the bandage away again. He touches his abused fingers to the patch of soil that he’d bled on, with a little hollow where the naiad had scooped some of it away. “This is really not how I wanted this to go,” he remarks, reaching down to pull a dagger out of his boot.

Confesor’s eyebrows shoot up. “You’re not about to slaughter an innocent rabbit or something, are you?”

Edmund pulls his sleeve up. “Why?” he says. “You don’t happen to have one handy, do you? Because that would be much less painful than this is about to be and accomplish exactly the same thing.”

“What are you going to do?” Confesor says, scrambling to his feet. His fingers twitch towards the knives up his sleeves.

“Ghosts are drawn to living blood,” Edmund says, gritting his teeth and drawing the knife-blade along the inside of his wrist. He hisses out a breath as he watches the fresh blood well up, then turns his wrist over to let it drip down into the little hollow left behind by the naiad, joining the blood that has already soaked into the earth.

“And you haven’t bled enough already today?”

“Have you seen any ghosts?”

“No,” Confesor allows. “But I’ve seen the earth open up and swallow us before deciding we didn’t taste very good, and I’ve seen a naiad try and drown me, so you know, I’m not even sure what I’ve seen today. And I always thought I lived a fairly adventurous life, too!”

“Surprise,” Edmund says through gritted teeth, squeezing his arm. “It’s the intent that matters,” he allows after a moment because it takes his mind off the pain, “not merely the blood. Without intent, it’s nothing more than coincidence.”

“Like the sacrifices on festival days,” Confesor says slowly, looking aside. Sunlight flickers on the burbling stream, casting bright reflections across his water-slick face. He drags a hand through his damp hair.

“I suppose,” Edmund says, watching the drops of his blood fall. They gather in a little pool in the hollow, dark and shadowed in the dying light of day. There isn’t much time left before he and Confesor have to go.

When Edmund judges that there’s enough – and that he’s sick of bleeding; surely three times is enough for one day – he turns his wrist over and washes it quickly in the stream, watching the streaks of red vanish into the water. He wraps another length of bandage around his forearm, tugging his sleeve back down to cover it, then crouches down by the pool of blood and waits.

Confesor doesn’t seem inclined to speak, for which Edmund is grateful. The two of them wait in silence, watching the lengthening shadows and the pool of blood. Edmund doesn’t expect that they will have to wait long – not long enough for the blood to cool and clot, even. And he’s right.

“I thought,” says a familiar, deliberate voice from behind them, “that we had succeeded in warning you off injuring yourself carelessly.”

Confesor nearly jumps out of his skin, his eyes going wide.

Edmund rises to his feet, grinning familiarly as the nearly transparent centaur goes trotting past him, bending to dip his fingers into the blood and raise them to his mouth. Almost immediately his skin flushes with color, running through him like ink in water. He shakes back long dark hair; Edmund watches curiously as the last bits of color fade into his tail and hooves.

“Oreius,” he says, letting a smile tug at his mouth, “I was hoping that it would be you who came.” He holds out his hand for Oreius to clasp, trying to hide his automatic shiver of aversion when they touch. Oreius’s skin, lifelike as it might seem to the naked eye, is cool to the touch, without the vivid pulse of life that Edmund expects. Everything in him recoils at the feel of it and he tries not to snatch his hand back when Oreius releases him, resisting the urge to wipe the memory of it off on his shirt.

His old friend gives him a sad smile. “I knew something had upset the palace,” he says. “I thought perhaps it was the Calormenes up to more mischief, but it must have been you.”

“It probably was,” Edmund says, his hand flying to his throat. He can still remember the roots of the palace pressing close about him, dragging him down. “Although I suppose that depends on what kind of mischief the Calormenes get up to.”

“The worst kind,” Oreius says, prancing a little in place – from nerves, maybe, though Edmund shudders to think what might make unflappable Oreius nervous. He hadn’t even hesitated in the face of the White Witch. “They rip the bones of Cair Paravel from the earth in order to build their monstrosity, and they use Narnians to do it. One of them is an anointed knight.”

Edmund looks up at that, surprised. “You can tell?” he says.

“It is part of the Deep Magic,” Oreius says, faintly chiding, and Edmund stifles a laugh. He’d sounded exactly the same when he had been teaching Edmund and his siblings all the things that were common knowledge to anyone born in Narnia.

“You could never tell before,” he says.

Oreius looks down at his hands. To Edmund’s eyes he appears solid enough, but maybe he sees something different. Maybe he’s seeing his own death. “Things are different now,” he says finally. “We are part of something greater – part of Cair Paravel, part of Narnia. So are knights – and kings, I would think, though none have set foot on this island in many years. None but you.”

Edmund ponders that, but he can’t think what help that particular skill might be in this situation. “Can you do anything about them?” he asks, changing the subject. “The Calormenes?”

“They will take it out in the blood of their prisoners,” Oreius says, raising his eyes skyward briefly before looking back at Edmund. “I may be dead, but I have little desire for any other Narnians to join me. And there have been too many already – here! In Cair Paravel!”

Confesor straightens up from where he had been leaning against a tree. “The ghosts of the Narnian slaves who were killed by the Calormenes are here?” he demands.

Oreius turns and looks at Confesor as if seeing him for the first time, arranging his features into an expression of polite surprise.

“This is Elizar Confesor,” Edmund says. “He’s – er, he’s with me. Master Confesor, this is Oreius. He is – was – one of Narnia’s greatest generals.”

“Pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Confesor says, sounding rather faint. Edmund suspects he’s never spoken to a ghost before.

Oreius inclines his head. “And yours, Master Confesor. Some of the Narnians that have died on this island since our own time still remain, it is true. Not all of them, and they are perhaps less clear of mind than we, though I do not know why.”

“Which of the others are still here?” Edmund asks, glancing around. He hadn’t thought that Oreius would come alone or that any other ghosts in the vicinity would be unable to resist the draw of fresh blood. Though – and he thinks uncomfortably of the little he knows of how Calormene work-slaves are treated – perhaps they drink their fill of living blood elsewhere.

“They will all come if you call them,” Oreius says.

Edmund’s eyebrows go up. Somehow, he hadn’t been expecting that. “Can you leave the island?” he asks. “Or are you bound to Cair Paravel?”

Oreius looks away from him, hooves stomping soundlessly against the earth. He gazes away through the trees, in the direction of the mainland. “I do not know,” he says finally. “I have never tried it.”

“Will you?” Edmund asks, and gives him the edge of a smile. “I think the Calormenes could use some good old-fashioned Narnian shaking-up.”

Oreius smiles, all teeth. “I will try. And I will tell the others to do so as well. There is something strange afoot in Narnia these days – at least as much as I can tell, given that this island lies half in the land of the living and half in Aslan’s Country.”

“Can you stay?” Edmund asks. “Beyond tonight and tomorrow, I mean?”

The centaur just looks at him solemnly. “There is something strange afoot in Narnia these days,” he repeats, and the way he says it makes a shiver run up Edmund’s spine.

“Is that a yes?” he says.

Oreius looks at him with ancient, all-knowing eyes. The blood is starting to wear off now; looking down, Edmund can see the color leaching out of his hooves and bleeding away up his legs, leaving him washed out and translucent. He looks up to see Oreius’s face still flush with color, solid as any living creature.

“We never left,” the centaur says, in the heartbeats before a scream splits the air.

Edmund whirls around, his hand flying to his sword hilt as he looks in the direction the scream had come from – is coming from, because it’s still going on, high and feminine. The throne room.

When he looks back, Oreius is gone.

Edmund snatches up his bag, slinging it quickly across his chest, and breaks into a run, Elizar Confesor on his heels. His feet follow the familiar hallways of Cair Paravel as if he’d never left, crashing through brush where carpet had once been and past the ruins of walls, careening around trees that have grown up in doorways and over little trickles of streams that run over broken marble. He goes skidding out of the trees and into a patch of cleared ground where the grass has been trodden down to nothing, piles of marble and red stone that he recognizes vaguely from his time in Tashbaan lying about. He can smell lime – and blood.

They’ve come out at the entrance to the throne room. Edmund feels a shiver run along his skin as he steps inside, through what would have been the doors more than a thousand years ago. It’s like an electric shock. He finds himself lifting his head, straightening his back, as if he’s wearing his crown again after all these years.

He can see from here that there’s a crowd gathered around the dais. Dwarves, mostly – Confesor had said that the chain-gang on the nameless isle was entirely made up of dwarves. The rest appear to be Calormene men. The woman is still screaming; Edmund can hear the sound of someone trying to shush her. They don’t appear to be succeeding.

Edmund goes quickly up the long, empty hall, glancing around as he does. There hasn’t been as much progress made as he had expected, considering how long the Calormenes have been in Narnia, considering what Confesor had said about the construction on the nameless aisle. It looks as if they’ve only recently begun to replace the columns that had lined the hall in his own time, long since toppled over in the centuries between then and now. Of the few walls that remain, none are more than head-high to a centaur and most not even that, though Edmund can tell that there has been some work done on them, places where the foundations have been laid in the red brick the Calormenes use, along with marble presumably gathered from elsewhere on the island. The ground is well-trodden, speaking of months, maybe years of work, despite the fact that there doesn’t appear to have been even a day’s worth of construction done here. There are several dozen dwarves here that Edmund can see; they can’t have been doing nothing all this time.

He takes this all in within the few seconds it takes him to make it from one end of the hall to the other, mounting the dais with Confesor on his heels. The second his foot touches it he feels that shiver again – an electric spark from head to toe, leaving him tingling all over. It’s as if the earth itself shudders beneath him. For a moment Edmund thinks that this is only his imagination, then he hears Confesor’s soft curse and realizes that the dwarves are murmuring to each other, looking around anxiously. He glances down, seeing gravel dance softly across the cracked marble floor before slowly drawing to a halt. It hadn’t been his imagination.

He expects to have to elbow his way forward, but the dwarves draw apart for him, though Edmund suspects that they aren’t even aware they’re doing so; none of them look at him. He makes his way to the front of the crowd and sees the body, sprawled in front of the remains of the thrones like an offering. It’s the architect from the beach – Bennat Haer, Edmund remembers, with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. The man’s head is smashed open, blood and brains smeared across the floor alongside the large chunk of marble that must have killed him, if its gory state is any indication. His eyes are still open, staring accusingly at Edmund.

The faun woman’s screams have trickled down into wretched sobs. She’s kneeling beside the body, her notepad abandoned beside her – Edmund can see a spray of blood on it, and all down the front of her practical gown, though to his experienced eye the patterns don’t quite match up. A Calormene man that Edmund doesn’t recognize is trying to pull her away, but she clutches at Haer’s arm, tears streaming down her face.

“Aslan’s claws,” Confesor hisses through his teeth, grabbing Edmund’s arm to hold him back as he starts to step forward. “Wait, damn you.”

“It killed him!” the faun woman wails, despite the Calormene’s attempts to shush her. “It killed him, this island, it killed him!”

“Aansa Shand –”

“What happened?”

It isn’t Edmund who asks, but the young Calormene officer from the beach, pushing his way through the dwarves. He looks across the dais at a man Edmund automatically marks out as the one most likely to be in charge – not a tarkaan, not by a long stretch, but the weave of his caftan is a little better than that of the other Calormenes, and there is gold on his fingers and glinting from one ear. No sword-knots on the hilt of his scimitar, but he does wear one; Edmund’s gaze goes to the coiled whip held in his left hand. An overseer, then. He glances quickly around at the dwarves, seeing now what he’d been too distracted by the corpse to see before: some of them are wearing manacles on their wrists, while all of them are bear iron rings riveted to one ankle, trailing a heavy length of chain. It makes Edmund sick to look at them.

“It killed him!” the faun woman shrieks. She raises her hands, smeared with Haer’s blood, and stares at them. “This island killed him, just as it did beiha Farrohq and beiha Lavassaney! Just as it killed all those others! Just as it tried to kill us not an hour since!”

“Will someone quiet that woman!” snaps the overseer. “It is none of your concern, Iravan Tarkaan,” he adds to the officer in Calormene. “I can handle the affairs of my own slaves.”

“They are not your slaves, they are the property of the Tisroc,” the officer replies in the same tongue. “As is beiha Haer. Even if one of your creatures is responsible for his death, that does not excuse me; I am the hand of Tash in this heathen land.”

“None of us killed him,” says one of the dwarves – tall, at least as dwarves go, with an unkempt beard and gray-streaked dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. There are manacles on his wrists and blood on his face, clotted and dried in the tangle of his beard. The surprising thing is that he speaks in accented but perfectly intelligible Calormene. “He was hit on the head. We’re dwarves. We can’t reach that high.”

“Aslan’s teeth,” Confesor hisses in Edmund’s ear, his fingers digging into Edmund’s arm. “That’s Athan Ironstone.”

“Should that mean something to me?” Edmund mutters back.

“Your dead friend said there was a knight here? Well, that’s him. Even if he doesn’t look like much right now. Gods, I thought they’d hauled him off to Tashbaan months ago.”

The overseer turns on Ironstone, his grip tightening on his whip. “So two of you worked together, hmm?”

“How could we?” Ironstone demands, still in Calormene. “Your sandflies watch us every second we work – we get these love-taps if we pause even for a second.” He points a finger at the long, ugly-looking gash on his cheek. “Besides, Zidan, if we were going to kill someone, it wouldn’t be the architect.” He grins at the overseer, all teeth. There’s a wild, familiar light in his eyes.

One of Peter’s, Edmund thinks, and has no idea where that had come from.

“He is right,” he says, shaking off Confesor’s hand and stepping forward, towards the body. He’s aware of suddenly being the object of scrutiny, hears one of the dwarves whisper to another, “Where did he come from?”

“Who are you?” the overseer – Zidan? – demands, looking at him suspiciously.

“Lady Bracken’s surveyors,” says Iravan Tarkaan, frowning at Edmund. “What do you mean?”

“A dwarf couldn’t hit beiha Haer on the head,” Edmund says. He crosses the dais quickly and kneels down by the architect’s body, trying to keep out of the way of the blood. He lifts the man’s head with delicate fingers and turns it as gently as possible so that he can see the wound more clearly. “Especially not from above. See where it struck, right here?” He points, seeing the faun woman flinch away from the gesture. Shards of shattered bone and shreds of pinkish brain matter mark the spot.

Zidan and Iravan come close enough to see, frowning down at Haer’s body. “It could have been thrown,” Zidan suggests.

“It wouldn’t have hit him from above,” Edmund says. “Which it did, see?” He gestures again, bending his wrist to demonstrate the angle. “Miss – Shand, is it?” he says to the faun, who nods tearfully. She folds her bloody hands in her lap to stop their shaking. “What was he doing when this happened? He wasn’t kneeling, was he? That might have done it,” he adds for the benefit of the two Calormenes, though he doubts it considering the way Haer has fallen. He’s seen his fair share of dead bodies in his time and been responsible for no few of them; he knows a thing or two.

“He was standing up,” Shand says, her voice trembling slightly. Her eyes dart back towards the architect, then away again. “It just came out of nowhere, we were standing right there – we weren’t even supposed to come today, but after the big earthshake this morning the Prince wanted beiha Haer here to work out what had gone wrong with the building –”

“It’s these bloody dwarves, that’s the problem!” says Zidan, which earns him a rumble of ill-content from the watching crowd. Edmund sees the overseers shift nervously, gripping whips and swagger sticks. The dwarves outnumber them five to one, even with the addition of the Calormene soldiers that had followed their tarkaan up from the docks.

“It’s the island,” says one of the dwarves, red-headed with a sharp, clever face beneath his filthy beard, which is matted with sweat and dried blood. “She doesn’t like Calormenes buggering about, mucking her up.”

“I will have none of your Narnian superstitions on my island!” Zidan snaps.

“Three dwarves are dead, another one will never walk again if he lives out the day, and one of your men has a leg broken in four places,” says the dwarf. “And that’s just today. There have been a dozen dead in the past month, and you call it superstition, darkie? Didn’t you hear her screaming or does that require more humanity than you have?”

He dodges backwards as one of the other overseers cracks his whip, but the chain around his ankle slows him, and the whip wraps around his left arm, knocking him down to the ground as the overseer pulls it back. “Mind your tongue, filth!”

Edmund bites his tongue to keep from snarling a reprimand, clenches his hands into fists and concentrates on the cracked marble beneath his feet, stares at the body like a bloody offering in front of him, all to keep from leaping up and throttling the man who has dared offer violence to a Narnian here in Cair Paravel, before Edmund’s eyes. He feels the coming storm like a sharp pressure behind his eyes, the day around him darkening as clouds roll in from a clear blue sky. Thunder rumbles in the distance.

“The island,” a dwarf says, looking upwards. Several others haul the fallen redhead back to his feet, pulling him back into their anonymous midst.

“It is a spring storm, nothing more,” says Iravan Tarkaan, his voice steady. He reaches down to pick up the chunk of masonry that had struck Bennat Haer. “What is this?”

Edmund raises his gaze. Earlier he had thought it nothing than another piece of broken marble, like the numerous others that litter the island, but from here, the way Iravan Tarkaan is holding it, he can see what it really is.

“Aslan have mercy,” he says, the words falling from his lips like prayers. What he’d taken for run-of-the-mill stone is actually a miniature lion’s head, lips skinned back from bared teeth in a snarl and covered with blood where it had struck Haer. Edmund recognizes it. It’s part of a capital from one of the columns in the throne room. The columns which hadn’t even been standing anymore the last time that he had been here, three hundred years ago. They’re nothing but a memory now.

It just came out of nowhere, Shand had said. Edmund looks up, searching his memory, trying to remember exactly where the columns had been – trying to discern if the columns had been high enough to do this much damage to a man’s skull.

“What is it?” says the tarkaan, looking at him sharply.

Edmund wipes his hands nervously across his trousers, wetting suddenly dry lips. For a moment he thinks that his vision is going, or maybe his mind – considering the circumstances, it’s not completely mad – because he can see flashes out of the corners of his vision: the high vaulted arch of a ceiling, the shimmer of the setting sun through stained glass, the long polished swath of pale marble. Laughter echoes in his ears, and the sound of familiar music, a babble of cheerful voices rising up as if from a wireless set in another room. For an instant, Edmund doesn’t smell fresh blood and brains, just the clean salt spray of the sea through open windows.

Just a moment, and then it’s all gone.

He looks up again, up at the place where the broken capital would have come from. It hasn’t been worn by wind and weather the way it should be after sixteen hundred years in the open; its lines are crisp and clean, as if freshly carved. It looks an instant from stretching its jaws in a yawn, blinking its marble eyes, letting an unseen tongue loll out in a lion’s laugh. There had been a column there, sixteen hundred years ago, and if someone had crouched up there and struck part of the capital off, hurling it down like a bolt of lightning, it could have struck a man dead. But there is no column now.

“Master surveyor,” says Iravan Tarkaan, his voice polite but with an edge of tension in it now. “What is it?”

“He’s a Narnian,” says the overseer Zidan in disgust, falling back into Calormene. “Don’t expect sense from him, just more superstitious nonsense.”

“There’s a man dead here and you call that superstition?” scoffs Ironstone in the same tongue. “None of us killed him. None of you lot did. We cleaned this up after the shake, so it’s not like he tripped and fell – not hard enough to smash his skull open. So something had to kill him. And it wasn’t us.”

“You will hold your tongue, dwarf!” Zidan snarls at him.

“Or what?” Ironstone snaps back. “You can’t touch me, overseer. I’m the Tisroc’s property now and he expects me to turn up on his doorstep in a few weeks. I don’t think he’ll be happy if I don’t.” He grins, fierce and wild and a little mad, and Edmund thinks again, Definitely one of Peter’s. There’s something going on here that he doesn’t understand.

Edmund looks down, studying Haer’s body. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, aside from some sign that what he knows must have happened hadn’t been that at all. Surely there is another explanation.

He feels the earth tremble again beneath his feet, sees the ripples spread through the pool of Haer’s blood, watches gravel dance across the marble floor. A familiar voice curls across the back of his mind.

Thieves, purrs Cair Paravel, like a cat bringing half-dead mice to her master. They are thieves, all of them, thieves and murderers and broken men. They think they can break us, we who are of the Deep Magic. Neither Aslan nor Tash nor any hand of man can bring us to ruin.

“Who said that?” Iravan Tarkaan demands, starting. The capital slips from his hand, falls to the floor with its bloody teeth bared in a rictus towards the sky.

They are coming, whispers Cair Paravel. They are here and they are coming home. They bring spring and summer, morning and evening, and a golden sword. Do you think you can break us, children of the Desert, sons of Earth? We are not the Lion’s cubs to be so easily tossed aside.

At this, some of the dwarves look quite alarmed. “We had nothing to do with this!” says one with a long dark beard which he has tucked into his belt to keep it out of the way. The ground rumbles again, enough to send them staggering across the dais. Edmund, still crouched low, catches himself with one hand on the floor, his fingers slipping into the pool of blood.

It’s like an electric shock. For a moment Edmund can’t move, can’t speak, can’t even breathe. He is acutely aware of his own blood, the sound of his heartbeat. He stares down at the rippling pool of blood before him, sees his own face reflected in it, sees it shift – younger, older, schoolboy, king, soldier, knight. Behind him, flickering, are the soaring heights of the throne room as it had been sixteen hundred years ago, when he had been king in Narnia.

“Edmund!”

It’s Confesor’s hand on his shoulder that drags him back to himself. Edmund jerks away from the blood and the body, back against Confesor’s legs, raising his red-tipped fingers to stare at them. Some part of him automatically catalogues the fact that the earth has stopped trembling for the time being.

Confesor hauls him to his feet, and Edmund drags his gaze away from his hand, wiping it frantically on his trousers. “I think we should leave,” he says in Edmund’s ear. “While we still can.”

“I think we all should,” Edmund makes himself say, with some difficulty. He clutches at Confesor’s arm for a moment, just long enough for him to regain his balance as he fights back a surge of incipient nausea. Thunder rumbles above them, far too close for comfort, and lightning streaks across the horizon. A storm is coming in, the previously bright day darkening far too quickly. There should be daylight for an hour or so yet.

King of Evening, Edmund remembers, and feels a chill go down his spine that has nothing to do with the sudden moisture in the air.

“What?” Confesor blurts out.

Edmund shakes him off and makes his way over to Iravan Tarkaan and the overseer Zidan, who are snarling at each other in Calormene. The dwarf Ironstone has edged close enough to listen in; he raises a dark eyebrow at Edmund when he notices him. Edmund shrugs in response.

He grabs Iravan’s arm. “You need to get everyone off this island,” he says.

The tarkaan stares at him as if he’s gone mad, which, to be fair, Edmund isn’t entirely sure he hasn’t. “Remove your hand,” he says.

Edmund does, leaving bloody fingerprints behind on Iravan’s sleeve. “Both of you need to listen to me,” he says. “You have to get everyone off this island right now, or they’re all going to die. Calormenes, Narnians, humans, dwarves, everyone – she will kill every living creature on this island before the sun comes up on Winter’s End.”

“Are you insane?” the tarkaan inquires, far more politely than Edmund would under similar circumstances.

“This is an earthshake, nothing more,” Zidan snaps. “They are a common occurrence on this island!”

“But just on this island,” Edmund says. “We don’t have them on the mainland. We never have. Have you ever thought to wonder why there are only earthquakes here, on this island, and not on any of the others? It’s because Cair Paravel is a living thing, and she hates you. She hates everyone, because she remembers when she was whole, when she was the greatest palace in this world or any other, and when all of Narnia came to bow the knee right here, to the kings and queens who sat in these thrones.” He hears something in his voice shift, an unfamiliar timbre there that rings like silver, like a dagger in the night. “And she remembers how her walls were broken and her gates smashed, her towers tumbled and her halls burnt. She remembers running red with Narnian blood. And she remembers being nothing. Cair Paravel was the heart of Narnia and now she isn’t even part of that land. And she hates it. She hates what she is, and what she was, and what Aslan made her – and she hates the men who think they can use her like she is nothing, like she is dead earth, more than she hates anything else in this world or any other. And for that reason, she will kill you, and everyone else here, now that she is awake.” He stops, panting, and feels his breath tear at his lungs. The storm is very close now; the day very dark.

“This is not the city of Cair Paravel,” says Iravan Tarkaan, his eyes dark and unreadable.

“No,” Edmund says, glancing down as the earth trembles again beneath his feet. It’s just a shiver, enough to make him sway slightly but not to threaten his balance. It’s like she’s waiting, though Edmund doesn’t know for what. For him, maybe. “This was the castle of Cair Paravel, which once stood on the eastern shore of Narnia sixteen hundred years ago. Caspian borrowed the name.”

We will not be broken, Cair Paravel whispers, and both Iravan and Zidan flinch at her voice, silent as the tomb which she has become. This is a land of lions, not of Tash.

“Who said that?” Zidan snarls, looking around as if expecting someone to step forward. The Calormenes, overseers and soldiers alike, are throwing nervous glances about the throne room, while the Narnians are standing well back. Most seem too weary to be as afraid as they should be.

“Who do you think?” Edmund says, knowing he sounds mad. But that unfamiliar timbre is gone, and he’s stupidly relieved to find that his voice is his own again, for however short a time that might be. “Listen to me, man. The palace and the island are one. This isn’t the Narnia you think you know – this isn’t the mainland. The rules don’t apply here. If you don’t get them out of here, she will kill everyone on the island. Your Calormenes and my Narnians both; she won’t make a distinction.”

“Your Narnians?” Iravan Tarkaan says softly.

Edmund meets his gaze. “Mine,” he says. “And my brother’s, and my sisters’.” There is an undercurrent to his voice that he has never heard before and that he isn’t certain he likes, with some of the rumble of the approaching storm to it. The corners of his vision shimmer again, gleaming marble and scarlet-and-gold banners briefly present before fading into the grime and filth of the present day. “I will not see them die for your pride.”


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The ghosts of Cair Paravel first appear in The Bone's Prayer.


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 | 32 | 33 | 34

Note: This chapter is too large for LJ's post limits, so rather than split it in two, I've elected to post it on Dreamwidth alone. You can comment here or on the LJ entry for this chapter.