Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (34)
Jul. 3rd, 2013 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air (34)
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG
Content Notes: mention of fraught marital situation
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). So much thanks tosnacky for her beta, since this is a monster of a chapter! See end for further notes.
Leocadia wakes to the sound of hoofbeats.
She opens her eyes, gazing up at the shadowed shapes painted on the ceiling of her box bed, before she turns towards the chilly breeze trailing thoughtful fingers against her cheeks. She hadn’t shut the curtains on her bed last night, hadn’t wanted to, not liking the trapped, enclosed feeling that they gave her. From here, she can see the thin spring curtains blowing inward, partially obscuring the figure of the cat standing on the windowsill, peering out into the gloom. Sixtoes. Leocadia hadn’t left the window open when she’d gone to bed; the cat must have opened it.
She throws the blankets back and sits up, shivering a little as she reaches for the red brocade dressing gown that she’d hung up last night. She flings it over her shoulders and ties the sash quickly around her waist as she pads over to the window, glad of the soft carpets beneath her bare feet.
Sixtoes’ tail lashes as Leocadia puts her hands on the sill beside the tabby cat’s front paws and leans out as well, the night air raising goose pimples on her skin. Loose strands of her braided hair fly wildly around her face; besides the sound of oncoming hoofbeats, she can hear the Calormene flags on the manor flapping wildly in the wind. Clouds roll quickly across the sky, obscuring the ocean of stars and the full moon above her. Thunder rumbles in the distance; Leocadia licks her lips, smelling ozone in the air. There’s a storm rolling in from the east, despite the fact that it had been a clear day not long ago.
A streak of lightning in the distance briefly illuminates the white chalk bear in the hillside. The bear and its watery paw-prints hold the light long after the lightning has faded, against all reason, glowing pale against the dark grass of the slope. Leocadia counts the moments it lasts against her heartbeat, the words silent on her tongue – five six seven – before it fades at last, though the image lingers on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks. She can imagine the bear standing up, shaking off the vestiges of sleep, and wandering down through the vale to drink at the banks of the Great River.
The lightning bolt, distant as it had been – to the east, over the Great Eastern Ocean leagues away – had illuminated the carriageway leading to the manor as well, giving Leocadia a brief glimpse of the oncoming riders. There are three of them, dressed in the battered wolf-skin cloaks of Calormene auxiliary scouts, riding lathered horses whose pace has slowed only a little now that they’ve come within shouting distance of the manor. Smaller dark shapes, which she can’t make out clearly from here, run alongside them. They’re low to the ground, four-legged, moving just as fast as the horses.
As Leocadia watches, someone strikes a light, a flame flaring briefly into existence as someone lights the lanterns on either side of the big front doors. It gleams off burnished armor and the dyed horsehair crest of a helmet – the guards that Yasruddin Tarkaan has on the manor. The remainder of Marcia Bracken’s retainers might be permitted to man the walls surrounding the park, but Yasruddin Tarkaan prefers to trust the safety of his borrowed house to his own men.
The scouts rein up in front of the front doors in sprays of gravel, the exhausted horses putting their heads down as their riders vault to the ground. Leocadia can hear them breathing from here, hot and heavy. In the lantern-lights, the smaller animals that had accompanied them down the paths resolve themselves into lean, reddish wolves, putting their heads down and letting their tongues loll out as the scouts demand Yasruddin Tarkaan, water for the horses and wolves, a bite to eat for themselves, grooms. Their voices drift up to Leocadia’s window, briefly interrupted by another rumble of thunder – closer now, and the flash of lightning that follows brightening the vale.
Leocadia’s braid falls over her shoulder as she leans further out the window, trying to get a better view of the wolves. For all her Telmarine blood, three hundred years old that it is now, she is a Narnian born and bred, and the wolves both repel and fascinate her. Wolves are creatures of the White Witch – the Queen of Winter, the undying enemy of the Great Lion, banished at the dawn of the Golden Age but ever striving to get back in, clawing at the boundaries between this world and the one in which she is imprisoned in hopes of finding a weakness that will let her creep back into Narnia to wreak eternal winter once more. In Narnia, wolves are like hyenas and polar bears – she casts her eye at the white chalk bear again – and albinos, hags and harpies and wer-wolves. All of them kissed by frost, creatures that will never quite shake the touch of the Long Winter, no matter how many centuries have passed since Aslan and the Kings and Queens of Summer brought spring to Narnia once more.
But the Calormenes don’t have Narnian hang-ups. In Cair Paravel, for all that the city streets were crawling with Calormene soldiers, it was mostly legionaries and native-born Calormene officers that are seen, not the auxiliaries that make up the bulk of the Calormene armies. The Calormene empire is vast, encompassing more than just the old core lands around Tashbaan, and her army is vast as well. Leocadia has heard rumors of the type of creatures that swell its ranks, the kind of creatures that might make even a Narnian – well used to nonhumans – gape in surprise and awe. Men and women with the bodies of snakes or crocodiles, shape-shifters, dwarves as dark as Yasruddin Tarkaan or Emrah Tarkaan, giant spiders, rocs, karkadann, manticores, talking beasts the like of which have not been seen in Narnia since the dawn of days. Leocadia has spent her entire life being told that Narnia is special, that besides Archenland and the eastern islands, there is nowhere else in this world quite like Narnia, but the truth is that that’s a lie. There are a lot of places in this world where humans and nonhumans live side by side, probably most in more harmony than they do in Narnia. The Calormene provinces are, from what she’s heard from various Calormene tarkaans and the odd tarkheena, some of them.
Most of the nonhuman auxiliary troops hadn’t been sent to Narnia, or at least that’s the rumor. The auxiliaries here are mostly human or close enough in form to Narnian nonhumans that it won’t alarm anyone. Narnia, after all, isn’t the kind of land that needs to be put down by terror in the form of horrendous beasts; men will do just as well, and Calormen has no lack of those. Narnia takes such pride in what she is that it apparently amuses the Tisroc to keep most of his nonhuman troops out of the occupying force, but some of them have made their way here anyway.
The Frontier Wolves are one such group. They’re auxiliary scouts that are normally stationed on the border of one of Calormen’s more distant provinces, usually recruited from conquered peoples or mercenaries from the barbarian lands beyond the empire. Like the other Calormene auxiliary cohorts and alae, most of the officers are Calormenes – lesser tarkaans and tiberi, the second rank of Calormene society, the equivalent to Narnian knights. Leocadia has heard stories about them since it was announced that several alae of Frontier Wolves would be joining the occupying Calormene force in order to aid in pacifying Narnia. They’re supposed to be fierce fighters, every man or woman among them killing their wild wolf before they truly join the ranks, even the Calormene officers. Some stories say that they’re shape-shifters, another kind of wer-wolf; that they’re skinshifters like Narnian selkies, shedding their wolfskins when they want to walk among humans, and donning them again when four paws and sharp teeth will do them better. Others say that the wolves who walk among them are talking wolves, like those in Narnia and Archenland, and as much a part of the ala as any of the humans.
The idea of letting a wolf, shape-shifter or merely talking beast, into White Bear Hall makes Leocadia shudder. She’s relieved when the Frontier Wolf in the lead pushes back the wolf’s head hood of his cloak, revealing tight black curls and skin that’s shadowed in the lamplight. The other two Frontier Wolves follow suit – a man and a woman, light-skinned and with hair and, in the man’s case, beard braided as elaborately as any Narnian dwarf’s.
“I must see Yasruddin Tarkaan immediately,” the dark-skinned man – an officer, presumably – says in Calormene. “My news is urgent.”
More lights are flickering on amidst the lower floors of the manor. Yawning groomsmen emerge to take the exhausted horses away to the stables, while a cautious-looking servant approaches the wolves with a basin of water held between her hands. She sets it down on the ground before them and almost jumps back as the wolves converge on it, their tails wagging tiredly as they lap up the water.
In careful Narnian, so accented that Leocadia can barely understand it, the female Frontier Wolf says, “If you have a few raw steaks for them, it would be appreciated.”
The servant mutters a response – too softly for Leocadia to make out at distance – and skitters away. The Frontier Wolf rests her right hand on her sword hilt, looking around as if she’s never seen the manor before. Maybe she hasn’t; Leocadia hasn’t gotten the impression that many members of the Calormene army come up to the manor aside from Yasruddin Tarkaan and his staff officers. Certainly an ordinary scout – especially an auxiliary – would never be invited.
Leocadia almost forgets that she’s essentially hanging out the window gaping at the strangers until the woman looks up, her eyebrows climbing as she sees Leocadia. Leocadia feels her cheeks heat and gives her an awkward one-handed wave before reaching out to pull the shutters closed. She latches them securely as Sixtoes sits back, raising a paw to her mouth as she begins to wash herself.
“It’s started,” Leocadia says to her.
Sixtoes gives her an unimpressed look.
Leocadia hunts around for her slippers, pushing her braid back over her shoulder as it falls forward again. Eventually she finds them under her bed – she must have kicked them there last night – and slips them on. Reaching for the door handle, she looks back at Sixtoes and says, “Aren’t you coming?”
The cat swipes her tongue over her paw one last time and yawns, to all appearances bored with the whole affair. She leaps down off the windowsill and pads over to Leocadia, pressing her soft back briefly against her bare ankles as Leocadia turns the door handle.
Outside, the hallway is dark. As far as Leocadia has been able to determine, all of the other rooms in this hall are unoccupied at the moment, a fact for which she is mostly glad. White Bear Hall is large enough to entertain half a dozen noble guests and their assorted retinues; Yasruddin Tarkaan and his staff rattle around in the manor. She can’t imagine how Lady Marcia copes, on the rare occasion that she’s permitted to leave Cair Paravel and come home. Glasswater Castle is twice the size, but it has the staff to match, and there had always been cousins and byblows coming and going. Besides, it has the city and the university nearby, while White Bear Hall is out here in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of the High Reaches.
She can hear voices coming from the direction of the stairwell as she makes her way down the hallway, the rich carpet swallowing up her footsteps. It’s dark enough that Leocadia thinks about going back to her room to get a candle, but even as the thought crosses her mind another flash of lightning crackles across the sky, illuminating the hallway from the window behind her. It’s a brief second, nothing more, but long enough for Leocadia to get her bearings. She follows the sound of Calormene voices towards the stairs, Sixtoes pacing along with her – sometimes out in front, sometimes beside her, sometimes lingering behind.
Leocadia trails a hand along the wall as she goes, her fingers bumping over the frames of low-set portraits, across rough brush-strokes of dried paint. As her vision adjusts to the dim light, the little quirks of the manor which seem quaint in daylight become menacing. Everywhere bear’s heads growl at her out of the shadows, from the carvings on the bannisters, to the subjects of the tapestries and paintings – there seems to be a bear hidden in nearly every one – even at the ends of the rafters above her. There are bears – white and brown and golden – worked into the carpets beneath her feet. There are brackens as well, but far fewer in number than the bears, and most of a much later date. The bears have been here ever since the hall was built, three hundred years ago in the shadow of the white chalk bear on the hillside. The brackens are a more recent addition and as such they stand out, awkward among the bear’s heads and bear’s paws.
She hesitates at the top of the stairs, her fingers resting lightly on the bannister, where the wood has been painstakingly carved – gods, she can’t imagine how long this must have taken – to feel like fur to the touch. It seems unlikely that anyone will be looking up the stairs, but she’ll be visible as soon as she reaches the landing, and she doesn’t particularly feel like raising any questions about why she’s decided to come snooping around, even though she has a ready answer on the tip of her tongue.
Sixtoes makes the decision for her, rolling her eyes and strolling past Leocadia’s bare ankles, soft-footed on the stairs. Leocadia follows her down, cognizant of the lights in the foyer, illuminating the disapproving gazes of long-dead Whitebear or Bracken ancestors immortalized in portraiture. As if she’s the first guest to go poking around her host’s house after midnight.
She and Sixtoes stop on the landing, Leocadia hugging the wall, portrait frames digging into her back, as she makes her way to the railing and crouches against it, wrapping her long fingers around the bars as she peers down into the foyer. A sleepy-looking maidservant goes past, a shawl thrown up over hair that presumably she hadn’t had time to brush. The sound of her hooves on the wooden floor is a soft click click as she passes below the landing on her way from the kitchen to, presumably, the library that Yasruddin Tarkaan is using as an office. Leocadia waits for her to return, blinking in slight surprise as Dolichene Cooper emerges and follows after the maidservant, her ever-present leather writing case tucked under her arm. Her hair is still braided for sleep and her dressing gown is tied quickly and crookedly. She vanishes after the maidservant, her slippers silent as she passes directly beneath Leocadia.
The sound of a door opening is accompanied by the soft murmur of conversation – Yasruddin’s deep voice, Emrah Tarkaan’s slightly lighter one, overlapping with the unfamiliar voices of the riders. They’re all speaking Tashbaan Calormene, from the sound of it, the most common dialect of Calormene. Fortunately it’s also the dialect that Leocadia knows; when she’d been growing up, it had been common for young noble children to learn Calormene, if only to be able to read the poetry that had been popular at the time. After the Occupation, it had proven useful. Prejun used to stomp around the Cair Paravel house, loudly bemoaning the cheek of the Calormenes to go conducting their business in their own language if they didn’t want Narnians to hear it. Leocadia, already wary of Prejun’s rages, had held her tongue. Calormene tarkaans didn’t expect a young Narnian lady to be able to speak their language and it had, at times, been useful for Leocadia to listen in on conversations not meant for Narnian ears, though those had gotten rarer as it became more common for Narnians to learn Calormene. Leocadia has found that young tarkaans take very well to the discovery that they can carry on a conversation in their own tongue with a young, attractive Narnian lady.
When the maidservant has reappeared, still yawning and with her tray now tucked under her arm, and presumably returned to the kitchen, Sixtoes looks up. Leocadia makes a shooing motion with her hands. The cat sighs deeply, her whole body seeming to droop, and creeps off down the stairs, the white tip of her otherwise gray-and-white striped tail waving behind her. Leocadia rises from her crouch and follows slowly, keeping one hand on the bannister and hoping that none of the stairs creak. She hadn’t thought to find out before this; she’s never exactly spent a lot of time creeping around in other people’s homes. Not even in her own, when it had still been there.
Once Sixtoes reaches the bottom of the stairs, she sits down and washes her paw again, her tail wrapped primly around her hind legs. Leocadia makes her careful way down the stairs after her, jumping a little when thunder rumbles again, unexpectedly, and a streak of lightning illuminates the grounds outside the stained glass windows that frame the front doors. Outside, she can hear the wind rising, rushing through the trees and hedges outside the house. Rain will no doubt follow soon after.
Once she reaches the bottom, she stops and looks around, letting one hand rest on the bear’s head at the end of the bannister. She feels uncomfortably exposed here, as if the flickering lamplight of the foyer is a spotlight on her, even with an explanation for her presence ready on her lips. If she were Tirian or one of his dangerous new friends, she’d have a dagger up her sleeve and a way out of every seemingly impossible situation, but all she has are her wits and a few prayers. There’s no telling which of the two of is more useless these days.
Sixtoes looks back at her, her claws flashing out to knead into a carpet decorated with brown and white bears in a snowy forest – how daring of the Brackens, winter scenes have never been in vogue for obvious reasons – and Leocadia bites her lip. But she’s come this far, there’s no point in going back upstairs now, even if her warm bed calls to her. Thunder rumbles again, ominously, and a fine spray of rain begins to tap against the stained glass windows just before the lightning comes. Leocadia turns away from it, following Sixtoes down the hallway, towards the murmur of Calormene voices.
Yasruddin Tarkaan has been using one of White Bear Hall’s several private libraries for his personal office. Either Lord Orichan or one of his predecessors must have done the same, since the room is kitted out with a large mahogany desk with bear’s paws for feet and a pattern of brackens along the side panels, which show scenes out of Narnia’s history. It’s actually a very nice room, Leocadia had noticed the first time that she had been inside. Two of the squashy brown leather couches had obviously been there before Yasruddin Tarkaan had taken it over, though the other chairs, mismatching, must have been brought in at some point.
There is only one lantern lit in the hallway, the others left dark. More shadows, Leocadia thinks tiredly, but all of Narnia is shadowed these days; there’s not much surprise there. Although the other doors in the hallway are closed, the library door has been left slightly ajar, emitting a thin beam of light that falls onto the dark carpet, its patterns invisible in the dim light. Leocadia steps back against the wall, edging along it until she can turn her head and peer into the brightly lit library. Sixtoes settles down by her feet, her paws tucked underneath the fluff of her belly.
From here, she doesn’t have a very good view, but the crack left open reveals the back of Yasruddin Tarkaan’s shorn head and a side glimpse of the Calormene Frontier Wolf, who has discarded his wolfskin cloak for the time being. Underneath it, he isn’t wearing what Leocadia thinks of as typical Calormene legionary armor, just a tired expression and worn riding leathers that have clearly seen hard use. He’s younger than she expects, maybe her own age. She can see Dolichene Cooper sitting at a small desk off to the side, her pen scratching as she writes in her leather folder. From the way that Yasruddin Tarkaan’s gaze moves around there are others in the room that Leocadia can’t see, presumably the two barbarian Frontier Wolves that had arrived with the Calormene officer. She hopes that their wolves aren’t with them as well, though she suspects that they would have scented her, or at least Sixtoes, by now and raised the alarm.
“– as you suspected, Yasruddin leiwa,” says the Calormene officer. Leocadia mouths along with the words, wishing that she was better at languages and hoping that she’s at least getting the general gist of the conversation. His accent is stronger than she’s used to, and she is fairly certain that she doesn’t know all the words that the military uses to communicate amongst itself. “The fort is full to bursting with Narnians. Some several thousand, I would guess, though it is hard to tell. There may have been more in the mines; we saw guards posted outside the entrance. I would guess that they would keep the women and children there, since they are easily defended.”
Yasruddin Tarkaan asks something, his voice too low to make out.
“Their armament seemed poor, leiwa –” General, roughly, or army commander, though the vowels are more rounded than Leocadia is used to and it takes her a moment to realize that that’s what the Frontier Wolf officer is saying. “What armor they had seemed to be ill-fitting, not meant for creatures of their species. All that we saw were armed, but scantily. Much of it appeared to be Calormene kit.”
“Plundered from the dead,” a man says from out of sight, his Calormene so heavily accented as to be almost unintelligible to Leocadia’s Narnian ears.
Yasruddin Tarkaan nods in understanding. “What of the King?” he asks.
Leocadia’s hand slips against the wall, her wedding ring knocking against the wood. She brings her hand quickly up to her mouth, biting a knuckle to keep from making any noise. Sixtoes looks up at her, her tail lashing once in warning.
None of the Calormenes seem to have heard, though Dolichene Cooper glances up, frowning. She looks down and starts scribbling again as the unnamed officer says, “The flag of Narnia flies over the battlements.” There is a particular lilt to his voice that Leocadia has learned means “caution,” and she sees him clench his fist on his knee. In front of him, Leocadia can see the corner of a low coffee-table; one of the Calormene-style glass-and-copper tea cups is in front of him, half full of reddish liquid.
“But did you see him?” Yasruddin presses.
The officer hesitates. It’s the woman Frontier Wolf, whom Leocadia can’t see, who says with forced certainty, “Yes. King Tirian is there.”
“And the rumors? These others, these – gods?”
“Rumors!” says the woman dismissively. “Nothing but ordinary Narnians. If the Narnian gods had any power, Aslan or these Kings and Queens of Summer, surely they would have appeared before now – and not in some dofni fort on the edge of the High Reaches, either.”
There is a moment of silence. Leocadia shifts a little, nervous at the lack of response before the officer puts in, more cautiously, “I have heard the stories of Tash walking, leiwa. Are the gods of these northerners any less than our own? If there are gods in Narnia again, as in the days of old –”
“In stories, undecurio –” the woman interrupts.
“– then surely they would not hide behind wooden walls or in the shades of this land, nor would they mask their presence,” the young officer concludes, frowning in her direction.
“We would not have passed their borders if these Narnian gods were as great as Tash or –” The woman says something completely unintelligible that certainly isn’t Calormene. “Leiwa Yasruddin, there is no one behind that walls of the fort other than those who ought to be there – as you said, merely Tirian the Woodsman and what remains of his folk. If there are gods yet in Narnia, they are little gods, with little power.”
There is another moment’s pause, after which the undecurio – a junior officer, roughly equivalent to a Narnian lieutenant – adds, “Except for Tash. Little gods, except for Tash.”
“Tash has other places to be than some backcountry mining fort, I think,” Yasruddin Tarkaan remarks.
Dolichene murmurs something in Calormene, her gaze downcast as her pen hesitates over the paper. Leocadia leans closer, trying to make out her expression, and flinches when the stone on her wedding ring scrapes across the wall. It’s only a small sound, but to her ears it seems absurdly loud, here in what should be the long dark quiet of the night, otherwise broken only by the steady rain outside and the occasional rumble of thunder. She sees Yasruddin Tarkaan look up, frowning, and turn towards the door.
Leocadia flings herself back from it, looking frantically around as she hears steps coming from inside the room, Sixtoes skittering away, her back raised in an arch and all the fur on her tail puffed out. There isn’t anywhere else in the hallway to hide, and she doesn’t have time to go back to the foyer. She throws herself at the nearest closed door and shoves it open, hurling herself bodily in the dark room before she eases it shut again, leaning her shoulder against the door, her hand still clenched on the knob so that she’ll feel it when someone tries to barge in after her. She thinks that there’s no way that Yasruddin could have missed that, that he’ll be banging his way in here after her soon enough, but instead she hears him say in Calormene, “Nothing. Just a cat.” This time, when he makes his way back into the library, he closes the door behind him.
Sixtoes, Leocadia thinks gratefully. She sinks down to the floor with her back still against the door, scrubbing her hands over her face and trying to will her frantically thumping heart to slow to a more reasonable pace. All she had wanted to know was where the Frontier Wolves had been and what they had seen there, and now she knows. Surely that’s worth a scare, as long as it doesn’t turn into anything worse. But that “as long as” is the real sticking point, as far as Leocadia is concerned. The Calormenes do horrible things to spies; she’s seen it in Cair Paravel. But she isn’t a spy. Whatever else she is, and there are a lot of ugly words for that, she isn’t a spy.
She sits there for a long time, curling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. The soft fabric of her dressing gown is warm against her skin as she presses her cheek to her knees, listening to the sound of the rain outside as it patters against the room’s glass windows. Even though this room shares a wall with the library, it’s too sturdily built to overhear anything but the occasional rumble of raised voices; the Whitebears’ long ago builders hadn’t fooled around with the construction. She hopes that Sixtoes will come back and let her know when it’s all right for her to leave again; even with the library door closed, right now Leocadia doesn’t feel comfortable navigating these halls alone.
Eventually she looks up. The curtains have been drawn in this room, but one is just slightly ajar, letting in a thin beam of moonlight that gives the room a little illumination. Leocadia has been in the dark long enough for her eyes to adjust and to her surprise, looking around, she finds that the room is much smaller than she had expected from its location in the manor. The other rooms in this hallway are drawing rooms or music rooms – the Whitebears hadn’t stinted on what had been the necessary amenities for entertaining in style three hundred years ago. But this is something else entirely.
She finds herself in a small, square room, with a shrine set dead center against the opposite wall, between the two curtained windows. The figure at the center of it is shadowed, features blurred by dark and distance, but Leocadia recognizes the shape, the way the ivory swallows what little light there is and the gold holds it. It is much smaller than the chryselephantine statue of Aslan in the palace chapel at Caspian’s castle, but it is clearly a replica. The Whitebears – and this smacks of the Whitebears, though Leocadia supposes that it isn’t out of the question that it was some Bracken ancestor’s idea instead – had had the money to exactly replicate the famous statue in miniature, using real gold and ivory rather than marble or painted wood with bronze or gilt the way some replicas do. In front of the statue are shallow bowls for offerings and a tray for incense or candles, though only a lingering trace of the smell remains. Either no one has offered here in a long time or the room is being aired out frequently; she suspects that it may be the latter, since the door had opened easily under her hand, the hinges well-oiled to keep from squeaking.
On the opposing two walls are four more shrines, two on either side. Here the light falls, so that Leocadia can see the gleaming metal figures of the Kings and Queens of Summer – the High King and the King of Evening to her left, the Queen of Spring and the Queen of Morning to her right. None of the figures is larger than the length of a grown man’s hand.
Leocadia swallows, one hand on the door as she levers herself to her feet. It’s a lararium, a household shrine to Aslan and the four little gods, the hands who do His work in Narnia – only now, she sees as she approaches the larger shrine, the chryselephantine statue of Aslan is dusty with disuse, while the bronze statues of the four are bright with care, seeming to gather even that one thin ray of moonlight into themselves. While the bowls before the Lion’s shrine are empty, the ones before the four little gods are full – tiny glasses of wine and tea, iced biscuits, polished beads and buttons, even a few small coins. Pools of pale wax mark where candles have burned down to nothing, while stubs of incense are crumbled almost to dust, held upright in a shallow tray filled with sand and small pebbles.
Leocadia presses her hands to her mouth, held together as if in a moment of a prayer. She wants to pray, desperately wants to, but she knows even while the litanies are drifting across the back of her tongue that they won’t mean anything to her any more. The sweet clarity of prayer is lost to her now, maybe forever. She knows too much.
Still, she crosses the room anyway, feet soft on the paneled wood floor. She can feel the glassy eyes of the four little gods on her as she passes them, empty and soulless – if they had ever been in those figurines, they aren’t now; she wonders if the people who leave offerings at the shrines realize it. She looks straight ahead as she walks, not daring to look to either side, and sinks gently to her knees on the hard floor in front of the chryselephantine statue, the skirts of her nightgown and dressing gown pooling out around her.
There are a hundred prayers that Leocadia knows by heart, but she can’t think of any of them now, not even the Lion’s Prayer. She can just about remember, O Aslan, who dwelleth over the Great Sea, but there her memory fails her and the words peter off uselessly into nothing, leaving her grasping at darkness. She looks up at the chryselephantine statue, pressing her hands together beneath her chin, and thinks, please. Please make it all be all right.
She doesn’t know what she expects, if she expects to be comforted by the very act of prayer or if she expects the warmth of the Lion’s breath to drift over her face. Instead she just feels – empty, as if she had opened the door to a room where she had expected to find an old friend and found the space barren instead. The emptiness drifts through her, settling in the pit of her stomach, in her bones, and it’s all Leocadia can do not to fall forward and weep, scream, pound at the floor with her hands until someone hears her. She wants to be reminded that she isn’t the last person left alive in Narnia.
She doesn’t, though, because someone would hear her – but not the Kings and Queens of Summer, long gone from their statues and shrines and wearing human skin once more, and not Aslan, who has abandoned Narnia yet again, as He always does. Leocadia doesn’t want to be heard, doesn’t want Emrah Tarkaan to pick her up off the floor with gentle hands or the Narnian servants to bundle her briskly away, like a china doll to be handled with kid gloves.
Instead, she stays on her knees for a long time, until the room’s chill eats through the thin cloth of her dressing gown and her legs begin to ache from the unyielding wooden floor. Even then she can’t quite bring herself to move, staring up at the empty golden eyes of the chryselephantine lion as the rain falls outside the windows. At least it isn’t snow.
Why, Leocadia of Newisle – no, Leocadia of Glasswater, she knows who she is – thinks, why would You do this to us? What have we done to displease You?
But there is no answer, and she is alone with her grief.
She isn’t sure when Yasruddin Tarkaan and his people leave the library, but eventually she hears a light scratching near the base of the door behind her. Leocadia pushes herself slowly to her feet, aching in every muscle from gods know how many hours kneeling on that floor – she’s long out of the habit of prayer – and goes to open the door.
By now the hall is dark, the flame of the lantern guttered out. The only light comes from the lightning flashing through the window at the end of the hallway and the pinpricks of Sixtoes’ eyes looking up at her near the floor.
“They’ve gone?” Leocadia whispers, though Sixtoes’ reappearance is answer enough to that question. Her voice sounds hoarse and scraped raw; she resists the urge to clear her throat, just in case anyone might hear.
Sixtoes nods silently.
“Thank you,” Leocadia murmurs, stepping out into the hallway. She starts to close the door behind her and stops, one hand wrapped around the handle, the other braced on the engraved wood panels – she can’t make out the design – to keep it from closing too heavily. For a moment, no more than the space between one heartbeat and the next, she feels eyes on her, burning holes into her skin like a hot iron. She whips around, her braid flying.
The chryselephantine statue of the Lion stares back at her, golden eyes empty and soulless, nothing there at all.
“King of Summer shield me,” she whispers automatically, her left hand flattening into the King’s Shield. It’s a symbol against evil, the kind that peasants use – the sign that Narnians who refuse to trust in Aslan alone make. Leocadia closes her hand into a fist as soon as she realizes what she’s done, easing the door the rest of the way shut. She turns the handle on the statue’s lidless eyes and sags a little against the door.
Sixtoes glances up at her, the corners of her mouth turning down in a cat’s frown. Her meaning is clear even without words.
“I just took a start.” The lie comes easily to her tongue – a little too easily, perhaps. Leocadia passes her hands quickly over her face, tucking loose strands of hair back behind her ears. “Have they all gone back to bed?”
Sixtoes points in the direction of the front door with her tail. Leocadia interprets that to mean that presumably the news that the Frontier Wolves had brought Yasruddin Tarkaan was so urgent that he’s immediately gone down to the army camp to deal with it.
“Then I suppose that you and I ought to be getting back to bed,” Leocadia says.
Sixtoes shrugs, a quick boneless shimmer of tabby fur. Leocadia’s fingers itch to pet her, to hold her close and stroke her, but there’s nothing ruder to do to a talking animal than treat it like a dumb one, and she resists the urge. She contents herself with nodding to Sixtoes with as much gratitude as she can put into that one short gesture, and Sixtoes reciprocates by winding briefly around her ankles, comfortingly warm.
They go quietly down the dark hallway, turning up the big staircase with its bear fur-grained bannister, and as Leocadia mounts the steps she sees the gleam of another pair of eyes out of the darkness. She stops, her hands braced on the bannister as she peers over into one of the opposite hallways: the marsh-wiggle girl, Sullycloud. The girl sees her looking and stares back defiantly before darting out of sight.
Leocadia and Sixtoes both look after her. “That girl will be trouble,” Leocadia murmurs softly, and sees Sixtoes nod in agreement. But she thinks: she isn’t the only one.
They make their way slowly up the stairs and down the hall, Leocadia keeping one hand first on the bannister, then on the wall at all times so that she doesn’t lose her way in the darkness and accidentally pitch herself over the stairs. Sixtoes stops her when she reaches the door to her room. Leocadia turns the knob and steps inside. She looks back at Sixtoes, raising her eyebrows in question. The cat shakes her head and turns away, wandering back down the hallway. Presumably she has decided that she wants fresh mice for a midnight snack or something equally delightful.
Leocadia locks the door behind her and sheds her dressing gown with a sigh of relief, toes off her slippers and mounts the short steps to her enormous bed. She had left the drapes open last night, but now she drags them shut, cocooning the bed in darkness and warmth. She feels like she needs it, that feeling of being safe and protected, with all that emptiness still echoing in the hollows of her soul. But even after she curls up beneath the blankets, clutching a pillow to her middle, she can still feel it – like no one is there. Like she, and all of Narnia, are alone.
Leocadia drags the blankets over her head. She can still hear the rain, faint but muffled, and the occasional distant rumble of thunder, always followed by a streak of lightning whose brightness is visible even through all the blankets. When she had been tiny, one of her nurses had told her that lightning bolts were the sparks made from enemy weapons striking off the King of Summer’s shield, thunder the sound of his horse’s hooves in battle. The Glasswater priest had said that thunder was Aslan roaring, lightning the flash of His mane. But they can’t both be right, she remembers asking Vespasian, puzzled. Can they?
When sleep finally finds her, she dreams again. She dreams that she is in a cave, or something very like a cave, with stone walls and floors and ceilings, but comfortable – rugs and bookshelves and even windows, not at all like the kind of nasty cave that she’s seen in picture books. It’s a warm sort of place, lit by candlelight and a crackling fire laid on in the hearth, before which are two padded armchairs. In one of the armchairs is a little human girl, maybe ten or eleven, with short brown hair and what Leocadia thinks of as the oddest sort of clothes. There’s something familiar about her, though Leocadia can’t think what it is. Nothing about her says “Narnian”, or even “Archenlander” or “Calormene” – she certainly doesn’t have the coloring to be a Calormene, at least the sort Leocadia sees in Cair Paravel, and she doesn’t look much like a proper Telmarine Narnian either; her skin is too pale and her hair too light and fine.
A muffled click of hooves on carpet-covered stone draws her attention, and Leocadia looks around to see a young faun – curly-haired, with a sharp clever face and completely unclad, which she finds rather shocking – come trotting up to the girl, bearing a tea tray. He sets it down on the table before her, chatting merrily away to her as she takes the overlarge cup and saucer from. Leocadia inhales, breathing in the scent of tea – rather common and everyday stuff, from the smell of it, rather than the fancier sorts she’s used to – along with burning wood from the fire, sardines, and the rest of the tea time spread. Her stomach rumbles in longing and she flushes, pressing one hand to her belly, but neither the faun nor the girl seems to notice.
“It’s been a long winter,” says the faun, and Leocadia’s gaze flies automatically to the small round windows, taking in the snow piling up outside. She presses a hand to her mouth, fighting back her automatic cry of alarm: she’s Narnian enough for that, at least, and she knows the words, the careful phrasing that no one in Narnia will repeat for a normal winter.
“You would have loved Narnia in summer,” the faun goes on. For a moment Leocadia can almost feel the heat of it, though perhaps it’s just the fire: the warmth of the sun on her bare skin, the heavy heat of the air, the rains that pour down without fail at least once a day during the wet summers and the long burning stretch of the dry ones. But then the feeling passes, leaving only memory behind.
“Now, are you familiar with any Narnian lullabies?” the faun asks, Leocadia apparently having missed some of the conversation. He takes a wooden case down from the mantel, fingers moving quickly and familiarly over it as he takes out the panpipes.
The girl winces a little, says, “Sorry, no,” apologetically.
“Well, that’s good,” he says, his hands fitting comfortably around the panpipes. “Because this probably won’t sound anything like one.”
Leocadia has heard faun lullabies before; one of her nursemaids had been a faun as a girl. It’s an odd choice for a host to entertain his guest with. She doesn’t know whether the music will affect her or not, but just in case she closes both hands into fists as he begins to play, digging her nails into the heels of her hands. She doesn’t know if she ought to watch the girl or the fire, but the conclusion with the girl is inevitable, so she watches the flames instead.
The first thing that she sees is a stag, breaking out of the flames, pursued by a rider. Both vanish in a spatter of sparks, to be replaced with a circle of dancing fauns and satyrs, swords sheathed on their hips. The music rises as their feet beat at the base of the flames; Leocadia feels her eyes start to drift shut, just as the girl’s are doing, and pinches herself hard. She is barely aware of the moment when the girl’s cup falls to the floor, spilling tea across the carpet, and she slumps over sideways in the armchair.
She’s staring straight into the heart of the fire when it dissolves into the head of a lion, and its roar rattles the windows of the cave house.
Leocadia jerks awake with a cry, fighting her way up out of the tangle of blankets. The drapes that had seemed so comforting last night feel stifling now, and she rips them open, staring out at the spill of sunlight into her bedroom. Last night’s storm seems like a dim memory, the world washed clean by the rain. It’s a lovely spring day – it’s been a long winter, she hears the faun say again, shuddering in memory – and Leocadia can barely believe it. She almost falls out of the tall box bed, missing the steps and stumbling heavily onto the floor, catching hold of the curtains to steady herself. She casts a worried glance at the cold hearth, but there is nothing there – not even ashes, which the maid must have cleaned out sometime yesterday. It hadn’t been cold enough last night for another fire, though there’s a brazier at the foot of her bed, now nothing but coals.
She’s seen the little girl before, she realizes now, in waking as she hadn’t in sleep. Seen her in another dream – with that same faun. Queen Lucy of Narnia, the Queen of Morning.
“No,” she says out loud, shaking her head furiously to clear the thought. She pads barefoot into the bathroom to wash quickly before dressing in another of Lady Marcia’s borrowed last season frocks, running a brush through her hair before twisting it back from her face and pinning it in place.
The manor seems eerily quiet as she descends the stairs. Leocadia rests her hand on the bannister, feeling the fur-grained wood beneath her fingertips, and looks around at the bears. No wonder Lady Marcia spends most of her time in Cair Paravel; this manor doesn’t seem very welcoming to those who aren’t Whitebears, no matter how long it’s been a Bracken possession.
When she enters the dining room, she finds Dolichene Cooper sitting at the big table, her cheek propped up on her fist as she stares suspiciously at the three figures at the opposite end of the table. Leocadia stops dead in the doorway, following Dolichene’s gaze, and feels her mouth drop open in surprise as she recognizes the three Frontier Wolves that had arrived at the manor last night, all of them hungrily engaged in devouring several enormous plates of food.
Up close, they look both more and less savage to Leocadia’s eyes than they had from the window of her room, though they have thankfully shed the wolfskin cloaks. The Calormene officer, to her surprise, seems to be about her own age or perhaps a few years older, a handsome young man with clear brown eyes and close-cropped black curls. The others seem to be about the same age: a woman with honey-yellow braids, sun-darkened skin, and kohl-smudged eyes, and a man with long brown hair, a close-cropped beard, and a pair of drooping moustaches plaited and capped with silver beads. Human enough, she thinks, for all that they’re wearing garb unlike anything she’s ever seen before. The two barbarians barely cease their eating to glance up at her entrance, though the Calormene puts his fork down, looking at her with interest as he stands.
“My lady,” he says in heavily-accented Narnian, coming around the edge of the table. “Is that right?”
Leocadia swallows back her alarm – she’s a daughter of the Lion, she has nothing to fear from a wolf – and steps forward, holding out her hand for him to bow over. “I’m Lady Leocadia of Newisle,” she says. “And you are –”
“Kavad Tibereh, undecurio of the Ala Variana XI – at your service,” he says.
“That’s the Frontier Wolves, isn’t it?” Leocadia asks, smiling her most brilliant smile at him and ignoring Dolichene’s soft snort. Tibereh means that he’s from the second rank of Calormene society, a step below the tarkaans.
“We have that honor,” he says, looking pleased to be recognized. “May I make known to you my men? Swindapa daughter of Sjöfn, and Brego son of Hrödulf, of the Úlfheðnar. Their tribal lands lie far to the south, where the world grows cold again.”
The man and woman glance up at their names, without much interest. Leocadia lets her lips shape the unfamiliar words. “How interesting,” she says. “Please, won’t you be seated? I’m afraid I won’t be much company if I don’t have some tea and a bite to eat.”
At this, Dolichene Cooper silently clears the mess of papers she has spread around her to make a place next to her. Leocadia raises her eyebrows in surprise, but doesn’t comment on it, taking the offered seat as Kavad Tibereh retreats to his place at the other end of the table. Dolichene looks exhausted, shadows under her eyes and her thick hair pulled back into a messy braid that falls over her shoulder. Leocadia wonders if she’s been up all night.
“Will the tarkaans be joining us this morning?” she asks, pulling an empty teacup and saucer in front of her and reaching for the teapot. At Dolichene’s nod, she pours for both of them, inhaling the steam of the pale golden liquid gratefully.
Dolichene yawns into her fist, then reaches for the sugar bowl. “General Yasruddin and Emrah Tarkaan are down at the army camp,” she says. She waves a hand at the table. “The post came earlier. There’s some for you.”
Leocadia picks up the indicated envelopes, which have already been slit open. “Did you read these?” she asks, frowning.
“Of course,” Dolichene says, dropping three lumps of sugar into her teacup. She doesn’t bother with cream. “Why? Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“I –” Leocadia begins, then stops. She hadn’t even considered the possibility. “Well, is it good news?” she says instead, looking down. There are two of them, one with the Newisle seal, the other with the Bracken seal. She recognizes Prejun’s secretary’s hand on the Newisle envelope.
“I suppose,” the other woman shrugs. “Lady Bracken says that you can stay as long as you like and she’ll arrange a divorce attorney for you. Your husband demands that you return to Cair Paravel. He’s quite rude; I think you’re well shot of him.”
Leocadia’s hand tightens on the envelopes, crumpling them. “I think so too,” she says softly.
She looks down, upending the envelopes so that the slightly crushed letters tumble out onto the fine lace of the tablecloth. She unfolds Lady Marcia’s first, unwilling to look at Prejun’s. Lady Marcia has always been nothing less than polite and kind to her, and she’s no different here, offering the hospitality of both White Bear Hall and her house in Cair Paravel, if Leocadia feels the desire to return to the city. Anything that she can do for Leocadia, Lady Marcia assures her, she’ll be more than happy to do, and she’ll make all the legal arrangements. At the end, Lady Marcia had added in her own hand, Be careful. Newisle is on the warpath. I’ve warned Yasruddin Tarkaan to watch out for him, just in case he decides to come to the Vale. I’ll do what I can on my end, of course.
Leocadia’s heart stills. She had never even considered –
She’s not even aware that her hands are shaking until Dolichene leans over and touches her wrist with ink-stained fingers. “If the Lord Provost tries to come here,” she says, “the General and Emrah will see him off with his wrists slapped and his tail behind his legs. That’s if they don’t arrest him for treason on the spot, mind.”
“Oh,” Leocadia whispers. She lowers the letter carefully to the table and lets go of it, pushing it away from herself with just the tips of her fingers, as if it might bite. It already has, in a way.
She swallows and looks over at the other letter, sitting innocently on the table by her left hand. It won’t get any better by waiting, she thinks, screwing her eyes shut for a moment before getting up the courage to reach for it. But before she can pick it up, Dolichene puts her hand over it.
“You don’t want to read that, Lady Newisle,” she says quietly. “There’s nothing in there worth reading, just bile. It would be better thrown in the fire.”
Leocadia looks up at her. It’s the kindest that she has ever heard Dolichene. “You’re sure?” she says, swallowing around the words.
“Positive,” Dolichene says. “I’ve read it, after all. I think you’d prefer not to.”
“Then would you get rid of it for me, please?” Leocadia asks. Her voice is shaking; she would prefer that it not, but she can’t seem to make it stop. She pulls her hand back – her fingers just brushing the back of Dolichene’s palm – and folds it into a fist on her lap, staring blindly at the pale golden liquid in her teacup.
“With pleasure,” says Dolichene. She picks up both letter and envelope, crumpling them into balls and stalking over to one of the nearby braziers. Leocadia watches the paper flare briefly into flame as she tosses them in.
“Thank you,” she manages, when she can breathe again.
“My pleasure,” Dolichene repeats, resuming her seat. “Eat something,” she adds, nodding at the covered tray in front of Leocadia. “I rescued that from the southern barbarians for you. It will help.”
“Thank you,” Leocadia says, surprised. A quick glance at the decimated sideboard tells her that she’s lucky that Dolichene had done so, since barely anything of the breakfast spread remains. She rather doubts that food will help, but she eats anyway – a poached egg, polenta sweet with honey and cream, crispy bacon – and Dolichene is right, she does feel a little better, or at least the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach recedes slightly.
“I think I saw them arrive last night,” she says when she’s mostly finished, swiping a toast soldier through the remains of the yolk, yellow on the fine china. She glances down the length of the long table, where the Frontier Wolves are – miraculously – still eating. She’s rather impressed with their ability to put away food, frankly. “Something woke me – I must have left the window open, I suppose. Did I actually see real wolves or did I dream that?”
Dolichene’s mouth compresses into a thin line, sharing that same Narnian disdain for the Queen of Winter’s creatures with Leocadia. “You saw wolves. Sir Asprenas wouldn’t let them in the house. Small mercies.” She gives the Frontier Wolves a poisonous look. “They shan’t be here for long, if the Queen of Spring has any mercy in her breast.”
“Thank Aslan,” Leocadia murmurs piously, though the words leave an empty hollow in her chest. “Is their presence here something I can ask about, or ought I to save my breath?”
“Army business,” Dolichene says matter-of-factly. Her gaze flickers up towards Leocadia, sharp and considering, and Leocadia is abruptly reminded that just because Dolichene is – presumably – a tradesman’s daughter, doesn’t mean that she lacks cleverness. She had gotten into The University on merit, after all.
“Nothing too dire, I hope,” Leocadia murmurs, taking her napkin off her lap and dropping it a crumpled heap on the table beside her plate.
Dolichene shrugs, still watching her. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere. How dire could it get? I doubt that your cousin, if he even has an army, has more than a few thousand men at most.”
Leocadia drops her gaze, picking at the fabric of her borrowed skirts. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I’m sure,” Dolichene says, and Leocadia looks up through her lashes to see the other woman’s suspicious expression. After a moment she shakes her head, pushing her thick braid back over her shoulder. “Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep and I’ve been up since the Frontier Wolves arrived.”
“No harm done, Miss Cooper,” Leocadia says. She leans forward and picks up the silver bell on the table, ringing it to call a maid to come and clear the table. The barbarians look up at the sound, and Leocadia smiles sweetly at them. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she says, replacing the bell and sitting back in her chair, “but you said that you were forced to leave The University when your patron was arrested. I was wondering who he was?”
Dolichene’s gaze flickers to a point over Leocadia’s right shoulder. “Castlejoy,” she says without looking at her. “Hilmagis of Castlejoy. His heirs fled, after. They’re probably dead now.”
Leocadia nods. Castlejoy is in the Southern Marches, near the border between Glasswatershire and Greatwoodshire – hardly one of the great noble families of Narnia, but they do have some lovely vineyards. Did, rather.
“If you like,” she says carefully, “after all this has cleared up, I’ll be your patron while you finish your degree.”
Dolichene stares at her in surprise. “I thought you were divorcing your husband,” she says.
“It’s not as if Newisle has an income anyway, since it’s not a landed lordship,” Leocadia shrugs. “I’ll petition the Tisroc for Glasswater. It’s mine by right, since Vespasian is gone and I’m of age now. Besides, this way Prejun won’t get his grubby hooves over it.”
“Good luck,” Dolichene says after a moment, still staring at her. “Hasn’t Bahadur already given it away to one of his favorites?”
“If he has, he’ll have to give it back,” Leocadia says firmly. “From what I know, it isn’t generally Calormen’s policy to seize properties from those that haven’t done anything wrong, or to install foreign governors for longer than need be. And Glasswater’s one of the great lands. It shouldn’t be in the hands of anyone but a Glasswater.”
She realizes too late that she’s lost Dolichene with the words. The other woman snorts and looks aside, muttering, “Nobles,” under her breath – though she pitches it so that Leocadia can’t help but hear it.
She looks down, pushing at the handle of her now-empty tea cup. For a few minutes, the only sound in the room is the quiet murmur of conversation at the other end of the table, in an unfamiliar guttural language that Leocadia can’t begin to make heads or tails of. “I did mean it,” she says eventually. “You’re obviously quite bright. You deserve the chance to finish your education.”
Dolichene frowns at her. Leocadia looks back, meeting the other woman’s eyes and hoping that her expression conveys her sincerity. “Not at Glasswater,” Dolichene says after a moment. “I’m a Beaversdam woman.”
Leocadia allows herself the edge of a smile. “It will be a bit irregular, but I’m sure something can be arranged. There’s doubtless precedent somewhere. It might put the Dean in a bit of a tizzy, though.”
“From what I’ve heard of the Dean of Glasswater University, the color of the sky can put him into a tizzy,” Dolichene snorts. “I’m sure the man will live.”
“I’m sure he will,” Leocadia says, smiling at Dolichene. After a moment’s hesitation, the other woman returns it, though it tips away almost immediately, as though she isn’t comfortable with the expression.
One of the kitchen maids scuttles in to clear the table.
“Could we get a fresh pot of tea, please?” Leocadia asks.
“No time for that, I am afraid.” Emrah Tarkaan strides into the room, pushing his burnoose back from his clean-shaven head. The Frontier Wolves all rise to their feet, though he doesn’t acknowledge them. “Lady Newisle, aansa Cooper, I hope that I have not interrupted your breakfast.”
“No, we’ve just finished,” Leocadia says, smiling at him. “Do you need Miss Cooper for something, Emrah Tarkaan?”
“Both of you, actually,” says the young tarkaan. “Yasruddin Tarkaan requests both your presences at the camp, if you would be so kind. Kavad, you and your lot had best come as well,” he adds in Calormene to the auxiliary officer, who inclines his head in acknowledgment.
It isn’t much of a request, Leocaia suspects. “Of course,” she says. “Just let me change into a riding habit; I’m afraid this frock isn’t meant to be worn on horseback.”
Dolichene rolls her eyes. “I’ll get my kit,” she said. “Don’t take too long powdering your nose, your ladyship.”
“I shan’t delay,” Leocadia promises. Her soft slippers are silent on the steps as she makes her way back up to her room. She dresses quickly in a dark blue riding habit with embroidery in varying shades of blue on the sleeves and bodice, fixing a hat with a drooping white feather on her head. She wears her own riding boots, now cleaned and polished after her long and dusty walk. The use has made them look worn; if she were back in Cair Paravel, she would have them thrown out and another pair made, but she’s not in Cair Paravel. Her cobbler in the city has her measurements, though; she supposes she can ask Lady Marcia to commission new shoes for her and find the money to pay for it somehow.
She frowns herself in the mirror, adjusting her hat, and nearly stabs herself through the eye with a hatpin when Sixtoes leaps up onto the vanity.
“For Morning’s first light!” she hisses, pressing the hand without the hatpin in it to her heart. “Can’t you make some noise?”
Sixtoes gives her a pointed look, sitting down and licking a paw.
Leocadia sighs and fixes her hat in place with the pin, flicking at the drooping feather with her fingers. “Yasruddin Tarkaan has asked me to join him at the army camp,” she says, which makes Sixtoes put her paw down and straighten up, frowning at her. “Since he’s asked for Miss Cooper as well, I gather that it isn’t for anything terribly dire, though if I don’t return, give my love to –” She stops. There’s Tirian and Vespasian, of course, but neither she nor Sixtoes will be seeing either of them any time soon – or at least Leocadia hopes they won’t. And Prejun can freeze in the Queen of Winter’s icy hell for all she cares.
“To Lady Marcia,” she says finally.
Sixtoes gives her a sympathetic look. Leocadia glances away, pretending to be fascinated by her own reflection as she tucks a loose curl back behind her ear.
“I’ll be careful,” she says at last, picking up her coat. “You do the same.”
Sixtoes’s response is to roll over onto her back, squirming around in the sunlight with her paws paddling slowly at the air.
Leocadia smiles at this, resisting the urge to rub her belly – Sixtoes wouldn’t appreciate it – and goes out, closing the doors quietly behind her. Sixtoes can get in or out of the room even through a closed door; Leocadia doesn’t know exactly how, but Sixtoes is a cat: she has her tricks.
She hurries down the stairs, where Emrah Tarkaan and Dolichene Cooper are waiting in the front hall. Dolichene has a leather case slung over her chest and is wearing a rather battered-looking man’s overcoat, deep forest green and patched with small neat stitches in a few places, the patches not quite matching the original color.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” Leocadia says as Emrah Tarkaan pulls his burnoose back up over his head and opens the door.
“I’ve seen worse,” Dolichene allows, which Leocadia takes for a compliment.
Outside, there are grooms waiting with three horses – the mare Leocadia had seen with him the other day, still without a proper bridle, and two dumb horses fully saddled. The three Frontier Wolves are there as well, already mounted on their unfamiliar saddles. No stirrups, Leocadia starts to note with fascination, and then notices the wolves – real wolves – lurking near their horses’ hooves. She takes an alarmed step back, running into Dolichene, who catches her elbow to steady her before she sees the wolves too. She draws in a sharp breath.
“They are harmless, my lady,” says Kavad Tibereh quickly.
“Unless you’re a steak,” says the woman Swindapa in Calormene, “or an enemy.” Her companion laughs, and Kavad turns to frown at him, his mouth twitching slightly. Leocadia can’t quite tell, but she thinks that at least one of the wolves snickers.
Emrah Tarkaan gives them a deeply disapproving look. “Keep your beasts under control,” he reproaches. “Lady Newisle, I swear that they will do you no harm. They are part of the Tisroc’s army as well, subject to the same laws and discipline as the rest of us. They would not dare – would you?” he shoots at the wolves.
One of them yawns in response, its tail beating slowly at the ground. They’re smaller wolves than the ones that Leocadia has seen in Narnia (from a safe distance, of course), their fur not quite as thick and somewhat reddish. That doesn’t make them any less wolves.
You are a lion of Narnia too, she reminds herself, screwing up her courage. And a lion is stronger than any wolf. “So the stories are true?” she says, making herself step away from Dolichene, closer to Emrah. Closer to the wolves. “There are talking beasts outside of Narnia and Archenland?”
“There are,” says Emrah Tarkaan. He beckons to one of the grooms, who leads his horse towards them. “There are many wonders in the Calormene lands. I hope that one day you will see them.”
I hope not, Leocadia thinks, but she smiles and says, “I look forward to it,” and lets him hand her up into the saddle. Fortunately her riding dress is designed for riding astride, which is lucky. Well, Lady Marcia has never had much taste for anything that would hamper her movements, and Leocadia knows that her friend prefers riding astride to riding sidesaddle.
She mounts with little difficulty – hardly as much as Dolichene, who looks painfully awkward in on horseback, clutching her horse’s reins as if terrified that the mild-tempered gelding is going to bolt at any moment. Emrah vaults easily onto his mare’s back – no saddle for him, not a proper war saddle like knights use, or even a riding saddle; just a thin pad covered in fine embroidery. The mare stands steadily still through all of this, looking utterly bored by the events. While the two Narnian horses are skittish around the wolves, the mare doesn’t even appear to notice them.
They start down the long carriageway to the main road, the two barbarians and their wolves loping out ahead at a nod from Kavad Tibereh. Two more mounted soldiers, ordinary Calormene cavalry, join them at the park gates, falling in respectfully behind the tibereh and Dolichene. Leocadia finds herself next to Emrah, who has dropped his horse’s reins. The mare doesn’t seem to need any direction.
Leocadia taps her fingers thoughtfully on her saddlehorn. “Can I ask what the Frontier Wolves are doing here, tarkaan?” she asks eventually. “I was quite surprised to see them here this morning. Has something dire happened?”
“Scouts returning to report to Yasruddin leiwa,” Emrah Tarkaan says. “The news was urgent; they returned late last night and the general judged it best for them to remain at the manor rather than return to the camp on exhausted horses.” He smiles at her. “I hope that you were not too inconvenienced by the disturbance.”
“Ah, that’s what it was that woke me last night,” Leocadia says, as if it’s just occurred to her. “But I’m a light sleeper, I don’t think I properly woke up. It was just a very great surprise to walk into the dining room and find – er, people of that sort there. I’m afraid I’m not accustomed to it.”
“My apologies, my lady,” Emrah says, and actually manages to sound sincere. “I’ve no idea why they were there and not somewhere more appropriate.” He pitches his voice louder for this, turning around to glance over his shoulder at Kavad Tibereh, who is apparently trying to flirt clumsily with Dolichene. She’s having none of it.
The younger officer looks self-conscious. “Bashan Tarkaan says that we ought not distance ourselves from our men, since we must all depend on each other on the battlefield,” he says.
“The mess is one thing, the home of a lady of quality is another,” Emrah says. “See that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Yes, centurio,” Kavad says, his expression crushed.
Emrah snorts and looks back around. They continue down the road for a little while, before Leocadia blurts out, “Is it bad news, what your scouts brought? It’s not –” She swallows past the sudden lump in her throat, feeling her hands tighten on the reins. “It isn’t about the King – about Tirian, I mean – is it?”
Emrah’s gaze darts towards her. His mare looks up too, her dark eyes surprisingly clever, and Leocadia is almost certain now that she is a talking horse. There have been rumors for years – for centuries – that Narnian horses have been kidnapped and sold into captivity in Calormen, to enrich the breeding of the already fine Calormene horses; she must be one of them, or a descendant.
“I am afraid that it is,” he says. His horse puts her head down and huffs out a breath. “Yasruddin leiwa sent scouts to confirm your news of the Narnian troops gathering at the diamond fort.”
“He didn’t believe me?” Leocadia says, obscurely hurt. She’s a lady of Narnia, the blood of Telmar and the blood of the lion; her word ought to mean something, even to a Calormene tarkaan.
“It required confirmation,” Emrah says calmly.
They ride through the line of trees that mark the estate boundaries. Leocadia had passed beneath them when she arrived, but at the time she had been too tired to pay much attention. Now she lets her gaze dart curiously around, searching for the dryads that are usually present in such places. If any of the trees live – and they probably do, especially on a noble’s land – then they’re sleeping now; she doesn’t see anything that might hint at a waking tree. A cluster of new leaves on a birch tree, however, shudders a little. Leocadia looks at it quickly, thinking that it might be a dryad, but by the time she turns her head the tree’s leaves sit still and silent except for a slight shiver from the morning breeze that twines cold around her shoulders. After what the Calormenes have done to many of Narnia’s forests, she’d sit quiet too in their presence if she was a dryad.
Once clear of the trees, Leocadia looks out across the Vale of Bracken – at the white bear on the opposite hillside, at the pawprint-shaped pools leading to its slumbering form. Villages and fields dot the valley, and at the opposite end, watching over the place where the road splits either to go westward into the Waste or northward, where it eventually peters out somewhere in the High Reaches, is another castle. This one isn’t much more than the remains of a stone keep – just a tower now, with a manor house built alongside it for one of the Brackens’ client knights. Leocadia can’t remember who’s supposed to be holding it; she isn’t even sure that she knows. In all likelihood, these days it’s probably the Calormenes.
From here, as they head down into the valley, she gets her first good look of the Calormene army camp. It’s all straight lines and right angles and to her inexperienced eye it seems huge, thousands upon thousands of soldiers that have come here with the express purpose of killing Narnians. For a moment the enormity of that stops Leocadia dead; she drops her horse’s reins and presses her hands to her chest, struggling to breathe. The Tisroc hasn’t sent an army – hasn’t sent armies – to Narnia just to keep the peace, because there hasn’t been much peace to keep over the past five years, no matter what Prejun and the other scorpions in the Cortes have done to encourage cooperation. He has sent them to Narnia to kill Narnians.
It’s too much, it’s all too much, and Leocadia can barely breathe from the enormity of it, her hands closed so tightly into fists that her nails cut crescent moons into her palms. She presses them to her chest, feeling the frantic thumping of her heart, and hears herself make a sound that might be a whimper or a keen – for what she’s done, for the blood that has been spilt and the dead that will lie eyeless and staring on the battlefield in a few days’ time, for all the dead that have given their lives, their freedom, and their sacred honor for Narnia over the centuries – the millennia. It’s all too much.
Emrah Tarkaan’s touch on her arm makes her start. “Lady Newisle?” he says questioningly, leaning over from his horse to steady her. “Are you well?”
“I – I’m –” She tries to force her hands away from her chest and doesn’t quite succeed. Her palms hurt where her nails are digging in, but she can’t seem to unbend her fingers. “Is that – are they really all – do you really need all of them?”
“I’m afraid so, my lady,” he tells her solemnly, his dark eyes fixed on hers.
“It will be a slaughter,” Leocadia breathes, each word like a punch to the chest. She feels breathless, stripped bare – like there’s nothing left of her but bones, blood, and betrayal.
“Not if your cousin is wise,” Emrah says. “If he is, he will know that to face the army of the Tisroc in open combat is futile. If he gives himself up, all this can be ended without any spilling of blood, either Narnian or Calormene.”
Leocadia feels like she’s going to be sick. “Tirian,” she begins. “My – the King – Tirian –” She hears her voice waver, uncertain of the words. “He won’t do that,” she finishes lamely. “Not ever. He’s too proud. Even after all this – he’s too proud.” She looks down at her horse’s neck, finally opening her fists so that she can touch the mare’s soft mane. “He is the blood of the lion too.”
Emrah looks at her for a long moment. “You may find, Lady Newisle,” he says finally, “that there is no more need for lions in Narnia. Nor for lionesses, either.”
To Leocadia’s surprise, it’s Dolichene Cooper who replies. “Narnia will always need lions,” she says.
Emrah looks at her in surprise, as if he’s forgotten that she’s there with them. “Be that as it may,” he allows courteously, turning his horse down towards the camp.
Leocadia forces herself to follow, unable to tear her gaze away from the camp as her mare rambles slowly after Emrah’s warhorse. She can see now that the camp is all rapid activity, packing itself up to march off to war, and bites back the bile that threatens to rise in her throat. No, she tells herself silently, this is right, this is the right thing to do, but it doesn’t feel like it at all.
They make their way down to the camp, which is laid out on what are probably some poor farmer’s fields – it’s close to spring planting now, from Leocadia’s vague and mostly theoretical knowledge of such things. She hopes that the Calormenes are paying him well for the inconvenience.
All that Leocadia knows about army camps, Narnian, Calormene, or otherwise, comes from books and snatches of conversation she’d overheard between Tirian and Vespasian years ago, during the old king’s wars with the northern giants. All she knows for sure is that Calormene marching camps are supposed to be among the most efficient on the continent: there’s a reason the Tisroc’s empire is so large, after all, and that reason is usually touted as the brutal efficiency of the Calormene army.
Even Leocadia’s inexperienced eyes can tell that the camp is just as efficient as rumored as they’re met at the camp’s entrance by a pair of guards who clearly recognize Emrah Tarkaan but demand a pass-sign anyway. After they’re let in, past the ditch and rampart that mark the boundaries of the camp – poor farmer, Leocadia thinks again, glancing at it – they hand over their horses to army ostlers and proceed up what appears to be the camp’s main avenue to the general’s tent, where the Calormene banners are planted firmly in the ground outside, detaching the Frontier Wolves at some point. Leocadia looks curiously up at the weather-beaten silk, the bronze animal heads; they’re very like the ones she’s seen in Caspian’s castle and outside the Cortes, only a little more battered, the colors not so bright, the bronze not so polished.
Emrah Tarkaan touches her back to draw her away, steering her inside the big canvas tent. Dolichene Cooper follows them inside, nodding a greeting to the soldiers on guard outside.
“My lord tarkaan,” Leocadia murmurs, dropping into a curtsey.
“My lady Newisle.” The tarkaan takes her hand, pressing a kiss to the air above the back of her palm.
Leocadia straightens up, letting her gaze flicker quickly and curiously over the other people in the tent. All are strangers, lower-ranking officers that she wouldn’t have run into in Cair Paravel in the general course of things. Several she identifies uncertainly as coming from the Calormene auxiliaries, rather than from the army proper. A Calormene-looking man is clad in the wolfskins and leathers of the Frontier Wolves; presumably the commander that Kavad Tibereh had mentioned. Another is a centaur – though not a proper Narnian centaur, but one whose human skin is as dark as Yasruddin’s and Emrah’s and whose horse half is striped black and white like the zebra that the old king had kept in his private zoo. Beside him is a tall, rangy woman with her ice-pale hair knotted up on the back of her head, wearing an archer’s glove on her right hand. Tattoos trace unfamiliar runes on her cheeks and down one side of her neck.
Leocadia is too well-bred to stare. She looks back at Yasruddin Tarkaan and smiles a little. “You sent for me, my lord tarkaan?”
“I did indeed. A moment, if you please.” He says something in Calormene too fast for her to catch to one of the other officers, who steps forward towards the map table in the middle, looking at Emrah and Dolichene. “Walk with me, Lady Newisle.” He offers her his arm.
Leocadia takes it; she doesn’t have a choice otherwise. He leads her out of the tent, down the main street of the camp, where passing soldiers salute him with that finger-flick the Calormenes use, but otherwise give them a wide berth. For a few minutes they walk in near silence, as if they are in their own little bubble inside the miniature world of the bustling camp, and finally Leocadia works up her courage to say, “Your army is very impressive, my lord.”
“Yes, I know,” Yasruddin Tarkaan says. “Is your cousin’s anywhere near as impressive?”
Leocadia thinks of the thin, starved-looking women with their too-big eyes, the near-naked children that had run screaming through the shattered stones of Arn Abedin, the men in their rags, making spears out of sticks; she thinks of the blood on Tirian’s face on Winter’s End and the sound of drums as the dancers beat the Queen of Winter out of Narnia. She drops her gaze, studying the well-beaten path in front of her. “No, it isn’t,” she admits. “But you knew that already, didn’t you, my lord?”
“My scouts returned last night, yes.” He gives her a searching look. “But you knew that already, didn’t you, my lady?”
Leocadia’s breath catches. She thinks, obscurely, of the empty lararium – of the echoing hollowness of it, and of dust thick on the chryselephantine Lion. Liar, she thinks. “I heard something and went to see what the disturbance was,” she says. “I was curious.”
“There was no harm done.”
“I didn’t mean any.” She looks up at him, at the white scars of the tribal markings on his face. The words come out as a whisper. “Please don’t kill my cousin.”
Yasruddin Tarkaan meets her gaze with his own, steady and unreadable. “I wouldn’t like to,” he says. “Whatever the prince desires, the Tisroc would prefer Tirian of Narnia alive.”
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The Frontier Wolves are, among other things, a riff on the Frontier Wolves of Rosemary Sutcliff's novel Frontier Wolf. The Calormene army is based off the Roman imperial military; most of the military jargon here is borrowed from, or derived from, the Latin terms.
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.
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG
Content Notes: mention of fraught marital situation
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). So much thanks to
snacky for her beta, since this is a monster of a chapter! See end for further notes.Leocadia wakes to the sound of hoofbeats.
She opens her eyes, gazing up at the shadowed shapes painted on the ceiling of her box bed, before she turns towards the chilly breeze trailing thoughtful fingers against her cheeks. She hadn’t shut the curtains on her bed last night, hadn’t wanted to, not liking the trapped, enclosed feeling that they gave her. From here, she can see the thin spring curtains blowing inward, partially obscuring the figure of the cat standing on the windowsill, peering out into the gloom. Sixtoes. Leocadia hadn’t left the window open when she’d gone to bed; the cat must have opened it.
She throws the blankets back and sits up, shivering a little as she reaches for the red brocade dressing gown that she’d hung up last night. She flings it over her shoulders and ties the sash quickly around her waist as she pads over to the window, glad of the soft carpets beneath her bare feet.
Sixtoes’ tail lashes as Leocadia puts her hands on the sill beside the tabby cat’s front paws and leans out as well, the night air raising goose pimples on her skin. Loose strands of her braided hair fly wildly around her face; besides the sound of oncoming hoofbeats, she can hear the Calormene flags on the manor flapping wildly in the wind. Clouds roll quickly across the sky, obscuring the ocean of stars and the full moon above her. Thunder rumbles in the distance; Leocadia licks her lips, smelling ozone in the air. There’s a storm rolling in from the east, despite the fact that it had been a clear day not long ago.
A streak of lightning in the distance briefly illuminates the white chalk bear in the hillside. The bear and its watery paw-prints hold the light long after the lightning has faded, against all reason, glowing pale against the dark grass of the slope. Leocadia counts the moments it lasts against her heartbeat, the words silent on her tongue – five six seven – before it fades at last, though the image lingers on the insides of her eyelids when she blinks. She can imagine the bear standing up, shaking off the vestiges of sleep, and wandering down through the vale to drink at the banks of the Great River.
The lightning bolt, distant as it had been – to the east, over the Great Eastern Ocean leagues away – had illuminated the carriageway leading to the manor as well, giving Leocadia a brief glimpse of the oncoming riders. There are three of them, dressed in the battered wolf-skin cloaks of Calormene auxiliary scouts, riding lathered horses whose pace has slowed only a little now that they’ve come within shouting distance of the manor. Smaller dark shapes, which she can’t make out clearly from here, run alongside them. They’re low to the ground, four-legged, moving just as fast as the horses.
As Leocadia watches, someone strikes a light, a flame flaring briefly into existence as someone lights the lanterns on either side of the big front doors. It gleams off burnished armor and the dyed horsehair crest of a helmet – the guards that Yasruddin Tarkaan has on the manor. The remainder of Marcia Bracken’s retainers might be permitted to man the walls surrounding the park, but Yasruddin Tarkaan prefers to trust the safety of his borrowed house to his own men.
The scouts rein up in front of the front doors in sprays of gravel, the exhausted horses putting their heads down as their riders vault to the ground. Leocadia can hear them breathing from here, hot and heavy. In the lantern-lights, the smaller animals that had accompanied them down the paths resolve themselves into lean, reddish wolves, putting their heads down and letting their tongues loll out as the scouts demand Yasruddin Tarkaan, water for the horses and wolves, a bite to eat for themselves, grooms. Their voices drift up to Leocadia’s window, briefly interrupted by another rumble of thunder – closer now, and the flash of lightning that follows brightening the vale.
Leocadia’s braid falls over her shoulder as she leans further out the window, trying to get a better view of the wolves. For all her Telmarine blood, three hundred years old that it is now, she is a Narnian born and bred, and the wolves both repel and fascinate her. Wolves are creatures of the White Witch – the Queen of Winter, the undying enemy of the Great Lion, banished at the dawn of the Golden Age but ever striving to get back in, clawing at the boundaries between this world and the one in which she is imprisoned in hopes of finding a weakness that will let her creep back into Narnia to wreak eternal winter once more. In Narnia, wolves are like hyenas and polar bears – she casts her eye at the white chalk bear again – and albinos, hags and harpies and wer-wolves. All of them kissed by frost, creatures that will never quite shake the touch of the Long Winter, no matter how many centuries have passed since Aslan and the Kings and Queens of Summer brought spring to Narnia once more.
But the Calormenes don’t have Narnian hang-ups. In Cair Paravel, for all that the city streets were crawling with Calormene soldiers, it was mostly legionaries and native-born Calormene officers that are seen, not the auxiliaries that make up the bulk of the Calormene armies. The Calormene empire is vast, encompassing more than just the old core lands around Tashbaan, and her army is vast as well. Leocadia has heard rumors of the type of creatures that swell its ranks, the kind of creatures that might make even a Narnian – well used to nonhumans – gape in surprise and awe. Men and women with the bodies of snakes or crocodiles, shape-shifters, dwarves as dark as Yasruddin Tarkaan or Emrah Tarkaan, giant spiders, rocs, karkadann, manticores, talking beasts the like of which have not been seen in Narnia since the dawn of days. Leocadia has spent her entire life being told that Narnia is special, that besides Archenland and the eastern islands, there is nowhere else in this world quite like Narnia, but the truth is that that’s a lie. There are a lot of places in this world where humans and nonhumans live side by side, probably most in more harmony than they do in Narnia. The Calormene provinces are, from what she’s heard from various Calormene tarkaans and the odd tarkheena, some of them.
Most of the nonhuman auxiliary troops hadn’t been sent to Narnia, or at least that’s the rumor. The auxiliaries here are mostly human or close enough in form to Narnian nonhumans that it won’t alarm anyone. Narnia, after all, isn’t the kind of land that needs to be put down by terror in the form of horrendous beasts; men will do just as well, and Calormen has no lack of those. Narnia takes such pride in what she is that it apparently amuses the Tisroc to keep most of his nonhuman troops out of the occupying force, but some of them have made their way here anyway.
The Frontier Wolves are one such group. They’re auxiliary scouts that are normally stationed on the border of one of Calormen’s more distant provinces, usually recruited from conquered peoples or mercenaries from the barbarian lands beyond the empire. Like the other Calormene auxiliary cohorts and alae, most of the officers are Calormenes – lesser tarkaans and tiberi, the second rank of Calormene society, the equivalent to Narnian knights. Leocadia has heard stories about them since it was announced that several alae of Frontier Wolves would be joining the occupying Calormene force in order to aid in pacifying Narnia. They’re supposed to be fierce fighters, every man or woman among them killing their wild wolf before they truly join the ranks, even the Calormene officers. Some stories say that they’re shape-shifters, another kind of wer-wolf; that they’re skinshifters like Narnian selkies, shedding their wolfskins when they want to walk among humans, and donning them again when four paws and sharp teeth will do them better. Others say that the wolves who walk among them are talking wolves, like those in Narnia and Archenland, and as much a part of the ala as any of the humans.
The idea of letting a wolf, shape-shifter or merely talking beast, into White Bear Hall makes Leocadia shudder. She’s relieved when the Frontier Wolf in the lead pushes back the wolf’s head hood of his cloak, revealing tight black curls and skin that’s shadowed in the lamplight. The other two Frontier Wolves follow suit – a man and a woman, light-skinned and with hair and, in the man’s case, beard braided as elaborately as any Narnian dwarf’s.
“I must see Yasruddin Tarkaan immediately,” the dark-skinned man – an officer, presumably – says in Calormene. “My news is urgent.”
More lights are flickering on amidst the lower floors of the manor. Yawning groomsmen emerge to take the exhausted horses away to the stables, while a cautious-looking servant approaches the wolves with a basin of water held between her hands. She sets it down on the ground before them and almost jumps back as the wolves converge on it, their tails wagging tiredly as they lap up the water.
In careful Narnian, so accented that Leocadia can barely understand it, the female Frontier Wolf says, “If you have a few raw steaks for them, it would be appreciated.”
The servant mutters a response – too softly for Leocadia to make out at distance – and skitters away. The Frontier Wolf rests her right hand on her sword hilt, looking around as if she’s never seen the manor before. Maybe she hasn’t; Leocadia hasn’t gotten the impression that many members of the Calormene army come up to the manor aside from Yasruddin Tarkaan and his staff officers. Certainly an ordinary scout – especially an auxiliary – would never be invited.
Leocadia almost forgets that she’s essentially hanging out the window gaping at the strangers until the woman looks up, her eyebrows climbing as she sees Leocadia. Leocadia feels her cheeks heat and gives her an awkward one-handed wave before reaching out to pull the shutters closed. She latches them securely as Sixtoes sits back, raising a paw to her mouth as she begins to wash herself.
“It’s started,” Leocadia says to her.
Sixtoes gives her an unimpressed look.
Leocadia hunts around for her slippers, pushing her braid back over her shoulder as it falls forward again. Eventually she finds them under her bed – she must have kicked them there last night – and slips them on. Reaching for the door handle, she looks back at Sixtoes and says, “Aren’t you coming?”
The cat swipes her tongue over her paw one last time and yawns, to all appearances bored with the whole affair. She leaps down off the windowsill and pads over to Leocadia, pressing her soft back briefly against her bare ankles as Leocadia turns the door handle.
Outside, the hallway is dark. As far as Leocadia has been able to determine, all of the other rooms in this hall are unoccupied at the moment, a fact for which she is mostly glad. White Bear Hall is large enough to entertain half a dozen noble guests and their assorted retinues; Yasruddin Tarkaan and his staff rattle around in the manor. She can’t imagine how Lady Marcia copes, on the rare occasion that she’s permitted to leave Cair Paravel and come home. Glasswater Castle is twice the size, but it has the staff to match, and there had always been cousins and byblows coming and going. Besides, it has the city and the university nearby, while White Bear Hall is out here in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of the High Reaches.
She can hear voices coming from the direction of the stairwell as she makes her way down the hallway, the rich carpet swallowing up her footsteps. It’s dark enough that Leocadia thinks about going back to her room to get a candle, but even as the thought crosses her mind another flash of lightning crackles across the sky, illuminating the hallway from the window behind her. It’s a brief second, nothing more, but long enough for Leocadia to get her bearings. She follows the sound of Calormene voices towards the stairs, Sixtoes pacing along with her – sometimes out in front, sometimes beside her, sometimes lingering behind.
Leocadia trails a hand along the wall as she goes, her fingers bumping over the frames of low-set portraits, across rough brush-strokes of dried paint. As her vision adjusts to the dim light, the little quirks of the manor which seem quaint in daylight become menacing. Everywhere bear’s heads growl at her out of the shadows, from the carvings on the bannisters, to the subjects of the tapestries and paintings – there seems to be a bear hidden in nearly every one – even at the ends of the rafters above her. There are bears – white and brown and golden – worked into the carpets beneath her feet. There are brackens as well, but far fewer in number than the bears, and most of a much later date. The bears have been here ever since the hall was built, three hundred years ago in the shadow of the white chalk bear on the hillside. The brackens are a more recent addition and as such they stand out, awkward among the bear’s heads and bear’s paws.
She hesitates at the top of the stairs, her fingers resting lightly on the bannister, where the wood has been painstakingly carved – gods, she can’t imagine how long this must have taken – to feel like fur to the touch. It seems unlikely that anyone will be looking up the stairs, but she’ll be visible as soon as she reaches the landing, and she doesn’t particularly feel like raising any questions about why she’s decided to come snooping around, even though she has a ready answer on the tip of her tongue.
Sixtoes makes the decision for her, rolling her eyes and strolling past Leocadia’s bare ankles, soft-footed on the stairs. Leocadia follows her down, cognizant of the lights in the foyer, illuminating the disapproving gazes of long-dead Whitebear or Bracken ancestors immortalized in portraiture. As if she’s the first guest to go poking around her host’s house after midnight.
She and Sixtoes stop on the landing, Leocadia hugging the wall, portrait frames digging into her back, as she makes her way to the railing and crouches against it, wrapping her long fingers around the bars as she peers down into the foyer. A sleepy-looking maidservant goes past, a shawl thrown up over hair that presumably she hadn’t had time to brush. The sound of her hooves on the wooden floor is a soft click click as she passes below the landing on her way from the kitchen to, presumably, the library that Yasruddin Tarkaan is using as an office. Leocadia waits for her to return, blinking in slight surprise as Dolichene Cooper emerges and follows after the maidservant, her ever-present leather writing case tucked under her arm. Her hair is still braided for sleep and her dressing gown is tied quickly and crookedly. She vanishes after the maidservant, her slippers silent as she passes directly beneath Leocadia.
The sound of a door opening is accompanied by the soft murmur of conversation – Yasruddin’s deep voice, Emrah Tarkaan’s slightly lighter one, overlapping with the unfamiliar voices of the riders. They’re all speaking Tashbaan Calormene, from the sound of it, the most common dialect of Calormene. Fortunately it’s also the dialect that Leocadia knows; when she’d been growing up, it had been common for young noble children to learn Calormene, if only to be able to read the poetry that had been popular at the time. After the Occupation, it had proven useful. Prejun used to stomp around the Cair Paravel house, loudly bemoaning the cheek of the Calormenes to go conducting their business in their own language if they didn’t want Narnians to hear it. Leocadia, already wary of Prejun’s rages, had held her tongue. Calormene tarkaans didn’t expect a young Narnian lady to be able to speak their language and it had, at times, been useful for Leocadia to listen in on conversations not meant for Narnian ears, though those had gotten rarer as it became more common for Narnians to learn Calormene. Leocadia has found that young tarkaans take very well to the discovery that they can carry on a conversation in their own tongue with a young, attractive Narnian lady.
When the maidservant has reappeared, still yawning and with her tray now tucked under her arm, and presumably returned to the kitchen, Sixtoes looks up. Leocadia makes a shooing motion with her hands. The cat sighs deeply, her whole body seeming to droop, and creeps off down the stairs, the white tip of her otherwise gray-and-white striped tail waving behind her. Leocadia rises from her crouch and follows slowly, keeping one hand on the bannister and hoping that none of the stairs creak. She hadn’t thought to find out before this; she’s never exactly spent a lot of time creeping around in other people’s homes. Not even in her own, when it had still been there.
Once Sixtoes reaches the bottom of the stairs, she sits down and washes her paw again, her tail wrapped primly around her hind legs. Leocadia makes her careful way down the stairs after her, jumping a little when thunder rumbles again, unexpectedly, and a streak of lightning illuminates the grounds outside the stained glass windows that frame the front doors. Outside, she can hear the wind rising, rushing through the trees and hedges outside the house. Rain will no doubt follow soon after.
Once she reaches the bottom, she stops and looks around, letting one hand rest on the bear’s head at the end of the bannister. She feels uncomfortably exposed here, as if the flickering lamplight of the foyer is a spotlight on her, even with an explanation for her presence ready on her lips. If she were Tirian or one of his dangerous new friends, she’d have a dagger up her sleeve and a way out of every seemingly impossible situation, but all she has are her wits and a few prayers. There’s no telling which of the two of is more useless these days.
Sixtoes looks back at her, her claws flashing out to knead into a carpet decorated with brown and white bears in a snowy forest – how daring of the Brackens, winter scenes have never been in vogue for obvious reasons – and Leocadia bites her lip. But she’s come this far, there’s no point in going back upstairs now, even if her warm bed calls to her. Thunder rumbles again, ominously, and a fine spray of rain begins to tap against the stained glass windows just before the lightning comes. Leocadia turns away from it, following Sixtoes down the hallway, towards the murmur of Calormene voices.
Yasruddin Tarkaan has been using one of White Bear Hall’s several private libraries for his personal office. Either Lord Orichan or one of his predecessors must have done the same, since the room is kitted out with a large mahogany desk with bear’s paws for feet and a pattern of brackens along the side panels, which show scenes out of Narnia’s history. It’s actually a very nice room, Leocadia had noticed the first time that she had been inside. Two of the squashy brown leather couches had obviously been there before Yasruddin Tarkaan had taken it over, though the other chairs, mismatching, must have been brought in at some point.
There is only one lantern lit in the hallway, the others left dark. More shadows, Leocadia thinks tiredly, but all of Narnia is shadowed these days; there’s not much surprise there. Although the other doors in the hallway are closed, the library door has been left slightly ajar, emitting a thin beam of light that falls onto the dark carpet, its patterns invisible in the dim light. Leocadia steps back against the wall, edging along it until she can turn her head and peer into the brightly lit library. Sixtoes settles down by her feet, her paws tucked underneath the fluff of her belly.
From here, she doesn’t have a very good view, but the crack left open reveals the back of Yasruddin Tarkaan’s shorn head and a side glimpse of the Calormene Frontier Wolf, who has discarded his wolfskin cloak for the time being. Underneath it, he isn’t wearing what Leocadia thinks of as typical Calormene legionary armor, just a tired expression and worn riding leathers that have clearly seen hard use. He’s younger than she expects, maybe her own age. She can see Dolichene Cooper sitting at a small desk off to the side, her pen scratching as she writes in her leather folder. From the way that Yasruddin Tarkaan’s gaze moves around there are others in the room that Leocadia can’t see, presumably the two barbarian Frontier Wolves that had arrived with the Calormene officer. She hopes that their wolves aren’t with them as well, though she suspects that they would have scented her, or at least Sixtoes, by now and raised the alarm.
“– as you suspected, Yasruddin leiwa,” says the Calormene officer. Leocadia mouths along with the words, wishing that she was better at languages and hoping that she’s at least getting the general gist of the conversation. His accent is stronger than she’s used to, and she is fairly certain that she doesn’t know all the words that the military uses to communicate amongst itself. “The fort is full to bursting with Narnians. Some several thousand, I would guess, though it is hard to tell. There may have been more in the mines; we saw guards posted outside the entrance. I would guess that they would keep the women and children there, since they are easily defended.”
Yasruddin Tarkaan asks something, his voice too low to make out.
“Their armament seemed poor, leiwa –” General, roughly, or army commander, though the vowels are more rounded than Leocadia is used to and it takes her a moment to realize that that’s what the Frontier Wolf officer is saying. “What armor they had seemed to be ill-fitting, not meant for creatures of their species. All that we saw were armed, but scantily. Much of it appeared to be Calormene kit.”
“Plundered from the dead,” a man says from out of sight, his Calormene so heavily accented as to be almost unintelligible to Leocadia’s Narnian ears.
Yasruddin Tarkaan nods in understanding. “What of the King?” he asks.
Leocadia’s hand slips against the wall, her wedding ring knocking against the wood. She brings her hand quickly up to her mouth, biting a knuckle to keep from making any noise. Sixtoes looks up at her, her tail lashing once in warning.
None of the Calormenes seem to have heard, though Dolichene Cooper glances up, frowning. She looks down and starts scribbling again as the unnamed officer says, “The flag of Narnia flies over the battlements.” There is a particular lilt to his voice that Leocadia has learned means “caution,” and she sees him clench his fist on his knee. In front of him, Leocadia can see the corner of a low coffee-table; one of the Calormene-style glass-and-copper tea cups is in front of him, half full of reddish liquid.
“But did you see him?” Yasruddin presses.
The officer hesitates. It’s the woman Frontier Wolf, whom Leocadia can’t see, who says with forced certainty, “Yes. King Tirian is there.”
“And the rumors? These others, these – gods?”
“Rumors!” says the woman dismissively. “Nothing but ordinary Narnians. If the Narnian gods had any power, Aslan or these Kings and Queens of Summer, surely they would have appeared before now – and not in some dofni fort on the edge of the High Reaches, either.”
There is a moment of silence. Leocadia shifts a little, nervous at the lack of response before the officer puts in, more cautiously, “I have heard the stories of Tash walking, leiwa. Are the gods of these northerners any less than our own? If there are gods in Narnia again, as in the days of old –”
“In stories, undecurio –” the woman interrupts.
“– then surely they would not hide behind wooden walls or in the shades of this land, nor would they mask their presence,” the young officer concludes, frowning in her direction.
“We would not have passed their borders if these Narnian gods were as great as Tash or –” The woman says something completely unintelligible that certainly isn’t Calormene. “Leiwa Yasruddin, there is no one behind that walls of the fort other than those who ought to be there – as you said, merely Tirian the Woodsman and what remains of his folk. If there are gods yet in Narnia, they are little gods, with little power.”
There is another moment’s pause, after which the undecurio – a junior officer, roughly equivalent to a Narnian lieutenant – adds, “Except for Tash. Little gods, except for Tash.”
“Tash has other places to be than some backcountry mining fort, I think,” Yasruddin Tarkaan remarks.
Dolichene murmurs something in Calormene, her gaze downcast as her pen hesitates over the paper. Leocadia leans closer, trying to make out her expression, and flinches when the stone on her wedding ring scrapes across the wall. It’s only a small sound, but to her ears it seems absurdly loud, here in what should be the long dark quiet of the night, otherwise broken only by the steady rain outside and the occasional rumble of thunder. She sees Yasruddin Tarkaan look up, frowning, and turn towards the door.
Leocadia flings herself back from it, looking frantically around as she hears steps coming from inside the room, Sixtoes skittering away, her back raised in an arch and all the fur on her tail puffed out. There isn’t anywhere else in the hallway to hide, and she doesn’t have time to go back to the foyer. She throws herself at the nearest closed door and shoves it open, hurling herself bodily in the dark room before she eases it shut again, leaning her shoulder against the door, her hand still clenched on the knob so that she’ll feel it when someone tries to barge in after her. She thinks that there’s no way that Yasruddin could have missed that, that he’ll be banging his way in here after her soon enough, but instead she hears him say in Calormene, “Nothing. Just a cat.” This time, when he makes his way back into the library, he closes the door behind him.
Sixtoes, Leocadia thinks gratefully. She sinks down to the floor with her back still against the door, scrubbing her hands over her face and trying to will her frantically thumping heart to slow to a more reasonable pace. All she had wanted to know was where the Frontier Wolves had been and what they had seen there, and now she knows. Surely that’s worth a scare, as long as it doesn’t turn into anything worse. But that “as long as” is the real sticking point, as far as Leocadia is concerned. The Calormenes do horrible things to spies; she’s seen it in Cair Paravel. But she isn’t a spy. Whatever else she is, and there are a lot of ugly words for that, she isn’t a spy.
She sits there for a long time, curling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. The soft fabric of her dressing gown is warm against her skin as she presses her cheek to her knees, listening to the sound of the rain outside as it patters against the room’s glass windows. Even though this room shares a wall with the library, it’s too sturdily built to overhear anything but the occasional rumble of raised voices; the Whitebears’ long ago builders hadn’t fooled around with the construction. She hopes that Sixtoes will come back and let her know when it’s all right for her to leave again; even with the library door closed, right now Leocadia doesn’t feel comfortable navigating these halls alone.
Eventually she looks up. The curtains have been drawn in this room, but one is just slightly ajar, letting in a thin beam of moonlight that gives the room a little illumination. Leocadia has been in the dark long enough for her eyes to adjust and to her surprise, looking around, she finds that the room is much smaller than she had expected from its location in the manor. The other rooms in this hallway are drawing rooms or music rooms – the Whitebears hadn’t stinted on what had been the necessary amenities for entertaining in style three hundred years ago. But this is something else entirely.
She finds herself in a small, square room, with a shrine set dead center against the opposite wall, between the two curtained windows. The figure at the center of it is shadowed, features blurred by dark and distance, but Leocadia recognizes the shape, the way the ivory swallows what little light there is and the gold holds it. It is much smaller than the chryselephantine statue of Aslan in the palace chapel at Caspian’s castle, but it is clearly a replica. The Whitebears – and this smacks of the Whitebears, though Leocadia supposes that it isn’t out of the question that it was some Bracken ancestor’s idea instead – had had the money to exactly replicate the famous statue in miniature, using real gold and ivory rather than marble or painted wood with bronze or gilt the way some replicas do. In front of the statue are shallow bowls for offerings and a tray for incense or candles, though only a lingering trace of the smell remains. Either no one has offered here in a long time or the room is being aired out frequently; she suspects that it may be the latter, since the door had opened easily under her hand, the hinges well-oiled to keep from squeaking.
On the opposing two walls are four more shrines, two on either side. Here the light falls, so that Leocadia can see the gleaming metal figures of the Kings and Queens of Summer – the High King and the King of Evening to her left, the Queen of Spring and the Queen of Morning to her right. None of the figures is larger than the length of a grown man’s hand.
Leocadia swallows, one hand on the door as she levers herself to her feet. It’s a lararium, a household shrine to Aslan and the four little gods, the hands who do His work in Narnia – only now, she sees as she approaches the larger shrine, the chryselephantine statue of Aslan is dusty with disuse, while the bronze statues of the four are bright with care, seeming to gather even that one thin ray of moonlight into themselves. While the bowls before the Lion’s shrine are empty, the ones before the four little gods are full – tiny glasses of wine and tea, iced biscuits, polished beads and buttons, even a few small coins. Pools of pale wax mark where candles have burned down to nothing, while stubs of incense are crumbled almost to dust, held upright in a shallow tray filled with sand and small pebbles.
Leocadia presses her hands to her mouth, held together as if in a moment of a prayer. She wants to pray, desperately wants to, but she knows even while the litanies are drifting across the back of her tongue that they won’t mean anything to her any more. The sweet clarity of prayer is lost to her now, maybe forever. She knows too much.
Still, she crosses the room anyway, feet soft on the paneled wood floor. She can feel the glassy eyes of the four little gods on her as she passes them, empty and soulless – if they had ever been in those figurines, they aren’t now; she wonders if the people who leave offerings at the shrines realize it. She looks straight ahead as she walks, not daring to look to either side, and sinks gently to her knees on the hard floor in front of the chryselephantine statue, the skirts of her nightgown and dressing gown pooling out around her.
There are a hundred prayers that Leocadia knows by heart, but she can’t think of any of them now, not even the Lion’s Prayer. She can just about remember, O Aslan, who dwelleth over the Great Sea, but there her memory fails her and the words peter off uselessly into nothing, leaving her grasping at darkness. She looks up at the chryselephantine statue, pressing her hands together beneath her chin, and thinks, please. Please make it all be all right.
She doesn’t know what she expects, if she expects to be comforted by the very act of prayer or if she expects the warmth of the Lion’s breath to drift over her face. Instead she just feels – empty, as if she had opened the door to a room where she had expected to find an old friend and found the space barren instead. The emptiness drifts through her, settling in the pit of her stomach, in her bones, and it’s all Leocadia can do not to fall forward and weep, scream, pound at the floor with her hands until someone hears her. She wants to be reminded that she isn’t the last person left alive in Narnia.
She doesn’t, though, because someone would hear her – but not the Kings and Queens of Summer, long gone from their statues and shrines and wearing human skin once more, and not Aslan, who has abandoned Narnia yet again, as He always does. Leocadia doesn’t want to be heard, doesn’t want Emrah Tarkaan to pick her up off the floor with gentle hands or the Narnian servants to bundle her briskly away, like a china doll to be handled with kid gloves.
Instead, she stays on her knees for a long time, until the room’s chill eats through the thin cloth of her dressing gown and her legs begin to ache from the unyielding wooden floor. Even then she can’t quite bring herself to move, staring up at the empty golden eyes of the chryselephantine lion as the rain falls outside the windows. At least it isn’t snow.
Why, Leocadia of Newisle – no, Leocadia of Glasswater, she knows who she is – thinks, why would You do this to us? What have we done to displease You?
But there is no answer, and she is alone with her grief.
She isn’t sure when Yasruddin Tarkaan and his people leave the library, but eventually she hears a light scratching near the base of the door behind her. Leocadia pushes herself slowly to her feet, aching in every muscle from gods know how many hours kneeling on that floor – she’s long out of the habit of prayer – and goes to open the door.
By now the hall is dark, the flame of the lantern guttered out. The only light comes from the lightning flashing through the window at the end of the hallway and the pinpricks of Sixtoes’ eyes looking up at her near the floor.
“They’ve gone?” Leocadia whispers, though Sixtoes’ reappearance is answer enough to that question. Her voice sounds hoarse and scraped raw; she resists the urge to clear her throat, just in case anyone might hear.
Sixtoes nods silently.
“Thank you,” Leocadia murmurs, stepping out into the hallway. She starts to close the door behind her and stops, one hand wrapped around the handle, the other braced on the engraved wood panels – she can’t make out the design – to keep it from closing too heavily. For a moment, no more than the space between one heartbeat and the next, she feels eyes on her, burning holes into her skin like a hot iron. She whips around, her braid flying.
The chryselephantine statue of the Lion stares back at her, golden eyes empty and soulless, nothing there at all.
“King of Summer shield me,” she whispers automatically, her left hand flattening into the King’s Shield. It’s a symbol against evil, the kind that peasants use – the sign that Narnians who refuse to trust in Aslan alone make. Leocadia closes her hand into a fist as soon as she realizes what she’s done, easing the door the rest of the way shut. She turns the handle on the statue’s lidless eyes and sags a little against the door.
Sixtoes glances up at her, the corners of her mouth turning down in a cat’s frown. Her meaning is clear even without words.
“I just took a start.” The lie comes easily to her tongue – a little too easily, perhaps. Leocadia passes her hands quickly over her face, tucking loose strands of hair back behind her ears. “Have they all gone back to bed?”
Sixtoes points in the direction of the front door with her tail. Leocadia interprets that to mean that presumably the news that the Frontier Wolves had brought Yasruddin Tarkaan was so urgent that he’s immediately gone down to the army camp to deal with it.
“Then I suppose that you and I ought to be getting back to bed,” Leocadia says.
Sixtoes shrugs, a quick boneless shimmer of tabby fur. Leocadia’s fingers itch to pet her, to hold her close and stroke her, but there’s nothing ruder to do to a talking animal than treat it like a dumb one, and she resists the urge. She contents herself with nodding to Sixtoes with as much gratitude as she can put into that one short gesture, and Sixtoes reciprocates by winding briefly around her ankles, comfortingly warm.
They go quietly down the dark hallway, turning up the big staircase with its bear fur-grained bannister, and as Leocadia mounts the steps she sees the gleam of another pair of eyes out of the darkness. She stops, her hands braced on the bannister as she peers over into one of the opposite hallways: the marsh-wiggle girl, Sullycloud. The girl sees her looking and stares back defiantly before darting out of sight.
Leocadia and Sixtoes both look after her. “That girl will be trouble,” Leocadia murmurs softly, and sees Sixtoes nod in agreement. But she thinks: she isn’t the only one.
They make their way slowly up the stairs and down the hall, Leocadia keeping one hand first on the bannister, then on the wall at all times so that she doesn’t lose her way in the darkness and accidentally pitch herself over the stairs. Sixtoes stops her when she reaches the door to her room. Leocadia turns the knob and steps inside. She looks back at Sixtoes, raising her eyebrows in question. The cat shakes her head and turns away, wandering back down the hallway. Presumably she has decided that she wants fresh mice for a midnight snack or something equally delightful.
Leocadia locks the door behind her and sheds her dressing gown with a sigh of relief, toes off her slippers and mounts the short steps to her enormous bed. She had left the drapes open last night, but now she drags them shut, cocooning the bed in darkness and warmth. She feels like she needs it, that feeling of being safe and protected, with all that emptiness still echoing in the hollows of her soul. But even after she curls up beneath the blankets, clutching a pillow to her middle, she can still feel it – like no one is there. Like she, and all of Narnia, are alone.
Leocadia drags the blankets over her head. She can still hear the rain, faint but muffled, and the occasional distant rumble of thunder, always followed by a streak of lightning whose brightness is visible even through all the blankets. When she had been tiny, one of her nurses had told her that lightning bolts were the sparks made from enemy weapons striking off the King of Summer’s shield, thunder the sound of his horse’s hooves in battle. The Glasswater priest had said that thunder was Aslan roaring, lightning the flash of His mane. But they can’t both be right, she remembers asking Vespasian, puzzled. Can they?
When sleep finally finds her, she dreams again. She dreams that she is in a cave, or something very like a cave, with stone walls and floors and ceilings, but comfortable – rugs and bookshelves and even windows, not at all like the kind of nasty cave that she’s seen in picture books. It’s a warm sort of place, lit by candlelight and a crackling fire laid on in the hearth, before which are two padded armchairs. In one of the armchairs is a little human girl, maybe ten or eleven, with short brown hair and what Leocadia thinks of as the oddest sort of clothes. There’s something familiar about her, though Leocadia can’t think what it is. Nothing about her says “Narnian”, or even “Archenlander” or “Calormene” – she certainly doesn’t have the coloring to be a Calormene, at least the sort Leocadia sees in Cair Paravel, and she doesn’t look much like a proper Telmarine Narnian either; her skin is too pale and her hair too light and fine.
A muffled click of hooves on carpet-covered stone draws her attention, and Leocadia looks around to see a young faun – curly-haired, with a sharp clever face and completely unclad, which she finds rather shocking – come trotting up to the girl, bearing a tea tray. He sets it down on the table before her, chatting merrily away to her as she takes the overlarge cup and saucer from. Leocadia inhales, breathing in the scent of tea – rather common and everyday stuff, from the smell of it, rather than the fancier sorts she’s used to – along with burning wood from the fire, sardines, and the rest of the tea time spread. Her stomach rumbles in longing and she flushes, pressing one hand to her belly, but neither the faun nor the girl seems to notice.
“It’s been a long winter,” says the faun, and Leocadia’s gaze flies automatically to the small round windows, taking in the snow piling up outside. She presses a hand to her mouth, fighting back her automatic cry of alarm: she’s Narnian enough for that, at least, and she knows the words, the careful phrasing that no one in Narnia will repeat for a normal winter.
“You would have loved Narnia in summer,” the faun goes on. For a moment Leocadia can almost feel the heat of it, though perhaps it’s just the fire: the warmth of the sun on her bare skin, the heavy heat of the air, the rains that pour down without fail at least once a day during the wet summers and the long burning stretch of the dry ones. But then the feeling passes, leaving only memory behind.
“Now, are you familiar with any Narnian lullabies?” the faun asks, Leocadia apparently having missed some of the conversation. He takes a wooden case down from the mantel, fingers moving quickly and familiarly over it as he takes out the panpipes.
The girl winces a little, says, “Sorry, no,” apologetically.
“Well, that’s good,” he says, his hands fitting comfortably around the panpipes. “Because this probably won’t sound anything like one.”
Leocadia has heard faun lullabies before; one of her nursemaids had been a faun as a girl. It’s an odd choice for a host to entertain his guest with. She doesn’t know whether the music will affect her or not, but just in case she closes both hands into fists as he begins to play, digging her nails into the heels of her hands. She doesn’t know if she ought to watch the girl or the fire, but the conclusion with the girl is inevitable, so she watches the flames instead.
The first thing that she sees is a stag, breaking out of the flames, pursued by a rider. Both vanish in a spatter of sparks, to be replaced with a circle of dancing fauns and satyrs, swords sheathed on their hips. The music rises as their feet beat at the base of the flames; Leocadia feels her eyes start to drift shut, just as the girl’s are doing, and pinches herself hard. She is barely aware of the moment when the girl’s cup falls to the floor, spilling tea across the carpet, and she slumps over sideways in the armchair.
She’s staring straight into the heart of the fire when it dissolves into the head of a lion, and its roar rattles the windows of the cave house.
Leocadia jerks awake with a cry, fighting her way up out of the tangle of blankets. The drapes that had seemed so comforting last night feel stifling now, and she rips them open, staring out at the spill of sunlight into her bedroom. Last night’s storm seems like a dim memory, the world washed clean by the rain. It’s a lovely spring day – it’s been a long winter, she hears the faun say again, shuddering in memory – and Leocadia can barely believe it. She almost falls out of the tall box bed, missing the steps and stumbling heavily onto the floor, catching hold of the curtains to steady herself. She casts a worried glance at the cold hearth, but there is nothing there – not even ashes, which the maid must have cleaned out sometime yesterday. It hadn’t been cold enough last night for another fire, though there’s a brazier at the foot of her bed, now nothing but coals.
She’s seen the little girl before, she realizes now, in waking as she hadn’t in sleep. Seen her in another dream – with that same faun. Queen Lucy of Narnia, the Queen of Morning.
“No,” she says out loud, shaking her head furiously to clear the thought. She pads barefoot into the bathroom to wash quickly before dressing in another of Lady Marcia’s borrowed last season frocks, running a brush through her hair before twisting it back from her face and pinning it in place.
The manor seems eerily quiet as she descends the stairs. Leocadia rests her hand on the bannister, feeling the fur-grained wood beneath her fingertips, and looks around at the bears. No wonder Lady Marcia spends most of her time in Cair Paravel; this manor doesn’t seem very welcoming to those who aren’t Whitebears, no matter how long it’s been a Bracken possession.
When she enters the dining room, she finds Dolichene Cooper sitting at the big table, her cheek propped up on her fist as she stares suspiciously at the three figures at the opposite end of the table. Leocadia stops dead in the doorway, following Dolichene’s gaze, and feels her mouth drop open in surprise as she recognizes the three Frontier Wolves that had arrived at the manor last night, all of them hungrily engaged in devouring several enormous plates of food.
Up close, they look both more and less savage to Leocadia’s eyes than they had from the window of her room, though they have thankfully shed the wolfskin cloaks. The Calormene officer, to her surprise, seems to be about her own age or perhaps a few years older, a handsome young man with clear brown eyes and close-cropped black curls. The others seem to be about the same age: a woman with honey-yellow braids, sun-darkened skin, and kohl-smudged eyes, and a man with long brown hair, a close-cropped beard, and a pair of drooping moustaches plaited and capped with silver beads. Human enough, she thinks, for all that they’re wearing garb unlike anything she’s ever seen before. The two barbarians barely cease their eating to glance up at her entrance, though the Calormene puts his fork down, looking at her with interest as he stands.
“My lady,” he says in heavily-accented Narnian, coming around the edge of the table. “Is that right?”
Leocadia swallows back her alarm – she’s a daughter of the Lion, she has nothing to fear from a wolf – and steps forward, holding out her hand for him to bow over. “I’m Lady Leocadia of Newisle,” she says. “And you are –”
“Kavad Tibereh, undecurio of the Ala Variana XI – at your service,” he says.
“That’s the Frontier Wolves, isn’t it?” Leocadia asks, smiling her most brilliant smile at him and ignoring Dolichene’s soft snort. Tibereh means that he’s from the second rank of Calormene society, a step below the tarkaans.
“We have that honor,” he says, looking pleased to be recognized. “May I make known to you my men? Swindapa daughter of Sjöfn, and Brego son of Hrödulf, of the Úlfheðnar. Their tribal lands lie far to the south, where the world grows cold again.”
The man and woman glance up at their names, without much interest. Leocadia lets her lips shape the unfamiliar words. “How interesting,” she says. “Please, won’t you be seated? I’m afraid I won’t be much company if I don’t have some tea and a bite to eat.”
At this, Dolichene Cooper silently clears the mess of papers she has spread around her to make a place next to her. Leocadia raises her eyebrows in surprise, but doesn’t comment on it, taking the offered seat as Kavad Tibereh retreats to his place at the other end of the table. Dolichene looks exhausted, shadows under her eyes and her thick hair pulled back into a messy braid that falls over her shoulder. Leocadia wonders if she’s been up all night.
“Will the tarkaans be joining us this morning?” she asks, pulling an empty teacup and saucer in front of her and reaching for the teapot. At Dolichene’s nod, she pours for both of them, inhaling the steam of the pale golden liquid gratefully.
Dolichene yawns into her fist, then reaches for the sugar bowl. “General Yasruddin and Emrah Tarkaan are down at the army camp,” she says. She waves a hand at the table. “The post came earlier. There’s some for you.”
Leocadia picks up the indicated envelopes, which have already been slit open. “Did you read these?” she asks, frowning.
“Of course,” Dolichene says, dropping three lumps of sugar into her teacup. She doesn’t bother with cream. “Why? Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“I –” Leocadia begins, then stops. She hadn’t even considered the possibility. “Well, is it good news?” she says instead, looking down. There are two of them, one with the Newisle seal, the other with the Bracken seal. She recognizes Prejun’s secretary’s hand on the Newisle envelope.
“I suppose,” the other woman shrugs. “Lady Bracken says that you can stay as long as you like and she’ll arrange a divorce attorney for you. Your husband demands that you return to Cair Paravel. He’s quite rude; I think you’re well shot of him.”
Leocadia’s hand tightens on the envelopes, crumpling them. “I think so too,” she says softly.
She looks down, upending the envelopes so that the slightly crushed letters tumble out onto the fine lace of the tablecloth. She unfolds Lady Marcia’s first, unwilling to look at Prejun’s. Lady Marcia has always been nothing less than polite and kind to her, and she’s no different here, offering the hospitality of both White Bear Hall and her house in Cair Paravel, if Leocadia feels the desire to return to the city. Anything that she can do for Leocadia, Lady Marcia assures her, she’ll be more than happy to do, and she’ll make all the legal arrangements. At the end, Lady Marcia had added in her own hand, Be careful. Newisle is on the warpath. I’ve warned Yasruddin Tarkaan to watch out for him, just in case he decides to come to the Vale. I’ll do what I can on my end, of course.
Leocadia’s heart stills. She had never even considered –
She’s not even aware that her hands are shaking until Dolichene leans over and touches her wrist with ink-stained fingers. “If the Lord Provost tries to come here,” she says, “the General and Emrah will see him off with his wrists slapped and his tail behind his legs. That’s if they don’t arrest him for treason on the spot, mind.”
“Oh,” Leocadia whispers. She lowers the letter carefully to the table and lets go of it, pushing it away from herself with just the tips of her fingers, as if it might bite. It already has, in a way.
She swallows and looks over at the other letter, sitting innocently on the table by her left hand. It won’t get any better by waiting, she thinks, screwing her eyes shut for a moment before getting up the courage to reach for it. But before she can pick it up, Dolichene puts her hand over it.
“You don’t want to read that, Lady Newisle,” she says quietly. “There’s nothing in there worth reading, just bile. It would be better thrown in the fire.”
Leocadia looks up at her. It’s the kindest that she has ever heard Dolichene. “You’re sure?” she says, swallowing around the words.
“Positive,” Dolichene says. “I’ve read it, after all. I think you’d prefer not to.”
“Then would you get rid of it for me, please?” Leocadia asks. Her voice is shaking; she would prefer that it not, but she can’t seem to make it stop. She pulls her hand back – her fingers just brushing the back of Dolichene’s palm – and folds it into a fist on her lap, staring blindly at the pale golden liquid in her teacup.
“With pleasure,” says Dolichene. She picks up both letter and envelope, crumpling them into balls and stalking over to one of the nearby braziers. Leocadia watches the paper flare briefly into flame as she tosses them in.
“Thank you,” she manages, when she can breathe again.
“My pleasure,” Dolichene repeats, resuming her seat. “Eat something,” she adds, nodding at the covered tray in front of Leocadia. “I rescued that from the southern barbarians for you. It will help.”
“Thank you,” Leocadia says, surprised. A quick glance at the decimated sideboard tells her that she’s lucky that Dolichene had done so, since barely anything of the breakfast spread remains. She rather doubts that food will help, but she eats anyway – a poached egg, polenta sweet with honey and cream, crispy bacon – and Dolichene is right, she does feel a little better, or at least the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach recedes slightly.
“I think I saw them arrive last night,” she says when she’s mostly finished, swiping a toast soldier through the remains of the yolk, yellow on the fine china. She glances down the length of the long table, where the Frontier Wolves are – miraculously – still eating. She’s rather impressed with their ability to put away food, frankly. “Something woke me – I must have left the window open, I suppose. Did I actually see real wolves or did I dream that?”
Dolichene’s mouth compresses into a thin line, sharing that same Narnian disdain for the Queen of Winter’s creatures with Leocadia. “You saw wolves. Sir Asprenas wouldn’t let them in the house. Small mercies.” She gives the Frontier Wolves a poisonous look. “They shan’t be here for long, if the Queen of Spring has any mercy in her breast.”
“Thank Aslan,” Leocadia murmurs piously, though the words leave an empty hollow in her chest. “Is their presence here something I can ask about, or ought I to save my breath?”
“Army business,” Dolichene says matter-of-factly. Her gaze flickers up towards Leocadia, sharp and considering, and Leocadia is abruptly reminded that just because Dolichene is – presumably – a tradesman’s daughter, doesn’t mean that she lacks cleverness. She had gotten into The University on merit, after all.
“Nothing too dire, I hope,” Leocadia murmurs, taking her napkin off her lap and dropping it a crumpled heap on the table beside her plate.
Dolichene shrugs, still watching her. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere. How dire could it get? I doubt that your cousin, if he even has an army, has more than a few thousand men at most.”
Leocadia drops her gaze, picking at the fabric of her borrowed skirts. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I’m sure,” Dolichene says, and Leocadia looks up through her lashes to see the other woman’s suspicious expression. After a moment she shakes her head, pushing her thick braid back over her shoulder. “Sorry. I didn’t get much sleep and I’ve been up since the Frontier Wolves arrived.”
“No harm done, Miss Cooper,” Leocadia says. She leans forward and picks up the silver bell on the table, ringing it to call a maid to come and clear the table. The barbarians look up at the sound, and Leocadia smiles sweetly at them. “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she says, replacing the bell and sitting back in her chair, “but you said that you were forced to leave The University when your patron was arrested. I was wondering who he was?”
Dolichene’s gaze flickers to a point over Leocadia’s right shoulder. “Castlejoy,” she says without looking at her. “Hilmagis of Castlejoy. His heirs fled, after. They’re probably dead now.”
Leocadia nods. Castlejoy is in the Southern Marches, near the border between Glasswatershire and Greatwoodshire – hardly one of the great noble families of Narnia, but they do have some lovely vineyards. Did, rather.
“If you like,” she says carefully, “after all this has cleared up, I’ll be your patron while you finish your degree.”
Dolichene stares at her in surprise. “I thought you were divorcing your husband,” she says.
“It’s not as if Newisle has an income anyway, since it’s not a landed lordship,” Leocadia shrugs. “I’ll petition the Tisroc for Glasswater. It’s mine by right, since Vespasian is gone and I’m of age now. Besides, this way Prejun won’t get his grubby hooves over it.”
“Good luck,” Dolichene says after a moment, still staring at her. “Hasn’t Bahadur already given it away to one of his favorites?”
“If he has, he’ll have to give it back,” Leocadia says firmly. “From what I know, it isn’t generally Calormen’s policy to seize properties from those that haven’t done anything wrong, or to install foreign governors for longer than need be. And Glasswater’s one of the great lands. It shouldn’t be in the hands of anyone but a Glasswater.”
She realizes too late that she’s lost Dolichene with the words. The other woman snorts and looks aside, muttering, “Nobles,” under her breath – though she pitches it so that Leocadia can’t help but hear it.
She looks down, pushing at the handle of her now-empty tea cup. For a few minutes, the only sound in the room is the quiet murmur of conversation at the other end of the table, in an unfamiliar guttural language that Leocadia can’t begin to make heads or tails of. “I did mean it,” she says eventually. “You’re obviously quite bright. You deserve the chance to finish your education.”
Dolichene frowns at her. Leocadia looks back, meeting the other woman’s eyes and hoping that her expression conveys her sincerity. “Not at Glasswater,” Dolichene says after a moment. “I’m a Beaversdam woman.”
Leocadia allows herself the edge of a smile. “It will be a bit irregular, but I’m sure something can be arranged. There’s doubtless precedent somewhere. It might put the Dean in a bit of a tizzy, though.”
“From what I’ve heard of the Dean of Glasswater University, the color of the sky can put him into a tizzy,” Dolichene snorts. “I’m sure the man will live.”
“I’m sure he will,” Leocadia says, smiling at Dolichene. After a moment’s hesitation, the other woman returns it, though it tips away almost immediately, as though she isn’t comfortable with the expression.
One of the kitchen maids scuttles in to clear the table.
“Could we get a fresh pot of tea, please?” Leocadia asks.
“No time for that, I am afraid.” Emrah Tarkaan strides into the room, pushing his burnoose back from his clean-shaven head. The Frontier Wolves all rise to their feet, though he doesn’t acknowledge them. “Lady Newisle, aansa Cooper, I hope that I have not interrupted your breakfast.”
“No, we’ve just finished,” Leocadia says, smiling at him. “Do you need Miss Cooper for something, Emrah Tarkaan?”
“Both of you, actually,” says the young tarkaan. “Yasruddin Tarkaan requests both your presences at the camp, if you would be so kind. Kavad, you and your lot had best come as well,” he adds in Calormene to the auxiliary officer, who inclines his head in acknowledgment.
It isn’t much of a request, Leocaia suspects. “Of course,” she says. “Just let me change into a riding habit; I’m afraid this frock isn’t meant to be worn on horseback.”
Dolichene rolls her eyes. “I’ll get my kit,” she said. “Don’t take too long powdering your nose, your ladyship.”
“I shan’t delay,” Leocadia promises. Her soft slippers are silent on the steps as she makes her way back up to her room. She dresses quickly in a dark blue riding habit with embroidery in varying shades of blue on the sleeves and bodice, fixing a hat with a drooping white feather on her head. She wears her own riding boots, now cleaned and polished after her long and dusty walk. The use has made them look worn; if she were back in Cair Paravel, she would have them thrown out and another pair made, but she’s not in Cair Paravel. Her cobbler in the city has her measurements, though; she supposes she can ask Lady Marcia to commission new shoes for her and find the money to pay for it somehow.
She frowns herself in the mirror, adjusting her hat, and nearly stabs herself through the eye with a hatpin when Sixtoes leaps up onto the vanity.
“For Morning’s first light!” she hisses, pressing the hand without the hatpin in it to her heart. “Can’t you make some noise?”
Sixtoes gives her a pointed look, sitting down and licking a paw.
Leocadia sighs and fixes her hat in place with the pin, flicking at the drooping feather with her fingers. “Yasruddin Tarkaan has asked me to join him at the army camp,” she says, which makes Sixtoes put her paw down and straighten up, frowning at her. “Since he’s asked for Miss Cooper as well, I gather that it isn’t for anything terribly dire, though if I don’t return, give my love to –” She stops. There’s Tirian and Vespasian, of course, but neither she nor Sixtoes will be seeing either of them any time soon – or at least Leocadia hopes they won’t. And Prejun can freeze in the Queen of Winter’s icy hell for all she cares.
“To Lady Marcia,” she says finally.
Sixtoes gives her a sympathetic look. Leocadia glances away, pretending to be fascinated by her own reflection as she tucks a loose curl back behind her ear.
“I’ll be careful,” she says at last, picking up her coat. “You do the same.”
Sixtoes’s response is to roll over onto her back, squirming around in the sunlight with her paws paddling slowly at the air.
Leocadia smiles at this, resisting the urge to rub her belly – Sixtoes wouldn’t appreciate it – and goes out, closing the doors quietly behind her. Sixtoes can get in or out of the room even through a closed door; Leocadia doesn’t know exactly how, but Sixtoes is a cat: she has her tricks.
She hurries down the stairs, where Emrah Tarkaan and Dolichene Cooper are waiting in the front hall. Dolichene has a leather case slung over her chest and is wearing a rather battered-looking man’s overcoat, deep forest green and patched with small neat stitches in a few places, the patches not quite matching the original color.
“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” Leocadia says as Emrah Tarkaan pulls his burnoose back up over his head and opens the door.
“I’ve seen worse,” Dolichene allows, which Leocadia takes for a compliment.
Outside, there are grooms waiting with three horses – the mare Leocadia had seen with him the other day, still without a proper bridle, and two dumb horses fully saddled. The three Frontier Wolves are there as well, already mounted on their unfamiliar saddles. No stirrups, Leocadia starts to note with fascination, and then notices the wolves – real wolves – lurking near their horses’ hooves. She takes an alarmed step back, running into Dolichene, who catches her elbow to steady her before she sees the wolves too. She draws in a sharp breath.
“They are harmless, my lady,” says Kavad Tibereh quickly.
“Unless you’re a steak,” says the woman Swindapa in Calormene, “or an enemy.” Her companion laughs, and Kavad turns to frown at him, his mouth twitching slightly. Leocadia can’t quite tell, but she thinks that at least one of the wolves snickers.
Emrah Tarkaan gives them a deeply disapproving look. “Keep your beasts under control,” he reproaches. “Lady Newisle, I swear that they will do you no harm. They are part of the Tisroc’s army as well, subject to the same laws and discipline as the rest of us. They would not dare – would you?” he shoots at the wolves.
One of them yawns in response, its tail beating slowly at the ground. They’re smaller wolves than the ones that Leocadia has seen in Narnia (from a safe distance, of course), their fur not quite as thick and somewhat reddish. That doesn’t make them any less wolves.
You are a lion of Narnia too, she reminds herself, screwing up her courage. And a lion is stronger than any wolf. “So the stories are true?” she says, making herself step away from Dolichene, closer to Emrah. Closer to the wolves. “There are talking beasts outside of Narnia and Archenland?”
“There are,” says Emrah Tarkaan. He beckons to one of the grooms, who leads his horse towards them. “There are many wonders in the Calormene lands. I hope that one day you will see them.”
I hope not, Leocadia thinks, but she smiles and says, “I look forward to it,” and lets him hand her up into the saddle. Fortunately her riding dress is designed for riding astride, which is lucky. Well, Lady Marcia has never had much taste for anything that would hamper her movements, and Leocadia knows that her friend prefers riding astride to riding sidesaddle.
She mounts with little difficulty – hardly as much as Dolichene, who looks painfully awkward in on horseback, clutching her horse’s reins as if terrified that the mild-tempered gelding is going to bolt at any moment. Emrah vaults easily onto his mare’s back – no saddle for him, not a proper war saddle like knights use, or even a riding saddle; just a thin pad covered in fine embroidery. The mare stands steadily still through all of this, looking utterly bored by the events. While the two Narnian horses are skittish around the wolves, the mare doesn’t even appear to notice them.
They start down the long carriageway to the main road, the two barbarians and their wolves loping out ahead at a nod from Kavad Tibereh. Two more mounted soldiers, ordinary Calormene cavalry, join them at the park gates, falling in respectfully behind the tibereh and Dolichene. Leocadia finds herself next to Emrah, who has dropped his horse’s reins. The mare doesn’t seem to need any direction.
Leocadia taps her fingers thoughtfully on her saddlehorn. “Can I ask what the Frontier Wolves are doing here, tarkaan?” she asks eventually. “I was quite surprised to see them here this morning. Has something dire happened?”
“Scouts returning to report to Yasruddin leiwa,” Emrah Tarkaan says. “The news was urgent; they returned late last night and the general judged it best for them to remain at the manor rather than return to the camp on exhausted horses.” He smiles at her. “I hope that you were not too inconvenienced by the disturbance.”
“Ah, that’s what it was that woke me last night,” Leocadia says, as if it’s just occurred to her. “But I’m a light sleeper, I don’t think I properly woke up. It was just a very great surprise to walk into the dining room and find – er, people of that sort there. I’m afraid I’m not accustomed to it.”
“My apologies, my lady,” Emrah says, and actually manages to sound sincere. “I’ve no idea why they were there and not somewhere more appropriate.” He pitches his voice louder for this, turning around to glance over his shoulder at Kavad Tibereh, who is apparently trying to flirt clumsily with Dolichene. She’s having none of it.
The younger officer looks self-conscious. “Bashan Tarkaan says that we ought not distance ourselves from our men, since we must all depend on each other on the battlefield,” he says.
“The mess is one thing, the home of a lady of quality is another,” Emrah says. “See that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Yes, centurio,” Kavad says, his expression crushed.
Emrah snorts and looks back around. They continue down the road for a little while, before Leocadia blurts out, “Is it bad news, what your scouts brought? It’s not –” She swallows past the sudden lump in her throat, feeling her hands tighten on the reins. “It isn’t about the King – about Tirian, I mean – is it?”
Emrah’s gaze darts towards her. His mare looks up too, her dark eyes surprisingly clever, and Leocadia is almost certain now that she is a talking horse. There have been rumors for years – for centuries – that Narnian horses have been kidnapped and sold into captivity in Calormen, to enrich the breeding of the already fine Calormene horses; she must be one of them, or a descendant.
“I am afraid that it is,” he says. His horse puts her head down and huffs out a breath. “Yasruddin leiwa sent scouts to confirm your news of the Narnian troops gathering at the diamond fort.”
“He didn’t believe me?” Leocadia says, obscurely hurt. She’s a lady of Narnia, the blood of Telmar and the blood of the lion; her word ought to mean something, even to a Calormene tarkaan.
“It required confirmation,” Emrah says calmly.
They ride through the line of trees that mark the estate boundaries. Leocadia had passed beneath them when she arrived, but at the time she had been too tired to pay much attention. Now she lets her gaze dart curiously around, searching for the dryads that are usually present in such places. If any of the trees live – and they probably do, especially on a noble’s land – then they’re sleeping now; she doesn’t see anything that might hint at a waking tree. A cluster of new leaves on a birch tree, however, shudders a little. Leocadia looks at it quickly, thinking that it might be a dryad, but by the time she turns her head the tree’s leaves sit still and silent except for a slight shiver from the morning breeze that twines cold around her shoulders. After what the Calormenes have done to many of Narnia’s forests, she’d sit quiet too in their presence if she was a dryad.
Once clear of the trees, Leocadia looks out across the Vale of Bracken – at the white bear on the opposite hillside, at the pawprint-shaped pools leading to its slumbering form. Villages and fields dot the valley, and at the opposite end, watching over the place where the road splits either to go westward into the Waste or northward, where it eventually peters out somewhere in the High Reaches, is another castle. This one isn’t much more than the remains of a stone keep – just a tower now, with a manor house built alongside it for one of the Brackens’ client knights. Leocadia can’t remember who’s supposed to be holding it; she isn’t even sure that she knows. In all likelihood, these days it’s probably the Calormenes.
From here, as they head down into the valley, she gets her first good look of the Calormene army camp. It’s all straight lines and right angles and to her inexperienced eye it seems huge, thousands upon thousands of soldiers that have come here with the express purpose of killing Narnians. For a moment the enormity of that stops Leocadia dead; she drops her horse’s reins and presses her hands to her chest, struggling to breathe. The Tisroc hasn’t sent an army – hasn’t sent armies – to Narnia just to keep the peace, because there hasn’t been much peace to keep over the past five years, no matter what Prejun and the other scorpions in the Cortes have done to encourage cooperation. He has sent them to Narnia to kill Narnians.
It’s too much, it’s all too much, and Leocadia can barely breathe from the enormity of it, her hands closed so tightly into fists that her nails cut crescent moons into her palms. She presses them to her chest, feeling the frantic thumping of her heart, and hears herself make a sound that might be a whimper or a keen – for what she’s done, for the blood that has been spilt and the dead that will lie eyeless and staring on the battlefield in a few days’ time, for all the dead that have given their lives, their freedom, and their sacred honor for Narnia over the centuries – the millennia. It’s all too much.
Emrah Tarkaan’s touch on her arm makes her start. “Lady Newisle?” he says questioningly, leaning over from his horse to steady her. “Are you well?”
“I – I’m –” She tries to force her hands away from her chest and doesn’t quite succeed. Her palms hurt where her nails are digging in, but she can’t seem to unbend her fingers. “Is that – are they really all – do you really need all of them?”
“I’m afraid so, my lady,” he tells her solemnly, his dark eyes fixed on hers.
“It will be a slaughter,” Leocadia breathes, each word like a punch to the chest. She feels breathless, stripped bare – like there’s nothing left of her but bones, blood, and betrayal.
“Not if your cousin is wise,” Emrah says. “If he is, he will know that to face the army of the Tisroc in open combat is futile. If he gives himself up, all this can be ended without any spilling of blood, either Narnian or Calormene.”
Leocadia feels like she’s going to be sick. “Tirian,” she begins. “My – the King – Tirian –” She hears her voice waver, uncertain of the words. “He won’t do that,” she finishes lamely. “Not ever. He’s too proud. Even after all this – he’s too proud.” She looks down at her horse’s neck, finally opening her fists so that she can touch the mare’s soft mane. “He is the blood of the lion too.”
Emrah looks at her for a long moment. “You may find, Lady Newisle,” he says finally, “that there is no more need for lions in Narnia. Nor for lionesses, either.”
To Leocadia’s surprise, it’s Dolichene Cooper who replies. “Narnia will always need lions,” she says.
Emrah looks at her in surprise, as if he’s forgotten that she’s there with them. “Be that as it may,” he allows courteously, turning his horse down towards the camp.
Leocadia forces herself to follow, unable to tear her gaze away from the camp as her mare rambles slowly after Emrah’s warhorse. She can see now that the camp is all rapid activity, packing itself up to march off to war, and bites back the bile that threatens to rise in her throat. No, she tells herself silently, this is right, this is the right thing to do, but it doesn’t feel like it at all.
They make their way down to the camp, which is laid out on what are probably some poor farmer’s fields – it’s close to spring planting now, from Leocadia’s vague and mostly theoretical knowledge of such things. She hopes that the Calormenes are paying him well for the inconvenience.
All that Leocadia knows about army camps, Narnian, Calormene, or otherwise, comes from books and snatches of conversation she’d overheard between Tirian and Vespasian years ago, during the old king’s wars with the northern giants. All she knows for sure is that Calormene marching camps are supposed to be among the most efficient on the continent: there’s a reason the Tisroc’s empire is so large, after all, and that reason is usually touted as the brutal efficiency of the Calormene army.
Even Leocadia’s inexperienced eyes can tell that the camp is just as efficient as rumored as they’re met at the camp’s entrance by a pair of guards who clearly recognize Emrah Tarkaan but demand a pass-sign anyway. After they’re let in, past the ditch and rampart that mark the boundaries of the camp – poor farmer, Leocadia thinks again, glancing at it – they hand over their horses to army ostlers and proceed up what appears to be the camp’s main avenue to the general’s tent, where the Calormene banners are planted firmly in the ground outside, detaching the Frontier Wolves at some point. Leocadia looks curiously up at the weather-beaten silk, the bronze animal heads; they’re very like the ones she’s seen in Caspian’s castle and outside the Cortes, only a little more battered, the colors not so bright, the bronze not so polished.
Emrah Tarkaan touches her back to draw her away, steering her inside the big canvas tent. Dolichene Cooper follows them inside, nodding a greeting to the soldiers on guard outside.
“My lord tarkaan,” Leocadia murmurs, dropping into a curtsey.
“My lady Newisle.” The tarkaan takes her hand, pressing a kiss to the air above the back of her palm.
Leocadia straightens up, letting her gaze flicker quickly and curiously over the other people in the tent. All are strangers, lower-ranking officers that she wouldn’t have run into in Cair Paravel in the general course of things. Several she identifies uncertainly as coming from the Calormene auxiliaries, rather than from the army proper. A Calormene-looking man is clad in the wolfskins and leathers of the Frontier Wolves; presumably the commander that Kavad Tibereh had mentioned. Another is a centaur – though not a proper Narnian centaur, but one whose human skin is as dark as Yasruddin’s and Emrah’s and whose horse half is striped black and white like the zebra that the old king had kept in his private zoo. Beside him is a tall, rangy woman with her ice-pale hair knotted up on the back of her head, wearing an archer’s glove on her right hand. Tattoos trace unfamiliar runes on her cheeks and down one side of her neck.
Leocadia is too well-bred to stare. She looks back at Yasruddin Tarkaan and smiles a little. “You sent for me, my lord tarkaan?”
“I did indeed. A moment, if you please.” He says something in Calormene too fast for her to catch to one of the other officers, who steps forward towards the map table in the middle, looking at Emrah and Dolichene. “Walk with me, Lady Newisle.” He offers her his arm.
Leocadia takes it; she doesn’t have a choice otherwise. He leads her out of the tent, down the main street of the camp, where passing soldiers salute him with that finger-flick the Calormenes use, but otherwise give them a wide berth. For a few minutes they walk in near silence, as if they are in their own little bubble inside the miniature world of the bustling camp, and finally Leocadia works up her courage to say, “Your army is very impressive, my lord.”
“Yes, I know,” Yasruddin Tarkaan says. “Is your cousin’s anywhere near as impressive?”
Leocadia thinks of the thin, starved-looking women with their too-big eyes, the near-naked children that had run screaming through the shattered stones of Arn Abedin, the men in their rags, making spears out of sticks; she thinks of the blood on Tirian’s face on Winter’s End and the sound of drums as the dancers beat the Queen of Winter out of Narnia. She drops her gaze, studying the well-beaten path in front of her. “No, it isn’t,” she admits. “But you knew that already, didn’t you, my lord?”
“My scouts returned last night, yes.” He gives her a searching look. “But you knew that already, didn’t you, my lady?”
Leocadia’s breath catches. She thinks, obscurely, of the empty lararium – of the echoing hollowness of it, and of dust thick on the chryselephantine Lion. Liar, she thinks. “I heard something and went to see what the disturbance was,” she says. “I was curious.”
“There was no harm done.”
“I didn’t mean any.” She looks up at him, at the white scars of the tribal markings on his face. The words come out as a whisper. “Please don’t kill my cousin.”
Yasruddin Tarkaan meets her gaze with his own, steady and unreadable. “I wouldn’t like to,” he says. “Whatever the prince desires, the Tisroc would prefer Tirian of Narnia alive.”
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The Frontier Wolves are, among other things, a riff on the Frontier Wolves of Rosemary Sutcliff's novel Frontier Wolf. The Calormene army is based off the Roman imperial military; most of the military jargon here is borrowed from, or derived from, the Latin terms.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-04 12:11 am (UTC)I'm really, really curious as to what her role is here, why she left the Narnian camp to join the Calormenes for now. She's doing a bit of spying but knows that she's not really a spy. So what will she do with the information she has been learning here? I'm glad she has a friend at the Manor, and one who is really helpful in warning her or keeping her out of trouble. It's good that Leo is also trying to make friends with Dolichene - there's no other company for her here besides Sixtoes - and I do like how Dolichene advises her to not even bother with Prejun's letter.
As fascinating as it is to see more of the Calormene army structure (and with wolves and other talking animals), I think the most interesting part of this chapter for me was when Leo was in the shrine room of the manor. It really does seem as if most Narnians no longer pray to Aslan and they do turn all their hopes and prayers to the Kings and Queens of Summer. And why does Leo keep dreaming of the Pevensies' past, and seeing Lucy and Tumnus in her dreams again?
This was a great chapter and I'm always looking forward to the next Dust update. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-08 11:08 pm (UTC)Leocadia is not a spy. You could say that she's actually the exact opposite of a spy, in some ways. Note that there's one blatant falsehood in this chapter, during the conversation that Leocadia overhears, and there's a reason for that. (Some of the plot lines actually do interconnect, even if it's not immediately obvious!)
Again, I'm glad that you enjoyed and thank you for commenting!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-04 12:55 pm (UTC)I love that you redid the Last Battle, and I'm liking this version so much more than the original (Susan! In addition to many other things). I love that the Pevensies are being worshipped as gods, and that they appear to be becoming gods, and whatever you have going with the White Witch (which seems fairly ominous) and with Aslan (which also seems fairly ominous) and all of the world building and backstory that you made. Especially the world building and backstory. And also I love everything about this story, which to be honest is a bit too much to name. But I love it anyway.
This chapter, despite the fact that I desperately want to see exactly what is about to happen with Peter in the High Reaches and Edmund on the island and with the ghosts from the island (I really would like to know what they end up doing), was also wonderful. I like Leo, and the bits you put in about things like the enduring Narnian fear of or distaste for wolves, the neglect of Aslan in favor of the four little gods and the makeup of the Calormene army, and I kept on grinning as I was reading because this story just makes me so happy (and then that feeling drove me to write this whole thing). So, sorry for going on about this, but I love this story and I think you're a great writer and I really want to thank you for writing this and I look forward to the next chapter whenever it comes.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-08 11:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-04 07:24 pm (UTC)Love the observation of other lands with humans and non-humans and that so many of them are under the yoke of the Calormene empire. Yes, it’s very Roman. It’s still great.
The Frontier Wolves are just wonderful.
The theology of the Four and Aslan and Leocadia’s despair are so sad and so interesting. Aslan is gone from Narnia, the statue is empty and soulless. shiver
LOVE the dream.
And oh, the army. The way you write Leo’s reaction to seeing its size and lethality. GASP. It's just great, as always.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-08 11:24 pm (UTC)I always figured that it was unlikely that Narnia would be the only country with nonhumans in it; I suspect Narnia and the Narnians like to think of themselves as being "special" that way, but they actually aren't, at least by this point in time.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-06 08:45 am (UTC)Units called Frontier Wolves will always remind me of Rosemary Sutcliff, and Frontier Wolves with actual, you know, wolves is wonderful!
(no subject)
Date: 2013-07-08 11:29 pm (UTC)I admit, I got a little too gleeful when I realized I could do Frontier Wolves with actual wolves. (Or werewolves. Heh.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-14 06:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-14 08:59 pm (UTC)Thank you for reading!
(no subject)
Date: 2016-02-25 02:46 am (UTC)Also, you friends-locked "Midnight Man." Is there anywhere that can be read by a random binge-reader like myself?
Also again: as a PhD student who is ABD & trying not to panic over dissertation issues & research -- great sympathy for your academic adventures! :)
~ Laughing Collie (or collie13 on LJ)
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-07 06:59 am (UTC)I've unlocked both The Sun King (which is one of my favorite things I've ever written) and Midnight Man; they both give away the end of Dust a bit, but not in any way that can't be found elsewhere.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-30 05:16 pm (UTC)...though not for long -- gleesqueeeeee! More Dust reading! :)
[Later addition:] *happy-sigh*! Thanks so much for unlocking those two stories -- very satisfying! I will miss Dust not having the complete ending you planned, but those two stories were *lovely*. Heh... though now it makes me wonder how Susan chooses to deifically manifest!
Thanks again! :)
~ Laughing Collie
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-04 03:59 am (UTC)That character also made me think: I remember many years ago taking a summer school trip to southern Spain, and being simply agog at it all. As my teachers explained it, the desert-born Moors came a-conquering to the lush and verdant Spanish plains -- and felt they'd reached paradise! This belief was reflected in their huge gardens full of fruit trees and flowering bushes and blossoms of every hue -- as well as the soaring, gloriously beautiful architecture. The Moors made sure the sound of water could be heard *everywhere* in their buildings too, and to do so they didn't just put in fountains, along with the little connecting bricked troughs, so water ran through all the rooms facing the many inwardly-opening courtyards. No, the Moors went one further: they even carved tiny troughs in the banisters for the stairs, so water could trickle down through them as well!
Admittedly, in Dust the Calormenes have conquered Narnia for only five years, so I don't suppose they've built much yet... but I can't help but wonder: will there be people like Emrah Tarkaan, or maybe even Yasruddin Tarkaan, who fall in love with this green and fertile land and don't wish to leave? Might some of them even "go native" -- and if they do, how will they deal with deified Pevensies -- and vice versa? ;)
~ Laughing Collie
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-07 07:07 am (UTC)(In the back end of Dust, the Calormenes ended up being very, very Roman-based, mostly because I'm a Romanist so that's where it's easiest for me to draw from from, which is most evident in this chapter but shows up elsewhere too. Thus the vast and diverse range of Calormene auxiliaries.)
But yes, in all likelihood, and because this is always happens, there are undoubtedly Calormenes who fall in love with Narnia for one reason or another.
(no subject)
Date: 2016-03-19 05:22 pm (UTC)Re talking horses: oh, cool! I'm delighted to discover my internal speculation on the mare's ancestry (specifically re "The Mare Who Gambled and Lost") was correct. Foreshadowing: a mark of great literature! :)
I wonder how the native Narnians will react to any Calormenes who so love the land that they want to stay?
I had a curious thought re the "Romanizing" of the Calormene army. I am, of course, no expert on the Romans, but it occurred to me that their solution for losing battles seemed to be to send more and larger armies until the "unpacified" area was conquered. That being the case, and with the Calormenes having a far larger empire (and consequently far more resources to draw on) than little Narnia... it seems to me that something relatively drastic -- like, say, deific intervention a la Rabadash -- will be necessary in order to convince the Calormenes to not just quit invading, but also to withdraw completely. Am I right? :)
~ Laughing Collie
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-21 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-03-03 10:02 pm (UTC)