[Fic] "Missed Connections" -- Chronicles of Narnia
lyreofsheliak said: Steadfast, Shezan and Susan, taking one another's measure? (575 words)
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
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Missed Connections
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Rabadash's voice preceded him through the outer doors of the temple as Shezan waited beside a frieze of the goddess sowing famine, not bothering to artfully conceal that she was waiting. "--of Achadith, wife and advisor of Tash, great queen of heaven, harbinger of victory and defeat, lady of the eclipse, the earthquake, and all things out of season."
"You may have received reports of it from your people, this past spring," Shezan added, as the Narnian queen stepped within her domain. Her skin was pale as salt that crusted the heart of the desert and her hair, though properly dark, hung scandalously loose and free.
Susan Pevensie smiled. "So I did," she said. She glanced around the antechamber with its mosaics and carvings, then up to the intricately recessed ceiling with its myriad angled slits to let dappled light dance across the marble floor. "I believe they understated its beauty, O sister of my most worthy suitor, and most noble of Tolkheeras, though not the weight of the goddess's presence one feels in the very stones."
She was not, Shezan noted, wearing Rabadash's courting gift around her neck. Instead, she had woven the silver chain with its tiny pearl-encrusted dagger pendant into the circlet that held her hair back from her foam-white face. An interesting balance between acceptance and rejection.
"To receive your judgment is a most singular honor, O most gracious of Queens," Shezan said, and bowed.
When she raised her head, she caught a glint of buried laughter in the Pevensie tetrarch's eye. Yes, she thought. You know that I know, and I know that you know, and neither of us will ever speak a word of the stitches beneath the surface of the Spring Festival. Not in Tashbaan of the thousand eyes and ears.
"The goddess is ever present," Shezan continued, "but one can feel her will more clearly in some places than others. Come with me to the inner sanctum, where I will teach you to purify yourself and listen for the whisper of the gods. You wait here, O my brother," she added to Rabadash, and graciously feigned blindness to both his frustration and the quickly masked relief on Susan Pevensie's face.
"To hear is to obey," the northern queen said, and nothing in her posture or her voice gave the lie to the earnestness Shezan knew must be feigned.
Shezan allowed herself a moment of mourning that this woman was unlikely to become her sister by law. Barbarian and demon-friend though she might be, she had still been a worthy opponent, and by all reports she had taken to the formalities of the Tisroc's court (may he live forever) with the grace and focus of a falcon at the hunt. If she could give half so much loyalty to Calormen as she had given to Narnia, if she became Takhun at Rabadash's side, their mingled splendor might echo and reflect down a thousand years of history.
Ah well. If it was not to be, it was not to be. There were other ways for Shezan's milk-brother to lead Calormen to the fullness of the gods' intended glory.
Perhaps some of them might even allow Susan Pevensie to survive the insult she would pay Calormen when she broke the promise she had so rashly (or unknowingly, which was but rashness by another name) given Rabadash when she allowed him to place a silver chain around her throat.
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End of Ficlet
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Note: The necklace is a reference to Tribute, a three-sentence ficlet about gifts.
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