Narnia fic!
The Finish-a-thon deadline isn't until the 31st, but my fic is done, the Master List entry is already posted, and kerravonsen already posted her fic. So I'm posting mine. Early! Will wonders never cease?
Title: By Sun and Candlelight
Author: kalquessa
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia
Genre: Gen, Character study
Word Count: 2,823
Written for: multific's Finish-a-thon
Characters: Susan
Season/Spoilers: All of the books, Last Battle in particular, naturally.
Rating: G
Warnings: Second-person narrative voice. Self-indulgent lyricism. Implied theology.
Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of Narnia, nor of England, nor of the Country some have found beyond the Eastern Sea.
Summary: You remember bright-fletched arrows and how it felt to pull them back against a well-strung bow.
A/N: As usual, this fic owes its existence to a number of lovely people. expectare and ellenmillion performed much-needed beta sweeps. Any remaining errors in grammar, spelling, or canon-compliance are not theirs. izhilzha listened to me dither about second person narrative, said encouraging things, and sent helpful links. kerravonsen put the thought of entering this as a Finish-a-thon bunny in my head, and then ran the Finish-a-thon like the pro she is, just as she does every year. Ladies, you are rock stars one and all!
1.
"You walked with him the night he died."
Halfway up the staircase, you turn and find that you are being addressed by Jill Pole.
"I don't know what you mean." You try to be calm and civil, but after the argument with Peter it's no wonder that you sound a trifle exasperated, even to your own ears.
"Lucy told me. The night Aslan was sacrificed on the Stone Table. The night the Deep Magic was broken. Lucy said the two of you walked with him while Peter and Edmund slept." Jill's face is set in a stormy frown that you find particularly nettling, for some reason. You can't understand why your siblings have suddenly begun to enjoy the company of your tiresome younger cousin, but why they should also encourage visits from Eustace's mousy school friend is even more baffling. The girl isn't even as old as Lucy and her manners can only be described as uncongenial. Yet the others seem to prefer this shrill little creature's company to your own, lately.
"Lucy and the rest of them talk a great deal of make-believe people and events," You reply loftily. "You can't expect me to remember every game we ever made up to amuse ourselves."
"How can you deny him like that?" The question is sharp, a zealot's demand. "How can you deny him after everything? You walked with him, touched his mane, rode on his back." Jill's voice quavers ever so slightly as she says, "He called you 'dearest'. Lucy told me."
More than a little disconcerted, you stare at the younger girl for a long moment in silence. Realization, when it hits, is so startling that you laugh before you can stop yourself.
"Good Lord! Are you actually jealous?" The sheer madness of it all, of arguing with Peter, of Edmund and Lucy's wounded gazes, of this girl-child's harping reproaches, wrings another gasp of laughter from you. "Has everyone really gone completely mad? What are you jealous of? It's all pretend, a game for when we were bored!" And then, because you asked Peter the same question an hour ago, and received no satisfactory answer: "Don't you understand how ridiculous you all are?"
Jill Pole regards you wordlessly, just long enough for the silence to grow taught and oppressive. Then the younger girl drops her eyes, her jaw tight, gives a nod that could mean anything, and walks away. Feeling unsettled and harried, you continue upstairs, where you wash your hair and mend the hem of a skirt you hardly wear. The small rituals of sanity calm your nerves, and you begin to feel a little better. Later, you sleep and dream of weeping into warm golden fur, the weight of a bow in your hand. You remember nothing upon waking.
2.
The last time you see Edmund is when he comes to say goodbye to you. He is leaving with Peter and Professor Kirke on some errand that sounds like more of the made-up nonsense they all favor. He knows you disapprove of the whole thing, but he comes anyway and taps at your door. You sigh, give him an indulgent smile, and ask him if he plans to slay any dragons while he is away, your voice half teasing and half chiding. He smiles at that, perhaps a little sadly at the edges, but still with affection.
"Take care, Su," he says, holding out his hand.
You reply, "You, as well, Ed," and after a moment put your hand in his. Instead of merely squeezing it briefly, the way you expect him to, he bows to brush a kiss across your knuckles. It is a strange gesture, too graceful and gracious for any young man of nineteen, let alone one that needs a haircut as badly as Edmund does. Yet, in the moment it takes him to right himself and depart, it seems as natural as breathing. You are restless and unsettled for an hour afterward, but you don't wonder why.
3.
The grave markers stand all in a line, and it occurs to you that if one were to walk past reading out the names they bear under one's breath it would form a driving, steady drumbeat: "Pevensie, Pevensie, Pevensie, Pevensie, Pevensie." You do not walk past but stand, numb in body and mind, until long after the cold has worked its way up from the ground through the soles of your shoes and set its teeth in your feet and ankles. You slowly come awake to the raw feeling of breath going in and out of your body and you shift your gaze to watch it drift away as a cloud on the air before you. You don't know why you half hope and half dread to recognize some shape in the shifting mist before each breath fades to nothing. You haven't slept properly for a week, and you blame any odd turns you've had in the past few days on the lack of rest, and the shock. You shake off these thoughts as you shake the cold ache out of your ankles, turn away, and set out toward home alone.
4.
Some while after you've fled the party, Jane finds you on the second-floor balcony, looking out at the house's sprawling grounds.
"Here you are," she says, and joins you at the railing. "I wondered where you'd disappeared to."
It's a warm evening, but you wrap your arms about yourself as if to ward off a chill. "I think I wasn't ready to come back to all this, after all."
"Well, you've been through a great deal," she replies. "No one expects you to just dive back into gay society and smile and flirt like nothing's happened. Well," she gives you a chagrined smile, "nobody but poor Thomas, anyway."
Her smile draws a faint, bewildered laugh from you, and you hide your face in your hands for a moment. "I never meant to be so...he must think me the biggest snob on the earth, speaking to him like that. He only wanted me to stop moping."
"People who have been through everything you have are permitted to mope, and they should not have to endure clumsy teasing, however well-intentioned," Jane asserts, putting one hand on your shoulder. "He should have expected nothing less than to be cut down. Although I doubt he expected quite that regal a reaction." She smiles at you, amused.
"If by 'regal' you mean 'more than a little unhinged,'" you protest. "I really don't know what came over me."
"You've been through a great deal," she says again, her smile turning serious.
"I know." You take a deep breath of the country air, and close your eyes for a long moment. "But he had a point, I haven't exactly contributed to the holiday mood, the past two days. It's just that...after the accident, there was so much to do with the estate and everything, papers that had to be signed and people that had to be paid...I was so long getting things settled and seen to that I suppose I just got used to the quiet and to being by myself."
"It must have been difficult taking care of all that yourself."
"I wanted to do it, though," you insist. "I made them all let me do as much as I could myself. It gave me something to be doing. Now that it's all sorted out and done, I thought...but I seem to have forgotten how to even have a conversation that isn't somber and dull." You give a little self-deprecating laugh. "No, I don't think I was ready for this, after all. I should never have come."
"Maybe something smaller to start out," Jane suggests. "A weekend in the country might be too much just now, but an evening gala or a dinner, something in town so that you could get back home afterward..." she trails off, looking at you with concern.
"Maybe," you reply, sounding non-committal even to yourself. Jane looks at you, considering for a long moment, then seems to come to some decision.
"Listen, Su, for a while now I've been feeling a bit...I don't know, tired out, I suppose. With the whole society scene, I mean." She waves a hand back at the door behind you. "And being out here, out of the city for the past two days has made me think of summers on my grandparents' farm. I miss the country, it seems."
You smile at a memory that has been on the edges of your mind ever since you left London two days ago. "We were so happy, that time in the country. The four of us, I mean. I know there was a war going on everywhere else, but we had such games, and we were so happy together. Mum always said that the country did us an amazing amount of good."
"Well then," Jane's smile widens. "How about this: when we get back to town, I'll start making inquiries about cottages for lease. Once I've found one, the two of us will retire with a trunk of sentimental novels for a quiet holiday in the countryside. Like the stodgy old heiresses we are, eh?"
You can't help but laugh a little, at Jane's humor and at the little flower of relief that blossoms at her suggestion. You find yourself nodding. "I think that sounds marvelous."
"Good." Jane puts and arm across your shoulders. "I think we'll both be better for a little rest and fresh air."
5.
Your first day at the cottage you take a walk alone, and find yourself in someone's orchard. The sun through the leaves and the cider smell of early-fallen apples remind you of something you can't quite call to mind, and you wonder why it seems to you that they should be mixed with a distant fragrance of salt water.
6.
Autumn in the country with Jane is blessedly peaceful, though you find yourself unable to spend long hours reading novel after novel as she does. You discover that you enjoy sewing and knitting, things that you learned to do of necessity in wartime, but which now provide a way to fill the hours with something both pleasant and productive.
The train back to London breaks down in the middle of a quiet valley dusted over with the winter's first snow, and the two of you find yourselves sharing a box for far longer than expected with two children and their grandparents. You're inclined to hide behind your knitting in silence, but the little girl asks what you are making, and Jane inquires about the book the gentleman is reading, and a steady stream of conversation is set in motion. By the time the train is running again you are all laughing at a story that the grandmother is telling about her grandson and at his indignant protests at being slandered in this way. You are a merry party getting off the train, even if you are all quite tired from your unexpectedly long day of travel.
I haven't laughed like that since the last time we were all together in Narnia. The thought passes from your mind as quickly as it entered, and you climb into the cab Jane hails to promptly fall asleep on her shoulder. You won't have occasion to ask yourself what you meant by it until ten years later, when you are telling the whole story to your brother-in-law after Christmas dinner. On the drive home--your head pillowed on your husband's shoulder instead of Jane's this time--you will decide that you must have been thinking of the games you played with Lucy and Edmund and Peter back during the war. You will marvel drowsily for a moment at how easy it is to think of them now, without pain or pause, before you fall asleep.
7.
You feel like you are getting old and your memory must not be what it once was because you can't remember some things readily any more, and there are others that you can't remember at all. You have forgotten almost everything about the trip you took to America when you were young, the year of the train accident is a blur, and you can never recall if your youngest was born before or after you moved into the house where you now live. Sometimes you're halfway through a novel before you realize you've read it before and know how it ends.
You also suspect that you may be going just a bit off your head in your old age (you are only just fifty, but you can remember when you considered any age over thirty-five very old indeed) because you can remember places you've never been to, things you've never done. You recall graceful towers against the sky, banners and horses, blue silk and green water. You remember bright-fletched arrows and how it felt to pull them back against a well-strung bow. These memories cannot belong to you, and you're a little glad for that: they are beautiful with a sharp, quick beauty that is exhilarating but exhausting, and perhaps a little painful. You might have had the strength for something like that once, but now you prefer the softer, gentler beauty of a warm kitchen on a cold afternoon, your children's smiles, and autumn sunlight at the window.
8.
Narnia creeps back into your memory the same way that it left so long ago: gently and imperceptibly. When you find yourself one day recalling what it was like to throw your arms around your brother when he was still fully kitted-out in battle-scarred armor, it seems almost like you never forgot Narnia in the first place. You remember more and more as you get older, and that strikes you as rather amusing. You have a sense that Narnia and your memories of it have always been somewhere just out of sight, waiting patiently for the day when you'd want them again. It seems that you put them away one day, just to keep things tidy, and after a while when you had no occasion to get them out again, forgot you had them at all. But you are well and truly old now, and old age gives you opportunities to open the old cupboards and drawers (and wardrobes) of your mind, discovering old treasures, finding new uses for things put away as troublesome clutter and purposeless keepsakes. Once you would have had no use for red-and-gold banners on the wind or the sound of horns, but now they seem as essential a remembrance as that of dancing with your husband at your daughter's wedding. You're never going to visit either Archenland or America again, but you're glad you know the way to both. You have to smother a chuckle when an acquaintance asks where you came by your recipe for savory herb bread because you're reasonably certain that you got it from a badger.
When your youngest grandson whispers fearfully of the monsters in his closet, you do not try to convince him that they don't exist. Instead, you send him to sleep with stories of a place far off--and yet so very near--where children may meet monsters, true, but also trees who talk and animals that chat over tea, unicorns, dwarves, centaurs, and a great, wise Lion.
9.
You gaze at the trees all around you, at the blue sky above and the lush grass under your feet, and it occurs to you to wonder why you aren't confused or surprised.
"I'm back in Narnia," you say, and your certainty is no less sure for being quietly and simply expressed.
"There you are," Lucy says from just behind you, and you turn. She is sitting between your brothers on the grass.
"Here I am," you reply.
"We were beginning to worry that we'd have to put off serving the tea," Edmund scolds with a smile, rising to greet you with a sketch of the same bow he gave when he kissed your hand in farewell. Peter stands as well, and offers a hand to Lucy, who is already halfway to her feet when she remembers to let him help her. They look exactly as they did the last time you saw them, though they are smiling, now.
"You haven't gotten a day older!" You exclaim.
"Neither have you," Peter laughs, and when you look down at your hands, feel the ease with which the breath enters and leaves your lungs, the steady, strong beat of your heart, you realize that he must be right.
"But I've been away for ages," you protest, and then Lucy is laughing. You realize that it really is incredibly funny, and you're all laughing joyously when the Lion steps out of the trees. You fall silent and return his gaze seriously.
"Susan."
"Sir." You find that you remember how to curtsy like a queen.
"Dearest," he says then, and it is warmth and light and returning home to all things best beloved.
Title: By Sun and Candlelight
Author: kalquessa
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia
Genre: Gen, Character study
Word Count: 2,823
Written for: multific's Finish-a-thon
Characters: Susan
Season/Spoilers: All of the books, Last Battle in particular, naturally.
Rating: G
Warnings: Second-person narrative voice. Self-indulgent lyricism. Implied theology.
Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of Narnia, nor of England, nor of the Country some have found beyond the Eastern Sea.
Summary: You remember bright-fletched arrows and how it felt to pull them back against a well-strung bow.
A/N: As usual, this fic owes its existence to a number of lovely people. expectare and ellenmillion performed much-needed beta sweeps. Any remaining errors in grammar, spelling, or canon-compliance are not theirs. izhilzha listened to me dither about second person narrative, said encouraging things, and sent helpful links. kerravonsen put the thought of entering this as a Finish-a-thon bunny in my head, and then ran the Finish-a-thon like the pro she is, just as she does every year. Ladies, you are rock stars one and all!
1.
"You walked with him the night he died."
Halfway up the staircase, you turn and find that you are being addressed by Jill Pole.
"I don't know what you mean." You try to be calm and civil, but after the argument with Peter it's no wonder that you sound a trifle exasperated, even to your own ears.
"Lucy told me. The night Aslan was sacrificed on the Stone Table. The night the Deep Magic was broken. Lucy said the two of you walked with him while Peter and Edmund slept." Jill's face is set in a stormy frown that you find particularly nettling, for some reason. You can't understand why your siblings have suddenly begun to enjoy the company of your tiresome younger cousin, but why they should also encourage visits from Eustace's mousy school friend is even more baffling. The girl isn't even as old as Lucy and her manners can only be described as uncongenial. Yet the others seem to prefer this shrill little creature's company to your own, lately.
"Lucy and the rest of them talk a great deal of make-believe people and events," You reply loftily. "You can't expect me to remember every game we ever made up to amuse ourselves."
"How can you deny him like that?" The question is sharp, a zealot's demand. "How can you deny him after everything? You walked with him, touched his mane, rode on his back." Jill's voice quavers ever so slightly as she says, "He called you 'dearest'. Lucy told me."
More than a little disconcerted, you stare at the younger girl for a long moment in silence. Realization, when it hits, is so startling that you laugh before you can stop yourself.
"Good Lord! Are you actually jealous?" The sheer madness of it all, of arguing with Peter, of Edmund and Lucy's wounded gazes, of this girl-child's harping reproaches, wrings another gasp of laughter from you. "Has everyone really gone completely mad? What are you jealous of? It's all pretend, a game for when we were bored!" And then, because you asked Peter the same question an hour ago, and received no satisfactory answer: "Don't you understand how ridiculous you all are?"
Jill Pole regards you wordlessly, just long enough for the silence to grow taught and oppressive. Then the younger girl drops her eyes, her jaw tight, gives a nod that could mean anything, and walks away. Feeling unsettled and harried, you continue upstairs, where you wash your hair and mend the hem of a skirt you hardly wear. The small rituals of sanity calm your nerves, and you begin to feel a little better. Later, you sleep and dream of weeping into warm golden fur, the weight of a bow in your hand. You remember nothing upon waking.
2.
The last time you see Edmund is when he comes to say goodbye to you. He is leaving with Peter and Professor Kirke on some errand that sounds like more of the made-up nonsense they all favor. He knows you disapprove of the whole thing, but he comes anyway and taps at your door. You sigh, give him an indulgent smile, and ask him if he plans to slay any dragons while he is away, your voice half teasing and half chiding. He smiles at that, perhaps a little sadly at the edges, but still with affection.
"Take care, Su," he says, holding out his hand.
You reply, "You, as well, Ed," and after a moment put your hand in his. Instead of merely squeezing it briefly, the way you expect him to, he bows to brush a kiss across your knuckles. It is a strange gesture, too graceful and gracious for any young man of nineteen, let alone one that needs a haircut as badly as Edmund does. Yet, in the moment it takes him to right himself and depart, it seems as natural as breathing. You are restless and unsettled for an hour afterward, but you don't wonder why.
3.
The grave markers stand all in a line, and it occurs to you that if one were to walk past reading out the names they bear under one's breath it would form a driving, steady drumbeat: "Pevensie, Pevensie, Pevensie, Pevensie, Pevensie." You do not walk past but stand, numb in body and mind, until long after the cold has worked its way up from the ground through the soles of your shoes and set its teeth in your feet and ankles. You slowly come awake to the raw feeling of breath going in and out of your body and you shift your gaze to watch it drift away as a cloud on the air before you. You don't know why you half hope and half dread to recognize some shape in the shifting mist before each breath fades to nothing. You haven't slept properly for a week, and you blame any odd turns you've had in the past few days on the lack of rest, and the shock. You shake off these thoughts as you shake the cold ache out of your ankles, turn away, and set out toward home alone.
4.
Some while after you've fled the party, Jane finds you on the second-floor balcony, looking out at the house's sprawling grounds.
"Here you are," she says, and joins you at the railing. "I wondered where you'd disappeared to."
It's a warm evening, but you wrap your arms about yourself as if to ward off a chill. "I think I wasn't ready to come back to all this, after all."
"Well, you've been through a great deal," she replies. "No one expects you to just dive back into gay society and smile and flirt like nothing's happened. Well," she gives you a chagrined smile, "nobody but poor Thomas, anyway."
Her smile draws a faint, bewildered laugh from you, and you hide your face in your hands for a moment. "I never meant to be so...he must think me the biggest snob on the earth, speaking to him like that. He only wanted me to stop moping."
"People who have been through everything you have are permitted to mope, and they should not have to endure clumsy teasing, however well-intentioned," Jane asserts, putting one hand on your shoulder. "He should have expected nothing less than to be cut down. Although I doubt he expected quite that regal a reaction." She smiles at you, amused.
"If by 'regal' you mean 'more than a little unhinged,'" you protest. "I really don't know what came over me."
"You've been through a great deal," she says again, her smile turning serious.
"I know." You take a deep breath of the country air, and close your eyes for a long moment. "But he had a point, I haven't exactly contributed to the holiday mood, the past two days. It's just that...after the accident, there was so much to do with the estate and everything, papers that had to be signed and people that had to be paid...I was so long getting things settled and seen to that I suppose I just got used to the quiet and to being by myself."
"It must have been difficult taking care of all that yourself."
"I wanted to do it, though," you insist. "I made them all let me do as much as I could myself. It gave me something to be doing. Now that it's all sorted out and done, I thought...but I seem to have forgotten how to even have a conversation that isn't somber and dull." You give a little self-deprecating laugh. "No, I don't think I was ready for this, after all. I should never have come."
"Maybe something smaller to start out," Jane suggests. "A weekend in the country might be too much just now, but an evening gala or a dinner, something in town so that you could get back home afterward..." she trails off, looking at you with concern.
"Maybe," you reply, sounding non-committal even to yourself. Jane looks at you, considering for a long moment, then seems to come to some decision.
"Listen, Su, for a while now I've been feeling a bit...I don't know, tired out, I suppose. With the whole society scene, I mean." She waves a hand back at the door behind you. "And being out here, out of the city for the past two days has made me think of summers on my grandparents' farm. I miss the country, it seems."
You smile at a memory that has been on the edges of your mind ever since you left London two days ago. "We were so happy, that time in the country. The four of us, I mean. I know there was a war going on everywhere else, but we had such games, and we were so happy together. Mum always said that the country did us an amazing amount of good."
"Well then," Jane's smile widens. "How about this: when we get back to town, I'll start making inquiries about cottages for lease. Once I've found one, the two of us will retire with a trunk of sentimental novels for a quiet holiday in the countryside. Like the stodgy old heiresses we are, eh?"
You can't help but laugh a little, at Jane's humor and at the little flower of relief that blossoms at her suggestion. You find yourself nodding. "I think that sounds marvelous."
"Good." Jane puts and arm across your shoulders. "I think we'll both be better for a little rest and fresh air."
5.
Your first day at the cottage you take a walk alone, and find yourself in someone's orchard. The sun through the leaves and the cider smell of early-fallen apples remind you of something you can't quite call to mind, and you wonder why it seems to you that they should be mixed with a distant fragrance of salt water.
6.
Autumn in the country with Jane is blessedly peaceful, though you find yourself unable to spend long hours reading novel after novel as she does. You discover that you enjoy sewing and knitting, things that you learned to do of necessity in wartime, but which now provide a way to fill the hours with something both pleasant and productive.
The train back to London breaks down in the middle of a quiet valley dusted over with the winter's first snow, and the two of you find yourselves sharing a box for far longer than expected with two children and their grandparents. You're inclined to hide behind your knitting in silence, but the little girl asks what you are making, and Jane inquires about the book the gentleman is reading, and a steady stream of conversation is set in motion. By the time the train is running again you are all laughing at a story that the grandmother is telling about her grandson and at his indignant protests at being slandered in this way. You are a merry party getting off the train, even if you are all quite tired from your unexpectedly long day of travel.
I haven't laughed like that since the last time we were all together in Narnia. The thought passes from your mind as quickly as it entered, and you climb into the cab Jane hails to promptly fall asleep on her shoulder. You won't have occasion to ask yourself what you meant by it until ten years later, when you are telling the whole story to your brother-in-law after Christmas dinner. On the drive home--your head pillowed on your husband's shoulder instead of Jane's this time--you will decide that you must have been thinking of the games you played with Lucy and Edmund and Peter back during the war. You will marvel drowsily for a moment at how easy it is to think of them now, without pain or pause, before you fall asleep.
7.
You feel like you are getting old and your memory must not be what it once was because you can't remember some things readily any more, and there are others that you can't remember at all. You have forgotten almost everything about the trip you took to America when you were young, the year of the train accident is a blur, and you can never recall if your youngest was born before or after you moved into the house where you now live. Sometimes you're halfway through a novel before you realize you've read it before and know how it ends.
You also suspect that you may be going just a bit off your head in your old age (you are only just fifty, but you can remember when you considered any age over thirty-five very old indeed) because you can remember places you've never been to, things you've never done. You recall graceful towers against the sky, banners and horses, blue silk and green water. You remember bright-fletched arrows and how it felt to pull them back against a well-strung bow. These memories cannot belong to you, and you're a little glad for that: they are beautiful with a sharp, quick beauty that is exhilarating but exhausting, and perhaps a little painful. You might have had the strength for something like that once, but now you prefer the softer, gentler beauty of a warm kitchen on a cold afternoon, your children's smiles, and autumn sunlight at the window.
8.
Narnia creeps back into your memory the same way that it left so long ago: gently and imperceptibly. When you find yourself one day recalling what it was like to throw your arms around your brother when he was still fully kitted-out in battle-scarred armor, it seems almost like you never forgot Narnia in the first place. You remember more and more as you get older, and that strikes you as rather amusing. You have a sense that Narnia and your memories of it have always been somewhere just out of sight, waiting patiently for the day when you'd want them again. It seems that you put them away one day, just to keep things tidy, and after a while when you had no occasion to get them out again, forgot you had them at all. But you are well and truly old now, and old age gives you opportunities to open the old cupboards and drawers (and wardrobes) of your mind, discovering old treasures, finding new uses for things put away as troublesome clutter and purposeless keepsakes. Once you would have had no use for red-and-gold banners on the wind or the sound of horns, but now they seem as essential a remembrance as that of dancing with your husband at your daughter's wedding. You're never going to visit either Archenland or America again, but you're glad you know the way to both. You have to smother a chuckle when an acquaintance asks where you came by your recipe for savory herb bread because you're reasonably certain that you got it from a badger.
When your youngest grandson whispers fearfully of the monsters in his closet, you do not try to convince him that they don't exist. Instead, you send him to sleep with stories of a place far off--and yet so very near--where children may meet monsters, true, but also trees who talk and animals that chat over tea, unicorns, dwarves, centaurs, and a great, wise Lion.
9.
You gaze at the trees all around you, at the blue sky above and the lush grass under your feet, and it occurs to you to wonder why you aren't confused or surprised.
"I'm back in Narnia," you say, and your certainty is no less sure for being quietly and simply expressed.
"There you are," Lucy says from just behind you, and you turn. She is sitting between your brothers on the grass.
"Here I am," you reply.
"We were beginning to worry that we'd have to put off serving the tea," Edmund scolds with a smile, rising to greet you with a sketch of the same bow he gave when he kissed your hand in farewell. Peter stands as well, and offers a hand to Lucy, who is already halfway to her feet when she remembers to let him help her. They look exactly as they did the last time you saw them, though they are smiling, now.
"You haven't gotten a day older!" You exclaim.
"Neither have you," Peter laughs, and when you look down at your hands, feel the ease with which the breath enters and leaves your lungs, the steady, strong beat of your heart, you realize that he must be right.
"But I've been away for ages," you protest, and then Lucy is laughing. You realize that it really is incredibly funny, and you're all laughing joyously when the Lion steps out of the trees. You fall silent and return his gaze seriously.
"Susan."
"Sir." You find that you remember how to curtsy like a queen.
"Dearest," he says then, and it is warmth and light and returning home to all things best beloved.