well behaved women

Buried Queens
Pt. 8

A/N: All Kitoky's fault, again. Wrote this in one evening, pretty much. Critique welcome.

Susan Pevensie has been living alone in London since her siblings died, alone with her grief and determination. She's long since abandoned childish fantasies, but her recent dreams of a great lion give her comfort where nothing else does. And then she is catapulted into Narnia again; but a very, very different Narnia indeed.



The quiet still prickled at her.

Entering the long cool shadows of the trees from the camp made it all the more apparent. There was no life here, and if there had been once it was long dormant, lost to time and shadow.

She followed Caspian into the trees, but once they were within the shelter of the mighty trunks he paused, and with him Apolinar, wrapped in a dark cloak and following her with suspicious eyes. She wore borrowed boots and a tunic and trousers, carrying her dress, and the soldiers around her had stared at her, a few nearly as taken-aback as they'd looked at the harpy.

Susan paused. Did she know this place? Yes, familiarity lingered there, and there, an echo in the line of the land, and trees once well rooted or sapling fallen, rotting, or ancient with gnarled bark and heavy limbs. Yes, she knew it. Any hunting party or expedition had to have a place to stop, at the very least to water their horses, and these woods had been friendlier then, yielding up their secret hollows as gifts to the rulers of Narnia.

She set out quickly, covering ground without flinching, trekking up a long bramble-twined slope heavy with underbrush and thicker trees. It became hard going after a very short time, and she was grateful for the excuse to slow down.

It gave her reasons to furtively search the undergrowth and trees around her, eyes moving restlessly over dark shapes, trying to find coherency in shadows. It was no use; she couldn't find any sign of Narnians, and she doubted she would. But she couldn't stop herself, like she hadn't been able to stop her eyes roving in the dark of the caves, frantically searching for some recognizable mark, some hint of light or a familiar face.

Abruptly she caught sight of a flicker of movement--the quick flash of a tail, a bright eye. She managed to keep going through an effort, staring at the little squirrel who clung to a trunk and stared right back.

Was it a dumb beast or a Talking Animal? She remembered the squirrels as small, excitable creatures prone to excessive chatter, quick to hope and cheer. They'd amused Edmund most of all. And that flick of its tail could almost be categorized as furtive--

She was still staring when her feet went out from under her abruptly, down an unexpected slope, heels gouging into soft damp earth. She caught herself on a handful of thin, thorn-covered branches and hissed in pain, twisting and clenching her fingers until she found her footing and could loose her grip. Blood was already welling up from the torn skin, sliding along her palm. She stared down at it, dismayed, and flexed her fingers experimentally. The skin tugged, and her hand prickled with pain.

Caspian came to a stop beside her--he'd obviously taken a more careful approach to the descent, once her drop warned them. He took her hand before she could protest and examined it, eyes moving over her skin, mouth tightening.

After a moment he said, "it will need to be cleaned when we reach the water."

Apolinar came to her other side and unexpectedly put a hand beneath her arm, balancing her as she picked her way down the slope in the too-big boots. His face was inscrutable, and his touch wasn't painful, but she didn't think he was happy about the arrangements.

It turned out they taken a shortcut.

She'd been intending to loop around in order to find the clearer path on higher ground, but time had apparently eroded the security of the ground, and the thick bushes and trees had died or at least thinned out. She hoped the spring hadn't run dry.

Here, with some of the cover cleared away, the markings were more visible. Susan noticed them even when she stopped looking and began paying close attention to where she placed her feet. It was unlikely that Caspian and Apolinar, well trained soldiers following a possible enemy, would pay little enough attention to their surroundings to miss them.

She wasn't surprised when Caspian halted, but she still felt a sharp thrill of alarm.

"Susan Pevensie," he said after a moment, accent lilting curiously over the syllables. "What are they?"

She twisted, sure footed now, pulling her arm out of Apolinar's grasp. A sign composed of a collection of flowing lines. It mean water, actually, but there was no need for him to know it meant anything.

The silence had gone on too long. She gave them both a empty, composed face, staring them down without flinching. "Why do you assume they mean anything? They look like scratchings in bark to me."

Caspian smiled thinly and waited, the silence thickening.

"My lord," she said, putting icy precision on each syllable. "They are too old to concern you."

"I think we'll decide what concerns us," Apolinar countered, his voice dark. His eyes were narrow, and she had the feeling that if he was still holding her his fingers would be biting into her arm from all the tension he was gathering.

Decide all you want. I won't play along. She stepped away, further down the lack-of-path. "Do you need the water or not?"

Apolinar started to speak, but Caspian raised a hand, expression opaque, and they followed her. Probably a temporary reprieve, but one she was grateful of all the same.

She halted at two trees leaning together with brambles and bushes covering the entrance thickly. Apparently this barrier had not lessened. Stepping carefully between shrubbery, she let her feet find the surprisingly intact path and follow it. Apolinar gave a muffled curse behind her as he followed, apparently not careful enough, but Caspian was quiet except for the rustling of his passage.

The trickle of water reached her ears before she actually emerged, and when she did she came to a halt, a soft sigh of pure pleasure easing out of her. It was still incredibly beautiful, and curiously untouched.

The years seemed to have passed over this pool of clear water. Set deep in the rock, it was fed by a number of small streams, the majority of them trickling down a rough rock face that led to it. The earth that hemmed it in moved in serpentine lines, curving in and out and providing informal ledges.

And unlike in the surrounding woods, here flashes of life showed. A fish flicked fins in the depths of the pool and shivered back into the shadows of the rocks. A bird chirruped softly in the trees, and there might have been the gleam of eyes in the low underbrush on the other side of the pool. Some tension she hadn't even quite been aware of loosed from Susan's shoulders. There was life here. She'd been half afraid it was a wasteland, fallen fatally still under a pall of dark magic. She sank to her knees and dipped her hands into the pool, splashing water on her face.

"Bring them back," Caspian said to Apolinar, and the man nodded, bowed with his arm held against his stomach, grimaced briefly at the gauntlet of thorns before pushing back into them.

Caspian walked toward Susan.

The dress had fallen in a soft pale heap beside her; warily watching him out of the corner of her eyes, she picked it up with her unwounded hand and dipped it into the water, promptly faced a dilemma. How do you scrub fabric with only one useful hand?

And for that matter, was it polite to scrub your clothes in someone's drinking water?

Before she could go into deep debate on that one, Caspian knelt beside her and took her wrist, surprisingly gentle. She allowed him to guide it down and he pulled it below the surface of the water, examining the wounds as the fluid cleaned the blood away. He lifted it out after a moment.

"Shallow," he said. "But they should be bandaged."

She lifted her dress.

He slid her a look from beneath dark lashes, one eyebrow cocking. "There is little enough fabric there as it is," he said quietly, mouth quirking, and released her wrist to cut strips off of his white shirt.

While he dressed the minor wounds with the same meticulous care he'd shown her feet, she lifted her head to look at the trees, scanning the canopy and the latticework of thinner branches at the heights. Sunlight filtered through in sleepy, honeyed beams, filling the space with a heavy golden warmth, and it lulled her.

"Do you think you're going to win?" The words slipped out easily, quiet and peaceful, dropping into the silence like sharp stones. His fingers froze, biting into her skin, and he kept his head down for a long moment; she knew she'd made a mistake, but refused to retract it or back down. She remembered Caspian--her Caspian, Narnia's Caspian--as being fiercely full of determination. This man seemed hollowed out, grimly set, like subdued England to Narnia's golden life. When there was no answer, she looked at him.

"I will see Miraz dead," he said softly, eyes burning. His grip on her wrist was almost cruel now, mouth tautly curved. He didn't seem to see her at all, only some private nightmare.

"You hate him," she observed, unsurprised. Undoubtedly, without Cornelius's protective efforts, he would have known of his father's true death much sooner. Cornelius had wanted him to grow up unburdened by hate. Clearly the political machinations of Telmarine Lords high and low had no such concerns.

He lowered his head again, and finished tying off the knot, grip gentling. "I will reclaim Narnia, as it is mine by birthright."

"Narnia," she said, biting off each word, "belongs to no Telmarine."

"No? But you are no Narnian. You are human."

"I am nothing less and nothing more," she whispered, fiercely and half to her self. The sum of my parts...even when I didn't remember, I knew. She had to believe that, had to hold onto that, or now, home again, she didn't know how she'd survive. He cocked his head to the side, watching her.

"Telmarines conquered this land," he said, and unfamiliar arrogance flared, marking his dark eyes and proud, set mouth. "By right--"

"Which is why they cower in their stone walled city now," she snapped, and then pulled up short.

His mouth moved in a hard smile, not particularly happy but satisfied. "How do you know this?" He asked. "If you are, as you said, not from the city--"

"I--" She began, and knew it wouldn't be of much use. He'd just come to a conclusion, and she didn't think it was one she'd like. This wasn't England, with telephones and telegrams and newspapers. Nor was it old Narnia, where gossip and news was carried by birds and mice and even sometimes by the very caressing sigh of the wind. "I take care to know my enemies," she ended with instead, sharp. If she couldn't assuage his suspicions, that didn't mean she'd back down or act ashamed.

She almost missed the hesitation, but it was there. "Is that what we were?" He asked, staring at her. "Enemies?"

Prickles danced down her spine, and Susan wondered if he was even aware he'd used the past tense. Was it something subconscious, swimming up, or a deliberate choice? What had Cornelius really told him? And what, damn it all, had Cornelius known?

"I--" She began.

Movement deep in the bushes as soldiers pushed into sight, led by Apolinar. Feranzo was there as well, but the veteran among the three she was most familiar with was missing. Evidently Mazramorn had been spared this duty.

Caspian broke away from her and went to instruct them. She pulled the dress out of the water, tightened the knot on her bandages absently with her teeth, and then plunged both hands back in and began to scrub. The chilly water swiftly numbed the hot sting of pain, and she was finished in only a moment, draping her dress over the grass and sitting back.

The Telmarines, Caspian included, were filling water skins, flasks, pitchers and pots with the cold water, some of them drinking it greedily with their hands. Burdened by a collection of flasks, Caspian at last stood up and announced a halt to the proceedings. "We will return to camp," he said, and nodded at one of the younger men. "Mark the trail as we return."

Apolinar cocked his head at her and she rose to her feet, gathering her dress up in her arms, and followed the obediently.

The trail was clear-cut this time, and easy to traverse. She hardly thought anyone could have difficulty with it, but then she was extremely well trained for a Queen, and some of the boys looked younger than her, and utterly inexperienced. None of them had fresh-eyed naivety, though, which she was grateful for; that tended to get you killed in battle. They were a collection of grim, serious men.

Apolinar helped her again, twice, catching her elbow. She wasted time wondering what game he was playing, because his eyes were no more friendly, until she realized that it was habitual courtesy, and had very little to do with her, personally, at all. The realization sent a wash of morbid amusement over her. How long had it been when someone who was not interested in her personally--as a queen, as a beautiful girl, as a tragic figure--had shown her courtesy? Too long. And how long has it been since I've walked among true Narnians? She thought with a flicker of bitterness. Too long.

Back into camp, hard earth beneath the shadowed edges of canopy--and there was someone waiting there. A man on a horse, both exhausted, the man's face drawn with lines of harsh exertion. He was bleeding from his shoulder, fluid slipping between his fingers, and he spoke in a mangled fumble of language, harshly out of breath.

Apolinar went rigid. "Caspian," he barked, and the prince came up beside them, swept the camp with a single glance, and shouted a series of quick, harsh orders.

Then he turned toward the two men--from their dress, she guessed sentries--flanking the man who'd brought news. "Keep her in the tent," he snapped. "Guard her."

They both bowed, and Susan moved forward before they could step toward her. "Where are you going?"

Apolinar and Caspian both turned toward her, Apolinar's face hardening with suspicion.

Don't look at me like that, you stupid bastard, she thought in a flush of helpless, unexpected fury, I can helpyou-- Caspian held her eyes for a long, unreadable moment before his face hardened and he turned away.

"Watch her carefully," Apolinar said curtly, and the two men nodded and moved in on her. She shied away, backing before they could touch her, and they herded her toward the tent entrance.

They didn't follow her inside, which was a relief. She tossed the dress on the rugs and sank down, listening to men gearing up, the whickers and restless sounds of horses, and finally a low clear voice she recognized down to her soul before the thunder of hooves began and receded.

They were going to battle. It was obvious. Body rigid with tension, listening to the quiet voices of the men outside, she laid back in the furs, toeing off the big boots--she might have blisters tomorrow--and closing her eyes against the quiet gloom of the tent walls. Am I supposed to just wait here patiently? She thought of Lucy, curled in the belly of Aslan's How, waiting patiently for their return, and felt the familiar savage spike of pain, dulled by time and countless tears.

She abruptly felt too frustrated to cry herself to sleep one more time, rolled over, and fisted her hands. I'm too wound up, she thought. I won't be able to sleep--

True to form, that meant in only moments she was slipping out of consciousness.


She awoke to the soft, clinging shadows of twilight, and the hush of the camp around her. Even the quiet conversations of her guards were gone now. She didn't want to test her luck by checking if they were actually sleeping.

But with some effort, and smearing her elbows and front with dust, she managed to roll under the canvas.

Outside the air was cool and dim, light fading gently. Late afternoon, perhaps; she'd taken a longer nap than she expected, although admittedly light came through the trees with difficulty. The camp was largely empty, looking peculiarly desolate despite the fact that she was only barely familiar with it when it was full of men and motion.

She reached the treeline and stepped carefully to the side of one towering tree, concealing herself from the casual eye. Then, craning her neck, Susan searched the treetops. Even if it was a Talking Animal, she was forced to admit, it might not come. It might simply assume she accompanied Caspian's Telmarines of her own free will.

But she was counting on a squirrel's notorious curiosity, which dragged them into all sorts of situations, and she was willing to wait.

The woods still felt eerily empty of life, but it felt more peaceful, and she leaned against the trunk, bark digging into her back, and waited in absolute quiet. It felt a little like the tense stillness before a battle, when your world narrows down to focus on the moments ahead and you find yourself holding your breath and forcing your grip to loosen on your bow. But she didn't quite know what she was waiting so tensely for; she hardly expected the squirrel to come flying out of the branches and attack her.

And then there was a soft rustle of leaves, and she lifted her head to see the squirrel perched on one of the tree roots, bright black eyes watching her intently.

It has to be a Talking Animal. It wouldn't have followed us otherwise. A small, cautious bubble of hope swelled under her breastbone. Unless it came for food, a slightly more cynical voice warned.

Susan pushed herself away from the tree, moving as quietly and gently as she could, gliding over damp dead leaves and twigs. For a brief dizzying moment she recalled Jill, Jill whose testimony she'd dismissed along with all the others, and the way she moved over the ground like a satin-shod ghost. Everything familiar in Narnia reminded her of her family, and her heart squeezed painfully, making her briefly and treacherously near-glad of its strangeness. The squirrel cocked its head to the side but didn't flee, and in only a moment she was kneeling before it. She extended her fingers, letting it sniff them.

"Find--" she hesitated, her voice a low harsh whisper. "Find Trumpkin for me, please. Tell him...tell him my horn summoned me." Cornelius had known something; she hoped Trumpkin would, as well. If he at least had remnants...

The squirrel stared at her and for a second her heart sank--just a beast, tame enough to allow approach but uncomprehending--and then it reached out, carefully, and wrapped a small, delicately-boned paw around several of her fingers, tipping its head forward. The air came out of her in a gasp, the relief was so intense.

Behind her, someone called out sharply.

She leapt to her feet and spun, heart pounding in her chest, guilt--despite the fact that she had nothing to be guilty for--feeling like it was spread all over her face. Apolinar, Caspian and two other men were approaching her; she didn't know how she'd missed the hoofbeats. Damnit! They must have been going slowly, and she'd been so focused on the squirrel...

"What," one of the nameless soldiers said sharply, "was she doing?"

Apolinar shaded his eyes briefly, looking into the tree. "It's a squirrel," he observed dryly.

They all looked at her, taking in her clothing, the dirt on her front. Her whole body felt frozen, poised to bolt. She didn't know what they'd do, but she knew she'd just stepped over a dangerous line. Couldn't you have been a few minutes later?

"It was cute," she finally said evenly, meeting their stares without flinching. When all else fails, be brazenly ridiculous. People rarely know how to handle it. There was a moment of silence while they digested this.

"It's a rodent," Apolinar remarked, black eyes sparking with unexpected amusement.

"I gave orders for you to be confined," Caspian said softly. His face was unreadable.

She had no answer for this, so she simply waited stiffly.

After a moment Caspian simply nodded at the two unknown soldiers and strode away, Apolinar at his side. They each took an arm and marched her back to the tent, through a camp suddenly full again. They deposited her at the tent flap, turning to guard it. She stopped before pushing inside, running her eyes over the camp.

Wounded men were everywhere.

Most of them were minor; a gash on the arm, bruises to the ribs, blood along the face but no signs of concussion. But there were some--gutshot, blood frothing at their lips--that made her shudder and ache for Lucy's elixir, her hands flexing. She had been no stranger to treating wounds when she was Queen, and when she returned to England after the accident she'd reentered the field from a mundane point of view, and watching them struggle and suffer made her want with a painful intensity to move forward and offer aid.

There's nothing you can do that they can't, she told herself, watching men move through the ranks of wounded, alternately exchanging what sounded like jokes with the mostly whole and bending grim-faced over the deeply wounded. Their competence was obvious. And these men are not your allies. Do you really think that revealing more of your identity will help you?

It still hurt to turn her back.