[au] Narnia and the North

[the_seafarer]

There's a chill bite to the air, these days. The horses have been growing out their winter coats, and they look shaggy and plump as Caspian turns them out into the paddocks. Behind the stables, in the makeshift woodshop he'd cobbled together, the sleigh from his drawings is starting to come together. 

He hopes he'll have it finished by Christmas. With a little luck, and maybe some assistance, he thinks it should be possible. The tack, he's largely left up to Susan's devices, though he'd commission Gimli the dwarf for the various buckles and other metal pieces they'll need.

Once the horses are turned out, he gets to his other morning chores with a will, whistling cheerfully as he does. The stable stays strangely quiet around him. It takes him the better part of an hour to realize the strangeness is because he's become accustomed to Susan's cheerful presence working alongside him, talking or humming or simply working in companionable silence. 

Caspian pauses in his task – refilling the grain chest – and looks around. Susan's nowhere to be seen, and when he later wanders through the stables, checking each stall and outside, he can't find her there, either.

Comments

[sai_delgado]

Susan wrinkles her nose at Caspian. "Thee are braver than that," she teases, before turning back to the doctor. Fog-gray eyes widen in true surprise.

"Quiet? Do'ee say so? Say true?"

[the_seafarer]

Caspian leans an arm on the back of the chair, his smile tinged slightly wry, as Cornelius laughs. "Never would guess it now, would you? But he was a good and curious scholar, a dutiful Prince, and a kind lad, which was worth more than all the rest."

[sai_delgado]

Realization strikes her all of an instant. Of course Caspian's youth in his uncle's house would have been different. She reaches for his free hand, unthinking, and as she holds to it she brushes her thumb over the inside of his wrist in apology and comfort both.

"He's still curious, and kind, and good," she replies. "But ye know that already." Seeking to shift the topic just a little, she adds, "He told me ye taught him of magic, sai?"

[the_seafarer]

He laces his fingers with hers and squeezes them, gently. "Only the theory," Cornelius tells her. "Miraz didn't think it appropriate for a Prince to learn anything else."

To himself, Caspian thinks his uncle wasn't likely to have him be taught anything that Miraz himself did not already know, in order to mitigate any threat from his young nephew. But Cornelius goes on. "I myself only dabble in the stuff. Tricky business, magic."

[sai_delgado]

"Tricky indeed," Susan says, and oh, but she can't keep her tone from being a little wry. "But mayhap safer here in sai Aslan's Country than elsewhere."

[the_seafarer]

"This is a place of Deep Magic," Cornelius agrees, solemn. "Deep Magic from before the dawn of time. And of only the good sort, my dear. Never fear."

Caspian looks down at her. "Doctor Cornelius here was the one who found Queen Susan's Horn," he says. "Which turned the tide of our rebellion."

[sai_delgado]

"I'd not, never in life," she hastens to assure Cornelius, worried that she's offended him somehow. "Not here, say true, and not with - with His Majesty, ever."

Susan tips her head back to look up at Caspian, curiosity alight. "The - thee've told me of this, haven't ye? The one thee used to call them?" She doesn't wait for the answer before looking back to Cornelius. "However did'ee find it?"

[the_seafarer]

"Through much trial and trouble and complex spellcraft," Cornelius replies. "And it took me many months, wandering through dangerous parts of the country – for all of Old Narnia had been driven into hiding, in those days. But find it I did, deep in the woods of Lantern Waste."

[sai_delgado]

Lantern Waste, she repeats, silently. Not a desert, nay, but a waste land all the same, it seems.

(the road of trials)

"It were very brave of ye," she murmurs.

[the_seafarer]

"I was young and foolhardy," Cornelius tells her, kindly. "But it was all worth it, in the end."

"And more," Caspian puts in. "If you had never found the horn, Doctor, I doubt we might have won the war."

[sai_delgado]

"Ka like a wind," Susan murmurs, even as a flicker of wonderment passes through her thoughts.

Roland had had a horn as well. The Horn of Eld; the Horn o'Deschain. Blown by Cuthbert at Jericho Hill, and lost there, until Joe and the door and a number of things had happened. He has it now, again, still, wherever he is, and--

He reaches it, Moiraine had said.

Susan shakes her head, pushes the near-idle thoughts aside, and beams a bright smile at them both. "It must have been a wonder to hear."

[the_seafarer]

"Like nothing I'd ever heard before or since," Caspian agrees. "Sweet and clear and still strong enough to make the hillsides ring."

[sai_delgado]

As Caspian speaks, she tries to imagine it, and wonders if the call of the horn sounds anything like the song of the rose Eddie had told her of.

“And ye knew what would happen?” she asks them both. “When ye winded it?”

[the_seafarer]

"Not precisely," Cornelius tells her. "Legend only said that if the horn was winded in our darkest hour, help would come. It did not specify what form that help would take."

"Some thought it might bring us an army," Caspian says. "Others, that it might call Aslan Himself to our aid. Doctor Cornelius believed it likely to call back the High King and his brethren, and he was correct."

[sai_delgado]

“How wise ye are,” Susan tells Cornelius, admiration in her look and tone. “And how clever to discover it all.”

[the_seafarer]

The good Doctor chuckles. "A lifetime spent in study of Old Narnia did then bear fruit," he agrees, modestly.

"But we weren't certain where the help would arrive, if it would come directly to us on the battlefield or somewhere else. I surmised that if it were the High King and his consorts, they might appear where they'd been lost – in Lantern Waste – or where they'd lived – here, in the castle of Cair Paravel. So his Majesty dispatched Pattertwig the Squirrel to Lantern Waste and the Dwarf Trumpkin to what was left of the castle, and determined to blow the horn at dawn the next morning."

[sai_delgado]

“To give them time to reach both places?” She leans against the side of the chair, a little closer to Caspian, and has to consciously stop herself from curling into it with her feet tucked under while she listens to the tale.

“At dawn, with the light? Aye, it seems—“

(the coming of the White)

“—-I kennit.”

[the_seafarer]

"Yes, precisely so," says Doctor Cornelius, with the approval Caspian recalls from the times when his tutor had been pleased with his recall or problem-solving. "The time of day – or night – in which it is wrought can have a powerful effect on the operations of White magic."

Caspian, seeing the way Susan shifts, drops a hand to her shoulder and coaxes her to lean into the chair and curl into it the way she might on the couch at Milliways. "Although we didn't quite manage to blow it at dawn," he says, wry. "Miraz fell upon us almost as soon as our messengers had left, and we fought for our lives with no space to breathe for three hours and more."

[sai_delgado]

She can tell what he's doing as clearly as if he'd spoken it. Susan smiles up at him in appreciation and shakes her head, just the faintest bit.

He may not mind, but she'll not scandalize those dear to him by showing poor manners.

But she puts her hand over his on her shoulder and squeezes gently, as she murmurs. "Say sorry, I do, that yer uncle were such a cruel man. Thee deserved so much better."

[the_seafarer]

"A more despicable example of Manhood I have rarely known," Cornelius says, his eyes flaring with deep, old anger. "His disdain for the very country he illegally ruled – his treatment of you, Sire – "

"He wasn't much of an uncle, I'll grant you," Caspian says, wry. "Nor a king."

He runs his thumb over Susan's fingers and smiles down at her. "But, there now, there are better stories to tell. Let's not linger on him."

[sai_delgado]

Susan's clear gaze meets his sea-gray one. "I kennit," she says, softly. Both the pain of such a betrayal and the wish to not think about it - aye, she understands both, and well he knows it. Mayhap they'll still need to talk about it sometime, oh aye, for she's no stranger to men hiding their own pain, but she'll not push him on it here and now.

She turns back to Cornelius with determination and with a warm smile. "I've so many questions, say true, but I'd not wish ye to think me nosy. It's only I've not -- ye must understand, I've no formal lessoning, not really, not the way His Majesty does, or those of Gilead in my world."

[the_seafarer]

He squeezes her shoulder gently as his old tutor chuckles. "My dear, a curious mind is a great boon. Whatever you'd like to know of a dusty old academic such as myself, I would be happy to share."

"A good deal of that formal learning was dead boring," Caspian says, amused. "Although I expect the good Doctor has a copy of the Grammatical garden or the Arbour of Accidence pleasantlie open’d to Tender Wits, if you'd like to see the size of the books he used to foist upon me."

[sai_delgado]

"Not that I'd be able to read it, do'ee ken?" she points out, wrinkling her nose at Caspian. Susan shakes her head, sending her braid falling forward over her shoulder, and turns back to Cornelius to explain.

"We'd no books in Hambry, not really, not more than a very few. My da' had the ledgers for the stockline records, and that were all. Books, true books, were precious as gold."

[the_seafarer]

"Not many in Narnia had formal schooling, either," Cornelius tells her. "What use has a Horse or Bear or Giant for a written message or astronomy?"

"What use had I?" Caspian teases him. "For astronomy, at least. I gave it up for good after the war, when I could simply ask Glenstorm for anything we needed to know."

[sai_delgado]

The faintest hint of relaxation runs through her at the doctor's affirmation - she'd not wanted him to think poorly of her - and Susan beams at him, then gives Caspian a skeptical glance.

"And thee a sailor," she laughs.