[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

[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.

[the_seafarer]

He laughs, too. "Of navigation, I learned nothing at all until I was almost a man," he says, amused. "Miraz hated the sea and everything to do with it, so it was never part of my lessons."

[sai_delgado]

She shakes her head at him and turns back to the doctor. "Ye must have had a time of it," Susan decides. "What sorts of things did'ee teach?"

[the_seafarer]

"Law," his old tutor tells her. "History. Cosmography, Heraldry, Rhetoric, Physic. Alchemy and Astronomy. And Music, of course. His Majesty learned to play both recorder and theorbo."

[sai_delgado]

Susan stares at him in utter surprise. "So much!" she marvels. "A scholar such as I'd never thought to meet, say true. And thee--"

This, as she whirls back to Caspian. "-- thee never said a word of any of it!"

[the_seafarer]

Cornelius chuckles as Caspian blinks at her, taken aback. "Well, I never thought of it as particularly interesting..."

[sai_delgado]

"Mayhap it's all in a day's for a king," she says, practically, and rolls her eyes at him. "But aye, Caspian, it's interesting, say true."

She doesn't even notice that she's slipped and failed to call him by a title as she turns back to Cornelius. "I've only ever heard of one other who knows all sorts of things as ye do, sai, enough to teach them. It's a marvel, it is."

[the_seafarer]

"You're too kind to an old man," Cornelius tells her. His sharp eyes and equally sharp ears have missed nothing, and nor does Caspian miss the interested way he considers the both of them. "This other you speak of, who did they teach?"

[sai_delgado]

"I never met him myself, ye understand," Susan's careful to explain. "But his name were Vannay, sai Abel Vannay of Gilead. He were part of the court there, answering to the Lord of Light, and taught the gunslingers their lessoning in their training -- that which weren't weapons and the way of the gun."

She thinks, trying to remember everything Roland had told her, and that 'Bert and Alain had as well, and concludes, "He were known as Vannay the Wise."

[the_seafarer]

"A good tutor is worth their weight in gold and more," Caspian says. "I'm sure this Vannay was no different."

He smiles over at Cornelius. "You'd have loved Susan as a student, dear Doctor. You've never met anyone so curious and clever and so quick to catch onto things."

[sai_delgado]

"He were well-regarded, say true," Susan agrees, right before she flushes pink at Caspian's compliment.

[the_seafarer]

His eyes crinkle with his smile, while Cornelius leans back comfortably in his chair, lacing his fingers over his generous stomach. "A lady from another world," the Doctor marvels. "Even after death, I see you're having adventures, Sire."