[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]

"That kind of lure never meant anything good where we're from," Cuthbert observes. "Glad to hear this was different."

If it hadn't been, by now they'd know, probably.

[the_seafarer]

"It's difficult to explain," he says. "It felt the way it felt to blow Queen Susan's horn, or to run about with Bacchus and Silenus – like Deep Magic, not White or Dark. One could feel the love in it – and the loneliness, too."

Caspian shakes his head as they pass into the stand of dark trees. "I've felt that other sort of lure before – "

(Deathwater)

"– and this, thank the Lion, wasn't anything like."

[sai_delgado]

Cuthbert, say sorry, isn't paying as much attention as he should be to everything Caspian's just said.

"Queen Susan's Horn?"

There's an odd sort of intensity in the way he asks it.

[the_seafarer]

"Aye."

He gives the gunslinger a curious glance, but is happy enough to expand on it. "Queen Susan the Gentle, she of the Golden Age. Susan Pevensie, if you know her. Aslan gifted her a horn, and it became one of the treasures of the realm. It was said that blowing it at one's darkest hour would bring aid."

[sai_delgado]

Cuthbert reins up sharply enough to draw a protest from Kiseki.

"Aye? And you've blown it?"

[the_seafarer]

Caspian and Duncan carry on a few more steps, largely because Caspian is so surprised at the sudden halt, before they, too, rein up. "Yes, I've blown it," he confirms, and frowns at Cuthbert.

"What interests you so?"

[sai_delgado]

And at that he can't help it, no more than he could help himself at Jericho Hill when he'd wrung the most glorious music from Eld's horn, the Horn o'Deschain, in those final minutes before he fell.

(I blow it sweeter than you ever did)

Cuthbert starts laughing, bending forward over the saddle-horn as mirth overcomes him, and his laughter is somehow the shining bell-silver of youth and vibrancy and life and hope unfettered.

[the_seafarer]

Caspian's frown turns bemused, and Duncan's ears flicker. There's nothing mean in Cuthbert's laughter – rather, it seems like he's just realized something and been a bit surprised and amused by it.

Or it could be something else. Either way, Caspian can hardly listen without chuckling, himself.

(this is a merry shipmate you've brought us, brother)

"Whatever the joke is," he observes, "it seems a fine one."

[sai_delgado]

"Oh, 'tis, surely 'tis," Cuthbert manages, when he can catch his breath. "Part of the trials of a ka-mai, I'll have you know."

He straightens, finally, and meets Caspian's eyes, amusement still in his own.

"We'd a horn something like that in Gilead as well, you see. The Horn of Eld; known by many as the Horn o'Deschain. And to sound it, why, it was like calling down light itself. Believe me, I've got excellent reason to know."

[the_seafarer]

"Loud as thunder," Caspian murmurs, "but far longer; cool and sweet as music over water but strong enough to shake the woods."

There's a glint of mischief in his own eyes as he meets Cuthbert's amused glance. "And did it call down the great Kings and Queens of the past for you, too?"

[sai_delgado]

"Wouldn't that have been something? We could have used such aid that day - the gunslingers before us all the way back to Arthur Eld, we really could. Maybe if I'd been able to blow it just a little longer," Cuthbert tells him. He shrugs and spreads his hands, Kiseki's reins held in his left.

"But alas, I caught an arrow though the eye, and now I'm as you see me."

[the_seafarer]

Caspian grimaces, then looks wry. "I suppose truly magic horns are in a far shorter supply than the fairy tales would have us believe."

He shakes his head. "Besides I have it on good authority from the Kings and Queens themselves that it was a bit unnerving to think they could be whistled for, like hounds."

[sai_delgado]

"I guess it would be at that." He shakes his head and chirrups to Kiseki, starting him along the trail again to bring him even with the other man.

"You're just full of surprises, aren't you?"

[the_seafarer]

He waits for Cuthbert to join him, then turns Duncan's head and moves him back along the path. "Not by my reckoning," he says, cheerfully, and looks over at Cuthbert with a small smile.

"But you don't know me very well yet." Nor he Cuthbert. Or Alain, though he suspects not many people at all know all of Alain's quiet depths.

[sai_delgado]

He chuckles. “We’re never strangers to ourselves, is that it? But aye, I don’t. Not yet.”

The two horses move along the path at ease with each others’ presence. Cuthbert seems easy enough as well, though there’s something thoughtful about his glance.

[the_seafarer]

Caspian, too, is deep in thought. "There was something else about her dream this morning," he says, finally, having come to his decision.

He looks over at the gunslinger. "I didn't mention it before because I'm not sure she even knows it. There was a moment where she thought I was one of the harriers after her."

(get yer filthy blue-marked hand off me, you bastard)

"But at the name of Aslan, she relaxed and would speak with me. It didn't quite bring her back to herself – "

Here, he looks rather grim. " – but it seemed to help."

[sai_delgado]

“Did it, now.” It doesn’t sound like a question, more like Cuthbert’s thinking over the implications. He shoots Caspian a glance. “Good to know. Although you don’t sound especially happy about that.”

[the_seafarer]

"I'm happy it helped Susan."

(that name again)

What will he do, if Rilian comes in again? "What enchantment is on her, at least, seems not so deep as to be insurmountable."

[sai_delgado]

"It wasn't the first time she was witched either. If this is the same thing," Cuthbert informs him. "Which I'm not at all sure it is. Rhea Dubativo's been sent to Na'ar, may it do ya, to trouble us no more."

Not that that always matters around here, of course - after all, the both of them are dead and still riding along. Not to mention the business with Walter o'Dim, Marten Broadcloak that was.

Still, there's something about the other man's manner that sets alarm bells ringing, and Cuthbert's attention on him sharpens.

"You have reason to think that might not be the case?"

[the_seafarer]

"I think magic like that can leave a scar," he says. "I think you're right, and it's not the same thing, but having been enchanted once... perhaps it's like the hypnotism, and it's easier to do a second time."

Like an illness that leaves a person vulnerable to another infection, and another, and another. He can feel the gunslinger's attention on him, sharp as a blade. "Not with Susan."

Caspian studies the path before them, between Duncan's pricked ears. "You remember, I think, that I have a son? Rilian."

[sai_delgado]

"Aye. The one your centaur friend likes." No question, no hesitation; he was always the one, among their ka-tel, who remembered the names and faces and put them together.

"The one who followed you to the throne." Caspian's watching the path; Cuthbert's watching him. "Something happened, didn't it."

It's not a question. Not quite. But the invitation's there all the same.

[the_seafarer]

Caspian nods. "I have a son," he says. "It will not surprise you, then, to learn I had a wife. We had Rilian very late, you know; we'd almost given up the idea of having an heir at all. But have him we did, eventually, and he grew up tall and fair and bold, a true knight of Narnia. And he loved his mother."

If he tries, he can see a haze of spring-green on the trees ahead of them, can hear the gaily blowing horns and the laughter of the courtiers as they rode out. "One morning, about ten years ago or a little longer, Rilian rode out a-Maying with his mother and her courtiers."

If he's going to tell this story, he thinks, he might as well tell it as well as he can, ignoring the old, old pain that aches beneath his breastbone as he does. "But while they were out, his mother the Queen was bitten by a serpent, and perished."

[sai_delgado]

Cuthbert draws a sharp breath. It's worse, somehow, to think of such a thing happening in the midst of joy and celebration.

In his mind's eye he can see with the unflinching clarity of memory the flash of green amid yellow leaves, hear the deadly hiss and his own scream

(Roland look out!)

and the thunder of the big gun as Roland shot the witch's serpent from the air mid-strike.

He also hears what Caspian doesn't say. "Give her peace," he murmurs. "That can't have been easy for him. Or you."

Rilian had been there but hadn't been able to stop it. Caspian, from what he says, hadn't been there at all, and Cuthbert knows very well the weight of that kind of guilt.

[the_seafarer]

Cuthbert's indrawn breath is like a key turning, unlocking the grief that's never far away. He thinks of the star-girl, Liliandil, smiling and gentle, and of taking her in his arms, knowing he'd never be able to hold her there with him. "It wasn't," he agrees, his voice a little rough.

"And it was especially hard on Rilian. He vowed to find the serpent and have his revenge, and went out riding every day for a month or more searching for it. On one of those days, he simply never returned. We found no trace of him, not horse nor cloak nor trail, nor anything else, that day or any other."

[sai_delgado]

"He vanished?" His eyes are narrow with concentration, now, as he starts to put together the pieces.

To have succeeded Caspian on the throne of Narnia, this Rilian had to have returned, but given what else he's said--

"What happened to him?"