The Tale of the Bearded Glass; or, How Queen Edaline Looked in a Mirror and Saw More Than Just Her Reflection
A Golden Age AU. Queen Edaline looks in a mirror, and finds herself in a different Narnia, one without magicians and pixies and all the other magical creatures she knows. But without the magic, how will she get home?
Written for caramelsilver in the 2010 Narnia Fic Exchange, for this prompt:
What I want: Here's different things I want (feel free to pick and chose, mix and match, whatever catches your fancy.): always-a-girl!Edmund kicking ass, (Shipping her with Peter would make my day.) all-male!Pevensies, pick-pocket!AU, rulers-of-the-underworld!AU, or the Pevensies just being awesome in Narnia. (Jill/Edmund or Peter/Jill would also be really fun to see.)
Prompt words/objects/quotes/whatever: Knives, swords, the girls dressed in boys clothes, Edmund smoking, snark, cynical!Pevensies, fighting with two swords. OH! Outsider POV on fucked-up Pevensies would be awesome too. I'm also not opposed to characters swearing.
Author's notes: Thanks to crantz, musesfool, and unsuitenedt for the beta and handholding, and thanks to cofax7and rthstewart for the good advice and encouragement.
After about the sixth door she got her first real fright. For one second she felt almost certain that a wicked little bearded face had popped out of the wall and made a grimace at her. She forced herself to stop and look at it. And it was not a face at all. It was a little mirror just the size and shape of her own face, with hair on the top of it and a beard hanging down from it, so that when you looked in the mirror your own face fitted into the hair and beard and it looked as if they belonged to you. "I just caught my own reflection with the tail of my eye as I went past," said Lucy to herself. "That was all it was. It's quite harmless." But she didn't like the look of her own face with that hair and beard, and went on. (I don't know what the Bearded Glass was for because I am not a magician.)
—Chapter Ten, "The Magician's Book" - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
~oOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO~
Queen Edaline Looks In A Mirror
On a sunny summer day, in the fifth year of the reign of the High King Peter and his sisters the Queens, the great castle of Cair Paravel stood gleaming in the sun over the mouth of the Great River of Narnia. The wyverns of the Palace Guard were perched in various spots along the castle roofs and parapets, all basking in the warm sunny day. In the harbor below, merchant ships docked and unloaded their wares, and the shipwrights were busy putting the finishing touches on the newest carrack for the Narnian Navy. The court magician was also there, explaining to King Peter and Queen Susan the wards he had put on the ship to protect her. Queen Lucy was in the Queen's Garden with several water nymphs, as they blessed the new fountain. And up in the palace, Queen Edaline the Just watched curiously as a willow dryad hung the bearded glass on the wall of her bedroom.
"Ariadne," she said from the window seat, where she was supposedly reading the daily reports from the Court Magicians as her attendant fussed with the mirror, "tell me again why it's necessary that I have this mirror in my room?"
"Because it was a gift, your majesty," Ariadne replied, attempting to drive a hook into the wall, and quite focused on her task.
"We get lots of gifts. I don't have to have them in my private rooms. Especially such an odd gift as that," Edaline said, wrinkling her nose in distaste as she looked at the mirror. It was small, just about the size of a face, but was fitted with hair on both the top and bottom of it, so when you looked in the glass, you saw your own reflection, but with a beard and a rather messy hairstyle. Edaline had looked in it a few times since she'd opened the gift this morning at breakfast, and she had to admit, it was a neat trick - a quick glimpse gave her the feeling she was looking at an entirely different person.
"But you know the note attached said it was from the pixies, and it was a special gift, meant for you, not for the High King or the other Queens. So it's only right it should hang here."
"I know, I know," Edaline muttered. "Not like Peter needs to see himself with a beard anyway."
"That's unkind, majesty."
Edaline giggled. She'd been teasing Peter about his lack of ability to grow a beard for ages, and it was a very sore subject for the High King, who had taken to peering closely at his chin in mirrors when he didn't think anyone else would notice. Edaline, of course, always noticed and never failed to let him know when she did.
Of course, Edaline herself had been caught saying and doing foolish things, and this gift of the bearded glass being a result of that. At Peter's birthday celebration last month, she had complained bitterly when she hadn't been allowed to compete in the tournament, because, as Peter had maddeningly pointed out, she was a girl.
"The knights will be uncomfortable," he'd said to her that morning over breakfast. "They won't know how to fight a girl."
"Unfair! You let Susan and Lucy compete in archery!"
"Archery is not a contact sport," he had said and then quickly added before she could interrupt, "or it shouldn't be, not in a tournament, so don't get any ideas in your head. In any case, you know it's different from you dueling or jousting." He had cast a forbidding glance at Susan and Lucy, but neither of them were inclined to join in the argument, which had had several go-rounds already in the weeks leading up to the celebration.
"But I'm just as good at those things as you are!"
He had groaned and rubbed his head. "I know, I'm still sore from our last practice session. But look, Eda, it's not fair and not courteous to the knights coming from the islands and Calormen and all the other countries to have you compete. They're not used to women fighting, and they'd let you win. And you wouldn't want that either, would you?"
She hadn't. She wanted to win or lose on her own merits, not because some man thought she was too much of a girl to fight. So she had given up on the argument, rather graciously, she'd thought, and gone with Susan to get dressed, in the new gown made specially for the celebration, which she had been avoiding up until that moment. But she'd complained to Susan about the unfairness of it all as she was being laced into the new dress, and had been overheard by their attendants and the seamstress and the seamstress' assistants. Evidently there had been a gossip among the group, and by the time the tournament had started that afternoon, there was a joke circulating around the court and the palace staff about how Queen Edaline wished she were a Just King, which had embarrassed her to no end.
The joke had obviously spread quite far, she thought ruefully as she glanced at the bearded glass Ariadne had finally hung straight. If the pixies all the way out in the Western Wild had heard it and were sending her this gift...oh, Aslan, it would be a long time before anyone forgot it.
It wasn't that she wanted to be be a boy. At age fifteen, Edaline had long put away that childish desire, if not her preference for trousers over dresses. And she liked being Queen - she was, after all, as well trained as Peter with the sword, and she was a talented archer, if not as good as Susan, and she could handle a knife and spear as well as anyone. She knew she was as good as any boy, but sometimes she chafed at the unfairness of it all - how she and her sisters were always underestimated as Queens, how she felt she always had to go an extra step to prove herself to Peter, and to their subjects, and not just because of her past actions with the Witch although that was never far from her mind.
"Your majesty?" Ariadne glanced over at her. "I've finished. Come look."
"I've looked into it several times already," Edaline protested, but she got up all the same.
Ariadne peered curiously at the mirror. "It's so odd, seeing myself like that." She shuddered minutely, and several leaves fell to the floor. "I know it's my reflection, but it seems almost…like a different me."
Edaline glanced over the dryad's shoulder. "The pixies were just making fun, that's all."
"But just look!" Ariadne insisted, and stepped aside so that Edaline was standing directly in front of the glass, smiling at her reflection.
She reached out a hand to touch the hair decorating the frame. "I have to admit, it's a nice beard, but I don't quite like the hair — Oh!"
"Are you alright, your majesty?"
Edaline nodded, and oh, it almost looked like the bearded glass nodded back at her, which wasn't really possible. Was it? "I'm fine. I just felt, oh, it felt like a pull — oh! Again!" She felt like she was being drawn closer and closer to the mirror, and she didn't really think she could get much closer to the wall, but now she was almost nose to nose with her reflection. And when she looked at her eyes, she realized with a start that she was staring at a different face now, not her own. "Ariadne, step back! There's enchantment at work here!
"Your majesty! Be careful! Hold on!"
She could hear the concern in her attendant's voice but it sounded very far away, and she knew that Ariadne was trying to pull at her, but her hands felt as light as the breeze. All she could see was that other face getting closer and closer, as the glass pulled her in, in and away from Ariadne and Cair Paravel. She felt like all the breath was being squeezed out of her and she tried to cry out, but her voice didn't seem to be working in the mirror.
The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the floor, gasping for breath, and staring up at that other face.