N/A: Warnings for Angst in this chapter. Also, yes, the coat Ed picked up last chapter is the one Skandar Keynes wears in the LWW movie.
Lux Aeterna
4 – The White Witch
Edmée could have sworn that she had been walking through the woods for hours.
She had kept on, calling Lucy less and less as even her fur coat couldn't stop her throat from getting cold and parched. Every breath was like daggers in her lungs, air as frozen as the landscape it swept through. She was obviously lost, had just barely run from a bell sound for apparently no reason whatsoever, and to boot, the pair of old boots she had put on after leaving her slippers behind in the wardrobe, which were way too big for her feet (making walking–and running–through the snow and even harder job). It had seemed like a good choice at the time, for the boots were made for waking on snow, but she had been regretting her choice for a while now. At least the slippers would have given her comfort.
By the time she started to think that maybe there was no hope at all and she would die, frozen in her sister's magical land, she saw what seemed to be a door on a tree not too far away.
Getting desperate and belatedly remembering Lucy's supposedly faun friend, she hoped that maybe the creatures in this magical land would be kind and merciful toward a little girl freezing on their doorstep, so she knocked several times, her body getting slower and slower by the minute.
Ed had started to wonder if she had truly had the misfortune of not catching anyone at home, when the door opened and what looked indeed like a faun stood in front of her. He–for she guessed the faun was a he, no story she had ever read had talked about faun females (she would know, she had devoured every Greek myth she could find)–looked at her, clearly stunned, and Edmée started to wonder if he would just keep staring at her until she froze to death.
"Mr Tu-Tu-Tumnus?" her chattering teeth were making it difficult to speak, but nonetheless she pressed forward. "I-I-I'm Lu-Lucy's sis-ter..."
That seemed to bring him out of his shock, and he quickly pulled her inside, muttering apologies and asking if she wanted some tea.
"Y-Yes, please..."
He guided her into a big fluffy chair, and once she had drunk some of the marvellously hot tea, which warmed her to her very toes, she made the question she had been wanting to ask since the moment she had entered his house.
"Where is Lucy? I-I entered into the wardrobe mere minutes after her, but she was nowhere around..."
The faun, Mr Tumnus, looked at her, pity clear in his eyes. "Oh, Lucy went back a while ago. You see, time, it... It's different, here in Narnia. Mere minutes on your world, can be hours here. And hours here can be mere seconds there. Have you been looking for her this whole time?"
"Well, yes. She's my little sister, I wasn't about to leave her alone in a forest with a stranger–no offense meant, of course..."
"None taken," he said, smiling.
"I mean, I was walking through the forest, and looking for Lucy, but then I heard a strange sound, like bells–coming out of nowhere, can you believe it?–, and I really meant to stay and see if Lucy was there, in whatever that was, but... I had this... This... A very bad feeling, and I just... I just ran. I would swear I heard something roar at me, but seeing as we're in what seems to be a woodland, that must have been my mind and the cold playing tricks on me..."
Ed stopped talking then, because the faun, who was already pale by nature–although not as much as her, she thought with some remaining bitterness–, paled further, as if she had just told him that the Devil itself had been chasing her.
"The White Witch..." by the way he said the title, one could think she was the worst evil imaginable. As if witches in fairy tales weren't ominous enough by themselves. Edmée told herself she was glad for having avoided meeting her.
(Really, one day she would have to learn to stop tempting Fate)
The faun and her talked for what seemed hours, about the evil White Witch; about Aslan, the Great Lion; about a prophecy concerning one Son of Adam and three Daughters of Eve; about his odious labour as one of the White Witch's supposed spies, and many more things.
"I'm not the only one, Edmée. There are many more, under the Witch's power but ready to sacrifice ourselves for a free Narnia. The one you and your siblings will bring."
She wanted to tell him that she was no hero, that she and her siblings were nothing but lost children in the middle of an awful war, that they might just be orphans and just didn't know it, and so many other things, but then a howl was heard, quickly followed by several more, getting closer and closer. Mr Tumnus was pulling her out of his house even before she could fully grasp what was going on, her coat abandoned on his armchair, the cold air fully snapping her back into situation, her robe nowhere thick enough to offer protection to something apart from her modesty.
It was all in vain.
They were approaching a dam when the same bell-like sound Ed had heard before came from their left, a sledge stopping so suddenly in front of them that she thought it would actually turn over. It had cut their scape, and by the time Mr Tumnus tried to move around it, search another way out, Ed knew they were lost. After all, the biggest wolves she had seen in her life, wolves bigger than she had ever dared to imagine, were surrounding them in all sides but their front, where the sledge stood.
The palest woman Ed had seen in her life–title that until then had referred to Edmée herself–rose from the sledge, hair a very pale shade of blonde, half-up with an ice crown as its only adorning feature, rose lips and eyes as dark as the moonless night sky. She wore a long, white fur-dress up to her shoulders, and large wand on her left hand.
There was no need for introductions, for Ed knew who the woman was instantly, with a rather painful clarity: The White Witch.
"Well, well, well... Just look what we have here. Tumnus, where do you think you're going?"
Mr Tumnus made his best to seem unperturbed, but his trembling chin delated him.
"I–I was merely going to visit a friend, your Majesty."
Her dark eyes narrowed, the uncanny beauty of her face seeming colder all of sudden, and Ed did her best not to move a muscle, for the horrifying beauty of the Witch only distressed her further, the dread that had moved her to run away the first time she heard the bells threatening now to drown her.
"The Trees have talked, Tumnus! They saw you speaking with a Daughter of Eve. And yet you dare to lie to me!?"
If Edmée had been scared before, now she was absolutely terrified, for she–and Mr Tumnus, she knew, by her peek at his face–knew that the girl, the Daughter of Eve, as the Witch had called her, could be none other than Lucy. Yet, at the same time, a pure, joyful relief washed through her, for her sister had gone back and if what Mr Tumnus had told her about Narnia's time was true, then she wouldn't be back in a long while, if at all, God willing.
The Witch raised her wand, and Ed found herself unfrozen at the same time the woman seemed to be going for the kill against the faun.
"Wait! Your-Your Majesty, please, wait! He was but leading me to you! But oh, I've found myself so utterly unpresentable that he agreed to have a friend of his help me get ready to meet you, O Queen! Please, forgive him. I–I am the Daughter of Eve. He was but trying to maintain my shame hidden, for this is no way to present myself to the great Queen of Narnia..." Edmée was pulling every trick she had learned when dealing with extremely dangerous and self-important girls in her boarding school, praying that the Witch would at the very least spare their lives. She couldn't die in a magical land away from home. Her father, in whichever way he came back, would come back, if only to say goodbye. She could not be the one to go without saying goodbye. And even thinking what it would do to her mother, poor Helen Pevensie who worked herself to the bone for them all...
A harsh slap startled her from her frightened thoughts, and its force was so that she actually stumbled into the ground, Mr Tumnus' fearful gasp unheard as Edmée fought to get the blank spots out of her vision and her ears to stop ringing. Her collision against the cold, frozen ground hadn't helped, either, but when she rose her eyes to the Witch, she could see with an awful clarity the anger and sheer hatred in those black orbs, snarl even more pronounced on her lips.
The White Witch had been the one to slap her.
"Don't think me a fool, Daughter of Eve. Flattery won't get you anywhere, nor will your lies. No. I'll let you live for now, yes. But hear this well," said the Witch, her cold hand grasping Edmée's chin hard enough to bruise it, "this I accept, for your fate awaits... Your siblings will surely come for you, and once they do, I'll kill them in front of you, dearest, before spilling your blood on the Stone Table."
All around them, the Witch's minions clamoured in joy, and as a dwarf bound her, Mr Tumnus barely had the time to clean some of the blood of her split lip with a hankie, before he, too, was bound, and the hankie fell to the floor. His hooves moved swiftly, covering it with snow before the others could notice, and thus they were dragged away, back into the Witch's castle.
Edmée wondered if it wouldn't have been better to die swiftly right then and there.
When Lucy came out of the wardrobe, she stumbled with something that made her land on her bum against the ground, a sound that in the previously quiet night, she was sure, would have reached pretty much everyone at the house.
Thus she was ready to run for it, sure that she would make it back into her room before the Macready caught her, when she happened to see what had made her stumble in the first place, just out of the corner of her eye. And any thoughts of running to her room were cut at their very beginning, because she would recognize those dark blue rabbit-shaped slippers anywhere.
She had, after all, been the one who had given them as a gift to her sister not even a full year ago, her parents having bought them two sizes bigger than Ed's feet so she would be able to "enjoy them for a long while". Even as Edmée had turned grumpy and mean, she had never used anything but those slippers to walk around on her pyjamas, choosing to go barefoot while they were being washed or drying out in the sun.
She had seen those same slippers on Edmée's feet not a few non-Narnian hours ago, when Peter had forced Ed to apologize again to her.
Lucy knew, she knew that if Ed had been somewhere around–and she would have had to be, because her slippers were right there and Ed would sleep with them on if Peter or Susan had let her–, her sister would have already been laughing at her. But her sister was nowhere around, her slippers where there and a pair of the old boots that had stayed by the last coats were missing. Which, Lucy just knew, meant that her sister had gone into Narnia too.
Before her happiness could overcome her, though, she remembered Mr Tumnus' warnings, and how the White Witch was tightening the search around Lantern Waste.
And Edmée didn't know about the Witch. She didn't, for Lucy hadn't warned her, and fear grasped her heart as she realized that her sister was in Narnia, alone, with no idea of the danger she was in, probably looking for Lucy.
Peter and Susan, who had risen with the noise of their sister hitting the floor rather loudly in the otherwise strangely silent night–Peter already mostly up, waiting for Ed–, came upon the room to see their littlest sister trying her best to open the wardrobe again, a fearful look fixed on her face.
"Lu?"
She did not hear them, trying as she was to open the door that had closed so suddenly, almost burning with her determination to go back for her sister. Peter, finally getting that Lucy would not answer until the damned wardrobe was open, moved to help her, his hand with Lucy's as they tried to open the door to no avail.
"What–? Lu! What's so–important?" said Peter, as he found he could nor remove his hand from the doorknob nor move the doorknob itself.
"Edmée!" screamed Lucy, as Susan got closer, not sure if she was hearing nearing steps or if it was just her imagination. "Edmée is there, and she's in danger!"
Peter and Susan shared a concerned glance, and Susan moved to help with the doorknob, the steps now definitely not her imagination, getting closer by the minute.
"Hush, then, and let's go! The Macready is coming!"
When Susan touched the doorknob, the three siblings were finally able to open the door, and Susan followed Lucy, rather bewildered, as Peter stayed back a little to watch if the Macready would come into the room.
He saw the doorknob of the spare room start to turn, and instantly moved further back into the wardrobe, pushing Susan and Lucy also further in, not that Lucy needed any encouragement.
Mere seconds later, Lucy stood by one side as Peter and Susan stumbled into the snow, a part of her revelling on the look on her siblings' faces even as another part of her kept telling her to go look for Ed right now.
It will be okay, she told herself. Peter and Susan are here, so now finding Ed will be easy. I'm sure that she found Mr Tumnus, anyway...
Her fear was thus mostly quenched, and she delighted herself in Peter and Susan's apology, allowing herself to start a brief snowball war before they calmed down again and Susan proposed to leave.
"But we can't!" protested Lucy. "Edmée is here, somewhere, and she doesn't know about the White Witch! She could be in danger!"
Peter turned pale at that, his eyes focusing on the woods as if his stare alone would call Ed to them, while Susan hugged herself and trembled, as Lucy saw by her face, not only due to the cold air.
"Lu?" asked her sister, her eyes saying everything else, like Do you know how could we find her and Would someone here help her to What kind of danger are we talking about. Lucy answered with a determined stare, and turned to the woodlands.
"I'm sure Mr Tumnus will know something. Ed might even be with him. We should go there now."
"Well, then, just let me get us some coats" said Peter, getting some of the coats from the wardrobe.
"Peter!" cried Susan.
"Oh, come on. If you think about it, we're not even taking them out of the wardrobe..."
When they reached the faun's house, it had been trashed thoroughly, and the only clue as to their sister's whereabouts was a torn grey coat, one of the ones from the wardrobe, as Susan identified.
They all feared the worst, when a Robing drew their attention. And they didn't know it back then, but they would never go back to England, Spare Oom becoming nothing more than a vanishing memory.
A/N: Ed and Tumnus are captives of the White Witch! (Yes, I know, nothing new) I always wondered... Hey. Come on. From Tumnus' example, and the Fox's, we get that some of Jadis' supposed minions are willing to do what's right once they're given some hope. And it annoyed me that the whole "some Trees are with her" thing didn't go anywhere in the movie, for it looked like they could make good spies. Anyway, gals, here the action picks pace. Also, the song I hear whenever I think about the White Witch and Ed is "Tag, You're It" by Melanie Martinez.
