Ch 11: Edmund

Something was wrong. Really, really wrong. And his head hurt so, Ed thought Barton might somehow have kicked him. He'd dismounted, that much he knew. Had they been ambushed? No, Leina would have smelled any attackers. Unless they were downwind.

He opened his eyes. Broad, blue sky arched overhead. Trees, check. Cliffsides, check. No, that boulder was in the wrong spot. Or hadn't been there at all. And it was bloody cold. The wet from the ground underneath his sprawled-out form soaked into his tunic.

Body in once piece and not bleeding, check. Weapons, check.

Something snuffled nearby. Seconds later, Edmund heard running, padded feet. He scrambled into a kneeling position that sent his aching head into a pounding spin.

A wet nose jammed itself into the back of his neck. He smelled wolf pelt and heard a grunting, growling sound. Leina leaped around to his front and slung her broad paws over his shoulders. She sniffed him all over.

He pushed her back far enough to look into her yellow eyes. "Why aren't you speaking?"

Her ears flattened. The stupid-human glare to which he was accustomed filled her face, and she growled again.

The cold of the air and wind and ground no longer mattered. Icy needles of horror started jabbing him all over. "Leina, you're not speaking. You're speaking ... wolf."

She stilled, her mouth open. Then she circled him, wider and wider--sniffing, listening, everything she did when they were in foreign, possibly dangerous territory. Then Edmund knew where they were, and a piece of his soul ripped away. He sat there, hollow, until the truth sank in.

No. Please. Please, please, please, no.

Sick, he bent and pressed his forehead against the cold ground, hoping the chill would banish his too-real headache and wake him from this nightmare. No. No. No.

Nothing disappeared. Not the headache, and not this waking hell that wasn't Narnia. With his face still pressed into the grass, he let loose a long, rage-filled, pain-stricken scream that echoed off the rock and rang into the sky. The grass muffled it only barely. Lying there, gasping, he thrust his hands into his hair and let everything left inside him spill away like sand. He would never see his wife and child again. Children. Would never know the other. Would never know if it was a boy, or a pale-haired little wisp of a girl to match her mother.

Asha, Asha. He couldn't even feel her anymore. The bright spot inside him that was his soulbound connection to her had gone, and the only reason he knew it had been there was the awful vacuum it left behind. The pain sharpened, dug at him like a jagged axe, choked him like a strangling rope. He drew enough breath to scream again and tear at the earth with clawed fingers.

Leina was there in an instant, shoving her nose at his hands, urging him up, pressing her body underneath him. Boneless, he let her get him seated. She stayed in his face, her coarse-furred ruff against his cheek, her muzzle hard alongside his nose. He glimpsed in one yellow eye a depth of empathy he could no longer summon from himself.

Unless.

He shoved her away and scrabbled at the smallest of the pouches on his belt, nearly tearing the antler button off in his haste. He plunged his hand into the soft deerhide and came out with nothing. Snarling, he ripped the pouch from his belt and tore it open. The seams snapped apart. No silver-sheened birch leaf fluttered down from the empty scraps. No connection to Asha. No way home.

With a third scream, he flung the pieces as far away as he could, then jammed his knuckles against his temples and stared upward as if the sky had an answer. His headache slammed. He didn't care. Didn't care if it chose to grind him into powder.

Susan had gotten her wish. He hoped, with the last bit of feeling he had left, that she choked on it.

- # -

The first sensation that came back to Helen was pain. Her arms and legs, so long tied into one position, now pulsed with aches that made her start panting as soon as consciousness returned.

But much unlike the days of her captivity, she was blessedly warm--a warmth that, if not for her aching limbs, might have made her think she was safe at home in Finchley.

Except that even Finchley wasn't as safe as she'd once believed.

Then sound came back. The man's voice, the man who'd rescued her. The man she'd thought might be ... No. Impossible. Ridiculous, even.

"Where do you think you're going to go?" the man hissed. "You're lucky I found you before you froze to death. It's full dark."

A decidedly British accent, thought Helen. Which, though it didn't answer the question of who he was, at least told her he wasn't one of her captors.

And then another voice answered it, not as deep but just as British. "I'm not stupid. And I don't bloody care if the whole world ices over at this point."

"Shut your mouth!" snapped the first man. Then, less harshly, he added, "You, of all people, ought not to be wishing for that. Here, the Germans must have stolen a store of coffee."

Helen dared to open her eyes then. The warmth came from a wool army blanket and a flickering fire, over which was roasting something that smelled like ambrosia after the stale fare her captors had given her. The blond man passed a tin cup across the fire to a darker-haired one who didn't drink it, but curled his hands around it and set it on his knee.

Beside the dark-haired man sat a giant of a wolf.

Helen gasped and flung off the blanket, prepared to run and never mind her rubbery legs.

Both men twitched as if to follow, but the blond one held up a supplicating hand. "Wait! Wait. We won't harm you." A pained look passed across his face in the shifting firelight. "I promised you, didn't I?"

She hesitated, looking first at him, then the enormous wolf (who did no more than stare as a quizzical dog might do), and then at the roasting meat over the fire. A hare, maybe. Reluctant, but too famished to resist the lovely scent of that food, she sank back down on what she saw were more blankets, and pulled the one that had been covering her over her shoulders.

The darker man passed his untouched coffee to her. He gave her an awkward smile as he did it, and their hands touched. He snatched his away and gave her the same surprised examination as she must have been giving them, as though he had thought her an illusion. He wore the same strange clothing as the other man. Helen still wasn't certain that the lack of adequate food and rest hadn't addled her wits.

The blond one broke the awkward pause by clearing his throat. Softly, he said, "Are you hungry, Mum?"

She hunched deeper into the blanket and found her voice. "You're not my son."

He frowned and prodded the fire until it burned higher. In the glow, Helen saw the bird from earlier, sitting on an outcrop of rock nearby. "Peter Pevensie," the blond said. "We live in Finchley. My father is Michael, and he served in the War. You sent us away then to Professor Kirke's house, to keep us safe from the bombings."

Outrage and hunger fought for her attention. Anyone could learn those things. Anyone at all who wanted gain her trust, and then to kidnap and hurt her and her family. At the end of her patience, and near to tears again, she said, "My son is a boy!"

"Was a boy. Isn't now." The man--she refused to call him Peter--sounded troubled.

"And no one bloody knows why!" snapped the darker-haired one. He shot a guilty look at Helen. "Sorry." Then he glared at the blond again. "But it's true, and until we find ... Peter, it's all over. There's no going back."

"We don't know that, Ed."

Warmth drained from Helen's face. "Edmund?"

The dark-haired main turned a drawn, frowning face on her. The expression reminded her so much of her second son, a lost ten-year-old boy missing his father, that her heart went out to him no matter who he professed to be. "I don't understand," she whispered.

The frown lines around his mouth deepened. The wolf beside him laid down, so close that it touched his leg. He gave its shaggy cheek a distracted brush with the back of his hand, as if to acknowledge it was there. "And we can't explain."