The next day passed in a haze of waiting. Lucy (with Elinda) was cooking all of Edmund's favorite dishes, supervising an army of messengers, and dashing to the great gates to look down the road betweentimes. Susan tried to help, but for the first time in years, she ruined a piecrust and let a pot of stewed dried prunes boil over and burn. Then she gave up, found her needlepoint basket, and climbed the spiraling stairs to the highest tower.

From this tower flew the banners of the sovereigns present at Cair Paravel, surmounted all by the great red-on-green Lion of Narnia. At the moment only Lucy's gold-on-green vial and her own silver-on-purple lily fluttered above her. Peter's gold-on-red eagle lay folded neatly, uppermost on the basket of banners, flags, and pennants.

She had to dig nearly to the bottom of the basket—past a small, folded, Archen flag; personal banners of Kings and Queens long-gone; and even a crumpled white-on-blue snowflake which had somehow escaped the long-ago bonfire (but she did not glimpse even a corner of the blood-red banner with the black wand that had flown over the battlefield at the fords of Beruna, and for that she was thankful)—before she found Edmund's silver-on-black scales of justice. She shook out the musty, wadded lump and smoothed it against her skirt, rubbing at the silver stitching and trying to restore its shine; then folded it neatly and set her workbasket atop it, hoping by the weight to press some of the worst creases from it. And she looked long to the south.

The road approached the castle from the west, along the jutting peninsula, but from this eastern tower she could see to the horizon in every direction—could see the mountains of the Western Wild, faint and blue in the distance, could see the misty hills where the trees faded out and the moors began to the north. The low hump of Galma lay east and a little north, with Terebinthia hidden directly beyond it, and if the sun had not shone so dazzlingly on the water, she would have been able to see the shadow of the Seven Isles due to the east—nearly a fortnight's sail.

Southwest, she could see where the trail for Archenland forked from the Beruna road, twining through the trees to follow the curves and twists of the Glasswater, climbing the wooded, rolling rises and foothills, and at last disappearing with a bend around cloud-wreathed Stormness Head. There was no sign of anyone approaching. With a barely audible sigh she arranged herself on a low stool against the parapet wall and opened her basket.

She had two or three unfinished needlework pieces within, and these she picked up in turn, examined, and set down again. None was right. For a fleeting moment she entertained a wild, shining vision of crafting an elaborate work of art—some masterpiece of stitchery that showed the King, wrongly accused yet overcoming betrayal and returning triumphant. Good defeating evil, justice avenging wrong, peace conquering war. A spider skittered across the floor and disappeared into a crack, and she dismissed the bright dream. Such a thing was work for Alambil's hands, not for those of a Daughter of Eve.

She set aside the fancywork and looked thoughtfully at the needles, threads, hooks, spools, and silks. Then, with careful, deliberate movements, she chose a quartet of wooden needles and a new ball of grey wool. She unwound the first length of the yarn, and she began to knit. A sock. Her mind remembered the number of stitches required to circumscribe Edmund's leg, what sort of ribbing he preferred, and how long a cuff he liked. Her fingers remembered the minute adjustments to make for a perfect fit. Her heart remembered watching her grandmother knit (grey for socks, red and blue for mittens), and learning to wrap the yarn around the needle and pull the stitches through.

Long ago, she had knit smog-grey socks with her mother for "our boys" fighting the war against the Germans. Not so long ago, she had knit steel-grey socks for her brothers, to wear in their pre-dawn training with the Centaurs and Giants of Narnia's army. They had worn them to shreds, sliding across the waxed polish of the ballroom floor, and she had roundly scolded them when she found them out. After that, she taught Lucy to knit and left supplementary sock production to her.

Thus, in bittersweet memory and the rhythmic twining of wool twisted 'twixt wood, broken often to gaze south—searching the road for any approaching rider, any shifting of the trees or flurry among the birds—and at last to swallow and lift the growing beginning of a sock from where it lay, the day passed.

At noon, when the sun stood high overhead and the cuff and heel of a sock hung from her needles, she laid them aside with a sigh and descended. Lucy presented an impressive spread of food for Susan's inspection: fruit pies and meat pies, baked apples and broiled pavenders, six golden loaves of bread cooling on a towel and a sticky, glistening slab of honeycomb standing on a platter nearby. The Dogwood-Boy who tended the beehives had brought it in just that morning.

"Let's have a light luncheon," said Lucy. "I thought we could break open a loaf of bread and have bread and honey—perhaps some pie—and put off dinner."

It was a quiet meal. Susan asked about Elinda's father and mother and younger brothers, and they spoke in low voices of fishing and harvest and the coming winter. Lucy had a pair of Eagles taking turns with the lookout, and for three-quarters of an hour the two Queens and their visitor feigned interest in nothing but the weather.

Then Lucy and Elinda volunteered to ride down to the Glasswater Smithy for the sword and Susan (after seeing them off on swift horses with a bag of gold) mounted the tower steps and took up once more her lonely vigil. Slowly, the sun crawled through clouds and across the sky. Slowly, the endless rounds of plain yarn loops grew into the foot of a sock. Slowly, the fear which had subsided that morning stole back and gnawed once more at her heart. For still, the road was empty.

She jumped when she saw two riders approaching, but Clearskry the Eagle circled only once before gliding back to her and reporting that Queen Lucy and Lady Elinda returned.

Lucy came up to her and they unwrapped the sword and drank in the gleaming length of it. With a single finger, Susan traced the runic letters running down the blade (Beware Dark Magic) and the join, clearly visible halfway down. It would always be there, but the Chief Smith had sworn it better than new in every other respect and polished it to a blinding brightness. Susan had never liked looking at swords or knives, but there was something beautiful and good and right in the shining steel before her, and she smiled. Then Lucy wrapped it up again and asked,

"Where shall I put it? Edmund's room?"

She nodded; then thought of the pieces of a sword, hidden carefully under a bed, of midnight screams and terror glimpsed in an elder brother's eyes as he turned to her for comfort. "Better to put it in Peter's. But where is Elinda?"

"She went to the kitchen for a snack," said Lucy, and grinned. "She'll eat more than her share of the baked apples if I leave her there too long." Dropping a kiss on Susan's head, she turned to go. "We'll watch from the south tower."

There was nothing more to do but wait. Soon two heads—one brown, one blonde—appeared over the parapet of the southern tower, below her. Her friendly wave was answered, but they were too far for conversation to carry. She knitted on, her fingers losing their rhythm to count and then jumping ahead. The sun edged toward the Western Mountains. She reached for a darning needle to weave the last stitches together and close the toe.

Just as the sun slid behind the mountains, just as the last stitch slipped off her needle, a great screech came from Clearskry and her heart jumped. She rose, the sock dropping from her fingers, and looked south. Below her Lucy was jumping up and down and hugging Elinda. Beyond that—she blinked, not daring to trust her eyes. Was it really there?

Far to the south, small as mice, she could just glimpse two riders through the trees, approaching Paravel.

Edmund.