The rain pattered softly on the top of the umbrella. Susan stood underneath its protection, watching the water fall on top of the freshly dug graves of her siblings.
After the funeral was over and Susan had watched as the dirt covered the coffins, she stood next to her aunt Alberta as people passed by and offered their condolences. Eustace's funeral had been yesterday. Susan had stood next to Alberta and Harold there, and now they stood next to her as support.
They had never really been close. Alberta and Harold were the type of people who were impossible to get close to. They had never approved of Eustace's friendship with Edmund and Lucy; they said it made him unrealistic and flighty. All day yesterday, Susan had felt tension and anger building up in Alberta. Susan couldn't help but fear that Alberta blamed Eustace's cousins for his death.
Fortunately, she hadn't said anything yet.
"My condolences for your loss," someone said from in front of Susan. She didn't recognize the voice, so she didn't even bother looking at them, or responding.
"I'm sorry I wasn't able to get to know your family in this life, but there's always the next."
Susan did respond to that. "I don't believe in such foolish fantasies."
"You did, once."
Now Susan looked at him. She didn't recognize him. He looked somehow both young and old at the same time. He had a smooth triangular face and high arching eyebrows. There was a look about him that reminded her of something she had once known.
"I imagine one of my siblings told you about those games we used to play," she said coldly.
"Like I said, I never had the pleasure of meeting them."
"Sorry," Alberta interrupted. "But who are you?"
"Ah…" the stranger paused. Out of the corner of her eye, Susan could see a wry smile flitting across his expression. "My name is Terence. You could say I'm a friend of a friend. I've come to pay my respects."
"A friend of a friend?" Alberta's eyes narrowed with dislike. "I've never met you before. Did you know my son?"
"Your son?" the stranger asked. "Eustace? No, but I wish I had. I attended his funeral yesterday."
"He's dead," Alberta hissed. "It's so tragic, everyone keeps telling me. And do you know why? It's tragic because he was so young. He had his entire life before him, and then those Pevensies came and got him all caught up in those stories of theirs, and he was never the same afterwards, and he'll never be the same again, because he's dead!"
"Alberta," Susan said tiredly. "It wasn't—"
"And don't try and tell me it wasn't their fault. I know better. If it weren't for your brothers and sister, he would never have been on that train!"
"Alberta," Harold said, putting his hand on her shoulder. "You're tired. Perhaps it'd be better to just go home."
Alberta glanced around at the people who were trying to furtively eavesdrop on their conversation and agreed. They left, leaving Susan behind with the strange man.
"A friend of a friend?" she asked.
"Yes."
"They didn't have any friends," was her blunt response. "They were too obsessed with their little make-believe world. They didn't have time for the real world." Left unspoken was the fact that she had had time for the real world. She hadn't spent forever chasing after rainbows and lions.
"It's hard to be divided between two worlds," Terence said softly. "You feel as if there's nowhere you belong, and yet at the same time you belong equally to two different worlds."
Susan laughed bitterly. Lucy had accused her of caring too much about nylons and boys and school and wanting to belong. "I don't think I have that problem. I have the opposite problem. I've always been stuck in this world. I never belonged there."
The stranger reached out and gently touched her arm. She didn't flinch.
"I wouldn't say that. Once a queen of Narnia, always a queen of Narnia."
It took a few seconds for the words to register in Susan's mind, but when she turned to look at the stranger, he was gone.
That encounter stuck with Susan for weeks afterwards. How had he known those words? Despite what he had said about not knowing them, he must have been a friend of Peter's or Edmund's. Or maybe Lucy's. Lucy always seemed to have people hovering around her. She was the type of person other people felt comfortable around.
And yet, Susan believed she'd spoken the truth, when she said that they hadn't had any friends. They hadn't, outside of the friends of Narnia, or whatever they had called themselves. All they ever did was talk about Narnia. They had been completely absent from the real world. Susan couldn't help feeling sorry for them, although she knew they felt the same way about her.
The real world. This was the real world, right?
Susan stood in a grove of trees. The sunlight dappled through the tree branches, speckling the moss. The trees stood tall and firm, and something about them reminded her of Narnia.
Somewhere beyond the trees, someone started singing. Susan couldn't hear the words, but the tune was haunting and mournful. She tried to struggle through the trees towards the voice, but no matter how far she moved, she could never reach the singer.
"Hello?" she called out. "Who's there?"
The singing stopped. Susan waited with bated breath. For some reason, it seemed so important to her to meet the singer.
"Susan?" someone called.
Susan flinched. "Lucy?"
"Susan!" Lucy called again. "Come find me!"
Susan stared at the trees blocking her way.
"I can't!" she called back.
"Why not?"
"You're too far away, Lucy. You're dead." Susan reached out and touched one of the trees, frowning. "You're dead, Lucy. This is a dream."
The trees faded around her, morphing into the familiar shadows of her bedroom as she woke up. Susan stared up at the ceiling. Every night this week, she had dreamed about one of her siblings, and the dreams kept getting more and more realistic.
She turned over in bed and punched her pillow, trying to force it into a more comfortable shape. She needed to sleep.
After breakfast that morning, Susan grabbed a sweater and her bag and left the house. She was being haunted by memories and dreams and she couldn't stand it anymore. She had to get out into the fresh air. Perhaps it would help her clear her head.
Downtown, the hustle and bustle of everyday city life was comforting, even though it made her notice her loneliness even more. The world was ignorant of her loss, and things moved on anyway, without the rest of the Pevensie family.
She wandered through the streets, past restaurants and boarding houses. When the dusty tomes of a used bookstore caught her eye, she slipped in, wandering through the shelves, running a cold hand over the book spines and feeling the embossed titles under her palm. But nothing there stood out to her, so she moved on
Around the corner, another shop drew her eye, this one an antique shop; probably family heirlooms sold off during the war and never reclaimed.
Susan wandered into the antiques shop. It was filled with a maze of rambling shelves. Susan assumed that at the end of the maze was the store owner's counter, but right now she couldn't see anybody in the shop. She paced through the maze and past the shelves, her eyes skimming the objects for sale: silver candlesticks and tea sets and family jewelry.
The cluttered shelves reminded her of that summer they spent at Professor Kirke's house during the war. As she walked, Susan reached out and ran her hand along the shelf, humming as she did. She turned the corner and her eyes caught sight of a crown beside the aisle, surrounded by other antiques.
She stopped, her humming dying in her throat.
It was her crown.
The crown Aslan had placed on her head at Cair Paravel so long ago.
It sat on top of a wooden box, which sat on top of a rickety wooden chair on its last legs. Susan walked up to it as if in a trance. She reached out a tentative hand and touched one of the gems. There was no denying what it was; it looked exactly the same as she remembered it.
"Does that belong to you?" someone asked from behind her. Susan jumped and spun around, almost knocking the crown down.
"What?"
"The crown." The old man who had interrupted her nodded at it. "You've been staring at it for a while. Is it yours?"
"I—" Susan stared at the crown, remembering those years she had spent wearing it. Had it all just been their imagination? Or had it actually happened?
"Yes," she said, turning back to the old man. "Yes, it is." Her voice grew firmer.
The old man nodded slowly. "Did you lose it, then?"
"Yes," Susan said softly. "I think I did."
"Well, someone found it and knew it belonged to you. Even knew you'd be coming along here."
Susan stared at him. "Someone brought it here? Who was it?"
"He was young. Had that kind of face you see all the time now; someone young who'd seen too much. He brought the crown and that box there, the one it's sitting on. It's all for you; he paid me to keep it here for whoever said it was theirs."
Susan stared at him, then at the crown and box. "Thank you for keeping it for me," she said.
He shrugged. "He paid well."
The man shuffled away between the crowded aisles, leaving her behind with the box and crown. Susan picked up the crown, turning it around so she could look at the stones on the front. It was made of gold, with bright diamonds on the front forming delicate flowers and golden vines woven through the flowers. The gold was tarnished and scratched, but it was still familiar to her.
She didn't dare put the crown on; who knew what would happen? Would she be transported back to Narnia, or would she just stare at herself in the mirror and not know who she was anymore? Either she was going insane from grief and stress, or their childhood stories were real, like the others had always said. Susan remembered the stories they had told, the adventures they had gone on. Had it all been real?
A bell at the front of the shop rang as someone entered, and then she could hear the old man greeting someone.
Her gaze darted around the crowded area. How long had she stood there, remembering? Had anyone noticed?
She unfurled her fingers from the crown and placed it back on top of the box that the old man said it had come with. She didn't recognize the box, but she picked it up anyway. It wasn't heavy enough to be hard to lift, but there was still a good amount of weight to it, rather like a stack of books.
With the corner of the box digging into her stomach, she turned and left the shop, nodding at the proprietor as she passed.
At her kitchen table, Susan stared down at the wooden box in front of her, where she had set it when she got back to her apartment from the antique store. The crown had been wrapped in her scarf and placed on her kitchen counter. She'd still been hesitant to touch it with her bare skin for fear of what would happen, or perhaps for fear of what wouldn't happen.
The box itself didn't look Narnian, but it also didn't look exactly British, either. At least, the British of the 20th century. To Susan's untrained eye, it looked almost like an artifact from a museum: ancient, but well-preserved, not weathered at all by the elements, and not worn smooth from continuous human touch.
From what she could tell, it was shut by a simple metal clasp, not locked at all. She slid a tentative finger along the top of the box and waited.
Nothing happened, so she undid the clasp and lifted the lid up.
Inside was a book. It was bound with leather and darkened with age. The front cover was engraved with a horn and bow and arrows—her signet—but she had never seen this book before. She carefully lifted the book out of the box and set it on the table, running a gentle hand over the front cover before opening it.
There was no title or name, but it was obvious that it was a magic book, with spells, recipes, rituals, and other things she had no name for described in detail. It was surprisingly written in Modern English, not Old English or even Middle English as the age of the book suggested.
Susan looked closer at the handwritten words. Based on the flow of ink, it was written with quill and ink. But the way the letters were formed looked almost like her own handwriting. She ran a careful hand over the page, then flipped through the book and opened to a page at random, reading the instructions for a fire spell.
The spell was simple: it only required her to focus and speak a few magic words in Old English. Susan felt ridiculous trying a magic spell—she believed in science, after all, but no one was there to see her try.
She didn't know whether to be surprised or not that it worked. As she stared down at the small flame flickering in her open palm, she wondered what else was real, if magic was.
Her hand felt slightly warm, but it wasn't burning. She made a fist, suffocating the flame in her closed palm.
Thoughts of the white witch flew through her head This was magic, sorcery. The witch had used her power to control the world, keeping the land in eternal winter and its subjects subjugated. But had the witch always been evil, or had the magic corrupted her? Power could corrupt, Susan had seen that full well during her time as Queen, through the interactions with neighboring rulers, and in her time on Earth in human politics. Was magic more corruptive than plain old political power?
Because Susan had had power once: she had been a queen. Knowing that she had resisted the urge to abuse her powers as queen, would she still be that strong and cling to her beliefs, even when the forces of the world broke their laws for her?
Susan wasn't sure. But, staring at the book and the crown on her table, she knew that she had to try.
A magic book, in her own writing, with her crown. Was she going mad? She flipped through the book again, looking for answers. A flash of color caught her eye, and she flipped back, trying to find it.
Towards the middle of the book, an entire page had been set aside for an illustration of a small woodland stream. Something in that scene struck Susan. It looked like the stream in the woods behind the professor's house. They had played there before Narnia, getting wet and tracking mud in the house. After Narnia, they had sat in the shade by the rippling water and talked about what they had lost.
Susan decided she had nothing better to do than visit the professor's house and visit the stream again. He had left it to Peter in his will, but with Peter dead, it fell to Susan. A visit to the countryside might do her well, despite all the memories she would find there.
In a few hours, she was packed and at the train station. The crown was wrapped in a sweater and stowed in her handbag, which she held close to her body. The book was likewise carefully wrapped, but in her suitcase.
Standing on the platform waiting for her train, she almost expected to feel a sting as she was pulled into another world, like she had felt at the beginning of their second trip to Narnia, but nothing happened other than the arrival of her train.
On the train, she was tense, remembering how her family had died. She slipped her hand inside the bag and held the crown, imagining she could feel the magic in it. It felt wonderful to finally be doing something again, and she felt the fear slip away.
The train pulled into the station and the hired car dropped her off at the house, and then she was pulling out the key and unlocking the door.
It still smelled the way she remembered, although the echo of her footsteps was emptier than she was used to. She sat her luggage down in the bedroom she had once shared with Lucy and headed to the professor's office. There she found the notes and letters for what they had been planning, how they had been having dreams about Narnia, separate dreams, and had hoped to use the rings to somehow arrive in Narnia.
She had forgotten the rings, but the professor had told her about them, and the forest between worlds. That trip to Narnia had been engineered by man, not inexplicably ordained by Aslan, and if the Professor's uncle had managed it, then why couldn't Susan?
Still, that raised the question, where were the rings now? They had been on that train but hadn't been among the personal effects identified and given to Susan. Were they lost at the crash site, or stolen by someone, or had they sent themselves to Narnia? If the rings had gone to Narnia like they were intended to, they hadn't taken any passengers with them. The bodies had all been there, and Susan had identified them.
Susan set the papers back down on the desk and frowned at them. She had hoped to find answers, but instead, had just found more questions.
She glanced at the magic book, which she had set on the edge of the desk. It was open again to the drawing of the stream. She pulled the book closer, running a hand over the colors. Now that she was at the professor's house, she was remembering more and more of their time there, and she was almost positive that it was the same stream that flowed next to the professor's house.
Things kept adding up, coincidences and memories and dreams, and she wasn't sure where they led, but she was tired of pretending that everything was fine.
She glanced out the window. It had been a long day. Tomorrow she would try and find the grove again and see what happened.
The next morning, she slept in; the sun woke her up as it shone in her eyes. She packed a quick lunch in a shoulder bag, as well as a sweater, some water, and a small knife, and slid the book in too. And, after a breakfast of toast and jam, she set out.
The woods around the house were overgrown and creeping closer, but the stream still flowed at the edge of the trees. A small path next to the stream too small to be made by humans led her further into the woods as she ducked and twisted around branches.
As she walked downstream, she let the fresh air and bird chatter flow over her, feeling the stress melt away.
When she had reached the grove she was looking for, she sat down at the base of the largest tree and looked around. It was much as she remembered it, and as it was portrayed in the book, although the stream bed had deepened as water eroded the soil. The trees were the same. The moss growing on the banks was the same. Feeling foolish, she placed a gentle hand on the trunk of the tree she sat beneath, like she had seen Lucy do countless times.
It was just wood. No dryads, no special feeling of life and magic. It wasn't like she had expected anything to happen, but she had hoped.
The book was stuffed back into her back, and she mused that it wasn't such a great coincidence that the book's drawing resembled this grove. It was, after all, just a stream and some trees.
But she had made it out here, so she resigned herself to enjoying a quiet morning by herself and spent some idle time dangling her feet in the water while she ate her lunch.
When the food was gone and her feet dried, she stood up to walk back to the professor's house and paused.
The path she had followed was gone.
She turned in a circle, searching, but didn't see it. But even though she couldn't find the path, she had walked here downstream, so the way back was upstream.
The thicket by the water's edge was too thick for her to fight through, so she removed her shoes and stockings again, rolled up her trousers, and began wading upstream. The water was cool and the stones slippery. She kept walking upstream, feeling the gentle tug at her ankles from the current.
To her confusion, the path never resurfaced. She kept walking and walking. Her feet grew wrinkled, and a headache began to grow.
She'd been walking too long; she should have reached the house by now. She bent down and cupped her hands in the water, taking a slow drink. Standing up, she shook her hands dry and stared up at the sky.
She was lost.
Which was ridiculous; it should have been an easy walk to follow the stream back to the house. She glared down at the water and kicked at it, sending droplets spinning into the air.
"What did that poor stream ever do to you?"
The words, spoken after hours of silence, startled her and she whirled around.
A little green man stood there. He had curly hair with horns and a pointed beard and a mischievous look on his face.
"Who are you? And where did you come from?" she demanded.
"You'd have to ask my mother that. And you may call me Robin."
"This is my land. You're trespassing."
"Are you sure it's your land? Do you even know where you are? Do you know where you're going?"
"I know where I'm trying to go," she whispered.
"And where is that?"
"Somewhere I belong."
"For most people, that's their home."
Susan snorted. "Home There's nothing left back there for me. I thought I wanted to be an adult, but all I actually wanted was to do something, to be someone."
Robin was silent.
"I don't know why I'm telling you this," Susan said, a little hysterically, "but I was a queen, in another land. But when I went back to my own world, I was just a child again. But I still had my memories of being a queen, and making decisions, I remembered being someone." She could feel tears threatening.
"I just want that back again," she whispered.
"Once a queen, always a queen, your majesty," Robin said. He looked at Susan solemnly. "I could tell when I saw you, that you were someone who was destined to do great things. You said you went to another world."
Susan nodded.
"If you do go back there, will things still be the same as they were when you were queen?"
Susan shook her head. "No," she whispered. "They won't."
"Then why not start over?"
"What do you mean?"
He shrugged. "Try a new world and see what it brings you."
"There's more than two worlds?"
"Your majesty, there are more worlds than there are stars in the sky." He bowed dramatically. "Different worlds and different times; so many stories undiscovered just waiting for you."
Susan considered this. She'd been so focused on Narnia and finding out if it was real, and if so, how to get there. The thought of still other worlds besides the two she had known hadn't occurred to her.
But maybe this was her chance to create a place for herself, away from the influence of her siblings.
Susan had never been the special one. Peter was the High King; Edmund, the Prodigal Son; Lucy, the Faithful Believer. But Susan had always been the tag-along, the one who was just there. The Pevensies came as a set, and Susan was the spare.
"How do we get there?" Susan asked.
Robin smiled. "Follow the water." He gestured just beyond the bend in the stream, where the water disappeared into the trees like a gateway.
Susan's gaze followed where he was pointing, and when she turned back, he was gone.
She wasn't surprised. And because she didn't have anything else to do, or anywhere else to go, she kept walking through the water, around the bend, and on to her next adventure.
And then Susan went to Camelot and found her place there and she became best friends with Morgan and Lynet and everyone was happy and no one died!