Thank you to MariaSybilla for reviewing, and partially understanding my crazy mind. A couple of notes about this chapter. Yes, this is an Alina chapter again. Lucy will have plenty of time to make up for it I promise. Also, this chapter got away from me, so I split it into two parts. This should get most of the exposition out of the way.

Alina woke up, feeling more rested than she had in months. She didn't even mind the little girl sleeping in the bed beside her. Lucy seemed like the kind of person that just adopted people instantly. Maybe that's what it felt like to have sisters. When she left the room, she realized that she'd also slept longer than she had in quite some time, as the sun had long since risen and what looked like the entire crew was hard at work. She thought she must be seeing things as she realized they weren't all human.

"What do you think of our ship, my lady?" A very loud voice said. The voice that came from a mouse.

"What are you?" She asked.

"Finally, someone original. I've never been asked that one before, as it's always appeared to me to be rather obvious," the mouse said.

"How? Are you? Is it magic?" Alina had never seen real magic, but it had been implied that wherever it is that she was had it.

"The real magic is getting him to shut up," the younger man, Edmund, said as he walked up to her, "I'm sorry, Reep," he said as he turned to the mouse, "but you can be quite something to comprehend sometimes. As it happens, she and I do need to have a rather long conversation."

"As you wish, Your Majesty," the mouse bowed and scurried off.

Edmund turned back to her, "I'm sure you have some questions and so do I, but I'm trying to figure out a place to start. How did you sleep?" He seemed genuinely concerned.

"Better than I have in a while, actually. Thank you," she said.

"Why do you look at me like I've gotten my head screwed on backwards?"/

"Your sister is missing, I'm your only clue, and you're wondering how I slept instead of devising some form of torture to get information out of me. Men in power who take the time to care for their prisoners are often playing a longer game."

"When you torture someone, eventually they'll tell you anything to get you to stop. It's usually more productive to just talk, especially if you don't consider the person you're talking to to be an enemy. Would you like to go first, or shall I?" She supposed she'd have to play whatever game this was. At least it was him and not the other man.

"You're going to go first, but I will tell you something. Lucy's alive and I have a reasonably good idea of where she is. She told me that you could explain this world to me."

"Is she alright?" He didn't seem fazed by the fact that she'd talked to Lucy, which made her wonder all the more about Lucy's normal patterns of behavior.

"That might be a stretch, but she was unharmed when I talked to her." He wanted to say more, she could see it. He wanted ask her a million questions.

What he said instead was, "Where did you want me to start?"

"Tell me everything."

He started in yet another world, with yet another war. Him and his siblings hadn't been shipped off not to war but away from it. Instead of a boring summer in the country, they got mixed up in something else entirely, and it was Lucy that found it first. He slowed down in a fashion that she recognized as he recounted following her. "It turns out that she was right. There was an entire snow-covered forest. I was so busy marveling at my surroundings that I almost got run over by a sled, pulled by reindeer. I almost died then and there, and in my darker moments I think that would have been better than what happened next. It was a woman's voice that spared me. She was taller than any woman I had ever seen, and I'd find out later that she wasn't entirely human. She told me to come sit with her, and she covered me with the big coat she was wearing, and she made hot chocolate come out of nowhere. She told me that she could make me anything I wanted, to eat. I hadn't had anything resembling candy in months because of the war rationing, so I asked her for my favorite candy. As I drank and ate, she asked me about my family and mourned the fact that she didn't have any children of her own. She told me that she was the Queen of Narnia, and she wanted to make me her heir. She wanted to meet the rest of my family, which I wasn't so keen on. Do you have siblings, Alina?" He asked./

"No."

"Being a younger sibling can give a person quite an inferiority complex, and I'm afraid mine has always been considerable," he said, similarly to what Lucy had told her the night before, but she didn't interrupt him to say so. "I didn't want my brother, Peter, to be king too, but she assured me that he would be my servant. I would have done anything for her then, and she knew it. She told me to bring my family to her house, she gave me directions, and she left me to my thoughts."

"I'm sorry," Alina said.

"Why are you apologizing? I haven't gotten to the bad part yet," Edmund said softly.

"Because I think I know why Lucy wanted you to tell me this story."

And so he got back to it. He told her about how it was that they all got into Narnia, and how he separated from them. "I didn't want to wait and listen to two beavers talking nonsense. I wanted to see her, so I did. Her "house" was made entirely of ice and it was filled with statues, the most gruesome statues you've ever seen. I was almost killed again, by the chief of her police, a wolf named Maugrim. Once he realized who I was, he took me to her. She wasn't as happy to see me as I had thought. In fact, she was furious. I told her where the rest of my family was, and she sent out a party to find them while she shoved me in a cell with frozen over water and a chunk of stale bread. Lucy's friend Mr. Tumnus was in the cell next to me. I had turned him in, and the White Witch made sure he knew it too.

"Did she have a name?" Alina asked.

"Back where she came from, I think her name was Jadis. That was the name she called herself, but the Narnians just called her the White Witch. That was the name that stuck."

"Titles are like that sometimes." That didn't seem to comfort him.

"I tried to help him by telling her what I had heard the Beavers say, about Aslan."

"Who's Aslan? Lucy mentioned that name multiple times."

"Don't get ahead of me," he said as he proceeded to detail what she made him watch, how useless and powerless and stupid and guilty he felt as he was tied up in her camp.

"They always make you watch," she said.

"I deserved it."

"You were just a child."

He continued on to what had happened to his siblings in the meantime and being rescued. "I was brought to Aslan's camp, where he spoke to me. The contents of that conversation remain between me and him, but I will tell you about him. Aslan is a lion, the creator and true ruler of Narnia, and the most selfless being I have ever met or will ever know. I owe him my life. You see, there is a rule in Narnia, one that was weaved in with the magic of the world when it was created. Traitors belong to the White Witch, and it is her place to kill them on a place called the Stone Table. Otherwise, the world would be lost. Without me, the prophecy overthrowing the White Witch could not be fulfilled. Knowing that, she came to claim me. Aslan spoke to her in private for a good long while, and she left, and that was the end of that. Or so we thought. Lucy and Susan followed him that night." There were tears freely flowing down his face now, but he was trying to soldier on. "He went to her, and all of the evil she had pulled out of the world…"

"I don't need to know the details," she said. She could feel a knife twisting in her heart already.

"She killed him."

"How did you find out?"

"Lucy sent the trees to tell us while they stayed with him. We went to battle under Peter's leadership. I was still a contrarian, so when it seemed to be going poorly, and Peter ordered me to leave, I decided to take on the White Witch single handedly. Using the element of surprise, I was able to destroy the wand she used to turn creatures to stone. She then stabbed me and left me for dead. The next thing I remember is feeling a warmness spread through my body. It was Lucy, using the cordial she'd been given. And then I saw an impossible sight." He smiled then, as big of a smile as she'd ever seen on anyone. "It was Aslan."

"But that's impossible."

"There was another magic that the White Witch didn't know about. "'When a willing victim who has committed no treachery dies in a traitor's stead, the Stone Table would crack, and even death would turn backwards.'"

"What happened to the Witch?"

"She died, by Aslan's hand I'm told," Edmund said, and then he told her what happened afterward, how they ruled for 15 years and how it was that they came back to England, "Tumnus told us of the ancient legend of the White Stag…"

"Did you kill it?" Alina asked, remembering Morozova's stag in her mind.

"Why would we kill it? The legend went that if you caught the White Stag, it could grant your wishes. Are you alright?"

"There is a legend in Ravka as well, about the most powerful Fabricator that ever lived. It was said that he could even raise the dead."/

"Is a Fabricator different than a Grisha?" Edmund asked.

"Grisha are separated into different categories by what they can do, but for the purposes of the legend, imagine him as one of the most powerful Grisha that ever lived. He and his younger daughter were killed after he used his powers to bring her back to life. Before he died, he created three amplifiers through three different creatures. The first was a white stag. It was said that its bones could amplify the power of the Grisha who killed it. This turned out to be only partially true. The stag was capable of giving its power to one who found it and showed mercy."

"I'm guessing you know this firsthand."

"That creature's antlers are hidden beneath my skin. Your turn."

"We never caught the stag. What we found was this old lamp post covered in vines. Lucy, being Lucy, remembered something of how she had found it the first time and ran off. We followed her and ended up back in the wardrobe. When we emerged, it was as if we never left."

"How old are you? And how did you end up back here?"

"That is a very good question without a simple answer, and it gets weirder." He told her of how they returned and what they had done, the fact that his older siblings could never get back, how he and Lucy had been stuck with Eustace, and finally, how they had ended up on The Dawn Treader

She didn't have much time to ask questions, as she heard "Land ho!" They had reach a rocky island, like nothing she'd ever seen before.