Threads
Chapter 8
Edmund knew he had screwed up.
He felt his cheeks redden, in sheer anger at himself. He ruffled his hair and then pulled at random strands of his curls. His sight became lost in an unknown horizon, disconnected from the reunion for a second.
He could vaguely hear Lucy saying his name. He could also hear the rest of the party saying other things, but he wasn't really interested in finding out what they were.
Edmund was too busy remembering when he'd seen Rhindon last.
He'd been using it during the ambush—so it shouldn't have been too far off from where he fell unconscious. Reep and his mice should have seen it there.
And then there was his satchel. Last he remembered, it was still attached to the horse's neck. During the ambush, no soldier had snuck around to it, or even tried to open it.
"Do you remember the horse?" Edmund asked hurriedly, interrupting the conversation, "did any of you see if the horse I'd been riding was still around?"
Reep shook his head.
"No, your grace. When we found you, you were already on your own. No horse, no…nothing."
Edmund clicked his tongue and tapped his foot.
"Damn it," he hissed with quiet anger.
Lucy watched his brother's reaction with surprise—she had rarely seen him as upset. Not even when they were at Carlomen, at the mercy of Prince Rabadash had she seen him so worried.
"Ed?" Lucy called again, "what's the matter? If it was the horse then—"
Edmund turned towards his sister, brow furrowed.
"No—not the horse. It's the sword, everything else, too—it's all back at the castle."
"What? Ed, you're not making any sense."
Edmund looked at his sister, hoping she'd understand him just by the look of his eye. But Lucy was truly at a loss and Edmund didn't know how to articulate a word.
"Right, so you want to go back to the Telmarine nest not because Eirene was captured, but because you want a bloody sword?" Trumpkin broke the silence.
Edmund shook his head, his mind still miles away from the conversation. He was internally submerged in anxiety—who had Father Christmas' gifts? What would they do with them?
Edmund merely shook his head, still lost at thought. When he looked up at Trumpkin,his face was serene.
"I need to gather my thoughts. Pardon me," he said simply.
Lucy watched Edmund exit the badger's burrow with strange tranquility. The kind of calm that preceded a storm. She followed behind.
"Ed?" She said when she spotted him a few meters away, in between trees.
"If it's Rhindon then you needn't worry, I'm sure we'll be able to get it easily enough—"
"No, Lu. It's not just Rhindon."
Edmund turned his head about to make sure they were alone in the clearing. Admitting to his mistakes had always been a difficult affair in the past, but he knew he couldn't hide anything to Lucy. He breathed in, bracing himself.
"I—I fucked up, Luce," he breathed out. Lucy was expectant, and merely observed his brother. He walked away from her and turned around.
"I didn't just take Rhindon with me, back at Cair Paravel. I opened the coffers and took everything. I thought I could keep them safe with me until I found you and Pete and Sue…"
"Ed, they're just things—"
"No, Luce. They're your things, your gifts and they're well, old magic."
Lucy's expression changed, realizing what Edmund meant.
She knew that Edmund had a long history of studying magic in all of its forms, dark and light. He had even become a specialist in its darkest forms. He was one of the most learned scholars in it, even if he never admitted it. He understood dark magic like no other, and he knew at what lengths it could come to.
And among his studies, Edmund discovered that dark magic could be amplified when used with an already magic object. It magnified it, in the most gruesome ways.
And the gifts to the Pevensie's were the perfect object to corrupt.
In short, if Edmund had cause for concern, Lucy knew she had to be worried, too.
"It's like that time with Ansurius, isn't it?" Lucy said.
Edmund stayed quiet.
He walked away, looking down at the ground, immersed entirely in his thoughts. Lucy turned away, too, remembering poor Ansurius. He'd been a Wise Man, a respected healer with a moderate amount of fame, known all around the continent. Some people even dared to call him a warlock, but he always denied practicing magic.
Ansurius was a mysterious man, learned in the occult across different cultures. And he'd also been Edmund's friend. They both enjoyed each other's company and respected each other's knowledge of magic and the supernatural.
Eventually, Edmund trusted him enough to share the fact that he was haunted by the White Witch still. Edmund told him that the nightmares wouldn't let him sleep and that nothing he did ever helped to scare the visions away. Ansurius and his knowledge of herbology helped him, and it gave him Edmund's respect.
What happened next, Lucy wasn't sure. She merely knew that slowly, Ansurius had been getting obsessed with Narnian folktales, of legends of old, magical objects. There was a particular rumor that she'd heard of Ansurius desperately searching for the bark of a Silver Apple Tree, and corrupt it with dark magic.
"Wood is the most powerful material of all. It creates objects. It creates spaces that can harness life inside it—houses are made of wood. Ships are made of wood. Wood can be used to construct, to build anything I want. And I want to create. To create reality. To bend it to my wish. And there's nothing better construction material than magical wood—the Silver Apple tree…"
It was rumored that Ansurius had spoken those words one day at a feast, in hushed whispers. The rumors became so strong that Edmund could no longer ignore them.
The next they'd heard of Edmund's friend, he had already gone missing in the Lone Islands, in some inhospitable and remote location. Lucy wasn't privy to the details, but knew that Edmund had found him and that Ansurius had found the bark to the Silver Apple Tree.
Edmund had never described the scene, he only ever said so much.
"It killed him, Lu. And it made the land barren. Darkness swelled and soared and it was—horrible. Dark flames erupted from the burning wood. I heard Ansurius' voice in the crackle of the fire and I saw what he envisioned in the fumes. It was—he succeeded. He created things, yes. But what he created was death, the concept, but fleshed out. It's—it's hard to explain."
That was the only thing Edmund had said to Lucy, and refused to say anything else for a while. When people at court asked too many questions, Edmund eventually became fed up an answered simply:
"He found the bark. And he built, he constructed his own reality. But you see, his invention gave him all the things it took. It took energy and will, and it gave them all back, but twisted and sick. Dark Magic is like an opposite force, it gives what you want it to give you, but always the other way around. He'd agree with me, if he could."
Lucy heard Edmund walk, a twig snapping under his foot. It brought her back to reality.
"Well, if it turns out to be like Ansurius…" he sighed, "I bet Pete and Sue will love to find their gifts turned into some horrid, murky potion," Edmund said, a lace of irony in his voice.
"They'll be thrilled," Lucy replied.
"I know, right?" Edmund smirked bitterly.
Edmund dug his hands into his hair.
"But, on the bright side, I don't really think Telmarines would even know what to do with the gifts. They don't seem to be that brilliant anyways."
"You said that Eirene did," Lucy said.
Edmund clenched his jaw and his breath shortened. She did know what they were. She was learned and perhaps she knew how to use them, he thought.
He dug his hands into his trouser pockets. Lucy sat down on the forest floor and Edmund felt a crumbled piece of paper against his hands. He pulled it out, remembering the letters.
"We really need to go back to the castle, then," Lucy said.
He unfolded the piece of paper, hoping to find the words that had disappeared once again present. Slowly, the ink reappeared, displaying Peter's lavish handwriting.
Edmund remembered that the first time he had read the letter, it had almost no information on Eirene. It merely said that Peter regretted not uniting forces with her.
But as Peter's words began appearing, Edmund hoped it said nothing about Eirene, the relics, and dark magic. He really did not want her to become the villain of the story.
He watched short excerpts being sprinkled across different parts in the letter. Various details appeared, entirely discrepant from the one's he'd originally read.
"Luce," Edmund said, "look at this."
Lucy rushed to Edmund's side and watched the words display themselves.
"I didn't get to finish the letter back home," Edmund began,
"Me neither," Lucy said, as she kept on reading.
"But now…it seems different."
Lucy began reading the letter softly next to Edmund.
"Caspian led a battalion to save his sister….it hastened her arrest. Torture—" Lucy read and gasped, stopping for a second. When she continued, she spoke softer, her voice void of her usual happiness.
"Her execution followed shortly after. Narnians took the lead…reawakened ancient powers—" Lucy trailed off.
Lucy looked up from the letter and watched her brother. He had his eyebrows knitted together, his hand pulled into a fist. He swallowed hard and gathered his breath. He cocked an eyebrow then, his jaw tightened.
It was impossible for Lucy to figure out what he was feeling, so she turned away. She returned her eyes to the letter, careful to note if anything else appeared.
Edmund considered what Lucy had read. It seemed like the letters functioned like foretellings of the future. He started to think they were a sort of roadmap, scenarios they were supposed to avoid.
"Eirene is not like Ansurius then, but somebody else is about to make the same mistakes that he did."
"Like who?"
Edmund didn't answer Lucy's question. He was still lost in thought. Two priorities became clear in his head: recover his siblings' gifts, and bring Eirene to safety. It seemed that the stability of the country depended on those two things.
Edmund turned to Lucy, then. He wanted to tell her that they couldn't let anybody else know about the letters, about what they narrated and how they'd changed. But before he could utter a word, hurried footsteps approached them. It was Trumpkin,flushed and with a shy glimmer of hope in his eye.
"Nikabrik's returned. He has information about the Telmarine lair."
(OPEN UP FOLLWOING CHAPTER WITH NIKABRIK GIVING INSIGHT OF WHAT WENT DOWN AT THE CASTLE AND THE AMBUSH. AND THEN HE LETS SOMEHTING SLIP ABOUT THE RELICS THAT HE SHOULDN'T HAVE KNOWN. THAT MAKES EDMUND SUSPICIOUS OF HIM, BUT DOESN'T SAY ANYTHING YET. NIKABRIK GOES TO THE RAID, WITH THE PARTY. HE IS MORE CONCERNED WITH FINDING THE OBJECTS THAN EIRENE, AND EDMUND NOTICES IT. BUT HE SAYS NOTHING. LATER, WHEN THEY RETURN, HE IS VERY MUCH DISTRAUGHT THAT THEY DID NOT FIND THE RELICS.
the letter says something about caseína finding out that Eirene was captured and then hurrying an attack on the telmarine castle. That in turn made Meraz hurry on with Eirene trial and execute her.
WHAT OF THE RELICS'?
"Perhaps by letting out company of Narnians that
he worst part is that I don't even know where to start."
"Perhaps by letting our dear company of Narnians that we also intend to free Eirene and that
He realized he had screwed up.