Prompt: "even with the pevensies there, it still takes years to dethrone jadis"
Pairings: Gen
Content Warnings: Brief mentions of permanent bodily harm but nothing graphic
Chapter 44: War Effort
Sometimes Susan just stops marching, sometimes she just spills out of her saddle, and just goes to sit, watching Aslan's troops walking past her. Her siblings used to worry about her, try to command or beg or taunt her into rising, but now they just keep going, knowing in the end she'll eventually stand and follow the end of the procession, an arrow notched on the string, ready to let it fly because it's all she can do now.
How long has this been going on? That first winter after The Winter was hard on morale; they'd lost more troops to desertion than battle that winter, but spring had brought new swells into the ranks. It seemed to happen every winter, but never as bad as the first. It's still summer now, but already the autumn colors are touching the leaves. She hopes this winter will be kinder.
A few soldiers, new ones who've joined late this year, glance at her and murmur "The Merciful"-she's not sure what she thinks of the moniker, but it's not wrong when her arrows always fly true, always kills rather than maims. Maybe if it was peacetime they'd sing of her beauty or some other useless quality; poor Lucy, no one will sing of her glorious face with the nasty scar she'd gotten last spring from that minotaur's horn. Better than Edmund-god, her poor baby brother, it still hurts to think of the arm Peter had to cut off him to save him from the Witch's petrification spell.
She looks at the troops-their subjects, their charges, their burden-and wonders when it will all end.
