"Look!" Lucy called suddenly, pointing through the trees, to something which apparently neither of her brothers could see. They were about an hour into the day's travels, and she thought she might have seen something – a strange speck of red through the trees, something moving in a wind they could not feel. "What is it?" Edmund asked skeptically, using his sword to push aside a low-hanging bramble and holding it up for Lucy.
"I think I see the city," said Lucy as she ducked beneath it. "Tamas. I think I saw a banner."
"It's possible," shrugged Peter.
All three were quite exhausted. Lucy thought vaguely that it probably didn't help that they were carrying around their weight in dirt and filth. She felt totally disgusting. As she trudged on through the wild, her mind drifted…
" Susan, we've come to rescue you!" she could picture herself saying, her dagger held high and a pile of groaning guards behind her. Her hair was matted, her face was smudged with blood and grime, and a trail of mud and ooze had followed her into the corridor.
"Oh," her sister said, her eyes trailing up and down Lucy's state of dishevelment worriedly. "Er. Perhaps a different day. I'm ah…rather busy."
"Come on!" Lucy said, her white smile a stark contrast to her dirt-encrusted face. She held out a filthy hand, at which her sister flinched comically backwards.
"Ah, as you can see, I'm er…I'm…arranging flowers," Susan said hurried, grabbing a vase shoving a few peonies from another into it. Lucy's face dropped into a confused frown.
"But Su," she protested. "We've come all this way. Peter and Ed are out in the hall."
On cue, her brothers popped their heads into the door, both even more disgusting than Lucy. Susan let out a small shriek and knocked the vase on her nightstand to the ground; it shattered, but she seemed not to notice.
"Out!" she gasped fearfully, waving her hands at them passionately. "Get out of my room! Don't come back until you've bathed!"
Chuckling, Lucy followed her brothers further in – in, which was at this point out of course.
It was about three rough hours later when they saw the end of the trees. Lucy let out an excited yell, and Edmund was about to run forward when she saw the snake and grabbed his shoulder to stop him. From the higher branches came the hissing a moment later, as the jade-colored head of the creature slid down and fixed all three with its unwavering stare. Alarmed, they all took a step back, but it seemed a very long snake indeed, for it only followed them, a slough of green coils still clutching the branch.
"Let me handle this," said Peter quietly, lifting his shield from its hold on his back and bringing it in front of him. He drew his sword a moment later with a muted ring of metal, the sound swallowed by the thick forest. Behind the snake's darting head, Lucy could see light between the trees, and the base of a red-stoned wall, but none of them dared move while the animal still seemed so focused on them. Unlike the other creatures they'd encountered, the snake seemed quite simply a snake, and nothing else.
Lucy and Edmund stood back a short ways as Peter slowly raised his shield up between the snake's eyes and theirs. He himself moved carefully to the side as he did so, but the snake remained fascinated by the play of the light on the bits of his shield that had miraculously stayed shining. Then he lifted his sword, watching the snake watch the shield, and abruptly struck down through the air. The metal made a woosh sound as it split the space between the branch and the snake's head, and then abruptly its head was spinning off to the side as the body uncurled limply and fell to the ground with a thud. The thing looked like it had been nearly five feet long.
"Well played," Edmund said approvingly, and this time Lucy let him run. The three of them raced to the end of the tree-tunnel, laughing in earnest for the first time in quite a while, stumbling and falling every now and then, but it didn't matter. They had survived the Void. They had found Tamas, and the sight of the regal pennants streaming high above the city raised such a bubble of hope in Lucy's chest, the noise from outside, the realization that perhaps now they could find a safe place to eat and bathe and sleep, and more than anything, the hope rekindled that they weren't too late to save their sister. Finally, they were here!
"So…how is it we were planning on getting in?" asked Edmund after a rather empty minute, in which the three simply stared in gratitude up at the city on the hill. They were only a few dozen yards from the wall itself, but it must have been twenty-five feet tall and none of them had any hope of scaling it without a rope or a hand-hold of some sort.
"Good question," said Peter, frowning concernedly. After a moment, he cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled up to the top of the wall, "HELLO?"
A very astonished guard stuck his head out over the wall and nearly fell off when he saw the three grime-encrusted travelers down below. Peter smiled in triumph.
"You don't suppose you could help us up, do you?" he called up again. "We've come quite a long way."
The guard looked terrified and disappeared.
"Do you think he'll bring help?" Lucy asked, taking a seat on the grassy hill that led up to the wall. Unlike the rat-infested fields on Tamitha's side of the wall, this side flourished green and beautiful, and the river could be heard just out of sight around the corner, where it forked and dipped beneath the wall to provide water for the city.
"I suppose we'll find out," Edmund sighed as he sat beside her. Only Peter remained standing.
A half hour later, Peter finally agreed that no help was forthcoming, and they looked for an alternate strategy. Peter's rope had been lost in the first world of the dead – who, Lucy thought, might have been sent back home by Timothy by now. She sent a small good thought his way, for though she was upset that he had stolen the rings, she admired his dedication to his cause, and it was a good one. So now without any rope, and without any help from within, either they'd have to fly over the wall or find some other way around it.
Edmund was the one who found the other way around it. Completely desperate for alternatives, finally Peter succumbed to his younger brother's idea – it was the only option. However stupid and dangerous, it was the only option, and time was of the essence. So the three found themselves next to the river, washing it crash down beneath the city walls, where they could see it run through an iron grille and into the city itself. None of them could swim in armor, of course, but the current was so swift that it would probably carry them with or without it. They would only have to worry about being smashed into the grille, or caught in it. If they couldn't make it through on the first shot, there would be no second shot. The grille looked to be wide enough to fit even Peter in, but the wrong angle could mean disaster.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Peter asked his siblings for what seemed to Lucy the eighteenth time. They stood on the bank together, one in a row, Peter first, Lucy second and Edmund last, checking to make sure their things were secure and preparing themselves to jump.
"The answer is still yes," Edmund told him. "On three."
Lucy began the count, but none of them said 'three.' All had taken the largest breath they could manage and jumped into the leaping waters, for better or for the worst.