Lucy knew she would wouldn't really feel clean until she had a chance to wash with some strong Narnian perfumes and soaps, but she couldn't deny how utterly amazing it felt when to slide into a large tub of crystal-clear water, steaming hot and waiting for her in the back room of the tavern they'd decided upon. Of course, the instant she submerged herself, the water turned a foul brown color, with swirls of a nauseating green and chunks of dried whatnot floating about, but that was fixable. Making a face, Lucy quickly got out, pulled the plug and filled the tub again by pulling down the chute that held the water from the heated spring below. The second tubful was slower to discolor, and so she scrubbed and fussed until it was too filthy to be of much use anymore, then dumped and refilled once again.
By the end of her fourth tubful, she was as clean as she was going to get. Her damp hair, though still coarser than she would have liked, was free of blood and dirt; her skin was rubbed pink and raw and glowed in a sort of relieved, exhausted way. Edmund had pointed out that they ought to have some clean clothes for after they bathed, and Lucy was glad her rather sharp-minded elder brother had thought of this. The new dress was made of a scratchy material that made Lucy's legs itch, but it was clean and unripped and at the moment, she was not apt to be much more picky than that. Sighing happily, Lucy piled her filthy armor in a heap to retrieve later and left the bath room.
She found her brothers in the inn's tavern, both damp and wet-haired and talking over a mug of what she presumed was ale. They smiled at her when she came in, and she took a seat in the chair Peter quickly pulled up for her.
"Feel any better?" Edmund asked his sister fondly.
"Much," said Lucy, sighing. "I imagine I look and smell it, too."
"Ed and I were trying to figure out how to go about this," Peter began after a moment of pleasantries, his hands clasped on the table in front of him and his voice slightly hushed. "I don't think this is the sort of thing where we could just charge in and take her back, see, because Su wouldn't have just sat there and let herself be taken. They would have had to post guards to keep her from escaping."
"We think we ought to figure out where she's being kept before making a move," Edmund explained to Lucy, who nodded. "If the king plans to marry her, I'd guess she'd be at the castle. So we need to find the castle, which shouldn't be too hard, and try to figure out her location inside it. Then we can try and sneak in to sneak her out."
"Escape shouldn't be too complicated, though, right?" Lucy pointed out. "If all four of us are together, even if we're still in the castle or under attack, we can use the ring and get back to Narnia."
"That's a good point, but it's a little risky," said Peter, frowning and taking a sip from his mug. "If we're in a rush and one of us gets left behind…I can't let that happen."
"We can't let that happen," Edmund reminded him.
"As you say."
"Well then, I say we ought to get going as soon as possible," said Lucy practically. "We have half a day left and I feel loads better after that bath. How about you?"
"I agree, Lu, but I think we should try to get an early night if we can," Peter replied, signaling to an idle waitress to come over to the table. "I've got us a room here tonight, and the son of the owner said he'd wash up our armor for two silvers. We can go out and find the castle today, then rest on it and come back in the morning, how's that?"
"It's a plan," said Edmund with an agreeable nod as the waitress came over to see what they needed. A short while later, the three were exclaiming over the first hot meal they'd had in days, the simple fare so much more meaningful after the long, difficult journey. Lucy was still in shock that they'd actually made it over alive. It was almost hard to remember their quest wasn't over, that the hardest part was probably still before them, but the absence of Susan's soothing voice in their conversation hung over the three of them as a heavy-handed reminder of what they'd set out to achieve.
When they had eaten, and all had moved their armor into a back room to be cleaned, the three washed off their most important possessions – weaponry, money and Lucy's gifts – and took them with them. Bruised and scratched but with high spirits, the siblings set off into the city.
With a bit of asking, the three soon determined that the castle was stationed on the north wall, neither to the east nor to the south. It looked to be about two in the afternoon, and they'd been told it was about an hour's walk through the city to reach it, so the three set aside their exhaustion, picked up their determination in its stead and headed north. Lucy enjoyed not having to look at her feet as she walked, since cobblestones were cobblestones and even in her stiff new boots, it was so much easier to walk here where a fall didn't have the possibility of oozing rashes and a mouthful of potential poison.
Tamas, they'd been told, was in area no larger than Tamitha, but it seemed to have nearly twice as many residents; it was a crowded city with precariously tall wooden buildings and people overflowing the streets, and it was quite full of noise. Lucy noticed that Peter was keeping a hand on his coin pouch as he walked along, and though she generally liked to trust people, understood that this was probably wise. They were jostled and pushed aside so frequently that she would have been hard-pressed to notice if anything at all disappeared from her belt. Edmund, the most naturally suspicious of them, looked as though he was in the presence of a rank odor.
Lucy saw the castle about twenty minutes before they actually reached it. It towered above everything else, built of stone instead of wood, and decorated with pennants and streamers in excess, perhaps in celebration of the upcoming wedding. She remembered what the magician at the Wall had said about the king's wedding using magic, and thought he'd been right to be exasperated – while many people seemed to suffer in the streets, begging food and help from the passers-by, just inside the polished iron gates of the outer wall was visible an abundance of cheap magic tricks, or at least things that she could not explain without magic. Frogs around a small pond were hopping in formation to amuse fancily dressed lords and ladies as they passed. Men dressed in comical costumes were conjuring delicacies and cheap jewels from thin air to dispense among the crowd of courtiers in the gardens. On an inner door was carved a face that would give directions to those who asked, and everything sparkled with an unrealistic, unconvincing, tacky sort of shine.
"Well?" said Edmund as they stood a short distance from the gate, which was guarded by eight well-cut spear-carriers.
"Just watch a little," Peter murmured, stepping backwards into the crowd so as to draw less attention to himself. Lucy and Edmund did the same, though Lucy occasionally now had a hard time seeing over the people who would pass by.
Watching a little turned out to be invaluable. After a short while, a richly dressed couple approached the gates and displayed a piece of paper, which seemed to be some sort of ticket in. Lucy speculated out loud that it was a wedding invitation, and her brothers agreed this was likely. In any case, the four guards on the outside of the gate gave a signal to the guards inside it, who undid the many locks and latches and dragged the tall, thick iron bars back to let the couple in. After they'd left, the gate was again locked and the guards resumed their stiff, attentive positions, watching the crowd with looks of distaste and suspicion.
"We could get in by river again," Edmund suggested as they now walked along the perimeter of the wall. They were examining the river again, where it resurfaced more shallowly and trailed under the stone wall of the castle to fork out into a sort of half-moat within the gardens. A bridge spanned it on the inside of the gate, but out here, there was only a series of planks fastened into the ground over the unsteady earth that hid the river just beneath.
"That won't work," said Lucy as she looked more carefully. "Look, the grille is much to narrow."
This was true. They had barely squeezed through the grille in the Wall, and the bars of this one were much closer together. Not even Lucy would have been able to slip through.
On the east side of the castle wall they discovered something new – a second, smaller gate, guarded by only a guard inside and a guard out, where an irregular trickle of uniformed men and women were passing. Women with large baskets of laundry or lists clutched in their hands hurried past the guards, who only looked over their garb and opened the gates for them, while men carted broken furniture or led horses out into the city. The three of them observed a little while until the sentry seemed to grow suspicious of them and they deemed it a good time to leave.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Lucy asked her brothers as they headed back towards their tavern. Both nodded, Edmund with a smirk and Peter with a sort of anxiousness in his eyes, but it was nothing new and so both his siblings ignored it.
Lucy let a smile play on her face and wondered if there would be a uniform small enough for her.