It's the first funeral she ever attends, and it's an elaborate thing, full of all the rituals Narnia has accumulated over the centuries. It is her grandfather who goes to meet eternity this day, he of the greying flanks and the dim eye; he of the elaborate stories and the palsied hands; he whose memories reach back a century. She doesn't even know how to go about missing him.
She's not yet reached her third year, still a child in her family's eyes, and as she stands off to one side of the mound, her mother reaches out with one slender hand and strokes her chestnut hair. With a bored sigh and a stamp of one foreleg, she leans into her mother's flank and tries to ignore how the ceremonial tail braid is pinching.
Halfway through the chanting, she drifts off, waking only when the last handful of dirt is sprinkled over the burial mound. They spend the rest of the night dancing, hooves pounding and hands weaving and eyes shining and tails flying, remembering their dead in rituals of life overflowing.
In the end, her elder brothers drink too much spiced wine and are herded away by their impatient mother and their laughing father. She spares one backward glance for the scene, watching as cousins and friends spin and leap; though death is still only a word, she finds strange comfort in the knowledge that she will someday rest peacefully here by the river, sleeping with her ancestors.
It's the last funeral she ever attends, and it's her own. There are no elaborate rituals, no chants, no fires, no dancing. No family members clasp hands and meld grief for her; all passed years ago, fading into death before her, though her own years are still few. Those that survive her are quiet, stoic; death is an old acquaintance by now.
Her body is matted with dirt and sweat and blood, but someone young and as-yet unbroken has wiped the gore from her face. It doesn't make a difference: she still looks far older than her twenty-eight winters.
There is no burial mound waiting to accept her; the ground is solid beneath its mantle of snow, the earth cold and frozen and empty as the grey sky above. Fire consumes her body, catching her lifeless hair and, briefly, putting flame into her lusterless chestnut coat.
The paltry group of soldiers- some half-dead, others hollowed out- murmur empty benedictions and griefless farewells as they slip away from the site. No one mourns anymore; the dead, it is whispered, are to be envied.
When the leaping flames subside, and the coals cool, the ashes disappear silently beneath suffocating snow.
There is no mound by the river, but her sleep is peaceful nonetheless.