Daughter of Eve, Niece of Thomas
By JalendaviLady
Timeline: A few days post-The Last Battle and beyond.
Disclaimer: The upcoming and already-released movies belongs to Walden Media and the books belong to the current holders of the C. S. Lewis's estate.
Chapter 8: The Knife
It was two weeks after Peter's return.
Susan woke in the wee hours of the morning to knocking at her bedroom door.
Susan fought her way through the bed curtains she was only just now truly getting used to, and fairly ran to the door. She knew that if a Narnian was disturbing her, and not Peter or Edmund, at this time of night, something major must be going on.
But it was not one of the Narnians.
Edmund was standing there in his nightshirt, looking somewhat haunted.
"Ed? What is it?"
"Nightmares."
She almost told him to go back to his own rooms, to handle it on his own the way she and Peter had to. But then she remembered that despite the adult responsibilities they had taken on, that Edmund had now made his own, they were still children.
He wasn't all that far separated in time yet from the boy who ran into a house under bomb attack to save a photograph, after all.
She beckoned him inside.
He flopped onto the foot of her bed, letting himself fall back onto the plush bedcover.
"What about?"
"The kitchen workers were sharpening the knives today."
Susan tilted her head, not understanding, and sat down next to him. "Why...?"
He stared up at her. "No one told you girls exactly what was going on when I was rescued, did they?"
She felt her heart quicken. "No. And Aslan told us not..."
"...to linger on what had happened. Or something like that." He closed his eyes. "I know Peter was told, because I overheard the centaurs talking to him about it."
He suddenly seemed much younger than he was.
"Ed?"
"The White Witch had decided to go ahead and kill me," he finally said after a long silence.
Her heart felt like it had just entered its own 100-year winter.
He rolled onto his side, and she put a hand on his shoulder.
Edmund lay there for a few long minutes, not so much crying as simply leaking.
"They tied me to a tree," he finally said. "I couldn't move."
She squeezed his shoulder.
"And then that dwarf bared my throat, and I heard her sharpening the knife..."
And then he was truly weeping.
Susan surprised herself with the word, although in hindsight she must have used it before and in the same sense. Crying was, to her at least, what children did. Weeping was more adult, more mature.
More kingly, even if Edmund wasn't wearing his crown at the moment.
"They came just in time, didn't they?" she finally asked.
He nodded, sitting up again.
After a long silence, he asked her, "How can we fix a country when we can't even fix ourselves?"
Susan thought long and hard before admitting, "I don't know. Aslan thinks we can, but I don't know how. Maybe we're just hurt in different places than they are."
...
Long after Edmund had gone back to bed, Susan lay staring at the ceiling, thinking.
What about them, all four of them, had earned four children from a formerly quiet road in Finchley crowns?
Why had they been chosen to find their way to Narnia?
Why had Aslan gotten them involved at all?
What could they possibly do here that someone older, more experienced, could not?
How did it all fit together?
She found no answers.