23 - Fear

The moment Lucy neared enough for him to see her clearly, Van bolted toward the main deck with a sick feeling in his chest. Weights crushed at his ribcage. Lucy had crumpled into a ball on the griffin's back, and though he could see no wound, the look of agony on her face gripped his airway in a stranglehold. She's hurt, get help! he tried to shout, but his voice would not come.

Furious with his incapacity, he leaped down a flight of steps to the main deck. Edmund was right behind him, and the captain's look of alarm echoed every bad feeling racing through Van's mind.

As soon as the griffin reached the deck, Lucy tumbled off the beast's back. Van caught her in his arms, and she curled against his chest with a shuddering whimper. Van felt a purely feral growl bubbling up in his throat. He looked to Arrow.

The griffin's pupil was dilated, his eye almost entirely black. The look of fear in the birdlike face was only now beginning to fade. "Women. A score of them. Dark dresses, high-collared. They just looked at us..." The griffin opened his beak wide in a terrified pant, even as he shook like a dog flinging water from its pelt.

Lucy whimpered again, hiding her face in Van's chest. Frantically, caring neither about propriety nor audience, Van patted her down, searching for an injury.

She raised a tear-streaked face, and instead of finding him, she sought the captain. "Edmund!" she squeaked, and launched herself out of his arms and into her brother's.

Van struggled with a pang of unreasonable jealousy, then it washed away as he realized Lucy was sobbing against Edmund's chest. "Gone ... all gone, all dead," she cried. "I heard her say it in my head. Peter, Susan, you, the children. Even Mother and Father. Alone, I was alone ..."

The anguish in her voice tore open Van's chest—a shocking, bright stripe of pain he could neither predict nor prevent. His hands twitched. He wanted to snatch her back from Edmund's grasp and thrust her behind him, ready to defend her with every menacing weapon he possessed. How had she wound herself through him so thoroughly that the very look of fright on her face demented him with fury?

"Lucy," Ed said, and Van heard the captain's voice shaking with impatience and worry, "what is the matter? What did you find?"

"Their skin ... was purple. Their eyes were like flame." Lucy clutched at Edmund's leather jerkin as if to convince herself he was there in front of her.

Ed muttered a particularly stunning curse word. "Aslan's ears, Lucy, you're the bravest woman I know." He stroked her braided hair, then raised his head over hers. "Dreadken," he said to Van. "They feed on fear, prey on it. I faced one once, and it almost killed me."

Dreadken—a nasty breed of witch from Dark Island in the Eastern Sea. Sailors knew well the fate awaiting them if they dared approach that island. Anyone who returned from Dark Island was frenzied with incoherence, and did not live long enough afterward to tell just what he'd faced there.

Van had never met one of the Dreadken, and he thanked his stars for it, because he'd seen the damage done to those who had. Soldier or sovereign, it didn't matter—one encounter with a Dreadken was enough to drive a man into madness for the rest of his shortened life. How, how had Lucy and Edmund faced them—How had Lucy faced so many?—and lived to tell of it?

Van had enough sense to step closer, but he was hard put to keep his voice down and avoid alarming the crew. "Twenty of them?" he hissed. "They'll annihilate us as soon as we get close!"

"They can only strike a fearspell if they're able to focus on you," Edmund said. "If we keep them distracted with our archers, we'll have a chance." Ed looked back down to his sister. With a startling display of tenderness (Was that how it was to be a family?), he dried Lucy's tears with his fingers. "Buck up, Lu. You've done well."

She shook her head and struggled visibly to get herself under control. "That's not all," she insisted. "They have half a dozen Calormene ships, and an Ettin battering ram. And she's with them, Ed. The White Witch is back, and Aslan is nowhere in sight." Lucy crossed her arms over her belly, gasping with the remnants of her terror, and Van stepped a little closer to her.

The captain's face went grim. "Then it's time to cash in my tricks." He sought Van again. "Take the ship's wheel. Lucy, lead him where you saw their fleet. I have a bad feeling they're headed for Cair."

- # -

At last.

At long, long last, after a hundred years of waiting, and another score of years of half-life oblivion in the wastes of northern Ettinsmoor, At last, Jadis would make Narnia hers, for no other reason than that it had been so long denied her. No one, no one denied her anything. Her own sister had met her doom trying. Jadis had spent her years after the Battle of Beruna wisely, planning and plotting, searching out weaknesses and planting spies.

And finding spies, as well. One of her generals had noticed a troublesome lack of influx of weapons for the money laid out in return. That led to reports of a rogue ship prowling the Eastern Sea. Some said it was a pirate. Others, a rebel for the Narnians. Still others thought it a ghost ship, and indeed, any report received on The Phoenix was obtained thirdhand, for no one who'd seen the ship ever resurfaced to talk of it. The hearsay took months even to get to her.

Until Faun Kamus came to her with news of the ship's captain, whose identity had been unknown all this time.

Edmund.

His name alone set her pacing restlessly across the deck of her Calormene flagship. She would crush Narnia, and then spend the rest of her endless years wiping mention of him from the pages of history.

He had destroyed her wand. Almost destroyed her. She would return the favor with interest.

Two of the Calormene puppets approached her. The first bowed low, then preened the feather on his turban as if she cared what it looked like. "The Phoenix comes, O She Whose Justice Is Swift, and Whose Mighty Army Is—"

"Ready our bronze catapults," she snapped. "Bring up the oils from the hold." She eyed him fiercely, and it bothered her that she could take no satisfaction in the look of terror on his face.

It was the wrong face.

The Calormenes bowed, bowed again, then bowed yet again. Just as she was ready to swipe at them with her wand (a new wand, small and protected from attack because she could hold it close to her body), they fled.

She studied the wand, and briefly considered striking at their retreating backs, just to see if their destruction would amuse her.

No. She needed to see fear, real fear of her power, on their faces. But even that would not bring her the pleasure she desperately sought.

There was only one person whose terror would fill the gaping hole where feeling had once been. Killing him would be slow, thorough, and satisfying—she was sure of it.

But then, it only took one courier to carry orders. "Slave," she called pleasantly.

The Calormenes turned, and Jadis aimed her wand at the second one. His fright gave her no pleasure as he turned to water that splashed to the deck. The second Calormene bolted away as quick as his feet would carry him.

Jadis stared at the puddle on the deck. A stream of water trickled toward her feet. She sidestepped it, indifferent to the slave's fate. Aslan had been able to return to life the people she'd made into stone with her previous wand. He would not find that so easy now that her victims were turned to water that ran everywhere.

One thing Jadis did well was to learn from her errors. But even that could not please her.