We Seven

A Narnia & Mirror, Mirror Fanfiction

Part 5

They had been in Tashbaan three weeks, and – although she was trying to muffle the noise with a silken pillow, so as not to be discovered – Susan was crying herself to sleep. Jo had never doubted she and Alexis were right about Rabadash, but that didn't mean she wanted to be.

"Oh, Su..." She got out of her own bed, slipping on a dressing-grown of some slippery, satin-like material and tying it in place at the middle. "Su, it's going to be all right." There was a sinking in the cushions as Jo settled down beside her sister and put her arm around her waist, snuggling close, like she used to when they were very little girls. "Tumnus's plan'll work great, you said it yourself."

Tumnus had come up with his brilliant scheme of pretending they were preparing to host a banquet on their galleon and then taking off, sails up for home – for the safety of Narnia – as soon as it was dark.

Relieved by this (they had thought themselves thoroughly trapped), Susan had grabbed the faun's hands and danced with him for sheer joy. Jo had silently vowed the moment they were back at Cair Paravel, she was going to grab Lucy and kiss her on both cheeks for befriending the faun in the first place; she might well have – however inadvertently – saved their lives in so doing.

It was true Rabadash had been behaved well toward them – just as Jo told Alexis nearly a month prior – for the sake of his hope Susan would be his wife.

(To their faces, at any rate. There had been a dreadful, underhanded incident when a comment originating from Rabadash – though none of the Narnians had proof of this – resulted in one of the prince's royal companions dragging Jo away from the others, only Sallowpad spied him taking her by the arm as she cursed him out, and – a day later – the man, all but disowned by Rabadash and the Tisroc, for being caught, sported an eye patch while there was a lingering trace of pinkish dried blood on the raven's beak.)

But to his own servants, he was entirely himself – so much so even Susan couldn't pretend not to see it.

The last thing she wanted was to marry a prince such as this, but when she finally admitted it, though Jo cried, "Hallelujah!" and was very cheerful, Edmund remained grave. He warned her getting out of Tashbaan after refusing her suitor wasn't going to be as simple as getting in had been.

"But what if it doesn't?" she choked. "What if I give myself away when I'm pretending to invite him to the banquet? What if the strange boy who looked so much like Corin, the one Ed mistook for him, tells somebody? He heard us make all our plans, you know."

"Nah," said Jo, and she tightened her grip on Susan's waist, giving her a reassuring squeeze. "He had those big, scared eyes, like a wounded stag." She'd thought she'd never seen Corin look that way before. It turned out, she still hadn't. "He won't tell."

"What if he's captured by one of Rabadash's men and they torture him?"

"They won't."

"You can't know that. Oh," she sobbed. "I've put us all in terrible danger. I was such a fool. I wish I would grow up and stop behaving like a stupid child."

Jo made a friendly little grunt of concession to this point.

"By the Lion's mane! I don't know how you can be so calm about it, Jo. I really can't imagine what it is that keeps you so tranquil! If we're caught, Edmund thinks Rabadash will make me his slave as soon as his wife. But I cannot bear the thought of what he'll do to you! I should think you would be very angry with me for..." She couldn't finish. "I behaved badly when Alexis warned me, back at Cair Paravel, and now all of us are in danger. I am the cause of this. Can you ever forgive me?"

"I already have," Jo assured her. She rubbed her sister's arm. "Don't let's worry about it anymore tonight, okay? Try and sleep."

"I'll do something grand to make it up to you," Susan promised. "Once we're home safe."

"You won't," said Jo. "There's no need. But don't you forget this, either." She hoped now, at last, Susan understood just how much they all loved her, how none of them – herself and Alexis included – wanted her to go without anything she desired. "The next time there's a prince..."

"Oh, pooh, I'm done with princes," she whimpered melodramatically. "They're nothing but a lot of bother."

Jo smiled to herself. "Not all of them. Don't give up." She added, in a low voice, letting go of Susan and propping herself up on an elbow, "But, if you try and force me to make friends with another twit like that giggling cow Lasaraleen, so you can win one over, I promise I'll smoother you in your sleep."

Susan cracked a smile in spite of herself. "I suppose that's fair. She was rather grating, was she not?"

Jo settled back down and the girls both wrapped their arms around one another again, only this time they faced each other. "She was insipid."

"She certainly talked too much," Susan conceded.

"Somebody should really warn Rabadash she's a torture risk – I pinched her at dinner, when no one was looking, and she told me everything Rabadash's men had ever said about me in front of her."

"Oh, Jo" – and Susan's next sniff was more like a hypocritical giggle – "you didn't!"

"What? She had it coming!"

"What were they saying? His men? You won't tell me?"

Jo sighed. "Nothing especially clever. They call me the boy-woman. Rabadash convinced some of them I have a cock I hide underneath my dresses. If you ask me, he's just jealous because – if I did have one – it would definitely be bigger than his."

Susan coloured brightly, her whole face lighting up scarlet. "Josephine!" She wondered how her sister could say such things unflinchingly.

"Well, you asked." She kissed Susan's burning brow and pressed her own against it. "Now, stop crying and sleep." They were nearly nose-to-nose. "You'll make that pillow grow mildew by morning at this rate."

When Jo's breathing grew more even, more rhythmic, like she'd fallen asleep, Susan murmured, to herself, "Be a big girl. There are other princes."

This was still true enough, but she was no longer in any hurry to meet one, whatever Jo said.

On the day all seven of them went to hunt the white stag – the one legend held could grant wishes if he were caught, the one even the most competitive hunter would have never actually killed – Rabadash and their near-imprisonment in Tashbaan was long relegated to just a bad memory.

Lucy and Royce even smiled, if ever he were brought up, because they remembered him primarily as the idiot who tried to take Anvard and wound up a donkey-king for all his pains.

Of course, he turned back into a human prince, presumably as handsome as Susan ever found him before she properly knew him, but he couldn't risk leaving the city and becoming a donkey forever.

Jo would have thought this as funny as they did – she was there, though Susan wasn't – when Aslan changed him, but – while she had laughed so hard at Corin's taunting Rabadash in court she'd fallen out of her seat and Edmund had asked if she needed to excuse herself a moment – she'd never been able to forget that his last human words before he started braying were threats against Susan, swearing he'd drag her by her hair back to Calormen. She knew Edmund thought even traitors could mend, and she loved him for it, but personally, she'd been hoping – especially after hearing what she heard – Aslan would write Rabadash off as a loss and just eat him. There was spoiled, there was treacherous, and then there was whatever the hell Rabadash was. Jo thought he must be insane. Properly, raving insane. The sort of man who – in another time and place – would be in an institution. His insanity frightened her. She knew it did Susan, too. Why else would her sister have avoided joining the archers, leaving it to Lucy and Jo when she was the better marksman (or markswoman, if you like) than both together and knew it? But at least he'd been a peaceful ruler, since the old Tisroc died. It just wasn't fully by choice.

Anyway, they'd been told at breakfast by Tumnus that the stag had been spied, and they'd readied for a journey west to seek it.

Royce changed his mind whenever Lucy or Edmund asked him what he wanted to wish for. One minute it was a great feast (he was hungry when they asked that time), the next he wanted a new saddle for his horse, or a fast carriage painted his favourite colour. Jo thought Susan's wish would be obvious, that she'd want love, a prince of her own, but Susan adamantly denied this, though she couldn't hide her reddened cheeks. Peter desired a very general sort of wish for prosperity for his subjects, but Susan – ever practical – said she wasn't sure wishes worked that way, because wouldn't any magnanimous person over hundreds of years who got a wish already have made one to such an effect? Edmund wanted better health for his horse, Philip, who wasn't ill, exactly, but wasn't so young as he'd once been. Alexis said he already had everything he wanted, and this was mostly true – those few things he desired, even after all these years, such as the return of his dead family, simply weren't something any magic stag could give him. Jo – who was in adulthood rather more like Helen Pevensie than anyone realised (probably because by then they only remembered their mother as they remembered a dream) – wanted a baby, a child of her own; she'd been married over a dozen years, the only one of her six siblings to wed in Narnia, and hadn't had one.

It struck her as rather a shame, since she knew Alexis would make an excellent father.

They had a sighting of the stag, and made chase, but – before they knew it – the white hindquarters had vanished into a thicket through which their horses could not follow. All seven alighted from their mounts, Edmund patting Philip's neck and not bothering to tie him up as his siblings and brother-in-law were doing to their horses since he knew he could trust him to wait.

In the thicket, they found a lamppost but did not know what it was. Susan called it an 'iron tree' and Royce snickered into his palm and Edmund corrected her, pointing out the light on top. Peter thought it a funny place to set a lantern. Lucy asked if he didn't think the trees might have been much smaller when the lantern was first erected.

"It makes me think of a story I heard," Alexis decided. "From you, I think, Jo."

"I never said anything about it." Jo's brow furrowed. "I've never seen it before. At least, I don't think I did." And she brought a hand to her brow, suddenly unsure.

"I must have dreamed it," said Alexis, taking her hand.

Blinking in the glow, squeezing her husband's hand, Jo had a flicker of a vision: a woman with dark eyes – like Edmund's – whose mouth formed the word, "Darling," and a framed photograph of a man this woman loved, cracked in Edmund's hand after a horrid blast. She shook her head, struggling to clear it.

"Let's go back." Susan was trembling. "It's an ill omen. We should return to the horses."

But the others overruled her, six to one, and she had no choice but to press on.

"If you will all have it so," she murmured. "In Aslan's name, so be it." Peter took her arm and whispered some gentle reassurance.

As they pressed on, Susan gasped, "Lamppost – it is called a lamppost."

"Mum," croaked Jo, blinking through the green gloom at her husband, "the woman with Edmund's eyes is our mum." How could she have forgotten?

And at hearing 'Mum', Lucy all at once wanted her so badly there were tears on her face before they felt boards under their feet. And Royce was soon crying, too, for no better reason than that his twin had cried first.

A hard tumble out of a wardrobe and onto the floor of a spare room, however, will stem nearly anyone's tears.

"Yes," said Lucy, the first to find her voice, though it was raspy from crying. "Spare Oom. I remember this."

Edmund and Susan were too busy looking down at their clothes, the same clothes they'd been wearing fifteen years earlier when they first discovered Narnia, in bewilderment to say much of anything.

Royce was frisking himself, hunting for a sizeable jewel, a ruby attached to his hunting cloak, which he'd had on his person moments before and sighing when he had to admit defeat. More was the pity – it would have fetched a fortune here.

Peter's light blue eyes were wide, and he looked at Jo, but she and Alexis stared only at one another, gawking. Alexis had never seen her in her 'England' clothes, and it was surprising – as well as admittedly amusing – for him, on top of the general shock of seeing his wife turn into a child version of herself before his very eyes. Jo was relieved Alexis had changed, too – he looked the way he had when she first saw him, when Aslan introduced them after he had rescued Edmund. She'd realised all at once what was happening to her own body, felt the change as it occurred and they all stumbled over the boards together, and had been gripped by a horrible, chest-tightening fear her husband would not alter as she had, and she would find herself quite hopelessly in love with a grown man. But he looked, thankfully, to be about sixteen to her fourteen years.

It was an adjustment for him, though; he couldn't stop himself constantly running his hand over his face, feeling for the beard that had been there.

Jo and Alexis managed, finally, after some minutes, to tear their eyes from each other and to stare at the others long enough for the humour of the situation to really sink in. And – out of the ensuing silence – all seven of them were exchanging sideways glances and laughing at once.

That would have likely been the end of the adventure, for the time being, except for the matter they couldn't see their way to overlooking.

They all felt they really must explain to the professor why there was an extra child in his house...

"Come on!" cried Jo, one arm folded around her middle and the other hand extended in the professor's direction. "You can let him keep his own name!" This was in response to the suggestion that Alexis take on the name Nicholas, now he was in England.

"Alexis does sound rather too foreign, Jo." Peter grimaced apologetically. "With the war and everything..." He shook his head. "Nicholas could be English."

Professor Kirke nodded. "And if we are going to say he is my ward, it would be sensible to give him a passably English name."

"Are we? Going to say that, I mean?" asked Susan. "That is" – and she looked at Jo – "I know my sister was hoping, well, that our mother would adopt him. So he could live with us. When we return to Finchley."

"And where, might I ask," the professor said simply, "were you going to tell your mother he was from? A boy with no name, no nationality, no identity at all to speak of in this world."

It was Lucy who said, "But couldn't we just tell Mum where he really came from? About Narnia, and being kings and queens? And Alexis being married to Jo while we were there, of course."

"I've found," said the professor, bringing his hands together and wringing them, for he understood it was difficult, "it's generally better not to mention visiting other worlds to people – even people you love – unless you're certain they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. I myself never told my own mother about Narnia, and I was there when it was created."

"But..." stammered Jo. "Nicholas?" Nicholas Kirke. Such a name! Certainly, her Prince Alexis didn't deserve that. "Really?"

Alexis – who was to be called Nicholas from then on – put his hand over hers and squeezed it. "I don't mind. It was my father's name. Your brother and the professor are right; I think Alexis would sound too strange here."

"Hang on! You could be called anything you want," Royce cut in. "Are you sure you'd settle for Nicholas?" Even if it was his dad's name. "Wouldn't you like some other name? Some even more regular name?"

"And what's a regular name to you?" laughed Edmund. "Royce Pevensie?"

"It's got a good ring to it, you've got to admit." He grinned, giving a quick shrug.

"I suppose," said Jo, biting her lip and then releasing it. "I suppose... If I can call you Nick, now and again, it's probably all right." She had used to call him Lex in Narnia sometimes. "And you will write to mum" – here, she was appealing to Professor Kirke – "and say you want him – I mean, Nicholas – to stay with us a while, since we all stayed so long with you? You won't forget?"

"Certainly I shan't forget, my dear," he assured her, smiling and reaching for the silver apple-jar in which he kept the tobacco for his pipe.

Jo was satisfied with this. She felt quite sure, once their mum got to know Nicholas, she – who loved children so – would want to keep him, and if the professor would say he was getting to be rather old and tired and wasn't keen on having the boy isolated in this big house, so far from his peers, she would be very glad to let him go on staying with them indefinitely in London, and probably arrange about his going to school with Peter and Edmund and Royce when the term started up. They wouldn't have to worry a wit about being separated until school-time, which couldn't be helped.

"We are sorry," Edmund felt he ought to add, "about losing six of your coats, sir."

"Fur is dreadfully expensive," conceded Susan, and Lucy nodded her agreement.

"I do wish we'd thought of it then, if ever we thought we'd be coming back," Peter lamented. "We wouldn't have left them lying about when the snow melted."

"Even if we could get back into Narnia and find them, they'd be old and spoiled," said Royce.

"Should we try?" Lucy asked, her fair brow raised. "They might be cleaned. Do you want us to, sir?"

Nicholas put an arm around Jo's waist and tried to drag her nearer himself, as if to prevent her going anywhere near the wardrobe without him (she gave him a look for this and stepped out of his grasp), but the precaution wasn't necessary. Professor Kirke told them of course he didn't think they should try, generous and polite as the thought was.

To be honest, he didn't expect it was even possible to get back to Narnia by that way.

"And remember," he advised, "what I've told you. Try not to talk too much about it even among yourselves. Magic has a nasty habit of being overheard and of becoming disheartening if too often spoken of – magic is a bit like charm or talents, in the way that they can be burdens if too much admired, too often brought up and made a great fuss over."

"Will we ever go back?" There was a quaver in Nicholas's voice. It was the world of his birth, after all. He might be glad to be here – with Jo – certainly it was preferable to being left behind if the others had to return – but the thought of never, not ever...

"I expect so," said the professor. "It'll probably happen when you're not looking for it, though it's still best to keep your eyes open, all the same."

Susan closed her eyes and groaned when she saw two dressing-growns hanging from the bedpost beside hers. "Oh, for mercy's sake!" She yanked the linens down, revealing two heads on the pillow beneath, Nicholas and Jo curled up and looking cosy. "You can't have him in here."

Jo blinked her dark eyes open and stretched her arms over her head languidly. "What? Whyever not? We've been sharing a bed for over a decade." She saw no reason to give up the practice now. "How's he meant to get any sleep without the melodious sound of my snoring?"

"I never said it was melodious," mumbled Nicholas. "I said I was long grown accustomed to it."

Jo aimed a feather-light kick at his ankle, hardly more than a nudge (she was gentle because of his condition); he grunted, her point taken.

"All right, all right – as you like – it's melodious."

Yes, thought Susan, Jo's snoring is melodious, and the sky is purple. She put her hands on her hips. "What if the Macready discovers you like this?"

"Oh, bother the Macready," she huffed, leaning back against Nicholas's arm and snuggling closer to him, preparing to return to warmth and her groggier dreams.

"Jo, use your head for something other than a place to keep a hat, just this once! If she finds him in here, if she writes to our mother, and her letter reaches him before the professor's..."

"She wouldn't!" Jo sat up again, mouth agape with horror. "She wouldn't, would she?"

Susan shrugged. Was Jo willing to risk it? She might lose him forever if there was a scandal. They might all lose him. They would be only six again, instead of seven. "Just have him sleep with the boys."

Jo gave Nicholas a sad little nudge with her elbow. "Su's right. You can't sleep here. Let's hope Royce's snoring will be just as melodious as mine, yeah?"

Nicholas kissed her on the cheek and, though he made rather a dragging fuss about it, did get up and leave them, preparing to go and pester his wife's brothers into making room for him tonight.

Jo looked so glum Susan couldn't understand it. "It's only for a little while, Jo."

Glancing at the door, as if making certain Nicholas wasn't still there, listening, she whispered, almost hissing, "But it isn't."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, Mum isn't going to let him just move into our bedroom, even if he comes to live with us, now is she?"

Susan supposed not.

"Then we'll be separated for school. We'll go back to Saint Finbar's, and he'll be with Peter and Edmund – it'll be Royce's first time there, as well."

Yes, she supposed that was true as well.

"It's not going to be anything like it was in Narnia. Maybe not ever."

"Don't be dramatic." Susan sat down beside her on the bed, putting her arm around her sister's shoulders. "It's not forever. We'll be grown up in a few years, and it will be simply splendid!" Her soft blue eyes grew starry as she talked of parties and social engagements and being allowed to wear rouge. "Lipstick, too, you know! Real bright red lipstick! Can you imagine? When we're grown up, we can do anything we want. It'll be well worth waiting for. Especially since the war will be over by then. What a time we're going to have!"

Jo, though she leaned her head on her sister's shoulder and behaved as if she'd been greatly consoled, wasn't so sure. Her heart felt icy with dread, making her whole chest numb and her slow heartbeat as far off as a distant drum. The simple fact was, she didn't want parties or rouge, or any of the other things Susan seemed to look so forward to. She just wanted to sleep in the same room as her husband at night, and to know her siblings were only a few corridors away – all six of them – if ever she needed them.

She didn't see how that was going to be possible anywhere in England, regardless of what age she was.