We Seven

A Narnia & Mirror, Mirror Fanfiction

Part 6

"They've always got the most interesting stories in that magazine, haven't they?"

Jo replaced the magazine on the stand's rack (she hadn't any spending money left for purchasing such a thing, not after buying a sandwich from a vendor across the street before deciding to amble over to look at the contents of this news stand) and glanced over her shoulder at the speaker.

He was an earnest, somewhat gawky, bespectacled boy with a broad face and wide-set mouth.

"You go to Saint Finbar's," said the boy.

"Yep." She gave him a friendly smile.

"I go to Hendon House; that's across the road." His brow crinkled slightly. "You know, I think I've seen you before."

"Sorry." Jo gave him an apologetic shrug. "I don't think so."

"Yes, I have seen you! We've met!" His cheeks coloured. "Sort of, anyway." He snapped his fingers together and pointed, gesturing a little pathetically. "You're the one who sent a stray cricket ball through our library window. I was the bloke sitting at the desk right next to it."

"That was me." It wasJo's turn to colour, though – because she was tanned while he was rather pasty in complexion – it was less noticeable on her. "But in my defence, that half-wit Anne Featherstone can't bowl to save her life. It was too wide, you see."

He shook his head. "I'm afraid the finer points of the sport are quite beyond me – all the points of any sport are, really, if I'm being honest."

She noticed what might have been a thin sketchbook under his arm, half-concealed by this dangling scarf. "You prefer to draw?"

"Yes, rather! I much prefer it." One shoulder lifted modestly. "At least I don't fumble with a pencil in my hand. And you don't have to depend on a team when you draw."

"Oh, I like drawing, too." She gestured at the rack with a tilt of her head. "I was looking for some ideas in there."

"Find any good ones?"

She shook her head. No, she hadn't, not really.

"That dark-haired girl who always sits by herself under the alder tree by the gate... She's your sister, isn't she?"

Grinning, Jo put a hand on her hip. "Yes, she is, but people don't usually work that out for themselves." Because we don't look alike, because I'm only adopted, and she's a real Pevensie... "How'd you guess?"

"She only talks to you, but hardly ever to anyone else, and... Well, I don't know" – he shifted from one foot to the other – "you act like you're sisters."

Jo chuckled. "What's your name?"

"Ashley," he told her. "Ashley Sion."

"D'your friends call you Ash or something?"

"They might do." His cough was self-conscious. "Except that I haven't got any."

"You've just made one now." Beaming, she extended her hand. "I'm Jo. Jo Pevensie. It's great to meet you, Ash."

He took her hand, a trifle shyly, and shook it. "Well! That's..." Clearing his throat, he squeaked out, "It's a pleasure."

"And listen, as a gesture of friendship, I hereby promise not to hit a cricket ball through your window ever again."

The library was hardly his window, he demurred. "But thank you all the same. I think I will like having a friend."

"Jo!" Susan came running towards them. "Jo!" She stumbled to a halt and flicked her hair over her shoulder tempestuously when she saw Ash, narrowly resisting the urge to bite back a groan. "Come on, Jo, hurry!" Her arm hooked through her sister's. To Ash, smiling tightly, she managed a curt but polite, "Excuse us, won't you?"

As Jo – her free hand clamped to her head to keep her boater hat from falling off – craned back to wave goodbye to her new friend, Susan hissed, very sharply and not very quietly into her ear, "This is why I worry about you sometimes, Josephine! You don't have the sense not to talk to boys like him."

Her brow furrowed. "I didn't notice anything wrong with him."

"Don't be stupid! He tries to flirt with any girl who pauses at that stand for longer than a minute." Susan's nose crinkled. "He does that positively dreadful 'I've seen you around' routine pipsqueak boys think is so jolly clever and worldly."

"What? He wasn't flirting, he's lonely."

Susan's eyes rolled heavenward. "I swear there are moments anyone would think you were Lucy's age. You think every boy who talks to you wants to be your chum. Really! Who would ever believe you were once a high court lady involved in great political intrigue?"

"Whatever you say, Queen Susan." Jo sighed. She loved Susan dearly, would have died for her without a second's hesitation, but her sister could be so cynical and unforgiving when it came to the opposite sex. "Where's the fire?" She meant, of course, what was the great emergency Susan was dragging her off for.

After they dodged a honking automobile and Jo pulled a face at the driver – who bellowed, "Watch yourself, lass!" – and they'd zipped past a stone lion on the pavement's edge and come at last to the steps leading down into the Strand Station, Susan breathlessly told her.

Peter was fighting again.

Nicholas was rather put out he'd missed the whole fight. Having excused himself to find a toilet after drinking too much lemonade, it had transpired only Edmund and Royce had been there when Peter got into his scuffle with another boy.

"It's a jolly good thing you did miss it!" exclaimed Susan, her eyes darting from him to Peter with cold disapproval. "Royce was knocked down, and Edmund..." Edmund – beside her on the bench – was still holding a clenched hand to his left eye. "Well, Edmund, he's..."

"The bastard got in a lucky blow," mumbled Edmund.

"Edmund!" cried Lucy, shocked at his language.

"Anyway," Susan pressed on, though she could hardly hold to her original point with the others fussing as they were, "if you had been here, Nicholas, with your condition–"

It had a name – his condition – in their world, though the Pevensie children had never heard of it until their mother – having taken a shine to Nicholas just as they'd hoped she would – brought him to a doctor and introduced the term haemophilia into their home.

Not that it mattered – it had a name here, but no cure.

Nicholas hated being called a haemophiliac, much the same way someone with a wonky leg and uneven gait might loathe being labelled a cripple.

Whenever he became too moody about it, Jo would grasp his shoulders, make him look at her, and snap, "It's a word, Nick. It means someone who can't stop bleeding. And you are one. You're also funny and handsome, and you have six people who love you desperately. Eight, if you want to count my parents. Nine, if you count Professor Kirke, too. So get over yourself already!"

And then he would usually concede she was right; wives generally were.

"I wish you wouldn't fight, no matter what," Lucy said to Peter, patting his arm. "Whatever was it that made you hit him?"

Peter mumbled something about being bumped and told to apologise for it.

Jo could hardly believe this was the same brother who had given her such a hard time in Cair Paravel, back when she'd been undiplomatic towards Prince Rabadash. Somehow, she'd thought Peter especially, as the most openly noble of her brothers, the former high king, would have adapted to their return to childhood better.

"You know," she said wryly, "for all Father Christmas said it was ugly when women fight, it isn't too pretty when boys do it, either."

"It isn't that hard just to walk away, is it?" sighed Susan long-sufferingly. "Think of the dreadful example you're setting for Royce!"

(Royce was, at that particular moment, preoccupied with sticking his little finger up his nose, wrongly having assumed his siblings – busy snapping at one another – weren't going to look at him for a bit.)

"Let's talk about something else," said Peter shortly.

"Like how dreadful Saint Finbar is going to be!" blurted Lucy, swinging her feet, which did not quite reach the platform under the bench. "I don't want to go to school! I want to stay home with Mum. I miss her!"

"Buck up. You managed fifteen years without our mum," Royce reminded her. "A term won't be so bad."

"I miss Mum when I go away to school, too," Jo admitted. "But remember, Lu, there's all kinds of fun things at school to look forward to. Games and sports, I mean. You can do swimming and cricket. Ice skating, too, if it gets cold enough."

"Snowball fights," Nicholas contributed.

"Snowball fighting isn't a sport." But Susan was smiling when she said it.

"It is," Nicholas insisted, "if you are doing it correctly."

"And think of all the new friends you'll make," Jo reminded Lucy brightly.

Susan felt like being prickly, and so she said, "Yes, well, you are always making new friends, Jo, whether or not they're worth having. What do you think about it, Nicholas?"

Jo – scowling – pinched her.

"Ow!"

A moment later, Edmund demanded, "What did you pinch me for?" lowering his hand and glaring through his bloodshot eye at Jo. "I didn't say anything."

"I didn't pinch you," she cried. "I only pinched Su because she was trying to start something. You're all the way over there! I can't even reach you from my seat."

"Sharp's the word!" Peter's eyes went wide – just as tiles above their heads shook and loosened themselves – and he leaped from his seat. "It must be magic."

"Or it's an earthquake and we're going to be buried underground!" Susan shouted but consented to catch hands with the others, when that was Peter's next suggestion.

"If it is magic, we mustn't be separated by it," said Nick to Jo, who said, simply, "No," and put her hand in his by way of response.

Edmund made a fuss about taking Peter's hand, but Peter grabbed it despite his protests.

The roaring, clanking world around them quieted; it stilled.

They found themselves on a glorious beach with golden sand and the bluest water, and as this was much cheerier a sight to the children than the looming walls of a school – further, two separate schools – which promised nothing but Latin, French, and Algebra, they all waded in with cries of delight.

Of course, when they grew hot and thirsty, and had lost interest in splashing one another, and explored some ways inland looking for fresher water to drink, Susan finding a gold chess knight by the remains of a well and clutching it as if the little ruby-eyed horse-head was all she had left in the world, they realised they were at Cair Paravel.

They'd come home.

Only it was a ruin now...

In the treasure chamber, from which Susan took her bow and arrows when she could finally be persuaded to follow the beam of Edmund's electric torch down into it in the first place, Jo came across very little she thought was worth the bother of taking away.

Lucy found a dress with golden thread that was too tall for her, before folding it up resignedly and taking her diamond-encased cordial while her twin played with a handful of gold coins, making them clink together. Peter had his precious broadsword Rhindon. Edmund was a great deal more worried about saving the battery of his torch than finding a keepsake.

But, for all the memories this place held, there wasn't much Jo felt she needed to have again herself.

In the end, she found a leather rucksack and stuffed the lace veil she'd worn at her wedding inside it; then she strung Nicholas's mother's engagement ring (which she'd long assumed to be lost) onto a chain to hang around her neck.

Nicholas took nothing except his old watch. It no longer told the hour aright, no longer ticked, but he wanted it back because it contained the miniatures of his sisters he'd shown Edmund so long ago.

"Can you bear to leave Cair again, Jo?" he asked her as the others were all making their way to the stairs, Edmund still grumbling about his torch's waning battery.

"I can if the two things I care about most leave it with me."

He eyed the rucksack and ring, wondering if she meant those, but it was both his hands she'd held in her own when she'd spoken.

Finally, it had happened.

Susan had found her prince.

When Trumpkin the dwarf (their DLF) told them about Caspian, most of them had been expecting a boy hardly older than Edmund, some sheltered thirteen-year-old Telmarine who had been allowed to go on living at the new castle when his uncle usurped his father's throne only because Queen Prunaprismia hadn't any children of her own. They had not taken into account, perhaps, how many years had actually gone by while the queen was barren and Caspian was being educated by his half-dwarf tutor in lieu of the nurse who'd been taken from him as a small child.

None of them had thought Caspian would be almost a man, which indeed he proved to be, though his face was still smooth with youth and his eyes remained rather innocent despite some of the alarming things they had recently seen.

There wasn't any need for Caspian to offer Susan a flower or to display especially gorgeous court manners in order to catch her fancy – their eyes meeting in the woods, gazes locking across a dappled glen, seemed to do the trick well enough.

When they spoke to each other, they spoke in low tones, shared only between themselves, their words never carrying to the ears of the others even in the naturally echo-y Aslan's How. Somehow it seemed fitting he had been the one to blow the horn – her own lost horn which had been her other Christmas gift – and bring her back to Narnia.

They had archery practice together, just outside the How, aiming for pinecones. Caspian had always prided himself on being an expert marksman with his crossbow, but he squinted and said, "Are you sure that's not an acorn," to Susan's suggested mark.

And while he was certainly impressed, he was not unduly surprised when her arrow struck it down after his own only made it shake and flutter a bit.

"You fancy him, don't you?" Jo said that night when they were all arranging makeshift bedrolls around the remains of the Stone Table. "Caspian."

"Oh, yes, I suppose." Her cheeks were pink. "That is, I like him as well as I know him. Which isn't very well."

"You must know him pretty well." Jo waggled her eyebrows teasingly. "What do you talk about when you're whispering together if you aren't telling each other all about yourselves? You were talking for hours outside."

"Was it hours? Really?" Susan was plainly astonished by this revelation. "I could have sworn – sworn on anything you like, Jo – we were only speaking for some few minutes, waiting for the boys to get back from scouting the woods for Telmarine spies.

"And, if you really must know, we talk about how things were here before – I've told him about the mer-people and my beautiful horse and the giants. We're a bit like a fairy-tale to him, all of us. He grew up hearing about us as if we were legends and myths.

"It would be like if King Arthur and Queen Guinevere showed up in England."

"The sooner the better," said Jo cheekily, pumping a fist in the air.

"Listen. I'm sorry. I know I've been pretty glum up till now." Susan gnawed on the inside of her cheek, remembering her quiet pouting, her stony silences. "I've been a wet blanket, as Edmund says, since I realised that ruin really was Cair Paravel. Our old home. Lucy's still cross I didn't believe she saw Aslan on our trek here. But that's all over now, I promise. I'm finished with being sulky."

Jo said she was glad to hear it.

"I just didn't see then how things could ever be good again! Everyone we knew is gone. Thirteen hundred years! But it won't be dreadful if the people we're going to be around in this new Narnian era, once we get this Miraz fellow out of the way, are like Caspian seems to be. I think – I really do think – I can be happy to be here, to stay here again, for another fifteen years or longer, if only they are." She added, cautiously, "Of course, it mightn't be... I mean, when I thought I could love Rabadash..." It was the first time in years Susan had said his name. "You know... Princes aren't always what they appear."

"That's because Rabadash wasn't the right prince! Caspian isn't anything like him."

"Do you like Caspian, Jo? Do you trust him? Tell me the truth."

"Of course. He's on our side, and he loves old Narnia and Aslan."

"And that's..." She held her breath a moment and settled into the centre of her 'bedroll'. "That's all? You don't think anything else of him?"

But it was obvious, even to someone who could doubt as deeply as Susan in her worst moments, Jo – when it came to that – never thought of anybody at all apart from Nicholas.

She already had her prince.

Susan adjusted the folds of her skirts around her knees, smoothing them as she balanced carefully on the edge of the stone parapet, looking out into the clear night. "Do you see those stars?" She pointed. "The cluster of bright ones that end there, looking like a sort of tail? That's the Leopard."

Caspian smiled, inching nearer to her. "I love stars. Astronomy was one of my favourite subjects. Sometimes, late at night and early in the mornings, Doctor Cornelius would take me up to a tower where we couldn't be overheard, under the premise of doing our 'bit of astronomy' my uncle Miraz had approved. I looked forward to those lessons with every fibre in my being. Of course, we could not actually see the stars as well as this from that tower. We could not have seen your Leopard."

"No?"

He shook his head. "The trees got in the way."

"The best place for stargazing is out at sea." Susan told him about the Splendour Hyaline. "When the stars shine above the water, sometimes it looks as if there were two skies, and your ship is gilding on one of them."

"I have never been to sea."

She gaped at him. "What? Never?"

"My uncle doesn't approve of ships." He swallowed hard. "As a boy, I was not even permitted to learn Navigation in theory."

"That is too bad," she lamented. "But – perhaps, when this is over – we could go out on a ship."

His gaze became sheepish. "You and me, your Majesty?"

"You look so surprised! Have I shocked you? But, really! I don't see why not." She shrugged. "You want to learn, and I haven't seen the Lone Islands in over a century."

"I have never seen them at all."

"You ought to – they belong to Narnia, after all, and if you're going to be king..."

Tucking a strand of his dark hair behind one ear self-consciously, he mused it mightn't be proper – quite – for him and Susan to travel together unaccompanied. "As things stand at present, I mean."

"That's right." Susan looked away to hide her disappointment in his putting her off. "Quite right, I daresay. Good of you to consider propriety and honour. You will make a fine king of Narnia."

"But... Things... Things may change." And she felt the lightest brush of Caspian's hand over her knuckles. "Things may be different before anyone is ready to sail anywhere again."

Susan's face was gone as bright as the stars she'd been pointing to.

"Yes," she whispered, almost too pleased to speak clearly. "They might."

"Nicholas?" Lucy stared at her brother-in-law with a bewildered expression. "Where on earth did he come from?"

Nicholas was sitting in one of the large, beehive-like hollows of the How, clutching a tawny-coloured cat close to his abdomen, gently rocking it back and forth. "It was when we raided Miraz's castle. Our mice had tied him up and muzzled him, poor puss." He scratched the cat under the chin, and he purred. He loved this boy who had rescued him from those big, horrid rats with their pointy sticks. "So I took him out with me."

"Oh. Well!" She'd been against the raid from the start, said all along they ought to wait for Aslan, but Peter had insisted, and it had all gone wrong – they had lost so many good Narnians. "At least something good came from that awful raid."

"Agree to disagree, my queen." And Reepicheep the chief mouse was staring at them from a foot away, one paw resting upon the hilt of his tiny rapier. "If Lord Alexis was not your Majesty's brother by marriage..." His high little voice trailed off, ending on a faded squeak full of indignation.

It hardly mattered what he would do if the wretched cat's saviour was not Queen Lucy's kin, for – alas – he was, so – regardless of the personal slight – he felt he owed Nicholas his allegiance and even his life.

Nicholas knew this was what Reepicheep was thinking, knew all the Talking Mice were very worthy beasts, and so tried hard – for his own part, even as his biased hands stroked the cat – not to think about things such as oversize rat traps lined with blocks of cheese.

He succeeded in thinking of them only a little.