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"and sometimes you hear the silence speak." Narnia. Edmund, Susan, Jadis. PG13.
Longest fic I have written ahoy! I have been writing this SINCE THE SUMMER, and it has been informed by a variety of things along the way, including but not limited to 1001 Arabian Nights, Philip Pullman, the big bang, the Eucharist, my sociology class, and my love-hate relationship with economics.
Thank you, Pen, for fielding the initial drabbles and doing thumbs-up. Thank you, Bedlam, for fielding the later drabbles and doing thumbs-up, and also for betareading.
HERE GOES. (Eeeeeee!)
and sometimes you hear the silence speak
Narnia. Edmund, Susan, Jadis. There are shades of Pevencest and Edmund/Jadis here and there, though it is 'technically gen'. PG13.
Edmund and Susan go to Calormen to collect magic. "We are doing this for Narnia, sister, and nothing else."
ETA: The DVD commentary for this fic is here. Some missing scenes are here.
In the language of the desert tribes, the word for ‘magic’ is the same word for ‘wind’. You cannot see the wind; you can only see what it does. You only know it is there when it cools your skin or sends fallen leaves dancing. The tribes name a wind not for what it is, but by the sandstorms it conjures.
The north wind they call ‘the devourer of the sun’ and the southern wind they simply call ‘the fire’. The westerly winds are called ‘the hand of god’ because of how they can reshape the desert completely, relocating dunes and burying oases, rearranging navigable routes. Not that it looks very different in the end – it’s still sand as far as the eye can see. The desert never really changes, and this is a comfort in the way that being caught is a comfort after the exertion of fleeing and lying.
At night the moonlight silvers the dunes into a winter landscape, and Edmund wanders a little ways away from the caravan, his feet sinking into the sand as he goes. His heart remembers and his mind reminds, and his eyelids are heavy but he has no wish to sleep. He lets the chill of the desert night sink into his bones until Susan comes to find him, an extra cloak under one arm.
“This sand,” she says, draping the cloak around Edmund’s shoulders. “It’s getting into everything. My shoes, my hair. Especially my shoes, and it irritates my feet.”
He smiles. “We’ll be there soon, Su.”
“Next time,” says Susan, taking his hand and leading him back to the caravan, “we will travel by sea.”
+
After freshening up, they eat supper with the Tisroc in a gilded hall with images from Calormene folk tales carved into the walls. There is the story of Al Adzin and his magical lamp, there are the seven voyages of Zindebad, and here is a likeness of the treasure caves of the Forty Thieves.
They sit on one side of a long table laden with food, and at the clap-clap of the Tisroc’s hands, the dinner entertainment begins: lissome dancing girls, their eyes demure and their bare skins glossy with fragrant oils. A trained bear follows; the smile leaves Susan’s eyes at the sight of the dumb beast, castrated and collared, poked and prodded into tricks. After the bear, a magician dressed in bright colors performs legerdemain. Edmund watches him carefully and tries to figure out where the man keeps his coins and sashes, how the doves stay quiet until they are released, how wine can disappear into thin air.
The magician reaches into the air above his head and plucks a bright red apple from an invisible tree and, after asking permission from the Tisroc to approach the table, bows deeply before Susan and offers her the fruit. She blushes in delight, and Edmund takes note of the grin on her face and on the magician’s as she thanks him.
Finely crafted trickery is its own magic, and one can still learn from it.
Susan would tell Edmund later that her favorite act had been the storytellers. These are two women: one is a hunched and grizzled crone with opalescent cataracts and gold bangles on her arms, and the other is a young woman with kohl-lined eyes. They sit on cushions on the floor, and the old woman waits patiently as the girl prepares a jeweled water pipe.
Susan turns to the chancellor beside her and asks, “Are they grandmother and granddaughter?”
“No,” Edmund hears him reply. “They are more like sunrise and sunset.”
The crone begins to speak in a voice as cracked as history as the girl inhales deeply through the pipe hose. The heavy smoke pours from her lips and curls into images from the story: men, women, and spirits that love and despair; cities that rise and fall; gods who curse and gods who redeem. The smoky figures float towards the table and twine around them all. They breathe in the smoke’s sweet smell, clove and cardamom and cinnamon and something else that Susan can't name but Edmund recognizes.
He waves the smoke away.
+
They go to Calormen to renegotiate trade agreements. This is what he lets everyone believe because Peter cannot tolerate the idea of witchery, and Lucy hates the thought of Edmund being around all that stuff again.
“That’s why it must be you,” Edmund had said. Susan watched him with what he suspected was amusement, but he knew she was at least considering it. “Peter would be suspicious and Lucy would just try to stop me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “They don’t know about this?”
“They will know when we come back.”
Edmund described the magic he sought to collect: protective runes, illusions, spells that reveal the truth. There are chants that fortify strength, ceremonies that ward off possessions, amulets that bend your enemies’ minds to see what you want them to.
“I know better than any of us what magic can do,” said Edmund, and at his words the expression on his sister’s face softened. Susan reached across the table and covered Edmund’s hands with her own, and he resisted frowning – he didn’t need anyone’s pity.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, as Edmund knew she would. “Narnia will be the stronger for it.”
“Good,” he replied, withdrawing his hands. “I’m glad to hear it.”
And he smiled.
+
One late afternoon, Edmund rides into the desert for the sheer pleasure of it.
The horse he rides is one from the Calormene stables, a dumb beast that raises no protest when Edmund digs his stirrups into its sides: faster, farther. The sounds of Tashbaan recede behind him and he bids his horse stop when he can no longer hear the city. There is something majestic in the silence, and honesty in such desolation. Edmund urges the horse to the top of a dune and is still, surrounded on all sides by endless things.
“Where were you this afternoon?” Susan asks him before supper.
“Out,” he shrugs.
He likes the heat of Calormen, its yellow light that gilds slow afternoons, so different from the fingers that leave frost across the landscape of his dreams.
+
In the evenings they convene in Susan’s rooms and dismiss their retainers. Susan fills their goblets with wine as Edmund locks the doors and closes the windows. They tell each other what they have learned.
Although Narnians have been using magic since the land was sung, they have in recent years become wary of it, having suffered under the Witch. Aside from Susan’s horn and Lucy’s cordial, the only magic acceptable now is the Deep Magic, something associated with Aslan and the inexplicable powers that move him. Narnian magic is not so much the willful manipulation of forces, but rather an articulation of justice, a description of harmony and the way of nature. Not turning people to stone, but the changing of the seasons. Not crafting sweets from ice, but the paths stars trail through the sky.
But here in Calormen, how casually such strange wonders are woven into the fabric of everyday life! “There is a potion that will turn you invisible for a day and a night,” says Edmund, and “There is a telescope that will show you whatever you want to see from wherever you are in the world,” says Susan. They make notes and transcribe instructions, sketch runes and symbols and their meanings. They keep these notes in a lacquered box and cast a spell on it to make it unopenable unless it is Edmund or Susan’s hands that touch it.
“Look at how filthy my fingers are,” says Edmund, displaying ink-stained fingers. Susan makes a face, which is all the invitation Edmund needs to reach out and smear ink on her cheek.
Susan cries out and rears back. “That was uncalled for!”
“You going to send me to bed without my supper, then?” he says, and dips his fingers in the ink well.
They end up chasing each other around the room while Susan says things like, “This is no way for a king and queen to act,” and Edmund comments on how hard it must be to look offended and giggle at the same time.
“This is undignified behavior,” Susan declares breathlessly, trapped between a corner and her brother.
“Nuts to your dignity,” and leaves ink on her nose, her chin, her neck.
“Peter wouldn’t approve of this.”
“Peter,” he responds, “is not here.”
+
At first he had found it easy to dismiss Susan in Narnia as he had done in England. Her delight in her court and attention to the upkeep of Cair Paravel are tedious, and Edmund wonders how her jaws don’t ache from smiling at grubbing diplomats and suitors she plans to dismiss anyway.
“You have such patience for the games they play,” Edmund commented one time.
Knowing it was not all compliment, she had replied, “Only for the ones that matter.”
Just as Lucy knows intimately the frailties of her own heart, Peter the solitude of his station, and Edmund his past crimes, Susan knows how far she can bend and how not to break for it.
It is a rare thing to see her undone as she is now. Her pale skin streaked with dark ink, her hair loose and her laugh unpretentious. The magic wafting from the spells and fetishes strewn around the room flickers in the air, and maybe he should’ve known then; he should have remembered. You shouldn’t be careless with magic, especially when you have been so before. It leaves its mark on you, and it calls to its own.
+
The sound of galloping reindeer and the tinkle of sleigh-bells. Edmund remembers this as the very first place he saw the Witch.
The dreams are never the same from night to night, but they always start like this. The world is cold and white beneath his feet, pristine and drained of color and laid bare for her arrival. And oh, the wildness of her! The fierce delight in her eyes when she comes to him with her arms outstretched as if meeting a long-lost lover. When Edmund was a child, it was not her wildness that drew him to her, but her illusion of sympathy. He is grown now, and there are certain tricks that won’t work on him.
He does not fear her.
“I am no longer yours,” he tells her.
The Witch draws herself to her full height, and Edmund can see in her stature a little of her Jinn heritage. But unlike the Jinn there is no fire in her eyes, only a dead black, and still he doesn’t back away from her, won’t let himself do so.
“Oh, my dear boy, don’t you see?” says the Witch. “You carry me in your thoughts and nurture me in your grudges. You keep me in your dreams. It is not you who are mine.” She bends to be face to face with him, and smiles. “I am yours.”
+
Susan charms scryers, fortune-tellers, royal scholars, and the fellow who gave her the apple during that first performance. “His name is Farroukh,” she tells Edmund in hushed excited tones, as if he were Lucy, “and he really is rather lovely.” Edmund makes his own investigations, and also hunts down the pair of storytellers from that first day; they seem to know something of magic as well.
“Mama Biguda has little to say to young men looking for information,” says the young woman who smoked the water pipe. There is no kohl around her eyes this time; her dress is simple and she wears no jewels, but she moves with the grace of those who know their own worth.
“And you?” asks Edmund. “Do you have anything to say to these young men?”
She laughs and tells him her name is Shativa as Edmund takes her hand and bows to kiss her knuckles.
+
Edmund and Susan go to the marketplace in commoners’ clothes. Their skin color and strange accents don’t stand out as much as Susan had feared; the marketplace is filled with vendors and traders from all over the world, and they have strange skins and accents of their own. By not fitting in at all, Edmund and Susan fit in perfectly.
Susan flits from stall to stall, contentedly mixing business with pleasure as she barters and smiles her way to a lower price. Edmund stays close and makes small talk with passers-by, cross-referencing marketplace rumors with what the Hawks and Foxes have told him before he left Narnia.
“A bracelet for Lucy,” Susan announces, showing him her hard-won gifts as they wander through the hustle and bustle. “A flute for Tumnus.”
“Lucy has piles of jewelry that she barely wears,” Edmund says flatly. “She thinks they’re bothersome.”
“Well, if she doesn’t want to appreciate her present, I’ll wear it for her.”
“How very big-hearted of you.”
They pass a stall selling Turkish Delight. Edmund stares until the vendor notices and starts waving a box of it in his face. He shakes his head, smiling weakly, and feels Susan’s arm around his waist, tugging him away.
“They’ll rot your teeth,” she tells him, like he is ten years old all over again, and leads them back into the crowd.
The Street of the Enchanters is as noisy and crowded as the rest of the market. At first you would not notice anything out of the ordinary, but then you see a man with the eyes of a cat, a dancing slave-girl whose feet never touch the ground, and a woman whose wings peek out when a breeze flutters the dirty cloak she wraps around herself. There is a strange taste to the air that reminds Edmund of the hookah smoke from the first day.
When Susan disappears into an herbalist’s to find the items on their list, Edmund drifts to the stall next-door. Hanging from the tapestries that serve as stall dividers and piled on the tables are a miscellany of objects of every shape and color. There is no theme; it looks as if the vendor had simply wandered in a freewheeling sort of way through the world and collected the things he fancied without rhyme or reason, hoping for the best. A number of things look familiar, but further investigation would reveal small details that only emphasize their strangeness. This knife, for example…
It is a double-edged knife, and while one edge is remarkable for its obvious sharpness, the other edge is more peculiar. It seems to be playing optical tricks on him, the way he cannot quite see where the blade ends and the air begins. Edmund doesn’t lift it to investigate, doesn’t touch it. Doing so only encourages vendors, but it is too late: his interest has been noticed. The vendor puts on his winning smile, and he strikes.
“Sir is interested in this knife?” he says. He has the dark complexion of a Calormene, but Edmund cannot place his accent.
“What manner of knife is this?”
With a flourish of his hand, the vendor recites, “It is a magic knife, forged in a world far from here, farther than I’m sure you’ve traveled, good sir.”
“I’m sure,” Edmund replies indulgently.
He displays the knife’s strange blade. “You see how this side extends to a point so fine that even the eye cannot see it?”
Edmund has no intentions of buying this knife, but he takes on the tone of the disinterested interested buyer to amuse himself. “Is that what it’s doing?”
“It’s for cutting the veil between the worlds. Nothing better for those seeking a new beginning, not just in new lands, but in a new universe!”
A familiar voice cuts in disdainfully: “Taking refuge in other worlds is no way to go about your problems.”
And it is Susan, her basket heavy with souvenirs and magical paraphernalia, and her expression one of high-minded disapproval. She floats to Edmund’s side, lacing their fingers together and squeezing his hand. “You should be ashamed, selling such tricks,” she says.
“My lady is wise and strong,” the vendor murmurs with a bow. Susan brings this sort of behavior out in people.
The vendor, a businessman through and through, points out topaz earrings that chime fairy music and ribbons that change color as you dance. Edmund hovers nearby as she is drawn into haggling, the knife at the corner of his eye, and weighs out the consequences of decisions he will never make.
+
She leaves no footprints in the snow and her breath does not mist in the air. The Witch beckons, “Walk with me, my king.”
Edmund frowns. “I am not your king. You are not my queen, or anything. We are nothing to each other.” But he falls in step with her anyway, easily like the first time long ago.
A crescent moon hangs in the sky; there are no stars. Like the first time, the trees only watch quietly, holding their own counsel. The Witch asks, “Are you learning much magic, Edmund?”
“That is no concern of yours.”
“Of course it is. Magic is a concern of mine, for they have named me the White Witch and this is what I am. I am of magic. And you are a concern of mine, my boy, for you have eaten of me.”
“I am not that same boy who fell for your tricks, Jadis.”
She doesn’t seem to hear him. “I took the winter inside of me so that I may bend it to my will.” The Witch scoops a handful of snow and holds it out to Edmund. The snow doesn’t melt on the palm of her hands, and instead it transubstantiates into a number of things: a jewel, a silver coin, a chalice of wine. All illusions, Edmund knows. A crown, a dagger, and back to snow. “This is my body and my blood, as far as creatures like me can have such things,” she says, and the snow changes again.
The smell of confectionary sugar is familiar and Edmund takes an involuntary step backward. In a rush he remembers being wrapped in furs and her soft body beside him, the sleigh rushing through the winter landscape. The stamp of reindeer hooves on packed snow and the cold biting at his face where the wind lashes, where her fingers touch.
The Witch holds out the box of Turkish Delight. “Won’t you have just one?”
+
Dancing with Susan is nothing like dancing with Lucy, who doesn’t care for knowing the steps and whose feet goes any which way her heart takes her. He usually lets Lucy lead anyway. In the background Peter and Susan would dance together with as much elegance and aplomb as Edmund and Lucy dance through stifled giggles. Lucy brings out the merriment in him and he finds himself missing her now.
“This is the part Peter always makes a mess of too,” Susan tells him complacently. “We’ll do this until we get it right, don’t worry.”
Edmund says, “It’s not that I’m worried.”
The Tisroc has arranged for a banquet tonight (that is to say, he has announced it, and set his retainers to arranging it) and has asked Susan and Edmund to perform a courtly dance of Narnia. Edmund let his sister answer, knowing she would reply with more enthusiasm and grace than he, and this led to where they are now, practicing in the gilded hall where the banquet is to take place. The palace servants glide to and fro like silent ghosts in the background, decorating and setting up and bringing in tables and chairs; they give the dancing monarchs in the middle of the hall wide berth.
“I almost wish we can enchant my feet so they’d know what to do,” Edmund mutters.
“Oh, hush,” says Susan as Edmund twirls her, though really she twirls herself while holding Edmund’s hand above her head. “We don’t need magic for everything.”
By the end of an hour, their faces are flushed with exertion and strained patience and when Edmund calls for a rest, Susan does not object. They call for wine and it is brought to them in silver goblets. The servants bow as they are thanked, scuttling backwards and turning around only when they have reached a distance of twenty paces from them.
“What a curious custom,” Susan comments as they make their way to one of the hall’s large windows overlooking the gardens. “A wonder they don’t bump into anything.”
“Calormen is full of many wonders,” he says absently. The breeze that floats in is cool and soothing as Edmund leans against the windowsill; Susan doesn’t deign to do so for fear of dirtying her sleeves.
“Farroukh told me of a spell,” says Susan, “that lets you climb into other people’s dreams.”
Edmund keeps his voice neutral. “Oh?”
“They say that, once, a sorceress used the spell to climb into her beloved’s dreams. He was a general in the Tisroc’s army, and far away at the time. Off reclaiming Calormene lands conquered by King Frank XII, I believe. Every night she came, and together they would defy the distance between them.”
Edmund rolls his eyes. “That’s a nice bedtime story. Anything ever came of it?”
“Well, they got married of course, when he returned. They were in love, after all.”
“Maybe she used a love spell.”
In Susan’s reply, he hears the words of a queen who has spent the past many years winning the hearts of men and women in the name of her country. “Love is its own magic,” she says. “It needs no other spells.”
He takes in the lushness of the Tisroc’s gardens below them and wonders detachedly how much water must be pumped to keep them in such a verdant state. Water, he notes, that could have been distributed instead to the people living in the dust and squalor of Tashbaan’s ghettos. Calormen has been teetering on the verge of drought for some months now; the rains have not come and the people grow restless. There will be border disputes with Archenland over the Winding Arrow delta (again), and Narnia will officially declare neutrality to preserve her hard-won peace with Calormen. But he and Peter owe Lune certain favors, and Edmund mentally flicks through a growing list of spells and enchantments, and catalogues what may come in particularly useful to Archenland’s impending struggle.
“Anyway,” Susan continues, “it was terribly romantic. Calormenes are not so skeptical of sorcery as Narnians.”
“Aslan protect the Narnians from their own skepticism,” Edmund mutters.
“This spell is a good one, I think,” she says. “You can do much with it. I thought perhaps you might use it to implant false prophecies in other people’s dreams, which could be particularly useful in quelling Redhaven. Aren’t they rather superstitious there?”
“Who are we to talk of being superstitious, with what we are doing?” Edmund slips his arm around Susan’s waist. As she shifts closer he plants a kiss on her temple, then covers the hand holding her goblet with his own and drinks from it.
Susan laughs. “At least we are doing this for good.”
“We are doing this for Narnia, sister,” he says, “and nothing else.”
+
You keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and Edmund mulls over the contrariness of such a statement as the Witch waits, knowing, patient, there at the edge of his mind, and at his fingertips when he practices charms and incantations late into the night long after Susan has gone to sleep.
+
“Do you ever change an ending to please the audience?” Edmund asks.
“Of course,” Shativa answers. Her long hair tumbles down her back as she sifts through her clothes for a dress to wear. “A pleased audience pays better. Mama Biguda doesn’t like to, but I convince her.”
“How do you do that?”
“I remind her endings are illusions anyway. In a story, there are a thousand endings and a thousand beginnings between the first word spoken and the last word said.”
And later the Witch tells him, “Your storyteller is wise. Things never truly finish, as you know.”
Light is sparse in the winter night, but he can see the Witch as clear as if it were daytime, summer. Her face is unreadable, and he strives to keep his likewise. “Then,” he says in an even tone, “what were you all those years ago when Aslan cast you out? What are you now?”
She tips her head to the side. “For someone whose convictions are so contingent on the existence of absolutes, Edmund, you don’t act like it.”
“Don’t presume you can talk to me about my convictions.”
The Witch says, “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.”
Edmund frowns. “What spell is that?”
“It is not a spell. It’s advice from your own world.”
“That is not any language I’ve heard of in Narnia.”
“I didn’t say,” says the Witch, “it was from Narnia.”
+
Occasionally, they ride into the desert together and race across the dunes. Edmund rides hard and fast and Susan matches his speed most of the time, but horseracing is hardly her favorite outdoor activity. He shoots her a wild grin over his shoulder, free in all this emptiness, and sees the grim determination writ on her face. Lucy would grin back, he thinks, and Peter would probably be in the lead anyway, throwing him smug grins.
“I win,” Edmund declares, still panting when Susan catches up with him. Her cheeks are flushed and her braid is loose, though Edmund knows he can’t be in any much better of a condition. They share a few seconds of quiet atop the dune, catching their breaths.
Susan says, “I let you win.”
“Of course you did.”
He takes the skin of water she offers him and expects the water to be warm, but it is as cool and fresh as if drawn from a Narnian brook, and doesn’t at all taste like leather.
“Do you like that?” Susan smiles, seeing his expression. “I used one of the charms to keep it cold.”
“I thought you were the one who said we don’t need magic for everything.” But he leaves it at that, because you cannot ask for anything better than cool water in the desert. He hands the skin back to Susan, who takes another drink. Edmund says, “Do you want to go another round?”
Her expression is wary. “What? Another race?”
Tashbaan is small and far away, and Susan and her horse shrink into the distance as she makes her way to it at a leisurely trot. Edmund ambles his horse in a different direction, watching his sister until she disappears over the next dune, and then he flicks the reigns, clicks his tongue, and digs his heels into the horse’s sides. The horse neighs, rearing like the wild thing it has never been, and breaks into a gallop.
They run.
+
The tawny gold of the desert reminds him of the Lion.
+
He is bent over her desk, quill moving furiously, when Susan’s hands alight on his shoulders. “Edmund.”
“Mmm.”
“It’s late, brother.”
“I know what time it is,” he says. “Don’t let me keep you from sleep if you wish it.”
“I’m not worried about my getting enough sleep, Ed.”
“You do worry about such a lot of things.”
Susan’s hands slide forward and she puts her weight on her elbows on his shoulders, and her fingers tangle in his hair. “Aren’t you tired? We discuss stabilizing the price of grains tomorrow and I’ll thank you to keep from yawning at our hosts more than you’ll want to already.”
He shakes his head, displacing her hands. “I’ll thank you not to tell me what’s best for me.”
“You know, you haven’t been sleeping much at all,” says Susan, frowning. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You are looking haggard, and there are circles under your eyes so hollow I wager I’ll hear an echo if I yell into them.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Su.”
“Don’t keep things from me, Ed,” she says firmly. “You were the one who asked me to come down here with you.”
He puts down his quill and turns to face her.
“And don’t you dare tell me it’s for my own good,” warns Susan. “I get enough of that from Peter.”
“Then,” he says, “I shan’t tell you anything at all.”
“Are you joking?”
“Of course not.” But Edmund grins cockily at her anyway.
Her jaws clench and there is a moment when he thinks Susan might fall to anger, but instead she says, “You frustrate me. You always have. And you know this, so you think I can’t tell when you’re troubled but I can.”
“Nothing troubles me,” says Edmund, “except the price stabilization of grains. And perhaps your nagging.”
“Go to your room, Edmund,” she snaps. “Get some sleep.”
He gathers his papers and his books, and when he goes to kiss his sister good night she steps away.
“Don’t frown so, Su,” he says. “It makes you look ugly.”
Edmund leaves.
Back in his room, Edmund conjures fire from the air with old words and a complicated gesture, and he practices until he can conjure it silently with a single wave. He transfigures his quill into a nightingale, which sings for him and eventually flies out the open window. (He leaves the windows open so he’ll be sure that when the air becomes chilly and he shivers from cold, it is only the fault of the desert night.)
When morning comes, it finds him asleep at his desk surrounded by papers, the ink on them still drying.
+
“Edmund,” Susan says softly, touching the bruise-like shadows under his eyes.
“Stop,” he says, and turns away.
+
The White Witch laughs. “Truly? You think I’ve used a spell to appear to you in dreams? I don’t know which of us you flatter more, Edmund. Do you think I bring you prophecies?”
“You have never brought me anything but lies,” Edmund replies coolly. He hates the way she looks at him, the way her black eyes glitter.
“When I said you would be king, I did not lie,” she says. Her smile has become familiar to him again. Even in his waking hours surrounded by the heat and the gilt of the sun, he can close his eyes and see it: the shape of her lips and the possibilities they weave for him. The Witch says softly, in a voice full of promise, “Would you like to know what you have brought me, my king?”
Then, a curious thing happens.
There is a sound like the rush of wings, and from somewhere behind Edmund an arrow is loosed, its fletchings as red as summer blossoms. The arrow buries itself deep in the Witch’s chest, and there is no blood from the wound. The Witch, her eyes wide and her pretty mouth parted, raises her hands to touch the arrow as if to ascertain that yes, it is real, it has pierced her. She utters no cry of pain, and the last thing Edmund hears before the Witch shatters into a hundred shards of ice is a ringing as resonant as bells, filling his being.
He wakes to find Susan pretending to be asleep in his bed, her arm around him. Her breathing is shallow, and her touch is light.
“Susan,” he says breathlessly. “Susan.” He ribs her hard. “I know you’re awake. What are you doing here?”
“…Bad dreams,” she mutters.
Edmund hesitates. “Yours, or mine?”
There is no answer.
“Did you use the spell to get into my dreams? Susan!” He throws off her arm.
“What?” she snaps.
“Did you magic yourself into my dream?” he demands.
A tell-tale pause before she says, “Of course not. Go back to sleep.”
He frowns at her in the dark. Susan has never been able to lie to her siblings. She can fool princes and noblemen and diplomats from far-distant isles, but she is laid bare before her brothers and sister. In the end, Edmund lets her stay with him. When her arm slips around him again, he doesn’t push it away. When he sleeps, he does not dream.
+
The hookah coal is by now mostly ashes, and the room is gossamer-hazy with failed attempts at Calormene storytelling.
Susan has trouble inhaling correctly – “Take it into your lungs,” Edmund tells her, and she snaps, “But of course, where else would it go?” – and she never really quite masters it. She ends up burping smoke in a way that make both of them giggle, and it inspires Edmund to tell a story Tumnus told them once about a dragon, although his smoke-dragon ends up looking more like a giraffe.
“Maybe you should tell a story about a giraffe,” Susan suggests.
“Mmmm.” His head feels heavy, and he wants nothing more than to curl up on some Narnian hillside and listen to the pipe-songs of Fauns. “Those new to storytelling often believe that, just because they are the ones telling the story, they are the ones who have power over it.”
“How queer,” says Susan, staring at him with eyes that are half a world away. “Did your storyteller tell you that?”
“Every word.”
In his room the next day, Edmund examines the tobacco. It is soaked with essence of honey, treated with cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, and something called the seer’s leaf, which only grows in Calormen’s hot climate. “But just a touch of it,” said Shativa. “A touch of the seer’s leaf is all you need.”
You take the ink of the story into your lungs, you make it a part of you, and you will exhale a little bit of who you are. Most non-Calormene scholars tend to agree that the smoke and the story are just vessels for the leaf’s visions, but the Calormene know better: once you start to tell a story, it’s difficult to say what is a vessel of what. Causality, as the seer’s leaf will teach you, is trivial. All these things and more besides, Shativa tells him.
“The leaf smoke becomes a part of you,” Shativa had said, “and once it is, what does it matter how it became a part of you? For, listen, I will tell you a story about the age of the universe. Or at least, the age of a universe. There are several, you know.”
“You want me to set up, um, another hookah?” Edmund said thickly.
“I think we’ve smoked enough for the day,” said Shativa. Her tone sounded amused, but Edmund wasn’t sure. “This will be short, your highness.”
Her story went like this: “In this other universe, in the beginning, all the universe was a single speck of matter. It is so small you would not be able to see it, and so heavy you would not be able to lift it. It is heavy with the world, you see, for it is the embryo from which all things would come. And then, perhaps suddenly, perhaps slowly (for there were no days or nights then, nor any sort of division of time, not yet), this single speck of matter burst apart. It exploded under its own gravity and it threw its parts outwards to wherever it found room to dance, space to breathe.
“It is with this explosion that the laws of that universe came to be. When a man of that world asks another, ‘How old are the bones of the world in which we live?’ he must realize that the theories and frameworks his people use to answer such questions have only been existence since the explosion itself. Before the explosion, the laws were different, and so were the names of shapes and the shapes of names. The manifestation of this new universe has rendered what came before obsolete. Indeed, there had been no concept of ‘before’, before. Do you see?”
Normally Edmund has little patience for Calormene circumlocution, but he did smoke a lot this afternoon and he thinks he does see, in a way.
Shativa asked, “Are you familiar with our religion?”
Edmund replied, “I know of it.”
“I know that, in your Narnia, our Tash is portrayed as a heathen demon, antithesis to your lion god Aslan. You see him as a harbinger of destruction, and you despise our sacrifices to him.” She said, “Your majesty,” and stroked Edmund’s hair with a cool and gentle hand.
He rolled his head, letting her hand slide to his cheek. “Yes?”
“In destruction, there is rebirth, renewal.” Shativa leaned in close, the smile of a secret on her lips. “Through sacrifice, we coerce gods.”
+
He never sees Susan in his dreams – only her arrows.
Still, it warms him to know she is there. Sometimes Edmund already has his sword or crossbow in hand as if in empathy, but when he comes to face Jadis, even though he can easily dispatch the Witch, he finds he never does. Her black eyes bore into his as she murmurs the words and endearments that are by now so familiar, and his arms become heavy and leaded. She does not fight her fate, nor does she flee. Edmund wonders if maybe, just as he has grown and learned over the years, the Witch has too. Perhaps they have both learned patience and how to temper their passions. He recognizes in her acquiescence the consideration between battles and wars.
Susan’s arrows find Jadis again and again but, even when Edmund remembers to turn around, he can never see his sister. He thinks maybe he can feel her in the last bright flashes of the Witch’s death – there is a warmth that surrounds him that he thinks may be Jadis as she burns; or maybe Susan in his dreams, her golden light rushing to envelope him; or perhaps Susan in his bed in real life, soft and steady and gentle as she ever is.
“Why do you think you can do it?” Edmund asks into the darkness of his bedroom. “Why can you kill her and I can’t?”
He hasn’t ever mentioned Susan climbing into his dreams since that first time. Edmund acknowledges it implicitly, by letting her sleep in his bed as if they have always done so, by automatically reaching for her when he wakes, by not rejecting her solace when she holds him closer in the middle of the night.
Susan, one arm across his chest and her head tucked into the crook between his neck and shoulder, answers, “Because it isn’t my dream. We are so easily overwhelmed by our own dreams.”
“So you think she really is just a dream, then?” And when she doesn’t reply, Edmund says, “You shouldn’t have to do this, you know. I ought to—”
“You sound just like Peter when you say that,” she muses. “It’s not a matter of ‘have to’. Just because you faced her alone the last time, doesn’t mean you have to always. We came for you eventually, and we will again. Look, you were the one who asked me down here. I don’t begrudge you holding me at arm’s length, but I do wish you’d stop acting so surprised whenever I take your side.”
He hesitates. Apology would be clumsy and denial insincere, and Edmund finds himself not knowing quite what to say. He tries, “Even so.” When this doesn’t feel like enough, he tries, in a lighter tone, “If you ever tell anyone I let you inside my head, I’ll have yours.”
Susan raises her head and brushes her lips against his cheek. “Yes,” she says softly, “we all have our prides to think about, don’t we?”
+
“Your sister loves you,” the Witch says absently.
“It’s not unusual for a sister to love her brother.”
“Such a pretty girl, and so diligent with her study of magic. I would that she had stumbled into Narnia first, that I had met her first. Susan and I would have had a bit of fun, I think, before I turned her into a pretty statue.”
He knows she only says it to anger him, and it angers him even more that it works. “She would not fall to you, Jadis,” Edmund retorts. “Her heart can withstand more than you think.”
And she laughs. “Don’t talk to me of women’s hearts, boy. You do not even know your own.”
Then, the arrow is loosed.
“My little flown bird,” says the Witch, and Edmund hears the mourning in her voice. Her eyes never leave his, and she fingers the arrow as if it were a piece of jewelry around her neck. “Your sister’s aim is truer than she thinks.”
She crumbles into snowflakes and the winds scatter her to the four corners of the world. When Edmund lifts his hand to shield his eyes from the flurries, the snow alights on his skin and does not melt. He tastes sugar on his tongue, and he wakes up.
+
There are scrolls and charms spread across the floor of Susan’s bedroom, abandoned for the afternoon for the basket of fruit Farroukh sent up to her. Susan holds out another date and Edmund takes it with one bite.
“Tell me, Ed,” she says after she licks the sticky sweetness from her fingers. “What would you wish for, if you were Al Adzin?”
Edmund says, “What would you wish for?”
Susan rolls her eyes. “Don’t answer my question with another question.”
“Don’t answer my question with an order,” he answers without pause.
She chuckles. “Oh, Ed,” she says, cheeks pink with a little too much wine. “Perhaps you and I are not so different.”
Edmund raises an eyebrow. “Do you think me so different from you? Perhaps to your mind I don’t bleed when I am cut, or that I secretly have seven toes.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she retorts, leaning into him, “and I know perfectly well how many toes you have.”
He leaves her rooms reassured: that he loves his sister, loves Narnia, and has never been afraid to do what must be done. In his room, Edmund reviews export restrictions and agricultural subsidies until sunset, which is when the palace becomes quiet and still. Sunrise and sunset are meditative times devoted to the worship of Tash.
As twilight crawls into the sky, Edmund leaves his rooms and makes his way to the eastern wing where the older collections of the Tisroc’s royal library are kept, the ones to which only the Tisroc and his right-hand men have access. A few nights ago, during a walk around the gardens, the grand vizier had described to Edmund how to cut his hand to slake the blood-thirst of the lock, told him where the traps are set and how they might be defused. Yet, at the end of it, the grand vizier could not remember for the life of him what he had been talking about for the past many minutes.
“You were talking about the irrigation infrastructure in the southern reaches,” Edmund reminded him gently.
“Ah, yes,” the grand vizier had nodded, as if emerging from a fog. He blinked a few times, frowning, then looked at the young king and continued as if nothing had happened. “I fear there will be famine if we are not able to preempt another source of grain.”
“Might I suggest lowering tariffs on crops?” Edmund had replied.
The conversation went on as such as the two men made their way through the Tisroc’s fertile gardens, politicians politely negotiating the wealth of their nations.
In the library, the dusty shelves are heavy with books, each page crackling with the arcana of centuries.
Is she omen? Is she memory? Is she dreams? The White Witch dies each night and Susan’s arrows pierce where his resolve cannot. Edmund doubts he will find the answers to these questions in old books, but he is confident he will find something. He’s not the type to sit still and let things wash over him, after all, not anymore.
+
Ancient Calormene script looks like the crests of waves. Edmund paints protective runes on Susan's body with the enchanted ink he procured from Mama Biguda. (They're only partly protective runes, but he doesn't tell his sister what else they do.) He traces the words along Susan’s spine, over her heart, down the side of her neck: points of power. From her ankle to her soft belly, a long lyric invoking old gods.
“Edmund,” says Susan, a little tightly.
“Shh,” he murmurs, and writes around her wrists, writes along her clavicles.
The ink glows and sinks into her skin and is gone, and in the end there's no proof she's been subject to spells except for a flush in her cheeks and an unfocused look in her eyes. She reaches for Edmund and he lets his sister curl into him, dizzy with magic.
Her body burns with fever, though Edmund has anticipated this aftereffect. Susan clutches him shivering as they lie on her bed, mumbling about how cold she is into his neck, her lips heated and soft and her fingers tightly curled around his arms. Edmund reaches for the blankets with some difficulty – Susan keeps grabbing him when he moves away. He makes soothing noises and murmurs nothings at her as he adjusts the blankets around them.
“Edmund,” Susan breathes. “O my brother, what have you done to me?”
“Don’t you trust me, Su?” he asks softly. “I thought we’re to trust each other, you and I.”
Her skin is raw and sensitive with magic; he can tell from the way she mewls at every brush of the sheets on her skin and how she curves into his touch. Edmund kisses her face to soothe her and she lets herself be lulled by it, kissing him back disconnectedly. Her hands cup his face, slide down his neck and turn into fists clutching his shirt as she murmurs his name, sometimes like a question and sometimes like a plea. His sister unfurls in his arms, and he exerts only the gentlest pressure in holding her still, holding her close. Edmund makes no unexpected movements and speaks very slow, very soft, the way one would to a dangerous animal caught in a trap. There is nothing to fear, he is telling her. More importantly, there is nothing to fight.
“You do know,” she says, “that I would never hurt you.”
Edmund says, “Nor I you.”
“You are my brother.”
“And you are my sister.”
“Do you understand, Edmund?” She lifts her head to look into his eyes. “She won’t have you again. I want to promise you this. I want you to accept my promise.”
Edmund is bound to Peter by allegiance and duty, and bound to Lucy by a tenderness borne of the fact that she was the victim of his first significant betrayal. His relationship with Susan, however, has always been more nebulous. Her tolerance for frippery tries his sensibilities, and they have never been the closest of the four. He is hit by a sudden fondness for her now, with her face unmasked and her blue eyes wide. The magic has laid her open, and Edmund cannot help but feel a flash of guilt for pushing her to this state. But certain things, he has decided, must come to pass.
He says, “No witch will have me, with you and your bow by my side.”
“We should never have come to Calormen.” Susan curls up with her head resting on Edmund’s shoulder. “We should never have.”
“Come, Su, don’t be like that. This is for Narnia. Aslan wants his country to be strong and prepared for anything.”
They are quiet again, waiting for Susan’s breathing to fall back to even. When she eventually speaks, struggling against the fever, there is a clarity in her voice that wasn’t there before. “Tell me what you’ve done to me, Edmund.”
“The spell protects one from possessions.”
“That’s not all it does. I feel it.”
“No doubt you’re feeling a lot of things right now, Su. You ought to just relax.”
“We should cast it on you too.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then how does it work?” she demands.
“You needn’t concern yourself with that.”
Susan clutches his shirt and although he does not look at her face, he can imagine her angered expression from the way she tenses her body. “Do not talk to me as if I were a child!”
“Sorry,” he says softly. “I know you’re not.”
“Edmund, tell me.”
“I’ll tell you later,” he promises, and kisses her forehead and strokes her hair, and never does.
+
“Edmund!”
Susan is shaking him violently from sleep and he blinks to consciousness with the morning sun and his sister’s fury in his eyes. “What did you do?” she demands.
“Susan–” he says, rubbing his eyes, but the words tumble from her mouth like a flood.
“I can’t go into your dreams anymore. I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find a way in. I could feel you and the winter and I couldn’t find a way in! What did you do?”
Susan’s fingers clench bruises into his skin, and attempts to wriggle out of her grasp are unsuccessful. She has always been able to hold Edmund down if she wants to, though in recent years, as he grew in height and his arms filled out, this has been increasingly due to Edmund’s submission than her strength. It is one of the things he has learned from her: to let oneself be conquered as future investment, power through calculated assent.
He says to her, “Susan, calm yourself.”
“Don’t you dare!” she rages. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do, Edmund. What magic have you done to me? Or on yourself, or on what, I don’t know. You said it was a spell of protection!”
“I wasn’t lying,” he says quietly.
“What is it protecting me from?” she demands.
“It doesn’t just protect you.”
Her eyes narrow. “Undo this spell.”
“No.”
“Edmund.”
“Susan.” He raises his hand to stroke her cheek and she swats at it, rearing a little. Edmund takes the opportunity to surge up at her, catch her body in his arms and flip them over, trapping Susan between himself and the bed.
“Get off me,” she hisses.
“Susan, it’s not your battle to fight. It never has been.”
“Get off me!”
He does. “I’m sorry. I never should’ve let this go on for as long as it has. Don’t waste your time on other people’s dreams, Su – nothing good comes of it. Besides, it wasn’t you she had, it was me.” And now she’s mine, he thinks. “She’s just dreams, after all. It’s just dreams.”
“It’s clearly not just dreams!”
“How are you so sure?”
She brushes her hair from her face and breathes deeply the way she does when trying to rein in her temper. Looks away, and has no answer. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
“Some fights are necessarily fought alone – you’ll learn this someday.”
Susan glares at him. “Don’t take that tone with me.”
Edmund rolls his eyes.
He listens to her entreaties and accusations as she dresses herself, clumsy with frustration, but he is used to such displays of passion, and is unmoved. Edmund flops in an armchair and eats an apple, letting her anger pass through him.
Susan doesn’t share his bed with him that night. Edmund is relieved, a little, but he tosses and turns, stretches out on a bed that suddenly feels too big for him.
When he dreams, Jadis smiles in wild delight and offers him her hand.
[end.]
More Author’s Notes
-- Jadis’s Latin translates to, “All things change and nothing truly dies.”
-- The knife in the Street of the Enchanters is the subtle knife from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Someone totally cut a window to Narnia from Cittagazze. The vendor isn’t the true bearer of the knife, since Edmund would notice if he had two missing fingers, so the poor guy is probably going to come to a bad end somehow.
-- Mama Biguda is just a switching around of Mamagubida, which is the name of Tryo’s debut album. Tryo are a lovely acoustic reggae band from France who sing about things like colonization and the legalization of marijuana, and have a song titled “G8”. I love them kind of a lot.
-- Keeping that in mind, I had to restrain myself from extending Edmund’s conversation with the grand vizier into something like this.
Thank you, Pen, for fielding the initial drabbles and doing thumbs-up. Thank you, Bedlam, for fielding the later drabbles and doing thumbs-up, and also for betareading.
HERE GOES. (Eeeeeee!)
and sometimes you hear the silence speak
Narnia. Edmund, Susan, Jadis. There are shades of Pevencest and Edmund/Jadis here and there, though it is 'technically gen'. PG13.
Edmund and Susan go to Calormen to collect magic. "We are doing this for Narnia, sister, and nothing else."
ETA: The DVD commentary for this fic is here. Some missing scenes are here.
In the language of the desert tribes, the word for ‘magic’ is the same word for ‘wind’. You cannot see the wind; you can only see what it does. You only know it is there when it cools your skin or sends fallen leaves dancing. The tribes name a wind not for what it is, but by the sandstorms it conjures.
The north wind they call ‘the devourer of the sun’ and the southern wind they simply call ‘the fire’. The westerly winds are called ‘the hand of god’ because of how they can reshape the desert completely, relocating dunes and burying oases, rearranging navigable routes. Not that it looks very different in the end – it’s still sand as far as the eye can see. The desert never really changes, and this is a comfort in the way that being caught is a comfort after the exertion of fleeing and lying.
At night the moonlight silvers the dunes into a winter landscape, and Edmund wanders a little ways away from the caravan, his feet sinking into the sand as he goes. His heart remembers and his mind reminds, and his eyelids are heavy but he has no wish to sleep. He lets the chill of the desert night sink into his bones until Susan comes to find him, an extra cloak under one arm.
“This sand,” she says, draping the cloak around Edmund’s shoulders. “It’s getting into everything. My shoes, my hair. Especially my shoes, and it irritates my feet.”
He smiles. “We’ll be there soon, Su.”
“Next time,” says Susan, taking his hand and leading him back to the caravan, “we will travel by sea.”
+
After freshening up, they eat supper with the Tisroc in a gilded hall with images from Calormene folk tales carved into the walls. There is the story of Al Adzin and his magical lamp, there are the seven voyages of Zindebad, and here is a likeness of the treasure caves of the Forty Thieves.
They sit on one side of a long table laden with food, and at the clap-clap of the Tisroc’s hands, the dinner entertainment begins: lissome dancing girls, their eyes demure and their bare skins glossy with fragrant oils. A trained bear follows; the smile leaves Susan’s eyes at the sight of the dumb beast, castrated and collared, poked and prodded into tricks. After the bear, a magician dressed in bright colors performs legerdemain. Edmund watches him carefully and tries to figure out where the man keeps his coins and sashes, how the doves stay quiet until they are released, how wine can disappear into thin air.
The magician reaches into the air above his head and plucks a bright red apple from an invisible tree and, after asking permission from the Tisroc to approach the table, bows deeply before Susan and offers her the fruit. She blushes in delight, and Edmund takes note of the grin on her face and on the magician’s as she thanks him.
Finely crafted trickery is its own magic, and one can still learn from it.
Susan would tell Edmund later that her favorite act had been the storytellers. These are two women: one is a hunched and grizzled crone with opalescent cataracts and gold bangles on her arms, and the other is a young woman with kohl-lined eyes. They sit on cushions on the floor, and the old woman waits patiently as the girl prepares a jeweled water pipe.
Susan turns to the chancellor beside her and asks, “Are they grandmother and granddaughter?”
“No,” Edmund hears him reply. “They are more like sunrise and sunset.”
The crone begins to speak in a voice as cracked as history as the girl inhales deeply through the pipe hose. The heavy smoke pours from her lips and curls into images from the story: men, women, and spirits that love and despair; cities that rise and fall; gods who curse and gods who redeem. The smoky figures float towards the table and twine around them all. They breathe in the smoke’s sweet smell, clove and cardamom and cinnamon and something else that Susan can't name but Edmund recognizes.
He waves the smoke away.
+
They go to Calormen to renegotiate trade agreements. This is what he lets everyone believe because Peter cannot tolerate the idea of witchery, and Lucy hates the thought of Edmund being around all that stuff again.
“That’s why it must be you,” Edmund had said. Susan watched him with what he suspected was amusement, but he knew she was at least considering it. “Peter would be suspicious and Lucy would just try to stop me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “They don’t know about this?”
“They will know when we come back.”
Edmund described the magic he sought to collect: protective runes, illusions, spells that reveal the truth. There are chants that fortify strength, ceremonies that ward off possessions, amulets that bend your enemies’ minds to see what you want them to.
“I know better than any of us what magic can do,” said Edmund, and at his words the expression on his sister’s face softened. Susan reached across the table and covered Edmund’s hands with her own, and he resisted frowning – he didn’t need anyone’s pity.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, as Edmund knew she would. “Narnia will be the stronger for it.”
“Good,” he replied, withdrawing his hands. “I’m glad to hear it.”
And he smiled.
+
One late afternoon, Edmund rides into the desert for the sheer pleasure of it.
The horse he rides is one from the Calormene stables, a dumb beast that raises no protest when Edmund digs his stirrups into its sides: faster, farther. The sounds of Tashbaan recede behind him and he bids his horse stop when he can no longer hear the city. There is something majestic in the silence, and honesty in such desolation. Edmund urges the horse to the top of a dune and is still, surrounded on all sides by endless things.
“Where were you this afternoon?” Susan asks him before supper.
“Out,” he shrugs.
He likes the heat of Calormen, its yellow light that gilds slow afternoons, so different from the fingers that leave frost across the landscape of his dreams.
+
In the evenings they convene in Susan’s rooms and dismiss their retainers. Susan fills their goblets with wine as Edmund locks the doors and closes the windows. They tell each other what they have learned.
Although Narnians have been using magic since the land was sung, they have in recent years become wary of it, having suffered under the Witch. Aside from Susan’s horn and Lucy’s cordial, the only magic acceptable now is the Deep Magic, something associated with Aslan and the inexplicable powers that move him. Narnian magic is not so much the willful manipulation of forces, but rather an articulation of justice, a description of harmony and the way of nature. Not turning people to stone, but the changing of the seasons. Not crafting sweets from ice, but the paths stars trail through the sky.
But here in Calormen, how casually such strange wonders are woven into the fabric of everyday life! “There is a potion that will turn you invisible for a day and a night,” says Edmund, and “There is a telescope that will show you whatever you want to see from wherever you are in the world,” says Susan. They make notes and transcribe instructions, sketch runes and symbols and their meanings. They keep these notes in a lacquered box and cast a spell on it to make it unopenable unless it is Edmund or Susan’s hands that touch it.
“Look at how filthy my fingers are,” says Edmund, displaying ink-stained fingers. Susan makes a face, which is all the invitation Edmund needs to reach out and smear ink on her cheek.
Susan cries out and rears back. “That was uncalled for!”
“You going to send me to bed without my supper, then?” he says, and dips his fingers in the ink well.
They end up chasing each other around the room while Susan says things like, “This is no way for a king and queen to act,” and Edmund comments on how hard it must be to look offended and giggle at the same time.
“This is undignified behavior,” Susan declares breathlessly, trapped between a corner and her brother.
“Nuts to your dignity,” and leaves ink on her nose, her chin, her neck.
“Peter wouldn’t approve of this.”
“Peter,” he responds, “is not here.”
+
At first he had found it easy to dismiss Susan in Narnia as he had done in England. Her delight in her court and attention to the upkeep of Cair Paravel are tedious, and Edmund wonders how her jaws don’t ache from smiling at grubbing diplomats and suitors she plans to dismiss anyway.
“You have such patience for the games they play,” Edmund commented one time.
Knowing it was not all compliment, she had replied, “Only for the ones that matter.”
Just as Lucy knows intimately the frailties of her own heart, Peter the solitude of his station, and Edmund his past crimes, Susan knows how far she can bend and how not to break for it.
It is a rare thing to see her undone as she is now. Her pale skin streaked with dark ink, her hair loose and her laugh unpretentious. The magic wafting from the spells and fetishes strewn around the room flickers in the air, and maybe he should’ve known then; he should have remembered. You shouldn’t be careless with magic, especially when you have been so before. It leaves its mark on you, and it calls to its own.
+
The sound of galloping reindeer and the tinkle of sleigh-bells. Edmund remembers this as the very first place he saw the Witch.
The dreams are never the same from night to night, but they always start like this. The world is cold and white beneath his feet, pristine and drained of color and laid bare for her arrival. And oh, the wildness of her! The fierce delight in her eyes when she comes to him with her arms outstretched as if meeting a long-lost lover. When Edmund was a child, it was not her wildness that drew him to her, but her illusion of sympathy. He is grown now, and there are certain tricks that won’t work on him.
He does not fear her.
“I am no longer yours,” he tells her.
The Witch draws herself to her full height, and Edmund can see in her stature a little of her Jinn heritage. But unlike the Jinn there is no fire in her eyes, only a dead black, and still he doesn’t back away from her, won’t let himself do so.
“Oh, my dear boy, don’t you see?” says the Witch. “You carry me in your thoughts and nurture me in your grudges. You keep me in your dreams. It is not you who are mine.” She bends to be face to face with him, and smiles. “I am yours.”
+
Susan charms scryers, fortune-tellers, royal scholars, and the fellow who gave her the apple during that first performance. “His name is Farroukh,” she tells Edmund in hushed excited tones, as if he were Lucy, “and he really is rather lovely.” Edmund makes his own investigations, and also hunts down the pair of storytellers from that first day; they seem to know something of magic as well.
“Mama Biguda has little to say to young men looking for information,” says the young woman who smoked the water pipe. There is no kohl around her eyes this time; her dress is simple and she wears no jewels, but she moves with the grace of those who know their own worth.
“And you?” asks Edmund. “Do you have anything to say to these young men?”
She laughs and tells him her name is Shativa as Edmund takes her hand and bows to kiss her knuckles.
+
Edmund and Susan go to the marketplace in commoners’ clothes. Their skin color and strange accents don’t stand out as much as Susan had feared; the marketplace is filled with vendors and traders from all over the world, and they have strange skins and accents of their own. By not fitting in at all, Edmund and Susan fit in perfectly.
Susan flits from stall to stall, contentedly mixing business with pleasure as she barters and smiles her way to a lower price. Edmund stays close and makes small talk with passers-by, cross-referencing marketplace rumors with what the Hawks and Foxes have told him before he left Narnia.
“A bracelet for Lucy,” Susan announces, showing him her hard-won gifts as they wander through the hustle and bustle. “A flute for Tumnus.”
“Lucy has piles of jewelry that she barely wears,” Edmund says flatly. “She thinks they’re bothersome.”
“Well, if she doesn’t want to appreciate her present, I’ll wear it for her.”
“How very big-hearted of you.”
They pass a stall selling Turkish Delight. Edmund stares until the vendor notices and starts waving a box of it in his face. He shakes his head, smiling weakly, and feels Susan’s arm around his waist, tugging him away.
“They’ll rot your teeth,” she tells him, like he is ten years old all over again, and leads them back into the crowd.
The Street of the Enchanters is as noisy and crowded as the rest of the market. At first you would not notice anything out of the ordinary, but then you see a man with the eyes of a cat, a dancing slave-girl whose feet never touch the ground, and a woman whose wings peek out when a breeze flutters the dirty cloak she wraps around herself. There is a strange taste to the air that reminds Edmund of the hookah smoke from the first day.
When Susan disappears into an herbalist’s to find the items on their list, Edmund drifts to the stall next-door. Hanging from the tapestries that serve as stall dividers and piled on the tables are a miscellany of objects of every shape and color. There is no theme; it looks as if the vendor had simply wandered in a freewheeling sort of way through the world and collected the things he fancied without rhyme or reason, hoping for the best. A number of things look familiar, but further investigation would reveal small details that only emphasize their strangeness. This knife, for example…
It is a double-edged knife, and while one edge is remarkable for its obvious sharpness, the other edge is more peculiar. It seems to be playing optical tricks on him, the way he cannot quite see where the blade ends and the air begins. Edmund doesn’t lift it to investigate, doesn’t touch it. Doing so only encourages vendors, but it is too late: his interest has been noticed. The vendor puts on his winning smile, and he strikes.
“Sir is interested in this knife?” he says. He has the dark complexion of a Calormene, but Edmund cannot place his accent.
“What manner of knife is this?”
With a flourish of his hand, the vendor recites, “It is a magic knife, forged in a world far from here, farther than I’m sure you’ve traveled, good sir.”
“I’m sure,” Edmund replies indulgently.
He displays the knife’s strange blade. “You see how this side extends to a point so fine that even the eye cannot see it?”
Edmund has no intentions of buying this knife, but he takes on the tone of the disinterested interested buyer to amuse himself. “Is that what it’s doing?”
“It’s for cutting the veil between the worlds. Nothing better for those seeking a new beginning, not just in new lands, but in a new universe!”
A familiar voice cuts in disdainfully: “Taking refuge in other worlds is no way to go about your problems.”
And it is Susan, her basket heavy with souvenirs and magical paraphernalia, and her expression one of high-minded disapproval. She floats to Edmund’s side, lacing their fingers together and squeezing his hand. “You should be ashamed, selling such tricks,” she says.
“My lady is wise and strong,” the vendor murmurs with a bow. Susan brings this sort of behavior out in people.
The vendor, a businessman through and through, points out topaz earrings that chime fairy music and ribbons that change color as you dance. Edmund hovers nearby as she is drawn into haggling, the knife at the corner of his eye, and weighs out the consequences of decisions he will never make.
+
She leaves no footprints in the snow and her breath does not mist in the air. The Witch beckons, “Walk with me, my king.”
Edmund frowns. “I am not your king. You are not my queen, or anything. We are nothing to each other.” But he falls in step with her anyway, easily like the first time long ago.
A crescent moon hangs in the sky; there are no stars. Like the first time, the trees only watch quietly, holding their own counsel. The Witch asks, “Are you learning much magic, Edmund?”
“That is no concern of yours.”
“Of course it is. Magic is a concern of mine, for they have named me the White Witch and this is what I am. I am of magic. And you are a concern of mine, my boy, for you have eaten of me.”
“I am not that same boy who fell for your tricks, Jadis.”
She doesn’t seem to hear him. “I took the winter inside of me so that I may bend it to my will.” The Witch scoops a handful of snow and holds it out to Edmund. The snow doesn’t melt on the palm of her hands, and instead it transubstantiates into a number of things: a jewel, a silver coin, a chalice of wine. All illusions, Edmund knows. A crown, a dagger, and back to snow. “This is my body and my blood, as far as creatures like me can have such things,” she says, and the snow changes again.
The smell of confectionary sugar is familiar and Edmund takes an involuntary step backward. In a rush he remembers being wrapped in furs and her soft body beside him, the sleigh rushing through the winter landscape. The stamp of reindeer hooves on packed snow and the cold biting at his face where the wind lashes, where her fingers touch.
The Witch holds out the box of Turkish Delight. “Won’t you have just one?”
+
Dancing with Susan is nothing like dancing with Lucy, who doesn’t care for knowing the steps and whose feet goes any which way her heart takes her. He usually lets Lucy lead anyway. In the background Peter and Susan would dance together with as much elegance and aplomb as Edmund and Lucy dance through stifled giggles. Lucy brings out the merriment in him and he finds himself missing her now.
“This is the part Peter always makes a mess of too,” Susan tells him complacently. “We’ll do this until we get it right, don’t worry.”
Edmund says, “It’s not that I’m worried.”
The Tisroc has arranged for a banquet tonight (that is to say, he has announced it, and set his retainers to arranging it) and has asked Susan and Edmund to perform a courtly dance of Narnia. Edmund let his sister answer, knowing she would reply with more enthusiasm and grace than he, and this led to where they are now, practicing in the gilded hall where the banquet is to take place. The palace servants glide to and fro like silent ghosts in the background, decorating and setting up and bringing in tables and chairs; they give the dancing monarchs in the middle of the hall wide berth.
“I almost wish we can enchant my feet so they’d know what to do,” Edmund mutters.
“Oh, hush,” says Susan as Edmund twirls her, though really she twirls herself while holding Edmund’s hand above her head. “We don’t need magic for everything.”
By the end of an hour, their faces are flushed with exertion and strained patience and when Edmund calls for a rest, Susan does not object. They call for wine and it is brought to them in silver goblets. The servants bow as they are thanked, scuttling backwards and turning around only when they have reached a distance of twenty paces from them.
“What a curious custom,” Susan comments as they make their way to one of the hall’s large windows overlooking the gardens. “A wonder they don’t bump into anything.”
“Calormen is full of many wonders,” he says absently. The breeze that floats in is cool and soothing as Edmund leans against the windowsill; Susan doesn’t deign to do so for fear of dirtying her sleeves.
“Farroukh told me of a spell,” says Susan, “that lets you climb into other people’s dreams.”
Edmund keeps his voice neutral. “Oh?”
“They say that, once, a sorceress used the spell to climb into her beloved’s dreams. He was a general in the Tisroc’s army, and far away at the time. Off reclaiming Calormene lands conquered by King Frank XII, I believe. Every night she came, and together they would defy the distance between them.”
Edmund rolls his eyes. “That’s a nice bedtime story. Anything ever came of it?”
“Well, they got married of course, when he returned. They were in love, after all.”
“Maybe she used a love spell.”
In Susan’s reply, he hears the words of a queen who has spent the past many years winning the hearts of men and women in the name of her country. “Love is its own magic,” she says. “It needs no other spells.”
He takes in the lushness of the Tisroc’s gardens below them and wonders detachedly how much water must be pumped to keep them in such a verdant state. Water, he notes, that could have been distributed instead to the people living in the dust and squalor of Tashbaan’s ghettos. Calormen has been teetering on the verge of drought for some months now; the rains have not come and the people grow restless. There will be border disputes with Archenland over the Winding Arrow delta (again), and Narnia will officially declare neutrality to preserve her hard-won peace with Calormen. But he and Peter owe Lune certain favors, and Edmund mentally flicks through a growing list of spells and enchantments, and catalogues what may come in particularly useful to Archenland’s impending struggle.
“Anyway,” Susan continues, “it was terribly romantic. Calormenes are not so skeptical of sorcery as Narnians.”
“Aslan protect the Narnians from their own skepticism,” Edmund mutters.
“This spell is a good one, I think,” she says. “You can do much with it. I thought perhaps you might use it to implant false prophecies in other people’s dreams, which could be particularly useful in quelling Redhaven. Aren’t they rather superstitious there?”
“Who are we to talk of being superstitious, with what we are doing?” Edmund slips his arm around Susan’s waist. As she shifts closer he plants a kiss on her temple, then covers the hand holding her goblet with his own and drinks from it.
Susan laughs. “At least we are doing this for good.”
“We are doing this for Narnia, sister,” he says, “and nothing else.”
+
You keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and Edmund mulls over the contrariness of such a statement as the Witch waits, knowing, patient, there at the edge of his mind, and at his fingertips when he practices charms and incantations late into the night long after Susan has gone to sleep.
+
“Do you ever change an ending to please the audience?” Edmund asks.
“Of course,” Shativa answers. Her long hair tumbles down her back as she sifts through her clothes for a dress to wear. “A pleased audience pays better. Mama Biguda doesn’t like to, but I convince her.”
“How do you do that?”
“I remind her endings are illusions anyway. In a story, there are a thousand endings and a thousand beginnings between the first word spoken and the last word said.”
And later the Witch tells him, “Your storyteller is wise. Things never truly finish, as you know.”
Light is sparse in the winter night, but he can see the Witch as clear as if it were daytime, summer. Her face is unreadable, and he strives to keep his likewise. “Then,” he says in an even tone, “what were you all those years ago when Aslan cast you out? What are you now?”
She tips her head to the side. “For someone whose convictions are so contingent on the existence of absolutes, Edmund, you don’t act like it.”
“Don’t presume you can talk to me about my convictions.”
The Witch says, “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.”
Edmund frowns. “What spell is that?”
“It is not a spell. It’s advice from your own world.”
“That is not any language I’ve heard of in Narnia.”
“I didn’t say,” says the Witch, “it was from Narnia.”
+
Occasionally, they ride into the desert together and race across the dunes. Edmund rides hard and fast and Susan matches his speed most of the time, but horseracing is hardly her favorite outdoor activity. He shoots her a wild grin over his shoulder, free in all this emptiness, and sees the grim determination writ on her face. Lucy would grin back, he thinks, and Peter would probably be in the lead anyway, throwing him smug grins.
“I win,” Edmund declares, still panting when Susan catches up with him. Her cheeks are flushed and her braid is loose, though Edmund knows he can’t be in any much better of a condition. They share a few seconds of quiet atop the dune, catching their breaths.
Susan says, “I let you win.”
“Of course you did.”
He takes the skin of water she offers him and expects the water to be warm, but it is as cool and fresh as if drawn from a Narnian brook, and doesn’t at all taste like leather.
“Do you like that?” Susan smiles, seeing his expression. “I used one of the charms to keep it cold.”
“I thought you were the one who said we don’t need magic for everything.” But he leaves it at that, because you cannot ask for anything better than cool water in the desert. He hands the skin back to Susan, who takes another drink. Edmund says, “Do you want to go another round?”
Her expression is wary. “What? Another race?”
Tashbaan is small and far away, and Susan and her horse shrink into the distance as she makes her way to it at a leisurely trot. Edmund ambles his horse in a different direction, watching his sister until she disappears over the next dune, and then he flicks the reigns, clicks his tongue, and digs his heels into the horse’s sides. The horse neighs, rearing like the wild thing it has never been, and breaks into a gallop.
They run.
+
The tawny gold of the desert reminds him of the Lion.
+
He is bent over her desk, quill moving furiously, when Susan’s hands alight on his shoulders. “Edmund.”
“Mmm.”
“It’s late, brother.”
“I know what time it is,” he says. “Don’t let me keep you from sleep if you wish it.”
“I’m not worried about my getting enough sleep, Ed.”
“You do worry about such a lot of things.”
Susan’s hands slide forward and she puts her weight on her elbows on his shoulders, and her fingers tangle in his hair. “Aren’t you tired? We discuss stabilizing the price of grains tomorrow and I’ll thank you to keep from yawning at our hosts more than you’ll want to already.”
He shakes his head, displacing her hands. “I’ll thank you not to tell me what’s best for me.”
“You know, you haven’t been sleeping much at all,” says Susan, frowning. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You are looking haggard, and there are circles under your eyes so hollow I wager I’ll hear an echo if I yell into them.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Su.”
“Don’t keep things from me, Ed,” she says firmly. “You were the one who asked me to come down here with you.”
He puts down his quill and turns to face her.
“And don’t you dare tell me it’s for my own good,” warns Susan. “I get enough of that from Peter.”
“Then,” he says, “I shan’t tell you anything at all.”
“Are you joking?”
“Of course not.” But Edmund grins cockily at her anyway.
Her jaws clench and there is a moment when he thinks Susan might fall to anger, but instead she says, “You frustrate me. You always have. And you know this, so you think I can’t tell when you’re troubled but I can.”
“Nothing troubles me,” says Edmund, “except the price stabilization of grains. And perhaps your nagging.”
“Go to your room, Edmund,” she snaps. “Get some sleep.”
He gathers his papers and his books, and when he goes to kiss his sister good night she steps away.
“Don’t frown so, Su,” he says. “It makes you look ugly.”
Edmund leaves.
Back in his room, Edmund conjures fire from the air with old words and a complicated gesture, and he practices until he can conjure it silently with a single wave. He transfigures his quill into a nightingale, which sings for him and eventually flies out the open window. (He leaves the windows open so he’ll be sure that when the air becomes chilly and he shivers from cold, it is only the fault of the desert night.)
When morning comes, it finds him asleep at his desk surrounded by papers, the ink on them still drying.
+
“Edmund,” Susan says softly, touching the bruise-like shadows under his eyes.
“Stop,” he says, and turns away.
+
The White Witch laughs. “Truly? You think I’ve used a spell to appear to you in dreams? I don’t know which of us you flatter more, Edmund. Do you think I bring you prophecies?”
“You have never brought me anything but lies,” Edmund replies coolly. He hates the way she looks at him, the way her black eyes glitter.
“When I said you would be king, I did not lie,” she says. Her smile has become familiar to him again. Even in his waking hours surrounded by the heat and the gilt of the sun, he can close his eyes and see it: the shape of her lips and the possibilities they weave for him. The Witch says softly, in a voice full of promise, “Would you like to know what you have brought me, my king?”
Then, a curious thing happens.
There is a sound like the rush of wings, and from somewhere behind Edmund an arrow is loosed, its fletchings as red as summer blossoms. The arrow buries itself deep in the Witch’s chest, and there is no blood from the wound. The Witch, her eyes wide and her pretty mouth parted, raises her hands to touch the arrow as if to ascertain that yes, it is real, it has pierced her. She utters no cry of pain, and the last thing Edmund hears before the Witch shatters into a hundred shards of ice is a ringing as resonant as bells, filling his being.
He wakes to find Susan pretending to be asleep in his bed, her arm around him. Her breathing is shallow, and her touch is light.
“Susan,” he says breathlessly. “Susan.” He ribs her hard. “I know you’re awake. What are you doing here?”
“…Bad dreams,” she mutters.
Edmund hesitates. “Yours, or mine?”
There is no answer.
“Did you use the spell to get into my dreams? Susan!” He throws off her arm.
“What?” she snaps.
“Did you magic yourself into my dream?” he demands.
A tell-tale pause before she says, “Of course not. Go back to sleep.”
He frowns at her in the dark. Susan has never been able to lie to her siblings. She can fool princes and noblemen and diplomats from far-distant isles, but she is laid bare before her brothers and sister. In the end, Edmund lets her stay with him. When her arm slips around him again, he doesn’t push it away. When he sleeps, he does not dream.
+
The hookah coal is by now mostly ashes, and the room is gossamer-hazy with failed attempts at Calormene storytelling.
Susan has trouble inhaling correctly – “Take it into your lungs,” Edmund tells her, and she snaps, “But of course, where else would it go?” – and she never really quite masters it. She ends up burping smoke in a way that make both of them giggle, and it inspires Edmund to tell a story Tumnus told them once about a dragon, although his smoke-dragon ends up looking more like a giraffe.
“Maybe you should tell a story about a giraffe,” Susan suggests.
“Mmmm.” His head feels heavy, and he wants nothing more than to curl up on some Narnian hillside and listen to the pipe-songs of Fauns. “Those new to storytelling often believe that, just because they are the ones telling the story, they are the ones who have power over it.”
“How queer,” says Susan, staring at him with eyes that are half a world away. “Did your storyteller tell you that?”
“Every word.”
In his room the next day, Edmund examines the tobacco. It is soaked with essence of honey, treated with cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, and something called the seer’s leaf, which only grows in Calormen’s hot climate. “But just a touch of it,” said Shativa. “A touch of the seer’s leaf is all you need.”
You take the ink of the story into your lungs, you make it a part of you, and you will exhale a little bit of who you are. Most non-Calormene scholars tend to agree that the smoke and the story are just vessels for the leaf’s visions, but the Calormene know better: once you start to tell a story, it’s difficult to say what is a vessel of what. Causality, as the seer’s leaf will teach you, is trivial. All these things and more besides, Shativa tells him.
“The leaf smoke becomes a part of you,” Shativa had said, “and once it is, what does it matter how it became a part of you? For, listen, I will tell you a story about the age of the universe. Or at least, the age of a universe. There are several, you know.”
“You want me to set up, um, another hookah?” Edmund said thickly.
“I think we’ve smoked enough for the day,” said Shativa. Her tone sounded amused, but Edmund wasn’t sure. “This will be short, your highness.”
Her story went like this: “In this other universe, in the beginning, all the universe was a single speck of matter. It is so small you would not be able to see it, and so heavy you would not be able to lift it. It is heavy with the world, you see, for it is the embryo from which all things would come. And then, perhaps suddenly, perhaps slowly (for there were no days or nights then, nor any sort of division of time, not yet), this single speck of matter burst apart. It exploded under its own gravity and it threw its parts outwards to wherever it found room to dance, space to breathe.
“It is with this explosion that the laws of that universe came to be. When a man of that world asks another, ‘How old are the bones of the world in which we live?’ he must realize that the theories and frameworks his people use to answer such questions have only been existence since the explosion itself. Before the explosion, the laws were different, and so were the names of shapes and the shapes of names. The manifestation of this new universe has rendered what came before obsolete. Indeed, there had been no concept of ‘before’, before. Do you see?”
Normally Edmund has little patience for Calormene circumlocution, but he did smoke a lot this afternoon and he thinks he does see, in a way.
Shativa asked, “Are you familiar with our religion?”
Edmund replied, “I know of it.”
“I know that, in your Narnia, our Tash is portrayed as a heathen demon, antithesis to your lion god Aslan. You see him as a harbinger of destruction, and you despise our sacrifices to him.” She said, “Your majesty,” and stroked Edmund’s hair with a cool and gentle hand.
He rolled his head, letting her hand slide to his cheek. “Yes?”
“In destruction, there is rebirth, renewal.” Shativa leaned in close, the smile of a secret on her lips. “Through sacrifice, we coerce gods.”
+
He never sees Susan in his dreams – only her arrows.
Still, it warms him to know she is there. Sometimes Edmund already has his sword or crossbow in hand as if in empathy, but when he comes to face Jadis, even though he can easily dispatch the Witch, he finds he never does. Her black eyes bore into his as she murmurs the words and endearments that are by now so familiar, and his arms become heavy and leaded. She does not fight her fate, nor does she flee. Edmund wonders if maybe, just as he has grown and learned over the years, the Witch has too. Perhaps they have both learned patience and how to temper their passions. He recognizes in her acquiescence the consideration between battles and wars.
Susan’s arrows find Jadis again and again but, even when Edmund remembers to turn around, he can never see his sister. He thinks maybe he can feel her in the last bright flashes of the Witch’s death – there is a warmth that surrounds him that he thinks may be Jadis as she burns; or maybe Susan in his dreams, her golden light rushing to envelope him; or perhaps Susan in his bed in real life, soft and steady and gentle as she ever is.
“Why do you think you can do it?” Edmund asks into the darkness of his bedroom. “Why can you kill her and I can’t?”
He hasn’t ever mentioned Susan climbing into his dreams since that first time. Edmund acknowledges it implicitly, by letting her sleep in his bed as if they have always done so, by automatically reaching for her when he wakes, by not rejecting her solace when she holds him closer in the middle of the night.
Susan, one arm across his chest and her head tucked into the crook between his neck and shoulder, answers, “Because it isn’t my dream. We are so easily overwhelmed by our own dreams.”
“So you think she really is just a dream, then?” And when she doesn’t reply, Edmund says, “You shouldn’t have to do this, you know. I ought to—”
“You sound just like Peter when you say that,” she muses. “It’s not a matter of ‘have to’. Just because you faced her alone the last time, doesn’t mean you have to always. We came for you eventually, and we will again. Look, you were the one who asked me down here. I don’t begrudge you holding me at arm’s length, but I do wish you’d stop acting so surprised whenever I take your side.”
He hesitates. Apology would be clumsy and denial insincere, and Edmund finds himself not knowing quite what to say. He tries, “Even so.” When this doesn’t feel like enough, he tries, in a lighter tone, “If you ever tell anyone I let you inside my head, I’ll have yours.”
Susan raises her head and brushes her lips against his cheek. “Yes,” she says softly, “we all have our prides to think about, don’t we?”
+
“Your sister loves you,” the Witch says absently.
“It’s not unusual for a sister to love her brother.”
“Such a pretty girl, and so diligent with her study of magic. I would that she had stumbled into Narnia first, that I had met her first. Susan and I would have had a bit of fun, I think, before I turned her into a pretty statue.”
He knows she only says it to anger him, and it angers him even more that it works. “She would not fall to you, Jadis,” Edmund retorts. “Her heart can withstand more than you think.”
And she laughs. “Don’t talk to me of women’s hearts, boy. You do not even know your own.”
Then, the arrow is loosed.
“My little flown bird,” says the Witch, and Edmund hears the mourning in her voice. Her eyes never leave his, and she fingers the arrow as if it were a piece of jewelry around her neck. “Your sister’s aim is truer than she thinks.”
She crumbles into snowflakes and the winds scatter her to the four corners of the world. When Edmund lifts his hand to shield his eyes from the flurries, the snow alights on his skin and does not melt. He tastes sugar on his tongue, and he wakes up.
+
There are scrolls and charms spread across the floor of Susan’s bedroom, abandoned for the afternoon for the basket of fruit Farroukh sent up to her. Susan holds out another date and Edmund takes it with one bite.
“Tell me, Ed,” she says after she licks the sticky sweetness from her fingers. “What would you wish for, if you were Al Adzin?”
Edmund says, “What would you wish for?”
Susan rolls her eyes. “Don’t answer my question with another question.”
“Don’t answer my question with an order,” he answers without pause.
She chuckles. “Oh, Ed,” she says, cheeks pink with a little too much wine. “Perhaps you and I are not so different.”
Edmund raises an eyebrow. “Do you think me so different from you? Perhaps to your mind I don’t bleed when I am cut, or that I secretly have seven toes.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” she retorts, leaning into him, “and I know perfectly well how many toes you have.”
He leaves her rooms reassured: that he loves his sister, loves Narnia, and has never been afraid to do what must be done. In his room, Edmund reviews export restrictions and agricultural subsidies until sunset, which is when the palace becomes quiet and still. Sunrise and sunset are meditative times devoted to the worship of Tash.
As twilight crawls into the sky, Edmund leaves his rooms and makes his way to the eastern wing where the older collections of the Tisroc’s royal library are kept, the ones to which only the Tisroc and his right-hand men have access. A few nights ago, during a walk around the gardens, the grand vizier had described to Edmund how to cut his hand to slake the blood-thirst of the lock, told him where the traps are set and how they might be defused. Yet, at the end of it, the grand vizier could not remember for the life of him what he had been talking about for the past many minutes.
“You were talking about the irrigation infrastructure in the southern reaches,” Edmund reminded him gently.
“Ah, yes,” the grand vizier had nodded, as if emerging from a fog. He blinked a few times, frowning, then looked at the young king and continued as if nothing had happened. “I fear there will be famine if we are not able to preempt another source of grain.”
“Might I suggest lowering tariffs on crops?” Edmund had replied.
The conversation went on as such as the two men made their way through the Tisroc’s fertile gardens, politicians politely negotiating the wealth of their nations.
In the library, the dusty shelves are heavy with books, each page crackling with the arcana of centuries.
Is she omen? Is she memory? Is she dreams? The White Witch dies each night and Susan’s arrows pierce where his resolve cannot. Edmund doubts he will find the answers to these questions in old books, but he is confident he will find something. He’s not the type to sit still and let things wash over him, after all, not anymore.
+
Ancient Calormene script looks like the crests of waves. Edmund paints protective runes on Susan's body with the enchanted ink he procured from Mama Biguda. (They're only partly protective runes, but he doesn't tell his sister what else they do.) He traces the words along Susan’s spine, over her heart, down the side of her neck: points of power. From her ankle to her soft belly, a long lyric invoking old gods.
“Edmund,” says Susan, a little tightly.
“Shh,” he murmurs, and writes around her wrists, writes along her clavicles.
The ink glows and sinks into her skin and is gone, and in the end there's no proof she's been subject to spells except for a flush in her cheeks and an unfocused look in her eyes. She reaches for Edmund and he lets his sister curl into him, dizzy with magic.
Her body burns with fever, though Edmund has anticipated this aftereffect. Susan clutches him shivering as they lie on her bed, mumbling about how cold she is into his neck, her lips heated and soft and her fingers tightly curled around his arms. Edmund reaches for the blankets with some difficulty – Susan keeps grabbing him when he moves away. He makes soothing noises and murmurs nothings at her as he adjusts the blankets around them.
“Edmund,” Susan breathes. “O my brother, what have you done to me?”
“Don’t you trust me, Su?” he asks softly. “I thought we’re to trust each other, you and I.”
Her skin is raw and sensitive with magic; he can tell from the way she mewls at every brush of the sheets on her skin and how she curves into his touch. Edmund kisses her face to soothe her and she lets herself be lulled by it, kissing him back disconnectedly. Her hands cup his face, slide down his neck and turn into fists clutching his shirt as she murmurs his name, sometimes like a question and sometimes like a plea. His sister unfurls in his arms, and he exerts only the gentlest pressure in holding her still, holding her close. Edmund makes no unexpected movements and speaks very slow, very soft, the way one would to a dangerous animal caught in a trap. There is nothing to fear, he is telling her. More importantly, there is nothing to fight.
“You do know,” she says, “that I would never hurt you.”
Edmund says, “Nor I you.”
“You are my brother.”
“And you are my sister.”
“Do you understand, Edmund?” She lifts her head to look into his eyes. “She won’t have you again. I want to promise you this. I want you to accept my promise.”
Edmund is bound to Peter by allegiance and duty, and bound to Lucy by a tenderness borne of the fact that she was the victim of his first significant betrayal. His relationship with Susan, however, has always been more nebulous. Her tolerance for frippery tries his sensibilities, and they have never been the closest of the four. He is hit by a sudden fondness for her now, with her face unmasked and her blue eyes wide. The magic has laid her open, and Edmund cannot help but feel a flash of guilt for pushing her to this state. But certain things, he has decided, must come to pass.
He says, “No witch will have me, with you and your bow by my side.”
“We should never have come to Calormen.” Susan curls up with her head resting on Edmund’s shoulder. “We should never have.”
“Come, Su, don’t be like that. This is for Narnia. Aslan wants his country to be strong and prepared for anything.”
They are quiet again, waiting for Susan’s breathing to fall back to even. When she eventually speaks, struggling against the fever, there is a clarity in her voice that wasn’t there before. “Tell me what you’ve done to me, Edmund.”
“The spell protects one from possessions.”
“That’s not all it does. I feel it.”
“No doubt you’re feeling a lot of things right now, Su. You ought to just relax.”
“We should cast it on you too.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Then how does it work?” she demands.
“You needn’t concern yourself with that.”
Susan clutches his shirt and although he does not look at her face, he can imagine her angered expression from the way she tenses her body. “Do not talk to me as if I were a child!”
“Sorry,” he says softly. “I know you’re not.”
“Edmund, tell me.”
“I’ll tell you later,” he promises, and kisses her forehead and strokes her hair, and never does.
+
“Edmund!”
Susan is shaking him violently from sleep and he blinks to consciousness with the morning sun and his sister’s fury in his eyes. “What did you do?” she demands.
“Susan–” he says, rubbing his eyes, but the words tumble from her mouth like a flood.
“I can’t go into your dreams anymore. I couldn’t find you. I couldn’t find a way in. I could feel you and the winter and I couldn’t find a way in! What did you do?”
Susan’s fingers clench bruises into his skin, and attempts to wriggle out of her grasp are unsuccessful. She has always been able to hold Edmund down if she wants to, though in recent years, as he grew in height and his arms filled out, this has been increasingly due to Edmund’s submission than her strength. It is one of the things he has learned from her: to let oneself be conquered as future investment, power through calculated assent.
He says to her, “Susan, calm yourself.”
“Don’t you dare!” she rages. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do, Edmund. What magic have you done to me? Or on yourself, or on what, I don’t know. You said it was a spell of protection!”
“I wasn’t lying,” he says quietly.
“What is it protecting me from?” she demands.
“It doesn’t just protect you.”
Her eyes narrow. “Undo this spell.”
“No.”
“Edmund.”
“Susan.” He raises his hand to stroke her cheek and she swats at it, rearing a little. Edmund takes the opportunity to surge up at her, catch her body in his arms and flip them over, trapping Susan between himself and the bed.
“Get off me,” she hisses.
“Susan, it’s not your battle to fight. It never has been.”
“Get off me!”
He does. “I’m sorry. I never should’ve let this go on for as long as it has. Don’t waste your time on other people’s dreams, Su – nothing good comes of it. Besides, it wasn’t you she had, it was me.” And now she’s mine, he thinks. “She’s just dreams, after all. It’s just dreams.”
“It’s clearly not just dreams!”
“How are you so sure?”
She brushes her hair from her face and breathes deeply the way she does when trying to rein in her temper. Looks away, and has no answer. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
“Some fights are necessarily fought alone – you’ll learn this someday.”
Susan glares at him. “Don’t take that tone with me.”
Edmund rolls his eyes.
He listens to her entreaties and accusations as she dresses herself, clumsy with frustration, but he is used to such displays of passion, and is unmoved. Edmund flops in an armchair and eats an apple, letting her anger pass through him.
Susan doesn’t share his bed with him that night. Edmund is relieved, a little, but he tosses and turns, stretches out on a bed that suddenly feels too big for him.
When he dreams, Jadis smiles in wild delight and offers him her hand.
[end.]
More Author’s Notes
-- Jadis’s Latin translates to, “All things change and nothing truly dies.”
-- The knife in the Street of the Enchanters is the subtle knife from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Someone totally cut a window to Narnia from Cittagazze. The vendor isn’t the true bearer of the knife, since Edmund would notice if he had two missing fingers, so the poor guy is probably going to come to a bad end somehow.
-- Mama Biguda is just a switching around of Mamagubida, which is the name of Tryo’s debut album. Tryo are a lovely acoustic reggae band from France who sing about things like colonization and the legalization of marijuana, and have a song titled “G8”. I love them kind of a lot.
-- Keeping that in mind, I had to restrain myself from extending Edmund’s conversation with the grand vizier into something like this.