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[It was a long walk to Caer Glaem. Fortunately, Susan was close enough that that the road to it was fairly safe. She would feel better about this whole thing if her brothers and sister were here, or if she had her bow, or even her horn. Instead she was wearing her school clothes, and they were none too clean at this point. Still, Susan was hoping for a better explanation, and from what the friendly fairies and townspeople had to say the castle was the place to get it.

She was hungry. Fruit trees and handouts didn't do much in the way of assuaging hunger when one was walking all day. She hoped there would at least be food in the castle; it was looming large in her vision now and she hoped to get there within the end of the day. It was a good thing, too. She'd bathed in a stream that morning, but--

"Lawkamercyme!" cried a high pitched voice, and Susan turned her head just in time to see a small, green-tinted fairy fall into a faint. A dark shadow globbed its way towards the fairy, Susan was sure it had foul intent. Dark shadows with gleam of teeth almost always did. She wished for her bow more than ever, but didn't hesitate to pick up a large stone at her feet. She was frightened - how did one fight a shadow? Oh, she hated to fight - but she wasn't about to just stand there and watch. She shouted, "You! There! Get away from that fairy!"

The shadow did not seem much impressed. And so Susan threw the stone with impressive aim, clipping the beast right in the mouth. It hissed and abandoned the fairy, heading towards her instead. She bent to pick up another rock.]

[ VIDEO ]

[For a long moment, the locket shows a beautiful face with a furrowed brow, staring intently at its own reflection. Susan has never seen anything like this before. She is at the castle now, clean and clothed and fed, so her image doesn't look quite as dire as it had earlier that day, and her dark hair is swept back neatly in a braid.] Ah - so it does work! At least, I assume it does, and this is a message going out all over the lockets and not just some sort of fancy mirror.

[In either case, she's beginning to feel a little self-conscious. She reaches for easily remembered dignity.] I don't mean to intrude, but I have heard that this is something which happens often. And I wonder, is there anyone from England here? [She misses her family; two weeks of walking among strangers in a strange land was more than enough alone time for now, thanks.] Or even [marked hesitation] Narnia?

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Susan paused before following Gendry. She took in the architecture with an expert eye... and this was a beautiful castle. Not only that, but it was streamlined and well-equipped for defense.

"Will you look at the size of it..." Surely, this was not strictly natural construction - not unless it had been made in the same way as the pyramids.

"Nice, ain't it?" But it was not the size Gendry appreciated. Indeed, having lived all his life in the shadow of the Red Keep, there were few castles that might impress him. But it was the state of the city, which did not seem to have the ugly underside that dominated Gendry's memories of King's Landing. It might have been built unnaturally, but it continued to thrive in an equally unnatural manner as well. "Do they have castles like this, where you're from?"

Did they have castles like this... She laughed a little. Cair Paravel had been like this, equally well-formed and shining, a diamond of a castle: flawless, well-cut, and unassailable. She could find no immediate advantage in Caer Glaem save for size, but perhaps that was because Cair Paravel would always be preeminent in her heart. When last she'd seen it, it had been a ruin and some part of her still ached over that, but she best remembered it has it had been.

"Yes and no," she said, moving to follow him into the courtyard. "None quite so large, I think."

"I'd never been in one before. At least not a proper one." He and the Brotherhood had stayed at Acorn Hall once and he'd even gone inside, but it was the house of a small lord of no great importance. Their forge hadn't been used in ages. "But I grew up outside one. The Red Keep, so it was. You could go anywhere in the city and its towers would still be staring down at you. When I left, I didn't think it would ever shrink away in the distance."

It did, though, and it had been a strange moment when Gendry could no longer look over his back and see the familiar sight that had marked the entirety of his life.

Gendry was very open. Susan wished she could be also, but her story was so very strange and she was so very used to not talking about Narnia; it was difficult. "That must have been a strange feeling, looking back and seeing those towers disappear. It's funny how the things we think are certain can change so suddenly."

For example, this castle. "It looks like this place has seen some damage," she said, glancing about at towers which had not been visible from outside the castle walls. She'd thought she'd be safer here than on the open road, but she hadn't seen anything near this devastation except for the occasional battlefield...

"There was a battle here, some months ago. More recently, a bunch of those shadow creatures melted into a bigger one. I heard it was a tough fight, that."

He'd missed out on the action, but in a place like this, people talked. "A pity no one had a giant dog for it, eh?"

"That explains why so much of this damage is inside the walls," and why the walls weren't damaged at all. She wondered if they would have needed a bigger dog or a pack of dogs or if there had been more magic involved.

It was starting to seem like there was always more magic.

She gave Gendry a smile for his joke - it was a good one, after all, and one that shook off the creeping shadow: she did not feel safe. "I wonder how they defeated it - without the giant dog, I mean."

"I didn't listen to the whole story," Gendry admitted reluctantly. His cheeks reddened to admit it, because a knight ought to not only know these things, but have been in the thick of it. Instead, he'd been half listening as he worked the forge from his fairy tutor that had momentarily tired of trying to teach him to read. "But these sorts of things don't last. Likely we'll be seeing the last of them soon enough."

Graciously, Susan pretended not to notice his embarrassment. Of course, that meant she couldn't at all be reassuring or offer an alternative, instead she redirected her line of questioning to something he knew more about. "What do you mean, 'they don't last?' They just... disappear?"

"Not so much vanish like magic. I only mean that trouble brews here at times, but it don't last. In my first month, it was giant worms. Some as long as me, some longer by far. They would kill anything what got in their way. But their bellies were filled with treasure, so there was no shortage of folk eager to kill them." He grinned at that. It had been treacherous fighting, to be sure. But he'd certainly tucked away a fortune thanks to that.

Susan gave a surprised laugh at that thought. Oh, the dwarves would have loved a hunt like that. "I have to say, I'm not surprised. But I wonder..."

Well, she wondered the sort of things she always wondered: What did the worms do? How did their bellies get filled with treasure? Was the treasure undigested, or was it partially gnawed away by stomach acid - that is, was it food? If it wasn't, why would they eat it?

"...were they all killed off? Or was it some sort of... seasonal thing?"

"Bit of both, I think. I figure they came here because they were hungry for more treasure. I don't know how many we killed, but they stopped attacking before long. Either we killed them all or they were smart enough to let up."

And so he ascribed that same behavior to these shadows. There was only so many of them that could be killed before they would eventually wise up and let up on becoming canine crunchies.

She glanced over the grounds, trying to see any sign of whether or not they had breached the castle - or indeed, come up through the ground. "What did you need to kill them? A giant bird?"

This is said with a bit of sarcasm, but she is also still feeling out her ground here.

There had been long enough that signs of the worm invasion were few, save for the deepest parts of the castle where little priority had been placed on patching up tunnels that had inevitably collapsed on themselves anyway. The dungeons were a sight.

"Bloody hell, but that would have been hard. No, a blade was enough to cut them open."

"Well, there's that, at least," she said with a certain amount of relief. It was good to know that everything didn't depend on magic here in order to defend yourself.

"The attacks on the castle - have they all been magical creatures? Or have the Unseelie made it through the walls here as well?"

He grimaced and shook his head. "There was an attack, three months ago. Both courts were made to fight one another. I was at the other court. We were trying to steal a weapon from them. Only, they came here to do the same. In the end, both sides stole one another's weapons, so it seemed a bloody waste of time."

He was bitter for more reason than that, though. He'd been stranded in enemy territory and it had taken him a month on horseback to make it back.

"...funny that they got the same idea to do that sort of thing at the same time," Susan said. 'Made' to fight each other? Were they... driven by something? Or was it just... war.

This whole thing was very strange. Susan felt that she'd never known a war quite like this one.

"It weren't so funny to be caught in the middle of it," he muttered bitterly. "They tried to attack again, only a month ago. They made it as close as Cothromach before they were driven off."

"No, I'm sure it wasn't funny at all." She tugged a piece of flyaway hair behind her ear. "I didn't mean funny as in - 'haha' but as in - curious. War isn't funny at all."

If she hadn't been so tired, she was sure she'd have nightmares. Walking all day, however, didn't give you much luxury for interrupted sleep, however hard or cold the ground happened to be.

"I know that." He didn't quite grin, but there was clear amusement at her effort to clarify herself. He'd understood the meaning well enough, but his aptitude for cynicism meant ignoring that. "So where is it you're from?"

Susan eyed him, not sure whether or not he was having her on and frowning a bit at the thought of it. But then... while the question should be simple enough... her frown deepened for a moment, then she said decisively, "I'm from England."

After all, she was never going back to Narnia again. She would always remember it, it would always be part of her, but she was not from Narnia, even if she was in some indefinable way of Narnia.

Once a king or queen...

"London, actually. That's our capital."

They were beginning to exit the courtyard now, coming up on the second entrance.

Gendry seemed to consider the name for a moment, before at last shrugging. "Never heard of it."

Before he could announce his own home, one of the castle servants approached. Dressed in a waistcoat and a delicately trimmed pencil mustache, he was very much an important member of the serving staff and did not likely lower himself to cleaning things. He was an organizer and he greeted them both with a thin smile. "Ah, Prince Gendry. Fighting the good fight again, I see! Aha, so very clever of you... and ah!" He seemed to pause and his expression flickered with a childish giddiness. "Oh my my my my, you must be Queen Susan. We were wondering if you'd ever show up! I'm afraid you are late. The feast was two weeks ago."

Gendry ignored the servant, which he almost always did. Instead, he gaped at Susan. "Queen?

Susan eyed the man as he came towards them: punctilious was the word which came to mind. 'Steward' was the second. He carried himself as a man used to some authority and Susan subconsciously stood a little straighter. Servants at this level, she always felt, were almost more like guides and schedule-keepers and--

"Prince?" she turned to gape at Gendry, in a most un-queenlike way. And then there was her shock at being addressed in this strange and foreign land as queen. She turned her only slightly less surprised gaze to the steward. "Queen?"

The man looked taken aback, as if he'd come upon a table where the napkins had been set crookedly. "Well - are you not Queen Susan, high queen of Narnia? The fairies said you accepted their offer almost two weeks ago." A hint of disapproval in his tone. "We set a place of honor for you at the feast."

Doubtless her absence had thrown off his seating arrangement, she thought, frowning.

High Queen at that. Gendry's expression had changed to something more suspicious. She was doing little to object to the title. In any case, it was one thing to be an accidental son of a king. But a queen was a queen, no matter how one looked at it. She was high born. She didn't seem it now, but a little mud would do that to anyone.

He leveled a steely gaze at the servant. "I told you I ain't no prince. Call me Ser if you like, but you can bugger off about princes."

The servant exhaled loudly and did little to disguise his rolling eyes. "Yes yes, of course, Ser Gendry. I don't suppose you'll find time to want a bath drawn, hm?"

Gendry snorted derisively. "Draw one for her Grace over there. I had one last week already."

Edited 2014-08-23 03:24 (UTC)

The steward's attitude toward Gendry bothered Susan - and his attitude towards her - as if she was at fault for being late, of all the ridiculous things - wasn't doing him any favors.

But queens, if that was what she was here, were supposed to be gracious. They also didn't need to take bother from servants.

"I believe there's a bit of confusion here," Susan said, achieving a tone that was decidedly more 'older sister: annoyed' than 'regal and warm' but she'd had a long two weeks. "What is your name?"

"Reginald, Your Majesty," and he affected a bow worthy of her station. It felt starched at the corners.

"Thank you, Reginald," Susan said. "Now if you will withdraw for a moment, I believe Prince Gendry and I have something to discuss."

The reminder was just as much for the steward as it was for Gendry - if he was going to 'your Grace' her, she could very well serve that dish right back - but the steward should know better than to linger when two royals needed to converse. Stewards should also know better than to publicly inquire after someone else's bathing habits - it was rude with the potential to be humiliating, even if she agreed that bathing once a week was hardly sufficient.

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