Scorn & Stricture

by Anonymous

Summary:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man of a Westrosi wedding party bound for Narnia, must be in want of a wife.

Notes:

• For Snacky.

Yes, it's the Jon Snow/Susan Pevensie romcom loosely based on Pride & Prejudice that nobody, including Snacky, asked for! It'll be fun, I promise.

Diverges from GoT/ASoIaF canon near the end of book/season 1, when Jon attempts to leave the Watch; here he did so successfully.

More or less canon-compliant for Narnia, set pre-HHB.

Chapter 1: The Dinner

Susan’s first inkling that Peter’s wedding seems destined not to go smoothly comes when the Westrosi princess steps off her ship and promptly faints at his feet.

A great deal of commotion follows in which humans swarm the dock, mingling with a Narnian crowd of Fauns, Dwarves, and Talking Beasts of all descriptions. The lot of them cause a din that makes Susan want to cover her ears, yet fails to stir so much as a single red hair on the girl’s head.

Eventually Peter manages to wrangle them into some semblance of order, issuing commands in his calm, clear voice until the unconscious princess is loaded into a litter held between two patient Mules. Their precious burden sways lightly between them as they set off on the road up to the Cair, their hooves steady and certain.

Susan has barely a chance to exchange a glance with her brother - have they sent us a girl who is ill or silly, and which is worse? being a difficult thing to communicate with a single look, no matter how speaking - before a dark haired Westrosi man in plain black garb pauses before them with a distracted air, his eyes tracking the rest of his party.

“You’ll have to excuse her,” he says, his gaze settling somewhere between the pair of them. “She gets seasick.”

“A most unfortunate malady,” Susan says, fixing her most charming smile in place. “Or so I’ve been told. My brother the High King and I hope she recovers with all speed, of course–”

“Excuse me,” the man says, cutting her off. “I need to catch up.” Giving them the barest nod, he turns on his heel, marching away with a long, easy stride.

“Westrosi are not much for pleasantries, I see,” Susan says to Peter, watching the mystery man make his way up the path in his party’s wake; a pity he’s so rude, really. She’s always had a weakness for men with curls in their hair.

Peter only laughs. “Don’t be too rough on the poor chap, Su. I’m sure he’s merely concerned for his lady, as you might expect any attendant of yours to be in a similar situation.”

“I do not get seasick,” Susan says, perhaps a touch too primly, and takes her brother’s elbow. “Nor would I ever permit any of my people to slight foreign dignitaries. Of course we take no offense–” here, Peter snorts, but she perseveres, ignoring him as only a long-suffering sister can, “–but they can hardly know that to be our character, after all! It’s quite reckless of him.”

“I daresay he looked to be a fellow who can handle himself,” Peter says, “much as I daresay you are merely suffering the sting of wounded pride, that any man should dare ignore the words coming out of your lovely mouth.”

Susan narrows her eyes. “You take that back, Peter Pevensie.” But her brother only laughs, and kisses her on the cheek, and tugs her up the long path, away from the sea.

*

Dinner goes little better. Cair Paravel’s grand dining hall glitters, a blaze of candles lit and the doors facing the sea thrown open to let the breeze in, the tang of the sea flavoring the air.

And the wine, of which Susan had doubtless consumed more than she ought, when considering her empty stomach. Their visitors had yet to put in an appearance, and though she’d been assured the princess had quite recovered from her swoon, the Westrosi had politely but firmly rebuffed her at the door to the wing they were housed in. Truth be told, she’d caught them casting anxious looks at the creatures filling the Cair’s corridors, and the unease had settled in her limbs down at the pier blossomed.

“I do not think this is going well,” she says to Lucy, swirling the wine in her glass, peering into its claret depths as though she might see the future within.

“Oh, do let’s not be wet blankets, Su.” Lucy draws one foot (which has mysteriously lost its elegant little slipper) up onto her chair, her other leg swinging beneath her skirts. “Peter doesn’t seem bothered, after all, and he’s the one who’s meant to marry her.”

That’s true enough, small comfort though it is. Even now, Peter chats amiably with his attendants, loose-limbed and entirely at ease, as though his bride-to-be were not mysteriously absent from her own arrival banquet; as though her people were not sullen, rude, and struggling against Narnia’s every attempt to make them welcome. Sighing, Susan wishes for Edmund, for the cutting edge of his cynicism and his eyes which miss nothing; alas, he’s away in the islands, Galma having chosen to kick up a fuss once more about Mermaids and trade routes at the most inopportune of times.

“It’s a lovely event, at least,” Lucy says, looking about the hall with wide eyes, as though she’s a girl out of a little river village and not a queen who’s sat her throne for near on a decade now. “You’ve done a splendid job, as you always do.”

“Thank you. At least someone deigned to notice, even if it is only my grubby little sister. Wherever has your shoe got to?”

Lucy shrugs. “Under the table somewhere, I suppose. I think Fergus was gnawing on it.”

Susan can’t quite stop the offended gasp that slips from her mouth. “Fergus would never!” Hearing his name, her Wolf guard pops his head from under the table, and deposits an object in her lap–oh.

Holding back another sigh, Susan hands Lucy her slightly soggy slipper and swallows the rest of her glass in one go, already longing for the night to end.

“Ah,” Lucy says, sitting up straight (the offending shoe disappears beneath her skirts, though not, Susan suspects, in order to end up on her foot). “They’re finally here.”

And indeed, the Westrosi flood into the far end of the room, a small sea of humanity looking vaguely lost and ridiculous among the Narnians. An impression hardly aided by their clothing, a churning mass in shades of black and grey. A people with all the life leeched from them, left behind on their own shores, perhaps.

Their deadened sea parts, and a blushing girl steps forward, all white gown and white skin, crowned with a blaze of fire-colored hair.

“Well, well,” Susan murmurs, and tips her refilled glass in the princess’s direction. She knows how to dress, how to make the most of her striking looks; that much is clear, and it softens Susan’s initial impression. This seems a woman unlikely to let a Beast borrow her shoe for a plaything.

She’s so distracted in watching Peter step forward to take Sansa’s hands in his own, kissing each one in turn as the girl pales, standing stiff as a statue, that she doesn’t notice the dark haired man from the docks until some movement catches her eye, and she turns to find him beside her, as stiff as her brother’s prospective bride.

He’s quite handsome, she notices, taking the time to study him while his gaze remains on Peter, leading Sansa up to the high table. Not quite so tall as she herself – but then, so few men are, Peter being the notable exception – but broad enough in the shoulders and narrow in the waist, with well-kept hands and a few day’s growth of dark beard shadowing his face. And what a face it is; too beautiful by half, with those wild curls tumbling across his brow and a slight pout to a mouth she’s suddenly curious to see smile. Not the petulant sort, though; no, that particular expression Susan has seen once too often on men, often enough to discard the men wearing it upon sight. This man doesn’t pout, she decides, her eyes narrowing at him over the rim of her glass. He broods.

“Your Grace,” he says, finally taking note of her scrutiny. There’s nothing at all to glean from his voice; a low, pleasant enough rumble, but one utterly devoid of tone, just as his face remains without expression. His gaze sweeps her from head to toe in return as he says it; a quick thing, and easily missed by a less vigilant observer, but Susan has never been lesser. She notes his study, and the faint flush in his cheeks that follows; notes the stark, unadorned black of his attire and tips her chin a bit higher, certain of it now. This is a man in a place where he does not belong, standing beside her with his hands resting on the seat that would be Edmund’s, were he here, for all the world as though he means to take it for himself.

“Did your lady not tell you?” she asks, her voice smooth. “We use Your Majesty here on first address, Sire or Madame thereafter. Your Grace is a title for nobility, not royalty.” Where Narnia’s arcane rules regarding titles come from, she doesn’t know, but the Narnians had insisted wholeheartedly that they preceded the time of the Witch, and therefore, they were used still, though typically none of them make a point of holding anyone to such silliness.

But something about this unreasonably handsome man irritates her beyond her limits, and so Susan tilts her chin up, looking down on him from every bit of her additional height. “I do hope she’s quite recovered? Your lady, that is.”

“My lady–” he says, brows drawing together. “Oh, Sansa. She’s well enough.”

Susan blinks at him, lips parted at the brusque, overly familiar way he speaks of the woman even now approaching them; Lady Sansa Stark, eldest sister of Robb Stark, the King in the North. A corner of his mouth tugs up at Sansa’s approach, and for one bitter moment, Susan rues her desire to see him smile. It’s just as damnably attractive as the rest of him.

“Your Majesty,” Sansa says, coming to a halt before them on Peter’s arm, dipping in an elegant curtsy. It’s a relief to see that Sansa knows how to behave, even if her attendants do not.

“You must call me Susan,” she says, kissing the other woman’s cheeks and clasping her hands. “If I may call you Sansa?”

“Of course,” Sansa says, something like warmth coloring her voice. “And I see you’ve met my brother, Jon. I hope he hasn’t bored you.”

Susan’s stomach drops to her feet as though filled with stones. “Your brother?”

“Jon Snow,” the man at her side says, nodding his head. “Your Majesty.”

Chapter 2: The Tournament

“I don’t think she likes you.”

Across the pavilion, Peter shoots her a glare. “She hardly knows me. I’ll not condemn a woman for failing to fall into a stranger’s arms at the first possible moment.”

“Hmm.” Stretching her arms, Susan runs her hands through the length of her hair, beginning the arduous process of braiding it into a tight fishtail down her back. “Nor would I, brother, but for the facts I gathered over the past few nights while you occupied yourself with eating and drinking and speaking to Lucy as much as could be considered polite.”

Turning all his attention to the stubborn buckles on his vambrace, Peter curses under his breath. “And what would those facts be? Go on, do tell me before you burst, Su. I know you’re longing to.”

“First,” Susan says, ignoring his jibe and wishing she could tick her points off on her otherwise-occupied fingers, “she goes stiff as stone every time your hand so much as brushes hers. She dislikes being touched, particularly by men.”

“She’s shy,” Peter mutters, shortly.

“Perhaps,” she allows. “Second, she eats and drinks almost nothing, and you needn’t bother to refute me. Yes, it may be lingering seasickness, or an entirely understandable bout of homesickness. Or…”

“Or she may loathe the thought of wedding me so much it makes her feel ill?” The tight smile stretched across her brother’s lips would warn off anyone else; even Ed would be reluctant to push his luck in the face of that expression.

Susan presses on. “Indeed. But none of that troubles me so much as the third fact I chanced upon that very first night, while I sat and ate and observed you in lieu of attempting conversation with the boor seated beside me.”

“And that would be?”

“You like her no better.”

For a moment, Peter’s jaw tightens, and she fears she’s gone too far. “What gives you that idea?”

Delicately, Susan shrugs. “You’ve no desire for a quiet, fragile, subservient bride. I’ve known the Dryads who’ve caught your fancy, the Satyrs and Naiads. Adventurous, boisterous, rough-and-tumble creatures, to a one. The sort who appreciate your bawdy jokes and make their own in return, who laugh long and loud and care not a whit what anyone else thinks of them. This girl will never be that.”

Peter looks over her head. “A wife is not the same as a lover,” he says, his voice stiff as the vambrace he finally fixes into place.

Shifting her arms to relieve the growing ache as her fingers weave strands of hair together, she huffs out a breath. “In your case, they must be,” she says. “Kings and princes of other lands may marry for convenience, all the while planning to be unfaithful spouses, but not you, Peter. That is not a life any of us would tolerate. You needn’t pretend you can begin to countenance such a thought. Either we marry for love, the lot of us, or we’ll have none at all.”

“Exactly.” The bleakness in Peter’s voice stops her short, leaving her scrambling to wrap and tie off her braid before it falls apart. “It hardly matters, does it?”

“It matters to me!” Scrambling to her feet, Susan follows Peter to the pavilion’s tied-back flaps, the sunlight outside streaming in, the excited murmur of the crowd growing louder at their appearance. “I only want you to be happy, Peter. You can hardly blame me for that.”

“I don’t, Su.” Tucking an arm around her waist, he tugs her closer, dropping an affectionate kiss on the top of her hair. “But let’s leave it for now, yes?”

“If you insist.” Shading her eyes with her hand, Susan looks out over the stands, filled nearly to the brim, waiting for the next round of the tournament to begin. The royal box stands notably barren, Sansa seated there alone, empty chairs meant for her brother and the Pevensie siblings at her side. “I ought to go keep her company for the swordfights, I suppose. Where has Lucy got to this time?”

“I said she might take Ed’s place in the fights, since he’s not here,” Peter says, shoving his helmet on, likely to keep from having to meet Susan’s glare. “You know how she is, Su. Go on, take your seat. I feel an abiding need to hit something.”

So does Susan, frankly, but she tamps it down behind clenched teeth and a quiet smile, making her way through the crowds up into the blessed shade of the box.

“Oh, hello,” Sansa says, fingers plucking at her skirts, half rising as Susan drops into her chair, hoping she looks more unruffled than she feels. “I wasn’t certain anyone else was coming.”

“Peter and our sister are participating in the fights,” Susan says, trying not to bite the words off. Sansa has done nothing whatsoever to her, after all, other than fail to fall in love at first sight with Susan’s brother. And bring her own irksome one along, of course. “And your brother? Lord Snow?”

Sansa laughs softly, casting a sidelong glance at Susan. “Don’t let him hear you call him that,” she warns. “He hates it. Just Jon, if you don’t want to make him dislike you.”

Susan’s none too sure she doesn’t, but she lets it pass for the moment. “Not Lord Jon, at least? Has he no titles, then?”

“Robb tried to give him a holding of his own,” Sansa says, frowning, looking down at her lap. “Though our mother didn’t like that. But Jon wouldn’t take it. He’s very stubborn, you see.”

“Too stubborn to accept gifts from his King? What a paragon your brother is,” Susan teases, keeping her voice light, not wishing to offend Sansa. “Has he taken vows of poverty or some such?” Such things are rare in Narnia, but not entirely unheard of; the Centaur tribe of the utmost eastern woods, for example, who gift their visions of the future to Narnia’s rulers and refuse to accept payment of any kind in return, insisting the Lion wishes them to live simply. It would explain Jon Snow’s poor attire, if nothing else.

“Something of the sort,” Sansa says, turning towards Susan, a gleam in her eye. “It’s his oath, you see–oh, look, there they are!”

Turning back to the field, Susan sees Peter approaching, Jon Snow at his side, both armored, carrying their helmets, with a massive white wolf trotting at Jon’s heels.

“My lady,” Peter says, bowing deeply to Sansa. “Sister,” he offers to Susan, throwing a wink her way with a flash of white teeth, and while her ire with his refusal to face facts remains, she can’t help grinning in return. Always, she has loved to watch her brothers fight, though she hopes Jon Snow manages to offer Peter some sport; she’s never seen him lose to anyone other than Edmund, and that only rarely.

“Might I have the honor of your favor, my lady?” Peter asks of Sansa, formal, courtly, impeccable, and Susan watches Sansa blush, fumbling for the handkerchief kept for this purpose, a deep grey in color, with a snarling wolf embroidered in white at the corner. She manages to still the trembling in her hands long enough to secure it around Peter’s bicep, before settling back into her seat with a small sigh of relief, which Susan allows herself to silently echo. One more trial over and done with, and the poor girl hadn’t swooned again at Peter’s feet. A small victory, but one she would happily accept on behalf of them all.

Jon Snow clears his throat, and Susan’s attention snaps forward. “Your Majesty,” he says, his face perfectly still, giving nothing away, the bite in his voice surely a product of her imagination. “Would you be gracious enough to grant me your favor?”

She opens her mouth to issue a denial without thought before snapping it shut, feeling rather like a gaping fish. Gritting her teeth, she fixes her face in her most pleasant smile, and steps off the dais, pulling her own handkerchief from beneath the bodice of her armor, warm from her skin; a clean, pure white, with the face of the lion picked out in red all around the border. She’d done the work herself, every stitch. A shame, she reflects, stepping close to this odious man, knotting it around his arm, wishing dearly that she could tie it around flesh rather than armor; tight enough to dig in, to wear a groove in his skin.

“Good luck, Sir,” she says prettily, tying a neat knot. “You will need it.”

This close, his breath stirs the fine hairs that have escaped her braid, fluttering around her face. “Did I beg for your honor abjectly enough?” he asks, too low for anyone else to hear over the crowd, even Peter. “No one bothered to teach me how to speak to queens, Your Grace.” There’s no venom in his voice now, no malice; nothing at all but a faint reproach, and Susan stumbles as she steps back, his dark eyes staring daggers at her even as he catches her elbow, steadying her with a gentle touch.

In the next moment, he turns away as she ascends the dais once more to take her place, and she might have imagined the whole thing. “Ghost, stay with Sansa,” he orders the wolf, and it obediently jumps up, settling itself at her feet.

The men step away, the crowd roars, and the announcer, a Bear with a booming voice, sets things in motion.

Sitting back in her chair, Susan blinks, wishing for a cool drink and some moments alone. That he should speak to her so, as if she had been the one in the wrong, as though she had been rude to him–! The injustice of it burns at her, and she sets her jaw, watching him walk away, the straight set of his shoulders and the easy way he handles his blunted sword, as though it’s an extension of his arm, his practice swings arcing through the air with speed and ease.

“He’s beautiful,” Susan says, groping for something to say before Sansa should notice her awkward silence, meeting the other girl’s baffled look with a nod towards the white bundle at her feet. “The wolf, I mean. Ghost, was it?” Hearing his name, the wolf’s ears twitch, red eyes meeting hers, though the beast doesn’t shift from Sansa’s feet.

“Oh! Yes,” Sansa says, bending down to scratch his ears. “He’s Jon’s. All my siblings have a direwolf. Robb and Jon found them when they were puppies.”

Susan’s brows draw together. “All your siblings, but not you?”

“I had one, once.” Sansa bites her lip, her eyes on the field. “Her name was Lady. She died.”

“I’m so sorry,” Susan says, wincing, impulsively reaching over to take Sansa’s hand. She can’t imagine losing Fergus, dear as he is to her; Talking Wolves live a good deal longer than dumb ones, of course, but nothing like so long as humans. Her heart aches for Sansa, for the tears gathering in her blue eyes.

“It’s silly,” Sansa says, swiping at them. “It’s been years now, and I had her for so short a time. It’s stupid to cry over it.”

“It’s never stupid to cry out of love,” Susan says, groping for something to stem Sansa’s tears and coming up empty. “Dash it! We’ve given away our handkerchiefs to those silly boys,” she says, and Sansa giggles, a little hiccupping sound.

“Oh, I do hate tournaments,” she says, gripping Susan’s hand so tight at the first clash of metal that her bones ache. “They’re so horrid. I know it’s weak of me, but I can’t bear the sight of the injuries.”

“Injuries?” Susan asks, confused. “No one ever comes away with more than bruises - well, Ed did break his ankle one year, but that was his own fault for tripping in that rabbit hole. But surely–surely they don’t use edged weapons, in your country?” At Sansa’s nod, she’s left speechless. How barbaric, although such a cavalier attitude towards life may go some way to explaining Sansa’s timidity. Likely Susan would be more timid too, if she were expected to watch limbs flying and blood spurting at every sporting event she attended.

“Well,” she assures Sansa, “here no one is ever in any real danger, and should they somehow come to harm, Lucy would fix them up.” Ed’s whinging over his ankle had lasted no longer than the time it had taken for Lucy to arrive on the scene, roll her eyes, and dole out a precious drop of cordial, all while warning him it was absolutely the last time, and next time he’d simply have to suffer the consequences of his carelessness.

“That is a relief,” Sansa murmurs, and in the next moment she’s dropped Susan’s hand to clap hers together, for Jon Snow–

–Is winning, Peter having been put on the back foot. He’s being driven down the field before Jon’s furious advance, the unrelenting smash of his blade barely blocked, time and again, by Peter’s.

“You can do better than that, Peter!” Susan shouts, rising to her feet, and knows that he hears her by the annoyed tilt of his helmet, by the way he heaves Jon’s latest stroke up and away, giving himself a breath to take the offense, to make up some ground.

But to no avail. So fast it happens in the blink of an eye, Jon catches Peter’s blade with his own on the downswing, sending the tip down into the dirt and pivoting, delivering a swift kick to Peter’s knee at the same time as his elbow finds the gap between helmet and hauberk, the two strikes throwing Peter, with his greater height, off balance and sending him tumbling over backwards.

“Jon Snow of the Kingdom of the North is the winner!” the Bear proclaims, lumbering over to lift Jon’s free hand in a massive paw while the Westrosi cheer and the Narnian crowd applauds with restrained disappointment.

Susan does not applaud at all; only sits stiffly, watching Jon Snow’s approach, her hands clutched together in her lap as he stops before them, ignoring his clapping sister entirely, his dark eyes catching only on her as he pulls his helmet free.

“I hope I’ve honored you sufficiently,” he says, chin raised as though he expects her to hit him, and oh, how she’d like to.

“Congratulations,” she says through stiff lips, and rises. “Tell me, Sir, do you plan to compete in tomorrow’s archery tournament?”

He tilts his head, his gaze boring through her, leaving her feeling transparent as glass. “Will you command me to, if I say no?”

“No,” she grits out, forcing her lip not to curl. “I merely offer a challenge. I could not command you to do aught, Sir, as you are no subject of mine.”

Jon Snow smiles, something predatory in it, and on the dais, Ghost lifts his head. “Then yes.”

*

The Magpie lands with a whirring of feathers on her windowsill as just Susan’s Dryad handmaiden finishes weaving a strand of pearls through her hair, the warm white of them glowing in the dark mass of it.

“Ah, Kaia,” Susan says, dismissing her handmaiden with a wave of her hand and turning to the Bird. “What have you to report?”

“A most interesting conversation, Majesty,” Kaia says, preening her feathers. That a great many Talking Beasts make excellent spies when their targets are humans who live far from Narnia and give no thought to curbing their words around animals, she and Ed learned long ago. And while most Birds excel at remaining unnoticed, (Peafowl and Swans being notable exceptions), Magpies have ever been Susan’s particular favorite, for one reason.

“Well, let’s have it then.”

Kaia coughs, her natural hoarse voice going through several registers, and when she speaks again, Sansa Stark’s voice comes from her throat.

“You know how difficult it would be for Robb, if I don’t do it. And mother would be so disappointed in me, that I couldn’t manage to make the best of it as she did, with father.”

Kaia’s feathers stir, and the next voice that emerges from her is Jon Snow’s. “It would be awkward and unpleasant, yes. We can still leave tomorrow, if that’s what you want.”

“It isn’t!” Sansa’s voice cries, impassioned even at this secondhand remove. “I just can’t bear the thought, now that I’ve seen him. It was different back at Winterfell, when Peter was just an idea, a courtly letter and a sketch on paper.”

“I know.”

“What do you think of them, Jon? Tell me truly.”

A hoarse, dry laugh comes from Kaia’s throat, and Susan jumps, shoving back the urge to check for Jon Snow over her shoulder. “The King’s a decent man. A good fighter, and not a sore loser, either. I understand why you feel the way you do, but I believe he’s a man worth your trust.”

“I see.” Kaia pauses, tilting her head, before speaking in Sansa’s voice once more, her bright, dark eye fixed on Susan with something like borrowed amusement. “And the sister?”

“He has two.” Is it Susan’s imagination, or has Kaia’s rendition put something evasive in Jon’s tone?

“You know perfectly well I mean the elder one. She’s very beautiful, is she not?”

“Handsome enough, I suppose,” Jon’s voice echoes, and Susan fancies she can hear the shrug in it. “But not enough to overcome her snobbery. That woman looks down on everyone and everything from her high throne. She’s intolerable.”

The Magpie cuts herself off with a cough, dropping back into her natural register. “It’s sorry I am, Majesty, but that is what he said.”

“It’s quite all right, Kaia,” Susan says coolly. “Better men than Jon Snow have said worse things about me. Is that the end of it?”

“Yes, Majesty,” Kaia says, fluttering along the sill, agitated. “The princess felt a chill, and that horrid man came over to close the window just then. I thought of giving his eyeball a good pecking, but I came back here instead. How dare he say such things about you!”

“Pay it no mind, Kaia. We cannot be beloved by all those we meet, after all.” Susan rises, shaking out her emerald-colored skirts, glancing over her appearance one last time in the mirror. “Thank you. You’ve done well.”

Tonight’s festivities promise to be interesting, indeed.

*

Peter, infuriating man that he is, only shrugs when she repeats her newfound knowledge to him on the dance floor. “What of it, Su? So they don’t like us. Let them leave, go back across the sea without our alliance. It’s no great loss to us.”

She resists the urge to trod upon his foot with some difficulty. “It would most certainly be a loss, Peter, to have it appear that a foreign princess scorned you, that there was something so wrong with you – with Narnia, with us – that it sent her packing in under a fortnight!”

Setting her lips in a grim line, she glares up at her brother, willing him to take this seriously. Narnia’s place among the crowns of the continent stands none too steady; oh, Archenland may be their steadfast ally, less bothered by magic and Talking Beasts than the others, but the Islands? They view their returned overlords with resentment and suspicion even after a decade, eyes sharp as gulls’ always on the watch for any sign of weakness. And the less said of Calormen, of the desert’s rapacious maw hungering to swallow Narnia’s wild beauty, her rough magic, the better. A Narnia without allies cannot, will not survive intact, not without a good deal more bloodshed than Susan is willing to countenance. Of the four, Peter presents by far as the best candidate for a wedded alliance; he’s the eldest, the High King, the one whose children will be most naturally expected to take up ruling when the Pevensies are gone. That he’s a man adds another point in his favor, for Susan’s long been aware that if and when she weds, it will likely as not mean leaving Narnia for her husband’s land. The same would go for Lucy, were she and Ed not still too young for the whole business, and–well. No force lesser than Aslan himself would ever inspire Lucy to leave Narnia.

Peter sighs, sweeping her through an elegant turn, his feet moving without thought just as her own do, his body having learned the patterns of dances as well as fights. “What would you have me do? You said it yourself. The girl doesn’t like me, and I can’t say I’ve found her so fascinating I would try to prevent her fleeing me, if that’s her wish. And I do wish you wouldn’t spy on our guests.”

“You may as well wish for the sun not to rise, Peter.” Their hands come together, a brief press of palm to palm, and flutter away. “It is what I do.”

Peter regards her, his brows coming together like a thundercloud. “It’s rude.”

“They’re rude!” Susan hisses, nearly missing her footing in the injustice of it. “Or he is, at least. Beating you like that in the tourney - hardly an honorable move, to kick one’s knees out.”

“It was well within the rules of the fight, and well done. I ought to have seen it coming.” The dance slows, the music winding down, and Peter leans closer. “Do you know what I think, Su? I think that’s what this is all about, really. It isn’t that the Lady Sansa doesn’t like me. It’s that Jon Snow doesn’t like you. It’s your pride that’s wounded, not mine.”

Jon Snow, like her? What an odious thought. Susan can’t possibly imagine anything she longs for less. “Why should I want him to like me? Lion forbid. I’m not quite so vain that I require every male in my vicinity to love me, Peter.”

“No,” her brother says, bowing to her, rising with a wink. “Only the handsome ones.”

She sends him off with bitten off orders to dance with Sansa, and to make some sort of attempt to exert his considerable charm on her. Unfortunately, the next time she manages to locate his golden head, standing high above so much of the crowd, it’s on the opposite side of the room from Sansa’s blazing one, tucked deep in leafy conversation with a Dryad or three. Giving up on both her brother and the idea of refreshing her drink, Susan makes her way to the princess herself.

“Lady Sansa,” she says, offering her most elaborate, courtly curtsy, extending her arm with a flourish. “Would you care for a dance?”

Sansa’s mouth opens, though no sound emerges; the Westrosi party has spent enough nights at Narnian romps now to have seen women dancing with women and men dancing with men just as they do with one another, but their reactions clearly have not yet caught up to their current circumstances. Apparently, this is not a thing that’s done in Westeros.

Refusing to let her smile fall, Susan grasps the other girl’s hand and draws her from her seat, encountering such little resistance as to melt away what small shards of guilt had dug into her. “Come,” she says, flashing a smile that’s all teeth at Jon Snow, lurking behind his sister’s chair. “It will do you good to get out from under the wings of your dour knight for a few moments.”

The dance is a sprightly, courtly one, much as she had danced with Peter, filled with hops and turns; a bit energetic for conversation, and at first, neither of them attempt it. Keeping a watchful eye on her partner, Susan notices the growing flush in Sansa’s cheeks, the smile that tugs at her lips with every swirl of her skirts, every clap of her hands, and judges the moment right.

“You are a wonderful dancer, Sansa.”

Sansa laughs, the first true sound of merriment Susan’s heard from her lips. “I’ve always loved song and dance,” she confides, her voice breathy. “Even if I am not accustomed to this one in particular.”

“I hope I make a satisfactory partner.” There’s little point in false modesty. There’s no better dancer in the Narnian court than Susan, and all know it. “My brother is an accomplished dancer, as well. I hope he’ll demonstrate his skill with you shortly.”

Sansa’s gaze flits away, and her feet falter, the barest stumble that none other than Susan would note. “I would be pleased to do as the High King wishes, of course,” Sansa tells the floor. Against the wall, Jon Snow straightens, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes fixed on the pair of them.

Tearing her gaze from one sibling to the other, Susan bites her lip, spinning away from the other girl and back again. No point in pussyfooting around it forever. “You don’t care for Peter?” Her voice is light, as though it doesn’t matter, as though she could not possibly be offended by any reply Sansa might make; only a concerned sister and prospective friend making an innocent query.

“He is a perfect King,” Sansa says, too quickly. “Gracious and polite. There is nothing to complain of in his behavior.”

“We can disagree on that point. But that is not what I asked.” For a moment, Sansa allows their eyes to meet, and the fear and indecision Susan sees there nearly knock her from her feet.

Just as nearly as the litter of half-grown Wolf pups, careening through the ballroom at top speed, tripping over their own enormous paws and flag-plume tails, not to mention the feet, paws, and hooves of various guests. Lucy trails a half-step behind them, skirts hitched to her knees, fur coating her sleeve and grass stuck in the mess of her hair, calling out names with barely a space for breath. Susan executes a practiced pivot to avoid the hurricane that is her sister, sweeping Sansa out of the way in the same motion, barely registering Lucy’s halfhearted apology, tossed over her shoulder as she runs.

They’re gone as quickly as they appeared, leaving Susan blinking, turning back to Sansa with mortified apologies on the tip of her tongue, only to find her partner giggling helplessly, fingers pressed to her lips.

“Oh, don’t apologize,” Sansa says. “Please, I quite understand. I have one of my own just like her, you see.”

“No one is quite like Lucy.” Unbidden, Susan feels her brows attempting to rise into her hairline; many things might be expected of the siblings of this delicate, quiet woman and her brooding, tightly contained brother, but a wild little lioness of a sister would not have been Susan’s first guess.

“Arya may be far worse,” Sansa confesses, as they leave the floor. “I’ve found Lucy’s conversation quite charming, when she stops moving long enough to speak, and I’ve yet to see her throw food at anyone.”

“She saves that for picnics,” Susan says drily. “Be sure to keep your distance from any groups of Faun or Satyr younglings you see, for Lucy is sure to be among them, plotting mischief.”

Sansa laughs once more, a low note that warms the air around them, and Susan feels something in her guarded heart loosen. She quite likes this woman, she decides, all of her shy airs and tentative confidences included. And if she likes Sansa, perhaps there’s still a chance that Peter may, as well. It only needs a bit of delicate handling, gentle hands to shepherd them in the right direction.

Susan has always excelled at herding.

Depositing Sansa back at her seat, Susan prowls the room in search of Peter, only to come up empty. The close heat of the room makes her skin glow, and after two circuits, she gives him up as a lost cause; her brother will reappear, or he will not, as he pleases. No matter – tomorrow brings the archery tournament. With Susan and Jon Snow both competing, Sansa and Peter will be all but alone in the royal box. Dispatching Lucy for the day will be simple enough. All Susan truly needs to do is leave Lucy’s bow out to tempt her in the morning, and let her sister’s irrepressible nature do the rest.

Sipping blissfully cool lemonade, Susan presses her back against the walls, relishing the sharp shock of the chill stone along the overheated skin of her bare shoulders, and lets her gaze wander.

Peter’s Dryads, all still present and accounted for - excellent. At least he hadn’t snuck off with them. Lucy and her dashed puppies, nowhere in sight. And Lady Sansa, her hand on her brother’s arm, whispering something in his ear that makes him shake his head, that riot of black curls bouncing. Curious.

Even more so when Sansa’s eye catches hers before Susan can look away, and she renews her directive to Jon, a little shove included that would make Susan laugh, were it not for the fact that it propels Jon straight in her direction.

Muttering curses in her head, Susan calculates the distance between them as he stomps closer, the very picture of ill-grace, and finds it sadly too late to execute an elegant retreat. And she’ll be damned before she’ll let him compromise her dignity by running away like a goose of a girl (not to be mistaken for a girl Goose, who would simply bite him, a strategy which merits consideration).

“Your Majesty,” Jon says, face stiff as his posture, coming to a halt before her, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. “Would you honor me with a dance?”

Susan swallows the last of her lemonade, endeavoring not to swallow her tongue along with it. “It would please me to accept exactly as much as it pleases you to ask, Sir,” she says, her tongue a sweetly poisoned barb, and gives him her hand.

His fingers grasp hers tightly, cool and dry, and Susan pushes back the sudden, absurd fear that her palms are damp, wishing she had thought to wipe them on her skirt.

“Tell me, do you always take orders from your sister?” she asks as they begin; not a dance that allows for separate movement, for courtly freedom, for Susan couldn’t be so lucky. No, instead they find themselves pressed close, her hand at his shoulder, the cage of his arms enclosing her, fingertips brushing the heat of her skin, impossibly cool.

That he knows she means to needle him is clear in the twist of his mouth, as though he wants to smile. “Usually,” he says, his gaze fixed over her shoulder as they turn along the floor. “I know enough to know Sansa’s more clever than I am. If she thinks I should do something, I’ll do it, no matter how little I want to.”

Begrudgingly, Susan allows her estimation of him to rise, just a bit. A man who listens to his sister’s advice is allowed a bit of grace, in her mind, tonight of all nights. “Not all brothers are so wise.”

He lets out a huff that may have been a laugh, in another life. “I suspect yours are, if they know what’s good for them. Peter certainly heeded your words, during our fight. You called out, and he nearly had me.”

She tips her head to the side, considering, surprised he had noticed such a small thing in the chaos. But perhaps she shouldn’t be; a man who is that adept of a fighter is an observant one, who takes note of details. A thing she would do well to recall. “You could not have expected me to do otherwise, I hope. My heart is not tied to a scrap of cloth, that I should give my loyalty along with my favor.”

For a long moment, he studies her as they move through the steps, his eyes narrowing, the muscle along his jaw shifting. “No,” he says, seeming to come to some decision. “I would expect nothing else from you, Your Majesty.”

His fingers tighten along the blade of her shoulder, shifting with their momentum, a momentary pressure leaving tingles in its wake. Resolute, Susan presses on, bringing herself back to the matter at hand. Jon Snow may be of use to her plans yet. “And King Robb? Does he respect Sansa’s advice, as well?”

Jon blinks, his gaze drifting back over her shoulder once more. “Sometimes. Robb knows his own mind.”

“Ah,” Susan says. She knows that particular tone all too well, has heard it leave her own mouth more than she’d care to admit when speaking to diplomats, to courtiers and advisors. “I understand. Peter can be stubborn when he wishes, too.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you meant it, did you not?” Jon makes no reply, but the look on his face is answer enough. “Let me venture a guess, Jon Snow,” she says, as they orbit one another, close enough that she feels her dress has molded to her body from the heat, from the damp of her skin. How he can stand being so covered up, she can’t imagine, her eyes drawn to the clasps at his throat, the tight lacing at his cuffs, every bit of skin aside from hands and face hidden away. “This marriage alliance is a thing you fear your brother will be stubborn about,” she ventures, lifting her chin to cut off the denial he’s opened his mouth to issue. “Please. I am no fool. I have eyes and ears, just as you do. My brother and your sister have not started out on the best footing. For Peter’s part, I believe he only needs more time; my brother hasn’t the patience for drawing out shy, reticent women, but I think he would soften towards Sansa, given time and opportunity.”

Jon says nothing, and she sighs, speaking faster in her need to convince him. Of course he’s making her do all the work herself. “What I cannot figure out, because I lack the knowledge, is why she dislikes him. It is my suspicion that while you may love and respect your sister too much to push her into anything, it is still your desire to see this alliance sealed. Am I correct?”

Again, his jaw flexes, and she entertains a brief moment of concern for his teeth. “You are. My King entrusted me with a duty, so I mean to see it done.”

“And do you believe her objection to Peter is of a fundamental nature, something that cannot be overcome?” The music slows to a halt, but she holds tightly to his hand, their fingers interlaced, her other hand grasping his shoulder, not willing to release him when she’s so close.

“Maybe,” he says. “I don’t know.”

Suppressing the urge to sigh, Susan nods. It will have to be enough. “Help me, then. If you and I work together, we can force them into proximity more often, and give nature the opportunity to run its course. They needn’t know a thing about it.”

His eyebrows raise. “You want to work with me?”

“Any port in a storm, Jon Snow,” Susan says, archly. “Do we have a deal?”

For a moment, she’s certain he will say no, certain that bored, blank look will slide back over his face, shutting her out; certain that he will return to Sansa’s side and divulge her plans, and the offended Westrosi will set sail at dawn.

Instead, he smiles, and brings their clasped hands to his lips, pressing a kiss to her knuckles, warm and feather-light. “Deal.”

*

The archery tournament goes exactly as planned – more or less.

Lucy takes Susan’s bait, just as she knew her sister would, though she grows bored and wanders off sometime before the third round, distracted by the Otters shouting cheerfully vulgar suggestions from the Cair’s moat.

Which leaves Susan (well in the lead, of course), Jon Snow (a competent archer, if far from Susan’s own excellence), and a smattering of others still competing.

Squinting, Susan attempts to watch Peter and Sansa from the corner of her eye without making her scrutiny obvious, noting that they seem…well, cozy is not quite the word, but amiable, perhaps?

“What do you suppose they’re talking about?” she asks Jon Snow, under the cover of selecting the perfect arrow for her next shot.

“The amount of time you’re taking to shoot, most likely,” he says, and doesn’t even have the grace to look abashed when she turns to him, open-mouthed.

Biting her tongue, Susan counts to ten in her head, even and methodical alongside her breath. “I’m simply trying to ascertain what effect, if any, either of them are having on the other without being obvious.” She leaves the you utter clod unspoken, but from the way Jon’s eyebrows draw together, he hears it perfectly well.

“Sansa’s bored,” he offers, after a moment. “She’s too much of a lady to show it outright, but she always bounces her foot when she’s ready to be done with a thing.”

Indeed, a risked glance shows the hem of Sansa’s skirt twitching, and worse, Peter leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees, chin in hand. No less bored than his would-be lady love, then. “Clearly they mean to make this difficult for us.”

Jon shrugs. “It may not be any fault of his. Sansa’s never been interested in archery.”

“And you couldn’t think to mention this before?” Selecting an arrow at random, Susan turns and stomps towards the targets, Jon close at her heels. “What sort of things will capture her attention, then? What does she enjoy?”

For a moment, she takes his silence as another piece of his refusal to be helpful, until she glances over her shoulder and sees the hesitation in his face, his eyes on the ground. “Song and dance,” he offers, clearly understanding the answer’s inadequacy. “Romantic stories of all kinds, really. Fine clothes and pretty things, gardens and flowers. Cake of some kind, I think?”

“Fine clothes and cake?” She makes no effort to disguise the scorn in her voice, and Jon’s face flushes. Cake! The man may as well have stated Sansa enjoys breathing air and petting kittens. If Peter or Ed had given such a sorry accounting of her tastes to anyone – well. Susan can’t think what she’d do, but it would hardly be polite. “Everyone likes those things!” Eyeing Jon, still dressed in his habitual plain black, she raises an eyebrow, as if to say almost everyone.

“I do like cake, at least,” he says, mildly enough, and it’s Susan’s turn to flush. “I’ve always been Sansa’s least favorite sibling. It’s Robb she shared her confidences with, Arya who could tell you every song she loves to sing, Bran who helped her smuggle treats from the kitchens and find the best hiding spots to share them. No doubt any one of them could give you a better idea of her, but she’s stuck with me.” He offers her a mirthless smile, and something in Susan’s heart twists. “As are you.”

It’s the most she’s ever heard him say at one time, and for once, she has no witty response, nothing to push back the unwanted prick of sympathy worming its way into her heart. For a moment, it occurs to her to wonder when last anyone had bothered to ask Jon Snow what sort of things he enjoys.

Turning before any of those words can spill from her, she raises her bow – not the bow, of course, the gift that allows her to never miss, for that would be less than sporting – sights her target, and lets fly. She doesn’t bother to watch the arrow’s flight; she already knows it will hit dead center.

“Well,” Jon says, and though she doesn’t turn to him, ruthlessly tamping down the absurd urge to apologize to the man, she hears something conciliatory in his voice, some bit of emotion breaking through that icy reserve. “Now they’re probably talking about that.”

Chapter 3: The Tour

Two days later, the lush hills above the Cair dance with a cool breeze, flowers nodding in the wind, yellow and blue, soft pinks and lavender a glowing backdrop to the riotous orange of sunsets, of flames. A pair of Fauns armed with harp and flute sit in the grass, their delicate notes blending with birdsong and the bleating of lambs nearby, soft as their wool.

Blankets dot the meadow, covered with the remnants of their picnic, half-loaves of fresh, crusty bread and orange rinds, the last bits of cheese and nuts being picked over in a desultory fashion by those of their party who’d not yet given into the lulling warmth of sun and the joy of full bellies, and rolled over to take naps.

“It is a beautiful spot,” Sansa says, a shy smile coloring her voice; her arms are filled with a bounty of flowers, the tips of her fingers gone green and yellow with pollen. “You were right.”

Pushing her hair back from her face, Susan smiles at her and tries not to catch Jon Snow’s eye; a difficult thing, when he keeps staring at her so, as if she couldn’t tell on her own that the time to spring the next phase of their plan has come. Honestly, the gall of the man! The way his eyes have trailed her through the afternoon, anyone would think he’d lost his wits, or suspected she had, which amounted to much the same thing.

“Yes, this hill is one of our favorites,” Susan says. Letting her shawl slide from her shoulders, she bares the shining white of her arms to the sunlight, its warmth having outweighed the cool of the breeze, and rises, shaking out her skirts to send any stray crumbs flying in Jon’s direction. “Peter knew you would love it too. But you haven’t even seen the best part yet!”

A little twisting path through the trees leads further up the hill, ending in a grove that holds a graceful little ruin; some temple of ages past, perhaps, a round space of fluted columns and greying stone, canopied by a great wisteria tree and twined about with vines of morning glory, all framing an open view down to the crystalline blue of the ocean, and the far distant horizon. A perfect place for a romantic assignation.

Not that Susan intends to reach it herself, not today. Instead, she subtly prods Peter with her foot until he takes the hint, and their merry little foursome troops off into the shade.

“Do carry this for me, Peter,” she says, a little way up the path, passing him a little basket packed with lemon cakes (what a joy, to have efficient spies!). Carefully, she ignores both his quizzical look and the sigh, so slight she might have imagined it, from Jon, his shadow dogging her footsteps.

Susan knows the path well, having ascended it a hundred times; knows just the right place, where it takes a sharp bend to wind more steeply upwards, the view of the meadow behind them cut off and the path plunging around another turn just ahead.

Faking a stumble, she lets herself fall against a slim birch tree, clutching at its bark and letting a pained cry escape her lips.

“Su? What is it?” Peter exclaims, turning back and taking her arm as she allows the tree to support her, favoring her right leg. “Are you hurt?”

“Silly thing,” she says, making her voice high and breathy, as if tight with pain. “I’ve twisted my ankle, that’s all.” She’d never have fooled Ed, she knows, looking up at her brother through her lashes, but Peter? Peter has always been the easiest of her siblings to lie to, his expansive heart leaving no room for doubts or deceit, even of the smallest sort.

“We’ll have to go back,” Peter says, already offering her his arm, but she shakes her head, waving him off.

“Don’t be silly! It’s nothing at all. There’s no reason to let my clumsiness rob you of your fun. You should go on up. I’ll just wait here.” Peter looks doubtful, and Sansa’s hesitating, her slim hands clutched together; Susan hopes she’s not laying it on too thick, and hopes just as fervently that Jon plays his role with anything approaching naturalness. The man may have hidden talents, but she rather doubts acting is among them.

Peter shakes his head. “No, I don’t think we ought–”

“I’ll stay with her,” Jon interrupts, stepping forward and taking Susan’s hand, putting an arm around her bare shoulders. “I don’t mind.”

“Are you sure?” Sansa asks, something tremulous in her voice, and Susan’s not entirely certain which of them she’s speaking to.

“Yes, of course.” Before she can take more than one or two limping steps, Jon all but sweeps her off her feet, depositing her on a nearby log and leaving Susan with an expression on her face she hopes passes for dazed. “I’ll only feel worse if I ruin your afternoon as well as Jon’s! Do go, please, and enjoy the little treat Peter has for you,” she adds, nodding at the basket still dangling from her brother’s hand, half-forgotten in the tumult.

Reluctantly, the pair of them start off up the path again, and Susan leans back on her elbows, only to sit up straight again with a jerk as Jon kneels in the dirt before her.

“What are you doing?” she hisses, low enough for the others, not yet out of sight, to miss.

“Pretending to check your ankle,” he returns, in a murmur just as quiet, and his hands pass beneath the hem of her skirt, fingertips a feather-light touch against the bones there, so close to the skin; the pads of his fingers pass over the delicate, ticklish place at the inside of her ankle, and Susan shivers. “They may look back,” he says, looking up at her. “Please don’t kick me.”

The pressure of his touch grows more firm, long fingers splayed up the back of her calf, and Susan finds her breath grown shallow, her skin heated as though she still sat in the meadow’s golden light.

“I very, very much want to, Jon Snow,” she says, though she doesn’t move, not even when his thumb brushes over that sensitive spot once more.

He only watches her, peering up from under those tumbled curls until she has to suppress the urge to squirm. “You’re a very good actress, Your Majesty,” he says finally, blinking and looking down the path, where Peter and Sansa have disappeared around the curve.

She sighs, reluctantly accepting the hand he offers to help her up. “You may as well call me Susan, if we’re to be partners in this farce,” she says, and ignores both his small smile and the arm he offers her, stalking back down the path all on her own.

*

Dearest Edmund,

Greetings from the Cair, where I shall only be in residence for another day or two. If my next letter is delayed, please do not worry yourself overmuch! I hope Galma continues to be sufficiently interesting, and that the Duke’s granddaughter has not not been too eager in her usual display of affections.

My plans for Peter are proceeding nicely – I’ve finally managed to convince him that a trip south would be great fun, both for ourselves and for Lady Sansa, as several of the towns along Glasswater bay ought to captivate her. I did try hints and subtle suggestions for days, but of course in the end I had to resort to plain speaking to get him there. I know, I know – I can hear you laughing at me from here. I’m sure you would not have fared any better!

First, we are headed to the far side of the bay and the Archen foothills, bound for Zardeenah’s Grace. Unless her brother is wrong (and though it pains me to admit it, my faith in him has grown of late, even if he remains as rude and presumptuous as ever), Lady Sansa ought to love the Calormene storytellers in residence there, and the tales they tell so wonderfully. From there we plan to make our way to Glasswater town proper, to visit the mills and looms, all the finest cloth goods Narnia has to offer on sumptuous display. As you can imagine, Peter was less enthusiastic about that stop, but he perked up when I pointed out a prosperous industry reflects well on Narnia as a nation and the lot of us as rulers.

Lucy’s quite put out that she has to stay behind and hold things together at home, but I told her that was really your fault for being away so long. Unfortunately for me, there is no question of leaving Jon Snow behind, and the more we work to throw Peter and Sansa together, the more I’m forced into his dubious company as a result.

He does have a very nice seat on a horse, I’ll grant him that much. And he isn’t dull, so I shan’t die of boredom, though I fear we may strangle one another before this trip ends, as he likes me no better than I like him. The look on his face at times when I catch him staring–! No, it’s better not to think of it. The man is impossible.

Do wrap up your business and sail for home soon, or we will have a new sister before you return.

Your most favorite elder sister,
Susan

*

“It came to pass, in the days before days, that the great god Tash wished to find himself a bride. To this end, he sought out Zardeenah, Lady of the Night, and begged of her a veil, one woven of the night sky and studded with stars, so fine that no woman could resist such a gift. At first, the goddess refused him, for she was beloved of maidens innocent of the touch of men, and spurned marriage and all its trappings. But so long and well did clever Tash plead his case that her heart softened towards him, and she promised she would weave what he desired. As her price, Zardeenah declared Tash must perform three trials…”

Slipping away from the captivated audience, seated (or sprawled, as their limbs and comfort level dictated) on fat pillows spread across the floor, Susan quietly lets herself out into the courtyard. Its fountain burbles loudly in the night, all but covering the easy, melodic voice of the storyteller within. That matters little; she’s heard this tale before, and knows how long it is in all its twists and turns, all the trials and tribulations endured by Tash, all the tricks he and Zardeenah play on one another. More than long enough for her to get a breath of cool air, free of the rich scent of incense curling through the room, the thick haze of it enhancing every word, drawing the storyteller’s listeners ever deeper into the world of gods and heroes.

Drawing the sweet, fresh air into her lungs, Susan slips silently through the shadows around the fountain and runs directly into Jon Snow, standing there like a block of stone.

Catching herself on the edge of the basin, the cool, damp stone slides beneath her palms, impossibly slick under her grip. Without a word, Jon rescues her, his hand firm against the small of her back, ensuring she doesn’t tip fully into the damned pool.

“Have you ever considered wearing any color other than black?” Placing a hand on the solid wall of his chest, she nudges him back just a bit; just enough to feel she can breathe once more; a difficult thing with his hand still on her, a heavy heat in the steamy summer warmth of the night.

“Have you considered making any noise at all if you want people to know you’re coming?”

“I didn’t,” she says. “That was rather the whole point.” But even as she says it, she can see him smiling, her eyes adjusting to the moonlight, and bites her tongue. No, she’ll not allow him to provoke her again, no matter how amusing he finds her near-tumble. “Were you not enjoying the story?” she asks instead, wrenching her tone back into smooth politeness with the weight of experience even as she smooths down her green skirts, her hair.

“The smoke bothered Ghost.” As he speaks the name, the white direwolf pads to his side, tongue lolling, and Susan blinks, wondering how in the world she could have ever missed spotting him, as his fur all but glows in the darkness. Were Tash still on the prowl for starlight, he may well have grabbed Ghost by mistake. “And you?”

“I’ve heard it many times. Refugees from Calormen began trickling over Narnia’s borders shortly after the Winter ended, most by ship but some few hardy souls through the desert and Archenland’s mountains beyond. People with what they consider heretical beliefs, by and large, but also simply those who’d run afoul of their government. Their resettlement here has been a special concern of mine. I’ve visited so often I doubt they have a single story between them I’ve not heard at least twice now.” Jon stares at her through the dim light as though he’s never seen her before, and Susan shifts, growing less comfortable by the moment. “Also, I hoped that Peter and Sansa might feel more free if they thought themselves unobserved.” Searching for any distraction, she reaches out a hand, letting Ghost sniff her fingers, surprised when he gives them a vigorous shove with his nose, happily seating his head beneath her palm.

“Maybe,” Jon says, watching her scratch at Ghost’s ears, still with that odd look on his face. “We might spot them through a window, if we move across the yard.”

Jon’s theory proves correct, and the shadowed arcade opposite the windows even provides a bench, in the bargain. Perched at one end, Susan can just make out Sansa, seated beside a sliver of Peter; she suspects Jon Snow has the better view, but craning her neck seems the far preferable option to moving closer.

In the strained silence between them, Jon coughs, his eyes seeking her out in the moonlight, sidelong. “You look very pretty in green,” he says, his tone wooden, an uncomfortable actor reciting a line long practiced.

Taken aback, she can only blink. Rote or not, compliments are the last thing she would expect from him. “Thank you. It’s my favorite color.”

“Yes,” he says, fingers clutched on his knee, as though it had taken great effort to be polite to her for the length of a single sentence. “Yes, I’d noticed.”

How queer. Perhaps his sister has managed to impress upon him some basic courtly manners, after all.

“It was kind of you,” he says a moment later, still in that abrupt, flat tone. “To help these people, I mean, even though they don’t share your blood or even your beliefs. It’s remarkable, really.”

Confused now by his words as much as his unexpected politeness, Susan stirs. “I don’t believe so. It’s merely what any leader worth the name would do. What are we for, we monarchs, if not to help our people? And it is my conviction – and that of my brothers and sister – that any who seek a life of peace are our people, no matter their creed or birth.”

In the quiet, the storyteller’s voice hums across the courtyard, low and urgent, and Jon shakes his head in the moonlight. “Not many monarchs would agree. I wouldn’t have expected it of you, to be honest,” he says, and Susan feels it again, that whiplash of temper his words so often release within her, as if precisely calculated to cut her.

Just then, the tale must reach one of its more frightening moments – Tash in the cave of the giant spiders, perhaps – for inside the room, Sansa starts and takes hold of Peter’s arm, the gesture an easy reflex, before she looks up at him and snatches her hands away, her face gone pale.

Susan frowns, her outrage forgotten. “Drat. For a moment there, I thought progress might have been made.”

“So did I.” To his credit, Jon sounds as gloomy as she, though with that being his customary tone of voice, it’s difficult to guess how much he truly cares. He glances at her once more, and something like a strangled laugh leaves his throat.

“What is it?”

“I was just thinking how much easier it might be for them if they were in our place.”

Susan raises her eyebrows. “If they were thankfully not the ones expected to marry? Yes, I suppose that would make it a great deal easier on them.”

He shifts on the bench, and Ghost rises from his seat at Jon’s feet, pacing restlessly. “If they were in the dark, I meant. It’s the way he looks that bothers her.”

The way Peter looks? Frowning, Susan shifts slightly closer, attempting to see more of her brother, to make certain he’s not forgotten a crucial piece of attire or left his bedhead uncombed, but no. All appears in order; a tall, neat, reasonably handsome, golden-haired man, as he’s always been. “Whatever is the matter with the way he looks? I’ll have you know Peter is considered quite attractive among his subjects.”

“Shocking,” Jon says, his voice dry. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with him, exactly. But Sansa was betrothed once before. I’m not certain if you were told.” They hadn’t been, but that’s little enough matter; Susan herself has been ‘betrothed’ more times than she can count, the whims of princes and diplomacy both as changeable as the winds. She only shakes her head and waits for him to arrive at his point.

“His name was Joffrey Baratheon, and he was the heir to the Iron Throne of Westeros,” Jon says, not looking at her. “He was also a monster who had our father executed. He made Sansa watch, and then he tormented her for months in ways I’d rather not think about, much less speak of. Gods only know what would have happened to her, had Robb and I not allied with his Baratheon uncle and managed to depose him. Now Joffrey’s uncle Renly sits the Iron Throne of Westeros, and Robb is King in the North in return for putting him there.”

“And Sansa is free,” Susan says quietly, looking at the quiet, contained princess through the window with new sympathy. “Let me guess, this Joffrey was golden haired?”

“Sansa thought him the most handsome boy in the world,” Jon says, nodding in the darkness. “She adored him, before he showed his true colors. I’d bet Peter looked very much like him, a decade or so ago.”

“I see.” And she does; so much is horridly, perfectly clear. Why Sansa had fainted upon her first sight of Peter, why she shies away from his touch and pales whenever he’s too near, why she had confessed to Jon that the idea of marrying Peter had been different when he was just ‘a sketch on paper’. A thing with no color in it, no cruel gleam of gold.

Beside her, a huff and a scramble of claws breaks Susan from her reverie. Ghost hops up on the bench beside her and lays down with an elaborate yawn, his hind legs digging into her hip, shoving her across the bench until she fetches up against Jon with a startled yelp.

“I’m sorry,” Jon says, leaning forward to glare at Ghost, who merely blinks and licks his chops in return. “Did he hurt you?”

“I may have pawprints on my skirts, but I am otherwise unharmed,” she says, attempting to resist the urge to shift so much as a muscle lest even more of her come into contact with him. Not that she can imagine how that might be possible; her entire left side is flush against Jon, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh.

Counting the positives, her view of Peter has improved significantly, her brother dipping his head to whisper something to Sansa, who responds with a tight smile.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” she says, tipping her head to the side, contemplating Peter. It’s a pity he’s always been so fond of his hair; the prospect of his shaving it seems unlikely. “Tell me, did this Joffrey have a beard?”

Jon laughs, and she can feel the rumble of it. “He was a boy-king, hardly older than Sansa, and this was years ago. So no.”

“In that case, I have an idea.”

A moment, and then Jon shrugs, a movement felt rather than seen. “It might help, I suppose.”

Perhaps he’s not so dense as she thought, after all.

In the silence of the courtyard, the storyteller’s soothing voice reaches them, a musical river of indistinguishable words; in the room, Sansa claps with glee, casting a quick smile up at Peter, radiant as the sun.

In the shadows outside, Susan relaxes into the curve of Jon’s body without noticing, and breathes free.

*

“Stop that,” Susan hisses, snatching Peter’s hand away from his face for what feels like the twentieth time this morning.

The look he throws at her is less than friendly, though in her opinion, the clear light reflecting from Glasswater’s harbor reflects most becomingly on the burnished gold of the scruff covering his chin. “You cannot imagine how intolerably itchy it is,” he grumbles right back, snatching his hand away and scratching madly at his jawline while reaching for her ribs with his other hand, causing her to scramble away with an undignified yelp, well out of tickling range. “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this. Or why, for that matter.”

“I told you, Sansa prefers bearded men. It’s all the fashion in Westeros.” Gesturing to Jon Snow, who’s turned back to stare at them – probably judging the ridiculous sound she just made, knowing him – she studies the black of his short beard, trying to imagine what he’d look like without it. Faintly ridiculous, she decides, as he turns back to Sansa. No, he’s much more handsome with it.

Much as she might wish he wasn’t, or at least that she might manage to ignore that fact. Clearly, she’s been too long in the sun today, that he’s distracting her so.

“I’ll stop here and rest,” she tells her brother, nodding towards one of her favorite spots in Glasswater, the great shaded mulberry groves where Dryads wander among the leaves of their sisters and cousins, tending the silkworms growing fat on their largesse. “Go on and keep Sansa occupied. Buy her whatever fabrics she fancies.”

Peter rolls his eyes; she gets the sense he’s only just refrained from putting out his tongue at her. “Yes, thank you, sister dear, for that sage advice. Whatever would I do without you to explain the mysterious ways of women and courting?”

“Fail at it and die alone, most likely!” Susan calls after him, only to flush crimson as she spots Jon walking back towards them. Peter says something to him as they pass, too low for Susan to hear but with a grin aimed in her direction, a thing she likes not one bit; even less so when Jon laughs in return.

A small smile still plays along his lips when he reaches her side, and Susan sets her jaw as she wanders through the shadows along the edge of the grove, safely out of the way of the Dryads and their long, spindly fingers, rustling as they work.

Jon says nothing, only eyeing the trees and the fat white grubs wriggling amongst their leaves with interest, all with that smile still on his face, some secret little amusement gained at her expense until Susan can no longer resist, the words bursting from her. “What did Peter say that was so funny?”

“Only that you were ‘as full of teeth as a bear’ today, and I ought to watch my hide.” An unflattering but not inaccurate assessment, considering the feeling that’s grown beneath Susan’s skin of late, an itch like that of Peter’s face, only seated deep within, an unscratchable frustration she can’t quite pinpoint. Perhaps it’s the heat. Susan has never been comfortable in the heat; alone among her family, she prefers the chill of winter.

“Yet you braved my company anyhow,” she says with a tight smile, realizing she’s let him dangle for far too long without a response. “How gallant.”

He shrugs. “It made me recall all the times Robb tried to warn me off looking for our little sister, Arya. She was constantly getting herself into trouble and running off to pout somewhere. If anyone else found her, she’d shout and curse, fight like a little wildcat.”

“But not you?”

“Not me,” he says, and the smile on his face seems wider, more genuine. “Maybe it was because I just let her complain and never tried to tell her how she’d done the wrong thing or how she should behave herself and apologize, I don’t know. But Arya was always a kitten with me.”

“Sansa said Lucy reminded her of Arya, after Lucy barreled through a revel with a pack of puppies in tow.”

Jon laughs. “That’s something Arya would do, for certain. I don’t know that I’d say Queen Lucy reminds me of Arya, but they’d be friends, I think. It’s a bit frightening to imagine.”

“And me?” Somehow, she can’t resist asking, though she suspects she won’t like the answer.

The long moment he hesitates speaks for itself. “She’d be very impressed by your shooting.”

“It’s something,” she says, and manages a laugh, even if it is a bit rueful. She and Lucy don’t always see eye to eye either, after all.

“Robb would like you, though,” he offers, as if to make up for it somehow, and she watches the change in his face, how his dour, brooding expression vanishes when he speaks of his family, becoming something she might call cheerful in another man. Something almost light. “He’s very much like Peter. Solid and responsible, but warm and easy at the same time. Charming. You’d like him, certainly more than you like–”

“Your Majesty!” one of the Dryads gasps as they pass; Brycie, an old friend who had once been a handmaiden of Susan’s. In the leafy confusion of embraces and chatter that follows, Jon Snow slips away, swallowed somewhere in the great cloth markets of Glasswater, and Susan forgets to think of him for a time.

It’s not until the sun lengthens towards afternoon and Fergus’s strong nose leads them back to the rest of the royal party, down at the wool sheds, that he’s forcibly returned to the forefront of her mind.

The air reeks, as it always does near the wool sheds, with the pungent scent of sheep. That doesn’t seem to bother Sansa, who’s leaning over the half-wall along the street side of the sheds, watching the little creatures inside with fascination on her face (Peter, Susan notes happily, stands bargaining at a stall nearby over a gorgeous length of sky-blue cloth, a perfect match to Sansa’s eyes).

“I’m sorry,” Sansa says, in a voice quiet enough not to be overheard, as Susan leans beside her. “I know they’re perfectly normal Narnians and I oughtn’t stare so, but they’re just so…so…”

“Industrious?” Susan suggests, for Raccoons are that. Their clever, sensitive paws sort rapidly through the raw wool, picking out burrs, mats, and all manner of other flaws so small as to be invisible to Susan’s eyes. Most residents of Glasswater are humanoid, at least insofar as their upper limbs go; fingers and opposable thumbs serve as a great advantage in the spinning of thread and weaving of cloth. Dryads, Fauns, Minotaurs, Centaurs, and Dwarves abound here, as well as a scattering of humans, with furry denizens rarely seen. But it’s Raccoons who hold a monopoly on Narnian wool production, the fabric spun from the fibers they comb the finest and softest to be found.

“Adorable,” Sansa sighs. “Their faces! And their little hands!”

Thankful Sansa is sensible enough to speak in a low voice, Susan quiets her own even further. “They are,” she admits, turning her back to them and patting Sansa’s hand. “But they do not like to hear it. Only Mice are more sensitive about such matters.”

Reluctantly, Sansa turns as well, mirroring Susan. “This town is a wonderful place. I admit, I was unsure when Peter said we were stopping to visit the center of Narnia’s cloth production – it sounded a bit dull – but it’s been such fun. I had never stopped to think where different fabrics came from, not really. Oh, I knew wool came from sheep and linen from flax, but to see it all come together, and then have all the finished products laid out for the choosing!” She sighs, a sound full of pleasure, and Susan’s heart warms with the satisfaction that comes when a plan begins to bear fruit.

Across the street, they watch Peter absently scratch his jaw, adding another gold coin to a stack as the Minotaur merchant crosses her arms over her massive chest.

Susan huffs out a laugh, and hears Sansa’s answering giggle, a light thing caught on the sea breeze. “Peter’s always been terrible at bargaining,” she confesses. “He claims that’s what he has me and Edmund for. Left to his own devices, he’ll just hand over whatever they ask for and look baffled if we protest. A price is a price, he says, and who is he to rate the value of someone else’s hard work?”

“That sounds like Jon,” Sansa says, nodding further down the street; if she cranes her neck, Susan can just spot Jon in the distance at another stall. Buying more black wool to add to his extensive collection, no doubt. “He’s very big on fairness, and not looking down on anyone just because they’re poor, or uneducated. It’s the Watch that made him that way, I think. He wasn’t always.”

“The Watch?” Susan asks, frowning, hearing the importance in the way Sansa says the name.

“The Night’s Watch,” Sansa says, biting her lip and eyeing Susan, as though it’s something unmentionable, something she’s ashamed of perhaps, or at least not meant to discuss. “They’re a group of soldiers who guard the rest of Westeros from, oh–magic, I guess you’d call it. Monsters. Things people used to believe in but don’t really, not anymore. They all live in a giant wall of ice and wear black all the time and take some horrible oath to devote their whole lives to it. It’s all very silly if you ask me, and both Robb and King Renly freed him of it, but Jon takes it quite seriously.”

Interesting. That explains his clothing choices, at least, though the dismissive way Sansa speaks of magic and monsters, standing in a land composed of nothing but – according to some, anyhow – makes her uneasy. Narnians remember all too well the deadly realities of magic. “If he devoted his life to it, whatever is he doing here?”

Sansa frowns, looking down at her hands. “He left them, after our father died. Robb needed his aid, so he left. To rescue me, and Arya too.”

Confused by her downcast attitude, Susan grasps Sansa’s hand, squeezing her limp fingers. “As any good brother would, surely.”

Sansa looks up, her eyes shining. “He’s better than I deserve.” At Susan’s disbelieving sniff, Sansa grasps her hand, shaking her head. “No, truly. I was horrid to him when we were children, and he’s never reproached me for it, not once. Sometimes I almost wish he would. I’d feel less guilty about it.”

Well. Susan certainly knows all about horrid behavior from younger siblings, and how sweet an apology from them can be, but even so. She finds it hard to believe that this lovely, quiet, shy girl could ever have been half so hateful as she’s making it sound, particularly to someone as cold as Jon Snow. Likely he hadn’t even noticed whatever it was, armored in that icy pride of his.

“I’m sure it couldn’t be so awful,” she says, pushing her petty thoughts back. “After all, he’s here with you now, isn’t he? He seems very much on your side these days, in any case.”

Sansa smiles. “That’s very kind of you. It’s no wonder he likes you so well.”

Blinking, Susan feels certain she’s misheard. “Likes me? Jon Snow?” Certainly he does not; his calculated rudeness has proven that, time and time again. The impossibility of such a thing stops her thoughts in their tracks, it’s so absurd.

“Oh, yes,” Sansa says, threading her arm through Susan’s as though they’re already sisters. “He’s terrible at demonstrating it, I know. You’ll have to forgive him. He’s never been very good at conversing with strangers, particularly when those strangers are pretty girls. A fault in his upbringing, really. I try to help him, but you know how it is,” she says, shrugging as if to say brothers, ugh. After her efforts at herding Peter in the past few weeks, Susan can’t truly disagree. “He says plenty of nice things about you, though. How sharp you are, how clever and graceful, how everyone here loves you so. He couldn’t cease talking of how well you shoot for days after that tournament! It grew almost tedious.”

Groping for words, Susan’s feet falter as Sansa tugs her further down the road, oblivious to Susan’s distress. “There must be some mistake,” she says, her voice sounding strangled. “The man hates me, I’d swear it.”

“Who hates you?” a voice says, and she turns to find Jon Snow himself looming at her shoulder with a package under his arm, brooding as ever, eyebrows drawn together as though the sight of her arm-in-arm with Sansa displeases him. Fair enough; she ought to have handed Sansa off to Peter long ago, only their conversation had taken such an odd turn, leaving her standing here in the middle of the road, wide-eyed and flat-footed, at sea and queasy with it.

“No one at all,” Sansa says brightly, coming to Susan’s rescue, hugging her arm close. “Who could possibly hate her? Only the greatest of fools, don’t you agree, Jon?”

For a moment, Jon Snow stares at her without expression, his face held as stiffly as his shoulders. “Yes,” he says, finally; just that and nothing more.

Peter rejoins them just then, looking harried and rubbing at his chin, but with the blue wool triumphantly procured, and the endless, awkward moment falls away into the continued whirl of their tour.

That night, when she returns to her temporary quarters, Susan finds a neatly wrapped package waiting for her. Opened, the wrapping reveals yards of glistening, deep green silk, the shade so lovely she gasps with pleasure, her fingers skimming the lush fabric.

Atop it lies a note, the writing neat and spare, without flourish, as befits its owner.

To replace that which Ghost damaged.
-JS

---

Notes:

Yes, I'm aware raccoons are a new-world animal and not native to Europe. I don't care, they're cute and would be good at wool production, if they were so inclined.

Chapter 4: The Fountain

“They’re late.” Eyeing the skies above, the sun long past its zenith and beginning to lose itself to building clouds, Susan sighs. “We should never have left them behind.”

“They were eating breakfast together,” Jon points out, reasonable and all the more grating for it. “It didn’t seem right to intrude on that. Don’t you trust your brother?”

“When he has that sly look on his face, as he did when he loftily promised that he and Sansa would be directly behind us, and we must be off at once because it wouldn’t do to let the Keepers of the Fountain think we’d snubbed them? No, not one bit. He simply didn’t want to come.” Turning in a whirl of skirts, Susan kicks a white pebble across the lawn as if it were the cause of all her problems, following its path across the wildflower-studded grass to the base of the Fountain with her eyes. “Do you always trust your brothers?”

“Yes,” Jon Snow says. Of course he does.

“More fool you,” she mutters, under her breath.

Approaching the little fountain, Jon eyes it as though it might bite him. “Maybe it’s for the best if they don’t come. What if this magic fountain of yours doesn’t show them what we’d like it to?”

“It isn’t my magic fountain,” she says, proud she manages not to sound sulky. “It’s Bacchus’s. And if it did show they truly shouldn’t be wed, well. It would be the best to know now.” Susan shrugs. “But it won’t. You know as well as I that they’re suited for one another.”

“If you say so.”

“But it won’t be me saying so,” she manages, gripping onto the thread of her patience with both hands. “It will be a prophecy. You do believe in those, don’t you?”

Across the clearing, a quiet rustling sound prevents any reply, and Susan turns slowly to face the approaching Keepers, putting on the serene face she reserves for royal audiences. Perhaps she should have warned Jon Snow about them; alas. Too late now.

To his credit, his eyes widen only slightly at the sight of three dwarf-sized Porcupines coming towards them, with much clicking of quills and snuffling of wide noses.

“Your Majesty,” says their leader, a rather elderly fellow called Quillerby, tiny spectacles balanced on his snout. Bowing deeply before her causes all the quills along his spine to quiver, and Susan takes a small, mean pleasure in how Jon’s face pales. “Sire.” Straightening up, the little fellow peers at the two of them, his beady eyes turned amusingly huge behind their lenses. Looking them up and down, he pauses, as though someone else might be hiding in Susan’s skirts. “And where are High King Peter and his betrothed? Do tell me I haven’t gotten things in a muddle again, oh dear.”

“No, no, not at all,” Susan hastens to assure him. “My brother is simply…delayed. He will arrive shortly, I don’t doubt.”

“Hmm, hmm,” the Porcupine says, sounding like nothing so much as a nest of angry bees. “Well, perhaps I ought to go ahead and give you the welcome without him. Delays won’t do, you know. Can’t abide them. Though, if they don’t make it, one couple may receive the wisdom of the Fountain just as well as two.”

“Oh, no, sir–” Jon Snow stammers.

Susan’s voice tumbles over his in the same breath, their words an overlapping tangle. “We’re not a couple–it’s only Peter–”

“–you’ve got it quite wrong–”

“–I’d never dream of it–”

“Come along, come along,” Quillerby says, paying them and their protests not the least mind. “We haven’t all day. I’m old, and the weather’s turning. My bones ache in the damp.”

Sighing, Susan gives in. “Just go along with it,” she says to Jon, in a low voice. “They’re stubborn, and very set in their ways. We mustn’t offend them.”

“Are they that important?”

“They’re that intimidating,” she hisses, gesturing at the swaying field of quills before them as Quillerby and his assistants trundle across the lawn towards the fountain. “Do you truly want to see what happens if they should feel slighted?”

Standing before the basin, happily burbling away with cold, clear water, Quillerby drones on (and on, and on) about the history of Bacchus’s Fountain, its place in Narnian culture, and its prophetic abilities regarding love, which show themselves only under the light of the full moon, when a prospective couple stand before the basin.

“If the waters flow clear as glass,” Quillerby says, as Susan bites her lips to hold back a yawn, “a couple is ill-suited, and should not wed. If, however, the waters turn the pale gold of wine, it signifies a good partnership, one in which the couple will be content.” This, in all honesty, is what Susan expects the fountain will show Peter and Sansa; a solid foundation, one as good as most royal marriages can hope for. “If, however, the fountain blooms with the pink shades of roses, the couple is fortunate indeed, and will have a lifetime of gentle, happy love. And should the fountain show the deepest red, that is a couple blessed and cursed by Bacchus in equal measure, for their pairing will never lack for passionate fervor in all respects.”

Beside her, Jon Snow coughs, and Susan holds back a smile.

“You see,” she whispers, leaning over to speak in his ear, “passion is when two people want very much to–”

“I know what it is.” The words are bitten off so sharply Susan giggles, and has to hastily rearrange her face as Quillerby shuffles in their direction, his long speech finally, blessedly concluded.

“Do send the High King to us should he have any questions, when he arrives,” Quillerby sniffs, an expression of profound disapproval settling across his features, whiskers quivering. “Otherwise we shall leave you in peace, for the mysteries of love are not to be observed by outsiders. I wish you much joy in whatever the Fountain reveals.” With that, he and his assistants make their ponderous way back towards their burrow, leaving Susan and Jon alone in the glade, with the Fountain bubbling before them and the quiet little house meant to shelter supplicants at their back.

As the clacking sound fades away, Jon stirs. “You know, I don’t think he does.”

“On that, we are in agreement,” Susan says, and the sound of their laughter fills the little glade.

*

Susan barely reads the whole of Peter’s note before she clutches it in her fist, the paper crumpled in annoyance. “What does he mean, they aren’t coming?”

Kaia hops back from Susan’s clenched fingers, her bright eye fixed on the white of Susan’s knuckles. “Apologies, Majesty. The King didn’t have much more to say, I’m afraid.”

Running a hand through her hair, Susan tries to resist the urge to pace. “Was someone ill? Did they receive bad news from Lucy, or Edmund? How did he seem to you?”

Kaia cocks her head to the side, thinking. “They were all perfectly well. King Peter seemed a bit, well. Jolly, Majesty. That’s the word I’d use.”

“Jolly?” The word comes out in an undignified squeak, and next to her, Jon coughs, his mouth hidden behind his hand.

“Oh, yes. He and the princess were laughing together, almost like they had a secret. They reminded me of the way yourself and King Edmund get when you’ve thought of a particularly lovely scheme, if you don’t mind my saying so, Majesty.”

Susan colors; she does rather mind with Jon Snow here, eyeing her, but that’s hardly Kaia’s fault.

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Jon offers. “Maybe they’ve decided to start wedding preparations after all, if they’re so easy with each other. Did my sister send any word to me?”

Kaia eyes him doubtfully, hopping about in agitation. No doubt still thinking of tweaking his curls, or worse, for the slights he’d once paid Susan. “No. And they didn’t say a thing about any wedding, either,” she says, disdainful as any Bird can manage, though Susan suspects the nuance is wasted on Jon. “The King said you were to remain here, Majesty, so as not to give any offense to the Keepers.”

“Oh, drat him anyhow,” Susan curses. As if she needed to be told! Of course they couldn’t simply cut and run; they’d requested that the Keepers turn away the usual crowds of hopeful lovers so that Narnia’s High King might have his privacy. To leave now with a hasty terribly sorry, but we’ve changed our minds would demonstrate a breathtaking lack of respect, one that Susan winces to even contemplate. No, she and Jon are well and truly trapped here.

“You may tell him that we’ll stay the night here and catch them up shortly,” she says, eyeing the sky once more, the towering white clouds billowing up, higher than the Cair. “Do you think it safe to fly, or ought you stay a bit?”

Beside them, Jon tugs on the laces at the high neck of his shirt, a long sliver of pale throat exposed to what little relief the close air offers from the heat; Susan’s skin has long since gone damp, her palms and the backs of her thighs sticky, her cheeks pink with heat. It’s as though the heat has crawled inside her and made itself at home in her bones, everything about her tense and flushed as she watches Jon rake the curls back from his face; suddenly, the Fountain looks terribly inviting, and she wishes she could part with enough of her pride to beg Kaia to stay with them. Anything to not be left alone with him and this wild longing burrowed into her, her good sense fleeing her grasp, letting her baser instincts surface, the ones which don’t mind if a man is surly and rude, so long as he’s well made and willing.

But she can’t say any of that; she can only dig her nails into her palms and tear her gaze from him before he notices.

Spreading her wings, Kaia opens her beak, testing the air. “I’ll go straight off, if you don’t mind, Majesty. I should avoid the worst of the weather if I leave now.”

With little choice, Susan bids her friend and spy farewell with a heavy heart, watching the black dot of the Magpie grow smaller and smaller until she vanishes, leaving Susan isolated.

Just her, Jon Snow, and the impending storm.

*

Rain lashes the windows of the snug little house on the green, and Susan paces like a Tiger, wearing a path in the rug while Jon watches her with wary eyes.

“Sit down,” he says. “You’ll tire yourself out for nothing.”

She scoffs, trying to ease the tension in her limbs through constant movement. “No, thank you.” She’d sooner run out into the rain than chance sitting next to him; the cottage, being made for lovers, features only seating barely big enough for two.

“Suit yourself,” he says, making himself more comfortable on the chaise he’s chosen, as if to spite her. “Ghost will start to chase you, if you keep that up.” In the far corner, Ghost’s ears shift at the sound of his name, but he makes no other move.

“If only it weren’t so damnably hot,” she complains, lifting the hair from the back of her neck, risking a glance at Jon Snow, stretched out on the chaise with his collar all undone and his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, bringing all sorts of wicked thoughts to mind.

“It’s your own fault.” Lying there, his eyes narrow, as if he’s caught her staring, and she turns away, too late. “ I told you to stop pacing. A woman with sense would listen.”

That he’s perfectly correct doesn’t help; something inside Susan snaps, the threads of her patience frayed through. “Why must you always be so rude?” she hisses. “Did your mother not teach you any manners?”

Something in his dark eyes flashes as he sits up, and she takes a half step back, involuntary. “I never knew my mother,” he says, sitting perfectly still. “Didn’t yours teach you any, or did she only teach you how to belittle others? You’re very good at that.”

Susan swallows with some difficulty, all the annoyance bleeding out of her in an instant from the wound he’s inflicted, just as she’s wounded him. “We don’t remember our mother,” she says, her words hardly louder than the rain pounding against the roof, the growl of thunder in the distance. “I suppose that’s one thing the two of us have in common, Jon Snow.”

Lightning flashes, and some part of Susan’s mind idly counts the seconds ticking by in silence as they stare at each other in some bitter, shared understanding; eight, nine, ten before the thunder rumbles, and Jon stirs.

“I wish it wasn’t,” he says, clearing his throat, and though he shoots her a queer look, something in her believes he means it. After all, doesn’t she wish the same?

But clearly, Jon isn’t finished with her yet. He opens his mouth, closes it once more, indecision weighing on him before he lets the words burst forth. “Why must you always call me by my full name? Is it to remind me of my proper place?”

“What in the world do you mean, your place?” Susan asks, utterly baffled.

“As a bastard,” he says, his eyes blazing, fixed on hers, refusing to look away. “You can’t imagine how many people have thrown it in my face, all my life. But I’d have liked to think better of you, Susan.”

Did she imagine it, the slight emphasis on her name, the quicksilver hurt in his expression?

“Jon,” she says, biting down on her tongue before that reflexive Snow can slip from it, “believe me when I say I had no idea of the circumstances of your birth. Nor do I care, not in the least.” He only glowers at her from under the shadow of those curls, and she sighs, throwing her hands up. “I rule over a country of Talking Beasts and creatures of nature, of magic. Do you think many of them live as so many humans do, with strict rules governing mating? Such things don’t matter here. I didn’t know your parents weren’t wed, but if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered to me one bit. For that matter, I had no notion it was related to your name.”

“Why then?” he says, once the silence has stretched to its breaking point, only the last of the rain dripping from the trees to fill it.

Susan hesitates, then steps closer, so that he’s forced to tip his head back to look up at her, the growing moonlight touching the bones of his face, the gleam of his dark eyes, and suddenly, she can hardly breathe, the heat pressing in all around them. “I thought it a moniker gifted to you for some deed or quirk of personality, the way they call Peter ‘Magnificent’. That you were impervious to cold, perhaps, or–I don’t know, always won snowball fights!” At that, Jon smiles, just enough to see, and it breaks her heart. “But mostly I said it because I like the way it sounds,” she admits, loosing her hold upon her dignity. “If I caused you hurt by it, I regret that, bitterly.”

“It doesn’t sound so bad,” he says. “Not when it’s in your mouth.” He explains it all then, in his low, quiet voice; the way surnames work in Westeros, his marking him out for life. How he’d grown up a bastard among trueborn siblings, his mother a forbidden mystery and his future forever uncertain. The haven the Night’s Watch had seemed, and the lessons it taught him before he’d turned his back on it, choosing the family of his birth. And finally, this sojourn with Sansa to a new world, his brother King Robb’s attempt to give him an escape, a new start in life.

“So there you have it,” he finishes. “A bastard and an oathbreaker. Hardly fit company for a Queen.”

“How horrid we’ve been to each other,” Susan says, and bites her lip, thinking of all the times she’d looked down on him for what she’d taken to be rudeness. “I simply thought you one of the most ill-mannered men I’d ever met.”

He flushes, easy to see even in the dim light. “I’ve never had much of a gift for talking to people, for making them like me. At some point I stopped trying. I judged you the moment we first met on the pier, and let that judgement be my excuse to behave as I wished. It was wrong of me.”

“And I returned your lack of grace with my own, at each and every turn.” The dregs of her pride are thoroughly wrung out now, trampled underfoot, and she can only squash them further. “I ought to have behaved better. I’m sorry.”

“So am I.”

“What a muddle we made of things,” Susan says, sinking down beside him on the too-small chaise. “Sansa even told me flat out that you liked me, and I didn’t believe her. I was too certain of myself, too proud of my ability to read people.”

Jon laughs, looking at her sidelong. “Peter said much the same. That I should take the sharp edges of your tongue as a compliment, because only someone you cared about could get underneath your skin.”

“He should know,” Susan says, before a terrible thought strikes her, and she sits bolt upright. “Peter said that to you? When?”

“It was while we were in Glasswater, I think. Why?”

“That’s when Sansa spoke to me. You don’t think…”

She eyes Jon in growing horror, and once more, he proves himself a quick study. “Sansa isn’t much of a schemer,” he says, his tone doubtful. “But if she was going to, it would be about love.”

“They’ve set us up!” Susan springs to her feet, pushing her hand through the coils of her dark hair, heedless of the disarray left behind. “I don’t believe this–if it had been Edmund, maybe, or even Lucy, but to be tricked by Peter, of all people! This is too awful.”

Jon looks up at her with that strange, frozen expression. “I take it you don’t care for the idea, then?”

“Don’t care for it?” she cries, kicking the edge of the rug like a frustrated child, knowing she’s being ridiculous but unable to care. “It’s intolerable. Oh, I need some air.”

Peter, she thinks, her inner voice savage, as she pulls open the door and tumbles out into the cool night, the heat washed away in the rain. Her open, honest, straightforward brother, his every thought and feeling written upon his face for everyone to see; the person she’s known and trusted longer than any other in the world. When she caught up with him, there would be a truly blazing row. How dare he think he could interfere in her life like this, and never mind one bit that she’d been doing exactly the same to him. That fact, Susan doesn’t let bother her at all; she’s been ordering all their lives to her satisfaction for years, but having the tables turned on her grates like a file rasped over her spirit.

She makes it to the edge of the fountain, her fingertips dipped in the clear, icy water, before Jon Snow catches up with her, spinning her around with a hand on her arm.

“Can you at least tell me what it is about me you find so intolerable, if not my birth or my circumstances?” he says, his voice as cold as his name. “If we’re to be honest with each other, I think I deserve at least that much.”

Susan blinks, the abruptness of his demand combined with the nearness of him enough to leave her mind reeling with confusion. His fingers tighten around her arm, his breath stirring the loose strands of her hair, and for a moment, she can’t think what he means, can’t think of anything at all beyond the way he looks at her, all full of pain and longing. Can’t think of anything but how perfectly, utterly foolish she’s been, all this time, to deny herself; to deny them both.

Then it clicks. “Jon,” she says, as carefully as she can, watching his eyes fall to her mouth as she shapes his name. “I meant the idea of losing to Peter was intolerable, you ridiculous man.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.”

“Then you don’t find me–”

“I find you irritating,” she says, her fingers reaching up to trace his cheekbone. “Impossible.” Her fingers follow the spiral of a loose curl down, marveling at the way his eyes close, as though he can’t trust himself to watch her touch him. “Intoxicating.” Sliding her hand to the back of his neck, she brings his face to hers, their foreheads touching. “The only thing I find intolerable about you is that you haven’t yet kissed me.”

So he does.

Beside them in the moonlight, the fountain ripples, and turns a rich, brilliant red.

“Well,” she murmurs against his mouth when they break apart, breathless and shaky, “that’s confirmation, if we needed any.”

“I don’t.” His eyes are dark and filled with promise when he looks at her, already leaning in the direction of the house, but Susan shakes her head, dropping to her knees beside the fountain.

She has been here before, and knows that Bacchus must have his due.

Dipping her palms below the surface of the wine, Susan cups them together, and Jon sinks down beside her, his hands beneath hers, lifting them to his lips like a sacred vessel, drinking from the hollowed bowl shaped by her bones.

Her portion must follow his, and they reverse the process, her hands beneath his, drops of red falling back into the pool, his thumbs cool against her cheekbones and the wine rich and heady in her mouth, fruit and faint spices chased by the salt of his skin when she lets her tongue dart out to taste the place at his wrist where his pulse beats.

Only then do they cross the lawn to the house, leaving wet handprints on one another’s skin and clothing, heedless and laughing. How could she ever have thought him dour and brooding, this man whose lips curve against her skin as he kisses her, who laughs when they stumble in their eagerness?

Her laces are half undone by the time they make it through the door, her dress sliding to the floor just inside, and something tears – her chemise or his shirt, Susan doesn’t know, doesn’t care – before they face one another at last, stripped bare.

“No more armor,” she says, as he falls back onto the chaise, pulling her down with him, her knees falling to either side of his hips. “No more pretense. Just us. Do you like what you see, Jon?”

He looks up at her as though he sees all the world within her, and when he speaks, his voice is rough. “You have to ask?”

Susan laughs; she doesn’t, the proof of it abundantly clear, rubbing between her legs, but that’s hardly the point. “I don’t, but I should like to hear you confess it anyhow.”

“Yes,” he says. “Gods, Susan, yes.”

“I’ve met only one god,” she says, leaning down until her lips brush his. “But I’m willing to expand my worship.”

When she takes him inside her, it’s the sweetest blasphemy she can imagine.

Chapter 5: The Lifetime

“Ah, Susan! How was your sojourn at the Fountain, sister dear? Did you and Jon Snow enjoy yourselves?” Peter asks, falling into step beside her in the Cair’s long corridors, his voice so full of false cheer and grating insinuation Susan shudders, speaking through clenched teeth.

“I hate you.”

Though she favors Peter with her most venomous glare, it fails to have the desired effect on him; it hasn’t in years, if she’s to be honest. “Do you? Or do you simply hate being wrong?”

“I am never wrong,” Susan says, aiming for a lofty tone and walking faster, desperate to reach her rooms before this conversation can escalate.

“The love bites on your neck say otherwise,” Peter murmurs, bending close, and Susan can’t stop her hand from flying to her throat, though she’s all but certain Jon never–

“Ha!” Peter’s triumph echoes through the hallway, drawing every curious eye within range. “Caught you. So you did have your fun with him after all, then?”

“That is none of your business,” Susan says, at the door of her chambers. “Oh, and Peter?”

“Yes?”

“Edmund is most definitely my favorite brother,” she says, and has the dubious satisfaction of slamming the door in the teeth of his laughter.

*

“Peter says you’re angry with him.” Startled, Susan looks up from the dinner table to meet Sansa’s blue eyes, huge and innocent, utterly free of guile. “You musn’t be, you know. It was my idea, and I talked him into it. He was quite reluctant at first.”

“Not reluctant enough,” Susan grumbles from behind her wineglass, though in truth she can’t remain annoyed at the situation; not when Jon keeps catching her eye from across the room, the shy smile on his face more beautiful than all the stars in the sky.

“He knew you would dislike being…”

“Manipulated?” Susan offers.

“Managed,” Sansa corrects. “And yes, before you ask, Jon already berated me this morning. But I can tell he’s happy.” For a moment, the silence stretches out, Susan refusing out of some misplaced petulance to meet Sansa’s eyes. “And so, I think, are you,” Sansa says finally, so gently Susan can’t bear it.

“All right, yes. And do stop being so horridly nice about it, when you know full well Jon and I were trying to do the same to you and Peter.”

Sansa laughs, a sparkling sound. “Of course. But you had good cause to believe it was for the best, at least.”

“I would hope you did as well.”

“I know my brother,” Sansa says. Across the room, they watch as Peter approaches Jon, clapping him on the shoulder, the two men leaning in to talk to each other as if they’ve been best friends their whole lives long, everything about their body language loose, easy. “And I knew you would be good for him.”

Clasping her fingers together, Sansa pauses for a moment, her knuckles white. “I’m not good at much–no, please don’t. I’m not, and I know it. I’m not strong or brave or witty. But I do see people. I pay mind to what they say, what they do. So often, you know, the two don’t match up at all. And you and Jon, you were so belligerent about each other that it was really quite funny. He fits in here, more than he ever did in Winterfell, and it’s mostly thanks to you.”

Biting down hard on the inside of her lip to push back the tears that threaten, Susan reaches under the table, squeezing Sansa’s hand with a fierceness that surprises them both. “Strength is not merely a matter of physical power,” she says, her voice husky. “Sometimes strength is just a matter of surviving. In my mind, you are very strong, indeed.”

Sansa’s answering smile is tremulous, her eyes shining, but she grips Susan’s hand just as fiercely in return.

Before either them can say a word (or burst into tears, which seems equally likely), Lucy careens to a stop before them, her hair a wild tangle, one braid dangling askew before her eye, giving her a raffish look. “Susan, have you seen my crown–” she begins, before Sansa coughs, pointing over Lucy’s shoulder, to where–

Ah, yes. To where a rogue Otter brandishes Lucy’s delicate little golden crown, using it to make a violently obscene gesture than even Susan struggles not to blush at.

“Bugger,” Lucy says, before picking up her skirts and flying off in pursuit of the little Beast, who drops to all fours and runs for his life, pilfered loot clutched in his teeth.

Susan picks up her wineglass, draining it all in one long swallow. “Honestly, between my behavior to both you and Jon, and Lucy’s…everything, I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you had no desire to become part of our family.” Though she keeps her voice light, there’s truth in her words, much as she would wish otherwise. She’d quite miss Sansa, she realizes with a pang.

“Peter and I discussed it,” Sansa says, her eyes on the table. “We’ve decided we ought to be friends before anything else, and there’s not so much pressure on us, not with you and Jon…well. You know.”

Oh, she knows. “Friends,” she says, ignoring the final part of Sansa’s statement entirely. “That’s a good beginning, I think. Does that mean you’ll remain here in Narnia with us?”

Sansa stays quiet, for so long Susan begins to think she won’t answer at all. Then: “I had a dream, the other night,” she says, her voice steady, stronger than Susan’s heard it previously. “Or something like it, I don’t know. It felt more real than a dream, more real than waking, even. I saw Lady.” A slow smile spreads over Sansa’s face, turning her from merely beautiful into something incandescent, the living sun herself seated beside Susan. “She was surrounded by golden light, and when she curled up next to me with her fur all soft and warm, I felt so safe, so whole. I haven’t felt that way since the first time I left home, back when she was still alive.”

Susan clears her throat, suspecting she knows the answer to her next question already; Aslan works in mysterious ways. “Did Lady speak to you?”

“She did,” Sansa says, looking at her sidelong. “I think you know the voice I heard. He told me that I saw him in the form I most loved, as I wouldn’t like his usual form at all, but that I was welcome here, and would always be safe, even if I had walked a dark path to reach the light.”

“As we all must, it seems,” Susan says, her words for Sansa but her eyes only on Jon, her brooding bastard prince, standing there in his striking black, surrounded by Narnian friends; happy, smiling. At peace.

“I spoke with Peter about it,” Sansa says, her voice quiet. “He explained about Aslan, how he comes and goes and never exactly tells you what you want to hear, only what you need to hear. He was quite lovely about it, actually. Almost…tender.” Her face flushed, Sansa laughs, a bewildered little sound Susan has felt too often on her own lips of late. “So yes. I’ll stay in Narnia for now, and see what happens.”

“We will be glad to have you, whatever your choice,” Susan says. “And I promise to never interfere again.” Something about the look on Sansa’s face when she speaks of Peter now, that breathless little laugh in her voice, tells Susan she won’t need to; nature will run its course there, in time. A slower, more gentle course than the torrent unleashed for her and Jon, to be sure, but a steady course nonetheless.

“Don’t be too hasty,” Sansa says, picking up her glass and nodding across the room, where Jon Snow watches them, for all the world like there was no one and nothing between him and Susan. “It seems interfering works out quite well from time to time.”

“So it does,” Susan murmurs, and stands, and goes to meet him.

*

“You’re very sweaty.”

“Jon!” she protests, with a halfhearted jab to his shoulder, lacking the energy for more, her bedding and their legs all tangled together, damp from their recent exertions. “You beast. It’s inexpressibly rude to tell a woman she’s sweaty.” Even if it’s true, which is the undeniable case.

“I see,” he says, so serious she has to twist in the moonlight, craning her neck to look up at his face and catch the amused slant of his mouth. “Well, you’ll have a lifetime to teach me better manners.”

Susan catches her breath, swallowing hard against a quickened heartbeat, against the gleam in his eyes, against all the things she had longed for without knowing her own heart. “A lifetime already, is it?”

“I expect nothing else from you, Susan Pevensie.”

---

Notes:

Thanks to Larm for Quillerby's name and the idea of a magic fountain, and to Jane Austen for the use of her glorious first sentence so I didn't have to write a real summary.