Summary: She had the heart and character of a queen. How far would Aslan go to bring her back, to remake the one He loved into a queen again?
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
~Kahlil Gibran
She unlocked Peter’s door first. She walked in and took the picture of the lion down and set it facing the wall; she couldn’t do this under Aslan’s eyes. She went to Peter’s desk. His papers were in piles, some leftover from his studies with the professor. (Narnia’s first boy grew up into a man, and was beloved by them all. They had needed him when they came back; Susan needed him still. Aslan—if you’re here—why is he gone?) Some of Peter’s papers were plans he’d drawn up of a garden in England, an arrow pointing to a tree, with notes written in his curling letters on one blank edge: “Workmen’s clothes. Early morning. Ladder.”
Next to it was his brown, hardback diary. She opened it; the last page dated the day he—the day of the train accident. (It still hurts to think the word “died”. For any life but hers. With hers it was just the truth.) She brushed her fingers over the letters; his magnificent Narnian script hadn’t changed, even through his college days.
“The plans are set; Edmund and I will give the rings up today. Ed and I’ve both caught each other looking at them, wishing we could use them; wishing we could go back—go home. The spirit who appeared had the ache of loss and fear in his eyes, fear I know as a king, and I want to help. My Narnia. But Prof told us once he’d had the same sensation when we went through the wardrobe, and he’d found it wasn’t his adventure. It’s Jill and Eustace this time; they’re the ones who can still go back. Aslan will guide them, and guard Narnia. And thanks be to you, for giving me a glimpse of it again; for sending some of us on another adventure the rest will be able to hear recounted.”
Susan stopped, her breathing harsh. Narnia had been calling to them. It’d been so long since Jill and Eustace’s adventure, she’d thought they were forever over—but they hadn’t been. Something Narnian came, and Peter and Edmund saw it, saw a glimpse of what they longed for. If the call was for them—could they have gone to Narnia?
Could they still be alive?
She let herself believe it, just for a moment; a moment of dangerous hope, because she’d already been wounded. And the crumbling of her hope hurt just as deeply as the first loss.
Aslan had said they couldn’t go back. And Aslan’s word was unbreakable. That’s why she’d turned away to begin with.
There was more, Peter’s writing growing loopier and larger, like it did when he wrote in the grip of emotion.
“We’ll all be there, all seven friends of Narnia, to see the youngest two off. Lucy asked Susan to come. I wish we could, but I have said no. She is no longer a friend of Narnia, hard as that is, and it is for Narnia we are going. One who has betrayed Narnia cannot come to help Narnia, till the Lion Himself pardons her. Till she turns back and asks.”
She drew back, flinching. Betrayal? Like Edmund had? She’d never—it wasn’t—she hadn’t had a choice, she couldn’t be in England and choose a land that couldn’t keep them and a God who didn’t choose them! It hadn’t been a betrayal, it wasn’t a betrayal if He’d betrayed them first!
“Only,” a tiny voice whispered inside her, “He did the same to your siblings, and they still stayed faithful. Still loved Him.”
And she knew it to be true. They had loved Him more than her. They’d chosen to stay with Him. And Peter’s words proved it. He’d made the decision as High King of Narnia, to do what was best for Narnia, and to let her go the way she’d chosen. Let her go a way separate from theirs.
She put her hands over her face and cried.
She would give up all that she had ever gained in England, if it meant walking and laughing with them again.
Living.
Because she’d died the day they did.
She used her shirt to wipe the tears from her hand (hardly queenly behavior, she thought—but Peter had said she wasn’t a Narnian queen), reaching to close the diary. But there was one more paragraph at the bottom.
“I cannot tell Ed or Lucy—they have enough to bear—but I wish with all my heart that Su was coming. Aslan, somehow, someway, bring her home to Narnia again.”
She set the diary aside. Narnia. She had loved it once too; the first thing she’d loved that she’d lost.
Now she had lost everything, including herself. Who was she when there was no one left to love her, when even her past was denied to her?
She didn’t go into any of the other rooms that day. She went out, and if she smiled less, she also noticed that James seemed more at ease. Maybe he saw her pretending, too. Maybe honesty was better.
The next day she went to her parents’ room. Her mother had books on her nightstand (Edmund the scholar had taken after her), and her father’s pills stood in a straight row on his, but the room was otherwise spotless. Her father had never really left the military, she thought, as she noted the bed corners folded with military precision.
Anymore than we really left Narnia, she added somewhat grimly. I wonder if it was the same for him.
Only—she had tried to leave.
And now, seeing the consequences of it, Susan wondered if she could ever be forgiven.
And if it mattered whether she was, because forgiven or not, the pain and the loss (two separate things) would stay. For as long as she lived. Stay and make life feel like death.
There was nothing to change or hold on to in her parents’ room. She sat on their bed and tried to catch glimpses of them, of the mother who taught her gentleness, the father who taught her the importance of order and of strength in suffering.
That night, Mary stayed close to her, studying her face. Susan assumed she was watching, slightly mothering, to make sure Susan wouldn’t break down.
But it happened the night after, and the next, and Susan finally asked her, more gently than she would have before, what the matter was.
Mary hesitated.
“You look like a queen,” she said at last. “Or—something. Something in your face looks like ‘a spirit refined’ like Henry’s always quoting.” She touched Susan’s shoulder as Susan stiffened. “I didn’t mean to make you sad—it’s just I’ve never seen you this way. It’s…compelling.”
Susan looked away, but at the memories of her mother’s gentle voice, she said a quiet thank you. And she wondered if her mother would have finally been happy, been proud, of her oldest daughter. Because whatever was in her face started drawing others as well. Not the same ones she’d been surrounded by before (except for James; he never left), the ones her mother and father hadn’t liked—but Alice, who’d lost a brother in the war, Kenneth, with a roguish scar her set had declared made him handsome and haunted eyes at certain sounds, and Edward, the quiet scholar who might grow into another judge. They brought a friend or two with them, creating a group that revolved around her, and they looked at Susan with a look she almost didn’t recognise.
A look she’d seen from Narnians, when they’d brought the gentle queen wounded hearts with hope of healing. When her beauty bid them believe the world was good, and her strength bound up their wounds.
At first she turned away. She was too wounded to bind up any other wounds; it wasn’t fair to ask her.
But she kept turning back. Kept turning back, because their faces were written with a hurt she’d seen before. It’d been in her siblings’ eyes, when they were losing her.
And she went home and cried.
She didn’t have the grace to be a queen, not if she went back to Narnia now, and not even in England.
Whatever she was, it wasn’t a queen.
Because she was beginning to learn what she was—broken.
OOOOO
Oh, my daughter, my Gentle Queen. I give life. Come and drink, for you are dying still.
Come and I will make you Queen once more.