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[queenofmay]

The drifts are deep and it hasn't stopped snowing for the better part of the day, which mean its white nearly as far as the eye can see in every direction where the paths of footsteps aren't tracking to and fro. There are thin trails toward the forest and the field, and well worn paths around the loop of the lake and back and forth from the stables to bar. But even those are dusted with the still falling snow.

It's really quite impossible not to be dusted with the snow, with how much is falling. Light but constant, piling everywhere, in everything. So that Marian, who couldn't care less about her own hair jeweled with flakes in a good portion of it now that her hood has fallen away from focus, is laughing and brushing it off the nose of a mare the same color of the icy flakes she dusts away, who is head and half a neck leaning out the window into her.

She could do this from inside, where it is toasty and her fingertips wouldn't be full of chill, but where would be the fun in the that. Insides are always before and after everything already, and she knows how it feels to be cooped in a space too small for too long, without wide enough windows, while people pretend it isn't so. Which is where she finds herself. Behind Lineave's stall and just under the outside eave of the roof, in front of the the window facing out into endless fields of white.

Marian grinned, as her heavy cloaked shoulder was nudged, soft snuffling that broke to a low wicker again, as she was reaching up to stoke the jowl still faintly wet from whenever they were last let free to run for the day. "I should wonder if it is winter or freedom that has made you more impatient."

But she produced an apple from the folds of her cloak staving away another minute of it.

Comments

[the_seafarer]

"Truly, it would be impossible," he agrees, leaning back against the stable wall with one shoulder pressing into wood, mouth half-turning to a smile. "You'd have loved Narnia in the winter. The fauns would dance in the snow for hours, and there would be hot mulled wine and cider, and the best sort of hot chocolate, when all was done and we wanted to come in from the cold."

And the woods, the Western Woods, stretching to Lantern Waste and the ancient frozen palace between the hills, trees glassy with ice and coated with thick frost.

"Not to mention rather large snowball fights in the courtyard, as I recall."

Not that winter in Narnia was all fun and games and celebrations: there were wars fought, tricky negotiations made, long, bleak stretches of cold and dark, when it seemed the whole land dreamed nightmares of the Hundred Year Winter and the return of the Witch, but it was cheerful and lovely more often than it was not, and Spring did always come with a relieving thaw, in the end.

[queenofmay]

That Caspian leans on the cold, semi-snowed building doesn't surprise her, but that he starts talking of his Narnia does. It's not so much that she doesn't think everything might remind him of his once-home, but that he speaks of it freely without question or curiosity. The loss of a world she does not think can be much like the loss of a person, and the loss of a person can take more than years out of a person.

When he's had still but months to grapple with the loss of his everything once in Narnia, gone in flames.

Words she has tucked away, not like treasure, but like the deepest of secrets shared on the coldest of nights.

"I think I would have," Marian agreed gently, stepping back to the window and Lineave, watching her mare rummage for the best parts of new sheathes of hay on the ground near her food bag, before looking back to him. "It does sound like a very beautiful time of fun to be had by all. I don't believe Nottingham's had a winter festival the likes of that since I was a younger girl."

Which is, maybe, her own small step in admission without turning the topic from his Narnia. He's seen her world now. There's no use to pretending what they do get to is nearly as grand as it once was. Food for the heart of girl-child raised beloved among once-happy people. Then, it had been. And they still managed what they would in villages, but it was not the same as it once had been.

[the_seafarer]

Narnia, in winter. Truly, a few perfect diamond days, more so than the worst. When even storms blowing across the land, raging at icy water below the castle walls, simply drove them all inside to fires and warm blankets lining every available surface, furs to tuck into at night, heavy cloaks lining the throne by day. The Narnian winters, now gone, enveloped in darkness and flame.

(for there is nothing left)

Gaze gone a little distant, at the memory of ghostly boots tramping slow along the stable floor, of his uncle's iron-hard eyes, his iron-gray beard. So real he could have sworn it happened, truly. Telling him the things Caspian has tried without success not to know.

"Well," he says, in reply to words he'd heard, though faintly muffled, "you simply cannot stop the fauns from having fun, you see. Anyone who tried would, without fail, be pulled into the merrymaking and not released til at least the night had passed."

Amusing memories, surpassing those of winter nights now turned to nothing. "There's a faun here, actually. I don't suppose you've met him? Mr. Tumnus is his name."

[queenofmay]

Caspian dips, distracted, and Marian actually isn't that surprised.

Sometimes he mentions it, and more likely are the times he doesn't at all. She knows how sometimes the best memories are the ones far harder to hold in ones hands than the truly painful, horrible memories. More fragile than glass and distance stars, and dreams of a world that isn't your own now.

But Marian smiles as he goes on, the fingers of one hand curling on the windowsill, as she watched him speak. The faintest ghost of a smile, on the backdrop of that suddenly somber set brow, and the the world of snow falling beyond him and the eave of the roof.

It brightened at the question, even, "I have, in fact. He shared a cup with me not too long ago-" Well, as it was for her, perhaps. "-and spoke short, but dearly fondly, of your Lucy, and all of her siblings."

How very Milliways it was to suddenly wonder, amid the thoughts of knowing Caspian's Narnia was gone, whether winter of a non-lethal kind had newly returned to the forests of Narnia where Tumnus still came and went from. To tempt, very gently, with some teasing mirth, "I could believe him to be a snow-dancer given another winter or two with no Queen to fear."

For now, he was a little nervous, if quiet kind and endlessly loyal in word as well as deed.

[the_seafarer]

"Yes, he's quite close with the Pevensies. Rather an irreplaceable advisor, from what I heard, though he's from well before my time."

Hundreds and hundreds of years before the seas came crashing into cracked earth and the stars fell from a split sky, so perhaps it is no surprise that Caspian has not, precisely, sought out the company of the faun as much as he may have, previously.

Besides that, it's always been a bit odd to know that Tumnus was going back and forth between Milliways and the Golden Age of Narnia, where ruled High King Peter, hundreds of years before Caspian knew him or his siblings. Still, he smiles at her jest, coming back to himself with barely a blink. "Oh, I think so. No doubt he'll be relieved to see the Spring, but winters here hardly last for a hundred years, witches about or no. Truly, I believe him to be more scholar than dancer, snowfalls notwithstanding. His histories of Narnia are unparalleled, for his time."

[queenofmay]

A very long time before him, if Lucy's books are to be believed.

A magic and a deep faith that took them there, and to Caspian's own time, and back to their same home rarely hours apart from whence they came. Which, in all true honesty, is far less hard to believe when one has been coming to Milliway for the better part of half a year before hearing that it is possible of other lands, as well as this one.

But it is not hard for her to catch the edge of reticence in Caspian either, right up until he smiles. A smile that washes away the slowly pooling shadows in his face. Perhaps, chasing them right to the edges of his grey eyes, while he's giving a vote of confidence she could not have known herself. "Truly?"

"Perhaps, I should see about acquiring a copy from him, to go with the rest of my little library on it."

When she sees him, again, if she did. The fluidity of Milliways had it's own ways and votes on that.