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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.

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[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.