With Courage [King Caspian X OC]

Chapter 25

Her first thought was that it was smaller than she remembered.

Her second was that it was just as grey.

Amber drew her eyes over the formidable town house as she stood outside its gates, waiting for her heartbeat to slow. It stuttered furiously inside her chest, a butterfly trapped in a jar, wings batting against the glass again and again in its bid for freedom. It knew that standing there was a betrayal to her younger self. Small and round-faced, burning red with the inherent shame of being young and confused but desperately trying to survive, she had sworn she would never be back.

Greenwoods Orphanage was a simple building. A long, oppressive slab of dark stone pockmarked with tiny windows and draped with dying ivy, with each end jutting forward to create a stern crescent, like arms waiting to pull you in. All she saw were hands itching to wrap around her throat.

One day, she had prayed, there would be a time where this building was nothing more than a dark blot in her mind, completely without definition. Where the scars it had left her with were so faded she could no longer trace them on her skin. She pushed open the gate and tried to swallow her loss. That future would never exist now.

Everything about being here felt wrong, as if she were wading through her memories. These streets had been packed tightly in a box and hidden in the back of her mind to stay both safe yet hidden, collecting dust over the years. Now she held them up to the light, watched their images pull into focus once more in horrible technicolour.

Tiny details kept making her falter. When she was a child, she could never reach the brass door knocker. She remembered vividly a day where a boy, Marcus, closed the door before she could make it inside, and yelled through the wood that she could only enter if she knocked the door properly. With every jump her fingers just brushed the edge of the knocker. Enough to make it sway, but not enough to make it knock.

Now it hovered at her eyeline, orange with rust, the final flecks of paint warped and rough under her hand. She knocked twice and braced herself.

She spent a minute waiting, in which she strongly debated turning tail and fleeing the country. When she felt the need to cry, she looked up and willed the tears back inside – a habit she had adopted as a child, after being told by a matron that showing emotion would make her seem weak and, consequentially, a bigger target than she already was – but the sight of the dark walls towering high above her made her feel as if she were at the bottom of a well with no way to climb out. There was no way to brace herself against the onslaught of memories she found in every nook. She faced forward again.

The door opened.

"Who are you?" The woman who pulled it open was dressed in a grey collared dress and a pristine white apron, her dark hair in perfect pin curls. In one hand she held the door open, fingers white around the wood, and in the other was a brown bear with a missing arm.

A child was crying somewhere inside. With the door open, the sound dominated the space, reverberating off the halls and escaping into the sky, to be swallowed by the suffering of the city.

"Amber Blackwill." She answered reluctantly. The words stuck to her mouth like caramel, welding her teeth together.

"Is that supposed to mean something to me, girl?"

She cleared her throat and reminded herself of the words that had accompanied her journey there. I am not a child. I cannot be pushed around. In her pocket, she sought courage from the comforting weight of Caspian's compass. "I want to speak to Headmistress Walton. Does she still work here?"

"She does. What business do you have with her?"

"That's between me and Headmistress Walton. May I come in?"