Daggers of Ice

Chapter 4

1010.

The Tenth Year of the Golden Age.

Edmund.

Those eyes.

Cold and dark – too green, too sharp, too familiar.

He knew them.
He would know them anywhere.

They had haunted him for years, after the Battle of Beruna. He'd seen them in the smoke of every battlefield, in the gleam of ice across the northern lakes, in every dream that ended with the sound of breaking glass.

It was the same colour – that uncanny shade of wintergreen – but in the space between one heartbeat and the next, they had changed.

And somehow, he knew.

It was no longer Arianna of Charn looking out at him.

It was her.

Jadis.

He felt the shift, subtle but absolute, like the world itself holding its breath. Before the thought had fully formed, he was moving – years of training collapsing into instinct. His sword flashed upward in a single smooth motion, and the tip found her throat again, the steel pressing just hard enough to break skin.

The laughter that spilled from her lips was not Arianna's.

It was colder. Fuller. Too knowing.

The sound sank its claws into him; that same terrible laugh that had once filled battlefields and frozen hearts.

The White Witch.

His siblings hadn't moved. The room hung frozen – Peter poised like a drawn bow, Susan's lips parted in disbelief, Lucy whispering something to Asura that he could barely hear.

But he couldn't look away.

Her voice broke the silence.

"I could make you a king, Edmund. A true king."

The whisper wrapped around him like silk – soft, suffocating.

He felt it slide through the cracks of his armour, slick and familiar, the echo of a spell he had broken but never escaped. The same tone that had promised warmth in the cold, certainty in the chaos.

He clenched his jaw. He would not fall for it again.

He was not that boy.

He was not the trembling child clutching cursed sweets in a snowbound world.

And yet, the voice struck something deeper than reason – a sound his bones remembered even if his mind refused to.

She smiled, and he felt the press of her shoulder against his hand – bare, cold, inhuman. His fingers had tightened without him meaning to.

"Join me once," she breathed. "Be my king, and see all other crowns kneel, as you were always purposed."

The words slipped like smoke, circling him, threading through the very air. They were the same words she had once whispered in his dreams. The same promise. The same lie.

But her skin – Aslan save him – her skin was so cold.

There was no doubt.

It was no trick of the mind, though it was beyond reason.

It was Jadis. Somehow, impossibly, the Witch spoke through the young woman's mouth – her tone, her power, her hunger alive again in the room.

He had seen her die. He had seen Aslan tear her down, her blood spilling on snow. He had watched her melt into nothing under the Lion's roar.