Daggers of Ice

Chapter 7

1010.

The Tenth Year of the Golden Age.

Lucy.

Lucy tossed and turned beneath her silken sheets, the fabric warm but suffocating: the weight of it pressing down on her like guilt. Sleep refused to come, no matter how many times she turned her head or rearranged the pillows.

With an exasperated sigh, she threw the blankets aside and lay flat on her back, staring up at the canopy above. By day, the curtains glowed a deep crimson – like living flame, rich and regal. But under the wash of moonlight, they were reduced to shadow: colourless, lifeless, cold.

Her thoughts were anything but.

Again and again, she saw those eyes.
Hard, dark emerald.
Set in a face of perfect, terrible calm.

And then again – the eyes of such a similar colour, but burning, wild and alive – framed in golden-brown skin, alive with something that was not rage, but power barely contained.

Lucy squeezed her eyes shut.

Ugh.

She pressed the pillow over her face, muffling the low groan that escaped her lips.
"Uuuuuuuuuuuugh," she muttered into the linen, the sound half frustration, half despair.

Something was wrong. Deeply, terribly wrong.

That gnawing unease clawed at her belly again – the same feeling she'd had as a child when Mr. Tumnus had confessed his betrayal to the White Witch. That quiet intuition, older than logic, whispering truths she wasn't ready to face.

It wasn't a haunting.

Jadis's magic had always been cruel and deliberate: but surviving death – surviving Aslan's judgment – was impossible.
It should be impossible.

He had ended her. The Lion Himself. His roar had shattered her wand; His breath had undone her winter.

So how–?

Lucy's hands fisted in the sheets. The memory struck her with painful clarity: Arianna's stillness, the sudden shift in her eyes – from burning green to endless darkness – and that voice, smooth as oil and sharp as ice.

It hadn't been an act. She was sure of it.

The change had been instant.

Absolute.

Like the world itself had stopped to listen.

"Aslan," she whispered into the quiet. "Help us."

The plea barely left her lips before it broke into silence. The kind of silence that filled the Cair when the sea paused between tides – an unnatural stillness, waiting for something to give.

She rolled onto her side, staring toward the narrow window where the moonlight fell across the floor in thin, silver bars. The ocean beyond glimmered restlessly, each wave breaking like a heartbeat.

She thought of Edmund; his steady eyes, the scar along his jaw, the way he'd looked at Arianna. She knew that look; she'd seen it before, when he'd defied Peter's orders, when he'd risked everything because he had discerned something the rest of them had not.

"Don't do anything foolish, Ed," she whispered. Her voice trembled only slightly. "Please."

Below, she could hear the guards changing shifts, their boots soft on the flagstones, voices murmured in tired cadence. The air smelled faintly of salt and wax and the dying embers of the hearth.

But Lucy Pevensie did not sleep.

She lay awake as the night deepened around her, the moon climbing higher, the tide rising against the cliffs. Every sound seemed sharper – the crash of the waves, the hiss of wind through the stone arches, the faint creak of the castle settling.

And beneath it all, a quieter rhythm; something she could not name.

A pull.
A presence.
A faint, impossible whisper that might have been memory or might have been warning.

The witch is not gone.

...

Narnia. The Northern Lands, within the mind of Arianna of Charn.

Jadis.

Dark emerald eyes stared back from the mirror, sharp and knowing.

Jadis smiled, slow and serpentine, as she admired her reflection.

Every angle, every line was perfection. The long gown that clung to her was woven from gold and starlight, its fabric alive with a faint, inner fire. The crown that adorned her brow was older than the world she had conquered – a circlet of pale gold set with fractured emeralds and the broken shards of another diadem. Her sister's.

A small, satisfied smile curved her lips.

A true Empress, she thought. Still.

Even trapped within the mind of another, her power persisted.

Even dead, she endured.

She reached up, adjusting the crown that rested upon her brow; delicate, glittering gold, stolen from the head of her dear dead sister. It sat perfectly upon her own brow, as if made for her.

Soon, the North would move.

And when it did, Narnia would break.

The army that the child had amassed had grown considerably; far larger than Jadis could have hoped for. Far larger than those who had been in her employ before the arrival of the Pevensie children and the destruction they'd wrought upon her plans.

She had waited too long to reclaim what was rightfully hers. Cast out, twice over – first by her own sister, and then by the Lion Himself.

But she had planned for this.

She always planned.

The vessel, the girl, had been her insurance. The perfect child, so eager to please. She had taken her in, raised her, sharpened her mind and her daggers alike.

She had not expected the girl to survive so long. But Arianna was strong – stronger than she'd ever meant her to be.

And that strength was becoming... inconvenient.

Lately, control had slipped. The girl's mind had grown colder, quieter – harder to reach. She'd learned to seal herself off, to cut away her emotions like a snake shedding its skin.

How ironic. The child had learned her lessons too well.

Jadis's smile thinned.

And then, him.

The image of the Just King flickered through her mind – dark hair, sharp jaw, that same indignant fire that had drawn her long ago.

She had not expected him.

Edmund Pevensie.

The boy she'd once broken with a promise of sweets and crowns.

The man who had shattered her in return.

For a moment – just a moment – she remembered the heat of his defiance, the fury in his eyes as he drove his blade into her heart.

It had almost been... beautiful.

Her laughter echoed softly through the empty corridors of Arianna's mind.

"Yes," she purred. "He will be her undoing."

Her reflection smiled back at her – not Arianna's, but her own. Pale, tall, radiant with a cold light that no mortal flame could mimic.

"Just as he was mine."