Once a Queen
Susan didn’t forget, she just choose to live.
Aslan cast her out from her home and demanded she find him in her old world.
Believing does not equal worship. A god believed in isn’t always a god who she owes tribute.
Out of her brothers and sister Susan knew she would be the one who felt the lost the most. She was the one who would never truly adjust. Peter took it as he took everything, with magnificent acceptance. It was what he did with every burden. He shouldered them and soldiered on. Edmund would never repay his betrayal in his own eyes even after a country had both forgiven and forgotten. He would take anything Aslan took away as his due, as if losing his Kingship was his right, his Christmas gift. Lucy had so much faith she didn’t need to be IN Narnia. She didn’t NEED to be queen. She could find Aslan no matter where she was, she had always been able too.
Susan was a queen. Susan didn’t know how to be anything but a queen. She knew how to form alliances, to woe ambassadors and how to subtly threaten enemies. She was called the Gentle but she knew how to wield an iron fist in a velvet glove. She could both soothe and protect her country. She never forgot her mother’s words- you can always go from being nice to being mean but you can rarely go from being mean to being nice.
She was crowned when she was twelve years old. A child queen on an unstable throne. Sure the Lion himself had breathed over her and her siblings but those outside their borders did not know this. All they knew is that the power had shifted and the Narnians believed that the God of their old legends had returned.
Susan called the Centaurs, the Dwarves, the Fauns, the Wolves and anyone else with knowledge to her. She demanded they teach her how they ruled their clans along with the ways of governing a united kingdom.
Father Christmas had gifted her a bow and she learned how to wield it. Her bow did not easily miss and in time neither did she. She worked with the archers in their army. Every day while Peter and Edmund studied the sword she studied the bow.
Even at twelve she knew gifts could be taken away.
She just didn’t know everything could be taken away.
She grew into an adult and was shoved back into her child body, returned to her land only to be ripped away forever and lost her family before she really learned that lesson.
Everything can always be taken away.
No matter what it is the Lion can always take it away if He deems it fit to do so.
And take he did.
He took her country.
He took her body.
He took her bow, her horn.
He took her purpose.
He took her family.
He shoved her through a long forgotten wardrobe, in an old but strange land and back into a long forgotten body. She tripped over her child limbs and scratched at her uncomfortable wool clothes. She couldn’t remember the scratch of wool over her skin, her feet didn’t remember the pinch of her shoes. The training bra she started wearing before they were put on the train felt awkward over her barely grown breasts. Her fingers weren’t roughened from the bow string, her muscles didn’t flex and pull with hard earned strength.
Her soft curves had been replaced by baby fat and her toned muscles had disappeared.
Her memories had not.
Her drive had not.
Once a Queen of Narnia, always a queen of Narnia.
Once a High Queen of Narnia, always a High Queen of Narnia.
This God decided to shove her back into her child body, took away her kingdom and shoved her back into a forgotten world where she had no power. This God decided her life for her without her consent. This God took away her country as if he had a right to play with her life.
Maybe he did.
He was a God after all.
The First time he sent her back to England she tried so hard to be good enough for Him.
She tried to adjust. She let her cloths scratch, her shoes pinch and her training bra lay uncomfortable over her sore growing breasts. She let her mind adjust to her old bodies schedule. She reminisced with her siblings and the professor every morning at breakfast. She remembered and gave tribute to a Lion who called himself God.
She checked the wardrobe every day.
She prayed to Him every night.
She didn’t know why her kingdom had been taken away from her like a child denied a sweet before dinner. She didn’t know who was taking care of her people with all four monarchs gone. She didn’t know how the negotiations for the alliance between Archenland were going now that she wasn’t there to marry the king’s nephew. She didn’t know if they would return. She didn’t know what she did to loose her kingdom but she’d damn well do everything she could to earn it back.
She looked everyday, she knew the others did too. All of them shoved in strange bodies just wanting to go home.
She didn’t know at the time how wonderful the professor was. Somehow the old man who had only known them as children was able to treat them as the adults they were. He offered wine at dinner and didn’t laugh when it tasted cruel and bitter on their children tongues. He trusted them to figure out their new bodies, new limbs. He found old fencing foils for Peter and Edmund to train with, a bow for Susan and books on healing for Lucy.
Susan started to retrain her child eyes and child muscles. She knew she’d have to earn her callouses again. She found old cloths and remembered how to make her fingers sew to bring them down and fit her. She ran and did the exercises she did in Narnia. She searched her twenty-seven year old brain to find the exercises she did fifteen years earlier now that her body was twelve again.
She learned how to move in her body again. She remembered the stories of this land.
And then the war ended.
They went back to London.
It had been sixteen years since Susan had seen her parents. One year in this world. It took her a long time to find her mother’s face in the train station. Even though she was twenty-seven (thirteen) she ran into her mother’s arms and hoped it would be better.
It wasn’t.
She was still a Queen without a kingdom. She was still an adult in a child’s body.
Now she was treated as a child as well.
The professor was able to treat them as adults, he had been to Narnia. He knew Aslan. He knew of God’s who played with lives. He knew of the things they had seen. He knew that they were adults for all they were shoved in children’s bodies.
When Susan went back to London she asked her parents for archery lessons.
They laughed at her.
Susan couldn’t remember the last time she had been laughed at for a request. Maybe when she was fifteen and in a bit of a foolish tizzy about a visiting delegation from a neighboring kingdom. One of her Ladies in Waiting, a centaur only a little older than herself had giggled at a particularly silly request. It had been silly, the giggle had snapped Susan from a fifteen year old girl getting ready for a party and back into her role as queen.
She’d never been laughed at for something practical.
She could feel her old but still strange face trying to arrange it’s baby fat into a queenly, commanding look before Peter kicked her under the table.
She wasn’t a queen here.
She wasn’t anything here.
She was a girl-child with no power and commanded no respect. It didn’t matter if her request was practical or silly. It didn’t matter that she had been a diplomat for the last twelve years.
It didn’t matter.
Peter though, Peter was now a boy of fourteen. HE was allowed ideas in this backwards world. He supported her request, saying the Professor had begun to teach Edmund and him to fence and shown Susan the bow.
Her parents listened to this.
In this world she wasn’t a queen. She was a girl and she didn’t matter.
She didn’t matter.
She didn’t matter in this world, she was just a girl, waiting to be a woman, married and bearing children.
She learned this lesson quickly.
She learned it when she asked for books on government at school with Lucy and her teacher laughed at her. She learned it when she expressed interest in learning how to host parties in England and was encouraged but told it was a woman’s skill, an unimportant skill. As if alliances weren't born and killed in ballrooms as they were in council rooms. As if an insult in a seating arrangement wasn’t as grave as an insult in a treaty meeting. As if those didn’t happen side by side.
Edmund had stopped wars with his spies.
Susan had stopped wars with her parties.
She had gathered her potential enemies together and showered them in kindness and hospitality. She smiled, she flattered. Peter showed his strength in arms, Susan showed her strength in culture, Edmund in his ability to move in the shadows and Lucy in her faith in goodness.
This was as important as battles on fields. Susan knew she saved the lives of her people by helping stop wars before they started.
Here in England the body count didn’t matter if the glory of the crown was won.
A woman had no place in that glory.
Susan schooled her child face, round with baby fat, to take on the haughty, queenly look she learned to wield in court. She glared the teachers who said she couldn’t rule the world. She snuck over to the boy’s campus and broke into the library and took the books they refused to give her. Peter helped her get her archery lessons and brought her copies of his calculus homework.
She would be worthy of her Kingdom when she returned. She never doubted that she’d return.
And then she was pulled out of a train station and dropped back into her country so far into the future that the years didn’t matter. She wasn’t a Queen anymore, she was a Legend.
She just wanted her kingdom back.
She just wanted her country to be whole again.
She just wanted her identity, her body, her power back.
She didn’t want to be a legend. She just wanted to be a queen again. She wanted to take care of her people. She was twenty eight and fourteen and she was tired of being held to the whims of a Lion.
Was it so bad to know her own power, be taken away from it and want it back?
Was it so bad to know that she could not only rule but rule well.
Was it so bad to want to be more than a girl waiting to be a woman, waiting to be a mother?
Did she deserve to be ripped away from her land again and banished forever?
Did she deserve to be exiled from the country that owned her blood and tears?
Did she fail this Lion God?
She did not deserve his judgement. She had always done what was best for her land and her people.
When the Lion shoved them back into the world, back into England, back into this pathetic country where she was nothing, Susan mourned.
She mourned the loss of the past year as she hadn’t before.
The first time was about making herself worthy of her country.
Now she never would be. She never would sit in her throne room again. She would never ride her horse. She would never practice her bow in the courtyard. She never would take council with her subjects and learn of their lives. She would never host parties that decided the fate of her kingdom. She would never act a council or ambassador again.
The centaurs had a tradition of mourning for one year and one day. The wolves mourned until the next full moon where they would run and tell stories of their fallen. The druids danced their mourning dances. The merfolk sang their mourning songs. The nymphs stilled the waters and did not speak. Susan took to her bed for a week, hardly touching food or water. The school called her parents worried about the undetectable malady that had fallen her. Lucy sat with her, telling her the old fairy tales of their abandoned kingdom. Susan turned her back to her sister. Peter and Edmund came from the boys campus. She turned her back to them too.
She would never be good enough for her kingdom.
Her people had been taken away from her like a child who looses a toy.
All because a Lion said so.
She thought he finally had taken everything from her.
She was wrong.
Before had been about becoming good enough for her kingdom. Now was about becoming good enough for this world. She stopped hiding her Queenlyness and glared at teachers who tried to cow her. She breezed through lessons she had learned years ago and demanded to be taught more.
She argued politics and policy. She put together seating arrangments with a diplomatic eye.She gathered the girls of her school around her. She learned her bow again and set it aside. It had no place in this world.
She picked it up again because it deserved to be remembered.
She learned to paint her face again, the style here different than Narnia. She learned to sneak out of her dorm and find her way into the city. She learned to style her hair and pick out her cloths. She knew the power of presentation, the power of a smile. She met boys from the boys school behind the woodshed and kissed them. She met girls in her dorm and she kissed them too. She had nothing yet everything to prove in this world.
This world where she thought there was nothing left to take.
“Find me in your own world.” a God had told her.
She had lived in Narnia for fifteen years and in this world for fifteen also. What world was truely hers?
She was Susan the Gentle, Susan of the Horn, High Queen. She refused to become Susan the Damned.
She stopped giving a Lion tribute. A God who took everything was not a God she owed.
Her siblings said she forgot. She never forgot. She took the twisted promises of a Lion and made them her own. She kept her promise to Him. She’d live in this world but she’d live her way, not his.
She is not her brother Peter who is still respected and given responsibilities and listened to in this world. She is not Edmund who will never escape the guilt of a childhood mistake. She is not Lucy who builds herself in faith and trust. She is the Gentle, the promised, the chosen and she is put in a land that cares for none of that.
She might not have her kingdom but she is still a Queen. She will be a Queen until she dies.
The same train station that pulled her back to Narnia took her family away for good. She knew why they were traveling. Edmund had called her as she was pressing her hair for the birthday of the latest girl she had kissed. Told her of the dreams, the rings. Susan felt the responsibility of a kingdom she could no longer rule press down into her very bones. She is twenty-one for the second time and the ache of responsibility has never left her.
But Narnia no longer welcomes her and she will not give its God her blood anymore.
Out of all her siblings Edmund is the one who understands. He returns out of Duty to Country. She stays out of Duty to Self.
She loses them all.
Peter who was allowed to still carry his Duty wrapped around him like a cloak. Edmund who weighed each word whispered with justice on his tongue. Lucy, sweet Lucy, who loved so much she never had to look to find the Lion. The Professor and Polly, gentle hands who guided them. Eustance and Jill, children who Narnia had shaped and molded into people who could change the world.
Taken.
She attends their funerals alone. She burries her siblings next to her parents dressed in black with her nylons on and her lipstick slashed red against her lips. She holds the hand of the girl who’s birthday she had gone to. A party instead of a train. The mourners look at her, a girl barely out of her youth, holding the hand of a friend and burying the decaying flesh of her taken family.
Susan is twenty one and she still remembers the first time she was twenty one. The callouses built from a bow and a quill. The weight of her crown on her head. The responsibility of a queen. Now she is twenty one again and there is a different weight of grief pressing into her over burdened shoulders.
The night Susan lays her family in the ground she sleeps next to the girl who held her hand and dreams of a Lion for the first time in years.
“Daughter of Eve, return to me.” He calls to her as if he has a right to her loyalty.
“No.” she looks him the eye.
In the morning she wakes and turns to the woman in bed next to her.
“I’m moving to America. Will you come with?”
The third time Susan leaves her country it is because she choose to. She has her bags packed, her inheritence in the bank and in her pocket. She has her lovers hand in hers. She has her lipstick and her nylons. She has her pen, her parties, her politics and her policies.
Susan didn’t forget, she just choose to live.