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EUSTACE SRUBB is an unexpected surprise, to say the least. He's terribly entitled and all too nasty about it. And the first thing he did was hurl Reepicheep across the deck.
It's safe to say I don't like him. Not in the slightest.
"Insufferable is the word you're looking for," Edmund grumbles, glaring at the boy lying unconscious in a spare hammock belowdecks. Eustace had fainted not long after being brought aboard, seemingly from the shock and disbelief of being in Narnia. So Tavros brought him down to the crew's quarters until he wakes up. I'm hoping that won't be for at least another few hours.
"Is he always like that?"
The king snorts. "Always," he says. "Lucy and I have been living with him for weeks now. He's horrible."
But what he says doesn't make any sense to me. "What do you mean? Are Susan and Peter not with you?"
Edmund shakes his head, setting down the clothes Caspian gave him. "Peter's back in the country with Professor Kirke and my father is visiting universities in America so he took my mum and Susan with him and left us in Cambridge."
His eyes tell me all I need to know. His father may be back from fighting in the war, but it still hasn't ended.
Ed offers a half-hearted smile in hopes of lightening the air. I can't fathom how he's lived like this for so long — fought wars in Narnia only to return home to the same battle still raging on his doorstep. The very one that kept his father from him. When he told me about it all those years ago during our journey to Aslan's How, it had already lasted three years. And now...
I stare into the sable pools of his eyes. "Lucy said it's been two years." And I can see it in his face — how the once-soft lines have grown sharper and more prominent, his eyes hardened if only by a little. I can see it in his broad shoulders and the way he carries himself with more confidence now. He got taller, too. I noticed when he was hugging me on deck and my chin could no longer rest on his shoulder, but now it's even more obvious as I reach up to touch the dusting of stubble on his jaw and realize how far away he is. Two years. "That explains this," I murmur.
That half-smile flickers across his mouth again before his eyes lift back to mine. He wants to know.
"Three," I answer, letting my hand fall back to my side. His heavy tension and fear recede across the link with that number. "You're older than me now," I add.
The boy's shoulders sag with crushing relief as he sighs and pulls me into him. It takes me by surprise a little, but after missing this feeling for so long all I can do is sink into his embrace and desperately burn it into my memory. It makes sense, anyway. The last time Edmund left Narnia, 1300 years had passed. He probably thought he'd return to see all his friends reduced to myths and legends, again. He thought I'd be dead, or lived out decades of my life while he was gone.
