Alliance

Chapter 48- Revelare

Sanya looked absent again, her gaze drifting towards the window.

Selene had patience, lashings of it, but not when it came to her mum.

"AMMA!"

The Queen jumped, and looked back at her daughter.

"I'm sorry." She said again, standing up. "It's your Uncle Peter's birthday, and I'm a little out of it."

She hadn't meant to say that- she didn't discuss the Pevensies with her children, unless it was telling them pretty stories and reminiscing about happy memories- but she couldn't help blurting it out.

Oh, hells, that was why she was being so blank.
"Sorry, Amma, I didn't realise." Selene only had vague memories of her uncle, and her aunts- even her recollections about her father were faded and she often wondered if they were real memories or simply dreams and thoughts she had made up herself.

"It's alright, Sel, I didn't expect you to." She gave a slight smile, and placed the book beside her daughter. "I think I might go for a walk in the Gardens- when Seraphina wakes, tell one of the servants to call for me."

There were no servants at Paravel that day, but who was she to remind her mother of that?
"Course, Amma, no problem." She said, picking up the book and taking her glasses from her bedside table. "You know Sera sleeps like a log, I doubt she'll get up till it's suppertime."

Sanya chuckled, "That's true. I can't risk her ruining her sleeping schedule, I'll come wake her up in an hour myself."

"I can do it." Selene volunteered at once. It wasn't just her mother who doted on little Sera- she did, Jem did, the entire palace did. Their mother called her 'my sweet angel', and it was incredibly appropriate- she was just the cutest little thing- quiet, pensive, with big brown eyes which made Sanya's heart ache every time she looked into them, and was the sweetest five-year-old in general. She could also be unimaginably stubborn and whiny- but everyone had to have flaws. "If you're not back, I mean."

Her mother gave her a smile which didn't quite reach her eyes and nodded, "Thank you, Selene."

-

Peter had planted these Gardens for her. She hadn't thought he really would- but he had. This green space of solitude and tranquillity, embellished by red, blue, yellow, pink, white, purple blooms, was hers by him.

There had been a time when she considered her brother-in-law to be the most estranged from her. But, after the battle with the Giants, that had changed. They weren't simply in-laws and allies- they had become comrades, they had become family.

And then he had gone, along with her husband, and the rest of her family.

"Almost six years," She told herself with a sigh, not even bothered by the constant pain anymore, and plucked a blue tulip. She didn't usually pick flowers, of course not, but she wanted the company in her lonely room. Edmund had gotten flowers for her only once, on their ninth anniversary- he'd said that flowers were too cliché for him and she deserved much more than that, and had also added that that he could never compare with Peter planting 'a whole bloody garden' for her- but this blue reminded her of him, his favourite colour and the blue tunic she had seen him in years ago, before they were married. The blue tunic, which now rested in a trunk full of his clothes and belongings, along with his siblings' possessions, gathering dust in an underground chamber of the Treasury. After five years, no one had any more hope of their return, at least not now. Already people were starting to think of them as 'gone', instead of simply missing.

The merchants in the towns had made quite a fortune selling things which they claimed belonged to the 'late' Rulers.
Tumnus and Trinus were looking into adopting a dryad child, whose parents had perished in a fire in the Dancing Lawn, and Salland had told her that they were hoping to name her after Lucy and Susan ('Luan?' She had suggested, and the couple had actually thought it was a good name).
Letters addressed to Cair Paravel were no longer to the Queen Regent of Narnia, Sanya of Rihaaya, but High Queen Sanya of Narnia and Rihaaya.