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A weak afternoon sun hung in the sky over Anvard, its balmy rays shooting through the windows of the royal library. The golden light leeched sharp edges off of bookcases and sculptures, as though it were an ice garden melting with the onset of spring. Pity the sun couldn’t take the chafing edge from the heels of Aravis’s shoes, or ease the death grip her corset had on her chest. She would have appreciated that a great deal more than having to look at the ruined beauty of a melting ice garden.
The battles were done, the trials were done. The Narnian monarchs had gone home, with the occasional short-winded letter from Lucy being the only correspondence Aravis received. She had received no word from home, and didn’t think any would be forthcoming. She was the ward of a king, a lady of his court, but that king was a barbarian, and there was little that could wash out the stain of having defied her father as Aravis had. She had known from the beginning that it would be this way. Still, news of her brother, and whether or not Zhaleh and her child (she must have given birth by now) were healthy would have been appreciated.
It was as if Aravis had been sequestered away in a temple, as incongruous a description as that might have been for a royal court. She had no news of Calormen, no news of anything as regards to her homeland. King Lune might receive private missives, his council might discuss that land, but the court at large was thoroughly uninterested in what went on in Calormen, now that Rabadash had been packed back off to Tashbaan and his armies had gone trudging after him. If ever she asked, the one she asked looked at her as though she had asked if she could take their firstborn to the nearest sacrificial altar.
Well, almost everyone. But those few sympathetic to Aravis’s desires couldn’t really help her.
Aravis found Shasta where she normally found him, huddled in the back corner of the library, well-hidden from prying eyes. Aggravation dug deep lines into his forehead as he pored over a book which, like all the others here, he could barely understand. Aravis wondered if it had been his tutor with him today, or Lune himself.
“How’d you keep them from making you do this, too?” Shasta grumbled when he realized Aravis was there, scowling down at the book as though it had insulted him, somehow.
“I already know how to read the language of the land,” Aravis said smoothly. “The children of Tarkaans are taught many languages.”
She sat down and winced as her corset shifted position on her torso, rubbing painfully against her breasts. Her ladies said that it would quit doing that as she filled out (if she filled out; more than once, Aravis had happened to walk into her chambers and hear people whispering about how ‘thin and boyish their dark lady was’), and that there was no real point in having a smaller one made, for with her new, hearty diet, she could fill out at any time. Aravis wasn’t entirely certain that she believed them; they could be lacing it wrong, anyways. As it was, she still had yet to grasp exactly why women would want to wear corsets in the first place. It was an even bigger mystery than why any women would go about in layers upon layers of skirts, even if it was cooler in Archenland than it was in Calormen. Aravis felt as though she was trying to walk while wearing leaden weights.
Shasta glared sullenly at her. “Well, lucky you. Some of us didn’t grow up a Tarkaan’s child.” He paused for a moment, then winced. “Sorry, I know it wasn’t—“
Aravis shook her head tiredly. A few months ago, it might have angered her, but a few months ago she was still overwhelmed with the newness of this place, and didn’t think that either of them would have any cause for dissatisfaction. A few months ago, they still couldn’t stand each other, and all they had in common was the fact that they were fleeing from home, and had taken flight on the back of a Talking Horse.
Do we really have so much more in common now? Aravis wondered ruefully. That one new point seems to have made all the difference.
“Is it really so difficult?” she asked him, sneaking a glimpse at the book Shasta had been attempting to read from. Even upside down, she recognized the passages. That was the book she had learned the language of the Narnians and the Archenlanders from. It was practically required reading in noble households when the head of the family was likely to have dealings with foreign dignitaries. She remembered mastering it easily when it was taught to her, years ago.
“My tutor says it gets harder to learn how to read as you get older,” Shasta explained. “Well, what he said was that I was probably never going to be able to read that well, but the K—“ he stopped himself, and said, very deliberately, “—Father wouldn’t hear of it. Said I’d learn how to read if he had to teach me himself.” He looked thoroughly miserable as he cast his gaze back down at the book.
“And how has that been going?” Aravis suspected she already knew the answer to that, but she’d not been allowed inside the library whenever Shasta’s tutor or King Lune was here with him; almost no one was. She had to confess some curiosity.
Shasta grimaced. “Very poorly. Corin keeps sneaking in, and he’s been a right pest, always trying to get me to go riding with him, or hunting. I told him to ask you instead; you’re the one who actually likes that kind of thing.”
At that, Aravis snorted. “I haven’t heard anything from him.” Truth be told, she was rather relieved that Corin hadn’t approached her about going riding or hunting with him. Corin was one of a very small group of people at court who actually behaved as though Aravis’s past in Calormen was something that could be spoken of openly instead of being hidden as something shameful; that was true. But Aravis was also quite certain that he would have made horrible company at either riding or hunting, and that his retinue wouldn’t have been nearly as understanding as he was.
(There was also the matter of the cumbersome riding costumes Archenland ladies were expected to wear, and those awful sidesaddles. Aravis couldn’t bring her horse to anything faster than a canter without feeling as though she was going to fall off. She had no intention of being made a fool of in front of any number of courtiers and officials who already found her mode of speech strange, and the table manners she had learned from her mother vaguely offensive.)
“I didn’t think he had; he was up here again today trying to get me to go hunting with him. The ki—Father threatened to have him scrubbing pots down in the kitchens if he didn’t go away.” Shasta’s pale blue eyes glazed over slightly as he rapped his fingers against the table. “You know what’s really odd? They keep saying I can’t read at all, but I already could read before I got here. I couldn’t read much, but I could. Fa—Arsheesh taught me to read numbers, and animals’ names—“ the words came out in a hot, frustrated stream “—and the names of people’s trades so I could pick things up for him from the shops in our village. I know the names of the gods, and I can sign my own.” His face screwed up. “Why doesn’t that count?!”
“Because you were taught to read in Calormen,” Aravis told him coolly. “And here, anything Calormene is about as welcome as a hungry guest in a house struck by poverty.”
Shasta opened his mouth, looking for a long moment like he’d like to argue with her. And why not? Lune and Corin had been kind to him; they’d been kind to her as well. But let’s call this what it is, why don’t we? “You’re right,” he muttered. “That’s it, exactly.”
Said the girl who was dressed up in uncomfortable foreign clothes and still stuck out like a sore thumb, to the boy who was stripped of the name he had always known and given one that sat on his shoulders like a yoke. They noticed things, these children. Indeed, it was hard not to, when they had spent all their lives watching, if what they watched for were such disparate things as a father’s fraying temper or an impending social gaffe. The court’s disapproval was easy to spot.
Aravis fiddled with the long belt of her dress, running her fingernails over the stitches in the woven belt. How she missed her mother’s beaded sashes, which had become hers after her mother’s death. “Do you ever miss it, Shasta?” she asked in a brittle voice. Suddenly, her fingers felt as though made of porcelain, hard and rigid, but fragile enough to break under even a slight blow.
Slowly, Shasta nodded. “I mean…” His face screwed up. “I don’t miss all of it. I always got horribly sick from the sun in midsummer; I don’t miss that. Arsheesh had a foul temper; I don’t miss that, either. But there were things…” He smiled almost wistfully. “I miss being called ‘Shasta’; you’re the only one who does, anymore. I miss the food we ate in the village on festival days.”
At that, Aravis perked up. Mindless of whether she was interrupting him or not, she probed, “Did you have rose sharbat on festival days?” That had always been a mainstay when her family attended a festival in one of the cities her father ruled.
Shasta shook his head. “No, we didn’t have anything like that—I’d never even seen a rose before we got to Tashbaan. We had oranges and candied almonds. You’ve had rose sharbat?” There was no mistaking the note of envy in his voice.
“Of course I had. Do you think any Tarkaan’s family hasn’t?” Even the poorest of the noble houses in the remote western provinces kept diverse, well-stocked larders, ready to produce delicacies at a moment’s notice. It wouldn’t do to be caught at a disadvantage by guests, after all.
“Well, I’m not part of a Tarkaan’s family,” Shasta reminded her pointedly. “And where I grew up, the nearest Tarkaan lived thirty miles inland and wouldn’t have walked into our village if it was to rescue his kidnapped son.” Before Aravis could make any retort, his eyes lit up and he asked her, “Do you suppose they’d make rose sharbat for us here if we asked them?”
“Ha!” Aravis laughed derisively. “If it hasn’t got bread or meat in it, I’m reasonably certain our good cooks will look on any food they’re asked to cook with suspicion.” The last time Aravis had had any fresh fruits and vegetables was during her stay in Lasaraleen’s house in Tashbaan. Since then, she’d only seen fruit baked into cakes and pies, and vegetables swimming in stew or boiled to within an inch of their lives, and not even all that often, either. The Archenlanders were very fond of their meat, their bread, their cheese; they served those at every meal. But fruits and vegetables, they weren’t ‘sturdy’ enough, weren’t ‘filling’ enough. It was thoroughly ridiculous to Aravis that in Calormen, any peasant who could afford food could afford to have fresh fruits and vegetables on his table (if the season permitted), but in Archenland, even the King didn’t have those things on his table every day, and by choice, too.
Shasta scrunched up his face. “I suppose you’re right,” he said gloomily. “I can’t even get oranges here; who’d have rose sharbat?”
For a moment, Aravis thought it amusing, in a bitter, ironic sort of way, that now that Shasta was Crown Prince of Archenland, he had silks and jewels, down mattresses and feather pillows, but he couldn’t have a simple treat that he wanted to try. Then, Aravis remembered that she couldn’t have that simple treat, either, nor any of the meals she had had at home prepared the way she had known them. Amusement curdled in her stomach.
“Do you ever miss it?” she heard Shasta ask her, as though from far away.
It took Aravis a moment to realize what he meant by that. When she did, she stared down her nose at him, glaring slightly. “What sort of a question is that?!”
Shasta’s face flushed. “I’m sorry!” he squeaked, sounding for all the world like one of the Talking Mice Aravis met a month ago (‘A new race,’ she had heard it whispered, though Aravis couldn’t really make sense of it. Every animal she knew of had an intelligent equivalent in Narnia, even insects—she had met a swarm of Talking Bees just last week—so why would an intelligent race of Mice be emerging only now?). “It’s just that with everything you said about your stepmother and your parents forcing you to marry, I didn’t think…”
Aravis held up her hand. “I don’t miss that.” The situation was more complex than she had let on, but what had bound her then still bound her now. She would keep her silence. It was the least she could do. “However, that was not the sum of my life in Calormen. Far from it. There is plenty that I miss.”
Oh, for the days when her mother lived. Oh, for the days when her older brother drew breath still, and her strongest memories of him were not the jar of ashes brought home, not the blood-soaked corpse that haunted her dreams. The sweet, earthy scent of the possets tucked away in her chests of clothes, the sound of rain on the flat roof of her father’s country residence, her little brother’s laughter and her father’s sigh, she missed that. She missed everything that she couldn’t’ have anywhere but at home.
“Well—“ Shasta’s jaw was set in that line which months ago Aravis would have called mule-headed, but now she recognized as merely determined “—when I’m king, we’ll just tell the cooks to make Calormene food.”
Aravis didn’t tell him that the cooks would first have to be taught how to prepare Calormene food. She smiled, and said, “And we’ll wear Calormene clothes, and play Calormene instruments—“
“—And we’ll even have Calormene poetry contests,” Shasta declared with an almost vicious smile on his face. Which was rather odd, considering that he’d told her not long ago that he hated Calormene poetry, but so long as decent poets were found for the contests, she couldn’t care less. “And you can call me ‘Shasta’ in front of everyone, and no one will complain.” There entered into his voice a rather longing note, his eyes glazed and far-away.
She inclined her head, and said in a decidedly neutral voice, “Indeed, I can.”
All of it would cause a great scandal, Aravis was sure, but after the last few months she was more than ready to cause a scandal or two, if only for the novelty of it. Imagine what Lasaraleen would say; she might even hazard a trip north to see it for herself.
But until they could, they would just have to wait.