Chapter Text
Somehow, Edmund wasn’t even the last to wake up. Properly hungover, exhausted, and worn out by last night’s revelries, his siblings had decided by mutual agreement to take supper as their first private meal of the day. Of course, no one bothered to tell Edmund that until he had arrived in their parlor still wearing his dressing-gown, now covered in inkstains and stinking of old paper, in time for one of the Cats of Peter’s guard to inform him that he was still asleep. In fact, the only one awake was Lucy, leaning pensively near the window with a concentrated expression on her face.
“Lucy,” Edmund said in greeting. He dropped, exhausted, into the chair next to hers, his head lolling backwards has he took to examining the ceiling tiles as his new hobby. “Morn.”
“It’s afternoon, Edmund.”
“May I have a biscuit?” he asked, non-sequitur, leaning over the table to snatch a biscuit from under her nose. She looked up from her papers to glare at him as he dipped the biscuit into her tea.
“Your biscuit technique is so bad,” she giggled. “Do you like crumbly tea? You’ll start a new trend soon, I swear.”
“I dread the days,” he replied.
“How was Glasswater? I heard you arrived late last night. Peri asked after you.”
“‘Peri’ also came to see me this morning. Well, afternoon,” Edmund said. “As for my mission? Well, let’s say that I wanted to learn some proof notation but I came back with a traitor.”
Lucy’s head snapped to his, and the rest of the story came spilling out before she could demand more.
“So you went to Glasswater to learn Lady Hemara’s dance, and you left arresting a Calormene informant? Ed, you’ve outdone yourself this time.”
“Yes, and we’re still nowhere close to discovering what this ‘catastrophe’ will be.”
“Stop being so glum, brother! You even made it on time for the ball.”
“She didn’t seem particularly overjoyed at that, did she?”
Lucy swatted him. “Oh, don’t be a downer. You know she is easily stressed around the society season, she’s trying her best.”
Edmund thought about this, and then decided he didn’t want to think this early in the afternoon. “What are you up to? They have you on naval contracts again?” he asked, changing the subject.
“No,” Lucy said. Instantly, her expression seemed to cloud over; instinctively, she reached around and popped a biscuit in her mouth, as if stress eating. “Worse.”
“Oh?” Edmund raised an eyebrow. Few things were worse for Lucy, their carefree sister, than sitting still for extended periods of time to pore over dense legal texts. “What could possibly —?”
“What is a fifteen-letter word — or phrase — that means ‘Dear Aslan! His Majesty's beard is out of control!’”
Edmund nearly choked on Lucy’s crumble tea — well, his now, by right of conquest. “I’m sorry?!”
“It’s the new broadsheets. The Dwarves have started printing crosswords, and I’m not very good at them, but do you know the answer to this one?”
He watched intently as Lucy scrunched her nose up in concentration, flipping the paper over and squinting at the answers, and then started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know, brother,” she giggled.
Lucy didn’t resist as Edmund leaned over to snatch the paper from her.
“‘God shave the king,’” he read out loud.
Lucy never got the opportunity to see if he thought it was funny or not because at that moment, Susan chose to stumble in, with a blank expression and horrendous bedhead.
“I am going to chop all my hair off,” she declared. “This has gone on for far too long, and it is too tedious to manage. Why, maybe I’ll shave it all off! I’ll be like the time when Peter had to go on that western campaign — wait, why are you laughing? Ed? Lu? Was it something I said?!”
The faint bickering of Lucy and Susan was pleasant — and familiar — background noise, as the housekeeper dragged a fresh tray of breakfast foods from the kitchens in the midday sun. The light in the parlor, designed to be east-facing to catch the sunrise, was odd. Far too unfamiliar. This hour of the day would be more suited to rotting in his study trying to absorb those old dusty musty scrolls than eating a piece of toast slathered with far too much butter. His mind had managed to wander to replaying the look on Peridan’s face at that rejection.
“It’s not personal,” he said out loud. “I’m busy.”
He almost believed it himself.