[Fic] "Queen Lucy, the Firebird, & the Death of Koschei the Deathless" - Chronicles of Narnia

[edenfalling]

narniaexchange reveals are up!

I received the wonderful In Exile by therck, which follows Prunaprismia after the end of Prince Caspian. Go read it, it's awesome. :-)

And I wrote Queen Lucy, the Firebird, and the Death of Koschei the Deathless for rthstewart: In which Queen Lucy of Narnia and Princess Elena of Vinyedvyeri go on a quest to defeat Koschei the Deathless, rescue Elena's brothers, and incidentally get Lucy back home after she was carried off by a magical bird. (2,700 words)

[AO3 crosspost / ff.net crosspost]

Many thanks to autumnia for the beta!

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So, thoughts on the story. rthstewart's basic request was for a happy ending, delightful characterization, and to laugh at least once. Some subsidiary ideas included pagan and/or mythological influences, somebody doing something s/he shouldn't be doing but succeeding anyway, and a crossover with one of Lois McMaster Bujold's universes, either Chalion or Vorkosigan.

I think I did a good job on the main prompt and Lucy doing something she probably shouldn't but succeeding anyway, and while Russian fairy tales aren't exactly mythological influences, they're not completely unrelated. The Vorkosigan crossover is very subtle, the kind of thing you probably only notice if you're very familiar with the universe in question and also looking for it -- it's done entirely by name and title choices, a mention of an "Emperor-Beyond-the-Stars," and the indirect description of a Cetagandan attack sometime before the people of Vinyedvyeri came to the Narnian world. My thought is that when the Cetas dropped a nuclear bomb on Vorkosigan Vashnoi, some people escaped through a magical door into another world... but really, you can make up your own stories for how Barrayarans got to Narnia. I am not going to contradict any of them. :-)

My research for this basically involved finding a copy of Aleksandr Afanasyev's Russian Fairy Tales and reading the whole damn thing. Which was not exactly what I would call difficult -- folktales don't survive if they aren't entertaining, after all! -- but the thing about reading long enough to spot patterns is that you read long enough to spot patterns, and then you can't stop. Also, the chief difference between my story and a proper folktale, aside from the Narnia thing (which is really less of a tonal and thematic problem than you might expect), is that folktales don't have to make sense. They can drop plot threads, introduce completely random new elements, and just go willy-nilly so long as they're interesting. Modern fiction readers prefer their stories to pay a bit more attention to basic logic -- which autumnia illustrated when asking where on earth Elena had gotten oil to put on Baba Yaga's gate. So I changed that to her picking the lock with her hairpin, which both makes more logistical sense and sets up the bit later on when she picks the lock on Koschei's treasure chest. (Thanks, autumnia!)

I wish I'd been able to get Susan in more, but someone had to stay home and keep Narnia from falling apart in the absence of her siblings, and frankly, she's a lot more suited for that kind of practical day-to-day governance than either of her brothers.

...

The thing is, as is standard for me, the story I wrote is not the one I initially planned. Not in the slightest.

What I wanted to do was retell Shards of Honor with the premise that Barrayar was a country in the Narnian world rather than a planet in the Vorkosiverse, and Cordelia and Lieutenant Dubauer fell through a magical door when they were ambushed on Sergyar. (The ambush was set by Cetagandans, incidentally, since in a universe without Barrayar they annexed Komarr themselves and were quite pleased to find a back route to Escobar.) They found themselves in the Western Wild and met Aral, who'd been abandoned by his patrol who were working on... well, this is where things get vague, because I hadn't hashed out all the details and I couldn't make the rough draft come to life on the page.

Basically somebody early in Barrayaran history had stolen an apple from the garden in the utmost west and planted it to protect the country from Jadis and the northern giants. And it worked, because magic things do what they're meant to do, but the way it protected the country was by creating a magical barrier that kept everyone IN as well as any potential enemies OUT. And since this Barrayar is very northern taiga forest without a convenient Baltic Sea to moderate the climate, things were hard for a long time. (Time of Isolation, basically.) When the barrier finally fell -- I am inclined to think somebody got tired of horror stories about the outside world and chopped down the magical tree to prove it was all nonsense -- they had maybe twenty or thirty years to establish tentative contact and trade before Jadis conquered Narnia and put up her own magical barrier, plus an eternal winter that screwed up the climate in all the surrounding countries. And since Barrayar bordered the Western Wild to the south and the giants of Harfang to the east, they were pretty well locked out of contact with the rest of the world. Again. They were not pleased AT ALL.

Cue an invasion by the giants (mimicking the Cetagandan invasion in canon), followed by civil war (Mad Yuri, etc.), and you're left with a people suffering from xenophobia, rabid militarism, and a century of resentment toward Narnia (and no inclination to distinguish between Jadis and her successors). So of course they try to invade and win themselves a reliable connection to the outside world.

Cordelia gets away from Aral somehow, and in a fixit twist, Lucy's cordial heals Dubauer since his nerve damage counts as a wound! And then Shards of Honor happens more or less as in canon, only with ground warfare instead of spaceships, and also the Narnians are a lot more tolerant about Cordelia's trust in and love for Aral than the Betans were, because they've been through the Winter and so understand at least some of what's driving the Barrayarans, and are something of a warrior culture themselves.

In the end, Dubauer goes home to Beta Colony via Aslan Express, and Cordelia settles down with Aral in Barrayar. I'm not sure what goes wrong with Miles in this AU, but I suspect something to do with the Lady of the Green Kirtle, who likes to play long and subtle games. That one obviously backfires, but she's immortal; she has time. And I guess instead of being vicereine and viceroy of Sergyar, Cordelia and Aral end up as ambassadors to Narnia or something like that, which allows Miles's personal chaos field to interrupt the hunt for the White Stag and the Golden Age lasts two or three times as long! Yay!

Anyway, that's what I was trying to write, which would have let me incorporate a couple other ideas from rthstewart -- "a Narnia with creaky wheels, the faint smell of manure, grass stains, open windows, and lots of animal hair that everyone is too polite to comment upon," "a Golden Age > 15 years, so, therefore I'd love an AU look with adult Pevensies, OC consorts, and the next gen," and the presence of cranky Talking Beasts as characters -- but as I said, I couldn't make it come alive on the page.

So I wrote a fairy tale instead.

Such is life.

(P.S. The conclusion I used for Lucy's folktale -- "and if they have not died, they may still be there today" -- is actually a typical phrase from Hungarian folktales. The Russian variant runs more like, "I was there at the feast and they gave me soup to drink, but it ran down my beard and not into my mouth," which clearly doesn't fit Lucy as the narrator. Also I think the Hungarian ending just flows better. Please forgive this minor inauthenticity!)

Comments

[lexicology]

Ah, I do love me a good folktale. And the bit at the end with the Pevensies bantering sets it of just perfectly. Incidentally, I think there's a couple variants of that Russian ending that are less male-centric, but you're right that the Hungarian one is just cooler.

[edenfalling]

Thanks! Yeah, there's another ending tag that... I forget the exact form, but it goes something like, "I was at the feast and they gave me [nice clothes], but on the way home a bird flew past saying [description of clothes] and I thought it said [stolen/ugly/pick-a-negative clothes] so I threw them away." I think I only saw that once on its own, though; it is usually an optional follow-up to the soup-in-beard business.

The Hungarian one is just such a neat construction. I don't remember where I first encountered it, but I remember thinking it was so much less annoying than "and they all lived happily ever after." It's not nearly as prescriptive, for one thing, and it has that element of uncertainty, leaving the door open for adventures to keep happening. :-)

[autumnia]

Thanks for allowing me the privilege to have the first look at the story! :-) And I think the final version came out very nicely. I'm just glad that the crossover was hinted at but not too obvious since it would have gone over my head (and others not familiar with the Vorkosigan universe).

[edenfalling]

Thank you for your helpful comments! :-)

Yeah, I figured with a crossover that either I had to go full-out or I had to just hint at it for flavor. Since I couldn't get the full-out crossover fusion thing to work, I took the subtle route instead.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

RAWRR -- I seem to have lost my comment. I wanted to say thank you so much for the wonderful story. I suspect it was you based on the style and it was SO intimidating and so wonderful to think that you had worked written that wonderful, wonderful work.

Also, I LOVED your alternative idea and would love to see your scraps and bits. But my goodness, that would have an enormous story. The scope of it is astounding. GIANTS and Aral and Cordelia and the apple both protecting Barrayar and locking them in.

Wonderful wonderful stuff and thank you for the wonderful work.

[edenfalling]

Thank you for a wonderful prompt!

As for scraps of the alternate idea, this is as far as I got:

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Commander Cordelia Naismith stumbled out of a narrow cave mouth, supporting Ensign Dubauer over her shoulder, and stopped dead at the edge between shadow and sunlight.

This was not the world she had been on an hour ago. The sky was pale blue rather than turquoise, and the sun yellow-white rather than a deeper gold. The terrain wasn't too dissimilar -- grassy highland plains stretching toward distant mountains -- but the plants themselves were utterly different, all of them nagging at the edges of her memory as if she should know them already. In fact, she thought, taking an involuntary step backward toward the shelter of the cave, if she didn't know better, she would swear she had stepped into a holo documentary of Earth.

Impossible.

And yet, she couldn't deny the evidence of her senses. She had dragged the injured Dubauer into the cave barely five minutes ahead of the Cetagandan scouting party, hoping to lose them in the darkness, and had exited somewhere completely different, as if they had walked through a jump point underground.

Damnation. She hoped the René Magritte had escaped the Cetas and returned home to Beta Colony with a warning. The Cetagandan Empire was on an expansionary path -- Komarr twenty years ago, Marilac ten years ago -- and they were due for another war. Cordelia had no idea what they wanted with an unknown world in the middle of nowhere, but she doubted it would be beneficial to any of the neighboring polities.

Dubauer moaned, one leg twitching and spasming as if trying to give out under his weight. Hastily Cordelia lowered him to the mossy ground outside the cave and shoved her handkerchief between his teeth, in case the symptoms turned into a full-blown seizure. Dubauer stiffened, then began to shake all over in slow waves, his mouth drawn back around the handkerchief in a rictus grin.

Cordelia waited out the seizure, then blew out her breath and examined him anxiously, which she hadn't had time to do before. She had caught the edge of the ravine as Dubauer shoved her out of the Cetagandan's line of fire, fumbled out her stunner, and dropped the painted soldier to the ground. Then she had hauled the ensign to his feet and run for the only potential shelter she could think of.

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Basically I couldn't find the right balance between reusing Bujold's words and events and telling the story in my own voice and pacing. :-(

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Oh.... Oh.... <33333

She had dragged the injured Dubauer into the cave barely five minutes ahead of the Cetagandan scouting party, hoping to lose them in the darkness, and had exited somewhere completely different, as if they had walked through a jump point underground.

Perfect

[waywren]

What there is is flat gorgeous, though. ♥

[edenfalling]

Thank you! :)