Susan doesn't believe in the mansion spirits, but she is being followed by something in a way that makes little sense.

It begins when she wakes up. Opening the drawer to the sideboard in her room to retrieve tea, she finds another gold chess piece wrapped neatly in ribbon. Lancelot didn't put it there - it hadn't been there when she made her pre-sleep cuppa the night before, and she woke up when he did and sleepily saw him off to his training; he hadn't gone near the drawer. She shuts the chess piece firmly away, makes her tea, and dresses blearily for her own archery practice.

There's a new bow in the closet, too. To her pleasure, it's a heavier one that requires a stronger pull - she's quite got used to the draw of the ones the closet first supplied to her.

After her shooting routine, she finds a lipstick in the precise shade Ingrid used to wear on the bathroom vanity. When she's showered and dressed for the rest of her day, she finds her favorite pastry - a sort of breakfast roll she used to get from the shop by the tube station she'd walk past on her way to work, back in London - on a platter in the kitchen.

It's when she opens one of the closets in the hall off the library to return a pile of laundered wash-cloths that she receives both some clarity and a deepening of the mystery: a jumble of assembled balloons tumbles out, made of some queer material and filled with a gas that keeps them afloat. The writing on them reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUSAN PEVENSIE.

She stares at them, perplexed.


Susan's birthday post! Three days (by our reckoning) and eight months (by her reckoning) early! Feel free to have your puppets run into her in any reasonable location at any point during the day; she's just going to be accumulating more Stuff she can't get rid of as the day goes on.

When Susan wakes up, dawn is just cresting and she is alone.

This is not news. She often wakes up alone. But she'd hoped, despite Lucy's insistence that her visit was only for the day, that her sister might return. She hasn't, though, and Susan most continue on with her life.

She bathes, and brushes her hair until it's shining, and braids it into its usual crown. She can still feel the remnants of her brief assignation with Liu Mingyan as she stretches to pin her hair in place, and she presses her fingers to a mark on her collarbone for one thoughtful moment.

Then she goes to her closet and throws open its door -

- and freezes.

Susan has spent several weeks trying, impossibly, to inventory the contents of this mansion from top to bottom. Ever since the undead rose, she's been looking for a bow. There's been nothing. She knows there's been nothing; she's checked in every nook and cranny to determine, without question, that there is absolutely nothing.

There are three bow staves lined up along the wall. Although her eye is unpracticed of late, she can tell at a glance that one is a longbow, one is a recurve, and one is composite. She's drawn to them immediately, lifting each one in turn, feeling the wood and - in the case of the composite - the horn, as well. Each is unstrung, but there are a selection of strings coiled and hanging from a peg above them. When she turns, there's a quiver full of arrows; upon inspection, their fletchings and points are varied, as are their lengths.

She trembles, aching with want. Dressing goes quickly, more quickly than she's used to - her nylons twist, and she struggles to attach the garters. So she discards the lot, and pulls on a strange, newfangled pair of woolen stockings that are made of a stretchy material that joins up at the waist. She pulls a warm dress over it - one with sleeves that hug close to her arms. When she goes to retrieve her favorite boots, she finds a supple leather bracer stored with them.

She forces herself to remain calm. Oh, she doesn't leave the supplies in her closet. After all, what if they disappear again? She places them all carefully on her bed, and then rushes to the kitchen for a light breakfast and to fill a canteen with tea. And then she's half-running back to her room, gathering up the lot, and taking it outside.

As she stands outside, near a shooting range clearly made for muskets, she learns that though her body has lost some muscle mass since her last adulthood, it still remembers how to string a bow. These are not bows for novices: They all have heavy draw weights, and she has to warm the longbow up with her hands before she can wrangle the string into its nocks at both ends of its limbs. Susan knows better than to dry-fire a bow. Still, once each one is strung, she situates the quiver at her hip and gives each bow an experimental draw or two, easing the string back into place once she has a sense of their draw. She is thrilled to find that she will need practice some before she can pull the longbow to full draw.

A fierce, wild grin spreads unchecked over her face as she fits her first arrow to its string.