The coffins went into the earth one by one, quiet and solemn and somehow absurd. Susan wanted to cry and scream and run in circles all at once. Instead, she stood alone, pale and still, clutching five yellow roses. One from each bouquet, and the rest of them would be buried.

After all this, it was wrong, horribly wrong, that their final resting place would be here in gray pragmatic England. Even now, it was raining.

The service was short. She stood frozen in place as men and women with black umbrellas and neat, dark clothing passed her, murmuring consolations. None of them wanted to stay out in the rain, though, so it wasn't long before she was alone. She looked down at her feet, sensible black shoes shiny against the wet grass, just visible beneath her long wool coat. So different from the way she usually dressed. So different from the way they had dressed as kings and queens in...no. That way lay madness.

The roses trembled in her hands and a petal fell, sticking to her left shoe. Every way lay madness. Even now, she could never quite make up her mind that Narnia had been a dream. It was strange to watch her own reflection in the mirror and know when the boils and the gawky teenaged awkwardness was going to turn into beauty. Strange to look in the mirror at twenty and know how she would look in five years, because she had already grown up once.

Strange to think how Peter's golden good looks had been as suited to an Oxford blazer as to shining armor.

Or Edmund, quiet, good-natured Edmund, who had settled the disputes of lords in one land and his school mates in another.

Or Lucy, who was at home wherever she happened to be.

In Narnia--what use was there in pretending now, inside her own head? Everyone who knew was gone--there would have been a funeral pyre. The fauns would have played dirges on their pipes, and Caer Paravel would have been hung with banners bearing the royal crest. Aslan would have been there, proud and stern and fearsome. She could have touched his mane and looked into his eyes and found something there that would make the agony of losing them a little less.

Instead there was rain, gray headstones, and a sea of black umbrellas moving toward the waiting automobiles.