Sometimes she wakes, gasping, from dreams she can barely recall on waking--joy in the coolness of earth between her toes, laughter wheeling high and bright as the hawks overhead as she dances hand-in-hand with foxes and fauns and dryads, unafraid between the bright-steel flourishes of centaur swords--to gentle hands and sweet, soft words.

"It's all right, darling, it's all right, it was only a dream," he murmurs, smoothing her hair back from her forehead in a gesture that aches with tenderness, and pretending not to notice the tears she never sheds.

Susan looks into her husband's handsome, concerned face across the wreck of their marriage bed and wonders if his eyes would seem bluer if she had never seen a Narnian sky.