adaperturamlibri:

Aravis Tarkheena 

She envies Shasta here. He is uncertain how to carry himself, unconfident in his newfound status as the lost prince and the future king, but even with his lingering awkwardness and his lack of knowledge, this is home to him. This is a reunion, a returning, a restoration of all that should have been and that now can be. He belongs in this land of cool winds and rolling hills, connects with this land of genteel earnestness and of plain honest speech.  

She doesn’t.

She is the refugee, the foreigner, all dark-skin and speech too superfluous for this sincere land. She is different, separated, the reminder of a ruthless invasion and of losses that still echo through this stone fortress in which she dwells. She is the runner, the brave and the foolish one all at once, the prideful child of a land of prestige and tradition, the one that escaped not because there was no choice, but because the choice was unacceptable.

Even still, she misses it.  

She misses the desert sands and the refreshing oasis’s and the way the sun danced across the river; she misses the cool silks and spicy foods and the elegant and poetic cadence of their speech. She longs for the feeling of belonging and relishes the comfort of nostalgia. Calormen was not without its beauty.

Yet she will not regret her decision (she will mourn decisions made along the way; the bitter tang of harshly spoken words, the deep scars of pride), but she ran to freedom, to that elusive hope in the northern sky, and she will not stop searching until she finds that for which she yearns.

She stays there, in the stone castle on a green plain, surrounded by mountains and streams, and she makes her own decisions and learns her own wisdom, and she makes this her home. She learns to embrace the gentle poise of Archenland’s court, the earnestness of its people, and she melds it with the lessons she learned as a little girl under the harsh, unforgiving, beautiful Calormen heat until it becomes something of her very own (something forgiving, something honest, something graceful, built on the foundation of sweet grass and grey stone and swirling to the northern sky with cascading folds of gentle silk and time-honored poetry).

This is her home.

Narnian Monarch Series