Susan pauses, sipping from her fresh mug of tea while she gathers her thoughts. "A great deal of learning on the job," she decides. "I was twelve, when we first entered Narnia. There had been a prophesy that two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve would defeat the White Witch and take the thrones at Cair Paravel, and we managed that in considerably less than a month. Peter was thirteen; Edmund was barely ten and Lucy was almost nine. What little we knew of the world! Peter and I were, of course, used to minding the littler ones." This is said modestly; Susan had been the little mother and the primary caretaker of her whole family.

"But a fantastical world like Narnia, whose populations were more talking beasts, and fauns and dryads and river-gods, and dwarfs and giants and centaurs, with not a single human? I don't know; perhaps only a child could wrap his mind around that sort of responsibility." Her gaze is very faraway indeed. "By the time we left, we were quite good at it, I believe. It really does take considerably more hard, thankless work than one might imagine."