Narnia fic: "The White Harvest"

[bedlamsbard]

Title: The White Harvest
Author: bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Content Advisory: Language, fantasy battle sequences, violence
Summary: Sooner or later, the two fleets would meet and clash, spilling blood and broken spars into the calm blue water of the Eastern Ocean, feeding the monsters that inhabited the depths of the ocean, calling up the gods who watched over all who took to the sea. Narnia goes to war. Sequel to The Coastwise Lights.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, settings, situations, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, settings, situations, etc., belong to Walden Media.
Author's Notes: Thanks so much to snacky for the beta! Title from Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea-Wife." "The White Harvest" uses Warsverse backstory. It does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). Some scenes previously appeared in Make and Break Harbor. See end for a list of ships named in the story.



1

Osumare woke up to the sound of the High King retching messily out one of the stern windows. Sympathy would have been unwelcome, so instead of saying anything he lay in bed, listening to the sound of the Rising Sun going about her merry business, and only opened his eyes when Peter banged the window shut.

“Feel better?” he asked, not moving from his comfortable nest of sheets and blankets.

The High King was leaning against the wall next to the window, looking distinctly green. The only thing he was wearing was his trousers; his shirt was slung over the foot of Osumare’s bed. At the question, he gave Osumare a look of pure disgust, said, “No,” and got the window open again just in time.

Osumare levered himself up from the bed, reaching for his clothes. If it was anyone else, he’d be worried about their stomach for battle – given the most likely outcome for the day – but the one thing that had never bothered High King Peter of Narnia in all the years that Osumare had known him was killing. The entire fleet knew that His Most Royal Narnian Majesty had no head for the sea.

“I’ll make some tea,” he said in his most soothing voice, pulling on his breeches and going bare-footed to the spirit-stove in its tiled corner.

“Oh, good,” Peter said weakly. “I’ve just run out of things to vomit up.” He pulled his head back into the cabin, bracing himself on the wall with one hand. “Isn’t it good that everyone in the fleet has already sworn an oath to respect me.”

“They swore oaths to obey you, not to respect you,” Osumare pointed out, shaking the kettle to check that it had water in it before putting it on the stove. He struck a careful flint and touched it to the stove, leaning well back until the alcohol-soaked wick caught. “But they do that anyway,” he went on, pinching out the taper.

“I’ll take being obeyed,” Peter said. He made an abortive move towards the window again, then stopped, wincing. “I should have sent Ed.”

“You started this business, you finish it,” Osumare said, with mild sympathy. He found a clean mug and the tea tin he was looking for and set about preparing the remedy for seasickness he’d been plying the High King with since they’d left Narnia. Unfortunately it didn’t last more than a few hours at a time, and Peter had so far refused his urging to try the ship’s leech’s pin-pricks. Not that Osumare really begrudged anyone’s refusal to get stuck with pins, gold ones or not, but by the second week he was more than a little surprised that Peter wasn’t ready to try anything that might get rid of the sea-sickness.

Peter wrinkled his nose. “Is that any way to talk to your king?”

“I believe that’s what you said to Queen Susan, your majesty,” Osumare pointed out.

“So I did,” Peter agreed after a moment’s thought.

Up on the deck, the officer of the watch sounded six bells. Osumare put the mug down, the packet of tea prepared, and put his shirt on, keeping an eye on the kettle. Peter made a gagging sound and put his head out the window again.

Osumare watched him with some concern. The High King had been like that, with occasional patches of improvement, since they’d left Cair Paravel. The last time he’d ferried Peter around it hadn’t been half so bad; Osumare was surprised he was still on his feet this time, seasickness tea or not.

He picked up the mug and went over to the spirit stove as the kettle began whistling. Peter tottered over to take the mug, now full of tea, from him, and Osumare turned his attention back to the spirit stove, flicking at the lever that was supposed to turn it off. The little blue flame beneath the grill puttered off obediently, leaving nothing more than a little lingering heat in the air — already unwelcome at the beginning of a humid Terebinthian summer, even on the open ocean.

“We’re breakfasting with Her Majesty, Edeny, Malubay, Alacyn, and the Terebinthian representatives,” he reminded the High King.

Peter was leaning heavily on Osumare’s desk, clutching the mug and looking wan. “I remember,” he said. “You know, I left my social secretary behind in Cair Paravel for a reason.”

“Of course, your majesty,” Osumare said smoothly, and saw Peter roll his eyes. “Please remember that in a bell or so the steward will come and clear out the cabin so that we can use it for breakfast.”

“I do remember things, you know,” Peter said at his back as Osumare picked up his uniform jacket and went out on deck, holding the cabin door open so that two great cats from the Royal Guard and Peter’s body servant could go in and minister to the High King.

Dawn painted the Great Eastern Ocean in shades of gold and red. Osumare glanced up at the sky automatically – red sky at morn, sailors be warned – but this early it was clear and cloudless, the curve of the moon still pale in the heavens. To either side of the Rising Sun were spread the ships of the Royal Narnian Navy, a motley band of cutthroats, pirates, deserters, and other miscreants, each and every one of them loyal to Narnia unto death. Before them stood the the Labyrinth, the tangle of jagged stones that completely encircled Terebinthia. Most of them were as tall as or taller than the Rising Sun’s mainmast; a few would have dwarfed even the Winter’s End, the fleet’s aerial carrier. The Labyrinth was almost a league deep, filled with more danger than any dozen nautical leagues even on the Great Eastern Ocean; true to its name it was a maze of lichen-covered rock, with its depths varied and ever-shifting and filled with the monsters of the sea. Sharks, certainly, and wraith-sisters and devilfish, and a thousand other beasts. There were passages through it, of course: the eel-holes that Terebinthian fishing boats used, only a few of which were large enough to admit even a small warship, and the Needle, the twisting passageway that was the only known route wide enough and deep enough to admit a ship-of-the-line. That was the passage Osumare had always taken; to make it successfully from the open ocean to the Port of Paradise was called “threading the Needle.” The stones of the Labyrinth themselves were called the Guardians, many of them connected to each other by rope catwalks. The minders, who usually barely allowed themselves to be seen, were out in full force today, presumably armed to the teeth as they squatted on top of the tall rocks on the edge of the ocean. At this distance they were nothing more than black shapes on the stabbing gloom of the Guardians. Over the whole daunting mess loomed Calypso’s Heart, the volcano that lay at the center of the island. Legend said that it was the goddess herself who’d raised the Labyrinth from the depths of the sea to protect her favored home.

It made a grim sight, the more so coupled with the Terebinthian fleet arrayed in front of the entrance to the Needle, a stubborn barrier to complete Narnian domination over the entire Eastern Ocean north of the Spearhead. Sooner or later, the two fleets would meet and clash, spilling blood and broken spars into the calm blue water of the Eastern Ocean, feeding the monsters that inhabited the depths of the ocean, calling up the gods who watched over all who took to the sea.

Osumare would have preferred sooner rather than later. The ships had been doing this dance for a week already before the Sun had arrived yesterday with the High King onboard. Prince Seabright was evidently still holding out hope that this would be resolved without bloodshed. Unless he was prepared to bow the knee and swear his oath to Narnia without reservation, Osumare didn’t think he had much of a chance.

“Morning, Admiral,” said Chinyere Greywater, his first lieutenant, coming up to him with a swagger in her step. Osumare’s steward trailed behind her, carrying a tray with a pot of tea and two cups on it. Chinyere took one; Osumare took the other.

“We do travel in style when His Majesty is with us, don’t we?” she said, blowing across the top of the cup to cool her tea.

Osumare looked at the cup, which was made of repoussé silver and dwarfed by his brown seaman’s hand. “You could say that,” he agreed. “Though I doubt this was the High King’s decision.”

Chinyere grinned. “Not exactly his type?”

“It’s one of Queen Susan’s tea sets,” he said, pointing out the daffodil stem that made up the handle of the cup. “I wonder if he’s noticed.”

She laughed and changed the subject. “Jaq Malubay’s already here, with Fiorenza Paolucci; I sent them down to the wardroom, though it doesn’t look like they’ve gone.” She nodded over his shoulder.

Osumare turned around, hastily switching his teacup to his other hand so he could clasp hands with Captain Jaq Malubay, then with the lady knight Fiorenza Paolucci, following behind the naval captain. “We came to keep you company,” Osumare told them, grinning.

“That’s so kind of you,” Jaq said, his eyes dancing. He was a short, stocky man, originally from Marinel on the far side of the continent; he’d sailed with Osumare for three years under the black flag until they’d made the decision to turn to Narnia. His ship was the sleek Copper Rain, which was changing its ensign now – from the naval insignia above a red lion on gold that meant command by a fleet admiral to one with the gold lion on red. A monarch of Narnia commanding. “And here I thought we were holding off on all the fun until His Majesty arrived.”

“Something like that,” Osumare said. “But we thought we’d come keep you safe.”

“What are you going to do, catapult barrels of boiling tea at them?” Jaq nodded at the cup in his hand. “Njord have mercy, I took Queen Susan to the Seven Isles last year and we didn’t travel half so nice.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever sailed with the High King,” Fiorenza said, tucking her thumbs into her sword belt. “Where is Peter?”

“Where do you think?” Osumare said. “When is Lucy getting here?”

“Now, from the sound of it,” Chinyere said, as the Ilhazul Reisende, the officer of the watch, called the appropriate notification. A few minutes later Commodore Edeny Yricsdottir and Captain Laris Alacyn clambered over the side of the Rising Sun, followed shortly by Queen Lucy, who was brandishing her cordial almost before both feet hit the ground.

“Hullo, Osumare!” she cried merrily. “Where’s my brother?”

“My cabin,” Osumare said, raising his tea cup in a salute. “I would suggest you go quickly.”

“I’ll go with you,” Fiorenza said. “Someone has to sit on Peter while you dose him.” She followed Lucy into the cabin, trailed by two leopards from Lucy’s Guard. Both of them looked rather ill.

Edeny raised an eyebrow at her back, strolling over to join the knot of captains. Laris Alacyn followed sedately in her wake, his monkey riding quietly on his shoulder. “Good to see you, Admiral,” he said, putting out his hand for Osumare to shake. His grip was firm; he smiled easily at Osumare before he let go.

Edeny Yricsdottir didn’t offer to shake hands. “Nice of you to finally show up, Seaworth,” she said, with only a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

Osumare drank the last of his tea and handed the cup off to the steward. “Oh, you know me, Edeny. I like to make a fashionably late entrance.”

“Well, as long as you’re the last of the late arrivals,” Jaq said. “Addai and Qaya came in a few hours ago, so I think that’s everyone – unless His Majesty decided to call out Taini, too?” His expression suggested the unlikelihood of this, and Osumare shook his head. They had to keep someone at home, just in case Calormen or some other enemy decided to make a try for the Narnian homeland while the High King and the majority of the Navy were abroad. Taini Ticotin’s Black Pearl and three others ships remained on coastal patrol, just in case. Leaving Narnia unprotected would have been unimaginably stupid, and the High King Peter was nothing of the sort.

“Now we’re just waiting on the Terebinthians,” Osumare said, and almost on cue all of them turned to look at the Terebinthian fleet, stubbornly guarding the entrance to the Needle.

2

The Narnian fleet had been blockading the Needle for three months now, which was about three months longer than anyone had actually expected the blockade to last, given that Terebinthia was dependant on the sea in a way that few other islands were. They couldn’t blockade the two dozen or so eel-holes in the Labyrinth, since no one knew where they were, but that didn’t exactly help Terebinthia’s bad mood. Only Paradise hookers, the small fast fishing boats that were ubiquitous in Terebinthia, could run the eel-holes, not traders or warships. Terebinthia might be able to feed itself, but they weren’t making a profit anymore, and it hadn’t taken them long to feel the effects, especially once the aerial corps began making strafing runs with firepots over the Port of Paradise. The minders on the Labyrinth couldn’t watch every corner of Terebinthia and the griffins in the Narnian aerial corps had rather a lot of practice at doing their job.

Sending the aerial corps to attack civilians wasn’t what Osumare would have done, but he hadn’t been commanding, Edeny Yricsdottir had, and she’d made that decision because the hookers slipping out of the eel-holes to attack the Narnian blockade hadn’t been navy, but civilian fishing boats. Her decision made perfect logical sense. That didn’t mean Osumare liked it.

Peter came up to the deck half a bell after his sister had gone to dose him with cordial, still pale, but no longer looking quite so ill. Fiorenza followed him, talking softly with Hazhir, the head of Peter’s Guard.

“Lu said the fleet hasn’t tried to break the blockade,” he said, leaning on the rail next to Osumare. He was dressed now, though he’d left his tunic unbuttoned over his pale green shirt.

“No use in trying if they know they won’t succeed,” Osumare said, glancing at the thin crescent of Terebinthian ships blocking the Needle. “We outnumber them two to one. Prince Seabright must still be hoping we can resolve this peacefully.”

Peter snorted. “He could have done that six months ago, before he started listening to Lune’s nonsense.” He straightened back up. “That is a bit intimidating, isn’t it?”

“What, the Labyrinth? There’s a reason no one has ever taken Terebinthia before.”

Peter’s mouth twitched, his expression avid. “Before,” he repeated, sounding satisfied, and turned away from the rail. Fiorenza tugged him towards her, doing up the buttons on his tunic as he rolled his eyes.

“Here come the Terebinthians,” she said. “Haz, send someone to go and get His Majesty’s crown, will you?”

“All we’re going to do is dissemble and threaten each other,” Peter protested as Hazhir sent another Guard member racing off.

“Well, you might as well be formal about it,” Fiorenza told him, straightening his tunic.

Osumare grinned, bracing himself on the rail as he watched them. Sure enough, a longboat was on its way over from the Terebinthian fleet. “Seabright’s not coming,” he said, glancing at it. “That looks like Admiral Breakwave; the prince must be afraid that if he comes himself we’ll hold him until he signs Terebinthia over to Narnia.”

“There’s a good idea,” Peter said wistfully. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

“We did,” Fiorenza told him. “Unfortunately it doesn’t work if the prince doesn’t actually show up.”

“Pity,” Peter said, and sighed as the wildcat Hazhir had sent returned, bearing his crown delicately in her mouth. Fiorenza took it from her, wiping any remaining spittle off with her sleeve, and glared at the High King until he bent his head to receive it. When he straightened back up, she continued making minute adjustments to her satisfaction. Peter hadn’t bothered to bring his most formal crown; this was a thin circlet of golden oak leaves with rubies inset at uneven intervals.

When she stood back, she quirked a finger at Osumare. “You, button up your coat. We’re Narnian officers, let’s look like it.”

Osumare did so, adjusting his sword belt. “Who put you in charge?”

“Alarmingly, I’m the only person on this floating terror actually trained in diplomacy,” Fiorenza said, resting her left hand idly on her sword hilt. “Since we’re playing at diplomacy, you listen to me so we don’t offend the nice Terebinthian diplomats anymore than we’ve already done.”

Unlike the majority of the misfits that had filtered into Narnia to join the army or navy, Fiorenza Paolucci was the best of the best, a lady knight educated and trained at the famed Accademia Militare di Shoushan in the empire of Shoushan. From what Osumare had heard and the little Fio said, the Accademia trained its cadets in everything from basic survival to court etiquette alongside the best fighting techniques you could learn away from the battlefield. Fio didn’t talk about it much; Osumare guessed that she was probably homesick. Like the rest of them, she hadn’t left her homeland under the best of circumstances.

“If diplomacy means looking nice, then you’re a vision,” he told her, and she rolled her eyes, looking a little pleased by the compliment. She and the High King were dressed similarly, though she wore pale fawn and dark brown rather than Peter’s shades of green.

“Flatterer,” she said.

“And here I thought you knew that we pirates do nothing of the sort,” Osumare said, offering her a mocking half-bow, and she punched him lightly in the arm.

“Children,” Peter drawled, his expression amused. “Play nice.”

“Aren’t we both older than you, your majesty?” Fiorenza said archly.

“Do try and show it,” Peter said. “Fio, you’re with me; Osumare –”

“I’ll make sure Breakwave gets a proper greeting,” Osumare said, and grinned.

3

No one was surprised when the negotiations went nowhere. Breakwave blustered, the High King threatened, Queen Lucy got steadily more sarcastic as breakfast went on, and Edeny nearly backhanded Osumare when he stepped on her foot to keep her from insulting one of the Terebinthian diplomats. Laris Alacyn had had to excuse himself early when his monkey tried to bite some salt-lord from the southern shore. By the time Osumare was escorting the Terebinthians to a strategic withdrawal, open hostilities had been arranged to commence at dawn tomorrow.

“I’ll regret seeing you across a battlefield, Admiral,” Osumare told Breakwave as they waited for the diplomats to climb down into the waiting longboat.

“You don’t have to,” Breakwave said, glancing around the deck of the Rising Sun. He wore an uneasy expression; Osumare couldn’t blame him, given that four members of the Royal Guard were hanging back watching the Terebinthians depart. None of the four lionesses looked at all happy. Osumare wagered they looked even less so when Breakwave caught his sleeve and drew him forward, pitching his voice low.

“You were Terebinthian once, Admiral Seaworth,” he said. “You could be again –”

“Thank you, Admiral, but no,” Osumare said, drawing back. “My loyalty is to Narnia and her kings and queens.”

Breakwave’s lips compressed into a thin line. “Surely you know that High King Peter can’t possibly succeed. No one has ever defeated the Labyrinth –”

“They said that about the White Witch,” said Osumare. He slapped Breakwave on the shoulder. “I’ll see you on the battlefield, Admiral.”

4

Well after midnight, Chinyere came to wake Osumare with a light touch on his shoulder. “Admiral,” she said softly, as Osumare opened one eye. In the other bed, Peter twitched awake, a dagger suddenly in his hand before he recognized Chinyere and let it fall.

“What is it?”

Chinyere blinked, looking a little unnerved at suddenly having the full attention of the High King focused on her for the first time. Technically Peter was supposed to be sleeping alone in the great cabin, the privilege of being a king of Narnia, but he’d been so ill since they left Cair Paravel that he’d submitted surprisingly meekly to sharing the cabin with Osumare. (Which, frankly, had almost been more alarming than his seasickness; the High King of Narnia wasn’t known for being meek about anything.) Nobody on board had protested, since that meant that the entire ship hadn’t been shuffled around their sleeping quarters while Osumare took Chinyere’s, Chinyere took Reisende’s, and so on down until the ship’s cats were looking for somewhere to bunk down. A warship didn’t keep spare cabins for guests.

“Paradise hookers, your majesty,” she said. “A damn lot of them.”

“Seabright’s making a move,” Peter said, rolling out of bed and grabbing for his boots. He shoved his feet into them, then snatched up his sword, buckling it around his waist as he barged out the door. Osumare did the same and followed him out onto deck, Chinyere trailing after them.

The Royal Guard on deck were sitting up, alert and staring out at the ocean. It was a hot night; beads of sweat were already rising beneath the thin cotton of Osumare’s shirt. The battle tomorrow would be miserable, though better hot than cold. He’d spent one too many winters chasing merchant ships across the equator to think cold was remotely preferable to heat.

“Admiral,” Chinyere said, handing him a spyglass and pointing out the direction.

Osumare saw immediately what had raised the alarm. Rounding the rocks of the Labyrinth was a small fleet of Paradise hookers, dark sails raised to catch the wind – and send them straight at the Narnian fleet. There was any amount of sabotage they might be up to – cutting the ships free of their anchors, disabling the rudders, even trying to take some of the ships, though a hooker couldn’t carry enough people to make that practical –

He passed the spyglass to Peter. “Bats,” he told Chinyere softly. It was well past sunset, too dark for the birds they’d usually use to pass messages, and there were no owls in the navy. “Warn the others. No flags; let’s not allow the Terebinthians to see we’ve noticed them.”

“Aye, sir,” she said, striding off.

“Why to the south?” Peter murmured, keeping his voice low. Sound carried easily across open water; neither of them wanted to alert the Terebinthians. “The flagship’s here, we’re the obvious target –”

Osumare shook his head. He was missing something, he knew it, something important, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was -–

“They could even catch us in a pincer if they wanted,” Peter went on. He swung the spyglass around to the north; Osumare squinted into the darkness, but that side of the Labyrinth was clear. The only Terebinthian ships were coming from the south side. “Why, what’s so important about the south –”

He passed the spyglass back, his eyelids flickering. Osumare watched the hookers approach. The first ship they’d reach would be Lasi Pertwee’s Sea Queen; the Archenlander had spotted them already and had the same idea as Osumare. Her archers were scaling the rigging, bows and quivers on their backs, while the remainder of the crew waited on deck. If the hookers saw the action, they made no sign of it.

Both he and Peter glanced upwards as the Narnian bats took off in a black cloud that soon dissipated, each bat carrying its message to the other ships of the fleet. Within minutes the entire fleet would know.

And then the fireship rounded the Labyrinth, towed by three Paradise hookers.

Osumare cried out despite his better instinct, grabbing at Peter’s wrist. The High King’s eyes snapped open; he said shortly, “The Winter’s End. That’s where they’re going.”

The aerial carrier. The single greatest advantage Narnia had over all her foes on sea. The most vulnerable ship on the fleet, because the carrier wasn’t meant to go into combat, it was supposed to stay out of it, a landing place for the griffins that provided the navy’s aerial support. If the Terebinthians sank her, it would come near to crippling the Narnian fleet.

“Oh, sweet Tethys, Mother of Seas, Lady of the Hungry Waters –” The prayer died on Osumare’s lips as he turned away from the rail, giving up secrecy in return for prudence. “Somebody sink that fucking bitch!” he bellowed. “Damn you bastards, sink her!”

Lights were flaring up throughout the fleet; he wasn’t the only officer who’d spotted the fireship. The bulky Winter’s End was casting loose, or trying to, her captain desperately trying to steer her out of the way. Osumare kicked his boots off and hauled himself up into the rigging, leaving Peter on the deck below him as he climbed for the crow’s nest. The seaman stationed there, a human named Vicken, knuckled his obeisance hastily and passed him the spyglass, clutching at the railing as he stared at the encroaching disaster.

“Keep an eye on Terebinthia,” Osumare snapped. With the entire fleet’s attention on the fireship, now would be an excellent time for Prince Seabright to mount an offensive. Osumare didn’t want to be caught flatfooted if he did.

The deck of the Winter’s End was an anthill of action, crewmen running madly around in near-chaos. Of all the ships in the fleet, only the Winter’s End carried catapults; they were being readied to launch at the fireship. If they hit in time – if they hit well – they could sink the fireship before they came close enough to the End –

The attention of the Sea Queen and the Poison Rose, the two nearest ships, was taken up with the hookers harassing them. Both had run out their scorpia, oversized crossbows that fired bolts capable of punching through two feet of solid oak, and had archers mounted on the deck and the tops, firing down upon the hookers. Shadowsinger was trying to maneuver itself so that it could fire on the fireship, but it was blocked by the hookers and the other two ships. No one else was close enough –

Osumare moaned, pressing the spyglass so close against his face that he knew he’d have marks tomorrow. Aerial corps wings were rising from the flight deck of the Winter’s End, barrels clutched in their talons – seawater, or even the End’s drinking water, Captain Alacyn had to be frantic by now, mad enough to throw anything at the fireship in the hopes of saving his ship. It wouldn’t do any good, nothing that small could put out the raging inferno headed straight at the End.

He was vaguely aware of Peter on the deck below him, snapping an order out to Chinyere. The two Guard leopards were practically glued to his side, just as agitated as Osumare though with less cause. Another flight of bats rose from the Rising Sun, briefly blocking out Osumare’s view of the End before they separated.

He saw the Swiftsure glide out of the line, cutting hard against the wind as she made straight for the fireship. She was a seventy-foot corvette, small and sturdy; the Alvaradans couldn’t build a poor warship if they tried. Her sails were up; Nelka Sabiny must have had her crew rowing as hard as they could. She might just make it.

The first of the End’s catapults launched, but the round fell short, landing in the ocean between the foremost two hookers with a splash. The second struck splinters off the burning figurehead, but made no other impact upon the fireship.

“Sink the bitch,” Osumare pleaded, half a prayer and a half a curse. “Tethys, Njord, gods of sea and storm, sink that fucking bitch –”

He expected the Swiftsure to turn so that she could rake the fireship, send scorpion bolts crashing through her sides and ripping her belly open for the sea to rush in. But the Swiftsure didn’t have enough scorpia for that; she’d barely tickle the fireship, unless she got in a lucky hit – except Sabiny didn’t turn, just kept heading steadily for the fireship. Osumare stared at the ship through his spyglass, and realized in horror that the Swiftsure was steadily dropping her longboats, each of them packed full of her crew, until the only people left on the ship were the ones pulling the oars and the slim figure of Captain Sabiny at the wheel.

Osumare knew abruptly what Sabiny meant to do, in the three heartbeats before the Swiftsure barreled straight into the side of the fireship, the force of her oarsmen driving the fireship forward before it broke in two. Flaming shards of wood flew in all directions, sending the crews on the hookers towing the fireship diving into the ocean as their sails caught fire. The Swiftsure was already burning, her momentum continuing to carry the fireship out into the open ocean as the Winter’s End ponderously inched out of range.

Alarmed by the fireship’s failure, the hookers attacking the Sea Queen and the Poison Rose began to disengage, their crews running back and forth across the decks to rearrange their sails. Too late the Shadowsinger got into position, her sides rippling as she loosed scorpion bolt after scorpion bolt. Even from here Osumare could hear the screams.

He took a deep breath, tearing his gaze away from the burning ships, and swung the spyglass back towards the Terebinthian fleet. There were lights lit on every ship, but none of them moved to aid the dying hookers. If asked, then, Prince Seabright and Admiral Breakwave would claim that the night attack, before the truce had expired, had been no work of theirs, just an independent action of the beleaguered fishermen who manned the hookers.

Osumare glanced back at the scrum on the other side of the fleet. The Narnian ships were rapidly mopping up what was left of the hooker fleet; the fireship was disintegrating into the ocean, and the Swiftsure was burning merrily, but well out of reach of the Winter’s End unless the wind changed abruptly. Osumare prayed that Nelka Sabiny and all her people had gotten off the Swiftsure in time.

5

The Swiftsure was still burning when Osumare and the High King were rowed over to the Winter’s End to find out the extent of the damage. There were dark shapes circling beneath the water as they passed over it – sharks and worse things, the scavengers of the seas. Like crows on land, they could sense a battle about to begin – or already ended, like the mess of wreckage where the hooker fleet had died. The unfortunates who hadn’t been lucky enough to get pulled out of the water by the Winter’s End or the Shadowsinger were contributing to their meal; scattered clouds of blood in the water revealed the signs of their passage. Osumare eyed them uneasily, touching the line of cedar on the side of the gig. By this time tomorrow he might not be in any better condition.

The gig bumped gently against the side of the Winter’s End. He and Peter clambered up the rope ladder let down for them, dropping lightly onto the deck. There was blood congealing in pools all across it; the dead were being laid out in rows on the far side of the End’s massive waist. Osumare was relieved to see that most of them appeared Terebinthian instead of Narnian, then felt a twinge of guilt. Admiral Breakwave had been right on one thing, at least: Osumare Seaworth had been Terebinthian, once.

Fiorenza Paolucci came to greet them, her expression tired. “Her Majesty’s tending to the wounded,” she said, and Osumare saw Peter breathe in, sharp, and his shoulders relax.

He reached out to pull Fiorenza into a short one-armed hug; she gripped the back of his shirt for a moment, then kissed his cheek and stepped back. “I thought you were with Malubay on the Rain.”

“Faryion wanted a word.” She named the commander of the aerial corps. “It went on longer than I expected. Bit more exciting than I expected, too.” She turned away from him, striding towards the undercastle. “Prisoners in the brig, just like you ordered.”

Osumare blinked at the High King. “When did you –”

“You were busy. I sent bats.” They followed Fiorenza down into the dank gloom of the griffins’ berthen deck, Peter shuddering a little at the enclosed space. The High King of Narnia was claustrophobic as well as prone to seasickness; Osumare wasn’t sure if he’d gone belowdecks even once since the Rising Sun had left Cair Paravel.

They descended further down into the bowels of the ship, standing aside once as a pair of seamen dragged a spare chest of medical supplies up from the hold. They paused to nod to Osumare and the High King, their hands too full to make their obeisance. The End’s brig was in the orlop deck, three sets of iron cages currently full of Terebinthian prisoners and a fourth that held only a single woman. One of Captain Alacyn’s lieutenants was standing guard over them along with a brace of angry-looking marines and, somewhat to Osumare’s surprise, one member of Lucy’s Guard. The big black jaguar was sitting primly on a crate of scorpion bolts, his tail dangling over the side. He scrambled up when he saw Peter, who’d been followed onboard by the customary two members of his Guard.

“Admiral Seaworth!” said the lieutenant, goggling at him. Osumare tried to remember his name, but couldn’t drag it up out of the depths of his memory and settled for nodding at the man instead. The lieutenant’s eyes widened even further when he recognized the High King. “Your majesty!” He tried to salute and bow all at once, nearly tripping over his own feet; a few of the Terebinthians laughed, until one of the marines banged his sword hilt against the nearest cage to make them stop.

“Hullo, Lieutenant,” Peter said tiredly, summoning up a smile. “Jeresh, what are you doing down here?” he added to the jaguar. “Shouldn’t you be with my sister?”

“Her Majesty’s orders. I’m keeping an eye on that one,” said Jeresh, nodding at the woman. “Relative of yours, Admiral? She says her name’s Seaworth.”

Peter and Fiorenza both glanced at Osumare curiously. He stepped past them into the narrow aisle between the cages, looking the woman up and down. She was shorter even than Queen Lucy, with dusky skin and her dark hair in looping braids that kept it out of her face. There was no insignia on her ribbed leather vest, but all her clothing was fine quality – far better than any common fisherman could afford. As far as Osumare was aware, the Salt-Lord Geremy Seaworth only had two daughters, and the elder was the same age as Osumare. Which left the younger sister, the one who’d been born the year Osumare had left Terebinthia. He only remembered her name because the Salt-Lord had thrown a three-day feast for the village, and they’d toasted her birth every hour on the hour.

“Lady-in-Rising Chaonaine Seaworth, of Njord’s Landing?” he guessed.

She raised her chin defiantly. “Who’s asking?”

“Fleet Admiral Osumare Seaworth, of the Royal Narnian Navy. And no,” he added, when she tensed further, “I’m not a relative. I wasn’t born with the name Seaworth.”

“Some fisher boy sniffing at the heels of your betters?” she scowled.

“Not anymore,” Osumare told her kindly, and turned back to Peter. “Your Majesty, may I present to you the Lady-in-Rising Chaonaine Seaworth of Njord’s Landing? I presume her ladyship was the one leading this particular enterprise.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” said Peter, managing to sound it. “Excuse the accommodations; you won’t have to put up with them much longer.”

“Because His Grace is going to kick your arse back to Narnia?”

“Because until the battle’s over, this is the safest place in the fleet,” said the High King. “After the fighting’s over, we can move you somewhere more appropriate to your station.”

“Oh, maybe not,” Fiorenza said, crossing her arms over her chest. “The war doesn’t officially start until sunrise, which makes you a brigand. I’m sure a hanging at first light will do wonders for morale.”

Seaworth stiffened. “You dare, you thieving bitch –”

“Wrong Narnian,” Fiorenza said, tossing her hair. “I’m an anointed knight with a lineage that goes back to the Libri d’Oro, while you’re just a treasonous oath-breaking petty noble from some rock in the Eastern Ocean.”

“Fio,” Peter said tiredly.

She turned back towards him. “Apologies, your majesty,” she said, not particularly sounding sincere. “I probably should have mentioned that Nelka Sabiny’s dead. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be with Captain Alacyn.” She waited for Peter to nod before she stepped away, climbing back up the ladder.

“Damn,” Osumare said softly. Nelka had been a good officer and a popular captain.

Chaonaine Seaworth sneered. “You should string her up. I bet she’s nothing more than some whore’s brat with a stolen sword –”

“You, shut the fuck up,” Osumare snarled. “She’s worth ten of you, and so’s the captain you murdered –”

“Admiral Seaworth, that will be enough,” Peter said. His voice was cold. “Lady Seaworth, I would suggest you consider your situation and cooperate. If you do so, you will be ransomed back to your people.”

She raised her chin. “And if I don’t?”

“As the lady knight said. You attacked my fleet while your country and mine were under truce. I would be well within my rights to have you hanged as a pirate.” He eyed her. “Or I may just start killing your people until you decide to talk.”

“You wouldn’t dare –”

Peter drew his sword and she stuttered short, watching him warily. Her throat worked for a moment, her gaze fixed on Rhindon’s shining blade, brilliant even in the gloom of the orlop.

“I’ll talk,” the Lady-in-Rising Chaonaine Seaworth said finally. “But not while he’s here.”

6

Nelka Sabiny’s first lieutenant was kneeling by her captain’s body. Osumare dredged her name out of the morass of his memory and knelt down beside her, putting a hand on her back.

“She said she’d be able to get off in time,” Lieutenant Tahirah said, sounding like she was fighting off tears. As far as Osumare knew, she didn’t have a surname; she might have been from one of the upper caste Calormene families, which didn’t tend to have family names. Or it could be that she just didn’t want to use it.

Compulsively, Tahirah leaned forward and straightened the collar of Nelka’s shirt, her hands lingering. Nelka must have been sleeping when the alarm was raised; she wasn’t wearing either jacket or shoes, just trousers and a loose shirt. Her hair was unbound, and some of it was crisped at the ends. Osumare glanced down at her feet, where the beginnings of burns were visible. There was no sign of any wound on her body, just the old scar around her throat from a failed hanging back before she’d come to Narnia. There was a lantern on the deck above her head, one of those stained glass confections Laris Alacyn liked, glowing softly purple and gold and illuminating Nelka’s face, still a little soft with a baby fat. She’d been one of the youngest captains in the Narnian fleet.

“Dekel brought her off the Swiftsure,” Tahirah said dully. “They were the last two off – the other rowers had already gone overboard. He said she’d collapsed by the wheel.” She tucked a strand of Nelka’s red hair behind her ear. “The leeches said it was probably smoke inhalation.”

“It would have been fast,” Osumare said. It wasn’t much reassurance, but it was better than nothing. He leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss to Nelka’s forehead, breathing in the smell of smoke, of burned hair and burned flesh, and suddenly wanted to be sick. “She saved the Winter’s End.”

“That was what she wanted,” Tahirah said, staring at the body of her captain. “That was what she said.”

Osumare gripped her shoulder, then rose and walked away, his gorge rising in his throat. Captain Alacyn, in his role as a divine of Okeanos, was moving slowly down the line of bodies, a censer hanging from one hand and a tangle of bells in the other. For once his monkey was still, clutching dumbly at his shoulder in a tight knot of fur and the stained brocade vest and trousers it had been wearing as long as Osumare had known Alacyn. The captain nodded at Osumare, but didn’t speak, just proceeded slowly down the line, wafting incense over the dead, calling on the gods with each ring of the bells. The censer glowed softly, ghostly in the darkness. The officer of the watch had marked six bells when Osumare was on his way up from the orlop – barely three in the morning, as the lubbers called it. The war hadn’t even started yet.

Counting Nelka, there were five Narnian dead; the others weren’t officers, and Osumare didn’t know if they were from the Swiftsure or one of the other ships that had been attacked. The others were all Terebinthian. Some had been burned so badly they were unrecognizable, while the others bore obvious arrow or sword wounds. Presumably they were the ones who’d been lucky enough to escape the sharks.

Osumare walked once down the line, then back again, studying the faces of the Terebinthian dead in the colored light cast by the stained glass lanterns. It took him a few minutes to realize that he was looking for something. Someone, rather.

He hadn’t been lying to Chaonaine Seaworth when he’d told her they weren’t related. They weren’t. The Seaworths had owned the land Osumare had been born on; he’d always liked the way it sounded, so when he’d been picked up by Urvashi Julane and her Bastard Queen he’d left behind his old surname and taken the new one. But he’d left behind a brother in Terebinthia, and if Lady-in-Rising Chaonaine Seaworth had attacked the Narnian fleet with her own people, then Adan Wisewaters might just be here somewhere.

Osumare prayed he wasn’t.


7

Up on the quarterdeck, the End’s officer of the watch marked seven bells on the ship’s big bronze bell. The sound was echoed through the fleet, ghost-like, and even more distantly in the waiting Terebinthian fleet. Osumare massaged the skin over his eyes, wishing he was back in his bed, preferably asleep. They should all have been asleep right now, getting some much needed rest before tomorrow’s battle.

Captain Alacyn’s steward refilled his teacup and stood back, lurking quietly in a corner of the End’s great cabin. Osumare stirred a heaping spoon of sugar into his cup. Queen Lucy, across the table, was drooping; Fiorenza was practically asleep on Peter’s shoulder; Faryion, the griffin commander of the aerial corps, was looking decidedly ruffled; and Alacyn seemed to be sustained by pure fury. Only the High King looked unaffected by the night’s events, and Osumare was certain that was a guise, since Peter was as human as the rest of them, excepting Faryion.

Peter took a sip of his tea and set the cup aside, reaching out with a pointer to remove the little figure of the Swiftsure from the map in front of them. He nudged it to the side of the map, which was a detail map of Terebinthia and the sea around it, and pondered the remaining figurines.

“Glory or Revenge,” Osumare suggested, prodding a lump of sugar that was so far refusing to dissolve. “I would suggest Revenge; Saltensail’s very steady, and he’s Terebinthian by birth.”

“Is that wise?” said Queen Lucy, frowning.

“Lu,” Peter warned, prodding the figure of the Revenge into shape. He frowned at the gap it left in the Narnian line, then pushed the Sea Queen into its place. “Signal Captain Saltensail about his new role,” he ordered. “And Pertwee as well, she’s to take the Revenge’s position in line.”

“Your majesty, if you want every Terebinthian-born sailor to leave the fleet, you’ll have to start with me,” Osumare said to Lucy, a little more harshly than he’d meant.

She looked surprised at his tone, her chin coming up defiantly. “I don’t want anything of the sort,” she said. “Considering the circumstances, I think it’s wise to ponder whether or not a Terebinthian or a — whatever Captain Addai is — is better suited for the mission in question.”

“Addai’s Galman,” Alacyn put in mildly.

“Saltensail’s a native Terebinthian, which means he knows the Labyrinth,” Osumare said, making his voice level out through force of will. Lucy had a point, even if he didn’t agree with it. “Addai’s never even threaded the Needle, so he wasn’t considered in the first place, though Glory’s certainly small enough. Revenge is a little larger than Swiftsure or the longships are, which is why I didn’t put Saltensail in that party in the first place, but when he left Terebinthia he brought her out through an eel-hole, not the Needle. I know he won’t betray Narnia; his status when he left Terebinthia was fairly unequivocal.”

“He seduced the Lord Chancellor’s wife,” Fiorenza roused herself to say. “In the Lord Chancellor’s bed. And was caught by the Lord Chancellor. He’s due to hang the moment he sets foot back on Terebinthian soil, apparently.”

Lucy’s mouth twitched slightly. “I see. My apologies, then. I’m sure if Peter didn’t trust Saltensail, he wouldn’t have brought him.”

“No,” Peter said, raising his head from the map. “If I didn’t trust Idris Saltensail, I wouldn’t have done him the insult of bringing him somewhere where his loyalties might have been compromised. Look, no more arguments, all right? We’re all very tired, since it’s four in the sodding morning, and none of us are thinking straight.” He took a sip of his tea. “Which is probably what Terebinthia wanted.”

There was a moment of silence, broken by Alacyn’s monkey chattering as it tried to crack open a walnut. Queen Lucy smiled at it absently, then said, “Did that woman tell you they’d been sent by Prince Seabright, then?”

“She said nothing of the sort, but I don’t doubt it,” Peter said. “Landowner or no, all her people would have been called up for the navy; they wouldn’t be under her command normally. And those are strong, healthy men and women, not old ones or young ones or sick ones, the one that would be left behind during a general call-up.”

“She’s no landowner,” Osumare added. “That’s her father. Her sister, maybe, if the old salt-lord’s dead, but not her.”

“My point,” Peter said dryly.

“You should hang her,” Fiorenza said between yawns. “And her men.”

Peter sighed. “I won’t be hanging anyone for the same reason I gave orders to take prisoners, not to kill on sight. We’re here to take and keep. I don’t want Terebinthia to take potshots at every Narnian within twelve leagues for the next thirty years because I hanged men and women who were just protecting their homeland.”

Fiorenza’s mouth compressed into a thin line. “You’d be within your rights,” she said.

“I know that. So do they.” He ran his finger idly over the rim of his teacup. “Besides, I like her,” he added, which made everyone at the table look at him in alarm. Two of the last three people he’d said that about had tried to kill him, and the third had been an Archenlander spy who’d been blinded and sent back to King Lune.

“I don’t think she likes you,” Osumare said finally, feeling like a teenage girl gossiping behind the boatsheds after her first village dance. At least the grim mood in the cabin was lightening; they could use that.

“She’ll come round,” Peter said airily, and waggled his eyebrows. Lucy looked rather like she might cry.

“Peter! What would Ed say?”

Peter grinned and made a terrifyingly explicit hand gesture which made Fiorenza spit her tea out all over the map. “He’d say –”

They were saved from further revelation about the High King’s attraction to dangerous Terebinthians (which Osumare couldn’t exactly resent, given their history) by Faryion, who was nodding off over the teacup clasped delicately between two talons, but who roused himself in order to ask if there was going to be anything new for tomorrow aside from the change in ships. The High King assured him that everything else would go as planned at least until the fighting started.

Laris Alacyn fed a lump of sugar to his monkey. “Is there any message you’d like us to signal to the fleet, your majesty?”

Unexpectedly, Peter’s mouth quirked. “Narnia expects every man to do his duty?”

Lucy was the only one who laughed. Fiorenza raised her head, blinking sleep from her eyes, and said, “We’re not all men.”

“We’re not all human,” Faryion said, expression suggesting insult.

“Don’t signal that,” Peter assured Captain Alacyn. “Narnia knows everyone will do their duty.”

8

Four bells. The horizon was lightening, though the sun hadn’t yet risen, and the ships of both fleets were buzzing with activity. If the Terebinthians had noticed that three of the Narnian ships had slipped away under cover of darkness – the last burning spars of the Swiftsure had been extinguished around one bell – they made no sign of it.

Razor netting had gone over the sides of the Rising Sun just a few minutes earlier, ready to slash any attempted boarders to ribbons. Up on the fore weather deck, the Sun’s quarter-wing of griffins were waiting impatiently, already in harness. Their crew hurried about, making last minute preparations of firepots and heavy stones. Archers lurked in the tops and on deck, extra quivers easy to hand. The remainder of the crew was armed to the teeth – literally, in the Royal Guard’s case.

Plate mail was a lubber’s affectation on shipboard. Not even the High King wore plate, just well-worn leathers with rings sewn in at particular vulnerable points. He’d been in enough sea battles to know better than to wear plate. Osumare hoped Fiorenza’s people knew the same. He’d reminded her in Cair Paravel and again last night, but she didn’t have as much experience at sea as Peter did. Shoushan was landlocked; she was trained to fight on her feet or from a horse’s back, not from the deck of a tossing ship. But she was a damn good soldier, and they’d need her and her fighters if – when – they made landfall. That was why Peter had asked her to come.

Osumare resisted the urge to pace the quarterdeck. Both fleets were tense with the waiting, each ship as taut as a bowstring at full draw. Every few seconds someone’s gaze went to the eastern horizon, looking for the first rays of sunlight to creep over the open ocean. Lieutenant Cydippe and the other saltwater Narnians lurked at the waist, most of them stripped to nothing more than loincloths and breastbands for the women. When it began, they’d go over the side to board the Terebinthians ships. Before he’d brought the Rising Sun into Narnian waters Osumare never would have thought that the civilized denizens of the depths would ever cooperate with landsmen, let alone follow the command of one. The Terebinthians wouldn’t expect it.

The High King stepped up beside him, curling his left hand around his sword hilt. The gold embroidery on his studded leather bracers and the stiff fighter’s collar on his neck gleamed dully in the light from a lantern someone had forgotten to extinguish. Osumare snapped his fingers and pointed at it, making Ensign Merryweather scurry to put it out. The nix did so, then cast a longing look down at Cydippe and the other saltwater Narnians at the waist.

Peter’s mouth quirked. “We’re so eager to get ourselves killed when we’re young,” he said, with the advanced wisdom of a man who’d only passed his twenty-fourth birthday that winter.

“Not that young,” Osumare said firmly. Merryweather wasn’t yet fourteen. If he was killed, it would be on the Sun’s deck, not because Osumare had sent him into the maw of the sea serpent.

“I was younger,” Peter said. He stroked the lion’s head pommel on his sword, his gaze fixed on the horizon. Osumare heard his breath catch as something that might have been the glow of the sun broke the flat blue barrier between ocean and sky. The Lone Islanders believed that it was only in the space between true night and true day that a man could speak to the Emperor-over-the-Sea and be sure of being heard. Soon the Emperor’s ears would be closed.

It was a vague, nonsensical thought, and Osumare found himself leaning forward slightly, his hand falling to his own sword-hilt. A shiver of eagerness ran through the fleet, a kind of restrained excitement like the moment before a boat-race started, hands on tacks and lines itching to be cast off from the constraints of land.

The glow grew, spreading. The sailors at the capstan were leaning on the bars, practically vibrating with eagerness as they waited for the order to raise anchor. The wheel-master Farid, normally so patient, was white-knuckled at the wheel, dressed for the occasion with a cross-belt bristling with sharpened knives.

The sun broke the horizon.

For a moment the quiet remained, that stillness of two countries not yet at war, and then the sea began to echo as captains shouted orders. Crews fitted scorpion bolts into the grooves of their weapons, ratcheting them into place with a familiar creaking sound that raised the hair on the back of Osumare’s neck. On the far side of the Sun, Lieutenant Cydippe and the other saltwater Narnians slipped into the water, hopefully unnoticed by the watching Terebinthians. The sailors at the capstan looked up at Osumare, waiting for the order to raise the anchor, but it never came. Narnia was at war, but no ship in the fleet moved.

9

Griffins rose in a flurry of beating wings from a dozen ships in the Narnian fleet, flying towards the Terebinthian fleet in a V led by Faryion and the End’s first wing. They flew low, heavy with the first payload that was held in webbing slung under their bellies or clutched in their talons. Osumare could hear shouts from the Terebinthian ships as the griffins neared them, archers hastily changing their aim from the Narnian ships to the aerial attack.

He raised his telescope, fixing it on the Terebinthian flagship Sea Dragon. Admiral Breakwave was on the quarterdeck, barking orders at his sailors; his scorpion crews were hastily adjusting their scorpia to fix on the griffins. They wouldn’t make it in time – not in time to stave off the first wave, at least, which was coming in hard and fast, a few of the griffins with lighter loads climbing so that the rocks they dropped would gather more momentum going down. When they let loose, Osumare could hear the screams echo across the water.

A flicker of movement at the tops of the Guardians. Osumare turned his telescope up, frowning, and barely restrained himself from letting his jaw gape open in shock. He’d expected archers on the Guardians, but not sodding siege weapons; the damned things hadn’t been there last night. The first stone was a streak of darkness across the sky, scattering the griffins’ formation as they retreated back to the fleet for their second payload.

“’Ware trebuchet!” Osumare bellowed, snapping the telescope closed. “’Ware trebuchet on the Labyrinth!”

The fleet was anchored out of range of the trebuchets, though when they finally began the approach it wouldn’t take long before trebuchet stones were raining down on them. Even when the Narnian fleet came closer, their height put them out of range of the scorpions, though the archers in the tops might have a chance. The Terebinthians must have snuck them up in pieces and assembled them last night while the Narnian fleet was occupied with the fireship and the hooker attack.

Osumare replaced the telescope in its case and gave in to his urge to pace, clasping his hands behind his back. On the fore weather deck, the aerial corps crew was hastily supplying the Rising Sun’s quarter-wing with their second payload – firepots this time. More dangerous to carry than rocks, but there was nothing more deadly on shipboard.

The second wave of griffins launched. An aerial carrier like the Winter’s End carried enough griffins to rotate waves of attack at their leisure, but everyone else would send out the same griffins time and time again. After this second wave, they would start rotating which ships sent out griffins, if the Terebinthians were so good as to allow them that luxury. Osumare rather thought they would be; as far as he knew, no other navy in the world used aerial forces like Narnia did, and certainly no one else had a military genius like the High King at its head. Terebinthia had no idea what to expect.

Up ahead, the second trebuchet stone whistled as it flew, sending griffins diving right, left, and high out of formation. It splashed harmlessly into the ocean, where a huge razor-backed shark surged out of the water to investigate the disturbance. It disappeared when it found that there was nothing edible about the missile, sending up a surge of white-edged spray in its wake. Osumare didn’t think it had long to wait.

10

Griffins went screaming by overhead, intent on disabling the trebuchets. Osumare had signaled the orders to Laris Alacyn on the Winter’s End; signals would be faster than sending a bird right now. He resented the delay, resented the fact that the Terebinthians had thought of something he and the High King hadn’t made contingency plans for.

“Easy,” said the High King next to him, as calm as if he was sitting in his sister’s bower back at Cair Paravel. “They’re wondering why we haven’t shown our hand yet. They think we know something they don’t.”

“We do know something they don’t,” Osumare said, gritting his teeth. The Terebinthians had archers in their tops as well, and they were loosing at the griffins now, arrows clattering against the battered rock faces of the Guardians as their shots fell short or splashing down into the ocean as they overshot. At least one struck a minder, so that the man clutched at the length suddenly protruding from his chest and fell slowly backwards off the Guardian, falling two hundred feet into the white-capped waters of the Great Eastern Ocean. He had barely hit the water when the sharks started fighting over him.

After that, the Terebinthian archers stopped shooting volleys at the Guardians.

Peter smiled, showing his teeth. “That’s what they’re worried about. They’ve heard the stories about us; they’ve heard about Galma and the Seven Isles and Masongnong. They’re wondering what we have up our sleeves.”

After a moment, Osumare returned the smile. “A few tricks yet.”

They looked up as the sound of cracking wood echoed off the rocks of the Labyrinth. The arm of one of the trebuchets had been shattered by a lucky stone; the griffins attacking that one turned their attention to the western trebuchet, whose minders were guarding it with bows and crossbows. They weren’t getting many shots off; the griffins who’d already dropped their payload were dive-bombing them, claws outstretched to rake and tear. One woman, intent on diving out of the way of a griffin with osprey markings, dived right off the Labyrinth. Osumare heard her scream, the sound cutting off as a shark surged up out of the water to close his teeth around her middle and drag her back down. The waters at the foot of the Guardians were already dark with blood.

Osumare clasped his hands behind his back, feeling the sweat on his palms – nerves or heat or both. It wasn’t that he hadn’t expected the Terebinthians to put up a fight, he just hadn’t expected them to occupy the griffins so early. Throwing two fleets at each other was the way fighting was usually done on the open waters of the Great Eastern Ocean, where they’d hack at each other for hours until one finally withdrew or went down to the waiting arms of the sea gods. The High King thought that was a waste of time and troops. When Narnia fought her battles, she sent in the aerial corps first to soften up her enemy, so that by the time the fleet finally closed the battle would be half-won already.

Up on the Guardians the griffins had chased off or killed the last of the minders and had turned their attention to the remaining trebuchet. Half a dozen of them descended on it like birds to a crust, their screeches hanging in the air as they battered at it with claws and wings. Osumare extended his telescope to watch them, not entirely certain what they thought they were doing, and then suddenly understood: they were pushing the trebuchet to the edge of the Guardian. One tremendous push later and it went over the edge, tumbling down end over end to smash down onto the stern of one of the rearmost ships in the Terebinthian fleet, driving straight down through her decks. There was a cheer from the Narnian fleet as the griffins regrouped and swung round to return to their ships, seen off by a volley of Terebinthian arrows. Several of them struck targets, but none of the griffins fell. Drops of trailing blood drifted down to the open water between the two fleets, where it drew the attention of a giant devilfish. The beast’s long tail lashed the water to white foam as it swam in circles just beneath the surface, agitated by the blood and the lack of accompanying flesh.

Osumare smiled, thin. The Sun’s quarter-wing was part of the next wave and they were tense with expectation, talons scratching the deck as they prepared to take off at the End’s signal. They were in the air before the last returning griffin had blundered her way onto the Greenwitch’s deck, laboring to make it home before her wounded wing gave out on her.

“Sir?” said Chinyere, coming up beside Osumare. “Why aren’t we attacking them?”

“We are,” said the High King. His expression was calm as fire ran up the mizzenmast of one of the Terebinthian ships, as two sailors leapt from the tops on the Sea Dragon screaming and tearing at their burning clothes, as a lucky arrow caught a griffin under the breastbone and sent him hurtling downwards, barreling through a crowd of sailors on a Terebinthian brig as he crash-landed.

“I mean –” Chinyere said clumsily. Osumare let his mouth quirk a little; Chinyere had been sailing with him since before he’d sworn to Narnia and even though the High King had sailed with them every time he’d had to leave the mainland, she was still cowed by his presence.

Peter took pity on her and explained. “We can’t keep this up forever, but Prince Seabright doesn’t know that. All they know is that they’re being attacked from the air, by a foe they’re not prepared to defend against, while meanwhile the Narnian fleet sits here and waits. For all they know we have something else we can throw at them.”

“Another alliance with the merpeople,” Osumare suggested. Technically the merfolk were subject to Cair Paravel, but that was a mere technicality. If the High King wanted King Arion to send levies when Narnia called them up, he had to negotiate the terms new every time. Since they’d beaten off Masongnong there hadn’t been an occasion that deserved the hassle, but there was no way that Prince Seabright could know that for sure.

“Something like that,” Peter agreed. “Every second they sweat it out is another second our saltwater Narnians have to do their sabotage, so that when Seabright finally loses his patience and attacks, his fleet will be hamstrung.” For a moment he looked wistful. “They have orders to capture Prince Seabright and Admiral Breakwave if the opportunity presents itself, but I doubt we’ll have that much luck.”

“But why don’t we attack them directly, your majesty? We outnumber them.”

“I’d rather more of their people died than ours,” said Peter. He tapped his fingers lightly on his sword, watching as the griffins that had already dropped their payload of stones and firepots began to attack the sailors and soldiers in the tops of the Terebinthian ships. They were well within arrow-range now, but most of the Terebinthian captains had placed their archers in the tops, so that they were the ones who were now being battered by the aerial assault.

“There’s always the chance,” the High King went on, “that Seabright won’t decide to risk an open attack. I’d like to winnow his army early and force him to an early surrender, but I doubt that’s very likely.”

“We’d be a bit disappointed, sire,” Chinyere ventured after a moment. “We got all dressed up to dance, after all – and there’s the prize money, of course.”

“Of course,” Peter agreed, smiling. “Damn, but we could use the ransom money,” he added distractedly. Chinyere took the hint and stepped back.

“Do you think they will?” Osumare asked him softly. “Surrender, I mean.”

“No.”

11

“In the world we came from,” said the High King, “there was an attack that was something like this. It had been going on for weeks.” He spoke slowly, and Osumare couldn’t decide if it was because the words pained him somehow or because he was dragging them up out of the depths of his memory.

“What happened?” Osumare prompted when he seemed disinclined to continue. He’d never heard the High King or his siblings talk about their first homeland before. In Narnia a man’s past was a commodity as well as a privilege and not one spoken of lightly; that was as true for her rulers as it was for her adopted children.

Peter’s gaze went distant, focusing somewhere far away from Terebinthia, from the screaming griffins and the waiting fleet and the burning ships. He frowned. “They sent us away,” he said even more slowly than before. “They sent us away to be safe. There was a war –” He stopped, blinking, and shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

“It must have been a very long time ago, your majesty,” Osumare said tentatively. He couldn’t imagine a war that the High King was unable to remember, a war that the High King hadn’t fought in.

Peter blinked. “No. It was the same year we came to Narnia.” He put his head to the side, as if trying to grab onto the fleeting strands of something long forgotten. “Su might know,” he said finally, then shook his head again. His gaze was suddenly hard and bright, intently focused on now instead of then.

“Ah,” he said, “Seabright’s decided to make a move.”

12

“Signal to the fleet,” Osumare said to Chinyere, “Narnia expects that everyone will do their duty, and – why are you laughing?” he added to the High King, who’d started cackling in what couldn’t even remotely be described as dignified. Osumare couldn’t see why; it had seemed like a decent enough message when he’d suggested it last night.

“No reason,” Peter said, his mouth twitching. “Carry on, Admiral Seaworth.”

“Narnia expects that everyone will do their duty, and to raise anchor and prepare to engage the enemy,” Osumare finished, giving Peter an odd look. The High King turned away, still chuckling. Osumare wondered briefly if he’d finally snapped under the pressure, then decided to think about it later.

The flags ran quickly up and down the halyards in a blaze of colors, echoing through the fleet as the other captains repeated the signal. A cheer went up from the Narnian fleet, accompanied by the sound of hundreds of swords, axes, and marlinspikes banging on shields. The Terebinthian fleet, glad to finally be doing something, roared back at them. Dark shapes roamed the quickly closing open waters between the two fleets.

“Prepare to loose scorpia!” Osumare yelled, eyeballing the distance between the two fleets. He was pleased to see that the Terebinthian fleet had been visibly depleted by the Narnian aerial attack; two ships had been sunk entirely, while nearly the entirety of the fleet bore damaged from dropped stones or firepots. Several of them appeared to be having trouble steering, which would have been Cydippe’s work. One poor sloop was being carried away by the wind, her crew running around her deck in panic as they attempted to get their ship back under control.

“Lieutenant Reisende, if you please!” Osumare said. “Flag signals to the fleet to loose scorpia at my command!”

“Aye aye, Admiral!”

Osumare licked his suddenly dry lips. The smaller, faster Terebinthian ships were in the lead, followed by the flagship Sea Dragon and the Prince of Tides, which had the royal pennant flying from the mainmast. They’d start separating out soon enough, each ship picking the Narnian ship it wanted to engage with, and then this chance would disappear as the battle dissipated into ship to ship combat.

“To the fleet!” he barked. “Loose scorpia – now!”

Three hundred scorpia loosed within seconds of each other, the bolts flying hard and fast towards the enemy fleet before they thudded home in men or ships’ hulls. At this distance they wouldn’t punch through the hull of a well-built ship, but they could impale three men at once, and did. There were shouts and screams from the Terebinthians, men dead instantly and men dying on the decks of their ships. Terebinthian scorpia didn’t have the range that Narnian ones did, but the Narnian fleet would have less than a minute before the Terebinthians were within range to start shooting back.

“Reload!” Osumare yelled, clasping the hilt of his sword to keep his fingers from twitching. “Aim! Loose scorpia!”

The scorpia snapped again, and Osumare shouted for his archers as the ships came into bowshot. Lieutenant Marcolis, crouched up in the tops with the archers, began to call orders, then yelped a warning of, “Incoming!”

“Down!” Osumare screamed, and caught the High King by the collar of his jerkin to thrust him down against the deck as Terebinthian arrows clattered around them. Someone screamed.

“To the fleet!” Osumare yelled, letting go of Peter and scrambling back up to his knees. “Loose at will! Farid! Bring us about six points to starboard!”

The ship heeled over hard as the wheel-master spun the wheel, bringing the Rising Sun around so that she pointed directly at the approaching enemy. Out of the corner of his eye Osumare was aware of at least a half-dozen other Narnian ships doing the same. The wind was in no one’s favor, bearing away from both fleets; both fleets turned into the wind so that when they met it would be in a staggered shape rather like an arrowhead, with the Poison Rose and a Terebinthian brig with White Ghost painted on her stern as its tip.

“Signal to the fleet,” Osumare ordered, the last signal until the fleets disengaged, “engage the enemy, and with a will! And then to your station, Ilhazul.”

The Rising Sun heaved forward, running against the waves with white foam dashing at her sides. Bowstrings and scorpions were snapping constantly, a drone like bees on a summer day; once the High King pulled Osumare down against the deck, shield off his back now and sheltering them as arrows clattered around them. The smell of seawater and blood reigned supreme over other less pleasant smells; sailors were hastily throwing down buckets of sand on the deck to keep from slipping in the blood and muck that accompanied any battle on sea.

“Still feeling seasick?” Osumare muttered in his monarch’s ear, in one of those rare moments when neither side was shooting arrows at the other.

Peter turned and grinned at him, his teeth white in his tanned face. “Not at the moment, but give me another hour and I’m sure I can manage something for you.”

Three arrows sprouted in the deck just in front of them. Osumare blinked at them, bemused, then threw himself at the rail. The nearest Terebinthian ship was launching her boats.

“Prepare to repel boarders!” he bellowed. “Marines to the waist!”

Crewmen scrambled to their places, lining up with shields and swords to the fore and halberds and spears further back, crowding the scorpions and their crews. Osumare drew his sword, the weight of it reassuring in his hand, and took up an axe in his left hand. The Terebinthian ship was swinging in towards them, her sailors rapidly drawing up her sails to leave the space clear for her archers. Osumare was unsurprised to see Admiral Breakwave looking back at him from the quarterdeck – the Lord Admiral knew that the High King was onboard the Rising Sun. If the Terebinthians could capture the High King, then they might be able to end the battle before too many of the Terebinthian ships were sunk.

“Chinyere!” he said, looking around for her.

“Here, Admiral,” she said, stepping around two members of the Guard who were lurking at the High King’s side.

“Supplies for fire arrows down below with the ship’s leech,” Osumare said. “Make sure they get up to Lieutenant Marcolis and tell him he’s to light up the Sea Dragon.”

“Aye, Admiral,” she said, then vaulted over the railing on the quarterdeck, where Osumare lost sight of her.

“Ten gold suns to the scorpion that hulls the Sea Dragon!” he heard the High King shout. There was a cheer in response to the words, as the scorpion crews bent over their machines with renewed fervor. Most of them were stripped to the waist in the heat, shocking contrast to the well-armored sailors and marines on the deck that waited to meet the Terebinthian boarders. Archers gathered in ranks on the fo’c’sle and the quarterdeck, drawing and releasing so quickly that the snap of bowstrings was an ever-present hum in Osumare’s ears.

The boats were being launched over the side now, boarders crouched low with shields over their heads to repel the arrows that were raining down on them from the Narnian tops. Osumare was suddenly very glad he’d laid down the razor netting on the Sun’s sides last night; it was a beast of a job to clamber over the stuff, the more so when being shot with arrows and struck with spears.

A cry from overhead caught his attention. The griffins, having laid off their assault on the Terebinthian ships while they rested briefly onboard the Winter’s End, were regrouping. The Sun’s quarter-wing was spiraling down towards the Sea Dragon in pairs of two, some with firepots or dwarf archers in harness, while others attacked only with sharp beaks and empty talons. The first to hit knocked an archer from the tops, sending him screaming to the ocean, where the sound cut off abruptly. His partner snatched up another archer, carrying him away from the ship before he dropped him into the ocean. The man was still clear of the churning waves when two sharks leapt to fight over his body.

“Up mainsails!” Osumare bellowed, turning towards the bow of his ship. “Haul ‘em high! All of them, up now!”

Three crewmen were swarming up the ratlines to the tops, each one carefully bearing a lit lantern in one hand, with sheaves of prepared fire-arrows bundled onto their backs. Marcolis and the midshipmen on the mizzenmast and the foremost were waiting eagerly for them, hauling them up onto the fighting platforms when they got close enough. The officers shared out the arrows between their archers, each of them hanging the lanterns on the nail in the mast that top-eyes usually used during the night watch. The door panels were left open.

Peter glanced up, then cupped his hands around his mouth. “Admiral Breakwave!” he shouted. “You still have a chance to save your ship! Surrender to me now and you and your men will live!”

“Remember, you won’t be able to get your full draw or you’ll scorch your fingers!” Marcolis was reminding the archers. “Aim at her sails – it’s a big damned target! You heard the Admiral – light her up!”

If Breakwave heard the lieutenant, he didn’t show it. “I will not surrender!” he shouted back at the High King. “If you’re so afraid of bloodshed, King Peter, then perhaps you should be the one to run!”

Hazhir snarled, her hackles raised. She leapt up to place her front paws on the railing and roared, the sound echoed by the other members of the Guard and the great cats in the Sun’s complement of marines until the ship echoed with it. It made the hair go up on the back of Osumare’s neck.

“Loose at will!” he ordered, and the fire arrows rained down on the Sea Dragon.

13

The ship caught flame almost immediately. There were already scattered fires on the fo’c’sle and the waist near the capstan, hastily having sand thrown over them by panicked seamen, but the fire arrows caught the sails alight, running down the tar-soaked rigging in waves of orange fire to the horrified cries of her crew.

“All hands to board the Rising Sun!” Admiral Breakwave bellowed. “A hundred gold dragons to whoever brings me the High King alive!”

Peter laughed, somewhat ruining the effect.

“Boarders to larboard!” Chinyere shrieked, brandishing her twin swords. “Give ‘em a warm Narnian welcome!”

The boarders in the Sea Dragon’s boats were throwing grappling hooks now, some of them catching on the quarterdeck’s railing as the Dragon’s crewmen began to scramble up the Sun’s side’s, trying their damnedest to avoid the razor netting. Osumare slashed at the first man over the rail, sending him falling backwards into his boat, and cut the line he’d used with his axe. On his right two members of the Guard had dragged a boarder over the rail and were ripping at him with their teeth, while on his left the High King was using his shield like a club, his sword already red with blood. Before them, the Sea Dragon alight, her crew abandoning ship like rats. Admiral Breakwave was shouting helplessly, but his lieutenant dragged him off the quarterdeck and into a boat, hacking it loose from the Dragon’s side with a hatchet.

But the burning Sea Dragon was still on a collision course with the Rising Sun.

Osumare leapt back from the rail, shouting for his wheel-master, but Farid was slumped over the Sun’s wheel, three arrows protruding from his back. Osumare swore and shoved him aside, manhandling the Sun hard to starboard to take her away from the Sea Dragon. A Terebinthian sailor swung a boarding axe at him, then stopped dead as an arrow punched through his left eye, sending him staggering back three paces before he fell.

More boarders were swarming over the Rising Sun’s sides, some of them stopped by the Narnians on deck or by archers from the tops. It seemed like every damned seaman in Terebinthia was determined to die on Osumare’s ship, and he was happy to acquiesce to that particular desire.

“Ilhazul, take the wheel!” he ordered, seeing Lieutenant Reisende cutting a boarder nearly in two with his scimitar. The Calormene dispatched the Terebinthian who came at him with a marlinspike, then vaulted the woman’s falling body to take the wheel from Osumare.

Osumare let go and turned away, snatching up the axe he’d stuck in the railing to free up his hands. The Sun’s waist was a mess of fighting men and beasts, and his beautiful ship stank of the dead and the dying. He could see Admiral Breakwave vaulting over the starboard railing on the waist, his sword in his hand, and slice his way through two Narnian sailors on his way towards the quarterdeck. Osumare spared a moment to admire his swordsmanship; old man or not, Breakwave was good.

“Seaworth!” he bellowed. “Seaworth!”

A member of the Guard launched herself over the railing, snarling as she bowled over a knot of Terebinthians who had backed Chinyere into a corner by the undercastle. Not a heartbeat later the lioness was dead, an spear pinning her body to the deck. Breakwave, still battling through the crowd, snatched it free and raised it over his shoulder.

“Down!” shouted the High King and bowled Osumare down, knocking his head painfully against the deck. The spear went over both their heads; Osumare heard a scream from behind him but didn’t know whether Breakwave had struck one of his own men or one of Osumare’s. The High King was off him in a heartbeat, beating off a sword-stroke with his shield and stabbing its bearer through the neck. Blood spattered hot across Osumare’s face as he scrambled back up to his feet, cutting his way through the mess to the stairs. He tripped over a body on his way down and fell the rest of the way to the waist, where a Terebinthian who looked pleased at this development wielded a club at him.

Osumare cut the man’s legs out from under him and scrambled up, putting his axe into his throat to stop his screams. He almost followed it up by decapitating one of his own seamen, who had been raising a hatchet, but turned the blow on the Terebinthian beside him as he recognized his captain.

Up on the quarterdeck, a tiger roared, and Osumare glanced up to see the High King fighting off four Terebinthian sailors at once, all of them intent on the bounty Breakwave had ordered. A griffin dove in a clean brown streak to snatch one of them up and toss him over the side.

Not far away he saw Admiral Breakwave making a dash for the quarterdeck stairs, knowing that if he could get the High King under his sword he’d have the Rising Sun and probably the rest of the Narnian fleet as well. Osumare launched himself after the man, bashing his way through knots of fighters and nearly tripping over a scorpion that had gotten loose from its lashings before he reached Breakwave. He shouldered the admiral sideways against the railing, knocking his sword out of his hand with the haft of his axe, and laid the tip of his own sword at Breakwave’s throat.

The admiral looked back at him, breathing hard from the exertion and the heat. “You have me at a disadvantage, Admiral Seaworth,” he said.

Osumare nodded, too out of breath to speak immediately. He finally gasped out, “Do you surrender?”

“Yes,” said Breakwave, with a look in his eyes like he’d just seen his own child thrown to the sharks. “Yes, I surrender.”

14

They were still counting up the dead and wounded when Osumare and Peter were rowed over to the Winter’s End with Admiral Breakwave sitting glumly in the barge with them, but none of the Narnian ships had been sunk, though the Greenwitch was listing badly to larboard and the Sea Queen had somehow lost both her masts. The majority of the Terebinthian fleet was either burning, sinking, or flying Narnian colors. Prince Seabright had escaped back through the Needle with his Prince of Tides and several other surviving Terebinthian ships, raising the thick chain between the Guardians to keep anyone from following him.

It would have been easy enough to disable the chain and send the less battered Narnian ships after him, but there were sure to be any number of booby traps set in the Labyrinth, just waiting for an invader to spring them. Better to let the prince of Terebinthia stew in his defeat – and besides, he had one more surprise waiting for him when he dropped anchor at the Golden Steps. Osumare didn’t even give him a full day before he offered the High King his surrender.

Admiral Breakwave was staring bleakly around at the destruction. The ocean was littered with broken spars and torn sails, but no bodies. Those had already been disposed of by the dark shapes that were still moving restlessly beneath the water as if searching for some overlooked morsel. There were plenty of Narnians in their bellies as well as Terebinthians, though at least the preliminary butcher’s bill was lighter than Osumare had dared hope. Battles were messy, uncertain things; it was always better to expect the worst rather than the best.

They bumped against the massive hull of the Winter’s End and one of the crewmen scrambled to tie up the gig. Peter was the first up the aerial carrier’s side; Osumare sent the admiral after him, then followed both of them up. Two members of the Guard scrambled up after him, falling into their customary places behind the High King. Both of them looked tired, though they’d fastidiously cleaned up the blood that had been splattered liberally across their coats after the battle for the Rising Sun had finished.

“Okeanos have mercy,” Breakwave breathed, staring across the broad weather deck of the End. Osumare steered him gently towards the aftcastle, where a number of the other prominent prisoners taken during the battle were standing, guarded by those members of Lucy’s Guard that had remained behind on the End when she’d gone. The Lady-in-Rising Chaonaine Seaworth was among them, standing stiffly beside a tall dark woman that Osumare vaguely remembered from the embassy a few months earlier. There was a collective sigh of horror from the captains when they drew close enough for Admiral Breakwave to be recognized. The lord admiral made a gruff sound of acknowledgment, his head ducking for a moment in shame, then went to join them.

Captain Alacyn descended the steps of the quarterdeck, ignoring the prisoners. His monkey followed him on the rigging, leaping for his hand when he put it out. It scrambled up his arm to settle on his shoulder, eyeing Peter and Osumare curiously.

“Any word from Her Majesty yet, sire?” he asked.

Peter shook his head. “I assume she’s busy persuading Prince Seabright of the wisdom of total surrender right now; I don’t expect we’ll have long to wait. My sister,” he added, smiling wryly, “is very persuasive.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Osumare said feelingly. Queen Lucy could be quite the charmer when she put her mind to it, although he had a hunch that she was taking this particular opportunity to persuade the prince at the point of a sword, with Fiorenza Paolucci and the heavily armed crews of three Narnian sloops standing by as extra leverage.

Three months before, nearly four now, Osumare had purchased a set of highly illegal charts from the owner of a chandlery in the Port of Paradise. To chart the eel-holes that Paradise hookers used to enter and depart from the Labyrinth was punishable by death, which was the fate of the smugglers Sweet Wyl had gotten the charts from. Osumare had explored it himself while the Narnian embassy was falling apart in Waterside Hill and determined that it was possible to send a small sloop through the passage. Or three of them, heavily armed, to place an ambush for a retreating Terebinthian prince whilst the rest of Terebinthia was occupied with the Narnian fleet. When Prince Seabright returned to the Port of Paradise, he’d find himself greeted with a Narnian queen unwilling to compromise, a lady knight furious over a violation of the laws of war, and over a hundred sailors and soldiers ready to back them up.

Peter smiled. “I don’t give him more than a few hours.”

Alacyn nodded, looking like he was about to speak. Before he could, one of the prisoners tried to step forward, and was met by a lioness’s sudden snarl. The woman looked startled, but called anyway, “High King Peter! What’s going to happen to us?”

Peter strode towards her, waving the lioness back. “If Prince Seabright decides to make peace, Captain Swiftstream, you’ll be ransomed. If he decides otherwise or if your families can’t afford to ransom you, you’ll be treated with all honor and taken back to Narnia until such time as the money can be raised or His Grace and I come to terms. And, of course, Narnia will always take good sailors.”

Swiftstream bristled at the last. “I’m not a traitor!” she said, looking significantly at Osumare as she did so.

“I’m beginning to tire of people accusing me of treason,” he remarked, “considering I was all of nine when I left Terebinthia and I’m still serving the only king I’ve ever sworn an oath too.”

“Although you are, of course, a rarity,” said Alacyn, who’d been a captain in the Archenlander navy until the king’s son had vanished, when Lune had abruptly decided Alacyn must have been involved in the business. As far as Osumare knew he hadn’t been, but that hadn’t stopped King Lune from trying to have him executed for it. Alacyn bore a certain grudge.

Swiftstream raised her chin and turned away.

“There was a bird just before you arrived, your majesty,” Alacyn said in an undertone to Osumare and Peter. “Lieutenant Ayme from the Glory sent it – Captain Addai died of wounds received in battle not half an hour ago.”

Osumare swore. “First Nelka and now Addai, gods, what a loss –” It could have been worse, but Osumare didn’t like to think about could-have-beens when there were perfectly could here-and-nows to fret about.

Alacyn nodded in agreement, while the High King looked grim. “I’ll speak with Faryion and the griffins,” he said. “Send for me if there’s any new word. And send the prisoners to the wardroom and give them some refreshment; we’re civilized in Narnia and I’ll thank them to remember it.” He slapped Alacyn on the back and strode off towards the flight deck, where most of the ship’s aerial corps complement was sprawled out, slack with exhaustion.

“Seaworth, there’s a man been asking to speak with you,” Alacyn said softly, drawing Osumare further away from the Terebinthian prisoners. “One of the sailors we took from the hookers last night. He’s been driving my guards mad about it. Will you speak with him or shall I have him put in his place?”

“What’s he called?” Osumare asked, frowning slightly. He knew a few people in the Port of Paradise, but most of his acquaintances were barkeeps or chandlers, not fishermen. If it was one of King Edmund’s spies, which was always possible, it seemed more likely the man would be asking for the High King or for Queen Lucy, not for him.

“Wisewaters,” Alacyn said.

Osumare went still. It took him a moment before he could nod and say, “Yes, I’ll speak to him. Do you mind if I use your cabin?”

Alacyn nodded. “I’ll have someone bring him up,” he said. “And some tea, unless you’d prefer something stronger.”

15

By the time Osumare heard footsteps in the companionway outside the End’s great cabin he was beginning to wish he’d taken Alacyn up on his offer of something stronger than tea, even though it wasn’t yet noon. The steward had brought him tea and biscuits, which made Osumare rather painfully aware of how long it had been since breakfast in the brief hours before dawn, but which didn’t really do anything for his nerves when it came to facing his brother for the first time in twenty-four years.

The table they’d all sat around last night looked the same, though the tea things had been taken away; Osumare was sitting behind Alacyn’s varnished wooden desk, which had portraits of Alacyn’s wife and young son nailed to the surface. The boy had to be almost ten now; from what Osumare had heard, Alacyn hadn’t seen either of them since he’d fled Archenland. There was a half-finished letter to Neva Alacyn on the desk, the ink bottle still open but miraculously unspilled. Osumare capped it and moved a book over the letter so that it wouldn’t come to any harm.

The footsteps in the companionway grew closer. Osumare sat up in Alacyn’s chair, drumming his fingers on the desk. Adan Wisewaters was escorted into the great cabin by two seamen, or rather, one human and one oceanid. They left the cabin at Osumare’s gesture, closing the glass doors of the great cabin behind them and leaving him alone with his older brother.

For a moment neither of them spoke. Adan massaged his left wrist absently, looking around at the cabin. The End’s great cabin was twice again larger than the Sun’s; the glass doors that led out to the companionway were just the beginning of its opulence. Alacyn had richer tastes than Osumare did, and he’d decorated the walls of the cabin with landscape paintings from Narnia, Archenland, Calormen, and the Eastern islands. There were panels of stained glass set into the stern windows; the room was hung with the flower-shaped colored glass lanterns Alacyn liked. Bookshelves lined one wall of the cabin, with glass doors to keep the books from falling during a storm or battle. There were even elaborately woven carpets from Calormene and the Seven Isles on the floor. Osumare wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to be impressed by Alacyn’s taste or wonder where he’d gotten the money, since he couldn’t afford any of it on a captain’s salary.

Adan finally said, “You’ve done well for yourself.”

“The End isn’t my ship,” Osumare said shortly. “Mine is the Rising Sun.”

“Oh.” He looked around again.

Osumare made himself reach for the teapot. “Sit down. Have some tea. Eat a biscuit. Alacyn’s cook is surprisingly good – Shoushani, you know.”

Adan brought a chair over from the table and sat down, looking at the silver tea cups as Osumare poured. “Do you want sugar? Cream?” Osumare said, casting around for something, anything, to say. “They keep goats on the End –”

“Osu’, stop,” Adan said softly. “It’s been twenty-four years. There’s no need for us to pretend to know each other.”

Oh, good, Osumare nearly said, but held his tongue on the words. He stirred sugar into his tea instead. “How did you know it was me?”

“You have Da’s ears,” Adan said. “And you still do that thing where you stand back on one foot and clench your fists when you’re angry – I saw you when you and High King Peter came to talk to the Lady-in-Rising Chaonaine. Why did you change your name to Seaworth?”

“I always liked the sound of it,” Osumare said, feeling five-years-old and being lectured by his older brother again. He sipped at his tea, then took it away quickly and poured cream in. He’d put in too much sugar.

Adan frowned at him. “Why did you leave?”

“I should think that would be obvious,” Osumare said, his hand clenching on the handle of the cream pitcher. “I didn’t want to stay.”

“You were nine years old!” Adan snapped. “You weren’t old enough to know what you wanted!”

“I was old enough,” Osumare said through his teeth. “Tethys have mercy, Adan, it was twenty-four years ago! Let it go.”

Adan’s mouth compressed. “Why are you here?” he said shortly.

“I should think that should be obvious as well,” Osumare said, and made himself let go of the cream pitcher. “Since we just had a battle and your prince is bottled up in the Port of Paradise with my king on his doorstep. Damn it, Adan, did you come here just so you could criticize me? If so, I have other things I could be doing,” he added, starting to rise.

“Wait,” Osumare’s brother said, putting a hand out to stop him.

Osumare looked down at him. Adan was only six years older than Osumare, but he looked like he’d aged two years for every one of Osumare’s. His skin was brown from a lifetime of exposure to sun and wind, his curly hair going salt-and-pepper, while his hands were gnarled as only an old fisherman’s could be. There were laugh-lines around his brown eyes.

“What do you want from me?” Osumare asked him, suddenly feeling very tired.

“You should come home,” Adan said. He looked down at his outstretched hand as if wondering how it had gotten there, closing it into a fist and putting it in his lap.

“No.”

“You should come see Ma,” he went on ruthlessly. “We’ve all spent the past twenty-four years not knowing if you were dead or alive or worse. You have to come and see Ma.”

“Well, you can tell everyone in Whitetyde I’m alive,” Osumare said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to want a visit, though, since I’m probably on a list of most hated men in Terebinthia right about now.”

“That’s not true -–”

“I’m the fleet admiral of the Narnian Navy,” Osumare said frankly. “Which just kicked all hell out of the Terebinthian navy and which is less than a day from making Prince Seabright crawl on his knees to the High King to surrender, so no, I don’t think I’m going to be all that popular in Terebinthia. And that’s quite aside from every other Terebinthian I’ve talked to telling me I’m a traitor, despite the fact that I left the island more than two decades ago.”

Adan looked at him, his mouth tightening. “You’re still my brother,” he said, “and Ma’s second son.”

“And now you can tell her that her second son is alive,” Osumare said, and resisted the urge to leap for the doors when a member of the Guard pawed one of them open. She put her head in the room, looking at Adan with curiosity.

“The High King wants you to come on deck, Admiral,” she said. Adan jumped at the words, staring at the leopard like he’d never heard one speak before. Well, maybe he hadn’t; there weren’t many talking beasts outside of Narnia. “Message from Queen Lucy and Lady Knight Fiorenza.”

Osumare smiled. “Seabright’s come to his senses,” he said to his brother.

16

The last time Osumare Seaworth had been in Waterside Hill it had been under different circumstances.

The castle looked no different than it had before; the fighting had never touched the Port of Paradise. When the Prince of Tides had exited the Needle to find three Narnian ships-of-war waiting for the retreating remnants of the Terebinthian fleet in the bay, Prince Seabright hadn’t even bothered to put up a token protest. The Prince of Tides had dipped her flags immediately. Osumare might have been embarrassed on Seabright’s behalf if he hadn’t known first hand just how badly Terebinthia had been beaten in the battle.

The Rising Sun had entered the Needle at two bells, barely three hours after the fighting had first begun. They’d dropped anchor at the Golden Steps at three bells; it was the easiest passage of the Needle that Osumare had ever had. The Port of Paradise and Waterside Hill looked as if the war had never even happened, or at least they would have if it wasn’t for all the grim faces they’d passed on their way up the Seashell Road to Waterside Hill. It wasn’t much of a hill, rising only a few feet higher than the rest of the Port of Paradise. The castle, though handsome enough, couldn’t hold a candle to Cair Paravel. There weren’t even any defenses; Terebinthia had never needed them. No enemy had ever passed the Labyrinth before.

They were waiting in the antechamber outside the throne room, where the High King would accept Prince Seabright’s surrender in a few minutes. The Royal Guard was visibly nervous, their tails fluffed out and their backs arched as they gathered around the High King. Osumare couldn’t blame them, considering the circumstances, but Peter himself looked unruffled, gazing up at the doors as he waited with his hands clasped behind his back. Osumare followed his gaze up.

The doors to the throne room were considered wonders of Terebinthia. Each one was carved out of a single piece of hardwood from the forests at the heart of the island; at three times the height of a man and as wide as three men walking abreast, Osumare couldn’t even imagine how large the trees they’d come from had been. He’d seen large trees in Narnia before, but nothing that could produce this. They were covered in elaborate carvings, telling the story of the gods that had raised Terebinthia from the depths of the ocean and the goddess that lay sleeping at the heart of the volcano, waiting for the day when she would be woken by the last prince of Terebinthia at the world’s end. Osumare had grown up with those stories and looking at the carvings sent a frisson of unease running up his spine. This Prince Seabright could very well be the last of them.

Osumare looked at Peter out of the corner of his eyes, wondering if the High King knew that story. Narnia had stories of its own, of course. He didn’t know if any of them were about the end of the world.

He turned his attention forward again as the doors finally drew open, revealing the Prince of Terebinthia sitting at the far end of the throne room. He was sitting upright and straight-backed, the only sign of nervousness in his clenched fingers on the arms of his throne. Queen Lucy and Fiorenza Paolucci flanked him; it had the effect of making him look rather like a prisoner. Colored light filtered down through the stained glass windows above his head, painting patterns on the marble floor.

At Peter’s nod, Osumare stepped forward into the throne room, resting his left hand on his sword hilt as he advanced a few steps inside. Despite the open windows on either side of the room it was even warmer here than it had been in the antechamber; Osumare felt the sweat begin to gather beneath his shirt. His uniform jacket felt like a cruel joke. The early morning heat had settled down to something scorching in sunlight and sweltering indoors, so humid that Osumare was convinced he could have cut it with a knife if he was so inclined.

If Prince Seabright felt the heat, he didn’t show it. Only the rise of his chest beneath his court finery showed that he was even alive, waiting on his throne for his conqueror to arrive. Osumare almost felt sorry for him. He could have escaped this mess by submitting to Lucy’s demands at the embassy, but no ruler alive could have been expected to do that. The members of his court, gathered at either side of the hall, barely looked any happier. Some of them were marked by signs of the morning’s battle, while others bore their scars in the absences of their loved ones, captured or killed by Narnia. Osumare confidently predicted a rush of demands to release the live ones after the ceremony.

His survey of the room complete, Osumare nodded to the prince and stood to the side. The High King entered the room without any pomp or circumstance, bare-headed and in leathers like a common fighting man except for the golden lion’s head for his sword pommel. Only a fool would take him for a commoner.

He strode up the aisle towards the throne, Osumare following at a discreet distance along with Hazhir. The rest of the Guard filed into the throne room behind them along with soldiers in Narnian colors, bows at the ready in case of treachery. A few of the Terebinthians shifted, their expressions unhappy; Hazhir bared her teeth in warning and they subsided. The High King didn’t seem to notice.

Peter stopped in front of the throne, looking up at Prince Seabright. Osumare couldn’t remember what his given name was; there had always been a Prince Seabright in Waterside Hill. This one was tall and slim, like his forefathers before him, with dusky skin and close-cropped dark curls that held his crown in place. The pearl crown of Terebinthia, said to be given to the first Prince Seabright by Okeanos himself, and never once worn by any man not a legitimate prince of Terebinthia. He and the High King stared at each other, blue eyes and black eyes locked, and then Prince Seabright rose, descending the steps of the dais. He and the High King were the same height; the Prince of Terebinthia was older than Peter by only a year. Osumare saw Lucy and Fiorenza look quickly at each other, Fiorenza tensing a little and leaning forward like she was prepared to tackle the Prince if he made any untoward moves in the direction of the High King.

The room was silent. Osumare was stiff with tension, his left hand clenched so tightly on his sword hilt that he knew he’d have marks on his palm when he finally pulled it away. A prince of Terebinthia had never before knelt to a foreign king; he couldn’t imagine the young Prince Seabright had any desire to be the first of his name to do so. If he had a dagger up his sleeve, this could go very wrong, very quickly.

No one had spoken yet. Prince Seabright reached up to take the crown slowly from his head, making the waiting crowd let out a soft sigh, like the tide washing up on the shore the morning after the tumult of a storm. When he started to kneel, Peter stopped him, his fingers brushing across the insides of the prince’s wrists. Prince Seabright looked up at him. His expression was more weary than anything else.

“You fought well, your grace,” said the High King of Narnia.

“You were better, your majesty,” returned the Prince of Terebinthia, holding the pearl crown in his hands. Both men looked down at it, then the High King lifted it gently from the grip of the Prince. Seabright made no attempt to stop him, letting his hands fall to his sides when it was gone. The light from the windows struck colors from it – silver and gold, pearls and emeralds and sapphires; all the colors of the sea and the rainforest, those two opposites that defined Terebinthia. It was as delicate as the crowns of the kings and queens of Narnia, a crown untouched by the hand of man in the forging, made for one bearer and one bearer alone. It was never meant to be worn by anyone other than the Prince of Terebinthia. Osumare knew the minute the High King realized that, because Peter’s face changed slightly, his eyes warming with familiarity and something like caution. Queen Lucy noticed it as well, her mouth thinning in a slight frown.

Prince Seabright took a breath, composing himself before he spoke. He did not attempt to kneel again. “Your majesty, to your benevolent mercy I surrender myself and my people,” he said simply. “Terebinthia and all her possessions are yours.”

“This is a fine crown, your grace,” said the High King. “A fine crown should be worn by he who deserves it.”

“Your majesty,” Princes Seabright murmured. His poker-face was very good; only a twitch on the smallest finger of his left hand betrayed his confusion.

“I am High King of Narnia,” said Peter. “My siblings and I are not so insecure on our thrones that we see the need to strip the prince of Terebinthia of his. Do you bear any reservation in your heart to swear your oath to Narnia, to remain prince of Terebinthia under the dominion of the kings and queens of Narnia, to support Narnia in war and in peace, to keep your own gods and your own laws?”

To become a client-state like Galma or the Seven Isles, Osumare translated quietly to himself. It was the best offer that Prince Seabright was likely to get; if he had been very unlucky he would have been stripped of his crown and Terebinthia would have become a proprietary possession of the Narnian throne just as the Lone Islands are now.

Prince Seabright sighed, soft. “No, your majesty,” he murmured, and knelt. His voice reverberated throughout the room as he spoke. “In the names of the gods Calypso and Okeanos, who raised Terebinthia from the depths, and the gods Tethys and Njord, who guard her harbors, and in the names of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea and his son Aslan, I, Udeme Seabright, the seventeenth of my name, do solemnly pledge and bind my loyalty and the sacred honor of my house to that of the High King of Narnia, now and to the end of days, until the sea rises and the sky falls, and the Deep Magic fails.” He breathed in, his eyes downcast.

Osumare felt something like disappointment thrum in his veins, sorrow for a land that hadn’t been his for two decades now. The entire room seemed to sigh with the Prince of Terebinthia, any dreams of defying the power of the lion broken.

Peter held the crown in his scarred hands. “I, Peter, High King over all Kings of Narnia by election, by conquest, and by the will of Aslan, solemnly swear in my name and in the name of my family to keep faith and life and sacred honor with Terebinthia, now and to the end of days, until the sea rises and the sky falls, and the Deep Magic fails.” He adapted the oath effortlessly, the same way that Osumare had heard him do a hundred times before, and leaned forward to replace the crown on Prince Seabright’s brow before he drew his dagger. The blade sliced effortlessly across his palm; Osumare winced for him, though Peter didn’t hesitate. He smeared the fresh blood across the prince’s forehead, just beneath the emerald said to have come from the heart of the island.

“May Aslan and the gods of the sea witness and keep faith,” said the High King. He raised Prince Seabright to his feet, kissing both cheeks. “Welcome to Narnia, cousin. We’ll work out the details later.”


end


----------
List of ships named (more present in the story than named)

Ships (Narnian)
Copper Rain: under the command of Captain Jaq Malubay
Glory: under the command of Captain Addai
Golden Summer: under the command of Captain Qaya
Greenwitch: no captain named
Poison Rose: no captain named
Quickkill: under the command of Commodore Edeny Yricsdottir
Revenge: under the command of Captain Idris Saltensail
Rising Sun: flagship, under the command of Fleet Admiral Osumare Seaworth
Sea Queen: under the command of Captain Lasi Pertwee
Shadowsinger: under the command of Captain Tristorm
Swiftsure: under the command of Captain Nelka Sabiny
Winter's End: aerial carrier, under the command of Captain Laris Alacyn

Ships (Terebinthian)
Sea Dragon: flagship, under the command of Lord Admiral Breakwave
Prince of Tides: under the command of Prince Udeme Seabright
White Ghost: no captain named

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Comments

[lady_songsmith]

I was taking notes because otherwise I would have forgotten all the things I wanted to say about this wonderful fic!

I like the tea set detail, and I really like the flags detail -- is that your explanation for the difference in colors in LWW (gold ground for the banners; red for the boys' tabards)? Because I, like the heraldry nerd I am, have been chewing that one over for a while, and I rather like this explanation. (The one I settled on was that the gold/yellow lion on red was the Pevensie family colors; red lion on gold/yellow was Narnia; and red lion on silver/white is Peter's personal colors - that last from his shield.) At least they fixed Lewis's heraldry in the movies - red on green would have looked atrocious, not to mention being terrible inaccurate heraldicly... er, I did mention the nerd part, yes?

Now was the monkey PotC or Borgias inspired, or just, y'know, pirate=monkey?

Ooooh, that bit about the Lone Island's superstition and the Emperor - brill!

Psst, typo - "they were losing at the griffins"

Oh, OW, Peter. Yes. It is hard to imagine a war he didn't fight in - and that he remembers most being sent away -- I can hear the pain and anger in that even as distant as he must be just then.

The details of the sea battle are fantastic. You really get the flavor of it - right down to the sand-buckets and the reward for particular successes.

And I love that last scene ALL OVER AGAIN!

[bedlamsbard]

I am so glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for the lovely feedback!

More or less -- I'm not a big heraldry person, but my logic eventually was that Narnian colors are red on gold, but the royal family's is gold on red. Or something. *hands* (On the other hand, in Silent Seas, the colors are Lewis's red on green.)

The monkey is inspired by two pirate monkeys -- Barbossa's Jack from PotC and Morgan's King Charles from Cutthroat Island. (Love that movie.) I think that Alacyn's is actually named King Lune, or maybe named after some other Archenlander king, who knows.

Again, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[lady_songsmith]

I may have to add that movie to my watch list!

Lewis's color is one of those 'he really ought to know better' things; the rule of tincture goes back to the 1500s as a codified rule and way before that as a practice. It pretty much boils down to 'high contrast is GOOD'; you don't put white and yellow on top of each other and you don't put the darker colors (red, green, blue, black) on each other. One would think a medievalist would know this if only by osmosis from looking at the things.

Of course I enjoyed it; I adore your Golden Age fic! (and, y'know, the rest of it too, but especially Golden Age.)

[bedlamsbard]

The main character is a lady pirate. How can you go wrong with that? (Apparently it got really bad reviews, but I love it anyway.)

Ah, that makes sense.

[ghostrunner]

“All hands to board the Rising Sun!” Admiral Breakwave bellowed. “A hundred gold dragons to whoever brings me the High King alive!”

Peter laughed, somewhat ruining the effect.

I fucking love Peter so goddamn much, that beautiful, heartless, conceited bastard.

I liked the battle scenes. Well done. Battles are hard work to write.

[bedlamsbard]

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

I don't know if I'd call Peter heartless...

[snacky]

Yay! Two thumbs up!

I like it even more than I did before. :D

[bedlamsbard]

*high fives you* I'm glad you liked it, and that it improved!

[rthstewart]

Terrific as always. Your world building is superlative, with the ship names and captains and their histories, even the swearing. I adore the griffins in battle, too, and how they are used as a sort of RAF in Narnia. I always enjoy Osumare as a point of view character too and the bit of backstory with his brother at the end is terrific.

Your attention to detail in the battle is superlative and makes for a very exciting and compelling read. And Peter, oh Peter, you are such a ... well... mean SOB but showing some adroit compassion at the end. A little. Maybe. I still want to see more of Fio, Osumare, and Peter together. So adorable. Really. She wipes Cat spittle off his crown!!!

[bedlamsbard]

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Thinking of griffin tactics is a lot of fun, I admit.

Alas, the threesome (sort of) bit at the end with Fio, Osumare, and Peter got cut. It might go up as a coda in a few days, though. :)

[starlady]

I really liked this one, it's a great combination of a naval battle with a lot of personal history on everyone's part--I love how all of your characters have their own checkered pasts, and I really liked the weight the various mythologies gave to the story. And Osumare and Peter being themselves, but not being weighed down by it.

[bedlamsbard]

I'm glad you enjoyed it! Backstory: it's a hobby. *g*

[theodosia21]

I enjoyed this a lot! ^_^

[bedlamsbard]

Thanks for reading! I'm glad you liked it.

[autumnia]

What an epic story this was. I love how long you wrote it, the epic battles and all the descriptions of the ships, other characters and the landscape.

Poor Peter, you may be Magnificent but you still can't get over your seasickness. And Lucy finally coming with her cordial! I love the scene where Fiorenza's straightening the High King, making sure his buttons are all fastened while asking for the Guard to get his crown -- the familiarity of the movements makes one think that she's done this quite often in the past. It's kind of interesting to see it as a relationship of more than just King and subject. (Also terrific was when she ordered Osumare to straighten up and look more professionarl afterwards. Am totally loving how women in Narnia are so decisive and commanding when need be.)

A shame Narnia lost one two of its captains. Like Osumare, I had hoped Nelka Sabiny managed to save herself after ramming her boat into the Terebithian one. I loved the scene of Alacyn performing last rites on the dead -- very visual in my head, with the smoke trailing from the censer, the silent monkey, and the very, very early hours of the morning and darkness surrounding them with the lanterns glowing above their heads.

So even now, Peter still remember a little bit of their past in England. I'm surprised he still remembers that much when his head's been full of thoughts on ruling his country for the last decade or so. It's also interesting to see him even talk about that past.

“Ten gold suns to the scorpion that hulls the Sea Dragon!” -- what a way to encourage your troops, High King! :-)

So that's where Lucy and Fiorenza went during the battle! Very, very clever. I wonder whose idea it was to do that.

Since the mention and brief glimpse we've had of Osumare's brother, I've wondered if the two would ever meet again face to face, and you've actually gone and done it! I'm not actually sure who I feel more sorry for, Adan or Osumare. Probably both. And I'm a bit in agreement with Adan about Osumare seeing his mother but clearly, it would be impossible to walk around Terebinthia when people keep looking at you as a traitor.

Hypothetically, does Peter's oath to Terebinthia still stands after a thousand years? And it would be fun trying to imagine how Dust would have turned out if the Narnian Navy as it in the Golden Age still existed. It makes me look forward to the day we'll see Casmyn Wavewalker and his fleet in Narnia!

[bedlamsbard]

First off, thank you so much for the lovely feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the story.

I think, with Peter, that he remembers things as they're relevant -- for example, he has very little memory of his childhood or his school or his parents, but he remembers the Blitz because he's using similar tactics, and he remembers Nelson's message from Trafalgar because it's relevant. (Sort of.)

Combination of ideas, I think. Probably Peter or Edmund originally, back when they were planning the initial invasion back at Cair Paravel.

I think it is an understatement to say that Osumare's relationship with his family is somewhat strained. :)

Peter's oath still stands; in theory the Seabright family's oath still stands as well, since it was made to the High King's family rather than to Narnia itself. (Probably a deliberate choice on Prince Seabright's part.)

[autumnia]

I think it is an understatement to say that Osumare's relationship with his family is somewhat strained. :)

Very much an understatement. :-) Unlike with the Lady-in-Rising, I hope at least that Osumare acknowledged that Adan was his brother and that the older man was released without needing to be ransomed. It doesn't seem like the Wisewaters ever improved their station, so I doubt they'll have the gold or whatever needed to pay Narnia to release Adan.

Well, if the Seabrights ever acknowledge their old oath, Peter would be more than happy to have help in kicking the Calormenes out of Narnia in Dust. Heh.

I really liked this story a lot. I ended up going back and skimming "Coastwise" as well as reading the semi-followup with the Narnian Coast Guard, and the other bits you've written about the Narnian Navy.

[bedlamsbard]

Osumare isn't actually related to the Seaworth family, if that's what you're saying?

For the common sailors, I think some of them are swapped for Narnian prisoners taken by the Terebinthians (there were a few, though not enough to swap straight across), while others were ransomed, though for considerably less than officers/nobles. Osumare pays Adan's ransom himself.

[cofax7]

Oh, man, that was fab. Just thrilling as all hell.

I love the level of detail you put into this: all the little pieces of a well-researched, well-constructed story. And the unresolved issues, like Osumare's brother, and why Peter's still so bad at sailing. And the many distinct characters. It's always nice to see Fiorenza again, as well.

[bedlamsbard]

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

It is possible I like adding extra characters a little too much. The first draft had thirty-two named Narnians in, twenty of whom actually appeared.

[watersword]

This is awesome — I love the worldbuilding so much, I can't even say, and the distinctiveness of Osumare's voice!

[bedlamsbard]

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I may have a secret (heh) love for worldbuilding, it is true. :)