Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (7)
Dec. 12th, 2008 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air 7
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding. Certain elements in this chapter inspired by Scott Lynch's novel The Lies of Locke Lamora.
Author's Notes: This is part seven, obviously, and this is also the first WIP I've posted since 2006. (And that WIP was abandoned, so one can see I'm understandably nervous about posting another one.) The structure of this lends it to being posted in sections, though, so that's how it's going up. Because of this, however, it's not getting posted to any comms until the whole thing is done. Thanks tolassiterfics for beta and encouragement (and urban angst).
There is something liberating about being in disguise, about not being hunted for his face, and Tirian can’t help but luxuriate in the lessening of tension. Being around Narnians draws up his hackles, makes him painfully nervous and trips him up time and time again. He has failed his people too often to be comfortable in his own skin around them, which is only a lesser tragedy in the grand scheme of this war, but it is a tragedy nonetheless, and it is his own tragedy, which makes it more of one, at least to him.
The broadsheets that call for his arrest are years old, and he has not changed much in the intervening time, at least not enough to make him unrecognizable. Still, Queen Susan and King Edmund had sat him down before they’d left Arn Abedin, an assortment of tubes and powders on the table beside them, and set about changing his face as best they could.
“There’s not all that much we can do,” Susan had observed, browsing among the offerings on the table. “For one, there aren’t that many options, and for another, I think Peter still wants you recognizable.”
“That seems rather counter to the point,” Tirian said.
“He wants the Narnians to know you, the Calormenes to pass you by,” Edmund said, picking up a bowl. “Let’s try for darker hair and skin, to make you like more of a Telmarine. How did ninety percent of the humans in Narnia end up looking as Telmarine as Caspian’s people, and you look like the illegitimate child of an Archenlander barmaid?”
“My great-grandmother was an Archenlander barmaid,” Tirian replied, his voice very dry. “King Bastian’s second and third wives bore him no children, so even though he had put Nealie aside at his father’s order, he had no choice but to take their son as his heir.”
“Huh,” Edmund had said, sounding surprised, and Susan had laughed and said, “How dreadfully romantic, in the sense of, ‘not at all, really.’”
“You know how Archenland is, Su,” Edmund said. “Crown princes disguised as Calormene slaves, dukes as dockhands, all that. I suppose a princess as a barmaid isn’t so very far off.”
“She was not a princess,” Tirian had corrected, “she was just a barmaid, and it was Bastian – Prince Bastian then – who was in disguise.”
“Huh,” Edmund said again. “So your family has practice with it, then.”
Generations back, Tirian might have demurred, but then they’d set to work on him, and when they finished, Susan had held up a mirror, and Tirian had seen himself as he had never been: still slight, still with the faintly panicked expression on his face that he’s long since grown used to, but his red hair is Telmarine black and his skin is bronzed, his freckles suddenly, inexplicably vanished. Susan had added a scar through his left eyebrow and another at the edge of his jaw, using a chalky white gel she dabbed delicately on the tip of one finger.
“People’s eyes are drawn to distinguishing marks,” she explained. “They’ll be less likely to look at your face if there’s something to distract them. I could give you a birthmark, but –”
“I could break your nose,” Edmund offered, leaning against the table with his arms crossed over his chest. “That would also probably do the trick.”
“Er,” Tirian had said, trying to think of the best way to say, “no thank you, please,” and Edmund had laughed and Susan said sedately, “Perhaps not.”
There is a freedom in not wearing his own face, but it does not mean that he doesn’t tense every time they pass someone else on the road – two troops of Calormene soldiers and a Narnian lumber party, the talking horses shod and their heads bent low in shame, the minotaurs chained, the dwarves dragging their feet, all watched over by a group of mixed Calormene soldiers and Narnian traitors. Still, no one among the three had given more than a cursory look to the three men heading eastwards; there is nothing threatening about them, Tirian supposes. Peter had been the only one to speak upon being questioned, and his tone had been bored, a faint hint of worry creeping in when the Calormenes spoke of the Narnian rebels hiding out in the forest, but he had protested with all earnestness that they had seen no one in their travels, and certainly never been attacked by any bandits, Narnian or otherwise.
“Our goods are precious,” he had said, patting his saddlebags with one bare hand, “and I wager that we could put up enough of a fight to make any bandit think twice about challenging us.”
“Still, my friend,” the Calormene officer had replied, “it is best to be cautious, especially for men traveling in these woods. Those who dwell here are no friends to any civilized folk, and they would not hesitate to take your lives for the sake of your possessions. I cannot offer you an escort into safer territory, but I beg of you to heed my warning; I would not like any ill to befall you so soon after you had left my keeping.”
Peter’s reply was bored. “I assure you, sir, that your warning is heard. Still, I think you are overly cautious; the woods seemed safe enough to me.” And he’d laid one hand on his sword-hilt, the lion’s head pommel wrapped in brown leather and so disguised, and the Calormene officer had offered him a hint of a smile and ordered his men to continue their patrol.
That had been two days ago, when they were still in the rosewood, and there has been no trouble since. Not from Narnians, as Tirian has more than half-feared, and not from Calormenes, his greatest fear.
“I don’t understand,” Eustace protested that first night. “Why’d they just let us go? Aren’t they looking for us?”
Peter was cleaning his dagger, and he hadn’t looked up when his cousin spoke. “Why should they be? It’s not as if we exactly set up an announcement when we left Arn Abedin, and even if we had, Cair Paravel is the last place they’d expect Tirian to be going, and they certainly don’t expect me.”
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough,” Eustace grumbled.
“Trust me, coz,” Peter had replied, “I’m taking it seriously.”
They’re out of the rosewood now, out of the west – they crossed the Beruna Bridge yesterday, and they’re into familiar land now. Counter to everything that makes sense, Tirian finds himself relaxing. This is his country, this is the land he grew up in. The shape of the earth is familiar and loved, and even though there are only a few scattered trees where there had once been forests, even though the rivers are choked with silt, even though the few Narnians they see shy away from them into whatever cover they can find, this is still his land. This is still the Narnia he knows and loves.
“There,” Peter says, very softly, in the late morning. He reins his horse to a stop and sits still, looking into the field to the south of them.
Eustace blinks in surprise. “What is that?” he demands.
Tirian looks at the huge mass of tumbled stones, overgrown with grass and a few scrubby trees, too small to fall to the axes of the Calormenes. “It’s just a hill,” he says. The remains of one of the old shrines of Narnia stands before it, but those are scattered throughout the country; they mean nothing. Around that are a few shallow dips in the ground, odd in the middle of the field, but still – that means nothing. There are odd things throughout this country; a few more are meaningless. Remains of ditches, perhaps, or damage from some earthquake.
Peter twists around in the saddle to look at him, raising his eyebrows. “It’s not a hill,” he says. “That’s Aslan’s How.”
“What?” Tirian says blankly. “But – that’s not possible. Aslan’s How was destroyed! If it even existed at all,” he adds doubtfully, because he’s read Caspian’s memoirs, heard all the stories and read all the histories, and not one of them can agree on where Aslan’s How had been or even if it had ever been real. Silverstam, a well-known historian from Absalian’s reign, had been ardent on the fact that Aslan’s How had never really existed, but had instead been nothing but metaphor. There are no remains anywhere in Narnia of the structure that King Caspian X writes of, he’d written in his History of the Narnian Revolution, the most commonly studied history of Caspian’s rebellion. Instead of Aslan’s How being a real physical structure, it is far more likely that it was instead a representation of shelter and safety, something that the hunted Narnians of the First Telmarine Age had never known.
“Oh, it exists,” Peter says, mouth twisting a little in amusement. “I was there. It suffered damage in the attack courtesy of Miraz’s war machines, but it was never destroyed. There,” he adds, pointing. “That was the battlefield. Miraz’s troops set up to the west, not far from the ford at Beruna. The Narnians were quartered in the How. Miraz and I fought at the henge, there, and Sopespian stabbed him in the back after Caspian made the damn fool mistake of letting him live.”
There’s an odd, amused tone to his reminiscences, and Tirian finds himself biting his lip, trying to think of something to say in reply. But that’s not what our histories say, he wants to protest, but the truth is that the histories all contradict each other; the only one that lines up precisely with what Peter’s saying is Caspian’s own account of the rebellion.
“How is letting someone live a mistake?” Eustace asks suspiciously.
“We couldn’t have let him live anyway,” Peter says. “He was too dangerous. Caspian didn’t understand that at the time, and we didn’t realize that Miraz’s men had their own ambitions, few of which required Miraz being alive and most of them requiring his death at our hands. Caspian just had to be so damn noble –” He stops abruptly. “So I take it the chances of any Narnians hiding out in the How aren’t particularly high, then?”
“Hardly,” Tirian admits. “I don’t think anyone in Narnia knows Aslan’s How actually exists, or if they do, where it is. I think I would have heard. I don’t hear of everything that happens in Narnia, but I do hear most things, eventually.”
“It’s probably for the better,” Peter says. He turns his horse back to the road. “I know what’s buried under all those stones,” he adds softly, and doesn’t answer when Eustace asks, “What? What’s under there?” Instead, he spurs his horse into a trot, forcing Tirian and Eustace to keep up with him.
From here, the road turns north to Cair Paravel, climbing the low hills of the east. This close to the capital, within the reach of the Ban, there are towns at regular intervals. Most times the road passes through them and Tirian fights the urge to pull down the brim of his hat to cover his face, even though there are few who spare them more than a passing glance. Peter looks around with interest, or at least Tirian thinks he does; the High King’s face grows grimmer and more pinched with every mile as he takes in the fields that surround the towns, the few trees that remain, the closed-off expressions that the townsfolk wear.
Narnian towns are mixed human and nonhuman, always have been, and Tirian’s not sure, but he thinks that something about this may strike the High King as odd, because when they’d passed through Kettlestream yesterday, the first and westernmost of the towns along the roseroad, he’d blinked in surprise and turned to Tirian as soon as the fields of the town were fading into the distance behind them. “Your Narnians live in towns?” he’d asked.
Tirian had blinked in surprise. “Of course,” he replied. “Didn’t yours?”
“Never,” Peter said. “There was only ever one city in Narnia, and that was the White City beneath Cair Paravel. Towns were for humans, and we had few enough of those in Narnia for most of our reign. A few centaur and dwarf villages, but nothing like this.”
Tirian hadn’t known what to say to that, because the idea is so alien – where had the Narnians of the Golden Age lived, then? He’s never known anything but peace between humans and nonhumans, always living cheek to jowl in the towns of Narnia. Of course, there had been neighborhoods that were more heavily frequented by one race or another, but that was only to be expected. Humans prefer to be closer to humans, centaurs to centaurs, fauns to fauns, and so on and so forth. But never so far apart that they were in separate towns, or not in towns at all – it makes no sense, what the High King is saying. How? Why? It seems absurdly impractical.
They mount the last of the hills before they reach the river valley that stretches out before Cair Paravel and Tirian sees Peter’s face go abruptly grim before it shuts down to complete blankness. From here they can see Cair Paravel, city and castle alike, and beyond that the ocean and the archipelago of islands before it, including the nameless island. If Tirian squints, he thinks he might be able to see the white stones of the sacred ruins on the nameless island.
“Your majesty?” he asks softly, hesitant to bother the High King with questions. “Is something amiss?”
Peter’s voice is flat when he speaks. “That’s Cair Paravel,” he says, and it’s almost, but not quite, a question.
“Yes,” Tirian says, his heart lifting as he looks down into the valley. From so far away Caspian’s castle is nothing more than a miniature, the city a vast sprawling mass of urbanity around it, spanning both sides of the Great River, towns and fields scattered throughout the valley and surrounding the lionsroad. The banners that hang limply from the high, rounded towers of Caspian’s castle are Calormene black and gold, not Narnian scarlet, and the ships in the harbor are Calormene ones, bigger and bulkier than Narnian ships, but otherwise Tirian could be returning to Cair Paravel from a stay at his hunting lodge (long since turned into a barrack for Calormene soldiers). He could be coming home.
Cair Paravel is not his home, not now. Now Cair Paravel is harbor to Bahadur of Calormen and his men, Caspian’s castle despoiled and ravaged. Tirian’s grip tightens on the reins, sharp with anger. Calormen has twisted everything Cair Paravel has stood for since Caspian laid its first stones upon the earth.
“May Aslan forgive us,” Peter whispers. “This is not the Narnia I knew or the Narnia I left.” He bows his head, lips moving silently, and Tirian looks away.
He looks down into the valley, because he knows how it’s supposed to look, and after that first flush of home, home, home at last after all my wanderings he can see what’s wrong with the valley. Calormene ships in the harbor, of course, and not the merchant ships he’s accustomed to, but the great war galleons of the Tisroc. An army camp on the south bank of the Great River, set up around one of the gentrified suburbs of the city. Barges on the Great River, some of them shepherding logs before them down to the ocean, where they will be taken up by Calormene ships and taken to Tashbaan to be sold. Narnia has never done that; would never choke the freshwater Narnians so. For the first time in five years, Tirian wonders how the Calormenes managed to contain the naiads and potamaeids, all the wild spirits of the land and water and air, because surely sheer force of arms cannot pinion them. There has to be something else, some foul magic no Narnian could fight against.
“So!” calls a voice from above, and they all put their hands to their swords, Peter getting half a foot of blade drawn before he lets Rhindon slide back into its scabbard, the runes glinting briefly in the sunlight.
The raven alights on a stone mile marker before them and mantles his wings briefly before folding them against his sides. “So,” he says again, “Tirian the Woodsman, last king of Narnia, returns to Cair Paravel. Are you so weary of the west that you long for death, my lord?”
“Crackclaw,” Tirian says in greeting. “I see your eyes are as good as ever.”
“Better than most, Woodsman,” Crackclaw says. “You wear Caspian’s likeness. Is it not death you seek after all?”
“He doesn’t look that much like Caspian,” Eustace says grumpily, eyeing Crackclaw with dislike. Tirian doesn’t blame him; there are too many people who have betrayed him to make holding grudges practical, but Eustace had taken the raven’s abrupt departure at the worst of times personally. “What are you doing here, Crackclaw, gloating?”
“Wondering,” says Crackclaw. “What could happen to lure the last king of Narnia out of the west? And so short on the sound of a horn that has not been heard in Narnia for three hundred years, as well – if I guess correctly, and I think that I do. Where was it you found the Queen of Spring's horn, Woodsman? Your desperation does you no credit; fairytales and prayer have gotten us nothing yet, so why should another myth do Narnia any good?”
“I was not the one who blew Queen Susan’s horn,” Tirian says. “And who said it was a myth?”
“You know as well as I that the only help the lion sent has won Narnia nothing,” Crackclaw replies, turning his head briefly towards Eustace, who scowls. “Do you seek to find the King of Summer on the nameless island, as Caspian did so many years ago? You will have to look farther afield than that. Perhaps into your dreams, or the end of the world, or upwards to the stars.”
“Or,” Peter says, “he could look to his left.”
Crackclaw’s wings rise a little before he closes them. “Your face I don’t know,” he says. “And your name I certainly don’t.”
“I think you know my name,” Peter says, drawing Rhindon in one smooth movement and flicking the leather off the pommel with his thumb. He lets the sword fall, blade striking the earth and standing upright, quivering a little. The golden lion’s head gleams; the runes on the fuller of the blade seem to burn.
Crackclaw takes to the air in a flurry of black feathers. “King of Summer!” he spits. “Impossible!”
“Truth,” Peter replies. He leans down, far off the side of his horse, and pulls Rhindon free of the earth, wiping both sides of the blade across his trousers before he sheathes it. “Peace, raven. You are a friend of Narnia?”
“He’s a friend of himself,” Eustace snaps. “He doesn’t like anyone; all he cares about is his own skin.”
“Not true,” Crackclaw declares, settling back down onto the mile marker. He looks at Peter with new respect. “I am a friend of Narnia, I am an enemy to her foes. Whatever it is you ask for, my king, I will offer.”
“Don’t trust him, Peter,” Eustace warns. “He’s just going to turn around and sell us out to the Calormenes.”
“Are you?” Peter asks, raising his eyebrows. He’s sitting straight in his saddle, and looking at him, all Tirian can think of are the paintings in Cair Paravel – the King of Summer, young and golden, crowned in sunlight and gilded in armor, Rhindon raised in his hand as he rides into battle. But Peter doesn’t look anything like that, not really – except that, in some indefinable way, he does. It has less to do with looks and more to do with carriage; Peter moves like a king. Modern clothes don’t diminish him at all; he wears his borrowed garb as if it’s just another set of armor, sits his dumb Calormene horse like the beast is the unicorn he’s sometimes portrayed with, and though he’s crownless, he holds his head so high there might as well be gold on his brow.
Crackclaw hesitates and Eustace reaches for his sword.
“Don’t, coz,” Peter says without looking around. “Are you going to go to the Calormenes, Crackclaw?” he asks softly, and Crackclaw’s wings flare wide, for that heartbeat dark and endless.
“Never again,” the raven promises. “Not for all the gold in Narnia.”
“Good,” Peter says lightly. “Will you fight for me and mine, then?”
“Fight?” Crackclaw repeats. “Do I look like a warrior to you? Why would I do such a thing?”
“Because your High King asks it of you, Crackclaw,” Tirian says. “Will you deny the will of Aslan?”
“It isn’t Aslan who stands before me now,” Crackclaw says. “What do you wish of me, my king?”
“Nothing at the moment,” Peter says, “although if you could see through to not betraying us to the Calormenes, I’d appreciate that. And,” he adds, “I want you to let the people of Narnia know that there is hope for this land again. Let them know that their High King has returned and that Narnia will be free, I promise them that.”
“Your wish is my command, sire,” Crackclaw says, and dips his head in a bow before he takes to the sky again, winging his way upwards. From far above, his voice echoes downward, “And welcome home, my king!”
For a moment a small, smug smile plays across Peter’s lips, and then it’s gone as he looks back down at the valley below. “Home,” he murmurs. “Indeed.”
The lionsroad follows the Great River to the gates of the city, although Cair Paravel has long ago burst its boundaries and spilled past the walls into the rest of the valley. This close to the city the roads are full of travelers, merchants and farmers, Calormene troops shoving Narnians aside without care. The fields are new-plowed, and Tirian can’t hide his smile as he looks around at them: at least his people won’t starve this year. Next to the lionsroad, the Great River is choked with barges, boats, and logs, a rusalka balanced precariously on two logs screaming vile imprecations at a trio of water-rats steering a raft across her path, while upstream, a pair of shirtless Calormene sailors catcall at a banshee who steps from log to log as calmly as if she was walking on solid ground.
There are two kinds of neighborhoods outside the city walls, one on either side of the river. The north bank is a poor neighborhood, home to those new-come to the city, and the houses are small and cramped, the streets dirty. The lionsroad passes on the south bank, where the houses are big and handsome, the gardens well-kept and verdant: this is the neighborhood for those of wealth who do not hold ancestral homes within the city walls. New money, mostly; the nobles and well-established merchants won’t be caught dead living so close to the city in such a new neighborhood.
“Before the Calormenes came, the population of Cair Paravel had more than doubled in the past two decades,” Tirian tells Peter and Eustace proudly.
Peter doesn’t look at him. “And this is a good thing how?” His voice is flat.
Tirian blinks in surprise. “Why, the city has grown and strengthened – there is new revenue and –”
“Why the hell did Caspian call it Cair Paravel?” Peter interrupts, like he hasn’t spoken. He looks around and his face is shadowed, his expression grim; he lets his hand fall to his sword-hilt like a talisman.
“What, like your Cair Paravel was any better?” Eustace says sarcastically.
Peter closes his eyes briefly. “When we sat in Cair Paravel, these were all fields. I used to drill my armies there, on the north bank, and we held festivals there, on the south bank. Merfolk and oceanids, all the saltwater Narnians, used to swim up the Great River to meet with us. There was a vineyard to the north, I remember, not so far away, and orchards all up the hillside. The dryads used to leave baskets of fruit on the steps of the great hall for us whenever they were in season. There was a herd of talking horses that used to travel through here; they’d usually stay for a week or so, and sometimes the colts would join the army or –” He rubs a hand over his face. “I should never have come back.”
Shocked, Tirian blurts out, “But why would you say such a thing, your majesty?” before he can think better of it.
Absently, Peter says, “You probably shouldn’t call me that here; it might raise eyebrows,” and then he shakes his head. “This isn’t Narnia,” he says, very softly, and spurs his horse on ahead.
Tirian follows him. “I can’t call you by your name,” he protests.
“Why not?” Eustace demands.
The High King just sighs. “Somehow I’m guessing we can’t just ride into the city,” he says, looking up the road.
Tirian follows his line of sight to see the Calormene soldiers at the entrance to the city. The big wood-and-metal gates, fancifully decorated with renderings of Caspian’s Rebellion and the rebuilding of Cair Paravel, stand open now, wide enough for two wagons to pass through, and there are Calormenes on either side of the road, some of them going through the wagons and carts trying to enter or leave the city while others stand by with loaded crossbows in their hands, watching warily. No one is getting in or out of the city without being questioned.
“No,” Tirian says, “though the last time I was here, they were only searching the wagons, not the people.”
“Why?” Eustace asks disbelievingly. “I mean, not why did you come here, because I know that and it was completely stupid, but why are they searching the wagons?”
“The Calormenes are worried about smuggling,” Tirian explains. “Drugs, weapons, supplies –people. Those who’d like to leave but are forbidden to by Prince Bahadur. The nobles who remain, some of the merchants. Their lives may be more comfortable here than life in the camps is, but they are closely watched by Bahadur and his whisperers, and they have little true freedom.”
“Poor bastards,” Peter notes.
“Yes,” Tirian agrees softly. “Some of them will pay well in order to leave Cair Paravel, but few have made it out. Most leave Narnia entirely and flee to Archenland or Shoushan.” Vespasian had been one of those; he’d been lucky enough to get out of Cair Paravel before the city had been shut down completely, and lucky enough that his family’s ships had been able to run the Calormene blockade on the harbor.
Peter shakes his head, his expression grim, as they join the queue of people trying to get into the city. This late, there are fewer travelers and more commuters, folk who live within the city and work outside – on the river or for the Calormene army, mostly. The majority of those who work the farms live there as well, rather than in the city proper.
The sun has fully set by the time they reach the front of the line, and the Calormene guards motion them brusquely off their horses. “Names?” one of them asks as another guard throws back the flaps of their saddlebags, a big Narnian hound with a black and gold collar nosing around. The collar signifies he’s in the service of the Tisroc, and Tirian bites off his curse. Traitor.
“Breakneck,” Peter says easily, “out of Welham in Archenland. My cousins Scrubb and Lamorak.”
“Reason for entry?”
“Trade. I’m a rare coins and antiques dealer.”
“Huh,” the guard says, scribbling that down on his ledger.
They submit to drawing their weapons for inspection, and Tirian watches anxiously as the guard glances over the runes on Rhindon’s blade. On the open gates behind them is a detail of the duel between Miraz the Kinslayer and the High King, and whoever had done the carving must have known Peter, because the representation is nearly perfect. The depiction of the sword of Narnia in his raised hand is likewise, and if the Calormenes should turn and look at that and then at the sword Peter’s holding out for inspection –
The Calormenes don’t turn, and Peter sheathes his sword. But the Narnian hound, the drug-sniffer, is watching with his brow suddenly wrinkled in thought, looking from the High King to the gates. He’s a traitor already, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t cry out. If he does so –
Peter’s hand is easy on the hilt of his dagger as the guard gives Eustace’s and Tirian’s swords and daggers a cursory look, then waves them forward. The hound doesn’t say anything, just watches them until they pass through the gate.
“Lamorak?” Eustace asks Peter as they lead their horses into the city, hooves clopping on the cobbled streets.
Peter shrugs. “I could hardly call him Tirian, could I?”
Tirian glances sideways at the posted broadsheets on the wall. His own face stares back at him – at least the reward is high, and he can’t help but admit that he’s thought about having one of his own people turn him in on occasion, because the winters in the west are long and hard and food is scarce and the money would help his people immensely. Something’s always come up to break the famine, though, and he’s grateful for that, because the Calormenes want him dead nearly as much as some of the Narnians do. The broadsheets besides his are mostly people he knows – Eustace, Jill, Arnau, Ourente, Jewel, Vespasian – and a few he only knows by name and reputation, like the pirate king Casmyn Wavewalker. Tirian of Narnia, styling himself King of Narnia, believed to be At Large in the Woods of the West. Wanted Dead or Alive. Reward: 2000 Crescents.
Eustace squints at the posters. “Why are you worth so much more than me?” he asks, disgruntled. “I’m only worth five hundred crescents, but you’re two thousand? That’s not fair.”
“When you’re a king of Narnia, you can be worth two thousand crescents too,” Peter says. “Don’t feel too bad; five hundred crescents is enough to buy a young warhorse.”
“Is that good?”
“Have you ever tried to buy a Calormene warhorse for less than four hundred crescents?”
“Have you?” Eustace asks suspiciously.
“Oh, yeah,” Peter says. “Not easy. You have to be a very smooth talker. I’ve never managed it; I always ended up putting up six hundred suns or more – about four hundred seventy-five crescents, four-eighty, depending on exchange rates at the moment. Edmund talked one of the horse merchants at the Shifting Market down to three hundred once, though.” He smiles for a moment in fond memory, then he glances around and his expression darkens. “Where are we staying?”
“There’s an inn by the river,” Tirian says slowly. “The Tumblehome. I’ve never been there, but my cousin used to conduct business there.”
“Sounds a little above our means,” Peter drawls. They advance slowly down the street, leading their horses. Tirian doesn’t miss the way that Peter’s gaze is constantly flicking around, never resting long on any one spot. He keeps one hand on his sword-hilt, the other on his horse’s reins. For a moment his eyes are caught by the bronze-cast statue of himself and his three siblings in the center of the street – the statue is surrounded by a fountain that’s currently run dry.
Tirian frowns at it, wondering briefly where its crimnaiad has gone, then says, “Business of – questionable legality, I should say.”
“Sounds perfect,” the High King grins.
“I think we have different ideas of ‘perfect’,” Eustace grumbles.
“I think we have different ideas of what our goal in this city is,” Peter says.
The Tumblehome is in the Riverfront District, down by the mouth of the Great River and not far from the docks. The tang of salt water is in the air and Tirian inhales deeply. He can’t keep his gaze from flickering upwards toward the castle.
He grew up here, in this city; he was born here and raised here and except for a few seasons spent at the royal hunting lodge or fighting giants in the north, until the Calormenes came, this was all he’d ever known. Until now, he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the taste of salt water, the sound of the sea, the bustle of the city – so shocking after the stillness and quiet of the woods. This is his Narnia, not the grouping of terrified refugees clinging to freedom with tooth and nails in the wild lands of the west.
Their saddlebags stored away in the rooms they’ve let, they go down to the dining room for dinner, and Peter hooks an empty chair with one foot and puts his feet up on it, leaning back in his own seat. Ostentatiously, he orders the most expensive thing on the menu and Eustace gapes at him. Tirian tries to keep from doing the same thing. Once it wouldn’t have mattered, but now – when they’re trying to keep from drawing attention to themselves –
“Are you out of your mind?” Eustace hisses at Peter. “We are trying to fly under the radar here!”
“You sound like Susan,” Peter says idly, pouring his glass full of deep red wine. “Or at least you would if Susan had no idea what my plan was; usually she does and she’s just busy trying to tell me that my plan is stupid and going to get us all killed.”
“You have a plan?”
“Of course I have a plan. I also want dinner. Is this Narnian wine?”
Tirian tastes it. “Yes, the Redceren 27 –”
“A very good year,” the faun waiter says as he brings over their food. “Is there anything else I can help you with, masters?”
“Yes, actually,” Peter says easily. “Who rules this city?”
The faun looks confused. “‘Rules’, master? You mean Prince Bahadur of Calormen, of course.”
“I think you know what I mean,” Peter says, and leans back in his chair, toying with his wineglass. For a moment Tirian thinks his fingers are moving in unfamiliar patterns, then he blinks and all Peter’s doing is running the tip of one finger over the top of the glass. It sings, just a little bit.
“May I ask where you’re from, master?” the faun asks.
Peter sits up, puts the wineglass down on the table. From nowhere there’s an unfamiliar gold coin between his fingers and he walks it over his knuckles before he drops it on the table and lets it spin on its edge. “I’m from Narnia,” he says, and slams his palm down on the coin. When he takes his hand away, it’s face up: his own face.
Tirian bites off his curse and reaches for his dagger beneath the table. What in the name of Aslan is the High King doing –
The faun’s eyes fix on the coin, then flicker up towards Peter’s calm face. “You want the capo del’fiume,” he says. “Bencivenni da Maresti.”
He reaches for the coin, but Peter puts his hand over it. “Do I?”
“I would not lie to someone who pays me so well,” the faun says.
“And where would I find him?” Peter continues.
The faun hesitates. “There is a tavern,” he says at last, “down by the river. Maresti owns it; it’s called The Broken Arm.”
“My thanks,” Peter says, and flips the coin up to him.
The faun catches it, bows, and hurries off, hooves clicking on the wooden floor.
Tirian takes his hand away from his dagger, his heart raising. “Wasn’t that part of our trade goods?” he asks.
“What he got was a Calormene crescent,” Peter says and smirks, holding up the Narnian sun between two fingers. “It’s still good gold.” He rubs the sun between two fingers and holds up his hand again: empty.
Eustace’s jaw drops. “Where did you learn that?” he demands.
Peter laughs. “Would you believe I learned it at Cranwell?” he says. “We used to go out and get drunk at the pub whenever they’d let us loose, which wasn’t actually all that often, what with the war and all. I learned it from a mate of mine named Haweis; he’s a flight lieuey with the twenty-five now.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” Tirian bursts out, and then nearly falls over himself apologizing, because he shouldn’t talk to the High King like that –
“Don’t bother,” Peter says, sounding highly amused. “I’d explain, but I think it would just confuse you more.”
“So you didn’t learn everything in Narnia,” Eustace says, watching Peter with sharp eyes over his food.
“Just the important things,” Peter says, and digs into his meal.
Tirian finally brings himself to taste his own food – grape leaves stuffed with finely minced squid, fish, and lamb, spiced with certain Narnian herbs. It’s the best thing he’s eaten since he still sat his throne.
“This is incredibly rich,” Eustace says after a few bites. Although bites perhaps isn’t the best word; he’s been shoveling food into his mouth, because they’ve had to gorge themselves when given the chance. They can’t always be sure that there will be food on the table tomorrow, not with the life they lead.
Peter raises his eyebrows. “How can you tell?” he asks. “You haven’t stopped to taste it.” He’s cutting thin slices of his roast shark’s head, savoring each bite. He stops to spear one of the eyes – they’ve been replaced with miniature pink apples soaked in brandy. This particular has been a specialty of Cair Paravel’s for centuries now.
Eustace looks down at his plate. “I don’t even want to know what this is going to do to my stomach,” he announces. “Wait. What is this?”
The High King glances over. “It’s like a thick bouillabaisse over rice,” he says. “Those are fish. You may have heard of them before.”
“Yes, Peter, I know what fish are, possibly because I spent several months on the Dawn Treader with Caspian –”
“Shut up,” Peter interrupts, his grip on his fork and knife shifting abruptly.
“Don’t tell me to –”
“Get out from under the table,” the High King orders, and Tirian gets his dagger out of its sheath as he sees the Narnian hound from the city gates crawl out from under the table.
“I know who you are,” he tells Peter.
“Do you?” Peter says coldly.
“I’ve worked that gate every day for the past three years. I know every carving on those gates, and I know your face and I know that sword,” the hound says. He’s still wearing the black and gold collar – one of the dogs the Calormenes have hired to smell out drugs or other contraband at the gates; dogs can find it more easily than humans can. “And I know who he is,” he adds, nodding at Tirian. “You think every dog in Narnia doesn’t know that scent? I knew who he was the moment you got within twenty yards of the gates.”
“And yet you didn’t say anything,” Peter observes. “But you work for the Calormenes.”
“I have a family. They pay well. I have to make a living somehow.”
“And what?” Eustace demands. “You want a pay-off in order to keep your mouth shut?”
The hound gives him a cool look. “I know who you are, too,” he says. “Eustace, the King of Narnia’s pet human. If I turned both of you in, I wouldn’t have to work for the rest of my life. And yet you all sit here free and happy.”
Tirian glances around. There are no Calormenes in the dining room, at least none that he can see, but that doesn’t mean anything; there are too many traitors to be able to trust race and species alone –
“But you didn’t,” Peter says softly, putting his fork and knife down.
“Calormene paystub or not,” the hound says, “I light candles to the King of Summer like the rest of Narnia. I know who you are, and I heard the Queen of Spring’s horn sound a week ago, and I knew – we all knew.” He grins a dog-grin, tongue lolling out of his mouth, and Peter smiles back.
“Narnia will be free again,” the hound finishes, reverently, and bends in a bow.
“Get up,” Peter says, glancing around. “There’s a reason I’m not using my own name. But yes – Narnia will be free again.”
The hound rises and stands still, tail wagging slowly. “The faun told you the truth,” he says. “Maresti is at The Broken Arm, in all probability. But what he did not tell you is that he reports to the capo del’strada, not the capo del’fiume, and before the night is out Elizar Confesor will know that the High King is in Cair Paravel again. And half his men probably report to the other capos, and by the time the sun dawns, the only people in Cair Paravel who won’t know are the Calormenes.”
Peter blinks once, the only real sign of surprise he’s shown, and then nods. “This place The Broken Arm,” he says. “Can you take us there?”
“Your majesty, he takes Calormene gold,” Tirian says before the hound can answer. “He can’t be trusted.”
“He didn’t inform on us to the guards,” Peter says, holding the hound’s gaze. “Can you take us there?”
The hound glances at Tirian, then back at Peter. “Yes,” he says.
The Broken Arm is at the far edge of the Riverfront District, just where the Riverfront starts to bend into the Mare’s Quarter, one of the old city districts by the sea. The streets are lit, but badly, flames flickering behind the dirty glass of the lanterns – those that aren’t broken, at least. The city council had been talking about cleaning up the Riverfront for years before the Calormenes had come; Tirian has never been in this particular district of the Riverfront, so he’s not sure if it’s worse now than it had been before. Eustace looks vaguely startled by everything, giving the homeless satyrs sleeping on doorsteps wary looks and shying away from the prostitutes that seem inexplicably drawn to the High King, who favors them with a sweet, if disinterested, smile. Tirian’s not sure, but he thinks that Peter may be slipping every rusalka or swan-maid who rubs up against him money. He stops to ask them questions: where are they from, how long have they been doing this, do they want –
“You shouldn’t encourage them!” Eustace exclaims after the third one, a banshee with brilliant red hair, gives the High King a long kiss before she slips back into the shadows. “On the house, sweetheart,” she’d told him when she pulled away. “I like you. Come back anytime.”
“I mean,” Eustace continues, “you could catch something! Do they have venereal disease in Narnia? You could get, like, Narnian gonorrhea. Or syphilis! Or something.”
“I’m not going to get syphilis,” Peter informs him. “Or gonorrhea.”
“Syphilis makes you crazy,” Eustace goes on. “I read about it back in England. Although with you I don’t know if we’d actually notice until it killed you –”
“You can’t actually get a venereal disease from kissing someone,” Peter says.
“Yes, and where did you learn that, from –”
“The RAF, actually,” Peter says. “I thought this was a good neighborhood,” he adds to Tirian.
“Yes,” Tirian says, blinking. “I mean, it’s not the Garden District or Goldhouse Row, but –”
“Never mind,” Peter says, and sighs.
The hound – his name is Redear – looks back at them, tail wagging slowly. “Hurry up,” he says. “I’m already late. My wife’s going to kill me. I’ve barely seen ear nor tail of my pups in a week.”
“I thought I couldn’t see anything stranger than what I’ve already seen in Narnia,” Eustace mutters to Tirian as they continue on down the street. “But that’s so normal – it’s just...coming from a dog.”
“Welcome to Narnia, coz,” Peter calls back over his shoulder, striding on ahead and chatting with Redear about Narnian opportunities in the Calormene workforce or something of the like. Tirian can’t quite make out the words.
There’s a fog starting to descend on the city, shrouding the streets in mist and hiding buildings that loom up suddenly as they round corners. The streetlights are even more muted than usual, the occasional flicker of flame illuminating silvermist addicts or blazeleaf smokers huddled at their bases. Tirian hasn’t had experience with either drug for more than a decade now – not since he was a teenager sneaking out of the palace to go to parties in the Garden District – but the sugarsweet scent of blazeleaf hanging in the air is unmistakable.
“Here,” says Redear, stopping in front of a squat three-story building. Like most Riverfront buildings, it’s made of brick, with balconies on the second and third floors, the railings elegant iron filigree. The painted shutters are all closed, and the tables on the balconies are empty. The sign hanging over the door has what might be a roughly-painted landscape on it, or maybe it actually is supposed to be a broken arm; Tirian honestly can’t tell. At least the sign also has The Broken Arm printed on it.
Redear glances around nervously, wags his tail once, and says, “I have to go.”
“Wait –” Peter begins, but too late: the hound has already vanished into the fog.
“Oh, this is such a bad idea,” Eustace declares, looking around nervously and putting his hand on his sword-hilt.
Tirian is inclined to agree, but he’s also not going to argue with the High King of Narnia.
“Let me just get something cleared up for me before we go in,” Eustace continues.
“Okay,” Peter agrees, doing something to his sword and dagger. He turns to regard the two of them curiously.
“Are we or are we not going in to talk to some kind of crime lord?”
“We are,” Peter says. “Or rather, I am, you aren’t going to say anything.”
“Why? I thought we just came to Cair Paravel for money and supplies!”
“And who do you think has money and supplies?” Peter asks, raising his eyebrows. “Or the ability to get both out of the city? And a significant base of operations and people. Organized crime does tend to be fairly organized.”
“What, and you learned this in – what, Narnia? I thought you were going on about how your Narnia was some kind of pastoral paradise!”
Peter laughs, a little amused. “Politics basically is organized crime, coz,” he says. “It’s just a little harder to kill the ambassadors without a good excuse. And the armies are bigger.”
“Oh my God,” Eustace says breathlessly, and then Peter pushes open the door.
The tavern is full of light and laughter, humans and nonhumans alike drinking and gaming and telling stories. Tirian blinks around the smoke in the air, his eyes watering, and tries not to blanch.
Most of the refugees in the western camps are good people: remnants of the army or the border guard, civilians that have fled the towns, a few nobles and merchants lucky enough or loyal enough to choose the wild wood over the Calormenes. There are few residents of Cair Paravel that have managed to make it to the camps: the ones that have are the ones with money.
These aren’t good people. These are criminals.
Just looking across the tavern, Tirian can see satyrs gambling with stacks of Calormene crescents and Narnian lions and trees, a group of selkies at a back table with packages of what look suspiciously like blazeleaf, a centaur arguing with two men over a table full of glass vials, a man snorting silvermist off a rusalka’s bare breasts –
This isn’t his Cair Paravel. Except it is, and always has been, but this isn’t a side of his city that Tirian’s ever seen before, and it’s certainly not the side of the city that he wants the High King to see. He’s going to kill that hound –
Peter steps forward, draws his arm back to his shoulder, and throws his dagger. It lands dead center in the painted target on the back wall and the room goes quiet, several dozen Narnians all reaching for their weapons. Peter strolls forward in the sudden silence, his thumbs hooked in his sword-belt and his coat thrown back to show off the gleaming golden lion’s head on Rhindon’s hilt.
A satyr looks from the golden lion’s head on the pommel of the dagger embedded in the wall to the sword on Peter’s hip, then to Peter’s face. “Who the fuck are you?” he demands.
Peter flips a golden coin into the air. “Call it,” he orders.
No one says anything.
“What, no one?” Peter says, and lets the sun fall to the floor, face up. He strides forward and yanks the dagger out of the wall, sheathing it on his hip.
Warily, Tirian puts his hand on his sword-hilt. Eustace already has an inch of steel drawn, looking around with his eyes wide.
“Listen, o man,” Peter says idly, turning around to face the room, and Tirian knows that, knows those words –
“– and hear of the glory of gold-crowned Peter, Fire-eater, Bittersteel, Summer’s King, wise in council, strong in battle, named High King over all Kings of green-hilled and blue-watered Narnia.” He walks a second sun over his knuckles, ostentatious.
The centaur behind the bar says, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“He’s the High King of Narnia,” says a new voice.
Tirian looks to the stairs, along with everyone else in the room, and sees the man descending slowly, both his hands on the pair of Calormene scimitars sitting on his hips.
“Didn’t you all hear the horn?” he continues.
The sun vanishes from Peter’s hand. He rubs his thumb over Rhindon’s hilt. “You must be Capo Maresti,” he says.
Tirian sees the tavern-goers tense even more, looking around each other, and tightens his grip on his sword-hilt.
Maresti doesn’t answer. “Come upstairs, your majesty,” he says. “Bring your friends. We can...talk.”
“I’d rather stay down here,” Peter says, and Maresti says, “Fair enough. You, move.”
A group of fauns clears away from a wooden table in the corner of the room, and Peter steps over towards it. Tirian and Eustace follow, settling into their chairs as Maresti calls for a pitcher of Galman dark beer. He pours out drinks for all of them, sprinkling salt into the cups in the Galman fashion.
“Try the beer,” he says to Peter. “It’s good.”
“It is,” Peter agrees, sipping at it.
“You don’t really taste it that way,” Maresti says. “Like this,” and he drinks the whole cup down in one gulp, banging it back down onto the table when he’s finished.
Peter snorts and tips the cup back. He slams it back down on the table, empty, and reaches for the pitcher, but Maresti gets it first. “Let me,” he says, refilling their cups and salting them anew.
“Sip it slowly,” Tirian whispers to Eustace, and Eustace replies, “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
“This is a strange place to find the High King,” says Maresti, watching Peter.
“This is a strange place to find Narnia,” Peter replies. “Strange times and strange places call for strange actions.”
They tip back their cups in unison, bring them back down onto the table within seconds of each other.
“I knew when you entered the valley,” Maresti says, filling and salting the cups for a third time. “I knew when you passed the gates. I knew when the Calormenes didn’t recognize you, and when Redear knew who you were. I knew when you took rooms at the Tumblehome. I knew when you started asking questions.”
“You know a lot,” Peter says, his voice a little rougher than it had been a few minutes earlier.
They drink again. Tirian puts his cup down, and after a moment, Eustace does the same. He doesn’t like the way Maresti is looking at the High King.
“You’d know a little more,” Maresti says, “if you’d been in the city for more than three hours before you came here.”
“No,” Peter says, surging to his feet. He knocks his chair over.
Tirian starts up, but a pair of hands close on his shoulders, keeping him down. “What are you doing?” he demands.
“I know who you are too, King Tirian,” says Maresti.
“Let go of me!” Eustace yells, and then there’s a sharp crack as the selkie holding him slams his head down into the table and puts a knife to the side of his throat.
“Hands on the table, King Tirian,” Maresti orders.
“You don’t give him orders,” Peter says. Rhindon in his hand, the runes shining in the lamplight, but the High King’s voice is blurring and he’s swaying on his feet. “You don’t –”
“Put your gods-damned hands on the table, King Tirian, or the boy dies.”
Slowly, Tirian raises his empty hands and splays them out on the table.
Peter shakes his head. “Tirian –” he begins. “He’s not Maresti.”
“Oh, I am. I’m just not my brother Bencivenni.” He stands up and Peter holds up Rhindon with both hands, the blade wavering in the air. “You might as well put your sword down, High King. You won’t be able to –”
“Clearly you don’t know me very well,” Peter says, and hits him in the face with Rhindon’s hilt.
Maresti goes staggering backwards, hands clutched to his face and blood spurting out through his fingers, and Peter slams his elbow into the neck of the faun that grabs for him, slashing out with Rhindon at the satyr behind him. Blood sprays across his face as the satyr goes staggering backwards and he strikes out again, but the move is slow and it’s easy for the members of Maresti’s gang to get out of the way.
Peter shakes his head from side to side, turning in a slow circle with Rhindon held out in front of him. “I’m going to fucking kill you,” he says, his voice slurring, and then, “Edmund’s going to fucking kill me,” as Rhindon falls from his hand and clatters to the floor, and then the High King of Narnia falls too.
----------
Flight Lieutenant Haweis first appears in Shine So Bright. Golden Age Narnian coinage first appears in The White City.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: PG-13
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding. Certain elements in this chapter inspired by Scott Lynch's novel The Lies of Locke Lamora.
Author's Notes: This is part seven, obviously, and this is also the first WIP I've posted since 2006. (And that WIP was abandoned, so one can see I'm understandably nervous about posting another one.) The structure of this lends it to being posted in sections, though, so that's how it's going up. Because of this, however, it's not getting posted to any comms until the whole thing is done. Thanks to
lassiterfics for beta and encouragement (and urban angst).There is something liberating about being in disguise, about not being hunted for his face, and Tirian can’t help but luxuriate in the lessening of tension. Being around Narnians draws up his hackles, makes him painfully nervous and trips him up time and time again. He has failed his people too often to be comfortable in his own skin around them, which is only a lesser tragedy in the grand scheme of this war, but it is a tragedy nonetheless, and it is his own tragedy, which makes it more of one, at least to him.
The broadsheets that call for his arrest are years old, and he has not changed much in the intervening time, at least not enough to make him unrecognizable. Still, Queen Susan and King Edmund had sat him down before they’d left Arn Abedin, an assortment of tubes and powders on the table beside them, and set about changing his face as best they could.
“There’s not all that much we can do,” Susan had observed, browsing among the offerings on the table. “For one, there aren’t that many options, and for another, I think Peter still wants you recognizable.”
“That seems rather counter to the point,” Tirian said.
“He wants the Narnians to know you, the Calormenes to pass you by,” Edmund said, picking up a bowl. “Let’s try for darker hair and skin, to make you like more of a Telmarine. How did ninety percent of the humans in Narnia end up looking as Telmarine as Caspian’s people, and you look like the illegitimate child of an Archenlander barmaid?”
“My great-grandmother was an Archenlander barmaid,” Tirian replied, his voice very dry. “King Bastian’s second and third wives bore him no children, so even though he had put Nealie aside at his father’s order, he had no choice but to take their son as his heir.”
“Huh,” Edmund had said, sounding surprised, and Susan had laughed and said, “How dreadfully romantic, in the sense of, ‘not at all, really.’”
“You know how Archenland is, Su,” Edmund said. “Crown princes disguised as Calormene slaves, dukes as dockhands, all that. I suppose a princess as a barmaid isn’t so very far off.”
“She was not a princess,” Tirian had corrected, “she was just a barmaid, and it was Bastian – Prince Bastian then – who was in disguise.”
“Huh,” Edmund said again. “So your family has practice with it, then.”
Generations back, Tirian might have demurred, but then they’d set to work on him, and when they finished, Susan had held up a mirror, and Tirian had seen himself as he had never been: still slight, still with the faintly panicked expression on his face that he’s long since grown used to, but his red hair is Telmarine black and his skin is bronzed, his freckles suddenly, inexplicably vanished. Susan had added a scar through his left eyebrow and another at the edge of his jaw, using a chalky white gel she dabbed delicately on the tip of one finger.
“People’s eyes are drawn to distinguishing marks,” she explained. “They’ll be less likely to look at your face if there’s something to distract them. I could give you a birthmark, but –”
“I could break your nose,” Edmund offered, leaning against the table with his arms crossed over his chest. “That would also probably do the trick.”
“Er,” Tirian had said, trying to think of the best way to say, “no thank you, please,” and Edmund had laughed and Susan said sedately, “Perhaps not.”
There is a freedom in not wearing his own face, but it does not mean that he doesn’t tense every time they pass someone else on the road – two troops of Calormene soldiers and a Narnian lumber party, the talking horses shod and their heads bent low in shame, the minotaurs chained, the dwarves dragging their feet, all watched over by a group of mixed Calormene soldiers and Narnian traitors. Still, no one among the three had given more than a cursory look to the three men heading eastwards; there is nothing threatening about them, Tirian supposes. Peter had been the only one to speak upon being questioned, and his tone had been bored, a faint hint of worry creeping in when the Calormenes spoke of the Narnian rebels hiding out in the forest, but he had protested with all earnestness that they had seen no one in their travels, and certainly never been attacked by any bandits, Narnian or otherwise.
“Our goods are precious,” he had said, patting his saddlebags with one bare hand, “and I wager that we could put up enough of a fight to make any bandit think twice about challenging us.”
“Still, my friend,” the Calormene officer had replied, “it is best to be cautious, especially for men traveling in these woods. Those who dwell here are no friends to any civilized folk, and they would not hesitate to take your lives for the sake of your possessions. I cannot offer you an escort into safer territory, but I beg of you to heed my warning; I would not like any ill to befall you so soon after you had left my keeping.”
Peter’s reply was bored. “I assure you, sir, that your warning is heard. Still, I think you are overly cautious; the woods seemed safe enough to me.” And he’d laid one hand on his sword-hilt, the lion’s head pommel wrapped in brown leather and so disguised, and the Calormene officer had offered him a hint of a smile and ordered his men to continue their patrol.
That had been two days ago, when they were still in the rosewood, and there has been no trouble since. Not from Narnians, as Tirian has more than half-feared, and not from Calormenes, his greatest fear.
“I don’t understand,” Eustace protested that first night. “Why’d they just let us go? Aren’t they looking for us?”
Peter was cleaning his dagger, and he hadn’t looked up when his cousin spoke. “Why should they be? It’s not as if we exactly set up an announcement when we left Arn Abedin, and even if we had, Cair Paravel is the last place they’d expect Tirian to be going, and they certainly don’t expect me.”
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously enough,” Eustace grumbled.
“Trust me, coz,” Peter had replied, “I’m taking it seriously.”
They’re out of the rosewood now, out of the west – they crossed the Beruna Bridge yesterday, and they’re into familiar land now. Counter to everything that makes sense, Tirian finds himself relaxing. This is his country, this is the land he grew up in. The shape of the earth is familiar and loved, and even though there are only a few scattered trees where there had once been forests, even though the rivers are choked with silt, even though the few Narnians they see shy away from them into whatever cover they can find, this is still his land. This is still the Narnia he knows and loves.
“There,” Peter says, very softly, in the late morning. He reins his horse to a stop and sits still, looking into the field to the south of them.
Eustace blinks in surprise. “What is that?” he demands.
Tirian looks at the huge mass of tumbled stones, overgrown with grass and a few scrubby trees, too small to fall to the axes of the Calormenes. “It’s just a hill,” he says. The remains of one of the old shrines of Narnia stands before it, but those are scattered throughout the country; they mean nothing. Around that are a few shallow dips in the ground, odd in the middle of the field, but still – that means nothing. There are odd things throughout this country; a few more are meaningless. Remains of ditches, perhaps, or damage from some earthquake.
Peter twists around in the saddle to look at him, raising his eyebrows. “It’s not a hill,” he says. “That’s Aslan’s How.”
“What?” Tirian says blankly. “But – that’s not possible. Aslan’s How was destroyed! If it even existed at all,” he adds doubtfully, because he’s read Caspian’s memoirs, heard all the stories and read all the histories, and not one of them can agree on where Aslan’s How had been or even if it had ever been real. Silverstam, a well-known historian from Absalian’s reign, had been ardent on the fact that Aslan’s How had never really existed, but had instead been nothing but metaphor. There are no remains anywhere in Narnia of the structure that King Caspian X writes of, he’d written in his History of the Narnian Revolution, the most commonly studied history of Caspian’s rebellion. Instead of Aslan’s How being a real physical structure, it is far more likely that it was instead a representation of shelter and safety, something that the hunted Narnians of the First Telmarine Age had never known.
“Oh, it exists,” Peter says, mouth twisting a little in amusement. “I was there. It suffered damage in the attack courtesy of Miraz’s war machines, but it was never destroyed. There,” he adds, pointing. “That was the battlefield. Miraz’s troops set up to the west, not far from the ford at Beruna. The Narnians were quartered in the How. Miraz and I fought at the henge, there, and Sopespian stabbed him in the back after Caspian made the damn fool mistake of letting him live.”
There’s an odd, amused tone to his reminiscences, and Tirian finds himself biting his lip, trying to think of something to say in reply. But that’s not what our histories say, he wants to protest, but the truth is that the histories all contradict each other; the only one that lines up precisely with what Peter’s saying is Caspian’s own account of the rebellion.
“How is letting someone live a mistake?” Eustace asks suspiciously.
“We couldn’t have let him live anyway,” Peter says. “He was too dangerous. Caspian didn’t understand that at the time, and we didn’t realize that Miraz’s men had their own ambitions, few of which required Miraz being alive and most of them requiring his death at our hands. Caspian just had to be so damn noble –” He stops abruptly. “So I take it the chances of any Narnians hiding out in the How aren’t particularly high, then?”
“Hardly,” Tirian admits. “I don’t think anyone in Narnia knows Aslan’s How actually exists, or if they do, where it is. I think I would have heard. I don’t hear of everything that happens in Narnia, but I do hear most things, eventually.”
“It’s probably for the better,” Peter says. He turns his horse back to the road. “I know what’s buried under all those stones,” he adds softly, and doesn’t answer when Eustace asks, “What? What’s under there?” Instead, he spurs his horse into a trot, forcing Tirian and Eustace to keep up with him.
From here, the road turns north to Cair Paravel, climbing the low hills of the east. This close to the capital, within the reach of the Ban, there are towns at regular intervals. Most times the road passes through them and Tirian fights the urge to pull down the brim of his hat to cover his face, even though there are few who spare them more than a passing glance. Peter looks around with interest, or at least Tirian thinks he does; the High King’s face grows grimmer and more pinched with every mile as he takes in the fields that surround the towns, the few trees that remain, the closed-off expressions that the townsfolk wear.
Narnian towns are mixed human and nonhuman, always have been, and Tirian’s not sure, but he thinks that something about this may strike the High King as odd, because when they’d passed through Kettlestream yesterday, the first and westernmost of the towns along the roseroad, he’d blinked in surprise and turned to Tirian as soon as the fields of the town were fading into the distance behind them. “Your Narnians live in towns?” he’d asked.
Tirian had blinked in surprise. “Of course,” he replied. “Didn’t yours?”
“Never,” Peter said. “There was only ever one city in Narnia, and that was the White City beneath Cair Paravel. Towns were for humans, and we had few enough of those in Narnia for most of our reign. A few centaur and dwarf villages, but nothing like this.”
Tirian hadn’t known what to say to that, because the idea is so alien – where had the Narnians of the Golden Age lived, then? He’s never known anything but peace between humans and nonhumans, always living cheek to jowl in the towns of Narnia. Of course, there had been neighborhoods that were more heavily frequented by one race or another, but that was only to be expected. Humans prefer to be closer to humans, centaurs to centaurs, fauns to fauns, and so on and so forth. But never so far apart that they were in separate towns, or not in towns at all – it makes no sense, what the High King is saying. How? Why? It seems absurdly impractical.
They mount the last of the hills before they reach the river valley that stretches out before Cair Paravel and Tirian sees Peter’s face go abruptly grim before it shuts down to complete blankness. From here they can see Cair Paravel, city and castle alike, and beyond that the ocean and the archipelago of islands before it, including the nameless island. If Tirian squints, he thinks he might be able to see the white stones of the sacred ruins on the nameless island.
“Your majesty?” he asks softly, hesitant to bother the High King with questions. “Is something amiss?”
Peter’s voice is flat when he speaks. “That’s Cair Paravel,” he says, and it’s almost, but not quite, a question.
“Yes,” Tirian says, his heart lifting as he looks down into the valley. From so far away Caspian’s castle is nothing more than a miniature, the city a vast sprawling mass of urbanity around it, spanning both sides of the Great River, towns and fields scattered throughout the valley and surrounding the lionsroad. The banners that hang limply from the high, rounded towers of Caspian’s castle are Calormene black and gold, not Narnian scarlet, and the ships in the harbor are Calormene ones, bigger and bulkier than Narnian ships, but otherwise Tirian could be returning to Cair Paravel from a stay at his hunting lodge (long since turned into a barrack for Calormene soldiers). He could be coming home.
Cair Paravel is not his home, not now. Now Cair Paravel is harbor to Bahadur of Calormen and his men, Caspian’s castle despoiled and ravaged. Tirian’s grip tightens on the reins, sharp with anger. Calormen has twisted everything Cair Paravel has stood for since Caspian laid its first stones upon the earth.
“May Aslan forgive us,” Peter whispers. “This is not the Narnia I knew or the Narnia I left.” He bows his head, lips moving silently, and Tirian looks away.
He looks down into the valley, because he knows how it’s supposed to look, and after that first flush of home, home, home at last after all my wanderings he can see what’s wrong with the valley. Calormene ships in the harbor, of course, and not the merchant ships he’s accustomed to, but the great war galleons of the Tisroc. An army camp on the south bank of the Great River, set up around one of the gentrified suburbs of the city. Barges on the Great River, some of them shepherding logs before them down to the ocean, where they will be taken up by Calormene ships and taken to Tashbaan to be sold. Narnia has never done that; would never choke the freshwater Narnians so. For the first time in five years, Tirian wonders how the Calormenes managed to contain the naiads and potamaeids, all the wild spirits of the land and water and air, because surely sheer force of arms cannot pinion them. There has to be something else, some foul magic no Narnian could fight against.
“So!” calls a voice from above, and they all put their hands to their swords, Peter getting half a foot of blade drawn before he lets Rhindon slide back into its scabbard, the runes glinting briefly in the sunlight.
The raven alights on a stone mile marker before them and mantles his wings briefly before folding them against his sides. “So,” he says again, “Tirian the Woodsman, last king of Narnia, returns to Cair Paravel. Are you so weary of the west that you long for death, my lord?”
“Crackclaw,” Tirian says in greeting. “I see your eyes are as good as ever.”
“Better than most, Woodsman,” Crackclaw says. “You wear Caspian’s likeness. Is it not death you seek after all?”
“He doesn’t look that much like Caspian,” Eustace says grumpily, eyeing Crackclaw with dislike. Tirian doesn’t blame him; there are too many people who have betrayed him to make holding grudges practical, but Eustace had taken the raven’s abrupt departure at the worst of times personally. “What are you doing here, Crackclaw, gloating?”
“Wondering,” says Crackclaw. “What could happen to lure the last king of Narnia out of the west? And so short on the sound of a horn that has not been heard in Narnia for three hundred years, as well – if I guess correctly, and I think that I do. Where was it you found the Queen of Spring's horn, Woodsman? Your desperation does you no credit; fairytales and prayer have gotten us nothing yet, so why should another myth do Narnia any good?”
“I was not the one who blew Queen Susan’s horn,” Tirian says. “And who said it was a myth?”
“You know as well as I that the only help the lion sent has won Narnia nothing,” Crackclaw replies, turning his head briefly towards Eustace, who scowls. “Do you seek to find the King of Summer on the nameless island, as Caspian did so many years ago? You will have to look farther afield than that. Perhaps into your dreams, or the end of the world, or upwards to the stars.”
“Or,” Peter says, “he could look to his left.”
Crackclaw’s wings rise a little before he closes them. “Your face I don’t know,” he says. “And your name I certainly don’t.”
“I think you know my name,” Peter says, drawing Rhindon in one smooth movement and flicking the leather off the pommel with his thumb. He lets the sword fall, blade striking the earth and standing upright, quivering a little. The golden lion’s head gleams; the runes on the fuller of the blade seem to burn.
Crackclaw takes to the air in a flurry of black feathers. “King of Summer!” he spits. “Impossible!”
“Truth,” Peter replies. He leans down, far off the side of his horse, and pulls Rhindon free of the earth, wiping both sides of the blade across his trousers before he sheathes it. “Peace, raven. You are a friend of Narnia?”
“He’s a friend of himself,” Eustace snaps. “He doesn’t like anyone; all he cares about is his own skin.”
“Not true,” Crackclaw declares, settling back down onto the mile marker. He looks at Peter with new respect. “I am a friend of Narnia, I am an enemy to her foes. Whatever it is you ask for, my king, I will offer.”
“Don’t trust him, Peter,” Eustace warns. “He’s just going to turn around and sell us out to the Calormenes.”
“Are you?” Peter asks, raising his eyebrows. He’s sitting straight in his saddle, and looking at him, all Tirian can think of are the paintings in Cair Paravel – the King of Summer, young and golden, crowned in sunlight and gilded in armor, Rhindon raised in his hand as he rides into battle. But Peter doesn’t look anything like that, not really – except that, in some indefinable way, he does. It has less to do with looks and more to do with carriage; Peter moves like a king. Modern clothes don’t diminish him at all; he wears his borrowed garb as if it’s just another set of armor, sits his dumb Calormene horse like the beast is the unicorn he’s sometimes portrayed with, and though he’s crownless, he holds his head so high there might as well be gold on his brow.
Crackclaw hesitates and Eustace reaches for his sword.
“Don’t, coz,” Peter says without looking around. “Are you going to go to the Calormenes, Crackclaw?” he asks softly, and Crackclaw’s wings flare wide, for that heartbeat dark and endless.
“Never again,” the raven promises. “Not for all the gold in Narnia.”
“Good,” Peter says lightly. “Will you fight for me and mine, then?”
“Fight?” Crackclaw repeats. “Do I look like a warrior to you? Why would I do such a thing?”
“Because your High King asks it of you, Crackclaw,” Tirian says. “Will you deny the will of Aslan?”
“It isn’t Aslan who stands before me now,” Crackclaw says. “What do you wish of me, my king?”
“Nothing at the moment,” Peter says, “although if you could see through to not betraying us to the Calormenes, I’d appreciate that. And,” he adds, “I want you to let the people of Narnia know that there is hope for this land again. Let them know that their High King has returned and that Narnia will be free, I promise them that.”
“Your wish is my command, sire,” Crackclaw says, and dips his head in a bow before he takes to the sky again, winging his way upwards. From far above, his voice echoes downward, “And welcome home, my king!”
For a moment a small, smug smile plays across Peter’s lips, and then it’s gone as he looks back down at the valley below. “Home,” he murmurs. “Indeed.”
The lionsroad follows the Great River to the gates of the city, although Cair Paravel has long ago burst its boundaries and spilled past the walls into the rest of the valley. This close to the city the roads are full of travelers, merchants and farmers, Calormene troops shoving Narnians aside without care. The fields are new-plowed, and Tirian can’t hide his smile as he looks around at them: at least his people won’t starve this year. Next to the lionsroad, the Great River is choked with barges, boats, and logs, a rusalka balanced precariously on two logs screaming vile imprecations at a trio of water-rats steering a raft across her path, while upstream, a pair of shirtless Calormene sailors catcall at a banshee who steps from log to log as calmly as if she was walking on solid ground.
There are two kinds of neighborhoods outside the city walls, one on either side of the river. The north bank is a poor neighborhood, home to those new-come to the city, and the houses are small and cramped, the streets dirty. The lionsroad passes on the south bank, where the houses are big and handsome, the gardens well-kept and verdant: this is the neighborhood for those of wealth who do not hold ancestral homes within the city walls. New money, mostly; the nobles and well-established merchants won’t be caught dead living so close to the city in such a new neighborhood.
“Before the Calormenes came, the population of Cair Paravel had more than doubled in the past two decades,” Tirian tells Peter and Eustace proudly.
Peter doesn’t look at him. “And this is a good thing how?” His voice is flat.
Tirian blinks in surprise. “Why, the city has grown and strengthened – there is new revenue and –”
“Why the hell did Caspian call it Cair Paravel?” Peter interrupts, like he hasn’t spoken. He looks around and his face is shadowed, his expression grim; he lets his hand fall to his sword-hilt like a talisman.
“What, like your Cair Paravel was any better?” Eustace says sarcastically.
Peter closes his eyes briefly. “When we sat in Cair Paravel, these were all fields. I used to drill my armies there, on the north bank, and we held festivals there, on the south bank. Merfolk and oceanids, all the saltwater Narnians, used to swim up the Great River to meet with us. There was a vineyard to the north, I remember, not so far away, and orchards all up the hillside. The dryads used to leave baskets of fruit on the steps of the great hall for us whenever they were in season. There was a herd of talking horses that used to travel through here; they’d usually stay for a week or so, and sometimes the colts would join the army or –” He rubs a hand over his face. “I should never have come back.”
Shocked, Tirian blurts out, “But why would you say such a thing, your majesty?” before he can think better of it.
Absently, Peter says, “You probably shouldn’t call me that here; it might raise eyebrows,” and then he shakes his head. “This isn’t Narnia,” he says, very softly, and spurs his horse on ahead.
Tirian follows him. “I can’t call you by your name,” he protests.
“Why not?” Eustace demands.
The High King just sighs. “Somehow I’m guessing we can’t just ride into the city,” he says, looking up the road.
Tirian follows his line of sight to see the Calormene soldiers at the entrance to the city. The big wood-and-metal gates, fancifully decorated with renderings of Caspian’s Rebellion and the rebuilding of Cair Paravel, stand open now, wide enough for two wagons to pass through, and there are Calormenes on either side of the road, some of them going through the wagons and carts trying to enter or leave the city while others stand by with loaded crossbows in their hands, watching warily. No one is getting in or out of the city without being questioned.
“No,” Tirian says, “though the last time I was here, they were only searching the wagons, not the people.”
“Why?” Eustace asks disbelievingly. “I mean, not why did you come here, because I know that and it was completely stupid, but why are they searching the wagons?”
“The Calormenes are worried about smuggling,” Tirian explains. “Drugs, weapons, supplies –people. Those who’d like to leave but are forbidden to by Prince Bahadur. The nobles who remain, some of the merchants. Their lives may be more comfortable here than life in the camps is, but they are closely watched by Bahadur and his whisperers, and they have little true freedom.”
“Poor bastards,” Peter notes.
“Yes,” Tirian agrees softly. “Some of them will pay well in order to leave Cair Paravel, but few have made it out. Most leave Narnia entirely and flee to Archenland or Shoushan.” Vespasian had been one of those; he’d been lucky enough to get out of Cair Paravel before the city had been shut down completely, and lucky enough that his family’s ships had been able to run the Calormene blockade on the harbor.
Peter shakes his head, his expression grim, as they join the queue of people trying to get into the city. This late, there are fewer travelers and more commuters, folk who live within the city and work outside – on the river or for the Calormene army, mostly. The majority of those who work the farms live there as well, rather than in the city proper.
The sun has fully set by the time they reach the front of the line, and the Calormene guards motion them brusquely off their horses. “Names?” one of them asks as another guard throws back the flaps of their saddlebags, a big Narnian hound with a black and gold collar nosing around. The collar signifies he’s in the service of the Tisroc, and Tirian bites off his curse. Traitor.
“Breakneck,” Peter says easily, “out of Welham in Archenland. My cousins Scrubb and Lamorak.”
“Reason for entry?”
“Trade. I’m a rare coins and antiques dealer.”
“Huh,” the guard says, scribbling that down on his ledger.
They submit to drawing their weapons for inspection, and Tirian watches anxiously as the guard glances over the runes on Rhindon’s blade. On the open gates behind them is a detail of the duel between Miraz the Kinslayer and the High King, and whoever had done the carving must have known Peter, because the representation is nearly perfect. The depiction of the sword of Narnia in his raised hand is likewise, and if the Calormenes should turn and look at that and then at the sword Peter’s holding out for inspection –
The Calormenes don’t turn, and Peter sheathes his sword. But the Narnian hound, the drug-sniffer, is watching with his brow suddenly wrinkled in thought, looking from the High King to the gates. He’s a traitor already, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t cry out. If he does so –
Peter’s hand is easy on the hilt of his dagger as the guard gives Eustace’s and Tirian’s swords and daggers a cursory look, then waves them forward. The hound doesn’t say anything, just watches them until they pass through the gate.
“Lamorak?” Eustace asks Peter as they lead their horses into the city, hooves clopping on the cobbled streets.
Peter shrugs. “I could hardly call him Tirian, could I?”
Tirian glances sideways at the posted broadsheets on the wall. His own face stares back at him – at least the reward is high, and he can’t help but admit that he’s thought about having one of his own people turn him in on occasion, because the winters in the west are long and hard and food is scarce and the money would help his people immensely. Something’s always come up to break the famine, though, and he’s grateful for that, because the Calormenes want him dead nearly as much as some of the Narnians do. The broadsheets besides his are mostly people he knows – Eustace, Jill, Arnau, Ourente, Jewel, Vespasian – and a few he only knows by name and reputation, like the pirate king Casmyn Wavewalker. Tirian of Narnia, styling himself King of Narnia, believed to be At Large in the Woods of the West. Wanted Dead or Alive. Reward: 2000 Crescents.
Eustace squints at the posters. “Why are you worth so much more than me?” he asks, disgruntled. “I’m only worth five hundred crescents, but you’re two thousand? That’s not fair.”
“When you’re a king of Narnia, you can be worth two thousand crescents too,” Peter says. “Don’t feel too bad; five hundred crescents is enough to buy a young warhorse.”
“Is that good?”
“Have you ever tried to buy a Calormene warhorse for less than four hundred crescents?”
“Have you?” Eustace asks suspiciously.
“Oh, yeah,” Peter says. “Not easy. You have to be a very smooth talker. I’ve never managed it; I always ended up putting up six hundred suns or more – about four hundred seventy-five crescents, four-eighty, depending on exchange rates at the moment. Edmund talked one of the horse merchants at the Shifting Market down to three hundred once, though.” He smiles for a moment in fond memory, then he glances around and his expression darkens. “Where are we staying?”
“There’s an inn by the river,” Tirian says slowly. “The Tumblehome. I’ve never been there, but my cousin used to conduct business there.”
“Sounds a little above our means,” Peter drawls. They advance slowly down the street, leading their horses. Tirian doesn’t miss the way that Peter’s gaze is constantly flicking around, never resting long on any one spot. He keeps one hand on his sword-hilt, the other on his horse’s reins. For a moment his eyes are caught by the bronze-cast statue of himself and his three siblings in the center of the street – the statue is surrounded by a fountain that’s currently run dry.
Tirian frowns at it, wondering briefly where its crimnaiad has gone, then says, “Business of – questionable legality, I should say.”
“Sounds perfect,” the High King grins.
“I think we have different ideas of ‘perfect’,” Eustace grumbles.
“I think we have different ideas of what our goal in this city is,” Peter says.
The Tumblehome is in the Riverfront District, down by the mouth of the Great River and not far from the docks. The tang of salt water is in the air and Tirian inhales deeply. He can’t keep his gaze from flickering upwards toward the castle.
He grew up here, in this city; he was born here and raised here and except for a few seasons spent at the royal hunting lodge or fighting giants in the north, until the Calormenes came, this was all he’d ever known. Until now, he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the taste of salt water, the sound of the sea, the bustle of the city – so shocking after the stillness and quiet of the woods. This is his Narnia, not the grouping of terrified refugees clinging to freedom with tooth and nails in the wild lands of the west.
Their saddlebags stored away in the rooms they’ve let, they go down to the dining room for dinner, and Peter hooks an empty chair with one foot and puts his feet up on it, leaning back in his own seat. Ostentatiously, he orders the most expensive thing on the menu and Eustace gapes at him. Tirian tries to keep from doing the same thing. Once it wouldn’t have mattered, but now – when they’re trying to keep from drawing attention to themselves –
“Are you out of your mind?” Eustace hisses at Peter. “We are trying to fly under the radar here!”
“You sound like Susan,” Peter says idly, pouring his glass full of deep red wine. “Or at least you would if Susan had no idea what my plan was; usually she does and she’s just busy trying to tell me that my plan is stupid and going to get us all killed.”
“You have a plan?”
“Of course I have a plan. I also want dinner. Is this Narnian wine?”
Tirian tastes it. “Yes, the Redceren 27 –”
“A very good year,” the faun waiter says as he brings over their food. “Is there anything else I can help you with, masters?”
“Yes, actually,” Peter says easily. “Who rules this city?”
The faun looks confused. “‘Rules’, master? You mean Prince Bahadur of Calormen, of course.”
“I think you know what I mean,” Peter says, and leans back in his chair, toying with his wineglass. For a moment Tirian thinks his fingers are moving in unfamiliar patterns, then he blinks and all Peter’s doing is running the tip of one finger over the top of the glass. It sings, just a little bit.
“May I ask where you’re from, master?” the faun asks.
Peter sits up, puts the wineglass down on the table. From nowhere there’s an unfamiliar gold coin between his fingers and he walks it over his knuckles before he drops it on the table and lets it spin on its edge. “I’m from Narnia,” he says, and slams his palm down on the coin. When he takes his hand away, it’s face up: his own face.
Tirian bites off his curse and reaches for his dagger beneath the table. What in the name of Aslan is the High King doing –
The faun’s eyes fix on the coin, then flicker up towards Peter’s calm face. “You want the capo del’fiume,” he says. “Bencivenni da Maresti.”
He reaches for the coin, but Peter puts his hand over it. “Do I?”
“I would not lie to someone who pays me so well,” the faun says.
“And where would I find him?” Peter continues.
The faun hesitates. “There is a tavern,” he says at last, “down by the river. Maresti owns it; it’s called The Broken Arm.”
“My thanks,” Peter says, and flips the coin up to him.
The faun catches it, bows, and hurries off, hooves clicking on the wooden floor.
Tirian takes his hand away from his dagger, his heart raising. “Wasn’t that part of our trade goods?” he asks.
“What he got was a Calormene crescent,” Peter says and smirks, holding up the Narnian sun between two fingers. “It’s still good gold.” He rubs the sun between two fingers and holds up his hand again: empty.
Eustace’s jaw drops. “Where did you learn that?” he demands.
Peter laughs. “Would you believe I learned it at Cranwell?” he says. “We used to go out and get drunk at the pub whenever they’d let us loose, which wasn’t actually all that often, what with the war and all. I learned it from a mate of mine named Haweis; he’s a flight lieuey with the twenty-five now.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” Tirian bursts out, and then nearly falls over himself apologizing, because he shouldn’t talk to the High King like that –
“Don’t bother,” Peter says, sounding highly amused. “I’d explain, but I think it would just confuse you more.”
“So you didn’t learn everything in Narnia,” Eustace says, watching Peter with sharp eyes over his food.
“Just the important things,” Peter says, and digs into his meal.
Tirian finally brings himself to taste his own food – grape leaves stuffed with finely minced squid, fish, and lamb, spiced with certain Narnian herbs. It’s the best thing he’s eaten since he still sat his throne.
“This is incredibly rich,” Eustace says after a few bites. Although bites perhaps isn’t the best word; he’s been shoveling food into his mouth, because they’ve had to gorge themselves when given the chance. They can’t always be sure that there will be food on the table tomorrow, not with the life they lead.
Peter raises his eyebrows. “How can you tell?” he asks. “You haven’t stopped to taste it.” He’s cutting thin slices of his roast shark’s head, savoring each bite. He stops to spear one of the eyes – they’ve been replaced with miniature pink apples soaked in brandy. This particular has been a specialty of Cair Paravel’s for centuries now.
Eustace looks down at his plate. “I don’t even want to know what this is going to do to my stomach,” he announces. “Wait. What is this?”
The High King glances over. “It’s like a thick bouillabaisse over rice,” he says. “Those are fish. You may have heard of them before.”
“Yes, Peter, I know what fish are, possibly because I spent several months on the Dawn Treader with Caspian –”
“Shut up,” Peter interrupts, his grip on his fork and knife shifting abruptly.
“Don’t tell me to –”
“Get out from under the table,” the High King orders, and Tirian gets his dagger out of its sheath as he sees the Narnian hound from the city gates crawl out from under the table.
“I know who you are,” he tells Peter.
“Do you?” Peter says coldly.
“I’ve worked that gate every day for the past three years. I know every carving on those gates, and I know your face and I know that sword,” the hound says. He’s still wearing the black and gold collar – one of the dogs the Calormenes have hired to smell out drugs or other contraband at the gates; dogs can find it more easily than humans can. “And I know who he is,” he adds, nodding at Tirian. “You think every dog in Narnia doesn’t know that scent? I knew who he was the moment you got within twenty yards of the gates.”
“And yet you didn’t say anything,” Peter observes. “But you work for the Calormenes.”
“I have a family. They pay well. I have to make a living somehow.”
“And what?” Eustace demands. “You want a pay-off in order to keep your mouth shut?”
The hound gives him a cool look. “I know who you are, too,” he says. “Eustace, the King of Narnia’s pet human. If I turned both of you in, I wouldn’t have to work for the rest of my life. And yet you all sit here free and happy.”
Tirian glances around. There are no Calormenes in the dining room, at least none that he can see, but that doesn’t mean anything; there are too many traitors to be able to trust race and species alone –
“But you didn’t,” Peter says softly, putting his fork and knife down.
“Calormene paystub or not,” the hound says, “I light candles to the King of Summer like the rest of Narnia. I know who you are, and I heard the Queen of Spring’s horn sound a week ago, and I knew – we all knew.” He grins a dog-grin, tongue lolling out of his mouth, and Peter smiles back.
“Narnia will be free again,” the hound finishes, reverently, and bends in a bow.
“Get up,” Peter says, glancing around. “There’s a reason I’m not using my own name. But yes – Narnia will be free again.”
The hound rises and stands still, tail wagging slowly. “The faun told you the truth,” he says. “Maresti is at The Broken Arm, in all probability. But what he did not tell you is that he reports to the capo del’strada, not the capo del’fiume, and before the night is out Elizar Confesor will know that the High King is in Cair Paravel again. And half his men probably report to the other capos, and by the time the sun dawns, the only people in Cair Paravel who won’t know are the Calormenes.”
Peter blinks once, the only real sign of surprise he’s shown, and then nods. “This place The Broken Arm,” he says. “Can you take us there?”
“Your majesty, he takes Calormene gold,” Tirian says before the hound can answer. “He can’t be trusted.”
“He didn’t inform on us to the guards,” Peter says, holding the hound’s gaze. “Can you take us there?”
The hound glances at Tirian, then back at Peter. “Yes,” he says.
The Broken Arm is at the far edge of the Riverfront District, just where the Riverfront starts to bend into the Mare’s Quarter, one of the old city districts by the sea. The streets are lit, but badly, flames flickering behind the dirty glass of the lanterns – those that aren’t broken, at least. The city council had been talking about cleaning up the Riverfront for years before the Calormenes had come; Tirian has never been in this particular district of the Riverfront, so he’s not sure if it’s worse now than it had been before. Eustace looks vaguely startled by everything, giving the homeless satyrs sleeping on doorsteps wary looks and shying away from the prostitutes that seem inexplicably drawn to the High King, who favors them with a sweet, if disinterested, smile. Tirian’s not sure, but he thinks that Peter may be slipping every rusalka or swan-maid who rubs up against him money. He stops to ask them questions: where are they from, how long have they been doing this, do they want –
“You shouldn’t encourage them!” Eustace exclaims after the third one, a banshee with brilliant red hair, gives the High King a long kiss before she slips back into the shadows. “On the house, sweetheart,” she’d told him when she pulled away. “I like you. Come back anytime.”
“I mean,” Eustace continues, “you could catch something! Do they have venereal disease in Narnia? You could get, like, Narnian gonorrhea. Or syphilis! Or something.”
“I’m not going to get syphilis,” Peter informs him. “Or gonorrhea.”
“Syphilis makes you crazy,” Eustace goes on. “I read about it back in England. Although with you I don’t know if we’d actually notice until it killed you –”
“You can’t actually get a venereal disease from kissing someone,” Peter says.
“Yes, and where did you learn that, from –”
“The RAF, actually,” Peter says. “I thought this was a good neighborhood,” he adds to Tirian.
“Yes,” Tirian says, blinking. “I mean, it’s not the Garden District or Goldhouse Row, but –”
“Never mind,” Peter says, and sighs.
The hound – his name is Redear – looks back at them, tail wagging slowly. “Hurry up,” he says. “I’m already late. My wife’s going to kill me. I’ve barely seen ear nor tail of my pups in a week.”
“I thought I couldn’t see anything stranger than what I’ve already seen in Narnia,” Eustace mutters to Tirian as they continue on down the street. “But that’s so normal – it’s just...coming from a dog.”
“Welcome to Narnia, coz,” Peter calls back over his shoulder, striding on ahead and chatting with Redear about Narnian opportunities in the Calormene workforce or something of the like. Tirian can’t quite make out the words.
There’s a fog starting to descend on the city, shrouding the streets in mist and hiding buildings that loom up suddenly as they round corners. The streetlights are even more muted than usual, the occasional flicker of flame illuminating silvermist addicts or blazeleaf smokers huddled at their bases. Tirian hasn’t had experience with either drug for more than a decade now – not since he was a teenager sneaking out of the palace to go to parties in the Garden District – but the sugarsweet scent of blazeleaf hanging in the air is unmistakable.
“Here,” says Redear, stopping in front of a squat three-story building. Like most Riverfront buildings, it’s made of brick, with balconies on the second and third floors, the railings elegant iron filigree. The painted shutters are all closed, and the tables on the balconies are empty. The sign hanging over the door has what might be a roughly-painted landscape on it, or maybe it actually is supposed to be a broken arm; Tirian honestly can’t tell. At least the sign also has The Broken Arm printed on it.
Redear glances around nervously, wags his tail once, and says, “I have to go.”
“Wait –” Peter begins, but too late: the hound has already vanished into the fog.
“Oh, this is such a bad idea,” Eustace declares, looking around nervously and putting his hand on his sword-hilt.
Tirian is inclined to agree, but he’s also not going to argue with the High King of Narnia.
“Let me just get something cleared up for me before we go in,” Eustace continues.
“Okay,” Peter agrees, doing something to his sword and dagger. He turns to regard the two of them curiously.
“Are we or are we not going in to talk to some kind of crime lord?”
“We are,” Peter says. “Or rather, I am, you aren’t going to say anything.”
“Why? I thought we just came to Cair Paravel for money and supplies!”
“And who do you think has money and supplies?” Peter asks, raising his eyebrows. “Or the ability to get both out of the city? And a significant base of operations and people. Organized crime does tend to be fairly organized.”
“What, and you learned this in – what, Narnia? I thought you were going on about how your Narnia was some kind of pastoral paradise!”
Peter laughs, a little amused. “Politics basically is organized crime, coz,” he says. “It’s just a little harder to kill the ambassadors without a good excuse. And the armies are bigger.”
“Oh my God,” Eustace says breathlessly, and then Peter pushes open the door.
The tavern is full of light and laughter, humans and nonhumans alike drinking and gaming and telling stories. Tirian blinks around the smoke in the air, his eyes watering, and tries not to blanch.
Most of the refugees in the western camps are good people: remnants of the army or the border guard, civilians that have fled the towns, a few nobles and merchants lucky enough or loyal enough to choose the wild wood over the Calormenes. There are few residents of Cair Paravel that have managed to make it to the camps: the ones that have are the ones with money.
These aren’t good people. These are criminals.
Just looking across the tavern, Tirian can see satyrs gambling with stacks of Calormene crescents and Narnian lions and trees, a group of selkies at a back table with packages of what look suspiciously like blazeleaf, a centaur arguing with two men over a table full of glass vials, a man snorting silvermist off a rusalka’s bare breasts –
This isn’t his Cair Paravel. Except it is, and always has been, but this isn’t a side of his city that Tirian’s ever seen before, and it’s certainly not the side of the city that he wants the High King to see. He’s going to kill that hound –
Peter steps forward, draws his arm back to his shoulder, and throws his dagger. It lands dead center in the painted target on the back wall and the room goes quiet, several dozen Narnians all reaching for their weapons. Peter strolls forward in the sudden silence, his thumbs hooked in his sword-belt and his coat thrown back to show off the gleaming golden lion’s head on Rhindon’s hilt.
A satyr looks from the golden lion’s head on the pommel of the dagger embedded in the wall to the sword on Peter’s hip, then to Peter’s face. “Who the fuck are you?” he demands.
Peter flips a golden coin into the air. “Call it,” he orders.
No one says anything.
“What, no one?” Peter says, and lets the sun fall to the floor, face up. He strides forward and yanks the dagger out of the wall, sheathing it on his hip.
Warily, Tirian puts his hand on his sword-hilt. Eustace already has an inch of steel drawn, looking around with his eyes wide.
“Listen, o man,” Peter says idly, turning around to face the room, and Tirian knows that, knows those words –
“– and hear of the glory of gold-crowned Peter, Fire-eater, Bittersteel, Summer’s King, wise in council, strong in battle, named High King over all Kings of green-hilled and blue-watered Narnia.” He walks a second sun over his knuckles, ostentatious.
The centaur behind the bar says, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“He’s the High King of Narnia,” says a new voice.
Tirian looks to the stairs, along with everyone else in the room, and sees the man descending slowly, both his hands on the pair of Calormene scimitars sitting on his hips.
“Didn’t you all hear the horn?” he continues.
The sun vanishes from Peter’s hand. He rubs his thumb over Rhindon’s hilt. “You must be Capo Maresti,” he says.
Tirian sees the tavern-goers tense even more, looking around each other, and tightens his grip on his sword-hilt.
Maresti doesn’t answer. “Come upstairs, your majesty,” he says. “Bring your friends. We can...talk.”
“I’d rather stay down here,” Peter says, and Maresti says, “Fair enough. You, move.”
A group of fauns clears away from a wooden table in the corner of the room, and Peter steps over towards it. Tirian and Eustace follow, settling into their chairs as Maresti calls for a pitcher of Galman dark beer. He pours out drinks for all of them, sprinkling salt into the cups in the Galman fashion.
“Try the beer,” he says to Peter. “It’s good.”
“It is,” Peter agrees, sipping at it.
“You don’t really taste it that way,” Maresti says. “Like this,” and he drinks the whole cup down in one gulp, banging it back down onto the table when he’s finished.
Peter snorts and tips the cup back. He slams it back down on the table, empty, and reaches for the pitcher, but Maresti gets it first. “Let me,” he says, refilling their cups and salting them anew.
“Sip it slowly,” Tirian whispers to Eustace, and Eustace replies, “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
“This is a strange place to find the High King,” says Maresti, watching Peter.
“This is a strange place to find Narnia,” Peter replies. “Strange times and strange places call for strange actions.”
They tip back their cups in unison, bring them back down onto the table within seconds of each other.
“I knew when you entered the valley,” Maresti says, filling and salting the cups for a third time. “I knew when you passed the gates. I knew when the Calormenes didn’t recognize you, and when Redear knew who you were. I knew when you took rooms at the Tumblehome. I knew when you started asking questions.”
“You know a lot,” Peter says, his voice a little rougher than it had been a few minutes earlier.
They drink again. Tirian puts his cup down, and after a moment, Eustace does the same. He doesn’t like the way Maresti is looking at the High King.
“You’d know a little more,” Maresti says, “if you’d been in the city for more than three hours before you came here.”
“No,” Peter says, surging to his feet. He knocks his chair over.
Tirian starts up, but a pair of hands close on his shoulders, keeping him down. “What are you doing?” he demands.
“I know who you are too, King Tirian,” says Maresti.
“Let go of me!” Eustace yells, and then there’s a sharp crack as the selkie holding him slams his head down into the table and puts a knife to the side of his throat.
“Hands on the table, King Tirian,” Maresti orders.
“You don’t give him orders,” Peter says. Rhindon in his hand, the runes shining in the lamplight, but the High King’s voice is blurring and he’s swaying on his feet. “You don’t –”
“Put your gods-damned hands on the table, King Tirian, or the boy dies.”
Slowly, Tirian raises his empty hands and splays them out on the table.
Peter shakes his head. “Tirian –” he begins. “He’s not Maresti.”
“Oh, I am. I’m just not my brother Bencivenni.” He stands up and Peter holds up Rhindon with both hands, the blade wavering in the air. “You might as well put your sword down, High King. You won’t be able to –”
“Clearly you don’t know me very well,” Peter says, and hits him in the face with Rhindon’s hilt.
Maresti goes staggering backwards, hands clutched to his face and blood spurting out through his fingers, and Peter slams his elbow into the neck of the faun that grabs for him, slashing out with Rhindon at the satyr behind him. Blood sprays across his face as the satyr goes staggering backwards and he strikes out again, but the move is slow and it’s easy for the members of Maresti’s gang to get out of the way.
Peter shakes his head from side to side, turning in a slow circle with Rhindon held out in front of him. “I’m going to fucking kill you,” he says, his voice slurring, and then, “Edmund’s going to fucking kill me,” as Rhindon falls from his hand and clatters to the floor, and then the High King of Narnia falls too.
----------
Flight Lieutenant Haweis first appears in Shine So Bright. Golden Age Narnian coinage first appears in The White City.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-13 08:26 am (UTC)yeah, he is. oh peter, why diddn't you take him with you?
also, favorite line:
“When you’re a king of Narnia, you can be worth two thousand crescents too,”
teheehee
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-13 08:27 pm (UTC)I SECOND THAT QUESTION. ♥
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-13 05:32 pm (UTC)*shiver*
Oh, PETER.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-13 09:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 05:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-13 11:15 pm (UTC)Seeing a lot of Lies of Locke Lamora influence here, and loving it
Peter would be perfectly alright with getting in a drinking competition with a crimelord, oh yes he would.
Snorting Narnian!cocaine off of a rusalka's breasts ::giggles::
and then the High King of Narnia falls too. Well, shit.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 05:46 pm (UTC)I still cannot believe I put in the line about snorting silvermist off a rusalka's breasts. In my defense, it was, like, one in the morning?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-13 11:47 pm (UTC)OMG CUISIIIIIIIINE (I WANT ONE OF THOSE STUFFED GRAPE LEAVES THINGIES)
OMG MAFIAAAAAAA
omg drugs. DRUUUUUUUGS. are they gonna do some?!
omg capitalist urban expansion and environmental degradatiooooooon
OMG TEENAGED TIRIAN SNEAKING OUT TO WILD PARTIES OF DEBAUCHERY. fic plz.
unrelatedly (except perhaps in levels of awesome): OMG SEASON FINALE TONIGHT. AND SEASON 2. *\O/*
where is the beer-salting tradition from?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 05:49 pm (UTC)I am so tempted to have Peter do the magic mushrooms from this one Farscape ep, where there are, like, four mushrooms and "three gets you high, one gets you dead"! Because Peter would do it.
TIRIAN WAS A TEENAGED REBEL YO. and...this may actually become a plot point. Because he knows how to sneak in and out of the palace!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 12:40 am (UTC)Just one thing, if you want italian beta'ing. Capo del fiume and capo della strada (strada is feminine, and you don't use an apostrophe except before a vowel). If you don't, feel free to ignore. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 05:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 02:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 02:50 am (UTC)Also, I do not, uh, speak Italian. So I'm kind of poking in the dark with lovely online dictionaries, which practically turns it into a different language anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 06:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 06:48 pm (UTC)(This is, uh, me being crazy, apparently.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 11:57 pm (UTC)Oh Peter, so incredibly macho. The dagger-throwing and beer-drinking and womanizing (sort of). And why on earth didn't Edmund come with. Edmund has probably saved his life or something loads of times and yet somehow Peter doesn't count on needing him enough to have him come with? not even when he's going right into a literal den of thieves. peter peter peter.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 01:28 am (UTC)Edmund, well...we'll get to Edmund.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 10:21 pm (UTC)Loving Dust by the way, can't wait for the next instalment, I'm on the edge of my seat.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-14 11:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-15 01:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 04:26 am (UTC)Don't ask me why, but for some reason it's THIS line that made me cry.
Tirian is such a good man! He doesn't deserve what he's getting....
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 04:29 am (UTC)Oh bedlam why are you doing this to me?????
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 04:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-17 04:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-18 04:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-18 09:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 06:14 pm (UTC)I finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora yesterday and I'm so totally in love with it. SO THANK YOU<3 FOR MENTIONING IT! I can't wait to read the second one.
And this chapter is so made of awesome. PETER!! Where did he leave his brain? Cause sometimes it doesn't seem like he brought his logical and cautios brain. Because drinking with a crimelord (CAPA!!) you don't know ANYTHING about sounds like a *great* idea. I love his last line. Edmund will kill you indeed. And man, I can't wait for more. I'm strangely in love with this Cair Paravel (Nothing to do with tLoLL at ALL!) but I still feel so incredibly sad about what was lost. And you can feel Peter's pain so well. And this is Tirians pov!! And I don't think Tirian is really getting Peter's heartbreak here.
And I'll stop fangirling now. Great job, Bedlam. You keep amazing me=)=)
(PS: In the conversation with the Raven you wrote that it was the Queen of Mornings horn, but isn't that supposed to be Queen of Spring?)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 10:12 pm (UTC)Peter left his brain in England, apparently. *bounces* Either that, or the Pevensies haven't quite readjusted to Narnia as well as they like to think or as well as everyone else thinks -- after all, they've been away longer this time than they had in PC, and England's another kettle of fish entirely.
Man, Cair Paravel breaks my heart. Because -- yes, thriving metropolis, port city, trade center, full of diversity and, you know, occupied by the Calormene invaders and all that -- but it's not Cair Paravel. It's not the city of legend, the white city on the sea that the Pevensies ruled. And there's no way that Tirian can know or understand that.
*snaps fingers* Damn. Thanks for the heads up, I will go fix that now.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-13 12:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-13 02:36 pm (UTC)