Narnia fic: Dust in the Air (9)

[bedlamsbard]

Title: Dust in the Air 9
Author: 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.
Author's Notes: This is part nine, 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.



Eustace wakes up with one of the worst headaches he’s ever had in his life – and Narnia’s been responsible for most of those, except for the time in England when Lucy had taken them all out (except for Susan) to celebrate Peter and Edmund’s return from Malaya a few months before they’d come to Narnia this time. He opens his eyes and closes them almost immediately, moaning. The light’s too bright and he can’t make anything out past it; the one thing he sees is a dark, blurred shape before him.

“Eustace?” Tirian says quietly, his fingers light on Eustace’s wrist. “Are you awake?”

He hears all the words, but it takes him a few minutes to put them together in the right order. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah, I’m – awake. Yeah.”

Tirian’s voice is slow and calm. He touches Eustace’s chin and raises it up, turning Eustace toward him. “Open your eyes,” he says. “Look at me.”

“The light hurts,” Eustace complains, but he opens his eyes again anyway, wincing, and tries not to squint too much.

Tirian is nothing but a blurred, flesh-colored shape in front of him, with some darker spots roughly where his eyes, nose, and mouth should be. There’s another blurry shape that’s probably his hand. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“I can’t see any of your fingers,” Eustace says, and closes his eyes again, relaxing as the world goes blessedly dark. It doesn’t do anything for the pounding in his skull – like all of Underworld is falling in again, right on top of his head – but at least he doesn’t have to look at anything.

There’s a shrill ringing in his ears that coincides with a stranger’s voice saying, “Is he going to throw up?”

Eustace considers the matter. “Yes,” he decides, and Tirian catches his shoulders and braces him as he’s violently sick, trying to ignore the wet, metallic sound as he retches into a basin that someone shoves into his lap. He clenches his fists on the edge of the basin to hold it in place, his shoulders shaking under Tirian’s hands.

He lets go of the basin when there’s nothing left to throw up, leaning back against Tirian’s shoulder as someone takes the basin away. Tirian wraps his arms around his chest, warm and steady. “You hit him too hard,” he says over Eustace’s head, his voice very faintly accusing.

“He’s awake now,” the stranger says. His voice is rough, with the flat vowels characteristic of a Cair Paravel native – Tirian’s accent is a more refined version of the same. “Just be glad for that.”

“At least he’s here,” Tirian says. “Where is the High King? What have you done with him?” From the tone of his voice, it’s not the first time he’s asked the question.

“Is it –” Eustace begins. “Peter’s not here?”

“No,” Tirian tells him quietly, his voice hard. “They drugged him in the tavern and took him away.”

“Don’t worry for him,” says the stranger. “He’s safe enough; even I don’t dare harm the High King of Narnia, and no one else will lay hands on him.”

Eustace winces. “Speak more quietly,” he begs, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead, then rubbing furiously at his right ear to try and force the ringing away. It doesn’t work and he lets his hand fall back into his lap. “Where are we?”

The stranger doesn’t answer. Tirian says, “We’re on the river – on one of the riverboats, I think.”

“The Queen of Mirrors,” the stranger says.

“What?”

“It’s the name of the riverboat,” Tirian explains. He shifts a little. “You’re Bencivenni Maresti,” he says. “I recognize you now. You weren’t capo del’fiume before the Calormenes came, but your sketch was in a file about crime in the city about six years ago.”

He sounds remarkably calm, but he’s speaking too close to Eustace’s ears and Eustace whimpers a little, his fingers clenching and unclenching on the fabric of his trousers.

“Sorry,” Tirian murmurs to him. “Try opening your eyes again.”

“Really?” Eustace says, digging at his forehead again. “Because I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

“You can always close them again afterwards,” Tirian points out, maddeningly calm.

“Okay,” Eustace agrees after a moment, opening first one eye, then the other. Tirian is still blurry, but at least significantly less so; Eustace can make out his face and hair, fuzzed a little around the edges. Although for some reason there are two of him. The light from the wide floor to ceiling windows behind him stabs into Eustace’s eyes like knives and he screws them tightly shut.

“Better?” Tirian asks.

“Little bit,” he admits. “Not much. How long –”

Tirian just sounds tired when he says, “It’s almost noon. You’ve been in and out a few times since they brought us onboard.” Over Eustace’s head, he adds, “Could he get some water, please? Or juice?”

“Get it,” Maresti snaps, and over the ringing in his ears Eustace hears footsteps on wood and the sound of pouring liquid.

“Try and drink something,” Tirian says to Eustace, putting a glass to his lips. Eustace gulps at the sweet, sugary stuff, licking his lips to get the last drops when Tirian takes the glass away. The grape juice puts a little more strength in him and he shakes his head to clear it, which only makes his headache increase tenfold. For the first time, he thinks to reach for the knife that should be on his right hip. He’s sitting on a couch or something similar, enough to let him know without having to grope for it that his sword isn’t there.

He’s still wearing his sword belt, but his knife sheath isn’t on it. Eustace closes his fingers on the thick fabric of his trousers.

“Don’t bother,” Maresti says, sounding bored. “Your weapons aren’t on you.”

“You don’t say,” Eustace mutters. He puts his head back on Tirian’s shoulder and Tirian makes a soothing sound in the back of his throat

They’re all quiet for a while, Eustace trying to force himself not to fall asleep because he remembers reading somewhere that you shouldn’t sleep with a concussion. And he’s fairly certain he has a concussion. He drifts a little between sleeping and waking, comforted by Tirian’s weight against his back, and after a while the pounding in his head fades somewhat and the ringing in his ears subsides, though neither one goes away entirely.

Then a door opens and Eustace jerks awake, reaching automatically for a sword that’s not there.

“Coz, are you all right?” Peter says.

Eustace opens his eyes a crack, squinting past the light and turning his head to see Peter standing in the doorway, a minotaur standing just behind him with its hand on his shoulder. It shoves Peter forward into the room and Peter goes, correcting his stumble on the threshold with the same effortless grace he displays during weapons practice. He’d had it in England, too, muted the way all the Pevensies had seemed to be – they were always either dulled around the edges or painfully sharp, a little too quick to anger or too slow to respond. But in Narnia – in Narnia they’re something else entirely, something Eustace has never seen before, never read about in any of his books – not the ones in his library back in England and not the ones painfully scavenged in Narnia – and doesn’t understand at all.

“I have been considerably better,” Eustace announces. Tirian’s fingers nudge sharply at his hip and he adds, a little reluctantly, “I have also been significantly worse.”

Granted, the first time he was significantly worse he was a dragon, but at least he didn’t have a concussion. The second time he’d been bleeding to death and possibly screaming in pain, but he hadn’t had a concussion then, either. But he had had the privilege of seeing more of his blood than he’d ever wanted to on the outside of his body rather than the inside, and also Jill crying over him and trying to kiss him but missing his mouth and getting his nose or his cheek every time.

“Tirian?” Peter continues.

Eustace squints at him, trying to determine how long he can keep his eyes open before the shockingly bright light – they’re indoors; sunlight isn’t supposed to be that bright – gets to him and he has to close his eyes again. So far, so good.

Peter looks tired, dark shadows beneath his bloodshot blue eyes, his hair mussed and the first three buttons on his shirt undone so that the chain he’s wearing his signet ring on is visible. At least Eustace thinks it’s the chain; it’s just a vaguely darker line against Peter’s skin from this distance, especially with his eyes playing tricks on him the way they are. Peter’s only in shirt, trousers, and boots; no sword belt, no waistcoat, and no jacket. Eustace has maybe been in Narnia too long this time; the sight of Peter without a sword belt makes him blink and raise a hand to rub at his eyes. Not carrying a weapon in Narnia, especially in the western woods, is a little like prancing around London starkers.

“I am unhurt,” Tirian announces, and then adds, a little reluctantly, “We have been treated with every courtesy.”

“Except for getting concussed,” Eustace points out.

“And I thought I had it bad,” Peter says dryly. He starts to step towards them, but the minotaur’s hand flexes on his shoulder, bringing him to an abrupt halt. “That’s my cousin over there,” he bites out, his tone suddenly very cold. “So let me go or I assure you, you will regret it. You’ve already searched me twice for weapons and I’m assuming you did the same to them, so whatever you think I’m going to do, think twice.”

The minotaur doesn’t move, and this is approximately the same time that the combination of the light and the fact that there are two of everything, and “everything” is so blurry that the only way Eustace can tell Peter isn’t wearing his sword belt is because his shirt is white and his trousers are dark and there’s no other color in between, gets to Eustace. He closes his eyes and whimpers, the shrill ringing sound back in his ears, and almost misses the sharp slap of flesh on flesh and the following thud, so heavy that Eustace can feel it reverberate up from the spot where his feet are resting on the floor. Following that is the calm sound of unhurried footsteps approaching them, and then someone’s fingers, smooth with callus, are light and cool on his chin. Eustace does his best to swat them away, but Peter says, voice easy with command, “It’s just me, Scrubb. Let me see,” and he subsides.

“How bad is it?” he hears himself ask, the words a little distant behind the ringing, like someone talking through a telephone with a bad connection.

Peter turns his head carefully from side to side; Eustace tries to relax enough to let him do it without resistance. His oldest cousin’s touch is surprisingly light and surprisingly gentle; he hadn’t expected that Peter could be gentle. “It looks worse than it is, I think,” he says. “You’ve got a fairly impressive black eye, a nasty bump on the head, and an ugly cut, but that’s just show. Head wounds always bleed like stuck pigs. You’ll be all right in a few days.”

“Are you sure?” Eustace demands, ignoring the way it makes his head pound. “You’re not a medical professional! You’re not even a medic, you’re a pilot! I could be dying!”

“Yes,” Peter says, “you could be dying. You could have torn a blood vessel in your brain, and your skull is slowly filling with blood. Depending on where it is, the pressure will eventually build up and crush your brain like an egg. You could be dead within hours or weeks; I suppose we won’t know until you eventually fall over.”

“What?”

“But probably not,” Peter continues calmly. “Just in case, though, you might want to break your leg or something on our way back; Lu won’t want to waste cordial on something that’s just a maybe. Unless you’re already dead by then, of course.”

Horrible pounding pain in his head or not, Eustace opens his eyes to glare at Peter, only to find his cousin regarding him calmly, his lips quirked in a faint smile. “Probably not,” he says again.

“How do you know?” Eustace challenges, hearing the agitation in his voice. Maybe back in England a hospital could do something about a bleed in his brain, but not here in Narnia. No one has that kind of medical training, and he’s not sure he’d allow anyone to put a knife anywhere near his head even if they did, incipient death or not.

“Coz, I’ve been a professional soldier – among other things – for a quarter of a century now,” Peter points out. “I’ve seen a lot of head injuries. You should be fine.” He straightens up from his crouch, gripping Tirian’s shoulder briefly, and says, “You should try and get some sleep, Scrubb, even though this shouldn’t take too long.”

“I thought you shouldn’t sleep on a concussion,” Eustace says sullenly. “And you’re only twenty-three.”

“Add on fifteen years in Narnia,” Peter says dryly, “which almost makes the numbers make sense. That you shouldn’t sleep with a concussion is an old wives’ tale; you need more sleep and not less. That I know from experience, and more of it than I’d like.”

“I always thought you had brain damage,” Eustace mutters.

“In Narnia and in England,” Peter clarifies. “Keep an eye on him,” he says to Tirian before he turns away.

“Of course,” Tirian murmurs.

Eustace shuts his eyes again as Maresti says, sounding bored, “Are you content with your kinsmen’s health, High King?”

“I’ll do,” Peter says, although he doesn’t sound particularly convinced. Eustace listens to him step away towards the opposite end of the room, along with the sound of pouring liquid.

“Whiskey, your majesty?” Maresti offers. “It’s Glasswater, from the twelfth year of Erlian’s reign. Very rare, and very good.”

“I don’t like to drink after being drugged,” Peter says calmly, a chair scraping back as he sits down. “Let’s talk.”

Eustace tries to listen in, but they’re speaking in low, angry voices, and concentrating too hard makes his headache increase and the ringing in his ears grow louder. He catches a snatch of words now and then – “Lord Vespasian of Glasswater”, “long table”, “Calormene bastards”, “Casmyn Wavewalker” – but most of the conversation is lost in the ringing. He goes back to dozing a little, drifting back into sleep as Tirian rubs circles onto his hip with his fingers, soothing.

This time he dreams. The sound of waves is familiar, along with all the sounds of a ship on the sea – all the creaking and the rustling and the snap of sails, the groaning and snoring and farting of a hold full of sleeping sailors. There, the whistling hitch of Rynelf, the snuffling of Pittencream, the occasional muttered curse in English or High Narnian or some other language from Edmund. Eustace sits up abruptly, the hammock swinging wildly for a moment before he remembers the trick of moving in one and swings his legs out, barefooted on the smooth wooden planks of the Dawn Treader.

No one in the forecastle stirs as he crosses the floor to the ladder. He climbs up and pushes up the hatch, clambering out onto the deck and letting it fall shut behind him. The sailors on the night watch ignore him, going about their business, and Eustace crosses to the rail, hanging onto it and leaning over to stare down into the dark depths of the sea.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” Caspian asks from beside him.

Eustace turns his head to grin at the king, his heart lightening to see him young and eager again. “Well, I’m dreaming,” he explains. “So it would stand to reason.” He pauses, then says, “Your country’s a bit messed up.”

“Why haven’t you fixed it yet?” Caspian asks accusingly, turning dark, angry eyes on him, and Eustace takes a hasty step backwards as the king’s hand falls to the sword on his hip – a sword with a golden lion’s head for a pommel –

“Eustace, wake up,” Tirian says, and Eustace snaps his eyes open, moaning as his headache comes back with a vengeance and the ringing in his ears intensifies to whole new levels.

Peter’s a blurry shape in front of him – two shapes, rather, vaguely overlapping each other and fuzzy around the edges. There’s a long bundle wrapped in the dark fabric of his jacket and tucked under his arm; he’s wearing his sword belt now. “Come on,” he says, he and Tirian together getting Eustace up with his arms over their shoulders.

“Why is the floor sideways?” Eustace asks, staggering into Tirian’s side as the floor tilts up beneath him.

“Oh, yeah, he definitely has a concussion,” Peter mutters, heaving him up. “Don’t think about it, coz. Just hold onto us and walk.”

“You say that like it’s easy,” he hears himself whine, and Peter mutters a curse in something that’s not English and hauls him along, steering him around the limp dark bulk of the fallen minotaur on the floor.

Eustace isn’t precisely certain, but it takes them a pretty fair amount of time to get off the riverboat and back onto solid ground. He has to stop to throw up again another couple of times; there’s nothing left to throw up, so it’s mostly just dry-heaving. Out of the corner of his eyes, he’s vaguely aware of other blurred shapes, but Peter and Tirian are the only ones close enough to make out. He shuts his eyes as soon as they make it to the riverboat’s deck, out into the bright Narnian sunlight, and then opens them a fraction, squinting enough to see the deck beneath his feet.

It’s moving. Eustace shuts his eyes again and trips into Peter’s side; his cousin steadies him absently, his attention distracted. He almost walks off the ramp down to the docks; Tirian and Peter catch him just in time.

“How far are we from the Tumblehome?” Peter asks Tirian over Eustace’s head.

“We’re at the opposite end of the Riverfront District,” Tirian says.

“I don’t suppose you have taxis in Cair Paravel,” Peter says, not sounding particularly optimistic.

“There are usually a few pedicabs waiting around the docks,” Tirian says matter-of-factly, waving his free hand in the air.

Eustace squints, sees a satyr pulling a two-wheeled cart come running up in front of them. Then he shuts his eyes again, hoping if he screws them shut tightly enough the ringing in his ears will go away.

Peter and Tirian get him up into the cart, then climb in on either side of him. Tirian gives the satyr directions and the creature takes off running, the pedicab bouncing over the cobbled streets. Eustace dry heaves again, helplessly, and Tirian curls his fingers warmly against the back of his neck, crooning a Narnian lullaby that makes Peter turn his head and look at him, settling the long bundle of his jacket more firmly across their laps. Eustace thinks it might be their swords.

They make it back to the Tumblehome eventually, and Peter levers him out of the pedicab while Tirian pays the satyr. The three of them stumble up through the doors and up the stairs, where Tirian fumbles with the door to their room and Peter dumps Eustace onto one off the two beds there before kneeling down to pull his boots off, then his sword belt.

“Hey,” Eustace protests weakly, batting at his hands.

“You’re not my type,” Peter informs him archly, hanging his sword belt off one of the bedposts.

“What, too male?” he says, closing his eyes again. The floorboards shift as Tirian comes over, along with a faint clink of metal on metal as Peter unrolls the weapons he’s got bundled up on his coat – retrieved from Capo Maresti, apparently.

Peter snorts in apparent amusement. “It’s like you don’t know me at all, coz,” he says. “I’m going to go get something to eat from the restaurant downstairs,” he adds. “I’ll bring something back. Try and get some more sleep, Scrubb.”

“What are you even talking about?” Eustace says, but the door opens and shuts again without an answer.

Tirian sits down on the bed beside Eustace, drawing his sword with a rasp of metal and then sheathing it again. “You should try and go back to sleep,” he says.

Eustace throws an arm up to cover his eyes. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and then, “Please tell me I’m going to feel better tomorrow.”

“Probably not,” Tirian says gently. “When I was sixteen, Vespasian knocked me out of the saddle during jousting practice and I fell badly; I was in bed for a week.”

“Oh, for the love of God,” Eustace grumbles.

But it’s easy to just lie here in the dark, head pounding and ears ringing and all. And after a little while the headache fades away and the ringing turns into all the sounds of a ship at sea, and Eustace opens his eyes and looks out at the Dawn Treader spread out beneath him. He makes a strangled sound and flings his arms around the mast, the wind snapping at his hair as he huddles in the crow’s nest. In real life, he’d managed to get coaxed up here exactly once, and that had resulted in him being violently sick over the side, the sailors on watch cursing up at him.

He grits his teeth, clinging to the mast, and straightens up until he can get a better look around. To the west, the ocean is calm and blue until it crashes onto the shores of the mainland, which is strikingly, shockingly green, like a painting rather than something real. White stone catches the sunlight and throws it back at him, scarlet and gold banners snapping in the wind from the towers of a castle he’s never seen even in pictures. Beneath the headland where the castle rises from the rock as if it had grown there, ships bob at harbor, more than a hundred of them, strange and unfamiliar, their banners a bright paint box of colors, with the same red and gold as the castle prominent.

He looks to the east. The sky roils dark, lightning cracking across it; Eustace breathes in the scent of ozone as the storm approaches, moving impossibly dark over the ocean towards the Dawn Treader. He leans down over the edge of the crow’s nest to shout a warning to the crew; it looks even worse than the one that had driven them onto the shores of Dragon Island, and he doesn’t have good memories of that particular experience.

Caspian is sitting cross-legged on the capstan, writing in a leather-bound notebook. He looks up at Eustace’s shout. “Something’s burning,” he says accusingly. “Why don’t you put it out?”

And Eustace smells the smoke. He looks around frantically, but the Dawn Treader is untouched, the storm is coming unabated from the east, and the castle on the mainland is lit by crackling orange flames, its bright banners blazing briefly before blackening and falling into the wreckage of shattered stone. A bell begins to toll over and over again.

And then he hears the horn.

Eustace sits straight up in bed, panting like he’s just ran a marathon. Tirian is crouching on the floor, a dagger in his hand, and Peter has kicked over his chair and is standing with his sword bare in hand, staring around with his eyes wide.

“Susan,” is all he says.

The horn sounds again, deep and driving into Eustace’s bones like someone’s hammering in tent stakes and setting up camp, and he shakes his head furiously, clenching his hands on thin air. It takes the breath from him and leaves him reeling, reaching out blindly for nothing he knows.

Tirian straightens slowly. “I have heard that horn before,” he says.

Peter’s breathing is harsh and ragged. “Susan,” he says again, then leans over and sheathes his sword in the scabbard on his sword belt, hanging off the bedpost of the second bed in the room. The steel slides home with a faint hiss.

“That is Queen Susan’s horn,” Tirian says, his eyes going wide. “But – I don’t understand. You are already here.”

“That’s not how it works,” Peter says. He takes three steps in one direction, then turns on his heel and takes another three steps that way, running his hands through his hair. “When Father Christmas gave it to her all those years ago, he said it would always bring help whenever she blew it. I used to hear it across the whole of Narnia when something went wrong and she was in trouble.” He shakes his head, left hand clenching on the space where his sword hilt would be if he was wearing his sword belt.

Tirian stares at him. “So we should return to Arn Abedin,” he says. “Immediately.”

“No,” Peter says, pinching the bridge of his nose between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “No, that’s the last thing we should do. Two short blasts means whoever’s closest, not come at once. I remember that. She will too. We talked about it before I left.”

“But if she is in trouble,” Tirian says. “If she needs our immediate aid –”

Peter turns on him, his expression anguished but resolute. “We can’t help her,” he says. “It’s a three-day ride to Arn Abedin from Cair Paravel and what we’re doing here has to happen if we’re planning on winning this war. Ed and Lu are closer; they’ll take care of it. And even if they can’t –” He swallows hard. “Susan’s smart. She can take care of herself.”

“We are talking about the same Susan Pevensie, aren’t we?” Eustace says suspiciously. “The same one who thinks of nothing but lipsticks and nylons and –”

“Shut up, Scrubb,” Peter snaps. “You’ve known Susan all your life.”

“Exactly why I say –”

“I’ve known Susan for two lifetimes,” Peter says, “and if that’s all you think of her, I can make sure she personally disabuses you of that notion. No,” he says, shaking his head, “we stay here. If we’re needed,” he adds, gritting his teeth, “Ed will send a bird from Arn Abedin.”

Tirian doesn’t say anything, but he sheathes the dagger and lays it aside, sitting back down on the edge of the bed next to Eustace. Peter stays standing for a minute, staring off into empty space as if he’s seeing something aside from the plain walls of their rented room, then he leans down and rights the chair he’s knocked over, sitting down and bowing his head over the desk, his hands buried in his hair.

Abruptly, Eustace realizes he’s seeing clearly for the first time since he woke up in the Queen of Mirrors, and that his headache and the ringing in his ears are gone. He can look out the open window at the bustling riverfront below without flinching away from the light. He’s also suddenly incredibly tired, all the strength gone out of him, and he yawns and more or less collapses back down into the bed, asleep again nearly instantly, and this time, dreamless.

But when he wakes up the next morning, it’s all back. Maybe not quite as bad as originally, but “not quite as bad” is still really bad. It still means that the room is just one big blur of shape and color, that an entire forge has taken up residence inside his skull, and that someone keeps ringing a triangle just inside his ears over and over again. As well as the fact that he’s suddenly throwing up most of his stomach lining, leaving his mouth and throat raw and vile-tasting.

Tirian’s nowhere in sight, he realizes belatedly, squinting until the one moving blur in the room resolves itself into Peter doing kata in the center of the room, whipping his sword and dagger back and forth through the air until the room seems to sing with the sound of cleanly-forged steel.

Eustace coughs and pours himself a cup of water, rinsing his mouth out and spitting into the bucket before he pushes it away. “Where’s Tirian?” he asks, his voice sounding odd in his ears, a little tinny past the ringing.

“He went out,” Peter says without stopping in his exercises. “I’m not sure where.”

“There’s a two thousand crescent reward on his head!” Eustace protests.

“And he’s in disguise and he knows the city,” Peter says, sword and dagger whipping forth in smooth figure eights. “He’s not exactly going to prance through the streets shouting, ‘I’m King Tirian of Narnia! Come arrest me!’” His smooth movements slow gradually until he’s standing still, then he sheathes the dagger and starts a new pattern with sword alone. “How are you feeling?” he asks as an afterthought.

“I don’t know,” Eustace says. “Are there supposed to be two of you?” He reaches for the bucket again as his gorge rises and he starts retching again.

“We’ll leave you here,” Peter decides. “We’ve got business in the city that needs to be completed in the next day or so; I don’t want to risk getting run out of town without getting the supplies we need for Arn Abedin.”

“Are you planning on getting us thrown out of Cair Paravel?” Eustace asks suspiciously.

“Planning has little to no impact on what actually happens,” Peter says, his sword slashing through the air in front of him. “Rules of battle, rules of life.”

Eustace scowls at him. “Are you actually here to do anything besides spout aphorisms like some kind of old sage and get us into trouble?”

“Only what you didn’t do,” Peter says. “We weren’t supposed to be able to come back to Narnia, Scrubb, none of us were. Which means that the reason we’re here is to fix the mess that you let happen.” He drops to one knee, sword a smooth extension of his arm in a C curve over his head.

Eustace opens his mouth to snap something back, something about Peter being an arrogant bastard and Aslan trusting him and Jill enough to send them here in the first place, but the thing is that Peter is exactly right: they’ve been here five years and they haven’t managed to do anything except watch Narnia descend further and further into the grip of the Calormenes, until the Calormene occupation seems normal. He shuts his mouth and stares at the back of Peter’s head as he rises, switching his sword to his left hand. He gets through the first two steps of the kata – nothing that Eustace has ever seen before, not even in five years, maybe six if he counts his time on the Dawn Treader and the search for Rilian – before the door opens and Peter spins abruptly on his heel, his sword pointed straight at Tirian’s throat.

Tirian freezes in the doorway, then takes a careful step sideways toward Eustace and closes the door behind him. Peter lowers his sword and sheathes it on the sword belt hung off the bed post. “Where were you?” he asks curiously.

Tirian raises the package he’s carrying, wrapped in brown paper and string. “I went to find a bookshop,” he says a little defensively. “I’ve spent the last five years hiding out in the woods and reading the same seven books; I want to get new ones while I have the chance.”

Peter stares at him blankly, then shrugs. “All right, then,” he says. “We have to go find an antiques dealer, then supplies.”

“Why an antiques dealer?” Eustace asks suspiciously. “What exactly are you planning to buy?”

“Not buy,” Peter says, reaching into the pocket of the jacket he’s got thrown over the back of his chair and pulling out a coin purse. He spills a handful of gold and silver and copper into his palm. “Sell. Narnian coin from sixteen hundred years ago, along with Archenlander crowns, Calormene crescents, Natarene rose nobles, Shoushani dragons – coins from a dozen nations, most of which don’t exist anymore. They’re worth far more now than they were when we sat in Cair Paravel, easily enough to pay for the supplies we need and a way to get them back to Arn Abedin.” He sorts through coins absently, then dumps them back into the purse and stows it away in his jacket.

“Do you have a treasure trove or something hidden away beneath the ruins of that castle?” Eustace says, because that would explain a lot. Like how the Pevensies have produced outdated Narnian clothes out of thin air, although really, after sixteen hundred years you’d think they’d have rotted away to rags or worse.

“The Arn Abedin treasury’s one of the few things that survived intact,” Peter says. “There’s magic that slows the effect of time and protects it from intruders – the same spells on the treasuries at Cair Paravel. We used to keep money and supplies there in case something happened to Cair Paravel, and except for the food, it’s all still there now.” He reaches for his sword belt and buckles it on over his hips.

Tirian puts the package of books down on the bed next to Eustace, picks up the bucket he’s been retching in, and empties it out the window into the river. Eustace catches Peter’s flinch out of the corner of his eye.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Peter tells Eustace, coming over. He picks up Eustace’s sword belt, and drapes it over the bed post next to his head, then draws the sword and tests the edge on the ball of his thumb before sheathing it again.

“What am I going to do, fall down the stairs?” Eustace grumbles. He’s tried getting up exactly once this morning, and he’d nearly walked onto Peter’s sword blade trying to piss. That had gone badly.

“You might come up with something,” Peter says, testing the dagger on the opposite side of the sword belt too. He leans down and pulls a knife out of his boot, slipping it beneath Eustace’s pillow. “Just in case,” he adds, patting Eustace’s shoulder a little absently, the same way he might pet a dog. “I’d give you a crossbow, but I’m a little too worried you’re going to shoot us when we come back in.”

“I’ll try to resist stabbing you in the neck,” Eustace assures him, leaning back against the headboard.

“A prospect about which I am somewhat less than enthusiastic,” Peter says, pulling his jacket on and reaching for the door.

After he and Tirian leave, Eustace opens up the package Tirian brought, tossing the paper aside. He inspects the half-dozen books, but his eyesight’s not up to it; he can’t make out any words at all. He can barely make out the ink on the page – Narnia apparently invented the printing press about a hundred years ago and most of these books are printed, at least so far as Eustace can tell by touch, although at least one is handwritten. Two of them have pictures, and Eustace squints at those until his headache intensifies to previously unknown levels and he pushes the books aside, lying back with his arm over his eyes until he falls asleep again.

He dreams he’s back on the Dawn Treader, standing on the quarterdeck with his back to the rail and the body of the ship, watching Caspian as the king sits cross-legged with the back to the dragon’s tail and whittles a piece of aspen wood with Lucy’s lion-headed dagger.

“What are you making?” Eustace asks.

“I’m not making anything,” Caspian replies. “I’m trying to fix Narnia.” He holds up one hand and lets the half-dozen pieces of broken wood fall to the deck.

Eustace cranes his head to see. Put together, they’ll form Narnia carved out in white aspen, dark lines painted on the wood to mark out Cair Paravel, Arn Abedin, all the roads and rivers and mountains. Except – he’s looked at a lot of maps of Narnia lately, and this one isn’t quite right. There’s something off about the shape of the coastline, for one, and where there should be an archipelago of tiny islands just off the coast of Cair Paravel, there’s nothing.

Caspian throws the dagger down point-first into the deck. It stands up straight, quivering. “Why haven’t you brought any glue?” he demands of Eustace. “Why haven’t you sewn her back up yet?”

“But that’s not Narnia,” Eustace hears himself protest. “That’s not the Narnia I know.”

Caspian glares at him from beneath long, dark lashes. “Why haven’t you fixed it yet?”

The Dawn Treader bucks in the ocean and they both look up, staring fascinated as the mast cracks in half and slowly falls over, toppling off the side of the ship to land with a splash among the waves. “My ship!” Caspian protests, leaping up, but all Eustace can do is stare down at the place where the scarlet flag of Narnia is floating on the sea, the golden lion getting water-logged and finally sinking down, down, down…

He opens his eyes and gets his hand around the hilt of the knife Peter put under his pillow in the same heartbeat. There’s someone in his room with him – Eustace squints until his blurred and multiplied vision finally manages to offer him a complete image, fuzzy around the edges and of which there are possibly two or three, but at least he can make out that whoever’s in the room with him is a satyr, not a human, and it’s holding a sheet of paper in one hand.

“Eustace the Outlander,” it – he – says, looking from Eustace to the paper and back again. “I thought so! That reward’s a year’s wages for me if I bring you in.”

“No,” Eustace mutters, “oh, no.” He can’t keep his eyes in focus any longer; the room dissolves into a blur of colors and vague shapes. The ringing in his ears is so loud that he can’t hear anything else the satyr says.

He watches the blur of brown that’s the satyr come closer, his fist clenched hard around the hilt of the knife. He bends down low over Eustace, snapping his fingers in front of his face, and Eustace stabs the knife up beneath the floating rib, straight up into the heart, just like Edmund taught him once, years ago. What he forgets, though, is how Edmund taught him to estimate for a nonhuman, especially the ones whose skeletal structures aren’t quite human – like satyrs.

Eustace doesn’t reach the heart, but he does a lot of damage going in. The satyr snarls a curse, grabbing for him, and Eustace lets go of the knife to roll to the side to avoid him, reaching out by memory to the place where Peter hung his sword belt and getting his fingers around his sword hilt. He pulls it free of the scabbard and gets it between him and the satyr just as the satyr lunges for him, impaling himself on Eustace’s sword and collapsing onto his chest.

“Oh, God,” Eustace wheezes, pushing at the satyr’s shoulders with his free hand until he manages to roll it off him and onto the floor. He raises a hand weakly to his chest, rubbing the blood-sodden fabric of his shirt between his fingers. Then he passes out.

He wakes up again at Peter’s shout, flailing a hand towards his sword belt and his sheathed dagger before he realizes that Peter wouldn’t bother with shouting if he was being attacked.

“Peter,” he groans, pushing himself up and cracking his eyes open.

“By the Lion, Eustace,” Tirian says, dropping something heavy on the floor and scrambling forward. He gets his hands on Eustace’s chest and rips his shirt open, fingers pressing light and careful against Eustace’s skin.

“’m all right,” Eustace says. “It’s not my blood.”

Peter has his sword in his hand when he crouches down and rolls over the satyr’s body, pulling the piece of paper he’d had in his hand free. “It’s your wanted poster,” he says. “And this is the pedicab runner from yesterday. He must have recognized you and come back to turn you in for the reward.”

Eustace pushes Tirian’s hands aside, squinting dizzily down at Peter. He’s relatively certain that the floor isn’t supposed to be tilting from side to side like the Dawn Treader in a storm, but that’s not the strangest trick his eyes have played on him today and he’s almost managing to learn how to compensate for everything.

Peter sheathes his sword and reaches down to pull Eustace’s sword free, cleaning it on the satyr’s fur and passing it to Tirian to slide back into its sheath. He pulls his knife free and cleans that too, slipping it back into his boot. “I concede that you can apparently take care of yourself, coz,” he says.

“Oh, thanks,” Eustace says, squinting at the smears of red across his hands. He scrubs his palms down the front of his trousers, trying to get them clean, and feels the dried blood start to flake off.

“What about the body?” Tirian asks after a minute, busying himself by getting up and splashing water into a bowl. At least he’d refilled the pitcher before he and Peter left. He finds a towel and hands it to Eustace.

“Well,” Peter says matter-of-factly, “I suppose we can’t just leave it here. Although it’s going to leave an awful stain on the floor; blood doesn’t come off easily.”

Eustace turns his head to stare in Peter’s general direction in vague horror. He could be talking about spilled tea, for all the emotion in his voice.

Peter straightens up and crosses the room, dumping stuff out of one of the big sacks he and Tirian have hauled in. “Tirian,” he says, “I don’t suppose you’d know where in the city I can dump a body?”

For a moment Tirian doesn’t answer. Then he says, “I’m afraid it was never something I particularly occupied myself with when I still lived in Cair Paravel, although I believe that the river is the traditional place.”

Peter winces, then says gamely, “Well, I suppose the doyarchu need to eat too, although I can’t see any of them living in that river.” He gestures with one hand at the window and the Great River outside.

“Not for many years,” Tirian says, getting up as Peter motions him over. Eustace lets his eyes go back out of focus as the two of them manage to contort the satyr into the empty sack, then Peter slings it over his shoulder, staggering a little under its weight, and goes out the door.

“You know,” Eustace says once it’s shut behind him, “he’s far too calm about that. I mean, most people, they come in and find a dead body on the floor, you expect some degree of panic, but not Peter.”

“Well, he is the High King,” Tirian says, as if that should explain everything.

“You’re the king,” Eustace points out. “And he’s like this in England, too, just sort of…off. And he’s not a king there.”

Tirian doesn’t say anything, although he does hand Eustace a clean shirt. Eustace smoothes the fabric between his fingers, the blood mostly gone now, and tries to figure out what it is that’s been bothering him since they left Arn Abedin, aside from Peter. And even Peter hasn’t been that bad – he’s been quiet and melancholy and bossy, but he’s always like that. Eustace thought there’d be less melancholy in Narnia, but apparently Peter’s decided that he likes the mood of it, so he’s sticking to it here as well as in England. Eustace hadn’t understood it then; he doesn’t understand it now. England is home. Narnia is – a duty, nothing more. An opportunity to prove himself, at most. But it’s not England, it’s not the main act. It’s just – fantastic and magical and bloody and terrifying, but there’s no substance to it. He’s never understood the Pevensies’ insistence that Narnia is the substance and England is the shadow.

It’s not Peter, or at least, it’s not just Peter. It’s something that’s been itching at the back of his brain ever since the first time he heard Susan’s horn, more than a week ago – nearly two – now. The sound of it had woken him from a sound sleep and sent him stumbling to his feet in the Calormene cell they’d been imprisoned in, looking around to see where it had come from. He’d felt it in his bones, in his teeth, a siren call through his blood that made him draw in a sharp breath – all in the bare minutes before the Calormene commander had come storming into their cell to throw Tirian up against the wall, spitting curses and questions in accented Narnian. Tirian had laughed in his face, mouth bloody where the Calormene had hit him, and said, “That is the sound of Narnia’s salvation.” But Eustace hadn’t been thinking that. He’d thought, absurdly, this isn’t supposed to happen, and then the Calormene had turned on him and Jill and he’d stopped thinking at all.

It’s just a horn. The Pevensies are just people; they’re not legends made flesh, not the way the Narnians think. No one should be looking at them like they’re the second coming – Tirian shouldn’t be looking at them like they’re the second coming; Tirian is the rightful king of Narnia. Tirian should damn well be the rightful king of Narnia, after everything Eustace and Jill went through to put Rilian on the throne all those years ago.

His reverie is broken by the shrill sound of a whistle from the open window. Eustace glances up, curious and trying to figure out if he’s actually heard anything or if it’s still just the sound in his ears, but Tirian has gotten slowly to his feet. “That’s a provost’s guard whistle,” he says. “The city guard.”

“Isn’t this a dangerous neighborhood?” Eustace asks warily.

“Not around here,” Tirian says. “Or at least, there don’t tend to be many guardsmen around the Tumblehome that will raise an alarm. That’s why Vespasian likes it for his business.”

The whistle sounds again. Tirian leans over and picks up his jacket, throwing it on over his shoulders. “I’m going to go find the High King,” he says. “He should have been back by now.”

“Maybe he thought dumping a body in the middle of the day wasn’t such a great idea!” Eustace calls after him, then winces as the shouting jars his head and turns his low-level headache into one that’s significantly worse. “Oh, bloody –” he manages, and then he manages to snatch up the bucket in time to throw up what little’s left of his stomach lining, along with everything he’s drunk since Peter and Tirian left this morning.

The effort leaves him shaking like a leaf, and he manages to set the bucket down gently before he keels over backwards on the bed, exhausted and with an arm over his eyes so he won’t exactly look at anything and have his headache worsen. The ringing in his ears is shrill and continuous, blending badly with the low rumble of a riverboat horn from outside, the bells tolling at the temple of Tash that the Calormenes have set up, a dozen vendors’ cries for bread and pasties and fish –

Tirian throws open the door and Eustace sits up, nearly falling off the bed as it seems to spin madly beneath him.

“We have to leave,” Tirian says. “The High King’s been arrested for murder.”



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