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bedlamsbardI must have been really close to posting Tuesday at some point, because it's already coded, and I don't go through and add HTML formatting until right before I post. *hands* It's virtually done, I just don't really like the ending very much, and I now have slight problems with the characterization -- which is why I started rewriting it at one point, "Bad Moon Rising" would have been the same story completely rewritten from the beginning, but I stalled out.
Chronologically, it probably takes place slightly before How High the River Rises, since there are mentions of Narnia's money problems. (Wait! I just found an age marker which puts Peter at 20, so around five or six years in.) The most important thing to know is that in this story, Peter fights off ninjas. Naked.
The oil in Edmund’s lamp is getting dangerously low, but he doesn’t want to get up to refill it just yet; he’s certain that if he leaves for even a moment he’s going to lose either the thread of the translation or the decoding or worse, both.
He chews on the end of his quill, looking back and forth across the Marinese dictionary on his left, the code key on his right, and the letter in front of him. First to decode it, then to translate it, and there’s no reason at all for Marinel to have an interest in Narnia’s government, which means that it probably wasn’t a native Marinese speaker who wrote this and that he’s getting the message third-hand. Badly-translated and encoded Marinese to Narnian – Lion’s mane, but this is a royal mess of a message.
…on the eighth night of the seventh month of the thirty-second year, to bring an end forever to the reign of the High King of Narnia…
Son of a bitch. Edmund bites the end off his quill, the taste of feathers and ink suddenly bitter in his mouth. It’s the thirty-second year of the Empress of Edan’s reign, and their years have sixteen months and if his math is right – that would be today. Tonight.
He jerks out of his chair, barely noticing as it falls backward, and snatches his sheathed sword off the wall. It’s the work of a moment to get the secret passage open, the stones sliding aside to let him in. Edmund heads down into the depths of the castle at a dead run, thanking Aslan that Peter’s quarters aren’t far away, even by Cair Paravel’s always interesting and constantly shifting standards.
He bursts into Peter’s bedroom with his sword in his hand to find his brother sitting naked on the window seat, drinking straight from a bottle of Glasswater whiskey. The room’s no more of a mess than Peter’s room usually is – the sheets are dragged off the bed, but the bookshelves are untouched, a pair of centaur twin longswords still sheathed on the wall. There’s also a body on the floor by the bed, face-down, neck snapped, a knife not far from his outstretched hand.
“Your timing’s off, Ed,” Peter says as Edmund lowers his sword, blinking at the sudden light. “No, really, come on in. Do you want a drink?”
He’s drunk, or at least well on his way there. “Are you all right?” Edmund asks, sheathing his sword and belting on his sword belt, a little belatedly. He goes over to the body and rolls it over. Raedwulf of Northhope, the Ranskan exile who trained with Peter’s knights, and he’s not wearing a stitch. “I thought he liked you.”
“Yes, well, apparently not as much as I thought,” Peter says, tipping the bottle back. His throat works as he swallows.
“Apparently not.” Edmund reaches for the knife and Peter says, glancing over, “Don’t, the blade’s poisoned.”
Edmund leans over to inspect it, finding the groove on the blade and the thin line of black there – a tincture of Watchman’s Lace, native to western Narnia. A few drops are enough to kill a grown man. The groove, though – that’s Lascar style, not Ranskan. And most Narnians – at least the ones that bend the knee at Cair Paravel – don’t tend to go in for poison, at least as a general rule. “Did you get cut?” he asks, looking up anxiously, but aside from a few fading bruises from arms practice, Peter seems unhurt. And it’s pretty easy to tell.
“No, but I’m going to have to burn my sheets.” Peter tips the bottle back again, then makes a face and overturns it. Dry as bone. “There’s a bottle of Old Bern behind volume six of The Long and Glorious History of Blessed Calormen or whatever the fuck that monstrosity’s called; bring it over here, why don’t you?”
Edmund doesn’t move, trying to gauge how drunk his brother is. Bottles of Glasswater are big, and if this one was full before Peter got into it – “How long’s he been dead, Pete?”
Peter shrugs and tosses the empty bottle aside. Edmund winces, but it doesn’t smash, just rolls until it hits the bedpost and stops. “Since about two minutes after he tried to kill me in my sleep. Seriously, bring the Old Bern over here; I need it after that.”
Edmund straightens up, pointedly not looking at Peter’s bed. There are some things he’d really not like to know about his brother’s love life, but unfortunately one of the things he knows is his Peter’s propensity for sleeping with people who want to kill him. “Raedwulf’s been in Narnia for almost two years now and had plenty of opportunity to kill you before. Why now?”
“Fine, I’ll get the damn brandy myself,” Peter says, unfolding himself from his full lotus.
“Put some clothes on,” Edmund says automatically, although he doesn’t bother to avert his eyes.
Peter rolls his eyes. “Who are you, Susan?” He crosses to the bookshelf and pulls out the History, glancing at it briefly before he tosses it over his shoulder. “Why is this even in here? This shelf is supposed to be stuff I want to read.”
“Yes, I’ve been trying to trick you into actually learning something about our neighbors,” Edmund says, crossing to Peter’s closet and throwing the doors open. He pulls out a pair of trousers and a shirt at random and throws them at Peter’s back. “Is it working?”
Peter looks at him over his shoulder, his eyebrows going up. “No.” He pulls the bottle of Old Bern out, works the cork free with his teeth, and takes a slug of it, then puts the bottle down on the shelf so he can start dressing. After he’s got his shirt on, he picks up the bottle again and starts drinking, doing up the buttons on his shirt one-handed.
“I can’t believe you’re hiding alcohol in your room,” Edmund grouses. “You’re the High King of Narnia, you have a liquor cabinet in your study, which is right next door, by the way, and you’re hiding Archenland brandy behind your books –”
“There’s summerwine in the back of my closet,” Peter offers, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth. He holds the bottle out towards Edmund. “And Terebinthian rum about three shelves over; Osumare brought it back the last time he was out.”
“Aslan’s mane, Pete,” Edmund says, but starts to cross the room anyway. He’s reaching for the bottle when Peter says, “Wait, if you didn’t know about Raedwulf, then why are you here?”
“Oh, shit,” is the only thing Edmund has time to say before the windows explode inward, showering glass and three masked black-clad men down into the room.
“This isn’t my night,” Peter announces grimly, taking a last mouthful of brandy before shifting his grip on the bottle and smashing it against the bookcase. He ducks a throwing star that embeds in the bookcase where his head had been a moment before. “I mean, do you people coordinate or something? What will be least convenient for the High King at any given point in time?” He catches an assassin’s elbow in his left hand, slams the broken end of the bottle into the man’s face.
Edmund draws his sword in time to meet a swordsman blade to blade, broken glass crunching under their booted feet. He disengages, feints left, strikes right, and spins away as the body falls. “Stop whining, Pete!”
There’s a sharp crack of breaking bone as Peter crushes the first man’s elbow, then snaps his neck, dropping the broken bottle to snatch up the man’s slim, narrow sword. He turns lightly on his heel to parry the third man’s sword and strike his head from his shoulders in the same move, hissing pain as he steps on broken glass. “Oh, first the man I’ve been sleeping with for more than a year tries to kill me with a poisoned dagger, then a shalot of Edanese ninjas break my windows, which I’m going to have to have fixed now, then I waste a perfectly good bottle of Old Bern when they try to kill me –”
“You didn’t have to break the bottle,” Edmund says reasonably as Peter throws the sword down and leans against the side of his bookshelf, cursing as he pulls broken glass out of his bare feet. “Wait, you’ve been sleeping with Raedwulf for more than a year?”
“And you say you know everything that goes on in Cair Paravel,” Peter says, smug for a minute before his voice goes rough and he yanks an inch-long shard of glass out of his heel. “Motherfucker.” He limps across the room to his closet, where he pulls out a shirt at random and shreds it between his hands to bandage his feet.
Edmund crouches down to pull off the black mask of the man he killed. The features are classic Edanese, all right – broad cheekbones, narrow jaw, deepset eyes, thin mouth. “Did you piss off Edan somehow or are these hired mercs?” he asks over his shoulder. “And if they’re hired, who hired them?”
“Edmund,” Peter says softly, balancing on one foot as he tugs his boots on.
“I can assure you with reasonable certainty it was not me,” Edmund says, going through the would-be assassin’s pockets. He comes up with a handful of Narnian moons and stars, but nothing else. “Seriously, you’ve been sleeping with Raedwulf for more than a year?”
“Don’t dwell on it or anything.” He produces a curved Alvaradan cutlass from the inside of his closet. “Edanese shalots are six men. That was three. Where are the others?”
Edmund straightens abruptly. “Your guard should have come bursting in here about five minutes ago. Ten, if we count Raedwulf.”
“Fifteen,” Peter corrects. “Coello and Istvana are on guard inside tonight. They’re good. They should have known.” He moves to one side of the door, Edmund to the other, and they nod at each other before Peter reaches out with one hand and pulls the door open.
Edmund’s first into the darkened study, pivoting neatly on the balls of his feet as he takes it all in. The Royal Guard on duty tonight are a pair of tigers named Istvana and Coello inside; a jaguar named Sadurnie and a leopard named Hazhir outside in the hall. There’s no sign of Coello, but Istvana is sprawled on the floor in front of the fireplace, unmoving. Behind Peter’s desk, the curtains are drawn back from the big window that looks out over the valley and the window hangs open.
Edmund moves forward silently, edging around the side of the room towards the window. Peter goes the opposite way, crouching down next to Istvana’s body and digging his fingers into the ruff of fur around her neck. Edmund glances over as he pulls a crossbow bolt free and holds it up.
“Poison,” he whispers.
“Damn,” Edmund replies softly, back to the wall beside the window. He reaches out and twitches forward the curtain to try and get a look outside.
The crossbow bolt goes an inch into the polished oak of Peter’s desk.
“That was a gift!” Peter hisses, crouching low to the ground as he edges towards the weapons rack on the wall. He reaches up to pull down the big rosewood hunting bow there, along with a quiver full of broadhead war arrows. “He could at least have hit the damned paperwork.” He slides bow and quiver across the floor towards Edmund and exchanges the cutlass for Rhindon, buckling on his sword-belt quickly before he draws his sword.
Edmund braces the bow on the inside of his calf as he strings it, then leans the quiver against the side of Peter’s desk and draws an arrow, nocking it. “You have a mirror?” he asks.
“Second drawer down on the left,” Peter supplies, crouching low and moving around the edge of the room. “For signaling,” he adds pointedly as Edmund raises his eyebrows.
“Excuses, excuses,” Edmund says lightly, holding the mirror out so he can get a better look at where exactly the sniper’s shooting from. Second window on the right in the northwest hall, top floor. That hall is supposed to be secured, so how the hell – they’ll deal with that later.
Edmund puts the mirror down and pulls the arrow back to his ear. He’s not Susan, but – he steps out, shoots, drops down to the floor. There’s no answering crossbow bolt to the head, so he’ll look at that as a good sign.
“Four down, two to go,” he says, straightening. “Where –”
Peter puts a finger to his lips, nodding towards the phoenix statue on the left side of the fireplace. “I’m a little more interested in where Coello is,” he whispers.
Edmund puts the bow down on Peter’s desk and draws his sword, advancing forward. Peter steps delicately around Istvana and reaches out to press a certain three feathers on the phoenix’s wing, then down to rotate a trailing bit of stone flame completely around. The statue slides aside, revealing a dark space that’s usually a passageway and is occasionally just a hiding space without a second exit.
Edmund gets a look at Coello and the two Edanese assassins behind him, then Coello snarls a curse and leaps for him. He slams his sword up, the blade slashing across Coello’s chest a bare second before the tiger hits him, sword spinning out of his hand and across the floor as all the tiger’s bulk lands on his chest. He crashes down to the floor, the back of his skull hitting the stone hard enough that his vision blurs. He jams a hand up beneath the tiger’s jaw, trying to keep those teeth away from his face, and reaches blindly for a sword, a knife, an arrow, anything.
Coello’s breath is hot on his face, one giant paw ripping at his chest, another at his arm, and Edmund gives it up and shouts. There are supposed to be guards outside the doors as well as inside.
He’s vaguely aware of the clash of steel on steel and the sound of the door slamming open, but that pales in comparison to the importance of trying not to die. He can feel the hot seep of Coello’s blood through his shirt, the snap of Coello’s jaws an inch from his face, and then the tiger goes tumbling aside. He goes tumbling onto his side and Edmund scrambles backwards, grabbing for his sword, as Hazhir and Sadurnie converge on Coello.
One of the assassins is already on the floor; Peter slams Rhindon’s hilt up into the base of the second man’s jaw and watches as he falls. “Hazhir, Sadurnie, get off,” he says, and the two big cats move backwards smoothly, leaving Coello gasping on the floor, blood spattering his fur.
Peter puts his head to one side, staring down at Coello with surprised hurt written all over his face. “Why’d you do it?” he asks.
Coello turns his head from side to side a little furiously, but he doesn’t meet Peter’s eyes. Hazhir puts her paw down on his throat, growling. “Traitor,” she spits. “Kinslayer.”
Peter leans down and pulls Edmund upright. “You all right?” he asks.
“Are you?”
He shrugs and looks away. “Sadurnie, find Sidonie for me and tell her she needs to run better background checks when she’s hiring, get me the palace guard, put extra guards on my sisters, and shut down Cair Paravel. We had one traitor, we may have others.”
“And send someone to the top floor of the northwest hall,” Edmund adds, touching his fingers to the thick spill of blood across his chest. He hurts like hell – tigers aren’t particularly light – but he doesn’t think any of the blood is his.
“I’ll stay with him,” Hazhir says, and Sadurnie nods and springs off.
Peter stares down at Coello, then turns away, his jaw working silently. “Those two are still alive,” he says, gesturing behind him. “So I know where to send my cleaning bill. And their heads.” He glances back at Coello. “But not your back pay, Aslan in the east.”
“You owe Coello back pay?” Edmund asks, cleaning his sword on his trousers and sheathing it.
Peter gives him a flat look. “Have you had a look at Narnia’s treasury lately? Just about the only people I don’t owe money to are you and Su.”
“You owe Lu money?”
“I lost a bet,” he says shortly. He looks down at the sword in his hand, expression a little surprised, like he hadn’t expected to still see Rhindon there. After a minute, he cleans the blade on the bottom of his shirt and sheathes it. “Excuse me,” he says to them, and crosses the study back to his room, slamming the door behind him.
“Majesty?” Hazhir asks helplessly, staring up at Edmund with big green eyes.
He shakes his head. “Watch them,” he says to her, following Peter. He pulls the door open, steps into Peter’s bedroom, and shuts the door. “Are you all right?”
“Get out of here, Ed,” Peter says, his back to him. He’s leaning heavily on one of the bookcases, his face in his hands.
“No.” Just for emphasis, he puts his back against the door and crosses his arms over his chest. “There have been assassination attempts before.”
“Not like this,” Peter says, turning back towards him. He looks tired. He looks old, for someone who’s only twenty and working themselves to death every day of it. “Not twice in one night.”
Edmund makes a vague uncertain motion with his hand, trying to figure out what to say to his brother. Peter’s never been like this before. “If it’s any help,” he says, “they didn’t coordinate it. The message I intercepted didn’t make any mention of Raedwulf, so that was just coincidence. But the Edanese shalot, that was –”
Peter makes a sharp motion with one hand, cutting him off mid-sentence. “That was political,” he says. “Raedwulf…wasn’t. Neither was Coello.” He slams a fist suddenly into the wall. “Who’s next, you?” he snaps. “My lover, my bodyguard – just about the only people left who can betray me tonight are my siblings and my advisers.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Apparently my taste in men is even worse than I thought.”
“Osumare hasn’t tried to kill you,” Edmund points out.
“Osumare’s a pirate who got my entire country embroiled in a war that could have wiped Narnia off the map,” Peter says bitterly. “Although no, on the bright side, he hasn’t tried to kill me. There is that.” He grinds broken glass beneath his heel, paces back and forth a few steps, restless.
“Get away from the window,” Edmund says.
“Do you really think someone’s going to try and make it a trifecta? How many times can someone go after the High King in one night before he finally snaps?” He stands in front of the broken window and spreads his arms. “Come on, then. Give it your best shot.”
Edmund grabs his shoulder and pulls him away. “No, because the palace guard might think you’ve gone insane. Come out here and let Lucy look at your feet before you lame yourself permanently.”
Peter jerks free of his grip and stares at him flatly.
“The fact that you’re at least a little bit drunk doesn’t help,” Edmund points out, gesturing at the empty bottle on the floor. “Come on, Pete. At the very least, you’re standing in a room with broken windows and four dead bodies.”
There’s a little bit of surprise on Peter’s face as he glances around, seeming to notice the corpses for the first time. “Oh,” he says. “I suppose there is that.”
Edmund touches his brother’s wrist lightly with two fingers, Peter’s skin warm beneath his.
*
Bad Moon Rising (alternate opening)
“You know,” Edmund says out loud around a mouthful of eagle feathers, donated for the purpose by the family that’s taken up residence in one of Cair Paravel’s towers, “when I was back in England, I never thought that having a bodyguard would be so remarkably like having a nursemaid.”
It says a lot about how well they know each other now that neither Chailya nor Kuzui blink. The tiger and the jaguar are sprawled out in front of the fireplace in his study, deceptively languid as they bask in the heat. Chailya raises her head, yawns, and says, “It’s late, sire. If you don’t get some sleep you won’t be fit for anything tomorrow.”
Edmund taps the end of the quill against his teeth, staring down at the jumble of nonsense on the page in front of him. Except it’s not just nonsense; there’s a discernible pattern, and he’s nearly positive he has the hang of it now. There is the slight problem that it may not be in Narnian, though. “What am I even doing tomorrow?” he asks.
Chailya sounds a little hurt when she says, “Please, your majesty. I’m a bodyguard, not a social secretary. Give me some credit.”
“But I do know you happen to know my schedule,” Edmund says, circling something on the page in front of him. Not the original – he’s working off a copy of a copy; he’s got no bloody idea where the original is, since the copy is something that had been passed to him through several intermediaries, worse luck.
“Only for security purposes!” Chailya protests. “Not out of any –”
Kuzui laughs, muffling the sound on his front leg. “What helps you sleep at night, Chai,” he says. “Not that I’m protesting your workaholic tendencies, sire, but the sooner you retire for the evening the sooner we’re off-duty. And I happen to know that Chailya here has a –”
“Shut up!” the tiger exclaims, shooting from her recline up into a sitting position. “That’s – ah, I’m sure his majesty has no interest in my…love life.”
“I don’t,” Edmund assures her. “But I won’t keep you from your bloke any longer,” he adds, and stands up, shuffling the papers into a leather folder that he tucks under his arm. He glances at the hour-candle on his desk – praise Aslan, it is late; the candle’s nearly down to the dregs.
Chailya gets up, Kuzui following and turning the motion into a stretch.
*
Not really sure I have any notes to add. I think this was the only fic I wrote where one of Peter's lovers actually does try to kill him, though it's a running joke in the Warsverse that half the people Peter sleeps with try and murder him. He comes out in this story a little more messed up than I really prefer him to be, or at least messed up in different ways. One important thing Tuesday sets up is Coello's treason, which comes up again in other stories. (Or at least I think it does, I can't remember anything off the top of my head where it does appear.)
Chronologically, it probably takes place slightly before How High the River Rises, since there are mentions of Narnia's money problems. (Wait! I just found an age marker which puts Peter at 20, so around five or six years in.) The most important thing to know is that in this story, Peter fights off ninjas. Naked.
The oil in Edmund’s lamp is getting dangerously low, but he doesn’t want to get up to refill it just yet; he’s certain that if he leaves for even a moment he’s going to lose either the thread of the translation or the decoding or worse, both.
He chews on the end of his quill, looking back and forth across the Marinese dictionary on his left, the code key on his right, and the letter in front of him. First to decode it, then to translate it, and there’s no reason at all for Marinel to have an interest in Narnia’s government, which means that it probably wasn’t a native Marinese speaker who wrote this and that he’s getting the message third-hand. Badly-translated and encoded Marinese to Narnian – Lion’s mane, but this is a royal mess of a message.
…on the eighth night of the seventh month of the thirty-second year, to bring an end forever to the reign of the High King of Narnia…
Son of a bitch. Edmund bites the end off his quill, the taste of feathers and ink suddenly bitter in his mouth. It’s the thirty-second year of the Empress of Edan’s reign, and their years have sixteen months and if his math is right – that would be today. Tonight.
He jerks out of his chair, barely noticing as it falls backward, and snatches his sheathed sword off the wall. It’s the work of a moment to get the secret passage open, the stones sliding aside to let him in. Edmund heads down into the depths of the castle at a dead run, thanking Aslan that Peter’s quarters aren’t far away, even by Cair Paravel’s always interesting and constantly shifting standards.
He bursts into Peter’s bedroom with his sword in his hand to find his brother sitting naked on the window seat, drinking straight from a bottle of Glasswater whiskey. The room’s no more of a mess than Peter’s room usually is – the sheets are dragged off the bed, but the bookshelves are untouched, a pair of centaur twin longswords still sheathed on the wall. There’s also a body on the floor by the bed, face-down, neck snapped, a knife not far from his outstretched hand.
“Your timing’s off, Ed,” Peter says as Edmund lowers his sword, blinking at the sudden light. “No, really, come on in. Do you want a drink?”
He’s drunk, or at least well on his way there. “Are you all right?” Edmund asks, sheathing his sword and belting on his sword belt, a little belatedly. He goes over to the body and rolls it over. Raedwulf of Northhope, the Ranskan exile who trained with Peter’s knights, and he’s not wearing a stitch. “I thought he liked you.”
“Yes, well, apparently not as much as I thought,” Peter says, tipping the bottle back. His throat works as he swallows.
“Apparently not.” Edmund reaches for the knife and Peter says, glancing over, “Don’t, the blade’s poisoned.”
Edmund leans over to inspect it, finding the groove on the blade and the thin line of black there – a tincture of Watchman’s Lace, native to western Narnia. A few drops are enough to kill a grown man. The groove, though – that’s Lascar style, not Ranskan. And most Narnians – at least the ones that bend the knee at Cair Paravel – don’t tend to go in for poison, at least as a general rule. “Did you get cut?” he asks, looking up anxiously, but aside from a few fading bruises from arms practice, Peter seems unhurt. And it’s pretty easy to tell.
“No, but I’m going to have to burn my sheets.” Peter tips the bottle back again, then makes a face and overturns it. Dry as bone. “There’s a bottle of Old Bern behind volume six of The Long and Glorious History of Blessed Calormen or whatever the fuck that monstrosity’s called; bring it over here, why don’t you?”
Edmund doesn’t move, trying to gauge how drunk his brother is. Bottles of Glasswater are big, and if this one was full before Peter got into it – “How long’s he been dead, Pete?”
Peter shrugs and tosses the empty bottle aside. Edmund winces, but it doesn’t smash, just rolls until it hits the bedpost and stops. “Since about two minutes after he tried to kill me in my sleep. Seriously, bring the Old Bern over here; I need it after that.”
Edmund straightens up, pointedly not looking at Peter’s bed. There are some things he’d really not like to know about his brother’s love life, but unfortunately one of the things he knows is his Peter’s propensity for sleeping with people who want to kill him. “Raedwulf’s been in Narnia for almost two years now and had plenty of opportunity to kill you before. Why now?”
“Fine, I’ll get the damn brandy myself,” Peter says, unfolding himself from his full lotus.
“Put some clothes on,” Edmund says automatically, although he doesn’t bother to avert his eyes.
Peter rolls his eyes. “Who are you, Susan?” He crosses to the bookshelf and pulls out the History, glancing at it briefly before he tosses it over his shoulder. “Why is this even in here? This shelf is supposed to be stuff I want to read.”
“Yes, I’ve been trying to trick you into actually learning something about our neighbors,” Edmund says, crossing to Peter’s closet and throwing the doors open. He pulls out a pair of trousers and a shirt at random and throws them at Peter’s back. “Is it working?”
Peter looks at him over his shoulder, his eyebrows going up. “No.” He pulls the bottle of Old Bern out, works the cork free with his teeth, and takes a slug of it, then puts the bottle down on the shelf so he can start dressing. After he’s got his shirt on, he picks up the bottle again and starts drinking, doing up the buttons on his shirt one-handed.
“I can’t believe you’re hiding alcohol in your room,” Edmund grouses. “You’re the High King of Narnia, you have a liquor cabinet in your study, which is right next door, by the way, and you’re hiding Archenland brandy behind your books –”
“There’s summerwine in the back of my closet,” Peter offers, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth. He holds the bottle out towards Edmund. “And Terebinthian rum about three shelves over; Osumare brought it back the last time he was out.”
“Aslan’s mane, Pete,” Edmund says, but starts to cross the room anyway. He’s reaching for the bottle when Peter says, “Wait, if you didn’t know about Raedwulf, then why are you here?”
“Oh, shit,” is the only thing Edmund has time to say before the windows explode inward, showering glass and three masked black-clad men down into the room.
“This isn’t my night,” Peter announces grimly, taking a last mouthful of brandy before shifting his grip on the bottle and smashing it against the bookcase. He ducks a throwing star that embeds in the bookcase where his head had been a moment before. “I mean, do you people coordinate or something? What will be least convenient for the High King at any given point in time?” He catches an assassin’s elbow in his left hand, slams the broken end of the bottle into the man’s face.
Edmund draws his sword in time to meet a swordsman blade to blade, broken glass crunching under their booted feet. He disengages, feints left, strikes right, and spins away as the body falls. “Stop whining, Pete!”
There’s a sharp crack of breaking bone as Peter crushes the first man’s elbow, then snaps his neck, dropping the broken bottle to snatch up the man’s slim, narrow sword. He turns lightly on his heel to parry the third man’s sword and strike his head from his shoulders in the same move, hissing pain as he steps on broken glass. “Oh, first the man I’ve been sleeping with for more than a year tries to kill me with a poisoned dagger, then a shalot of Edanese ninjas break my windows, which I’m going to have to have fixed now, then I waste a perfectly good bottle of Old Bern when they try to kill me –”
“You didn’t have to break the bottle,” Edmund says reasonably as Peter throws the sword down and leans against the side of his bookshelf, cursing as he pulls broken glass out of his bare feet. “Wait, you’ve been sleeping with Raedwulf for more than a year?”
“And you say you know everything that goes on in Cair Paravel,” Peter says, smug for a minute before his voice goes rough and he yanks an inch-long shard of glass out of his heel. “Motherfucker.” He limps across the room to his closet, where he pulls out a shirt at random and shreds it between his hands to bandage his feet.
Edmund crouches down to pull off the black mask of the man he killed. The features are classic Edanese, all right – broad cheekbones, narrow jaw, deepset eyes, thin mouth. “Did you piss off Edan somehow or are these hired mercs?” he asks over his shoulder. “And if they’re hired, who hired them?”
“Edmund,” Peter says softly, balancing on one foot as he tugs his boots on.
“I can assure you with reasonable certainty it was not me,” Edmund says, going through the would-be assassin’s pockets. He comes up with a handful of Narnian moons and stars, but nothing else. “Seriously, you’ve been sleeping with Raedwulf for more than a year?”
“Don’t dwell on it or anything.” He produces a curved Alvaradan cutlass from the inside of his closet. “Edanese shalots are six men. That was three. Where are the others?”
Edmund straightens abruptly. “Your guard should have come bursting in here about five minutes ago. Ten, if we count Raedwulf.”
“Fifteen,” Peter corrects. “Coello and Istvana are on guard inside tonight. They’re good. They should have known.” He moves to one side of the door, Edmund to the other, and they nod at each other before Peter reaches out with one hand and pulls the door open.
Edmund’s first into the darkened study, pivoting neatly on the balls of his feet as he takes it all in. The Royal Guard on duty tonight are a pair of tigers named Istvana and Coello inside; a jaguar named Sadurnie and a leopard named Hazhir outside in the hall. There’s no sign of Coello, but Istvana is sprawled on the floor in front of the fireplace, unmoving. Behind Peter’s desk, the curtains are drawn back from the big window that looks out over the valley and the window hangs open.
Edmund moves forward silently, edging around the side of the room towards the window. Peter goes the opposite way, crouching down next to Istvana’s body and digging his fingers into the ruff of fur around her neck. Edmund glances over as he pulls a crossbow bolt free and holds it up.
“Poison,” he whispers.
“Damn,” Edmund replies softly, back to the wall beside the window. He reaches out and twitches forward the curtain to try and get a look outside.
The crossbow bolt goes an inch into the polished oak of Peter’s desk.
“That was a gift!” Peter hisses, crouching low to the ground as he edges towards the weapons rack on the wall. He reaches up to pull down the big rosewood hunting bow there, along with a quiver full of broadhead war arrows. “He could at least have hit the damned paperwork.” He slides bow and quiver across the floor towards Edmund and exchanges the cutlass for Rhindon, buckling on his sword-belt quickly before he draws his sword.
Edmund braces the bow on the inside of his calf as he strings it, then leans the quiver against the side of Peter’s desk and draws an arrow, nocking it. “You have a mirror?” he asks.
“Second drawer down on the left,” Peter supplies, crouching low and moving around the edge of the room. “For signaling,” he adds pointedly as Edmund raises his eyebrows.
“Excuses, excuses,” Edmund says lightly, holding the mirror out so he can get a better look at where exactly the sniper’s shooting from. Second window on the right in the northwest hall, top floor. That hall is supposed to be secured, so how the hell – they’ll deal with that later.
Edmund puts the mirror down and pulls the arrow back to his ear. He’s not Susan, but – he steps out, shoots, drops down to the floor. There’s no answering crossbow bolt to the head, so he’ll look at that as a good sign.
“Four down, two to go,” he says, straightening. “Where –”
Peter puts a finger to his lips, nodding towards the phoenix statue on the left side of the fireplace. “I’m a little more interested in where Coello is,” he whispers.
Edmund puts the bow down on Peter’s desk and draws his sword, advancing forward. Peter steps delicately around Istvana and reaches out to press a certain three feathers on the phoenix’s wing, then down to rotate a trailing bit of stone flame completely around. The statue slides aside, revealing a dark space that’s usually a passageway and is occasionally just a hiding space without a second exit.
Edmund gets a look at Coello and the two Edanese assassins behind him, then Coello snarls a curse and leaps for him. He slams his sword up, the blade slashing across Coello’s chest a bare second before the tiger hits him, sword spinning out of his hand and across the floor as all the tiger’s bulk lands on his chest. He crashes down to the floor, the back of his skull hitting the stone hard enough that his vision blurs. He jams a hand up beneath the tiger’s jaw, trying to keep those teeth away from his face, and reaches blindly for a sword, a knife, an arrow, anything.
Coello’s breath is hot on his face, one giant paw ripping at his chest, another at his arm, and Edmund gives it up and shouts. There are supposed to be guards outside the doors as well as inside.
He’s vaguely aware of the clash of steel on steel and the sound of the door slamming open, but that pales in comparison to the importance of trying not to die. He can feel the hot seep of Coello’s blood through his shirt, the snap of Coello’s jaws an inch from his face, and then the tiger goes tumbling aside. He goes tumbling onto his side and Edmund scrambles backwards, grabbing for his sword, as Hazhir and Sadurnie converge on Coello.
One of the assassins is already on the floor; Peter slams Rhindon’s hilt up into the base of the second man’s jaw and watches as he falls. “Hazhir, Sadurnie, get off,” he says, and the two big cats move backwards smoothly, leaving Coello gasping on the floor, blood spattering his fur.
Peter puts his head to one side, staring down at Coello with surprised hurt written all over his face. “Why’d you do it?” he asks.
Coello turns his head from side to side a little furiously, but he doesn’t meet Peter’s eyes. Hazhir puts her paw down on his throat, growling. “Traitor,” she spits. “Kinslayer.”
Peter leans down and pulls Edmund upright. “You all right?” he asks.
“Are you?”
He shrugs and looks away. “Sadurnie, find Sidonie for me and tell her she needs to run better background checks when she’s hiring, get me the palace guard, put extra guards on my sisters, and shut down Cair Paravel. We had one traitor, we may have others.”
“And send someone to the top floor of the northwest hall,” Edmund adds, touching his fingers to the thick spill of blood across his chest. He hurts like hell – tigers aren’t particularly light – but he doesn’t think any of the blood is his.
“I’ll stay with him,” Hazhir says, and Sadurnie nods and springs off.
Peter stares down at Coello, then turns away, his jaw working silently. “Those two are still alive,” he says, gesturing behind him. “So I know where to send my cleaning bill. And their heads.” He glances back at Coello. “But not your back pay, Aslan in the east.”
“You owe Coello back pay?” Edmund asks, cleaning his sword on his trousers and sheathing it.
Peter gives him a flat look. “Have you had a look at Narnia’s treasury lately? Just about the only people I don’t owe money to are you and Su.”
“You owe Lu money?”
“I lost a bet,” he says shortly. He looks down at the sword in his hand, expression a little surprised, like he hadn’t expected to still see Rhindon there. After a minute, he cleans the blade on the bottom of his shirt and sheathes it. “Excuse me,” he says to them, and crosses the study back to his room, slamming the door behind him.
“Majesty?” Hazhir asks helplessly, staring up at Edmund with big green eyes.
He shakes his head. “Watch them,” he says to her, following Peter. He pulls the door open, steps into Peter’s bedroom, and shuts the door. “Are you all right?”
“Get out of here, Ed,” Peter says, his back to him. He’s leaning heavily on one of the bookcases, his face in his hands.
“No.” Just for emphasis, he puts his back against the door and crosses his arms over his chest. “There have been assassination attempts before.”
“Not like this,” Peter says, turning back towards him. He looks tired. He looks old, for someone who’s only twenty and working themselves to death every day of it. “Not twice in one night.”
Edmund makes a vague uncertain motion with his hand, trying to figure out what to say to his brother. Peter’s never been like this before. “If it’s any help,” he says, “they didn’t coordinate it. The message I intercepted didn’t make any mention of Raedwulf, so that was just coincidence. But the Edanese shalot, that was –”
Peter makes a sharp motion with one hand, cutting him off mid-sentence. “That was political,” he says. “Raedwulf…wasn’t. Neither was Coello.” He slams a fist suddenly into the wall. “Who’s next, you?” he snaps. “My lover, my bodyguard – just about the only people left who can betray me tonight are my siblings and my advisers.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Apparently my taste in men is even worse than I thought.”
“Osumare hasn’t tried to kill you,” Edmund points out.
“Osumare’s a pirate who got my entire country embroiled in a war that could have wiped Narnia off the map,” Peter says bitterly. “Although no, on the bright side, he hasn’t tried to kill me. There is that.” He grinds broken glass beneath his heel, paces back and forth a few steps, restless.
“Get away from the window,” Edmund says.
“Do you really think someone’s going to try and make it a trifecta? How many times can someone go after the High King in one night before he finally snaps?” He stands in front of the broken window and spreads his arms. “Come on, then. Give it your best shot.”
Edmund grabs his shoulder and pulls him away. “No, because the palace guard might think you’ve gone insane. Come out here and let Lucy look at your feet before you lame yourself permanently.”
Peter jerks free of his grip and stares at him flatly.
“The fact that you’re at least a little bit drunk doesn’t help,” Edmund points out, gesturing at the empty bottle on the floor. “Come on, Pete. At the very least, you’re standing in a room with broken windows and four dead bodies.”
There’s a little bit of surprise on Peter’s face as he glances around, seeming to notice the corpses for the first time. “Oh,” he says. “I suppose there is that.”
Edmund touches his brother’s wrist lightly with two fingers, Peter’s skin warm beneath his.
*
Bad Moon Rising (alternate opening)
“You know,” Edmund says out loud around a mouthful of eagle feathers, donated for the purpose by the family that’s taken up residence in one of Cair Paravel’s towers, “when I was back in England, I never thought that having a bodyguard would be so remarkably like having a nursemaid.”
It says a lot about how well they know each other now that neither Chailya nor Kuzui blink. The tiger and the jaguar are sprawled out in front of the fireplace in his study, deceptively languid as they bask in the heat. Chailya raises her head, yawns, and says, “It’s late, sire. If you don’t get some sleep you won’t be fit for anything tomorrow.”
Edmund taps the end of the quill against his teeth, staring down at the jumble of nonsense on the page in front of him. Except it’s not just nonsense; there’s a discernible pattern, and he’s nearly positive he has the hang of it now. There is the slight problem that it may not be in Narnian, though. “What am I even doing tomorrow?” he asks.
Chailya sounds a little hurt when she says, “Please, your majesty. I’m a bodyguard, not a social secretary. Give me some credit.”
“But I do know you happen to know my schedule,” Edmund says, circling something on the page in front of him. Not the original – he’s working off a copy of a copy; he’s got no bloody idea where the original is, since the copy is something that had been passed to him through several intermediaries, worse luck.
“Only for security purposes!” Chailya protests. “Not out of any –”
Kuzui laughs, muffling the sound on his front leg. “What helps you sleep at night, Chai,” he says. “Not that I’m protesting your workaholic tendencies, sire, but the sooner you retire for the evening the sooner we’re off-duty. And I happen to know that Chailya here has a –”
“Shut up!” the tiger exclaims, shooting from her recline up into a sitting position. “That’s – ah, I’m sure his majesty has no interest in my…love life.”
“I don’t,” Edmund assures her. “But I won’t keep you from your bloke any longer,” he adds, and stands up, shuffling the papers into a leather folder that he tucks under his arm. He glances at the hour-candle on his desk – praise Aslan, it is late; the candle’s nearly down to the dregs.
Chailya gets up, Kuzui following and turning the motion into a stretch.
*
Not really sure I have any notes to add. I think this was the only fic I wrote where one of Peter's lovers actually does try to kill him, though it's a running joke in the Warsverse that half the people Peter sleeps with try and murder him. He comes out in this story a little more messed up than I really prefer him to be, or at least messed up in different ways. One important thing Tuesday sets up is Coello's treason, which comes up again in other stories. (Or at least I think it does, I can't remember anything off the top of my head where it does appear.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-24 06:39 pm (UTC)Ah ha ha, Edmund Pevensie. Also, dear Peter: you are a human being you know.
Thanks for posting this!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-25 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-24 06:44 pm (UTC)OH EDMUND.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-25 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-24 07:49 pm (UTC)Wasn't expecting one of the guards to be a part of it, so that was definitely a surprise.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-25 04:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-18 01:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-18 11:49 pm (UTC)