bedlamsbard (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bedlamsbard) wrote2011-12-13 04:23 pm
bedlamsbard) wrote2011-12-13 04:23 pm
UFO: Narnia fic: "Be Like Water" (girl!Peter/Caspian, 5/7)
Heads up, people who read this through the first time: so far my only major rewrite came in this part. Although by "major" I mean "300 words."
Note: This is a repost, I kept accidentally cross-posting.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
*
“They are not ready,” Caspian tells Peta. “Only a handful of them can hit the target at all!”
“Lucky for us,” Peta says, lacing up the front of her jerkin and sliding the three big buttons home. “Come here,” she motions, and Caspian steps over to her as she starts to double-check the laces on his brigandine.
“Lucky for us,” she continues, “they won’t be shooting at individual targets, they’ll be shooting at a mass of horsemen, and that’s a little easier. I mean, the Telmarines will be moving, so all they have to worry about is shooting continuously and not accidentally shooting each other. Or us,” she adds, thoughtfully, and straightens, smoothing her hands over the front of his brigandine.
Two days later, and they know for certain which route the Telmarines are taking across the river. Are already taking, maybe; Susan is already out in the woods with the first set of Narnian archers to maneuver the Telmarines into the funnel Peta has planned. If all goes well, then it will be a slaughter. Caspian’s not entirely certain how he feels about this. The Telmarines are his people – but they made their choice to serve his uncle Miraz, and this is their due. And yet –
“Are you all right with this?” Peta asks, turning away from him. She buckles on her swordbelt, looping the end of it around itself in a complicated knot, and draws first sword, then dagger, checking the edges of each on the skin of her inner arm before she resheathes them.
“All right with what?” Caspian says, picking up his baldric.
Peta tilts her head back to watch him as he straps it on, shifting his weight until it falls exactly where he likes it. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“I was not aware that I actually had a choice.”
“If you refuse, it will raise some fairly serious questions about where your loyalty lies,” she allows. Her gaze is calm and steady, and Caspian doesn’t look away.
He takes a great breath. “They are cavalrymen,” he says, “not common soldiers, peasants called up to fight for the banners of their lords without a choice of their own. They brought this upon themselves.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“It is.”
She leans down to pick up her shield, strapping it across her back. “Are you ready?” she asks.
Caspian nods. “I am,” he says.
Peta steps toward him and puts a hand on the back of his neck to pull his head down briefly, their lips pressed together for a bare moment. “For luck,” she says before she steps away. “Let’s go.”
Outside, the sky is beginning to lighten, dawn creeping pale fingers across Narnia as Peta and Caspian pull themselves into the Telmarine saddles retrieved from the camp at Beruna; a pair of talking horses have graciously offered to bear that indignity as well as their king, queens, and Caspian. Edmund and Lucy meet them outside, the Narnian king’s eyes solemn. Peta leans down to speak to them as Caspian waits in silence. Their conversation is too quiet for Caspian to hear, and he looks away, eyeing the crossbowmen that are waiting to follow them into the woods and join their fellows already there. They look back at him, some of them shifting impatiently, others white-faced with fear. A few of them double-check the quarrels in their quivers.
Peta straightens and Edmund steps back, his good hand on his younger sister’s shoulder. “End it, Peta,” he says, and she smirks at him.
“You’re so demanding, Ed,” she says, and then she’s riding towards the woods, Caspian following just behind her and the Narnian crossbowmen behind them.
The woods in Narnia are thick, wild and uncouth, and Caspian is not fond of them; he is too much of a Telmarine for that. They raise the hair on the back of his neck, keep him looking over his shoulder and jumping at small noises. In contrast, the Narnians seem at ease here. Of course; he thinks grimly, this is their native habitat. Most of them were born and raised in woods like this. Not necessarily these woods – too close to Telmarine lands, which encroach farther and farther upon the few Narnian sanctuaries every year – but woods like this. He wonders if in these woods Peta sees her Narnia, something that has never changed, something that feels very much like home.
When they reach the part of the woods where they’ve set up the funnel, Caspian and Peta go through positioning groups of crossbowmen where they want them to be.
“Remember your stance,” Caspian admonishes, and a faun named Balsan grins at him cockily.
“Why, Prince Caspian,” he says, “I think we managed to learn something from you, even if you are a Telmarine.”
Caspian smiles. “Just remember which end of the crossbow the quarrel comes out of,” he says.
“This end, right?” asks a satyr, and Caspian rolls his eyes before he turns his horse away.
“They are actually funning, aren’t they?” Sebird says suspiciously, shaking his head. “It’s like your own four hooves don’t make perfectly good weapons –”
“You cannot throw your hooves at the enemy from a dozen paces away, I think,” Caspian tells him, and the horse sighs.
“I suppose you’re right,” he admits reluctantly. “Anyway, I’m just a horse, what do I need to know about all this business anyway?”
“How to avoid it, perhaps,” Caspian suggests.
Sebird debates this notion in silence for a few moments as he picks his way through the underbrush to catch up with Peta and her horse. “Hmmph,” he says at last, and Caspian hides his smile.
Peta is sitting very straight, her hands clenched on her saddlehorn; there are no reins on these horses. She turns her head towards Caspian as they approach. “All set?” she asks.
“They are prepared,” Caspian says.
“Good.” Without another word, she turns her horse aside, heading towards the trap they’re setting up for any Telmarines who make it through the funnel of archers and crossbowmen. Caspian follows.
“There’s been a bird from Susan,” Peta says suddenly over her shoulder. “The first troop has crossed the river.”
“That’s good,” Caspian says uncertainly, with a sudden pang of doubt. Whoever these men are, whatever oaths they’ve sworn, they’re still men. Still Telmarines.
Like him.
You walked away from your oaths and you turned your coat, he hears King Edmund saying, and ducks his head. Has he really left Telmar behind, then? Is it Narnia he’s fighting for now, or for Telmar, for his own throne?
Or for Peta?
He looks up at her back, the strong, steady line of it, and licks suddenly dry lips. He’s had his hands on his skin, had his mouth on hers, had her in his arms and in his bed. He knows the way she tastes and the way she sounds when she comes, the way she gasps when he makes love to her, the way her hair feels beneath his hands when she pulls it free of its braid. He is a son of Telmar, a son of Caspian the Conqueror, but he has thrown his lot in with the High Queen of Narnia, who’s myth and legend and history all wrapped up in one, a package that shouldn’t really be – a woman who has always done a man’s work, a man’s duty. Caspian doesn’t know if there are girls in Telmarine Narnia that want to be her – the thought seems almost obscene, somehow, because how could anyone else ever be like Peta? – but he knows that half the boys in Telmarine Narnia wanted to bed her, and she hadn’t even been anything more than a flicker of legend in the mists of history, not truth at all. Perhaps considerably more than half now, depending on what stories have been spread in the Telmarine parts of Narnia.
They emerge from the woods into a wide clearing, around which the trees grow closer together than any others Caspian has seen so far. He looks around uneasily, every never in his body screaming protest: this isn’t safe, this place is hostile, this place wants him dead. Specifically.
Glenstorm and his sons, waiting there with Asterius and a handful of other minotaurs, look at him, then away. Caspian concentrates on the patch of woods that’s clearer than the area around it, the place where the remainder of the Telmarines will come pouring in, angry and scared and bleeding, desperate, but he finds himself shifting, looking around every few minutes, his hand never straying far from his sword-hilt.
“What bee do you have in your bonnet?” Sebird demands irritably. “You’re like a pregnant mare with horseflies. Stop twitching, you’re making me nervous, and you shouldn’t be able to do that.”
“My apologies,” Caspian says, and hears the strain in his voice.
“What is it?” Peta says shortly.
“It’s nothing,” Caspian says.
“Liar. Tell the truth.”
Caspian shifts in his seat, then puts a hand up to his head and runs it through his hair. “I feel…like I’m being watched,” he admits. “Like there is something here that does not like me at all, something that would happily see me dead.”
Peta glances around at Glenstorm and Asterius, then at the trees. “Are you awake?” she asks.
“What?” Caspian says, confused.
“Shut up. If you’re awake, I would appreciate a sign just about now,” Peta says sharply. “By my order – mine, Peta the Magnificent, High Queen of Narnia, Lady of Cair Paravel, Empress of the Lone Islands.”
There is no answer, and annoyance flickers across Peta’s face. “It figures,” she says viciously.
“No dryad has been seen in Narnia for a thousand years,” Glenstorm says quietly. “There was too much damage done – during the Dying Times, by the Telmarines, by us. They had no choice but to flee into themselves if they wanted to keep their lives, and so many of them have died over the centuries.”
Peta looks around, her expression changing. She looks distressed, and Caspian wants to take her in his arms. Except for that he still doesn’t understand. There is no forthcoming explanation, though, and Caspian finds himself looking around anxiously again. The feeling of being watched hasn’t abated at all, just intensified.
Peta shakes her head. “You’re right,” she says to Caspian. “I feel it now. Someone out there doesn’t like humans.”
“Humans,” Caspian asks, “or Telmarines?”
She gives him a sharp look. “I’m no Telmarine,” she says, and Caspian is suddenly very aware of the sharp glares being leveled at him by the Narnians around them.
“Of course not,” he says hastily. “My apologies. I did not mean to offend you, I was merely – thinking out loud.”
“Huh,” Peta says, still sounding mortally offended, and Caspian bites his lip. It’s not so bad to be a Telmarine, he wants to say. After all, I’m a Telmarine. But there is no worse fate for these Narnians, no worse insult, and it seems that despite thirteen hundred years of absence and exile, Peta and her siblings have picked that up as well. Telmar and Telmarines are now universally hated in those parts of Narnia that still remain Narnian.
He looks away, and then back. “I truly did not mean to offend you,” he offers up, his voice quiet, the words sincere.
Peta glances at him, smiles faintly. “You should probably be more careful about what you say around here, Prince Caspian,” she says. “Someone might think you’re trying to insult them.”
“I suppose I should,” Caspian allows, and sighs.
“Besides the Telmarines, there have been no humans in Narnia for almost three hundred years,” Glenstorm says, “and long before that, no human was a friend to Narnia. You cannot blame them for their suspicion.”
Peta’s eyes narrow. “Watch me,” she mutters, then draws her sword.
Caspian stares at her, wondering what she means to do, and then he hears what Peta has heard – the sound of shouting, the screams of dying men, the crash of horses through the woods as the first troop of Telmarine cavalrymen approach them. He draws his own sword.
There are only a few of them left, horses skidding and stopping when they break through the clearing and find the Narnians waiting for them there.
“Narnia!” Peta shouts, and raises her sword.
The battle is joined. Caspian is too busy trying to stay alive to worry about the lives of the men he’s killing, or wonder that he’s killing Telmarines, killing his people. When they finally stop coming, Peta grabs his arm. Caspian turns to look at her, wide-eyed; Peta’s face and clothes are streaked liberally with blood, and her sword is red to the hilt. He must look similar.
“Something’s gone wrong,” she says. “There should be more –” She lets go of Caspian and throws up her arm as a hawk descends from the sky, landing on her gauntleted wrist.
Caspian shudders; he’d never let a wild hawk so close to his eyes, even if these wild birds can speak –
“Queen Susan says that only half the Telmarines crossed the river here,” the hawk says, mantling its wings to keep its balance. “She does not know where the others have gone –”
Peta swears. “Tell my sister to meet me at Beruna!” she orders, and tosses the hawk back up into the sky.
“Beruna?” Caspian asks.
“They’re certainly not here,” Peta says, and turns her horse’s head into the woods. “With me!”
Their pace is wild, breakneck, so fast that Caspian is certain that no Telmarine horse could possibly match it. When they finally break out of the woods onto the shoreline of Beruna, it’s to a shower of Telmarine arrows from the crossbowmen set up along the shore, infantrymen and horsemen behind them fording the slow-moving river.
Peta brings her shield up to protect her face as the rest of them scatter and duck. A centaur screams and falls as three quarrels pierce his chest, and Caspian bites off his shout as he takes a bolt in the shoulder.
“Back!” Peta screams. “Retreat! Back to the How!”
“My son!” Glenstorm bellows, trying to fight his way forward as Asterius holds him back and drags him into the woods, and Caspian realizes that the fallen centaur is Rainstone. Another centaur falls, and a minotaur, the latter trying to fight to his feet, and Peta pulls a dagger from her sleeve. Her face is grim.
“I’m sorry,” she says as a crossbow bolt bounces off her shield.
“What are you doing?” Caspian demands as Sebird screams fear beneath him and backs up. “Your majesty!”
Peta slides off her horse’s back onto the ground, shield still raised on her left arm. “Get them out of here, Caspian!” she yells.
“I’m not leaving you behind!”
“Stop being an idiot!” Sebird shouts at him, and turns neatly on his heels, heading back into woods and undercover.
“No!” Caspian yells, and throws himself off the horse’s back, rolling when he hits the ground and coming up with his half-drawn.
Peta grabs him by the collar and forces him down to the ground. “Crawl,” she orders grimly. “Because your life damn well depends on it. You fucking idiot.”
“What are you doing?” he demands as they make their way over to the Narnian fallen, crossbow bolts flying around them.
“I can’t leave survivors,” Peta says. “They know too much.”
“What?” Caspian says blankly, and then they reach the minotaur, who’s cursing and spitting as he claws at the crossbow bolts in his torso.
“Take my shield,” Peta orders, and Caspian takes it from her. Crossbow bolts bounce off it, tinny and metallic.
She cups the minotaur’s big head between her small hands. “I cannot save you,” she says, and her eyes are huge and heartbroken but her voice is steady. “Do you understand?”
Blood bubbles from the corners of the minotaur’s mouth. “I understand,” he says. “Do what you must, your majesty. It has been my honor to see you come to Narnia again.”
“It has been my honor and privilege,” Peta says. She puts the tip of her dagger against the base of his throat, just beneath his chin. “Go with peace into Aslan’s Country,” she says, and buries the dagger up to the hilt.
Blood spatters across her face in a fine spray of red and Caspian looks away, swallowing. Peta pulls the dagger free, stops to close the minotaur’s eyes, and says shortly, “Keep moving.”
Rainstone is dead already, but the second centaur, Summerfire, is still alive. He starts thrashing wildly as they approach, but his broken leg keeps him on the ground. Dimly, Caspian notices that the crossbowmen have stopped shooting.
“No!” Summerfire exclaims. “I will not allow this! You will not murder me the same way you have murdered Otzen!”
“I can’t let you live,” Peta says. “You know too much.”
“No!” Summerfire yells, struggling to get up. “No! This is why there are no humans in Narnia, damn you, witch, no!”
“Hold him!” Peta barks, and Caspian gets his hands on Summerfire’s shoulders, struggling to hold the centaur down as he strikes out at Peta. She takes the blow full across without wincing; Caspian flinches at the sound of it, the dry crack like a branch breaking.
He thinks that Summerfire has broken Peta’s nose; there’s blood running down her face when she turns back, the dagger steady in her hand. “Go in peace to Aslan’s Country,” she says again, and buries the dagger up below his jaw. She doesn’t have time to pull it free as Caspian knocks her aside, both of them barely missing the Telmarine pike that takes Summerfire through the chest, the dead centaur jerking obscenely as the Telmarine pulls it free.
Peta is free in a heartbeat, her sword in her hand, and Caspian draws his own sword, the weight of Peta’s shield awkward on his left arm. Telmarine swordsmen don’t fight with shields, he doesn’t know how –
“They want us alive,” Peta says breathlessly, staring around as the Telmarine soldiers surround them. She holds out her left hand and Caspian passes over her shield, drawing his dagger as soon as his hand is free. “Gods above, I’m not being taken alive.”
“Is there an alternative?” Caspian asks, turning in a slow circle with Peta at his back. There’s no sign of the Narnians that came in with them; he’s not sure whether to be reassured they got away or disappointed they’re not coming back for them.
“Yes,” Peta says. “Dying heroically, or killing everyone else. Either way, I’ll fall on my sword rather than get taken alive, I swear on Aslan’s mane.”
“Why?” Caspian asks. It seems like a relevant question at the time. None of the Telmarines are advancing, just watching them. An officer on horseback is splashing across the river towards them; he can’t identify the face or the rank from this far away.
“Well, you Miraz is going to kill,” Peta says, as easily as if she’s sitting in her bower instead of surrounded by an enemy who happily wants her dead. “And me – well, I’m a woman.”
“So –” Caspian begins.
“If you’re a woman,” Peta says, and he feels her swallow hard against his back, “that means torture, and that generally means rape. Most people don’t look at female soldiers as having the same basic rights as male soldiers.”
“I am sure the commander here will treat you with all due respect and honor for your position.” If the commander here is Glozelle. If he’s been replaced – or, little gods, if it’s Miraz himself commanding – she may well be right.
“I doubt it.” There’s a strained quality to her voice that makes Caspian think that maybe she’s been here before sometime, and he can’t think what to say to that.
Peta shifts her stance. “What the hell are you waiting for?” she demands of the Telmarines. “Come on, you cowards, are you afraid of a woman and your own prince?”
A few of the Telmarines look at each other in confusion. “Prince Caspian?” one of them says at last.
“Yes,” Caspian says, tilting his chin up. “Is this any way to treat your prince?”
“We have orders to take you alive,” says the pikeman, and Peta draws in a sharp breath and hisses, “I told you so,” and, “Over my dead body.”
“Orders from who?” Caspian says.
“Lord Miraz, the Prince Regent,” says the officer as his horse canters up behind his men. There’s a crossbow in one hand, and he slides a bolt home and raises it to his shoulder. “You have been bewitched, your highness, by some witch-woman of the Narnians.”
“This witch-woman, I’m sure,” Peta says. “So shoot me, then. Get it over with, if you’re too much of a coward to meet me blade to blade.”
“No woman can defeat me in battle,” the officer says, “but you are no woman; you are a witch, and I will not let you bewitch me the way you have bewitched our prince and stolen him.”
Caspian blinks.
“This is new,” Peta says. “I haven’t heard that one before. Caspian, have you been bewitched and stolen?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Caspian says, “since I was with the Narnians long before I met you. My uncle tried to have me killed,” he insists, louder. “My uncle wants my throne for myself! Remember your oaths, Leftenant! Your oaths are to the king of Telmar and his sons, and I am the rightful king of Telmar, I am the crown prince of this land. It is to me you owe your loyalty, not to my uncle.”
The officer looks briefly hesitant, but he says, “Your highness, you are not of age, and until then my oaths and loyalty are to the Prince Regent, not to you. You and your witch-woman are outnumbered. Be sensible, my prince: you can still leave this without bloodshed. I do not want you to be hurt in any fighting that might occur.”
“Oh, yes, that would be a pity,” Peta says tightly. “I might make a mess.”
“You would rather serve a man who tried to have his own nephew killed?” Caspian asks, grasping desperately for the threads of words that will save his life this time the way they had when Trufflehunter and Nikabrik had taken him up in front of the Narnians. The only difference is that this time he’s not arguing with someone who wants him dead for vengeance, but someone who wants him alive for his own safety, only this officer, whoever he is, is wrong. He may live until they turn him over to Miraz, but after that – as King Edmund would say, all bets are off.
He resists the urge to lick his lips; that would make him look guilty. “I swear to you on my father’s grave, sir, that on the night my cousin was born, my uncle Lord Miraz ordered men to my bedchamber with my death planned out. It was only through the good will of a friend inside the castle that I was able to escape. Surely you have heard –”
“The Prince Regent would never do such a thing,” the officer says. “Your highness, you are ensorcelled, bewitched, it is this woman who has done these things to me – you cannot know this because that is her magic, but you –”
“Magic,” Peta says, “rather despises me, and I’m wretched at it, which is why I’m standing here with a sword and a shield rather than waving my hands and conjuring up a storm of toads or something equally annoying. Or a lightning bolt, something useful.”
The officer gives her a nervous look, but otherwise ignores her, and turns his attention back on Caspian. “Your highness, I beg of you, please don’t make me raise arms against a member of the royal family. It would be a disgrace to my blood –”
The arrow takes him through the eye, and Caspian bites off his gasp as the officer falls backwards, his feet catching in his stirrups as his horse rears in triumph.
“What took you so damned long?” Peta shouts at her sister as Susan emerges from the treeline, turning in her saddle and shooting arrows faster than Caspian has ever thought possible.
A heartbeat later he beats back a Telmarine pike, striking out with sword and dagger and feeling hot blood spray across his face. There’s shouting all around him – nearby, from the crossbowmen by the river, from across the river, from the men still fording.
There are a dozen centaurs with Queen Susan, all armed and shooting. Peta smashes her shield into the face of a nearby Telmarine pikeman.
“Ambush!” Susan shouts back. “They played us!”
“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed!”
A centaur forces his way through the melee, using his crossbow as a battering ram. “Your majesty!” he shouts, and extends an arm to Peta. She swings onto his back, and then Caspian draws his arm back and throws his dagger, burying it in the heart of the nearest Telmarine.
“Caspian!” Peta shouts, but the centaur is bearing her away, and he’s left alone in the midst of the Telmarines around him, fighting desperately with his sword gripped two-handed now. The crossbow wound in his arm throbs in time with his heart, and it’s too much, it’s all too much, this on top of the earlier fighting – he takes a cut to the leg that sends him stumbling to his knees before he forces himself back up, laying about himself blindly. He can’t see – there’s a red mist before his eyes, and he can’t see –
“Caspian!” he hears Peta shout again. “Gods all damn you, what the hell do you think you’re doing, let me go –”
“Take him alive for Lord Miraz!”
“No,” Caspian says heavily, remembering Peta’s words, “no, no, no –”
Someone strikes the sword from his hand, and Caspian gropes at his belt for a dagger that’s no longer there.
“Susan!” Peta screams.
I can’t let you live, Peta had said earlier. You know too much.
“End it, then,” Caspian tries to say, tasting the blood on his lips, and feels the arrow pass so close to his face that the fletching brushes his cheek.
It takes the Telmarine behind him, the man with his hand on Caspian’s collar, and then huge claws close on Caspian’s torso and he finds himself being borne upwards, the wind screaming in his ears and beating at his face. He makes a startled sound and tries to fight his way free, but he has no sword, and he can do nothing but squirm blindly.
“Still, your highness,” a voice says from above him. “We are very high; you do not, I think, want to fall.”
“What are you?” Caspian demands.
“My name is Fleetwing. I am a griffin; King Edmund sent me. Do not fear; we shall be back at Aslan’s How soon. Do not look down if heights disturb you.”
His voice is small when he speaks, and he doesn’t know if Fleetwing – little gods, a griffin, and he’s seen them at the How but he’s never spoken to one, has never been certain they can speak, but he supposes he should know better by now – can hear him, but Caspian says, “I cannot see.”
“Queen Lucy is at the How. Her cordial will heal you. Be still: it is half a day’s ride from Beruna to the How, but far less by air.”
The upper air is cool and Caspian finds himself shivering, shock starting to set in. He tries to catalogue his injuries: the crossbow bolt in his right arm, the cut on his leg, a throbbing suspicion that he’s cracked a rib and broken his wrist, whatever has happened to his eyes – his eyes, dear gods, let it be nothing at all, let it be –
The griffin touches down and Caspian stumbles as he finds solid ground beneath his feet, and then King Edmund has a shoulder under his. He says, “Lean on me, Caspian, it’s all right.”
“The High Queen –” Caspian begins, his head swimming.
“Susan sent a bird, they’re on their way back.”
“My uncle –”
“Now’s not really the time. Sit down.” His good hand is gentle on Caspian’s shoulder, and Caspian stumbles and nearly falls; Edmund steadies him.
From the feel of it, he’s sitting on sun-warmed stone – one of the fallen blocks outside of the How, perhaps. “I can’t see,” he says; it seems important to get that out.
“You’ve got blood in your eyes is all,” Edmund says. His voice is calm and reassuring, gentler than Caspian has ever heard it before. “You’ll be all right. Lu!”
“Hold your horses,” Queen Lucy says, and Caspian jumps; he hasn’t heard her approach. Her fingers are soft and uncallused on his face, then move downwards until she’s holding his arm. “Hold him, Ed, I have to take the quarrel out or we’ll have problems.”
“Yeah, that I remember.” Edmund braces him with his good arm and his body, his shoulder behind Caspian’s head, and Caspian bites off a shout as pain sears through him from wrist to shoulder.
Wood clatters on stone and Lucy says soothingly, “It’s all right, Caspian, you’ll be all right, I just had to take the quarrel out.” She touches his face again, continues, “It’s all right, Caspian, swallow this,” and he has the flickering sensation of sweetness and bitterness at once on his tongue before he swallows.
Whatever it is burns its way down his throat and settles warmly at the pit of his stomach, as intoxicating as Archenlander brandy. For a moment Caspian can feel nothing but pain – and then the pain is gone, replaced with bone-deep exhaustion.
“Little gods,” he murmurs, and blinks. Then he realizes he still can’t see. “I can’t –”
“Hold still,” Lucy says, swiping the edge of her thumb over his eyes. “There? Is that better?”
He blinks again, sees her round face swim into clarity in front of him, worried and earnest. “Yes,” he says, and then he passes out.
-
-
He wakes to Peta’s empty room. There is, as there always is, a dark-lantern burning in the corner, and Caspian struggles up to his knees to crawl over and open the door to let a little more light into the cave. The shadows seem to fall heavy in the corners, and he shudders a little.
Someone’s stripped him of his armor and clothes and laid out new clothes for him. He dresses as quickly as he can, his fingers skipping over the new scars on his flesh. The one on his leg is deep, the one on his arm round and puckered. There’s a shallow slash across his forehead, just over his eyes. His wrist aches; so do his ribs. But he’s in one piece and seemingly unhurt, safe now.
He’s lost his sword and dagger, and no one has put out new ones. Caspian bites his lip, wondering if maybe they think this is his fault somehow – they haven’t armed him again, after all – and then pulls the door open and steps into the hall. He goes downstairs to the table room; it’s the most likely place for them to be.
He hears Peta’s voice from the hallway. “I’m such an awful damned idiot.”
“None of the rest of us caught it either,” Susan says, soothing.
“We should have,” Edmund says, sounding restless. “Aslan in the east, we should have. We should know better than to underestimate anyone, and we’ve already got all the evidence we need to tell us Miraz is smart; he’s not another blockhead kingmaker –”
“You’re out of practice,” Lucy says. “We all are.”
“We damn well shouldn’t be!” Peta snaps. “It’s been a year. We’ve gone a year without people wanting to take over Narnia before, haven’t we?”
“The situation’s a little different,” Susan says delicately.
“It shouldn’t be!” she snarls again, and Caspian steps into the doorway and clears his throat.
They all look up. They’re gathered around the Stone Table, Susan and Lucy seated, Edmund standing, Peta pacing restlessly with her hand on her sword-hilt.
“Oh, good,” Peta says, and gives him a faint smile. “You’re all right.”
“So are you,” Caspian says, and then backpedals, “I mean, ah –”
She holds up her bandaged wrist. “Flesh wound. Nothing to worry about. I’ve had worse.”
“Aslan help us,” Edmund mutters under his breath.
Caspian looks over at him. “I understand some thanks is owed,” he says.
Edmund shrugs. “Think nothing of it, Prince Caspian. I just hate to think of what Peta would have done to me if I hadn’t sent someone – although to be fair, it’s Fleetwing you should be thanking; he took the initiative to get in there. I’d just sent a messenger to Peta. I suppose he likes you.”
“Unlike some people I can name, and I’ll certainly be breaking heads over that particular point,” Peta spits.
Susan nods, grim. “I’ll help you,” she says. “I can’t believe –”
“What happened?” Caspian asks.
Peta puts her head to one side. “Come on in,” she says. “Sit down. You’re probably still tired; I remember how the cordial works.”
“Probably because there were points when you were actually living off the damn thing,” Edmund says, but he sounds more tired than he does anything else.
Caspian ventures further into the cave, but instead of sitting down, he leans against a column not far from Peta. For a moment Edmund’s eyes are on him, weighing and judging, then the king looks away.
“Now,” Peta says, “when you say ‘what happened?’ did you happen to mean in general or at the riverside? Because it’s all pretty much a huge fucking mess.”
“Both,” Caspian says carefully.
“Peta sent your team away,” Susan says quietly. “Mine – refused to go back in after Whitehelm came out with Peta. Because you are a Telmarine, and a Telmarine prince at that. I’m sorry. I would have gone in myself, but – I don’t think –”
“One of you would have died,” Peta says ruthlessly. “Probably you; they wanted Caspian alive.”
“Also, you couldn’t have carried Caspian out,” Edmund says practically.
“There is that.”
“What about my uncle?” Caspian asks.
“Fuck,” Peta says concisely.
Edmund shakes his head. “The crossing at Weir was a diversion. He only sent through about a quarter of his horse, probably just to test us, and crossed the rest of the army at Beruna while we were distracted. He did ford most of the army after all, and now the castle is all lit up. We gave him exactly the excuse he wanted to declare wholesale war on us, and on you.”
“Me?” Caspian says uncertainly.
“They saw you,” Peta says, crossing her arms over her chest. “And you made it very, very clear who you are. He hasn’t done it yet, but there’s no way Miraz isn’t going to use that as an excuse to declare you mentally unfit to hold the throne of Narnia. Although it has been a while since I’ve been called a witch to my face.”
“Lucky you, a trip down memory lane,” Edmund says dryly.
“Not the one I was hoping for.”
He gives her a thin smile. “The army’s moving relatively slowly, but the cavalry’s already set up on the other side of the woods – on the Red Plain, I don’t know if it has another name now or not. There’s a pretty huge fucking lot of them. If you asked me to guess, I’d guess that his plan is to set up a second camp on the other side of the How to block a westward or southward retreat. It’s what I would do.”
“It’s what I would do,” Peta corrects absently. “Either way, he has us: there’s nowhere we can retreat to, and if we did, I think we’d lose more Narnians on the way than we would in an actual battle, and considering the likelihood that we’re all going to be slaughtered, that’s saying something.”
“Way to look on the bright side, Peta,” Edmund says.
“I try.”
“Aslan’s How is the ancient stronghold of Narnia,” Caspian says warily. “It has sheltered Narnians for a thousand years against countless attackers; surely you are not even considering leaving it –”
“The How is a tomb,” Peta says flatly. “It’s not defensible – not easily, at least. The longer we stay here, the better chance we have of being forced out somehow. We can be starved, we can be poisoned, Miraz can fucking smoke us out if we let him get close enough. He doesn’t need his twenty thousand troops to besiege; he only needs a handful of that. And he can wait. But no,” she adds, “we aren’t leaving, because we don’t have anywhere else to go. Cair Paravel is dust and ruins, Arn Abedin is probably likewise, and there’s not anywhere else that I can think of. And if we leave, we demoralize the army; they’ll start thinking we’re beaten, and we can’t let them think that, because as soon as they start thinking we’re dead, we are.”
“Right now,” Susan says, “they think they can win just because we’re here, because we’ve never lost a war. Which is true. But we have lost battles, and they don’t remember that. They think they’ll win just because they have Peta here, and me, and Ed, and Lu.”
“Can’t we?” Caspian asks.
“Your faith is stunning,” Peta says. “We’re kings and queens, not miracle-workers. Winning this will require a little more than blind faith, however charming that is.” She rubs a hand over her face and then through her hair, pulling it out of the ponytail at the back of her skull. “I need to get some sleep before I fall over.”
“Do that,” Edmund says. “And you too, Su. Lu and I have things well in hand. Before I would have said that Miraz doesn’t seem like the type to move troops at night, but now – things have changed.”
“Yes, I’m sure the situation in the morning will be substantially more interesting than it is now, and by interesting, I mean bad, and by bad, I mean vaguely terrifying,” Peta says. “Wake me up if he makes a move on the How.”
“Of course,” Edmund says matter-of-factly. “Caspian, you should get some sleep too; I know you just woke up, but Lu’s cordial has to take its energy from somewhere, and it’s coming straight from you. If you don’t get the extra rest you’ll feel it when it’s least convenient for you.”
“All right,” Caspian agrees. “If there’s anything I can do – my uncle –”
“Not your problem,” Lucy says. “Now he’s all our problems.”
Upstairs, Su bids them good night wearily at the cave she’s sharing with Lucy and closes the door behind her, and then Peta and Caspian are left alone. She closes the door of her room once they’re both inside and puts her back to it, rubbing both her hands over her face. “Aslan in the east, that was a royal disaster,” she mutters.
“You couldn’t have known my uncle would do what he did,” Caspian says. He touches her wrist gently with two fingers, and she raises her head and smiles at him, tired and wan.
“No, I couldn’t have known,” she agrees. “But I should have assumed he was going to fuck with us somehow. Aslan’s mane, I should have known – no, don’t say anything, I know what it is you’re thinking. You’re right, there’s no way I could have known, not for certain, but I should have had troops at Beruna. I should have assumed he was going to fuck with us, I should have – Aslan’s mane, the things I should have done. It’s only been a fucking year!”
“Surely we made enough of an impression on my uncle’s horse –” Caspian begins.
“An impression. Not a dent. He sent three troops over the river at Weir; I was assuming twice that, if not twice that. This was nothing.”
She pushes past him and starts unbuckling her sword-belt, laying it aside, and bends over to unlace her boots. “I’m out of it, Caspian,” she says softly, her attention on her boots. “I’m out of practice. I’m getting slow. Time was I would have seen this coming a mile away. A league away.”
Caspian blinks, uncertain, and says, “Not everyone can be right all the time, and no one can see the future. You couldn’t have predicted that my uncle would do what he did; it’s not what any other Telmarine king has ever done, not since Caspian the Conqueror –”
“I was,” Peta says, tossing her boots aside one by one. “Right all the time, I mean. I’m good at this, Caspian, good at making war, good at fighting, good at winning. I have my siblings to take care of the rest of Narnia, but this – this is mine. And I’m fucking it up like it’s nothing, like I’m an amateur, like I’m green as fucking grass.”
She turns toward him, the front of her shirt unlaced now to hint at the curve of her breasts, her hair loose and floating around her shoulders, her eyes shadowed and her face pale. “I’m fucking this up,” she says.
“I think you are doing better than I would have done had you not come,” Caspian offers. He steps towards her and cups her cheek in his hand. “Nothing is lost yet, your majesty. The future is yet to come, and tomorrow may bring something new.”
“May,” Peta repeats, frowning. She sighs. “God, I need some sleep.”
Caspian tilts his head towards the bedroll. “I am hardly going to protest.”
She laughs a little. “Good,” she says, and leans up to kiss him lightly on the mouth. “Although,” she adds, “I’m afraid you aren’t getting under my figurative skirts for a few days; I’m on my courses.”
“Oh,” Caspian says, taken aback, and Peta laughs and kisses him again.
-
-
Three days later the bridge at Beruna is completed and the entirety of Telmar’s army settles into position on the Red Plain, scarce a league away from the How. Peta takes the news grimly and says, her face sober, “Well, it could be worse. They could have set up shop right outside our front doors and we wouldn’t be able to go outside without getting shot at.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” Edmund says.
“Yes, because clearly I need someone to keep me informed of the bright side at all times,” Peta says. “How are we on food?”
“We’ll hold.”
A week after that they learn that Miraz has been crowned.
“He says you’ve gone over,” Susan tells Caspian, and puts her hand over his, her face kind.
Caspian pulls his hand away. “You mean that he says I’ve betrayed Telmar.”
“Well, you have,” Lucy says matter-of-factly. “So he is right about that. I mean, not that it makes you all that much less eligible for the throne; every country has some story about younger princes or mad uncles or whatnot that run off to go find an army in some other country, and about half of them actually succeed. Well, not every country; I never heard the like about Narnia, but everywhere else, yes. It means that you can still take the throne if you win.”
Peta, coming into the table room with a mug full of tea in one hand, squints at her. “You are aware that we are actually fighting this war to take our thrones back?” she says.
“What?” Caspian says, startled.
“Peta, I don’t think Aslan wants –” Lucy begins.
“I don’t care what Aslan wants,” Peta says viciously. “I’m going back to England over my extremely dead body, and I don’t particularly feel like playing general for someone else. Narnia is our country; I’m not just going to leave it like this.”
Lucy leaps up from her seat. “You can’t defy Aslan!” she exclaims. “If he wants us to stay –”
“Don’t,” Peta says dangerously, “bring Aslan into this, little sister. No one has seen him in thirteen hundred years.”
“I saw him –”
“You saw the reflection of light off my sword-hilt,” she says, her voice ruthlessly. “Sunlight in the trees. A shadow. You didn’t see Aslan.”
“Peta –” Susan begins as Lucy’s eyes go wide in surprise.
Lucy cuts her off. “This isn’t our Narnia, High Queen,” she spits. “Cair Paravel’s dust and tumbled stone and ruins. There aren’t four thrones anymore! There’s nothing here left for us. We’re here because Aslan brought us here to save Narnia, not to rule it. You and I and Su and Ed all know we can’t possibly be staying. You can’t make it happen just because you’ve found someone to warm your bed –”
Peta takes two steps toward her, raising her hand, and Edmund catches her wrist as he comes up behind her. “Think about what you’re doing, Peta,” he hisses in her ear as she goes still. “No one can see the future. Whatever the reason is that we’re here, that’s why we’re here. We have to win this war before we can worry about what will happen afterwards.”
“There’s a damned reason we’re fighting this war, Ed,” Peta snaps, turning towards him. “I’m not fighting it to put some fucking tyrant on the throne that neither the Narnians nor the Telmarines are going to listen to; I don’t want this country to rip itself apart the way it must have done when we left. This is my gods-damned country; I’m not fucking turning it over to someone else, not again. I’m not leaving again. I’m not abandoning Narnia again.”
“No one’s asking you to, Peta,” Edmund says. On her wrist, his grip is so tight that his knuckles are white. “We don’t know why Aslan brought us here. You just have to trust –”
“Trust what?” Peta snarls. “All that’s happening is that I’m fucking up all over the place! I’m not fighting this gods-damned war only to lose everything I’m putting my life on the line for, not again.”
“This isn’t about you!” Lucy shouts back. “You always think it’s about you and it’s not, it’s never about you! This is about Narnia, about what’s best for her; you and Narnia aren’t the same damned thing!”
“And what’s best for Narnia is turning her over to the Telmarines and these – refugees – to be squabbled over and picked at like a piece of meat?” Peta demands. “We can win every damned battle we want, we can win the war, but that’s not going to get us anything unless we can keep Narnia in one piece, and that’s not going to happen here, not without us. You know that. You know it, Lucy, fucking say it! There’s no one in Narnia now who can do what we did!”
“How would you know? You’re too busy being the gods-damned High Queen of Narnia to let anyone else have a try; you’re too blind to look around and see what other options might be available!”
“Lucy!” Susan says sharply. “You two both need to stop!”
“Shut up, Su,” Peta says without looking at her. “And take your hands the fuck off me, Ed. The reason I’m the High Queen of Narnia is because Aslan named me so! He didn’t say, ‘Peta, High Queen of Narnia on alternate Tuesdays,’ he said, ‘Peta, High Queen of Narnia over all Kings and Queens of Narnia,’ of which you are one, although I damned well don’t see you acting like it.”
“Just accept it!” Lucy yells at her. “Why can’t you just accept that our Narnia is gone? Why don’t you just see that everything you knew, everything we knew, is dead and gone and that we can’t get it back! You’re not her! You’re not the woman that Aslan named High Queen, not anymore, because things have changed! You can’t change the past, and you can’t see the future just because you want to. Things change, everything changes! Just look at us.”
Peta’s face crumples suddenly. “Go to hell, Lucy,” she says, and wrenches her arm free of Edmund’s grasp before she storms out of the room.
Lucy stands still, fists clenched at her sides, and breathes hard. She doesn’t look like a child anymore, Caspian realizes. And Peta – Peta had looked, at that last moment before she left, very, very young.
“Things change,” she repeats softly to herself, and looks around at the carving on the wall, the firelight flickering around it and illuminating it. “Everything changes.”
Susan starts forward, reaching for her, but Lucy walks straight past her outstretched hand out of the cavern.
Edmund rubs his good hand over his face and looks at his sister. “Well,” he says, “that went well.”
“Ha,” Susan says bitterly. “Ha fucking ha.”
Neither of them is paying any attention to him, so Caspian slips out of the room without either of the two looking at him, his head spinning. He doesn’t know Peta as well as he thinks he does, so it takes him a long time to find her, and by the time he does, the sun is setting.
She’s sitting on one of the ledges at the very top of the How, her head back against the layers of stone and earth, her eyes half-closed. “Go away, Ed,” she says without looking up. “I don’t want to talk.”
“It’s me,” Caspian says.
Peta cranes her head around. “Oh,” she says, and looks back. “What do you want?”
Caspian settles onto the ledge beside her. “You don’t trust me,” he says.
“I don’t trust most people. It’s nothing to feel special about.”
He looks out at the vast stretch of forest beneath them. “You trust me enough to share your bed. You trust me enough to be your shield-arm in battle. But you don’t trust me with Narnia.”
“Caspian,” Peta says softly, “I very seldom trust my siblings with Narnia.”
He doesn’t say anything.
She’s quiet for a long few minutes, and then she says, “You don’t understand what it’s like, being a woman and being a queen, even of Narnia. It’s different for Susan and Lucy; they’re not High Queen. And Ed – Ed isn’t a woman. I’m sure there are stories about him, about being subordinate to a woman, but it’s not – he’s good with dealing with that. Aslan knows he’s had to put up with it more often than any of us would like.”
“My uncle never meant for me to become king,” Caspian admits. “Years before his son was born, he never meant for me to become king.” It’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud. It’s the first time he’s ever admitted it to himself. “You were right. You shouldn’t trust Narnia with me.”
Peta laughs a little, half-bitter, half-amused. “I was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from Finchley,” she says. “I’d never held a sword in my life. I was a wretched daughter and not much of a sister, either; Su and Ed will tell you that. I like to think I still did all right.”
“High Queen Peta the Magnificent,” Caspian says, “and the Golden Age of Narnia.”
“Yes.” She studies her hands, rubbing her thumbs over the fading blisters there. “I think you would have done just fine.”
“Would have?” Caspian asks, carefully.
Peta tilts her head back, raises her face to the sky. “I’m not leaving,” she says. “Not again. I’ll face down Aslan himself if I have to, but I’m not leaving. I’ll spend my blood for Narnia, lay my bones in Narnian soil, I’ll cut myself open and bleed out if I have to, but I’m not leaving. I don’t – do well outside of Narnia. I don’t fit anymore.”
“There will always be a place for you in Narnia,” Caspian says simply.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
They sit in silence for a long time after the sun sinks below the horizon and lets the moon take over, casting everything below into a ghostly light.
“Why did you come up here?” Peta asks suddenly. “After what I said.”
“I don’t know,” Caspian says.
She pauses before she answers, watching him with cool blue eyes. “Thank you.”
“Why?”
Peta catches one of her braids in her hand, rubbing her thumb over it. “For listening,” she says after a moment.
“Always,” Caspian says, and means it with all his heart. He turns his head to watch her, suddenly stark with curiosity.
The moonlight silvers her hair, her skin, and Peta turns to smile at him.
“Can I ask you –” Caspian begins, then stops. It’s not for him to ask; it’s not for him to know.
“Yes,” Peta says.
He hesitates before he actually says it, but says it anyway. “What were you like? Before Narnia.”
She winces, then raises a hand to her face, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers. After a moment she lets her hand fall back down to her lap and turns to look him in the eye. “I was perfect,” she says. “I was everything my parents wanted me to be. I got good grades, I took care of my siblings, I was a prefect at school – and I was bored out of my mind. I wasn’t that fun to be around, either. Even Su thought I was a bore.”
“That seems unlikely,” Caspian says, turning the idea of Peta as a pampered nobleman’s daughter over in his mind. He knows a few of them, the ones who come to court to serve as his aunt’s ladies and try to catch his eye. He can’t see Peta as anything like them.
“I know, right?” Peta says, her mouth quirking a little. “It’s hard to believe. And then we came to Narnia and everything just – opened up. You know, I used to think England – our world – was the land of missed opportunities. If I hadn’t come here, I’d still be boring.”
“I don’t think you’d be boring.”
“I was. I was terribly boring. Apparently I used to be interesting, but then I went to school and it all went downhill from there.” She twists her braid around her finger. “My mother was terribly shocked when we came home last year. I was a completely different person. Well, we all were, but I went from being that perfect daughter to – well. I was that kind of daughter that nice mothers don’t want to have.”
Caspian bites his lip, because there isn’t anything he can say to that that wouldn’t be insulting. Eventually he decides on, “You started fights?”
She grins. “Oh, yes. I also slept around. Neither one does a lot for a girl’s reputation back in England, unless you happen to be one of the boys. Except they were mostly smarting because I could take them on and win.”
“That doesn’t seem much like the Peta of Narnia I know,” Caspian says. “Except for that last part, of course.”
“Of course.” She takes that as her due, and well she should; Caspian has seen her fight, and even before that, her legend is something that every Telmarine and every Narnian knows. After a moment she goes on. “I just don’t function well outside of a certain context.”
“Which is?”
Peta raises a hand, her wide sweep encompassing the whole of Narnia and the entire situation – the How, the war, Miraz. “This. Only girls don’t fight in England; I went back and my mother expected me to be preparing for marriage to some nice young boy from Finchley, some doctor or lawyer or something of the sort. Well, I would have joined the WAAF or the Wrens or the WRAC next year, but she was doing her best not to think about that. That probably would have been –” She pauses for a moment, lower lip caught between her teeth. “I suppose it would have been all right, because at least I would have been doing something, but as important as administrative work is for the military, it’s not really my thing.”
“I do have a little trouble picturing it, yes,” Caspian says, and grins when Peta turns to look at him, her eyebrows nearly reaching her hairline. After a moment she smiles back.
“Do you mind leaving me alone for a bit?” she asks. “It’s just that I’m not fit company for anyone right, and I think I’d like to be alone.”
“Of course, your majesty,” Caspian says, rising.
“Hey,” Peta says fondly, reaching up to catch his wrist. She pulls him back down to her and kisses him softly. “Don’t worry. Tomorrow will bring a new day.”
*
tbc
go to part six
Note: This is a repost, I kept accidentally cross-posting.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four
*
“They are not ready,” Caspian tells Peta. “Only a handful of them can hit the target at all!”
“Lucky for us,” Peta says, lacing up the front of her jerkin and sliding the three big buttons home. “Come here,” she motions, and Caspian steps over to her as she starts to double-check the laces on his brigandine.
“Lucky for us,” she continues, “they won’t be shooting at individual targets, they’ll be shooting at a mass of horsemen, and that’s a little easier. I mean, the Telmarines will be moving, so all they have to worry about is shooting continuously and not accidentally shooting each other. Or us,” she adds, thoughtfully, and straightens, smoothing her hands over the front of his brigandine.
Two days later, and they know for certain which route the Telmarines are taking across the river. Are already taking, maybe; Susan is already out in the woods with the first set of Narnian archers to maneuver the Telmarines into the funnel Peta has planned. If all goes well, then it will be a slaughter. Caspian’s not entirely certain how he feels about this. The Telmarines are his people – but they made their choice to serve his uncle Miraz, and this is their due. And yet –
“Are you all right with this?” Peta asks, turning away from him. She buckles on her swordbelt, looping the end of it around itself in a complicated knot, and draws first sword, then dagger, checking the edges of each on the skin of her inner arm before she resheathes them.
“All right with what?” Caspian says, picking up his baldric.
Peta tilts her head back to watch him as he straps it on, shifting his weight until it falls exactly where he likes it. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“I was not aware that I actually had a choice.”
“If you refuse, it will raise some fairly serious questions about where your loyalty lies,” she allows. Her gaze is calm and steady, and Caspian doesn’t look away.
He takes a great breath. “They are cavalrymen,” he says, “not common soldiers, peasants called up to fight for the banners of their lords without a choice of their own. They brought this upon themselves.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“It is.”
She leans down to pick up her shield, strapping it across her back. “Are you ready?” she asks.
Caspian nods. “I am,” he says.
Peta steps toward him and puts a hand on the back of his neck to pull his head down briefly, their lips pressed together for a bare moment. “For luck,” she says before she steps away. “Let’s go.”
Outside, the sky is beginning to lighten, dawn creeping pale fingers across Narnia as Peta and Caspian pull themselves into the Telmarine saddles retrieved from the camp at Beruna; a pair of talking horses have graciously offered to bear that indignity as well as their king, queens, and Caspian. Edmund and Lucy meet them outside, the Narnian king’s eyes solemn. Peta leans down to speak to them as Caspian waits in silence. Their conversation is too quiet for Caspian to hear, and he looks away, eyeing the crossbowmen that are waiting to follow them into the woods and join their fellows already there. They look back at him, some of them shifting impatiently, others white-faced with fear. A few of them double-check the quarrels in their quivers.
Peta straightens and Edmund steps back, his good hand on his younger sister’s shoulder. “End it, Peta,” he says, and she smirks at him.
“You’re so demanding, Ed,” she says, and then she’s riding towards the woods, Caspian following just behind her and the Narnian crossbowmen behind them.
The woods in Narnia are thick, wild and uncouth, and Caspian is not fond of them; he is too much of a Telmarine for that. They raise the hair on the back of his neck, keep him looking over his shoulder and jumping at small noises. In contrast, the Narnians seem at ease here. Of course; he thinks grimly, this is their native habitat. Most of them were born and raised in woods like this. Not necessarily these woods – too close to Telmarine lands, which encroach farther and farther upon the few Narnian sanctuaries every year – but woods like this. He wonders if in these woods Peta sees her Narnia, something that has never changed, something that feels very much like home.
When they reach the part of the woods where they’ve set up the funnel, Caspian and Peta go through positioning groups of crossbowmen where they want them to be.
“Remember your stance,” Caspian admonishes, and a faun named Balsan grins at him cockily.
“Why, Prince Caspian,” he says, “I think we managed to learn something from you, even if you are a Telmarine.”
Caspian smiles. “Just remember which end of the crossbow the quarrel comes out of,” he says.
“This end, right?” asks a satyr, and Caspian rolls his eyes before he turns his horse away.
“They are actually funning, aren’t they?” Sebird says suspiciously, shaking his head. “It’s like your own four hooves don’t make perfectly good weapons –”
“You cannot throw your hooves at the enemy from a dozen paces away, I think,” Caspian tells him, and the horse sighs.
“I suppose you’re right,” he admits reluctantly. “Anyway, I’m just a horse, what do I need to know about all this business anyway?”
“How to avoid it, perhaps,” Caspian suggests.
Sebird debates this notion in silence for a few moments as he picks his way through the underbrush to catch up with Peta and her horse. “Hmmph,” he says at last, and Caspian hides his smile.
Peta is sitting very straight, her hands clenched on her saddlehorn; there are no reins on these horses. She turns her head towards Caspian as they approach. “All set?” she asks.
“They are prepared,” Caspian says.
“Good.” Without another word, she turns her horse aside, heading towards the trap they’re setting up for any Telmarines who make it through the funnel of archers and crossbowmen. Caspian follows.
“There’s been a bird from Susan,” Peta says suddenly over her shoulder. “The first troop has crossed the river.”
“That’s good,” Caspian says uncertainly, with a sudden pang of doubt. Whoever these men are, whatever oaths they’ve sworn, they’re still men. Still Telmarines.
Like him.
You walked away from your oaths and you turned your coat, he hears King Edmund saying, and ducks his head. Has he really left Telmar behind, then? Is it Narnia he’s fighting for now, or for Telmar, for his own throne?
Or for Peta?
He looks up at her back, the strong, steady line of it, and licks suddenly dry lips. He’s had his hands on his skin, had his mouth on hers, had her in his arms and in his bed. He knows the way she tastes and the way she sounds when she comes, the way she gasps when he makes love to her, the way her hair feels beneath his hands when she pulls it free of its braid. He is a son of Telmar, a son of Caspian the Conqueror, but he has thrown his lot in with the High Queen of Narnia, who’s myth and legend and history all wrapped up in one, a package that shouldn’t really be – a woman who has always done a man’s work, a man’s duty. Caspian doesn’t know if there are girls in Telmarine Narnia that want to be her – the thought seems almost obscene, somehow, because how could anyone else ever be like Peta? – but he knows that half the boys in Telmarine Narnia wanted to bed her, and she hadn’t even been anything more than a flicker of legend in the mists of history, not truth at all. Perhaps considerably more than half now, depending on what stories have been spread in the Telmarine parts of Narnia.
They emerge from the woods into a wide clearing, around which the trees grow closer together than any others Caspian has seen so far. He looks around uneasily, every never in his body screaming protest: this isn’t safe, this place is hostile, this place wants him dead. Specifically.
Glenstorm and his sons, waiting there with Asterius and a handful of other minotaurs, look at him, then away. Caspian concentrates on the patch of woods that’s clearer than the area around it, the place where the remainder of the Telmarines will come pouring in, angry and scared and bleeding, desperate, but he finds himself shifting, looking around every few minutes, his hand never straying far from his sword-hilt.
“What bee do you have in your bonnet?” Sebird demands irritably. “You’re like a pregnant mare with horseflies. Stop twitching, you’re making me nervous, and you shouldn’t be able to do that.”
“My apologies,” Caspian says, and hears the strain in his voice.
“What is it?” Peta says shortly.
“It’s nothing,” Caspian says.
“Liar. Tell the truth.”
Caspian shifts in his seat, then puts a hand up to his head and runs it through his hair. “I feel…like I’m being watched,” he admits. “Like there is something here that does not like me at all, something that would happily see me dead.”
Peta glances around at Glenstorm and Asterius, then at the trees. “Are you awake?” she asks.
“What?” Caspian says, confused.
“Shut up. If you’re awake, I would appreciate a sign just about now,” Peta says sharply. “By my order – mine, Peta the Magnificent, High Queen of Narnia, Lady of Cair Paravel, Empress of the Lone Islands.”
There is no answer, and annoyance flickers across Peta’s face. “It figures,” she says viciously.
“No dryad has been seen in Narnia for a thousand years,” Glenstorm says quietly. “There was too much damage done – during the Dying Times, by the Telmarines, by us. They had no choice but to flee into themselves if they wanted to keep their lives, and so many of them have died over the centuries.”
Peta looks around, her expression changing. She looks distressed, and Caspian wants to take her in his arms. Except for that he still doesn’t understand. There is no forthcoming explanation, though, and Caspian finds himself looking around anxiously again. The feeling of being watched hasn’t abated at all, just intensified.
Peta shakes her head. “You’re right,” she says to Caspian. “I feel it now. Someone out there doesn’t like humans.”
“Humans,” Caspian asks, “or Telmarines?”
She gives him a sharp look. “I’m no Telmarine,” she says, and Caspian is suddenly very aware of the sharp glares being leveled at him by the Narnians around them.
“Of course not,” he says hastily. “My apologies. I did not mean to offend you, I was merely – thinking out loud.”
“Huh,” Peta says, still sounding mortally offended, and Caspian bites his lip. It’s not so bad to be a Telmarine, he wants to say. After all, I’m a Telmarine. But there is no worse fate for these Narnians, no worse insult, and it seems that despite thirteen hundred years of absence and exile, Peta and her siblings have picked that up as well. Telmar and Telmarines are now universally hated in those parts of Narnia that still remain Narnian.
He looks away, and then back. “I truly did not mean to offend you,” he offers up, his voice quiet, the words sincere.
Peta glances at him, smiles faintly. “You should probably be more careful about what you say around here, Prince Caspian,” she says. “Someone might think you’re trying to insult them.”
“I suppose I should,” Caspian allows, and sighs.
“Besides the Telmarines, there have been no humans in Narnia for almost three hundred years,” Glenstorm says, “and long before that, no human was a friend to Narnia. You cannot blame them for their suspicion.”
Peta’s eyes narrow. “Watch me,” she mutters, then draws her sword.
Caspian stares at her, wondering what she means to do, and then he hears what Peta has heard – the sound of shouting, the screams of dying men, the crash of horses through the woods as the first troop of Telmarine cavalrymen approach them. He draws his own sword.
There are only a few of them left, horses skidding and stopping when they break through the clearing and find the Narnians waiting for them there.
“Narnia!” Peta shouts, and raises her sword.
The battle is joined. Caspian is too busy trying to stay alive to worry about the lives of the men he’s killing, or wonder that he’s killing Telmarines, killing his people. When they finally stop coming, Peta grabs his arm. Caspian turns to look at her, wide-eyed; Peta’s face and clothes are streaked liberally with blood, and her sword is red to the hilt. He must look similar.
“Something’s gone wrong,” she says. “There should be more –” She lets go of Caspian and throws up her arm as a hawk descends from the sky, landing on her gauntleted wrist.
Caspian shudders; he’d never let a wild hawk so close to his eyes, even if these wild birds can speak –
“Queen Susan says that only half the Telmarines crossed the river here,” the hawk says, mantling its wings to keep its balance. “She does not know where the others have gone –”
Peta swears. “Tell my sister to meet me at Beruna!” she orders, and tosses the hawk back up into the sky.
“Beruna?” Caspian asks.
“They’re certainly not here,” Peta says, and turns her horse’s head into the woods. “With me!”
Their pace is wild, breakneck, so fast that Caspian is certain that no Telmarine horse could possibly match it. When they finally break out of the woods onto the shoreline of Beruna, it’s to a shower of Telmarine arrows from the crossbowmen set up along the shore, infantrymen and horsemen behind them fording the slow-moving river.
Peta brings her shield up to protect her face as the rest of them scatter and duck. A centaur screams and falls as three quarrels pierce his chest, and Caspian bites off his shout as he takes a bolt in the shoulder.
“Back!” Peta screams. “Retreat! Back to the How!”
“My son!” Glenstorm bellows, trying to fight his way forward as Asterius holds him back and drags him into the woods, and Caspian realizes that the fallen centaur is Rainstone. Another centaur falls, and a minotaur, the latter trying to fight to his feet, and Peta pulls a dagger from her sleeve. Her face is grim.
“I’m sorry,” she says as a crossbow bolt bounces off her shield.
“What are you doing?” Caspian demands as Sebird screams fear beneath him and backs up. “Your majesty!”
Peta slides off her horse’s back onto the ground, shield still raised on her left arm. “Get them out of here, Caspian!” she yells.
“I’m not leaving you behind!”
“Stop being an idiot!” Sebird shouts at him, and turns neatly on his heels, heading back into woods and undercover.
“No!” Caspian yells, and throws himself off the horse’s back, rolling when he hits the ground and coming up with his half-drawn.
Peta grabs him by the collar and forces him down to the ground. “Crawl,” she orders grimly. “Because your life damn well depends on it. You fucking idiot.”
“What are you doing?” he demands as they make their way over to the Narnian fallen, crossbow bolts flying around them.
“I can’t leave survivors,” Peta says. “They know too much.”
“What?” Caspian says blankly, and then they reach the minotaur, who’s cursing and spitting as he claws at the crossbow bolts in his torso.
“Take my shield,” Peta orders, and Caspian takes it from her. Crossbow bolts bounce off it, tinny and metallic.
She cups the minotaur’s big head between her small hands. “I cannot save you,” she says, and her eyes are huge and heartbroken but her voice is steady. “Do you understand?”
Blood bubbles from the corners of the minotaur’s mouth. “I understand,” he says. “Do what you must, your majesty. It has been my honor to see you come to Narnia again.”
“It has been my honor and privilege,” Peta says. She puts the tip of her dagger against the base of his throat, just beneath his chin. “Go with peace into Aslan’s Country,” she says, and buries the dagger up to the hilt.
Blood spatters across her face in a fine spray of red and Caspian looks away, swallowing. Peta pulls the dagger free, stops to close the minotaur’s eyes, and says shortly, “Keep moving.”
Rainstone is dead already, but the second centaur, Summerfire, is still alive. He starts thrashing wildly as they approach, but his broken leg keeps him on the ground. Dimly, Caspian notices that the crossbowmen have stopped shooting.
“No!” Summerfire exclaims. “I will not allow this! You will not murder me the same way you have murdered Otzen!”
“I can’t let you live,” Peta says. “You know too much.”
“No!” Summerfire yells, struggling to get up. “No! This is why there are no humans in Narnia, damn you, witch, no!”
“Hold him!” Peta barks, and Caspian gets his hands on Summerfire’s shoulders, struggling to hold the centaur down as he strikes out at Peta. She takes the blow full across without wincing; Caspian flinches at the sound of it, the dry crack like a branch breaking.
He thinks that Summerfire has broken Peta’s nose; there’s blood running down her face when she turns back, the dagger steady in her hand. “Go in peace to Aslan’s Country,” she says again, and buries the dagger up below his jaw. She doesn’t have time to pull it free as Caspian knocks her aside, both of them barely missing the Telmarine pike that takes Summerfire through the chest, the dead centaur jerking obscenely as the Telmarine pulls it free.
Peta is free in a heartbeat, her sword in her hand, and Caspian draws his own sword, the weight of Peta’s shield awkward on his left arm. Telmarine swordsmen don’t fight with shields, he doesn’t know how –
“They want us alive,” Peta says breathlessly, staring around as the Telmarine soldiers surround them. She holds out her left hand and Caspian passes over her shield, drawing his dagger as soon as his hand is free. “Gods above, I’m not being taken alive.”
“Is there an alternative?” Caspian asks, turning in a slow circle with Peta at his back. There’s no sign of the Narnians that came in with them; he’s not sure whether to be reassured they got away or disappointed they’re not coming back for them.
“Yes,” Peta says. “Dying heroically, or killing everyone else. Either way, I’ll fall on my sword rather than get taken alive, I swear on Aslan’s mane.”
“Why?” Caspian asks. It seems like a relevant question at the time. None of the Telmarines are advancing, just watching them. An officer on horseback is splashing across the river towards them; he can’t identify the face or the rank from this far away.
“Well, you Miraz is going to kill,” Peta says, as easily as if she’s sitting in her bower instead of surrounded by an enemy who happily wants her dead. “And me – well, I’m a woman.”
“So –” Caspian begins.
“If you’re a woman,” Peta says, and he feels her swallow hard against his back, “that means torture, and that generally means rape. Most people don’t look at female soldiers as having the same basic rights as male soldiers.”
“I am sure the commander here will treat you with all due respect and honor for your position.” If the commander here is Glozelle. If he’s been replaced – or, little gods, if it’s Miraz himself commanding – she may well be right.
“I doubt it.” There’s a strained quality to her voice that makes Caspian think that maybe she’s been here before sometime, and he can’t think what to say to that.
Peta shifts her stance. “What the hell are you waiting for?” she demands of the Telmarines. “Come on, you cowards, are you afraid of a woman and your own prince?”
A few of the Telmarines look at each other in confusion. “Prince Caspian?” one of them says at last.
“Yes,” Caspian says, tilting his chin up. “Is this any way to treat your prince?”
“We have orders to take you alive,” says the pikeman, and Peta draws in a sharp breath and hisses, “I told you so,” and, “Over my dead body.”
“Orders from who?” Caspian says.
“Lord Miraz, the Prince Regent,” says the officer as his horse canters up behind his men. There’s a crossbow in one hand, and he slides a bolt home and raises it to his shoulder. “You have been bewitched, your highness, by some witch-woman of the Narnians.”
“This witch-woman, I’m sure,” Peta says. “So shoot me, then. Get it over with, if you’re too much of a coward to meet me blade to blade.”
“No woman can defeat me in battle,” the officer says, “but you are no woman; you are a witch, and I will not let you bewitch me the way you have bewitched our prince and stolen him.”
Caspian blinks.
“This is new,” Peta says. “I haven’t heard that one before. Caspian, have you been bewitched and stolen?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Caspian says, “since I was with the Narnians long before I met you. My uncle tried to have me killed,” he insists, louder. “My uncle wants my throne for myself! Remember your oaths, Leftenant! Your oaths are to the king of Telmar and his sons, and I am the rightful king of Telmar, I am the crown prince of this land. It is to me you owe your loyalty, not to my uncle.”
The officer looks briefly hesitant, but he says, “Your highness, you are not of age, and until then my oaths and loyalty are to the Prince Regent, not to you. You and your witch-woman are outnumbered. Be sensible, my prince: you can still leave this without bloodshed. I do not want you to be hurt in any fighting that might occur.”
“Oh, yes, that would be a pity,” Peta says tightly. “I might make a mess.”
“You would rather serve a man who tried to have his own nephew killed?” Caspian asks, grasping desperately for the threads of words that will save his life this time the way they had when Trufflehunter and Nikabrik had taken him up in front of the Narnians. The only difference is that this time he’s not arguing with someone who wants him dead for vengeance, but someone who wants him alive for his own safety, only this officer, whoever he is, is wrong. He may live until they turn him over to Miraz, but after that – as King Edmund would say, all bets are off.
He resists the urge to lick his lips; that would make him look guilty. “I swear to you on my father’s grave, sir, that on the night my cousin was born, my uncle Lord Miraz ordered men to my bedchamber with my death planned out. It was only through the good will of a friend inside the castle that I was able to escape. Surely you have heard –”
“The Prince Regent would never do such a thing,” the officer says. “Your highness, you are ensorcelled, bewitched, it is this woman who has done these things to me – you cannot know this because that is her magic, but you –”
“Magic,” Peta says, “rather despises me, and I’m wretched at it, which is why I’m standing here with a sword and a shield rather than waving my hands and conjuring up a storm of toads or something equally annoying. Or a lightning bolt, something useful.”
The officer gives her a nervous look, but otherwise ignores her, and turns his attention back on Caspian. “Your highness, I beg of you, please don’t make me raise arms against a member of the royal family. It would be a disgrace to my blood –”
The arrow takes him through the eye, and Caspian bites off his gasp as the officer falls backwards, his feet catching in his stirrups as his horse rears in triumph.
“What took you so damned long?” Peta shouts at her sister as Susan emerges from the treeline, turning in her saddle and shooting arrows faster than Caspian has ever thought possible.
A heartbeat later he beats back a Telmarine pike, striking out with sword and dagger and feeling hot blood spray across his face. There’s shouting all around him – nearby, from the crossbowmen by the river, from across the river, from the men still fording.
There are a dozen centaurs with Queen Susan, all armed and shooting. Peta smashes her shield into the face of a nearby Telmarine pikeman.
“Ambush!” Susan shouts back. “They played us!”
“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed!”
A centaur forces his way through the melee, using his crossbow as a battering ram. “Your majesty!” he shouts, and extends an arm to Peta. She swings onto his back, and then Caspian draws his arm back and throws his dagger, burying it in the heart of the nearest Telmarine.
“Caspian!” Peta shouts, but the centaur is bearing her away, and he’s left alone in the midst of the Telmarines around him, fighting desperately with his sword gripped two-handed now. The crossbow wound in his arm throbs in time with his heart, and it’s too much, it’s all too much, this on top of the earlier fighting – he takes a cut to the leg that sends him stumbling to his knees before he forces himself back up, laying about himself blindly. He can’t see – there’s a red mist before his eyes, and he can’t see –
“Caspian!” he hears Peta shout again. “Gods all damn you, what the hell do you think you’re doing, let me go –”
“Take him alive for Lord Miraz!”
“No,” Caspian says heavily, remembering Peta’s words, “no, no, no –”
Someone strikes the sword from his hand, and Caspian gropes at his belt for a dagger that’s no longer there.
“Susan!” Peta screams.
I can’t let you live, Peta had said earlier. You know too much.
“End it, then,” Caspian tries to say, tasting the blood on his lips, and feels the arrow pass so close to his face that the fletching brushes his cheek.
It takes the Telmarine behind him, the man with his hand on Caspian’s collar, and then huge claws close on Caspian’s torso and he finds himself being borne upwards, the wind screaming in his ears and beating at his face. He makes a startled sound and tries to fight his way free, but he has no sword, and he can do nothing but squirm blindly.
“Still, your highness,” a voice says from above him. “We are very high; you do not, I think, want to fall.”
“What are you?” Caspian demands.
“My name is Fleetwing. I am a griffin; King Edmund sent me. Do not fear; we shall be back at Aslan’s How soon. Do not look down if heights disturb you.”
His voice is small when he speaks, and he doesn’t know if Fleetwing – little gods, a griffin, and he’s seen them at the How but he’s never spoken to one, has never been certain they can speak, but he supposes he should know better by now – can hear him, but Caspian says, “I cannot see.”
“Queen Lucy is at the How. Her cordial will heal you. Be still: it is half a day’s ride from Beruna to the How, but far less by air.”
The upper air is cool and Caspian finds himself shivering, shock starting to set in. He tries to catalogue his injuries: the crossbow bolt in his right arm, the cut on his leg, a throbbing suspicion that he’s cracked a rib and broken his wrist, whatever has happened to his eyes – his eyes, dear gods, let it be nothing at all, let it be –
The griffin touches down and Caspian stumbles as he finds solid ground beneath his feet, and then King Edmund has a shoulder under his. He says, “Lean on me, Caspian, it’s all right.”
“The High Queen –” Caspian begins, his head swimming.
“Susan sent a bird, they’re on their way back.”
“My uncle –”
“Now’s not really the time. Sit down.” His good hand is gentle on Caspian’s shoulder, and Caspian stumbles and nearly falls; Edmund steadies him.
From the feel of it, he’s sitting on sun-warmed stone – one of the fallen blocks outside of the How, perhaps. “I can’t see,” he says; it seems important to get that out.
“You’ve got blood in your eyes is all,” Edmund says. His voice is calm and reassuring, gentler than Caspian has ever heard it before. “You’ll be all right. Lu!”
“Hold your horses,” Queen Lucy says, and Caspian jumps; he hasn’t heard her approach. Her fingers are soft and uncallused on his face, then move downwards until she’s holding his arm. “Hold him, Ed, I have to take the quarrel out or we’ll have problems.”
“Yeah, that I remember.” Edmund braces him with his good arm and his body, his shoulder behind Caspian’s head, and Caspian bites off a shout as pain sears through him from wrist to shoulder.
Wood clatters on stone and Lucy says soothingly, “It’s all right, Caspian, you’ll be all right, I just had to take the quarrel out.” She touches his face again, continues, “It’s all right, Caspian, swallow this,” and he has the flickering sensation of sweetness and bitterness at once on his tongue before he swallows.
Whatever it is burns its way down his throat and settles warmly at the pit of his stomach, as intoxicating as Archenlander brandy. For a moment Caspian can feel nothing but pain – and then the pain is gone, replaced with bone-deep exhaustion.
“Little gods,” he murmurs, and blinks. Then he realizes he still can’t see. “I can’t –”
“Hold still,” Lucy says, swiping the edge of her thumb over his eyes. “There? Is that better?”
He blinks again, sees her round face swim into clarity in front of him, worried and earnest. “Yes,” he says, and then he passes out.
-
-
He wakes to Peta’s empty room. There is, as there always is, a dark-lantern burning in the corner, and Caspian struggles up to his knees to crawl over and open the door to let a little more light into the cave. The shadows seem to fall heavy in the corners, and he shudders a little.
Someone’s stripped him of his armor and clothes and laid out new clothes for him. He dresses as quickly as he can, his fingers skipping over the new scars on his flesh. The one on his leg is deep, the one on his arm round and puckered. There’s a shallow slash across his forehead, just over his eyes. His wrist aches; so do his ribs. But he’s in one piece and seemingly unhurt, safe now.
He’s lost his sword and dagger, and no one has put out new ones. Caspian bites his lip, wondering if maybe they think this is his fault somehow – they haven’t armed him again, after all – and then pulls the door open and steps into the hall. He goes downstairs to the table room; it’s the most likely place for them to be.
He hears Peta’s voice from the hallway. “I’m such an awful damned idiot.”
“None of the rest of us caught it either,” Susan says, soothing.
“We should have,” Edmund says, sounding restless. “Aslan in the east, we should have. We should know better than to underestimate anyone, and we’ve already got all the evidence we need to tell us Miraz is smart; he’s not another blockhead kingmaker –”
“You’re out of practice,” Lucy says. “We all are.”
“We damn well shouldn’t be!” Peta snaps. “It’s been a year. We’ve gone a year without people wanting to take over Narnia before, haven’t we?”
“The situation’s a little different,” Susan says delicately.
“It shouldn’t be!” she snarls again, and Caspian steps into the doorway and clears his throat.
They all look up. They’re gathered around the Stone Table, Susan and Lucy seated, Edmund standing, Peta pacing restlessly with her hand on her sword-hilt.
“Oh, good,” Peta says, and gives him a faint smile. “You’re all right.”
“So are you,” Caspian says, and then backpedals, “I mean, ah –”
She holds up her bandaged wrist. “Flesh wound. Nothing to worry about. I’ve had worse.”
“Aslan help us,” Edmund mutters under his breath.
Caspian looks over at him. “I understand some thanks is owed,” he says.
Edmund shrugs. “Think nothing of it, Prince Caspian. I just hate to think of what Peta would have done to me if I hadn’t sent someone – although to be fair, it’s Fleetwing you should be thanking; he took the initiative to get in there. I’d just sent a messenger to Peta. I suppose he likes you.”
“Unlike some people I can name, and I’ll certainly be breaking heads over that particular point,” Peta spits.
Susan nods, grim. “I’ll help you,” she says. “I can’t believe –”
“What happened?” Caspian asks.
Peta puts her head to one side. “Come on in,” she says. “Sit down. You’re probably still tired; I remember how the cordial works.”
“Probably because there were points when you were actually living off the damn thing,” Edmund says, but he sounds more tired than he does anything else.
Caspian ventures further into the cave, but instead of sitting down, he leans against a column not far from Peta. For a moment Edmund’s eyes are on him, weighing and judging, then the king looks away.
“Now,” Peta says, “when you say ‘what happened?’ did you happen to mean in general or at the riverside? Because it’s all pretty much a huge fucking mess.”
“Both,” Caspian says carefully.
“Peta sent your team away,” Susan says quietly. “Mine – refused to go back in after Whitehelm came out with Peta. Because you are a Telmarine, and a Telmarine prince at that. I’m sorry. I would have gone in myself, but – I don’t think –”
“One of you would have died,” Peta says ruthlessly. “Probably you; they wanted Caspian alive.”
“Also, you couldn’t have carried Caspian out,” Edmund says practically.
“There is that.”
“What about my uncle?” Caspian asks.
“Fuck,” Peta says concisely.
Edmund shakes his head. “The crossing at Weir was a diversion. He only sent through about a quarter of his horse, probably just to test us, and crossed the rest of the army at Beruna while we were distracted. He did ford most of the army after all, and now the castle is all lit up. We gave him exactly the excuse he wanted to declare wholesale war on us, and on you.”
“Me?” Caspian says uncertainly.
“They saw you,” Peta says, crossing her arms over her chest. “And you made it very, very clear who you are. He hasn’t done it yet, but there’s no way Miraz isn’t going to use that as an excuse to declare you mentally unfit to hold the throne of Narnia. Although it has been a while since I’ve been called a witch to my face.”
“Lucky you, a trip down memory lane,” Edmund says dryly.
“Not the one I was hoping for.”
He gives her a thin smile. “The army’s moving relatively slowly, but the cavalry’s already set up on the other side of the woods – on the Red Plain, I don’t know if it has another name now or not. There’s a pretty huge fucking lot of them. If you asked me to guess, I’d guess that his plan is to set up a second camp on the other side of the How to block a westward or southward retreat. It’s what I would do.”
“It’s what I would do,” Peta corrects absently. “Either way, he has us: there’s nowhere we can retreat to, and if we did, I think we’d lose more Narnians on the way than we would in an actual battle, and considering the likelihood that we’re all going to be slaughtered, that’s saying something.”
“Way to look on the bright side, Peta,” Edmund says.
“I try.”
“Aslan’s How is the ancient stronghold of Narnia,” Caspian says warily. “It has sheltered Narnians for a thousand years against countless attackers; surely you are not even considering leaving it –”
“The How is a tomb,” Peta says flatly. “It’s not defensible – not easily, at least. The longer we stay here, the better chance we have of being forced out somehow. We can be starved, we can be poisoned, Miraz can fucking smoke us out if we let him get close enough. He doesn’t need his twenty thousand troops to besiege; he only needs a handful of that. And he can wait. But no,” she adds, “we aren’t leaving, because we don’t have anywhere else to go. Cair Paravel is dust and ruins, Arn Abedin is probably likewise, and there’s not anywhere else that I can think of. And if we leave, we demoralize the army; they’ll start thinking we’re beaten, and we can’t let them think that, because as soon as they start thinking we’re dead, we are.”
“Right now,” Susan says, “they think they can win just because we’re here, because we’ve never lost a war. Which is true. But we have lost battles, and they don’t remember that. They think they’ll win just because they have Peta here, and me, and Ed, and Lu.”
“Can’t we?” Caspian asks.
“Your faith is stunning,” Peta says. “We’re kings and queens, not miracle-workers. Winning this will require a little more than blind faith, however charming that is.” She rubs a hand over her face and then through her hair, pulling it out of the ponytail at the back of her skull. “I need to get some sleep before I fall over.”
“Do that,” Edmund says. “And you too, Su. Lu and I have things well in hand. Before I would have said that Miraz doesn’t seem like the type to move troops at night, but now – things have changed.”
“Yes, I’m sure the situation in the morning will be substantially more interesting than it is now, and by interesting, I mean bad, and by bad, I mean vaguely terrifying,” Peta says. “Wake me up if he makes a move on the How.”
“Of course,” Edmund says matter-of-factly. “Caspian, you should get some sleep too; I know you just woke up, but Lu’s cordial has to take its energy from somewhere, and it’s coming straight from you. If you don’t get the extra rest you’ll feel it when it’s least convenient for you.”
“All right,” Caspian agrees. “If there’s anything I can do – my uncle –”
“Not your problem,” Lucy says. “Now he’s all our problems.”
Upstairs, Su bids them good night wearily at the cave she’s sharing with Lucy and closes the door behind her, and then Peta and Caspian are left alone. She closes the door of her room once they’re both inside and puts her back to it, rubbing both her hands over her face. “Aslan in the east, that was a royal disaster,” she mutters.
“You couldn’t have known my uncle would do what he did,” Caspian says. He touches her wrist gently with two fingers, and she raises her head and smiles at him, tired and wan.
“No, I couldn’t have known,” she agrees. “But I should have assumed he was going to fuck with us somehow. Aslan’s mane, I should have known – no, don’t say anything, I know what it is you’re thinking. You’re right, there’s no way I could have known, not for certain, but I should have had troops at Beruna. I should have assumed he was going to fuck with us, I should have – Aslan’s mane, the things I should have done. It’s only been a fucking year!”
“Surely we made enough of an impression on my uncle’s horse –” Caspian begins.
“An impression. Not a dent. He sent three troops over the river at Weir; I was assuming twice that, if not twice that. This was nothing.”
She pushes past him and starts unbuckling her sword-belt, laying it aside, and bends over to unlace her boots. “I’m out of it, Caspian,” she says softly, her attention on her boots. “I’m out of practice. I’m getting slow. Time was I would have seen this coming a mile away. A league away.”
Caspian blinks, uncertain, and says, “Not everyone can be right all the time, and no one can see the future. You couldn’t have predicted that my uncle would do what he did; it’s not what any other Telmarine king has ever done, not since Caspian the Conqueror –”
“I was,” Peta says, tossing her boots aside one by one. “Right all the time, I mean. I’m good at this, Caspian, good at making war, good at fighting, good at winning. I have my siblings to take care of the rest of Narnia, but this – this is mine. And I’m fucking it up like it’s nothing, like I’m an amateur, like I’m green as fucking grass.”
She turns toward him, the front of her shirt unlaced now to hint at the curve of her breasts, her hair loose and floating around her shoulders, her eyes shadowed and her face pale. “I’m fucking this up,” she says.
“I think you are doing better than I would have done had you not come,” Caspian offers. He steps towards her and cups her cheek in his hand. “Nothing is lost yet, your majesty. The future is yet to come, and tomorrow may bring something new.”
“May,” Peta repeats, frowning. She sighs. “God, I need some sleep.”
Caspian tilts his head towards the bedroll. “I am hardly going to protest.”
She laughs a little. “Good,” she says, and leans up to kiss him lightly on the mouth. “Although,” she adds, “I’m afraid you aren’t getting under my figurative skirts for a few days; I’m on my courses.”
“Oh,” Caspian says, taken aback, and Peta laughs and kisses him again.
-
-
Three days later the bridge at Beruna is completed and the entirety of Telmar’s army settles into position on the Red Plain, scarce a league away from the How. Peta takes the news grimly and says, her face sober, “Well, it could be worse. They could have set up shop right outside our front doors and we wouldn’t be able to go outside without getting shot at.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” Edmund says.
“Yes, because clearly I need someone to keep me informed of the bright side at all times,” Peta says. “How are we on food?”
“We’ll hold.”
A week after that they learn that Miraz has been crowned.
“He says you’ve gone over,” Susan tells Caspian, and puts her hand over his, her face kind.
Caspian pulls his hand away. “You mean that he says I’ve betrayed Telmar.”
“Well, you have,” Lucy says matter-of-factly. “So he is right about that. I mean, not that it makes you all that much less eligible for the throne; every country has some story about younger princes or mad uncles or whatnot that run off to go find an army in some other country, and about half of them actually succeed. Well, not every country; I never heard the like about Narnia, but everywhere else, yes. It means that you can still take the throne if you win.”
Peta, coming into the table room with a mug full of tea in one hand, squints at her. “You are aware that we are actually fighting this war to take our thrones back?” she says.
“What?” Caspian says, startled.
“Peta, I don’t think Aslan wants –” Lucy begins.
“I don’t care what Aslan wants,” Peta says viciously. “I’m going back to England over my extremely dead body, and I don’t particularly feel like playing general for someone else. Narnia is our country; I’m not just going to leave it like this.”
Lucy leaps up from her seat. “You can’t defy Aslan!” she exclaims. “If he wants us to stay –”
“Don’t,” Peta says dangerously, “bring Aslan into this, little sister. No one has seen him in thirteen hundred years.”
“I saw him –”
“You saw the reflection of light off my sword-hilt,” she says, her voice ruthlessly. “Sunlight in the trees. A shadow. You didn’t see Aslan.”
“Peta –” Susan begins as Lucy’s eyes go wide in surprise.
Lucy cuts her off. “This isn’t our Narnia, High Queen,” she spits. “Cair Paravel’s dust and tumbled stone and ruins. There aren’t four thrones anymore! There’s nothing here left for us. We’re here because Aslan brought us here to save Narnia, not to rule it. You and I and Su and Ed all know we can’t possibly be staying. You can’t make it happen just because you’ve found someone to warm your bed –”
Peta takes two steps toward her, raising her hand, and Edmund catches her wrist as he comes up behind her. “Think about what you’re doing, Peta,” he hisses in her ear as she goes still. “No one can see the future. Whatever the reason is that we’re here, that’s why we’re here. We have to win this war before we can worry about what will happen afterwards.”
“There’s a damned reason we’re fighting this war, Ed,” Peta snaps, turning towards him. “I’m not fighting it to put some fucking tyrant on the throne that neither the Narnians nor the Telmarines are going to listen to; I don’t want this country to rip itself apart the way it must have done when we left. This is my gods-damned country; I’m not fucking turning it over to someone else, not again. I’m not leaving again. I’m not abandoning Narnia again.”
“No one’s asking you to, Peta,” Edmund says. On her wrist, his grip is so tight that his knuckles are white. “We don’t know why Aslan brought us here. You just have to trust –”
“Trust what?” Peta snarls. “All that’s happening is that I’m fucking up all over the place! I’m not fighting this gods-damned war only to lose everything I’m putting my life on the line for, not again.”
“This isn’t about you!” Lucy shouts back. “You always think it’s about you and it’s not, it’s never about you! This is about Narnia, about what’s best for her; you and Narnia aren’t the same damned thing!”
“And what’s best for Narnia is turning her over to the Telmarines and these – refugees – to be squabbled over and picked at like a piece of meat?” Peta demands. “We can win every damned battle we want, we can win the war, but that’s not going to get us anything unless we can keep Narnia in one piece, and that’s not going to happen here, not without us. You know that. You know it, Lucy, fucking say it! There’s no one in Narnia now who can do what we did!”
“How would you know? You’re too busy being the gods-damned High Queen of Narnia to let anyone else have a try; you’re too blind to look around and see what other options might be available!”
“Lucy!” Susan says sharply. “You two both need to stop!”
“Shut up, Su,” Peta says without looking at her. “And take your hands the fuck off me, Ed. The reason I’m the High Queen of Narnia is because Aslan named me so! He didn’t say, ‘Peta, High Queen of Narnia on alternate Tuesdays,’ he said, ‘Peta, High Queen of Narnia over all Kings and Queens of Narnia,’ of which you are one, although I damned well don’t see you acting like it.”
“Just accept it!” Lucy yells at her. “Why can’t you just accept that our Narnia is gone? Why don’t you just see that everything you knew, everything we knew, is dead and gone and that we can’t get it back! You’re not her! You’re not the woman that Aslan named High Queen, not anymore, because things have changed! You can’t change the past, and you can’t see the future just because you want to. Things change, everything changes! Just look at us.”
Peta’s face crumples suddenly. “Go to hell, Lucy,” she says, and wrenches her arm free of Edmund’s grasp before she storms out of the room.
Lucy stands still, fists clenched at her sides, and breathes hard. She doesn’t look like a child anymore, Caspian realizes. And Peta – Peta had looked, at that last moment before she left, very, very young.
“Things change,” she repeats softly to herself, and looks around at the carving on the wall, the firelight flickering around it and illuminating it. “Everything changes.”
Susan starts forward, reaching for her, but Lucy walks straight past her outstretched hand out of the cavern.
Edmund rubs his good hand over his face and looks at his sister. “Well,” he says, “that went well.”
“Ha,” Susan says bitterly. “Ha fucking ha.”
Neither of them is paying any attention to him, so Caspian slips out of the room without either of the two looking at him, his head spinning. He doesn’t know Peta as well as he thinks he does, so it takes him a long time to find her, and by the time he does, the sun is setting.
She’s sitting on one of the ledges at the very top of the How, her head back against the layers of stone and earth, her eyes half-closed. “Go away, Ed,” she says without looking up. “I don’t want to talk.”
“It’s me,” Caspian says.
Peta cranes her head around. “Oh,” she says, and looks back. “What do you want?”
Caspian settles onto the ledge beside her. “You don’t trust me,” he says.
“I don’t trust most people. It’s nothing to feel special about.”
He looks out at the vast stretch of forest beneath them. “You trust me enough to share your bed. You trust me enough to be your shield-arm in battle. But you don’t trust me with Narnia.”
“Caspian,” Peta says softly, “I very seldom trust my siblings with Narnia.”
He doesn’t say anything.
She’s quiet for a long few minutes, and then she says, “You don’t understand what it’s like, being a woman and being a queen, even of Narnia. It’s different for Susan and Lucy; they’re not High Queen. And Ed – Ed isn’t a woman. I’m sure there are stories about him, about being subordinate to a woman, but it’s not – he’s good with dealing with that. Aslan knows he’s had to put up with it more often than any of us would like.”
“My uncle never meant for me to become king,” Caspian admits. “Years before his son was born, he never meant for me to become king.” It’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud. It’s the first time he’s ever admitted it to himself. “You were right. You shouldn’t trust Narnia with me.”
Peta laughs a little, half-bitter, half-amused. “I was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from Finchley,” she says. “I’d never held a sword in my life. I was a wretched daughter and not much of a sister, either; Su and Ed will tell you that. I like to think I still did all right.”
“High Queen Peta the Magnificent,” Caspian says, “and the Golden Age of Narnia.”
“Yes.” She studies her hands, rubbing her thumbs over the fading blisters there. “I think you would have done just fine.”
“Would have?” Caspian asks, carefully.
Peta tilts her head back, raises her face to the sky. “I’m not leaving,” she says. “Not again. I’ll face down Aslan himself if I have to, but I’m not leaving. I’ll spend my blood for Narnia, lay my bones in Narnian soil, I’ll cut myself open and bleed out if I have to, but I’m not leaving. I don’t – do well outside of Narnia. I don’t fit anymore.”
“There will always be a place for you in Narnia,” Caspian says simply.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
They sit in silence for a long time after the sun sinks below the horizon and lets the moon take over, casting everything below into a ghostly light.
“Why did you come up here?” Peta asks suddenly. “After what I said.”
“I don’t know,” Caspian says.
She pauses before she answers, watching him with cool blue eyes. “Thank you.”
“Why?”
Peta catches one of her braids in her hand, rubbing her thumb over it. “For listening,” she says after a moment.
“Always,” Caspian says, and means it with all his heart. He turns his head to watch her, suddenly stark with curiosity.
The moonlight silvers her hair, her skin, and Peta turns to smile at him.
“Can I ask you –” Caspian begins, then stops. It’s not for him to ask; it’s not for him to know.
“Yes,” Peta says.
He hesitates before he actually says it, but says it anyway. “What were you like? Before Narnia.”
She winces, then raises a hand to her face, pinching the bridge of her nose between two fingers. After a moment she lets her hand fall back down to her lap and turns to look him in the eye. “I was perfect,” she says. “I was everything my parents wanted me to be. I got good grades, I took care of my siblings, I was a prefect at school – and I was bored out of my mind. I wasn’t that fun to be around, either. Even Su thought I was a bore.”
“That seems unlikely,” Caspian says, turning the idea of Peta as a pampered nobleman’s daughter over in his mind. He knows a few of them, the ones who come to court to serve as his aunt’s ladies and try to catch his eye. He can’t see Peta as anything like them.
“I know, right?” Peta says, her mouth quirking a little. “It’s hard to believe. And then we came to Narnia and everything just – opened up. You know, I used to think England – our world – was the land of missed opportunities. If I hadn’t come here, I’d still be boring.”
“I don’t think you’d be boring.”
“I was. I was terribly boring. Apparently I used to be interesting, but then I went to school and it all went downhill from there.” She twists her braid around her finger. “My mother was terribly shocked when we came home last year. I was a completely different person. Well, we all were, but I went from being that perfect daughter to – well. I was that kind of daughter that nice mothers don’t want to have.”
Caspian bites his lip, because there isn’t anything he can say to that that wouldn’t be insulting. Eventually he decides on, “You started fights?”
She grins. “Oh, yes. I also slept around. Neither one does a lot for a girl’s reputation back in England, unless you happen to be one of the boys. Except they were mostly smarting because I could take them on and win.”
“That doesn’t seem much like the Peta of Narnia I know,” Caspian says. “Except for that last part, of course.”
“Of course.” She takes that as her due, and well she should; Caspian has seen her fight, and even before that, her legend is something that every Telmarine and every Narnian knows. After a moment she goes on. “I just don’t function well outside of a certain context.”
“Which is?”
Peta raises a hand, her wide sweep encompassing the whole of Narnia and the entire situation – the How, the war, Miraz. “This. Only girls don’t fight in England; I went back and my mother expected me to be preparing for marriage to some nice young boy from Finchley, some doctor or lawyer or something of the sort. Well, I would have joined the WAAF or the Wrens or the WRAC next year, but she was doing her best not to think about that. That probably would have been –” She pauses for a moment, lower lip caught between her teeth. “I suppose it would have been all right, because at least I would have been doing something, but as important as administrative work is for the military, it’s not really my thing.”
“I do have a little trouble picturing it, yes,” Caspian says, and grins when Peta turns to look at him, her eyebrows nearly reaching her hairline. After a moment she smiles back.
“Do you mind leaving me alone for a bit?” she asks. “It’s just that I’m not fit company for anyone right, and I think I’d like to be alone.”
“Of course, your majesty,” Caspian says, rising.
“Hey,” Peta says fondly, reaching up to catch his wrist. She pulls him back down to her and kisses him softly. “Don’t worry. Tomorrow will bring a new day.”
*
tbc
go to part six