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THE EASTERN SEA. SUMMER 1005
Standing at the bow of the Splendour Hyaline, Lucy breathed in the scent of the ocean waves. Fresh and clean and open, she had thought, at first, it was most like the smell of an early winter’s first snow. Now that she was finally out on the waters, she understood it was different. Saltier, less crisp and more warm—just as freeing and exciting. It reminded her of her first days in Narnia, over four years ago, and she was grateful for the opportunity to venture out into the Eastern Sea.
There had been a great deal to learn about ships and sailing first, but while book learning had never been something to keep Lucy’s attention for long, picking up the sailor’s trade was something that came as natural to her as breathing. It helped that she started young—poured herself over and into the texts and tomes from the library at Cair Paravel until she managed to piece together a broken history of shipwrights still living among some of the oldest trees in the kingdom.
Home to dryads just south of Rush River, the Hyaline Wood was an aged forest, with tales of grandeur spilling from the sap beneath peeling bark and wistful memories echoing through bristling leaves. The spirits had, for generations, called the trees their home, occupying them until the time came for the wood to lend its strength to Narnia’s ships. Lucy heard the call of the spirits in an instant when she first went to visit and had happily granted them back the duty of carrying Narnia’s sovereign across the seas.
With them came the satyrs of the area, who were equally gracious for the ability to return to their craft. Lucy called on them often in the first few years of her reign, eager to watch the kingdom’s fleet grow under their hard work.
This voyage was Lucy’s first, as it was for the ship upon which she sailed. She’d been aboard other vessels before of course—though the closest in nature to this one was one of King Lune’s charters, a carrack sent to escort them to young Prince Corin’s birthday celebrations only a year after they'd been crowned.
The Splendour Hyaline had been designed to be Narnia’s new royal charter. With a keel and frame built of the sturdiest and strongest of the trees in the Hyaline Wood, the ship was a part of Narnia itself. Lucy felt the thrum of life in the railing under her fingers and the pull of the waves beneath them, and excitement rattled through her bones at the month that lay ahead.
If nothing else, the young queen was eager for the chance to forego her gowns and crown for a voyage out across the Eastern Sea where only her ring confirmed her status, and even that rested safely beneath her tunic, hanging on a chain around her neck. The metal was cool against her skin; the wind kept it pressed against her chest as the ship pressed forward.
“Your majesty?”
Lucy bit back a sigh, but didn’t bother to correct Erwan again. No matter how many times she requested it, the ship’s captain refused to drop her titles while she stood upon the decks, even when the rest of the crew had obliged.
She turned from the railing to face the satyr. “What is it?”
“We’ve spotted another vessel, north of us.”
“Is it Narnian?” she asked. There weren’t many Narnian ships left from before the White Witch, but a few had scattered to the Eastern Sea and Lucy hoped to catalogue them all at some point. Narnia deserved to know what happened to its navy.
Erwan shook his head. “We can’t quite make out their pennants, but it looks to be of Galman make.”
“Spyglass?”
Lucy turned toward the north as Erwan passed the brass scope over, and peered through it to the ship no more than a league away. She could not make out a flag anywhere, but it was the state of the ship itself that took hold of her attention. The caravel’s sails were torn, and half their mainmast appeared to be cracked, splitting above the first cross post. A few bodies roamed the decks, but not enough to fill a full crew. At first, she wondered if the others would be down below working the oars, but Lucy could not see any movement along the lower levels of the ship either.
The ship was dead in the water.
A quiet warning bell sounded in her memory, reminding Lucy briefly of her last council meeting with Susan and Edmund just before she’d left Narnia. They’d discussed their relations with the nations of the sea and the slow progress of their negotiations. As far as Lucy understood, the various island kingdoms had grown accustomed to their independence outside of Narnia’s influence in the years that passed during the Hundred Year Winter. That Narnia was suddenly re-inserting herself into the equation was troubling—for Terebinthia and the Seven Isles in particular.
Lucy couldn’t fault them for it, and around the table at a council meeting, she understood Narnia’s need to be cautious in their dealings with the other nations. There were a great number of things to consider when navigating foreign relations, especially as they were the newest players in the game—Susan and Edmund had more than made that clear.
But on the open water, when it was only one ship, Lucy had a hard time of stifling her initial inclination to help. It wasn’t in her nature to withhold aid when it was so obviously needed. The Hyaline was abundantly stocked with more than enough supplies to get them through their leisurely voyage, and they were more than able to provide assistance if wanted. The decision seemed simple enough.
“Turn the ship north, Erwan,” she ordered, collapsing the scope.
“Have you determined who it is?”
“Their sails are torn and their mainmast is cracked,” she commented, looking up into the satyr’s hesitant expression. “Whoever they are, they require assistance.”
After two days adrift some stretch of ocean south of Galma’s shores, Nadora was nearly ready to give in and send her hawk home with an official report. It was her pride that kept her from doing so up until now, but the longer she and her men sat in the waters, the more dejected she felt.
The caravel was the smallest of her father’s fleet, and the only one she had convinced him she was able to take under her own command for her trial expeditions. In fact, it was the smallest of all of Galman ships currently in sailing shape, though it certainly was not sailable any longer. The storm they’d passed through two nights prior had done more irreversible damage than Nadora had thought. At this point, they were going to be several days late returning to port, if they even managed to get back, and if that weren’t signal enough of her failure, she did not want to know what was.
“Captain.”
She lifted her head to the door to her cabin. Varya stood as she always did when she had bad news to share, with her back ramrod straight, her features darkened by the curtain of jet black hair falling heavily around her face, cropped short at the jut of her chin.
Nadora wondered how much more bad news there could be. “What is it?”
“There’s a ship approaching. It looks… Narnian.”
It took a second for the statement to sink in, and then Nadora propelled herself from her desk, past Varya to the main deck.
She picked her way to the upper deck, practically flying over the torn canvas and large splinters of wood—her ship was a wreck littered with the strips of sail and several large sections of their broken mast. That they were still afloat was a miracle.
“Where?”
Varya pointed south, and Nadora cut across to the stern, keeping portside as she fished for her spyglass.
As it was, she didn’t need it.
The Narnian ship was close enough to make out the carved swan’s head and silken sails. As it grew closer, the galleon turned, perhaps to pull up alongside their battered vessel, and Nadora took in the carved wings that ran nearly half the length of the ship, as well as the slots below them, ostensibly for canons, though they were empty now. Nadora straightened at the sight of them, realizing the ship wasn’t just quick. She was equipped for battle, too.
But as she drew her gaze back up to the deck, Nadora noted the crew that lined the desk and realized the great swan was not planning to attack.
“Hello!”
The bright and joyous greeting came from just beyond the railing. It belonged to a young woman whose familiar face emerged from the Narnian crew just as Nadora eyed their numbers. They outnumbered her own at least twice over—thrice if she excluded those of her own too injured to fight—but she had a gut feeling there was nothing to be worried about.
She remembered the young Narnian queen from Anvard’s throne rooms some years before. Her smile was wide and not one Nadora would have mistaken.
“Your majesty,” she greeted, tucking her chin.
The queen’s smile faltered, but only briefly. “We only approached to see whether you might be in need of any assistance.”
Nadora’s obstinance held for the span of a breath. Having grown up on these waters, Nadora knew to be wary of foul play beyond Galma’s reefs, but there was something far too genuine in the young woman’s face for Nadora to hold onto her wariness. Besides that, they had a cracked rudder, limited manpower, and hardly a breeze to billow the sails let along a headwind strong enough to take them home. They were running out of options.
And yet…
To take aid from a kingdom they weren’t fully allied with would be a complicated venture—Nadora knew her father had reached tentative agreements with King Edmund, just weeks ago wherein their kingdoms planned to rely on their mutual trust in Archenland to fortify their own partnership. But agreement was not quite the same as alliance or friendship, and Nadora was loathed to cross any lines her father had drawn. She was neither an ambassador nor true captain, yet.
Varya cleared her throat to her left. “Captain, if I may?”
Nadora nodded, though she had a feeling she knew what the woman would say.
“Galma has tentative ties with Narnia, does it not? I don’t believe we would be complicating matters if we were to accept their help.”
Nadora turned over her helmswoman’s words, weighing their options as she looked back across her ship. Taking in the ruined vessel and her crew’s weariness, the answer seemed simple.. Her stubbornness had put them all through the ringer, and the longer they waited, adrift in the water with vague movements in some direction or another with their meager numbers, the less Nadora could stand the expression etched into each of their faces.
They no longer wanted her determination. They wanted to be home.
She might not have been an ambassador for her kingdom, nor Lady as her father was Lord—her authority was limited. But Nadora did govern the ship they sailed now, and there was no way for them to continue on in their current state. Determined, she looked back across to the Narnians and found the queen’s head turned toward a satyr at her side.
When their eyes met again, the young queen announced, “We’ve a number of Narnia’s greatest shipwrights on board, as well as supplies.”
The suggestion pulled a hint of a smile to Nadora’s face, her wariness all but gone now. Perhaps they could return to Galma’s port mostly whole, no one the wiser as to the full extent of the ship’s damages.
“We’ve a couple spare sails, don’t we?” Nadora asked Varya. “It’s really just the rudder and our mainmast that are the issue, right? For the ship itself?”
“Yes.”
She looked across the water to the other ship. “We’d be grateful for the help, your majesty. It’s our rudder that’s in most need of fixing.”
They could make their way home with a functioning rudder, and she would swallow her pride in owning the remaining damages.
“There’s an island not far west of here, if you’d like for us to guide you?”
She nodded, and Varya shouted the order for every able man to make their way back below decks for a final push. Nadora stood and eyed the queen a bit longer before she too followed suit. The Narnian said nothing of the obvious destruction that lay upon their main deck, and having found her tact humbling, Nadora felt the least she could do was join her crew in getting them safely to shore.
The island was small, but even at a glance Lucy knew there was more than enough shore for their numbers to spread out comfortably. The Hyaline dropped anchor just beyond the shallows and rowed toward land separately. As they passed beneath the Galman ship, Lucy called up.
“Are your men hungry, Lady Nadora?”
She had thought she’d recognized the woman before—her eyes were a shimmering shade of gray that was hard to forget—but Lucy hadn’t been able to place her until she had smiled her thanks when she’d offered to help mend their ship. It wasn’t much, but it had been enough for Lucy to remember.
They’d interacted minimally in Anvard, when the Narnians made their first visit to Archenland. At the time, Lucy found the Galman woman curiously stiff, and a touch out of place. She had wind-weathered hair and her skin was tanned, darker than that of the mountainous citizens of Archenland. Then, part way through the evening, Archenland’s prince—a mere toddler—had pulled upon the young woman’s skirts and Lucy had caught the smile that cracked across her face.
Now, however, Nadora peered down over the railing with no such smile, and Lucy did her best not to feel hurt by the obvious apprehension on her face. The truth was, they were near strangers.
“We’ve plenty to go around,” she added quickly, taking in the way Nadora’s hair fell matted against her forehead. Lucy guessed the rest of her crew was similarly worn and weary. “Perhaps we can share a meal and a short rest before we tend to your ship. The tide will have to wane before we can make any assessment, after all.”
After a beat, Nadora nodded. “Thank you, your majesty. My men will certainly appreciate it.”
The meal was served on shore, and while the two nations kept mostly to themselves, Lucy felt happier with the arrangement than she would have if Nadora had declined the invitation outright.
“Forgive me, your majesty, for saying so. But do you think it’s wise? Granting this much hospitality to a Galman crew?”
Lucy looked up from her apple, surprised to find Haifa’s familiar look of concern trained on her. The faun had been by her side since the early days of her reign—one of Mr. Tumnus’s cousins—and Lucy trusted him as much as she did the rest of her guard, but Haifa did not often question her judgement this way, at least not in the presence of others.
“I can’t think why not, Haifa. They were in need. We are still in open waters, and they seem grateful for our help.”
“Perhaps, but would this not cause issue in negotiations between your kingdoms?”
She sighed. This voyage had been an attempt to evade some of the more dry and dull components to her being queen. She loved Narnia, and she loved being queen. But where her siblings had much more important matters of state to handle, Lucy’s interests lay outside of court. She wanted to see all the people of her kingdom, and all the lands and sea.
“As far as I’m aware, we’ve reached a degree of understanding with Galma diplomacy enough to warrant, at the very least, the extension of a helping hand. Had they declined our aid, I would not have pressed. Considering they accepted, I’ve only done what seems appropriate. If my brothers or sister, or the Lord of Galma have issue with it, they can express them to me directly.
“Besides that,” she added. “Even you can see that their ship needs repairs. We’re doing them a favor, and that isn’t something to take lightly, either.”
Haifa drew his lips into a thin line before nodding. “Understood, your majesty.”
Lucy did her best to return to her food and the livelier discussion around them, glad to wash her hands of diplomacy, but, she was most grateful when, finally, Erwan called her attention and led them out to where the Galman ship sat in the receding shoreline.
It was difficult, letting the satyr handle the repairs himself. However, the ease with which he moved around even a battered ship was evidence that he was much better suited to the task than Lucy would be—no matter her desire to do it herself.
Erwan was, like most who of the satyrs who lived down by Splendour Cove, a creature of both the land and the sea. He would live and die by the waves if he were to choose. Shipbuilding was in his blood, and the salty waters of the sea was in his blood. He was meant for this work, in a way Lucy never would be, no matter what she learned.
Even so, she was desperate to prove herself useful, as something more than just a queen whilst aboard theSplendour Hyaline. But Erwan had already noted that the caravel’s design was distinctly Galman, and she had little experience or knowledge of the build, where the satyr did.
So she settled for standing near the shore as Erwan walked her through each decision as soon as the tide had drawn out. The sun was falling, but by his estimate, the repairs would be completed by nightfall and the ship ready to sail again in the morning.
Nadora watched the queen for several long moments after eating her fill among the two crews on shore. It was not odd to her that the queen would be so intrigued by the workings of her shipwrights. She had been incessant in her own expeditions among the Galman’s docks, willing and eager to understand all the work that went into a ship’s construction, into sailing.
But the young Narnian seemed actively involved in the working of the ship’s rudder, or at least kept well apprised of the repairs, surprising Nadora enough to finally give in to her curiosity and walk over.
“Do you know much about ships, your majesty?”
The girl turned from the shore back to face her, startled out of focus. Her features smoothed quickly though, as if she were used to making such adjustments upon a moment’s notice.
“Please, call me Lucy.”
Nadora blinked, but did not refuse. “Lucy then. I only ask because it seems your shipwright is instructing you in the repairs as much as he is keeping his men apprised of his decisions.”
“That’s because he is. Erwan has been teaching me about shipbuilding for a few years now. He’s the best there is in Narnia—came up with the plans for the Splendour Hyaline himself, in fact.”
“I didn’t know Narnia had such a ship in their possession,” Nadora answered, following her gaze out to the galleon.
“She’s a recent addition, fashioned to be Narnia’s new royal charter,” Lucy explained. “This is her maiden voyage, officially.”
“Officially?”
“I’m meant to reach The Lone Islands at the end of the month for some discussions with my brother.”
“A month? Is the distance so great?” Nadora had not gone further east than the Seven Isles, and they were more south of Galma than they were east.
“No, it normally would not take more than a week with the Hyaline, with the right weather, of course.”
She frowned. “Then why such a lengthy voyage?”
Lucy only shrugged and turned back toward the rest of their crew members, still separate but enjoying the meal they’d prepared.
“For occasions such as this, I suppose,” she answered. “Food and drink among friends met whilst out at sea. They aren’t things someone of my stature is likely to enjoy often.”
Nadora was surprised to hear her express it so simply, a plight so similar to her own fears, she nearly stopped breathing.
They were not so different, Lucy and herself. It seemed obvious to any who did not know them—they were only a handful of year apart in age, after all. An unknowing stranger would simply see two girls eager for adventure among the waves of the wide open sea at their feet. But their similarities went further than that.
Nadora had grown up on the water, a fact that not only aided to her guilt in the damages her ship had sustained, but also facilitated her need to move, to constantly travel. She enjoyed a life outside the confines of castle walls and a kingdom’s traditions far too much to stay in any one court too long.
Lucy, for all her authority as queen, seemed similarly eager for the freedom the sea provided. Nadora could see it in the way she stood—limbs loose, a few strands of her golden hair blowing in the soft breeze, an easy smile upon her lips. She was at peace upon the water, even just standing at the edge of it. Just the same way Nadora was.
Whether Lucy felt as restricted by her duties as Nadora did of the ones she was meant to inherit, there was no telling. But she suddenly felt quite lucky that the young queen’s ship was the one that had come to her aid.
There were a great many other vessels and crews in the waters of the area that could have noticed her drifting ship, and not all of them would have held someone quite like Lucy. Someone who mirrored her own self. Someone who, like the sea, was more soul than body and bone with too much life to give and have to be restrained by her own skin. A little wild and unexpected, but soothing and calm all the same.
Nadora smiled. She wouldn’t have thought, back in Anvard, that this girl—hardly younger than her but so much more youthful—would be someone she would want to befriend herself, but Nadora was glad to be given the opportunity to do so here, outside the confines of courtly etiquette and royal obligation.