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NARNIA. EARLY WINTER 1071
Thalia always felt that the day she was forced to make this sort of decision the weather ahead of her would be appropriately dark and dreary, something more akin to the storm in her heart. But the sun rose that morning into a clear blue sky over the Eastern Sea, shining as bright as ever. It only just warmed her cheeks before the sight laid out before her chilled her straight to the core.
Ships dotted the seas, dozens of them, each crowding into the port at Splendour Cove. It was not the first time Thalia had seen such a grand number of vessels headed for their harbor, but she had never seen so many of them geared for battle against Cair Paravel. The ships continued to press close, in spite of the catapults built into the cliffside, primed and ready to launch.
“My lady?” Daris, her general, awaited the order. They’d discussed their options well into the night, and Thalia had opted to wait for the morning light to reveal their odds.
Seeing them now, she let the question hang in the air for a moment.
“Give the command.”
The order came softly and with a terrible wretch of her heart, but Thalia felt the greatest pain came at the look on her sister’s face. It was why she did not turn to face her, or reach for her hand, though she desperately wanted it.
Despite their shared lineage, Petra was much more their mother’s daughter than Thalia ever was. She hadn’t taken to the waters like either of them had, and it only made her decision all the worse.
Weary, she let her eyes drift shut as she turned to the dwarves and satyrs to her right. “Burn the ships.”
'Forgive me…'she thought, watching the arc of fire that cut across the sky, from the castle’s battlements down to the ships and sea below.
She watched with Petra as each blazing, moss-covered stone landed, whether into the bay or in the sails of the vessels crowding in, or to the port walls themselves.
Many of the ships were not their own, but the harbor itself was Narnia’s joy. Built up in the years her mother sat upon the throne alone, the port stood as much a symbol of the kingdom as Cair Paravel did itself.
But her father, her aunts, and her uncle were gone. Her mother, too, was gone. Even her brother was gone. And though they’d held onto the kingdom the last fifty years, Thalia knew there was not much time left.
Petra’s hand slipped into hers, and though she could feel the shake of the fingers entwined with her own, Thalia felt reassurance in them too.
“It was the only way,” she explained. Her voice was nothing more than a whisper in the wind, drowned by the chaos around them.
Petra heard her regardless and squeezed her hand. “It can be rebuilt.”
It was a hopeful thought, but Thalia knew the chances of it happening were low. They had already received word of unrest in the far Western Wood, along the border with Telmar. The attacks from the sea alone were unprecedented, and after so many decades of peace among the kingdoms, Narnia had not been prepared for such an onslaught. If Telmar was to advance, they would lose it all.
Daris had asked that morning, exasperated as they all were, where this trial had come from. This seemingly sudden discontent among the islands of the sea. But Thalia knew the core of the issue lay with her in some way, her and her siblings.
She had not had King Edmund’s keen eye toward fairness, nor Queen Lucy’s ability to assuage the pain of her countrymen and women.
Her brother, for all his bravery and honor, did not have their father’s courage and leadership, nor their mother’s eye toward strategy and wit.
Even Petra, who Thalia had long ago thought to save from the troubles and duties of ruling a kingdom, had not gained Queen Susan’s tact and grace in refusing marriage proposals that did not suit her.
No one incident had led to this attack, but together—with Thalia’s inability to manage the tenuous ties that had been knitted together before she was even born, Oryn’s quick temper and even quicker blade, and Petra’s flippant disregard toward the fragile egos of men in power—they had ruined the efforts of the monarchs before them. Together, they had failed the kingdom.
They had intended to be as the kings and queens before them had been, as their family had been. But despite the small but tenuous victories they had won in recent years, Thalia knew the truth. Living up to the legacy left to them had proven impossible. She and her siblings had been fighting an uphill battle for the past two decades, since the loss of their mother.
Thalia pulled herself free of her sister’s hand and turned away from the open skies. She did not need to see the ships burn. She did not need to see her people die. This was the beginning of the end of Narnia, and she did not need to see it.
Loss trailed them from the very moment they destroyed the port just south of the castle. Splendour Cove was awash in debris, and Petra spent much of the following days yearning to do more than watch from broken alcoves as a bloodied tide pushed and pulled the charred sands.
It was almost a relief when they fled. There was only so much Petra could take of the destruction of her home. Her first, but not her last.
The Telmarines attacked just a few weeks after the smoke from the port cleared. Against howling winds and drifting snow, they seemed to have marched with steady determination straight through northern edge of the Western Wood to Cair Paravel.
With their own numbers dwindled and the castle already half its usual structure, Narnia’s remaining forces hadn’t stood a chance. They’d had no other choice but to flee.
Across the fields and through the woods to the south, Petra and her sister led the Narnians along the Rush River, grateful for the water as it had yet to freeze over despite the deep winter. Along the way, several others emerged from the wood to join them. Petra was glad for their numbers. The kingdom’s people were survivors. History books had taught her of the Hundred Year Winter, and she knew they would survive and flourish yet again.
But they needed a place from which to stand first, because Cair Paravel no longer did. They needed a place in which to heal, to clear the death and despair that clung to the shadows of the faces around her.
“How much further, Thalia?” she asked, when they had stopped for the night. They were not far, she knew, after trudging through the snow in a steady but agonizingly slow pace for the past three days. If her memory were better, she might have known exactly. But it had been years since she traversed the wood here. Years since she had seen their destination.
Her sister, as she had since they left the castle, did not reply.
Instead, Kanul, the fox who stood nearby, answered for her. “We should reach the How tomorrow, your majesty. By midday, I reckon.”
Petra accepted the information with a small nod and an even smaller smile. His voice was tired. Drained and weary. Everyone’s was. If it wasn’t their voices, it was their bodies that held no strength. And if not their bodies, then their fatigue was evident in their faces.
Even in small doses, loss could upend a person’s conviction and destroy their determination. For many of those in the camp around her now, Cair Paravel, the lower town, the port at Splendour Cove—it was the only home they knew.
They had lost everything.
Petra herself had spent all of her life there, before marrying Ram, and returned to it after, when both he and Anvard had fallen.
To see another of her homes, the place where she had been born, fall. It was a pain she had not wished to feel.
With a quiet huff, she blinked back her tears. There would be a time for that later, or so she had told herself for several years now. Since Ram died and she returned to Cair Paravel, in fact. But now, as then, was not the time to give in yet. Danger remained and there was a good while further to go.
Pulling her cloak tighter around her, Petra stood. Thalia remained sitting where she had deposited herself, the moment they had come to rest, but many of the others were still moving. Setting aside space for themselves in the hollow of the cave they’d found and lighting fires by which to see and warm their cold and wet belongings.
Gathering up the dirtied edges of her skirts, Petra maneuvered her way around her people, checking, first, on the injured guards that came with them from the castle, and then the Narnians that had joined them afterward.
Their resources were limited, but she made certain that they were all attended to before she too turned in, curling into the space left for her beside her sister.
The How was smaller than Thalia remembered, but when they arrived, all that matter was that it was dry and warm. The longer they stayed, the more she became aware that the caves were less a place to recuperate than it was a place to retire. A place to stop, altogether.
She saw it in the faces of those who had come with them and found secluded rooms and spaces for themselves in the shelter they’d claimed. It had once been a sacred place for Narnians to gather, to rest, and to find some semblance of peace before continuing on to whatever journey or task that faced them outside the walls. In some ways, Thalia felt it was still just that. A hallowed ground where the true heart of Narnia could be felt.
However, within just a few days, the space around her changed, becoming more settled, more lived in. And within the various nooks and crannies, Thalia could feel a shift in the entire atmosphere—from the crisp and airy reprieve the space had once offered to something heavy and dark, as if their grieving went beyond their own tears and sniffles and permeated the walls.
Near the end of the first week, as she finished her usual early morning rounds through the long corridors—an effort to maintain some sort of routine—Thalia came to the conclusion that Aslan’s How was a fitting repository for their grief. The dirt beneath her feet and the rock of the walls surrounding her were stained an impossible red, as if the How were bleeding for them, for Narnia herself.
She tucked the thought away when her sister joined her on the outer ledge of the upper levels of the How. It was her usual destination, following her early morning rounds through the long corridors, and Thalia enjoyed her time outside. Overlooking the field across to the wood near the Dancing Lawn, the morning was quiet and peaceful. If she was diligent, she could convince herself that she was simply away from the castle for a hunt, that nothing was wrong. The snow-covered expanse ahead of her put Thalia in such gentle ease, it almost seemed possible.
She’d always loved the winter. The snow was something peaceful to her, and the winter offered a strange sort of comfort with its chill. It was a brief respite from the heat of the summer and a time to think back and ahead, all at once.
“Do you think we’ll see it again?”
Petra’s voice shook lightly, almost fragile, and Thalia looked over to find her sitting with her shoulders drawn in and her fingers curled over each other. It wasn’t just her voice that shook, but her entire body. Sighing, Thalia shuffled over and tossed the excess of her cloak around Petra’s shoulders, doubling the warmth of her own.
“See what?” she asked, though she knew already the answer. Just as her sister knew what her response after would be.
“Home. Cair Paravel.”
She didn’t answer for several long moments, steeling her thoughts against the her own anger at the question. Of course, she wished they would see it again. She wished they hadn’t had to leave in the first place. There wasn’t anywhere else she wanted to be but within the walls she’d spent her childhood, among the books and the weapons and the fields and the towers that had been the only home she had ever known.
It was not that way for Oryn, who spent so much of his life afield, between tent flaps and linen bedrolls. His home had been of the woods and mountain ridges, of the wet marshlands and windy grasslands within their kingdom more than any other place under the sky.
Neither was Cair Paravel quite home for Petra, either. Taking to the sea alongside their mother from the moment she could walk and tumbling across the decks and rolling along with the waves, hers was a home upon the waters, malleable and fluid just as she was.
It was a lonesome, indignant anger that swelled in Thalia as her sister thought to claim the castle as her own. It was unfair, in some ways. Cair Paravel had been Petra’s home as well. But it was not hers the way it was Thalia’s. Petra had not stood alone at the upper gates to send Oryn off toward Anvard with three hundred of their soldiers—never to be seen again. Petra had not watched the fleets funnel their way toward their port in waves, nor had she witnessed the the force of ballistic attacks as they rained against the eastern walls, shaking even the strongest of the columns.
She felt selfish in her distress, angry in her aging, that there was nothing more she could do for the home that held so much of their lives, of the legacies left to them. Just the thought of the castle, broken and in pieces, made every piece of her body ache.
“Thalia?”
She inhaled slowly and swallowed, as if the air would help her rise, instead of sink. “Perhaps. If we are lucky.”
She was not sure how much she believed in luck anymore. Not after losing Oryn, and Anvard, and the port, and Cair Paravel. The whole of Narnia felt lost to her now, and luck seemed beyond her reach.
More convincing was the though that she no longer deserved to see it again after bringing such a devastation to it.
It was from the younger fauns and satyrs that Petra got the idea, late one evening several weeks into their new residency within Aslan’s How.
The weeks had passed quietly, but a sense of routine had helped the Narnians to settle into the fortress they’d claimed for a home. Of everyone, the youngest had come to make the best of what they had quicker than their elders—certainly sooner than either Thalia or Petra had—and with a much brighter perspective as well.
She supposed it was a product of their innocence or their youth, something that allowed them the ability to float above the constant dread of everything they’d lost, where Petra herself, her sister, and many of their parents and fellow Narnians could only barely manage to keep their head above the waters of their pain. Petra wondered, briefly, whether there was something innate in children that provided such a sense of hope, and whether there was any truth in the idea that children were their future. She wished there was. Perhaps for the first time since arriving at the How, she fervently wished there was, because these children, blindly optimistic, were quite ingenious.
Petra sent word to Lantern Waste at once, glad that Thalia and several of the more stringent of their remaining council members were out on a hunt. Her plans were not quite pragmatic—having nothing to do with their physical survival. But Petra knew they were just as important, so she pressed forward without their approval, quietly conversing with the children on where and how they managed to conceive of the colors they used.
Two days after the hunting party returned, Daris was approached by a guard with an urgent message from the rear entrance toward the How. The centaur huffed in response, but turned toward Petra and Thalia before responding.
“Your majesties, it appears we have a visitor, but I can’t say I quite believe who young Halon here says it to be.”
“And who is that?” Thalia asked. She sounded tired, speaking down into her lap—she did not bring her gaze up to meet others often, anymore.
Petra, however, had already stood. She did not need to hear the name to know who had come.
“I… I believe it to be Mr. Tumnus, your majesty.”
Thalia’s head snapped up. “Tum… Tumnus?”
Petra reached a hand down to her, a small smile on her face as she spoke. “I called for him. I thought… well, I suppose it would be best to explain it just once. Come with me to greet him?”
She knew Thalia’s memory of the faun was greater than hers. Queen Lucy’s oldest friend in Narnia and Court Advisor to the Four Kings and Queens, Mr. Tumnus had only remained at court a handful of years after they had disappeared again. And when Phillip finally returned from Lantern Waste with tales of a strange metal tree of light, the faun took leave of the castle altogether, promising to watch for their sovereigns at the place where they had once, years ago, entered the great land of Narnia. They never did return, and so the faun had never graced the halls of Cair Paravel again. Petra only had a vague recollection of his glossy dark hair and strange but pleasant face. She’d been but a toddler still when he left court, but Thalia…
In the moment that the entrance cleared for their queens to see their visitor, Petra could see that it was fortuitous that Mr. Tumnus arrived while Thalia was present.
His fur had grown lighter, and he was a great deal older than Petra had expected, his face quite wrinkled and his steps horribly slow. But Thalia ignored it all—along with Mr. Tumnus’s rather formal greeting—in favor of throwing her arms around the familiar old faun entirely. It was the most animated Petra had seen her sister within the walls of the How in all their time here.
Over Thalia’s shoulder, Petra saw the faun’s face soften, melting into a warm comfort, and she smiled. For this alone, she had been right to call Mr. Tumnus to come. She hoped, after they heard of her plans for painting Narnia’s history upon the walls of the How, both he and Thalia would agree with her that that too was the right decision.
She wanted to cover the walls of their sanctuary in their stories, so that those who looked upon them would know all that Narnia had endured.
Petra, her family, her people—they had already lost too much, had too much taken from them. Their castle was overrun and left to ruin by invading Telmarines, but Narnia was not lost to the world entirely. Nor was it reduced to dust, as their ships were, burning in the shallow waters of their grand port.
Narnia was no longer theirs as it used to be, reduced to just the few hundred who resided there in the How and any others who had driven further into the woods. But their limited numbers was not a complete loss. Narnia was still in the people themselves, and Petra was desperate to give them something they could hold onto. Something that showed the world they survived. They had overcome such odds before, there was no reason to doubt that they would not again. So long as even just one of them still lived, Petra felt their kingdom held something worth honoring, and she wanted to do it the way all great wonders were honored: through story.
History sang of victory and triumph as much as it warned again mistakes and loss. Narnia needed both the lessons of their past as well as the hope woven through their successes. Without them, they would lose everything and the kingdom would never return to what it was—or even come close. But if the walls of Aslan’s How were covered in their story, then even if it took a year, ten years, a hundred, or a thousand years, perhaps Narnia and its legacy would return.