Chapter Text
“he was pointing at the moon but i was looking at his hand. he was dead anyway, a ghost. i’m surprised i saw his hand at all…i stayed as long as i could, he said. now look at the moon.”
—“the worm king’s lullaby”, richard siken
☼
It’s like this: Peter never smiles at Caspian. It’s not that he doesn’t smile at all—he does—but rather that he never seems to make any kind of expression except something closed off and hostile when he’s looking at Caspian, ever since their disastrous first meeting in the woods, and so the first time Caspian sees the High King’s smile, he nearly walks straight into a tree.
It’s a nice smile. He has a nice face, truthfully, when it’s not set into a mask of indifference or quiet fury, and sometimes even when it is. Caspian can’t help noticing it—the smile, that is. Not Peter’s face. Well, mostly. He has to snatch glimpses of it out of the corner of his eye, storing them up and setting them aside to turn over and over like a rock in the hand when he has a rare few moments to himself to breathe and to stand and to think. Here, Peter laughing unexpectedly at something Edmund says in his ear. There, Peter dropping a kiss atop Lucy’s head. Peter casting some sly in-joke out to Susan for her to pass back as easy as you please, and Peter grinning when talking with Reepicheep and Trufflehunter about the old days of Narnia.
(More than once, Peter smiling bravely for their troops despite his obvious pain.)
It makes him seem like an entirely different person; one Caspian thinks he’d like to know better.
Of course, it always seems like Peter doesn’t want to know him. He’s made that well and clear enough, and if it weren’t for the legends Caspian grew up on, or the moments he observes Peter without Peter noticing he’s there, he might not find Peter so captivating at all. Beauty will only go so far, after all, even beauty of the kind the High King possesses.
Still, Caspian sees how the Narnians rally behind Peter the way they simply wouldn’t for him, sees the pressure that comes with it, and he thinks he understands, just a little, why Peter doesn’t smile so much.
☼
When Dr. Cornelius stood in the castle courtyard and told Caspian everything he knew was about to change, his hand on the saddle horn and his voice low and urgent, it’s like as not that he didn’t mean Caspian would blow an ancient magical horn that very night, summoning the Kings and Queens of old, the eldest of whom would turn out to be the most beautiful, infuriating boy he’s ever seen. But sometimes, runs the old Narnian proverb that Cornelius taught him, life is as untamed as stories, and in less than a fortnight, Caspian’s own has unraveled into chaos.
He meets the High King’s blade before ever meeting the High King himself, which he ought to have taken as an ill omen from the start. He is ferocious as a lion and stronger than any boy should be by rights; the best swordsman Caspian’s ever met, and even after they’ve stopped fighting and gotten a good look at each other, Caspian still can’t seem to catch his breath.
There is salt stiffening the High King’s hair. Sweat gleams on his collarbone where a shirt made for a man taller and broader than he slips down his shoulder, not quite held in place by the belt of his shield. It has a lion’s head golden as his hair for a buckle.
“I thought you’d be older,” Caspian hears himself say, blinking in shock. He wonders, albeit briefly, if he is somehow dreaming, but even his dreams were never quite this lovely. Or annoyed.
“Well, if you like,” says the High King Peter, taking a step back towards the other youths—the other King and Queens, Caspian realizes—“we can come back in a few years.”
“No!” he blurts before realizing from the youngest Queen’s giggle that it was likely said in jest. Composing himself, Caspian says, “No, it’s all right. You’re just—”
He glances away from High King Peter for a moment, toward his brother and sisters, if only so he can remember how to breathe. It doesn’t help much. They really are a strange and marvelous bunch, the lot of them.
“You’re not,” Caspian manages, “exactly what I—expected.”
For a moment, he and the boy-King regard one another. Caspian wonders if this is what it feels like to be a mouse in the presence of a cat, though he imagines Reepicheep might take some offense if he were to say so. The sunlight is golden against the planes of Peter’s face. His eyes are blue the same way the sky is before a storm, and somehow much older than any eyes have the right to be in the face of one so young. He smells of apples and woodsmoke; of sweat and the sea.
It seems like he might say something, and Caspian very nearly wants him to say something, and then—
“Neither are you,” says the dark-haired boy he takes to be King Edmund, eyeing the space between Caspian and the High King with something like amusement, or understanding, or just plain resignation. Caspian hasn’t any idea what he sees or thinks he sees, but for a moment he very nearly takes a step back just so King Edmund will stop looking at him that way. It’s an uncanny expression on a boy years his junior—but he supposes the stories always called the Kings and Queens from Narnia’s golden years magic, after all. Perhaps it’s to be expected, even if nothing else about this scenario is.
In the end, Reepicheep provides sufficient distraction for the High King to turn away. King Edmund and Queens Susan and Lucy follow suit, giving Caspian a moment to regain his footing. His professor always told him stories of how the trees in Narnia used to move and dance, to pick up their roots and walk like any man might, and were Caspian not aware that the forests of Narnia have slumbered for a thousand years, he might expect to look down and find tree roots rearranging the earth beneath his feet, he feels so unsteady. But no—it’s just the force of a single boy’s gaze.
Not just any boy, at least, but a boy, nonetheless.
Peter the Magnificent turns out to be nothing like Caspian expected, and also everything like he dreamed, on those rare occasions whenever he really dared to.
Mostly, they were childish dreams of a lonely, friendless boy, but—well. Caspian’s not a child anymore. Neither are the Kings and Queens, he thinks, in spite of how they look. They are all standing on some strange and terrible middle ground, the wasteland between childhood and the rest of one’s life, after innocence is spoiled but before anyone will look at you and see someone capable of doing what must be done.
Most days, Caspian doesn’t yet feel a man, but neither is he the mere child he once was. There is something within him that has been waking slowly for years, something that has finally roared awake in a matter of moments, the way spring creeps on slowly for weeks and weeks before arriving all at once in a great green crackling thaw overnight.
When Aslan shakes his mane, all the old songs say, and maybe it’s blasphemous, maybe it proves him unworthy, but Caspian thinks he never needed Aslan to come alive. All it takes is the High King’s halcyon gaze shifting his way and Caspian is alive, alive, alive, and all his bones are singing.
It’s a shame, then, that Peter only ever seems to do it after in a quiet, seething rage.
High King Peter turns back to face him and Caspian, hands shaking, offers him back his sword. It has a golden lion’s head for a pommel. The hilt is still warm from his grasp. Caspian tries not to shiver as their fingers brush.
The High King sheathes his blade without so much as looking at it—the mark of a swordsman who has done it a thousand times before. For the space of two heartbeats, he holds Caspian’s gaze, and then he finally turns away.
Caspian is left feeling wanting in more ways than one.
☼
That first night, the atmosphere beneath Aslan’s How feels markedly different.
There has always been a grim sort of determination and a spark of rebellion in the air, but now—now that the Kings and Queens are here, pulled right out of the past or a legend or perhaps another world—now the How brims with whispers and magic and hope. It’s true that they arrived much younger and more headstrong than anyone expected, and everyone looks twice at Queen Lucy’s short stature despite her hand that rests steady on her dagger, but is it not true, Caspian asks himself, that it was these very children, hardly younger than they are now, who came into Narnia so long ago and cast down the Witch? Perhaps none of Caspian’s counselors understand the means by which they are so young after ruling Narnia for many golden years, but magic is a strange thing in all the stories, and stranger yet in practice. The horn was to bring help, and it has brought them these children—the Pevensies, so they’ve said to be their surname—and so they must be able to do something. Anything.
He doesn’t get much chance to counsel with them; the journey to the How from the Shuddering Wood is long, and the hour is growing late when they arrive. Even ancient monarchs need their rest, and it seems like all the remaining vitality drains out of them as they stand before the Stone Table and Aslan’s graven image on the wall. They set the night watch and share a spare meal, and Caspian tries to offer them cots, but they insist upon sleeping on the floor like everyone else, never mind that most of their troops are beasts, even Talking ones, who are accustomed to bedding down on the ground.
The Pevensies sleep in the room with the Stone Table, which feels eerie and well-suited both. There’s something about them that makes Caspian nervous, or perhaps just a little awed. Something about the set of Queen Susan’s mouth, which is anything but Gentle. The cleverness of King Edmund’s eyes, or the way that Queen Lucy, who hardly comes up to her brothers’ chests, carries herself like she expects an attack. More than that—like she’d ready for it. Like she can handle one. Caspian’s not so sure she couldn’t; there must be a reason she is called the Valiant, after all.
And then there is everything about the High King—Peter is all his siblings ever call him—who is curious and wonderful to behold, and also perhaps the most infuriating person Caspian has ever known. In the time it took them to cross the Shuddering Wood, he listened to all of Caspian’s strategies and dismissed half of them out of hand, then spent the journey from the Dancing Lawn to the How dismantling and rebuilding the rest. There can be no arguing that his suggestions are good ones, and Caspian is grateful for them, but it rankles at times to feel so useless now that greater leaders are here.
Somehow, Peter Pevensie seemed to grow more kingly than ever as they strode through the silent woods—like the very air and sunlight itself were bringing him and all his siblings more fully out of the past and anchoring them to Caspian’s Narnia. He never stopped eyeing Caspian warily, though, when he thought that Caspian wasn’t looking.
His first mistake, really. It’s impossible not to watch Peter, or at least it would be really quite hard.
All this and more weighs heavily on Caspian’s mind, which is perhaps why he cannot sleep for hours upon hours, instead pacing the snaking corridors of the How long after the majority of the diurnal creatures have bedded down to rest.
Once, he passes by the chamber where the Stone Table stands as solemn and broken as ever. The Kings and Queens have curled up in a heap at the foot of it like so many children sharing a bed, arms slung over waists and ankles tangled together and faces tucked beneath chins. In the dim and shadowy room, in a place such as this, so strange and old and full of magic, they are almost like one many-limbed creature instead of four beings, distinct.
As he lingers for a moment in the doorway, however, Caspian notices three things.
One: the Pevensies sleep with the elder at the edges and the younger in the middle, Lucy nestled snugly against Peter’s chest with Edmund’s arm over her shoulder like a shield.
Two: Susan’s bow and quiver are laid neatly within reach, her fingertips just inches from her weapon, and Peter’s hand still grips the hilt of his sword.
And finally, three: the High King is not asleep after all, because Caspian can see the torchlight reflecting off the irises of his half-lidded eyes where he reclines with one arm around his sister and all his muscles still tensed for a fight.
His gaze slides to where Caspian stands in the doorway, and it takes everything in Caspian not to redden and flee like a fool. Instead, he nods stiffly, then reddens, then flees like slightly less of a fool, but still a fool, nonetheless.
It’s about then that he gives up on sleep and makes his way carefully out of the How. If one knows the passages of the How well enough, it is a small matter to navigate up and up and up until one finds any number of hidden openings onto the upper tiers of the How. From several of these, it’s easy enough to climb up to the summit, which is exactly what Caspian does, settling himself on the overgrown sod with his legs crossed. It’s a fair summer night, meaning all the stars look bright and clear as diamonds overhead. The moon is not quite full, hanging low enough in the sky that it almost seems close enough to reach out and pluck like an apple from a bough.
Though the surrounding forest blocks out quite a lot of the horizon, Caspian can make out some familiar constellations overhead; the Leopard, the Queen’s Horn, and just there is the edge of the Ship’s sails, coming up over the trees. To the north, he knows the constellation named for Narnia’s High King lies hidden from view. He spent many nights watching it rise and set through his window in the castle. Caspian is surprised to find that he misses being able to see it, but he does not miss the castle at all.
“Is it safe to be out here on your own?” a voice asks from a little ways below him, still unfamiliar in the way it curls around certain syllables and clips others short. Caspian starts and looks down to see the High King standing on the tier just below where Caspian sits, one forearm braced against the slender trunk of a birch sapling.
He doesn’t look very much like a High King out here in the dark, without his overshirt and the determined set of his shoulders he’s kept up all day. He looks very young and very tired. Caspian feels the same.
“I’m not alone,” he points out, relaxing his shoulders a fraction. “There are watchmen on the lower levels. And you.”
The High King—Peter—inclines his head. He still has his sword belted to his waist.
“I suppose that’s fair enough,” he says. “What are you doing?”
“Trying not to think, mostly,” Caspian admits, because it’s late and he’s tired and a little bit bold. “Stargazing, a little.”
“May I join you?” Peter asks. As though Caspian would ever say no. As though he even could—he, an exiled prince, and Peter outranking him in both title and legend.
He nods. Peter climbs the rest of the way to the top and settles with his feet over the edge. It’s a very boyish thing to do, making him feel younger and more human than ever.
“You know, Telmarines have different names for the stars than Narnians,” Caspian finds himself saying just to fill the silence, or perhaps to distract himself from the way the moonlight silvers the ends of Peter’s hair, limning the lines of his nose and jaw. He digs his fingers into the thin layer of turf between himself and the stone of the How, searching for any kind of anchor. “They come from our own legends and virtues, mostly. There’s the Hunter”—he points to a tangle of stars in the south—"Vengeance”—a triangle in the east—“the King’s Crown”—a box to the southwest. “But my professor told me their proper Narnian names in our lessons, and Glenstorm has taught me more since this venture began. I always preferred your names to ours.”
It feels strange and heavy in his mouth, that ours. The acknowledgement that despite the last weeks, despite everything, he is not a Narnian, but a Telmarine. An invader. A ruination. Perhaps that’s all he’ll ever be.
“They’re different than the ones in my old world,” says Peter, sounding a hundred leagues away.
A cloud obscures the moon for a moment, and they slip into shadows deep enough that Caspian cannot make out more than Peter’s silhouette against the sky, dark and devoid of details. Like this, he could be anyone. Both of them could.
So softly that Caspian might have dreamed it, Peter murmurs, “I missed the sky here.”
There’s a faint sigh from his direction, and the rustling of fabric as he shifts this way and that. When the moon comes back out again, clear and bright, Caspian can see he’s drawn one leg up to his chest and propped an elbow atop it.
Caspian’s not certain he’s allowed to ask, but his morbid curiosity gets the better of him. “How long has it been since you last saw it?”
He hardly understands the magic by which the horn brought forth the Kings and Queens out of the past. After hearing of magic all his life, it’s hard not to press for every detail he can get, just to try to make sense of it all.
There is a long moment of tangible silence from Peter, so heavy that Caspian wonders if he has made a grave misstep and very nearly begins formulating apologies in his head. And then, very thinly, Peter says, “A year. It’s been a year, in our world.”
Oh, Caspian thinks as everything unspoken behind those words hits him all at once. Only a year, for them. And for Narnia—
He tries to wrap his mind around it, the thought of leaving a place and coming back to it to find it so different. Caspian doesn’t know more than stories about what Narnia used to be like, but he can’t imagine that it’s anything like it is now. What must it be like, he wonders, to come home to find that home is stranger than you ever imagined? That it went on growing and changing and dying without you there to see it?
“And here,” he begins, slowly, but cannot bring himself to finish the thought. The sidelong glance Peter spares him says it all. A year for them. A thousand for Narnia, if the stories are to be believed.
He wonders if they are as changed by it as their home.
“What do you know,” Peter asks at length, still gazing up at the sky, “about Aslan’s How?”
“Very little,” Caspian admits, unable to begrudge him the rather tactless change of subject. “Just that it is a sacred place, and mostly a forgotten one. It’s the same for most of us. Reepicheep and the Mice know more, but I have been told it’s not much. That it’s some sort of tomb, perhaps.”
Peter scoffs softly, but it’s not a scornful sound. “It wasn’t always,” he says.
And Caspian cannot help the way he sits up straighter, leans in just a little, because he has always loved the stories about how Narnia used to be, and here is a piece of that Narnia sitting before him, as real and alive as Caspian himself. Peter doesn’t seem to notice the attentiveness, but he does keep talking.
“This was where Aslan rallied his armies,” he says, eyes sweeping out over the field below, “when we first came into Narnia. Before we fought the Witch. It wasn’t anything like this back then. The How wasn’t here at all.”
“It wasn’t?”
Peter glances at him, then away again. “No. That chamber where the Stone Table lies stood at the top of a great hill, and it wasn’t a chamber at all. It was all open ground. There wasn’t so much of this forest back then. You could see for miles and miles around from the summit.” His voice takes on a wistful edge that slips sharp and sweet between Caspian’s ribs. “You could see all the way to the mouth of the Great River. You could see Cair Paravel, and the sea, and the sun. I remember Aslan showed it to me before the battle, and before—”
He trails away into memory for a moment, lost in a past where Caspian cannot follow, before clearing his throat. His hand, where it rests against the stone of the How, is clenched into a bloodless fist.
“At any rate,” says Peter Pevensie, rather hollowly, “it’s not like that anymore.”
“What happened to it?” Caspian asks after one moment, and then two. The breeze rises and then falls in his ears. “What changed?”
And when Peter replies, “I don’t know,” it sounds like he’s mourning when he says it.
☼
(“I always wanted to see Cair Paravel,” Caspian admits quietly before they go back into the How.
It’s true. He used to daydream of it, sometimes, even though he knew the place it was thought to have stood was clear across Narnia from the Telmarine castle built centuries before—through the haunted Black Wood, at the very mouth of the sea his uncle so despised. It seemed impossible, back then, but then again—so did Narnians. So did the Kings and Queens.
When Peter doesn’t reply, he adds, “Doctor Cornelius told me that no living man knew where it once stood, or if there were any ruins left there at all.”
“There are,” Peter says, something like grief still in his voice. “Ruins, I mean. They’re still there, down on the island at the river’s mouth, only it wasn’t an island back then. It was a peninsula.”
“Oh,” says Caspian. He’s not so sure what else is left to say.
Peter looks at him for a moment, thoughtful and calculating. “Stand up.”
“Pardon?”
“Come on,” he says, a little impatiently, getting to his feet and extending a hand, which Caspian blinks at twice before registering he’s supposed to take it. “Up you come.”
He allows himself to be pulled to his feet, and then follows Peter to the eastern edge at the highest point of the How. They can just barely see over the tops of the surrounding forests to where the moonlight catches the faraway ribbon of the river, and beyond that, a glimmer that just might be the sea.
Caspian has never seen the sea before.
“Look there,” Peter says, touching only the tips of his fingers to Caspian’s shoulder and pointing with his other hand at a spot on the horizon very near to that fleeting glimmer. Queen Lucy’s constellation, the Lioness, hangs just above and to the left of his outstretched finger. “You can’t see it for the trees, but that’s Cair Paravel.”
His fingers fall away from Caspian’s shoulder as he adds, in a much quieter voice, “What’s left of it, that is.”
“Perhaps,” Caspian replies just as quietly, “one day it may be rebuilt.”
Peter is silent for five heartbeats before he says, “Yes. Perhaps.”
They stand there for a few seconds more before they retreat into the How and their separate sleeping arrangements. It feels like a lifetime to Caspian.)
☼
He thinks as he falls asleep that night that perhaps things won’t be so uncomfortable after all. That they can make this work, and Narnia will be better for it.
And then they raid the castle, and Miraz killed Caspian’s father, and dozens of Narnians die pointlessly in a failed infiltration they never should have tried. Caspian is not entirely to blame, because the raid was not his plan—indeed, it was the opposite of his plan. But he still feels sick to his stomach as they straggle their way back to the How in defeat, still tastes the sourness of guilt on the back of his tongue, because he still failed these people. He put his own petty need for revenge over their lives. How many died for his mistakes?
He didn’t kill them, and he didn’t lead them to the slaughter, but he certainly did not save them, either.
☼
Peter looks younger than ever when he throws all of Caspian’s mistakes in his face. His eyes are bloodshot and his cheeks are flushed and he spent half the walk from Miraz’s castle silently weeping, which Caspian only knows because he saw the tears on Peter’s cheeks when he stood on the other side of a rising drawbridge and very nearly—so it seemed—chose to stay. Later, stumbling homewards, he glanced over once in the reedy predawn light and saw the wetness still there, gleaming.
It's been raining hazily through the last leg of their journey, so it’s not so easy in daylight to tell that Narnia’s High King spent the night in tears. But Caspian saw, and Caspian knows. It is for that knowledge that he keeps his temper in check as long as he does; they’re all grieving. They’re all upset. He himself feels frayed to his very bones, pulled taut and ready to snap.
And then he does snap, eventually, because he’s only human. They all are.
(Sometimes, he wishes the Pevensies weren’t. Everything is so much more difficult when your legends are not legends but merely flesh and bone and brokenhearted enough to throw your mistakes back in your face so they won’t have to dwell on their own.)
Caspian hates that Peter can be saying the ugliest things he can manage to his very face, and yet some part of Caspian still can’t help but find him beautiful. The same way a vengeful god is beautiful, perhaps, or a lightning strike, right before it starts a forest fire. It’s infuriating.
He’s infuriating.
Probably that’s why Caspian can never seem to shut his mouth and ignore the way Peter is clearly itching for a fight. If he’s honest, Caspian’s itching for one, too. And he tries to let it go, he really does, but then—
“Your first mistake,” Peter says coldly, turning away from him, which stings far more than something so small should after everything else, “was thinking you could lead these people.”
“I am not the one who abandoned Narnia,” Caspian snarls back, and of course this is not his first mistake, nor even his second. Not by a mile. But it is one he will dearly regret, even long after he has been forgiven for it.
The High King’s eyes are frigid as the northern wastes. He looks wild. Wolfish. Like he might tear Caspian’s throat out without a second thought—but fragile, too, like he might be crying while he does it. He is dizzying. Confounding. Potentially as miserable as Caspian, or even more so, but it’s hard to focus on that when Caspian can hardly hear anything but the pounding of his own heart in his ears.
“You,” says Peter, his every word an arrow finding its mark, “invaded Narnia. You have no more right to lead than Miraz does!”
There it is. The thing that everyone has been thinking while they stand back and wait for Caspian to fail. The thing they’ll all say when he’s finally proven himself well and truly unworthy. The thing Caspian himself has been grappling with every night since he stumbled upon his childhood bedtime stories in the woods and foolishly thought he had a right to anything about them, much less to lead them—and into war, no less.
And what does Caspian do when his greatest fear is finally said aloud?
He runs. Or rather, he tries to run. To shove past Peter and retreat back into the How—fitting, he thinks, for the coward he is. The failure.
But Peter isn’t done with him yet. Sometimes it seems like he never will be.
“You, him, your father—”
Caspian freezes, heart twisting, as Peter delivers the contemptuous killing blow.
“—Narnia’s better off without the lot of you.”
He sees red, then, and feels the weight of his sword in his hands, and it’s only the icy, authoritative voice of Edmund that stops Caspian from potentially killing Narnia’s High King right there in front of the How, and subsequently getting himself killed, and thus probably dooming them all to extinction as well.
“Stop it!” Edmund commands, giving them both a furious look as he helps Glenstorm carry Trumpkin forward. Trumpkin, who is gravely wounded, like so many others in the few who survived. And Caspian had forgotten him entirely until this very moment.
Shame pours over him, searing hot. He can see it in dawning in Peter’s eyes, too, and immediately lowers his sword from the other boy’s throat. The tip of Peter’s own blade is already scraping the ground as Queen Lucy shoves past them, eyes brimming with tears but jaw set and hands steady as she reaches for the little bottle at her hip. All at once, Caspian remembers the legends of Queen Lucy the Valiant, and just why she was always said to be the first among the wounded and the last to leave their sides when all the great battles were over.
He must still have some faith in the old tales, then, because he doesn’t stay to see if the cordial will work. At least no more Narnians will die today. Sheathing his sword, Caspian retreats down the ramp into the depths of the How, blinking his burning eyes furiously. He will not weep for an audience. He will not weep at all. He cannot allow himself the luxury—not now.
Nikabrik follows him below like a shadow, and Caspian does not notice. Nor does he see the way Peter turns back to where he was standing, brows furrowed, lips parted as though to say something, anything to Caspian—
But Caspian is already gone.
☼
There are many benefits to using Aslan’s How as a stronghold and base of operations. It is highly defensible, favorably positioned, and large enough to house all their current troops—hence why they initially chose it. One of the downsides, however, is that there are not many places to go inside Aslan’s How, especially when one wants to be alone. The interior is mostly made up of twisting underground passages, which are too narrow for hiding, and Caspian can hardly sequester himself away in the room with the Stone Table, or the chambers they’ve been using for smithing and barracks.
His first thought is to make his way up and out onto the side of the How, where hopefully no one will come looking for him after the display he just put on. His feet, it seems, have other ideas, because when he looks up through a haze of exhaustion and misery, he finds himself standing in the little cave-like chamber Reepicheep showed him when they first explored the How—a chamber he himself showed the Kings and Queens not so long ago, where all the walls are carved with the very stories Caspian grew up on.
It was strange, seeing the real Kings and Queens standing beside their carven counterparts, Caspian had thought, and seeing how similar they looked. How young. Now, he’s not so sure. The crude renderings cannot capture the graveness of Edmund’s bearing, the wildness in Lucy’s heart. They don’t show Susan’s freckles, or the grief in Peter’s eyes.
Because of course, now that he’s here, Caspian cannot help but gaze down at the engraving of a younger, happier Peter Pevensie where he stands proud and resplendent upon the wall. He cannot help but wonder what happened to make Peter the Magnificent into the boy who just stood before him, sword drawn, with a look in his eyes like maybe he wanted Caspian’s blow to strike home. Because Peter, Caspian knows, is a far more capable swordsman than he. Just a single bout in a forest was enough to prove that; he’s faster and stronger and cleverer by far, and even when disarmed, he very nearly killed Caspian, and likely would have without Lucy’s intervention. If he had really wanted to hurt Caspian just there outside the How, there was nothing that could have stopped him.
Sometimes, Caspian thinks that he hates Peter Pevensie. More often, however, he will think of the confidence with which he handles his beautifully-wrought blade, or the way the sunlight fell across his cheekbones that first day in the forest, or the very tips of his fingers brushing Caspian’s shoulder blade atop the How, and Caspian becomes terribly unsure about the great knot of feelings that tangles in the pit of his stomach.
All this makes him a good deal harder to be angry at, so Caspian doesn’t think about it—of he tries not to, anyway. It’s rather hard to think of anything else, other than the failed raid, the Narnians’ cries, his uncle’s contemptuous sneer, Susan screaming Peter’s name across the drawbridge so loudly she still sounds scraped raw from it—
“Are you so glad of that magic horn now, boy?” comes Nikabrik’s voice, and Caspian nearly leaps out of his skin. Apparently he doesn’t expect an answer to his question—or presumes that he already knows it—because he saunters further into the little room, taking up far more space than his small stature alone, and continues, punctuating each pause with a tap on his sword’s hilt, “Your kings and queens have failed us—your army’s half dead—and those that aren’t will be soon enough.”
“What do you want?” Caspian asks, tattered remnants of his anger flaring just enough to remind him of how weary he feels. “Congratulations?”
Nikabrik has been clear from the start with his disregard for Caspian, and for any humans, including the Pevensies. Caspian cannot fathom why he would be here now, unless it is to rub salt in the already-smarting wound of their failure.
All he wants is to be left alone long enough to scrape together a semblance of the leader the Narnians expect him to be. To find enough scraps of bravery to hold himself steady a little longer, until they’ve figured out where to go from here. Surely even Nikabrik wouldn’t begrudge him that.
But then Nikabrik leers up at him and says, You want your uncle’s blood. Says, We can get it for you. He strides past Caspian, all swagger, but there is a deadly kind of confidence at the heart of him that has hooked Caspian’s curiosity and won’t let it go.
Their numbers are devastated, their loyalties divided, and Miraz will be coming for them relentlessly, it’s true. If there are options yet unexplored, perhaps it would be wise to consider them.
Casting one last glance at the once-rich etchings on the wall, pointedly avoiding Peter’s carven gaze, Caspian makes his choice. He takes the bait. He follows Nikabrik.
And of course it doesn’t end well.
☼
His first clue is the way Nikabrik looks at the Stone Table. Where everyone else regards it with the utmost wonder and respect, all but Queen Lucy too awed to so much as lay a hand upon it, here Nikabrik merely sneers dismissively.
By the time the second arrives as a deep-set unease crawling down his throat and into his bones, Caspian finds himself pinned into a circle with his breath clouding before him and his hand bleeding freely onto the stones.
All the stories of the White Witch never described her as beautiful, but she is—beautiful and terrible as the frosts that sometimes kill the harvest before their time, and even the knowledge of the lean seasons to come cannot make the way they glitter under the dawn any less lovely.
Caspian wonders, fleetingly, if this is Narnia at its core: a beauty with teeth. A magic that devours. A thing you can lose yourself to, whether you mean to or not.
This isn’t what he wanted. None of it.
But then the Witch’s hand is straining towards his, and though he can’t see it, the magic circle flares around his feet, and it becomes very hard, suddenly, to think about any kind of wanting except for the thought that he must stand here, very still, and keep his hand outstretched, even though he’s quite sure there was something else he wanted a good deal more just a moment ago.
Caspian always seems to be reaching for something. It appears he has forgotten, suddenly, what that something may be.
It’s like this: the Witch, enchanting, reaches. Caspian, enchanted, reaches back.
And chaos unfolds around them.
☼
(“Get away from him!” someone yells, and then Peter’s there, boots scuffing the circle to naught as he shoulders Caspian roughly away from the dais and the ice and the Witch, the Witch, the Witch, how could Caspian have forgotten the Witch?
Peter bleeds freely from a cut on his brow. His hands are steady on his sword. He is quite possibly the most beautiful thing Caspian has ever seen, and why is it, he wonders, that this keeps happening at the most inopportune moments? There is no trace of his earlier fury on his face. As it happens, that’s a bad thing, because he’s also at least halfway enchanted himself by the time that Caspian pulls himself up on his elbows, teeth aching to the gums with the taste of magic.
“You know you can’t do this alone,” says the Witch.
And Peter hesitates.
His sword has only just begun to waver when Edmund’s blade bursts through the Witch’s ice-bound stomach. Caspian stumbles to his feet too late to do anything or help anyone, too late for anything but staring at the silent, indecipherable exchange between the two brothers before Edmund says, sounding half-bitter and half-steeped in a quietly controlled anger, “I know. You had it sorted.”
By his tone, it’s clear he doesn’t agree one bit. When he turns and strides away, Peter flinches as though struck.
Caspian thinks, again, This isn’t what I wanted.
And still, it’s exactly what he got.)
☼
After Susan gives Peter a look even fiercer and sharper than Edmund’s, which Caspian hadn’t known was possible, and ushers Lucy out of the chamber with Trumpkin following behind, it’s just Peter, Caspian, three corpses, and the ice melting at their feet beneath the carved Lion’s watchful gaze. Caspian isn’t sure he should still be here, but somehow, he can’t bring himself to leave, either.
An excruciatingly silent moment passes, and then—
“I’m sorry,” Caspian blurts, just as Peter says, “Look, Caspian—”
They both stare at one another, abruptly silent and uncertain. Peter opens his mouth and then closes it. In the firelight, Caspian can make out a muscle fluttering in his jaw.
“Please, let me,” he says. Peter nods, fractionally. “I am truly sorry for—all of this. The Witch. Nikabrik. I didn’t realize—”
But no, he realizes, cutting himself off. Justifications, empty or otherwise, will do no one any good. Caspian had wanted what Nikabrik was offering, one way or another, and he nearly doomed them all because of it. There’s no use in hiding from that. Not now, and not ever.
“It’s all right,” Peter says rather tiredly. “There’s no harm done, at least. Well, mostly. It’s really my fault, anyway. I suppose I’m the one who made you feel like the Witch was your only option.”
This, Caspian did not expect. Has all the fire that’s been snapping between them for days finally fizzled out, then? Or maybe they’re both too exhausted to bother.
“I should not have accused you of abandoning Narnia,” he says, and it comes out softer than he intends.
Peter turns away from him at an angle, raking one hand through his hair. The action dislodges a rain of tiny flecks of ice. He’s bleeding from a dozen tiny scratches where the imploding ice caught him on the side of his face and hand. He says, “That’s the thing, though, isn’t it.”
Folding his fingers into his scraped-raw palms, Caspian makes a questioning noise.
“Well, you know,” replies Peter heavily, “you weren’t exactly wrong, now were you? We didn’t mean to leave, but we still left. And look what happened.”
Caspian does not touch Peter’s shoulder, but he comes very close before realizing the hand he’s outstretching is the one cut by the hag, and still bleeding, at that. He curls it loosely back into a fist and lets it fall to his side instead, stinging, regretful. “That is not your fault—”
Peter silences him with a shake of his head, a set of his jaw.
“Let’s just not,” he says. There is something unmistakably weary about it. “Call it square and such. We can shake on it.”
He holds out a hand, and this time Caspian does reach out. Except it’s the same hand as before, still bleeding, and of course Peter notices.
“Wait,” he says, and whether because of the authority he still wears as close as fur lining a cloak, or because of the furrow of his brows as he says it, Caspian waits. Peter’s fingers are shockingly gentle as he takes Caspian’s hand and turns it palm-up, holding it in both of his like a wounded bird he doesn’t want to startle away. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s just a cut,” he dismisses.
“If you say you’ve had worse, I’ll hit you,” Peter says. “You’re just like Edmund. Did you know, he got shot in the shoulder once and tried to tell me it was nothing? Sit down, just there.”
“Peter,” Caspian says. Peter’s eyebrows rise and he looks rather startled, which is how Caspian realizes he can’t quite recall if he’s ever called Peter by his name and his name alone before. He flushes, looks away.
After a moment, Peter sighs.
“Let me help,” he insists, very softly. “It’s the least I can do.”
And Caspian finds that his throat is suddenly too tight to speak, so he merely nods and sinks onto the very edge of the Stone Table where Peter indicates. Peter himself strides to the side of the room, stepping around the corpse of the hag with a look of distaste. After a moment spent rummaging in the bundle of packs and blankets stored in the far corner of the room, he returns with bandages readied and sets to work on Caspian’s wounded hand.
There are not a great many things Caspian has learned about Peter Pevensie since the horn pulled him out of his own life and smack into Caspian’s, but in this moment, he learns another: he is good with tending wounds, or at least with the aspect of bandaging small ones. He cleans and bandages Caspian’s cut with practiced, fluid movements, and there is the same quiet surety about them as when he looks over a map whilst considering troop placements and scouting plans, or when he talks strategy with Glenstorm and Reepicheep, or when he fights side by side with Susan, or leans over to Lucy with some comment to make her laugh.
It’s a little bit mesmerizing to watch him work—enough that Caspian almost forgets it’s his own wound Peter is tending, until the prickling pain kicks back in.
As Peter is wrapping the cloths carefully around Caspian’s palm in purposeful lines, he releases something like a sigh, but none of the tension in his shoulders.
“I really can’t believe I did that,” he mutters, more to himself than to Caspian, it seems. “After everything.”
Caspian nudges at Peter’s knee with his own, and then immediately regrets it, because that means now he can’t help but think about their proximity to one another. If only for a distraction, he asks, “Did what?”
Peter glances up at him through his fringe. “The Witch. I almost—after all that, I almost let her out.”
“More accurately, we almost let her out,” Caspian corrects. “You were enchanted as much as I was.”
“Mm,” Peter says. “Was I.”
It’s not a question, and something about the downwards tilt of every line on his face, the way Caspian hasn’t seen his shoulders relax fully since even before the raid, makes him think of the Witch’s words to Peter, the ones that made him very nearly lower his sword and walk right into her arms.
You know, she told him, you can’t do this alone.
And it is because of this that Caspian realizes perhaps Peter—High King Peter, Peter Wolf's-bane, Peter the Magnificent of the Northern Skies—is just as afraid of failure as Caspian.
“You couldn’t have known what she’s like, really,” Peter is saying, finishing with the wrappings and tying the ends of the bandages off neatly behind Caspian’s wrist. “None of you. But I’ve fought her before. I ought to have known better. Me more than anyone.”
Self-loathing, now that Caspian knows where to look for it, is a bitter film on his tone.
“Because you are High King?” he prompts, tilting his head to shake a sweat-tangled chunk of hair out of his eyes.
Peter hesitates for just a moment before he says, very haltingly, “Because of Edmund.”
Caspian’s confusion must be written on his face, because Peter studies him for a long, quiet moment, and then he opens his mouth, and he tells Caspian a story about a boy, enchanted by a Witch who seemed to be a Queen, and how that boy was nearly killed twice over by her before all was said and done. A boy who destroyed the Witch’s wand on the field of battle and took the shattered end of it to his stomach for his troubles.
“I saw it happen,” Peter says, fingers fussing uselessly with the knot in Caspian’s bandages. “It was—” He stops. Swallows. Visibly wrenches his face back into something more stoic. Caspian imagines it’s what watching someone die is like, all the life and light going out of them from one moment to the next. “We nearly lost him. We would have, if not for Lu’s cordial. He lived every day in Narnia after like he was trying to make up for what he did, and after all of that, I nearly mucked it all up because the Witch”—he says it like it tastes rather like some other word, and a foul one at that—“smiled at me and offered her help. Pathetic.”
This last part he says under his breath, but he’s still standing close enough to Caspian that Caspian hears it easily. In fact, Caspian realizes, Peter is quite done with tending to Caspian’s hand, and has just been standing there for half his story, not quite holding Caspian’s hand, but not quite not holding it, either. And Caspian truly has no idea what to do about either of those things.
“The stories,” he manages, after a few seconds of watching Peter tilt his hand this way and that, apparently inspecting his handiwork, “they don’t mention most of that. The destruction of the Witch’s wand, yes, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard about King Edmund being wounded.”
“Yes, well, stories tend to leave out the less glamorous parts, I’ve learned,” Peter replies dryly, finally dropping Caspian’s hand. The thing is, though, there’s a tremor to his voice that wasn’t there before.
Caspian forgets, sometimes, that Peter isn’t just High King of Narnia. He’s a boy, too—a person with enough weight on his shoulders even a giant would falter to bear it. Caspian didn’t know giants still existed until last week, nor Peter. He thinks Peter is a giant of a different sort, and that he is also smaller than Caspian ever imagined. His hands are no larger than Caspian’s. He is shorter by half an inch. He is greater, also, than Caspian could ever dream to be.
And he is stepping back, now, tilting his head, and squinting at Caspian’s torn left sleeve.
“Did you ever get this looked at,” he asks, fingers slipping along the bloodstained edge of the tear, close enough to the skin of Caspian’s shoulder that Caspian, unsure if he is suddenly bracing himself for the pain of a touch or the touch itself, very nearly forgets how to breathe, “after—was it your aunt who shot you?”
“No,” Caspian says, swallowing past the knowledge that Peter noticed that, that he remembered, even after everything. It is small and hard and smooth and rests almost painfully in the hollow of his throat. “Well—yes, it was my aunt. But no, I haven’t. It’s—”
“If you say it’s just a cut‚” Peter begins, and though his tone is threatening, there’s a ripple of something like laughter running through it, watery though it is, “I swear on the Lion’s mane, Caspian—have you just been bleeding this entire time?”
“No,” Caspian protests, though he has no idea if that’s accurate or not. “It stopped after we left the castle.”
At his mention of the castle—of their failed raid—all humor fades from Peter’s face. Caspian wants to kick himself for that, but there’s hardly anything to be done about it now.
“But what if it hadn’t?” Peter asks, tight and brusque and entirely business once again. Before Caspian can protest, he’s rounding to Caspian’s side and starting up the entire process all over again, this time on his shoulder, which really is just a scratch. “You’ve got to think about yourself, sometimes, you know. We’re not always going to be here.”
“I thought you accused me of being selfish,” Caspian jests, but it sounds weak even to his ears.
Peter’s fingers still against his skin.
“Well,” he says, “I’ve been plenty selfish, too.”
It’s not an apology, exactly. None of this is. But it’s—something. It’s shaped like one, maybe, if one were to walk around an apology in the dark, with their eyes closed, and only their hands outstretched to feel at the shape of it. It’s an olive branch, if it’s anything.
In the end, Peter finishes bandaging his arm in silence, and they never do get to shake on it, but that’s the very last thing on Caspian’s mind when he leaves the room and Peter still standing by the Stone Table behind, his shoulders still heavy with a weight he won’t let anyone else bear.
Here is a secret: Caspian is more confused by him than ever.
☼
He sits on the outside of the How with Cornelius at his side and listens as his professor tells him of his dream for Caspian to be king. To be a good one.
Once, this might have thrilled Caspian—the thought of kingship. His professor’s faith in him. Even leading the rebellion seemed exciting at the start; the stuff of legends, it felt like. The stuff that might one day become them. But now, all Caspian can think of is the bitterness in Peter’s voice as he said, Stories tend to leave out the less glamorous parts. Of the way the carvings in the How can never capture him in his entirety, even by half. Of the look in his eyes when he wrenched himself away from the sight of his people dying before him, and the flicker in the back of Caspian’s mind that whispered, This is what it is to be King when he saw it.
He is not so sure legends and kingship are all he was raised to believe.
He is not so sure of anything anymore.
And that’s before Miraz’s army begins pouring out of the woods.