Work Text:
SPLENDOUR COVE. SPRING 1020
The shores of Splendour Cove were typically quiet in the wee hours of the night, just ahead of daybreak, but its usual silence was broken today by the soft wails of a sleepless baby.
Nadora had tried, fruitlessly, to quiet her daughter for most of the evening. She’d attempted to rock her and bounce her and even sing to her—all tactics that had worked wondrously with her other children. But Petra, no more than a few weeks old, had no taste for it. So, despite the predawn hour, Nadora had wrapped her babe up tight and snug, donned her own thick velvet cloak, and left the castle entirely.
Her feet had taken them through the gardens and down the dirt path until dirt gave way to rocks. It was a dangerous path in the dark, but Nadora had walked it enough to know it with her eyes closed. All paths to the sea were like that for her—clear and simple and direct.
The horizon was beginning to burn softly, spelling out the coming day, but it was early enough in the season that the night’s chill would linger until mid-morning. And maybe it was the brisk morning air that did it, or maybe it was the briny taste of the breeze coming in over the water. But by the time Nadora set foot to the breach, Petra had stopped crying long enough to fall asleep.
It was the first in a long string of nights that Nadora felt any sort of peace with the girl, and she supposed she should have taken the chance to rest, herself. But it was a waste to have come all this way just to turn around, so she stepped carefully out of her shoes and walked along the shore.
It had been eight months since she’d been this close to the sea. Eight months since she’d let the tide come in to wash her toes or have the sand give way from beneath her feet as the water retreated. Eight months since she’d last stood here and watched the sky as she did now, counting the stars.
It had been autumn then, and it was not a child she held in her arms, but her husband. Nadora had stood on this same beach with Peter and watched the stars through the night until the sun came up and chased them away.
It wasn’t long after that night that he’d left with his siblings to seek the White Stag and never returned. Their horses had come back from the Western Woods with their saddle and packs but no riders, and subsequent searches through the woods and the rest of the kingdom had turned up empty.
Nadora herself had gone to search for them and whens he returned, unsuccessful, Oreius and Asena had come to her with the request to be relieved of their commands so that they might dedicate any and all their time to searching for the kings and queens.
Nadora had granted their requests with little fanfare. If she could not continue her search for her husband and her family—and she could not, given her responsibility as queen—then someone had to. Yet now, standing on the shore with Petra in her arms, she resolved to call them back soon.
“They won’t find him,” she whispered to the stars above. “Any of them.”
Nadora had known weeks ago, upon Petra’s birth, that they would not be found. She hadn’t said it aloud until this moment, but she’d known then. It was why she’d named Petra after her father. She never would have done it if she believed Peter and the others were still out there somewhere, lost. Nadora had held out hope for as long as she could, but when Peter had not arrived in time for Petra’s birth, well… The truth of things became clear to her then.
“He didn’t know about you before,” she said, glancing briefly down at Petra’s sleeping face. “But your aunt and uncle did.”
Susan and Edmund had both been so ecstatic when she told them—each in their own way. Susan had threatened another tournament celebration, almost immediately, and Edmund had jokingly asked if she and Peter planned to have enough children so that all five of them would one day each have a small child to hold for the royal portraits.
Nadora smiled softly and looked out over the water. The horizon was striped in brillant hues of pink and red, brightening the sky above into a soft blue.
“They would have told him…” Nadora’s voice broke around the lump in her throat, but she pressed on. “The moment they all realized something was wrong and they wouldn’t make it back as planned, one of them would have told your father about you.”
She had to believe it was true. That Peter knew, because it guaranteed that he would have done any and everything he could to come back, and Nadora had to believe that he tried to make his way home to her—to their family—but for some reason couldn’t.
“It must have been outside his control. Your father… He could do just about anything, you know. So the fact that he hasn’t come back to meet you yet just means…” She took a breath, trying to keep her heart from crumbling. “It just meant it was outside his control.” It was the only possible reason. The alternative… Nadora refused to believe the alternative.
The kings and queens of prophecy were missing. But they were not dead. That possibility was unacceptable, and yet it was this belief that posed its own problems.
Nadora did not know how to go about grieving someone who still lived. It caused a sort of brokenness she’d never understood before. Mourning the living—those lost to her despite not being lost to the world—chipped away at her soul each day, leaving behind a void she was not sure she could fill.
Nadora watched Petra for a while longer, uncertain if she would still turn and wake, but eventually she lifted her gaze back out over the water. There was a light breeze cutting through the swollen, salty air. It tugged gently at the loose hair she’d left unpinned behind her ears as she closed her eyes. For a moment, she imagined herself aboard a ship, sailing out east.
The horizon bright and orange behind her eyelids, she knew. The color bold and rich where the sky met the sea, and as she stood there, Nadora considered the possibility that Peter and the others were simply somewhere beyond the eastern edge of the known world.
How she wished she and Lucy might have made more progress on their maps and charts.
“Where are you?” she asked softly, opening her eyes to search the sky. “The kingdom needs you. And the children, they…”
Oryn was too young to properly remember his father, but Thalia had been stuck to Peter’s side every day of her life until he’d left on the hunt. Old enough to talk clearly now, she asked about him so often Nadora’s chest constantly ached from the pain of not knowing how to answer.
“You promised,” she muttered, taking in a shaky breath, only to let it all out again in a shout. “Right here on this shore, you promised! You’d be by my side, and I’d be by yours, for the rest of our lives—you swore it!”
Petra scrunched her nose at her mother’s tone, twisting in unrest, but Nadora didn’t have the energy to try and keep her from waking fully. Instead, she kicked up a clump of wet sand, and it plunked into the water as the tide came in. Distracted by the noise, Petra twisted around to watch as the water drug the sand out to sea.
“Come back,” Nadora pleaded as she shifted a now-squirming baby into a better position in her arms. “I need you. We all do.”
Truth was, she was exhausted. And it wasn’t just Petra that kept her from rest. The entire kingdom was at a loss—and worse yet, the people were beginning to lose hope altogether that the four monarchs would return. It did not help that this past winter had been long and harsh, colder than any since the before the Long Winter. Even Nadora had wondered whether there was any truth to the rumors that the White Witch was returning. But spring had come just as it had the year before, and the fear thawed some with it.
The only trouble was, there wasn’t anything beneath the fear.
Petra garbled something unintelligible, and Nadora sighed in agreement. She felt, some days, that there was no difference between her baby’s infant babbling and her own responses to the court and the kingdom’s people. None of Nadora’s answers regarding the whereabouts of their kinds and queens were suitable. There weren’t any answers, only guesses, and theories, and unknowns.
Swaying gently, Nadora rocked Petra back into silence.
Some had suggested that they’d been captured, taken from Narnia into Calormen to the south, or Telmar to the west. But few thought it plausible. The portion of the Western Woods in which they were last seen was a far cry from even the closest edge of Lantern’s Waste, and the deserts of Calormen were clear on the other side of the Archenland’s mountains.
Others wondered if they had not become waylaid, taken from the woods altogether and sent out to sea. But Nadora had personally searched the ships caught along the coast in the weeks after their disappearance and monitored all incoming and outgoing vessels for months afterward. Even now she received a regular activity updates from Haifa and Varya. No ship moved upon the Eastern Sea without her hearing about it. And besides, it did not matter whether they were stranded or hurt. Lucy alone was resourceful enough to sail them straight home, if not with her siblings than on her own to retrieve help.
And there it was, another reason Nadora had lost hope of finding them. It was the same, every time she ruminated upon the possibilities. Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy couldn’t simply be stuck somewhere in this world. They knew the land too well to be lost, and they loved their kingdom and their people too much to be kept from it by any ordinary means. Which left only the possibility that they were being kept from Narnia by some extraordinary means outside their control.
She braced Petra carefully on her hip and exhaled slowly before facing the sea again. The sun had finally broken free of the horizon now, and the day had properly begun. Which meant there were two young toddlers running through the castle in search of her already, with Jurien or Mrs. Beaver or the rest of the council not far behind with the day’s agenda.
Instinctively, Nadora reached for the pendant nestled at the base of her throat. It was silver, with an tiny silver ship sailing upon calm water, meant to represent the Drifting Noble . Varya commanded it now, of course, but everyone still spoke of it as Nadora’s. Peter had commissioned the necklace for their last wedding anniversary, nearly a year ago now, and it was the last proper gift he’d given her. It was a perfect representation of her ship, except for for the sun carved into the sail. That, Peter had said, was meant to allow her to see the way forward, even in the dark.
At the time, Nadora had scoffed, claiming she could find her way anywhere, in any condition. But since he’d gone, her hand had drifted to the pendant more times than she could count, and she ran her forefinger against the engraved symbol unendingly in an attempt to sooth her anxiety.
“Can you see the sun or is the moon still up for you?” she asked. “Are the stars even the same where you are? Can you read them and find your way back?”
Nadora considered, tiredly, the only theory she had not yet dismissed.
Peter and his siblings had spoken sparingly of their home world. There had been little reason to discuss it, and Nadora had never pushed. But the truth of the matter was, that they’d come from a world separate from Narnia, all those years ago. It stood to reason that they might have gone back. Mr. Tumnus, she knew, believed this possibility more than any other. He’d been the first to meet Lucy, after all. Not far from his home at the far edge of the Western Wood.
But the magic that had brought Lucy and the others to Narnia was unknown to her. And there was no guarantee it was the same magic that took them away, either. No one but Aslan truly understood that sort of thing anymore, and Nadora had no authority or power when it came to the great lion. No one did. He lived on a different plane altogether, from the way Mrs. Beaver and the other Narnians went on about him. As she’d never met him, Nadora wasn’t entirely certain herself, what to think.
She looked down to find blue eyes staring up at her. For a moment, she forgot where she was, staring into the eyes Petra had received from her father. Then, the bell tower at the gates above began ringing to signal the first hour of the day, and Nadora sighed.
Wherever Peter was, whatever the reason he and the others had not returned, the truth remained—there was still a kingdom to be run and duties to be upheld.
Her shoes remained abandoned on the north end of the shore, near the mouth of the trail back up to the castle, but Nadora made no move to leave the beach just yet.
“Happy Birthday, my love,” she said softly.
It was not customary to steal a birthday wish, but Nadora did not think Peter would mind. In fact, she hope her wish and his—wherever he was—would be the same. Just this once.
“I will wait however long it takes.” Another month, a year, or ten. What did it matter when every day felt like a lifetime? “Please, just come home.”