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“Caspian the Seafarer?” Tirian asked in response to Eustace's request, campfire lighting his face in a way perfect for storytelling. “Of course I know of him, though that's not a title I've seen as often.”
“Really?” asked Eustace. “‘Cos that's what everyone called him back when we two were last in Narnia.”
“Was it?” said Tirian, stroking his chin contemplatively. “I suppose it makes sense enough.” He sighed. “I'd have loved to spend much more time talking to you two, and recording it, if the circumstances weren't what they were. It might sound silly, interrogating Narnia’s great heroes on particulars for my history books, but―”
“Not at all,” Jill assured him. “We’d have loved to help.”
Tirian smiled. So did Jill and Eustace, but all three of their smiles were a bit sad.
“Anyway,” said Eustace, who did not like lingering on sad conversations, “What do you lot call him? Caspian, I mean.”
“Caspian the Liberator, he is called,” Tirian replied. “For he was the first true Narnian King in a thousand years, and it was his war of deliverance that freed the Narnians from Telmarine rule.”
Eustace nodded. “I guess that bit seems rather more important, in the grand scheme of things.”
“More important than sailing to the end of the entire world?” asked Jill, who had never liked learning about wars in history class.
“One cannot sail to the end of the world if one has no home country to come back to in the first place,” replied Tirian.
Eustace, who liked to sound very logical, added, “Fantastical adventures might be exciting, but it’s the revolutions and politics and such that give you room to have them in the first place.”
“Knock off it, Eustace,” Jill said, because he was right, but didn’t need to say it.
“You know,” Tirian started, a far-off look in his eye. “I’ve always thought of the history of those old kings―” both Jill and Eustace exchanged a look at something so recent for them being called ‘old’ “―had rather the most fantastical adventures in recorded Narnian history. Caspian especially. There are so many stories about him, you know, that one struggles to parse what is fact and what is fiction.”
“Fact or fiction, I’d like to hear about him,” Eustace said. “I knew him once, Caspian, but―well...” he became rather quiet. Back in England, he’d spoken about it more, but the sort of grief that came from being the best of friends with someone for a few months and then turning around to see them die of old age wasn’t something you could really understand without feeling it yourself.
“You call him the Liberator?” Jill asked, patting Eustace on the knee briefly. Jill didn’t quite understand it, but she was a brick.
“Yes,” Tirian said, slipping into that slightly far-off tone he told stories with. It was both similar and different to the way that Lucy told stories back home. “Caspian was the son of a Telmarine king, but his heart was Narnian. He knew of the Deep Magic that lived in the land, hidden under the Telmarine rule but more awake then than it is in these days, and he knew of the Kings and Queens of old, ancient even in those days, of the Golden Age of Narnia.”
“That’s your cousins he means, right?” Jill murmured to Eustace. Though she knew it was true, she still was amazed every time she remembered Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy were the same mythical heroes she heard about so often. It was a bit like finding that your mother’s strange friend is secretly King Arthur.
Eustace nodded, and then they both looked at Tirian to continue, for he had paused.
“That’s one of the points of contention for many historians, truthfully,” Tirian admitted. “Songs of the war say that Caspian called the Kings and Queens back to Narnia, young as if not a day had passed since they left, and that they woke the trees, and the very river Beruna itself rose to defeat the Telmarine army. King Caspian only wrote of those events later in his life. So there is doubt as to what is true, from those of more skeptical minds.”
“Pshh,” said Eustace, and “shh,” said Jill.
“I always believed Caspian’s words to be the truth, of a sort. We Kings and Queens of Narnia are told a special sort of history, that from our parents and grandparents, though even my father couldn’t say what of the stories he told me were meant to be taken as...well, metaphor.”
“Metaphor?” asked Eustace.
“Well, I did not think you would arrive as such until I met you in the flesh. Guidance, I hoped for, knowledge, even, perhaps, but little did I expect to be sent heroes of legend in the flesh, aged not a day exactly as the stories told. In truth, I wonder what else I have heard about those days may be more literal than I previously believed.”
“Well, I’d hope I look a bit older, at least,” Eustace grumbled, not without humour.
Jill asked, “What else have you heard?”
“Well, my grandfather always told me that us Kings of Narnia have the blood of the stars in us, since Caspian. My father always said it was more representative of our duty, our ties to Narnia―may your wisdom grace us till the stars rain down from the heavens, and all, but grandfather was not so sure.”
“You mean Liliandil, don’t you?” Eustace asked.
Tirian paused, thinking. “Liliandil, wife of King Caspian and mother of King Rilian?”
“That would be her, alright.”
“Did you meet her?” Tirian asked. There was a spark in his eye that neither Jill nor Eustace had seen previously, and they were both suddenly glad they could give him something like this in a time so dreary and dire indeed. “Was she truly a star come down from the heavens?”
“Well, I didn’t know her for long―we had to leave, before she and Caspian got married, and all that, but she told us her father was a star, at the very least, and she certainly looked like it. Though I’ve not seen many other stars since.”
Tirian did not seem to realize it, but as Eustace spoke, his hand came to twine around a lock of his own hair. It wasn’t as bright as Rilian’s had been, but the silver-gold strands still shone like soft starlight.
“Your love is gone, past the end of the world, from whence you’ll take back treasures untold, but to reach who you wish, you will leave behind all else that you hold dear,” Tirian intoned, his mind elsewhere.
“What was that?” Jill asked. “It sounds almost familiar.”
Tirians eyes seemed to refocus on the two of them. “I imagine it might,” he said. “It is a rather old song. Old as you, likely.”
Jill held back a laugh, because it was not quite the time for such things. “What’s it about?”
“Lost love, though the specifics are debated. I was thinking of it because―well, it has many names, but the most common is Mandate to the Seafarer.”
“Caspian the Seafarer,” Eustace said, half question and half remark.
“Yes. Few writings of the time have been preserved, but from everything I have read, he always wished to return to the end of the world, though he was never able to.”
“That’s where he was going, when we were here last,” said Eustace. “Before he had to turn around, of course.”
“Truly?” asked Tirian.
“That was what everyone said,” answered Jill.
Tirian twisted a lock of hair around his fingers again, contemplative. “If so much of it is true...did he truly carry it? Was he buried with the sword of the High King?”
“Rhindon?” Jill asked, for she had heard it spoken of often, though never like this.
“It had a name?”
She could not tell why, but suddenly Jill felt quite sad. “Yes. I don’t know if he was buried with it, though. We didn’t get to see the funeral. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” said Tirian. “Parts of history are bound to always be hidden from us. Either way, a mystery solved for me is doubtful to do any good now.”
And none of them truly wanted to think of that, just then.
“The story of the song is,” Tirian said, breaking the silence before any of them could dwell on it, “well, the story it goes with, which is one of many histories, that is―King Caspian called the Kings and Queens of the Golden Age to help him deliver Narnia from Telmarine rule, and they came. And,” here, Tirian grinned, “King Caspian fell in love.”
Jill grinned back. It felt a bit like schoolyard gossip, and a bit like a wonderful fairytale.
“He fell in love,” Tirian repeated, “that particular history goes. And if you take the song, and the right stories, well, a King or Queen of old was his beloved. And―it is muddled, for this is talk of legends, and not histories. But as you know, all stories have a bit of truth to them. So if it is true that the Kings and Queens came to him in the flesh, and that they also had to leave, as they did before, back to the world they came from―your world, then perhaps it is also true that King Caspian did travel to the end of the world to reach his lost love, not one who had died and gone to Aslan’s Country, but one who lived, but somewhere beyond Narnia. And when he returned, it was with a star, whom he married. Though a star, a lost Hero of the Golden Age―that is where it stops aligning. And you say Queen Liliandil was truly a star.”
Jill nodded, for Eustace was looking rather far-off at the moment.
Tirian sighed. “Well, he was buried with the sword of King Peter the Magnificent. And you say he tried to reach the end of the world once more before he died. Perhaps it is not a story with a happy ending.”
“No, I don’t think it was.” Eustace seemed to be speaking to himself more than them.
“Oh, pish,” said Jill, “Why is it that the most famous romances always end in tragedy?” She was not really mad at Tirian, or even the story, but sometimes you must be mad about a small thing, so that you don’t despair about a large one.
“Not all of them, Lady Jill,” said Tirian. “Have you ever heard the tale of the Two Knights?”
“I’m not sure. Tell me.”
“Well, there were two knights, and they loved each other as much as two beings can love without becoming one, so much that each could fight with the other’s sword as well as their own, and each sharpened the other’s sword on their own whetstone, because―”
“Because a knight’s sword is their soul outside their body,” finished Jill. “Oh, yes, I know this one. Though Lucy always told it to me as, what was it, Stormwind and the Lady Hark. When they both died, their weapons were melted down and forged into one, so that they could be together for eternity. She said that more than a few knights she knew had done that, back in her day.”
Tirian smiled. “Incredible,” he said, almost reverently. “Do you think King Caspian was buried with it, then, truly? Peter the Magnificent’s―what did you say it was called? Rhindon?”
“It means ‘Spring’s Tooth,’” Eustace said, and both of the others were surprised, for he hadn’t spoken in a while.
“Spring’s Tooth,” Tirian repeated, slowly. Eustace nodded, shortly. “He carried it, then? After the Kings and Queens left?”
“Often enough,” Eustace replied.
“Is it true, then?” Jill asked. “The whole story? I had no idea Peter was―”
“Well,” Eustace cut her off, a bit sharply, “Caspian never said he was taking that journey for any other reason than to find those seven Telmarine lords, and to find what was there at the end of it all.”
“Telmarine lords?” Tirian asked.
“You didn’t know about that?” Eustace asked, and then shook his head. “Nevermind. It’s not at all interesting,” he amended, which was very unlike Eustace, who (in Jill’s opinion) often found the most boring things quite interesting.
“You’d be surprised,” said Tirian, who often found boring things quite interesting too. “But either way, one’s official reasons for doing something and one’s personal reasons can be two very different things, especially when one is a King. I would know, myself.”
Eustace shrugged stiffly. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “And―if I did. It wouldn’t be my business to share.”
Jill saw how uncomfortable Eustace had gotten, and remembered quite suddenly that sometimes legends did not just have a bit of truth to them, but were not legends at all. She reached over to squeeze his hand, as if to say sorry, maybe, or perhaps simply, I understand how you feel. She had never liked the things Molly Stockbridge said about the two of them.
She turned to Tirian. “Is the story of King Gale in your history books?”