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You met him during his second stay in Narnia.
You weren't a Telmarine, like Caspian. By birth, you were closer to a Calormene. Your family, along with a smattering of other vulnerable folk on Telmarine-occupied lands, had allied with the Narnians in the battle against Miraz.
You weren't a warrior like your father, who fought at High King Peter's side. You weren't a healer like your mother, who cared for all those injured who fell beneath the notice of Queen Lucy's elixir.
Sometimes you ground herbs. Sometimes you carried messages. Sometimes you were just the hand a person squeezed while your mother cleaned their wounds.
But you crossed paths with the High King more than once.
At first, it was always in passing. Just enough to see glimpses and hear him speak.
He was quieter than one might expect. Sage. Strong. Next to his grinning, silver-tongued brother (who would talk knots around a person, as easy as breathing), he often appeared serious and formal.
When he spoke, it was easy to tell that he was the High King of old, for he spoke like a man assured that his word was law.
Sometime after the first few passing encounters, you were tasked with carrying a message to the king from an injured centaur.
You entered Aslan's tomb with your eyes low. The kings and queens were all gathered, and Prince Caspian, and a few others. "Your Majesties." You curtsied.
"Rise. What is it?" Queen Susan asked.
"A message for High King Peter."
He approached silently and stopped close. "What is it?" he asked.
"The centaur Runebit is awake, and he's asked to speak with Your Majesty at earliest convenience," you answered. You allowed your gaze to rise to his, then bobbed another curtsy and turned to leave. Normally, you might have waited to be dismissed, but you knew that your mother had her hands full, and you had tasks to return to.
Another day, he stopped by the makeshift infirmary himself, to bandage a bad scrape on his hand. (It felt almost like a kind of disrespect, to see his blood. To see him bleeding.) He didn't ask your mother to tend to it, like most did; he just quietly made his way to the little table of salves and wraps. Most of the room's occupants hadn't even noticed him walking in.
You hurried over as he grabbed a roll of bandages at random. "Not them," you chided.
He looked over at you, surprised. "What?"
"Begging Your Majesty's pardon," you said, taking a breath now that he'd stopped unrolling them, "those are for the furry folk. They're prepared different. For human skin, it's these." You handed him the correct roll.
"They're prepared differently?" he echoed, while setting down the incorrect bandages and unrolling the correct ones. "Explain."
You could only explain what you understood. "The bandages we use for human skin only slide on the fauns' fur. We have separate bandages for flesh, fur, and hide." You glanced at his injury. "I can wrap that for you, if you like."
He allowed it, watching you bandage the small injury.
When you finished, you asked him, "Do you need help finding anything else, Your Majesty?"
It took him several seconds to answer, "No. Thank you."
You curtsied and went back to work.
Brief, chance encounters.
Small things.
At some point, he learned your name. Perhaps he overheard your mother calling for you, or perhaps he asked someone else. It was startling, the first time he addressed you by it. You felt somewhat exposed. As if your name were being ushered suddenly into the light, held before the eyes of all of Narnia.
One day, when you went to a nearby stream to fill a bucket for your mother, he appeared from behind a tree just as you began the walk back. "I could carry it for you."
You struggled not to let too much water slosh out of the bucket. "That's no work for a king."
He took the handle from you anyway, relieving you of the weight.
You smiled shyly. "Thanks, Your Majesty."
Only, you noticed that he was walking slower than you had been. And as long as he was the one carrying the bucket, you could only walk with him, at his chosen pace. You couldn't exactly tell the king to hurry up.
"What will you do, after the war is won?" he asked.
You cleared your throat. "If home still exists, then I shall go home. With my mother and my father."
"And what then? Will you be a healer?"
"I fear I haven't the stomach for it. Crafting has always been more agreeable to my constitution. When we're home, my father and I build furniture and do wood carvings. Sometimes I do small sewing jobs, just around the house. Nothing good enough to sell, but a neighbor of ours sometimes brings us fish, when I stitch up holes for them."
The king listened. He seemed curious about everything. He didn't ask all that many questions, but he would hum in thought, laugh at a joke, and most of all, he seemed to keep slowing down his walk.
At a point, he even stopped walking.
"I don't know what I'll do when this war is won," he mused. "Sometimes I wonder whether I will truly be king again."
"You wonder?"
He met your eyes with a smile. "Well, I don't wonder whether I will be king. But I wonder whether I will rule. Whether I will rule Narnia, the way I did before. I thought I would, at first. But I have this persistent fear that things might be different, this time around."
It was the most you'd ever heard him say about his own thoughts, his own feelings. You kept quiet. Hearing his doubts felt more intimate than seeing his blood.
"But I suppose things are already different," he said, with a smile in his voice that drew your lowered gaze back up to him. "After all, there was no one like you around, in my first reign. I would never have left, if there were."
The comment felt disproportionate to how casually you knew each other.
He smiled, at your bewildered look. "You don't understand what I mean by that. It's alright. You've been a comfort. This land remembers us, but it doesn't submit to us the way it used to. It demands to be wrested again. Won again. It's grown wild and mean. You remind me of all the good in Narnia. Everything I used to miss."
"Then...I'm glad for that, Your Majesty."
He pulled a leaf from your hair. Examined the leaf, as though he might know the tree it fell from. "You look at me as if I were King Arthur."
"...King Arthur?" you repeated.
He laughed, in a satisfied way, as if he'd meant for you not to understand. "You have beautiful eyes."
"Oh! I, er...Thank you, Your Majesty."
He resumed walking you back.
When the battle ended and Narnia was won back for Aslan's army, there was food and music and dancing unlike anything you'd experienced before.
Peter's gaze snagged yours every time you glanced his way. He stood at the opposite edge of the clearing from you, in the company of the dwarf Trumpkin. Usually, there were too many dancers in the vast intervening space to quite make him out, but every time you did spot him, he was looking at you.
You didn't join the throng of dancers; you danced in place, keeping rhythm with your feet.
It was actually King Edmund who glided up to you out of nowhere, caught your hand, and gracefully pulled you into the fray.
You had never interacted with King Edmund before, and he didn't speak a word to you, now. He just smiled, with a face full of mirth and eyes too full of wisdom, and led you through the twirling steps of the group dance. You bumped clumsily around a few times before you found the rhythm. You danced a while with the younger king. He had a different intensity than his brother. It was like being lost in the rush of a river.
And then, without warning, he spun you into Peter, where he stood watching.
"Ah, my apologies, Your Majesty!" you said, catching your breath while his strong hands steadied you.
"No apologies necessary," he said softly. One of the many campfires reflected in his eyes. The battle had left marks on his face. Bruises, mostly. A small cut in his lip.
A drop from his sister's elixir would have healed all of it. You had seen a centaur dancing this evening who had been at death's door this morning.
The prospect of saving strong medicine for strong infirmities was a familiar one, but it seemed out of place in a king of legend. A king of legend would treat a healing elixir like a bottomless fountain.
"Are you enjoying the festivities?" he asked. As always, an accent of unknowable origin eroding the sharper edges of his words.
"Of course, Your Majesty," you said. "Although I can't say they're for me to enjoy. The victory was hard-won, but not by me."
He took your chin, directing you to meet his gaze again. "The victory is yours. You had a hand to it, just like everyone else. And I'm sure your father would say that knowing you were safe grinding herbs for the injured steadied his hand when his blade grew heavy. As it steadied mine."
Your face felt warm. You were still in his arms, still very close. You backed away, curtsying shyly. Such a strange and intense sentiment, that he thought of you while he was fighting.
It was very odd to have his attention. It felt odd.
"Are you enjoying the festivities, Your Majesty?"
"Peter," he corrected.
"...I couldn't."
"Go on. I give you permission." Though his words were soft, they were as steady as his blade. He said "permission" a bit like one might say "command".
You drew in a breath, your heart pounding in much the same way it did when you interacted with the talking bears or caught a glance of Aslan. "Are you enjoying the festivities, Peter?"
He smiled. Took your hand and pressed his lips to the back of it. You were startled first by the feeling of his hand– the realization that he'd taken off one of his gloves, as your flesh met his –and then by the feeling of his soft lips. You could feel the cut in them.
He raised his face. "I'm a bit too tired to dance, but I've enjoyed watching." He leaned in closer. "You look lovely, tonight."
"I don't look at all special, Your M-...Peter." After all, you of course hadn't brought along anything nice to wear.
He leaned in still more, pulling you closer and whispering in your ear, in a tone perfectly balanced between levity and authority, "Do not contradict the king."
You shivered, as he withdrew. You could feel the heat of every fire in the clearing upon you, now. The eyes of Narnia upon you.
"You are lovely," he repeated, with finality. Though it wasn't quite a repetition, was it? He had said before that you looked lovely, and now he was saying that you were lovely. "If you should so privilege the floor as to keep dancing, I would be privileged to watch."
Your heart raced.
Why were you here? Why was he watching? What did a king want with you?
"I...really must see if my father is well," you said breathlessly. "I mean, I must...He's refused to rest; I should see that he hasn't exhausted himself."
Peter gave no response. His expression didn't change. He just watched you stumble over your words.
You took a step backward, and still his expression didn't change. His hands didn't snare you back in. It should have felt like freedom, being allowed to retreat, but instead it felt like the free movement of a deer before a lion.
They all had a certain lion-ish-ness to their gaze, the four of them.
You scampered off.
The festivities carried on.
The festivities outlived the day, and you continued to drift about within the sphere of the king's attention.
Then High King Peter and High Queen Susan went for a walk with Aslan.
When they returned, Peter's expression was strange. Remote. And set in a grim resolve. He didn't approach you. He and his sister joined the younger two siblings and stood in a cluster for a while, sharing words no doubt too private for your ears.
You returned to your mother with a basket of foraged herbs and helped her restock the medicines which had been depleted in the aftermath of the battle.
You did not speak with Peter again before the whole host of Narnians, humans and animals and trees, were gathered to see off the kings and queens, who would be returning to their world.
When they announced that Peter and Susan would never return, his eyes met yours.
You offered him a compassionate smile. You were surprised by the news, but the kings and queens had always felt like temporary visitors. Whatever existed between you and the king, it was something shimmering and strange and ephemeral, by nature. You had known that. If anything, it was unsettling that he treated it differently.
But when the kings and queens were about to leave, something happened.
He grabbed your hand.
You supposed you must have looked away, for as many steps as he must have taken to approach you, it still came as a complete surprise.
Once again, it was his bare, ungloved hand in yours, dragging you after him much like his younger brother had dragged you to dance.
You heard a general gasp from those gathered around, but it was nothing to the rushing in your ears as the king traversed the space with you in tow.
You saw a wry smile from King Edmund, a smirk and exasperated eye-roll from High Queen Susan, a surprised look from Queen Lucy.
You turned your head and tried to catch a glimpse of your mother or father, in the crowd.
Then there was a rush of air. You shut your eyes. Peter pulled you close, and you couldn't help curling into him, as everything around you turned to wind and noise.
Chattering. Movement.
Peter's hands were on the small of your back and the space between your shoulders. The one between your shoulders rose to the back of your head. Petting, calming.
The space around you sounded both large and confined. It sounded like an ocean of people, chattering and moving all about, and it sounded like walls without windows– no outlet for all the sound. Suffocating sound.
"You took her with you?" Edmund was saying. "Is that allowed?"
"It must be; it's happened," Lucy reasoned brightly. "Oh, poor dear must be startled!"
"And she hasn't even seen the train yet," Susan said, her tone humored and dry but not unfriendly.
Peter spoke your name once, twice. "It's alright," he soothed. "Look up."
You obeyed the king. You raised your head from his chest. Past his arm, you saw an inscrutable wall of black metal and glass, moving faster than anything. Slithering like a great snake, faster than a river in a vicious storm. So fast, it looked as if it would tear the world in two around it. You flinched, whimpering as one of your hands covered your ear and the other clutched at the king's shirt.
"It's alright," he said again. "It's a train. It's here to take us home."
"Home?" you repeated pitifully.
"New home," he explained. "You'll love it."
Soft words. Steady words. Permission as command.
When your tears fell (quite against your will), High King Peter stroked your hair, King Edmund and High Queen Susan politely looked away, and Queen Lucy squeezed your shoulder consolingly.
When the great snake stilled, and after it had bled out a dizzying flood of people, the kings and queens led you into its open maw.
It was possible you were being devoured alive.