Disclaimer: it isn't mine. Fairly obvious, I think.

This is one of several stories I had saved. They have not been beta'ed or edited, so please forgive any mistakes.

Edmund Pevensie was a strange boy. Everyone said so: his schoolmates, his professors, even his few friends. There were, incidentally, only three exceptions: his brother and two sisters didn't think him strange.

To be sure, they were even odder. His brother was a schoolboy who could brandish a sword, until then lying dusty in a forgotten corner, almost as easily as most boys wielded a butter knife. His older sister was tall and gorgeous, her slender figure belied by the strength in her arms as she pulled a 70-pound bow and hit dead center every time. His younger sister was a tiny, light filled curly-headed thing who could intentionally bury a throwing knife three-tenths of an inch away from a squirrel in a tall tree. These were not normal pursuits, so if Edmund happened to speak in Shakespearean gobbledygook with unusual conversation partners, it still meant he was the least odd of the four.

Thaddeus Barlowe, a fellow occupant of Hendon House, had found him at it several weeks before. He had been arguing a point of international policy - Barlowe thought - and, oddly enough, losing. He watched from the shadows until Edmund clapped him? it? on the shoulder, saying, "Yea, my lord, and shalt hereafter bear my thanks. For by the lion thou hast the right, good sir." The suit of armour with which he had been arguing merely stood in front of him, apparently unabashed but unamused. Edmund simply resumed walking back to his rooms.

Barlowe scratched his head. Here was a difficult choice. He could follow Edmund or examine the suit of armour. He followed Edmund.

Edmund was pacing along slowly, his head bent in thought. He was muttering to himself, like some misplaced wizard or old man young again. Barlowe couldn't hear the words, but the accent wasn't any he could place. It certainly wasn't Pevensie's usual accent, though it would not sound out of place on someone like King Arthur.

Pevensie raised his eyes and started violently. He stopped pacing and gasped. "My lord?" he asked.

"No," Barlowe said, slowly. His eyes were wary, his mouth tight. He was anything but a lord. His grandfather was a policeman, his great-uncle a cab driver who apparently could not pay his debts and one day had taken his wife and disappeared. He, Thaddeus Barlowe, was no lord.

To Edmund Pevensie, who had not seen Barlowe in this light before, he looked almost exactly like King Lune, though lacking the whole half-nymph look. The king had descended in a somewhat indirect line from Frank the First, whom Narnians considered royalty but the professor still called "the cabbie". It was as if the suit of armour, which Edmund always imagined was the jolly old king, had been given youth and life and could answer him at last.

Edmund Pevensie was a strange boy. Everyone said so: his schoolmates, his professors, even Thaddeus Barlowe, one of his few friends. It simply isn't English to fly at one's schoolmate in a darkened hall and pull him into a crushing hug, but really, when one is homesick, one does odd things occasionally.