Oh, the Prince Caspian trailer is responsible for a great many wrongs, and this story is one of them.
Ian: She apologizes.
It's kind of trite, very fanservicey, and in my opinion, not the most educated piece I've ever written. My little sister enjoyed it, and I value her opinion very much because she's a very discerning fourteen year old, so you all get to read it, too.
It's a fun little fic about how Peter's sword, Rhindon, got its name, and I hope you enjoy it.
"Ah," said Peter, drawing a scabbard out of the chest with pleasure, "My sword!"
"The sword that Aslan gave you? Rhindon?" Caspian asked, not a little excited that he was seeing something that very few people ever see, a legend, come to life.
"No," Peter said, "This is the sword Aslan gave me, but that was not Rhindon; it had no name when it was given." Something older and wiser than Peter now was had woken up inside him, and he felt it renewing him into the way he was before he had left Narnia, noble and strong and kingly.
"Then how did it come to be Rhindon?" asked Caspian, who was now more curious than ever.
"We've no time for stories now, King Peter," Trumpkin reminded the two teenagers. "Perhaps when this is over you may tell the prince."
"Now the battles are over," Caspian reminded, setting his helmet down on a rock next to him as he sat down, "and you promised me the tale of Rhindon Wolfsbane."
"So I did," Peter remembered, sitting down on the rocks near Caspian. "Very well. It begins…where does it begin? Before a battle, in the northern mountains, against the trolls. It was cold that day…
"Cold enough that there's frost on my gauntlets!" Lucy, Queen of Narnia and the Eastern Isles, complained, holding up the offending fist. "How am I supposed to fight with frosty armor?"
"Well, if you'd stayed home with Ed and Su like we asked you to, you wouldn't have this problem," Peter reminded his teenaged sister, looking through the trees for any sign of the trolls.
"I'm Lucy the Valiant, Peter, not Lucy the docile!" the Queen said pertly. "I'm not supposed to stay home!"
"Suit yourself, but if that's the case, stop complaining," Peter said, listening closely to the trees.
Lucy scowled, but for the moment, her complaining stopped. Peter was still listening, and then he heard it; the crackle of breaking twigs and the shaking ground that told him that the trolls were close; they'd smelled them out, and now they were angry.
"Foul breath," Orieus said, his sharp nose sniffing the air. "Make ready!" he shouted, not caring now who heard; Lucy unsheathed her sword, a study and yet feminine affair that the armoury of Cair Paravel had made especially for her. Peter loosed his own sword in its scabbard, not quite ready to pull it forth.
The ground was shaking more, and the sound of heavy breathing was filling the air when suddenly the trolls burst through the trees, smashing left and right with their clubs and boulder sized fists. One particularly large one swung at Peter, throwing him from his horse and into a hefty pine tree. Peter slid down the trunk, armor rattling as he hit the ground, shaken and dazed but still very much alive. The scene rotated a few times in triplicate, but everything focused once more and he stood up, sword in hand, shoving the blade into the nearest troll's thigh and making the creature keen in agony, turning around to face the source of the powerful sting so that the faun who had been trying to fight it could bury his own sword into its shoulder, piercing it through the heart and killing it.
He was back in the thick of it, wondering where Lucy had gone when he saw her slicing, almost helplessly, at one of the larger trolls, who was not showing much pain in spite of the fact that she had all of hacked off his arm.
"Lucy!" Peter shouted as the troll buffeted her horse out of the way, leaving Lucy on the ground, stunned. He rushed over, hacking at the troll for all that he was worth, trying to use all of his height to his advantage against the still much taller troll. But nothing was working- the creature kept going at him, until finally it picked him up, raising him over its head with every intention of throwing him down to crush him that way. He threw Peter up, up into the air, and then the brute's fist connected with Peter's hip, throwing him against the rocks again. Everything jarred in Peter's vision, and he felt something break- an arm, a leg, he did not know, and then everything went dark.
When he woke up, the corpse of the troll he'd been fighting was in front of him face down with one of the centaur's spears in its back, and Lucy and Oreius were standing over him, looking concerned.
"Peter, are you all right?" Lucy asked. "That was a hard fall. Has anything broken?"
Peter moved all his limbs and found, rather remarkably, that nothing was in pain. "Something broke, but it wasn't me," he said, putting his hands down on the ground to get up. "AH!"
He quickly drew his hand away from the ground where he had set it down to find it bleeding. He looked down to see a shard of metal- a section of sword, which had sliced through the leather palm of his gauntlet and cut his hand. He looked around him to find another section, and another, the hilt of the sword still near his hand. The weapon, it seemed, had shattered.
Lucy looked sympathetic. "Oh, Peter, your sword! That was a gift from Aslan!"
Peter looked at the hilt in his hand and threw it to the ground, disgusted. "Fine lot of help that turned out to be," he said, feeling the back of his head for the bruise he knew was developing there. "Orieus, what's to report?" he said, trying to forget the sword for the moment.
"Three trolls dead, and one bleeding badly when I sent three of mine after it; the other small one fled. It'll probably die without its band the next time it meets another group."
Peter nodded, rotating his shoulder to try and relieve some of the stiffness that was slowly taking over all of his body after being thrown twice. "And our losses?"
"A few bruises, and a concussion, and your highness's injuries, but other than that, thankfully, nothing."
Peter nodded, a massive headache threatening to make him pass out. "Let's go home before I get thrown against another rock," he said, limping back to the place where the reserve stood with a new horse for the King- they'd done these patrols enough times in Peter's seven years on the throne that he had gotten quite used to losing mounts to a troll's fist or a miscast spell. Evil still lingered in the high hills of the north, but the hags and werewolves scarcely came down from there to really trouble Narnia any more.
"Peter, you should bring it home," Lucy said, and Peter paused, feeling the lightness of the scabbard by his side. It was a distressing feeling, now that he thought about it. Almost like being naked where everyone could see, open to attack."Perhaps the Armory can fix it. And it doesn't do to go leaving perfectly good sword hilts all about the wilderness, gifts from Aslan or not."
Peter nodded, and retraced his steps. But there was nothing left at the foot of the rock face; the sword in all its bits and pieces was gone.
"Where did my sword go?" Peter asked, looking for the pieces where they had broken on the stone.
"This mountain is a mysterious place," Oreius said vaguely. "The old legends say that a great lady lives here, inside the mountain in a palace of light. Perhaps she and her smiths have taken the sword, to fix it for you."
"Or a little goblin too cowardly to come out when the fighting started stole it," Peter said angrily. "Come on, let's go home. There's nothing more we can do here."
"King Peter, isn't it time we were going home, too?" Trumpkin asked, interrupting the story.
"Trumpkin, we were just getting to the good part!" Caspian complained.
"I think it can wait till dinner," Peter confessed. ""It's a story better saved for when you're not hungry enough to eat a horse. Then you can hear about the Lady of the Gilded Horn and the feast she gave," he hinted.
It was enough for Caspian; he kept his silence about the rest of the story until they were home.