Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. – C. S. Lewis
First – Descent
I.
The High King is a tall, strong man, and like his youthful brother, would be remarkably handsome had worry and responsibility not made their ponderous mark upon his face. His bland smile masks a mind whirring constantly in consideration of issues of jurisprudence, of diplomacy, of commerce, and his words leave his mouth only after they have been critically weighed against other worthy possibilities.
They are all like this, the Kings and Queens of this green land of Narnia.
He rises before dawn and retires long after the daily supper is over, staying at his desk to read over an entire treaty or settlement or charter by flickering candlelight like so many weary shopkeepers struggling with their daily bookkeeping. His wife does not care to recall the number of nights she has gone to bed and awoken with only a slight dent and some lingering warmth to show for his presence.
Peter is twenty-four.
He has adapted ages ago, like his brother and sisters, to this burden that settles heavily upon their shoulders. Narnia's desires have become his own, as have her triumphs and losses and well-being, and the Queen Consort teases him sometimes that he has always had a mistress with whom she cannot hope to compete with.
She remembers how impressed she was, like everyone else, by his kindness and his perceptiveness, and, as he caught her eye across the long table, how pleasing his eyes looked as he smiled, even if it was merely the polite smile he reserved for strangers. She noted how his thoughtful, educated speech contrasted with his tanned face and calloused hands – and saw that here was a man who was different from the slender young dandies at court who spoke endlessly of hunting and hawking and women and horses, a man that was set apart from other men in ways that were both obvious and indefinable.
During the masked ball on the eve of his departure from Archenland she made him laugh once, twice, many times, and it was intoxicating to meet his gaze. She had not been his wife yet – that would come a year later – and she remembers now as she eats breakfast alone, how she had only seen his blue eyes and his goodness – for above all he was so good – and not sought to look deeper.
II.
She has read many, many books. In the beginning, it had been textbooks and encyclopaedias on the subject of Narnia as she sought to understand the land in which she had made her home, and later, the land to which her husband was so inexorably bound. The Queen Consort has never been the scholarly type, but she found comfort in the knowledge stored up in these dry, dusty tomes. In three years of marriage she learns more about history, geography, anthropology, language, and science than she had ever accumulated in a lifetime.
"Did you know," she tells her chambermaid one day, "that I have read one thousand books, one for each day of my time in Narnia."
The man who is her husband no longer has the time to seek her out and entertain her as he had once done, and as he trains with his men in the ring she sits in the corner of the library, remembering when she would see him from her window, reading under one of the trees in her father's garden, and abandon her lessons for the simple pleasure of being with him. More often than not he would read aloud for her benefit, and she would luxuriate in the unreserved discussions they had afterwards. Now she has learned to read alone.
It was after her miscarriage that she pursued medical textbooks, branching out to midwifery and ancient remedies as she sought within the soothing words a salve for the loss of a child she had begun to dream of, to name, and make solid, even if it was all in her mind.
When Peter left her bedside reluctantly but firmly, called away by urgent news, she hated him, just a little, as her empty womb throbbed like a beating heart. When he rode off to war the next day, Susan, eyes clear and dry, found her weeping in bed. She hated herself, just a little, after that.
III.
Is it right, she sometimes thinks, for a man to be closer to his brother than his wife? Two voices reside in her mind, and one chides the other for thinking such uncharitable thoughts. Peter and Edmund have faced death together, and she suspects that the bonds linking them have a strength and depth unlike that of a marriage vow (she tries not to consider that it might be stronger or deeper). It would be petty and unworthy to begrudge the young King Edmund this bond that strengthens them both, but it galls her that he could sway her husband so easily in matters she cannot touch.
There are times in the night when he will awake with a shout or a gasp and she will lie still, pretending sleep as he mumbles and stirs and sits up in the bed, unwilling to look, as she has done so many times, straight into his eyes at a moment that he is most vulnerable and most open, and recognize nothing in his gaze. Yet it jars in her mind that with a smile, a quirk of the mouth or a flick of the eyes, his sisters may guess at his every thought, catch the unspoken ends of his words.
His siblings conspire to help him when he is incapable – or unwilling, to help himself. They coordinate their efforts like a well-trained team of hunting hounds, getting him to take a day's rest or bypassing his requests when they feel he is being stubborn and overprotective. Though he is High King, it is clear that they are not his lesser lieges.
IV.
Only after the miraculous birth of her firstborn child does she finds that there is no time to read. Peter insisted on a small army of servants and nannies, but she spends her days and nights with the babe by the cot in the nursery that has at last been put to use. As little Francesca grows and begins to recognize the sound of her voice and the look of her face, she returns to her books, and this time they are fairy-tales she reads, aloud. She remembers from her own childhood the stories of fragile, beautiful women inevitably finding their happy endings, and as she tells them to her own daughter and looks into the round blue eyes that are exactly like those of her father, she begins to wonder how profoundly she is skewering her child's perceptions, and how deep the damage will be.
V.
Hello, how are you, good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Goodnight. Perfect weather, what a fine day. The leaves are changing colour, look, Isabel. Yes, beautiful, Peter, they are truly magnificent.
They do not talk anymore. Oh, yes, they speak - the chatter of a married couple discussing mundane things is, in fact, the only thing they do. But they don't have discussions anymore – where they can disagree or agree and laugh, or think and reflect. She tries not to mind it as much as she does. After all, there was a time when the sound of his voice, no matter what words they formed, set her heart pounding.
She wonders if he feels it too, this cooling of passion. It has been a while – a long while – since he even looked at her in that way, though she can blame this on tiredness and the recent war.
Sometimes when she lies awake beside his slumbering form she lets her mind drift to before. That evening he had tried to teach her a faun dance, taken her by the waist, saying, "This is how the young men will look at you when you dance," and looked into her eyes until she blushed and turned away, feeling keenly the heat of his fingers through the layers of her dress.
At balls she watches him dance with the wives and daughters and nieces of ambassadors and foreign lords, and she recognizes the glow in their eyes, the way they tilt their heads back and laugh at his murmured words. The feeling that sparks within her is not jealousy, but loss.
*
(First of three parts)
I've read a lot of stories in this fandom where the original character heroine charms the pants off of either Peter or Edmund – sometimes both of them – and then after they've overcome a bunch of cheesy true love's obstacles they marry and everything's good for the rest of their lives. So I tried to look deeper into what the life of a High King's wife would actually be like, although I think it turned out a bit more depressing than I thought...
Pass or fail? Leave your thoughts :)