AN: What was this? Why did this happen? God only knows. Title from Oh Wonder's "White Blood".
Once, Susan learned a mermaid's song. Susan of all of them was always good at making people want to tell her things. She used to sing it through the corridors of Cair Paravel, and sometimes on long walks inland. No-one was ever sure if it had words.
It ran through your head like a tune you'd heard before, somewhere, and made you think of how big the sea had been, when you were little, and how much of a smell it had. It felt like seeing a seagull cross the sky, its raucous cry saying, you have reached the end of the land, now.
Sometimes Susan sang it low and sweet, and then it was piercingly sweet, like sunlight on the seas far off, and the summer around you, green and good.
Peter loved the big cats. If someone was looking for him they always remembered, after a while, to ask a panther or a leopard: chances were they'd find him with the cat they were asking, playing around. Rumours started, after a while, that Peter the Magnificent had come by his strength by wrestling with big cats, testing his strength against theirs.
No-one really knew if that was why he started play-wrestling with them or if he already had been, but it didn't really matter. He came in to dinner laughing with grass stains on his clothes.
Edmund walked the mountains. Once, he said he walked in circles because it made him feel as if he could make himself circular, a whole person again. At other times he said walking high circles let him see the world from all angles.
Mostly, the people who knew him thought, he just liked being so high up, where the light was. He liked the shape of the land and the colours of the mountain slopes. It was Edmund who made contact again with the wild Talking Goats of the mountains, whose forefathers had fled Narnia in the eternal winter, and he brought them into harmony with its new monarchs. Edmund was a fine diplomat and a shrewd broker of bargains, but it was the way he loved the mountains that tipped the scales.
He was never alone there. He carried food the kitchen staff had sent him off with, and a handkerchief Susan had embroidered with a sprig of gorse (she liked her hands to be busy), and Peter's old boots that fit him better now, and a staff Lucy chose for him herself.
Lucy spent her spring days in the woods, inhaling the sight of bluebells like perfume, and her summer days on the moors, where she waded through the heather and felt that under the sun she was on the very tip of the world.
Skylarks came spiralling up from the ground to sing over her head and greet her, squirrels raced over a network of branches to show her the glades that were thick with blue. She looked as freebooting as any pirate, in her loose tunic with a dagger at her waist, but she had no need to steal. She was Queen of Narnia, and she had the run of the place.
Christmas came to Cair Paravel in a blaze of fire in the hearth, and the vaulted ceiling of the Great Hall hung with sweet-smelling garlands, and the roaring of the sea at night. There was a great feast each year, and the hall rang with the sound of harps.
In Peter's study, though, they met after supper and lay quiet, or sang through the evening. Long, long ago, people sang across Narnia, the Lion walked the world and his heart was light.
On Christmas morning Lucy would thrust her head out of the window and gasp at the cold air, and watch the sea, writhing and throwing foam about. There was always frost on the windowsill. Narnian winters were cold.
Edmund drew. When he went with the mapmakers on their circuit, after the long winter was over, he would draw a little bird, or a spreading cedar, or a cave. It was a habit with him.
He went to Tumnus' cave and they wrote histories together: Tumnus writing in his careful script, Edmund drawing scenes from the court of Swanwhite the queen, councils from long ago, leaves twining around the pages.
He drew on journeys, too – ships riding the sea, Calormene temples, rocks off the coast of the Lone Islands. His hands were often ink-stained.
Peter was loved by Dryads: they would pull him into their dances, even into dances no other mortal had ever seen. He knew his way over the ground of the woods in the dark, and he was the first to learn Narnian star charts.
He had a light hand on the drum, too, so they set him in the centre of their ring, to drum against the beat of their feet on the grass and dead leaves.
Susan paced the halls and corridors of Cair Paravel. She was the first to find all its secret passages, or at least all that were found in the Golden Age. She was also a night owl, so that she was often the last one to walk the long path to bed, snuffing the lamps as she went.
In the early years her footsteps were a counterpoint to the sounds of Cair Paravel around her, but later she learned to move silently. She became the hub of the castle, the person who knew where everything was. Susan was a rustle of skirts among stone walls, a shadow passing at bedtime, a woman carrying a lamp.
"All right, come on then," said Lucy, and took a running jump onto the four-poster bed. It made a flumph! noise as she landed: she was bigger than she had been when they first did this, back when she was too small to get onto the beds except by jumping. She kicked a pillow, dislodged by her sudden arrival, onto the floor.
Edmund hurled himself with a yell the like of which Lucy hadn't heard since the last time they threw him into the winter sea at Cair Paravel, fully clothed. The Oof! with which he landed shook the gauzy curtains.
"Get off, you," Lucy said, and shoved him so that he rolled to the side; but then all of a sudden Susan was aflight, and when she landed Edmund rolled right back onto Lucy again.
"When did you get here?" Lucy demanded of Susan, whose initial jump they hadn't even heard, but Susan just laughed.
"'Ware your brother," she said, and they all three looked up to the corridor. There was a figure at the end of it starting to run, and a distant shout of For the Lion!.
Peter was the tallest and broadest of them all, and he managed to get hit by every single scrambling limb on the bed before they settled into a pile. Edmund spat out a strand of Susan's hair which had got in his mouth.
"We," Susan said presently, "are a mess. We are not fit to be seen." There was a laugh from outside the window, in the rose-trees. "And the birds know it!"
It was true: Susan's skirt had managed to gather all to one side of her, so that she seemed a heap of brocade with a long leg hanging out. Peter's hair was in his eyes while his cloak lay in a heap in the corridor, Edmund's tunic was quite seriously askew, and Lucy, looking down, realised she was showing a good deal of shoulder and her belt had come undone.
"Well, if some people would have a little more consideration for others," Peter said, as if he hadn't taken the full corridor for a run-up. Edmund elbowed him.
Lucy pulled herself upright, out of the pile of monarch she was trapped under, and shook out her short hair. "It's summer!" she said, and jumped off the bed, light as a bird. "Come on, you lot, get out of bed. The world is young."
And it was.