Chapter 2: White Flag

Chapter rating: K+ for alcohol use and Otter summer songs ;-)


The King had searched far and wide for a Princess to marry, traveling to many lands in his quest for a bride who would be his equal and love his land as he did. But he could find none who had the strength to claim his heart. Then one day he came upon a castle wrapped in overgrown vines and trees, crumbling with a hundred years of slumber…


The hours slipped by as quickly as a sigh, and days grew longer and nights more calm and warm, and the sunsets ever more glorious. If only the ship were not so very small! Lucy loved every inch of the Dawn Treader, but after a week of no land, no pressing adventures to occupy their thoughts, and no relief from her constant alternation between happiness and uncertainty, her dilemma was getting worse and not better. It was not exactly cabin fever, but a dreadful urge to do something, rather than this torturous waiting.

In the days that followed their departure from the Island of the Duffles, Lucy did not lock herself in her borrowed cabin (as she secretly thought of doing), The Dawn Treader was confined enough that there were always at least a dozen people around them at all times, which gave Lucy much practice at maintaining her composure when chatting with the ever-present Caspian, no small task when a golden-haired King smiles at one and one's eagle-eyed brother and fact-hungry cousin is at one's elbow to catch the smallest quiver.

Not that Edmund would have stopped Lucy if he had known – she had never feared that – for her brother had always been magnificently broad-minded when it came to trusting his sisters' judgment in affairs of the heart. But Lucy also knew that the slightest clue would have Edmund getting the whole story out of her and she simply could not bear the thought of her small kindling of hope exposed to the cold winds of pragmatic reality. She did not want to hear logic : that she was still technically a child, that they would be leaving Narnia again sooner or later (probably sooner), that she knew better than to go through this all over again, that the next Queen of Narnia would not be her. And not that Edmund would have said all or any of these things to her – he was Just, not harsh – but Lucy was literate in the language of Edmund's face and his eyes would tell her all these things.

And she did try, as hard as she could. At first Lucy thought she could remember how it felt to be laughing and fancy-free without this strange mad fluttering in the depths of her stomach, back to the time when they had just boarded the Dawn Treader and walked under Narnia's sun once again. Yes, surely that must be safe, thinking of the memories of their very first days at sea; but such recollections simply brought back the sensation of strong arms around her waist pulling her to safety, the sight of a much taller and broader Caspian in dripping wet clothes beside her in his tiny cabin, the wild smell of the cordial that made him glance at her in wonder, the sound of his clear voice proclaiming her freedom and safety in the slave markets of Narrowhaven, the taste of salt air upon her lips as winds showered the ghost of kisses from centuries past upon them.

Clearly, memories were the wrong way to go.

To prevent herself from going mad, Lucy talked with everyone during that week. "Hullo Cerdic, Rynelf," she would greet the men as she brought them refreshment during their routine tasks upon the ship. "Water this time? Or wine?" She already knew each crew member by name, and they all were happy to talk with someone who would listen to their stories of home or their plans for a craft of their own someday (well-worn litanies aboard ship) with an eager ear.

Wherever she could, Lucy also enthusiastically tackled the less favorable chores on deck – galley preparation and dish washing, and cleaning out the hens' coop (Coriakin had graciously given them poultry to replace the ones they lost in the storm), and scrubbing the deck (the first time the crew saw the Queen of old squatting on the forecastle heartily attacking the dirty boards with a bristle brush, the outcry was great, but as Edmund said she was stubborn and argued convincingly that it was the least she could do to compensate for her total failure as an oarsman).

And of course, she played a great deal of chess. (And lost a great deal of chess.)

And when all the chores were done and she still had long summer days to fill with not-fancying-Caspian, there was very little to do but talk, and Lucy found herself falling back into her old role of storyteller as Queen Lucy of the Golden Age. Sometimes after dinner she would be asked to tell of this or that tale of Narnia's early days, or to tell one they had never heard before, or to make up one of her own. These she obliged gladly, the long-disused courtly language of the bardic style slowly returning to her tongue and mingling with her own animated turns of phrases.

But the nights she treasured most were those in which she was invited down to the cozy little cabin beneath deck which Edmund and Eustace and Caspian shared, where she could join in their evening exchange of stories and songs. Caspian never tired of hearing their accounts of the earliest Kings and Queens of Narnia – at least, as it had been told to Edmund and Lucy, for much of the written lore from the centuries before their reign had been lost in the Great Winter.

Even more frequently, he would request a tale of their own time; the Battle of Beruna, of course, but also the many lesser wars and battles they fought in the first three years and the establishment of their rule from a fragmented country in disarray. And so they told him of those hard early years, abandoning the high style to convey more accurately the trials and turmoil of building a kingdom from the ground up. Edmund of course exaggerated her role in establishing friendly relations between the disparate clans and settlements of the wildly disorganized regions, and so in turn she credited him with revising and enforcing the entire morass of the judicial system they had inherited (well, he had!).

Then, Caspian discovered that she could sing – more accurately, that she had studied with the most celebrated bards of Narnia's golden age – and Lucy found to her intense embarrassment that she was called upon to sing nightly for them. This was very different than storytelling, for the latter usually involved a progression of "how did that one go?" and "wasn't it more like…", with several interjections from one or the other – or dubious questions from Eustace, who thank goodness had been un-rottened along with un-dragoned or otherwise he would have been simply miserable during these nights.

But when she sang, Lucy became acutely aware of how small the cabin truly was and how disconcerting it was to be the sole center of fixed attention when one's audience was barely a foot away. Calling up the old melodies and cantos demanded a great deal of concentration, thankfully, or else the proximity of Caspian and his steady gaze would have been dreadfully taxing on her self-control.

Yet each time, as she sat beside Eustace on the small bunk and wove the long-forgotten ballads that she had loved so much as Queen, Lucy felt her discomfort slipping away into the pleasure of the music. Time itself ceased to matter when she was once again Lucy Balladeer, who knew the songs as no other living soul did, who had spent decades learning Narnia's music.

As she sang, memories – this time comforting and with no bitter tinge – flooded back to Lucy. The magical strains that had caught her ear as a girl, listening first to Mr. Tumnus's pipes, then the Merfolk's songs at their coronation, and later to the long-expatriated musicians who had furtively kept the craft alive in Archenland during the Witch's reign, had drawn her inescapably to learn their refrains and seek out every living bard of the Narnian tradition. They brought their instruments – the stringed kithara and keyed dulcet, harp-like kinnor and wooden tambors – and added them to the simple flutes and drums that were already common amongst the Narnians. Lucy was an eager student, and glad of a patron and haven for their arts, the bards taught her their skills of melody and harmony and instrumentation.

In the years of peace that followed the early wars, Lucy had found and catalogued every scrap of written music in the dusty disorganized library of Cair Paravel (thanks in no small part to Edmund's assistance). She and her school of minstrelsy then began the laborious task of learning to read it, for Narnian music is much different than our dry flat symbols. It is almost a living breathing thing, capturing the wild sweet tones on paper with illuminations so brilliant and intricate that one can hardly concentrate on making out the notes. Though many were faded with centuries of age and some were missing pages, the manuscripts still seemed to almost move when Lucy would first glance at them, vivid histories and legends entwined inseparably in the notes. It took the combined efforts of all the assembled bards and musicians to decipher these pages into actual tones and rhythms; most of the refugees from Archenland had relied on a purely oral tradition of song-lore, so they had to piece together the known ballads with any corresponding bits of manuscript in order to work out the notation system.

But oh, the beauty that rose from voice and strings and keys when they finally pulled the songs off the pages and into the air for the first time! It made every labored hour of toil well spent to hear at last the music that Old Narnia had first sung into being: otherworldly, penetrating, dangerous, and unbearably beautiful. Lucy could never properly describe the feelings that it conjured for her – they went far beyond words – and the closest she could come was that of Aslan himself: it was not safe…but it was good.


On that seventh night in the lamplight of the narrow cabin, she sang of Queen Endelient, who ruled Narnia two hundred years before Swanwhite. It was not a happy tale. The Queen had loved unwisely, and her lover had betrayed her to the brutal Telmarines who, having successfully occupied their own country for a century, lusted for Narnia as well. Not knowing of her faithless love's treachery, Endelient had died by her own hand to save his life, as she thought. Narnia, it was said, very nearly fell to Telmar while the Narnians desperately instated the Queen's much younger sister on the throne.

Lucy had not planned to tell such a morbid tale – it was all Caspian's fault for humming a bit of a melody that his nurse had sang as a lullaby to him, a tune he said was "utterly bewitching," and begging for the full ballad. She froze when she heard it, and all the remembrances of the tale and its last telling came sharply, unavoidably back to her.

Lucy was tangibly reluctant to sing the blatantly romantic and tragic epic – "it's not exactly Eustace and Edmund's cup of tea," she protested. Edmund looked sharply at her, and said off-handedly that a rousing chorus of When a Dryad Asks You to Pollinate, Always Answer Yes would be more the thing. (The only tunes he would sing in their day, quite off-key and mostly under the persuasion of heavy spirits, were the more "colorful" kind that the Satyrs and Otters loved to sing in the hot summer nights. Lucy was not at all surprised when such barnburners as Euan Oi-Oi-Oi With Glee and A Wild Girl Gives a Merry Chase . could occasionally be heard rising from the underdeck cabin when the wine was flowing freely on board the Treader.)

"I am not afraid of a little tragedy," Caspian said with an irresistible smile. Lucy admitted to herself that singing this tale to Caspian was not her idea of auspicious foreshadowing. But he insisted that they would all – and here he looked meaningfully at the other two – like to hear the tale, and that he himself would especially love to hear the tune sung by a master singer.

She couldn't resist such a plea, and so despite her misgivings, Lucy sang of the ill-fated Queen and her love, although it was a much different performance than what she had given in Cair Paravel in the old days. Then, Lucy had played the keys of her dulcet as she sang, accompanied by several kitharas, and Rildor and Andimar had sung the stanzas of the Telmarine traitors, and Torin, who usually played his kinnor in graceful counterpoint with them, sat amongst the audience listening to their ballad. The acoustics of the Great Hall would always carry their voices with reverberating sweetness.

Here, there were no instruments to place the chords – what she wouldn't give to touch a dulcet again! – and the song truly called for the melancholy of its minor harmonies. Without the regular practice and training of her former studies, not to mention the drastic reversal of her age, Lucy knew her voice was far more fragile and clumsy than what it used to be, and the tiny cabin's sloping walls did it no favors.

But there was simply nothing like singing Old Narnia's music in Narnia itself, and seeing the play of memories across Edmund's face as he fell (reluctantly, as he always had) under the spell of its witchery. Even Eustace seemed interested in the intrigues of the story, despite the shake of his head when she came to the stanza of Endelient's needless death. And Caspian – well, whenever her gaze fell on him during the course of the ballad, his eyes were always fixed upon her, drinking in each note and syllable as though it was a wonderful vintage.

There was a lovely stillness as she came to the end of the tale. For a good while nobody spoke.

"My thanks, Lucy," said Caspian at last, hands behind his head as he lay in the low-slung hammock nearest the bunk. He looked very thoughtful. "That song has haunted my dreams ever since I was a boy, but I have never heard it sung in full. I believe my Nurse picked the happiest verses to croon over me, for I never knew it was a sad story."

"You did warn us," Edmund pointed out, grinning slightly at Lucy.

"It didn't make sense," said Eustace beside her. "Why didn't Endeli-lady just kill the Telmarines? Or the chap who turned her over? She didn't have to pull that Shakespeare rot just because she was in a bad way."

"She did it for love," said Caspian, almost wistfully. "To save Imradorn. She knew she would be slain by her enemies no matter what she said or did, and she believed her lover could be spared if she offered her life willingly. The tragedy of it, of course, is that her sacrifice was in vain."

Lucy met his eyes and saw a kindred understanding of what she felt. Oh Aslan, his eyes were blue, they were nothing like – no, don't think of that. "I think she would have done it, even if she had known," said Lucy softly. "Isn't that what love is? Believing even beyond hope? And the willingness to lay down even one's life for another."

"I pray it is so," said Caspian.

Eustace gave a slight snort, and Lucy poked him. To settle the inevitable scuffle, and also quite thoughtfully, Edmund handed Lucy a flagon of wine as he always used to after her ballads, and though the spiced wine was quite different than the heady potent libations from the Satyrs' vineyards that flowed in those feastdays, she drank eagerly and quickly, til the cup was empty. She peered regretfully into the bottom of the vessel.

"I brought the whole bottle," said Edmund, grinning, and produced the promised liquid.

"So did I," admitted Caspian, pointing to his own acquisition of refreshment stashed in the corner of the cabin.

The wine flowed freely that night as songs turned to more merry stories of the doings of Cair Paravel since their absence. It seemed as though several hours that passed before they finally grew sleepy enough to bed down for the night – Eustace had passed out a good fifteen minutes before this – and Edmund (who had always been a bear about his rest) put his blanket over his head and pointedly ignored the other two.

Lucy moved to the door of the cabin, her lamp in her hand. Caspian, a bit gropingly, caught her by the arm as she passed his hammock. "I am glad you came this night," he said in a low voice. "You were – well, you sang beautifully."

"Thank you," said Lucy automatically, even as her heart stopped for a moment and a ghostly parade of past remembrances came galloping full tilt into her head. The words. The ballad – dear Aslan, she wanted to forget, she did, she did. And they were nothing alike. They looked, they sounded nothing alike. And Caspian was very, very real here, looking contentedly at her with a drowsy smile.

"I challenge you Queen, for tomorrow night," said Caspian in a slurred, teasing voice.

"I accept," said Lucy, for she had no choice but to accept. She was Valiant, and she could not put her hands up and surrender to the darkness of her defeats. She would not let her frailty betray her now.

"Till tomorrow then."

Lucy nodded. "Sleep well, Caspian." She slipped past him to the door and let herself out, and it was not until she had left the cabin that the strain of the agonizing memories showed upon her face. She was blinded for a moment by the full force of how much it hurt, and her hands curled into fists so that she might not scream from the ache. Her dreams would be no comfort tonight.


The King did not know that the lady who lay sleeping inside that castle was no princess, but the Queen of that castle and of those lands, and that she could only be awakened from her long enchantment by the kiss of her true love.


A/N: This chapter was written under the influence of several pieces of music: Loreena McKennitt's "The Highwayman" and Dido's "White Flag" ("I will go down with this ship…" :SOB:). Things are not always what they seem…and Lucy has much much further to go in her journey. Drop me a line and let me know what you think so far!