"I hope it will never be told in Narnia that a company of noble and royal persons in the flower of their age… were afraid of the dark."

Reepicheep, on the edge of the Darkness

"Fools! This is the land where dreams – your worst dreams, your nightmares! – come true!"

Even as the words assaulted his tingling ears, Caspian's mind froze around them, his flesh beginning to crawl. Her bony fingers wrapped around the taffrail, wisps of grey cloth and skin barely distinguishable one from the other. Blood oozed under the nails, the only proof of her being truly living.

Behind, her, its claws scratched and gouged at the planking of the hull; he could hear its voice, hoarse and rasping, the panting sounds it made as the transformation completed. Drinian will be furious, claw marks in his ship, he realised, stupidly. Then, gaunt and ashen, her face appeared. With an agility not to be expected in her kind, she vaulted the rail and stood, not three yards from him, arm raised, mouth open. Ready to summon the demon.

"No!" he muttered, powerless to force numb fingers into position around his useless sword hilt "Please no, for the Lion's sake! Not him!"

"Look!" Eustace's whimper cut through the deeper rumble of general anxiety. "'Round the mainmast; they're circling. Lucy! Lucy, watch out, their breath… my hands! It's starting! Stop it! Leave me alone!"

While his cousin tried to cower beside the ship's wheel, Edmund stood stock-still, save for the tongue which flickered repeatedly over his lips. Something sweet, sugared and unmistakable brought vomit surging up in his throat. Turkish Delight.

That Turkish Delight: gooey, addictive, temptation in edible form.

He tensed, aware of the presence behind him, the chilling in the air. Any moment now, that long, snowy hand would curl around his shoulder. "Edmund."

"Edmund!" She meant it as a shout, but Lucy doubted if her frightened croak would reach the man beside her at the fighting top, still less her brother, far below on the poop. "They're all 'round the foot of the mast," she whispered, the bow beneath her fingers twitching with her every tiny shudder. "Those faces, and ugh! They're slimy and horrid and – oh, no! They can climb! Bowman, look! They're crawling up the mast!"

"I won't do it!" At the foot of the main mast, Rhince rocked in a terrified, hairy ball, eyes popping between tobacco-stained fingers. "You can't make me! Cap'n! They'm comin' down the mains'l, Sir! Get away – get back! They'll never let us go!"

"Never let us go!" Above the hubbub the shrill scream of the stranger sounded exultant. "Of course we shall never escape the terrors of the Dark Place! Never!"

Caspian backed away, but not from the demented wreck of a human; his glassy stare was fixed higher, on the mottled face of a burly, once-handsome man wearing a crooked coronet. "You are not real," he muttered, through chattering teeth. "You died; I saw it! Depart, demon! You are not real!"

His feet kept shuffling, until his back made contact with something solid, though neither he nor the solid thing noticed it. In fact, the solid thing, usually addressed as Drinian, was rooted to the spot, staring with cloudy, sightless eyes at a patch of damp darkness spreading across the deck.

His hands were linked behind his back; he could feel thin fishing wire cutting, feel the blood beginning to trickle down his wrists. He screwed up his eyes, trying to stop his ears to the shouts, the screams and the groans. Somewhere close, an order was shouted.

The patch of darkness on deck pulsed and spread again.

"Not real!" Edmund panted, forcing himself forward, on his toes, away from her icily outstretched hand. "You're dead, I tell you! I know you're not real – none of this is real!"

"Not real." Somewhere, nearby, he heard the faintest thread of another, barely human, voice: and, miracle of wonders, he recognised it.

"Caspian!" he shouted desperately, through the thickness of nausea in his tight throat. "It's not real! We're pulling them out from our nightmares! Fight it!"

"You are not real!" Shouting the words made it possible to believe the glowering menace looming closer was a fantasy. Caspian lunged forward, his arm striking straight through, making the image shimmer. "You are not real!" he yelled again, more certain this time. "Together, shipmates! They are not real!"

"Not real." The whipcords around his wrists seemed to snap with the dissipation of fog in his brain. "Man the oars! Topmen aloft! Boson, a good, strong stroke!"

He flung himself at the wheel, where Pittencream quivered, still trapped by his own terrors. Even the finest navigator needs a clue to steer by, but by bringing the ship full about, away from the gentle swish of breaker on shore, he must surely have the Dawn Treader on roughly the right heading.

The galleon lurched under his command, oddly sluggish. The damage she suffered in the fight, he thought, panic gripping him a moment before King Edmund's desperate chant cut through, reminding him of where he was. Dawn Treader.

Still, the voices echoed in his head, and the reek of blood and death struck at the back of his throat hard enough to make him choke. He gripped the wheel hard, forced his wandering mind to focus. Which way is west, for the Lion's sake?

"Move back, demon!" Caspian had his sword free now, raised before him, a greater menace to his oblivious shipmates than the mirage that would solidify in defiance of his better judgement. "I saw you fall – hag, away from Us, We are Narnia!"

"We're goin' in circles!" mumbled Peridan, at the foot of the poop ladder. "Gettin' pulled in… can't he see, we're steerin' straight for the flames?"

"Flames!" Another voice bellowed out. "We're afire!"

"What nonsense is this?" Mice, Edmund realised, did not dream. Reepicheep stood, whiskers a-twirl with indignation, bristling in the midst of mayhem. "Your Majesties all! Is this insanity to be permitted unchecked? The honour of Narnia..."

"Shut up, Reep, you're drawing their attention." Eustace stretched out a trembling hand to clutch into the animal's dark fur. "I can't scratch them off!"

"Scratch off what?"

"The scales! Look, I'm covered in them!"

"Courage, Eustace." Caspian's voice was dry and cracking, but the boy's terror served to shake him a fraction from his own. "Drinian! What do you mean, flinging the ship about so?"

"Look!" Circling the masthead was a large and ghostly white shape. "Albatross!"

It seemed to Edmund that every head lifted; and as the Dawn Treader heeled in answer to her captain's command, into the wake of the bird's wing-beats, an odd, warm sensation started up in his belly. "I can't believe we're using a bird for navigation," Eustace muttered.

"I don't think it's just a bird, somehow," said his cousin, as the cloying blackness began to thin into a creamy fog, then a mere, damp mist. "I say! We're clear!"

"Where've they gone?" wondered Peridan. "Them flames, didn't nobody see?"

Eustace squinted up into the perfect, sunny sky, then down at his hands; podgy, browned slightly by the unusual amount of time spent out of doors in hot weather, and entirely free of glinting, harsh scale. "Lucy!" he called, trusting the wide-eyed girl scurrying down from the fighting top to be honest. "Am I human?"

"As near as you've ever been." Her bottom lip was bloodied, where it had been bitten to hold in the whimpers, and her legs felt wobbly, but she was smiling, bow slung over her shoulder, as she reached them. "That was pretty horrid, wasn't it?"

Edmund licked his lips, delighting in the raw taste of sea air, unsullied by sugar. "Ghastly," he admitted. "Caspian, are you all right?"

"Aye." The King sheathed his sword, still staring at the spot where his nightmares had gathered. "That they should dissolve so speedily…" he added, to himself, before his manners re-asserted themselves. "Now, we must tend to our friend here,"

The Lord Rhoop would never have been identified by his brothers-in-arms, of that Caspian was certain, but after years trapped in an endless nightmare, was it to be wondered at? The older man hardly dared believe, until they all had reassured him very seriously, that he was truly safe and amongst friends. And only one boon did he demand of his rightful sovereign. "Never send me back there!"

He pointed dramatically toward the ship's stern, and they all turned, not without an inward quiver, to see…

Nothing.

Clear ocean, bright sky, not the faintest trace of the horror that had once been. "Why!" cried the Lord Rhoop. "Your Majesty has destroyed it!"

"I don't think it was us," said Lucy, by whose ear the king of the seabirds had murmured its command for courage. Edmund nodded.

"Aslan," he whispered. "I felt…"

"Warmth," Caspian concluded. Eustace nodded.

"Me, too."

"And I, Sire," added Rynelf, from the foot of the ladder. Lucy beamed.

"I knew he wouldn't abandon us," she said. "But Caspian, shouldn't we get Lord Rhoop some clothes – there must be something aboard to fit him; and some food."

"Coffee," said Edmund.

"A tot wouldn't go amiss," added Rhince, bustling up from the belly of the ship with a broad grin, now the crisis was past. The Dawn Treader began to heel again under gentle persuasion, turning the dragon's painted gaze fearlessly east once more. "Cap'n?"

"Hm?" Though he guided the ship's movement smoothly back onto her proper course, it seemed to Caspian his old friend had no clue of what he was about. "Aye, very good, Rhince. Very good."

"Rynelf, see the Lord Rhoop below; what so ever his lordship may require, see to it, in my name." Caspian cocked his head. "My Lord Drinian, is aught amiss with the polish of our deck?"

"No, no, Sire." Folly to look for the bloodstains: another ship, another time. Drinian forced up his head and smiled, just, to his assembled passengers. "Who would have thought, in former years, Rhoop had twice the bulk of the late Lord Restimar?" he mused.

"Drinian! You have to be joking!" exclaimed Eustace, with a thought for the muscled statue at the bottom of Deathwater. Caspian, though not a whit deceived by the show of merriment, shook his head.

"Indeed he does not, Master Eustace: though by a few moments' exposure to the horrors he has known so long, I believe I comprehend his drastic change in appearance!"

"So do I!" agreed Edmund heartily, as at a nod of assent from the captain, Rhince hollered the order to release a much-needed tot of rum to every man. "I – probably I oughtn't ask, but…"

"What did we see?" Eustace suspected his shrieks about scales had betrayed enough not to fret at further loss of face. "Dragons, of course. A whole flock of them. Do dragons come in flocks, or hives? I could feel their breath – all damp and smelly and smoky – on my skin. I – I thought…"

"You were turning into a dragon again? Oh, poor Eustace!" Lucy gave him a hug, half surprised he made no attempt to push her away. "There were great big monster things clambering up the mainmast after me," she confided. "With big, hairy faces, like wolves. You remember Maugrim, the Witch's chief of police, Ed? It was his head on a snake's body, and with back legs all knobbly and splayed, froggy. How ridiculous is that?"

"At least you only got the police chief," Edmund muttered. "I got the Witch herself; and her horrid, sickly, glorious Turkish Delight. She was telling me to – to…"

"Edmund, that's awful," Lucy sympathised, and he was thankful to see, she understood quite how awful that confrontation with his guilty past had been. "Do we all have something real in our worst nightmares, do you think?"

"I do, for a certainty." The children appeared lighter for having confessed; suddenly Caspian felt less foolish about doing the same. "It was Miraz," he said, bluntly. "You recall, Edmund, those friends of Nikabrik's, in the dark and the cold beneath Aslan's How?"

"The hag and the werewolf that were going to summon her, when Trumpkin and Peter and I broke in," the boy remembered them only too well. "The wolf took a chunk out of your arm before we managed to kill it."

"They were here, on the poop; but not calling on her power." Caspian shivered. "They called up the usurper - Miraz stood there, not half a pace from me! He never spoke, yet I felt his thoughts; that I am no true king, no good king, and he would be rid of me, as he was my father. I never felt such fear of him, alive, as I did then!"

"I suppose we all magnify the things we're scared of in our nightmares," said Edmund sensibly. "And I don't see, Lu, why our worst fears - my falling under the Witch's influence, Scrubb turning into a dragon, Caspian facing Miraz, you and your creepy-crawly phobia - to say nothing of Maugrim - shouldn't come into it. Somebody thought the ship was on fire, didn't they? That sounds like a proper sailor's nightmare to me."

"I think that was Rynelf, King Edmund," Caspian agreed. "Though had it been my Lord Drinian, I should not have been surprised. What could be more terrible to our captain than the destruction of his beloved ship?"

Drinian thrust a hand back through his tousled black hair. "Tiger," he said simply. Caspian gaped.

"Oh," he said, as the children stared, nonplussed. "Thank you, Rhince, I shall take a small tot, though you know I have not the true tar's appreciation for the substance."

"No more's the Cap'n, Your Majesty." Rhince grinned at his commander, receiving a wry nod in return. "We've slung a hammock for Lord Rhoop, sir; seems 'e wants nowt but to be left alone."

"Then we shall oblige him until he feels fit for company. Take the helm, Rhince: I ought to take a tour of the ship. No, Your Majesties, no cause to come; the men might speak more free to their captain alone."

"As you please, my Lord." Caspian chewed his bottom lip thoughtfully. "Tiger," he murmured. "Do you know, though I have heard its legend, Drinian has never actually told what happened on that unhappy ship."

"His first Archenlandish ship?" asked Lucy, puzzled.

"Must have been something pretty ugly," said Eustace. "I never knew Drinian could look so pale! What do you know, Caspian?"

"Why, what all the world knows; that at the height of the Pirate War - between Archenland and Terebinthia, which has been a nest of villains since Edmund and Lucy ruled Narnia - the frigate Tiger was attacked by four of the vessels calling themselves the Terebinthian Fleet..."

"The King's still using the pirates as a navy?" Edmund asked.

"Better say, the pirates are still using the King!" Caspian corrected indignantly. "As I was saying; four of their number assaulted the gallant frigate Tiger and destroyed her. Most of her crew died; a bare handful, Drinian amongst them, survived. How it occurred, I have never asked, for he has never indicated any desire to tell."

"I don't think I'd want to know, thanks." Lucy's voice trembled. "I remember hearing stories of ships attacked by Terebinthian pirates, and I think I should sooner face Maugrim again than that."

"I'm jolly glad we shan't have to face any of them again," Eustace knocked back his rum with barely a shudder, instantly strengthened by its warming effects. "Pirates, witches dragons and all! Ugh! That must be the nastiest adventure we've had yet!"

"I doubt any man will dispute with that," murmured Caspian, deliberately omitting any Beast from his statement. Reepicheep's tail thrashed in warning of his disapproval.

"Are Your Majesties all so afraid of what is gone?" he enquired, courteous as ever, though they all heard the strain in his voice. "That your very nights can be haunted by them?"

"Nasty things can seem even nastier in the dark, Reep," Edmund promised. "Phew! Bet you a shilling to a penny, none of us will sleep tonight!"

Nobody, he thought, seemed willing to wager against him.