General Tidying-Up

O0O0O0O

"No, you idiot, put your head back." It took Peter a very long, hazy moment before he recognised the speaker, and an even longer, hazier one before he recognised the room around him, flickering as it was in the lamplight.

"I'm home," he said, and the stark concern that drew Susan's brows together seemed to lighten just a fraction as she smiled, and said he was.

"Although it's no thanks to you," she added, scowling. "I am very cross at you, Peter! I've had a word with the Marshal, you know, and he told me you didn't even ride back! You had to be carried! In a litter! You were that wounded!"

"It's not so bad," Peter tried to sit up, but regretted the effort when his chest screamed, his stomach lurched and the room seemed to dip and twirl around him. "All right," he flopped back, "so it's bad. Sort of. It could have been worse."

"It very nearly was." Susan looked down at him with such naked fear that Peter wondered if he might perhaps be dying, and she just wanted to spare him the burden of knowing it. When he asked her if it was so, however, he was poked sternly in the shoulder –the one part of him that didn't seem to be in some way torn, bruised or bandaged– and called an idiot, which criticism he accepted with good grace.

"Are they . . ." he paused to accept a sip of water she forced on him, with the help of the clucking physic behind her, "what losses have we suffered?"

"Not as many as we might have, had you not arrived in time," Susan prevaricated, setting aside the pewter goblet she held. "Our greatest losses are in the form of minor casualties, rather than . . ." But here she stopped, because the word 'fatality' would simply not rise to her lips. Instead, she fussed with the counterpane as the physic murmured that his Majesty seemed to be out of danger, but if her Majesty had any need of him, she had only to send word.

"It could have been so very much worse, Peter," Susan said quietly, once the physic had left and her brother asked her why she looked like such a stormcloud. "To have drawn a sword when you already had such injuries . . ." she bit her lip.

"What happened?" Peter squinted up at the canopy, trying to remember. "I mean, I know that one of the Giants caught me broadside with his club –ugly, spiked affairs, those clubs– but that was days ago. I want to know what happened today; here, I mean. We were riding home –and making jolly good time, too, I might add– and then . . ."

Then they had heard the sound. The deep, pure note had bit into his heart and sent him into such a panic he hardly knew what happened next. Tarva had been tethered beside him, conveniently riderless, and Peter had made it down from the litter and up onto the horse before anyone knew what had happened. Together the King and Tarva set the pace back to the castle, Peter's sheer, tangible panic driving the horse on in a manner that no whip cut ever could have.

"We heard your horn," he realised, and Susan nodded.

"I didn't mean for you to, of course," she reproved, as if he could somehow have helped it. "I don't know exactly what we meant, but it wasn't that; we didn't even know you were on your way. It only seemed the proper thing to do at the time."

"For you to have done it, it must have been," Peter agreed, and his sister flushed crimson. "So we heard your horn, we came running, and . . . it all gets a little hazy there." He grimaced, trying to recall it, to piece details back in their proper place.

"I was in the keep," Susan said quietly. "When you arrived, I mean; you got here after the fighting had started, and by then, I was already in the keep. They had begun to batter the door."

"Oh, yes." That bit, at least, he remembered. "We came at the Cair from the forest gate; nearly gave poor Gillikin the fright of his life, I'm afraid, but one of the gardeners saw our banner, so that was all right."

"I heard him," Susan realised. "He called for Narnia and the Lion; I didn't know he was announcing you."

"No? Well, he got them all to wise up, anyway; the rest of the lot thought we were Calormenes, or some such. They got the gate unblocked pretty quick after that, though you wouldn't believe the lot they'd found to pile against it: bales of hay, tack, carriages, bits of armour and every other thing you can think of. I'm afraid they tipped one of the carriages, shifting it; made a dreadful crash. Then we were in, and we were on them in a trice– those of us fit to stand, at least."

"Those, and you," Susan said wryly, and Peter had the grace to blush just a little.

"All right, so I'm in poor shape; nothing a few days' rest won't cure. My memory's still a bit foggy, though. I can't quite . . . did I come right after you, then?"

"You must have done," Susan decided. "I heard them still calling about the banner when I was up in the battlements, so you must have just reached the courtyard. I don't know how you knew where to find me, though."

"Nor do I," Peter said cheerfully, clearly willing to let this detail slide if only he could piece together the larger bits. "It must have been frightfully quick work on my part, though. It's all such a muddle . . . I do remember somebody telling me about you, though I can't remember what he said. I remember climbing over a rubbish heap of a door, and then I remember running that fellow through in the tower room . . . oh, I think I knocked my knee against one of the steps."

"Yes, so did I," Susan admitted.

"Then you know it hurts like nothing else," Peter decided, and Susan agreed that she did. "But yes, the part I remember best is handling that little chap in the tower room, and then the one who came at me next . . . did he call me names?"

"The second one? I think so, yes."

"Good, then I remember that part properly, too. And after that . . ." He shut his eyes, and Susan thought he was trying to recall what had followed. She couldn't have known he was seeing the one thing he remembered perfectly– the look of empty terror in his sister's eyes, and how the dagger had glittered in the sun as it drew those scarlet drops from the smooth white throat. He didn't think he'd ever be able to get it out of his mind. When he spoke, he was careful to keep his voice very, very steady. "After that, I seem to have done what I set out to do."

"You did," Susan agreed, and her slim, bandaged hand hovered over his larger, equally bandaged one, patting it reassuringly. "You did marvellously, Peter, you really did. I think we should have been quite lost, but for you."

"And," Peter said with unmistakeable gravity, "the Cair should have been quite lost, but for you. No," seeing his sister was about to demur, "no, it's quite true, Susan. You held them off brilliantly; I shouldn't have thought it even possible, given what you had to work with, but . . . you did it."

"Well, of course I did." Her eyes opened in hurt surprise. "I hadn't any choice, Peter; this is my home."

And he did not dismiss her words with a careless 'I know' as so many might have done, because Peter, of course, knew exactly what she meant.

O0O0O0O

As Cair Paravel recovered from the attack, those in Archenland were doing much the same. King Lune had arranged for quarters and care for the wounded, and imprisonment for the conquered enemies. Then it was suggested that everyone should have supper taken up to their rooms, which sounded well to all.

"Do they always happen so quickly?" Lucy wondered, and if her laugh was a trifle shaky, we really can't blame her. Edmund, divested of his armour and watching as one of the maids carefully bound up his knuckles, which had been jammed under his own armour when he fell from Irra's back to dodge the spear, found he had to smile.

"Would you have preferred a lengthier ordeal?" he wondered, then flinched as the bandage was pulled too tight. Lucy, seeing the face her brother made, chased away the maid and took charge. With deft, gentle turns she wound the clean linen around the bruised hand, tied the ends off and sat back to tell Edmund not to be ridiculous.

"Of course I wouldn't rather it have taken longer; I only ask because you have seen more battles than I, and each one I have seen seems to happen all at once. Each time I expect that it must surely take a little longer, but each time it's all simply a blur. I find I haven't any time to get angry that we have to fight at all!"

"And surely that's just as well," Edmund decided. "After all, what purpose could it serve anyone if you were to be angry at soldiers who are only following the orders of their leader?"

It was such a dishearteningly practical observation that Lucy made a terrible face of her own and said she was going to see Corin. Edmund, gingerly flexing his hand, said very well, then, but she had better not be late returning for supper. His sister said if he thought such a thing were possible, then he didn't know Corin.

It didn't take Lucy long at all to locate the little prince, and with him she found a freshly-scrubbed, very uncertain-looking fellow who looked exactly like Corin. Smiling at both boys, Lucy marvelled that her brother and sister could ever have been so mistaken as to the similarities between the two; for all that he had the same face as Corin, the older boy seemed far more cautious in his manner, and nothing at all like the Prince she knew. While Corin was on his feet and forward in a trice at seeing Lucy enter, the other boy was much slower to rise, and he hovered uncertainly in the background as Corin began to regale Lucy with a detailed account of the battle as he had seen it. Lucy dimpled merrily until at last her friend stopped to draw breath, and she was able to get a word in.

"Yes, it was the most terrible thing, wasn't it?" she observed. "I hear you acquitted yourself most credibly, though– not that I should ever have thought it could be otherwise. But here, now," with an engaging smile, holding out a hand to the quieter of the pair, "we have yet to be properly introduced. Unless there are more of you than I was led to believe, you are our dear friend's long-lost son, are you not? I heard the cheers all the way back where the archers stood, and when I at last reached the castle, you were all anyone could talk about!"

"Oh," said the boy, very wide-eyed, "well, I . . . yes, they say I'm Prince Cor. I didn't know," he added, as if he expected Lucy to scold him for not revealing his identity when first they met. "I hadn't the least idea I was anything Royal."

"My dear," Lucy smiled, seating herself at Corin's belated invitation, "nobody holds you accountable for not remembering who birthed you! You were only a small boy when your father's courtier betrayed him and stole you away; I was not here when it happened, but when we lost your mother to the fever and my sister –whom I believe you have met, though she did not know it at the time– came to your father's court to see if she might help, she heard the dreadful tale at least a dozen times. Everyone in the Archenland knows what a blow it was to your family to lose you. You have been much missed these past years, and nobody seeks to scold you for being so long gone." Her smile when saying this was so infectious that Cor's face relaxed at once, and Corin whirled on him with a look of triumph.

"There, you see?" he declared, "I told you! And if Queen Lucy says a thing, then you know it's so." He then looked back to Lucy, and had they not been such friends, the open admiration on the boy's face might have made her blush.

"Your boasting does me too much credit, Corin," Lucy scolded, but could not quite make her dimples disappear, so Corin knew she wasn't really cross. "Now I will confess my real reason for coming to see you; as delightful as your company is, and greatly as I look forward to sharing in it quite soon, I cannot do so just yet. First I need to learn from you–"

"–where Rabadash is imprisoned," Corin finished, and Lucy gave him a look of such shock that he felt compelled to shrug and explain his reasoning. "Of course you want to see him. I know it won't do any good to wait until everybody is hovering around, watching you; they might not let you say everything you want to. I want to speak with him, too," he added, and here his eyes flashed so fiercely that Lucy felt a little alarmed at the sight of it, and said no indeed, he might not.

"I appreciate your fervour," she added, "but this is my own confrontation to make. Susan is my sister, and our brothers are both far too much Knights of the Lion to countenance the sort of things I mean to say. They would say it was unbecoming of a gentleman, and I daresay they would be quite right. It is to my great good fortune," she concluded, "that I am no gentleman."

"I needn't be a gentleman either," Corin offered, but Lucy said no, thank you, she thought he had better try to be.

"I would count it a great favour, however," she said quietly, "if you would be so good as to show me where the Prince is being held, and arrange it so that I might speak with him on my own."

This was clearly not Corin's idea of sport, but it was just as clearly the only part Lucy was prepared to let him take in hers, so he finally conceded it was better than nothing at all. Motioning at his brother and the Narnian Queen to keep very quiet, the Prince led them both out of his chambers, into the corridor beyond.

O0O0O0O

The voyage to the dungeon was much more of an ordeal than Lucy had imagined it might be. The gaol in Cair Paravel was not overlarge, and it was not a chore to obtain access to it, but the prison in King Lune's castle seemed to be a bit more complicated than that; at least, this was the impression Lucy gathered as she listened to Corin explain his plan to gain her entry.

"I might convince one of the guards," he whispered, as they made their way down a passageway at the back of the castle toward the narrow service stairs at the end, "but only one of them. The others are all much too strict, and they'd never allow you in to see him without Father saying it was all right– mind the top step, Queen Lucy, it tends to catch you up."

Queen Lucy minded the top step, as did Prince Cor behind her. The journey got more uncomfortable at this point, since the steep, cut-stone steps were terribly cramped. The odd little band had to travel one behind the other until they got to the bottom and came up against a low, dark door set with heavy iron hinges and a rough iron ring. The ring was rubbed smooth and shiny where people gripped it to push the door in, and it was here that Corin caught it up and heaved with all his might, grimacing when the heavy portal refused to give more than an inch.

Lucy, sensing a need for haste, applied her shoulder to the door as well, and so did Prince Cor. They made an awful lot of noise, I am afraid, and if anybody had been within even twenty yards of them it is quite certain they should have been found out at once. Everybody was grimacing and groaning, and they were at one point breathing so hard that the torches set along the wall flickered alarmingly, but at last they managed to make an opening wide enough even for Lucy.

"I have to come with you," Corin insisted, when Lucy tried to take her leave of the princes at that point. "I need to tell the guard what you want; he won't trust you, otherwise." This may have been a slight exaggeration, since all Archenlandish subjects knew who the Narnian Kings and Queens were, but Lucy forbore to debate the point. Instead she said very well, then, and placed a hand on Cor's shoulder when she saw he was looking rather doubtful about this turn of events.

"You'll be back out again soon enough," she pointed out, so the boy squared his shoulders a bit nervously, and walked with her into the narrow corridor.

Corin led the way, and Lucy and Cor were careful to keep up. This passage was lit not by colourful glass windows and blazing torches, as were the corridors above, but by small iron lamps hanging from the walls. These gave a very small flame, providing just enough light to illuminate the stone floor and the heavy doors set along the wall. It was actually much cleaner and far more pleasant than other dungeons, and it hardly smelled at all, but to the two boys and Lucy it looked an unpleasant sort of place indeed.

"Are- are all the people in here to die?" Cor asked, so softly that Lucy barely heard him. Corin heard, though, and tossed an indignant look over his shoulder.

"No, of course not! They're just here for their own wrongdoing. They stay until their sentence is served, and they go home. Don't believe everything you heard down South; we aren't really barbarians, you know."

Although the light was too dark to show it clearly, Lucy rather fancied Cor got quite red in the face at hearing this, and she was quick to intervene.

"Cor knows perfectly well we aren't barbarians, Corin!" she scolded, and gave the older boy's shoulder a quick squeeze to comfort him. "Corin didn't mean it like that, you know; he only meant that we have a different method of dealing with criminals than you may be used to. I understand that the Tarkaans all have private gaols in their homes, isn't that so? And isn't it true that an imprisoned man may be tortured or killed, if his crime is deemed severe enough?" Cor, who had often heard stories such as these, nodded timidly. Lucy nodded too, and continued to explain. "All Corin really meant is that here in the North, we have a different way of handling things. We think that such methods are perhaps a touch . . . extreme, and better fitted to tyrants than to good, even-handed rulers."

Corin turned again, looking as though he might very much like to add some colour to this euphemistic interpretation, but he wasn't given the chance, as at that moment a large guard appeared to cast a doubtful look over the trio.

"Your Highness?" he said, but made it very much a question. Corin, not in the least daunted, drew himself up to his full height to reply.

"The Queen Lucy would like to speak with Prince Rabadash."

The guard turned his gaze to Lucy. Though his expression may have lessened in scepticism it remained largely doubtful, and Lucy saw, with some alarm, that Corin was getting ready to insist. Her hand flashed out, caught the boy by the collar and tugged him back with an effort –when, she wondered, had he gotten so big? He was nearly past her chin– before she addressed the guard herself.

"It concerns an incident that took place during the Envoy's time in Calormen," she said, and spoke no more. Her hand, tightening briefly around Corin's shoulder, ensured that he kept silent, too. Whether it was the solemnity of her tone or the expression on her face that convinced him, Lucy was not sure, but the guard gave her a long, measuring look, and nodded.

"Very well," he grunted, "but I cannot countenance you entering his room alone. You'll need to speak to him with a guard, or from without."

"Of course," Lucy agreed, "I will be happy to have a guard with me." Then, when the guard eyed the princes askance, Lucy was quick to tell them both to wait for her in the stairwell. Corin bristled at this, but the older girl was unyielding. "Do not question me in this, Corin," she insisted. "This, I must do quite on my own."

In the end it was Cor who dragged his brother off, leaving Lucy to wait until she was certain they were beyond the door. Then she followed the guard down a side passage, this one even cleaner and better-lit than the first. The large brass lamps along the walls lit the corridor handsomely, and there were clean rushes on the floor. Lucy's guide stopped at one of the doors at the very end, which looked as innocent as many of the doors in the wing where Lucy herself was quartered, save that it had to be unlocked by a heavy key from the guard's own keyring first.

"This is his Highness, here," the guard observed, and tapped almost politely on the portal. "Prince Rabadash, you've yourself a visitor."

Prince Rabadash was unimpressed with this announcement, and indicated as much with a string of florid Calormene curses that made Lucy raise her eyebrows in spite of herself. Lucy had heard some colourful things travelling with the army, but Rabadash cursed most extensively, calling down the wrath of Tash on all the guard's ancestors, his family, livestock and neighbours, too. The guard, unmoved by these elaborate threats, simply waited until the prisoner had spent all his breath, and had to gasp for more. Then he gave the Queen a polite nod.

"As you see fit, your Majesty," he decided, and pushed the door in with some degree of caution. He preceded the Queen inside the room and made sure the Prince wasn't about to try anything impolite before he at last allowed Lucy to present herself in the doorway, and peer cautiously inside.

Rabadash, far from being incarcerated in a dank, filthy, rat-infested cell –as you may think would be perfectly fair treatment for one such as he– had been given a room that would have been comfortable by most any standards. There was a fair-sized window high in one wall, and the room was furnished comfortably with a soft bed, a nice chair and a writing desk. A small lamp on the desk was glowing softly, casting a pleasant light over everything, and there were even, Lucy saw, a few books on a low shelf. Somehow these niceties cheered her immeasurably. She hadn't felt entirely settled in her mind, coming to yell at a man locked in a repulsive hole in the ground, but speaking to a man who had been offered far more comforts than he deserved seemed quite another thing.

For his part, Rabadash glowered at Lucy for a moment before recognising her. Lucy knew the moment he realised who she was, for it was then that he leaped to his feet with a singularly unpleasant look on his face, his lip curling in disgust. The guard behind Lucy didn't exactly do anything, but he shifted his feet a bit, thumped his cudgel into the palm of his hand and recalled Rabadash to his presence in the room. The Prince subsided, though he did not sit again, and addressed her in such tones as made the young Queen's flesh creep.

"And so," he sneered, "as befits the King of a backward, barbarian country, Edmund sends no great man but his own sweet sister to berate me."

Lucy considered replying, but, for a reason even she could not name, decided against it at that point. Instead she kept quiet, and regarded the Prince with a sort of solemn silence that he foolishly mistook for meekness on her part.

"I see," he said, with such a dreadful note to his voice that it unsettled even the guard, "that at least one of the women in this accursed country knows how to hold her tongue."

The implicit slur against her sister was almost enough to drive Lucy to slap the mouth that made it. Her little palms tingled, itching to come into contact with that mocking countenance, and at that moment she wanted, more than anything else in the world, to strike the smirk from his loathsome face. She longed to make him suffer what she had suffered; to make him see what those three weeks had been to her, the nights she had spent pacing the floor of her chamber, mourning a sister she expected any day to lose. She wanted to make him see what he had cost them, and she longed, above all, to make him understand that he had lost.

But there were no words for that; nor were there blows enough to pound it into him. So Lucy stood quite still, a girl-queen looking impossibly out of place in that quiet room in a remote corner of King Lune's comfortable gaol, and she said nothing at all. It's quite possible she wouldn't even have known what to say had she chosen to speak, though I like to think she would have found the words had she wanted to. Instead she faced him directly, quite small and pale and solemn but otherwise very regal, and in fact she looked very much as Susan herself had looked when she had faced Rabadash days before, in Tashbaan.

That resemblance was what infuriated Rabadash most, for it was what made him realise that, even when he had supposed he had Susan in his power, she had in fact been as much out of his reach as was Lucy now. It was that very resemblance that made him leap for the young Queen, moving so fast and with such rage that the dreadful, long fingers actually closed about Lucy's slender throat before the guard was able to act. Brandishing his cudgel and shouting warningly, the guard moved in and drove the Prince back, leaving Lucy badly shaken, her throat smarting but otherwise none the worse for wear.

"Your Majesty," the guard stepped back once he had made sure Rabadash knew better than to try such a trick again, "Queen Lucy, are you all right?"

"Yes, I– yes," Lucy nodded, clearing her throat noisily, touching it, "thank you, I am." And her head was suddenly clearer and her voice stronger than they had been in a very long time. I am afraid the same cannot be said for Rabadash, who gnashed his teeth and rolled his eyes and howled like a spoilt child.

"I will have her!" he ranted, his voice rising to a shriek. "I will have her yet, the lying shrew, the daughter of dogs; I will have her for my own, and she will live to know her defiance of me for the folly it was! I will beat from her body every deceitful word, every proud thought, every bewitching look that ensnared me. I will trample these accursed lands to dust and ruin, I will blot their names from the memory of all men! And she shall watch it happen; she will see her family fall, her castle razed, her kingdom laid to ash and waste, and she will know it was lost all for her vanity! She will suffer for her pride, for her–"

"Enough!" You would not have thought a girl as small as Lucy could thunder, but thunder she did, and she looked rather terrible as she did it. "Enough! I could put up with your idiocy until the stars fell from the heavens, but I will not hear you speak against my sister. She is beyond blame in this; she is beyond your reproach, and she is certainly," witheringly; contemptuously, "beyond you."

Again the Prince looked as if he might leap at her, but this time he seemed to think better of it. It was not the guard that forced him to reconsider, though; rather it was the icy fire in Queen Lucy's eyes that quenched, for the moment, even the fires of the Prince's self-righteous fury. In the ensuing silence, Lucy spoke.

"You came into my home," she said, and though her voice trembled a little, she herself did not, "and I saw you for the ridiculous thing you are. At the time I spoke out of turn, and for my haste, I paid dearly. I did my sister the discredit of thinking her weak enough to be deceived by you. I thought her vain; I thought it my place to protect her. I timed it badly and behaved still worse, and I have regretted it ever since." Lucy paused for just a moment to collect herself; speaking truths so close to the heart is always a trying thing.

"Now, though," her hands clenched just once, "it is my turn. I know what you are, and I know who she is; I know, too, what she is not. You are the liar who tried to make her less than herself. You are the sneak who sought to win her by flattery, though you would have kept her by force. You took her to your wretched land, and you would have kept her there until she died of self-loathing. She, who is my sister, who is so sweet and gentle, so very above and beyond you that it makes me laugh to think that either of us ever believed you could win her! She is a thousand times the Queen I could ever be. She is mine; she is Narnia's. She can never be otherwise. She will never," fiercely, "ever be yours."

On that note, the tenuous control Lucy had kept over herself snapped, and rather than let the Prince see her end this fine speech in floods of tears, she whirled about and flew from the room, leaving the guard to lock it behind her. Gasping and shaking, Lucy flew down the corridor to the door at the end of it, dashed through the narrow opening, and found them there– Cor and Corin, looking a trifle bored, but waiting patiently all the same.

"Lucy!" Corin was on his feet in an instant, his eyes wide and somewhat fearful at the sight of the fierce, sunny little Queen collapsing in tears.

"I'm all right," she gasped, fumbling for her hanky, "I'm all right, really I–" but it was such a lie that she couldn't even finish it. Instead she sank to the steps, everything she had held inside that past month breaking free, and Corin, with a look on his face far different from that which had been there when Susan had wept, told Cor to go upstairs and wait for them there. Then he sat on the steps beside Lucy, put his arm firmly 'round her shoulders, and held her as she cried.

O0O0O0O

A.N.: This chapter has been, in some ways, two months in the making. It's a terribly tricky thing sometimes, being a sister! I only hope I managed in Lucy to strike that fine balance between lady and lioness that can be so tricky for a sister to maintain; far too often, it seems, the lioness wins out!

Up next: Love, Loss and Leave-Taking, wherein friends are made, two young ladies have a serious discussion, and a good-bye is said.