Lucy coaxed Jill to her feet, eyes vacant, unresponsive when she murmured that moving would be better than wallowing here.
Perhaps she needn't even have bothered, because the girl put up no resistance when Lucy took her hand, now both caked with dried blood between their fingers that didn't belong to them, and followed Caspian into the darkness, leaving the single distant skylight behind as their eyes adjusted to the deep, cavernous tunnel.
For the first several minutes the muscles in Lucy's chest ached with apprehension, expecting Edmund to appear at any moment out of the pitch black, or whoever had sent the rope down here in the first place, but no sound reached her ears save for the muffled echo of their own footsteps, and slowly, at least marginally, she relaxed.
Every now and then a thin shaft of light pierced down through a crack in the ceiling, cutting through several dozen feet of rock to splash over rough, earthy walls more than wide enough for all three of them to walk abreast, though Lucy trailed slightly behind Caspian, and Jill trailed slightly behind Lucy.
But little by little these patches of light became fewer and further between, and Lucy realized with a faint chime of alarm that they seemed to be moving downhill.
The temperature dropped off dramatically from the sunbaked land above, too, and she zipped up the front of the jacket she'd left loose and open for the past several days of sweltering heat.
"Well," murmured Caspian. "That's no good."
He stopped, boots scuffing on the stone, and she stopped beside him, blinking as the dim path ahead came into view.
Or rather, two paths.
The jagged rock wall split down the middle, two arched tunnels stretching off in different directions on either side, both too dark to see very far down.
"This isn't a way out," breathed Lucy. "We're just going deeper."
"I know," said Caspian, and his confirmation sent her stomach plummeting. "But who knows, maybe one of them goes back up."
"Or neither of them do."
He sighed. "Or neither of them do."
Lucy bit her lip, wondering for a moment if their skylight had really been so high up, if perhaps they could find a way to climb to it, or maybe Caspian could boost her up on his shoulders and she could try to reach—
But even as she thought of it, she knew it would never work.
"Which direction are we facing?" she asked, taking a breath and trying to think back to the way they'd come and where the tunnel had begun.
"East, I think." He glanced down at her, only the faintest outline of his face visible in the dark, but even without the usual expression cues, she knew he understood. "Are you sure?"
She nodded, and he took a step toward the right-hand tunnel, testing it as if something nasty might slither out from its mouth at any second, but the uneven rock proved no different than any part of the pathway they'd already traversed, and soon their footsteps echoed like they'd never stopped, now heading south, or something akin to south.
If either tunnel really led back to the surface, Lucy didn't fancy coming up near that forest again, and aiming as far away from that rocky maze as possible almost felt like a comfort, even if she'd only traded it for a different maze.
The claustrophobic weight of stone built the deeper they walked, and for a long time nobody spoke, as if the depth of earth itself had crawled into their throats and stuck there.
Just like their last morning in the Capitol, when that corrosive silence had bubbled up between them, she wished Caspian would speak, if only to distract her from the ruby-red pools leaking into her mind, from the loose sandy blond hair against hot stone.
She clutched his arm and he glanced back.
"It's… really dark in here," she mumbled, realizing what she'd done a second too late.
He smiled slightly, linked just like they had been at the Opening Ceremony, the lifeline she never meant to grasp yet somehow always reached for; linked in the eyes of the Capitol crowds screaming their names, wild cheers now replaced by the empty blackness of the underbelly of the arena, bloodstained overworld still lingering at the edges of her mind as she gripped Caspian's polyester sleeve like she'd known him a great deal longer than a week.
Then again, for all the Capitol knew, she had. Wasn't that the whole point? For all they'd teased in the interviews, they might have been childhood friends, surviving in the streets together, star-crossed orphans from Eight. Polly had been the one to suggest the angle, to intrigue the audience who so thoroughly enjoyed the tragedy of tributes who knew each other.
And maybe they did. At the very least they knew each other better than the Capitol knew either of them, and it occurred to her in that moment that their crushing embrace would have been televised, too.
Even without thinking, they must have sold it flawlessly.
Was Caesar commenting on them now? Were the cameras locked on their intertwined arms like they had been in the chariot?
Or perhaps they were watching Peter, his district partner now dead, though surely it gave him little cause to mourn. Had he known Edith well? Did he care about her? Lucy tried to picture their life in District Two, competing from the time they could lift a sword.
Perhaps it took a killer to love one. But he certainly hadn't sounded pleased about Gael.
"Twelve year olds shouldn't count."
A career tribute with a heart?
He'd been perfectly happy to hunt them down. At least, until…
Brilliant blue eyes flashed into her head again, a strange flicker of some mysterious expression across that handsome face, almost as if he'd been just as surprised by his own actions as she had.
Why would he stop? Her head should be rolling on that stone, but he'd hesitated. High King Peter had hesitated.
Did she look too young? She didn't look that young. Not like Gael.
"How old would you guess I was if you didn't know?" Her voice boomed in the passage, shocking in the oppressive silence, and Caspian made a noise almost like a laugh.
"That's what you're thinking about?"
She shoved his arm but didn't let go, suppressing her own spontaneous grin at the absurdity of such a thought out of context. "Just answer the question."
"Oh, I don't know… you'd probably still look fifteen to me. Maybe sixteen and just really poor."
"Hey!"
"You asked."
"I didn't ask to be insulted."
"My apologies, fair lady, would you care to return the favor?"
"What?"
"How old do I look?"
Lucy squinted up at him, scrutinizing his silhouette. "Old."
Caspian scoffed. "Old isn't an age."
"Sure it is, you get out of school and you're old, that's how it works."
"Well, I never finished school, so your system is flawed."
"Then why do you look like you already have five kids?"
"What? I do not look like I have five—"
"Okay maybe five is an exaggeration, but like, at least two. I didn't even think you were young enough to be in the Games, quite honestly."
"I'm nineteen in July!"
"The beard does a lot, I guess."
"Now who's insulting who?"
"I didn't say it was a bad thing."
"Well it kind of sounded like— woah." Caspian pulled up short around a corner and Lucy stopped behind him.
She didn't need to ask why.
A wide cavern opened up suddenly before them, bathed in a strange dreamy glow, columns of stone cast under pale, pearly green—which, now that she thought about it, had been creeping up slowly for some time—the darkness not quite so dark as it had been when they first entered the cave.
"Where's that coming from?" she murmured, loosening her grip on Caspian's arm, and realizing she could make out her fingernails distinctly against the weatherproof material.
She separated from Jill and stepped into the cavern, gazing around at the rugged walls and arching roof overhead, pillars like conjoined stalactites and stalagmites stretching like a scattered dead forest across the empty space.
"It's not daylight," said Caspian, following a step behind her, and that much was obvious enough.
This was more of a sickly glow, as if even the light were decaying down here.
"Maybe it's some kind of luminous rock," said Jill, her voice abrupt, hollow and haunted, like a ghost who'd forgotten she was dead for a moment.
Lucy glanced at her.
The thin glow seemed to come from everywhere at once, clinging to every surface rather than bouncing off of it.
"Yeah… I think you're right."
She turned and hopped up a little rise to a higher point in the uneven floor, gazing between pillars until something caught her eye amidst the haze. "Water." She pointed to a low pool on the far side of the cavern, so perfectly smooth and still that it might have been glass.
Caspian moved to look, too, and Lucy jogged closer, slowing as she came up to the edge and knelt beside it, her footsteps sending the gentlest ripples dancing out over its surface, mesmerizing in the strange, dim light.
Something glinted at the bottom, and she blinked. "Is that…?"
"What?" asked Caspian, following several paces behind as she gazed into the shimmering depths, down to the shape of a sword resting at the very bottom, so clear she could have reached down to grasp its hilt had the pool been just a little shallower.
And perhaps it was only a trick of the light through the water, but the blade looked almost golden, a ghostly yellow just like the stone surrounding it.
That doesn't seem right.
She'd just begun to wonder who would leave it there when another figure at the corner of the water caught her eye, and she bolted to her feet with a sharp gasp and ran straight into Caspian as he pulled Edith's knife from his belt.
"What—"
She pointed to the far side of the pool.
A boy, lying at the edge of the water against the wall, totally still, not even the rise and fall of breaths betraying a spark in his chest.
Dead.
Hidden in the shadow of a stony pillar, she hadn't even noticed him at first.
Caspian stood like a statue at her back, waiting, watching, but after several heart-pounding moments when still no movement came, his muscles relaxed, and Lucy inched carefully forward.
"Is it Edmund?" asked Jill shakily, staying well back.
From this angle, it might have been.
"I don't…" Lucy moved slowly around the pillar, peering down at the body, and then shook her head. "No." While roughly the right shape and size for Edmund, this boy had blond hair, not black, and a moment later she came close enough to recognize his face. "Corin. From Twelve."
Caspian lowered the knife.
"Do—" Jill glanced around. "Do you think Edmund might have killed him, then?"
Caspian glanced at her.
Lucy hesitated, scanning the cavern, the other pillars, but nothing else seemed to move or breathe, and at last she steeled her heart and knelt beside the body.
Sickly pale skin webbed with faint veins stretched over a sturdy bone structure, a coppery yellow substance now dried where it had trickled from his mouth onto the stone and into the glassy water. But no other injuries showed on his body, clothes intact, not a drop of blood to be seen. "Doesn't look like it," she murmured, "but—"
"Poison," said Caspian.
She nodded slowly, scanning the pale boy's face, now almost unrecognizable from the golden spitfire he'd been in training, his barking laugh ringing through the cafeteria as if it had been nothing more than an ordinary school lunchroom, challenging careers to fights he knew the guards would stop if they tried. "It must be the…" Her eyes fell to his hand, stained the same sickly color trickling from his mouth.
Only, it wasn't stained.
Cracks lashed his fingers, crumbling off in bits as if his hand were made of clay, as if it had just been caught in the middle of turning to stone, crumbling gold creeping nearly up to his wrist in tendrils, separating from the skin.
She drew a sharp breath and Caspian knelt beside her, his arm brushing her shoulder, dark eyes sweeping the body as her stomach churned.
"He must have tried to drink the water," he murmured, and Jill inched even further away from the pool. "But how…"
Lucy shook her head. "More Capitol magic, I guess."
Caspian snorted at the ironic remark and stood to get a better look at the pool. "The whole thing's gold… or… whatever that is. I suppose we can't get that sword out, then. Shame."
Lucy glanced up, Caspian's eyes glittering with the pool's reflection. "Don't even try."
"I'm not, I wasn't." He held his hands up and stepped back, though his abrupt tone betrayed his true thoughts, and Lucy squinted until he backed away a step further and she glanced down at Corin again.
A swell of pity bloomed in her gut, imagining what that water must have done when he touched it, let alone swallowed it. How long had it been since he'd had a drink?
"I suppose nothing's safe down here," she muttered, thinking grimly of her half-empty water bottle.
She scanned the body and slipped her hand into his pants pockets, an all-too-practiced motion, then into his jacket pockets, and then at last into the inside jacket pockets where she bumped into something small, and pulled out a spool of fishing line and a lighter.
Corin had made out well, all things considered; the sword, the rope at the entrance if he'd been the first one down here, though neither were of any use to them now.
She nearly stood, but at the last second spotted something around his neck, and reached down carefully to lift a thin silver chain with a locket on the end, opening it with her thumb nail to reveal a tiny faded picture of a man and a woman on one side, and on the other, a fresh, shiny image of two identical young boys, grinning through mops of curly yellow hair.
He must have been a twin.
Lucy's chest thrummed and she dropped the locket back onto his chest, recoiling at the sudden sense of intrusion.
This boy had a life back home, a family.
Could they see her right now? Rifling through their son's corpse? Was his brother on the other side of a screen somewhere, hair falling over blue eyes identical to Corin's, watching as she picked through the last of his brother's earthly possessions?
She stood and turned back to the others, handing Caspian the fishing line and lighter. "Merry Christmas."
"Thanks," he said, quirking an eyebrow for a moment before adding "Strange, though, I don't remember a cannon."
"This morning," said Lucy almost without thinking.
Eustace's dry 'sixteen to go.'
Now fourteen.
Caspian's brow furrowed. "But that was hours ago."
"They must not have a good way to retrieve bodies down here." Ordinarily a hovercraft would have descended to collect the dead within minutes, removing the unsightly waste before it could distract from fresh action. But down here that wouldn't be possible. "Lucky for us."
If Corin hadn't been the first to test the water, she or Caspian might have been the example instead.
Thank you, she breathed silently, to the boy, or perhaps to his family, and shuddered at how close she'd come to dying twice in one day.
Jill jumped and glanced at a pillar, and Caspian and Lucy both snapped up to look, but the deathly glow hadn't changed, the dim stone forest unmoving.
"What is it?" asked Lucy.
"I don't know," breathed Jill after a second. "I thought I heard— oh." She stepped closer to Lucy and pointed.
Lucy squinted and just barely caught a small shape skitter across the floor and up the opposite side of a pillar out of sight, the faintest scritching like tiny claws over stone disappearing with it.
"A lizard?" guessed Caspian hesitantly.
"I don't know," said Lucy, "I couldn't see well enough."
They stood in silence for several moments before Caspian sighed. "Well, I for one don't want to hang around here any longer than we absolutely have to."
The girls readily agreed, and they moved toward the back of the cavern which opened into yet another tunnel, wider than before, still lit with a hazy ghost-glow that clung to the walls and to their skin like a grimy film.
And so the day dragged on.
Even without the sun to give a hint at the time, it was time that tugged at them all the same, wearing heavier and heavier every step they took deeper underground with no hope of an uphill turn in sight.
The occasional plink of water dripping into shallow puddles only heightened Lucy's thirst the longer they walked, but she barely even dared to touch the damp walls, the image of Corin's crumbling fingers lingering ever-present in the back of her mind.
Every once in a while a faint skittering shuffle whispered at the edges of the tunnel, too, and they caught a glimpse of something moving on the walls, perhaps the size of a human hand. Caspian might have been right to call them lizards, though they kept mostly out of sight, and only once did she catch the reddish reflective glint that might have been eyes.
"I wonder if they're edible," she mused dryly. "Though, I suppose we've no way to cook them down here anyway."
"They might be poisonous, too," said Caspian, "If they're drinking from Deathwater."
"From what?"
"You know, the story? The pool that could turn you to gold?"
"I don't think I know that one," said Lucy, and Caspian raised an eyebrow in amusement.
"You mean there's a fairytale that Princess Lucy hasn't heard of?"
She scoffed. "They can't all fit into books, can they? What am I, some kind of fairytale oracle? Is that how you think of me?"
He shot her a small smirk. "Maybe."
Jill said nothing, just as silent as she had been before they entered what Caspian began to refer to as the Deathwater cavern, and the pressure in her silence built until Lucy expected an explosion, but none came, the girl's face betraying nothing but neutral vacancy.
One very small comfort seemed to be that the further they walked, the lower and lower their chances of meeting Edmund at all became, so snakey and maze-like was their path now, splitting off and rejoining itself, or shooting out into narrow dark passageways they avoided entirely.
But while they'd been fairly certain of their direction at the beginning, now it became anyone's guess. And still they moved downhill.
Not until Lucy's calves ached and Caspian grew short of breath did they finally stop in a small enclave off the main tunnel and collapse there, aching and panting, and Lucy shed her bag to extract the water bottle.
Barely restraining herself from downing it all at once, she took two large swallows and passed it to Caspian who accepted gratefully and did the same.
Next she dug out her dried rations and the last of the squirrel they'd cooked that morning, and Jill nibbled at a cracker while staring at her own canteen, water still sloshing inside, unopened.
Thankfully she'd been the one carrying it this morning.
The moment the thought entered her head Lucy tried to push it away, but this time it stuck.
She wrapped up the last few crackers and tucked them away, sealing the squirrel's bones into a bag to discard later. But still the sun's heat invaded her skin in the damp darkness, dry dust under her fingernails, thunderous footsteps in her ears.
"Thanks," she murmured, and Caspian looked up.
"For what?"
"Well, you did save my life today."
He nodded, expression changing a little, turning grey.
She took a breath, and almost didn't speak again, but a moment later her curiosity won out with an echoing snap of vertebrae. "Was Edith… I mean, was that… the first time you've ever…?"
"Yeah."
He said it softly, shortly, and averted his eyes to pick at his bandaged hand.
The contrast between the deadly power radiating from every inch of his body in the sunlight, and the quiet voice and delicate, shadowed silhouette here in the cool damp underground didn't seem possible, but she already knew how quickly one could overtake the other.
"If you want to sleep, I can take the first watch," she said. "We should probably stay on the lookout for… whatever's down here. Just in case."
"Let me do it," said Jill abruptly, and they both looked up.
"Are you sure?" asked Lucy.
Jill nodded, and Lucy couldn't quite read her wide brown eyes, but eventually relinquished with a nod of her own and hauled her bag up to use as a pillow as Caspian flopped onto his back with an arm behind his head and closed his eyes.
Jill moved a little way off to sit against the wall.
"You're welcome," said Caspian several moments after they'd settled in.
"Hm?"
"For saving your life." He shot her a small grin. "Guess you owe me double now."
She smirked, for the cameras or for him, she wasn't sure.
And then they fell into silence and his breathing evened out, and Lucy watched him, unabashedly now, his gentle face just as it had been that first night on the balcony, bathed in purple city lights.
But no matter how she clung to those lights, that clear midnight breeze, the muted rush of traffic, it was another boy who sat across from her, moonlight splashing over rigid features and glinting in shadowed eyes.
"You really did memorize them all, huh?"
Eustace's face would be the one shining in the sky tonight, somewhere far away in the world above, but for a second it was still Sarah from District Ten.
"My mentors told me to get to know my competition."
His steady silver gaze pinned her like ice, and she tore her eyes away, blinked, focused on Caspian, on his peaceful face, lips parted every so slightly as his chest rose and fell.
"Is that what you're doing now?"
She turned over, adjusted her backpack as the rough stone dug into her side, and closed her eyes against the dim light. She knew how to sleep on concrete, she knew how to shut out her body and sink into her mind, but now it was her mind that dug its claws in.
"I'm just playing the game."
Jill's muffled sobs echoed softly through the cave and heat pressed stubbornly into the back of Lucy's throat, no matter how she swallowed it down.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, gripped the edge of her backpack, forced the blackness in around herself, but still that chunk and thump stuttered through her chest, that body twisting and crashing to the hot stone, silver spear blinding in the sunlight, square shoulders shaking with every desperate, choking gasp for air; too quick, too sudden, the jarring snap with which all life ended, there one moment and gone the next, yet somehow she never expected it, never prepared herself for someone to disappear in a blink from this plane of existence.
Images blurred together in her head, swirling, suffocating, Corin's dead face, crumbling gold-caked flesh, silver locket, Eustace's grey eyes and dark freckles, blood-slick fingers clutching Jill's sleeve, Lucy's own much younger hands clutching the knitted doll she'd loved the best, pudgy legs crossed beside the wooden bunk bed, Biddie in the window.
Why was she always sitting in the window? That's what the other girls asked while Lucy braided yarn into pigtails with stubby fingers.
They always asked.
Lucy didn't like it when they asked.
"It's fun up here," said the yellow-haired girl, no older than nine, though to Lucy she was practically a grown-up, tucking her feet up to the sill. "Pevensie thinks it's fun, too, don't you?"
Lucy nodded fervently. "Biddie tells me stories in the window, like a fairy!"
One of the bigger girls scoffed. "What'll Housemother say when she hears you talkin' all that? Bridget Jackson, fillin' young minds with hogwash, shame on you!"
Lucy giggled at the nasally impression.
"That's why we do it in Pevensie's room," said Biddie, "Housemother hates the little'n's, don't she?"
"Hates the stairs, more like," said one of the others and they giggled again. "N' 'sides, if you're gonna sit in the window you gotta do it proper, put your legs out!"
"Come on, Garrett," sighed Biddie, "I'm tired of dares, can't you bother somebody else?"
"Nobody else'll do 'em anymore," scoffed the girl, crossing her arms, "They're too scared. Not like you."
"Don't be a baby, Jackson," said another girl, "I thought you wanted to play with us?"
"I'm playing with Pevensie right now, dare me later."
"Come on, just quick, I wanna see if you can do it."
Biddie rolled her eyes and stuck both stockinged feet out the window, kicking them up on a level with the chimney stack across the street. "I can do it, see?"
"Now let go with one hand."
"Are you crazy?"
The girl just sighed impatiently.
"You don't have to, Biddie," said Lucy from the floor.
She glanced over her shoulder. "It's okay, Lu, I'm not afraid."
Lucy nodded wisely and looked at the other girls. "Biddie's not afraid of anything."
Arabella Garrett cocked her head. "Prove it, then, let go with one hand."
"Just one?"
"Just one."
Slowly, Biddie lifted one hand from the window sill, the other still resting against the frame, but just as she did so, Garret jumped behind her and brought both hands down onto Biddie's shoulders.
"Boo!"
She jumped with a little scream and the others laughed, but then Biddie slipped. Her fingers flew up and connected hard with the sill, but tore past with the momentum, and she vanished over the edge.
A second later her cry cut short.
Lucy scrambled up to her little bare feet and ran to the window as the other girls all went silent in terror, grasping the splintered window sill and boosting herself up to look, sharp wood digging into her chest.
She wiggled just far enough over the edge to see down into the street four stories below, but just as her eyes locked onto Biddie's tiny form, a woman outside screamed, the sidewalk turning red.
She bolted awake with a gasp, the dim cave snapping back into place as her heart skipped a beat and she clutched her chest, lungs constricting sharply against the effort to draw breath.
Suffocating.
She coughed, throat tightening, heart pounding painfully against her ribcage as she gasped but the air caught, hands trembling against her jacket and grasping at the collar of her tunic, pulling it down from her throat, but still she choked, pale greenish stone swirling around her.
Pain like a knife stabbed through her chest and she squeaked as a hazy dark figure dropped down in front of her and strong hands grasped her shoulders, steadying her as air stuck stubbornly in her throat and swelled there until she forced it out with a sharp cough, gasping it back in, another stabbing pain between her ribs, and Caspian's low voice rumbled in her ear.
"Breathe, you're okay."
She clutched at his jacket, shaking, gripping him too tight as the world spun and he tucked her into his chest.
"I've got you, breathe."
And she tried, forcing thick air in and out, thoughts blurring, blood spilling into the street, red and grey, rubies and dust, until at last it all slowed, and she drew in a real, full, deep breath, and her aching chest loosened, shoulders trembling, fingers trembling.
Caspian shifted so that her cheek rested against the synthetic fabric of his jacket, and the world came slowly back into focus, rough stone walls, Jill's sleeping form curled up on the opposite side of the hollow.
"What time is it?" she mumbled.
"No idea," said Caspian softly, watching her with dark eyes. "I woke up a little while ago, told her to get some sleep."
Lucy glanced at Jill and then back up to Caspian, loosening her grip on his jacket as heat crept into her face. "Sorry, I—"
"You're alright." He helped her sit up, letting go of her shoulders as she brushed her tangled hair back and ran both hands over her face, squeezing her eyes shut. "Bad dream?"
She nodded, and he sighed.
"Me too."
She glanced at him.
It didn't sound like an invitation to talk, only a statement. A very tired statement.
She rubbed her eyes again, as if she could rub the girl in the window from her mind, but instead she only pressed her deeper, lights bursting around the silhouette of splayed limbs on concrete.
"Need anything?" asked Caspian at length, and she wanted to say no, wanted to apologize again, wanted to say it was stupid and it had all happened so long ago it shouldn't still bother her now, she hadn't woken up like that in years, thought it was over, thought she'd grown up.
But something in his eyes made her think again, made her think he wanted her to say something not only for her own sake, but for his, too. His own nightmares shrouded behind black eyes. His own fear of what the darkness and the silence might bring. A boy, not a man. A boy she might have known all her life, had but a single chance meeting brought them together.
And at last, she breathed, "Distract me."
He met her eyes honestly and she wondered how she'd ever thought he looked any older than herself.
"You said you'd never heard the story of Deathwater, right?"
She nodded with a shallow sigh of relief, and Caspian moved her bag so they could settle back against the wall, Lucy's spine digging into the rough stone as she lowered her head to his shoulder and closed her eyes, somehow natural, somehow necessary.
"I only know the way my nurse told it to me," he murmured, low enough not to wake Jill, but rumbling softly under Lucy's ear, "And I may be forgetting something, but… Once upon a time…"
She almost smiled at the hesitant, leading lilt in his tone.
"A traveling knight came upon a mountain spring, where by chance a few drops touched his boot as he passed. The leather in those places turned at once to solid gold, and encumbered by the sudden weight, he paused to marvel at it, thinking to himself, 'This cannot be, I must test such magic, lest dishonor myself as a knight.' So he turned back, plucked a fern to dip into the pool, and as far as the water reached, the fern turned to solid gold. Next he picked up a stone, and again, as far as the water reached, it became like a solid gold bar. So the knight, bewitched by the beauty of these objects, claimed the spring for his own and called it Goldwater, and returned home with his treasures."
"Not much for treasures," muttered Lucy, and Caspian gave a short amused breath.
"Well, the knight soon became very wealthy, traveling often to the spring and bringing home troves of gold, filling his house with such beautiful things that the townspeople came just to marvel. But even with all his riches he was not happy, for a curse also lived in the water, and with every golden chest and suit of armor he brought home, so too did he bring the curse, like an infection of the mind. Until one day, he abandoned his family and all his wealth to stare only into the spring's golden depths, longing for what he already owned, and from that day forth, the knight was never seen again."
"What happened to him?" asked Lucy, though she knew it would be told anyway, sleepiness creeping in again and drawling child-like in her tone.
"When at last the townspeople discovered the spring and all he'd done, they found only the golden statue of a man at the bottom of the pool. For the knight had grown so entranced and desperate for its beauty that he cast himself into the water, destroying himself to last forever as a tragic and morbid decoration, and a warning to all who followed. And the people of that town called it Deathwater ever after."
"That's a terrible story," murmured Lucy. "I love it."
Caspian scoffed and looked down at her, beard catching in her hair. "It used to make me cry."
An involuntary grin of surprise tugged at the corners of her mouth. "Really?"
"I know, it's shocking," he said with affected pride, and she giggled. "I was a sensitive kid, okay?"
Lucy smiled. "That's alright. I was, too."
Caspian shifted his arm around her, and settled back against the wall, the faintest thump of his heartbeat in her ear as her head grew foggy again. "No offense, Lucy Pevensie," he murmured, sleep closing in like a curtain on her mind, "But I think you still might be."
The next time Lucy woke, it was to a faint, high-pitched ringing sound, and she lifted her head from Caspian's shoulder, blinking as she drew a deep, free breath. "Is that a parachute?"
"A what?" He looked up, rubbing the exhaustion from his own eyes, and she wondered if he'd drifted off, too.
"That sound, it's the same as when we got the sponsor gift."
"You got a sponsor gift?"
"They did." She motioned toward Jill, the girl now also stirring at the sound. "But how would…?"
The faint ringing droned on, and Lucy stood, stiff and aching, to move toward it, and bumped into something metal with the toe of her boot just at the edge of the enclave.
The noise stopped.
She bent to pick up a little silver tin, cool against her fingers and identical to the one the Threes had received, only this bore an 8 on its glossy surface, and no parachute.
"How'd that get there?" mumbled Jill, sitting up and rubbing her eyes, but nobody knew the answer to that question, so Lucy turned back and knelt down in the middle of the floor.
Caspian and Jill both reached her side just as she cracked the tin open. Inside lay a single digital watch. Cheap, by the model, not an expensive gift, but a gift nonetheless.
Caspian picked it up and clicked the button on the side. The display face lit up with bright blocky numbers.
6:17 AM.
"Well." He glanced at Lucy. "Good morning."
A smile split her face before she could help herself. "Good morning. And thank you," she added to the ceiling, hoping some camera somewhere would pick it up, hoping Digory and Polly could hear her.
Caspian passed it back to her, and she passed it to Jill as she packed the tin away in her bag.
"Maybe you should tell stories more often," she said, and after that, their poor attempt at breakfast was not nearly so abysmal as it otherwise might have been.
They rationed out the last of the food, forgoing water altogether in an attempt to make it last, and Lucy voted Caspian wear the watch since he'd earned it.
This left nothing more to do but get back on the move, abandoning their temporary shelter for the tunnels which looked exactly the same as they had yesterday, the same rock, the same shadows, and the same very small, creeping dread that they might never find the way out. But the watch served well enough as a distraction to keep the dread at bay, and Lucy formed a habit of taking Caspian's wrist every few minutes and clicking the band just to see the time, until he wrenched it away and demanded with a laugh that she ought to have kept it for herself if this was how she was going to behave.
"I'm just offended I never got to hear this fantastic story of yours," said Jill in a tone so completely ordinary that Lucy did a double take.
"Well…" she glanced at Caspian, "No harm in trying for another watch, huh?"
He laughed. "And then you'll leave me alone?"
"I mean… maybe?"
He shot her a dry look, but told the story anyway as they walked further and further downhill, until the sheer volume of stone above them became dizzying to think about.
And then the path widened out of nowhere, and they stepped out onto level ground.
But it was not the level ground Lucy had been expecting or hoping for.
All three of them halted simultaneously.
Ice flushed through Lucy's veins and she staggered back a pace, gazing up into the incomprehensibly huge cavern that opened before her.
Not like the Deathwater cavern, a mere hole in the wall with its shallow ceiling and hazy glow.
This was a black abyss.
A city unlit, lost in a forgotten world, gargantuan pillars the size of buildings spaced evenly in rows across to the distant cliff face on the other side, narrow fissures of sunlight hundreds of thousands of feet overhead casting pale beams over glistening obsidian, gaping holes in suspended black pathways falling away to nothingness beneath.
Caspian gave a low whistle, and its deep melodic answer reverberated back so powerfully in the colossal hall that he and Lucy turned to stare at each other, wide-eyed, as if they'd just stumbled unaware into an ancient giant cathedral.
"I think… um…" Jill's thin voice came out incredibly small at the edge of the mammoth cavern. "I think we found the bottom."
