narnia (bloodred!verse) / year 2547
word count: 3,400
set in the universe of my tirian series, five months after the events of "untamed" — yes this is a bloodred christmas special, SURPRISE
**contains major untamed spoilers**
dedicated to abby w, leah, judith, emily, agustina, and everybody else who made untamed era such an incredibly precious time in my life with their undying love and support which i will never be able to fully repay, should i live a thousand lifetimes
xXx
CHRISTMAS DAY
xXx
A sharp bang woke Tirian rudely into a world of pale white light.
He squinted with a rasping groan, and rolled over to hide his aching eyes from the snow-heaped window shining directly into his face, burrowing back into the safety of his pillow just as another bang shattered the peaceful silence.
"Boys!" called a muffled voice from the other side of the door, "are you ever coming down?"
"Go'way," mumbled Hosha thickly in Tirian's ear, shifting beside him to yank another pillow out from under their heap and pelt it with a thump against the door.
The latch clicked and Tirian glanced blearily up just as Mal poked her head in.
He bolted upright. "Lion, woman, have you no sense of privacy?"
"Are you not even awake yet?" Mal's sharp black eyes flicked skeptically from the King of Narnia to her own younger brother, perfectly straight silky hair slipping over her shoulder as she leaned back, crossed her arms, and let the door swing open all the way.
Tirian rubbed his face, blinking in the bright wintery light that filtered through the frosted bay window and cast icy patterns over the warm stone and heavy scarlet drapery of Hosha's bedroom. "I am now, what do you want?"
"Father sent me to make sure you two weren't setting the house on fire. Hosha's usually the first one down on Christmas morning."
Hosha shot bolt upright beside Tirian, disheveled brown curls frizzing thick over his face and sticking on end. "What?"
Mal rolled her eyes, and the boys looked at each other as the significance of the day crashed over them both at once.
"Your fault," shouted Hosha as he shot out of bed and Tirian scrambled to follow, tripping over his own sheets as he bolted for the door.
"What— how— what's my fault?" He almost tripped again and pulled his right sock on more securely.
"You were the one talking all night!"
"Oh that's nice, I think you're forgetting—"
Mal tutted and snapped her fingers before they could rush past her. "You." She pointed to Hosha. "Put a shirt on."
"But— ugh." He doubled back and Tirian slipped out into the hall in his nightshirt, no care in the slightest for his appearance.
"Looks like I win this year," he called in gleeful sing-song to the boy who might as well have been his brother too as he turned at the end of the wide hall and descended the spiral staircase toward the ground floor of the House.
A rapid thunder of footsteps barreled after him and he quickened his pace as Hosha crashed into the landing overhead.
The scent of richly spiced pastries and baking bread struck him at the same instant as the crackling pine log in the hearth fire and the flicker of candlelight mixed with brilliant frosty sunlight slanting through the ceiling-height windows, and Tirian had almost reached the bottom of the stairs when the footsteps above him stopped.
He glanced up just as Hosha flung his legs over the edge of the iron railing overhead and landed hard on the stone floor of the common room directly in front of Tirian, wobbling for a split second before falling over and sprawling dramatically onto his back.
He grinned up from the floor, tunic half-buttoned and crooked, and quite possibly inside out. "Better luck next time."
Tirian's mouth twisted into an involuntary grin at the heap of very stupid seventeen-year-old boy at his feet, and shook his head as he descended the final two steps at a reasonable human speed. "You're an idiot."
Hosha grabbed his leg when he moved to step over him and Tirian just barely twisted around and yanked himself free in time to save his balance.
"Ey!"
"He has a speech to give tonight," said Gareth from his seat at the long pine table without so much as glancing up. "I would advise against killing the King before the Christmas festivities."
"Afterward is fine, then, I suppose?" grinned Tirian, and Hosha rolled his eyes as he sat up.
"Oh, bother all that, it's only Tir."
The young King glanced down at his best friend again with pursed lips.
Hosha looked up. "What?"
"I bet you got dropped on your head as a baby."
"Several times," put in Gareth flatly before Hosha could protest, and his tone was so dry even Tirian couldn't quite tell if he was joking.
"Hey," snapped Hosha as Tirian laughed and skipped away to steal a steaming citrus scone off the table.
Hosha scrambled to his feet. "That's not fair, why does everybody get to pick on me?"
"You do make it terribly easy," sighed Mal as she descended the stairs behind him and primly ignored his glare.
Tirian bit into the scone just as Lady Shadoht bustled in from the kitchen with two platters filled with frosted cakes and breakfast meats, and Elise followed a second later carrying a heaping basket of puffy white rolls.
"Mum, you didn't drop me when I was a baby, did you?"
"Of course not, dear," laughed the regal lady, frizzy black hair trundled up loose in a yellow silk scarf. "It was more a matter of trying to catch you when you jumped." She smiled and planted a kiss on her son's pouting face before turning back to the kitchen.
Elise pushed a fiery red curl behind her ear with the back of her wrist, pert freckled nose already smudged white with flour, and Hosha's attention moved instantly to the table as the girl arranged the platters around her basket.
"Did you make those?"
"I tried," she giggled, straightening her mountain of lumpy, doughy creations. "I suppose you'll have to tell me how I did. When everything's ready," she added quickly, but Hosha had already stolen a pastry out of the basket.
"I said when everything's ready!"
He grinned and jumped away as Elise rounded the table to snatch it back from him, but he held it up out of reach a second too fast. "Hey, Tirian's eating too!"
"Tirian can do whatever he wants."
"So can I," he laughed, and bolted away across the huge open room as Elise darted after him with a squeal, snatching at his crooked nightshirt as he skipped backward out of reach.
Tirian smiled and glanced across the table to Gareth, who scratched over thick parchment with his quill pen as if no distracting giggles echoed off the pale golden walls of his common room.
He turned over an official looking page, and Tirian furrowed his brow, leaning in for a closer look.
"Is that… the Galmian trade agreement…? I thought I was supposed to—"
Gareth glanced up and smirked. "Merry Christmas."
Tirian laughed, sharp and involuntary, grinning at the man's sheer practicality and yet grinning even harder at his own surge of genuine relief and gratitude for the gesture. "Lion, I'm getting old," he gasped with another shake of the head. "I shouldn't be so excited about paperwork, why— next thing you know I'll be happy to get socks for Christmas!"
"There's an idea for next year," grinned Gareth, and dipped his quill into the ink bottle as he turned back to his task.
Tirian watched the man's scratchy, sharp script scrawling across the page, and thought unbidden of his own father's flowing, looping handwriting, the opposite of Gareth's angular precision in every way, just as they'd always contrasted each other, flooding any room they inhabited with that fierce yet intoxicating contradiction of energies—gold and silver, night and day.
Tirian's stomach sank.
He glanced away from the papers, but the roaring fire and the wintery morning sunlight and the rich tapestries hung from every wall only struck another blow down to his core.
They had always come to the House on Christmas morning—he and his father—as it had only ever been the two of them alone in the royal apartments, and Erlian had always wanted more than that for his son. They'd come here for as long as Tirian could remember, to share the breakfast and the gifts and the day of freedom until the evening's wild festivities.
But although the House still echoed with laughter and drowned in the rich smells of spice and ginger dough, no less full now that Elise had taken up permanent residence in the spare room across the hall from Mal, something about it all felt empty.
Gareth said nothing, though surely he felt it too. Perhaps even more acutely than Tirian, after such a long life beside the King. But there seemed nothing really to say. No way to properly express the hollow pit at the core of such warmth and celebration.
Erlian was gone.
And the world moved on.
But still Tirian heard the silence where there should have been one more voice, felt the emptiness where there should have been one more seat at the table, ached with the absence of the strong arms that should have wrapped around his shoulders and held tight until he clawed his way out of them.
He'd slept here so that he wouldn't wake up alone, but still he could not wholly outrun the ghost of what should have been.
Hosha yelped, and Tirian glanced across the room just as a furry black lump leapt down from the window sill and landed in the scarlet seat of a high-backed armchair in cat form.
"Hey! Have you been here this whole time?"
"It's not my fault you're blind," rumbled Cinder blithely, in a tone that Tirian recognized (though Hosha seemed not to) as good-hearted mirth.
Elise snatched the stolen roll out of Hosha's inattentive hand and crossed her arms firmly over her midsection as he turned on her.
"You'll want to be careful," purred the Cat, "how you play your games today." He turned to groom a tuft of fur back into place on his shoulder. "At this rate you may forfeit the Lady's gift."
Hosha's brow furrowed. "You got me a gift?"
"Of course I did," said the fire-haired girl with an air of faint exasperation, "what do I look like, a monster?"
"Why did he know that and I didn't?"
"Because it's your gift, you impetuous toadstool!"
"Well, now I know, can't you at least tell me what it is?"
"Are you incapable of waiting for anything? You'll find out when everybody else does!"
"Give me a hint, then."
"No!"
"Just a tiny hint."
"Why you—" Elise uncrossed her arms to motion dramatically with the half-eaten pastry. "You can take this back since you've already ruined it, and that's as much of a Christmas gift as you deserve!"
Hosha almost retorted just as the ball of dough struck his shoulder with a white burst of powder.
A second later Elise bolted away with a squeal as Hosha darted after her and they ducked into the kitchen where Shadoht tutted over their echoing laughter.
Mal's fingers ghosted Tirian's hand before he even realized she'd come up next to him, and he glanced away from the kitchen door to meet dark, sparkling eyes.
"What—"
"Come with me for a minute."
"But why—?"
She interlocked their fingers before the King of Narnia could protest, and tugged him away from the table.
He glanced back to Gareth for some kind of explanation, but the lord only raised his eyebrows in protest of innocence gave a vague shrug, and Mal pulled Tirian out of the room into the bare entry hall, away from the noise and the roar of the fire, though greenery still hung from the towering sandstone pillars that lined both sides of the private space.
"What are we doing?" he laughed. "Am I in trouble?"
"Certainly not," she said, though the faintest ghost of a grin twitched at the corner of her mouth. "I'm just not sure how much time we'll have later, with all the festivities, so…" She dropped his hand and held out a flat, squarish package wrapped in crinkly brown paper.
Tirian blinked, staring for a moment before taking it carefully into his own fingers. "Why can't you give it to me after breakfast with everybody else?"
Mal said nothing, only nodding for him to open it.
He hesitated for a second, but at last gave in and unlaced the tiny red ribbon with which she'd bound it, tugging it free and tearing the paper off as a rough, leathery old book slid into his hand.
He froze with instant recognition.
The notch in the corner, the gold inlay of the title fading at the edges exactly where it always had, the same familiar smell of old parchment that had so entranced him as a child when his father took him onto his lap and read stories out of its faded pages, the old King's voice rumbling under Tirian's ear, beard brushing against his hair with the faintest scent of pipe smoke.
An Arrangement of Old Tales, compiled by King Caspian, amended by King Rilian.
"I— how on earth did you know I—"
"I heard you tell Hosha you'd been looking for it," she said softly. "The apprentice historian found it for me in the back chambers of the library. I thought you'd want the original, so I commissioned to have it reprinted and saved the old one for you."
Tirian traced its edges with delicate fingers, bewildered even as he flipped it open to the same old stories, the same old lettering, the same old illustrations, falling past on yellowed parchment until he reached the pages at the back and paused to read the faded header: Genealogy of Kings, From the Second Beginning to the Telmarine Age.
He'd never seen these pages before; likely as they contained very little of interest to a seven-year-old boy, but his eyes flicked now from King Peridan of the Silver Age all the way through to the end of his line, to the few scattered afterward, and then to Caspian the Conqueror.
The names ended in calligraphy after Rilian, son of Caspian X. But they began again in handwriting, trailing down to the bottom of the page, all in different scripts, the oldest of which had now nearly faded.
Caspian XI, son of Rilian
Elysian, son of Caspian XI
Halian, son of Elysian
Dorian, son of Halian
Idrian, son of Dorian
And at last, Tirian's eyes fell to the final two entries, and his heart skipped a beat.
There, on the page before him, just an inch below his frozen thumb nail, swirled the bold and looping black ink of King Erlian's easy scrawl.
He drew a sharp, shuddering breath.
Erlian, son of Idrian
Tirian, son of Erlian
How small must he have been when his father carved his name into that book, knowing one day he would succeed him?
"I'm sorry," said Mal, "if it's too much, or— maybe I should have waited—"
"No." The word came out tight and choked, and he swallowed as he shook his head, glancing at the girl whose dark eyes watched him with a tenderness almost foreign to her sharp features. "No, it's…"
He took another shaky breath, searching for the the right words, for any words that could encapsulate the trembling, aching fullness in his core as he clutched the well-worn leather binding his father had held so many times, even fallen asleep holding on the nights when Tirian crawled into bed with him and begged for stories after nightmares.
"Thank you," he breathed at last, and took her hand in his for a moment before pulling her fully into his arms.
Mal's hands slipped around his waist and he buried his nose in her silky hair, clutching her shoulders as he held the book with one hand and breathed out shakily with a release of all the tension in his chest.
She rubbed his back, her silence even more understanding than words for several long moments, before she spoke again with the faintest grin in her tone. "I only worried, you know, seeing as I've been told I have no sense of privacy."
Tirian laughed with a very tiny hiccup, and pulled back to smile down at her in spite of the misty heat behind his eyes. "To be fair, I never said it was a bad thing."
She grinned.
"Hey," called Hosha from the common room. "You better not be seducing my sister!"
Tirian glanced up just as the boy ducked into the entry hall, shaking his curls out of his face in the slanting natural light from the narrow windows on either side of the huge, wooden double doors.
He scoffed and dropped his hand from Mal's shoulder. "I'll have you know she kidnapped me."
"Good," said Hosha, olive fingers absently re-buttoning his tunic up the right way. "The last thing we need is Queen Mal, she'd be twice as bossy and three times as insufferable."
"I think I'd make a perfectly fine Queen."
"Tough luck," said Tirian, though he shot her a very tiny grin.
"Oh, yeah," said Hosha. "I forgot, you don't even know women exist yet."
"What?"
"Nevermind, you'll understand when you're older."
Tirian squinted. "I am nineteen days older than you."
"And besides," added Mal, "I thought you hated women."
"Yeah, well, my experience was you."
Tirian wadded up the brown wrapping paper and pelted it at Hosha just as the boy ducked and grabbed him from behind, locking his arms around Tirian's waist and peering over his shoulder.
"Woah." His grip loosened almost instantly. "Where did you get that?"
Tirian glanced back down at the book in his hand and his heart nearly skipped another beat at the mere sight of it.
"Queen Mal," said Mal dryly.
"You didn't tell me you were planning that!"
"I wasn't aware you wanted to know about everything I did."
"I wasn't aware you did anything interesting." Hosha took the book from Tirian but froze a split second later, realizing what he'd just done, and almost moved to hand it back before Tirian waved him off.
"It's okay."
Hosha glanced at him with soft golden-brown eyes as if to double check, a surprisingly mature sincerity replacing his boyish glint for a moment, and Tirian smiled.
He propped his chin on his friend's shoulder to watch as he traced the cover and gingerly flipped it open, poring through the ancient pages until he reached the genealogy and paused for a very long time on the last hand-written list.
"Boys!" called Shadoht from the other room. "Malahki! We're ready whenever you find it suitable to join us!"
Mal shot Tirian one last small smile before brushing briskly past him into the common room, pulling out the chair beside her father and laughing at something Elise had just said.
Hosha sighed, and at last dislodged the golden Prince from his shoulder as he turned and offered the book back to him.
Tirian took it carefully in both hands.
"I wish I'd known she did that," murmured Hosha, his eyes lingering on the book for another few moments before glancing up into Tirian's eyes. He smirked. "My gift is gonna look so dumb now, I only got you a sword."
Tirian laughed and wrapped an arm around the boy's neck, leading him back out into the firelit common area where the scent of breakfast beckoned them. "Don't worry, I got you a sword, too."
"Really?" Brown eyes flashed up to him with a fresh glint. "How'd you get it in here without me noticing?"
"I didn't, it's back in my room, you nosy brat, I can't get anything past you."
Hosha grinned. "We should go get it!"
"You will not," said Gareth from the table, and Tirian laughed again, tucking the book under his arm as they joined the others.
Hosha leaned into his ear. "After breakfast, then."
Tirian grinned and elbowed him, and took the seat across from Gareth as the man cleared his papers away, golden-brown eyes flicking up to meet Tirian's before glancing knowingly down to the book.
Tirian smirked. Liar, he thought, and Gareth suppressed a grin.
For a moment even the empty space seemed nearly filled; in spite of the ache that lingered, in spite of the quiet knowing that undergirded every ordinary gesture.
For a moment, Christmas Day did not feel so much like an enemy as it did a bittersweet friend.
And perhaps, for the moment, that would be enough for Tirian, King of Narnia.