"You are joking," Isadora snarled. "No, no way!"

Caspian smiled at her.

"Now, now, be reasonable, Dor," he said diplomatically. "It's not like I'm asking you to dance in it again. All you have to do is stand there."

"Stand there?! Stand there?!" Isadora said, her voice shooting up several octaves. "I want to see you just stand there in that thing!"

She pointed angrily at the offensive object.

It was the dress of black and gold that she had worn to Nain's coronation. The horrible thing was currently being held up by Cloe and Caspian dearly wanted to see his cousin wear it today because Sir Robert Ramsay, one of Archenland's finest portrait painters, was here to create a portrait of the two of them.

Isadora had sat for two portraits before; one of Caspian and herself with their paternal grandmother, Queen Marisela, and one of herself with her younger sisters, Ghaliya and Marisela, when her youngest sister was only a baby. She did not really remember sitting for the portrait with her grandmother because she could not have been more than two or three at the time. The portrait was a particularly beautiful one though and still hung in the room the Dowager Queen had occupied until her death. She really had doted upon them; the only two of her grandchildren that she had known.

The other portrait though; Isadora had clear memories of sitting for that. Marisela had been teething and Ghaliya and Isadora were at each other's throats for most of the sessions with the artist. Their mother had also insisted on some stupid milkmaid theme so they had all looked utterly ridiculous. The painting had been sent off to Meadowholt because only Prunaprismia liked it. It was a pretty picture of the three girls but there was an underlying irritation in all three of their painted faces that the artist had not quite managed to eliminate and Miraz had been very indifferent towards it.

"I am not wearing that damn thing," Isadora said now.

"It's your best dress," Caspian replied evenly. "Surely you want to look as good as possible. You are technically my heir after all; don't you want history to remember you favourably?"

"In a dress that just screams I am a Telmarine at a place in history where we are trying to bring two cultures together," she said, folding her arms.

Cloe coughed meekly and they both looked around at her.

"If I might," she said, "why not wear one of the Narnian colours? Red, green, and gold are the national colours of our country and you look particularly good in red, my lady."

"What a splendid idea, thank you, Cloe," Isadora said.

She looked at Caspian with raised eyebrows. "There you are, sire," she said mockingly. "I can wear red and you can wear green. You have always looked good in dark green."

He glared at her but he did not reply. He knew the dryad maid had had an excellent idea.

However, when Isadora rejoined him he almost did not recognise her for a moment. The scarlet dress was a new one but unlike any of her others. Instead of the current fashionable Telmarine cut, which was also heavily influenced by whatever the Archenlander style was, she was wearing a dress that could only be described as Narnian. It flowed out from beneath her bust and looked so much more effortless and comfortable than her usual dresses. In fact, it reminded him of the dresses Susan and Lucy had worn during the Revolution. Even her face seemed to have a softer quality.

She smiled and slipped an arm through one of his.

"Told you so," she said, fixing his collar with her free hand. "Green is definitely your colour."

Sir Robert Ramsay waited for them in Caspian's rooms where there was the best light. The painter had apparently spent an agonising half a day wandering the castle to find exactly the right conditions with an anxious Hywel bobbing along behind him attempting to make suggestions.

He was sorting through his paintbox as Caspian and Isadora entered but he looked up and smiled at the pair of them. He was a small and slight man with a delicately featured, almost effeminate face. His curly brown hair was tied back beneath a white cloth and he slid his small pair of silver glasses down his nose to better take a look at them.

"Hello, my dears," he said. "Welcome. I hope you will find my work most satisfactory."

He put down the brush he was cleaning and stood to greet them properly. In a few short steps he had crossed over to them and his brown eyes began to move rapidly across their faces.

"You both favour your fathers in the eyes. The eyes of Kings; of the Royal House Orellana. It shall make for quite the striking portrait," he said, with a small smile.

He indicated a chair behind him that had been set up in front of one of the many tapestries adorning the walls.

"Lady Isadora, if you would take a seat here, and your Majesty, if you would stand at her right shoulder?"

They moved to the position and he stepped forward to adjust them; placing Caspian's hand on the back of her chair and arranging the folds of her dress so they no doubt flowed in a more aesthetically pleasing manner.

"You are in the Queen's position," Caspian noted as the artist began to make the initial sketches on his canvas.

"But you don't have a queen yet," she shot back. "Besides, in my own right as Lady of the Bow I have more power than your queen will ever have. The master wanted me to sit here so let me sit."

Caspian chuckled softly at that. "A few hundred years ago, maybe you would have ended up as my queen," he whispered and sniggered as she tried to repress a shudder. Although the noble families still married each other and were therefore all related somehow, the practice of marrying first cousins to each other had vanished some time ago. A weaker family connection was now deemed appropriate between two parties who wished to marry.

Isadora couldn't help but wonder if she and Caspian would have married. If her brother had never been born, she would have had to marry a second son like her mother had before her. It probably then would have had to fall to Ghaliya to marry Caspian; an odd prospect. The two cousins had always maintained an amicable relationship but Isadora's tendency to hog Caspian's attention had meant that he did not have quite so close a relationship with her two sisters as he had had with her.

Ghaliya had only been a child though, while Caspian was a man grown. Such a preposterous idea needed no further contemplation and she strived to push it from her mind.

The sky outside was beginning to darken when Sir Robert finally laid down his brushes.

"Too much light has been lost now, sire. Shall we resume tomorrow?" he asked.

Caspian stretched out his legs. "Excellent. May we see the progress so far?" he said.

Sir Robert made a face of horror. "Oh no, sire. My paintings may only be seen when they are complete," he said, quickly whipping a tarpaulin over the canvas before they could see anything.

"Same time tomorrow then," Caspian said. The painter smiled, bowed, and then left the two royal cousins alone. Isadora edged slowly towards the painting.

"Dor," Caspian remonstrated as she lifted a corner of the tarpaulin slightly. "He said not to look."

"Well, you're no fun," she pouted, dropping it back into place. "Where is this undying tribute to our family bond going to hang anyway? Up here or down in the Long Gallery with the other portraits?"

"I've been giving it some serious thought, actually," he replied. "What do you remember about Cair Paravel?"

The name was familiar to her and she paused for a moment, scouring her memories. "That was the castle of the Kings and Queens of Old, correct?" she said eventually. "It was supposed to be on a peninsula on the coast somewhere."

He nodded. "The ruins are still there – although it is now an island not a peninsula," he said. "Trumpkin knows exactly where it is because that is where he met up with the Kings and Queens of Old during the revolution. I've been speaking with him, and Trufflehunter and some of the other Narnians, and none of them are truly comfortable at the prospect of spending their lives serving this castle. I was thinking of reconstructing Cair Paravel and I want this portrait of the two of us to be the first that hangs on its walls."

She smiled at him. "I like the sound of that," she said. "Have you got any plans for the new castle or is it all just wishful thinking at the moment?"

With that prompting, he led her into his study and they spent a good half an hour poring over the blueprints he had had drawn up for the redesign of Cair Paravel. On the way back to her own rooms, she took a wide detour so she could pass through the Long Gallery. It ran parallel to the upper levels of the Main Hall and contained all the portraits of the Kings.

Since the castle had not been completed until the reign of Caspian VI, Isadora had always wondered where the paintings of his forebears had hung before. No doubt they had had some sort of manor house or such like they had used before the castle had been finished.

She walked slowly down the line of portraits, taking in the familiar features of her forebears. Her grandfather, Caspian VIII, she had always thought to have had a nice face. She had never known him personally for he had been killed in battle a few years before her birth but she remembered how fondly her grandmother had spoken of her late husband.

After that slight pause, she continued down the line.

The portrait at the end was the eldest. It depicted Caspian I. He stood tall and proud; his shoulders back and his stance wide. His two hands rested on the hilt of a greatsword stuck into the ground before him and the Dirk could clearly be seen on his hip. One eye was covered by an eyepatch and his good one burned out of the painting with a hatred and a pride unlike any seen in his descendants.

When she was a little girl, the children used to play a game where they would have to stand in front of the portrait and stare into his terrible gaze for fifteen minutes. She had not been able to make it more than five, running for the nurse in tears, and even Caspian had only made it ten minutes.

"How do you feel knowing that man's blood is in your veins?" a voice asked. She turned and saw Trumpkin and Trufflehunter coming down the gallery. Papers were bundled in both their arms; Trufflehunter had been employed in the Archives and had proved a great help in integrating the Narnians into the Telmarine world. Clearly he had been aiding Trumpkin this evening and it had been the Dwarf who had posed the question just now.

"Once, I was proud to call him my ancestor," she admitted. "He has always been a symbol of Telmarine might. Caspian the Conqueror... But, I suppose you do not think of him so kindly."

"No. He is the man who wrought destruction upon Narnia and forced us into hiding," Trufflehunter said. "Caspian the Blind, we call him."

"In polite company," Trumpkin snorted. "Caspian the Killer, I've heard him called more often. Caspian the Cu-"

"Trumpkin!" the badger snapped.

"I was going to say Cut-throat," the dwarf replied innocently.

She smiled and turned back to his portrait. "I wonder what kind of man he was," she said, staring into his hate-filled gaze.

"The true man has been lost to history," Trufflehunter said, "and only a shadow of who he once was remains."


Thank you to Wildhorse1492 for your review last chapter!

Firstly, Sir Robert Ramsay is a one-off character but he is a representative of three men rather close to my heart. Although I have a bad relationship with most poetry, I have a particular love of 18th c. Scots poetry - especially that of Robert Fergusson, Allan Ramsay and, Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns. Since the real Allan Ramsay's son was a portrait painter, I couldn't resist putting a little ode to these great literary figures in the form of my own Archenlander artist.

Secondly, I've been doing more planning. Forging a Nation currently stands at the three main volumes of Caspian and Isadora's story, a prequel telling the story of their parents, and four one-shots. The first, Smoke, is already on my profile. The third and the fourth won't come until I am publishing Part Three of FaN. The second, however, will be out sometime this week.

For a hint as to the content, Caspian I may have been lost to history but that doesn't mean you can't see the man he was, my dear readers. :D