Susan
(Setting: after the three children have met Aslan)
They kept saying that he's going to be High King. Even now it is strange to think about since he's always just been my brother. But I think I know now that he can be a king. Perhaps I always knew it, but it wasn't until I saw him with Aslan that it all made sense.
Oh, Peter has always been a great brother and I love him dearly. I know that I can count on him to be my friend and protector. I know that he's a gentleman most of the time and he has always been trustworthy. But at the same time, he can be so irritating. I'd seen him in enough childish moods back home to question his ability to lead a nation. After all, he could hardly keep Edmund in line since coming to Professor Kirke's, and I'd never known him to treat Lucy so coldly. The stress of war and needing to be the strong one was probably pretty hard, but if he couldn't hold up under that responsibility, he surely couldn't take responsibility for a whole nation.
Even here, he has had his moments of being absolutely unbearable, mostly when he was interacting with Edmund. They used to be so close. I was jealous sometimes of the bond they had. But then Edmund became so difficult to deal with, and I think Peter simply stopped trying. I remember him saying once, in a moment of frustration perhaps, that it wasn't really his responsibility to make sure Edmund turned out decently. It might have just been that he didn't want to deal with the hurt of being rejected by his little brother.
After we discovered that Edmund had gone to the White Witch, I saw a fear in him that I'd never seen before. Even though I could hardly fathom that Peter was afraid, I simply assumed that the thought of the White Witch was more than he could handle. He was never afraid back home, but there wasn't exactly anything that was in the same category as the White Witch back home. So in a way it made sense.
Then he spoke to Aslan. I heard the regret and the pain and I knew. He wasn't afraid of the White Witch. He wasn't even really afraid for Edmund's safety. I think he sensed, even before Aslan reassured us, that somehow Edmund would be okay.
He was afraid of what his unkindness had done to his brother. He was broken by the role he believed he had played in slowly driving Edmund away from us. And he was terrified of facing Edmund again. I still remember him saying in an almost tearful, resolutely strong voice, "It's my fault really. I was too hard on him."
In his simple, quiet way he took complete responsibility for Edmund's behavior on himself. He admitted his failures as a brother and as a leader before us, before Narnia, and before Aslan. The nobility of what he did, even if it wasn't entirely true, shook me to the core. I'd never seen him like this. Yet somehow, in the moment, it didn't really surprise me. It had been there all the time.
And the thought of Peter on a throne suddenly doesn't seem so foreign.