england / october 16, 1948

prompt: "golden"

word count: 1,467

xXx

"Oh, Narnia must have looked so beautiful in the fall," sighed Jill, soaking in the warmth of the fresh-baked pecan muffin nestled just under her nose between cupped hands, her school jumper affording only a thin veil of protection from the crisp wind that sent crumpled red leaves skittering over the sidewalk.

Peter hummed, and the smile came through his voice even before she turned to look up at him, arms half crossed with one hand propping up his steaming coffee mug, jacket hanging loose at his shoulders like a russet cape, exposing his black suspenders. "Can't say I've ever seen anything else like it. But—I thought you visited in autumn yourself, or am I misremembering?"

"We did." Jill shrugged. "Sort of." A leaf crunched under the thick sole of her shoe as she moved to lower herself onto a red bench outside the café where Edmund had suggested they stop for something warm on their afternoon excursion. Peter followed her. "The trees were barely turning when we left the Cair, though, and you know we only stayed one night. After that it was all mountains, and they certainly weren't much to look at."

Peter rested one arm across the back of the bench just behind her shoulders. "No, I was never particularly fond of those mountains myself." He smirked faintly, as if even the bad memories carried their own nostalgia now. "The giants caused plenty of trouble in our time, though, so I saw my fill of them whether I liked it or not."

"Oh, that's right, how could I forget? That's where you were while Edmund was having that adventure with the lost prince of Archenland, wasn't it?"

"The very same." Peter glanced over his shoulder to where Edmund and Eustace stood together under the café veranda.

Edmund said something Jill couldn't hear, and Eustace laughed—a real, honest laugh, as crisp and clear as the biting autumn breeze, and it sent something fluttering in her chest.

He never laughed like that at school.

The Pevensie boys had stopped over the weekend before Edmund's term at university began, and Jill couldn't remember a nicer surprise in all her life. Peter had even managed to get them official permission slips to come out into town, something neither of their parents had ever bothered to do in all their years at Experiment House.

The afternoon could only have been improved if Lucy had joined them, but of course she was at her own school, and the boys had already been to see her.

"What was it like?" asked Jill as she turned back to Peter. "When you were kings and queens? There must have been feasts, and dances, and— oh, I can't even imagine."

"More feasts than you could possibly count," he chuckled, "and a great deal of dancing, though more outdoors than in. Lucy could tell you more about that." He took a sip of his coffee and settled comfortably back against the painted bench, glancing up into the pale sky that reflected like a mirror in his crystal blue eyes. "What I remember most is the way the country looked in the morning."

Jill watched him, a gust of breeze ruffling his hair over the straight bridge of his nose.

"The blanket of silver mist laying over golden fields, the reds and oranges of the trees peeking up out of it like rubies and topazes, the distant blue ridge of the mountains. It felt like anywhere you turned might open a doorway into something new. And that tang in the air… I always thought that was the closest to magic you could get in the natural world."

For the clarity in his eyes, he may have been gazing into Narnia itself. Jill's muffin rested forgotten in her hands. "Do you ever feel that way here?"

He looked down at her and smiled. "All the time. I'd say there are still autumn mornings when you could find an adventure around any corner, and sometimes I even think the air tastes faintly of magic, if you're in just the right place at just the right time. Lucy says it feels like all the worlds brush up against each other a little more than usual in autumn, and I'm inclined to agree with her."

Jill watched a bright orange leaf drift lazily down from the maple tree nestled beside the bakery.

"To England's credit, though," he added, "you're a great deal less likely to get jumped by a hungry ghoul in the middle of your afternoon walk. That can really put a damper on the mood."

Her eyes snapped back up to him, and Peter grinned in apparent amusement at her expression.

"It makes for a good story, though. I'll have to get Edmund to tell you sometime, he never did stop gloating over that one."

Jill breathed a silent laugh and shook her head, glancing back to the veranda where Edmund's rolled up sleeves and hazelnut vest suggested nothing of a person who had battled ghouls, though that did always seem to be the nature of it. Who would ever have thought she'd met a witch or freed a prince?

"I do wish you could have seen the bonfires," said Peter, taking a sip of his steaming coffee, and only then did Jill remember her muffin, nibbling it as he spoke. "Nothing ever beat those for magic. The dryads said the forest and the fire could speak to you, if you gave yourself up to it. It was madness," he laughed, "at least anyone here would think so, but nothing could have made more sense when you were really there. And it lasted all night, of course, as all the best dances did, and the trees would arch over you like the pillars of a cathedral and the fire would blaze so high you wondered how it didn't scorch the lowest boughs, and you never knew what possessed you to dance for so long but you always did, and the world looked so strange and so beautiful in the shifting shadows, and all the rest of your life felt like a dream."

Her heart leaped at the way he spoke, as if for a moment she had touched the air of Narnia herself, the fire flickering in her mind's eye just as he had described it—as if by mere description the world had shifted around him.

Not in the way things shifted around Edmund, when the quiet might gather into a solemn calm and you thought of dark woods or dark halls flickering with dim candlelight.

Not even in the way things shifted around Lucy, as if nature itself offered itself up for caressing and gentle kisses, as if sunbeams followed into her every footstep and turned any room she entered to one in which dancing would not be out of place.

Peter seemed to move the world with an energy of furious brilliance that reminded Jill of the Lion himself, igniting everyone around him with an effortless passion that he never even seemed to be aware of; as if everything he touched didn't instantly take on a new significance, as if the evident fondness in his smile didn't make those old adventures feel almost close enough to touch.

It was too easy to imagine a crown weighing on his golden hair and red robes fluttering from his shoulders, too easy to see him the way Lucy had once described him to her, the High King over all Kings in Narnia. Of course he lent a kingliness even to his simple cotton button-up.

"I used to find it strange," he said, and Jill blinked out of her reverie to find him looking at her. "When the people in Prince Caspian's time called our reign the Golden Age. It seemed too… old, too perfect. But the older I get the more it does feel like a sort of golden age. I don't suppose there are many other people who've had adventures like we have."

"Do you suppose there are any?" asked Jill. "Others, I mean."

He smiled, and that golden hint of adventure twinkled in his eye. "You never know."

She couldn't help but grin. That was his effect.

Any other day, she might have called the overcast sky and the shiver of impending rain rather dreary, but here with Peter's arm around her shoulders and Eustace Scrubb's laugher mingling with the cadence of some impassioned rant from his raven-headed cousin, it felt more like heaven.

And between the tang of dying leaves and the steam from her pecan muffin, the air did taste a little like magic.

As far as Jill Pole was concerned, it made all the sense in the world to call their time the Golden Age.

She just wasn't so sure it was over yet.