narnia / year 2303
prompt: "cinnamon buns"
word count: 2,418
xXx
for emily
xXx
Caspian started awake at his desk.
Shadows stretched long and dark across the cold grey stone and heavy purple tapestries of his royal bedroom, and he lifted his head with a groan against the stiffness that always settled in when he fell asleep in his chair, peeling his cheek from the open page of Doctor Cornelius' book of Old Narnian legends.
A single stump of candle wax flickered low a few inches from his fingertips.
How long had he been asleep?
Pale moonlight edged the row of narrow crystal window panes, piercing the interior darkness with threads of silver that told him the sun had set a long time ago.
If Doctor Cornelius had checked on him, he apparently hadn't thought him worth waking. They'd all been busy over the last few days, flushing Castle Telmar of its old occupants and scrounging up rooms and supplies to house the conquering Narnian forces with the help of graceful wood women and old townsfolk alike, reassigning positions and organizing a temporary order of government until Aslan's plan for the dissatisfied Telmarines had been fulfilled.
His old bedroom felt oddly comforting and foreign at the same time, a relic of a life he no longer belonged to—the goose-down pillows on his bed almost too soft after months on the wild forest floor or the torch-lit stone of the How, the boastful patterns of conquest carved into his wardrobe and side table now strange and cold to eyes more recently accustomed to the image of the Lion in humble, curving lines.
He rubbed both hands over his face, propping his elbows heavily on the edge of the ornate desk, and glanced down to the open book in front of him where a sprawling illustration spilled over both pages in the dying orange candlelight—four crowned figures riding through a forest of twisting autumn trees in pursuit of the fabled white stag—the image which had so often played through his mind in living, vivid detail during arithmetic lessons and sparring practice, in the days before it had all come to life around him, just as if he'd stepped through a magical door like those of which the tales told.
He hadn't been able to resist snatching a few of the old books when the creatures set to airing out the good Doctor's study.
How different they all looked to him now that he'd seen the real thing.
With a sigh, he closed the heavy tome and stood, wandering aimlessly to stretch his aching legs as the quiet and the stillness of the night crept into his blood. It was the kind of quiet that told him everything in the castle was asleep. Everything except for him.
He slipped out through the heavy antechamber door and into the hall.
Nothing stirred.
There was no one left to stop him doing whatever he pleased, even if they had been awake.
The thought made his stomach flip with mingled giddiness and anxiety as he trailed his fingers along the frigid stone walls and came to a hall lined with windows like huge archways looking out over the castle grounds and the countryside beyond. The lights of Beaversdam village twinkled just at the edge of the skyline, where inky black earth met silvery heavens, stars gleaming low on the horizon.
"Oh, I hoped I wasn't the only one up!"
Caspian jumped and looked back where he was going to find the young Queen Lucy padding quietly from around the corner just ahead of him, practically gliding in her flowing white night robe, red curls loose around small shoulders.
He almost hadn't recognize her for a split second in the pale light, so used to catching her amongst the vibrant Narnian creatures and richly saturated fabric of fluttering dresses that she may as well have been perpetually basking in her own personal sunbeam.
"Your Majesty," he said with a hasty deferential nod, standing up straighter as if it had been his uncle who'd caught him unaware.
But she waved off the formality with a shake of her head, sending wild curls scattering in graceful disarray. "You know you needn't bother. Have you been up long?"
"No…" He brought a hand to his hair only to find it mussed and all falling the wrong way, a clear indicator that he'd only just woken up, but Queen Lucy made no mention of it.
He glanced aside and brushed through the tangled locks with his fingers, thankful that the shadows hid the flush that was certainly creeping into his cheeks.
"Have you?" he asked awkwardly, remembering that he ought to have given more of a polite reply to her question.
"Oh, I haven't slept a wink," she said with a grin. "It's all too beautiful to waste, being in Narnia again, and it's such a brilliant night." She held a hand out, clutching something of an odd shape in pale fingers. "Sticky roll?"
Caspian looked down to find both of her hands full of the squashy sweets, two in each fist, one roll seemingly already half eaten, icing dripping down their sugary sides as if they were heaped with shining snow.
A short bark of a laugh escaped his throat before he could check himself, swallowing hard against the noise, but Queen Lucy only grinned wider, and he couldn't help but mirror the expression in bewilderment.
"Thank you," he said, plucking a bun from her small fingers.
"Don't thank me, it's your kitchens I stole them from."
He laughed again, this time the clear sound echoing off the dark hall like music, and Lucy beamed as she took a bite of one of her own rolls—namely not the one she'd already been eating—and wandered to the edge of a towering window.
Silver light splashed in through the frosted glass, casting the young queen in its glow like some kind of spirit hovering there under the arch, and something fluttered in Caspian's chest as if it had gone hollow with the moonlit thrill of it all.
He had only been briefly introduced to the Queen by her brothers in the midst of the celebration after their victory, and a hazy memory resurfaced of a dance in the light of the great bonfire, but the wine or sleepiness had distorted the memory almost to the point of a dream.
Suddenly he wished he could grasp a firmer hold of it.
"The moon is almost full," he said abruptly.
Queen Lucy stood on her tiptoes and leaned out against the high sil, gazing into the sky. "I can't see it."
"It'll be up behind the towers by now. I can show you, if you like."
He didn't know what possessed him to make the invitation, but the night suddenly seemed too wild and too bright to resist, and the Queen's eyes lit up with an eagerness that instantly washed away all of his hesitation, gleaming with the same wakeful daze that had driven him out here in the first place.
"Oh, do, please!"
Caspian smiled and turned to lead the way toward the castle's inner halls, light footsteps at his heels and then at his side as Queen Lucy arrived next to him like a ghost in the dark, almost brushing him with the air she displaced in the shadowy corridor.
"You grew up here, didn't you?"
He breathed out. "Yes… though it's never been at all merry til you got here. I think Narnians know how to make a place feel alive."
"Mm, they do." The smile slipped through her voice so clearly he could almost see it as they descended a shallow stair to the bottom of the central tower.
He opened the creaking door and held it for her, stepping in afterward and closing it carefully behind them with a low clank from the heavy iron latch that instantly struck an aching chord of nostalgia within his chest.
"This is where Doctor Cornelius used to take me for astronomy lessons," he murmured, voice echoing off the curved walls as they climbed the long, winding stair, her footsteps following perfectly at his side. "Where he told me Old Narnia was real."
"Oh," breathed Lucy with an audible thrill of awe and excitement.
At last, they came out through the hatch onto the top of the battlements into the brilliant, clear night air, the canopy of twinkling stars stretching far overhead, and the moon itself shining huge and round just beyond the highest branches of an oak tree and the thin spire of the high western tower.
Lucy smiled up into its pale silvery light, and breathed in as if soaking up the cool air into her very being.
She could almost have been wearing the night as a robe, a girl of perhaps a mere eleven years, yet she met the glow of the heavenly bodies with the eyes of a gracious woman, a wild adventuress, ancient beyond name, gazing up into a sky she had once known when the world was young.
His own fourteen years found themselves feeling very small and inconsequential beside her, perfectly at home atop the tower where he had spoken her name in whispers.
"It's beautiful," she breathed. "They must have been such splendid meetings."
"The best of my life," said Caspian. "I think I would have gone mad of boredom without them."
Queen Lucy smiled.
"Not because there was nothing else to do, you know," he amended quickly, "but… it all seemed so pointless to me without Old Narnia. Without the hope that it might come back one day. That it might even at that very moment be out there, somewhere. I can't tell you how often I looked for it. Even the slightest little sign."
The Queen's eyes glittered as she watched him, nibbling a little on a sticky roll and looking again for the briefest of moments like a child. "Did you ever find any?"
He shook his head. "Not until I ran away and everything happened, but you already know that story." He sighed, gazing out over the low, misty countryside that he knew so well from this vantage point. "I think I could have been happy even if I'd never found it—at least, I do hope I would have found something, but I simply couldn't bear to think it had all been stamped out. To think perhaps it had never lived in the first place."
"Mayn't it hurt more?" asked Lucy thoughtfully, "to think of it existing out there without you? Or existing once but no more?"
From the way she said it, he almost could have believed she'd felt that way herself, once. But he only shrugged.
"I thought so, sometimes. And it certainly did hurt, when I was younger, especially when my uncle was cross. Nothing ever made me lonelier than to think of Old Narnia on bad days, as if the whole world were mocking me, that I was here, and not there. But… I see now that it would have been the deeper loss to never have known it at all, than to know it only in absence. It would still be alive, in a sense, even if it were only in a story or a memory. A lot can come out of a story."
Lucy grinned. "A great deal of things in our time came out of stories. Most creatures hadn't even been alive to remember the last time there was a King in Narnia, so we looked back to all the things they left behind. Their books and their legends and their sculptures. Even Cair Paravel itself. It all came from a time long before us. And to think, now it's us that you look back to!" She beamed up at him, the moon reflecting in blue eyes as if each were a sky of its own. "I think we are all made up of each other's stories, really."
Caspian's chest swelled both with the cool night air and the thrill of her words, her perfect little face gazing up into his as if nothing in the world had ever been simpler. And for a moment he may as well have forgotten how to speak, words unnecessary as the nightsong of distant insects mingled with the rush of the waterfall at Beaversdam miles away, the little queen for a moment embodying every year of life she stored inside of her deceptively young body, even with hands full of sticky rolls and her night robe fluttering around tiny bare feet.
"Oh," she gasped at last, "do tell me one of the stories Doctor Cornelius told you up here!"
Caspian almost laughed at the music in her voice. "But— you already know them! Most of them were about you."
"All the more reason to tell them," she giggled into a bite of pastry. "You know how many stories of Alexander the Great are practically made up now—or, well, I suppose you don't know, but the point is the same. All sorts of things get lost or changed over a thousand years or two, you simply never know what might happen!"
"Alright," grinned Caspian, "but on one condition."
"What's that?"
"You tell me one of those stories from the Kings and Queens who came before your time—from really old Narnia."
A brilliant smile spread over Lucy's face, as if he herself were the moon, pearly white skin glowing in its smooth, silvery light. "Oh, how on earth do I choose?"
"Don't," he laughed. "Tell me all of them."
"Why, we'll be here all night!"
"Who says we shouldn't be?" His grin only widened. "It's my castle, isn't it?"
Queen Lucy giggled and bobbed a mock curtsey in the most ancient fashion she could possibly muster. "Your Majesty."
Caspian have her a deep bow in answer, and plopped down onto the stone roof of the tower, taking a bite out of his sticky roll as Lucy followed, the soft dough and sweet warmth of cinnamon icing flooding him with a childish boldness that the little Queen herself already seemed to have given him, pale nightgown flowing out around her crossed legs as if she were sitting in a puddle of moonlight.
And perhaps it was the lack of sleep finally catching up to him, or some enchantment she'd put into the sticky rolls, but for the next several hours he exchanged stories with the Queen of Old in the grey of the early morning as if he'd known her all his life.
And he supposed, in a way, he had.