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“in the right heaven-yellow light / anything could be holy enough / to save you.”
—“salvation”, keaton st. james
⚔
After the thunderous echoes of the falling ice have faded, the How is silent as a tomb, and Caspian feels as hollow. His wounds sting, and his shoulder aches dully where Peter shoved him to the floor breathless moments ago, but all Caspian can think is that he should hurt more, somehow, after what he nearly did.
Just as Caspian has heard a thousand tales of Narnia’s Golden Age, has learned every inch of the shape that the Kings and Queens left behind on the land, so too does he know of the White Witch. He never dreamed he’d see her himself—even the most complete accounts of Narnian history refused to recreate her likeness and only described her in the barest of terms.
He also never dreamed he might nearly unleash her back into Narnia, and in front of the Kings and Queens who defeated her, no less.
Some deliverer of Narnia he is.
Beside him, Peter releases a shuddering sort of sigh, and Caspian wonders if he’s thinking the same things, feeling the same regret for what they both nearly did.
Though they perhaps share a common shame, it cuts so deep Caspian cannot bring himself to meet Peter’s eye. His gaze falls instead to where Peter’s blade lies among the tumbled shards of ice, dropped from nerveless fingers in the chaos of the Witch’s defeat. Peter has not moved to retrieve it, and so now Caspian does instead. The hilt fits his palm like an old friend, and yet he finds it is heavier than he remembers it being that first day in the wood. To hold it now feels like to hold the world, or perhaps Caspian has only just begun to understand what it is to be a king—or Peter.
He is of a mind, naturally, to restore the sword to Peter’s hands, not unlike their first ill-gotten meeting. But when Caspian finally turns to Narnia’s High King, there is something terrible on Peter’s face as he gazes down at the ice upon the floor, and the strangest gleam in his eyes. If Caspian didn’t know better, he might think to call it desolation.
“High King?” Caspian asks, because he has never felt more unworthy. He has never felt less like a prince in all his life.
“Don’t,” says Peter, rather hoarsely. He does not look at Caspian. “Don’t call me that.”
Caspian frowns, fingers flexing around the sword’s hilt. “But you are king.”
Peter laughs, a short and bitter sound, and sharp enough that Caspian flinches. “I haven’t been much of a king at all, really, since coming back.”
But he has, in a way. He’s taken command in a way Caspian could never hope to. He was first in the charge last night and last among them to retreat; indeed, he lingered so long he nearly met his own fate at the end of a Telmarine arrow or sword upon the drawbridge. Peter, however foolhardily, has led them. What has Caspian done but blow a horn, hit his head, and fail to bring even a fleeting semblance of peace to Narnia since his escape from the capitol city in the dead of night?
He thinks: Nothing.
As it happens, he is wrong, but that is neither here nor there. Not yet.
“Peter,” Caspian tries instead, the shape of it unfamiliar but not unwelcome on his tongue.
Peter looks at him, then, his gaze as empty as Caspian feels. He blinks, focusing on the blade in Caspian’s hand, and it’s like watching someone wake up from a deep sleep or a nightmare—except something about the relief in Peter’s face frightens Caspian, a little. It is keen edged and strangely shaped. Caspian wonders, not for the first time, what sort of creatures these Kings and Queens of old really are.
He moves to offer the sword back to Peter, but the other boy grasps his wrist with unrelenting strength, staying Caspian’s hand. When his questioning gaze darts from Peter’s hand to his face, Caspian finds that Peter’s eyes are overbright, sharp as cut glass, and fixed very intently on the silverbright blade. It seems to shimmer in the dim and flickering torchlight, the gold engraved writing a fire all its own.
Very gently, so that the edges will not cut into his flesh, Peter releases Caspian’s wrist and instead takes the blade in both hands, cupping it like a bird or something else fragile and easily startled, not a weapon Caspian saw him dispatch countless Telmarines with just hours before. The hag’s blood still stains the metal in places, undried and tacky in the underground air. Peter ignores this, sliding his thumb along one edge, whisperlight, until blood beads against his skin. He does not draw back. If anything, he holds the naked blade a little closer, a little tighter, and Caspian—
Caspian is afraid. He does not know if it is of Peter or for him, but he finds that he hates this, whatever this is. He does not like to be afraid, though he feels he has been so his entire life. He wonders if Peter ever feels the same.
Peter, who is still before him, adding his own blood to the hag’s upon the blade.
Swallowing thickly, Caspian asks, “What are you doing?”
“It was my fault.”
Caspian blinks. “Pardon?”
“It was my fault,” Peter repeats, slower, hollower, pressing the tip of another finger against the blade, though not yet hard enough to draw blood. Caspian wants to yank it back, to remove it from his grasp, but he cannot as long as Peter holds it so closely. “It was my plan that got them killed. All of them.” His mouth twists downwards, not unlike Susan’s before she stormed away, Lucy at her side. “My pride.”
“I gave us away,” Caspian admits, and it is strangely relieving to do so—to lay claim to the fault that is his instead of snarling and shouting and trying to shed blame as a snake might its skin. They both have their share of it, and Caspian thinks he can accept that now.
Peter doesn’t seem to hear him, or perhaps he doesn’t care.
“Susan was right.” He pauses. Watches a drop of blood collect on the pad of his thumb. “You were right. I could have called it off, and I didn’t.” Peter shakes his head, self-loathing treacle-thick in his tone as he adds, “A king ought to be last in retreat, but that doesn’t mean—that doesn’t mean he oughtn’t retreat at all.”
“Peter,” Caspian tries, frowning, “that’s not—”
But Peter cuts him off, sounding suddenly brittle. “I could have let her out.”
Caspian is silent. Peter kicks a shard of ice with the toe of his boot. It skids and tumbles across the floor, coming to rest against the werewolf’s strewn-out corpse.
“I would have,” Peter says.
Caspian thinks that they will never know if that’s true or not—for which he is fervently grateful—but neither Peter’s tone nor the slump of his shoulders allows any room for dispute.
“You were right,” he tells Caspian quietly, terribly, “before. I abandoned Narnia. And now look where we are?”
His voice wavers but does not break as he says it, and Caspian finds himself regretting every unkind thing he threw in Peter’s face leading up to this moment. It is true they were not unsolicited, nor perhaps even undeserved, but they were also unkind and unkingly and Caspian is all at once ashamed to be standing here with Peter’s sword in hand, the hero of his childhood laid bare before him to reveal that he is nothing more than Caspian himself: a boy, and a lost one at that.
But before Caspian has time to consider any of this, much less say it, Peter moves, lifting the blade and guiding it so that the tip rests lightly against his chest, over his heart.
“What,” Peter asks, curling his fingers tight enough around the honed metal that Caspian inhales sharply, “is the punishment for desertion, among your people?”
Caspian’s throat is very dry. The cut on his palm feels on fire.
“Death,” he replies, and his voice catches entirely on the word.
The worst part of all of this, Caspian thinks, is that Peter smiles. It is a tiny, haunted thing, there one second and gone the next, but Caspian sees it, and it lodges itself in his throat, wedging in beside his heart which has been venturing upward towards his mouth since this conversation began, or perhaps since Caspian got his first proper look at High King Peter the Magnificent in the dappled sunlight of morning in the Shuddering Wood. Caspian didn’t think he could hate it when Peter smiles, but it seems Peter is forever proving him wrong.
Peter says, “Well, then,” like an invitation, or a judgement, or the very last word, and when he looks up from the tip of the sword pressing into his jerkin, there is a desolation more complete than the northern wastes in his eyes.
“This is madness,” Caspian insists, trying to lower the sword, but Peter only holds it tighter, the edges cutting into his palms until they bleed. Until both hands bear twin wounds to the cut on Caspian’s own palm.
“You don’t want to?” Peter asks, and he sounds both utterly exhausted and genuinely curious. He leans forward a little, as though he is thinking of spitting himself upon his own sword whether or not Caspian will help. Caspian tries to back up a step, but Peter follows doggedly, keeping the blade set against his heart. “You certainly seemed like you might have. Before.”
It was not so long ago, after all, that they stood outside the How with bared blades at one another’s throats. But here is a secret: Caspian has never wanted to hurt Peter. Caspian has never even hated him.
“I do not,” he tells Peter as firmly as he can manage, which is remarkably so considering his hands are trembling and he fears his knees will give out from under him if he steps wrong, or so much as steps at all. The confusion on Peter’s face is an arrow in Caspian’s heart; had he actually thought that Caspian hated him? That Caspian would—?
“I renounce the laws of my people,” Caspian says, lifting his chin, because he knows that he must if he is truly to be King of Narnia someday. “I will not strike you, Peter. Not for a mistake I share in the making of. I will not strike you at all.”
Deftly, he pulls the sword from Peter’s slackened grip and reverses it in his own, offering the hilt back to him as Caspian, almost without thinking, sinks to one knee before Narnia’s High King.
“What are you doing?” asks Peter, sounding surprised and a little strangled as Caspian impulsively catches one of his hands in a gentle grip.
Caspian murmurs, drawing Peter’s hand to his lips, “Pledging myself to my king.”
Very gently, he kisses the skinned knuckles of Peter’s fingers before placing them upon the sword’s hilt. Caspian does not relinquish his hold until Peter takes hold of it properly at last.
“I’m not your king, Caspian,” Peter whispers. “You don’t have to do that.”
But he is. He always has been.
“I want to,” Caspian whispers back, even as his cheeks burn and it feels like a shout in the silence beneath the How. Perhaps he’s been doing nothing but shouting how Peter makes him feel, even before he could parse it all himself. Perhaps Peter is the last to know.
Peter’s free hand rises to find Caspian’s cheek, then, cut palm smearing his blood across Caspian’s skin as he tilts Caspian’s chin up to look at him, really look at him in the torchlight. Oddly enough, it is not a sensation Caspian finds repulsive. His hand is cold. The whole chamber is.
That is not why Caspian shivers.
“I’ve misjudged you,” Peter says. This time, the smile that flits across his face is warm and real and a little bit fond. Caspian thinks there is nothing in Narnia so beautiful. “And I suppose I’ve been an ass.”
“That is one way of phrasing it,” Caspian concedes, and then he stops talking, because Peter, still holding the sword between them, lowers himself to one knee so he might properly meet Caspian’s gaze and share his station.
He murmurs, searchingly, “I’m sorry. For—oh, all of it.”
Caspian is sorry, too, but he finds he’s quite lost his voice in the way Peter looks at him, now, kneeling among the puddles of melting ice with only a sword and a handsbreadth between them.
“We have both made our share of mistakes,” he manages as Peter’s thumb traces the line of his cheekbone.
Peter huffs. “Forgive me?”
There is something in the way he says it, a deeper question, or perhaps a parallel one, and Caspian longs to answer. So it is only right, and perhaps the only thing at all, that Caspian should breathe, “With a good will.”
And then he reaches out and pushes the blade carefully aside so that he may pull Peter forward into a kiss.
It starts out gentle, which is to say that it doesn’t stay that way at all, because this is Caspian, and this is Peter, and they are not the sort of men who can hold onto gentleness for long, especially not with each other. The sword is discarded at some point, pushed away across the floor, and at another Caspian finds himself with his back against the Stone Table and Peter knelt before him, his hands in Caspian’s hair, hissing as Caspian bites down on the side of his neck, nosing at the sensitive junction of jaw and throat.
He thought the closest he would ever get to this was crossing blades with Peter the first time they met, that the only part of Peter his lips would ever touch were the knuckles of his sword hand when he bashed Caspian across the mouth, back before Caspian knew to appreciate it for who was touching him. And to be entirely fair, fighting Peter Pevensie certainly has its own appeal, Caspian thinks, for he has never met a swordsman Peter’s equal, save his brother—but this? This is something else entirely.
He doesn’t think that’s a bad thing.
Judging by the unrelenting line of Peter’s body against him, the press of his mouth on Caspian’s, hot and demanding as the rest of him has been ever since they crashed into one another with swords drawn and tempers flaring, he must think the same—insofar as one can think in these sorts of situations, anyway.
Time folds in on itself, twisting out of reach so that Caspian cannot tell if it has been seconds or hours of absolution given and received in Peter’s mouth, Peter’s neck, Peter’s hands against his skin, but eventually, Peter pulls back, inhaling a long and shuddering breath as he rests his forehead against Caspian’s.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers again, letting the words out like a sigh. A single tear slides down his cheek—has he been crying all this time, Caspian wonders? When did it start?—and Caspian can’t stop himself from reaching up to brush it away.
“For what?”
“I just wish,” says Peter, turning his head to lean into Caspian’s touch by a hair, “I’d listened to you. Everyone would still be alive if I had.”
“And they would still be alive if I had listened to you,” Caspian admits, bitter truth though it is. He huffs. “Or perhaps we all ought to have listened to Queen Lucy.”
Peter sighs harshly. His forehead presses into Caspian’s with almost enough force to bruise, and yet Caspian does not want him to pull away. “Yes, I’ve certainly done a bang-up job of that this time round, haven’t I?”
Caspian doesn’t know what he means by all that, exactly, but he understands the frustration still steeping Peter’s tone. Some of it still lodges in Caspian’s own chest. Sliding his fingers across Peter’s cheek to trace the shell of his ear, he says, “My professor always told me that we cannot take back our mistakes. We can only learn from them.”
“Yes,” Peter replies. He huffs softly, breath warm on Caspian’s mouth, like the memory of a kiss. “Do you want to know something I keep forgetting about kingship?”
“Always,” Caspian answers immediately, and then flushes at his own enthusiasm. Peter only smiles, though it’s more like half of one, and a sad half at that.
He shifts so he’s sitting beside Caspian, shoulders against the side of the Stone Table, rather than kneeling over him (which Caspian admittedly finds disappointing) and throws one ankle over Caspian’s own (which Caspian finds less so). When Caspian looks over at him, he finds Peter softly limned in gold, gazing up at Aslan’s graven image on the wall.
Peter says, softly, “You never do stop learning.”
“No?”
“No,” he affirms, offering Caspian a small and slantwise smile. “Just look at me. Thirteen hundred years, didn’t you say it’s been? And I’m still bloody learning.”
But he sounds less bitter about it than he might have, as though Caspian has kissed the anger right out of him, drawn it from his skin and left it to melt with the shards of ice on the floor. And indeed, he finds much of his own despair is gone, and what remains has crystallized into resolve instead.
“We will find a way to free Narnia,” he says, slipping his hand down Peter’s wrist to slot their fingers together, palm to bloody palm—a pledge of a different and older sort, one Caspian has read of in ancient stories of fealty and sacrifice. Perhaps those selfsame stories were present in Peter’s time as well. Perhaps Peter understands even better than Caspian what it means.
And Peter says, very quietly, “All right.”
Caspian squeezes his hand. Peter squeezes back.
And around them, the ice is melting.