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"What do you think Caspian's doing right now?" Eustace says in the garden two days after they get back from Narnia. He's sitting in the grass, poking idly at an anthill with a stick. This might seem like an unkind thing to do, but it's really an improvement – the Eustace who hadn't been to Narnia would have been picking their legs off.
"Turning forty-five," Edmund says glumly, tossing a cricket ball from one hand to the other. They sailed all the way to the eastern edge of the world and fought battles and had adventures, but now they're back to being schoolchildren again, with the long summer holidays stretching ahead of them. And there's nothing to do. "Time goes differently in Narnia. He could be dead by now."
Eustace turns a little green, and puts down the stick. "He wouldn't really be dead, would he?"
"The second time we went back to Narnia, it'd only been a year of our time, but a thousand years had gone by. Everyone we knew had been dead for ages."
"Edmund," Lucy says, looking up from her book and wrinkling her nose at him. "Stop it."
"A thousand years," Edmund says, ignoring her. He's been out of sorts all morning, ever since Aunt Alberta made him eat something made of soy for breakfast. "That's two and three-quarters Narnian years for every one of our days." Edmund's the sort of person who does this kind of arithmetic.
"Oh," Eustace says practically. "Well, then it's only been five years for Caspian. He's not dead. Just married, probably."
"It doesn't work like that, anyway," Lucy says. "Between the second and third times we went, it was a year for us but just three years for Caspian. It's not mathematical."
Edmund grunts and goes back to tossing his cricket ball in the air over his head and catching it.
After a few minutes, Lucy says, "Do you think Caspian married Ramandu's daughter in the end?"
"He should've," Edmund says. "She was about the prettiest girl I've ever seen."
"Yes," Lucy says. "She was." It's strange to think about Caspian married. And strange that a friend of hers might marry the daughter of a star. But then it's strange that her brother, the one who's throwing a cricket ball with grass stains on his knees and dirt on his face, is a king. Or had been a king. Sitting in Uncle Harold and Aunt Augusta's garden, King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant seem far away, like entirely different people, ones they'll never be again.
She and Edmund aren't going back to Narnia, not ever. Even if Caspian isn't dead yet, they'll never see him again. It amounts to the same thing.
**
"This would have never happened," Eustace said for the thousandth time, down in the hold of Pug's slave ship. "If you had let me go to the British Consul like I asked."
"Oh, give it a rest," Edmund said. Lucy was leaning against his shoulder, tired and cold, and could tell from his tone that he was just about fed up.
"If you hadn't brought me to this barbaric country," Eustace muttered, but quietly, like he was a little afraid Edmund might hit him.
Lucy could feel Edmund's body tighten up angrily under her cheek, so she quickly decided to change the subject. "Everything always comes out all right in Narnia, though," she said. "Right, Ed?"
"Mmm," Edmund said.
Lucy tugged at the hem of the tunic she was wearing, the one that really belonged to Caspian, and tried to think of a good story. "Oh," she said. "Remember when you and Susan escaped from Tashbaan in the dead of night with Prince Rabadash after you? That all came right in the end."
"Were you kidnapped and about to be sold as a slave then too?" Eustace asked, in a very snide voice.
"Eustace," Edmund started, but Lucy put her hand on his arm and he stopped again.
"He'll get us out," Lucy said, not quite sure if she meant Caspian or Aslan. Or if there would be a real difference. "You'll see." She tugged at her tunic again. It was blue and soft and still smelled faintly of Caspian and the sea. A good, trustworthy smell.
"More likely he'll leave us here and sail off on his own in that bathtub of his," Eustace muttered again. "We'll never see him again."
It really wasn't any good talking to him if he was determined to be like that. Lucy settled against Edmund's shoulder again and tried to go to sleep. And the next afternoon Caspian came to find them, like she knew he would.
**
Lucy climbs an elm tree in Uncle Harold and Aunt Augusta's garden late one afternoon, finding a comfortable branch to sit on and lean back against the trunk. She brings a book up there to read -- it's comforting, the bark behind her, the wind in the leaves that sounds like singing.
Underneath her hands, the branch sways gently, like a living thing. Like a tree that might be about to come awake. Lucy closes her eyes and leans her head back against the trunk, bark rough on the back of her neck. "Wake up," she whispers. She imagines the way the elm would look awake, the lean melancholy of him, focusing on the picture like maybe she can make it happen if she concentrates hard enough. "Wake up," she whispers again. The leaves rustle like they can hear her, but that's all that happens.
**
After Eustace got undragoned, he wanted to learn to swordfight. Caspian dug out some blunts, wooden swords with iron fixed to them for weight and balance, and started showing Eustace basic drills. Lucy sat over to the side to watch them. The clatter of wood swords, shouts and grunts as they bashed them together -- soon the two boys were sweating, their feet leaping back and forth as they sparred. Eustace's tongue was sticking out the corner of his mouth, and Caspian was grinning wildly, his fair hair tucked behind his ears, and when Eustace miraculously got a touch on Caspian they both started laughing, fencing furiously back and back. It looked like so much fun, like Peter and Edmund sparring a long time ago when they were only half-grown teenage kings and queens and Lucy sometimes rode out to the wars.
"Oh," Lucy said, when they broke apart to catch their breaths, jumping to her feet. "I want to play!"
Caspian smiled at her, and handed her his blunt, hilt over his wrist like a gentleman. "Queen," he said, bowing a little, and Lucy took the sword from him. She'd always been more of an archer, but she knew the basics with a sword or a knife. She could feel her body start to remember as soon as her hand closed over the handle.
She fenced with Eustace, laughing, deck of the ship warm under her bare feet, and when she glanced over at Caspian he was grinning at her.
"Here, Lucy," he said, and reached out for her. Now that he was almost grown-up, his hands were so oddly big, so his thumb and forefinger circled her wrist, spanning it easily. She could feel the callouses of his palms. "Hold it more like this." He adjusted the position of her elbow, shifting her grip a little. "See?" he said. Then he moved to stand behind her, so his arms came around hers, his chest pressed against her back, arms stretched along her arms. He held her arms in a slightly different way, elbows out. "Swing from your shoulders."
"Mmm," she said. He felt tall and strong behind her, her head just coming up to his chest. Safe like Peter, but strangely different too. She suddenly felt a little shy.
"Better?" he said, and she nodded, her head moving against him. Eustace stood opposite, hot and red in the face, leaning on his blunt sword and looking at them a little funny, and behind him was the long blue stretch of the sea.
**
Lucy is back at school for three weeks before she gets a letter from Eustace. It's a little muddled -- Eustace never really learned to tell a story in the right order -- but all about how he and a girl from his school had gone back to Narnia and they and a marshwiggle had rescued a long-lost prince way up north, and there were giants and cold and caves way underground. For a moment Lucy feels a flash of jealousy so strong it's hard to breathe. She can remember the northern frontier so clearly, the rocky caverns, the cold over the wasteland, the giants who were good giants and the ones who weren't. She and Peter had gone on an embassy together there once, just the two of them.
She has to put the letter away to go to dinner, and while she mechanically eats her mutton and mushy peas, she thinks about the worst part of all, about Caspian old and decrepit, about the lost prince being his grown-up son. About how she's still a little girl but sometimes it seems like all her friends have died of old age. She misses Mr. Tumnus suddenly, the musty, home-y smell of his cave, the scarf he knitted her that she'd left in Narnia.
Eustace had seen Caspian alive again on Aslan's mountain, after Caspian had died. And then Caspian had come into their world, just for five minutes. Lucy can't help thinking that if Caspian did it once, maybe he could do it again. Aslan never said he couldn't. He never said.
So she keeps her eyes open. Wardrobes and paintings and train platforms are all places where worlds can meet. Who knows what else might be? The bookshop or the maths classroom or her school trunk. Out of the corner of her eye, she keeps thinking she sees a golden head, or better yet, a golden mane, but when she turns to look, nothing in England ever really seems to be that color. She keeps turning to look, though, over and over.
**
Lucy and Caspian leaned on the railing along the starboard side of the Dawn Treader, watching the ship rustle its way through the lilies. The moon was huge, its light reflecting off the petals like off snow on a cold night so that it was hardly dark at all, light coming from everywhere at once. They were wide awake after having drunk so much of the sweet water, and Caspian's ropey muscled arms brushed against Lucy's on the railing. He was so much older than last time, calm and strong and tall. She had been a little in awe of him right when she first saw him on the ship, before he'd started talking and had just been Caspian again.
"You think we're getting close?" Caspian said. "To the end of the world, I mean."
Lucy took a deep breath of the wild smelling air, the heady draughts of it that made her feel so much more alive than usual. "We must be," she said. They were whispering -- it was hard to help it, with the way the air felt, the way the light was. Like you were someplace holy, that heady air of danger and safety all at the same time.
"Maybe we'll go right over the edge of the world," Caspian said. "You and me and Edmund and Eustace and Reep."
"Just us?" Lucy said idly. Above them the standard of the lion fluttered in the wind caused by the ship's movement.
"The rest of them won't want to come," Caspian said. He looked down at her, pale in the moonlight, his yellow hair glimmering. "They're not like us."
Lucy smiled at him. "Like what?"
"You know," Caspian said. "Kings and queens. And Reepicheep."
"Oh," Lucy said. "I'm not a queen anymore." The railing of the ship was warm under her hand, and she was barefoot. She should have felt like a little girl, barefoot at sea, but she didn't feel any particular age at all. Narnia always had that effect on her.
Caspian shook his head. "You're the most queenly person I've ever met," he said. And before she had time to think what he meant by that, he leaned down and kissed her on the corner of her mouth.
No one had ever kissed her before, not even when she was grown up in Narnia. It was different than she thought it would be. Happier and sadder all at once.
**
Peter told her once that when it was her last time in Narnia, she'd understand, that it would feel different than she thought. And after awhile it does, as the years take off the edge of longing. Sometimes she thinks she's brought Narnia with her back to England, somehow. Like the river is more alive than it used to be, that dogs are more doggy, that housecats are always on the verge of saying something. Some wild spring days when the wind whips her hair in tendrils around her face, she thinks everything is so awake. Maybe her most of all.
Sometimes she thinks that if she remembered the spell to make invisible things visible, she'd see Aslan everywhere she goes. In church she thinks she catches sight of him, just prowling down aisles alongside the nave, or in the transept, just turning out of view. The cathedrals all face east, to Aslan's country, and she thinks about the prow of the Dawn Treader, standing dead in the center of the rising sun. Sunlight comes through stained glass here, and her eyes aren't eagle-strong anymore, but maybe it's all closer than she used to think.
One afternoon at school, a squirrel is collecting nuts on the lawn and Lucy's watching him, thinking of Pattertwig. It's such a happy squirrel, eyes bright and whiskers sharp, whisking nuts carefully away. Lucy remembers that it's very bad manners to watch a squirrel go to his nest, so she doesn't, only watches him when he comes back to the lawn.
Marjorie comes up beside her. "I swear, Lucy Pevensie," she says, taking Lucy by surprise. "You and the animals."
"What?" Lucy says. The squirrel dashes past her, careening cheerfully around, and Lucy could swear it almost does a backflip for pure joy.
Marjorie stares at the squirrel, and then shakes her head wryly, like she's seen this before. "They're just so much more themselves around you. Even dumb old squirrels."
Lucy doesn't know what to say to that, but she thinks about it later. About making things more themselves, about oak trees and the River Cam, and Aslan at the back of all the stories, waking things up.
**
The train is taking the curve far too fast, but as she hears the roar of creaking metal it starts to become the roar of a lion. Lucy thinks, oh, Aslan, I knew you'd come, and then the story really begins.
**
END