Chapter Text
The arrival of a Giant at Cair Paravel causes quite the stir.
His approach is not precisely a surprise – a Giant is not a stealthy creature at the best of times and this particular Giant is making no attempt to hide – so there’s plenty of time for the King and Queen to plan a welcoming committee and feast.
Given the size of a Giant and the amount that they can eat, the time for such a preparation is necessary.
“Why do you think he’s come?” Lucy asks, half leaning out the window of Peter’s study, as if she can see Rumblebuffin from there. It’s unlikely, given that his study is facing the wrong direction.
“I don’t know, Lu,” Peter says, as patiently as he can manage. He’s had to answer the same question so many times, from so many people, all of them anxious and worried. Narnians, as they’ve all discovered over the last decade, don’t much care for change. He can hardly blame them for it but it can be trying. “But he’s a friend of Narnia and a hero of the Battle of Beruna. He’s welcome at the Cair at any time.”
“Oh, of course he is!” Lucy cries. “I should so like to see him again!”
Peter can’t help but smile at her enthusiasm. “Let’s go, then,” he says, putting down his quill and carefully stoppering his ink jar. “We’ll arrange the welcoming party on the eastern ramparts.”
Lucy darts ahead of him, eagerly calling the retinue of Narnians to join her.
Peter stands to follow her and hesitates for half a beat. You should wear your sword, Edmund’s voice says in the back of his mind. The Giants of the Ettenmoor have been restless as of late.
But Edmund is with Susan in Calormene, attempting to organise an alliance and a betrothal, and not here to offer his advice and opinion.
Peter leaves Rhindon on the sword mount in his study and follows Lucy through the castle.
They convene on the eastern ramparts of the Cair, which overlook the bay and beach. The view is spectacular and Peter admires it while he waits. He thinks he can see flashes of light glittering off of mermaid tails out in the deep, can hear the distant lulling of their song carried by the gentle breeze.
The height of the ramparts put them at nearly eye level with the Giant as Rumblebuffin approaches the castle. It’s much more suited to holding a conversation than making him crouch down to them and the clever architecture of the levels of the walls allows many of the other Narnians the same benefit no matter their size, from Phillip the Talking Horse to Lilygloves the Chief Mole to Flaxen the Talking Raven.
Half of the skill of being a monarch of Narnia is simply finding the way to make everyone feel like an equal.
“In the name of High King Peter,” cries Cair Paravel’s Steward, Wodengrim the Dwarf. Peter holds a brief hope that he will be brief, but he’s never quite managed to shift the steward’s love of titles and announcements, no matter how unnecessary it all seems. “Of the clear northern sky, of the House of Pevensie. The Magnificent. Ser Wolf’s Bane. The High King of Narnia, Emperor of the Lone Islands, Lord of the Seven Isles, Lord of Cair Paravel, Knight of the Order of the Lion, Hero of the Battle of Beruna and Friend of Narnia-“
Wodengrim pauses to take a deep breath.
“-and in the name of Queen Lucy, of the glittering eastern sea, of the House of Pevensie. The Valiant. Duchess of the Lantern Waste, Lady of Cair Paravel, Hero of the Battle of Beruna and Friend of Narnia, you are welcomed to Cair Paravel!”
“Goodness me,” Rumblebuffin says, voice shockingly loud and booming. “Is that Queen Lucy? Last I saw, you weren’t much bigger than your handkerchief.”
He leans forward, face coming alarmingly close to the ramparts, as if to help see them better.
They must seem incredibly tiny to him, Peter reflects.
Lucy laughs and throws her arms wide, as if she could possibly hope to hug him, and leans a dangerous amount over the side of the castle wall. “Yes! Oh, it’s been so long, Rumblebuffin. Won’t you stay and talk with me? We’ll have such a merry old time. There’ll be a feast for dinner; the chefs have been cooking all day and I’m so looking forward to it.”
Rumblebuffin’s face splits apart in a massive grin. “A feast. For me?” he says bashfully. “You’re too kind. You know, they said – the other Giants, they said – ‘Rumblebuffin, they’re going to turn you away, they won’t listen’ but I said to them ‘you don’t know Queen Lucy and I do. I fought beside her in Beruna, you know.’”
Lucy smiles at the compliment, but Peter can’t help but hold back a sigh at the confirmation that this is more than just a social visit. It had been a small hope, but a hope nevertheless.
“Begging your pardon,” Rumblebuffin says, turning to him, “but I request an audience with the High King. If that’s the way to ask.”
“Of course,” Peter says, “I should like to hear what you have to say. Why don’t you take a seat? I’m afraid the inside of the Cair is not sized for Giants but we shall simply have to have our meeting outside in the fresh air.”
“Of course,” Rumblebuffin says, “I didn’t think I would fit inside your tiny castle.” He sits with an earth shaking thump, face vanishing suddenly from their sight.
Peter quickly dismisses all the courtiers bar for Wodengrim and Oreius, the Centaur that is the Master of Arms, and the four of them quickly hurry down to a lower level so they may resume speaking to the Giant. It is not precisely the most secure of conversations when anyone in the castle could listen in, but it’s not a fact that can be changed either. There is simply no other option.
“So, now,” Peter says, in his most kingly voice to make up for the fact that he’s sitting on a stone wall with his feet dangling off the side like a schoolboy. “Why do you seek an audience with the High King of Narnia?”
Rumblebuffin removes his hat and holds it in his giant hands, fretting with it almost nervously. “Well, you see,” he begins. “We Buffins live in the Wilds on our own, mostly, away from Harfang and the Ruined City. So we don’t talk to the other Giants much, not when they’re so nasty. But lately…”
“Lately the Giants have been massing?” Peter prompts, as carefully as he can.
The Narnians on the northern border have been anxious about it. Anxious enough to send flyers to the Cair to tell him, at great length at that, but there haven’t been any fights and no major incidents. So far, it has been minor – Giants trespassing and standing on structures that ought not be stood on, miscommunications and misunderstandings. But it is only a short leap from there to wilful destruction, to the murder of Narnians or cutting down of dryad trees for wood.
The sorts of things that have happened before. The sorts of things that will necessitate a fight.
“Not massing,” Rumblebuffin corrects. “No, no. They’re not gathering together. They’re being driven south.”
“Driven?” Oreius repeats, crossing his arms. He looks like he’s glowering, but Peter can see the concern in his eyes.
What drives a Giant south? What drives many Giants south?
A shiver of dread creeps up his spine.
Rumblebuffin looks grave. “It’s the Tundra,” he says. “It’s been snow and ice for as long as I can remember, for as long as my mother and mother’s mother can remember. It’s been snow and ice for far longer than the White Witch ruled in Narnia. But lately… the Tundra has been growing. The snow and ice have been coming south, into the Wilds and bringing with them terrible things.” He waits a long moment and then says, “It is no normal winter.”
“A winter,” Lucy repeats, quietly, all her cheer gone. “An unnatural winter.”
They’re all thinking the same thing.
Like the White Witch.
Lucy manages to regain enough cheer to enjoy the feast, but Peter finds himself taking his cup of wine and walking along the shore.
Shimmer, the unicorn that is so often his battle mount, walks with him. Her hooves are near silent on the sand, and she gleams with her own light.
“Grave news,” she says, as he stares across the water in the growing dark. She’d been there, at the Battle of Beruna. She’d fought the White Witch with him. She knows what it will mean if there is another White Witch.
“Graver than you know,” another voice says.
Peter recognises it, bone deep, without even turning around. It summons a peculiar mix of hope and fear within him. “Aslan!”
“Walk with me, O High King,” Aslan says, commands, and Peter falls into step with him without question or pause. He’s aware of Shimmer dropping back, silently fading out of the conversation, and spares a thought to hope that she finds Lucy – his sister will be sad if she misses Aslan’s visit.
“It’s true then,” Peter says heavily. “It’s another White Witch.”
Why else should Aslan be here?
Aslan rumbles thoughtfully. “It is and it is not,” he says. The words should sound like he is equivocating and yet they sound like nothing but the clearest truth. The same, but different. “Jadis was a singular foe but the White Walkers are in her image and will be no easier to defeat. The Night King will bring with him the Long Night in the way she brought the Hundred Years of Winter with her.”
Even after nearly fifteen years of the Golden Age, Narnia has not totally recovered from the long years of winter. They certainly can’t survive another one so soon. Peter has spent all afternoon trying frantically to calculate their supplies, their stocks, what they will be able to survive.
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
“Is there anything to be done?” Peter asks. Aslan is here. Nothing is hopeless.
Aslan is silent for so long that Peter thinks he will not answer.
“Narnia is safe,” the lion says, eventually. “I could not evict Jadis once she had gained a foothold here but with the rightful Kings and Queens — with two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve — on the thrones of Cair Paravel… my power over Narnia is strong. The Night King and his White Walkers will never cross the border and winter shall not come until it’s time.” His voice goes ominous and deep, as if making a proclamation. “The sun shall rise and set each day.”
Peter should feel relief at that.
But the White Witch had ruled for one hundred years. Had been immortal as far as he understood it.
A human lifespan was not so long as that. How long might the four of them survive? Fifty years? More? Less? And if it need be all four of them…
What would happen to Narnia when they’re gone?
“But can they be defeated?” he asks. “Only… it is not wise to leave an enemy to lurk along one’s border waiting for an opportunity.”
Aslan swishes his tail. “I do not know,” he says. “It is through the rightful kings of Narnia that I grow strong. I have no rights to the Ettinmoors, to the Wild Wastes of the North, to the Unnamed Tundra, to the North or Beyond the Wall, and so I have no power over them.”
Peter is silent. He does not understand, not truly. He knows there are rules, are things like the Stone Table and the Deep Magic that even Aslan cannot disregard. But hadn’t they been named the rightful kings and queens of Narnia because Aslan said they were?
“Well,” he says, slowly. “Would you have the power to defeat them, as you did the White Witch, if we became the rulers of those lands?”
Aslan doesn’t snarl, not exactly, but Peter still feels the entire weight of his disapproval, great and terrible.
He’s reminded, sharply, of what Mrs Beaver had said all those years ago; if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or just plain silly. He has never forgotten that Aslan is not a tame lion, but at the same time…
“Did I name you,” Aslan says, lowly, “Peter the Conqueror?”
Peter swallows, ashamed. “I didn’t think of it like that,” he says, weakly.
It’s a poor excuse and a pitiful one for a king. Narnia has happily accepted them as Kings and Queens at Aslan’s say so — with the worst of the reception being the an almost baffled disinterest from people who didn’t really understand what Kings and Queens were even for — but it was unlikely that the Ettinmoors would be so accommodating.
It would be a conquering.
It’s so—
There has been fighting in Narnia since the Battle of Beruna. Nothing major — scuffling with the creatures that had made up the White Witch’s army, leadership conflicts within the Minotaur clans, forging peace between the Red Dwarves and Black Dwarves — but it has been enough to show him that peace is not always so easy to keep as it is to win.
If they conquered the Ettinmoors it would be a constant struggle to get the Giants to listen, constant fighting to enforce their rule.
Peter doesn’t want that.
“No,” he says, walking along the beach with Aslan at his side. “No, I am not a conqueror. I only wish to ensure the safety of Narnia, now and forever. And it does not sit right that we might hide here, safely, while others suffer at a threat we know well.”
Would Narnia block the threat from the nations to the south? Would it protect Archenland and King Lune’s subjects? Or would it simply go around them? What of the Mer-people nation, or the Lone Islands or the Seven Isles? They are part of Narnia but not of the mainland — does the protection stretch to them?
“You are a credit, High King,” Aslan says, sounding proud and sad all at once. “But I cannot help.”
Plans are already percolating in Peter’s mind. “Then I will go,” he says, “and see what threat lies to the North and what help we may provide.”
It seems strange to him that it feels so right when Aslan himself does not endorse it. Daunting, to go beyond Aslan’s will, like exploring a new frontier. And going north will indeed be a new frontier itself.
And yet, Peter knows within his heart that it is right.
“You’re going to tell me to stay here, aren’t you?” Lucy says, voice accusing.
Peter hesitates, briefly. “Yes,” he allows. “Someone ought stay in Cair Paravel. It wouldn’t do any good for us all to be gone. And Su and Ed haven’t sent any messages from Calormene in weeks. I worry something has happened.”
Lucy huffs but she must know he is right. “Oh, alright,” she mutters. “What a beastly thing. But next time there’s an adventure, I’m the one who’s going.”
Peter smiles at her, terribly fond. “Once this is all over, you can take the Splendor Hyaline on the royal tour of the islands, if you like,” he promises. “I know you enjoy sailing the most of all of us.”
Lucy seems appeased. “And Aslan is here,” she allows, because it seems as if Aslan has decided to stay for some time. “We shall have a grand time together.”
It’s not the first time that Aslan has visited them, since the White Witch’s defeat, but each time is rare and special. In a way he does envy her the chance, probably about as much as she envies him the chance to go.
“I shall have to send word all over Narnia,” Peter says gravely, beginning to consider the logistics of it all, “to raise a force that wishes to travel north and to warn those who remain of the danger. I shall leave Phillip here as acting Master of Arms, for I wish to take Oreius with me. If anyone understands how to fight beings like the White Witch, it is him.”
“Spottedjaw and Silentpaw will want to go,” Lucy says, naming the Leopard standard bearers. They have stayed faithfully at his side, ever since the Pevensies had found Aslan that very first time.
“Oh, I imagine lots of them will want to go,” Peter confesses. “There’s never any shortage of volunteers.” Sometimes they have more enthusiasm than skill but that has never been a disqualification for a Narnian. Enthusiasm really does count for a lot. “I shall have to send Rumblebuffin back to the Giants to ask for permission to travel through the Ettinmoors and the Wilds. And to ask if any of them wish to accompany us.”
“The Giants?” Lucy asks, somewhat doubtfully. “Of course Rumblebuffin is lovely and I’m sure the rest of the Buffins are just as good but…”
Peter nods. “Oh, I know,” he says, ruefully. “But I think they’ll be dead useful to have on our side. And better to have them looking north and fighting this Night King than coming south and fighting us.”
Aslan had said that the White Walkers would not touch Narnia but that didn’t include the Giants. Asking them to fight alongside Narnia might not make them allies in the long term — and Peter isn’t sure they could be trusted as allies long term — but that’s no call not to make an effort.
The next week is a flurry of organisation. Peter asks messengers — Magpies and Ravens and Robins and Sparrows — to fly to the corners of Narnia and the Dryads in the trees pass word along on the wind. It results in a terrible flurry of visitors to Cair Paravel and Peter and Lucy hold audiences each day, reassuring those who come that the danger is distant, that they’re all going to be okay, that the endless winter has not come again.
It pushes his patience to repeat it so many times when no one seems to believe it but Peter loves all his subjects even when they’re being silly and doom prophesying.
In the end, he puts together a party of only about thirty. Oreius the Centaur and Shimmer the Unicorn are both a given and as Lucy suggested the two Leopard standard bearers leap at the chance. Softgrumble the Bear waffles about the cold and hibernation but agrees that even a hibernating Bear cannot sustain another hundred year winter and they must take action first. Dartfeather the Grphyon takes charge of the airborne volunteers. There’s a young bull Minotaur with a heavy axe and a goat legged Satyr who bounces nimbly around the Cair.
And there are two Wolf sisters, Grim and Growl.
The other Narnians give them a wide berth. It’s been fifteen years since Maugrim worked as the White Witch’s enforcer — a generation by most accounts and more than a generation for several species of Talking Animals — but Narnians have long memories and longer grudges.
“We’ll go north through the Owlwood,” Peter says, laying out their route on a map. “We’ll cross through the Harpies Roost, then ford River Shriggle west of the Northern Marsh. Rumblebuffin will meet us there with whichever Giants will join us and escort us north through the Ettinmoors.”
Oreius crosses his arms. “The Harpies won’t like that,” he says, shrewdly. “Us bringing a fighting party near their lands.”
Peter nods. “I know,” he says. “I’ve asked the Dryads to pass on the message and when we get close I will treat with them and ask them to allow us across their lands. If not, we can go around and ford the river nearer the mountains.”
It would take longer, but it would not be a terrible detour.
None of the Narnians protest further, though none look particularly happy with it. Peter himself isn’t particularly happy with it, even nearly a week later when he’s standing near the dark and foreboding trees of the Harpies Roost.
A deathly scream echoes through the trees, ringing high into the sky. Peter keeps his hands clear of his sword, no matter that every instinct tells him to draw it.
He comes in peace. He cannot do that with drawn steel.
“Roostmother!” he calls into the trees. They seem to swallow his voice, no matter how much experience he has at making it ring out across a battlefield. “The High King of Narnia asks for passage through your forest!”
A second scream rings out. Then a third. Then another until the whole forest is alive with the sound of Harpy calls.
There’s a flutter of dark wings and something heavy thunks into the ground. It is not the graceful landing of an eagle or the controlled ferocity of a Gryphon but a forceful aggressive slam of something dark and brutal.
The Harpy is bat-like, with thin dark fur and leathery wings, yellow eyes and sharp needle-like teeth. Her short black hair hangs around her face, not obscuring the glare on her face. “Skynest has obeyed the treaty,” she hisses at him. “No hunting the Sons of Adam. No eating the small talkers. And yet the King still comes with swords bared.”
“My sword is not bared,” Peter says patiently. “We are not here to fight the Harpies. We’re travelling to the Ettinmoors and wish for your permission to go through the Harpies Roost.”
Harpies Roost is the barely passable cliff-ways and forest at the edge of Narnia and the Ettinmoors. Technically Narnia, perhaps, but if the Wolves are distrusted because of siding with the Witch then Harpies are much more so — like the Giants, they have historical reputations for eating Narnians, human or otherwise. If they could be run from Narnia, most of the Talking Animals would be happy to do so.
The Harpy hisses, low and long. “Nightflyer will speak with the Roostmother of Skynest,” she says. “The King will wait.”
She leaps into the sky with a forceful, angry beat of her wings and disappears from sight.
“That went well,” Peter says brightly to the contingent of shuffling Narnians waiting behind him.
None of them look like they agree with him.
Nightflyer doesn’t make them wait long. There are more screaming calls through the cliffs, more rushing sounds of wind over wings and things moving through the sky, and she crashes back down into the dirt in front of them.
“Roostmother says the King may pass,” she says ungraciously. “But the King must bare no sword and harm none.”
Peter nods, regally. “Those terms are accepted,” he says.
“Nightflyer will accompany you,” the Harpy says. She bares her needle-teeth. “Do not stray from the path.”
She leaps to the nearest tree and perches against the trunk sideways like gravity has no effect on her and gestures imperiously for them to follow.
Peter takes a deep breath and steps forward into the Harpies Roost.
Despite the oppressive feeling of being watched, they make it through. It’s colder here, snow starting to pile up around branches and tree trunks, crunching underfoot on the path. The seasonal trees are starting to go bare and dead.
“Thank you for your guidance,” Peter says to Nightflyer when they exit the other end. He can see Rumblebuffin and at least five other Giants waiting for them across the River Shriggle. “We may pass this way again, as we return, though I couldn’t say when that shall be.”
“Nightflyer will accompany you,” she repeats, baring her teeth at him as if he is attempting to renege on their deal. “The Harpies will know what business the King has in the north.”
Peter thinks about arguing. It is most certainly going to make this trip uncomfortable and he can already feel Oreius glaring at him.
“Of course,” he says graciously. “I hope you are well prepared for the cold and a long journey. We shall be some time, I think.”
Ultimately, it is probably better to have her come. It is a motion of trust by the Harpies — or if not trust then at least cooperation, some semblance that they are part of Narnia, are one of its people, and have any interest in the doings of the rest. And the more people that know of the threat in the north, the better. No one can say that the Harpies are not warriors.
Of the Giants, one is Rumblebuffin’s brother Tumblebuffin who seems as good a soul and in as cheerful spirits as his brother. The others are of different Giant families and clans, one even from Harfang itself, who are most certainly not in good spirits.
But they do know the Ettinmoors and the Wild Lands of the North and lead the party with unerring accuracy north to the Unnamed Tundra. They stick to the coastline, which eventually curves east, as though they have reached the very top of the Great Eastern Ocean.
“People to the east,” the Giant Shatterbone grunts. He claimed that in his youth, five or six hundred years ago, he’d travelled this way. There had been other Giants there, he’d said. And other small men.
It’s in the Unnamed Tundra that they first encounter the enemy.
Unlike the White Witch, the creature that must be a White Walker makes no attempt to communicate or parlay. It — he? — does not speak at all, merely makes clicking, gasping sounds like ice cracking. The people he commands have eerie blue glow to their eyes and do not respond to any attempts to communicate.
It is a terrible, confusing fight and it stops suddenly when Peter strikes the White Walker’s head from its shoulders with a sweep of Rhindon.
“They’re all dead,” the Wolf Grim says, hackles raised. She sniffs at one of the bodies lying discarded in the snow. “They were dead before we started fighting.”
Peter glances at them all uneasily.
When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, Aslan had said, years and years ago, when he had died and still lived, the Stone Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.
Aslan would not have caused such a thing, surely, nor allowed it to go unaddressed if it had been related. Surely.
“We should bury them,” Peter says. “Whatever evil has happened to them, they deserve that much respect from us.”
It is no easy work to dig graves in frozen soil but there is little that can stand against the might of a Giant and those of Narnia were strong beyond expectation. Frozen ground or no, they work hard to make an appropriate resting place for the dead.
It is not the first funeral Peter has given but it is the first for so many whose names he does not know. “Rest peacefully in Aslan’s country,” he says and means it. Whoever they were and whatever happened to them, they deserve that much. “In the name of Peter, High King of Narnia, I command you to walk this land no more.”
Later that night, when they have made camp and set up a heavy watch, feeling grim and out of sorts, Oreius comes to him as he sits beside the campfire. If he stares too long at the flickering flames, they almost look like shapes.
“They died easily enough,” Oreius confides. “But morale will suffer hard if we must fight that which is already dead.” He runs a whetstone along his blade. “Especially those that do not carry arms and must attack with teeth and claw.”
“We must focus on the White Walkers,” Peter agrees. “For the dead seem to stop when they are killed. I wonder… if that is equal to the stone spell the Witch used? They do not seem to have wands as she did, nor such powers to freeze men where they stand.”
“Lucky for us,” Oreius concedes, stamping his back hoof.
“It only seems more important now that we find out the cause of these White Walkers,” Peter says. “We must keep going east.”