The four swordmasters took their time getting to the King's Yard. After all, they did have to plan exactly what they were going to do to the four miscreants. Thus it came about that Oreius was looking back over his shoulder at Kanell and Peridan and Celer were also not paying much attention to the path ahead when they entered the courtyard. That was the second mistake (the first was ignoring Jaerin's hints of further disaster). The good general had scarcely walked five steps before his hooves skidded. He recovered and kept walking. That was the third mistake. Within moments, he was skidding and slipping, searching for footing (hoofing?) on the surprisingly icy ground. The others fared little better.

And so, when Peter, Edmund, Jaer, and Jaerin arrived at the King's Yard precisely fifteen minutes and twenty seven seconds after their abrupt dismissal, they found the four swordmasters of Narnia in an inelegant heap on the ground. Peridan was on top—as a human he had slightly better footing than his hoofed companions. All four boys gaped.

"Did you do that, Jaerin?" Edmund asked.

Jaerin shook his head, awe stamped on his face. "No. But I wish I had." He looked again at the rather angry faces of the swordmasters. "Then again, maybe it's a good thing I didn't."

Edmund snorted. "Yeah. You wouldn't be able to move fast enough if they thought you were responsible."

"What do we do now?" Jaer whispered.

"Help them," Peter, ever the noble one, said. "Come on. Maybe they'll go easy on us if we do."

They did not. After much more slipping and sliding, the four boys managed to help the four men get off the broad ice patch that coated half the courtyard. (It was later discovered that the ice was the result of two centaurs who had been carrying water barrels to the barracks when they hit an ice patch, slipped, and dropped the barrels. The barrels promptly shattered and the centaurs, annoyed, picked up the pieces and ignored the water.) Peridan, Oreius, Kanell, and Celer then proceeded to attack Peter, Edmund, Jaer, and Jaerin with great vigor, not letting up on them for an instant. If they had enough energy to be chasing each other around the Cair and wrestling in the conservatory, Celer said, they had enough for this.

Incidentally, it was at this time that the move the boys later designed, perfected and dubbed "The Lion's Might" had its roots. The four boys were fighting back to back and side to side against the swordmasters when, somehow, Jaer and Jaerin slipped and twisted, trading places. Edmund lost his shield about the same time and, without thinking, snatched the sword from Jaer's loosened grip. After some fumbling, Jaer managed to grab another sword and abandoned his own shield. Somehow, the boys managed to keep from being "killed" during this debacle—possibly because their opponents were too busy laughing.

After an hour of steady fighting, when the boys could barely lift their arms, Oreius ordered them all on a run to the Queen's Pavilion atop the highest tower of Cair Paravel. It was more of a crawl before they had gone five flights (Jaer always maintained that Peter only won because he was tallest and could thus reach further on his final lunge. Peter, of course, denied this). This, they thought, would discourage any more late night pranking. Perhaps it did. What it did not do was disrupt Jaerin's plans for the rest of the day. For those did not entirely depend on him.

No one could ever quite figure out exactly how Jaerin managed to get a harmless purple dye in Xati and Kanell's wine (their teeth and lips were purple for a week), ensure that the cakes that Sir Giles Fox ate at tea were liberally seasoned with pepper (the poor fox was sneezing all afternoon), plant stones and other hard objects in Celer's bed (he only thought he liked a hard bed), steal all the covers in Orieus' bedroom (and hide all the rest so he had to come from the barracks to the castle to find blankets), slip salt into Peridan's tea (that was slightly more expected) and sundry other odd things that happened throughout that day. Had they thought to ask the wives of Peridan and Giles, or any of the various Creatures and Animals in charge of keeping the barracks clean, they might have had their answer. Certainly Jaerin never told.

As for Jaer, he was extremely cautions for the next several weeks, checking his bed, his clothes, his books, his music, his instrument, his weapons, for any sign of tampering before venturing to use them. But nothing happened. At least, nothing more than Jaerin laughing hysterically at his brother's unneeded caution. Because his prank on his brother was to simply do nothing. It worked.

And so, all returned to normal at the castle of Cair Paravel.

Until Jaerin's clothes disappeared.

A/N—I leave it to you, dear readers, to imagine what happens next. For this story ends here. It is already two full chapters longer than I originally wrote it (the story used to jump from Jaer's "What did you do?" to the list of pranks Jaerin pulled. Thank you all for your hilarious reviews. I have enjoyed reading them! Know that they spurred me on to write more.

I've had bits of it written for a different setting for a while but when Jaerin was woken at that insane hour in for Christmas Eve training and received naught but a batch of bruises, I decided that he should have his revenge. His prank on Celer is one my own brothers actually pulled on each other. My younger brother ("Rett") dumped Risk pieces in my older brother's ("Matt") bed one night. I think that "Rett" had the saltiest water ever the next day. Though, my memory may be faulty—it might have been the other way around…

Have a glorious New Year!