Chapter Thirteen: Light's Dawn

Chapter rating: G

A/N: More updates in the works! WOOHOO!

The Queen's dreams grew strange, though whether enchanted or real she did not know...

Lucy would have given anything in the world to steal away and have a good cry. Tears were pressing in behind her eyes, the helpless horrible feeling about to crash over her. Nobody would blame her – she shouldn't be expected to be brave all the time –

Except she was Queen Lucy the Valiant. Queen. Always a Queen, whispered a golden voice deep behind the tears.

How would Lucy, Bearer of the Cordial, Countess of the Eastern Sea, and Knight of the Noble Order of the Table, have bourn such a blow while standing before others as Queen?

She would have lifted her head, pushed back the tears, and done what needed to be done.

And that is exactly what Lucy did. She stole a quick glance back at the table, determinedly not looking at Caspian, and reminded herself of the quest they had come to fulfill, of the obligation they owed to the sleepers to break the enchantment.

She felt the brush of a cool morning breeze on her cheek, and with it the faintest echo of the voice she loved most of all. Courage, child.

Aslan!

Lucy turned her head toward the light appearing upon the hill, half expecting to see a glimpse of him, but instead she saw the outline of another person appearing from the same place the girl had.

The figure that emerged from the door, joining the girl, carried no light – rather, he seemed to be lit from within – an old man, dressed in silver and with the kindest face imaginable. But he did not speak to them, only came to stand at the head of the table, turned to the East, and lifted up his arms. The girl did the same.

And then, they began to sing.

The words were strange and high and piercing, lifted up on the chill morning air and penetrating its misty darkness with light. And the music – but Lucy could not find any words to describe it, for it was the kind of music that made you want to cry and laugh and dance and keep listening to it for a very long time. It was the song of the early dawn, the color of the sky before the sunrise, the feeling of waking up before everyone else and watching the stars wink out one by one and the sun peek over the Eastern Sea.

Lucy gazed helplessly at them, silent tears streaming down her face, Caspian forgotten in that moment as the utter beauty of their song sank into her. There was no shame in weeping over such music.

Then not just two voices but many swelled in the same song, and the brightening horizon with its rising sun, larger and closer than they had ever seen it before, grew white with flocks of birds from the East. Lucy inhaled as she felt the prick of clawed feet on her shoulders, her hair, their song flooding her ears but too high and piercing for her to catch in notes she could sing herself.

The birds' fluttering wings enveloped her in a curtain of white. She peeked through them to look at the old man and the girl, who had not stopped singing this whole time, and stared hard at the bird that had flown to the man. In its beak was something that looked like a little red fruit, but so bright that it could have been a live coal. Lucy found herself clutching the little bottle around her neck, for surely that could be nothing other than the fire-berries that supplied her cordial, grown in the valleys of the Sun and filling the table of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. When picked fresh, it was said, they glowed like little pieces of Sun and were hot enough to burn your fingers. But the bird placed it in the mouth of the old man, who seemed to glow himself as he tasted the fire-berry.

The soft touch of a bird's wing brushed Lucy's cheek, wiping away the tears that lingered there, and she closed her eyes and thanked Aslan for his presence here too.

With a sigh of relief, she surveyed from the crew of the Dawn Treader, who had almost universally decided to continue the voyage on to the World's End, and turned to go at last to have her cry in private. Caspian's faithlessness had not seemed so bleak in the face of such beauty as the Song of Aslan's Table and the fire-flower birds; in the harsh light of day, it was less easily forgotten. His words kept ringing in Lucy's ears. She set her foot to a path through the stone hill where the door was set.

Edmund caught her arm. "Lu," he said under his breath. "Believe me, I'd love to punch the daylights out of him, but I thought you'd like the privilege yourself. Just say the word."

Lucy choked back a laugh that was half sob. "That's all right, Ed. I feel as though I've been punched. I don't wish the feeling on him."

"He doesn't deserve you," said Edmund.

"She looks like a queen," she said in a very small voice.

"Lucy!" Edmund gave her a stern look, needing no words to express what he was thinking.

"I know. It's silly of me to feel this way when I am a Queen. But, oh, Edmund –" Her voice dropped. "I thought – thought he didcare, just a bit, for me, did see me as a Queen, maybe even as his Queen."

With these last trembling, tearful words, Lucy suddenly found herself gathered up in a fierce hug, and the unexpected gesture from the usually reserved Edmund nearly brought tears to her eyes again. "Lu, he did care. I know he did – by the Lion, he told me as much! There were several nights in our cabin when he could speak of nothing else. And you've grown more like yourself every day of the voyage. I'd swear on my life you could be Lucy from the sixth or seventh year of our reign."

She sniffled into the arm of his shirt. "Thanks, Ed." For several moments she gathered silent comfort from his embrace, remembering the other times he had been there when others had not…

She remembered sinking dazedly onto a sofa in the sitting room where the four of them often gathered in the evening.

"Tumnus!" called Susan. "The cordial, quick!"

"What has happened?" said Peter in a very low voice to the Dryad that stood, tall and uncertain, in the doorway.

"The traitor has left her, forever," said Kirsikke. "I do not think we will see him again."

With a cry of surprise, Susan drew near and began questioning the Dryad intently. But it was Edmund, grave and silent, who went to Lucy's side and pulled her into his arms and laid her head on his shoulder.

"I'm glad you're here with me, Ed."

"It wouldn't be an adventure without the both of us, would it?"

"We've always been in it together, haven't we? Since the very beginning, really." It didn't pain them to talk of it, now, or else Lucy would not have liked to bring it up; but Edmund had long since grown past the hurt of their beginnings in Narnia and brought the story of his redemption to many other lost souls. "Even before the others believed us, we knew what Narnia was like."

"And you always were the first to want to know more about it – Lion's Mane, you were always volunteering us to take on the Fell reports in the Western Wilds."

"I knew we could handle it, me and you," said Lucy, smiling into the slightly damp front of his shirt.

"The scrapes you used to get us into!"

"We always got out of them somehow, didn't we?"

"It was a close shave, most of the time." Edmund was grinning too.

"At least Peter let me carry my cordial with me."

"And who do you think was partly responsible for that?"

"Why, I was, of course! Peter always did given in whenever I really tried."

"Girls have all the luck," said Edmund, shaking his head.

"You didn't complain much about girls' luck when it was your neck at stake. Why, don't you remember the time when you were all tied up by the Amazons of Fleetwood Forest, about to be dinner or who knows what else?"

"Yes yes, you and your knife saved the day! I'll freely admit it, since there were at least as many times when I got us out of the fire."

"We'll call it a tie, then." Lucy rubbed the smooth metal of the cordial bottle around her neck. "I don't suppose you can get me out of my scrape this time."

"I wish I could." Edmund looked keenly at her. "If it comes up, shall I ask him about it?"

"I trust you to say what you ought," said Lucy after a moment, and meant it.

As night fell over the little island, Lucy grew restless. The magic under her feet was making her long for something she couldn't explain, and the sting of Caspian's thoughtless words resonated in her weariness with numbing sorrow. She couldn't pretend any longer; she needed to be alone, under the Stars, where she could tell Aslan all about it. And she knew where she should go for such a place.

The waves crashed softly on the shore with a roar that somehow seemed to echo the Song of Aslan's Table, hushed and cold and sweet. The moon was overhead, and the full spectrum of Stars above, and in the distance she could make out the lines of the Dawn Treader moored in the bay with its dragon's head just visible in the moonlight. The water had a kind of pull that she found almost irresistible, as thought the tide itself drew her in to feel the lap of breakers over her feet. Lucy, the salty breeze seemed to whisper. Remember this?

I remember. Such sweet nights, lying with Torin on such a beach, entangled on their cloaks spread over the wet sand, glad of the cooling winds on their fevered skin, or simply letting their songs rise to the Stars. What music they made, on those long starry nights when the whole world was theirs. What she wouldn't give for just one such night.

Then, the Stars had been friends above them, receiving their songs with warmth and kindness. Here, they were strangers, nearly all of them, and Lucy had never felt so small and lonely under the canopy of the night sky over the Eastern Sea. She tipped her head up to the strange Stars. "Aslan," she whispered, "I know they must be yours too…but oh, how I need a friend here."

"I can tell you their names, if you wish."

Lucy whirled round at the unexpected voice. It was the girl, the Star's Daughter. She was bare-footed as Lucy was, the diaphanous folds of her dress moving in the breezes like a cloud around her. She held her out to Lucy. "They are my friends here."

Instinctively Lucy took her hand. "I do not know any of them," she confessed. "We have different Stars in our world." She realized with a start that she meant Narnia, and not England at all.

The Star's Daughter threaded her fingers through Lucy's, and her skin was warm in the chilled air of the beach. "My father tells me the Stars are much nearer here than they are in the West. I do not wonder that you find them strange and frightening at first."

"They are a bit like that when you meet them," said Lucy, thinking of her first time seeing Ashtiel in person and not just as a distant constellation.

"They are the only family I have known."

Something about her voice made Lucy squeeze her hand in what she hoped was a comforting way. "It must be very lonely, if it is just you and your father here on this island."

"I join the Stars' dance almost nightly," said the Star's Daughter, and for a moment Lucy felt a pang of envy, but the wistfulness of the girl's tone was impossible to resist, for it told a great deal of what she did not say.

"Do you never see our kind, then?"

"Very rarely." She clutched Lucy's fingers, as if they were a lifeline. "You are the first ship to come here in years."

"And what are you?" asked Lucy, looking with compassion at the unworldly figure clinging so tightly to her. "Are you a Star or Daughter of Eve?"

"I am neither," said the girl gravely. "My mother was a Daughter of Eve, and as you know my father is – was – a Star. I am between their worlds, a Half-Star, left to wander until I choose my way, either among the heavens or bound to earth."

Taking all of this in, Lucy felt a sense of kinship with this girl who, like her, was tied to two worlds, and at the same time belonged to neither. "What keeps you from your choice?"

"I long to know your kind," said the Star's Daughter in a kind of pleading voice. "I was too young to remember my mother, and I have known only such Men as have landed here before – but oh, I cannot help but want to see your lands and your people! I know the Stars and their Great Dance; surely I should know Man and its ways before I make my choice."

Lucy nodded. "You are fortunate, to have a choice – oh, what shall I call you? I almost said your name, but you never told us."

"That is because I do not know it myself. I will find my true name as a Star if I choose that path. I suppose I will have to choose a name, or be given one, if I become a Daughter of Eve." She reached a hand, the one not clutched in Lucy's, to touch Lucy's face. "I have heard you called Lucy, not just by the Men here but by my father, for he is friends with the Narnian Stars, and your name is legend among them."

Lucy felt a thrill go over her. "Oh, tell me! What do you know of them?"

The Star's Daughter smiled, her palm cupping Lucy's chin. "They speak of the Valiant Queen who used to sing to them, and of them. I even know some of your songs, the ones they have taught me." Her gaze became far away, her voice clear and high as she took up the melody Lucy knew so well.

"Look down on me, incline your ear, bend to my song
and shine on me, as in the silver starlight I wander
so far from the tree-woven forests of home."

The melody wavered and fell into the steady cadence of speech. "How I have longed to see your forests, Lucy of Narnia."

"Oh!" said Lucy, filled with sudden longing for this very thing, "My Ashtiel song! I was such a little girl when I sang it – hardly older than I am, now, I suppose – but I feel so much older. And it has been so long since I saw those forests!"

Was it only last year? No, more than a year, for she had been several months on the Dawn Treader, and as dear as those months had been to her, even dearer was the memory of the Trees waking up as she danced among them in the moonlight last summer, on their way to rescue Caspian.

"Would it not be wonderful if we could see them together?" said the Star's Daughter wistfully.

"It would," said Lucy, biting her lip. "But I think this is my last time here, before I am sent back to my world. And besides, there's – "

She stopped short. In the warmth of the unexpected friendship, she'd forgotten Caspian's sudden change of heart.

The hand around hers tightened. "I saw your face, at the Table. You love him, this King?"

By the Lion, I love him. "I can't help it," said Lucy, choking a little on her words. "He is Narnia, like it or not."

"You love him as you love your country," said the Star's Daughter. "With all your heart, like breathing, or singing."

Caspian. Lucy thought of the bright golden-haired King heading the Dawn Treader, turning to her for counsel at the Lone Islands, fighting her brother at Deathwater Island, full of hopes and wonders for the World's End. He was the song of her lips now, and she would give him up if this girl wanted it. "He would break this enchantment for your sake," she said, trying not to let her voice tremble.

"That is not how the enchantment will be broken," said the girl gently. "He must break it for their sake, with the sacrifice of one of his own."

"But –" began Lucy.

"I know what was in his mind when he spoke. That much was clear, for the Stars have shown me much of divination and perceiving truth. And I also know he is good of heart, but young, uncertain, easily diverted from his purpose and quick of temper. His heart was full of you, Lucy, but his mind was full of doubts of the future and fears from the Dark Island, I think."

"And your own mind?" said Lucy, afraid of the answer but needing the truth more. "What do you want?"

"I want to choose for myself," said the Star's Daughter softly. "Caspian does not know that if I choose him, I choose a lifetime of mortality. And how could I know from one morning that I want that? But oh Lucy, you know, don't you?"

"I do," she said, lifting her chin despite the quiver of her lips. "I want Caspian and Narnia and all that that means. I want to be in Narnia and of Narnia again, not just Queen in name, but ruling and living there till I die. I want Caspian so much, it hurts. And I thought he wanted me, but I must go back sometime, sooner or later, and he's afraid, he's not strong enough to bear it, and oh –"

Swiping a hand over her eyes, fed up with the tears that seemed to flow too easily these days, Lucy found herself supported by the firm hand of the Star's Daughter. "You are strong enough to bear it, Lucy. You have bourn so much already, and you will bear more. Don't you hear Aslan? Haven't you felt him since you stepped on this island? Some days, it is the only thing that keeps me from throwing myself to the depths. This is his island, his Table, and I cannot believe he would put me here to forget about me and leave me to doubt forever. Surely he has been with you all this time, and knows your heart."

Lucy had to pinch herself hard to keep herself from crying. This was just what Caspian had said to her, that night in his cabin when she was so afraid of letting herself love him. Surely Aslan knows your heart.

Oh, if that were true! Would Aslan truly give her what she wished so much for? But – he had let her heart be broken before.

Who said anything about safe? Course he isn't safe. But he's good.

He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.

Gone! And you and I quite crestfallen. It's always like that, you can't keep him; it's not as if he were a tame lion.

Courage, dear heart.

She had to trust him, the way she had when he had asked her to follow him into the unknown, leading her on dangerous paths where she had only him to show her the way.

"You are right," said Lucy, lifting her head into the girl's hand. "We are at his Table; perhaps he has even brought our paths together to give us hope. But oh, I do hope he has something good planned, because I am so very tired of being hurt." Her words turned nearly into a sob at the end, but she couldn't turn away from the clear steady gaze of the Star's Daughter.

"I cannot say, Lucy; I can only give you what I am given, if you will let me." She let go of Lucy's hand and touched both sides of her face.

"Gladly," said Lucy, pleading.

The Star's Daughter touched her forehead to Lucy's, and a stream of light flowed between them, slowly at first and then bursting into a prism of colors that danced before her eyes, dazzling in their brilliance and vibrant rhythms. Lucy gasped at the fierce magnificent joy of such light. The most glorious sunset seemed like a child's painting in comparison, put to shame by the intensity of the spectrum of shades and hues, purples and reds and blues and yellows that blazed with the unashamed splendor of dreamlike beauty.

"How?" breathed Lucy.

"This is the World's End," said the Star's Daughter. "We are given but a taste of it here, what you see…and now will you learn what we hear of it here? The song we sing, Aslan's Song?"

"Oh!" said Lucy, who could manage nothing more than this single beseeching syllable.

This was enough for the Star's Daughter, who began to sing, and her voice was full of the melody Lucy had heard that morning, cold and sweet and piercing, the song of dawn, but in a moment she stopped and sang the line again, slowly and clearly and low enough for Lucy to pick out the tones. Note by note, she learned the line that was so elusive and achingly beautiful, and it was even more sweet for the knowledge of how to sing it herself.

And by the time the dawn came over the Eastern Sea, hinting of light, Lucy sang the Song of Aslan's Table, tears still streaming down her cheeks, but with a voice strong and full, watching the horizon stream with white birds flying over them, alighting on their shoulders and clothes and hair, and such tremendous joy filled her that she shook and closed her eyes and gave in to the wondrous pleasure of it all, but still she did not stop singing.

And the Queen dreamed the most beautiful dream, about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill; but she never could remember exactly what that story was, and ever since that day when the Queen speaks of a good story, she means a story which reminds her of the forgotten story.

A/N: Plenty more to come! You know what that means...put on your alerts, let me know what you think!