“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
—
The crocuses are blooming, bright spots of yellow against the dead pale grasses, and that more than the warm and wild wind coming in off the water tells Caspian that it is truly time.
There is an unmistakable eagerness in the way he lopes down the well-beaten deer track to the cliffside, though there’s no one to see it. The boy’s head is high, dark eyes brighter than the morning sun glancing on the waves. When a blackbird trills from a high stalk he seems to consider singing back. Instead he only snorts, and tosses his head, and plunges quicker down the path.
If Benvolio were awake he would tell him to be careful. But the bat must still be caught in winter sleep; each time Caspian reaches across their bond he is met with silence. Oh, but the sunlight is warm on his back and the sea-birds are returning from wherever it is they go when the frigid gales come rolling in across the bay; it must be today. And even if it isn’t, Caspian will make it so.
He pauses for moment at the top of the cliffs to catch his breath. There is the sweet-earth smell of spring, and the salty tang of the outgoing tide, each scent as familiar as a mother’s touch. And there is the crag that juts out from the rest, and in its shadow is a deeper shadow, and Caspian smiles to see the cave that has sheltered his friend all winter. It’s been lonely without him, though he'll never tell him just how lonely.
Like a hawk about to dive he stands poised at the top of the cliffs, and the wind tears at his pale hair but can do nothing to dislodge his crooked grin.
"this hour I tell things in confidence. I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you."
The deer-track is beaten down by many hooves, the grass dead, the dirt packed. Anselm lopes ahead of his bonded but avoids the path. He bounds instead through the rustling waves of dried grass, over splotches of yellow petals, and purple, and white; and Marisol watches him with half a smile, trailing behind him without hurry.
Fog rolls in from the sea and coats the cliffs in mossy, pale gray. But the sun is shining overhead, high and bright, and its yellow light is burning through the mist without much difficulty, letting drops of dew collect on Marisol’s feathers. Today the world is quiet. Today there are only a few wanderers, with the vast majority of her people happily sequestered inside their stone homes. Out here the earth is as silent as the Garden of Eden; birds twitter overhead and rabbits ruffle the grass, but the plain is empty as far as the eye can see, and the roaring of the sea covers all other little noises.
Today Marisol is trying not to think of anything. Not her people, not Orestes. Not the spear she has so unwillingly left behind this morning. She tries not to think of anything but the weight of her hooves against the dry ground, the sound of Anselm’s heavy breathing, the warm gloss of the sun as it comes down in curtains. Her skin feels surprisingly warm.
Anselm barks. Then growls—a low, stormy sound. He slows to let Marisol catch up, which she does at a trot, and gestures with his broad white head toward the silhouette that stands over the edge of the cliff, a small, slight figure painted in dark blues and grays. But he seems comfortable here, and does not smell foreign. Quiet, Mari admonishes the dog, and he presses his ears back at her, indignant.
“By Her hand,”the sovereign calls out, though her voice is half-lost in the salty wind, and walks toward him.
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
—
He hears the bark, though he almost dismisses it for nothing - the hoarse voice of a seal (though this is not their season) or the slap of a wave against ancient, pitted rock. But despite all his daydreaming, Caspian knows well the difference between what is imagined and what is real, and he turns toward the sound with half the grin still on his lips.
It doesn’t fade when he sees the shapes, indistinct through the thinning mist, but it does catch. His ears flick sideways, then forward again; his thoughts turn away from Benvolio and the steep path down to him. There, pale as a ghost, is the dog - too angular and strange to be a wolf - and a pegasus, dark and slim as a shadow beside it.
There’s a part of Caspian that feels caught, though he’s doing nothing wrong. It’s too close to his secrets, and too far from where other Terrastellans usually are. And then there’s the greeting, hard against the wind, and maybe its his sudden suspicion but it feels like an accusation and not just their court’s traditional greeting.
Still, he turns fully around so that he’s facing the pair, ducking his head against the wind that sends his hair stinging into his eyes.
“Her mercy meet us,” he answers, in a voice so level and sincere even his mother would be convinced. Caspian has never quite managed to believe in Vespera’s mercy. Not after the Flood, and - more damning - the way she hasn’t been seen since. Like a sweep of grass only temporarily flattened by the breeze, his grin surfaces again. “You shouldn’t startle people like that so close to a cliff’s edge, you know-”
Just then, the speaker and her companion materialize fully from the mist and he realizes who has hailed him.
Caspian isn’t aware until his mouth shuts with a click of teeth that it had slackened at all; his eyes, for a moment, are wide and wondrous (and just a little worried). “Your Majesty,” he adds, and wonders what in the gods’ names he’s supposed to do now. Mercy meet them, indeed.
Anselm sniffs the cold air, a fast, sharp breath. His mouth opens to taste the wind, and the pale amber eyes narrow: then with equal quickness his suspicions subside, and through their link he affirms, the boy is not a foreigner.
The tight rise of Marisol’s shoulders slackens a little. Her stride lengthens and softens, then, with each step forward, and by the time she comes to a stop a few yards away from the blue-skinned stranger she has lost all the airs of a soldier and returned to a normal posture—a girl’s, if a little stiffer than the normal civilian’s. Overhead, stormy clouds race for prominence until all the sky is coated quarter-gray as thoroughly as the gaze of the Commander herself.
Her mercy meet us, says the boy. His voice is warm and level, as sincere as Mari could have imagined, which for whatever reason surprises her. Maybe it’s that he looks to young to be this devout or to be this good at lying; when he turns to meet them, his face is half-swallowed by a waterfall of salt-tousled hair and overwhelmed by a broad, childish grin. Amused, the Commander smiles wryly. This is the kind of place—the kind of person—that so often makes her forget her responsibilities, her flaws and means of guilt.
But almost instantaneously the foolish charm falls away from him. The grin drops. His eyes widen. And when he adds your majesty Marisol lets herself blow out a short, irritated breath, surprised by her irritation but feeling it nonetheless; whatever escape he might have represented is already long gone.
“Well,” she responds easily, “That's a bit long. Marisol's fine.” Maybe it’s lost in the distance between them in the dim light or the roaring wind, but she does manage to flash him the beginning of a smile in an effort to offset her regular indifference. "And who're you?"
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
—
He finds himself watching the dog, and not the queen.
There is something about all those teeth, open toward him, that yawning mouth and angular ears and the ribcage he can see rise and fall with each quick breath. He wonders if the dog ever feels left behind, the way he sometimes does when Benvolio skitters out on his wings over the semi-dark water, though the bat never goes too far. Caspian wonders if one has ever kept a secret from the other (surely not, just as Ben’s life was spent sleeping or doing things too mundane to be considered secret.
Sun stripes them gold, and then clouds wrest the light back to soft gray again, in the time the paint wonders what judgement she will pass. He does not miss the sharply blown breath, though he does have plenty of room to misinterpret it. When she replies, he begins to allow the smile back, his agile mind working at how to play the situation the way fingers work a knot. He settles, for now, on casually.
“Marisol,” he says, like he’s trying out the name for the first time, like he hasn’t known it forever. “I’m Caspian. Do you get tired of it, then - the titles? I think I’d make people say it every time.” The curl of his lips suggest he isn’t quite serious, but the angle of his head says differently. For a moment he’s glad his companion is not yet awake; his modification would be difficult to ignore.
Best make the most of it. Truly curious, the boy tilts his head toward the dog, who he still finds easier to look at than the queen (as though she is both Medusa and Helen). “And who’s this?” He is still mindful of the empty expanse and long drop behind him, and of the waves that batter the rock below; once again he modifies his insolence. “I just haven’t heard anyone mention a companion when they speak of you.”
He’s watching me, Anselm remarks through their bond, his “voice” strained with a little bit of irritation. Marisol answers with a metaphysical sigh—I know.
She’s suspicious of why, exactly, Anselm might be the one to hold his attention. Should he not be more concerned with making a decent impression on his queen? But some part of her is relieved. With his attention caught by the dog, she is left with a little more room to look him up and down, to narrow her gray eyes in scrutiny and wonder what he’s doing here, why she’s never seen him before.
Mari screws one eye up against the sting of the breeze, ignoring the brief flash of panic the introduction of a blind spot induces in her by rationalizing that even if he makes a move, Anselm sits like a stone between them. His tall, almost transparently-white ears shift forward; the pale, greenish yellow eyes glint in the cliff’s half-light. Though his posture is stiff, his dark mouth still curves in a relaxed pant and his tail wags lazily, stirring pebbles up from the cold ground.
I think I’d make people say it every time. Mari’s lip quirks into a sharp smile, quick as lightning, a flash of insolent humor that is there and then gone within a blink. Almost imperceptibly—even to her—her opinion of him changes. It swings, but she cannot tell in which direction. Does she respect his honesty? Or is she turned off by the ease with which he says it, the knowledge that this kind of ego is almost never an act? Both? She lets out a little snort before responding, amused and bewildered. “I certainly get tired of your Majesty,” she says dryly, “though maybe not Commander.”
That one still feels like a part of her. She can’t help thinking it always will. When a new king comes, when the world falls apart, when a stranger asks her who she is—it will always be Commander, not Sovereign. It sits on her like warpaint. Like a second skin.
“That’s Anselm,” she adds. “He’s a... new friend.” As if in response, the dog’s mouth falls further open in a smiling pant, tongue lolling into the cold rush of the wind; and the thick carpet of his white fur swirls in that same breeze until he is but a cloud held down to the earth by his duty to the queen.
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
—
He is relieved when they both smile, however briefly; he would not be reluctant to admit it is a lot of pressure, having these two particular sets of attention focused on him. Caspian is well aware he’s a petty criminal, and he’s not a stranger to being in dangerous situations, whether rising tides in hidden caverns or at the business end of avery edgy, very impatient smuggler’s cutlass. But there is something about the authority not just in her title but in her gaze that keeps him alert.
“Your Majesty does sound awfully…frilly.” And that did not fit either the woman before him or the sea behind; Dusk, for all its perceived softness, was not a frilly kind of place (thank the gods). Their quiet was the deep quiet of evening, their solitude the loneliness of a high cliffside against the sea, and their gentleness, well - maybe that was just secrecy.
When Marisol names her companion, Caspian turns his attention back to her, glad to have both the sun and wind at his back. “Well, new friends are always a good thing,” he answers with a grin, and thinks again of Benvolio, somewhere below his hooves. The bat would hardly believe him when he said he’d met the queen just moments before their yearly reunion.
As his thoughts return to the caverns a hundred yards below, the boy turns his head back toward the sea, eyeing the frothing waves for a moment. He’s eager to get down there, and a little uncertain of what the queen wants with him; Caspian is just an anonymous commoner, another pebble on a beach of them.
“I envy you,” he says offhand, and doesn’t mean for the obvious. “I’m headed down there,“ - here he cocks his head toward the beach - “but it’d be a much quicker trip with wings.” On the other hand, if Caspian could fly, it is too easy to imagine himself launching from the cliffside, catching a good stiff breeze, and never ever coming back.
Something about him seems familiar, and Marisol struggles to place whether the feeling is real—whether she has seen him slinking through the weekend markets or reprimanded him for pilfering jewelry from some tired traveling merchant—or whether she is imagining it, and it is only that he has the kind of face she sees so often in the streets. Smiling. Self-assured. But still with an awkward sparkle of hunger, as though despite his air of self-sufficiency he is still yearning for something.
Whether she knows him or not it would not make a difference. Now is the first time she’s put a name to the face (if it even is a face she’s seen before), and her first impression has been officially cemented. A gust of wind comes spiraling off the frozen ocean, ruffling Mari’s forelock back against her ears, which flicker in careful consideration as he smiles and then speaks: New friends are always a good thing.
Her lip quirks suddenly, sharply. The gunmetal gray eyes glint in brief amusement. Some part of her—a deeply stifled part of her, which does not often make noticeable appearances—wants to make a joke: something about the two of them becoming friends, or if he’s sure it would always be a good thing, or whether that means she should expect something positive out of their encounter. Where are your friends, Caspian? she wants to ask. Why are you here alone?
But he could ask her the same thing in return, and that is a question Marisol doesn’t feel quite patient enough to answer.
She does not miss the way his eyes stray toward the ocean, or how they linger there even as he speaks again. Curiosity bullies her into wondering what is down there that could possibly be so important as to take his attention away from the queen and her dog. But even Mariol is not quite so egotistical, and so she bites her tongue against the urge to ask.
Instead her dark head drops in a respectful nod. “If I could let you borrow mine,” she responds, grinning faintly. “I would. Good luck getting down, Caspian.”
And she turns to follow Anselm back into the fields.
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
—
They might have made good friends, if years and circumstances hadn’t separated them. On the other hand, Marisol was grounded and described by duty and law, and Caspian’s obligations are only to himself. Still, he appreciates her smile - or is pretty sure he does, anyway; there’s something a little keen in it.
If she would have asked that question she ponders, he might have told her a few different things.
My friend is down there, hanging from his feet, snoozing the last of winter away.
Friends aren’t too useful; they never make you any money.
All my friends are circumstantial.
It isn’t that he doesn’t have any; it’s that the bulk of them are cousins, or fellow jobless roustabouts, the half-wild youth of the meadows and woods instead of the city. They are his friends because they move in the same circles, nothing much more binding than that. Only Benvolio really knows him. But that’s alright; Caspian likes being unknown - especially to his queen.
And, for today at least (and each day after, he fervently hopes) it seems it will remain that way. His half-smile broadens at her response, though he does not reply that he doesn’t need luck, not for this task at least.
“Fair winds and warm fires,” he says by way of goodbye, and watches for a moment as the pair disappear back into the whispering grass. “See ya, Marisol,” he says, just to himself and the wildflowers, and then he turns and begins to pick his way down to the cave.
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