Even before the war they had played hide and seek. Lucy always discovered the best spots, and whenever Ed thought to trail her they sat conversing silently. Then Peter would use his giving-up voice, stricken with pretend grief and sure they must have died, and Lucy would begin to sob, run out and give the game away — Ed’s fingers folded into fists each time. They hadn’t been in London for the Blitz, but came home to its ruins eventually, and even after everything, there was a horrid beauty to it all, old hiding places gone, new ones waiting to be unearthed.

Ed’s shoulders sloped too much for his brother, and he had far too little time for sports and scavenging, too much for Greek heroes in books. Long before they put on fur coats they had been told to get along, but at school their mother wasn’t around. Stronger boys were how Ed learnt to negotiate, sometimes in front of Peter, sometimes not, but every so often the spite leaked out sideways, and Lucy couldn’t hide from that. Even long after the hatchet had been declared buried, Peter’s eyes blazed with indignation. Bastard. Backstabber. Judas.

Of course Peter had made high king, Peter who only ever needed to have been born first. (Lucy didn’t crave power, which was how she commanded it, but Ed and Susan would exchange a glance when Peter mocked her dreams of girls in strange, familiar clothes.) Mostly Ed’s good name took care of itself. When necessary he rode at Peter’s side, squashed or more often defused uprisings — bargaining, he was known to say, was all that justice was. Only now and then would a servant leave the room swearing Ed had quietly cursed. ‘Bloody Peter.’ ‘Bloody heroes.’ ‘That bloody lion.’

The witch had gutted him at Beruna, and that would have been that had Lucy been at all like him. How he’d clung on, Ed didn’t know, except that finding the stone knife where its last owner fell satisfied some queer part of him, and he’d held onto it. None of the others could look at the thing, but Susan seemed to have some sense of why he needed it. While Ed was being whipped on Christmas Day, each of them had received something — her horn and quiver, Lucy’s vial, Peter’s sword. It was said children who were bad never got anything, but in the end, Ed got the knife.

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