The Deeper Magic

Peripeep The Mouse

Anyone who has ever felt irrationally afraid of something, even though they know that their fear is ridiculous and unnecessary and that as soon as they wake up the next morning and the event has gone by with no trouble at all, they will feel splendidly stupid for ever feeling afraid, knows that there is a very real thing to be said about it. Though Lucy, (who was very good at trusting and was quite good at keeping some faith) knew with utmost certainty (or what she believed to be) that Edmund would be fine, her stomach still felt queasy and squirmish in the funniest way. 

Mr. Beaver's eyes narrowed in a very distrustful sort of way, and everyone could see how his mind was connecting the dots and he was beginning to feel quite angry and betrayed. "There's only once place he'd ever be going in this sort of weather," he said grimly, as if he were cornering a fish in a hole and the finality was setting in on them both.

"You don't suppose..." Mrs. Beaver whispered quietly. The possibilities were so frightening that even thinking of them could give one a terrible load of shivers.

"Only Aslan can save him now." He nodded gravely.

"He's gone to that witch, hasn't he." Susan sat back. The disbelief and disappointment on her face was incredibly believable. If you remember how she had looked after seeing Peter and Caspian's encounter with the White Witch and the ice and the werewolf at Aslan's How, that would be exactly how she looked now. She was certainly better at faking than Lucy, but it wasn't because she made a habit out of being dishonest or cunning or trying to confuse people about whether or not the neighbor across the way had really ran through the street while he was totally indecent, but rather because she couldn't believe the whole past few days anyway and she was still quite sad about it all.

"You've said that Aslan is waiting for us at the stone table?" Peter asked, and he pushed his seat out from the table and it slid across the muddy wooden floor with a soft scrape. It had already been a good many hours since they had left Mr. Tumnus's home, and somehow the sun was already beginning to sink below the trees and the darkness was setting in, which meant very undesirable travel conditions if they did not leave hastily. He wanted to get the beavers out of their dam as quickly as possible and away from the White Witch in order to avoid any remote possibility of a repeat of last time, which was indeed very sensible. However, they needed to do so in a slow, confuzzled way, or else the beavers would certainly know that something was strange and if that were to happen, it would make the journey a lot harder, and there would be no good way to guarentee that they wouldn't begin to think them spies or some other dreadful thing. 

The beavers nodded eagerly. 

"And that Jadis would very well like to kill us?"

Mr. Beaver grunted. "First chance she'd get!" 

"I'd hate to leave him, but I have a feeling we should get as quickly to Aslan as we can, then," Peter said quietly. 

The room fell silent for a good few minutes, and if you are wondering how they could possibly be so quiet in a moment like that, the explanation is this: what Edmund had not known, or any of them for that matter, was that the White Witch indeed hadn't been expecting him for a few more days. (For, though she was a mean and cruel person and hadn't a single sibling left to account for, she was not dumb, and she knew well that siblings were pesky things, and trying to navigate through worlds even more so, which you can read all about in an earlier tale.) 

You see, in the days of her reign she had grown rather fond of patrolling the woods. Necessity had become habit, and while most people her age would rather spend their free time reading a good book next to a warm fire or catching up on the newspapers or indulging in a little much needed rest, the White Witch found the most satisfaction in seeing to that not a single tree was out of place and not a single animal or beast was defying her. That night was the same, and for a few hours she had been circling around the great, bubbling cauldron pool and down to the shuttering woods and back again (for her sleigh was the fastest in all of Narnia, if it were not for Father Christmas, and she could have gone all the way down to the mountainous borders of Archenland and still make it back to her palace in the same day). Narnians were always anxious at the sight of her, and even a whisper of her presence was enough to make the sternest centaur shutter. On this particular night, however, it was much worse as Edmund's meeting with Jadis had caused quite the stir. (And at any rate, Narnians certainly weren't the best creatures when it came to sitting still. They were very honorable, and they had come to the conclusion that it would be simply preposterous for them to sit by idly in the event that perhaps the humans had really come to Narnia, though they still couldn't be certain it really had been a Son of Adam and not a curious faun in disguise or a lost Archenlander, though nobody would dare stray into Narnia in those days.)