AN: I'm sorry for the wait on this chapter, I've just been super busy. But I finally managed to get this written, so enjoy!
As soon as she and Reepicheep were alone in the bedroom that was to be hers as long as she stayed at Lord Digory's college and boarding house, Lucy reached into the leather pouch and pulled out the pocket watch. It seemed even prettier now, if that was possible.
"What do you think it does, Reep?" Lucy wondered aloud.
"Tells time, probably." Reepicheep guessed, shifting into a gray squirrel and waddling over from the pillow he'd been resting on, towards the edge, closer to Lucy who was sitting on the throw rug on the floor, fiddling with the long silver chain that extended off of the pocket watch.
"Well, ordinary clocks aren't dangerous." Lucy pointed out.
"That's true." Reepicheep had to agree with that.
"I wonder how it opens." she ran her fingers along the smooth silver circle until she found the clasp that held it shut. "Oh!"
"He seemed nice, the Lord Professor and his dæmon, don't you think?" Reepicheep said, very pleased to have finally meet another creature like himself, even if they didn't look alike-dæmons rarely did.
"Yes, of course." Lucy said absent-mindedly, staring intently at the now-open pocket watch.
It had a funny-looking inside, she decided, not at all how she would have expected it to look, but then, again, nothing in this place was turning out how she expected. If someone had told her a day or so ago that she would be away from home, in a strange college, possess a silver pocket watch she wasn't allowed to show to her brother, and have met another person with a dæmon, she would have thought they were insane.
Where numbers should have been, there were peculiar symbols rather like letters from another alphabet, maybe Norwegian; something northern, anyhow. At the bottom, where the six should have been, was an O with a slash through it, and at the top, where the 12 ought to be, was the letter, Æ. It was all in script and very pretty, but that didn't change how puzzling the letters were. What did they mean, anyway? There wasn't enough for a full language, or at least, there didn't seem to be. Maybe they stood for something?
"You're going to give yourself a headache." Reepicheep warned his human.
Lucy ignored his comment and squinted harder.
"You know that if you make yourself ill, I get sick, too." Reepicheep reminded her.
"Sorry, Reep, it's just-"
Her sentence was cut short by a knock at the door. "Lucy?"
"It's Peter!" Reepicheep quickly snatched up the pocket watch from Lucy's out-stretched hands and hid it under her pillow where her brother wouldn't be able to see it.
"Come in," said Lucy when Reepicheep crawled back out in his small, golden-eyed, ebony black mouse form.
The door creaked open and Peter walked in carrying a tray of food. "Lord Digory had our supper brought up to my room."
He waited to see if Lucy would tell him anything about what the professor had said to her. When she'd come out of his study earlier, she had been very quiet, whispering only that Lord Digory had a dæmon, nothing more. Of course, that alone would have been plenty exciting for a girl who'd been the only one of her kind all eight years of her life, but still, he got the feeling she was keeping something from him. Or else, he told himself, I'm just being overly sensitive and she's just very tired.
Lucy started munching on a piece of white bread and slurping up a china bowl of pea-soup. "Did you eat already?"
"I'm not feeling very hungry." Peter said. Truthfully, all he wanted was to get some sleep, but he needed to be sure Lucy was alright first, that she was really and truly safe here.
"Oh, but you should-"
"Don't worry." Peter smiled faintly at her, his voice faltering-even stammering-a little. "Look, my room is just four doors down, I-I-I'll hear you...if you need me at all..."
"Thanks, Peter." she put down what was left of her bread and squeezed his hand.
"Goodnight," he leaned forward and kissed her forehead. "I love you."
"I love you, too." Lucy said softly. "Goodnight."
As was always his fashion of behavior around Lucy, Peter started to steal out of the room softly, as though he was trying not to wake a sleeping infant. "Remember to brush your teeth before you turn out the lights and go to sleep, okay?"
"I will." she promised.
"Reepicheep, stay out of trouble." Peter said warningly, an eyebrow half-raised in the dæmon's direction. "And make sure she puts on a warm enough dressing-gown if she has to get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night."
"I will." he promised.
"You'll be alright?"
The girl and her dæmon nodded.
The next morning, when Lucy woke up and started looking for her clothes to get dressed, she couldn't find one of her shoes. Its match was on her left foot, a russet-like brown to match the charming tea-dress she was wearing and to clash prettily with her white stockings. She looked much neater than usual, wanting to put her brother's mind at ease. Lucy had thought perhaps that if he saw her making an effort to take care of herself on her own more, maybe he'd lose a bit of that weary expression on his face.
Not that such effort was easy to put forth, seeing as all she really wanted to do was sit up in her night clothes and puzzle over the pocket watch some more while talking to Reepicheep. She had vowed to have herself ready for breakfast the second she her heard Peter's knock at the door, but how could she when one shoe was no where to be found?
"Where did you put it?" Reepicheep crawled out from under the bed in the form of a cream-coloured ermine with lovely, sparkling chocolate brown eyes.
"I didn't put it anywhere." Lucy sighed, pouting and even stamping her stocking foot out of deep annoyance. "The maids put everything away. That's the worst of having servants, Reep, you never know where anything is without having to ask."
"Did you check the wardrobe?" Reepicheep suggested, standing up on his hind legs looking very adorable indeed, though Lucy knew better than to tell him so.
It was the first time Lucy had even noticed there was a wardrobe, now that she came to think of it, having been so preoccupied and sleepy the night before. It was such a lovely old wardrobe, too-the nicest one she'd ever seen, made of apple-wood and carved with pictures of trees and armoured bears and a great Lion and things of that nature.
"Lucy," Reepicheep gasped, shifting his shape back into its ordinary 'brown mouse with a golden feathered band' form. "look at the letter carved into the base of the tree trunk on the door!"
Leaning in to examine the beautiful engraving more carefully, Lucy noticed what had caught her dæmon's attention: there was an O with a slash through it just like the one in the pocket watch.
"What do you think it means?" she mused.
"Don't know." Reepicheep shrugged as he scooted over to look under the wardrobe, coming out again nudging a familiar object. "I found your shoe."
Lucy slipped the shoe on and slowly reached up her hand to open the wardrobe door.
"Maybe it's locked." Reepicheep thought aloud.
"I don't think so." said Lucy. "Not if it's in my room, for me to use."
"Well, probably not." Reepicheep changed his mind and agreed with her.
The door opened with an almost musical-sounding creak; four moth balls fell out. Reepicheep sneezed, he didn't like the smell of those little, crunchy white things. Lucy's nose wrinkled but she didn't mind it so much as her dæmon did; she took a step into the wardrobe as though it were a doorway into another room.
"Lucy!" Reepicheep protested. "Why are you-"
"Look, Reep!" Lucy sighed dreamily. "Fur! lots and lots of lovely fur coats all hung up in here!"
The little mouse rolled his eyes; he never could understand his lady's fascination with fur. After all, he himself was covered in it in most of his forms and didn't see anything so very special about it.
Sighing happily again, Lucy rubbed her face against the two closest coats and then started venturing further in, leaning heavily against all of the delightfully soft fur. Reepicheep hopped in after her and followed, having no choice-dæmons can't be long distances from their humans.
"Lucy, come on, Peter will be calling us for breakfast soon." Reepicheep reminded her, not being very keen on fooling around in the wardrobe.
"Reep, I say, that's not a coat," Lucy noticed something at the wardrobe's back. "what is it?"
He squinted and looked for the source of her confusion. It sort of look like a long, very wide, very glossy, gauzy black scarf or curtain had been hung up on the hooks in the back as a sort of decoration. Why someone would have wanted a decoration behind all of those fur coats where nobody could see it, Reepicheep and Lucy couldn't guess.
Ever so carefully, as if she was afraid of tearing it, Lucy started to lift up the gauze so that she could see what was behind it. Dim, yellow light drifted in where the back should have been along with a blast of chilly air.
"What on earth?" Reepicheep stated, wandering forward and discovering what felt-and looked-like snow under him.
"It's a forest!" Lucy realized, bending down to scoop up Reepicheep and carry him in her arms so she could walk faster and get to see things more quickly.
"Where's the yellow light coming from? It looks just like the light from any lamppost back home in London."
"It sort of is." Lucy told him, noticing a tall iron pillar with a lantern set on the top a few feet in front of them. It burned brightly and did indeed look very much like any of the ones in London might except for being a little older fashioned.
Normally, Reepicheep was not a very cuddly dæmon, only putting up with displays of affection when he could tell his human was yearning for them, but as he was feeling cold and did not want to shiver, lest it should look like fear, he curled himself as deeply into the nooks of Lucy's arms as possible.
They were still looking up in awe at the lamppost, wondering what it was doing there in the middle of a forest (and of course what the middle of a forest was doing behind the curtain in their wardrobe back at Lord Digory's college), when a stunning creature flew above their heads.
It was a snowy-white, moon-faced owl with huge, glowing orange-gold eyes and a wise little look about her as she swooped down a little lower.
"Lucy, it's not a real bird." Reepicheep whispered to her. "She's like Lord Digory's robin."
"You mean the robin has shape-shifted?"
"No, Lucy, of course not, the robin's human is grown up, she's settled. So is this one, actually, but it's not the Lord Professor's dæmon, she belongs to someone else entirely."
"But who else has one, Reep?" the words were just scarcely out of her mouth when a boy's face peered out from behind a tree.
It was a tallish boy of about nine or ten with dark hair and brown eyes. The owl flew over and landed on his now out-stretched arm as he walked closer to where Lucy was standing.
"Hullo," said Lucy, flushing with excitement and a little bit of nervousness at meeting another child, someone who couldn't be much older than she herself was, with a dæmon.
What was pretty surprising when Lucy realized it, was that Reepicheep had said something about this dæmon being settled-something he could just sense and know without question. Dæmons didn't usually pick a permanent form until puberty; but maybe, she thought, this boy's dæmon made up its mind earlier than most.
"Who are you?" the boy asked, not rudely but in a curt tone all the same.
"I'm Lucy Pevensie," Lucy told him.
He waited as if expecting more.
"Oh, right!" Lucy wasn't used to introducing Reepicheep to people. "This is Reepicheep." She placed him on the ground because he had shifted into a grayish brown tom cat and was squirming in her arms. "Reep."
"I'm Edmund," the boy told her, seeming a little friendlier now. "Edmund Coulter." Motioning up at his dæmon, he added, "This is Eleanor Glimfeather." She flew off of his shoulder and landed next to Reepicheep, fixing her steady eyes on him as if she knew all of his secrets within one glance. "Ella."
"Pleased to meet you, Edmund Coulter." Lucy replied very politely, stretching out her hand.
He smiled and extended his own hand so that she could shake it. "Pleased to meet you, too, Lucy Pevensie."
She saw now that he was wearing soft, gray, wool mittens on his hands-they felt warm against her own bare fingers-with the contour of an owl embroidered on the back of them.
An owl, she mused in her mind, just like his dæmon.
Owls were very pretty creatures, but they had a different sort of prettiest than most other pretty birds did, a sort of wisdom about them. Wisdom, being wise, having justice, loving justice. A strange, very regal-sounding title came to her mind as she looked at the boy standing in front of her, forgetting for a moment to let his hand go: The Just.
Edmund the Just, she thought to herself, I rather like the sound of that.
AN: Please review.