The summer was going by quickly in a blaze of fiery-hot days and muggy, dampish nights for Susan and Lucy who had never been so thankful in their entire lives that their cottage was old and sort of drafty; it was their only source of coolness as they laid in their bed with all the covers kicked to the floor. They'd be shivering and huddling and wishing it did not exist when the weather turned cold again, but they were glad enough of it now.
It had been over a month since they'd helped the rude dwarf escape from the tree and they hadn't heard or seen anything of him since, nor did they expect to. Even Lucy, who had always taken it upon herself to make friends even with the sort of persons who seemed grumpy at first, didn't really miss him. She still missed Edmund, though.
One morning, when the air was much cooler and easier to deal with than it had been as if late, Lucy and Susan decided get up early and go fishing at a little brook in the forest that they were very familiar with (Susan would never let Lucy near any unfamiliar bodies of water as long as there was an inch of life in her; knowing well how dangerously curious Lucy could get at times). Their fishing rods were old-fashioned sturdy things that had been repaired countless times over the years and had been strung with new line that was so glossy it didn't at all match the beat up poles themselves. Gathering up these-as well as the bait, which Lucy carried in a bucket because Susan was none too keen on wiggly things that came from underground-they left the cottage hand in hand, saying goodbye to their mother in the usual way.
The walk was pleasant and they talked back and forth part of the way before becoming quieter and more dream-like in their movements, just drinking in the over-all niceness of the day as they walked in the lush green forest which seemed much too vibrant and alive for the hazy summertime of the year. At the brook itself, frogs and toads hopped around happily as if they hadn't a care in all the world and the fish, unaware of the danger two girls carrying fishing rods really posed to them, jumped up and down, riding the little wave-like currents. Further up though, there came a less peaceful sound-a mournful shriek and muttered cursing-all too familiar.
"Is it him again?" Lucy wondered aloud as she and her sister wandered closer to the crier.
"Sounds like him." said Susan grumpily, still rather put-out with the dwarf for being so rude to them the last time. If it really was him again, he'd had better show some manners!
Sure enough, there was the ugly, hound-faced, bitter black dwarf whom they had saved from the tree and its dryad a month ago. His beard was shorter from where Susan had cut it with her scissors but it was still long enough so that it had gotten tangled in his fishing line and apparently it had happened just when a large fish had taken hold the bait, having no intentions of letting go.
"Hullo there," Lucy cried out to him, trying to be friendly. "You don't want to go in the water do you?"
"Of course not you stupid-" he followed this with a parade of words too vulgar to include here.
Utterly appalled, Susan put her hands over her little sister's ears. "Beastly dwarf!"
"What are you standing around like that for?" He snapped as if he had done nothing wrong and they were doing nothing but standing by and watching him get taken into the water. "Help me before I'm pulled to my death!"
"I say we let the fish pull him in." Lucy whispered to Susan, only half-joking. "He wont get anything worse than a good dunking."
Susan would have been more willing to leave the dwarf with his beard caught in a tree than to leave him like this. He was little, even shorter than Lucy was, and the brook was deep. Also, his rod looked like it was made of a rather heavy sort of wood, it might pull him down. "We'll have to help him this time, too, wouldn't want him to panic and drown as likely as not."
"Darn good of you!" Shrieked the dwarf angrily as the fish gave another good yank, almost succeeding in getting Nikabrik's chin wet. "Now stop being such bothersome ninnies and help me!"
In a flash, Susan had her scissors out again and raced over to the dwarf, cutting off the middle of his beard along with the line. "There!"
Nikabrik was free now and the middle of his beard, the fish, the bait, and the fishing rod, were on the muddy bottom of the brook, leaving nothing but a series of dark ripples behind them.
"Are you alright?" Lucy asked politely, noticing that the dwarf looked as though he might cry.
"Of course I'm not alright, you moron!" He sneered, reaching down to pick up a sack hidden behind the rock he'd been seated on while fishing. "You horrible children have gone and disfigured me."
"You aren't very bright," Lucy folded her arms across her chest and pursed her lips slightly. "Susan's just saved your life, haven't you, Su?" she glanced over at her sister.
Susan nodded, arching her left eyebrow at the scowling little man. "A simple 'thank you' would suffice."
"Thank you?" he snarled incredulously as if he was a beast rather than a human-like creature. "For what? You'd already ruined my fine beard and now you've gone and cut off the best part! I shall not be able to show myself to any of my friends until it grows back and I'm salvaged from shame!"
"Oh, don't be silly," Lucy told him in the kind comforting tone Susan used to use on her when she was little and had broken a toy or torn a page in a book by accident, trying to sound reassuring. "It doesn't look that bad, I'm sure your friends wont mind half so much as you do." She would have put her hand on his shoulder if he'd looked a little less wild or if his face had softened just a bit.
"You idiot, you don't know anything!" The dwarf clutched his sack a little tighter now as if he was afraid they were going to jump on him and try to snatch it away. "And I'll be taking this since your oaf of a sister has gone and ruined mine, leaving it at the bottom of that accursed brook." with that, he ripped Lucy's fishing rod right out of her hands and stormed off, muttering to himself.
"Well, I never!" huffed Susan, her eyes flashing with resentment as the dwarf scurried away.
Lucy was staring down at her hands which were a little red and splintered from the way the wood had been ripped out of them. "He took my fishing rod."
A while later, as they were traveling home at sunset, Lucy happened to look over her shoulder back at the brook, not sure of what exactly it was she wanted to see-perhaps the dwarf coming back to apologize and return her fishing rod. What she actually saw though was far more surprising even than that would have been; there was a white unicorn bending down to drink from the brook and a dark-haired boy in a scarlet tunic-Edmund, Lucy was fairly certain-standing beside him, stroking the creature's beautiful white neck and whispering something in his ear.
She stopped walking and spun back around to get Susan's attention, squeezing her sister's wrist as hard as she could. "Susan!"
"What's the matter?"
"Su, it's Edmund, he's come back!"
"Who?" her brow crinkled and her eyes were wide with confusion.
"Peter's brother!" Lucy huffed, not because she was cross-just because she was impatient to go back to the brook and talk to him.
"Peter is a bear." Susan reminded her in an annoyingly grown-up tone of voice.
"Ooh!" Lucy quickly spun Susan around so that she faced the brook; surely, once she saw Edmund and the unicorn for herself, she would have to believe. "Just look!"
"Look at what?" Susan seemed more puzzled than ever, blinking rapidly as if that would somehow help. "I don't see anything."
"But he's right over-" Lucy's voice stopped, she could see for herself now that he wasn't there anymore. He'd come back and now he was gone again before she had even gotten a chance to say hello and thank him for all the wonderful gifts he had left for them last winter.
"Come on, Lu, enough playing around." in a very no-nonsense sort of swift movement, Susan seized her little sister's hand again and started marching back towards the direction of the cottage. "We have to get home with the fish. Though we would have had more if that greedy dwarf hadn't taken your rod."
"But he was just right there." Lucy protested weakly, feeling what was almost a sharp ache of sadness in her ribs. Why wouldn't Susan believe her?
"The dwarf?" Susan fought back a yawn. "I know, and I'll tell mum-"
"No, not the dwarf!" cried Lucy, utterly distressed by this point. "Edmund!"
"Please, Lu, calm down and see reason." Susan told her as they came out of the edge of the forest and into the clearing their cottage was located in. "Peter is only a talking bear, a nice one, but a normal one. And he does not have a fairy for a brother."
"But he does!" Lucy insisted, pulling her hand away sharply, hoping to alert her sister to the fact that she wasn't playing or making up a story for fun, that she was telling the truth, that it was a real enchantment they had found themselves in the middle of.
"Lucy-Lu," she reached over and gently moved a lock of hair behind her sister's shoulder, bending down slightly so that they were eye-to-eye, Lucy still being shorter than her elder sister was even with all she'd grown that winter-although Widow Pevensie swore that one day she would shoot up and be just as tall, if not taller. "Look here, there is no magic afoot. There's only one very frightened poor bear whom we must be as kind to as possible to make him feel better if he comes back again next winter, alright?"
"But Susan," Lucy refused to back down until Susan stopped trying to sound like such a know-it-all grown-up. "you saw the boy at the gorge that night and you know Peter's different-"
"Lucy, sweetie, if you don't take our games less seriously, I'm afraid we'll have to stop playing so much." Susan sounded so much like their mother that Lucy almost wanted to smack her for it. She didn't want a mother right now, she wanted a sister, a friend, someone who would listen to her thoughts without calling them 'pretty stories' or 'funny games' or 'stuff and nonsense'.
"But don't you see what's happening?" Lucy exclaimed, much louder than she'd intended, though she didn't care a thing about volume right now. "There's some sort of-"
"Oh, do stop!" Susan rolled her eyes, taking her hand once again and refusing to let Lucy pull away (she did try but Susan's grip was too tight). "This has happened before: do you remember the time when you were four and you insisted you saw Aslan in the forest and that he wanted to talk to us? Remember how much you cried and got all worked up and-"
"Susan!" Lucy bawled, shaking her head furiously. "I did see Aslan and he did want to talk to us, don't you remember? Mum made you apologize to me!"
Susan winced; because of course she had completely forgotten that part of the story up until that very second. "Okay, bad example." her lips formed a thin, firm line on her face that Lucy knew to be final. "But I am right this time and that's that."
That night, as she laid in bed, Lucy was completely and utterly miserable. She hadn't wanted to get her mother involved in the argument (partially because she was a little scared her mother just might side with Susan and she wasn't sure she could handle that in her current state of mind) so she had told Widow Pevensie nothing at all and simply sighed and shrugged away any inquiries as to why she did everything so half-heartedly and barely even touched her supper. Now she just stared at the long dark wooden beams on the celing as they loomed above her, feeling hopelessly torn. She wanted to believe, she wanted to figure out the secret of the whole enchantment and perhaps even help somehow-if she could. But she also wanted her sister to take her seriously again and stop treating her like a toddler and that wasn't going to happen as long as she went on being adamant about how she really had seen Edmund and the unicorn at the brook. Still, she was too truthful to lie and say it was just a story she'd made up for fun, so there was nothing else for it but to be miserable and even to cry a little into her pillow when Susan's head was turned the other way.
A sudden tap at the windows snapped Lucy out of her gloomy thoughts and discouraged wonderings. Standing up and wandering over to it, she lifted the little brass hook that held them shut and peered out. Almost glowing with a pinkish-white gleam in the moonlight, were streams and streams of flower petals flying-not merely floating, but truly flying-about in an almost non-existent summer's night wind. Lucy knew at once what this had to be; they were not ordinary petals, but a dryad. The petals swirled around like a small dust storm, staying ever so close to Lucy and the window, until they settled in the shape of an outline of a woman.
Lucy's mouth hung open slightly, taken aback. She'd known dryads but she'd never really gotten much of a chance to speak to one personally, all by herself. Before now, the closest she had come to that was when her mother traded wool for apples from a fruit-tree dryad three or four summers ago. They were always around but they seemed to speak to humans less and less these days; which was why it was such a special treat for Lucy, who had already forgotten how sad she had been only a few seconds ago.
"Lucy..." the dryad's voice was soft and breezy like cool water bubbling up from a spring in the center of a tree. "Lucy...come..."
"Come where?" Lucy whispered, her eyes so wide they were big enough to reflect the beautiful full moon hanging in the dark sky over-head.
"I heard you and your sister talking in the forest...about the boy and the unicorn...you wanted to speak with him, right?"
"Well yes, of course." said Lucy, blinking three times in a row and forcing back a giggle as a little petal flew astray and touched her cheek as lightly as the wing of a butterfly.
"Then come...I know where he is...he's not gone away...not just yet..." The dryad's voice was so sweet, like candy from a traveling fair.
"Alright." Lucy whispered, stepping away from the window to grab her boots which were at the foot of the bed. "I'm coming, then."
She watched Susan carefully, a little frightened that she would see her leaving and put a stop to it, but she didn't stir, she only snored contently.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Lucy slipped the boots all the way onto her feet and started walking towards the door. It suddenly came to her that perhaps it would have been wiser to wait until she was outside of the cottage to put on the boots because they were creaking awfully loudly-at least in her perception-and Widow Pevensie might hear. She didn't hear and she didn't wake, not even when Lucy grunted slightly, lifting the door latch which felt strangely heavy, stepping out into the night air and the moonlight.
AN: *Please***Review*