Disclaimer: The Pevensies and all the characters and situations in the Chronicles of Narnia belong to C. S. Lewis and not to me. Similarly, Oreius belongs to Disney or Walden Media or whoever thought him up. Again, that person was not me. I own only a devious mind.

Part Two

"Where's Susan?" Lucy clutched the scrap of blood-stained white velvet that was all that was left of their sister's dress, wailing with the howling of the storm. "It got her! The ghost got her!"

She threw herself into Peter's arms, sobbing and blotting her eyes with her handkerchief. The one Susan had embroidered for her.

Edmund frowned, glaring at Peter as he tried to comfort Lucy. "All right, you can stop this now, the lot of you. Susan! You might as well come out. I'm not falling for it. Peter, you should be ashamed. You're scaring Lucy. Come on, Susan!"

Peter shook his head, his blue eyes round and uncertain and absolutely clear. He never was much of an actor, and Edmund could always tell when he was pretending. This wasn't one of those times.

"Do you think she's hiding?" Lucy asked with a hopeful little sniffle. "Susan? Please come out."

She ran over and flung open the wardrobe door, but Edmund saw nothing there but clothes and shoes. Lucy's face fell and she ran back to Peter, crying again.

"Where is she? Please find her."

"Shhh." Peter hugged her close. "We'll find her, Lu. Don't worry."

All this while, Oreius had been searching the room, and Edmund joined him. They found nothing.

"There is no way out besides the door we came in," the Centaur said. "And if she had come that way, we would have seen her."

Edmund scowled. "I'm supposed to believe she was carried off by a ghost?"

"You know Narnia is full of strange wonders," Oreius said solemnly. "The legends usually contain a kernel of truth. I feared this would happen. The year and the storm, it was inevitable."

"What do you mean, the year?" Edmund asked, exchanging a fearful glance with his brother.

"As I told you before, it is said that Princess Raine appears every fifty years in Cair Paravel. But the last time was a hundred years ago. It was just after Jadis seized power and the Winter began. The Cair was still occupied then, though not many lived here. Fifty years later, the castle was empty, deserted but for ice and snow. If Raine appeared then, there was no one to see her, no one for her to carry off. I feared she would be . . . more than usually hungry this time."

Edmund swallowed hard. "You think she might– She might take more than one of us?"

Lucy started to cry again. "No! Edmund, it's not true. It can't be really true. Susan can't be–"

"Don't worry, Lu, we'll–" He looked at Peter and then at Orius. "What are we going to do?"

Peter pressed his lips together and straightened his shoulders. "We're going to find Susan. She's got to be here somewhere. If she's not in this room, we'll have to search the rest of the Cair."

"I still want to know why this so-called Princess would want to grab somebody every fifty years," Edmund said. "Didn't she already have her revenge on the guy who killed her? What does she want now?"

"My King," Oreius began, "the legend says that–"

There was a boom of thunder, echoed by a loud crash in the corridor.

"Susan!" Peter cried.

He flung open the door, but there was only unrelieved blackness. The torches in the corridor had been put out. Edmund grabbed a candle from Susan's dresser and gave another to Peter.

"Come on."

"Peter," Luch sniffled, "I want to come, too."

"I don't know, Lu," Peter said. "You'd probably be safer if you stayed here with Oreius."

"We would all be safer if we stayed together, My King," Oreius said, taking up a candle himself. "Come along, Queen Lucy."

He put one hand on Lucy's shoulder, and the four of them stepped into the darkness, their three candles only a faint glow, showing them little of what was around them and nothing of what lay ahead. Edmund moved closer to Peter and wished Oreius wouldn't lag so far behind. Actually, the Centaur was scarcely two feet away, but it seemed a good deal farther. They had gone less than halfway down the corridor when Peter came to an abrupt stop.

"Did you hear that?"

The four of them froze, listening, and then Lucy squeezed in between her brothers. "It's– Oh, Peter, what is it?"

There was a faint scrabbling up ahead, barely audible over the whipping rain. Lucy's hand was gripping Edmund's bruisingly tight, but he was somehow glad of it. What was ahead of them?

Peter clenched his jaw. "Come on. Whatever it is, we'd better know for certain."

They moved forward in a tight knot, the scuttling sound sometimes near, sometimes faint and far away, but always ahead. Always drawing them on towards one of the little used parts of the Cair. Then when they reached the door to one of the towers, the sound stopped.

Edmund held his candle in front of himself, unable to see more than a little way ahead. For a moment there was nothing but the moan of the wind and the beating of the rain to cover their unsteady breathing, and then, almost too soft to hear, someone laughed.

Lucy caught her breath, gripping Edmund's hand even tighter and no doubt doing the same to Peter's. "Susan?"

"No," Peter breathed. "That wasn't Susan. I've never heard that laugh before. Have you, Ed?"

Edmund shook his head. "It, uh–" He used his sleeve to blot the sudden sweat from his upper lip. "It didn't sound human. Or at least it didn't sound alive."

Peter peered into the unrelieved blackness of the open doorway. "I don't think you can get up these steps, Oreius."

"Peter–" Lucy began, but Peter shook his head.

"You stay down here, too. Oreius will look after you. Come on, Ed."

Edmund gave Lucy's hand a little squeeze before he pulled free of her. "Don't worry, Lu. We'll be right back."

"It's all right," Peter assured her, kissing her hair, and then he nodded at Edmund and drew his sword. "Right then. Up we go."

Edmund unsheathed his own blade, comforted by the feel of it in his hand as he padded behind Peter up the narrow, winding stairs. Partway up, he glanced back to see Lucy's pale, anxious face in the white glow of Oreius's candle, and then he saw nothing but darkness above and below. He wanted to grab onto Peter's belt as he had often done when he was a very little boy and their mother had sent them up to bed, up into the darkness at the top of the stairs, but he merely held tighter to the hilt of his sword, steeling himself against whatever might be waiting for them above.

They both froze in the blinding lightning strike. And then, over the booming thunder, there again came that faint, unholy laugh. This time it was followed by a piercing scream.

"Lucy!"

Edmund dashed down the steps with Peter right behind him. He could hear a fierce struggle and then Oreius's cry.

"My Queen!"

"Lucy!" Peter cried almost shoving Edmund aside to get to the bottom of the stairs.

The corridor where they had left their sister was pitch black. Edmund held out his candle, squinting to see.

"Oreius?"

"Oreius?" Peter echoed. "Where are you?"

"Oh, My Kings."

They followed the Centaur's anguished voice a few feet down the corridor, their candles illuminating the place where he had bent down on his forelegs to reach something that lay on the floor.

"My Kings," he murmured again, and he handed Edmund a little embroidered scrap of white linen.

It was Lucy's handkerchief, stained with three drops of blood.

Author's Note: Again, profound thanks to Lady Alambiel for brainstorming and for coming up with great solutions to my plot problems.