"Shush! You don't want to wake the whole castle do you?" Edmund asked his younger sister.
Lucy grinned. "I don't think I am capable of doing that, Ed."
Edmund arched a dark eyebrow with a smile on his face. "Are you sure about that?" He teased.
"I thought that you were under house arrest?" Lucy asked him.
"I am." Edmund admitted.
Lucy had to laugh at her brother's ridiculous boldness.
"Then why are you, here?"
Edmund shrugged. "I needed to find out the truth."
Lucy facial expression quickly became serious. "The truth about what?"
"Peter."
"Oh." Lucy stated in a tone of realization. "How did you interrogate, this time?"
"Don't you mean, what did you find out?"
Lucy nodded, rolling her eyes, as she waited for her brother to continue.
He paused.
"Well," Lucy prodded. "Go on."
"You might want to sit down."
Lucy glanced at him questioningly as she took a seat on a nearby sofa, after groping for it in the darkness, for a few minutes.
Edmund clasped his hands together and then separated them and swung them. He finally decided to leave them at his sides, though not for long, because he used hand motions when he talked.
"Have you wondered why Peter has been acting so strangely?" He asked.
"Susan and I were just talking about it in her bedroom a few minutes before you startled me to death."
Edmund grinned.
"Sorry about that, Lu."
"It's alright. I wasn't too frightened." Lucy added with a small laugh.
"Please continue." She implored. "You're leaving me hanging!"
Edmund sighed.
"Alright. There's a map of Cair Paravel that only Peter and I have copies of. It contains the locations of secret passages and hidden staircases and such."
"Well, thanks for telling me about it!" Lucy interrupted, with an underlying tone of sarcasm in her voice.
"Anyways, I escaped my perpetual prison…"
Lucy giggled and Edmund glared.
"Sorry." She muttered, stifling another laugh.
Edmund continued.
"I will now ignore all untimely interruptions. Now, as I was saying, I left my bedroom by a rope and climbed down."
"The guards were asleep, you know." Lucy interrupted once more.
"I heard." Edmund answered. "I entered one of the secret doors on the side of Cair Paravel, and entered a tunnel which eventually led to Peter's room. I hoped to do a bit of investigating."
"You hoped? Did you ever actually burglarize his room?"
"First of all, I didn't burglarize Peter's room, I-."
"You just ransacked it without his knowledge." Lucy finished for him with a cheeky grin.
"I searched his room for any threats." Edmund corrected.
"Threats?"
"You know, what I mean." Edmund said with a sigh of frustration.
"Do I?"
"Threats such as a man or woman plotting to murder him in his bed or dementing his brain with their wicked antagonistic ideas or holding him at knife-point demanding for him to give them access to the royal treasury, or they would burn the castle down." Edmund expounded.
Lucy paused for a moment to let Edmund's previous response digest.
"Oh. Those sort of threats."
Susan could not stop worrying. What hadn't Lucy returned yet? Had she found something?
"If she is killed, I will blame it entirely on myself, as I was too cowardly to go with her." Susan reproved herself in the silence of her bedroom.
She glanced at the clock sitting on her bureau.
It was thirty minutes after midnight.
Lucy had left her only a few minutes after twelve o' clock.
She had been waiting much too long.
"Well, what did you find?" Lucy asked her brother in the darkness of the castle's library.
"Hold on. I'm getting there." Edmund replied. "Now, where was I… ah, yes. Peter was as still as a statue when I entered his bedroom through the hidden door. Of course, he was sound asleep, and we both know that he sleeps like a rock. He was dead to the world, snoring away, which thankfully masked my footsteps and other sounds I made, while sorting through his room."
"You mean, pillaging through his room?"
"Will you stop that?"
"Sorry."
"As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, Peter didn't hear a thing, and that's probably good, because he would have called the guards in on me if he had woken up. Then, I would be in even deeper trouble, than I am already in, and would never have the chance to escape my priso-."
Edmund's sentence was cut off by the opening of the library doors.