Chapter 1: If Stone Could but Speak
In which our hero, not unlike ourselves, has absolutely no idea what is going on.

Twigs snapped underfoot as the young girl struggled through the wet thickets, her bare legs covered with thorny scratches and her once-shiny new shoes now caked in mud. Leaves caught in her tangled dark hair and she slipped once, twice, on the blanket of slick leaves and grass on the slope. The sharp angry voices of her pursuers pushed her on.

The girl's name was Lucy, and she had at one time been a queen.

Grabbing handfuls of wet grass and brush, she stubbornly pushed on up the slope away from the river. The rain was hard, the slope steep, and those after her wore heavy armour while she was a but a slip of a girl, fourteen and quite small for her age. By their shouts, they had mistaken her in the darkness for a forest spirit or some strange dwarf.

You must be some kind of ... beardless dwarf? Lucy smiled, even through the tears and rain. Her strange homecoming was met with similar misunderstandings, it seemed, and a similar welcome of danger and pursuit.

A branch caught on her tartan skirt, tearing an even larger hole where an arrow had missed her by hairs. She yanked it free, losing a few precious inches as her wet shoes fought for purchase. She wrapped her small, chilled hands around the trunk of a wiry pine and thought, for just a moment, that it bent ever so slightly to pull her up. She propelled herself up and over the edge of the ravine, stumbling so suddenly on the even ground that she landed in a wet bedraggled heap.

The voices below her grew stronger.

Slithering like a lizard on the muddy leaves, she scrambled around the trunks of birch and pine, groping in the near-darkness to get her feet beneath her. Mud was in her eyes, stinging in her nose and mouth. What a sight she was! Lucy the Valiant, Lucy the Fair, Bold Lucy, the Warrior Queen of Narnia! Covered in mud, soaking wet, stumbling about in the dark like a half-drowned stoat. Oh, how she wished she dared laugh!

She caught hold of a friendly branch, feeling the rough bark and soft leaves of a willow. Gentle tendrils curled around her face, the wind pressing them to her back. Another step brought her to a solid wall of stone. The wind howled.

Her fingers flew over the slippery rock in desperation. The sound of heavy footfalls had reached the top of the slope.

Not solid. There was a gap behind the trunk, just big enough. Sucking in her breath, the young queen slipped between stone and tree and into the empty space beyond. She huddled in the darkness amid the roots and cool damp earth as the voices of men and the clanking of swords and armour passed her hiding place, unaware. Only when the awful noise had ceased and the shadows had vanished did she dare draw breath.

Thank you, friendly willow. Lucy pressed her hands against the bark of the willow where it grew close to the stone and closed her eyes in relief.

If perhaps Lucy had not been Lucy and had instead been another young girl in this unfortunate situation, she might have been at a loss for what to do now that the danger seemed past. Another girl might have crept back out into the rain, or stayed shivering amid the roots and dirt until an answer presented itself. Fortunately for Lucy, she was actually herself and was rarely prone to inaction.

Feeling along the stone, she determined the cave went deeper than her arms could reach. Groping into the pocket of her schoolbag, she pulled out the new torch Edmund had given her that morning.

"You'll need this for when you go sneaking through the halls at night, looking for adventure," he'd teased her. She switched it on, the tiny soft light illuminating the damp stone and casting grasping shadows where roots poked through the exposed earth.

"It is much larger than I would have thought," Lucy mused to herself. "It isn't warm, and it's quite dark, but at least it is dry. It will have to do, Lucy! You can't go back outside, and if you dally here they're bound to come back and see the light, and that won't do at all."

Fixing the beam of her light into the darkness beyond, she boldly strode forward deeper into the narrow passage until the wind could not be felt and the air became heavy to breathe. It was then she noticed something that made her heart skip.

The fine, powdery dirt underfoot was covered with overlapping footprints. Most were animal, but some were distinctly not.

"There can be no doubt, these are Narnian footprints!" Lucy exclaimed. There were the marks of small sharp boots she was sure must have belonged to dwarfs, and many sets of small cloven hooves. At one time, true Narnians had been in this cave.

Lucy hurried on, shivering from excitement rather than cold. Narnia's youngest queen had come home, and there were things she needed to know.

On and on, through the twisting turns that went forward and back, until abruptly she came to what must be the centre. It was a tiny little alcove, bare and still, and it was apparent at once that the only creature to draw breath within was herself.

Her disappointment could not help but show as she stepped slowly into the little space, her shoes crunching on ancient leaves. This seemed as far as the passage went, and it was empty.

As the torch's light played across the bare wall, a shadow loomed abruptly before it and she jerked back in surprise. Was that a hand, reaching toward her? No, it did not move. She moved closer, her light straining steadily into the shadows of that lonely little corner. It was a hand, the hand of a statue that sat crouched against the rough wall of the cave, its arm extended towards her.

The breath caught in Lucy's throat as the awful realization sank into her. The only stone statues she had ever seen in Narnia were during the reign of the White Witch.

With cold all the way to her fingertips, Lucy played the light across the little statue. Her heart ached even more when she saw it was a faun. He sat with his back against the stone, one hand pressed to it behind him, his shoulders bent as though he had run as far as he was able and could at last go no further, his other hand raised futilely to fend off his horrible, inevitable fate. Lucy felt tears in her eyes. Her very first friend in Narnia had been a faun.

"Poor, dear thing!" she whispered, turning the light away so she would not have to see the fear and pain on its face. "I wish stone could speak, then at least I could learn how you came here. The White Witch is long dead! How could this be?"

Weeping bravely, Lucy put out a hand to stroke the poor faun's curly stone hair. The statue was so old the stone felt rough and powdery beneath her fingertips. The Witch had indeed died long ago, and it seemed so too had this unfortunate creature.

As her fingers ran over the cold, lifeless stone, Lucy frowned through her tears. From the shadow on the wall, it looked as though the faun had been wearing something around his neck at the time of his awful petrification. A scarf of some sort.

It took a moment for Lucy to realize her breath had stopped. Slowly, ever so slowly, she lifted the light until it shone full on the stone face. The torch slipped from her fingers, clattering to roll against the wall.

There was a second when everything was still as the statue itself. Then, gently, she put out her hands to touch the face she had seen but for a moment, for the first time in so many years, and uttered the name that had haunted her thoughts since she was a child.

"Mr. Tumnus," she whispered, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks.