Holy crap. When I sat down writing tonight, I didn't actually think I'd finish this chapter! Go me!

Bit of news ... I've started classes again. I'm in my final year of university, with all the loveliness that entails, and have a thesis project to boot. Suffice to say updates will be few and far between in the next few months, but in no way have I given up on this. I have the whole dang thing planned out, after all. It only remains to actually write it.

You reviews and comments and letters to me have been fantastic. Even with the long delays between chapters, I hope you'll continue to show support for this story. It's wonderful to me, it truly is. Thank you so much.

............

Chapter 6: Felling and Deceit
In which a grave crime is witnessed by our heroes, and something is encountered in the dead of night.

Though it was difficult to track the sun through the foliage, the day seemed to be in decline after their encounter with the wolf. The heat lessened as the sun dropped, which unfortunately meant the insects came back. Tumnus offered Lucy his scarf, but she found it unbearably stifling and soon gave it back. He kept it bundled around his neck with ends tied back, preferring it to the flies.

It reassured him as well, despite the sweat that trickled down his back beneath the leather tunic. It had seen him through a hundred years of winter, after all, and its soft weight was familiar and comforting even in the summer heat. Not like the sword, which hung around his waist like a dead weight and kept sliding down his hips as the belt did not cinch quite tight enough. He couldn't believe he had even thought of trying to fight off the wolf with that thing. He had never even held a sword before.

Lucy, sweet little laughing Lucy, hadn't frozen for an instant. She was the one who'd actually killed it, not him. And she'd looked so proud of him for standing his ground that he hadn't the heart to tell her he'd simply been too scared to move.

She walked along ahead of him now, adjusting their course further west every time she got a look at the sun. Her dress was the same deep vibrant green as the foliage around them, and if not for the red of her belt and arrows and the white of the ivory quiver she might easily have become part of the forest, vanishing amid the trees like a dryad.

Lucy the Valiant. That's what she had called herself back in he treasure room at Cair Paravel, and it certainly fit. She had known exactly what to do even after the beast was dead, while he stood gasping like a fish and trying not to be ill. He felt so foolish he wanted to wrap himself up in his scarf and disappear.

He was so caught up in feeling sorry for himself that he nearly jumped out of his skin when Lucy stopped walking and shouted, "Aha!"

They had come to where the trees pressed up against a number of very large grey rocks, which stood like weather-worn sentinels splashed with moss and lichen. Lucy clapped her hands and turned to him happily.

"I finally know where we are now!" she cried. "I remember this place! There weren't so many trees here before, it was all more open, but I believe we are quite near to the River Rush."

Tumnus tried hard to remember the names of all the rivers in Narnia, but while he'd had a few very nice maps in his home alongside his father's dusty old books and treatises, he'd never looked at them much. Geography had never been a particular interest of his, a fact he was beginning to regret.

"There was a crossing on the other side of these rocks," Lucy went on, "I'm sure of it. After that, we'll be quite close to the Shuddering Wood, and I'm sure we'll find someone there who can tell us what is going on here."

Tumnus hurried after her, feeling suddenly much lighter. The Shuddering Wood was very near to the Lantern Waste, separated only by the Frozen Lake and the Telmar River. Well, he amended to himself, it probably wasn't frozen any longer. And his cave was probably no longer there anymore. Still, it felt good to think of something familiar to his Narnia, and he found he dearly wanted to stand with Lucy under the lamppost once again.

Lucy's memory turned out less accurate when it came to navigating the rocks. They followed numerous twists and turns into dead ends before they finally found a way through the maze, only to emerge from the trees and stop dead short.

The ground fell away before them as though cut with a knife, the sheer cliffs framing a hundred foot drop straight down. At the bottom of the gorge lay the river, winding like a white snake below. They both stood there, dumbfounded, staring at the impassable crevice.

"Oh, I am an idiot," Lucy spat, stamping her foot. "I can just hear Susan now: 'Over time the water erodes away the earth and soil ...'" her voice became high and singsong.

"Perhaps there's a way down?" Tumnus suggested tentatively. He was so surefooted that heights did not usually bothered him, though this was admittedly higher up than he'd ever been before. He knelt down and carefully gripped the edge of the cliff. Lucy gasped as he leaned his whole upper body over the precipice.

"What are you doing?! Come away from there!" She grabbed onto the tails of his scarf, as though to keep him from tumbling over. "Oh, please!"

Her grip on the scarf was choking him, so he obliged her. "I didn't see anything," he gasped, tugging the garment loose.

She wrung her hands, looking extremely agitated. "Oh, let's just go," she said miserably, turning away from the gorge. "I've led us completely the wrong way. We shall have to find another way across."

"Yes," Tumnus agreed, nodding his head. As he did he thought he caught sight of something on the far side, but when he looked he saw only the sun shining on the cliff. Still, as they made their way back through the rocks he kept glancing over his shoulder, feeling as though they were leaving something behind they ought to have remembered.

............

Tumnus had wanted to stop in the rocks, thinking they could both use a rest and a meal, but Lucy insisted on pressing on. She dallied only long enough to decide whether to follow the Rush up or downstream, deciding finally to head north back towards the Great River.

"South was where the minotaur was," she said, "and the Great River is still passable, in any case, so we're better off finding a way across there."

She did not speak much after that, and the faun could tell that she still rankled at leading them wrong, though it really hadn't been her fault. The thick forest growth made it dangerous to try and follow right alongside the gorge (and neither of them wanted to in any case), so they set a course vaguely northward through the trees. As the sun became increasingly hard to see, Lucy grew increasingly frustrated, doubling back and retracing her steps more than once. Eventually she fell back and Tumnus found himself in the lead, and much to his surprise he found he did quite well. He had a better sense of direction than she even in the fading light and found he could pick a much easier path through the undergrowth. Unfortunately, this did not improve the young queen's mood: she strode along a few paces behind him and sulked.

It was after a good few hours of this uncomfortable silence that Tumnus remembered neither of them had eaten anything since midday, and thought this would not do at all. He paused to try and dig an apple out of his pack and Lucy, who was not at all watching where she was going, walked straight into him and sent them both sprawling into the bushes.

"Why on earth did you stop?!" she growled petulantly, struggling out of a tangle of thorns. Tumnus couldn't answer, as he'd fallen on the sword hilt and it had given him a painful jab to the side. They both floundered helplessly in the bushes for a while, but by the time they managed to put themselves to rights they were strangely in much better spirits. They picked up the things that had fallen from Tumnus' open pack and Lucy fussed over his bruised ribs, and then they set off again together, this time side by side.

Lucy very quickly surprised him by apologizing. "You've been going on about how grown-up I am now," she said with a wry smile, "and here I'm still acting like a silly child. I am sorry, Tumnus," she sighed.

He smiled and for once did not feel himself blush. "I thought you've been quite remarkable," he said honestly, and feeling quite brave, he slipped his hand into hers. She blinked in surprise, but then her fingers curled around his and she swung their hands together as they walked, smiling brightly, and his heart suddenly felt wonderfully light.

The feeling lasted only a short time, for Lucy stopped abruptly, her gaze locked on a patch of leaves lying on the ground ahead. "Did you see that?"

Tumnus had not seen a thing, unless she was talking about the little curl of hair that fell around her ear. He looked to where she pointed and forgot about hair and ears and freckles.

The leaves before them undulated, rolling haltingly over the forest floor and swirling together in a slow, lazy spiral. No wind rustled the trees over head, yet the dry dead leaves seemed to be struggling somehow, trying to lift themselves up off the ground. Tumnus' breath caught in his throat as they began to form into a vaguely human shape, sprawled upon the ground as though in great agony. It raised a quivering hand to them, the brittle leaves rustling like old bones, and suddenly there was a tremendous crash and the figure dissolved, the leaves fluttering about in all directions as though blown apart by a heavy gust neither of them could feel.

Lucy's hand went stiff and cold in his. Leaves had settled into her hair, crowning her head like a wreath, and she looked as though she were about to be sick. From far off, another deep crack sounded which cut them both to the heart.

"They're felling trees!" Lucy gasped. She wrenched her hand from his and took off, bounding like a deer toward the sound.

He shouted to her, springing after her as quickly as he could. She was fast when she chose to be, he realized, but it wasn't long before he caught up to her. It turned out there hadn't been very far to go. The Great River glittered at them, blue and shallow and inviting, and completely swarming with Telmarines.

Aside from Lucy, Tumnus had never seen a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve before, and had never imagined that so many of them could ever be seen together in Narnia. They swarmed like ants across the riverbank, soldiers in black armour and bare-chested workmen, and what they were doing made him feel cold to the marrow of his bones.

Dozens upon dozens of the great trees that had lined the riverbank had been felled, leaving a bare field of jagged stumps. The timber was stacked in great piles everywhere, and men worked away with saws and axes to topple more of the noble giants.

Yet it wasn't this horrible crime that was the centrefold of the scene before them. Spanning across nearly a third of the river was a skeleton of timber, the framework of some feat of human construction. An enormous pulley rigged with a great stone mallet pounded the logs deeper and deeper into the ground, and with each heavy fall the weight felt like it struck Tumnus between the shoulders.

Lucy pulled him to hunker down behind a pile of stripped logs, which oozed fresh sap like blood. Her eyes were filled with angry tears. "Oh, how can they?" she hissed, clenching her fists. "Don't they know?"

Tumnus could not have said whether they did or not, but it certainly seemed they did not care. He peered over their grisly cover, careful not to touch to wood any more than necessary. There was an air of grim desperation over the place. Whatever the reason for what lay before them, there was something grave in its purpose and the faun felt it like a noose around his neck.

"I'm going to go closer," he said.

At first he could not believe what he had just said. Lucy's eyes went wide, and of course she began protesting vehemently, but as it turned out she was actually arguing that she should go and not him, and this he absolutely could not allow. He won out by claiming that he could be much quieter than she. He had lived in the forests all his life, he said, and there was not a faun born in Narnia that couldn't sneak through the trees without making a sound.

"But your scarf," she said, never one to give in. "Surely they'll see it."

He unwound the red muffler and settled it around her neck. "Hold onto it until I get back, then," he said with a nervous smile. Making sure the sword was on straight, he quickly hurried off through the trees before she could say anything more.

He felt strangely exhilarated. Perhaps it was the sight of something that could only be a nightmare, perhaps it was the fear and anger pumping through his heart, but whatever the reason he felt charged through every muscle. Even the sword, which had until now been an annoyance, rested more naturally at his side as he slipped through the trees, moving closer to the camp.

There was a ring of covered wagons that stood nearly within the treeline. A number of armoured Telmarines stood nearby, and by the sound of their voices something was certainly amiss. The faun crouched amid the bracken in the shadow of the nearest wagon, and from there had a clear view of what passed.

"They came in the night, like ghosts," one man said.

"How much did they take?" asked the man who faced him. Both their voices were heavily accented, like the soldiers who had attacked Lucy, but one of the men wore fine, dark-coloured clothes while the rest stood in sturdy but dented armour. That one, whose eyes were cold and hard and whose face sported a well-trimmed beard, had an air about him that reminded Tumnus uncomfortably of the White Witch.

"Enough for three regiments," was the grudging reply. "But there's more." The soldier lifted the back of the wagon for the other to see. From his vantage Tumnus could only guess as to what they saw, but the bearded man read it aloud.

"'You were right to fear the woods,'" his face twisted into a grimace. "'X'. Caspian," he said to the soldier, who looked confused. "The Tenth." He seemed to be grinding his teeth, and his black eyes glittered.

"Tell me, General Glozelle," he continued with a deliberate gaze on the other man, putting heavy emphasis on the first word, "how many men did you lose?"

The general looked confused. "None, Lord Miraz," he said. "We did not even see them."

The man's face twisted again, and he spoke as if to a child. "Then how did you come by your injuries?"

Glozelle remained confused. Without pause for breath, Miraz backhanded him hard across the face with his armoured glove. "I asked you, general," he said, drawing the man's sword from its sheath and holding it out to him, "how many men did you lose, in this bloody and vicious ... Narnian attack, of which you were a ... fortunate survivor?"

His voice, smooth as silk, sent chills up Tumnus' spine. The general, his lip bleeding, cast a look behind him at the three other soldiers who stood there, then looked back to Miraz and slowly took the sword that was held to him. "Three," he said finally.

The man smiled, hard as a knife. "My condolences," he said quietly, and turned to walk away. "I apologize, Lord Sopespian," he continued, to the other man in fine clothes who stood a few paces away. "It appears I was wrong. Prince Caspian is not a victim of these attacks, but their instigator. This changes everything."

Their voices faded as they strode out of earshot, where Miraz mounted a white horse and galloped away. Tumnus felt a tightness in the back of his neck loosen as the man vanished from sight.

The soldier with the bloody lip had not moved, but stood as though rooted to the ground. Slowly, as though made of lead, he turned to his men, the sword still clenched in his fist. They looked to their leader, not daring to move, and the world seemed to hold its breath. For a moment the general's gaze drifted over where the faun crouched hidden in the shadow of the wagon, and his eyes looked lost, harrowed and helpless. Finally, he tightened his grip on the sword and took a step forward.

Tumnus looked away. He heard the sword blows fall and clenched his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut.

............

He made his way back to Lucy as soon as at seemed safe. Luckily she'd had the sense not to stay beside the pile of wood and had moved off to hide in the underbrush. She came out as soon as she saw it was him, and they hurried off a safe distance from the sounds of the camp. By then it was growing dark and there was far less chance of them being seen, but they did not stop until they could no longer hear the pounding of the great mallet. Then Tumnus told her what he had seen and heard, though he could not bring himself to say anything of the three unfortunate soldiers.

"I don't understand any of it," Lucy said, shaking her head. "Who is Prince Caspian? And what are Telmarines doing in such force so deep in Narnia? It doesn't make any sense at all."

Tumnus had no answer. He felt strangely cold deep inside and could barely stomach the supper of damp mushrooms and slightly soft apples that Lucy dug out of their packs. It was a far cry from the warm sea breeze and glittering sky atop the hill at Cair Paravel. The tiny biting flies still hovered around them, but neither of them seemed to notice much anymore.

"We'll find another way across tomorrow," Lucy said finally, breaking the dismal silence as she huddled into her cloak, shivering slightly. "But for now we should get some sleep. I'm dreadfully tired."

So was he, he realized. Whatever bout of exhilaration he had felt earlier seemed to have left him and left him lacking. His silence and discomfort was plain to his friend, who after a moment's hesitation unwound the red scarf from her neck.

"You were very brave today," she admitted, wrapping it snugly around him. She smiled proudly at him, and for a moment new warmth began to creep into his middle. Moving closer to the young queen, he settled the long tail of his scarf over her shoulders, thinking she'd be glad for its warmth now, and nearly choked on his heart when she curled it around herself and leaned right into his chest, yawning.

For a moment he was frozen even worse than when facing the wolf. Awkwardly, he managed to put his arms around her, feeling an alarming pounding in his ears. This was Lucy, he reminded himself, who'd danced in the forest with him and held his hand on the grass beneath the apple trees. There was nothing wrong, surely. He rested his chin on her head and she shifted a little as his curly beard brushed her forehead. No, she was only cold, that was it. There was nothing wrong at all.

Except that she felt quite warm, actually.

He wasn't sure how long he sat there with Lucy snuggled up against him. She had fallen asleep almost immediately, while he couldn't seem to make himself close his eyes. It wasn't her nearness that kept him from sleeping this time. He kept seeing the faces of those three soldiers in his mind, which was odd as he had only barely even glimpsed them. The shadows of minotaurs seemed to skulk around in the trees just out of sight, and wolves seemed to creep behind every fern. The thought of more wolves, even wild and stupid ones, was enough to keep him wide awake.

It had been Maugrim's pack that had run him to ground after he'd fled the Lantern Waste. They had tormented him for hours in that cave, even before that horrible little dwarf had shown up with his iron cudgel and hacked his horns off. When that wolf had appeared on the ledge above them, he had thought for a terrible moment that Maugrim had somehow found him again.

Foolish, foolish faun, he berated himself. Maugrim was long dead, like everyone else from that time. There was new danger here now, one that didn't have anything to do with wolves or Witches, and only he and Lucy were left to face it.

He was painfully aware of the girl sleeping against his chest ... how could he not be? She had given him her brother's sword to carry. King Peter's sword. He felt the solemn eyes of the High King's statue boring into the back of his head again, and felt very grim and serious. Her family was not there to protect her now. For her sake, he couldn't afford to be so afraid.

A twig snapped, and every hair along his back stood up straight. He didn't move a single muscle, didn't even twitch an ear. After a few moments some ferns rustled nearby. His heart began to pound. The sound was much nearer this time.

Don't be afraid, he chanted in his head. He unwound his arms from Lucy and tried to wake her, but she only groaned and curled her fingers so tightly in his scarf that he had to untangle it from around his own neck. He gently settled her back against a tree with the red muffler wrapped around her and, with his hand holding the sword still, carefully began creeping through the ferns towards the noise. Don't be afraid, don't be afraid ...

He was as quiet as the wind. He couldn't see well in the dark, but he could hear quite clearly. There were footsteps, very soft and careful ones, sneaking all the closer to where Lucy was sleeping. He didn't try to draw the sword this time, but crouched in the shadow of a tree instead and held his breath. When a low shadow crept past him, he sprang at it.

He hit it head-first, forgetting he no longer had a set of horns to ram it with, but the force was enough to send them both crashing through the underbrush. Whatever he'd attacked felt like nothing so much as a child-sized bundle of solid muscle. Feet and fists flailed wildly and enraged muffled curses rang through the trees, but Tumnus refused to let up his grip even when a heel caught him in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him.

A sudden flood of bright light stopped the both of them mid-scuffle, and Tumnus was suddenly looking down on the face of a very angry, very disgruntled dwarf with bushy eyebrows and an amazing shock of bright red hair.

Lucy stood before them, holding the silver wand she called a torch in front of her. She clutched the scarf around her shoulders, wide-eyed. "What on earth are you doing?" she asked, bewildered.

**omg guys! It's Trumpkin! Who'd'a thunk?**

Next ... Chapter 7: What Lurks in the Dark
In which our heroes find unexpected aid, and a dangerous undertaking nearly goes horribly awry.