your lives wouldn't be worth a shake of my whiskers!"
All the children had been attending so hard to what Mr. Beaver was telling them that they had noticed nothing else for a long time. Then during the moment of silence that followed his last remark, Lucy suddenly said:
"I say—where's Edmund?"
There was a dreadful pause, and then everyone began asking "Who saw him last? How long has he been missing? Is he outside?" And then all rushed to the door and looked out. The snow was falling thickly and steadily, the green ice of the pool had vanished under a thick white blanket, and from where the little house stood in the centre of the dam you could hardly see either bank. Out they went, plunging well over their ankles into the soft new snow, and went round the house in every direction. "Edmund! Edmund!" they called till they were hoarse. But the silently falling snow seemed to muffle their voices and there was not even an echo in answer.
"How perfectly dreadful!" said Susan as they at last came back in despair. "Oh, how I wish we'd never come."
"What on earth are we to do, Mr. Beaver?" said Peter.
"Do?" said Mr. Beaver who was already putting on his snow boots, "do? We must be off at once. We haven't a moment to spare!"
"We'd better divide into four search parties," said Peter, "and all go in different directions. Whoever finds him must come back here at once and—"
"Search parties, Son of Adam?" said Mr. Beaver; "what for?"
"Why, to look for Edmund of course!"
"There's no point in looking for him," said Mr. Beaver.
"What do you mean?" said Susan, "he can't be far away yet. And we've got to find him. What do you mean when you say there's no use looking for him?"
"The reason there's no use looking," said Mr. Beaver, "is that we know already where he's gone!" Everyone stared in amazement. "Don't you understand?" said Mr. Beaver. "He's gone to her, to the White Witch. He has betrayed us all."
"Oh surely—oh really!" said Susan, "he can't have done that."
"Can't he?" said Mr. Beaver looking very hard at the three children, and everything they wanted to say died on their lips for each felt suddenly quite certain inside that this was exactly what Edmund had done.
"But will he know the way?" said Peter.
"Has he been in this country before?" asked Mr. Beaver, "has he ever been here alone?"
"Yes," said Lucy almost in a whisper, "I'm afraid he has."
"And did he tell you what he'd done or who he'd met?"
"Well, no, he didn't," said Peter.
"Then mark my words," said Mr. Beaver, "he has already met the White Witch and joined her side, and been told where she lives. I didn't like to mention it before (he being your brother and all) but the moment I set eyes on that brother of yours I said to myself 'Treacherous.' He had the look of one who has been with the Witch and eaten her food. You can always tell them if you've lived long in Narnia, something about their eyes."
"All the same," said Peter in a rather choking sort of voice, "we'll still have to go and look for him. He is our brother after all, even if he is rather a little beast, and he's only a kid."
"Go to the Witch's house?" said Mrs. Beaver. "Don't you see that the only chance of saving either him or yourselves is to keep away from her?"
"How do you mean?" said Lucy.
"Why all she wants is to get all four of you (she's thinking all the time of those four thrones at Cair Paravel). Once you were all four inside her house her job would be done—and there'd be four new statues in her collection before you'd had time to speak. But she'll keep him alive as long as he's the only one she's got, because she'll want to use him as a decoy; as bait to catch the rest of you with."
"Oh, can no one help us?" wailed Lucy.
"Only Aslan," said Mr. Beaver, "we must go on and meet him. That's our only chance now."
"It seems to me, my dears," said Mrs. Beaver, "that it is very important to know just when he slipped away. How much he can tell her depends on how much he heard. For instance, had we started talking of Aslan before he left? If not, then we may do very well, for she won't know that Aslan has come to Narnia, or that we are meeting him and will be quite off her guard as far as that is concerned."
"I don't remember his being here when we were talking about Aslan—" began Peter, but Lucy interrupted him.
"Oh yes, he was," she said miserably; "don't you remember, it was he who asked whether the Witch couldn't turn Aslan into stone too?"
"So he did, by Jove," said Peter, "just the sort of thing he would say, too!"
"Worse and worse," said Mr. Beaver, "and the next thing is this. Was he still here when I told you that the place for meeting Aslan was the Stone Table?"
And of course no one knew the answer to this question.
"Because, if he was," continued Mr. Beaver, "then she'll simply sledge down in that direction and get between us and the Stone Table and catch us on our way down. In fact we shall be cut off from Aslan."
"But that isn't what she'll do first," said Mrs. Beaver, "not if I know her. The moment that Edmund tells her that we're all here she'll set out to catch us this very night, and if he's been gone about half an hour, she'll be here in about another twenty minutes."
"You're right, Mrs. Beaver," said her husband, "we must all get away from here. There's not a moment to lose."
Chapter IX
In the Witch's House
And now of course you want to know what had happened to Edmund. He had eaten his share of the dinner, but he hadn't really enjoyed it because he was thinking all the time about Turkish Delight—and there's nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food. And he had heard the conversation and hadn't enjoyed it much either, because he kept on thinking that the others were taking no notice of him and trying to give him the cold shoulder. They weren't, but he imagined it. And then he had listened until Mr. Beaver told them about Aslan and until he had heard the whole arrangement for meeting Aslan at the Stone Table. It was then that he began very quietly to edge himself under the curtain which hung over the door. For the mention of Aslan gave him a mysterious and horrible feeling just as it gave the others a mysterious and lovely feeling.
Just as Mr. Beaver had been repeating the rhyme about Adam's flesh and Adam's bone Edmund had been very quietly turning the door handle; and just before Mr. Beaver had begun telling them that the White Witch wasn't really human at all but half a Jinn and half a giantess, Edmund had got outside into the snow and cautiously closed the door behind him.
You mustn't think that even now Edmund was quite so bad that he actually wanted his brother and sisters to be turned into stone. He did want Turkish Delight and to be a Prince (and later a King) and to pay Peter out for calling him a beast. As for what the Witch would do with the others, he didn't want her to be particularly nice to them—certainly not to put them on the same level as himself—but he managed to believe, or to pretend he believed, that she wouldn't do anything very bad to them, "Because," he said to himself, "all these people who say nasty things about her are her enemies and probably half of it isn't true. She was jolly nice to me, anyway, much nicer than they are. I expect she is the rightful Queen really. Anyway, she'll be better than that awful Aslan!" At least, that was the excuse he made in his own mind for what he was doing. It wasn't a very good excuse, however, for deep down inside him he really knew that the White Witch was bad and cruel.
The first thing he realised when he got outside and found the snow falling all around him, was that he had left his coat behind in the Beavers' house. And of course there was no chance of going back