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expected, and though the sky was overcast, one patch of watery silver showed where the moon was hiding above the clouds. The fields beneath her looked gray, and the trees black. There was a certain amount of wind—a hushing, ruffling sort of wind which meant that rain was coming soon.
    The Owl wheeled round so that the castle was now ahead of them. Very few of the windows showed lights. They flew right over it, northward, crossing the river: the air grew colder, and Jill thought she could see the white reflection of the Owl in the water beneath her. But soon they were on the north bank of the river, flying above wooded country.
    The Owl snapped at something which Jill couldn’t see.
    “Oh, don’t, please!” said Jill. “Don’t jerk like that. You nearly threw me off.”
    “I beg your pardon,” said the Owl. “I was just nabbing a bat. There’s nothing so sustaining, in a small way, as a nice plump little bat. Shall I catch you one?”
    “No, thanks,” said Jill with a shudder.
    He was flying a little lower now and a large, black-looking object was looming up toward them. Jill had just time to see that it was a tower—a partly ruinous tower, with a lot of ivy on it, she thought—when she found herself ducking to avoid the archway of a window, as the Owl squeezed with her through the ivied cobwebby opening, out of the fresh, gray night into a dark place inside the top of the tower. It was rather fusty inside and, the moment she slipped off the Owl’s back, she knew (as one usually does somehow) that it was quite crowded. And when voices began saying out of the darkness from every direction “Tu-whoo! Tu-whoo!” she knew it was crowded with owls. She was rather relieved when a very different voice said:
    “Is that you, Pole?”
    “Is that you, Scrubb?” said Jill.
    “Now,” said Glimfeather, “I think we’re all here. Let us hold a parliament of owls.”

    “Tu-whoo, tu-whoo. True for you. That’s the right thing to do,” said several voices.
    “Half a moment,” said Scrubb’s voice. “There’s something I want to say first.”
    “Do, do, do,” said the owls; and Jill said, “Fire ahead.”
    “I suppose all you chaps—owls, I mean,” said Scrubb, “I suppose you all know that King Caspian the Tenth, in his young days, sailed to the eastern end of the world. Well, I was with him on that journey: with him and Reepicheep the Mouse, and the Lord Drinian and all of them. I know it sounds hard to believe, but people don’t grow older in our world at the same speed as they do in yours. Andwhat I want to say is this, that I’m the King’s man; and if this parliament of owls is any sort of plot against the King, I’m having nothing to do with it.”
    “Tu-whoo, tu-whoo, we’re all the King’s owls too,” said the owls.
    “What’s it all about then?” said Scrubb.
    “It’s only this,” said Glimfeather. “That if the Lord Regent, the Dwarf Trumpkin, hears you are going to look for the lost Prince, he won’t let you start. He’d keep you under lock and key sooner.”
    “Great Scott!” said Scrubb. “You don’t mean that Trumpkin is a traitor? I used to hear a lot about him in the old days, at sea. Caspian—the King, I mean—trusted him absolutely.”
    “Oh no,” said a voice. “Trumpkin’s no traitor. But more than thirty champions (knights, centaurs, good giants, and all sorts) have at one time or another set out to look for the lost Prince, and none of them have ever come back. And at last the King said he was not going to have all the bravest Narnians destroyed in the search for his son. And now nobody is allowed to go.”
    “But surely he’d let us go,” said Scrubb. “When he knew who I was and who had sent me.”
    (“Sent both of us,” put in Jill.)
    “Yes,” said Glimfeather, “I think, very likely, he would. But the King’s away. And Trumpkin will stick to the rules. He’s as true as steel, but he’sdeaf as a post and very peppery. You could never make