The next to last story is called The Silver Chair. It starts out with Eustace finding his friend, Jill, crying because the school bullies are picking on her. At their school, the Experiment House, the people who ran it thought that kids “should be allowed to do what they liked,” and unfortunately there were a group of kids who did horrible things and picked on other kids mercilessly. Instead of getting expelled, they were talked to by the Head who didn’t punish them but treated the situations as “interesting psychological cases.” Well, it is in the middle of chase from the bullies that Eustace and Jill are taken from the Experiment House to a tremendous cliff in the other world. It is there that Jill receives a task from Aslan:
“Far from here in the land of Narnia there lives an aged king who is sad because he has no prince of his blood to be king after him. He has no heir because his only son was stolen from him many years ago, and no one in Narnia knows where that prince went or whether he is still alive. But he is. I lay on you this command, that you seek this lost prince until either you have found him and brought him to his father’s house, or else died in the attempt, or else gone back into your own world.”
He then gives Jill four signs to repeat by memory everyday, multiple times a day, so as to not be lead astray on their journey. Of course, she forgets to repeat the signs after a while, and her and Eustace and their guide, Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle, find themselves in some sticky situations.
The adventures of this story take place mostly in the land of the giants, north of Narnia, and then in a world under the ground where there are enchantments and narrow escapes from death.
I particularly enjoy the justice played out in the very end of the story, but I cannot ruin a good story for those who wish to read it now, can I?