Prince Caspian

Price Caspian begins one year after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe ends.  Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are all going off to boarding school, and are waiting together at the last train station where Peter and Edmund will go to one school, and Susan and Lucy will go to another.  They sit together on the platform bench when suddenly, Lucy feels a strange pulling.  Edmund feels it next, then Peter, and finally Susan.  The next thing they know, they are on a once-inhabited island (they can tell because there is a ruined castle on it, and an overgrown apple orchard).  They try to make the best of it because anything is better than being back at school again.  They gather apples and firewood, and prepare to spend the night in what they think is the courtyard of the ruined castle.  Susan comes back from the well, holding something.  It turns out to be a chessman, a knight.  It is peculiar becuase it is solid gold, with rubies for eyes.  She says it reminds her of the chessmen they used to play with when they were Kings and Queens in Narnia.  Then Peter says they'd better start using their brains and tallies up the points.  First, the "courtyard" is exactly the same size and shape as the Great Hall in Cair Paravel, and the dais is at the same end.  Second, the castle well is in the same place as it was at Cair Paravel, and is also the same size and shape.  Third, Susan has found one of their chessmen.  Edmund points out that Cair Paravel wasn't on an island; it was on a peninsula.  Peter says that someone could have dug a ditch "since our time."  Edmund says it's only been one year since they left Narnia.  Lucy says that if it really is Cair Paravel, there should be a door leading down to the treasure chamber, right at their backs.  They search, and the door is there.  Peter and Edmund rip the vines off, and tear down the locked door.  It does in fact lead to the treasure chamber, and there Peter, Susan, and Lucy find their Gifts.  They next morning, they see a dwarf in the process of being thrown off a rowboat by two human soldiers.  Susan shoots an arrow at them, and they run away, believing that the forest is inhabited by ghosts.  The dwarf, name of Trumpkin, thanks them heartily for their help and invites them to breakfast, seeing as how all the children have is apples and there is a fishing tackle in the boat.  The siblings want his story, so he tells it.