Keeping up with the Pevensies: Eustace the Undragoned
The Scrubbs are invited to spend a fortnight (two weeks) in Narnia. The invitation is mostly just a polite formality and the Pevensies expect them to politely decline.
They do not decline. Alberta knows that all of her friends will be jealous of her if she spends time with royals and Eustace is curious about the plant life and wants to please his mother. Harold is annoyed but goes along with it anyway.
They arrive in Narnia and all goes smoothly. Alberta and Harold attend court and parties. Eustace spends a lot of his time outside, looking at and documenting the plant life.
One day, a few days before the Scrubbs’s visit is over, Eustace stumbles across a small dragon’s hoard.
It’s a tiny hoard really, not much larger than eight square feet. Enough to be enchanted though. All of the Narnians in that area know to leave it alone.
Eustace, not knowing any of this, takes a small trinket he finds interesting. Not twenty seconds later, he is a dragon. He doesn’t know what to do so he does the first thing he thinks of, he heads back to the castle.
It takes several hours of chaos for anyone to figure out that the dragon is Eustace, but when they do, Aunt Alberta is not pleased.
She is so displeased in fact, that she starts yelling at Eustace, berating him for his stupidity and telling him that she wishes he had never been born. To top it all off, she disowns him. Eustace looks to his father for help but Harold does nothing.
Devastated and distraught, Eustace flies away. He doesn’t know where he’s going, all he knows is that he has to get away from his parents.
(As soon as Edmund finds out what happened, the Scrubbs are banned from Narnia. Edmund knows what it’s like to be rejected by people who are supposed to love you. They are in very different circumstances but still...)
Eustace eventually lands somewhere near the borders of the Ettenmoors. He stays in a clearing of pine trees and cries for hours until a brave mouse comes up to him and tries to talk to him.
He introduces himself as Peepisqueak (an ancestor of Reepicheep actually) and makes sure he’s alright. Peepisqueak helps him find food and a decent shelter.
Even though Eustace can’t talk, they form a solid friendship, Peepisqueak does more than enough talking for the both of them.
Since he has no way to learn his new dragon-friend’s name, he starts calling him Micel Freówine, meaning ‘big friend’.
A week and a half later, a group of giants are wandering toward the mouse village. Peepisqueak knows that Eustace is their only hope. Eustace is afraid to fight. Peepisqueak gives him a talk about courage and they fly into battle.
They (mostly Eustace) fight courageously and rout the giants but Eustace is badly injured by one of then on their way out. Peepisqueak falls off him into a tree and Eustace crash lands miles away.
It’s there that he meets Aslan. He feels the shame of the greed that turned him into a dragon and tries to change himself back. He fails of course, but Aslan helps him.
When Eustace recovers from being undragoned, he walks back to the mouse village. The mice think that he’s a baby giant but Peepisqueak stops them from making a Eustace-Kebab by saying that he recognizes his eyes.
Eustace confirms that he is, in fact, the Micel Freówine and tells them his name. Peepisqueak is overjoyed that his friend is okay and that he actually knows his name. He still calls him ‘big friend’ though.
Eustace knows he needs to go back and tell his cousins that he’s alright and Peepisqueak decides to go with him. No one in the mouse village is surprised, Peepisqueak has always been adventurous.
They are spotted a week later by a dryad who was told to keep an eye out for Eustace. A few days after that, they are picked up by a group of the Narnian military and taken back to Cair Paravel.
Eustace is welcomed back with open arms and adopted by John and Hellen. After telling the younger Pevensies his story, he is named Lord Eustace the Undragoned of Narnia. Peepisqueak is made a knight.