the golden age

[deepest_magic]

When the party has died down, Isabella, for one, is well and truly exhausted. She explores the palace until she finds a room with a bed in it, and into this bed she flops, still in her clothes and holding her staff and carrying the cordial in her pocket. She sleeps late, because the party kept her up so late and she hadn't really slept the night before; but around noon, she stirs, and gets up, and goes looking for James and wherever her backpack may have got to. The backpack she finds in the great hall where the principal mass of the party was; some enterprising creature took both bags from the battlefield at Beruna up to the castle for them, and she only wishes she knew who it was. She takes her bag to her room and carries James's with her and continues looking for her friend.

Comments

[deepest_magic]

"I don't have a lot of other ones though."

[neverbeatme]

"Quality before quantity?"

[deepest_magic]

"You haven't said if you want to, so I don't know how good the idea is."

[neverbeatme]

"That was me implying it was a good idea."

[deepest_magic]

"Oh, well then."

Perhaps not at lunch while there are other members of the household about toasting to the Lion and wishing each other a merry Christmas and generally being present.

[neverbeatme]

"Later," she adds. "Privately. How I feel about public kissing is a much more complicated question and will probably depend on how the private kissing goes."

[deepest_magic]

"That's fair."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. Public actions have public effects."

[deepest_magic]

"I think everybody would be very excited, but then they might be very upset if we stopped doing it after a while."

[neverbeatme]

"That's what's been on my mind, yeah. So I'd rather not risk the second thing."

[deepest_magic]

Isabella nods.

[neverbeatme]

"Right now I feel like public kissing should probably come at about the same level of seriousness as getting engaged. I might adjust that after I've thought about it some more."

[deepest_magic]

"Hiding not-engaged amounts of kissing from everybody who lives in our castle sounds - annoying."

[neverbeatme]

"Maybe," she acknowledges. "But there's levels and levels of public. I wouldn't mind letting some people know about not-engaged amounts of kissing if they didn't seem like they'd get excited and tell everybody, and if we were more than never-tried-it-before amounts of sure that it was something we wanted to keep doing."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah, that makes sense. Viridian would be one thing and - Flit would be another."

[neverbeatme]

—She cracks up.

"Oh my goodness!" she says, in a decent approximation of Flit's excited voice.

[deepest_magic]

Isabella laughs. "Exactly!"

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. Flit has many positive qualities, but 'ability to keep exciting secrets' is not one of them."

[deepest_magic]

"Well, we've never tried him on it, but let's not start him with one that really needs keeping."

[neverbeatme]

"I think if it was something really, really important, he'd do better than if it was something moderately-but-not-obviously important like kissing monarchs."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah, I suppose so."

[neverbeatme]

"That's my take, anyway."

[deepest_magic]

"You know about these things. Sometimes I wish I had a practical specialty like your knowing-things-about-people - I mean, outwardly practical. I have my knowing myself thing but that's not the kind of talent I'm talking about."

[neverbeatme]

"If I had any idea how to teach it, I would. But it doesn't seem to be teachable."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. I don't really want it to be the same thing, anyway. There are monarching things that I handle because I might as well, but there aren't any monarching things I handle because only I can."