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

[neverbeatme]

James reads it.

"Huh. Okay," she says, handing it back. "And my... whatever this is," she waves the decorated object slightly, "is magic somehow, but I don't think it's urgent enough that I should try to figure it out before I go to bed. Goodnight."

[deepest_magic]

"Night!" And to bed goes the queen.

It turns out that James's object relates to a stash of cloak-pins that have been gathered up into the knights' hall that Father Christmas restored. There are berry pins and leaf pins and flower pins, and James's investigations turns up their features: if, with her new present, she knights someone into the corresponding Order and they take suitable oaths of service, they will be able to wear a corresponding pin - otherwise quite bafflingly impossible. These pins can be recognized from farther away than their actual visible details ought to allow.

James's staff permits her to find all of them, where "all of them" begins by being just the pile of them in the Hall but later, as the dwarves reverse-engineer the designs on her order, come to be a larger quantity - and "finding" comes to have more information, including whether they are assigned to knights, whether those knights are alive, whether they are wearing their pins, and whether they have had their pins stolen. Each sort of pin has different effects. The leaves offer strength and durability, slight but useful; the berries make their wearers hardier and less easily exhausted; and the flowers improve the senses. The staff also has a distant communication function like Isabella's scepter, but while the scepter only works on friends, the staff only works on knights who have their pins on. The knights cannot hear each other, which means that while many simultaneous conversations are possible, it is most useful for one-to-one interactions or one-to-many announcements. It also technically has spying applications, but no knights sign on expecting to be wearing their cloak-pins like wires, and there are no particularly urgent targets.

Isabella's bookshelf is useful too. It will not appear more than one copy of a given text at a time, but they don't resist being copied, so she makes the bookshelf available for visitors' use and has copies scribed out of long-lost tomes. She is able to retrieve old favorite novels from Earth - but not, alas, anything so vague as "an engineering textbook" or "an introduction to physics". It might well have ruined the entire aesthetic of the kingdom, anyway (who knows if the physics are even the same in a country so pervasively magical?), and the people are happy and everything is stable; she doesn't lose too much sleep over not having the means to easily start an industrial revolution.

Acorn (who now has six kittens at home, but can make fewer and faster business trips with his cornucopia now that he has just about his pick of fast creatures to ride and now that everyone has farms) solicits a berry pin when he hears of the knightly orders' restoration.

[neverbeatme]

James thinks this is an excellent idea.

"Have you thought about what you want your knightly oath to be?" she asks when he brings it up.

[alicornucopia]

"I have an idea of the feel of it, Your Majesty, but I'm not sure of the words," says Acorn.

[neverbeatme]

"Well, what sort of a feel does it have, then?"

[alicornucopia]

He adjusts his whiskers uncertainly. "I still bear the cornucopia, your majesty, and I'm quite sure by now that I mean to go on doing it until I can't run it around any longer, and it seems that the pin would make that easier and more helpful and I would not be using the pin to do any things less in keeping with the spirit of helping my fellow creatures than that. Your majesty."

[neverbeatme]

"I think you'll make a very good berry-knight," she says. "Do you want me to help you find the words for your oath, or would you rather do that yourself?"

[alicornucopia]

"I'd be very much obliged for your help, your majesty. But I will try it myself first, I think? Unless it will be establishing a precedent for others after me. I don't think I had better be writing them for anyone besides myself."

[neverbeatme]

"You don't need to set any precedents if you don't want to. The oaths of the knightly orders are more personal than ceremonial; it's important to the magic in the pins that every knight's oath should be meaningful to them in particular."

[alicornucopia]

"Yes, your majesty. Then I'll - go and see if I can come up with something."

Acorn lollops off. He is back a bit later with a piece of scratch paper.

"I - I think I'm ready, your majesty."

[neverbeatme]

She nods. "Then we can go to the hall and get you a pin, and you can make your oath to it."

[alicornucopia]

Acorn nods and goes with her.

His oath is short and sincere and not particularly elegant, but the pin accepts it. He pins it to the strap of his cornucopia.

[neverbeatme]

The pin is very bright and beautiful and official-looking.

"Welcome, Sir Acorn," says James.

[alicornucopia]

Sir Acorn bows.

[neverbeatme]

James nods to him. She has a very good regal nod, suitable for honouring valued subjects.

[alicornucopia]

Sir Acorn is very impressed! He bows again and then runs off.

[neverbeatme]

And James brings the staff of knighthood back to Cair Paravel with her. She likes to have it on hand at all times, so she can check up on her knights and give and receive important news.

[alicornucopia]

In June of that year, the cartographer-knight centaur Starfall of the Order of the Lily advances farther overland to the southwest than anyone in regular touch with Narnia proper has previously ventured.

[pythbox]

And there she finds a winged horse drinking from a stream.

He hasn't noticed her yet; he is busy slurping up water.

[alicornucopia]

Huh.

"Good afternoon," she says.

[pythbox]

He yelps and rears and flaps his wings in startlement, causing considerable disturbance to the water and nearby greenery.

"Oh my goodness!" he says. "You're a centaur! Are you a centaur? You look like a centaur. You don't have any wings, so you can't be a winged horse." Over the course of this somewhat confused pronouncement, he calms down enough to get all four hooves on the ground and his wings folded neatly on his back.

[alicornucopia]

"...I am a centaur," agrees Starfall. "My name is Starfall. I'm on an errand for Their Majesties mapping the continent. I didn't know there were winged horses here, but that's the sort of thing I'm meant to learn."

[pythbox]

"Oh. Well, there are!" he says. "Mostly up in the mountains, but we've been coming down more since the Long Winter ended and there's things growing down here and all. Who's Their Majesties? Are you from Narnia?"

[alicornucopia]

"I am from Narnia!" says the centaur. "Their majesties King James and Queen Isabella were appointed to govern it by Aslan Himself when he was here defeating the White Witch."

[pythbox]

"Oh my goodness," says the winged horse. "That's very exciting! I should go tell everyone! Do you want to come? Oh, but you can't fly. I don't know a good way up into the mountains by hoof. Well, are there more things to tell?"