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 is sleepy but not quite asleep; she snuggles up cozily when Isabella arrives.

[deepest_magic]

"They were having a picnic," Isabella yawns.

[neverbeatme]

"Who?" mumbles James.

[deepest_magic]

"Winter 'n Father Christmas."

[neverbeatme]

...

"...I'll think about that in the morning," she decides. Snuggle snuggle. Snuggle snuggle sleep.

[deepest_magic]

Snuggle sleep indeed.

[neverbeatme]

And in the morning, when they are both more or less awake:

"...I guess a picnic was the best present Father Christmas could give him?"

[deepest_magic]

"Maybe. I assume it hasn't happened before, but maybe this year Winter would finally welcome the visit?"

[neverbeatme]

"Maybe... I bet Father Christmas would've had a hard time bringing him a picnic while he was being crushed under a rock, too, for that matter."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah. And back when Jadis was around he couldn't visit anyone."

[neverbeatme]

Nod nod.

[deepest_magic]

"But maybe they'll do it again next year, it's the sort of thing that could recur."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah... I'm wondering whether visiting Winter in his cell on Christmas would be a good idea or a bad one."

[deepest_magic]

"He didn't seem to mind my being there very much but I didn't loiter."

[neverbeatme]

"I have a year to think about it, I guess. But I might go visit him. On the theory that if Father Christmas has a picnic with him I might get to talk to Father Christmas for a while, and if Father Christmas doesn't have a picnic with him I can try to have a picnic with him instead in case that helps. But if it just seems to upset Winter I can not try it again the next year."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah, that all seems reasonable."

[neverbeatme]

Sigh. Hug.

"Okay, it's Christmas, let's go do something that's not at all depressing."

[deepest_magic]

"Snowball fight?"

[neverbeatme]

"Snowball fight," James agrees enthusiastically.

There is a royal snowball fight. It's adorable.

[deepest_magic]

It is adorable.

There's ice skating, later, although it takes a couple twisted ankles before the cobbler making the skates really has them down (thank goodness for Isabella's cordial) and there's hot beverages by frosty windows and there is sledding and there are songs in praise of Aslan sung through cold clear air. There is, in short, winter.

There's also Winter. James keeps visiting him and insinuating that she might like to join the picnic, next year; Isabella feels no such urgency and doesn't want to add noise to whatever data James hopes to collect from the exercise, so she makes no plans to go, busying herself instead with the emancipation of rebellious centaur foals and safety precautions in certain hunting grounds for speaking instances of prey species and the small health crisis caused by the discovery that the cornucopia can do cotton candy. Isabella practices harp and dances in the air on her air-walking shoes and when her old calligraphy teacher dies she takes over the class, showing small dryads and dwarves how to form pretty letters and decorate them.

The magic-detecting bracelets see use; Narnia proper is a bit picked clean but there are still a few things hiding in out of the way places where the Witch's followers couldn't dig them up, and more on the outlying islands. It is tremendous fun figuring out what they all do, and where they will best be put to use - most found objects, not being so customized for royal use as Christmas presents, find themselves turning the wells of small towns raspberry-scented or showing the stars on cloudy nights to centaur astronomers or rocking puppies to sleep or giving rides through the air to miscellaneous rodents. One or two objects seem to have no benign purpose at all, and after careful study they are destroyed.

Both monarchs are occupied with making sure the maps they have are better distributed, for the ease of the creatures who have reason to move about Narnia, or would if it were easier. Maps are alas not terribly responsive to up-to-the-minute weather conditions and some knights have to be deployed to rescue a party of tourist rabbits from a flooded bit of valley. Someone wants royal sponsorship for his book of the history of the Golden Age, beginning with the White Witch's defeat and going on from there, and he gets it. The rulers in question are epithized in this book as King James the Wise and Queen Isabella the Clever, which amuses the named parties very much. "The Golden Age" is published in time for copies to be sold in a little booth on Queensday, and a second volume is to be expected after a few more years have gone by and some more history has occurred.

Autumn concludes and its bright colors shrivel up and blow away.

And then there is -

[jackfrostbite]

Winter, again. Ever. Always.

He accepts the offer of another book after the first, and another, and another. He says that he does not mind if James joins his picnic. He gets better at concealing his despair, but never good enough to actually succeed, at least not in hiding it from the king. He does not ever quite get into a bad enough mood to be cruel to her, but there are a few times when she shows up and he refuses to speak at all.

[neverbeatme]

It's surprisingly easy to just... not make time to go see him.

But the fact that his Christmas present was a picnic with Father Christmas is, James feels, a pretty big hint. She tries to stop by the dungeon at least once a month.

Christmas approaches.

[pythbox]

Christmas arrives.

[neverbeatme]

James returns from the picnic well past midnight, carrying an unopened parcel. She flops into bed and falls asleep immediately.

[deepest_magic]

They weren't sitting up together, so Isabella went to bed at her normal hour, crossing her fingers that she'll be able to figure out whatever she got without a verbal explanation. Isabella sleepily snuggles up.