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

[jackfrostbite]

"I used to like Alice in Wonderland," he murmurs.

[neverbeatme]

This has the ring of self-destructiveness to James, and she can't quite tell why. Does he expect reading that book to be upsetting? Does he expect that she can't or won't actually produce a copy, and want to upset himself by asking for something he wants and then not getting it? Is it just how he feels about offering up even so trivial a vulnerability as the memory of a book he liked?

But she thinks the best she can do is probably to take him at his word.

"I'll see what I can do," she says, and goes.

[deepest_magic]

Isabella, meanwhile, is wrapping up a dispute resolution over the contents of a granary given a complicated will by the owner of the granary itself and some disagreement over how his heirs have to honor his deals with the farming creatures who stored grain there.

[neverbeatme]

James looks in on her, finds this discussion in progress, checks her mail tray in case she has received any important correspondence while she was speaking with the prisoner (she has not), and goes back to find Isabella again.

[deepest_magic]

Isabella has settled the granary dispute and sent the creatures home. "Hi, Jamie."

[neverbeatme]

"Winter's marking tunnel locations on a map, or at least is likely to be. He didn't want to start writing while I was there, for some reason. Also, he says he likes Alice in Wonderland, but I'm not totally sure that isn't some sort of subtle play to increase his own suffering for weird contrary Winter reasons."

[deepest_magic]

"Well, I don't see what harm a copy can do unless he, I don't know, mangles it to the point where the shelf won't take it back and generate a new one," says Isabella. "And that's a pretty minor harm I'm willing to risk if he wants one."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. If he finds some way to upset himself with it I can take that into account when I'm deciding what to do about future book requests."

[deepest_magic]

"I could go get it for him, unless you'd rather handle him on your own?"

[neverbeatme]

"No, go ahead," she says. "If you'll be all right. But I'm not sure how he'll take to being interrupted, so it's probably best to wait a few hours before trying to deliver him a book."

[deepest_magic]

"All right, this evening then."

[neverbeatme]

Nod nod.

...

Hug.

[deepest_magic]

Hug.

[neverbeatme]

"I already knew that talking to Winter is depressing, it's not new information, I'm not going to change my approach because of it, but wow, talking to Winter is really depressing," she sighs.

[deepest_magic]

"What did he say?"

[neverbeatme]

"Well, he warned me that if I keep talking to him then eventually I'm going to catch him in a bad mood and he'll say something nasty. Relatedly, if you go down there and he tells you to go away, I advise you to listen. I bet he's really good at upsetting people."

[deepest_magic]

"Wouldn't surprise me."

[neverbeatme]

"And he's trying not to show how upset he is about being locked in the dungeon but he is still very much upset about being locked in the dungeon. And I did specifically say I would be back with whatever I came up with from your bookshelf but I don't think he'll be annoyed about it if you bring it down instead."

[deepest_magic]

Nod.

"Did you find out whether he's unconscious while stabbed through the heart?"

[neverbeatme]

"I didn't ask this time."

[deepest_magic]

"Should I, or hold off?"

[neverbeatme]

"You can if you're curious. I don't have enough information to predict whether it'll upset him but trying not to upset him is mostly a lost cause at this point anyway."

[deepest_magic]

"Yeah."

[neverbeatme]

Slight shrug.

[deepest_magic]

Hug.

And that evening Isabella gets a copy of Alice in Wonderland out of her magic bookshelf and brings it to the dungeon.