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]

"Oh, good, I was wondering if the cordial would last forever - and - like a camera. Thank you!"

[pythbox]

He turns to James next.

"Eve's Son, I see you are enjoying your puzzle. It has many secrets left to discover."

[neverbeatme]

"Believe me, I know."

[pythbox]

He extracts a little leather case, the size of a smallish book, from his bag.

"This map likewise has many secrets," he says, handing it to her. "Perhaps one day you will discover all of them."

[neverbeatme]

"Ooh." She takes the case, opens it, and unfolds the map within. "Thanks."

[pythbox]

"You can start by finding your second present," he adds, and turns to go.

[deepest_magic]

"You get a treasure hunt for Christmas," giggles Isabella.

[neverbeatme]

"Apparently!"

She puts her puzzle down and starts playing with the map instead. It's pretty easy to discover that it can be zoomed and panned with a touch, the ink lines flowing smoothly across the page. And then—

"Hey, roads!" she exclaims. "I mean - there were already roads, but look."

The map is zoomed in on Cair Paravel, close enough to show what she's talking about: the road that runs from the castle to the nearest small town is depicted as wide and flat and clear, not the mess of pits and rocks and tangled overgrowth and sudden narrowings that it has been up until now.

"I bet he did the whole country. That's amazing. I'd been planning to send some people out to do a proper survey and start planning repairs, but now I can skip that and get straight to organizing maintenance." She glances at the side door. "If he was still here I'd hug him."

[deepest_magic]

"I wonder if Father Christmas even lets people hug him. For that matter, I wonder what he does the rest of the year. Make presents, I suppose, but how, so many of them are magic."

[neverbeatme]

"Good question. Maybe you can ask him next year," she says, zooming the map out as far as it will go. Continent-sized is apparently it. She folds it up and tucks it in her pocket.

[deepest_magic]

Isabella nods, and goes to put her new potted berries in an east-facing window before going to bed for the night.

[neverbeatme]

James takes her puzzle back to her room, but manages to put it down and go to sleep instead of staying up to work on more solutions.

[deepest_magic]

Time wears on.

The shipbuilding project gets off the ground - the White Witch had a ship, but it is widely believed to be haunted or cursed and the Narnians won't touch it. They build their own boats, and establish regular routes between Narnia proper and overseas territories of the Narnian Empire.

The schools are very popular. Isabella takes an old lady dwarf's calligraphy class and a centaur's forestry class and learns history from an ex-statue unicorn; she tries archery and singing and leatherworking. James sits in on miscellaneous lessons and teaches a bit of math. (The puzzle present turns out, after considerable fiddling, to unfold into a simple computer, although in an abstract and extremely mathematical way that renders it near-useless to anyone but James herself.)

Isabella heals any injured or sick Narnian who makes it to Cair Paravel, and will travel considerable distances for those who can't make the journey, with her cordial; when she notices the level of the juice visibly dropping she adds a berry from her potted plant as instructed by Father Christmas, and it fizzes and dissolves and the crystal is full again.

When the weather is fine - or dramatic - or she sees a new place - or when the leaves are startling red on the morning of Queensday when she turns thirteen - she takes a picture, and pastes it into her infinity notebook. Sometimes she takes portraits of her subjects and copies them onto loose paper for them to keep, and every now and again she will loan the postcard-camera to someone who is publishing a book, so that they can paste pictures into each copy as it comes off the press and have them all illustrated in a jiffy. She reliably gets it back afterwards.

There are pictures of herself and James in the infinity notebook, too. James with an eagle messenger on her fist, hearing news from Archenland. Isabella, staff in hand, dancing with a Faun on Kingsday. James on her throne gravely hearing the dispute between a rhinoceros and a rabbit. Isabella christening a new ship for their fleet with a bottle of champagne and a grin on her face. James practicing with her magic sword, solo, guided by its enchantment into learning how to do it herself. Isabella in the wardrobe mistress's most extravagant choice of finery officiating a wedding between Acorn and an equally shy lady rabbit. The king and queen together both of them on horseback beside Isabella's sometime-bodyguard unicorn, Dewdrop, and a small contingent of centaurs and bears riding out to respond to a report of a werewolf attacking the people of a distant town. Isabella can't reasonably wish to have had the camera before the notebook to put the pictures in and the accompanying pen (the pen, it turns out, will do calligraphy tips at her whim), nor before her ability to walk and run or the cordial that saved so many lives - but she very much likes having it early, to get down all the splendor of Narnia to keep forever between the white covers of her infinity notebook.

Queensday goes by, the pumpkins are harvested, the kitchens of Cair Paravel produce stew and drinks and sweets of them, and the frost descends.

[neverbeatme]

Christmas Eve finds them in the throne room as usual. James perches on her throne and plays with the computer-mode of her puzzle, watching it click and rattle from one configuration to another.

[deepest_magic]

Isabella is quadruple-checking her list of questions to ask Father Christmas in her infinity notebook.

Is there only one of you?
Where did you come from?
How do you give presents to everyone in Narnia in one day?
What do you do the rest of the year?
Why don't you go to Earth?
Do you go anywhere else?
How do you make the presents? Can I learn to make magic things too?
Where do you go when it's not Christmas?
How do you know what to get people?

[pythbox]

In he comes, just a few minutes after midnight.

"Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas," he says. "For you, Isabella, Daughter of Eve, you will find a new bookshelf in the library that can summon any book you can identify exactly. It cannot give you more books than it has room for, but when new ones start to crowd out the old, it can always bring them back, although it cannot offer more than one copy of the same book at a time. And secondly, this." He hands her a letter - a blank envelope sealed with red wax.

[deepest_magic]

"Thank you." She waits to see what James will get before interrupting with her questions.

[pythbox]

"And for you, James, Eve's Son—"

He hands the king a short wand or staff, just about the right size to be carried in her hand, made of a dark heavy wood. Twining all around it in a tight spiral are a succession of plant-themed decorations picked out in various metals and gems: different types of leaves along one third, different types of berries in the middle, and different types of flowers at the last. It's very pretty.

"Once, for a time, there were Knights in Narnia. They had a hall very near to Cair Paravel; perhaps you have seen its ruin. Now you will see it restored, that you may restore the Knights in turn."

With that, he turns and leaves.

[deepest_magic]

"Father Christmas, if you have a minute -?"

[pythbox]

Apparently he doesn't.

[deepest_magic]

Oh, drat.

"Next time maybe I will ask him questions first," she says, and she opens her envelope.

[pythbox]

The letter is unaddressed and unsigned.

But it contains her list of questions, neatly recopied.

Is there only one of you?
There is but one Father Christmas for all of Narnia, and all the world around it, and all the other worlds around that.

Where did you come from?
Like many creatures, I don't remember how I began, only how I have gone on from there.

How do you give presents to everyone in Narnia in one day?
I visit every creature exactly once, and there doesn't happen to be any trouble about it if some of those visits occur at what you would call the same time.

What do you do the rest of the year?
It's often Christmas somewhere.

Why don't you go to Earth?
Earth is a place of very little magic, all of it hidden, and I am not welcome there.

Do you go anywhere else?
Yes.

How do you make the presents? Can I learn to make magic things too?
Not all presents are made. Some are built or repaired or collected or written. If there was such a thing as a way for anyone to learn how to make the kinds of magical presents I have given you, it would be a very good present for you, better than almost anything else, and I would surely have given it to you by now.

Where do you go when it's not Christmas?
Home, occasionally.

How do you know what to get people?
I know a great many things, some of them by magic, some by listening. Some by reading messages that are written to me but never sent.

[neverbeatme]

James glances up from examining her mysterious knight-related object to ask, "What is it?"

[deepest_magic]

"Answers... to... my... questions. Not especially detailed ones, but answers. I think perhaps I'd better not write any more though, because apparently this counts as a present."

[neverbeatme]

"Can I see?"