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]

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?"

[deepest_magic]

"Sure." Isabella hands over the paper.

[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.