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]

Mm-hm. Otherwise it would be kind of awkward, just as Isabella feared. Admittedly, she was mostly fearing awkwardness at an earlier stage of the proceedings.

[neverbeatme]

James is definitely past any fear of awkwardness at this point in time.

[deepest_magic]

They are on the same page there too!

[neverbeatme]

Oh good!

[deepest_magic]

"So um, that went well," says Isabella, catching her breath, a few minutes later. "It could continue to go well on a regular basis and I would like that."

[neverbeatme]

"I would like that too! I'll make room in my schedule," says James.

[deepest_magic]

Isabella giggles. "Nobody like Flit looks at your schedule, right?"

[neverbeatme]

"I'm not literally going to write down 'kissing the queen' in any books of appointments. Just, you know, going to take into account for future planning that I should leave room for this semi-secret thing here and there."

[deepest_magic]

"I might literally write down 'kissing the king'. But nobody looks at my notebook without me right there supervising the page-turning so we're probably safe."

[neverbeatme]

"Okay."

[deepest_magic]

"Also it would not be on a schedule page so much as on a thinking-about-things page. Pleasant things."

[neverbeatme]

"See, I do most of my equivalent of that playing with my puzzle," says James. "Which I can't really write things down in, at least not in recognizable words."

[deepest_magic]

"I'm not at all clear how you go about thinking with the puzzle," says Isabella.

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. I know. It's not really very explainable. Sometimes it's just something to do while I think about other stuff, but sometimes I use it to help with the math."

[deepest_magic]

"My thinking isn't very mathy," remarks Isabella, sitting on the foot of her bed.

[neverbeatme]

"A lot of mine is. And even the stuff that isn't, I can express a lot of it as math if I try."

[deepest_magic]

"What does it mean to express something that isn't math as math?"

[neverbeatme]

"Well... I'm not exactly sure. I mean, I know how I do it, but any way I try to explain it just seems to amount to 'I play with my puzzle and think about things'."

[deepest_magic]

"Oh well, it can just be a mystery." Squirm. "C'mere?"

[neverbeatme]

She goes there.

[deepest_magic]

Kisses!

[neverbeatme]

Somehow James suspected this might happen!

It's so good to be right.

[deepest_magic]

It was pretty predictable, really.

[neverbeatme]

Yes. Yes it was.

[deepest_magic]

There is considerably more of that in the days that follow, sprinkled in with all their usual activities, behind closed doors; they do wind up telling Viridian the wardrobe-nymph, as well as the two senior housekeepers who'd be likeliest to stumble on them and Mr. Tumnus who is likeliest to need to explain their whereabouts, for convenience, but otherwise remain quite discreet.