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]

It surprises James only slightly how natural it is for her to track the whole battle in her head while she lunges among the wolves with her sword, directing orders to the appropriate pins with every spare breath. There are moments when it feels like the knights are collectively a single body, and she the mind that moves it.

Which is a good thing, because the Witch's creatures have numbers on their side, and the King's sword and the Queen's bow aren't making as much difference as she'd like.

[deepest_magic]

The Queen is a good shot, but some of the targets are very small, and of course they move, and after a while they're in melee with the knights and the king whom Isabella dares not risk hitting. She nudges Sunstone closer, looking for an opening -

And the dryad with the sling finds a rock that's to her liking and looses it.

Sunstone dodges, gets thunked in the wing, and tumbles to the ground.

Isabella has the wind knocked out of her, but her cloak prevents anything more serious than that. She's up with cordial in her hand before one of the attacking rats gets near; she kicks the rat, managing to neatly put enough distance between them that she can get cordial into Sunstone's beak and urge him to join the proper fighting. There are other creatures who could use her healing now.

Later, when the armor-cloak has shrugged off a swipe of the vulture's talons and she's had a good chance to fire her bow into the heart of one of the opposing dwarves and the battle is finally calmed - Sunstone is chasing a fleeing hyena - Isabella combs the field for any small helpers, perhaps non-knights intended to be noncombatant who joined the fight regardless without telling herself or James - and finds the rat she kicked. He was stunned and injured by the kick but not killed, and was left behind by the couple of insurgents who broke to run away, not that he'd be less surely caught if if he were trying to cling to that hyena's fur.

"James, live opposing rat incapacitated," Isabella says into her scepter.

[neverbeatme]

"Good," says James. She heads in that direction.

[deepest_magic]

The live opposing rat in question looks pretty uncomfortable. Isabella calls over a leopard to put her paw on him so that he can get a little cordial; no point in keeping him hurt.

[neverbeatme]

James checks in with the rest of the knights on her way. Everyone who was injured has been healed; everyone who is chasing a creature has them well in hand. The count of enemy dead and enemy captured-or-soon-to-be tallies with the initial numbers.

So she can afford to give the rat most of her attention.

[deepest_magic]

The rat is not happy. This is an unhappy rat.

[neverbeatme]

"Welcome to Cair Paravel," James says dryly.

[deepest_magic]

The rat continues to be unhappy.

Isabella tucks her cordial away.

[neverbeatme]

"Anything to say for yourself before we take you to the dungeons?" she inquires.

[deepest_magic]

"Eternal Winter is still out there!" yelps the rat defiantly.

"Then why wasn't he with you?" wonders Isabella.

The rat goes back to more quiet forms of unhappiness.

[neverbeatme]

"Good question," the king murmurs thoughtfully. "In fact... how do you know he's still out there? Have you seen him? I'd be surprised to learn he was part of this at all and didn't show up for the main event."

[deepest_magic]

"He helped us plan it!" hisses the rat.

"So maybe he's coming later, but this... wasn't a very good plan, if it was that," says Isabella. "There's more knights on the way, you lot are done, if he was using it as a distraction to attack something else then it seems an unnecessary step really, since most places aren't heavily defended most of the time anyhow and we'd see him if he crept up to the castle or something right now."

[neverbeatme]

"It's a terrible plan," James agrees. "From everything I've heard of him - I'd expect better. Much better. Still, I don't feel like taking chances."

She reaches out to all the pins.

"General announcement," she says, which is the knights' cue that everyone is hearing this and they shouldn't respond unless they have something very important to say. "There was an attack on Cair Paravel just now. Everyone and everything is fine, but one of the prisoners mentioned Eternal Winter. Don't panic, but let me know if you see anything that seems like it might be his doing, and especially if you see him."

But, studying the rat, she says to only those who are physically present: "If I had to guess, though, I'd guess he sold you out. I couldn't begin to guess why."

[deepest_magic]

"It seems more - apathetic, than a sell-out," says Isabella. "If he'd sold them to us he'd try collecting, wouldn't he?"

[neverbeatme]

"Mm... yes. By 'sold out' I mean more generally... failed to deliver what they were expecting. Knowingly sent them into a battle they were going to lose. And if he knew that... I'd almost say he planned it to minimize casualties. He could certainly have planned it to maximize casualties if he'd wanted to. But he didn't."

[deepest_magic]

"I'm not sure I'm seeing the subtlety in 'send them to attack Cair Paravel' that you are, casualties-wise?"

[neverbeatme]

"He could have sent them somewhere else," she explains. "He could have sent them anywhere else. He could have sent them everywhere else, at once, in secret, and made us chase down thirty different creatures attacking at once in thirty different places. We still would have won, but it would have been messier. Instead he sent them directly to the best-defended stronghold in the country, past towns and villages where they could have done so much more damage before we organized against them, with a force hardly even big enough to hold us in siege when they got here. Either he expected us to have the collective strategic genius and fighting ability of a wilted head of lettuce, or he wanted his side to lose as efficiently as possible."

[deepest_magic]

"Or the priority was us, personally," says Isabella. "We are not in thirty different towns. Although then I suppose it would have been sensible for them to come by night."

[neverbeatme]

"If he'd been after us personally, and actually wanted to succeed, he would've come along himself," she says. "Or done it very, very differently. Or both. Most likely both. In fact, sending them thirty different places still would've worked, if he'd wanted to draw us out - he would've gotten me that way for sure. I just wouldn't have been as easy a target as he might've hoped."

[deepest_magic]

"He's always had someone to answer to above him before this, and furthermore he's never been an insurgent but always the one with the overwhelming numbers. Perhaps he doesn't do well quite this undirected and unsupplied with even the possibility of reinforcements. Maybe he didn't think the creatures would want to make independent strikes, or didn't trust their initiative. Maybe he has some plan running in parallel, poisoning our larder or something, I'll want to check on that actually come to think of it."

[neverbeatme]

"Oh, believe me, I'm going to be checking every secondary plan I can think of," says James. "But... there were things he was very, very good at under Jadis - campaigns of public terror, assassination, that kind of thing - that he could have used effectively here, that I know he would have realized he could use effectively here, and he didn't. He sent them in with a simple, straightforward, blatantly doomed plan that played to none of his strengths."

[deepest_magic]

"Maybe he was going to change it midstream but something prevented him from joining them."

[neverbeatme]

"Maybe. I guess we'll see."

[deepest_magic]

"Maybe. I'm going to go make sure the household staff are all okay and that the doors have stayed closed."

Isabella sweeps off still in her armor-cloak.

[neverbeatme]

James heads back to the castle much more slowly, because she has knights to coordinate on the way.

All the prisoners are brought in safely. There are no intruders in the castle, and no sign that there were any. Nothing is poisoned or otherwise sabotaged. No reports of suspicious activity filter in from the rest of the country. Further conversation with the prisoners reveals that Winter told them he would be back and then never showed.

She doesn't get it.