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's surprisingly easy to just... not make time to go see him.

But the fact that his Christmas present was a picnic with Father Christmas is, James feels, a pretty big hint. She tries to stop by the dungeon at least once a month.

Christmas approaches.

[pythbox]

Christmas arrives.

[neverbeatme]

James returns from the picnic well past midnight, carrying an unopened parcel. She flops into bed and falls asleep immediately.

[deepest_magic]

They weren't sitting up together, so Isabella went to bed at her normal hour, crossing her fingers that she'll be able to figure out whatever she got without a verbal explanation. Isabella sleepily snuggles up.

[neverbeatme]

When they wake up the next morning, James yawns and says, "Father Christmas says I'm to tell you the magic printing press is for you. He didn't say where to find it, but it's probably around."

[deepest_magic]

"I'll keep an eye out for it."

[neverbeatme]

"That was a surreal experience," she adds. "And... sort of happy and depressing at the same time. Winter is almost okay sometimes with Father Christmas around, but then when he left..." She sighs. "I'm satisfied that he'll keep coming back, at least, and with that in mind I don't think I'll go back next year."

[deepest_magic]

"Maybe I'll go. If you don't think he'd object. Or I can ask myself, I suppose."

[neverbeatme]

"If you want to," she says. "I just... didn't get the impression that having me there helped any on top of having Father Christmas there. And it made my Christmas kind of depressing."

[deepest_magic]

"Maybe I won't, then. I have a while to decide."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah."

[deepest_magic]

Kisses.

And back to their monarching. Issuing proclamations and cutting ribbons to open bakeries and consulting on the second volume of The Golden Age and making proud, delighted speeches to their subjects on holidays and feasting and mediating and dancing and exploring and coordinating and rejoicing and enforcing and mentoring.

Years go by; Isabella doesn't picnic with Winter after all, although she occasionally considers it and occasionally visits him during the year, a little less often than her spouse does. Presents accumulate and are put to efficient use. Staff leave to care for aging relatives or start families or open businesses and have to be replaced; there are always guests to entertain, crafts and stories and skills to learn, food to taste, beautiful countryside to take photographs of - they've been to see most of the country in broad strokes but there's always some waterfall or glen or plateau or copse that has escaped them to go see the next time they go traveling. Always new subjects to meet - there are adults, of some species, who have never known unending giftless winter, who have always when saying the word 'Queen' meant Isabella and followed with 'and King', who have never gone to bed hungry or cold or afraid.

When the Queen and King, clever and wise, are solidly in their mid-twenties, it's maybe about time to address the question of heirs. (And of course the part-and-parcel question of, well, children - Isabella sighs when someone gives her a baby dwarf to hold, introduces her to a leggy centaur foal -) A question about it is in Isabella's notebook with a handful of others for the coming Christmas. Discreet researchers have been put to the question. No results yet.

For unrelated reasons they're visiting Tumnus in his old cottage, which he still lives in when he's on vacation from his work as their royal clerk. They're having tea, and little sausages, and toast with a fishy spread on them, and a plate of cheeses, and vegetable soup that makes the air smell like rosemary. It's terribly cozy.

They're just about to say their goodbyes and go home to the summer palace when Tumnus's cousin-in-law knocks and asks if Tumnus has - beg your pardons, your majesties - seen her grandchild lately? It's only the boy's gone missing. Nobody can find him anywhere.

This is the sort of thing one sets Knights to, and the nearest Knights are the monarchs themselves, and they don't have to be home before dark with Isabella's scepter. They mount up their horses and go looking, calling the little faun's name.

They give the lamp post a good, cautious berth, as soon as it's in sight swinging wide of it -

- and it doesn't help -