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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.
Hmm. Yes. James is definitely developing a sense that this could become a regular pastime.
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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Also it would not be on a schedule page so much as on a thinking-about-things page. Pleasant things."
"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."
"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."