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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.
"This has been... interesting," says James after a measured pause. "I have other business to attend to, but I'll come back when I can."
She decides that no good purpose would be served by telling him how obvious his loneliness is to her. Away she goes.
Meanwhile, Isabella finishes her notebooking and goes to talk to some dwarves, burrowing creatures, and things that can navigate without light, about getting the tunnels sealed up or filled in. Currently she is entertaining the argument of a mole who wonders if there might be anything of value left down there.
"I spoke with the prisoner and I think I might be able to convince him to tell me where to find more of those tunnel entrances."
James can probably tell that Isabella doubts very much that Snuffle the mole is right, but hasn't come up with a diplomatic way to say that.
"It seems unlikely. The way he talked about it, it sounded like a lot of these tunnels were nearly abandoned, and I'm sure with the sort of creatures who tended to work for the White Witch that if they abandoned a tunnel they'd take anything valuable out of it first. I think we should focus on making sure these tunnels don't get any good creatures hurt, and not worry too much about recovering whatever the Witch's creatures might have kept there."
Snuffle the mole snuffles.
The dwarves and one badger come to a conclusion about the best bet for sealing up the entrance Isabella was dragged into (the one best-known among civilian Narnians), and another dwarf and a rabbit have a second-best idea they suggest trying in parallel with the hole James and Isabella came out of. A bloodhound volunteers to look for other holes while they're investigating which hole-sealing method works best. Isabella agrees and sends them all off.
"Even knowing ahead of time that it wasn't likely to be much fun, talking to Winter was remarkably depressing," says James.
Isabella goes over and hugs her. "I probably would have found it depressing if I weren't busy being scared," she says. "He's a really unhappy person."
"I keep wondering if there might have been something I could've done about him earlier. But there isn't really anything I would have done differently without already knowing that Winter was off in the wilderness somewhere trying very hard to kill himself, and I couldn't reasonably have guessed that."
"What would you have done if you'd known that? He really doesn't trust us - he has no reason to, really - you think you could have gotten through to him?"
"Yes. The obvious way to make the approach would just be to pursue him exactly as though I very badly wanted to kill him."
"...And then he'd make himself an easy target and then you'd talk to him. Yeah, I could see that working."
"But instead - this happened. And now I can't let him go, and can't even try very hard to kill him because it would upset people more. And he's... he's given up almost completely; all he seems to want is to prevent anyone else from getting hurt on his account. He's afraid to tell me about the tunnels because he wants to have somewhere to run if he somehow gets free, but I think he's going to come around on that soon."
"I'm going to talk to him again within a few days, and I'll be surprised if he hasn't already decided to tell me."
"Do you know if there's a way for him to be okay being alive?"