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.
She will find King James asleep in a different room, with her crown on the nightstand and her sword and shield leaning against it. Several creatures around the palace know her whereabouts, because she cooperated with a smallish group to find an entire hall of furnished rooms and then slept a good few hours later than any of them once all had gone to bed.
Isabella puts the bag by the nightstand there and leaves James to sleep, and with her notebook makes a map of the entirety of Cair Paravel, every floor and corner, so she will know how much room they have for any of the uses that might come up for their palace because she is a queen now eeeeeeee.
At some point during this task, she will presumably return to the throne room, and at that time (if it is not too early) she will find James there, awake at last and taking breakfast with an assortment of creatures - supplied, of course, by the bashful Rabbit. They are discussing distribution of resources: James wants to know exactly who can contribute exactly what to the project of reestablishing agriculture in Narnia before the end of the season, and secondarily to the miscellaneous other necessary repairs and reparations.
The cornucopia can make food that is or contains seeds quite easily, so it will be straightforward to plant potatoes and strawberries and corn and all sorts of things. Most of the creatures of Narnia have stores sufficient to last months - the rabbit could not be everywhere all at once - but the ones who were recently statues will have more trouble. The spring has been rapid and thorough and magic enough that there is a fair amount of wild food to be harvested - even if the rabbit stopped doing anything at all right this minute most Narnians would be eating better than they have been for the next nine months of not-winter. But certainly it would be better to get something started before then. The rabbit will make better time with the cornucopia if accompanied by a swifter creature - he is himself pretty fast, but mostly he was able to avoid capture by being that and also small, and he would cover more ground on a leopard or a centaur or a unicorn.
Isabella is very impressed by the rabbit's work ethic, and says so, and he fidgets with his ear-tip again and thanks her.
"So am I," says James. "We'll see who wants to help you and who would be fastest about it, and hopefully we can have you on your way in a few days."
"Who is still around, I wonder - I suppose a lot of them have homes they wanted to get back to, there are certainly fewer about now than there were yesterday. I think I'll take a little bit of a survey. What's your name?" Isabella asks the rabbit, pen poised.
"Acorn, if it please Your Majesty."
"Thank you," says Isabella, and she writes this down. "I'll see if we can find anyone who'll tote you around to get farms and gardens started and if anyone wants to go along for plowing and that sort of thing. Oh, James, I made a map of the castle." She tears out that page carefully and hands it over. "We have dungeons and bedrooms and a ballroom and a completely enormous old-fashioned bathroom and kitchens and servants' quarters and there's a granary and pantry that's empty now but perhaps Acorn will fill it before running off so we have stores in case of emergency or confused creatures who don't happen to hear where the farms are."
"Very nice," says James. "And yeah. Acorn, I'd be very grateful if you could fill the granary and pantry while you're waiting for us to find out who can go with you and decide who should. Bella, do you have a spare notebook and pen? I'd like to tour the castle after breakfast, and I might as well copy your map while I'm at it. Then maybe we can meet back here for lunch, and see what our surveys have come up with?"
"I have a spare notebook and some pens but I'm a little worried about where I'm going to get more," she muses. "I'd rather not use them for redundant copies of anything until I know where more paper will be coming from, if that's all right."
"In that case, keep the map," she says, handing it back. "I'll just memorize everything. And I'll keep an eye out for sources of paper."
She meets James back at the throne room in time for what might more realistically be called dinner (since breakfast was already in the early afternoon) with a list.
She favours a pair of unicorn siblings, Moonlight and Starlight, for the task of carrying Acorn, because they volunteered as a pair and will be able to trade off the carrying and therefore make better time overall; and out of the slightly smaller pool of creatures who volunteered to help with plowing, she chooses a centaur who claimed to represent his mother and father and three older sisters in addition to himself, because as a group they'll coordinate easily and as centaurs they will be able to plow fields and keep up with unicorns if the unicorns keep to a pattern of ferrying Acorn around to dwellings in the immediate vicinity whenever the centaurs are busy plowing something.
Moonlight and Starlight also mentioned that they are both excellent swimmers, which will be helpful in case of spring floods and washed-out bridges, and the eldest centaur sister is reported to be an amateur cartographer with a collection of reasonably up-to-date maps that all together cover most of the country. Her brother has reported that he expects her to be pleased about the chance to revise and expand her collection with the return of the seasons.
Tumnus has specifically volunteered to be a first point of contact for any citizen of Narnia who wishes to present a dispute or request to their majesties, in case the matter is simple or there is a wait, and he says he hopes that James will vouch for his hospitality and good manners qualifying him for the position.
One nymph, a dryad belonging to a birch near the castle, was extremely surprised to find that Isabella was still wearing her "war clothes" and perfectly stunned to discover that there were no other clothes to be had, and wants to be their majesties' mistress of the wardrobe and general presentability (she took the liberty of doing up Isabella's hair while making her case; said hair is now prettily plaited in an off-center braid over the queen's shoulder, with flowers tucked into it).
A satyr has observed that there may be Narnians who are not aware of what is going on, whether because they live underground or were holed up with small children at home or found themselves ill on the days of the thaw and battle, and has volunteered to - along with a griffin of his acquaintance, for transportational assistance - travel the cornucopia's old route spreading the news that the White Witch need no longer be feared and that Children of Eve reign once again. He appears to be hoping to leverage this job into a longer-term position as royal herald, which is apparently a prestigious sort of thing to be.
A dwarf knows where Isabella can get more paper, and will be pleased to supply it. He is also a potential procurer for any number of other things that are not food (although if they want mushrooms and hams, he can arrange mushrooms and hams).
As for the dwarf, she acknowledges the information about him and suggests that as soon as she has found someone to fill the position of royal head-of-household - or whatever else you call the person whose job it is to keep track of all the miscellaneous supplies and personnel going in and out of a palace - she will introduce them to the dwarf in question.
Bella agrees; she'll tell the dryad and the satyr. And she'll place an order with the dwarf for paper. And then falls to her dinner. Monarchy is hungry work.
After dinner, James locates Tumnus.
Tumnus is playing his little straw flute in the unkempt grounds of Cair Paravel for two hedgehogs and a bluejay. He and all three animals bow to James when she approaches.
"Tumnus, do you have some time to talk about your new responsibilities?"
The hedgehogs trundle into the undergrowth; the bluejay flies away.
"It's good to see you again," she says. "I heard about you wanting to be - I'm not sure what we'd call the position. Royal secretary, maybe? And I think it's a good idea, but I want to make sure of a few things. First of all, I think it would be a good idea for you to write down the name and business of whoever comes to see you wanting to talk to us, so I can review them later and find out who wanted what. And second, especially right now while everything's still new, I definitely want to personally meet with as many of those people as I can, even if it's just to hear their name and what they want and then tell them who else to talk to."
"Of course," agrees Tumnus. "Both highly reasonable things to do."
"I'm glad you agree," she says. "In that case, congratulations on your appointment as royal secretary. I'll have somebody find you things to write with and on. And you can pick an office in the palace."
"Thank you, your majesty," says Tumnus, bowing again, and he trots up to the palace to pick an office.
James wanders around the palace and its environs, greeting whoever she sees and asking for introductions if she doesn't know them already, and tries to draft a proclamation in her head. The subject is complex: she wants it known that Winter is still out there, but she doesn't want widespread panic about it. If possible, she wants it known that she would really like to talk to him, but she doesn't want brave creatures endangering themselves trying to bring that about. Her guess is that he's less dangerous now, but it's only a guess.
The dwarf bows.
"The Witch couldn't rule from here because it wouldn't let anyone in while there wasn't a legitimate ruler to be had, and the dungeons are inescapable if we find any extra Witch's creatures who we want to lock up, and the whole place is self-cleaning which is why there weren't great snowdrifts' worth of dust everywhere even though it's been empty for a hundred years."
"Well, that's convenient. Thank you for telling us, Teggin. Is that everything, do you know?"
"I'm not certain, your majesty. It's what I remember from stories when I was a wee Dwarf," says Teggin. "But I'm certain all the magic about the place is good magic intended to serve the rightful rulers of Narnia, your majesty."
"Yes, I think so too," she says. "But I'd still like to know about all of it. If you think of anything else, or if you meet someone who knows more, please let us know."
"This is so cool," opines Bella.
James grins. "Yeah, it kinda is. What have you been up to besides talking to Teggin?"
"Checking out what Acorn left in the larder. Some of it's just ingredients - I mean, we could cut slices off gigantic hams with my pocketknife and eat them but that doesn't seem like the best thing to do - so I found a naiad who likes to cook - she's the same one who you saved from that wolf actually - and she's going to stay on and do that. I also checked with her and everyone I hired to see if we're going to have to come up with some way to pay them, and apparently we don't - I asked Tumnus, he's setting up his office, and he says that the Witch used to get much less willing help by paying people in food and we're basically paying the entire country in food so we can give them presents and honors if we like but for the most part everyone will be happy to help."
"Handy. I'm trying to come up with an announcement to make about Winter," she says. "I feel like it's fair to warn people that he's still out there, but I don't want them panicking about it."
"There's more of her people than just him out there. We could make an announcement that doesn't mention him specifically, something about under what conditions we'll grant amnesty - since some of them were probably only hungry - and to be generally watchful and tell us straight away if there's a sighting of any of her soldiers?"
"Hmmm... on the one hand, yes. On the other hand, there's a pretty big difference between him in particular and the Witch's creatures in general. The rest of them mostly weren't - public figures the same way, and the ones that were are dead, like that wolf I killed. And I really want to talk to him. I'll talk to the rest too, if we catch any, but Winter..." She sighs and shakes her head. "I think, because I kept seeing him and feeling like I could maybe get him on our side or at least get him to stop fighting if only I could figure out how, I feel like I have a responsibility to do that now that the war's over. But I don't know if I can afford to make it a priority. I guess I'll wait and see if he shows himself somewhere. Maybe he's just going to disappear into the wilds somewhere never to be heard from again."
"Yeah. I've been trying to find someone who knows where I can get a good map of the whole planet and not just this country, because apparently this country is not planet sized, but I haven't had any luck yet. So there could be plenty of places for him to go."
"I haven't even met anybody who can give me a clear sense of our borders. I guess that makes sense, since as far as I can tell Jadis's magic didn't stop at borders, so the effective size of Narnia has been however big she wanted it to be for as long as she was in power. She didn't freeze the sea, though, so maybe there are other countries across the water. I'll see if anybody knows anybody who knows shipbuilding."
"Yeah. It will be nice to know how much stuff we are actually monarching over, and if there are other countries we should probably tell them that this one is not ruled by an evil witch anymore."
"I'm on board with that. I wonder if they'll be as excited about us as the Narnians."
"Well, we've got to be better than who they were dealing with before, but maybe not as excited."
"I guess we'll see."
Spring bleeds into summer in its proper time, and the land is a riot of color and life. They acquire a pair of non-speaking horses, caught wild and trained most of the way as gifts for them from a herd of horse-savvy centaurs. On horseback they can survey their domain at a better pace; the animals are just pony-sized for the time being but will grow up the rest of the way before the king and queen do. James's is a serious-looking dark bay, Isabella's a long-maned skewbald. The Narnians turn out to have summer holidays, too, which they celebrate half-remembered and half-reconstructed (although none of these festivals are associated with anyone so interesting as Father Christmas).
Fall sets the forests of Narnia on glorious red-gold fire and sees a distinct pumpkin and apple theme in the meals served at the palace. The days grow shorter and cooler, and there is a bit of an undercurrent of nervousness among the Narnians: to be sure, winter is a normal part of the normal year, but the last time it came it was cruel and deadly. Acorn goes on a reassuring cornucopia run, though it is likely no one will need his services to get through a gentle three months of chill complete with Christmas partway through it.
"Christmas again after only ten months," comments Isaella on the twenty-fourth, grinning. "That'll never happen again, I'm sure. I suppose now we know the date for sure, I've gone and skipped celebrating my birthday because I didn't know when exactly the spring was supposed to be."
"Me too," says James. "I've been debating whether to celebrate my birthday on the right Narnian date, or calculate a new one from the number of days since my last one on Earth. Haven't decided yet. There's been so much else to do, I didn't really feel like planning a party anyway."
"I think next year I will have my birthday on Narnian September 13. And turn 'twelve' even though I guess in terms of how many days I have been alive I will be twelve a bit earlier than that, since we went backwards a few months when we came here. I wonder if our grownups have noticed we're gone yet."
"I don't know. The people living in the forest near the lamp-post haven't noticed anybody coming through - I told them to keep an eye out - so if Chris came to get us already, she didn't find the wardrobe or it didn't work for her. But for all we know, maybe it hasn't even been an hour."
"Yeah. Anyway, I like it here more than Earth. We're doing important things."
"And we have more leverage to do important things than we would at home."
"Exactly. Because the people here listen to us and at home that would be this entire other step to getting anything done."
"And I think maybe they need us more."
"Yeah. Anyway, we left notes. Do you suppose Father Christmas comes at midnight under ordinary circumstances or at other times of day?"
"I guess we'll find out. Want to stay up just in case? Or we could ask somebody. But after a hundred years they might not be sure."
"I think I do want to stay up, just in case. Someone who was stone for most of those hundred years might remember but I don't think anyone we have around the castle right now was a statue for that long."
"Okay. Staying up sounds fun, anyway."
And so midnight finds them perched on their thrones with tea and a plate of cookies for Father Christmas if he should happen to want them.
"Merry Christmas," he says, nodding to both of them.
"Merry Christmas. Want some cookies?"
He smiles. "Business first." And, turning to the queen: "Isabella, Eve's Daughter. Here is a book that never runs out of pages, and a pen that never runs out of ink. I think you will find them loyal companions." He hands her the notebook and pen.
"Ooooh. Thank you!"
"And James, Eve's Son. The wells damaged in the long winter have been repaired, and here is a little something to keep your mind occupied." He hands her the last object he was carrying - it's some kind of decorative puzzle, currently in the form of a tetrahedron with each face made of four adjacent triangular panels. The panels are made of various metals - gold, silver, copper, bronze, brass - and engraved with intricate geometric patterns.
"Thanks!" says James, resisting with considerable effort the urge to start playing with it immediately.
"Do you always come at midnight?" Isabella asks. "And how do I go about finding particular pages in my infinity notebook?"
And he's off, nibbling his cookie on the way.
"Thank you!" Isabella calls again, beaming and hugging her notebook.
"I wonder what he meant by 'loyal companion'," muses James. "I got the sense it meant a thing. Maybe it follows you around, or can only be read with your permission, or something."
"Maybe. See if you can open it?" Isabella suggests.
James takes the book and tries it. It opens just fine. She passes it back.
"Huh. I should've asked. Maybe it just means it's durable and I'll still have it in years and years."
"Yeah. I don't recommend you try losing it to see if it comes back."
"I don't think I will do that, no," agrees Bella. "What the heck is your thing, besides pretty?"
"Okay, that's cool," says James. "And I'd say it was way too simple, but there are more colours than sides, so I'm not even sure what would count as a solution. I'll play with it, I guess."
"Have fun," laughs Bella. "I'm gonna go to bed and in the morning I'm going to copy all my important long-term notes into my infinity notebook." She hugs it. It's white leather-bound with gold corners and an embossed gold outline of her scepter and crown on the cover, and only about an inch thick despite its reported page content. Off she traipses. "Merry Christmas!"
James fiddles with her puzzle as she heads for bed.
Isabella has a bag made - the backpack doesn't keep things near enough to hand for her liking, and anyway it looks very odd against the sorts of outfits the dryad wardrobe mistress likes to put her in (whether it's breeches and boots for riding or fine queenly garb for formal occasions). The bag, painted silk (for its strength and softness both) slung messenger-style over her shoulder, has a loop to tuck her scepter into and plenty of room for infinity-notebook, pen, and cordial, as well as any incidentals she picks up.
In the spring (which is met with ecstatic relief by the populace) when it is again possible to build things, the rulers of Narnia establish a handful of schools, although unlike those they remember from Earth these neither favor specific ages (which would be quite absurd in as diverse a country as Narnia anyway) nor demand attendance from anyone who does not care to go. These are soon turned into little library-study-halls where people who know things and people who wish to know things congregate. Isabella allows a dwarf to copy bits of her notes to compile into useful books; it turns out that the infinity notebook will cooperatively open to whatever page she is looking for, but it will do this only for her, and so she doesn't much mind having it in the hands of someone else as long as she opens it to begin with to whatever she wishes to show them.
James's birthday, calculated by subjective days, turns out to fall on Narnia's May 7, and when this is announced it is summarily fused with the nearest preexisting national holiday, a celebration of consistent warmth and sunshine and full of all the usual feasting and dancing and games associated with holidays generally. It is also customary to leave anonymous baskets of small presents ranging from flowers to practical gifts on the doorsteps of neighbors on the previously existing holiday. It is renamed "Kingsday".
Isabella doesn't recalculate her birthday, even though it would have fallen at a similar date; she just "turns twelve" four months after James turns thirteen, under the changing leaves. This allows her to co-opt a harvest-and-arts-and-eating-desserts festival associated with large impromptu markets for trade and display of various crafts and other things ranging from preserves to maple syrup, which suits her just fine. She eats desserts and browses art with the best of them. It is, to match James's, called "Queensday".
The giants to the north make a little trouble not long after this holiday, sensing a soft and juicy target, but the Narnians aren't as soft as all that. A small minority of giants are willing to meet with James for diplomacy when a letter is dropped into their camp by an eagle messenger, but the rest of them have to be driven away by force; James's sword and Isabella's cordial come in handy once again, as does Isabella's unicorn bodyguard from the Battle of Beruna. Eventually the giants are routed from the borders of Narnia.
And eventually Christmas comes again.
Isabella stays up.
When midnight rolls around, she is busy trying to find another solution to the cube shape.
And therefore misses Father Christmas's entrance, by the same side door as before.
"Merry Christmas!"
"Isabella, Daughter of Eve. You have been making good use of the fire-berry cordial, but its supply is not infinite. Keep this plant where it may catch the light of the rising sun, and when you see the level in the bottle begin to drop, pick one of the berries in the morning while it is still shining and put it into the bottle. They are not true fire-berries, but they will serve this one purpose very well."
Next he withdraws a smallish rectangle of card or paper, almost like a postcard. It seems like ordinary paper, if of a very high quality, all around its edges - but in the middle it is transparent, showing the texture of the paper only very faintly over a perfect view of whatever is behind it. He hands it to her along with the potted plant.
"This page will capture a picture if you look through it and wish it so. If you set it on top of ordinary paper, or any other surface that can be drawn or painted on, and wish it to copy its picture there, it will; if you hold it and wish it to clear itself so it can be used again, it will do that."
"Oh, good, I was wondering if the cordial would last forever - and - like a camera. Thank you!"
"Eve's Son, I see you are enjoying your puzzle. It has many secrets left to discover."
"Believe me, I know."
"This map likewise has many secrets," he says, handing it to her. "Perhaps one day you will discover all of them."
"Ooh." She takes the case, opens it, and unfolds the map within. "Thanks."
"You can start by finding your second present," he adds, and turns to go.
"You get a treasure hunt for Christmas," giggles Isabella.
She puts her puzzle down and starts playing with the map instead. It's pretty easy to discover that it can be zoomed and panned with a touch, the ink lines flowing smoothly across the page. And then—
"Hey, roads!" she exclaims. "I mean - there were already roads, but look."
The map is zoomed in on Cair Paravel, close enough to show what she's talking about: the road that runs from the castle to the nearest small town is depicted as wide and flat and clear, not the mess of pits and rocks and tangled overgrowth and sudden narrowings that it has been up until now.
"I bet he did the whole country. That's amazing. I'd been planning to send some people out to do a proper survey and start planning repairs, but now I can skip that and get straight to organizing maintenance." She glances at the side door. "If he was still here I'd hug him."
"I wonder if Father Christmas even lets people hug him. For that matter, I wonder what he does the rest of the year. Make presents, I suppose, but how, so many of them are magic."
"Good question. Maybe you can ask him next year," she says, zooming the map out as far as it will go. Continent-sized is apparently it. She folds it up and tucks it in her pocket.
Isabella nods, and goes to put her new potted berries in an east-facing window before going to bed for the night.
James takes her puzzle back to her room, but manages to put it down and go to sleep instead of staying up to work on more solutions.
The shipbuilding project gets off the ground - the White Witch had a ship, but it is widely believed to be haunted or cursed and the Narnians won't touch it. They build their own boats, and establish regular routes between Narnia proper and overseas territories of the Narnian Empire.
The schools are very popular. Isabella takes an old lady dwarf's calligraphy class and a centaur's forestry class and learns history from an ex-statue unicorn; she tries archery and singing and leatherworking. James sits in on miscellaneous lessons and teaches a bit of math. (The puzzle present turns out, after considerable fiddling, to unfold into a simple computer, although in an abstract and extremely mathematical way that renders it near-useless to anyone but James herself.)
Isabella heals any injured or sick Narnian who makes it to Cair Paravel, and will travel considerable distances for those who can't make the journey, with her cordial; when she notices the level of the juice visibly dropping she adds a berry from her potted plant as instructed by Father Christmas, and it fizzes and dissolves and the crystal is full again.
When the weather is fine - or dramatic - or she sees a new place - or when the leaves are startling red on the morning of Queensday when she turns thirteen - she takes a picture, and pastes it into her infinity notebook. Sometimes she takes portraits of her subjects and copies them onto loose paper for them to keep, and every now and again she will loan the postcard-camera to someone who is publishing a book, so that they can paste pictures into each copy as it comes off the press and have them all illustrated in a jiffy. She reliably gets it back afterwards.
There are pictures of herself and James in the infinity notebook, too. James with an eagle messenger on her fist, hearing news from Archenland. Isabella, staff in hand, dancing with a Faun on Kingsday. James on her throne gravely hearing the dispute between a rhinoceros and a rabbit. Isabella christening a new ship for their fleet with a bottle of champagne and a grin on her face. James practicing with her magic sword, solo, guided by its enchantment into learning how to do it herself. Isabella in the wardrobe mistress's most extravagant choice of finery officiating a wedding between Acorn and an equally shy lady rabbit. The king and queen together both of them on horseback beside Isabella's sometime-bodyguard unicorn, Dewdrop, and a small contingent of centaurs and bears riding out to respond to a report of a werewolf attacking the people of a distant town. Isabella can't reasonably wish to have had the camera before the notebook to put the pictures in and the accompanying pen (the pen, it turns out, will do calligraphy tips at her whim), nor before her ability to walk and run or the cordial that saved so many lives - but she very much likes having it early, to get down all the splendor of Narnia to keep forever between the white covers of her infinity notebook.
Queensday goes by, the pumpkins are harvested, the kitchens of Cair Paravel produce stew and drinks and sweets of them, and the frost descends.
Christmas Eve finds them in the throne room as usual. James perches on her throne and plays with the computer-mode of her puzzle, watching it click and rattle from one configuration to another.
Is there only one of you?
Where did you come from?
How do you give presents to everyone in Narnia in one day?
What do you do the rest of the year?
Why don't you go to Earth?
Do you go anywhere else?
How do you make the presents? Can I learn to make magic things too?
Where do you go when it's not Christmas?
How do you know what to get people?
"Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas," he says. "For you, Isabella, Daughter of Eve, you will find a new bookshelf in the library that can summon any book you can identify exactly. It cannot give you more books than it has room for, but when new ones start to crowd out the old, it can always bring them back, although it cannot offer more than one copy of the same book at a time. And secondly, this." He hands her a letter - a blank envelope sealed with red wax.
"Thank you." She waits to see what James will get before interrupting with her questions.
He hands the king a short wand or staff, just about the right size to be carried in her hand, made of a dark heavy wood. Twining all around it in a tight spiral are a succession of plant-themed decorations picked out in various metals and gems: different types of leaves along one third, different types of berries in the middle, and different types of flowers at the last. It's very pretty.
"Once, for a time, there were Knights in Narnia. They had a hall very near to Cair Paravel; perhaps you have seen its ruin. Now you will see it restored, that you may restore the Knights in turn."
With that, he turns and leaves.
"Father Christmas, if you have a minute -?"
Apparently he doesn't.
"Next time maybe I will ask him questions first," she says, and she opens her envelope.
But it contains her list of questions, neatly recopied.
Is there only one of you?
There is but one Father Christmas for all of Narnia, and all the world around it, and all the other worlds around that.
Where did you come from?
Like many creatures, I don't remember how I began, only how I have gone on from there.
How do you give presents to everyone in Narnia in one day?
I visit every creature exactly once, and there doesn't happen to be any trouble about it if some of those visits occur at what you would call the same time.
What do you do the rest of the year?
It's often Christmas somewhere.
Why don't you go to Earth?
Earth is a place of very little magic, all of it hidden, and I am not welcome there.
Do you go anywhere else?
Yes.
How do you make the presents? Can I learn to make magic things too?
Not all presents are made. Some are built or repaired or collected or written. If there was such a thing as a way for anyone to learn how to make the kinds of magical presents I have given you, it would be a very good present for you, better than almost anything else, and I would surely have given it to you by now.
Where do you go when it's not Christmas?
Home, occasionally.
How do you know what to get people?
I know a great many things, some of them by magic, some by listening. Some by reading messages that are written to me but never sent.
James glances up from examining her mysterious knight-related object to ask, "What is it?"
"Answers... to... my... questions. Not especially detailed ones, but answers. I think perhaps I'd better not write any more though, because apparently this counts as a present."
"Can I see?"
"Sure." Isabella hands over the paper.
"Huh. Okay," she says, handing it back. "And my... whatever this is," she waves the decorated object slightly, "is magic somehow, but I don't think it's urgent enough that I should try to figure it out before I go to bed. Goodnight."
It turns out that James's object relates to a stash of cloak-pins that have been gathered up into the knights' hall that Father Christmas restored. There are berry pins and leaf pins and flower pins, and James's investigations turns up their features: if, with her new present, she knights someone into the corresponding Order and they take suitable oaths of service, they will be able to wear a corresponding pin - otherwise quite bafflingly impossible. These pins can be recognized from farther away than their actual visible details ought to allow.
James's staff permits her to find all of them, where "all of them" begins by being just the pile of them in the Hall but later, as the dwarves reverse-engineer the designs on her order, come to be a larger quantity - and "finding" comes to have more information, including whether they are assigned to knights, whether those knights are alive, whether they are wearing their pins, and whether they have had their pins stolen. Each sort of pin has different effects. The leaves offer strength and durability, slight but useful; the berries make their wearers hardier and less easily exhausted; and the flowers improve the senses. The staff also has a distant communication function like Isabella's scepter, but while the scepter only works on friends, the staff only works on knights who have their pins on. The knights cannot hear each other, which means that while many simultaneous conversations are possible, it is most useful for one-to-one interactions or one-to-many announcements. It also technically has spying applications, but no knights sign on expecting to be wearing their cloak-pins like wires, and there are no particularly urgent targets.
Isabella's bookshelf is useful too. It will not appear more than one copy of a given text at a time, but they don't resist being copied, so she makes the bookshelf available for visitors' use and has copies scribed out of long-lost tomes. She is able to retrieve old favorite novels from Earth - but not, alas, anything so vague as "an engineering textbook" or "an introduction to physics". It might well have ruined the entire aesthetic of the kingdom, anyway (who knows if the physics are even the same in a country so pervasively magical?), and the people are happy and everything is stable; she doesn't lose too much sleep over not having the means to easily start an industrial revolution.
Acorn (who now has six kittens at home, but can make fewer and faster business trips with his cornucopia now that he has just about his pick of fast creatures to ride and now that everyone has farms) solicits a berry pin when he hears of the knightly orders' restoration.
"Have you thought about what you want your knightly oath to be?" she asks when he brings it up.
"I have an idea of the feel of it, Your Majesty, but I'm not sure of the words," says Acorn.
"Well, what sort of a feel does it have, then?"
He adjusts his whiskers uncertainly. "I still bear the cornucopia, your majesty, and I'm quite sure by now that I mean to go on doing it until I can't run it around any longer, and it seems that the pin would make that easier and more helpful and I would not be using the pin to do any things less in keeping with the spirit of helping my fellow creatures than that. Your majesty."
"I think you'll make a very good berry-knight," she says. "Do you want me to help you find the words for your oath, or would you rather do that yourself?"
"I'd be very much obliged for your help, your majesty. But I will try it myself first, I think? Unless it will be establishing a precedent for others after me. I don't think I had better be writing them for anyone besides myself."
"You don't need to set any precedents if you don't want to. The oaths of the knightly orders are more personal than ceremonial; it's important to the magic in the pins that every knight's oath should be meaningful to them in particular."
Acorn lollops off. He is back a bit later with a piece of scratch paper.
"I - I think I'm ready, your majesty."
She nods. "Then we can go to the hall and get you a pin, and you can make your oath to it."
His oath is short and sincere and not particularly elegant, but the pin accepts it. He pins it to the strap of his cornucopia.
"Welcome, Sir Acorn," says James.
Sir Acorn bows.
James nods to him. She has a very good regal nod, suitable for honouring valued subjects.
Sir Acorn is very impressed! He bows again and then runs off.
And James brings the staff of knighthood back to Cair Paravel with her. She likes to have it on hand at all times, so she can check up on her knights and give and receive important news.
In June of that year, the cartographer-knight centaur Starfall of the Order of the Lily advances farther overland to the southwest than anyone in regular touch with Narnia proper has previously ventured.
And there she finds a winged horse drinking from a stream.
He hasn't noticed her yet; he is busy slurping up water.
"Good afternoon," she says.
"Oh my goodness!" he says. "You're a centaur! Are you a centaur? You look like a centaur. You don't have any wings, so you can't be a winged horse." Over the course of this somewhat confused pronouncement, he calms down enough to get all four hooves on the ground and his wings folded neatly on his back.
"...I am a centaur," agrees Starfall. "My name is Starfall. I'm on an errand for Their Majesties mapping the continent. I didn't know there were winged horses here, but that's the sort of thing I'm meant to learn."
"Oh. Well, there are!" he says. "Mostly up in the mountains, but we've been coming down more since the Long Winter ended and there's things growing down here and all. Who's Their Majesties? Are you from Narnia?"
"I am from Narnia!" says the centaur. "Their majesties King James and Queen Isabella were appointed to govern it by Aslan Himself when he was here defeating the White Witch."
"Oh my goodness," says the winged horse. "That's very exciting! I should go tell everyone! Do you want to come? Oh, but you can't fly. I don't know a good way up into the mountains by hoof. Well, are there more things to tell?"
"Well, I'm sure their majesties would be pleased to meet an envoy of your people," says the centaur. "I'm just here to make maps. I can see if King James is available to talk with my pin of knighthood, though? In case she wants to send a more detailed message."
"What's a pin of knighthood?" he wonders.
"I'm a Knight of the Order of the Lily - King James restored some old orders of knighthood," explains Starfall, showing off the pin where it's attached to one of her bags. "It lets me talk to her from anywhere as long as she's holding the - I don't think the object was ever properly named, but there's an object that can talk to all the pins."
"Oh my goodness," he says. "You're a centaur from Narnia with a magic pin that talks to kings! I think that's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me!"
Starfall giggles. And addresses her pin. "Your majesty? I found a winged horse."
"Did you now," says the pin. "That's interesting. Where does the winged horse live?"
"Oh my goodness oh my goodness!" exclaims the winged horse, dancing excitedly in place. "Um, I live over there in those mountains! I guess the king probably can't see the mountains. But they're there, and I live in them!"
Starfall describes her current location in terms of the last time she reported in, consulting her map-in-progress.
"All right, I've found you on my magic map," James says after a moment. "And I can see the mountains on it too. How many winged horses are there in them?"
"A hundred or so, I think," says the winged horse. "Is that a lot? It seems like a lot."
"It's definitely more winged horses than we've found anywhere else. Up until now, I wasn't sure there still were any."
"Oh. Well, there are us!" he says. "My name's Flit, I forgot to say! This is all very exciting! I should go tell everyone all about it, what should I tell them?"
"You should tell them that the White Witch has been defeated, her creatures have fled, Narnia is prospering again, and the king invites them to send an envoy to Cair Paravel to see it all in person and talk to people and learn things."
And he leaps up into the air and - flits away, with surprising speed for such a large horse.
"Do you want me to stay around here for the time being to give the envoy directions or lead them back to Cair Paravel myself, your majesty?" asks Starfall.
"That would be very convenient, and I would appreciate it," she says.
"Then I will," says Starfall. She proceeds to set up her camp right where she is so Flit will know where to find her.
"Exciting centaur! I forget your name, I'm sorry! I told everybody about Narnia and things and they said I should go be an envoy because I'm adventurous!"
"I'm Starfall," Starfall says. "I can lead you to Cair Paravel starting tomorrow, or I can just point you in the general direction if you'd rather fly."
"I'd rather fly, I think! How far is it? Which way? How will I know when I get there?"
"Cair Paravel is east-northeast of here and it's a big castle where the biggest river meets the sea. You can ask anyone, if you land within Narnia proper and find someone to ask."
"Okay, thank you!" And he bounds into the air and starts flying east-northeast, because he is much too excited to go to sleep just yet.
It's a very long trip; he won't get there in one evening.
But at last he arrives, and lands near the castle, and looks around for any creatures who can tell him what to do next.
"Good morning!" she says. "Are you Flit? I am Queen Isabella."
"I am Flit! Hello! What sort of a creature are you, besides a queen? You're not at all horselike! Very few creatures are at all horselike, it turns out."
"I'm a human. Daughter of Eve," says Isabella, as the dryad ties off her braid and she pulls herself to her feet with a crystal-topped scepter. "There are a fair number of horselike creatures. There are centaurs and unicorns and apparently winged horses, in addition to non-speaking horses."
"A proper human Queen! Oh my goodness oh my goodness!" says Flit, prancing excitedly. "Is Pin - I mean, is the King human too?"
"The King is human too. Pin?"
"I forgot what his name was but I remembered about the magic pin he was talking through so I kept thinking of him as 'the king in the pin' but that's too long and Pin is a perfectly nice name if you're a winged horse, it can be short for Pinion or Pinfeather," he explains.
"The king's name is James," says Isabella. "There are winged horses named Pinfeather?"
"Yes! Is that surprising?" he inquires.
"I didn't have any preconceptions about winged horse names. But I think it's cute."
"Okay," Flit says agreeably. "I think Isabella is a pretty name! It's very mysterious. Anyway, what's an envoy supposed to do? I'm not really sure."
"Well, you come in and you join us for meals and stay in a guest room for a while - I think the ones that are set up for unicorns and so on should work all right for you - and you tell us about winged horses and we tell you about how Narnia is being run these days and eventually you go home and talk to the other winged horses about that. You can also talk to them through my scepter if you want, it will let people talk to their friends from far away, but I don't let it out of my sight so you couldn't say anything privately or very long that way. Maybe there are things winged horses need that we can supply or things we could use that winged horses could supply, or both, and then we figure out how we want to do that."
"That doesn't sound too hard, I guess," he says. "Okay!"
And Isabella leads him into the castle.
"I feel very welcomed!" he says, following after her and tucking his wings in close so they don't bang against the door-frames.
"So tell me about the winged horses. How are you organized? What do you do do all day? What were you eating during the long winter?"
"Well, the winter didn't make very much of a difference up in the mountains," he says. "Since it's cold up there anyway. I grew up with Gramps telling stories about how we used to live lower down and there were more things to eat sometimes and it all sounded very tasty but I didn't really understand what it was like until spring happened. Spring is very exciting! What do you mean, how are we organized?"
"Well, who decided you should be the envoy and how did they decide it?"
"I was really excited about it and no one else nearby was that excited but everybody agreed that we should send somebody so it was just obvious," he says.
"What would've happened if nobody was very excited, or if not everybody agreed that you should send somebody?"
"Well, if nobody was very excited we would've had to pick based on something else," he says. "Maybe somebody who was a good flier and didn't mind going. It's a long flight. I didn't even know how long it was until I flew it. And if not everybody agreed then the people who didn't think we should send somebody and the people who did think we should send somebody would argue, and if there was enough arguing about it and there wasn't anybody who really wanted to go then we probably wouldn't have sent somebody after all."
"What would have happened if you had really wanted to go but the others didn't think anybody ought to go?"
"Well, then they would've argued with me about it! But I don't know what they would've said because I don't know why anybody wouldn't want me to go," he says. "It's Narnia. Real proper not-always-winter-anymore Narnia."
"Okay," laughs Isabella, writing something down in her notebook. "When the spring came how come we didn't see any winged horses coming to see what was going on?"
"Well, because we weren't sure if there were even any people in Narnia anymore or if the evil winter witch had starved you all to death, and there wasn't anybody who wanted to go find out more than they wanted to stay home and enjoy having seasons," he says. "But then that centaur came by. And I got excited."
"Makes sense."
"I thought so!" he agrees. "Wow. Castles are weird. But very pretty. You mentioned food, is there going to be food?"
"Lunch will be served in about an hour. I can tell the kitchen what you like best to eat if you'll tell me."
"I don't think I know what I like best to eat!" he says consideringly. "Because I haven't tried all the things to eat that there are! There haven't been seasons for very long. I know I like fruit, though. I like every kind of fruit I've tried."
"Well, is there anything you can't eat, like - meat or cheese or something? I can tell them to serve less of those things and more fruit."
"I don't know what cheese is. I do know what meat is! Winged horses don't eat that," he says.
"Cheese is milk with some things done to it, different things depending on the cheese."
"Oh. Well, then I have no idea if I can eat cheese or not."
"Yes, your majesty," comes the reply.
"Oh my goodness!" says Flit. "It's another magic thing like the pins! I think I knew that already. But I'm still surprised."
Isabella giggles. "It's a little different from the pins, since I can talk to anyone who qualifies as a friend, not just someone who has another object, but yes."
He giggle-whinnies. "That must be nice to have. Narnia's so big, and ground creatures probably can't travel very fast, I can't imagine how you'd talk to your friends otherwise!"
"Some ground creatures can be pretty quick, and I have a horse, but yes, it's really useful. The problem with it compared to James's thing is that I have to start the conversation; people can't just talk to my scepter."
"Oh, I see. Still. You all have to go around things," he says. "I don't have to go around things unless they're mountains."
"We do, yes. It can be inconvenient."
"Well, maybe that's a thing that winged horses can help you with!" he suggests. "We could carry you to places so you didn't have to go around as many things to get there."
"Maybe! Currently when we're in that much of a hurry we'll ask griffins or something like that but we don't have anything regular set up."
"I could ask everybody back home if there's anyone who wants to carry ground creatures to places," he says. "That sounds like an envoy thing to do."
"It does! They'd have to live here to be accessible in emergencies for it to be the best way to get carried somewhere fast, though."
"That's true. But maybe there will still be people who want to. I can't be the only winged horse out of all the winged horses who's very excited about Narnia."
"Narnia's pretty exciting. James said there are about a hundred of you?"
"Yes! That is how many of us there are. But I don't know exactly because I didn't stop to count."
"Well, there will probably be time to get a more exact number later."
"Okay," he says. "Oh my goodness, I'm in a castle. Talking to a queen. In Narnia." He swishes his tail happily.
Isabella giggles. "I'm in a castle talking to a winged horse in Narnia. The excitement doesn't wear off too fast."
Flit giggles too. "Are winged horses as exciting to queens as queens are to winged horses?"
"They are to Daughters of Eve. If I brought you back where I came from and showed you to a bunch of other Daughters of Eve they would all be very excited."
"That sounds like fun!" he says. "Where did you come from?"
"It's a place called Earth. There's humans everywhere and nothing else there talks and there's no magic."
"That's so strange! I can't even imagine it."
"It's really different. I like it here better."
"Because of magic?" he guesses.
"That, and before I got here I wasn't a queen."
"That makes sense, since you're a queen of Narnia and you weren't in Narnia."
At twelve thirty lunch is served: there is a large platter of fruit and the main dish is based around roast vegetables nestled in mashed potatoes, with only small sides of meat for those present who eat the stuff. The household of Cair Paravel congregates, and eats, and identify unfamiliar food for Flit, and engage him in conversation about the lifestyle of winged horses. The dwarven housekeeper shows him to a guest room outfitted for unicorns which also has a reasonable amount of balcony - not enough for a running start, but enough to jump off if he can catch himself and cares to try, and enough for a well-stuck landing.
"He forgot your name, earlier," Isabella relates to James. "He was calling you 'Pin' because he'd been talking to you through Starfall's pin."
"Well, that's adorable," she says. "I wonder if being adorable is common among winged horses or if it's just him."
"He's pretty cute! I don't know about the others, but if he gets any particularly cute replies if he talks to the others through my scepter I'll let you know."
"Thank you. You're my favourite queen."
"Oh, good."
James giggles.
The winged horses wish to be formally citizenry of Narnia, and this is arranged without much ado, Flit continuing to serve as go-between. (None of them want to move to Cair Paravel as emergency mounts, but that's all right, there are already griffins around who can be called upon in a genuine crisis.)
The summer goes by. There is an incredible meteor shower one fine July night and Isabella stays up all night taking pictures of it. It becomes spectacularly hot that August and they have to explain to their wardrobe nymph how bathing suits are meant to work (dwarves being just about the only native Narnians with a care for modesty and disinclined as a group towards swimming) so that they can dunk in the sea, which is normally too cold for comfort but is very welcome in the baking summer. It cools off some by Queensday (Isabella turns fourteen) - in time for the honey cider to be served hot - and chills the rest of the way over the rest of the autumn, and winter settles in.
And Christmas comes.
He has a large bag over his shoulder.
"Merry Christmas," says James when she looks up and spots him.
"Merry Christmas," agrees Isabella.
Out from the bag comes a large, heavy-looking bundle, which he sets at her feet.
"Thanks!"
"Isabella, Eve's daughter," he says, turning to her, "here is a bow which will guide you in its use, and some arrows which will return to their quiver when their task is complete." He extracts these items from his bag - bow, quiver - and hands them over. "And here is a cloak which will protect you from physical harms." It is folded into a bundle much smaller than James's bundle.
"Thank you," says Isabella. She takes the weapon - recurved, smooth reddish wood, quiver matching-colored leather with white-fletched arrows, all very stylish - and then shakes out the cloak and tries it on. It's silvery-blue, like a river seen from high above, silken-soft. She buttons it from her chin to her knees and finds armholes under the extra capey layer around her shoulders and then flips up her hood and spins.
Away goes Father Christmas.
"Pretty!" says James admiringly. She has opened up her bundle and then closed it again. "Mine's some kind of armor. I'll wait until morning to try it on."
"Makes sense. I'm just impatient. I hope these things grow with us, we're both getting taller."
"It's Father Christmas. I bet they will."
"I bet. But if I ask I might get fewer presents. I guess we'll see." Isabella trots off to bed, cloak billowing out below the knees behind her.
The next morning, she tries it on.
Isabella swings by her room precisely to have a look at it. Knock knock.
A golden surcoat bearing the red lion of Narnia, over a coat of chainmail that clinks musically when she moves; steel gauntlets, etched with rows of tiny golden leaves that echo her crown, over gloves of the same golden fabric as the surcoat; gold-etched steel boots in the same style as the gauntlets, and likewise the steel plate that covers her arms and legs and shoulders. She even has her shield on her arm and her sword at her waist, and the object of the knightly orders secured to the other side of her sword-belt in a leather pouch. It's all very... kingly.
It's very kingly.
"Um hi."
"Hi."
"The armor is cool."
"Yes it is," she says, grinning.
"Is it comfy? It looks heavy."
"It's actually way comfier than I expected. And I can move in it. I think I'm going to wear it whenever I train with my sword from now on."
"Makes sense. I wonder why we both got armor-things."
"And he gave you that bow. Either he thinks there's going to be trouble soon, or he wanted us both to have armour and a weapon just because it's the kind of thing we should have."
"If there is going to be trouble soon I guess I should be practicing, too."
"You might as well even if there isn't. You have the bow, and even though it still works when you don't know how to use it, it works best when you do. You know?"
"Yeah. It's a good thing it's a ranged weapon, if I had a sword and shield like you somebody could yank my staff away from its loop on my bag and then where would I be?"
"Falling over, probably."
"Not very effective."
"Definitely not as effective as you could be. I don't think there are many situations that could be improved by you falling over more."
"And probably none of those situations are in combat. Do you suppose we ought to have been more proactive about looking for and capturing the Witch's surviving soldiers?"
"We found the ones we could find with the resources we had. I'd much rather be dealing with them now, with everybody well-fed and happy and all the roads and bridges and wells and my armour and your bow and all the knights who know anything about fighting, than right after we won with pretty much nothing but my sword and an untrained, disorganized quasi-army. However much consolidating they've been able to do since then, I'd be very, very surprised if it was anywhere near as much as we have."
"Yeah, that makes sense. But I'm wondering if we're going to be attacked, or if the presents are enough information to let us go looking for and surprise them before they go after us."
"I guess we'll see. And I'll take this as a cue to start organizing the fighting knights into an army."
"And I suppose we can see if any of the winged horses want to be ridden into battle when we have more than usual reason to imagine one might happen."
"That would be helpful. Especially if we can get the dwarves to produce decent armour for them... I'll look into it."
"You look really nice in your armor," blushes Isabella.
"Thank you," says James. "It's nice armour. I'm very fond of it. Is there something you want to talk about, here?"
"Um."
"'No' is an acceptable answer, I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything."
"Is 'yes but not talking about it works for me too if talking about it would be weird' usable?"
"Yes. Would talking about it be weird? I don't think talking about it would necessarily be weird."
"Well, I wouldn't know, you see."
"Wouldn't you?"
"If it would be weird? No, I don't know."
"Well, based on current estimates of projected weirdness levels, what are we going to do?"
Isabella laughs.
"I think me and my notebook are going to go somewhere and I will get back to you?"
"Sure, sounds good."
Isabella sneaks one more peek at James-in-armor and then scurries away.
James decides that while she has the armour on, she might as well go try out learning from the sword in it. So she'll be doing that.
Isabella comes and finds her again about an hour and a half later.
"Hi!" she says, pausing in her imaginary combat.
"Hi. How's it going?"
"Good! I am liking this armour."
"Does it help all by itself?" wonders Isabella.
"Not exactly. But it - gets out of my way. It doesn't get tangled up, it doesn't jam, it doesn't poke, it's lighter than it has any right to be."
"Cool. Um, I did my thinking."
She sheathes her sword. "And?"
"And I still think it's going to be kind of weird but perhaps not prohibitively weird. Um, the part you probably figured out was that I think you - the part I said out loud actually was that you look nice in your armor and I am guessing you figured out that it was in like a 'I find you attractive' way."
"Yeah, I caught on to that part."
"On the other hand, I barely remember what other humans besides us look like. And I don't think I'm actually quite bisexual? Because I have old notes about how pretty nymphs are and the notes are very much 'maybe I will be that pretty if I grow out my hair and get all willowy when I am taller' with no hint of anything else and that hasn't changed since. And nothing else around is human-looking enough, at least so far. And I have nothing written about you like that at all up until this morning. So I don't know how much of it is - anything you should find personally flattering?"
"I think I find it a little personally flattering regardless. The fact that you might not find me attractive if you were well supplied with Sons of Adam doesn't mean you don't, you know?"
"Yeah. Anyway, I don't think I'm actually quite not bisexual, either. I don't remember if there's a word for that."
"I'm not sure either. You could make up a word if you wanted a word," she suggests.
"Maybe I will. Anyway, so there's that, and - yeah."
"Okay. Well - I think nymphs are pretty. Not in an 'if I grew my hair out' way. I haven't spent much time evaluating whether I think you're pretty, but... I could. The two of us being the only humans around, and all. It seems reasonable."
Isabella nods, smiling a little.
James smiles back.
"So - let me know?"
"Yeah."
Isabella smiles and then goes off to find something else to do.
And when she's done with that, she cleans up and finds somewhere to sit and play with her puzzle while she thinks.
It's... inconclusive.
She turns up to lunch.
"Hi."
"Hi. I'm a pretty good shot with this thing, turns out."
"Well, you do have help. Still, congratulations."
"Yeah, two entire magic objects are helping me, but what I mean is that if we have an emergency for which I need to shoot at things tomorrow, I could shoot at things."
"I hope we don't, but good."
"I hope we don't too. Um, should I just wait and not prod you about the thing?"
"My conclusion so far is 'you are observably pretty, but I don't know what to do about it'."
"What do you mean?"
"Well... what do you mean, what do I mean?"
"Like, do you have ideas about what to do about it and can't pick one, or no ideas, or what?"
"It's hard to say. Why, do you have ideas?"
"If you wanted to you could kiss me."
"That's definitely an idea."
"I don't have a lot of other ones though."
"Quality before quantity?"
"You haven't said if you want to, so I don't know how good the idea is."
"That was me implying it was a good idea."
Perhaps not at lunch while there are other members of the household about toasting to the Lion and wishing each other a merry Christmas and generally being present.
"Later," she adds. "Privately. How I feel about public kissing is a much more complicated question and will probably depend on how the private kissing goes."
"That's fair."
"Yeah. Public actions have public effects."
"I think everybody would be very excited, but then they might be very upset if we stopped doing it after a while."
"That's what's been on my mind, yeah. So I'd rather not risk the second thing."
Isabella nods.
"Right now I feel like public kissing should probably come at about the same level of seriousness as getting engaged. I might adjust that after I've thought about it some more."
"Hiding not-engaged amounts of kissing from everybody who lives in our castle sounds - annoying."
"Maybe," she acknowledges. "But there's levels and levels of public. I wouldn't mind letting some people know about not-engaged amounts of kissing if they didn't seem like they'd get excited and tell everybody, and if we were more than never-tried-it-before amounts of sure that it was something we wanted to keep doing."
"Yeah, that makes sense. Viridian would be one thing and - Flit would be another."
"Oh my goodness!" she says, in a decent approximation of Flit's excited voice.
Isabella laughs. "Exactly!"
"Yeah. Flit has many positive qualities, but 'ability to keep exciting secrets' is not one of them."
"Well, we've never tried him on it, but let's not start him with one that really needs keeping."
"I think if it was something really, really important, he'd do better than if it was something moderately-but-not-obviously important like kissing monarchs."
"Yeah, I suppose so."
"That's my take, anyway."
"You know about these things. Sometimes I wish I had a practical specialty like your knowing-things-about-people - I mean, outwardly practical. I have my knowing myself thing but that's not the kind of talent I'm talking about."
"If I had any idea how to teach it, I would. But it doesn't seem to be teachable."
"Yeah. I don't really want it to be the same thing, anyway. There are monarching things that I handle because I might as well, but there aren't any monarching things I handle because only I can."
"I see what you mean."
"It's not a big deal. I just think about it occasionally," Isabella shrugs.
"Okay."
Dessert.
Dispersal of household.
"So we could go somewhere comfy where we aren't likely to be unexpectedly interrupted and try kissing now," says James.
"We could. My room?"
"Sure."
Isabella closes the door.
...kissing?
It's nice. Isabella approves.
Further trials may be needed.
Wouldn't want an inadequate sample size to ruin it.
Indeed.
Kiss kiss kiss.
Hmm. Yes. James is definitely developing a sense that this could become a regular pastime.
So is Isabella!
It's good that they're on the same page there!
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.
James is definitely past any fear of awkwardness at this point in time.
They are on the same page there too!
Oh good!
"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 would like that too! I'll make room in my schedule," says James.
Isabella giggles. "Nobody like Flit looks at your schedule, right?"
"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."
"Okay."
"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."
"I'm not at all clear how you go about thinking with the puzzle," says Isabella.
"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."
"My thinking isn't very mathy," remarks Isabella, sitting on the foot of her bed.
"A lot of mine is. And even the stuff that isn't, I can express a lot of it as math if I try."
"What does it mean to express something that isn't math as math?"
"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'."
"Oh well, it can just be a mystery." Squirm. "C'mere?"
She goes there.
Kisses!
It's so good to be right.
It was pretty predictable, really.
Yes. Yes it was.
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.
He has tried throwing himself on a bonfire (his meltwater put it out) and beheading himself (it grew back) and putting a sword through his heart (it fell out, after an unknown amount of time spent frozen, dreaming vague frosted dreams). He has tried drinking molten lead (the worst part was cutting it out of his stomach after it cooled) and impaling himself on a fixed vertical spike, in case gravity helped keep it in place (evidently it didn't help enough), and crushing himself under the biggest rock he could arrange (he spent a long, long time being very, very uncomfortable until his successive icy healings produced a pile of crushed ice uneven enough for the boulder to roll off). Around the turn of the year, he tries building an oven and shutting himself inside, reasoning that at least this way his meltwater won't put out the fire. It drowned him instead, which didn't work either. After about a day, he gave up and climbed out.
He still gets thirsty. Perhaps he could die of that.
So he finds himself a remote little cave, as dry as possible, and curls up inside and resolutely does not go out to find snow to eat or water to drink.
Until a rat in boots and a knitted tail-cover scurries in to seek shelter from the first storm of February.
Winter might recognize this rat.
...Winter does recognize this rat. Winter wishes he didn't recognize this rat. Winter wishes the rat had found a different damn cave.
"Eternal Winter," breathes the rat, almost reverently.
"Bristle," says Winter. It comes out hoarser than he means it to.
"What are you doing here? How have you not already found - well, it doesn't matter - come with me! There are more of us, we are regrouping!"
He doesn't really want to—there's nothing left for him among Jadis's creatures, without Jadis—but no, there is one thing. Jadis's creatures will speak to him. Jadis's creatures will not flee him in terror or turn him over to the Aslan-blessed human rulers of Narnia.
"Lead me there," he says at last.
"It's this way," says Bristle. "Perhaps you could carry me - I was only ducking into the cave for a bit of a rest."
"Very well," he says, smiling slightly despite himself. He scoops up the rat.
The rat sits quite contently in his hands and points out the path to where the rest of the remaining Witch's creatures are gathering.
It's such an incredible relief to be among creatures again, any creatures, that he almost doesn't mind which creatures they are.
The creatures are all very glad to see him and flock around him like he's a flag. They have barely-there and not-even-slightly-consistent plans for an assault on Cair Paravel, which they are more than happy to share with Winter.
He is drawn into the conversation, corrects some blatant foolishness, organizes them a little better, listens to everything they tell him about Narnia's restoration and the King and Queen who rule it. He doesn't really mean to encourage them like this, but... he can imagine what they would be like if he said he'd really rather get back to killing himself.
Certainly they would not be nearly as pleased as they are now.
While he's here... he inquires if there are any smiths among them, and if such a smith might be willing to make him something, just for his personal amusement.
There are dwarves! They don't have access to a proper forge under the circumstances, but could possibly make something rough and simple.
That should be fine. He describes what he wants, leaving out its intended use. Let them think he plans gruesome torture. It's the natural thing to think, when Eternal Winter asks you to build a sort of little open cage with a strong metal spike through the middle, never mentioning that the measurements he requests and the unusual design of the lock are all so that he will be able to lock it in place with the spike through his own heart. Perhaps that will be suitably permanent.
The dwarves agree, none too clear on the current dimensions of either the King or the Queen, and get to work on his request while the other creatures solicit his assistance in their plan of attack.
In hardly a day, the plan takes shape. Over the course of a few more, he gets them moving, sending the most careful and stealthy scouts ahead to check their path.
And he appoints Bristle leader - because, he explains, he has a secret errand to run. He does not expect it to take very long, but he can't put it off another day. If he has not returned by the time they arrive, they must go ahead without him.
He takes the smiths' contraption with him when he goes.
Well then.
They will go on ahead.
And Winter—will abandon them, to find somewhere even more remote to see if this time he can finally die. Probably they'll all be killed or captured. Probably a lot of creatures will die or be hurt. But he can't really think of a way to avoid that. And he would rather go back to failing at suicide than stay with these creatures who expect things from him that he doesn't want to give - who expect him to be someone he's not sure he is anymore. It's been painfully obvious since Bristle first showed him to their camp. He can't keep on like this, not even if these are the only creatures in all the world he can keep company with.
The creatures wait until the appointed time, and then, obedient to Winter's instructions, proceed in his absence.
High above, a mere speck in the sky at this distance, Flit is out for an afternoon flight.
He circles closer, curious about this odd arrangement of creatures.
There are some dwarves, and some dryads, and a variety of animals - rats, wolves, one vulture - a small but definitely unpromising assortment of creatures.
"Pin-I-mean-James-I-mean-your-majesty," he says, "there's some creatures coming toward Cair Paravel and they look sort of unfriendly, they have weapons and things and none of them is a knight."
"Thanks for telling me," she says. "How far away are they? How many of what kinds of creature? Can you see the weapons clearly?"
He provides the requested information, circling lower still to get a good look at the weapons so he can list how many of what kinds of those. A sizeable little band - especially with so few fighting knights of Narnia in the vicinity to meet them - but nowhere near an army.
When he gets close enough the vulture spots him and the creatures become alarmed. A dryad with a slingshot aims a rock straight at his eye.
Isabella is on her balcony playing a board game with a hedgehog who has been visiting the castle.
He yelps and flaps frantically for altitude; the rock hits a flailing hoof.
"A band of about thirty of the Witch's creatures is attacking Cair Paravel from the northwest. They're about three miles from the palace, about two and a half from the knight-hall. Stay out of their way, warn any creatures you can, get the innocent and vulnerable to safety." And then, to only the subset who are fighting knights - "Come to Cair Paravel. We'll meet them here."
"Another time," Isabella says to the hedgehog, and she gets up to sweep into her room and pluck her cloak from its hook and swirl it on around her shoulders. "What's the composition of the band?" she asks James.
The vulture seizes two sword-bearing rat comrades and flies up after Flit, intending to drop them on his back where they can attack and he'll be unable to kick at them.
"One vulture, one ogre, two raccoons, three hyenas, a few rats, five dryads, seven wolves, eight dwarves," she says.
Flit beats his wings harder, straining to his absolute limit for as long as he can. He's big and heavy, but his wings are strong. He keeps ahead of the vulture.
The dryad with the slingshot aims at one of the winged horse's wings as the vulture gives chase.
"Besides you and me and the household noncombatants what've we got in range?" asks Isabella, picking up her bow and arrows.
The stone falls short, tumbling in the mighty downdraft from Flit's wingbeats. He whinnies nervously anyway.
"Flit found them. He's bolting for Cair Paravel as fast as he can, but I think he's being pursued and he hasn't said by what or how fast they are. Fighting knights who can get here in time - one unicorn, one griffin, one leopard, one fox, one badger, two centaurs, five dwarves. More on their way, but that's going to be the first wave. I'm going out on the ground; depending how close they are to the castle when we engage, you might want to be up on the walls, or out where you can get at the wounded."
"Out, I think. I have armor on top of the new weapon." She buttons the cloak, pulls up the hood.
She tries it again, slinging harder with a snarl.
James tracks her knights while she heads for the exit.
One knight in particular is beginning to really outpace the enemy at last, flying higher farther faster more desperately than he ever has in his life. This shot misses him too.
And the vulture isn't catching up. He leaves off, descending with the rats to rejoin the rest of the company. They proceed forward double-time, rats on the backs of wolves, ogre carrying two of the slower dwarves. The dryad keeps slinging rocks at Flit but no longer really expects to hit him while he's fleeing.
Isabella follows, patting her bag to make sure she's got her cordial in there.
"Think you and your bow are up to archery from griffinback?" she asks on the way. "If so, I'm telling Sunstone to pick you up. If not, I'll assign you a guard."
"I can ride Sunstone and shoot, yes. I'll have him land if someone on our side's badly hurt."
"Okay." She finds Sunstone's knight-pin and tells him, "You're carrying the queen for this battle. She'll be using her bow and asking you to land if she needs to heal someone."
"Yes, your majesty," Sunstone replies through his pin. "I'll be there in a quarter-hour."
Speaking of which, Flit seems to be finally slowing down; she judges that he's far enough ahead of the incoming creatures to let himself coast a little. Also good. A handy way to track their progress, even without making him waste his precious breath on reports.
And now the waiting, once she's chosen her ground - the top of a slight rise northwest of the castle, so the tired enemy will have to come at them along the gentle upward slope. If she squints, she can just make out a dot in the sky that might be Flit on his approach.
Isabella, meanwhile, finds that an incoming knight-dwarf is favoring a foot, obliges him to take a bit of cordial before there's thick fighting making it difficult for her to offer it to him, and scans the terrain with a view to what's relevant for an archer on griffonback.
James keeps track of all the knights as they draw closer, giving some of them directions to meet each other on the way if it won't slow them down, informing them all of the composition and trajectory of the attacking group and guiding them out of its path.
Sunstone arrives when he expected to, alights before the queen, bows, and suggests a practice flight. Isabella agrees provided they don't go high enough above the treeline to give the incoming force free advance warning about what they may expect to meet. They take advantage of the leadtime to figure out how she's going to maneuver her bow around his wings, and then land again, her still mounted and ready to take off at a moment's notice.
And finally, all the knights who are going to get here in time are here, and Flit is clearly visible soaring toward the castle, and she glimpses a hint of the other creatures following him - then more than a hint.
"They're here," she says. Everyone on her side is wearing a pin, so she doesn't have to say it very loudly.
She thinks she can pick off the ogre, at least, nice big target, but she doesn't fire yet. "Odds they just want to talk?" she murmurs wryly into Sunstone's pin.
But she asks Flit - "What did they do when they saw you?"
"Threw rocks," he says mournfully. "With a rock throwing thing."
She addresses Sunstone's pin again. "They attacked Flit on sight. If you want, you can wait until they see us and see if they stop to negotiate. Otherwise, go ahead."
Isabella doesn't think she fancies being within range of the rock-throwing thing.
She fires at the ogre, the ogre falls, and everyone gives up on stealth at once.
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.
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.
"Good," says James. She heads in that direction.
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.
So she can afford to give the rat most of her attention.
The rat is not happy. This is an unhappy rat.
"Welcome to Cair Paravel," James says dryly.
Isabella tucks her cordial away.
"Anything to say for yourself before we take you to the dungeons?" she inquires.
"Then why wasn't he with you?" wonders Isabella.
The rat goes back to more quiet forms of unhappiness.
"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."
"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."
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."
"It seems more - apathetic, than a sell-out," says Isabella. "If he'd sold them to us he'd try collecting, wouldn't he?"
"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."
"I'm not sure I'm seeing the subtlety in 'send them to attack Cair Paravel' that you are, casualties-wise?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Maybe he was going to change it midstream but something prevented him from joining them."
"Maybe. I guess we'll see."
Isabella sweeps off still in her armor-cloak.
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.
Isabella doesn't either, but she's not dwelling on it quite as much as James is. She goes around wearing her armor cloak for the next while. It's winter anyway, a cloak is a reasonable thing to wear.
It doesn't make a difference; there are no sneak attacks from their inexplicable enemy. She keeps it up anyway, because she might as well.
There are side benefits to James wearing her armor around all the time.
That too.
The year wears on, as years so incorrigibly do. A flying horse who is not Flit travels to Narnia and dictates a popular collection of stories which are scribed down and distributed; Isabella's a fan. There is an enormous late-summer storm which tests some of the national architecture; repairs after that are pretty businesslike, although a few crops and houses are lost outright to flooding. The pictures of the lightning are spectacular, though. So are the pictures (a little gratuitously numerous) of James in armor. Over the course of the relevant section of the infinity notebook pictures of James not in armor also make an appearance, as "memories of kisses" serve to substitute somewhat for what the armor was doing in the first place.
Isabella has to renew her cordial again when a colony of dwarves takes fever. A few speaking animals want to settle on an island which has historically been considered too small to bother with; boating in Narnia is now in such a state that they will be able to travel to the mainland for supplies. Some giants have a giant baby and build a giant house. The first frost descends lightly; the second one is a hard crack of cold all at once, and then it is winter.
And, as is now the habit of winter, this winter contains Christmas.
And this Christmas contains monarchs waiting up till midnight.
"Merry Christmas, merry Christmas," he says, nodding to both of them. "And here are your presents. For you, Isabella daughter of Eve, a pair of shoes which you will find allow you to walk on air; and a fire-starter which will light fires in whatever colour you please, and its fires will always be very congenial about matters such as available fuel and what things they are and are not meant to burn." He hands her a pair of bundles, one rather larger than the other.
"Thank you! Merry Christmas."
"For you, James son of Eve, well, your project to restore the old mills and granaries of Narnia was very well begun, and now you will find it is very well finished; and I have left you a writing-desk in your office which will always have just the materials you need when you sit down to write."
"Very nice. Thank you!"
With a last acknowledging nod, he's off.
"I wonder if your desk is as thorough as my bookshelf? Fancy colored ink? Protractors and compasses?"
"I bet I at least get fancy coloured ink."
Bella opens her little package. It contains a lighter, made of engraved brass with flowers and vines much like her crown's twining all around it. She flicks the cap open, and spins the wheel, and gets a little white flame. Close, open, spin: green. "Cute." She opens her shoes. They're soft-leather turnshoes, white with green beading, and when she puts them on she can step quite confidently into the air until she touches the ceiling and giggles and steps back down.
James applauds.
And Isabella bows. "Thank you, thank you. I unwrapped them myself."
Giggle.
These shoes allow Bella to stand a couple inches up from her usual height so that she can more easily kiss James.
Ooh. What an excellent use for these shoes. James approves very much.
"Merry Christmas," says Isabella when her mouth is free, and then she heads to bed, discovering halfway up the stairs that she can sort of skate if she tries.
Although it obviously should politely refrain from disappearing any paper that has been written on, she tests this case immediately and finds that all writing done at the desk does indeed persist, whether left with it or taken away. It will even tolerate having its utensils briefly borrowed, but any pens and so forth taken as far away as the next room will return to the desk the moment they are left unattended. Still, even with its limitations it is a very good writing desk.
In mid-April the monarchs are invited to the incorporation of a new town in the hills; creatures are finally willing to live within walking distance of the White Witch's palace again. They plan to call the town Robinsong and are a mixed population of animals and things in the general category of griffins-and-so-on.
So the king and queen saddle up their horses and take a leisurely route towards the site of Robinsong to appropriately bless its existence.
When they've paused for lunch, mid tromping across a great field of grass and wildflowers, having last seen another soul twenty minutes ago when they passed a rabbit who bowed but didn't care to engage in conversation, Isabella finishes her peach and flops on her back in the clover, watching clouds scull across the sky.
James flops down beside her, makes a social calculation about likely effects should someone happen to see them, and concludes it is safe to reach over with one hand and interlace their fingers.
"Do you think about Earth much?"
"Sometimes. I run through all my old files every so often and spend some time remembering things, just because I think it'd be sad if I forgot about things like offering to put cheeses on little rafts for your dad, you know? But it doesn't really come up these days unless I think about it on purpose."
"Heh. Cheeses on rafts. I'd forgotten about that one. ...I suppose we're just missing like Winter. He stayed long enough for time to move again back there. Maybe they'll condemn the house or something since it seems it eats kids."
"...Which might mean they destroy the wardrobe, which might mean we couldn't get back even if we wanted to... not that I especially want to, but I can imagine being desperate enough to try it, if something went White-Witch-level wrong and there was no actual solution to be found. I guess at that point the fact that the wardrobe might be gone wouldn't stop me."
"I'm not sure they'd have a reason to destroy the wardrobe in particular? They'd have to go into the house to find it in the first place. I'm just imagining the door boarded up, maybe a sign, I don't think they'll torch the place on such a flimsy suspicion. Anyway, there are probably other ways to travel. It'd be too weird if that were the only one. I bet Father Christmas could turn something up if nothing else, although depending on the timing he might not be quite prompt."
"My childhood interest in exploring places where other kids disappeared is how we got here in the first place; a sign would do the opposite of help. No guarantee that they'd be that sensible about it, of course. For that matter I guess we have no way of knowing how long it's actually been on Earth since we left. About a minute there to an hour here means about a week there to a year here, so probably at least a few weeks, but I don't exactly have a precise measurement of the difference and I don't even know if it stays the same all the time."
"Yeah. Do we even know how long Winter was here before we showed up?"
"Not very precisely. With the number of years he was gone on Earth, though, it should've been a long while... longer than the White Witch actually reigned, I think, if the time difference is always exactly the same. So I guess it isn't. Maybe, I don't know, maybe the wardrobe or whatever affects these things will make long visits short if you return quickly but gives up on you after a while if you stay indefinitely. In which case we've been gone for years, probably."
"I guess we could ask Father Christmas but it probably counts as a present and we don't actually want to go back. For one thing, it would be really hard to explain why we're in our teens now."
"Chris could handle it, but then I'd still be some teenager on Earth instead of a King of Narnia. I'm in a much better position to do useful things as a King of Narnia."
"That too. Like, I'm sorry my parents think I have been whisked away by abandoned house monsters but this is a pretty big deal."
"Chris will be fine, I'm sure. I'm pretty glad I didn't have any friends I was especially attached to that I couldn't bring with me."
Handsqueeze.
"And I'm likewise glad that I could bring you with me."
"I'm glad you did bring me, even though you didn't know it was for keeps."
"I do sometimes wish there'd been more kids I could bring. Not because of anything specific, really, just because if we had twice as many monarchs and they were as good at the job as we are, we could be getting things done faster."
Pause.
"And... I'm slightly conflicted about whether or not I wish we had any Sons of Adam along. Because I'm definitely very happy about this kissing thing we're doing, but there is a traditional way monarchs make more monarchs and it seems unlikely that we'll manage it by ourselves. I mean, maybe one year we'll get immortality for Christmas and make the question of heirs academic, but we haven't yet. And I know it's kind of early for that sort of thing to be on my mind, but that's just the kind of person I am, I guess."
"Yeah... I've picked up that the first king and queen were human and had kids, but their kids didn't have any other humans to marry, though. Viridian thinks she might be distantly descended, it all just bled out into the population. We'd need more than a couple of Sons of Adam and a passing interest in them to solve that long-term. ...And maybe we're not supposed to? If the first dynasty fizzled out like that."
"Yeah... but the first dynasty fizzled out and then the White Witch happened. I'd really like it if we could find enough humans to keep a royal line going indefinitely, even if we have to adopt the first few, or something. It seems like for whatever reason, Narnia does better with humans on the throne."
"I am not having sex with Winter," says Isabella, "just getting that clear up front."
James cracks up.
"I mean... does the wardrobe work reliably enough that we should maybe try to get an actual colonizing expedition going? Would having too many humans around wreck things? Humans sometimes wreck things and not everybody can be on the throne at once if we need a sustainable population. Should we put this down as something to do when we're thirty-seven if nothing comes up before then?"
"I'm not sure about too many, but the wrong humans would definitely be a problem. And... it would hurt the kingdom more if we, or even if just one of us, went out the wardrobe looking for colonists and never came back, than if we lived to be a hundred and adopted some dryads or appointed a royal steward or something and then died of old age, I think. But if, say, we find a land full of humans across the sea somewhere, I'm keeping an eye out for adoptable kids who look like they'd grow up to be quality Princes or Princesses of Narnia."
"How do you tell by looking? I mean, I guess I might have been pegged for it when I was like six, but it'd have to be a big land of humans to have anybody that obvious."
"There are different ways to be obvious. I'd have to be a little lucky, but it seems like the kind of luck that's plausible in Narnia, you know?"
"True."
"Yeah."
"Maybe we'll get human neighbors for Christmas one year. But I'm inclined to leave it to Father Christmas unless it gets to be very worrying. I still think he was teasing me that one year one of my presents was answers to my questions."
"I like Father Christmas. He's so - he has one thing he does, and he's really good at it, and it suits him. And it's such a good thing. I like that."
"I like him too."
"I won't mind leaving the succession problem to him for a while. But I'm still going to think about it, because I do that. And I am not going to have sex with Winter either, in case that's a worry you were having, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't even meaningfully solve the problem considering he's some kind of ice monster now."
"The kids would be really weird little icicles. Thank you for not planning on having sex with Winter."
"I would be slightly surprised if Winter could even have little icicles. Why are we talking about this?" giggles James.
"Because he's the only other person from Earth who is around even for very generous definitions of around? What even happened to him, I wonder, the ice monster thing."
"Maybe the White Witch did something to him. I don't know. If I ever get a chance to talk to him, maybe I'll ask."
"Yeah. I wonder how her magic worked. If it was all the wand - we mostly seem to get magic things rather than learning to cast spells or anything."
"And I think Father Christmas said that if there was a way for just anybody to learn how to make magic things he would've given it to you already. But magic things have to come from somewhere, still... some of hers might've been from the kinds of not-human she was, like how some of her creatures had particular magic."
"Yeah. Maybe there is a kind of creature somewhere that makes magic things just as part of being its kind of creature..."
"Or maybe there's a lot of different ones... like how the fire-berry cordial is made out of fire-berries, that kind of thing."
"Have we seen anything else that looks like a potion sort of thing?"
"The White Witch had a little bottle of something and when she poured out a drop it turned into a cozy mug of truth potion..."
"Huh."
"Yeah. I dunno."
"I wonder if we should have made more of a go ransacking her house or if all her stuff is evil or something."
She reflects on this for a moment.
"Now that I think of it - everybody's been very content to just leave her house completely alone so far, but now that people are getting a little more comfortable with it, it might be time to do something a little more proactive about making sure nobody stumbles across a deadly poison generator. Everyone was perfectly safe when we went through it with Aslan looking for statues, but, you know, Aslan was right there. I'll think about it."
"Yeah. Maybe in the short term we can have a fence put up. Not that fences would be particularly deterring if a crow or a griffin wants in but it'd clearly mark 'witch house soon'."
"Yeah. Warning signs. 'Evil magic beyond this point'."
"House has not been decontaminated of possibly hazardous quantities of deadly poison. Do not approach by order of the King and Queen."
"Maybe we can get the mayor of Robinsong to help organize some local creatures."
"Only if they hold their entire election while we're there. Which I suppose they may do."
"Well, if not I'll just ask for volunteers, and fill in with nearby knights if there aren't enough to do the job."
"Makes sense."
Handsqueeze.
Their lunch eaten and their conversation having dwindled to a natural halt they saddle up again, reach Robinsong, help the creatures improvise a town incorporation ceremony, contract some beavers and a badger to assemble a fence a reasonable distance away from the Witch's house on the Robinsong side and expanding all around it in other directions, and go home to Cair Paravel.
Business is more or less as usual; in the spring, on Kingsday, the usual little gifts are left on various doorsteps.
James gets one; it is not signed but the fact that it is wrapped in bark suggests "dryad" and the fact that it got into the castle without her getting advance warning of the possibility narrows that down to "Viridian".
She takes her little present into her room and opens it.
wood.
She re-wraps the present, and puts it away, and contemplates this development.
Then she goes out and celebrates Kingsday. It is a good holiday and she is proud to be attached to it.
And if the opportunity should arise to ask Queen Isabella whether she got any interesting Kingsday presents this year, besides the useful and stylish new bag James leaves outside her door shortly after breakfast...
"I got a bag," wink, "and a coconut from the Isles and a comb and a sampler. You?"
"A lovely little framed calligraphed math proof, and a couple of books, and a really nice belt, and, uh, something else that I'm pretty sure is from Viridian and that implies things about the sex lives of dryads that I definitely didn't know yesterday."
"Uh?"
"It didn't come with a label, and Narnia doesn't exactly have comprehensive sex education - I wonder if I should try to think of something to do about that - anyway, I don't know what it's called and I'm having trouble describing it but I can just show you if you're curious."
"...Okay."
And there it is, in her room. Wrapped in bark. James unwraps it again. She is blushing slightly.
"That's... yeah, I don't have a great explanation for that unless you've been having conversations with Viridian that I doubt you have been. I guess she thought you'd... like... it?"
"I don't not like it. And no, I have not been having the kind of conversations with Viridian that would lead to her getting me a," she gestures at the present. "Unless this is her way of saying 'this kissing thing your majesties are doing seems to be going well, maybe you'd like to try... non-kissing'."
"I guess. I mean, it's probably less mortifying than her sitting us down and suggesting it, but wow."
"It is way less mortifying than that! I am so much less mortified."
"I bet there is a word for it but I don't really want to ask her."
"Maybe I'll work up the courage to ask at some point. Until then, I guess I can just think of it as my Kingsday present."
"It definitely is that!"
"So, do we want to try non-kissing? With or without my Kingsday present being involved."
"I mean, eventually? I didn't have a timeline in mind. But soon is - good."
"I didn't have a timeline in mind either. But, yeah. I approve of soon."
"And today is a special occasion, you may have noticed."
"I had definitely noticed that!"
The next morning, the queen wakes up in the king's bed.
Snuggle.
Royal snuggles. They're very snuggly. James is pretty pleased about them. What a nice way to wake up.
"G'morning."
"Good morning. A viable contender for best morning."
Giggle. "Definitely top five."
"If I've had better mornings, I'm having trouble remembering them." Snuggle.
"Well, there was the morning when we woke up and we'd won a war and we were king and queen, that was pretty great."
"True. But I was eleven and my understanding of kissing was purely theoretical, whereas on this morning," kiss.
Kiss!
What an excellent morning.
Definitely a candidate for best morning.
Well, it is the day after Kingsday. People may safely conclude that she liked her presents.
You know when else they get presents?
They get presents on Christmas, sitting cuddled up by a fireplace at midnight.
"Merry Christmas," he says cheerily. "For you, Eve's Daughter, here is a new pocket-knife to replace your old one. It has a few clever little tools tucked away, and you needn't trouble yourself about sharpening it." He hands over a gorgeous little folded knife. "And here also is a new bag, which will carry more than you might think to look at it." He hands her a very tidy and practical messenger bag.
That's good, because the one James got her had an unfortunate accident with a baby griffin four weeks ago. "Thank you! Merry Christmas." The knife is shiny and has mother of pearl worked into the handle.
This bag is a sturdy little backpack nearly bristling with pockets and flaps and loops. It has places to hang a sword and shield. It's a little on the plain side, but in perfectly respectable condition.
"Thank you very much," says James. "Merry Christmas."
Isabella tucks her pocketknife into her messenger bag.
And off goes Father Christmas.
But then she yawns. "I'd better go to sleep. I can finish admiring my present in the morning."
"Good plan," yawns Isabella. "Nobody's looking; my room or yours?"
"Mine's closer."
James's room it is.
Snuggle snuggle. Coziest monarchs.
James authorizes an expedition of flying creatures to map poorly explored border territory, mentions the opportunity to Flit, and receives delighted routine reports from the adorably excited winged horse as the creatures make their way over the mountains and subsequent desert.
The population has been getting bigger, and a few different citizens have objected to it being hard to get water in a straightforward manner without running into everyone and their cousin doing the same thing. Isabella finagles an agreement between two river gods and a clan of beavers and soon there is a big lake where previously there was not much of anything except one tree belonging to a dryad (carefully replanted elsewhere out of harm's way), which provides more edge area to the water supply and makes it easier for everyone to go collect what they need.
(It's also a pretty good fishing lake, after a few months. Isabella goes and does this once out of pure nostalgia.)
James investigates the Narnian state of sex education after some dithering about that, and is told by this and that creature that "we have our own way of handling things, we [leopards/dwarves/dryads/satyrs/giants/
The schools are still running. Isabella's little knife proves to have quite the unrealistic arsenal when waved near leather or wood or fabric but her new interest this year, quite unrelatedly, turns out to be the harp, which a naiad teaches. She has a simple piece ready to perform on Queensday.
Christmas, as always, comes again in its time.
Late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, James gets a report from a worried knight who witnessed a snowslide at a small village she was passing by on her way home from a long trip. James coordinates her and the nearest other knight in assisting the villagers, and all together they manage to safely dig out the three homes and one dryad's tree that were buried in snow, but this involves a lot of James relaying messages between knight-pins and it's surprisingly exhausting work given that she isn't actually shoveling any of the snow herself. She hugs Queen Isabella goodnight and goes to bed well before midnight.
So Isabella sits up alone, in her own room, having coaxed her bookshelf into sheet music of a few favorite Earth songs which she's attempting to adapt for harp.
"Merry Christmas," he says, handing her one small package. "Here is a little house that you can keep in your pocket. It can be tricky to unfold, but I am sure you will learn just fine. Your other present is waiting for you just inside the door - I heard you were learning to play the harp, so I found you one I think you will like very much."
"Merry Christmas! Thank you." Isabella takes the little house, but she is not sure how little it is so she doesn't unfold it in her room. She does unwrap it to find two squares of wood, hinged together; she leaves them stacked on top of each other on her desk and then goes to sleep.
In the morning, James finds a marvellously kingly cloak bundled up at the foot of her bed, and when she shakes it out a note falls to the floor suggesting that she wear it 'in case of weather'. Her other present, she is left to discover on her own; she pores over her magic map for a little while and eventually finds a restored seawall that should, if properly maintained, allow the creatures of Narnia better use of some low-lying coastal lands.
When some Isles voyagers have brought cocoa beans to Narnian shores and Isabella has coaxed an encyclopedia from her bookshelf with a loose explanation of how to refine them, there is at long last domestic cornucopia-independent Narnian chocolate. It is popular with several kinds of creatures, including centaurs, dwarves, and monarchs. Some of it doesn't temper right - the local chocolatier is still working on it - but liquid chocolate is still pretty good for some purposes.
For example, the purpose of royalty dipping fruit and cake into it and feeding it to each other. That's a purpose.
"We've been dating for about three years now," remarks Isabella, offering James a strawberry.
"Yes, we have." Nom. Smile.
"And it is getting increasingly difficult to not kiss you during public affairs. You'd think practice would help."
"You'd think! But it does not." She grins. "So. We've been dating for three years. It seems like it's going well. Want to get engaged?"
"How'd you guess?" Kiss.
"It's a mystery." She offers Isabella a return strawberry. "Never to be solved."
Isabella nibbles the strawberry. It's a small strawberry. She nibbles James's fingers too. "I love you."
James giggles. "I love you too. Let's get engaged, and subsequently married, and charm all the creatures of Narnia with our cuteness."
"They will be so charmed. They will not mutter disconsolately when they have to clean up after their quarrying activities, probably, because we will be so cute at them."
"That's dangerous levels of cuteness, that is. We should be careful how we use our newfound power."
"We are very responsible with power!"
"It's true, we are." Here is a tiny piece of cake. Here it is being dipped in chocolate. Here it is being conveyed to Isabella's mouth.
James gets a raspberry.
Kiss.
What a tasty betrothed.
Kiss kiss kiss.
That is a fine thing to taste of.
"So do we announce ourselves, have the herald go around with a proper announcement and a guess at a wedding date, or do we just stop being discreet?"
"We could do both. So the announcement isn't completely out of the blue, but people don't spend too long being confused by unofficial rumours."
"Sounds like a plan. Immediate cessation of discretion and have an announcement go around by the end of the week."
"Perfect."
Banana slice.
Nom!
"You're so cute."
"Thank you. I try. Coincidentally, my future wife is also very cute."
Is it okay if Isabella puts this fondue a little farther away so it does not get knocked over? Isabella thinks it is okay if she does that.
Yes. Yes, that is perfectly okay.
And the next morning after breakfast, when the household is dispersing, Isabella and her air-walking shoes creep up behind James for neck kissing purposes.
Giggle.
And from the visiting knights' table: "Oh my goodness!"
Giggle.
...Yeah, James is now laughing too hard to properly return kisses. She settles for hugging Isabella instead. And giggling on her. That too.
Hugs! And giggles.
Giggly hugs.
"Oh my goodness oh my goodness!"
That just cracks Isabella up all over again.
James likewise.
Between the gossipy creatures and the excitable ones like Flit, the news is well on its way to all corners of the kingdom by midday.
Be it known,
That Queen Isabella and King James are engaged to be married on the eleventh of July in the year 1008.
Narnian citizens are welcome to hold celebrations of the event in every settlement in the land. A copy of the wedding's intended menu, musical selections, and decoration scheme will be provided closer to the date for any organizers who would find this useful. A transcript of the ceremony will be distributed after the King and Queen have exchanged vows.
Many creatures are delighted to congratulate their majesties on their engagement.
Which is quite delighting itself.
Delight abounds.
And except for the small forest fire in the west (addressed by a river-god and local knightly help), an ideological squabble between some pine dryads and some oak dryads (settled by deploying a dwarven philosopher and some placating chocolate), and a very nearly violent confrontation between a griffin and a rat he mistook for a non-speaking prey creature (which has to be brought to royal mediation), the year is otherwise pretty uneventful.
"Merry Christmas, and congratulations," says Father Christmas. "For you both, here is a pair of magic rings that each know the way to the other, and whose wearers can take comfort in each other's presence even from very far away. And the old summer palace south of the Western Woods has been restored as well."
He offers each monarch a small red velvet bag, suitably sized to contain a magic ring.
"Thank you! Merry Christmas."
He departs, smiling.
"Magic rings! I guess we get engagement rings after all, in a sense. Have I mentioned how much I like Father Christmas?"
"You have mentioned it, but this seems like the right day of year to mention it again." Isabella tries her ring on; it fits perfectly, of course. Silver almost-Celtic knotwork with appropriately shaped diamonds throwing fire from the gaps. "Oh, pretty."
James's ring matches. She puts it on. It fits her perfectly, too.
"I like Father Christmas a lot!"
"He's pretty great." The ring sparkles in the firelight.
"I love you," yawns James. "Let's go to bed."
"I love you too. My room tonight?"
"Sounds good."
Snuggly sleepy monarchs.
So sleepy and snuggly. What a good Christmas. It is much like other Narnian Christmases in that way.
Narnia has wedding customs, but they are between various creatures, and would not apply (for example, neither ruler is planning to give her affianced a heap of wood, as is customary among beavers). So they import some Earth things - Isabella's dress, though it is in full Narnian fashion all over leaves and flowers, is white. There is a cake, with some local chocolate (much nicer quality by now) adorning the frosting. There will be dancing while a small orchestra of creatures accompanies them with traditional Narnian songs and a little Bach Isabella pried out of the bookshelf.
There is an excitable rumor going about that Aslan will appear to marry them, but they can't really plan on that or even get an invitation to him (people who do get invitations: knights, Cair Paravel householders, important personages from the neighboring lands, holders of various honors from the war, other individuals who they like personally). So they plan on Mr. Tumnus conducting the ceremony, and they write themselves some vows, and the whole thing is held on the beach in high summer with the breeze blowing blessedly cool over them all from the sea.
Aslan does not appear to serve as celebrant, so Tumnus does it, and he does a perfectly lovely job, and the king and queen kiss one another.
It is a beautiful ceremony, and after that there is a delicious feast, and the dancing is fun, and then the King and Queen of Narnia are married and this is an excellent thing to be.
So excellent! Most excellent.
And now that they are married they can go on a Royal Progress and visit the towns and villages of Narnia and meet with their subjects and attend lots of parties and stay in their new summer palace.
All of which traveling is made more comfortable with Isabella's pocket house, although the summer palace is roomier and prettier than the pocket house and some creatures are so woeful at the prospect of the king and queen not staying in their home that the pocket house must occasionally be foregone.
The king is perfectly content to stay in the homes of various creatures, and also perfectly delighted by Isabella's pocket house. There is a lot to be delighted about. They are the King and Queen of Narnia, and they have a beautiful and prosperous kingdom, and they are married.
All of which is so delightful. Their lives are so great.
Eventually, though, they have visited every town and village and major landmark; they have stayed at the summer palace twice, and in Isabella's pocket house innumerable times; and they return to Cair Paravel to catch up with all the business that could not be conducted via knight-pin or scepter. James does a lot of paperwork at her writing desk. Routine rulership resumes.
Some creatures are putting together a music festival. It's a few hours' ride away; would the queen like to come and bring her harp? The queen would. She kisses her spouse goodbye - "Love you, Jamie!" - and gets on her horse and heads to the festival. There are piping satyrs, singing badgers, harpsichord-duetting peahens, a giant with a set of drums, dwarves with brass ensembles and centaurs forming string quartets. And Isabella on harp.
And then, partway through Isabella's performance, abruptly and without warning, the water around the little island freezes over.
She hears "Winter".
She reaches into her bag for cloak and bow.
This has predictable effects on the already panicking creatures.
She shoots him; she gets him in the shoulder.
She reaches for her scepter to bring it to her lips and speak to James.
He yanks the arrow out of his shoulder and keeps walking, unconcerned by the fountain of sparkling black blood that arcs out over the amphitheater and freezes everything it touches - grass, the ground, assorted instruments, unlucky creatures slow to flee. The flow abates after a few seconds, down to a mere gush from a pressurized spray, but in the meantime Isabella is splashed with burning-cold fluid. And Winter has nearly reached her.
Her cordial's in her bag. She bolts towards the slow creatures, reaching for it. Sprinkle, sprinkle, sip.
She needs her air walking shoes.
"FLY," she warns the creatures, "HELP EACH OTHER, DON'T TRUST THE BRIDGE IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO -" He set up an ambush, there could easily be something wrong with the bridge, but there's a lot of wings here.
Shoes or warning James -
"FIND KNIGHTS," she says, still running away from Winter and rummaging in her bag for her shoes. Here's one, here's the other -
And Winter's hand closes on the back of her cloak and he yanks her off her feet. He hasn't even drawn a blade, though he carries a sword at his side and multiple visible daggers in assorted places - he hauls her toward him, reaching for her scepter.
The scepter is the most important thing, after maybe only the cordial, without it she's cut off why didn't she have a pin of knighthood without it she can barely walk. She reaches for it too. "JAMIE -"
Winter is stronger, has better reach, has more experience in close-quarters scuffles - he wrestles the scepter away from her in mere moments and tosses it away into the picturesque bushes. His icy blood stings her hands. He picks her up and slings her over his uninjured shoulder.
She's holding her shoes, she's wearing her bag. She puts the shoes on her hands and claws at the air. It's solid, like that, but slippery.
His blood freezes the water's surface solid enough to walk on. He catches one of Isabella's hands, pulls the shoe from it, tosses the shoe out over the ice - it hits the edge of the wide frozen ring around the island. When he gets the other shoe, he throws it in the other direction, and it reaches open water and floats there.
If James is mobilizing forces - and she must be, if Isabella reached her with the scepter, if anyone has found a knight - she does not seem to be mobilizing them fast enough.
Isabella grabs her cordial and sprinkles it on his bleeding arrow wound.
He grabs the cordial from her hand too, and shoves it into some pocket or other, and then he draws a dagger and stabs himself in the same spot again, with a little giggle. And now he is holding a dagger.
Shit. What does she have - besides skin that's freezing to her clothes - her pocketknife manifested a tuning wrench, maybe it has something for ice monsters - it turns into a small ice pick. That will not help, injuring him will not help. Lighter. She pulls her lighter and attempts to set him on fire.
"Would you like to know all the ways it's impossible to kill me?" he continues, in a bright brittle voice.
She puts her lighter back in her bag. He can't possibly know what her Christmas presents are, but he seems pretty generically invincible and she's quickly running out of tools, no wonder he hasn't taken the bag or broken her wrists or anything yet.
He does not sound like he thinks it is lovely. These are the emphatically fake-cheerful tones of someone sarcastically remarking that it's just wonderful how their house has caught fire and burned to the ground taking with it all of their belongings and their elderly grandmother and the family pet.
Well, of her options, which largely consist of "talking to him" and "not doing that" -
"What does happen if you cut your head off?"
This discussion has taken them to the shore of the lake. There are no creatures around.
His second shoulder wound is starting to heal - he wades the last ten feet to the rocky shore, then puts the queen down on a wet rock and splashes water on the injury so it ices over and stops bleeding.
He'd certainly notice if she started unfolding her pocket house's door to hide in it, and she's not sure he couldn't just beat down the door from its magical freestanding position it gets if she doesn't unfold the house all the way. What if she shot him in the eye - or can she pin him by his clothes to something, long enough to shuffle away -
- no, realistically she can't fight him.
Lighter comes out again. She flicks it on and then flings it at the nearest cluster of plants, some shrubs that start where the shore stones end. Convenient fire. Leave a clue in bright gold to show the knights where she was last able to leave a trail.
Winter looks at her, and looks at the fire, and makes a thoughtful 'hm' sort of noise, and then picks her up again - removing her bag in the process - and throws her into the fire and her bag into the lake. It catches on a jagged rock and sinks only so far.
She sits in the fire, hood up, cloak around her, teeth gritted. If she gets out of this she is taking a rose pin and who cares if it's redundant or stupid to be a knight and a queen, have a pin and a scepter, Jamie, Jamie -
Winter steps into the fire - his clothes catch in a few places, but meltwater from his body puts them out before they can be too badly damaged.
Isabella flings the lighter at a nearby tree.
"Do not doubt that I can find a more effective fire to throw you into," he says, picking her up again. "It was not in my original plan, but you make the option so tempting, with all this foolishness."
The tree catches, but he smothers the fire with a melting hand; the flood of meltwater puts out the bushes, too, on his way through. He stoops to pick up the lighter and flings it into the lake.
From there, he gets under cover of a tumble of tall jagged rocks, and continues carrying Isabella over his shoulder through progressively darker and tighter spaces until there is no light at all and she can only tell the location of the walls when an outlying arm or leg bumps into them. Some sort of tunnel, one must presume.
"What if there wasn't room for your head to grow back?"
"Such as if I were crushed under an enormous rock?" he asks, crouching in the perfect dark to feel along a wall. "I tried that. I passed the next several years as a very flat, very uncomfortable pile of ice shards."
"Have you tried jumping into a volcano? There's one on the Isles. It would probably evaporate all your meltwater on contact."
He shrugs, and finds whatever he's looking for. There is a click and a slight draft. He carries Isabella a short way and then, presumably, closes whatever door he just opened, before setting off again along the new tunnel.
"Swim to the bottom of the ocean. Pressure."
Either this tunnel is opening up, or he's getting better at not banging Isabella's extremities into the walls.
"Electricity. We don't have it here but just rigging up something to generate a shock couldn't be that much harder than getting an oven."
"Could it not? How would you do it, then?"
"I'd look it up first, I have books, but it involves magnets, I remember that."
"And here we come to the reason why I want to irrevocably enrage the King of Narnia."
"You think James will look up electricity and try killing you with it?"
"Not in particular. But I think you have both demonstrated that you are clever people, and you have resources I do not. And of the two of you, the king would have put up a much harder fight on being kidnapped."
"Why didn't you come with those creatures who attacked Cair Paravel if you wanted us to kill you?"
"When those creatures attacked Cair Paravel I was still trying very hard to kill myself and expected to have a far better chance to do it on my own than the defenders of the castle would in battle. And I'd hardly expect you to kill me after capturing me, especially not if it proved very difficult."
"Is not being the Witch's assassin any longer so unbearable?"
"Would you enjoy being feared and loathed by every good creature in the world?"
"You were already that. What changed?"
He doesn't answer immediately.
Well, Isabella has no other pressing engagements.
Finally he says, "I was... happy, under her rule. At least, you could call it happiness. I don't know a better word. But it was not a happiness I chose. And I find that now it is gone, I cannot choose to reclaim it."
"And you don't want to - swim across the ocean looking for nations we haven't even contacted yet to see if you can get a job as a refrigerator, because..."
Silence.
She's waiting.
An answer does not seem to be forthcoming, this time.
"What if James can't kill you, what if you are just immortal, forever, what then?"
"Then I am cursed to be miserable for all eternity."
"And during that time what are you going to do?"
"Continue trying very hard to stop."
"Are you planning to kill me?"
"I haven't decided."
"You don't make sense."
"Do I not?"
"No. For all you know James will just capture you and throw you in the dungeon with few to no implements of suicide. For that matter, don't pretend you couldn't have gotten notice to us that you had this problem and wanted help with it. You have enough of a vicious history to justify execution if it would be hazardous to try to take you alive, we could have figured something out, you don't need to add to the list. I don't understand anything about your pattern of behavior."
"You expect me to believe you would help me? Merely for the asking? You expect me to have heard of your wisdom and your kindness and thought them meant for one such as me? You, Aslan's creature?" He fairly spits the name, as though it causes him great pain merely to speak it. "You're right. You don't understand me at all."
"If helping means killing you? When our citizens flinch at your name, you'd think we'd keep you alive, risk good creatures to take you that way, if you wanted to offer yourself up for creative forms of demise? I'm not saying it wouldn't have been a horrendously awkward negotiation but we don't need or want you alive, not even to punish you!"
They have reached another door, or something like it; he's stopping and touching the walls again.
She pauses.
"James doesn't either. But she wants to. She has for years."
Silence.
"She probably would've talked to you even if it weren't to sit you down and discuss how to get you dead. She's wanted to talk to you since you fought at Beruna. She wants to figure you out."
"And why is Aslan's king," again he utters the name unhappily and with great difficulty, "so interested in the Witch's assassin?"
"She's interested in people. And she's very. Very. Good at learning what makes them tick. If Aslan handpicked us at all it wasn't for uncuriosity."
"Do you enjoy hearing his name?"
"...Yes. I mean, it's worn off a little from the first couple times."
"It is," he says, "the most horrifying thing I have ever felt."
"I don't know enough about the phenomenon to know why that would be."
"When I say you are Aslan's creature I do not mean that he chose you to rule Narnia, though I am sure he did. I mean that you are the sort of person he would choose. The sort who can speak his name unflinching. I am not, and could never be. Perhaps it truly is a curse. I do not know."
"I don't know either. But James would try to figure it out if she had a chance."
He continues walking in silence for a while. Incidents of Isabella bumping into the walls are very rare now indeed.
Still total darkness she can't adjust to?
Yes. Still that.
Damn.
"If I return you unharmed to your king, what do you expect to happen?"
"Returning me in person or just dropping me in the middle of the wilderness to be found and brought home?"
"Either. Both."
"If you drop me off somewhere I will try to find creatures who can find knights and tell Jamie I'm all right and have someone pick me up. And then I will tell her about this conversation and she will come to conclusions I can't predict because I don't have this talent of hers. And might try to get a message to you somehow - you must have some source of news, you set up the venue for the music festival. The contents of which message I can't predict because I am not James. If you carry me all the way to Cair Paravel and knock on the door some knight serving a guard post might decide to attack you, but James would probably get me to safety and then - look at you and try to figure out what you were going to do."
"And would you lock me in your dungeon and destroy the key, or would you try very hard to kill me?"
"I'd have to talk that over with James. But if this conversation has made it sound like I have some serious objection to you dying then you're very much mistaken."
He sets Isabella down on the floor, which is made of rough chilly stone.
"But I do not want to kill you," he adds, softly.
Isabella quietly pats the stone surrounding her, investigating its dimensions and possible sharp protrusions.
"Even we could run out of ideas eventually."
"And so you see why I might prefer you to be as strongly motivated as possible," says Winter.
"There are only so many things around. It is fairly unrealistic that we will come up with a Narnian space program to launch you into the sun within our lifetimes. And I'm concerned you might drown the sun even if there were conventional physics at work here, which I'm not sure of. ...Why haven't you tried going back to Earth? Have you?"
"You ask why I haven't and then ask if I have?"
"Well, I was first assuming that if you'd tried you'd likely have managed it, but then I wasn't sure."
"I have tried, and failed. But even if I went back..." He trails off.
"Then you'd be some kind of ice monster on Earth. But Earth has more possibilities for trying to kill you if you found being a live ice monster there disagreeable. Walk into Chernobyl. Investigate industrial chemicals."
A faint rustle of clothing, as of someone pacing in the dark. His voice moves with the sound.
"This is all I am," he says. "This is all I know. To be the scourge of kingdoms, to bring fear to the hearts of good creatures, to be hated. I would - it would be the same game on a bigger board. Do you wish that on them? Do you want to see me try to make the people of Earth very desperate to kill me?"
"No. But they have a better chance than I do of launching you into space. And - I don't know exactly how long ago in Narnian years you came here. But it couldn't have been much more than a century, that I know. And declaring that you can't learn to be anything else before you've even learned to be a hundred and fifty seems too pessimistic."
"Does it?" He's pacing faster now. "Does it, Daughter of Eve? You who have never tasted the fruit of the garden, never felt its curse? You, who have never spent one year as her majesty's creature, let alone a hundred? You would tell me I am too pessimistic?"
"Fruit?"
"Come in by the gold gates or not at all," he recites, "take of my fruit for others or forbear; for those who steal or those who climb my wall shall find their heart's desire and—find—despair." He half-growls, half-sobs the last word, and it sounds like he also punches a cave wall.
"My queen commanded that I journey to the garden and eat of its fruit, that I might live forever in her service." Pace. "I did not refuse." Pace. "I read the verse, and went in by the gate, and ate three apples." Pace pace. "And I was happy, for a time, and did not think much on the words I read at the gate." Pace pace pace. "I have found despair now, you may be sure."
"I had noticed."
He laughs bitterly.
"If you quoted it right," she says, "it doesn't say it's permanent."
"It also claimed I would find my heart's desire, and I have not. But I do not care to wait for it any longer."
"Do you know what it would be?"
"Not this. Not any of this. Not anything I have ever done or had or felt in my life, most especially not since I came to Narnia. Though my mortal life was no bright summer's day either."
"I bet James could figure it out."
"And when she tells me my heart's desire is to be dead, which I assure you it currently is, what then?"
"Then we get some dwarves to bring us some magnets and we try the electric chair."
Snort.
Pace. Pace. Pace.
"Can I have my cordial?" dares Isabella.
"To what end?"
"I got knocked around and bled on after the last time I had some. I can't do anything with it except heal, and you're not freezing the lake anymore so I can't even inconvenience you that way."
He thinks about it for a few seconds, and then says very abruptly and emphatically—almost as though afraid— "No."
"Why?"
Silence.
And her ring. Which might actually lead her out of here but only if Winter didn't stab her for trying.
Hugs, Jamie.
After a moment, her hugs are returned.
Okay, so James knows she's alive. The hugs are not very high bandwidth but they are nice. It's cold in here.
"I - I can't - I don't know if I can bear to kill you but I know I can't bear to live," he whispers. "It hurts too much."
"James could figure you out," murmurs Isabella. "If there's anything you could live with she could find it. But if you do kill me, she will know that you did it to get her to kill you. And you will have forfeited any remaining claim on her efforts if it's safer or easier to throw you in the dungeon."
He growls.
She stops pushing her luck. For the moment.
And now he's crying. That is a thing that is happening.
...Try to sneak or don't try to sneak? Ring, which way is Jamie?
The ring tentatively points just to one side of the sound of Winter's crying, which is getting louder with time.
So she'd have to go around him. And might step on him or something, which is a guaranteed disaster however loud he's being. Can the ring do a detour...? She rubs the knotwork under her thumb. Do you have another idea, ring?
Apparently the current best route is definitely right past Winter, and it is not a very good route at that. The ring seems almost apologetic.
It is not a very good route. Damn it, Winter, why can't your emotional incontinence lead to tactical incompetence? She shifts her weight, sends another ring-hug.
Ring-hug immediately returned.
"She can find me. She will. You'll probably like the results better if I've had some cordial when she gets here."
"Aslan's creature," he snarls. "Still knows how to threaten. Much good may it do you. Shall I sprout wings and fly you to Cair Paravel next?"
"I don't know, maybe if you stabbed yourself in the shoulders enough you could make ice wings, I don't know what you are."
"Cursed!" he spits. "Damned! To live forever in unbearable suffering! I cannot, I cannot!" And he breaks down crying again.
She hasn't tried to walk without her scepter in a very long time. Slowly, she stands up. She puts her hood up all the way over her face (no light to even worry about blocking), winces silently at the frozen spot on her hand that she accidentally aggravates moving her hand. Draws her cloak completely around herself.
Follows the ring. Tiptoe by soft careful tiptoe.
As soon as she touches him, he lets out an agonized wail and cringes away.
She flinches back, trips. How narrow is this tunnel? She tries to find the wall.
Winter's crying may be winding down, or just experiencing a temporary lull.
She shuffles perpendicular from Winter, trying to find a wall to follow in his direction and hug on her way out.
The wall she eventually touches is rough and uneven, much like the floor over which she walks.
Quieter crying. Silence.
She stops when he stops crying.
Sniffle.
Isabella doesn't say anything. Right now he may not know exactly where she is, which might be useful, and if he starts crying again she can shuffle forward again.
"Sit down," he says tiredly, "you're only going to hurt yourself."
She sits, leaning against the wall.
"How far do you expect to get even if you did manage to climb over me without my noticing? These tunnels will bear no light, most of them. You don't know how to find a door, or how to open one if you could. And that's if you don't get hopelessly lost or trip on the floor and break your skull."
"James will find me."
"You seem very sure of that."
"Are you not? You want her to find us and if you thought she'd have trouble with it we wouldn't be down here."
"There are a lot of places I could have brought you that aren't a lightless dead-end tunnel with a secret entrance if I wanted to be found while I was still in the middle of deciding whether or not to kill you," says Winter.
Isabella wraps up a little snugger in her cloak.
Ring hugs.
(Ring hugs back.)
"But you are very sure that James is going to find you," he says, "so perhaps I should be looking for more magic tricks, hm?"
"Any number of creatures could have seen which way you went and when they find the cave entrance they can track us by scent and see by sonar. There are dog knights, and at least one bat."
"No," says Winter. "No, I don't think so."
"There is a bat. Order of the Currant. His name is Aleek."
"But that is not why you believe James will find you. You believe that for some other reason. What is it, I wonder?"
"She won't stop looking until she has."
"Probably true. But depending on what exactly happens to you down here, it might take her a very long time indeed. And that, you do not seem to expect."
"I'm very concerned about the possibility that you will kill me, but I can't do very much about it so I'm concentrating on possibilities in which you do not."
"You were ready to sneak past me into a dark tunnel with no knowledge of what awaits you there except that a safe path must exist because I used it to get here. Would you like to know what I think? I think you have something that will lead you to James or James to you, whoever manages it first. Without that, your chances in those tunnels are much, much worse than your chances with me."
"And now," he says, "I must decide what to do about that."
Isabella wraps up tight in her cloak.
Silence.
Even if she came up with a clever diversion now it would have taken suspiciously long to come to mind.
"I don't want to kill you," he murmurs.
"I don't want you to kill me either."
"I noticed that."
"So we're agreed on you not killing me then, yes?"
"I don't..." He trails off and doesn't finish the thought.
"...don't what?" she asks after a reasonable pause.
"It doesn't matter, never mind."
Isabella's not so sure of that, but, well.
"Aslan's creature," he murmurs, wincing audibly over the name but not as badly as he did the last few times he said it.
"You keep saying that."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you are. Because..."
"Because I like his name?"
"I don't think it's the curse, that makes it hurt to hear it," he says, not quite answering. "I think that part is all me..."
"Even for people who like it it's different person to person."
"When Narnia belonged to Jadis, I had a place here. I - 'chose' to be hers much the way a trapped creature chooses not to chew off its own leg quite yet, but there was a place for me, and I took it. But this is Aslan's world now, and Aslan's king and queen rule in Narnia, and I... I do not think I have any hope left."
"You took the muzzle off."
"It hurt me to hurt him."
"And you saw us there, but you didn't tell the Witch. And he spared you, which I think was at least intended as a mercy. Is it only his name, whatever happens when you hear it -?"
"It's not always exactly the same. But it's always... a great terror. Like looking over the edge of a cliff into a black void, and knowing that if you fall, you will fall forever."
"I get the sensation that I'm going to be very busy forever."
He almost manages not to flinch from the name.
"And I... think now that I have already gone over the edge." He sighs. "I will give you your cordial. And then I will take you out of this place and wait for your rescue, if it has not already arrived."
"Thank you."
He takes her cordial out of his pocket and moves carefully toward her until he touches her cloak.
She takes the cordial out of his hand and drinks a drop.
"Probably best if I carry you out. No end to the trouble you could stumble into even just following me."
If he'd kept her scepter instead of flinging it aside - "If you must."
"It was many years before I could walk these tunnels safely without a guide, and with a guide I often hurt myself at first, sometimes very badly. If you want to walk it yourself, I will carry your cordial, so that when you fall it will not be lost and I can give you some."
"I will keep my cordial. I suppose I'd rather be carried more than trip into a mineshaft."
He picks her up and carries her out of the dead-end tunnel.
Which is not the most comfortable Isabella has ever been, but she doesn't complain. Ringhugs - three in succession, just to differentiate them: something has changed.
Ringhug, ringhug, ringhug.
The path he takes corresponds exactly with the path that the ring says would lead to James.
Isabella notes the draft, tries to keep loose track of step count and twists and turns but not doing a particularly good job of it.
And then he opens another door, and goes through, and shuts it, and carefully puts the queen down on her feet.
"It's safe enough for you to walk from here."
So she finds the wall with one hand, and she walks, slowly, carefully.
The direction to James seems to be changing awfully... fast.
Isabella goes on following the wall in James's direction. She keeps her hood down over her face.
After only a few more steps, the wall is no longer headed for James. The direction to James is perpendicular to this wall.
Isabella doesn't really want to try to walk in the dark away from the wall.
Ringhug. If you've got an idea, Jamie...
And the faintest, faintest little bit of light - so little you could almost think you imagined it - and a shadowy figure in the imperfect dark, sword in one hand and scepter in the other, lunging for Winter where he walks several steps behind Isabella.
He does absolutely nothing to stop her putting her sword through his heart.
And now it is safe for James to turn and give Isabella the scepter.
Which Isabella takes, squinting against even its tiny light. Sureness comes back to her feet. And now she can marginally relax, leaning on her scepter.
"I have her, she's safe," James murmurs, presumably to some knights - the staff of the orders of knighthood is in its usual position on her backpack, close enough to speak to if she turns her head just like so. "No one else here but Winter and he's dealt with for now."
"I should get a pin," says Isabella. "As soon as we get home I'm taking one of those pins. ...He wants to die. He's tried most things but not literally everything."
"...And his latest trick was 'kidnap the queen'?" guesses James. "And then...?"
"He wanted to make you angry enough to figure out a way to kill him."
"And he doesn't seem to have been pursuing that goal just now, so what changed?"
"He didn't want to kill me. ...And I was very clear that I didn't think we had any strong reason to keep him alive per se."
"We're close enough to Cair Paravel that I might not even need to ask a knight to haul him to the dungeon for me... I did not know there were secret tunnels under Narnia. I'm a little alarmed that Winter did."
"Apparently they're very dangerous. He carried me through most of them."
"We're going to have to have these entrances filled in or something... but the first thing I need to do is get Winter into the inescapable dungeons of Cair Paravel and then publicly announce that I have done so."
"Yeah. How much of my stuff besides the scepter was retrieved?"
She contemplates the frozen Winter for a second and then tips him carefully forward at an angle and starts dragging him out of this cave.
Isabella follows, slowly adding to the light.
It's a fairly short walk through a fairly straightforward tunnel, with only one switchback and no branches, before they emerge into a roundish cave that is much like the one the secret door was in except that instead of a secret door it has a wide surface entrance screened by bushes. James has a bit of difficulty getting Winter through the bushes.
Isabella holds branches out of the way as best she can.
There is James's horse, and there is Isabella's.
They go straight home. There is no salvaging the music festival. A rat knight and a raven one are studying the bridge to find that it was not sabotaged as Isabella feared; some naiads are breaking up the ice so it will melt quicker; but no one is in the mood for music any more.
At Cair Paravel, based on what they remember from the last time James put a sword through Winter's heart, they think they have about a minute between extracting the king's weapon and Winter being functional again. This is enough time to shove him into a cell and slam a door.
He doesn't so much as turn around to see where he is and who put him there. When he comes to life again, he sits on the floor - 'collapses' might not be too strong a word - and puts his face in his hands and cries very quietly.
First she has to announce through every available channel that Winter has been captured and is locked in the inescapable dungeons of Cair Paravel.
She does that.
And then she would really like to hug Isabella for a very long time.
Isabella would also like that yes please.
So many hug.
And Isabella tells her, in murmurs, between nuzzles, as much as she can remember about the conversation she had with Eternal Winter.
"There is something very weird going on with Winter," says James. "And I don't know what it is. And I'm not sure I can afford to deal with it. He's right that the best thing I can do for Narnia is leave him in the inescapable dungeon forever."
"...He's pretty casual about self-injury. If we do figure out an electrical generator we could toss him an icicle between the bars to stab himself in the heart with so we could open the door long enough to put it in there with him to try when he wakes up. But I kind of doubt it would even actually work."
"Yeah. I doubt that too. And there's just no way, for the sake of the creatures of Narnia, that I could ever let him out. Even if I was sure he wouldn't try anything, even if it was just to throw him in a volcano. For that matter throwing him in a volcano might not be something I'd want to announce to the public. It's a bit too... brutal."
"A bit. I mean, he'd prefer it, but it would be difficult to explain that to a million creatures who are concerned about the extent of our correctional system."
"Yes. The same with the electrical generator, for that matter. Can you imagine trying to industrialize Narnia with that as our first example of the use of electricity...?"
"It wouldn't have to be publicized, since it'd all happen in the dungeon, but yeah. Although I'm still not sure we ought to industrialize Narnia at all."
"It's a nice option to have in case there's ever a situation where it would obviously help."
"Yeah. ...Also I think the electric chair was a really early use of electricity on Earth but I'd have to look it up."
"The impact would be different here... and I'm not sure I like 'conduct a secret project to electrocute our prisoner' much better than 'openly electrocute our prisoner', considering the sort of thing that would happen if people started getting the impression that we sometimes conduct secret projects to do things to prisoners, even if they didn't find out exactly what. It's a mess."
"Yeah. I wonder if he's unconscious while he's stabbed in the heart. We could toss him an icicle occasionally if he'd rather. I don't want to be inhumane to improve our PR for how humane we are, but..."
"But we have a prisoner who desperately wants to die, and if we wanted to kill him we would have to keep trying drastic and awful-sounding measures until we found one that worked. Yeah. And the other thorny PR problem is that any hint he might have been given a chance to escape could send a mild panic around, and actually letting him escape is pretty likely to start a major one, even if 'letting him escape' means something like 'throwing him into a volcano' where we took him out of his cell to kill him but can't verify that he actually died."
"He was loose and there wasn't an active hunt for him for years and people lived with that, but - yeah, it's different if we had him and let him out."
James sighs.
"I wish he'd just asked nicely. I mean - I think I understand what he means when he says there's no way he would ever have thought to do that. But I still wish he'd just asked nicely."
"Yeah. Then it could have been 'Eternal Winter wishes only to pay for his crimes with his life, which is logistically difficult but please don't be alarmed' - and now that would just freak out poor bunnies and dryads and so on who never did anything to deserve it."
"Yeah."
"Well, maybe you can - psychologize him enough to figure out how to make the best of the situation."
Now is hug time.
It is definitely hug time.
Hug is definitely the time that it is.
But after a while of hug time it is notebooking time.
Then she goes down to the dungeon.
Winter is still huddled miserably on the floor of his cell, but no longer actively weeping.
"Winter," she says.
"You're not going to kill me, are you."
"It... presents some serious logistical difficulties," she says.
"Then I don't see what there is for us to discuss."
"No?"
"Does it please you to know you have condemned me to a slightly worse eternal torment than I was already suffering?"
"I can't say that it does, no."
"Then forget me here and set yourself to some more pleasant task."
"...You want me to go away and leave you alone so I don't get upset thinking about your eternal torment?"
"If all that's left to me is the choice not to drag anyone else down with me, then that is the choice I will make."
"I can respect that logic, I think," says James. "But we've already established the part about eternal torment, and I still want to understand the rest."
"Ask, then."
"Why did you kidnap Queen Isabella?"
"You have hatred in you, I think. What I could have done... you would have wanted to destroy me more than anything else, even knowing I wanted the same."
"...It occurs to me to wonder where you think you learned that."
"Don't be coy, Aslan's King. Or are your loyal creatures listening?"
"What were the words... 'you just don't want to admit you got played by an eleven-year-old'," he quotes. "I was there, you'll recall."
"...Pretend, for the sake of clarity, that I don't understand a word you're saying," says James.
"Very well. You stood accused a traitor, and your defense was not that she spoke falsely, nor that you had kept faith in your heart; you said your words were forced, but what you wanted recognized in that moment was your effectiveness, not the depth of your loyalty. Your victory, not your regret for its unintended cost."
"That's... a perspective," she says. "I wouldn't even say it's a wrong one, necessarily. But what all that have to do with me containing hatred? I hope you're not going to tell me I hated the White Witch."
He half-shrugs, still facing away from the bars of his prison, toward the solid stone wall.
"It is... harder to explain than I thought. But I still believe my plan would have worked."
"So - and let's not get into exactly what you were planning to do and whether or not it would have incited my undying hatred, because I don't see that as a productive line of discussion - why didn't you finish what you started?"
"The cost was too high."
"...Do you want to elaborate on that?"
"I found, when it came time to decide whether to kill her, that I did not want to. Even to save myself from eternal torment."
"You have killed people before," James observes.
"I... it would be dishonest to say I've changed," he sighs. "But perhaps also dishonest to say I haven't. I am... not the Witch's creature any longer. I am my own. And Winter's Winter - is no one's assassin. Not even my own."
"I... see."
"Do you truly?"
"I think so."
"A marvel."
"Maybe," she says. "If you want to think of it that way."
"Is your curiosity satisfied, your majesty?"
"Partially."
"I have no pressing engagements."
...She is surprised into a snort of laughter.
Winter giggles.
"Fair enough," she says. "I admit I'm running out of obvious questions..."
"What of the less obvious questions, then?"
"...Why didn't you say anything when you saw us hiding by the Stone Table?"
"It's hard to say," he says, after a pause.
"It's very possible that you could've won," she says, "if you'd caught us there and taken us out before the battle."
"I don't think I wanted to win."
"No?"
"No. I..." He shakes his head. "If we'd won, there would've been no end to it. And I didn't—I couldn't betray her, exactly. I was still the Witch's creature. But I could... just not see you. So I just didn't. I wasn't quite thinking of it in those terms... I wasn't quite thinking of it at all."
"What a complicated person you are," she murmurs.
"Do you mock me, Aslan's King?"
"Why do you keep calling me that, when apparently saying his name feels like falling off a cliff?"
"It is... a choice I have."
"So... when you believe you are hopelessly condemned to eternal suffering, your response is to be as nice to other people as you can, and also to deliberately hurt yourself?"
...He laughs. "You're not wrong."
"I don't think it's mockery to say you're a complicated person."
"Fair."
"Is there any chance you'll tell me where all the entrances to your secret tunnels are so I can have them watched or collapsed or blocked?"
"Not a good one. In case I am somehow ever freed, I want somewhere to hide where it would be very inadvisable indeed to come after me."
"I can respect that, but in the meantime, there are secret tunnels in my kingdom that I don't know about. Nobody other than you has used them to attack the good creatures of Narnia... yet."
"This happy state is likely to continue. Many of those tunnels had been abandoned by everyone but me even before the Witch was killed and all her creatures scattered."
"In that case, you're welcome to only tell me about the ones you think have some chance of being used against me."
"I will think on it."
"All right."
He falls silent.
"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."
"As you like."
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.
"Yes," agrees James.
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."
"How 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?"
"I don't have much hope of finding one at this point."
"Yeah, would've been a bit much to hope for."
"If he can be okay being alive at all, I don't think he can do it in the inescapable dungeons of Cair Paravel."
"That would probably be a higher bar to clear, yeah. Can it be better? We could bring him books to pass the time, if nothing else."
"Books might help a little. I'll ask."
Nod, nod. Squeeze.
"I think this might be the first time we've had this kind of - ongoing problem with no good solution. I don't like it."
"I don't either. Maybe once you've found out what we need to know about the tunnels and so on we can find out if he's at least unconscious while he's heart-stabbed."
"Yeah."
"Which, if he's actually immortal and there's actually no solution, won't really help, but if there's a solution and it just takes us fifty years it could help a lot."
She nods pensively.
Squeeze.
Yes, good, hugs. Hugs are so important.
And eventually sleep. And unrelated tasks, because they have a kingdom to rule.
But a few days later, she finds herself with free time and no pressing tasks to fill it, and she returns to the dungeon.
There is Winter, just as she left him, sitting on the floor facing the bare stone wall.
But she already knew that. She walks up to the bars and stands there for a moment, waiting to see if he's noticed her.
After a minute: "Good morning, your majesty. Or is it night? I've lost track already."
"It's late afternoon," she says. "Hello."
"Good afternoon, then. Are you here to ask after those tunnels?"
"The thought had crossed my mind."
He sighs. "I'll show you the entrances. If you are not afraid to give me a map and some paper and a pen."
"I think I can take that risk," she says dryly.
He snorts. "Do you not fear me, then?"
"...I respect the threat you could be if you wanted to. I believe that you don't want to." She pauses reflectively, then adds, "Also, the damage you can do from within my inescapable dungeons is somewhat limited."
He laughs.
"I did say somewhat."
He laughs harder.
She smiles.
His laughter fades eventually. He grows quiet.
James stays put and doesn't say anything.
"If you keep coming back here, I'm going to be cruel to you eventually."
Well that's... interesting. "I thought you didn't want to hurt anyone."
"I don't. But I'm not..." He trails off; shakes his head. "There will be times when it'll hurt too much and I won't care."
"That... does seem plausible," she says.
"If I ask you not to come here when I'm like that, are you going to ignore me?"
"I think I can decide for myself when I do and don't want to talk to you."
"I'll just feel worse about it afterward."
"I forgive you in advance."
"And you say you respect my threat," Winter snorts. "Tell me that again after I've had a go at you."
"All right, I will."
"...Are you that sure you can hurt me worse than I'm expecting?"
"Yes! This isn't a happy children's story. You are not protected by the power of your inward goodness. And I've not been—" He sighs. "It doesn't matter. You'll find out or you won't. I hope you don't."
"I don't know where you're getting these ideas about my belief in the power of my inward goodness."
...He laughs. "That's fair."
She smiles slightly. "I could bring you some books," she adds. "For something to do that isn't sit and think about how unhappy you are."
"Oh, as you please, your majesty," he says with a deliberate lightness.
"It pleases me to do the best I can for all my subjects."
"Yes, you've made that clear."
James sighs. "I'll just go get that map for you before you change your mind, shall I?"
"A wise king hath Narnia."
She goes. She gets a map and a pen and some paper. She comes back and passes them in through the bars.
"Run along," he says, making no move to turn around and pick them up. "I'll be a while at this."
"...I'll return in a few hours, then," she says. "And I'll see what I can get Isabella's magic bookshelf to cough up for you."
"I used to like Alice in Wonderland," he murmurs.
But she thinks the best she can do is probably to take him at his word.
"I'll see what I can do," she says, and goes.
Isabella, meanwhile, is wrapping up a dispute resolution over the contents of a granary given a complicated will by the owner of the granary itself and some disagreement over how his heirs have to honor his deals with the farming creatures who stored grain there.
James looks in on her, finds this discussion in progress, checks her mail tray in case she has received any important correspondence while she was speaking with the prisoner (she has not), and goes back to find Isabella again.
Isabella has settled the granary dispute and sent the creatures home. "Hi, Jamie."
"Winter's marking tunnel locations on a map, or at least is likely to be. He didn't want to start writing while I was there, for some reason. Also, he says he likes Alice in Wonderland, but I'm not totally sure that isn't some sort of subtle play to increase his own suffering for weird contrary Winter reasons."
"Well, I don't see what harm a copy can do unless he, I don't know, mangles it to the point where the shelf won't take it back and generate a new one," says Isabella. "And that's a pretty minor harm I'm willing to risk if he wants one."
"Yeah. If he finds some way to upset himself with it I can take that into account when I'm deciding what to do about future book requests."
"I could go get it for him, unless you'd rather handle him on your own?"
"No, go ahead," she says. "If you'll be all right. But I'm not sure how he'll take to being interrupted, so it's probably best to wait a few hours before trying to deliver him a book."
"All right, this evening then."
...
Hug.
Hug.
"I already knew that talking to Winter is depressing, it's not new information, I'm not going to change my approach because of it, but wow, talking to Winter is really depressing," she sighs.
"What did he say?"
"Well, he warned me that if I keep talking to him then eventually I'm going to catch him in a bad mood and he'll say something nasty. Relatedly, if you go down there and he tells you to go away, I advise you to listen. I bet he's really good at upsetting people."
"Wouldn't surprise me."
"And he's trying not to show how upset he is about being locked in the dungeon but he is still very much upset about being locked in the dungeon. And I did specifically say I would be back with whatever I came up with from your bookshelf but I don't think he'll be annoyed about it if you bring it down instead."
"Did you find out whether he's unconscious while stabbed through the heart?"
"I didn't ask this time."
"Should I, or hold off?"
"You can if you're curious. I don't have enough information to predict whether it'll upset him but trying not to upset him is mostly a lost cause at this point anyway."
"Yeah."
Slight shrug.
And that evening Isabella gets a copy of Alice in Wonderland out of her magic bookshelf and brings it to the dungeon.
There is a marked map and a pen sitting by the bars, behind Winter, who persists in facing the wall.
Isabella takes the map and pen, and puts the book through the bars.
"Hello."
"Hello. I brought you Alice in Wonderland."
"So you did. Why?"
"I have a magic bookshelf, so I could easily get a copy, and if you must be depressed at least you needn't be depressed and bored."
"And yet that does not explain why you brought me Alice in Wonderland."
"James didn't seem to think it would be a worse idea than her doing it."
"Was she right?"
"Well, I'm not scurrying up the stairs in regret yet, I don't know if you'd have preferred her to visit rather than me."
"I have a question, as long as I'm here."
"Ask."
"Are you unconscious while you're stabbed through the heart?"
"I dream unpleasant dreams."
"Is it better than being awake?"
"No."
"All right then, I won't offer to periodically toss you an icicle."
"An icicle?"
"To stab yourself with. Apparently it wouldn't be an improvement."
"One of us will be back later to swap the book out, if you think of another you'd like." And Isabella heads for the stairs.
"How'd it go?"
"Not too bad. But he has bad dreams while he's stabbed, so that won't help."
"I'm definitely starting to get a sense of why he talks about being cursed so much."
"I wonder if there's anything to learn from the place where he got the apples."
"I'm very hesitant to send an expedition - we can warn people not to eat the fruit, but there's always a chance someone will decide otherwise, and I don't want any repeats of Winter's problem. And there's just no way I could justify personally travelling there, even if I got him to give me directions. Definitely not this year and probably not this decade. Too much else to do."
"Yeah. Send a single trustworthy carnivorous scout, maybe."
"I'm not sure I'm willing to bet the apples aren't somehow tempting to carnivores. Winter's situation fills me with feelings of extreme caution."
Nod.
"One eternally unhappy person in my kingdom is more than enough."
"I'm not sure the immortality is directly interacting with the unhappiness, just making it hard to address."
"He did seem to remember a remarkably apt warning on the gate, didn't he?"
"I don't know how remarkable it is. He hasn't found his heart's desire. Besides, the rhyme indicates you can take fruit for other people just fine, so if we want to believe it entirely we should send people who want to be immortal in pairs."
"I don't know... the White Witch sent him to that garden. The poem warned about despair. Despair ensued. Maybe they're perfectly benign apples of immortality and Winter is just separately doomed, maybe being sent by the Witch was what caused his problem, maybe there are more factors at work that I don't understand, maybe there's an interpretation of the poem that shows how to use them safely... and maybe they're cursed apples that make you immortal at the cost of eventually ending up helplessly suicidal for the rest of eternity. I don't know, and I don't know how to find out, and I don't want to risk it without better information."
"He ate three, we don't know what happens if you don't eat three - but I agree it's not something we want to test. Maybe we should ask Father Christmas."
"Yeah, that's a good plan. Although it's hard to decide between trying to ask him and maybe not getting the chance, and wasting a present on a written question that might not be satisfyingly answered..."
"Well, I got a whole list of questions, last time, and he didn't wait for me to ask them before deciding they were my present, so we might be in a bind having thought of it anyway and might as well think of more things we want to know."
"He did seem to at least lightly imply that he only answers written correspondence that way, but yeah, fair point. Okay. Let's start keeping a list."
Out comes the infinity notebook.
"First question: What should we know about the apples of immortality...? I'm not sure I'm completely satisfied with that phrasing, but it seems good enough to write down."
Write write. "Well, he's Father Christmas, not an evil genie, he might be terse but I don't think we can get more out of him by asking really exactingly phrased questions."
"The phrasing still matters some. For example, if I asked 'what is Winter's problem', which was the first phrasing that sprang to mind, the answer might not be about the apples even though the question was intended to be."
"Ha. We can still ask what Winter's problem is though."
"True."
Isabella writes that down.
"What else might we want to ask him about? Maybe if there are any other surprises like those dark tunnels..."
Nod, nod. "And if Winter left anything out when he marked up the map."
"That too..."
"He tried to get back to Earth and couldn't. I want to know why. Not that I want to be on Earth particularly but I want to know why he found it intraversible."
"That would be useful."
Write write. "And if there's a way to let him die that Father Christmas happens to know. ...Do you suppose Father Christmas gives out mercy killings as presents."
"Well, we can ask."
Sigh. "Not very Christmasy."
"Yeah."
They can't very well visit him when they're in the summer palace for the summer.
They're back in Cair Paravel in autumn and there's Queensday and everyone stuffs themselves on harvest foods and there is a funeral for a knight who was getting on a bit and they have to establish traditions for knightly funerals and there are delights of married life to partake in and a grand ball that Viridian wanted to throw and how did they go this long without noticing that Narnia hadn't invented roof gutters and -
- there is snow, everywhere, deep and crisp and even, and a list of questions in Isabella's notebook.
1. What should we know about the apples of immortality?
2. What is Winter's problem?
3. Are there more surprises in Narnia like the dark tunnels?
4. Did Winter omit anything when he marked the tunnels?
5. Why couldn't Winter go back to Earth?
6. Is there a way to let him die?
7. Is there in general a reliable way to get between Earth and Narnia and back?
8. Are there any magic items lying around we could get without having to wait for you to bring them?
9. What other questions might it be worthwhile to ask you and what are the answers to them?
Father Christmas strolls up to the royal couple and hands Isabella an envelope and a smallish paper packet neatly tied up with string. "Here are your gifts, Eve's Daughter, and yours, Eve's Son." James gets a similarly sized packet of differently coloured paper. "The lighthouses of Narnia's coasts have been restored. I trust you can find creatures to operate them."
"Definitely."
"Merry Christmas," says Isabella cheerfully.
He smiles and nods to each of them and sweeps out of the room.
Isabella opens her envelope.
1. What should we know about the apples of immortality?
They cannot be safely picked or consumed except at Aslan's own personal instruction. Any who try under other circumstances will find the results more unwelcome than otherwise.
2. What is Winter's problem?
It isn't my business to say.
3. Are there more surprises in Narnia like the dark tunnels?
Not presently.
4. Did Winter omit anything when he marked the tunnels?
You will find his map entirely sufficient to your purposes.
5. Why couldn't Winter go back to Earth?
The way was not open to him.
6. Is there a way to let him die?
No, and nothing like it.
7. Is there in general a reliable way to get between Earth and Narnia and back?
Not that you would call truly reliable.
8. Are there any magic items lying around we could get without having to wait for you to bring them?
You have the means to find out. Enjoy your search.
9. What other questions might it be worthwhile to ask you and what are the answers to them?
It is not in my nature to be an oracle.
Isabella hands the letter to James and opens her other parcel.
James looks at the compass, and the bracelets, and the letter. "'Enjoy your search'?" she murmurs thoughtfully.
Isabella puts the bracelets on.
The compass points at Isabella. The bracelets tug very gently and subtly in the direction of the compass.
"Hmmm," says James.
Isabella lets her arms be guided compasswards.
"We both got... finding-ish sorts of things, it looks like," says James. "We could follow them around and see what they find us." She stifles a yawn. "Tomorrow. I was up early this morning."
The compass needle swivels. Now it points towards the corridor that James would take if she went to bed.
"I'm going to go see if Winter's awake, let him know what the letter says," sighs Isabella.
She hugs her wife and follows her compass to bed.
And down Isabella goes.
Someone is giggling down there! It sounds like Winter, but a Winter who is much less unhappy than usual.
That's weird.
Isabella continues down.
Inside of Winter's cell, there is a picnic blanket spread on the floor and provisioned with an exquisite Christmas dinner for two. Sitting across from Winter at the blanket is Father Christmas.
Isabella is momentarily struck speechless.
Winter doesn't notice her at first, being too busy laughing, and then as his giggles fade he proceeds to be too busy eating dinner.
"Um," begins Isabella.
He startles. "Where'd you come from?"
"Upstairs. I was going to tell you something about one of my Christmas presents that's relevant to you but then I was surprised."
"...What?"
"I asked - you didn't already tell him, did you? If you're going to tell him yourself there's no point in me interrupting," Isabella says, switching to addressing Father Christmas.
"And you said no, I'd wager."
Father Christmas nods.
"Wonderful," mutters Winter. "Merry Christmas to me."
"I'm sorry. I thought you'd want to know."
Winter sighs. "Thank you, your majesty."
And she goes upstairs again to bed with her spouse.
James is sleepy but not quite asleep; she snuggles up cozily when Isabella arrives.
"They were having a picnic," Isabella yawns.
"Who?" mumbles James.
"Winter 'n Father Christmas."
"...I'll think about that in the morning," she decides. Snuggle snuggle. Snuggle snuggle sleep.
Snuggle sleep indeed.
"...I guess a picnic was the best present Father Christmas could give him?"
"Maybe. I assume it hasn't happened before, but maybe this year Winter would finally welcome the visit?"
"Maybe... I bet Father Christmas would've had a hard time bringing him a picnic while he was being crushed under a rock, too, for that matter."
"Yeah. And back when Jadis was around he couldn't visit anyone."
Nod nod.
"But maybe they'll do it again next year, it's the sort of thing that could recur."
"Yeah... I'm wondering whether visiting Winter in his cell on Christmas would be a good idea or a bad one."
"He didn't seem to mind my being there very much but I didn't loiter."
"I have a year to think about it, I guess. But I might go visit him. On the theory that if Father Christmas has a picnic with him I might get to talk to Father Christmas for a while, and if Father Christmas doesn't have a picnic with him I can try to have a picnic with him instead in case that helps. But if it just seems to upset Winter I can not try it again the next year."
"Yeah, that all seems reasonable."
"Okay, it's Christmas, let's go do something that's not at all depressing."
"Snowball fight?"
There is a royal snowball fight. It's adorable.
There's ice skating, later, although it takes a couple twisted ankles before the cobbler making the skates really has them down (thank goodness for Isabella's cordial) and there's hot beverages by frosty windows and there is sledding and there are songs in praise of Aslan sung through cold clear air. There is, in short, winter.
There's also Winter. James keeps visiting him and insinuating that she might like to join the picnic, next year; Isabella feels no such urgency and doesn't want to add noise to whatever data James hopes to collect from the exercise, so she makes no plans to go, busying herself instead with the emancipation of rebellious centaur foals and safety precautions in certain hunting grounds for speaking instances of prey species and the small health crisis caused by the discovery that the cornucopia can do cotton candy. Isabella practices harp and dances in the air on her air-walking shoes and when her old calligraphy teacher dies she takes over the class, showing small dryads and dwarves how to form pretty letters and decorate them.
The magic-detecting bracelets see use; Narnia proper is a bit picked clean but there are still a few things hiding in out of the way places where the Witch's followers couldn't dig them up, and more on the outlying islands. It is tremendous fun figuring out what they all do, and where they will best be put to use - most found objects, not being so customized for royal use as Christmas presents, find themselves turning the wells of small towns raspberry-scented or showing the stars on cloudy nights to centaur astronomers or rocking puppies to sleep or giving rides through the air to miscellaneous rodents. One or two objects seem to have no benign purpose at all, and after careful study they are destroyed.
Both monarchs are occupied with making sure the maps they have are better distributed, for the ease of the creatures who have reason to move about Narnia, or would if it were easier. Maps are alas not terribly responsive to up-to-the-minute weather conditions and some knights have to be deployed to rescue a party of tourist rabbits from a flooded bit of valley. Someone wants royal sponsorship for his book of the history of the Golden Age, beginning with the White Witch's defeat and going on from there, and he gets it. The rulers in question are epithized in this book as King James the Wise and Queen Isabella the Clever, which amuses the named parties very much. "The Golden Age" is published in time for copies to be sold in a little booth on Queensday, and a second volume is to be expected after a few more years have gone by and some more history has occurred.
Autumn concludes and its bright colors shrivel up and blow away.
And then there is -
He accepts the offer of another book after the first, and another, and another. He says that he does not mind if James joins his picnic. He gets better at concealing his despair, but never good enough to actually succeed, at least not in hiding it from the king. He does not ever quite get into a bad enough mood to be cruel to her, but there are a few times when she shows up and he refuses to speak at all.
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.
Christmas arrives.
James returns from the picnic well past midnight, carrying an unopened parcel. She flops into bed and falls asleep immediately.
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.
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."
"I'll keep an eye out for it."
"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."
"Maybe I'll go. If you don't think he'd object. Or I can ask myself, I suppose."
"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."
"Maybe I won't, then. I have a while to decide."
"Yeah."
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 -