Here, sitting by herself writing in a prettily-bound notebook, is a twelve-year-old. Must have skipped a couple grades.
"The roof wouldn't be a particularly good place to put beehives, in terms of logistics or in terms of things for the bees to eat. And you need a fair number of of beehives to get enough surplus honey to sell more than a handful of jars. You can do a little beekeeping in your backyard, if you only want a small quantity, but the equipment's expensive for a high-school budget and you wouldn't get very much return on the investment," says Isabella. "There are easier ways to make money."
"A kid falls into a magical wardrobe and finds a land full of talking animals and fantasy creatures; a thinly veiled Christ allegory makes her Queen and she reigns for a fifteen-year Golden Age before being abruptly shunted home and finding that she is ten again and the wardrobe is no longer magic."
She almost but doesn't quite touch her cross necklace; she drifts into an almost British accent.
"My parents," she says, accent snapping back to standard American, "are the sort of loosely Christian who don't actually do anything about it, and my mother likes to flirt with New Age and Eastern spirituality on an unpredictable schedule. I'm Christian but not any specific kind - I haven't found a church I fit."
That afternoon is AP English, which Isabella attends. Partway through she is excused to the restroom. She doesn't bring her notebook along, although she does close it on her class notes - without so much as putting a bookmark between the oddly parchmentlike pages - before she goes.
Four thrones, three empty and in one of them a girl, who looks just like Isabella but a few years older, in queenly raiment with scepter and crown.
A map, pasted in in index-card-sized installments from some other source, of a place that seems unlikely to exist on the geography teacher's globe.
A to-do list with items like "expecting messenger from Archenland" and "consult Mr. Tumnus about rescheduling appointment with representative from the winged horses".
He pauses with a thoughtful look, then continues, "And besides, we were trying to make friends before you were apparently a magic princess. I'm definitely not going to be a jerk now!"
"Once upon a time a ten-year-old girl fell into a magic wardrobe in an abandoned mansion. She met fauns and dwarves and talking animals and dryads and unicorns and griffins and Father Christmas and an evil witch and a thinly veiled Christ allegory, all of whom were very excited about the land seeing its first human in centuries, and when the evil witch was defeated and the hundred-year winter thawed into a new spring, she was crowned the queen of Narnia and ruled for a fifteen-year Golden Age, and she had dozens of mostly magical Christmas presents, and then - she got on her horse and went for a ride and wandered past the wrong tree - and came out the wardrobe again and found that she was ten, wearing her old jeans and her old t-shirt and her old sneakers, and all her gifts were gone except for her infinity notebook. And the wardrobe. Was. No. Longer. Magic." Shrug. "So she remembered the way back to her father's house, and went - home."
"Yeah. Talked my mom into it and went with her. I wanted a bow and arrows, and it's convenient to explain the accent lapses and the calligraphy and a few other things. I considered begging for riding lessons but there's no way I'm getting my own horse so it's not necessary to explain why I can handle one."
"I'm fairly sure I have to have been shunted back for some reason. It may have been impossible to make the time continue to match up in such a way that my parents wouldn't miss me, that's my dominant hypothesis. I've tried the wardrobe again, it's just - it doesn't work anymore. I don't know what else to try."
"Something might be weird about the wardrobe that you could study. But when there's an obvious Jesus allegory walking around and actual physical Santa Claus delivering magical presents, I guess you can't expect normal rules to apply. Maybe it's astrology and there won't be another time it can work for decades."
"The first King and Queen of Narnia back when it was made were humans, but their descendants thinned out the human-ness into the surrounding populations pretty thoroughly to the point you would never notice. And, well, Aslan, in his way. I don't know if Father Christmas used to have a presence here and was only shoved out by the general Earthly hostility to magic later, or what."
"If it makes it easier, I have fairly thoroughly looked through branches of Christianity practiced today and I don't think any of them are right. I'm also not in the least confident that the Bible as popularly translated contains exclusively non-apocryphal content, or includes all of same. I'm not so much a Christian exactly as I am someone who has met Aslan and thinks his local name was probably Jesus."
"Well, yes. I'm not sure why Aslan did the legwork while the Emperor was inaccessible, but it's possible the Emperor was busy elsewhere, just like Aslan slipped off to do other things shortly after I was crowned. There are two worlds, I see no reason there shouldn't be more."
Here they are, sitting at a bus stop waiting to be carried away to a place where they can borrow horses and go on a trail ride, and the bus is just pulling up, and there is a peculiar and displeasing pulling sensation that is not normally associated with buses -
"This could be Narnia," says Isabella, "but then it could be somewhere else altogether - I'll be able to get a good guess when the sun sets and I can see the stars, but we might want to have made progress towards a source of water besides what we have on us before then. I don't immediately see civilization and none of these trees look awake to me. Unless one of you heard or saw or smelled a spring back in the direction of the thicket we probably want to walk along the beach until we find a stream emptying into the sea."
"If you see a boat out on the water, or anything by the shore that looks like people made it, etcetera, let me know. Unless one of you has matches or something on you it's not worth the time it would take to build a fire, and therefore not worth hunting up and carrying around any seafood we run across, but if you see berries or something that look appetizing I might be able to identify them."
Their path curves right. They cross a bit of rock that runs out into the water until it comes to a point. There's a sharp turn, and more land is visible off in the distance. "Can you two swim?" asks Bella. "I'm beginning to wonder if we're on an island. We might still find a connecting bit of land, though, soon or at lower tide."
"Okay," she says, "I see a stream over there, we should go hydrate and then follow it inland and see if there's anything to see there."
She starts walking again.
When she's turned a few corners, and found a well -
"I think this is Cair Paravel. I didn't think it would ever fall apart like this - I didn't have an heir named, but there were some competent people, there was a household, why wouldn't it have gone on being occupied - how long has it been? Fifteen years passed in no time, I suppose it could have been centuries, long enough to turn the peninsula into an island and overgrow the apples and wreck my castle - but oh if we're here, if it was abandoned early on and not after some period of infighting -"
Her accent is very thoroughly Narnian now.
"- then some of my things might be here, put away, maybe, I don't see anything much just lying around, my cloak and bag and scepter and bow and so on were probably all left where I disappeared and I don't know if anyone would have recovered them but the bookshelf at least wouldn't be trivial to move away from the castle -"
She leads them through the ruins, consulting her notebook's old map of the layout of Cair Paravel, until she finds what used to be the library. There are books in various but unpromising states of disrepair, and shelves for them, and also one short ordinary-looking bookshelf with nothing on it at all.
Isabella falls to her knees in front of it and touches the wood and it is suddenly and totally full of books - a set of encyclopedias, to be exact.
"Okay," she says, "the drawback of this particular present is you have to know what book you want. So if none of us can come up with the title of a book that will tell us how to build a raft, it won't be any help. But it will do any book you do know of, even Earth books, and we are definitely, truly in Narnia, not just a lookalike."
"If I've been ordering you around, I apologize. Please make yourselves at home inasmuch as you can given the state of the place and collect whatever books you like from the shelf. I'm going to see if there's anything in the storeroom. You may come along if you like."
It's very dark down there, and beginning to dim outdoors, too.
"Oh, I hope, I hope, I hope my scepter's in here," she mutters, descending the stairs carefully.
Isabella makes it to the bottom of the stairs without falling, and feels around until she locates a suit of armor, and pats it down, and then starts rummaging through the shelves. There are clinking noises. She sneezes from the dust. "Holiday dishes - miscellaneous jewelry -" she mutters. "Chess set - boxful of the good linen, probably all rotted now - that'll be my ceremonial sash - my dancing slippers - the ivory set - the nice silverware; why isn't that near the dishes, who put this away last? - my cloak! -" There is a swushing noise as she puts this on. "Oh, if my cloak's here someone did find wherever my stuff fell when I vanished and put it away for me - eugh, embroidered pillows don't hold up well - here's my crown! -" Another pause as she sets that on her hair. "And, come on, come on -"
The room lights up in a blinding flash, and when Suzy can see again, Isabella's in a silvery-blue cloak, holding a brilliantly jeweled staff in one hand, wearing a leafy circlet on her hair, beaming.
"I'll look more majestic when I've found everything else. Although I'll probably have to stick with the jeans and the T-shirt. I doubt anything less sturdy than these boots -" She plucks a pair of boots from a shelf - "has survived. My wardrobe probably was eaten by moths or cannibalized for scraps or both. I should be able to find my belt, though - oh, the cordial, I'm glad to have that but I'm sad no one was using it, I wonder if the berries are growing wild somewhere by now or if the plant died? - it'll last a while on whatever's in it, though - there's my bow!" The bow is gorgeous; so is the quiver of arrows she slings over her shoulders. "Oh I missed it - ooh, my pen - ha! This will serve as a lighter - there's my camera-like thing -" Isabella collects and wears or pockets or bags various objects until she's even more majestic, passing over literal heaps of precious gems while she does it.
"It's amazing this wasn't looted. The jewels you keep staring at are more or less the Narnian-royalty equivalent of arts-and-crafts supplies - not that they weren't valuable, just that during my reign everyone was very keenly aware that you couldn't eat rocks. Take a pocketful of them if you like - could even be useful if we meet people who might want to trade with us. But the magic stuff - I don't see the cornucopia anywhere. That's good, more or less, I hope someone got good use of it, even if it means we're going to eat a lot of apples and whatever I can shoot. But everything else was just sitting here, what a waste, however convenient it is -" Isabella puts her hair in a quick braid and attaches it to her head with a jeweled comb. "Hmm, the horn's missing, too." She pulls out her notebook, clips the pen she was so pleased to find to its cover, and opens it. "But everything else is here. Except the bookshelf and my various infrastructural presents, of course, those are presumably where they were put to begin with."
"Everything except the horn and the cornucopia! Oh, and I'm not sure what will have happened to my berry plant; it was in my window but that whole tower's collapsed. I'm going to look for it; if I can find it and it's growing, it's a good idea to replenish my healing cordial in case something happens."
"Summoned help. Sort of idiosyncratically. I got it pretty late in my reign and never used it myself, but occasionally someone else would have it and blow on it, and someone - not someone in particular, but someone who was in a position to help them - would hear and know where to go."
And, lighted staff leading the way, Isabella climbs around and rummages through ruins, until she is pretty sure that:
"The plant is either dead or relocated. But there's more of the cordial than it looks like - it'll be good for dozens, if not hundreds, of healings, and if we need that many before Christmas I'll be surprised. Although not floored, because we're here now for some reason."
"They'll be kind of worn out, but they're better than nothing, albeit I'm keeping my Earth backpack in the absence of my old bag. There does remain the question of how to get to the mainland when you two can't swim. I can walk there, I have shoes that will let me walk on air, but I can't take you with me. I could walk there and see if there are any boats, but if there's no boats and no creatures willing to give you a ride... I suppose I could attach the magic shoes to an arrow and shoot them back for your use? It's not that great a distance, I think I could make the shot with the good bow even with shoes throwing off the balance."
Isabella strides out, bejeweled and cloaked and even-striding and crowned Queen.
But there does not seem to be anybody living on the shore of the island, even though Isabella tries (dubiously) talking to two gulls, one tree, and the stream they found itself ("in case there's a river god").
She gets some old linens and bundles them into a roughly shoe-sized configuration, and goes out of the ruins to find a clear way to try shooting it, but before she's loosed her burdened arrow, there may be seen a pair of men in armor, in a small boat, coming up the river and holding a struggling bundle.
She shoots.
She grazes one of the soldiers' helmets; they drop their bundle in the water in a panic and wade away, abandoning their boat.
Isabella rushes forward to try to rescue the bundle.
One of Isabella's recovered objects was a little folding knife (ridiculously pretty, like all her things, but also sharp and efficient); soon she's cut the ropes and burlap off of what turns out to be a dwarf.
"Well," says the dwarf, when this has finished up and he's coughed up some water, "whatever they say, you don't feel like ghosts. Ghosts or not, you've saved my life, I'm much obliged to you."
"You're quite welcome," says Isabella.