Finally she spins on her toe to face Winter, who may still be on the floor in his careless way but has surely recovered from the blow by now. "You," she says, "must go to the lion, and tell him that I desire safe conduct to treat with him on a matter of as much importance to him as to me. Go peacefully, I do not mind if you alarm the pitiful creatures who side with him but do not harm them while I seek parley. Do you understand, my Winter?" She bends to crook her first two fingers under his chin to turn his head up for frigid eye contact, inspecting him, thinking furious thoughts to which he's only an accessory. "I think the lion may be unnerved to see you. We will see."
"Very well," says the queen, and she calls out a few servants who she will trust to guard her wand, scritches Winter's hair, and proceeds towards the hill. She sheds both wand and servants at the oak in question, and proceeds, with Winter and leopards, to the Stone Table.
"Delaney Hammond, huh?" says James, sheathing her sword, as soon as she judges Winter well out of earshot. "Makes sense."
"I guess if you aren't going to come back out again time has to keep going without you," muses Bella. "I wonder what happened to him, though?"
"I'll just bet he came in and met the witch queen," says James. "And didn't have any friends for her to entice. So she did - that to him, instead."
"I'm not sure whether that reaction was offended dignity, or... something else," she says. "But my money's on something else, even if I don't know exactly what. And I definitely don't advise saying it to him again. I'm pretty sure he would've tried to kill you on the spot if he hadn't held back at the last second for the sake of diplomacy."
"Yeah. It's sort of - compensating for the fact that I don't know how to use it, teaching me as I go along."
She approaches Aslan quite steadily. (There is a chill in the air at her approach, though the wand is gone.)
"You have," she declares, "a traitor there, Aslan."
"Tell you!" cries the Witch. "Tell you what is written on that very Table of Stone which stands beside us? Tell you what is written in letters deep as a spear is long on the fire-stones on the Secret Hill? Tell you what is engraved on the very scepter of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea? You at least know the magic which the Emperor put into Narnia at the very beginning. You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill."
"And so that human creature is mine. Her life is forfeit to me. Her blood is my property."
"What!" says James, very nearly at the same time. She is about to go on, but visibly cuts herself off and settles for an indignant stare.