"Are you going to be like this the whole way?" he inquires, not particularly expecting an answer.
And there, indeed, is the castle. Not far to go.
But that doesn't matter, because she strides out to meet them. She looks expectantly at Winter.
"Your majesty, the lion grants you safe conduct on the condition that you leave your wand behind at the great oak that stands between here and the Table, and he has sent these two easily intimidated leopards to watch and be sure that you do."
"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."
"And he still knows his old name but he doesn't like it. It's peculiar."
"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."