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When the party has died down, Isabella, for one, is well and truly exhausted. She explores the palace until she finds a room with a bed in it, and into this bed she flops, still in her clothes and holding her staff and carrying the cordial in her pocket. She sleeps late, because the party kept her up so late and she hadn't really slept the night before; but around noon, she stirs, and gets up, and goes looking for James and wherever her backpack may have got to. The backpack she finds in the great hall where the principal mass of the party was; some enterprising creature took both bags from the battlefield at Beruna up to the castle for them, and she only wishes she knew who it was. She takes her bag to her room and carries James's with her and continues looking for her friend.
"Well, we've got to be better than who they were dealing with before, but maybe not as excited."
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."
"Exactly. Because the people here listen to us and at home that would be this entire other step to getting anything done."
"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."
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.
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.
"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.