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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.
"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."
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."
"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."