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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 sure they'd have a reason to destroy the wardrobe in particular? They'd have to go into the house to find it in the first place. I'm just imagining the door boarded up, maybe a sign, I don't think they'll torch the place on such a flimsy suspicion. Anyway, there are probably other ways to travel. It'd be too weird if that were the only one. I bet Father Christmas could turn something up if nothing else, although depending on the timing he might not be quite prompt."
"My childhood interest in exploring places where other kids disappeared is how we got here in the first place; a sign would do the opposite of help. No guarantee that they'd be that sensible about it, of course. For that matter I guess we have no way of knowing how long it's actually been on Earth since we left. About a minute there to an hour here means about a week there to a year here, so probably at least a few weeks, but I don't exactly have a precise measurement of the difference and I don't even know if it stays the same all the time."
"Yeah. Do we even know how long Winter was here before we showed up?"
"Not very precisely. With the number of years he was gone on Earth, though, it should've been a long while... longer than the White Witch actually reigned, I think, if the time difference is always exactly the same. So I guess it isn't. Maybe, I don't know, maybe the wardrobe or whatever affects these things will make long visits short if you return quickly but gives up on you after a while if you stay indefinitely. In which case we've been gone for years, probably."
"I guess we could ask Father Christmas but it probably counts as a present and we don't actually want to go back. For one thing, it would be really hard to explain why we're in our teens now."
"Chris could handle it, but then I'd still be some teenager on Earth instead of a King of Narnia. I'm in a much better position to do useful things as a King of Narnia."
"That too. Like, I'm sorry my parents think I have been whisked away by abandoned house monsters but this is a pretty big deal."
"Chris will be fine, I'm sure. I'm pretty glad I didn't have any friends I was especially attached to that I couldn't bring with me."
"I'm glad you did bring me, even though you didn't know it was for keeps."
"I do sometimes wish there'd been more kids I could bring. Not because of anything specific, really, just because if we had twice as many monarchs and they were as good at the job as we are, we could be getting things done faster."
Pause.
"And... I'm slightly conflicted about whether or not I wish we had any Sons of Adam along. Because I'm definitely very happy about this kissing thing we're doing, but there is a traditional way monarchs make more monarchs and it seems unlikely that we'll manage it by ourselves. I mean, maybe one year we'll get immortality for Christmas and make the question of heirs academic, but we haven't yet. And I know it's kind of early for that sort of thing to be on my mind, but that's just the kind of person I am, I guess."
"Yeah... I've picked up that the first king and queen were human and had kids, but their kids didn't have any other humans to marry, though. Viridian thinks she might be distantly descended, it all just bled out into the population. We'd need more than a couple of Sons of Adam and a passing interest in them to solve that long-term. ...And maybe we're not supposed to? If the first dynasty fizzled out like that."
"Yeah... but the first dynasty fizzled out and then the White Witch happened. I'd really like it if we could find enough humans to keep a royal line going indefinitely, even if we have to adopt the first few, or something. It seems like for whatever reason, Narnia does better with humans on the throne."
"I am not having sex with Winter," says Isabella, "just getting that clear up front."
"I mean... does the wardrobe work reliably enough that we should maybe try to get an actual colonizing expedition going? Would having too many humans around wreck things? Humans sometimes wreck things and not everybody can be on the throne at once if we need a sustainable population. Should we put this down as something to do when we're thirty-seven if nothing comes up before then?"
"I'm not sure about too many, but the wrong humans would definitely be a problem. And... it would hurt the kingdom more if we, or even if just one of us, went out the wardrobe looking for colonists and never came back, than if we lived to be a hundred and adopted some dryads or appointed a royal steward or something and then died of old age, I think. But if, say, we find a land full of humans across the sea somewhere, I'm keeping an eye out for adoptable kids who look like they'd grow up to be quality Princes or Princesses of Narnia."
"How do you tell by looking? I mean, I guess I might have been pegged for it when I was like six, but it'd have to be a big land of humans to have anybody that obvious."
"There are different ways to be obvious. I'd have to be a little lucky, but it seems like the kind of luck that's plausible in Narnia, you know?"
"Maybe we'll get human neighbors for Christmas one year. But I'm inclined to leave it to Father Christmas unless it gets to be very worrying. I still think he was teasing me that one year one of my presents was answers to my questions."
"I like Father Christmas. He's so - he has one thing he does, and he's really good at it, and it suits him. And it's such a good thing. I like that."