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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.
"Fair enough," she says. "I admit I'm running out of obvious questions..."
"...Why didn't you say anything when you saw us hiding by the Stone Table?"
"It's very possible that you could've won," she says, "if you'd caught us there and taken us out before the battle."
"No. I..." He shakes his head. "If we'd won, there would've been no end to it. And I didn't—I couldn't betray her, exactly. I was still the Witch's creature. But I could... just not see you. So I just didn't. I wasn't quite thinking of it in those terms... I wasn't quite thinking of it at all."
"Why do you keep calling me that, when apparently saying his name feels like falling off a cliff?"
"So... when you believe you are hopelessly condemned to eternal suffering, your response is to be as nice to other people as you can, and also to deliberately hurt yourself?"
"Is there any chance you'll tell me where all the entrances to your secret tunnels are so I can have them watched or collapsed or blocked?"
"Not a good one. In case I am somehow ever freed, I want somewhere to hide where it would be very inadvisable indeed to come after me."
"I can respect that, but in the meantime, there are secret tunnels in my kingdom that I don't know about. Nobody other than you has used them to attack the good creatures of Narnia... yet."
"This happy state is likely to continue. Many of those tunnels had been abandoned by everyone but me even before the Witch was killed and all her creatures scattered."
"In that case, you're welcome to only tell me about the ones you think have some chance of being used against me."