The Magician King

CHAPTER 1

Quentin rode a gray horse with white socks named Dauntless. He wore black leather boots up to his knees, different-colored stockings, and a long navy-blue topcoat that was richly embroidered with seed pearls and silver thread. On his head was a platinum coronet. A glittering side-sword bumped against his leg — not the ceremonial kind, the real kind, the kind that would actually be useful in a fight. It was ten o’clock in the morning on a warm, overcast day in late August. He was everything a king of Fillory should be. He was hunting a magic rabbit.

By King Quentin’s side rode a queen: Queen Julia. Up ahead were another queen and another king, Janet and Eliot — the land of Fillory had four rulers in all. They rode along a high-arched forest path littered with yellow leaves, perfect little sprays of them that looked like they could have been cut and placed by a florist. They moved in silence, slowly, together but lost in their separate thoughts, gazing out into the green depths of the late summer woods.

It was an easy silence. Everything was easy. Nothing was hard. The dream had become real.

“Stop!” Eliot said, at the front.

They stopped. Quentin’s horse didn’t halt when the others’ did — Dauntless wandered a little out of line and halfway off the trail before he persuaded her for good and all to quit walking for a damn minute. Two years as a king of Fillory and he was still shit at horseback riding.

“What is it?” he called.

They all sat for another minute. There was no hurry. Dauntless snorted once in the silence: lofty horsey contempt for whatever human enterprise they thought they were pursuing.

“Thought I saw something.”

“I’m starting to wonder,” Quentin said, “if it’s even possible to track a rabbit.”

“It’s a hare,” Eliot said.

“Same difference.”

“It isn’t, actually. Hares are bigger. And they don’t live in burrows, they make nests in open ground.”

“Don’t start,” both Julia and Janet said, in unison.

“Here’s my real question,” Quentin said. “If this rabbit thing really can see the future won’t it know we’re trying to catch it?”

“It can see the future,” Julia said softly, beside him. “It cannot change it. Did you three argue this much when you were at Brakebills?”

She wore a sepulchral black riding dress and an actual riding hood, also black. She always wore black, like she was in mourning, even though Quentin couldn’t think of anyone she should have been in mourning for. Casually, like she was calling over a waiter, Julia summoned a tiny songbird to her wrist and raised it up to her ear. It chipped, chirruped something, and she nodded back and it flew away again.

Nobody noticed, except for Quentin. She was always giving and getting little secret messages from the talking animals. It was like she was on a different wireless network from the rest of them.

“You should have let us bring Jollyby,” Janet said. She yawned, holding the back of her hand against her mouth. Jollyby was Master of the Hunt at Castle Whitespire, where they all lived. He usually supervised this kind of excursion.

“Jollyby’s great,” Quentin said, “but even he couldn’t track a hare in the woods. Without dogs. When there’s no snow.”

“Yes, but Jollyby has very well-developed calf muscles. I like looking at them. He wears those man-tights.”

“I wear man-tights,” Quentin said, pretending to be affronted. Eliot snorted.

“I imagine he’s around here somewhere.” Eliot was still scanning the trees. “Discreet distance and all that. Can’t keep that man away from a royal hunt.”

“Careful what you hunt,” Julia said, “lest you catch it.”

Janet and Eliot looked at each other: more inscrutable wisdom from Julia. But Quentin frowned. Julia made her own kind of sense.

Quentin hadn’t always been a king, of Fillory or anywhere else. None of them had. Quentin had grown up a regular non-magical, non-royal person in Brooklyn, in what he still in spite of everything thought of as the real world. He’d thought Fillory was a fiction, an enchanted land that existed only as the setting of a series of fantasy novels for children. But then he’d learned to do magic, at a secret college called Brakebills, and he and his friends had found out that Fillory was real.

It wasn’t what they expected. Fillory was a darker and more dangerous place in real life than it was in the books. Bad things happened there, terrible things. People got hurt and killed and worse. Quentin went back to Earth in disgrace and despair. His hair turned white.

But then he and the others had pulled themselves together again and gone back to Fillory. They faced their fears and their losses and took their places on the four thrones of Castle Whitespire and were made kings and queens. And it was wonderful. Sometimes Quentin couldn’t believe that he’d lived through it all when Alice, the girl he loved, had died. It was hard to accept all the good things he had now, when Alice hadn’t lived to see them.

But he had to. Otherwise what had she died for? He unslung his bow and stood up in the stirrups and looked around. Bubbles of stiffness popped satisfyingly in his knees. There was no sound except for the hush of falling leaves slipping through other leaves.

A gray-brown bullet flickered across the path a hundred feet in front of them and vanished into the underbrush at full tilt. With a quick fluid motion that had cost him a lot of practice Quentin nocked an arrow and drew. He could have used a magic arrow, but it didn’t seem sporting. He aimed for a long moment, straining against the strength of the bow, and released.

The arrow burrowed into the loamy soil up to the feathers, right where the hare’s flashing paws had been about five seconds ago.

“Almost,” Janet said, deadpan.

There was no way in hell they were going to catch this thing.

“Toy with me, would you?” Eliot shouted. “Yah!”

He put the spurs to his black charger, which whinnied and reared obligingly and hoofed the empty air before lunging off the path into the woods after the hare. The crashing sound of his progress through the trees faded almost immediately. The branches sprang back into place behind him and were still again. Eliot was not shit at horseback riding.

Janet watched him go.

“Hi ho, Silver,” she said. “What are we even doing out here?”

It was a fair question. The point wasn’t really to catch the hare. The point was — what was the point? What were they looking for? Back at the castle their lives were overflowing with pleasure. There was a whole staff there whose job it was to make sure that every day of their lives was absolutely perfect. It was like being the only guests at a twenty-star hotel that you never had to leave. Eliot was in heaven. It was everything he’d always loved about Brakebills — the wine, the food, the ceremony — with none of the work. Eliot loved being a king.

Quentin loved it too, but he was restless. He was looking for something else. He didn’t know what it was. But when the Seeing Hare was spotted in the greater Whitespire metropolitan area, he knew he wanted a day off from doing nothing all day. He wanted to try to catch it.

The Seeing Hare was one of the Unique Beasts of Fillory. There were a dozen of them — the Questing Beast, who had once granted Quentin three wishes, was one of them, as was the Great Bird of Peace, an ungainly flightless bird like a cassowary that could stop a battle by appearing between the two opposing armies. There was only one of each of them, hence the name, and each one had a special gift. The Unseen Monitor was a large lizard who could turn you invisible for a year, if that’s what you wanted.

People hardly ever saw them, let alone caught them, so a lot of guff got talked about them. No one knew where they came from, or what the point of them was, if any. They’d always been there, permanent features of Fillory’s enchanted landscape. They were apparently immortal. The Seeing Hare’s gift was to predict the future of any person who caught it, or so the legend went. It hadn’t been caught for centuries.

Not that the future was a question of towering urgency right now. Quentin figured he had a pretty fair idea of what his future was like, and it wasn’t much different from his present. Life was good.

They’d picked up the hare’s trail early, when the morning was still bright and dewy, and they rode out singing choruses of “Kill the Wabbit” to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” in their best Elmer Fudd voices. Since then it had zigzagged them through the forest for miles, stopping and starting, looping and doubling back, hiding in the bushes and then suddenly zipping across their paths, again and again.

“I do not think he is coming back,” Julia said.

She didn’t speak much these days. And for some reason she’d mostly given up using contractions.

“Well, if we can’t track the hare we can track Eliot anyway.” Janet gently urged her mount off the track and into the trees. She wore a low-cut forest-green blouse and men’s chaps. Her penchant for mild cross-dressing had been the scandal of the season at court this year.

Julia didn’t ride a horse at all but an enormous furry quadruped that she called a civet, which looked like an ordinary civet, long and brown and vaguely feline, with a fluidly curving back, except that it was the size of a horse. Quentin suspected it could talk — its eyes gleamed with a bit more sentience than they should have, and it always seemed to follow their conversations with too much interest.

Dauntless didn’t want to follow the civet, which exuded a musky, un-equine odor, but she did as she was told, albeit at a spiteful, stiff-legged walk.

“I haven’t seen any dryads,” Janet said. “I thought there’d be dryads.”

“Me neither,” Quentin said. “You never see them in the Queenswood anymore.”

It was a shame. He liked the dryads, the mysterious nymphs who watched over oak trees. You really knew you were in a magical fantasy otherworld when a beautiful woman wearing a skimpy dress made of leaves suddenly jumped out of a tree.

“I thought maybe they could help us catch it. Can’t you call one or summon one or something, Julia?”

“You can call them all you want. They will not come.”

“I spend enough time listening to them bitch about land allocation,” Janet said. “And where are they all if they’re not here? Is there some cooler, magical-er forest somewhere that they’re all off haunting?”

“They are not ghosts,” Julia said. “They are spirits.”

The horses picked their way carefully over a berm that was too straight to be natural. An old earthwork from an ancient, unrecoverable age.

“Maybe we could make them stay,” Janet said. “Legislate some incentives. Or just detain them at the border. It’s bullshit that there’s not more dryads in the Queenswood.”

“Good luck,” Julia said. “Dryads fight. Their skin is like wood. And they have staves.”

“I’ve never seen a dryad fight,” Quentin said.

“That is because nobody is stupid enough to fight one.”

Recognizing a good exit line when it heard one, the civet chose that moment to scurry on ahead. Two sturdy oak trees actually leaned aside to let Julia pass between them. Then they leaned back together again, leaving Janet and Quentin to go the long way around.

“Listen to her,” Janet said. “She has so totally gone native! I’m tired of her more-Fillorian-than-thou bullshit. Did you see her talking to that fucking bird?”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Quentin said. “She’s all right.”

But if he was being honest, Quentin was fairly sure that Queen Julia wasn’t all right.

Julia hadn’t learned her magic the way they had, coming up through the safe, orderly system of Brakebills. She and Quentin had gone to high school together, but she hadn’t gotten into Brakebills, so she’d become a hedge witch instead: she’d learned it on her own, on the outside. It wasn’t official magic, institutional magic. She was missing huge chapters of lore, and her technique was so sloppy and loopy that sometimes he couldn’t believe it even worked at all.

But she also knew things Quentin and the others didn’t. She hadn’t had the Brakebills faculty standing over her for four years making sure she colored inside the lines. She’d talked to people Quentin never would have talked to, picked up things his professors would never have let him touch. Her magic had sharp, jagged edges on it that had never been filed down.

It was a different kind of education, and it made her different. She talked differently. Brakebills had taught them to be arch and ironic about magic, but Julia took it seriously. She played it fully goth, in a black wedding dress and black eyeliner. Janet and Eliot thought it was funny, but Quentin liked it. He felt drawn to her. She was weird and dark, and Fillory had made the rest of them so damn light, Quentin included. He liked it that she wasn’t quite all right and she didn’t care who knew it.

The Fillorians liked it too. Julia had a special rapport with them, especially with the more exotic ones, the spirits and elementals and jinnis and even more strange and extreme beings — the fringe element, in the hazy zone between the biological and the entirely magical. She was their witch-queen, and they adored her.

But Julia’s education had cost her something, it was hard to put your finger on what, but whatever it was had left its mark on her. She didn’t seem to want or need human company anymore. In the middle of a state dinner or a royal ball or even a conversation she would lose interest and wander away. It happened more and more. Sometimes Quentin wondered exactly how expensive her education had been, and how she’d paid for it, but whenever he asked her, she avoided the question. Sometimes he wondered if he was falling in love with her. Again.

A distant bugle sounded — three polished sterling silver notes, muffled by the heavy silence of the woods. Eliot was sounding a recheat, a hunting call.

He was no Jollyby, but it was a perfectly credible recheat. He wasn’t much for drafting legislation, but Eliot was meticulous about royal etiquette, which included getting all the Fillorian hunting protocol exactly right. (Though he found any actual killing distasteful, and usually managed to avoid it.) His bugling was good enough for Dauntless. She trembled, electrified, waiting for permission to bolt. Quentin grinned at Janet, and she grinned back at him. He yelled like a cowboy and kicked and they were off.

It was insanely dangerous, like a full-on land-speeder chase, with ditches opening up in front of you with no warning, and low branches reaching down out of nowhere to try to clobber your head off (not literally of course, though you could never tell for sure with some of these older, more twisted trees). But fuck it, that’s what healing magic is for. Dauntless was a thoroughbred. They’d been starting and stopping and dicking around all morning, and she was dying to cut loose.

And how often did he get a chance to put his royal person at risk? When was the last time he even cast a spell? His life wasn’t exactly fraught with peril. They lay around on cushions all day and ate and drank their heads off all night. Lately whenever he sat down some unfamiliar interaction had been happening between his abdomen and his belt buckle. He must have gained fifteen pounds since he took the throne. No wonder kings looked so fat in pictures. One minute you’re Prince Valiant, the next you’re Henry VIII.

Janet broke trail, guided by more muffled bugle notes. The horses’ hooves made satisfyingly solid beats on the packed loam of the forest floor. Everything that was cloying about court life, all the safety and the relentless comfort, went away for a moment. Trunks and spinneys and ditches and old stone walls whipped and blurred past. They dodged in and out of hot sun and cool shade. Their speed froze the falling sprays of yellow leaves in midair. Quentin picked his moment, and when they hit open meadow he swung out wide to the right, and for a long minute they were side by side, coursing wildly along in parallel.

Then all at once Janet pulled up. Quickly as he could Quentin slowed Dauntless to a walk and brought her around, breathing hard. He hoped her horse hadn’t pulled up lame. It took him another minute to find his way back to her.

She was sitting still and straight in the saddle, squinting off into the midday gloom of the forest. No more bugle calls.

“What is it?”

“Thought I saw something,” she said.

Quentin squinted too. There was something. Shapes.

“Is that Eliot?”

“The hell are they doing?” Janet said.

Quentin dropped down out of the saddle, unslung his bow again and nocked another arrow. Janet led the horses while he walked in front. He could hear her charging up some minor defensive magic, a light ward-and-shield, just in case. He could feel the familiar staticky buzz of it.

“Shit,” he said under his breath.

He dropped the bow and ran toward them. Julia was down on one knee, her hand pressed against her chest, either gasping or sobbing, he couldn’t tell which. Eliot was bent over talking to her quietly. His clothof-gold jacket had been yanked half off his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he said, seeing Quentin’s white face. “That fucking civet threw her and bolted. I tried to hold it but I couldn’t. She’s okay, she just got the wind knocked out of her.”

“You’re all right.” That phrase again. Quentin rubbed Julia’s back while she took croaking breaths. “You’re okay. I always said you should get a regular horse. I never liked that thing.”

“Never liked you, either,” she managed.

“Look.” Eliot pointed off into the twilight. “That’s what made it bolt. The hare went in there.”

A few yards away a round clearing began, a still pool of grass hidden in the heart of the forest. The trees grew right up to its edge and then stopped, like somebody had cleared it on purpose, nipping out the border precisely. It could have been ruled with a compass. Quentin picked his way toward it. Lush, intensely emerald-green grass grew over lumpy black soil. In the center of the clearing stood a single enormous oak tree with a large round clock set in its trunk.

The clock-trees were the legacy of the Watcherwoman, the legendary — but quite real — time-traveling witch of Fillory. They were a magical folly, benign as far as anyone could tell, and picturesque in a surreal way. There was no reason to get rid of them, assuming you even could. If nothing else they kept perfect time.

But Quentin had never seen one like this. He had to lean back to see its crown. It must have been a hundred feet tall, and it was massively thick, at least fifteen yards around at its base. Its clock was stupendous. The face was taller than Quentin was. The trunk erupted out of the green grass and burst into a mass of wiggly branches, like a kraken sculpted in wood.

And it was moving. Its black, nearly leafless limbs writhed and thrashed against the gray sky. The tree seemed to be caught in the grip of a storm, but Quentin couldn’t feel or hear any wind. The day, the day he could perceive with his five senses, was calm. It was an invisible, intangible storm, a secret storm. In its agony the clock-tree had strangled its clock — the wood had clenched it so tightly that the bezel had finally bent, and the crystal had shattered. Brass clockwork spilled out through the clock’s busted face and down onto the grass.

“Jesus Christ,” Quentin said. “What a monster.”

“It’s the Big Ben of clock-trees,” Janet said behind him.

“I’ve never seen one like that,” Eliot said. “Do you think it was the first one she made?”

Whatever it was, it was a Fillorian wonder, a real one, wild and grand and strange. It was a long time since he’d seen one, or maybe it was just a long time since he’d noticed. He felt a twinge of something he hadn’t felt since Ember’s Tomb: fear, and something more. Awe. They were looking the mystery in the face. This was the raw stuff, the main line, the old, old magic.

They stood together, strung out along the edge of the meadow. The clock’s minute hand poked out at a right angle from the trunk like a broken finger. A yard from its base a little sapling sprouted where the gears had fallen, as if from an acorn, swaying back and forth in the silent gale. A silver pocket watch ticked away in a knot in its slender trunk. A typically cute Fillorian touch.

This was going to be good.

“I’ll go first.”

Quentin started forward, but Eliot put a hand on his arm.

“I wouldn’t.”

“I would. Why not?”

“Because clock-trees don’t just move like that. And I’ve never seen a broken one before. I didn’t think they could break. This isn’t a natural place. The hare must have led us here.”

“I know, right? It’s classic!”

Julia shook her head. She looked pale, and there was a dead leaf in her hair, but she was back on her feet.

“See how regular the clearing is,” she said. “It is a perfect circle. Or at least an ellipse. There is a powerful area-effect spell radiating out from the center. Or from the foci,” she added quietly, “in the case of an ellipse.”

“You go in there, there’s no telling where you’ll end up,” Eliot said.

“Of course there isn’t. That’s why I’m going.”

This, this was what he needed. This was the point — he’d been waiting for it without even knowing it. God, it had been so long. This was an adventure. He couldn’t believe the others would even hesitate. Behind him Dauntless whickered in the stillness.

It wasn’t a question of courage. It was like they’d forgotten who they were, and where they were, and why. Quentin retrieved his bow and took another arrow from his quiver. As an experiment, he set his stance, drew, and shot at the tree trunk. Before it reached its target the arrow slowed, like it was moving through water instead of air. They watched it float, tumbling a little end over end, backward, in slow motion. Finally it gave up the last of its momentum and just stopped, five feet off the ground.

Then it burst, soundlessly, into white sparks.

“Wow.” Quentin laughed. He couldn’t help it. “This place is enchanted as balls!”

He turned to the others.

“What do you think? This looks like an adventure to me. Remember adventures? Like in the books?”

“Yeah, remember them?” Janet said. She actually looked angry. “Remember Penny? We haven’t seen him around lately, have we? I don’t want to spend the rest of my queenhood cutting up your food for you.”

Remember Alice, she could just as well have said. He remembered Alice. She had died, but they’d lived, and wasn’t this what living was about? He bounced on his toes. They tingled and sweated in his boots, six inches from the sharp edge of the enchanted meadow.

He knew the others were right, this place practically reeked of weird magic. It was a trap, a coiled spring that was aching to spring shut on him and snap him up. And he wanted it to. He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off.

“You’re really not coming?” he said.

Julia just watched him. Eliot shook his head.

“I’m going to play it safe. But I can try to cover you from here.”

He began industriously casting a minor reveal designed to suss out any obvious magical threats. Magic crackled and spat around his hands as he worked. Quentin drew his sword. The others made fun of him for carrying it, but he liked the way it felt in his hand. It made him feel like a hero. Or at least it made him look like a hero.

Julia didn’t think it was funny. Though she didn’t laugh at much of anything anymore. Anyway, he’d just drop it if magic was called for.

“What are you going to do?” Janet said, hands on her hips. “Seriously, what? Climb it?”

“When it’s time I’ll know what to do.” He rolled his shoulders.

“I do not like this, Quentin,” Julia said. “This place. This tree. If we attempt this adventure it will mean some great change of our fortunes.”

“Maybe a change would do us good.”

“Speak for yourself,” Janet said.

Eliot finished his spell and made a square out of his thumbs and forefingers. He closed one eye and squinted through it, panning around the clearing.

“I don’t see anything. .”

A mournful bonging came from up in the branches. Near its crown the tree had sprouted a pair of enormous swaying bronze church bells. Why not? Eleven strokes: it still kept time, apparently, even though the works were broken. Then the silence filled back in, like water that had been momentarily displaced.

Everybody watched him. The clock-tree’s branches creaked in the soundless wind. He didn’t move. He thought about Julia’s warning: some great change of our fortunes. His fortunes were riding high right now, he had to admit. He had a goddamned castle, full of quiet courtyards and airy towers and golden Fillorian sunlight that poured like hot honey. Suddenly he wasn’t sure what he was wagering that against. He could die in there. Alice had died.

And he was a king now. Did he even have the right to go galloping off after every magic bunny that wagged its cottontail at him? That wasn’t his job anymore. All at once he felt selfish. The clock-tree was right there in front of him, heaving and thrashing with power and the promise of adventure. But his excitement was slipping away. It was becoming contaminated with doubt. Maybe they were right, his place was here. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

The urge to go into the meadow began to wear off, like a drug, leaving him abruptly sober. Who was he kidding? Being king wasn’t the beginning of a story, it was the end. He didn’t need a magic rabbit to tell him his future, he knew his future because it was already here. This was the happily ever after part. Close the book, put it down, walk away.

Quentin stepped back a pace and replaced his sword in its sheath in one smooth gesture. It was the first thing his fencing master had taught him: two weeks of sheathing and unsheathing before he’d even been allowed to cut the air. Now he was glad he’d done it. Nothing made you look like more of a dick than standing there trying to find the end of your scabbard with the tip of your sword.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Julia.

“It is all right, Quentin,” she said. “This is not your adventure. Follow it no further.”

He wanted to lean his head down and rub his cheek back and forth against her hand like a cat.

“I know,” he said. He wasn’t going to go. “I get it.”

“You’re really not going?” Janet sounded almost disappointed. Probably she’d wanted to watch him blow up into glitter too.

“Really not.”

They were right. Let somebody else be the hero. He’d had his happy ending. Right then he couldn’t even have said what he was looking for in there. Nothing worth dying for, anyway.

“Come on, it’s almost lunchtime,” Eliot said. “Let’s find some less exciting meadow to eat in.”

“Sure,” Quentin said. “Cheers to that.”

There was champagne in one of the hampers, staying magically chilled, or something like champagne — they were still working on a Fillorian equivalent. And those hampers, with special leather loops for the bottles and the glasses — they were the kind of thing he remembered seeing in catalogs of expensive, useless things he couldn’t afford back in the real world. And now look! He had all the hampers he could ever want. It wasn’t champagne, but it was bubbly, and it made you drunk. And Quentin was going to get good and drunk over lunch.

Eliot climbed back into the saddle and swung Julia up behind him. It looked like the civet was gone for good. There was still a large patch of damp black earth on Julia’s rump from the fall. Quentin had a foot in Dauntless’s stirrup when they heard a shout.

“Hi!”

They all looked around.

“Hi!” It was what Fillorians said instead of “hey.”

The Fillorian saying it was a hale, vigorous man in his early thirties. He was striding toward them, right across the circular clearing, practically radiating exuberance. He broke into a jog at the sight of them. He totally ignored the branches of the broken clock-tree that were waving wildly over his head; he couldn’t have cared less. Just another day in the magic forest. He had a big blond mane and a big chest, and he’d grown a big blond beard to cover up his somewhat moony round chin.

It was Jollyby, Master of the Hunt. He wore purple-and-yellow striped tights. His legs really were pretty impressive, especially considering that he’d never even been in the same universe as a leg press or a StairMaster or whatever. Eliot was right, he must have been following them the whole time.

“Hi!” Janet shouted back happily. “Now it’s a party,” she added to the others, sotto voce.

In one huge leather-gloved fist Jollyby held up a large, madly kicking hare by its ears.

“Son of a bitch,” Dauntless said. “He caught it.”

Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn’t talk much.

“He sure did,” Quentin said.

“Lucky thing,” Jollyby called out when he was close enough. “I found him sitting up on a rock, happy as you please, not a hundred yards from here. He was busy keeping an eye on you lot, and I got him to bolt the wrong way. Caught him with my bare hands. Would you believe it?”

Quentin would believe it. Though he still didn’t think it made sense. How do you sneak up on an animal that can see the future? Maybe it saw other people’s but not its own. The hare’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets.

“Poor thing,” Eliot said. “Look how pissed off it is.”

“Oh, Jolly,” Janet said. She crossed her arms in mock outrage. “You should have let us catch it! Now it’ll only tell your future.”

She sounded not at all disappointed by this, but Jollyby — a superb all-around huntsman but no National Merit Scholar — looked vexed. His furry brows furrowed.

“Maybe we could pass it around,” Quentin said. “It could do each of us in turn.”

“It’s not a bong, Quentin,” Janet said.

“No,” Julia said. “Do not ask it.”

But Jollyby was enjoying his moment as the center of royal attention.

“Is that true, you useless animal?” he said. He reversed his grip on the Seeing Hare and hoisted it up so that he and the hare were nose to nose.

It gave up kicking and hung down limp, its eyes blank with panic. It was an impressive beast, three feet long from its twitching nose to its tail, with a fine gray-brown coat the color of dry grass in winter. It wasn’t cute. This was not a tame hare, a magician’s rabbit. It was a wild animal.

“What do you see then, eh?” Jollyby shook it, as if this were all its idea and therefore its fault. “What do you see?”

The Seeing Hare’s eyes focused. It looked directly at Quentin. It bared its huge orange incisors.

“Death,” it rasped.

They all stood there for a second. It didn’t seem scary so much as inappropriate, like somebody had made a dirty joke at a child’s birthday party.

Then Jollyby frowned and licked his lips, and Quentin saw blood in his teeth. He coughed once, experimentally, as if he were just trying it out, and then his head lolled forward. The hare dropped from his nerveless fingers and shot away across the grass like a rocket.

Jollyby’s corpse fell forward onto the grass.

“Death and destruction!” the hare called out as it ran, in case it hadn’t made itself clear before. “Disappointment and despair!”

CHAPTER 2

There was a special room in Castle Whitespire where the kings and queens met. That was another thing about being a king: everything you had was made specially for you.

It was a marvelous room. It was square, the top of a square tower, with four windows facing in four directions. The tower turned, very slowly, as some of the towers in the castle did — Castle Whitespire was built on complicated foundations of enormous brass clockwork, cleverly designed by the dwarves, who were absolute geniuses at that kind of thing. The tower completed one rotation every day. The movement was almost imperceptible.

In the center of the room was a special square table with four chairs — they were thrones, or thronelike, but made by someone who had the knack, pretty rare in Quentin’s experience, of making chairs that looked like thrones but were also reasonably comfortable to sit in. The table was painted with a map of Fillory, sealed under many layers of lacquer, and at each of the four seats, pieced into the wood, were the names of the rulers who’d sat there along with little devices appropriate to said rulers. Quentin got an image of the White Stag, and the vanquished Martin Chatwin, and a deck of playing cards. Eliot’s place was the most elaborately embellished, as befitted the High King. It was a square table, but there wasn’t any question which side was the head.

The chairs didn’t feel comfortable today. The scene of Jollyby’s death was still very clear and present in Quentin’s mind’s eye; in fact it replayed itself more or less constantly, with showings every thirty seconds or so. As Jollyby collapsed Quentin had lurched forward and caught him and eased him to the ground. He groped helplessly at Jollyby’s huge chest, as if he’d hidden his life somewhere about his person, in some secret inside pocket, and if Quentin could only find it he could give it back to him. Janet screamed: a full-throated, uncontrollable horror-movie scream that wouldn’t stop for a full fifteen seconds until Eliot grasped her shoulders and physically turned her away from Jollyby’s corpse.

At the same time the clearing filled with ghostly green light — a bleak, alien spell of Julia’s that Quentin still didn’t get the details of, or even the broad outlines of, that was intended to reveal any bad actors who might be present. It turned her eyes all black, no whites or iris at all. She was the only one who’d thought to go on the attack. But there was no one to attack.

“All right,” Eliot said. “So let’s talk about it. What do we think happened today?”

They looked at each other, feeling jittery and shell-shocked. Quentin wanted to do something, or say something, but he didn’t know what. The truth was, he hadn’t really known Jollyby all that well.

“He was so proud,” he said finally. “He thought he’d saved the day.”

“It had to be the rabbit,” Janet said. Her eyes were red from crying. She swallowed. “Right? Or hare, whatever. That’s what killed him. What else?”

“We can’t assume that. The hare predicted his death but it may not have caused it. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. It’s a logical fallacy.”

If he’d waited even another second he would have realized that Janet wasn’t interested in the Latin name of the logical fallacy that she might or might not have been committing.

“Sorry,” he said. “That’s my Asperger’s flaring up again.”

“So it’s just a coincidence?” she snapped. “That he died right then, right after it said that about death? Maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe the hare doesn’t predict the future, maybe it controls it.”

“Perhaps it does not like being caught,” Julia said.

“I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”

It was five o’clock in the afternoon, their regular meeting time. For the first few months after they’d arrived at Castle Whitespire Eliot had left them to do their own things, on the theory that they’d naturally find their own courses as rulers, and take charge of the things that best suited their various gifts. This had resulted in total chaos, and nothing getting done, and the things that did get done got done twice by two different people in two different ways. So Eliot instituted a daily meeting at which they sorted through whatever business of the realm seemed most pressing as a foursome. The five o’clock meeting was traditionally accompanied by what may have been the most gloriously comprehensive whiskey service ever seen on any of the possibly infinite worlds of the multiverse.

“I told the family we’d take care of the funeral,” Quentin said. “It’s just his parents. He was an only child.”

“I should say something,” Eliot said. “He taught me bugling.”

“Did you know he was a were-lion?” Janet smiled sadly. “True story. It went on a solar calendar — he changed only at equinoxes and solstices. He said it helped him understand the animals. He was hairy everywhere.”

“Please,” Eliot said. “I would give anything to not know how you know that.”

“It helped with lots of things.”

“I have a theory,” Quentin said quickly. “Maybe the Fenwicks did it. They’ve been pissed at us ever since we got here.”

The Fenwicks were the most senior of the several families who were running things at the time when the Brakebills returned to Fillory. They weren’t happy about being kicked out of Castle Whitespire, but they didn’t have the political capital to do much about it. So they satisfied themselves with making mischief around the court.

“Assassination would be a big step up for the Fenwicks,” Eliot said. “They’re pretty small-time.”

“And why would they kill Jollyby?” Janet said. “Everybody loved Jollyby!”

“Maybe they were trying for one of us, not him,” Quentin said. “Maybe one of us was supposed to catch the hare. You know they’re already trying to put it around that we killed him?”

“But how would they have done it?” Eliot said. “You’re saying they sent a rabbit assassin?”

“They could not turn the Seeing Hare,” Julia said. “Unique Beasts do not intervene in the affairs of men.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the Seeing Hare at all, maybe it was a person in hare form. A were-hare. Look, I don’t know!”

Quentin rubbed his temples. If only they’d hunted that stupid lizard instead. He was annoyed at himself for forgetting what Fillory was like. He’d let himself believe that things were all better after Alice had killed Martin Chatwin, no more death and despair and disillusionment and whatever else the hare had said. But there was more. It wasn’t like the books. There was always more. Et in Arcadia ego.

And even though he knew it was crazy, in a childishly elegant way, he couldn’t escape a vague feeling that Jollyby’s death was his fault, that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been tempted by that adventure. Or maybe he wasn’t tempted enough? What were the rules? Maybe he should have gone into the clearing after all. Maybe Jollyby’s death had been meant for him. He was supposed to go into the meadow and die there, but he didn’t, so Jollyby had to instead.

“Maybe there isn’t an explanation,” he said out loud. “Maybe it’s just a mystery. Just another crazy stop on Fillory’s magical mystery tour. No reason for it, it just happened. You can’t explain it.”

This didn’t satisfy Eliot. He was still Eliot, the languid lush of Brakebills, but becoming High King had uncovered a dismayingly rigorous streak in him.

“We can’t have unexplained deaths in the kingdom,” he said. “It won’t do.” He cleared his throat. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll put the fear of Ember into the Fenwicks, just in case. It won’t take much. They’re a bunch of pussy dandies. And I say that as a pussy dandy myself.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” Janet said.

“Then, Janet, you’ll go lean on the Lorians.” That was Fillory’s neighbor to the north. Janet was in charge of relations with foreign powers — Quentin called her Fillory Clinton. “They’re always behind everything bad in the books. Maybe they were trying to decapitate the leadership. Stupid pseudo-Viking fuckers. Now for Christ’s sake let’s talk about something else for a while.”

But they had nothing else to talk about, so they lapsed into silence. Nobody was especially happy with Eliot’s plan, least of all Eliot, but they didn’t have a better one, or even a worse one. Six hours after the fact Julia’s eyes were still flooded with black from the spell she’d cast in the forest. The effect was disconcerting. She had no pupils. He wondered what she could see that they couldn’t.

Eliot shuffled his notes, looking for another item of business, but business was in short supply these days.

“It is time,” Julia said. “We must go to the window.”

Every day after the afternoon meeting they went out on the balcony and waved to the people.

“Damn it,” Eliot said. “All right.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t today,” Janet said. “It feels wrong.”

Quentin knew what she meant. The thought of standing out there on the narrow balcony, frozen smiles on their faces, princess-waving at the Fillorians who gathered for the daily ritual, felt a little off. Still.

“We should to do it,” he said. “Today of all days.”

“We’re accepting congratulations for doing nothing.”

“We’re reassuring the people of continuity in the face of tragedy.”

They filed out onto the narrow balcony. In the castle courtyard far below, at the bottom of a vertiginous drop, a few hundred Fillorians had gathered. From this height they looked unreal, like dolls. Quentin waved.

“I wish we could do something more for them,” he said.

“What do you want to do?” Eliot said. “We’re the kings and queens of a magic utopia.”

Cheers drifted up from far below, faintly. The sound was tinny and far away — it had the audio quality of a musical greeting card.

“Some progressive reforms? I want to help somebody with something. If I were a Fillorian I would depose me as an aristocratic parasite.”

When Quentin and the others took the thrones, they hadn’t known exactly what to expect. The details of what was involved were vague — there would be some ceremonial duties, Quentin supposed, and presumably a lead role in policy making, some responsibility for the welfare of the nation they ruled. But the truth was that there just wasn’t much actual work to do.

The weird thing was that Quentin missed it. He’d expected Fillory to be something like medieval England, because it looked like medieval England, at least on casual inspection. He figured he’d just use European history, to the extent that he remembered it, as a crib sheet. He would pursue the standard enlightened humanitarian program, nothing extraordinary, greatest hits only, and go down in history as a force for good.

But Fillory wasn’t England. For one thing the population was tiny — there couldn’t have been more than ten thousand humans in the whole country, plus that many talking animals and dwarves and spirits and giants and such. So he and the other monarchs — or tetrarchs, whatever — were more like small-town mayors. For another, while magic was very real on Earth, Fillory was magical. There was a difference. Magic was part of the ecosystem. It was in the weather and the oceans and the soil, which was wildly fertile. If you wanted your crops to fail you had to work pretty hard at it.

Fillory was a land of hyperabundance. Anything that needed making could be gotten from the dwarves, sooner or later, and they weren’t an oppressed industrial proletariat, they actually enjoyed making things. Unless you were an actively despicable tyrant, the way Martin Chatwin had been, there were just too many resources and too few people to create anything much in the way of civil strife. The only shortage that the Fillorian economy suffered from was a chronic shortage of shortages.

As a result whenever any of the Brakebills — as they were called, even though Julia had never even been to Brakebills, as she wasn’t slow to point out — tried to get serious about something, there turned out not to be much to be serious about. It was all ritual and pomp and circumstance. Even money was just for show. It was toy money. Monopoly money. The others had all but given up on trying to make themselves useful, but Quentin couldn’t quite let it go. Maybe that was what had been nagging at him, as he stood on the edge of that meadow in the woods. There must be something real somewhere out there, but he could never quite seem to get his hands on it.

“All right,” he said. “What next?”

“Well,” Eliot said, as they filed back inside. “There is this situation with the Outer Island.”

“The where?”

“The Outer Island.” He picked up some royal-looking documents. “That’s what it says. I’m king of it, and even I don’t know where it is.”

Janet snorted. “Outer is off the east coast. Way off, a couple of days’ sail. God, I can’t believe they even let you be king. It’s the easternmost point in the Fillorian Empire. I think.”

Eliot peered at the map painted on the table. “I don’t see it.”

Quentin studied the map too. On his first visit to Fillory he’d sailed deep into the Western Sea, on the other side of the Fillorian continent, but his knowledge of the east was pretty sketchy.

“It’s not big enough.” She pointed to Julia’s lap. “That’s where it would be if we had a bigger table.”

Quentin tried to imagine it: a little slip of white tropical sand, embellished with a decorative palm tree, embedded in an ocean of blue-green calm.

“Have you been there?” Eliot said.

“No one’s ever been there. It’s just a dot on the map. Somebody started a fishing colony there after his ship collided with it like a million years ago. Why are we talking about the Outer Island?”

Eliot went back to his papers. “Looks like they haven’t paid their taxes in a couple of years.”

“So?” Janet said. “Probably that’s because they don’t have any money.”

“Send them a telegram,” Quentin said. “DEAR OUTER ISLANDERS STOP SEND MONEY STOP IF YOU HAVE NO MONEY THEN DO NOT SEND MONEY STOP.”

The meeting flagged while Eliot and Janet tried to outdo each other in composing the most useless possible telegram to the Outer Islanders.

“All right,” Eliot said. The turning tower had rotated to where the flaming Fillorian sunset lit up the sky behind him. Ladders of pink cloud were stacked up above his shoulders. “I’ll lean on the Fenwicks about Jollyby. Janet will speak to the Lorians.” He waved vaguely. “And somebody will do something about the Outer Island. Who wants scotch?”

“I’ll go,” Quentin said.

“It’s just there on the sideboard.”

“No, I mean to the Outer Island. I’ll go there. I’ll see about the taxes.”

“What?” Eliot sounded annoyed by the idea. “Why? It’s the ass end of nowhere. And anyway, it’s a treasury matter. We’ll send an emissary. That’s what emissaries are for.”

“Send me instead.”

Quentin couldn’t have said what the impulse was exactly, he just knew that he had to do something. He thought of the circular meadow and the broken clock-tree and the film clip of Jollyby dying started up again. What was the point of all this when you could just drop dead, just like that? That’s what he wanted to know. What was even the fucking point?

“You know,” Janet said, “we’re not invading it. We don’t need to send a king to the Outer Island. They haven’t paid their taxes, which by the way is like eight fish. They’re not exactly powering the whole economy.”

“I’ll be back before you know it.” He could already tell he’d gotten it right. The tension inside him broke as soon as he said it. Relief was flooding through him, at what he didn’t even know. “Who knows, maybe I’ll learn something.”

This would be his quest: collecting taxes from a bunch of backwater yokels. He had skipped the adventure of the broken tree, and that was fine. He would have this one instead.

“Could look weak, with the Jollyby thing.” Eliot fingered his royal chin. “You taking off at the first sign of trouble.”

“I’m a king. It’s not like they’re going to not re-elect me.”

“Wait,” Janet said. “You didn’t kill Jollyby, did you? Is that what this is about?”

“Janet!” Eliot said.

“No, really. It would all fit together—”

“I didn’t kill Jollyby,” Quentin said.

“All right. Fine. Great.” Eliot ticked the item off on his agenda. “Outer Island, check. That’s it then.”

“Well, I hope you’re not going alone,” Janet said. “God knows what they’re like out there. It could be Captain Cook all over again.”

“I’ll be fine,” Quentin said. “Julia’s coming with me. Right, Julia?”

Eliot and Janet both stared at him. How long had it been since he surprised those two? Or anybody? He must be on to something. He smiled at Julia, and she looked back at him, though with her all-black pupils her expression was unreadable.

“Of course I am,” was all she said.

That night Eliot paid Quentin a visit in his bedroom.

When he first found it the room had been stuffed with an appalling amount of hideous quasi-medieval junk. It had been literally centuries since all four of Whitespire’s thrones had been filled at the same time, and in the meantime the extra royal suites had been invaded and occupied by creeping armies of superfluous candelabras, defunct chandeliers listing and deflated like beached jellyfish, unplayable musical instruments, unreturnable diplomatic gifts, chairs and tables so piteously ornamental they would break if you looked at them, or even if you didn’t, dead animals ruthlessly stuffed in the very act of begging for mercy, urns and ewers and other even less easily identifiable vessels that you didn’t know whether to drink out of or go to the bathroom in.

Quentin had had the room cleared out to the bare walls. Everything must go. He left the bed, one table, two chairs, a few of the better rugs, and some pleasing and/or politically expedient tapestries, that was all. He liked one tapestry in particular that depicted a marvelously appointed griffin frozen in the act of putting a company of foot soldiers to flight. It was supposed to symbolize the triumph of some group of long-dead people over some other group of long-dead people whom nobody had liked, but for some reason the griffin had cocked its head to one side in the midst of its rampage and was gazing directly out of its woven universe at the viewer as if to say, yes, granted, I’m good at this. But is it really the best use of my time?

When it was finally empty the room had grown by three times its size. It could breathe again. You could think in it. It turned out to be about as big as a basketball court, with a smooth stone floor, towering timbered ceilings where light got lost in the upper reaches and made interesting shadows, and soaring Gothic lead-glass windows a few little panels of which actually opened. It was so gloriously still and empty that when you scuffed your foot on the stone it echoed. It had the kind of hushed stillness that on Earth you saw only from a distance, on the other side of a velvet rope. It was the stillness of a closed museum, or a cathedral at night.

There was some murmuring among the upper servants that such a spartan chamber was not entirely suitable for a king of Fillory, but Quentin had decided that one of the good things about being a king of Fillory was that you got to decide what’s suitable for a king of Fillory.

And anyway, if it was high royal style they wanted, the High King was their man. Eliot had a bottomless appetite for it. His bedroom was the gilded, diamond-studded, pearl-encrusted rococo lair of a god-king. Whatever else it was, it was entirely suitable.

“You know in the Fillory books you could actually get into the tapestries?” It was late, after midnight, and Eliot was standing eye-to-eye with the woven griffin and sipping from a tumbler of something amber.

“I know.” Quentin was stretched out on the bed, wearing silk pajamas. “Believe me, I’ve tried. If they really did it I have no idea how they did it. They just look like ordinary tapestries to me. They don’t even move like in Harry Potter.”

Eliot had brought a tumbler for Quentin too. Quentin hadn’t drunk any yet, but he hadn’t ruled out the possibility either. At any rate he wasn’t going to let Eliot drink it, which he would inevitably try to do when he was done with his own. Quentin made a nest for the tumbler in the blankets next to him.

“I’m not sure I’d want to get into this one,” Eliot said.

“I know. Sometimes I wonder if he’s trying to get out.”

“Now this fellow,” he said, moving on to a full-length portrait of a knight in armor. “I wouldn’t mind getting into his tapestry, if you get what I mean.”

“I get what you mean.”

“Pull that sword out of its scabbard.”

“I get it.”

Eliot was building up to something, but there was no rushing him. Though if he took much longer Quentin was going to fall asleep.

“Do you think if I did you’d see a little tapestry version of me running around in there? I don’t know how I’d feel about that.”

Quentin waited. Since he’d made the decision to go to the Outer Island he felt calmer than he had in ages. The windows were open, to the extent that they could be opened, and warm night air flowed in, smelling like late summer grass and the sea, which wasn’t far off.

“So about this trip of yours,” Eliot said finally.

“About it.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

“Do you have to?”

“Something about quests and adventures and whatever. Sailing beyond the sunset. It doesn’t matter. We don’t need you here for the Jollyby thing. One of us really should go out there anyway, they probably don’t even know they have kings and queens again. Just pass along any prurient details as a matter of state security.”

“Will do.”

“But I want to talk to you about Julia.”

“Oh.” Whiskey time. Trying to drink lying down, Quentin took a bigger swallow than he meant to, and it ignited a brush fire in his guts. He suppressed a cough. “Look, you’re only High King,” he gasped, “you’re not my dad. I’ll figure it out.”

“Don’t get defensive, I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“Did I ever tell you,” Eliot said, sitting on one of the two chairs, “how Julia and I met?”

“Well, sure.” Had he? The exact particulars were fuzzy. “I mean, not in granular detail.”

The truth was that they hardly ever talked about that time. They talked around it. No good memories there for anybody. It was after the big disaster in Ember’s Tomb. Quentin had been half-dead and had to be left in the care of some irritating but ultimately very medically effective centaurs while Eliot and Janet and the others returned to the real world. Quentin had spent a year recovering in Fillory, then he went back to Earth and gave up magic. He spent another six months working in an office in Manhattan until Janet and Eliot and Julia finally came and got him. If they hadn’t he’d probably still be there. He was grateful, and he always would be.

Eliot stared out the window into the black moonless night, like an oriental potentate in his dressing gown, which looked too heavily embroidered to be comfortable.

“You know Janet and I were in pretty rough shape when we left Fillory?”

“Yes. Though at least Martin Chatwin hadn’t chewed you practically in half.”

“It’s not a contest, but yes, that is true. But we were shaken up. We loved Alice, too, you know, in our way. Even Janet did. And we thought we’d lost you as well as her. We were well and truly done with Fillory and all its goods and chattels, I can tell you.

“Josh went home to his parents in New Hampshire, and Richard and Anaïs went off somewhere to do whatever it was they’d been doing before they went to Fillory. Not big mourners, those two. I couldn’t face New York again, nor could I face my grotesque so-called family in Oregon, so I went home with Janet to L.A.

“That turned out to be an excellent decision. You know her parents are lawyers? Entertainment lawyers. Fantastically rich, huge house in Brentwood, working all the time, no discernible emotional life whatsoever. So we sucked around Brentwood for a week or two until Janet’s parents got tired of the sight of our post-traumatic faces shuffling off to bed as they were getting up for a predawn squash match. They packed us off to a fancy spa in Wyoming for a couple of weeks.

“You wouldn’t have heard of it, it was that kind of place. Impossible to get into and ludicrously expensive, but money means nothing to these people, and I wasn’t about to argue. Janet practically grew up there — the staff all knew her from when she was a little girl. Imagine that — our Janet, a little girl! She and I had a bungalow to ourselves and positively legions of people to wait on us. I think Janet had a manicurist for every nail.

“And they did a thing with mud and hot stones — I swear to you there was magic in it. Nothing feels that good without magic.

“Of course, the terrible secret of places like that is that they’re horrifically boring. You have no idea the extremes we were driven to. I played tennis. Me! They got very scoldy when it came to drinking on the court, I can tell you. I told them it’s just part of my form. You can’t relearn technique, not at my age.

“Well, by the third day Janet and I were considering having sex with each other just to relieve the tedium. And then, like a dark angel of mercy come to safeguard my virtue, Julia appeared.

“It was like one of those Poirot mysteries set at a posh country seat. There was some accident down by the pool — I was never clear on the details, but an enormous fuss was made. I suppose that’s one of the things you pay for: first-class fuss. At any rate the first time I laid eyes on our Julia she was being carried through the lobby strapped to a backboard, soaking wet and cursing a blue streak and insisting that she was fine, absolutely fine. Take your paws off me, you damned dirty apes.

“The next day I came down to the bar around three or four in the afternoon and there she was again, drinking alone, all in black. Vodka gimlets I believe. The mysterious lady. It was painfully obvious that she didn’t belong at the spa. Her hair was a rat’s nest, you literally can’t imagine. Worse than now even. Her cuticles were bitten down to the quick. Shoulders hunched. Nervous stutter. And then she had no grasp of how things worked. She tried to tip the staff. She pronounced the names of French wines with an actual French accent.

“Of course I was drawn to her at once. I figured she must be Russian. Daughter of a jailed oligarch, that sort of thing. No one but a Russian could afford to stay there and still have hair that bad. Janet thought she was just out of rehab and from the looks of it headed right back in. Either way we fell upon her like starving people.

“The approach was subtle. The trick was not setting off her alarms, which were all obviously set to a hair trigger. It was Janet, that mistress of seduction, who cracked her in the end — she planted herself in a public lounge and complained loudly about a rather involved computer issue. You could watch our Julia wrestle with herself, but it was a fait accompli.

“After that — well, you know how it is on those vacations. As soon as you learn another person’s name they become inescapable. We ran into each other everywhere. You wouldn’t think a place like that was her style, would you? But there she was, up to her neck in mud, with cucumber slices over her eyes. She was constantly plunging in and out of baths and things. Once Janet tried to go in a steam bath with her, but she’d turned it up so high everybody else had to flee. Probably she had them thrash her with birch twigs. It was like she was trying to rid herself of some stubborn taint.

“It came out that she had a weakness for cards, so we spent hours just drinking and playing three-handed bridge. Not talking. We didn’t know she was a magician, of course. How could we? But you could tell she was bursting with some terrible secret. And she had those things that one likes about magicians: she was disgustingly bright and rather sad and slightly askew. To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you.

“Well, you know how in the Poirot books he always goes on vacation to get away from it all, the mysteries and whatever else, only to have a murder committed on the very island he’s fled to for peace and quiet and some civilized gastronomy? It was exactly like that, except that we were fleeing magic. One night I wandered over to her bungalow around ten or eleven at night. Janet and I had had a fight, and I was looking for someone to complain about her to.

“When I passed Julia’s window I saw that she was building a fire. That was odd to begin with. The fireplaces were absolutely enormous in those bungalows, but it was the middle of summer and nobody in their right mind was using them. But Julia had a roaring blaze going. She was building it very methodically, placing the logs very carefully. She marked each log before she put it on — scraped away some of the bark with a little silver knife.

“And then as I watched. . I don’t know how to describe it so you’ll understand. She kneeled down in front of the fire and began putting things in it. Some of the things were obviously valuable — a rare shell, an old book, a handful of gold dust. Some of them must just have been precious to her. A piece of costume jewelry. An old photograph. Each time she put one in she’d stop and wait a minute, but nothing happened, except that whatever it was burned or melted and gave off a nasty smell. I don’t know what she was waiting for, but whatever it was it never came. Meanwhile she got more and more agitated.

“I felt utterly tawdry spying on her, but I couldn’t look away. Finally she ran out of precious things, and then she started crying, and then she put herself into the fire. She crawled over the hearth and collapsed, half in and half out of the flames, sobbing her little heart out. Her legs were sticking out. It was awful to see. Her clothes went up right away, of course, and her face got black with soot, but the fire never touched her skin. She was absolutely sobbing. Her shoulders shook and shook. .”

Eliot stood up and went to the window. He struggled with one of the little panes for a second, then he must have found a catch Quentin had never noticed because he pulled the whole window open. Quentin couldn’t see how he did it. He put his glass on the sill.

“I don’t know if you’re falling in love with her or if you just think you are or what it is you’re doing,” he said. “I suppose I can’t blame you, you always did like to make things as hard as possible on yourself. But just listen to what I’m telling you.

“That was how it all started, how we knew she was one of us. The spell was something very strong. I could hear the hum of it even over the fire, and the light in the room had gone a funny color. But so much of her magic is just impossible to parse. I knew right away she’d never been to Brakebills, because it sounded like gibberish to me, and I couldn’t get within a thousand miles of how it worked or what she was trying to do, and she never said, and I never asked.

“But if I absolutely had to guess I’d say she was attempting a summoning. I’d say she was trying to bring back something that she’d lost, or that was taken away from her, something that was very precious to her indeed. And if I had another guess, I’d have to say that it wasn’t working.”

CHAPTER 3

The next morning, Quentin rode down to the docks in a black carriage with velvet curtains and plushly padded velvet seats. It was safe and musty inside, like a living room on wheels. Next to him, swaying loosely with the rocking of the carriage, sat Queen Julia. Across from them, their knees practically touching, was the admiral of the Fillorian navy.

Quentin had decided that if he was going on a trip to the island at the ass end of the universe, he should do it properly. He should make preparations. There were rules for this kind of thing. Such as: if you were going on a journey you needed a stout vessel.

All ships were available to the crown, in theory, but most of the ones they kept just lying around on call were warships, and those turned out to be scarily spartan on the inside. Rows of hammocks and racks of hard pallets. Not a stateroom in sight. Not really suitable at all for the Voyage of King Kwentin, as Eliot liked to spell Quentin’s name in official documents. So they were going down to the docks to find a ship that was suitable.

Quentin was feeling good. He was full of energy and a determination that he hadn’t felt for long time. This is what he’d been waiting for. The admiral was an almost alarmingly short man named Lacker with a thin gray face that looked like it had been hollowed out of schist by the action of fifty years of wind and spray.

It wasn’t that Quentin couldn’t have said what he was looking for, it’s just that he didn’t want to, because if he did it would have been embarrassing. What he was looking for was a ship from one of the Fillory novels, specifically the Swift, which figured in the fourth book, The Secret Sea. Pursued by the Watcherwoman, Jane and Rupert — he could have explained to Admiral Lacker, but didn’t — had stowed away on the Swift, which turned out to be run by pirates, except they were only pretending to be pirates. They were really a party of Fillorian noblemen, wrongly accused, who were seeking to clear their names. You never got a particularly nautically rigorous look at the Swift, but you nonetheless came away with a powerful impression of it: it was a plucky but cozy little vessel, elegant to look at but game in a fight, with sleek lines and glowing yellow portholes through which one glimpsed snug, shipshape cabins.

Of course if this were a Fillory novel the ship he needed would already be tied up at the docks, awaiting his command, just like that. But this wasn’t a Fillory novel. This was Fillory. So it was up to him.

“I need something not too big and not too small,” he said. “Mediumsized. And it should be comfortable. And quick. And sturdy.”

“I see. Will you require guns?”

“No guns. Well, maybe a few guns. A few guns.”

“A few guns.”

“If you please, Admiral, don’t be a cock. I’ll know it when I see it, and if for some reason I don’t, you tell me. All right?”

Admiral Lacker inclined his head almost imperceptibly to indicate that they had a deal. He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.

Whitespire stood on the shore of a wide, curving bay of oddly pale green sea. It was almost too perfect: it could have been carved out of the coastline on purpose by some divine being who took a benevolent interest in mortals having somewhere to put their ships when they weren’t using them. For all Quentin knew it had been. He had the driver drop them at one end of the waterfront. They clambered out, all three of them, blinking in the early morning sun after the swaying dimness of the carriage.

The air was ripe with the smell of salt and wood and tar. It was intoxicating, like huffing pure oxygen.

“All right,” Quentin said. “Let’s do this.” He clapped his hands together.

They walked, slowly, all the way from one end of the docks to the other, stepping over taut guy ropes and squashed and dried fish carcasses and weaving their way around massive stanchions and windlasses and through labyrinths of stacked crates. The waterfront was home to an astounding variety of vessels from all points in the Fillorian Empire and beyond. There was a gargantuan dreadnought made of black wood, with nine masts and a bounding panther for a figurehead, and a square-snouted junk with a brick-red sail crimped into sections by battens. There were sloops and cutters, galleons and schooners, menacing corvettes and tiny darting caravels. It was like a bathtub full of expensive bath toys.

It took an hour to reach the far end. Quentin turned to Admiral Lacker.

“So what did you think?”

“I think the Hatchet, the Mayfly, or the Morgan Downs would suffice.”

“Probably. I’m sure you’re right. Julia?”

Julia had said almost nothing the entire time. She was detached, like she was sleepwalking. He thought about what Eliot had told him last night. He wondered if Julia had found whatever it was she’d been looking for. Maybe she was hoping she’d find it on the Outer Island.

“It does not matter. They are all fine, Quentin. It makes no difference.”

They were both right, of course. There were plenty of decent-looking ships. Beautiful even. But they weren’t the Swift. Quentin folded his arms and squinted down the length of the docks in the late-morning glare. He looked out at the ships floating in the bay.

“What about those ones out there?”

Lacker pursed his lips. Julia looked too. Her eyes were still black from the day before, and she didn’t have to shade them against the sun. She looked right into it.

“They are at your disposal as well, Your Highness,” Lacker said. “Of course.”

Julia walked out along the nearest pier, straight-backed and sure-footed, to where a humble fishing smack was tied up. She jumped the gap neatly and began untying it.

“Come on,” she called.

Lacker gestured to Quentin to precede him.

“Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”

It was good to get out on the open water, but there wasn’t much wind, and as it warmed up the smack began to smell. Amazingly its owner emerged from belowdecks, where he must have been asleep. He was a sun-and windburned man with a gray beard, wearing overalls with nothing obviously on underneath them. Lacker addressed him in a language Quentin didn’t recognize. He didn’t seem at all put out or even surprised to discover that his boat had been commandeered by two monarchs and an admiral.

As for Lacker, he looked unfairly comfortable in the heat in his full dress uniform as they toured an even greater variety of inappropriate vessels. Most of them were out there because their drafts were too deep to anchor any farther in: a great bruiser of a ship of the line, some nobleman’s bloated party yacht, a fat, butter-colored merchant tub.

“What about that one?” Quentin said. He pointed.

“I beg your indulgence, Your Highness, my eyesight has suffered in the service of our great nation. You do not mean—”

“I do.” Enough with the period drama. “That one. There.”

A flat sandbar projected from one of the horns of Whitespire’s great bay. A ship lay near it in a few feet of water. The low tide had laid it gently down on one side on the sandy bottom, its underbelly exposed like a beached whale.

“That ship, Your Highness, has not left the bay for a very long time.”

“Nevertheless.”

It was partly out of thoroughness, partly out of a perverse desire to pay the admiral back for being, his promise notwithstanding, a little bit of a cock. The owner of the smack exchanged a long look with Admiral Lacker: this man, the look said, lubs his land.

“Let us return to the Morgan Downs.”

“And we will,” Julia said. “But King Quentin wishes to see that ship first.”

It took ten minutes to tack over to it, the sails flapping as the fisherman gamely worked his way upwind. Quentin reminded himself to pay the man something for this after. They circled the wreck listlessly in the shallow water. Its hull had been painted white, but the paint had been weathered and blasted down to the gray wood. There was something odd about its lines — something curiously swoopy about them. It finished in a long slender bowsprit that had been snapped off halfway.

He liked it. It was neither harsh and blocky like a warship, nor soft and too pretty like a yacht. It was elegant, but it meant business. Too bad it was a carcass and not a ship. Maybe if he’d gotten here fifty years earlier.

“What do you think?”

The smack’s keel scraped the sandy bottom loudly in the stillness. Admiral Lacker regarded the horizon line. He cleared his throat.

“I think,” he said, “that that ship has seen better days.”

“What do you think it was?”

“Workhorse,” the smack’s owner piped up huskily. “Deer Class. Ran the route between here and Longfall.”

Quentin hadn’t even realized he spoke English.

“It looks nice,” Quentin said. “Or it looked nice.”

“That was,” Admiral Lacker said solemnly, “one of the most beautiful ships that was ever made.”

He couldn’t tell if Lacker was joking or not. Except that it was pretty obvious that he never joked.

“Really?” Quentin said.

“Nothing moved like the Deer Class,” Lacker said. “They were built to carry bergspar from Longfall, then coldspice on the way back. Fast and tough. You could ride them to hell and back.”

“Huh. So why aren’t there more of them?”

“Longfall ran out of bergspar,” the fisherman said. Now he’d gone all chatty. “So we stopped sending them coldspice. That was the end of the Deer Class. Most were broken up for the clockwood in them, sold for scrap. It was the Lorians built them. Every shipwright in Fillory tried to copy them, but there was a trick to it. Trick’s been lost.”

“My first command,” Lacker said, “was a Very Fast Picket out of Hartheim. Nothing in the service could have caught us, but I saw a Deer Class blow by me once on its way north. We had studding sails set on both sides. Made us look like we were standing still.”

Quentin nodded. He stood up in the boat. A halo of little birds lifted off from the ship’s blasted hull, stalled for a moment on a puff of wind, and then settled back down again. The smack had come around to the far side, and they could see the deck, which was stove in in at least two places. The ship’s name was painted across the stern: MUNTJAC.

This wasn’t a Fillory novel. If it were, this was the kind of boat he’d have.

“Well, I think that settles it,” he said. “Take us back to the Morgan Downs, please.”

“The Morgan Downs, Highness.”

“And when we get there tell the captain of the Morgan Downs to get his floating rattrap over here and haul that thing”—he pointed at the Muntjac—“into dry dock. We’re taking it.”

That felt good. Some things it was never too late for.

Getting the Muntjac—it turned out to be the name of a species of deer — into anything like seaworthy condition was going to take a couple of weeks, even if Quentin exercised his royal prerogatives and press-ganged all the best shipwrights in the city, which he did. But that was fine. It gave him time for more preparations.

He’d been sitting on his nervous energy for so long, it was good to have something to do with it, and he was discovering how much of it he had. He could have powered a small city with it. The next day Quentin had an announcement posted in every town square in the country. He was going to hold a tournament.

In all honesty Quentin had only a very vague idea of how tournaments worked, or even what they were, except that they were something kings used to do at some point between when Jesus was alive and when Shakespeare was alive, which was as close as Quentin could get to placing when the Middle Ages had actually happened. He knew that tournaments were supposed to involve jousting, and he also knew that he wasn’t interested in jousting. Too weird and phallic, plus it was hard on the horses.

Sword fighting, though, that was interesting. Not fencing, or not just fencing — he didn’t want anything that formal. He had in mind something more like mixed martial arts. Ultimate fighting. He wanted to know who the best swordsman in the realm was: the no-buts, fuck-you, all-Fillory champion of sword fighting. So he put the word out: a week from now anyone who thought he could handle a blade should turn up at Castle Whitespire and start whacking till there was no one left to whack. Winner gets a small but very choice castle in the Fillorian boondocks and the honor of guarding the king’s royal person on his upcoming journey to an undisclosed location.

Eliot walked in while Quentin was clearing the grand banquet hall. A column of footmen was filing out, carrying a chair each.

“Pardon me, Your Highness,” Eliot said, “but what the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry. It’s the only room that was big enough for the matches.”

“This is the part where I’m supposed to say, ‘Matches, what matches?’”

“For the tournament. Sword fighting. You didn’t see the posters? The table goes too,” Quentin said to the housekeeper who was directing the move. “Just put it in the hall. I’m having a tournament to find the best swordsman in Fillory.”

“Well, can’t you have it outside?”

“What if it rains?”

“What if I want to eat something?”

“I told them to serve dinner in your receiving room. So you’ll have to do your receiving somewhere else. Maybe you can do that outside.”

A man was on his hands and knees on the floor ruling out the piste with a lump of chalk.

“Quentin,” Eliot said, “I just heard from someone in the shipwrights’ guild. Do you have any idea what that ship of yours is costing us? The Jackalope or whatever it is?”

“No. The Muntjac.”

“About twenty years’ worth of Outer Island taxes, that’s how much it’s costing us,” Eliot said, answering his own question. “Just in case you were curious how much it’s costing us.”

“I wasn’t that curious.”

“But you do see the irony.”

Quentin considered this.

“I do. But it’s not about the money.”

“What’s it about then?”

“It’s about observing good form,” Quentin said. “You of all people know all about that.”

Eliot sighed.

“I suppose I can see that,” he said.

“And I need this. That’s all I can tell you.”

Eliot nodded. “I can see that too.”

Contestants began trickling into the city a few days later. They were a bizarre menagerie: men and women, tall and short, haunted and feral, scarred and branded and shaved and tattooed. There was an ambulatory skeleton and an animated suit of armor. They carried swords that glowed and buzzed and burned and sang. A handsome pair of conjoined twins offered to enter individually and, in the event that they vanquished the field, gallantly declared themselves willing to fight each other. An intelligent sword arrived, borne on a silk pillow, and explained that it wished to enter, it merely required somebody willing to wield it.

On the first day of the tournament there were so many pairings that some of the bouts had to be held outside after all, on wooden stages set up in the courtyards. A circus atmosphere prevailed. The weather was just turning — it was the first cold morning of the year — and the fighters’ breath smoked in the dawn air. They performed all kinds of weird stretches and warm-ups on the wet grass.

It was everything Quentin had hoped for. He couldn’t sit still long enough to watch a whole match, there was always something unmissable going on in the next ring over. Shouts and clashes and weird war cries and even less easily identifiable noises broke the early morning calm. It was like being in a battle, but minus all the death and suffering.

It was three full days before the contestants worked their way through the draw to the final pairing. There were a few incidents and explosions along the way, where forbidden weaponry or major magic overpowered the safeguards they’d put in place, but no one was hurt too badly, thank God. Before it started he’d had a romantic idea about entering the tournament himself in disguise, but he could see now what a disaster that would have been. He wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds.

Quentin oversaw the final match himself. Eliot and Janet condescended to attend, though such grunting, sweaty exercises were beneath Queen Julia’s notice. Various barons and other court grandees and hangers-on sat in a row against the walls of the banquet hall, which looked woefully unmartial — he wished he’d done it outside after all. The last two fighters entered together, side by side but not speaking.

After all that they looked oddly alike: a man and a woman, both slender, both of average height, nothing outwardly extraordinary about either of them. They were cool and serious, and they showed no obvious animosity for each other. They were professionals, drawn from the upper tiers of the mercenaries’ guild. They were just here to transact business. Whatever violence they had stored up in their lean, compact bodies was still latent for the time being, fissile but inactive. The woman was called Aral. The man’s name, absurdly enough, was Bingle.

Aral fought veiled and tightly swathed, like a ninja. She had a reputation as an elegant fighter who made a fetish of her technique. Nobody had been able to break her form, let alone touch her. Her sword was an oddity: it was curved slightly and then recurved, in the form of an elongated letter S. Pretty but a pain to carry around, Quentin thought. You couldn’t fit it in a scabbard.

Bingle was an olive-colored man with hooded eyes that gave him a permanently melancholy look. He wore what might once have been an officer’s uniform from which the bars and trim had been snipped, and he fought with a thin, flexible, whiplike blade with a complicated basket hilt that didn’t look Fillorian. Though he’d won all his matches, the buzz on him was that he’d managed it without doing a lot of actual fighting. One infamous duel started in the morning and ran almost till sundown while Bingle engaged in an endless series of feints and evasions. The whole tournament was held up while they waited for the bracket to be filled.

In another match Bingle’s opponent waited till the opening bell had rung and then calmly stepped over the chalk line out of bounds for an automatic forfeit. Apparently they’d met before, and once had been enough. Quentin was looking forward to watching somebody make Bingle actually stand and fight.

Quentin nodded to the Master of Sword to start the match. Aral began a sequence of highly stylized movements, drawing fluid shapes in the air with her recurved blade. She didn’t approach her opponent. She seemed to be lost in concentration, practicing some ritualized, almost abstract martial art. Bingle watched her for a little bit, flicking the tip of his sword around uneasily.

Then he joined the dance. He began performing the same movements as his opponent — they became mirror images of each other. Apparently they were adepts of the same style and had chosen to open with the same form. Laughter rippled through the crowd. And it was funny, like a mime copying a passerby. But neither of the fighters laughed.

Afterward Quentin wasn’t sure exactly when this preamble ended and the fighting began. The two combatants passed too near each other, and it was like a candle flame accidentally brushing a curtain. A spark jumped the gap, the symmetry was broken, the fissile material reached criticality, and suddenly the room was full of the rapid-fire clatter of steel colliding with steel.

At this level of mastery the action went too fast for Quentin to follow. The precise details of the moves and countermoves and negotiations were lost on everybody but the combatants. Their shared style was all arcs and spins and constant motion as each side looked for openings and found only dead ends. You got the impression they were reading each other down to an atomic level, logging tiny twitches and tells and shifts of weight. The passes would start beautifully, set sequences that sometimes even included a flip or a somersault, then the flow would break and everything would be chaos until the blades tangled up and locked, and they disengaged and started all over again.

Jesus, Quentin thought. And he was going to get on a boat with one of these people. It was a little too real. But it was electrifying too: these were people who knew exactly what they were meant to do and never hesitated to do it, whether they won or lost.

Then all at once it was over: Aral overextended herself with a huge overhand chop that Bingle just managed to roll out from under, and by blind chance her blade stuck fast in the floor, in a crack between two flagstones. Coming up out of the roll Bingle kicked at it, reflexively, and it snapped neatly halfway along its length. Aral stepped back, not bothering to conceal her frustration, and indicated that she conceded the match.

But Bingle shook his head. Apparently he wasn’t happy with the grounds of his victory. He wanted to keep fighting. He looked at Quentin for a ruling. So did everybody else.

Well, if he wanted to play by good-guy rules, then by all means. Quentin wouldn’t mind seeing some more fighting himself. He drew his sword and offered it to Aral hilt-first. She felt the balance, nodded grudgingly, then resumed her fighting stance. The match recommenced.

Five minutes later Bingle jumped a low cut and attempted some midair finesse move that got tangled up in Aral’s ninja wrappings. He wound up right next to her, inside her guard, and she punched him savagely in the ribs, three times. He grunted and staggered backward toward the chalk line, and Quentin was sure he was going to ring out, but at the last second he realized where he was. He spun around and leaped balletically for the wall, pushed off it, turned head over heels, and landed lightly on his feet just in bounds.

The crowd gasped and applauded. It was a circus move, stagy and over the top. Aral irritably pulled off her headscarf and shook out a surprising mass of wavy auburn hair before resuming her stance.

“Bet you anything she practiced that in a mirror,” Eliot whispered.

The dynamic of the fight had changed. Now Bingle dropped the formal, balletic style they’d both been using. Quentin had assumed that that was where his training was, but it soon became apparent that he was some kind of technical freak, because he seemed to be able to shift styles at will. He went at her like a berserker, fast and furious, then cycled rapidly through a courtly dueling mode to a kind of shouting, stamping kendo style. Aral grew increasingly flummoxed trying to adjust, which was presumably what Bingle was after.

Breaking her silence, she shouted something and lunged flat out. Bingle met her attack with a parry so implausible it was vaudevillian: he stopped her blade — Quentin’s blade — with the tip of his, so that the two swords met point to point.

They bent ominously, almost double, for an unendurably tense second — there was a worrying saw-blade sound of flexed metal — and then Bingle’s sword snapped with a sharp, vibrant twang. He had to jerk his head to one side to avoid a flying shard.

He threw his useless hilt at Aral in disgust. The pommel clunked her on the temple, but she shrugged it off. She paused, evidently considering offering him the same largesse he’d offered her. Then, having made some inner calculation probably having to do with honor and principles and castles, she aimed an overhand cutting stroke at Bingle’s shoulder, the coup de grâce.

Bingle closed his eyes and dropped rapidly to one knee. As the blade descended he didn’t dodge, just brought his hands together smoothly and decisively in front of him. And then time stopped.

At first Quentin wasn’t sure what had happened, but the room exploded in amazement. He stood up to get a better view. Bingle had stopped the blade between the palms of his hands, in midstrike, bare flesh against sharp steel. He must have calculated the move down to the last erg and arc and nanosecond. It took a moment for Aral to understand what he’d done, and Bingle didn’t waste it. With the advantage of surprise he jerked the blade toward himself, out of her grip. He flipped it smartly, the hilt smacking solidly into his palm, and placed the blade at her throat. The match was over.

“Oh my God,” Eliot said. “Did you see that? Oh my God!”

The assembled barons forgot their noble reserve. They got to their feet, huzzahing, and mobbed the winner. Quentin and Eliot cheered along with them. But Bingle didn’t seem to see them. Those hooded eyes never changed their expression. He pushed his way through the crowd to Quentin’s throne, where he kneeled and offered Quentin back his sword.

The next time Quentin visited the waterfront the Muntjac was crawling with workmen, like piranhas on an unlucky Amazonian explorer except in reverse. They were putting the Muntjac back together — bringing it back to life. There was no part of it that wasn’t being aggressively sanded or varnished or tightened or reinforced or replaced. They’d got it up into drydock, propped it up on a forest of stilts, fixed the sprung boards, caulked and tarred and painted it. Out-of-sync hammer blows clattered from all quarters of the hull.

As it turned out the ship’s structural elements had been basically sound, which was good, because the shipwrights didn’t think they could have reproduced what they found. Deep in the hold, pieced into some of the complex joins near the prow, they’d found a complicated lump of wooden clockwork connected to taut lines leading off into various parts of the ship. They couldn’t figure out what it was for, so Quentin told them to leave it alone.

The Muntjac’s hull was now a smart jet-black with bright white trim. Hundreds of yards of new sail were even now being sewn by an army of sailmakers, an astonishingly technical process that took place in a vast, airy sail loft the size of an airplane hangar. The sharp, honest fragrances of sawdust and wet paint bloomed in the air. Quentin breathed them in. He felt like he was coming back to life too. Not that he’d been dead, just. . not quite alive. Something else.

With only two or three more days till the Muntjac could be floated, Quentin paid a visit to Castle Whitespire’s map room to see what he could learn about his destination. The Outer Island was the least exciting part of this whole undertaking, but he’d better at least be able to find it. After the clamor of the docks the map room was a reservoir of cool quiet. One whole wall was windows, and the other was taken up with a glorious floor-to-ceiling map of Fillory, from Loria in the north to the Wandering Desert in the south. The map was traversed by a rolling library ladder, so you could get right up close to the part you wanted to study, and the closer you looked, the more detail resolved itself, to the point where you could pick out individual trees in the Queenswood. No dryads though.

The map was lightly animated by some subtle cartographical magic. You could follow tiny combers in as they pounded the Swept Coast, one after the other. Quentin leaned in: you could even hear them, faintly, like the roar in a shell. A line of shadow was advancing across the map, showing where it was night and where it was day in Fillory. Overhead on the vaulted ceiling, tiny stars twinkled in the velvety blue-black of a celestial map that showed the Fillorian constellations.

This was Quentin’s kingdom, the land he ruled. It looked so fresh and green and magical like this. This was Fillory the way he’d thought of it as a little kid, before he’d ever been here — it looked like the maps printed on the endpapers of the Fillory and Further books. He could have watched it all day.

The map room wasn’t exactly a hive of activity. The only visible staff was a surly teenager with thick black bangs that fell over his eyes. He was bent over a table furiously working some kind of calculation using a collection of steel cartographical instruments. It took him a minute to look up and realize that he had a patron.

The boy gave his name, grudgingly, as Benedict. He might have been sixteen. Quentin had a feeling that not a lot of people came through the map room, and still less often were those people kings; at any rate Benedict was out of practice at showing the appropriate amount of deference. Quentin sympathized. Personally he could take or leave the bowing and scraping. But he still needed a map.

“What can you show me that has the Outer Island on it?”

Benedict’s eyes went blank for a second as he queried some mental database. Then he turned away and dragged himself over to a wall that was honeycombed with little square drawers. He yanked one out — they turned out to be thin but very deep — and extracted the single scroll it contained.

The centerpiece of the map room was a heavy wooden table with an elaborate brass mechanism bolted to it. Benedict nimbly fitted the scroll into it and cranked a handle. It was the only thing he did with anything remotely resembling alacrity. The crank unrolled the scroll and spread it out flat so you could get a good look at the section you wanted.

It was a lot longer than Quentin expected. Yards of almost-blank parchment scrolled by as Benedict cranked, showing curves and arcs of latitude and longitude or whatever the Fillorian equivalents were, traversing miles of open ocean. Finally he stopped at a tiny, irregular nugget of land with its name underneath it in italic script: The Outer Island.

“That must be the place,” Quentin said dryly.

Benedict would neither confirm nor deny this. He was painfully uncomfortable making eye contact. Quentin couldn’t think who Benedict reminded him of until he realized that this was what he had probably looked like to other people when he was sixteen. Fear of everybody and everything, hidden behind a mask of contempt, with the greatest contempt of all reserved for himself.

“It looks pretty far out,” Quentin said. “How many days’ sail?”

“Dunno,” Benedict said, which wasn’t quite true, because he added, obviously in spite of himself: “Three maybe. It’s four hundred and seventy-seven miles. Nautical miles.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Nautical’s longer.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred and sixty-five yards longer,” Benedict said automatically. “And a bit.”

Quentin was impressed. Somebody must have managed to beat some information into Benedict somehow. The brass map reader had many articulated arms that extended seductively outward, each one with a posable lens on it. Quentin swiveled one around, and a magnified version of the Outer Island swam into view. It was roughly peanut-shaped, with a star marked on it at one end. Its border was a thick dark line, with a fainter outline around it, doubling it, as if to suggest waves, or maybe the submerged edge of the landmass under the water.

It was about what he expected. A fine black thread, a single lonely stream, wandered from the interior down to the coast. Next to the star was the word Outer, in smaller letters. Presumably that was the name of the island’s one town. The lens failed to reveal anything else. All it did was make the fine grain of the parchment look coarse.

“Who lives there?”

“Fishermen. I guess. There’s an agent of the crown there. That’s why it has a star.”

They looked at the star together.

“It’s a shit map,” Benedict volunteered. He leaned down so that his nose almost touched it. “Look at the shading. Why do you want to know about it?”

“I’m going there.”

“Really? Why?”

“That’s actually a pretty good question.”

“Are you looking for the key?”

“No, I’m not looking for the key. What key?”

“There’s a fairy tale,” Benedict said, as if he were explaining to a kindergartner. “That’s where the key that winds up the world is. Supposed to be.”

Quentin wasn’t wildly interested in Fillorian folklore.

“Why don’t you come along?” he said. “You could make a new map of it, if this one’s so bad.”

Now he was a counselor of troubled youth. Something about the boy made Quentin want to shake him up. Get him out of his comfort zone so he could stop sneering at everybody else who was out of theirs. Get him thinking about something besides his own neuroses for a change. It was harder than it looked.

“I’m not rated for fieldwork,” Benedict mumbled, dropping his gaze again. “I’m a cartographer, not a surveyor.” Quentin watched Benedict’s eyes keep getting drawn back to the map, to that irregular peanut. Maps of places, rather than actual places, were obviously where young master Benedict preferred to live. “The linework is. .” He made a noise through his teeth: ch. “Jesus Christ.”

“Jesus Christ” was an expression the younger Fillorians had picked up from their new rulers. It was impossible to explain to them what it actually meant. They were convinced it was something dirty.

“In the name of the Kingdom of Fillory,” Quentin intoned, “I hereby pronounce you rated for fieldwork. Good enough?”

Should’ve brought my sword. Benedict shrugged, embarrassed. It was exactly what Quentin would have done ten years ago. Quentin almost found himself liking the kid. He probably thought nobody could possibly understand how he felt. It made Quentin realize how far he’d come. Maybe he could help Benedict.

“Think about it. We should bring somebody to update the maps.”

Though the draftsmanship looked fine to Quentin. Idly he turned the crank of the brass map-viewing contraption. It really was very neat: little half-concealed gears spun, and the Outer Island drifted away and was rolled up on the far side of the scroll. He kept cranking. Yards and yards of creamy blank paper passed by, decorated here and there with dotted lines and tiny numbers. Empty ocean.

Finally the scroll ran out, and the loose end popped out and flapped around.

“Not much out there,” he said, since he felt like he should say something.

“It’s the last scroll in the catalog,” Benedict said. “No one’s even looked at it since I’ve been here.”

“Can I take it with me?”

Benedict hesitated.

“It’s okay. I am the king, you know. It’s my map anyway, if you want to be technical about it.”

“I still have to sign it out.”

Benedict carefully rolled up the scroll and placed it in a leather case, then gave him a slip of paper that allowed him to take it out of the map room. He had cosigned it: his full name was Benedict Fenwick.

Benedict Fenwick. Jesus Christ. No wonder he was sulky.

Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had a psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn’t the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn’t trying to save the world from Sauron, he was attempting to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders. It would definitely do. They left Castle Whitespire three weeks to the day after Jollyby died.

A stiff salt breeze was scouring the waterfront. The Muntjac’s sails looked ready to lap it up and race off over the horizon in search of more. They were a glorious white with the very pale blue ram of Fillory splashed across them like a watermark, their edges snapping and vibrating with barely contained excitement. It really was a marvelous beast.

A brass band played on the waterfront. The conductor was visibly urging his charges to greater and greater volumes, but the notes were whipped away by the wind the second they left the instruments. With half an hour to spare Benedict Fenwick had turned up with the clothes on his back and an overnight bag stuffed full of clinking mapmaking equipment. The captain — once again, the unflappable Admiral Lacker — assigned him the last available quarters.

Eliot walked out onto the dock with Quentin to see him off.

“So,” he said.

“So.”

They stood together at the foot of the gangplank.

“You’re really doing this.”

“Did you think I was bluffing?”

“A little bit, yes,” Eliot said. “Say good-bye to Julia for me. Don’t forget what I told you about her.”

Julia had already stowed herself in her cabin with the air of someone who wasn’t planning to reemerge till they’d made landfall.

“I will. You’ll be all right without us?”

“Better off.”

“If you figure out what happened to Jollyby,” Quentin said, “go ahead and kick the ass of whoever’s responsible. Don’t wait up for me.”

“Thanks. For what it’s worth I don’t think it was the Fenwicks. I think they just think we’re dicks.”

Quentin remembered the first time they’d met, how odd Eliot’s twisted jaw had looked. Now it was so familiar he didn’t notice it. It looked like something natural, like a humpback whale’s jaw.

“I suppose I could make a speech,” Eliot said, “but nobody would hear it.”

“I’ll just act like you’re exhorting me to further the interests of the Fillorian people and show these renegade Outer Islanders, who probably just forgot to pay their taxes, if they even have anything to pay taxes on, or with, that we stand for everything that is just and true, and they’d do well to remember it.”

“You’re actually looking forward to this, aren’t you?”

“If you want the truth, it’s taking all my self-control just to stay standing here on the dock.”

“All right,” Eliot said. “Go. Oh, you’ve got an extra crew member. I forgot to tell you. The talking animals sent someone.”

“What? Who?”

“Exactly. Who or what, I never know which. It’s already on board. Sorry, it was politically expedient.”

“You could have asked me.”

“I would have, but I thought you might say no.”

“I miss you already. See you in a week.”

Light on his feet, Quentin jogged up the plank, which was hastily withdrawn behind him as soon as he was on deck. Incomprehensible naval yells issued from all quarters. Quentin did his best to stay out of people’s way as he picked his way back to the poop deck. The ship creaked and shifted slowly, ponderously, as it leaned and bore away from the wharf. The world around them, which had been fixed in place, became loose and mobile.

As they cleared the harbor the world changed again. The air cooled and the wind picked up and the water abruptly became gunmetal gray and ruffled. Massive swells came booming through underneath them. The Muntjac’s enormous sails caught hold of the wind. New wood cracked and settled comfortably into the strain.

Quentin walked to the very stern and looked out over the wake, swept clean and crushed into foam by the weight of their passage. He felt good and right here. He patted the Muntjac’s worn old taffrail: unlike most things and most people in Fillory, the Muntjac needed Quentin, and Quentin hadn’t let her down. He stood up straighter. Something heavy and invisible had relaxed its taloned grip, left its familiar perch on his shoulders and winged away on the stiff breeze. Let it weigh down somebody else for a while, he thought. Probably it would be waiting for him when he got home again. But for now it could wait.

When he turned around to go below, Julia was standing right behind him. He hadn’t heard her. The wind had caught her black hair and was whipping it wildly around her face. She looked outrageously beautiful. It might have been a trick of the light, but her skin had a silvery, unearthly quality, as if it would shock him if he touched it. If they were ever going to fall in love with each other, it was going to happen on this ship.

They watched together as Whitespire grew smaller behind them and was finally obscured by the point. She’d come here all the way from Brooklyn, just like him, he thought. She was probably the only person in the world, in any world, who understood exactly what all this felt like to him.

“Not bad, right Jules?” he said. He breathed in the cold sea air. “I mean, this whole trip is ridiculous, basically, but look!” He gestured at everything — the ship, the wind, the sky, the seascape, the two of them. “We should have done this ages ago.”

Julia’s expression didn’t change. Her eyes had never gone back to normal after the incident in the forest. They were still black, and they looked strange and ancient with her girlish freckles.

“I did not even notice we were moving,” she said.

CHAPTER 4

You have to go back to the beginning, to that freezing miserable afternoon in Brooklyn when Quentin took the Brakebills exam, to understand what happened to Julia. Because Julia took the Brakebills exam that day too. And after she took it, she lost three years of her life.

Her story started the same day Quentin’s did, but it was a very different kind of story. On that day, the day he and James and Julia walked along Fifth Avenue together on the way to the boys’ Princeton interviews, Quentin’s life had split wide open. Julia’s life hadn’t. But it did develop a crack.

It was a hairline crack at first. Nothing much to look at it. It was cracked, but you could still use it. It was still good. No point in throwing her life away. It was a perfectly fine life.

Or no, it wasn’t fine, but it worked for a while. She’d said good-bye to James and Quentin in front of the brick house. They’d gone in. She’d walked away. It had started to rain. She’d gone to the library. This much she was pretty sure was true. This much had probably actually happened.

Then something happened that didn’t happen: she’d sat in the library with her laptop and a stack of books and written her paper for Mr. Karras. It was a damn good paper. It was about an experimental utopian socialist community in New York State in the nineteenth century. The community had some praiseworthy ideals but also some creepy sexual practices, and eventually it lost its mojo and morphed into a successful silverware company instead. She had some ideas about why the whole arrangement worked better as a silverware company than it had as an attempt to realize Christ’s kingdom on Earth. She was pretty sure she was right. She’d gone into the numbers, and in her experience when you went into the numbers you usually came out with pretty good answers.

James met her at the library. He told her what had happened with the interview, which was weird enough as it was, what with the interviewer turning up dead and all. Then she’d gone home, had dinner, gone up to her room, written the rest of the paper, which took until four in the morning, grabbed three hours of sleep, got up, blew off the first two classes while she fixed her endnotes, and went to school in time for social studies. Mischief managed.

When she looked back the whole thing had a queer, unreal feeling to it, but then again you often get a queer, unreal feeling when you stay up till four and get up at seven. Things didn’t start to fall apart till a week later, when she got her paper back.

The problem wasn’t the grade. It was a good grade. It was an A minus, and Mr. K didn’t give out a lot of those. The problem was — what was the problem? She read the paper again, and though it read all right, she didn’t recognize everything in it. But she’d been writing fast. The thing she snagged on was the same thing Mr. K snagged on: she’d gotten a date wrong.

See, the utopian community she was writing about had run afoul of a change in federal statutory rape laws — creepy, creepy — that took place in 1878. She knew that. Whereas the paper said 1881, which Mr. K would never have caught — though come to think of it he was a pretty creepy character himself, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he knew his way around a statutory rape law or two — except Wikipedia made the same mistake, and Mr. K loved to do spot-checking to catch people relying on Wikipedia. He’d checked the date, and checked Wikipedia, and put a big red X in the margin of Julia’s paper. And a minus after her A. He was surprised at her. He really was.

Julia was surprised too. She never used Wikipedia, partly because she knew Mr. K checked, but mostly because unlike a lot of her fellow students she cared about getting her facts right. She went back through the paper and checked it thoroughly. She found a second mistake, and a third. No more, but that was enough. She started checking versions of the paper, because she always saved and backed up separate drafts as she went, because Track Changes in Word was bullshit, and she wanted to know at what point exactly the errors got in. But the really weird thing was there that were no other versions. There was only the final draft.

This fact, although it was a minor fact, with multiple plausible explanations, proved to be the big red button that activated the ejector seat that blew Julia out of the cozy cockpit of her life.

She sat on her bed and stared at the file, which showed a time of creation that she remembered as having been during dinner, and she felt fear. Because the more she thought about it the more it seemed like she had two sets of memories for that afternoon, not just one. One of them was almost too plausible. It had the feel of a scene from a novel written by an earnest realist who was more concerned with presenting an amalgamation of naturalistic details that fit together plausibly than with telling a story that wouldn’t bore the fuck out of the reader. It felt like a cover story. That was the one where she went to the library and met James and had dinner and wrote the paper.

But the other one was batshit insane. In the other one she’d gone to the library and done a simple search on one of the cheapo library workstations on the blond-wood tables by the circulation desk. The search had yielded a call number. The call number was odd — it put the book in the subbasement stacks. Julia was pretty sure the library didn’t have any subbasement stacks, because it didn’t have a subbasement.

As if in a dream she walked to the brushed-steel elevator. Sure enough, beneath the round white plastic button marked B, there was now also a round plastic button marked SB. She pressed it. It glowed. The dropping sensation in her stomach was just an ordinary dropping sensation, the kind you get when you’re descending rapidly toward a subbasement full of cheap metal shelving and the buzz of fluorescent lights and exposed pipes with red-painted daisy-wheel valve handles poking out of them at odd angles.

But that’s not what she saw when the elevator doors opened. Instead she saw a sun-soaked stone terrace in back of a country house, with green gardens all around it. It wasn’t actually a house, the people there explained, it was a school. It was called Brakebills, and the people who lived there were magicians. They thought she might like to be one too. All she would have to do is pass one simple test.

CHAPTER 5

Waking up that first morning on board the Muntjac, the only thing Quentin could compare it to was his first morning waking up at Brakebills. His cabin was long and narrow, and his bed lay along it opposite a row of windows that were only a couple of yards above the waterline. The first thing he saw was those windows, speckled with droplets and bright with sunlight reflected off the water, which they were skimming over at an unbelievable clip. Bookshelves, cabinets, and drawers had been cleverly tucked in along the walls and under the bed. It was like being inside a Chinese puzzle.

He swung his bare feet down onto the wide, cold planks of his little cabin. He felt the slight pitch and the even slighter roll of the ship, and the tilt that the wind had set it at. He felt like he was in the belly of some massive but friendly marine mammal whose joy in life was to lope along the surface of the sea with him inside it. Quentin was one of those annoying people who never got seasick.

He got his clothes out of the miniature dresser that was built into the wall, or the gunwale, or bulkhead, whatever you called a wall on a ship. He admired the neat rows of books on the built-in shelves above his bed, which were held in place by a narrow board so they wouldn’t fall off during a storm. He wasn’t especially looking forward to finding out what they were going to have for breakfast, and the less said about the bathroom the better, but other than that he was in a state of grace. He hadn’t felt this good in months. Years, maybe.

On deck he was the only person who had nothing to do. The crew of the Muntjac was small for a ship its size, eight hands including the captain, and all the crewmembers who were visible were very seriously engaged in steering the ship and splicing ropes and scrubbing the deck and climbing up and down things. Julia was nowhere in sight, and Admiral Lacker and Benedict were discussing some navigational nicety with a degree of animation Quentin hadn’t thought either one of them was capable of.

Quentin supposed he would consult on weather magic if any was required, but Julia was better at that stuff than he was, and anyway he couldn’t imagine how even Julia could improve on what they had, which was a clear sky and a cold stiff wind out of the northwest. He decided to climb up the mast.

He walked over to the last and least of the Muntjac’s three masts, swinging his arms forward and back, loosening up his shoulders. It was probably a stupid idea. But who hadn’t at some point in his life wanted to climb to the top of a sailing ship in full flight? It always looked easy in movies. The mast wasn’t exactly built for climbing — there weren’t any rungs or steps or spikes. He put his foot on a brass cleat. The man at the helm looked at him. Your king is climbing a mast, citizen. And no, he doesn’t know how. Deal with it.

It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t that hard, either. Where there weren’t cleats or spars there were at least ropes, though you had to be careful not to pull anything that wasn’t supposed to be pulled. He skinned a knuckle, then another one, and a fat splinter stabbed straight into the soft ball of his thumb and broke off there. The mast hummed with tension — he could sense it rooted deep in the hold, taking the force of the wind and balancing it with the force of water on the keel. The thing he hadn’t counted on was how cold it got, right away, like he’d climbed into another climatic zone, or maybe the lower limits of outer space.

The other thing he hadn’t counted on was the angle of the ship. He barely noticed it most of the time, but the farther he got from the safety of the deck the more perilously the ship seemed to be heeling over. He had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t actually in imminent danger of rolling right over and drowning them all. Probably.

By the time he got to the top he was no longer over the deck at all. He could have dropped a plumb line straight down into the water, which rushed along below him, a torrent of rough green glass. A blunt-nosed, milky-gray shape was keeping pace with them below the surface about fifty feet off their starboard side. It was huge. Not a whale — its tail was vertical, not horizontal. A gigantic fish, then, or a shark. Even as he watched it, it swam deeper, growing fainter and more diffuse, until he could no longer see it at all. The higher you get the more you realize how much bigger than you everything is.

Going down was easier. Once he was safely on deck Quentin decided to keep going the other way, down to the hold. The noise of the bright, busy outside world vanished as soon as he stepped through the dark hatch in the deck. There wasn’t far to go: three short flights took him to the bottom of the Muntjac’s hollow little world.

It was warm there. He could feel the ocean pressing in on him from the other side of the damp, sweating wood. The hold was so full of supplies there was hardly room to move. It wasn’t very scenic. He was making his way back to the ladder, back up to reality, or what passed for it in Fillory, when a weird, furry, upside-down face loomed out of the darkness at him.

He gave a high and not very kingly bark of alarm and hit his head on something. The face hung in midair — as his eyes adjusted he saw that the creature was hanging upside down from a crossbeam, so comfortably that it looked like it had been there its whole life. It had an alien, half-melted look.

“Hello,” it said.

That was one mystery solved. Their talking animal was a sloth. It was just about the ugliest mammal Quentin had ever seen.

“Hi,” Quentin said. “I didn’t realize you were down here.”

“Nobody seems to,” the sloth said, with equanimity. “I hope you’ll come visit. Often.”

It took them three days to sail to the Outer Island, and every day it got hotter. They left the autumn beaches and steel waters of Whitespire for a more tropical zone. They did this while traveling east, instead of north or south, which was weird to the people from Earth, but none of the Fillorians seemed surprised. It made him wonder whether this world was even spherical — Benedict had never even heard of an equator. The crew changed into tropical whites.

Benedict stood by Admiral Lacker’s side at the helm with a book of charts that laid out the approach to the Outer Island, page after page crowded with technical-looking dots and blobby concentric isobars. Working together they threaded their way through a maze of shoals and reefs that no one but they could see until the island was actually in sight: a little bump of white sand and green jungle on the horizon, with a modest peak in the middle, not so different from what he’d imagined. They rounded a point and entered a shallow bay.

The moment they did the wind dropped to nothing. The Muntjac coasted into the center of the harbor on the last of its momentum, rippling the placid green surface as it went. The sails flapped limply in the silence. It could have been a sleepy hamlet on the Côte d’Azur. The shore was a narrow sandy strand littered with dry seaweed and the fibrous bits that palm trees constantly shed, baking in the afternoon heat. A wharf and a few low structures stood toward one end, and one rather magnificent-looking building that might have been a hotel or a country club. Not a single person was visible.

Probably they were taking a siesta. In spite of himself Quentin felt a rising sense of anticipation. Don’t be an idiot. This was an errand. They were here to collect the taxes.

They lowered the launch in silence. Quentin climbed in, followed by Bingle and Benedict, who lost his sullen self-consciousness for a moment in his excitement at starting his survey. At the last minute Julia appeared from below and slipped aboard. The sloth, slung comfortably from its beam in the hold, declined to go, though it enjoined them, before closing its drooping, shadowed eyes, to remember that if they came across any particularly succulent shoots, or even a small lizard, it was an omnivore.

A long, skinny, rickety pier projected from the wharves out into the water, with an absurd little cupola at the end. They rowed for it. The bay was as smooth as a pond. Throughout this entire operation they hadn’t seen or heard a soul.

“Spooky,” Quentin said out loud. “God, I hope it’s not one of those Roanoke deals where the whole place is deserted.”

Nobody said anything. He missed having Eliot to talk to, or even Janet. If Julia was amused, or even got the reference, she didn’t let on. She’d been keeping to herself since they left Whitespire. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, or touch anyone — she kept her hands in her lap and her elbows drawn in.

He scanned the shoreline through a folding telescope that he’d charmed so that it would show beings both visible and invisible, or most of them anyway. The waterfront was genuinely, authentically deserted. If you adjusted the telescope — it had an extra dial — it ran the view a little ways backward in time too. Nobody had visited the beach for at least an hour.

The pier creaked in the stillness. The heat was murderous. Quentin thought he should go first, as king, but Bingle insisted. He was taking his duties as royal bodyguard very seriously. He wasn’t anywhere near as jolly as his name made him sound, though that would have been almost impossible since his name made him sound like a clown who entertained at children’s parties.

The big building they’d seen earlier was made of wood and painted white, with Ionic columns out front and grand glass doors. Everything was peeling. It looked like an old Southern plantation house. Bingle pushed open the door and stepped inside. Quentin pushed in right behind him. If he got nothing else out of this he was going to get a little thrill of the unknown, however short-lived. It was pitch-black inside after the glare of the afternoon, and pleasantly cool.

“Have a care, Your Highness,” Bingle said.

As his eyes adjusted Quentin saw a shabby but grandly appointed room with a desk in the center. At it sat a little girl with straight blond hair coloring fiercely on a piece of paper. When she saw them she turned around and shouted up the stairs:

“Mom-my! There’s people here!”

She turned back to them.

“Try not to get sand in the house.”

She went back to coloring.

“Welcome to Fillory,” she added, without looking up.

The little girl’s name was Eleanor. She was five and very adept at drawing bunny-pegasi, which were like regular pegasi except instead of horses with wings they were rabbits with wings. Quentin wasn’t clear on whether they were real or made up; you could never be totally sure about stuff like that in Fillory. Mommy was in her late thirties or thereabouts, pretty with thin lips and a pale untropical complexion. She descended the stairs smartly, in high heels and a vaguely official-looking jacket and skirt, and shifted Eleanor roughly out of her chair, which Eleanor accepted. She took her pictures and coloring things and ran up the stairs.

“Welcome to the Kingdom of Fillory,” the woman said, in a throaty alto. “I am the Customs Agent. Please state your names and countries of origin.”

She opened a very official-looking ledger and held a large purpleinked stamp at the ready.

“I’m Quentin,” Quentin said. “Coldwater. I’m king of Fillory.”

She paused, eyebrows arched, with her hand poised to stamp. She was making a good thing out of this routine: businesslike but sexy, with some nicely judged irony in there. There was something of the vamp about the Customs Agent.

“You’re the king of Fillory?”

“I’m a king of Fillory. There are two.”

She put down the stamp. In the column marked OCCUPATION she wrote: king.

“In that case — from Fillory?”

“Well, yes.”

She made another note.

“Ah, well.” She sighed and closed the ledger. She didn’t get to use her stamp. “There isn’t much paperwork if you’re from Fillory. I thought you might have come from overseas.”

“Address His Highness with respect,” Bingle snapped. “You’re talking to the king, not some wandering fisherman.”

“I know he’s the king,” she said. “He said that.”

“Then address him as ‘Your Highness’!”

“Sorry.” She turned to Quentin, trying, but not very hard, to suppress her amusement. “Your Highness. We don’t get a lot of kings here. It takes getting used to.”

“Well, all right.” Quentin let it go. “Look, Bingle, I’ll take care of guarding my dignity, thanks.” Then to the Customs Agent: “You can still stamp my form if you want to.”

Bingle shot Quentin a glance to the effect of, you have no idea how to be a king, literally none.

The Customs Agent’s name turned out to be Elaine, and once she’d satisfied herself as to their immigration status she was a gracious host. It was usual on the Outer Island to have cocktails in about an hour, she explained, but before then would they like to see something of the island? They certainly would. By all means, as long as they were here. Only they should be warned that someone would wind up carrying Eleanor on his shoulders. She was a sweet child but easily distracted and very lazy.

“She’s a terrible flirt. She goes straight for the men of the party, and if she figures out you’re an easy mark, you’ll be carrying her around for the rest of the day.”

They followed Elaine through the embassy, which was what the grand building turned out to be. It was dim and surprisingly elegant, with lots of club chairs and dark wood, something like an English gentlemen’s club. It was hard to picture the opulent age in which all this stuff had been shipped out here and assembled. The Outer Island must have had a heyday. They walked out the back gate and along a cart track hacked out of the tropical greenery. Elaine picked a tangy sweet-sour fruit from a low-hanging branch and offered it to Quentin.

“Try this,” she purred. It had dense nests of seeds inside that one spat out into the weeds.

The spicy scent of the seaside gave way to the dense green chlorophyl fug of the jungle. Here and there they passed a wrought-iron gate, painted white but rusting, with a path curving away back into the underbrush. Elaine discoursed about the various histories and scandals of the families that lived in the houses at the ends of the paths. She was handsome and had a bright, appealing manner. Though Quentin wondered why she wasn’t more affectionate to her daughter, the helpful little Eleanor. It didn’t jibe with her otherwise hospitable manner. Bingle stalked ahead of them, sword out, ready to slash or grapple any malefactors who might spring out of the jungle with designs on the king’s person. Quentin thought he was being rude, but Elaine didn’t seem to notice.

They stopped to admire a tropical clock-tree, which took the form of a palm tree instead of an oak. Quentin asked Eleanor if she could tell time, and she said that she couldn’t and what’s more she didn’t want to.

“Aren’t we being a little princess for the king,” said Elaine. Benedict sketched effortfully as they walked, trying not to blot his notebook with sweat. Julia stopped to study a weed, or maybe talk to it, and they left her behind. How much trouble could she get into? Quentin had had some half-formed idea of flirting with Elaine as a way of arousing Julia’s competitive spirit, but if such a spirit dwelled within her it remained unaroused.

After a half mile they came to the center of town. The cart track performed a wobbly loop and rejoined itself. There was a market here, or at least some market stalls, with a fishy reek and a few discarded, trampled fruit of the kind they’d picked on the way there. At the head of the loop stood a grand official building of the town hall variety with a stopped clock on its pediment like a blind Cyclops eye and a faded but still recognizable Fillorian flag hanging limp and exhausted in the damp heat.

In the center of the loop stood a stone monument, a granite obelisk with a statue of a man on top. Monsoons had weathered it badly, and tropical weeds had managed to crack off a corner of the base, but you could still make out the man’s heroic attitude, stoic in the face of what looked like impending misfortune.

“That is Captain Banks,” Elaine said. “He founded the Fillorian settlement on the Outer Island, by which I mean he ran his ship into it.”

Quentin wondered if there was a joke to be made about “founder” and “founder.” If there was it had probably already made the rounds of the Outer Island.

“Where is everybody?”

“Oh, they’re around,” she said. “We keep to ourselves here, mostly.”

Eleanor tried Elaine and was cuffed away. She held up her arms to Quentin, and he hoisted her up onto his shoulders. Elaine rolled her eyes as if to say, don’t say I didn’t warn you. The sun was setting in an absolute bloodbath of a sunset behind the trees, and the evening insects were growing bolder.

Eleanor squealed with delight at how tall Quentin was compared with her usual mount. She pulled the edge of her skirt down over his eyes. He gently lifted it up and she squealed again and pushed it back down. It was a game. She was surprisingly strong. Quentin supposed that there were worse things to be than an easy mark.

He stood there for a long moment, in the tropical darkness that lay beneath the hem of Eleanor’s skirt. Here I am, noble leader of the bold expedition to the Outer Island. King of all I survey. This was it, there really would be no surprise twist, no big reveal. The feeling of resignation was almost pleasurable, a mellow, numbing pleasure, like the first good, stiff drink of the evening.

He sighed. It wasn’t an unhappy sigh, but it included the thought: as soon as I have those taxes I am so out of here.

“You said something before about cocktails,” he said.

Dinner at the embassy was surprisingly good: a frighteningly toothy local fish served whole in a sweet preparation with some kind of mangolike local fruit. Eleanor waited on the guests with towering dignity, conveying salt shakers and glasses and other incidental items from kitchen to table with a straight back and slow, deliberate steps, toe-heel, as if she were walking a balance beam. Around eight thirty she dropped a crystal wineglass.

“For God’s sake, Eleanor,” Elaine said. “Go to bed. No dessert, just go to bed.” The accused wept and demanded cake, but Elaine was unmoved.

Afterward they all sat on wicker couches and chairs on an upper porch and took cautious sips of some appallingly sugary local liquor. The bay was spread out in the darkness below them, with the Muntjac afloat in it, illuminated by lanterns at bow and stern and at the tops of the masts. Julia contrived a spell to keep the bugs away.

Quentin asked where the bathroom was and excused himself. It was a cover story: he stopped by the kitchen, where he found what was left of the cake sitting underneath a glass dome. He cut a slice and took it up to Eleanor’s bedroom.

“Shhhhhh,” he said, closing the door behind him. She nodded seriously, as if he were a spy delivering a wartime communiqué. He waited while she ate the cake, then returned the evidence — the empty plate and the fork — to the kitchen.

When he got back to the veranda Elaine was alone. Julia had gone to bed. If she felt anything about him, she wasn’t about to fight over him for the sake of it. His grand outing with Julia was slipping away from him. Fine if nothing happened between them — at this point he’d be happy if he could just get her to talk to him. He was worried about her.

“I apologize about earlier,” Elaine said. “Your Highness. About your being king.”

“Forget about it.” He refocused his attention on her with an effort and smiled. “I’m still getting used to it myself.”

“It would have been easier if you were wearing a crown.”

“I did for a while, but it was incredibly uncomfortable. And it always fell off at the most inappropriate moments.”

“I can imagine.”

“Christenings. Cavalry charges.”

Under the influence of the local moonshine he was beginning to find himself insouciantly charming. Le roi s’amuse.

“It sounds like a public nuisance.”

“It was practically an enemy of the state. Now I just maintain a kingly bearing. I’m sure you noticed that.”

It was difficult to make out her expression in the twilight. Mobs of exotic eastern stars were filling in the black sky overhead.

“Oh, it was unmistakable.”

She began rolling a cigarette. Were they flirting? She had to be at least fifteen years older than Quentin. Here he was afloat in the wild magical tropics of Fillory and he’d stumbled on the only cougar within 477 nautical miles. He wondered who Eleanor’s daddy was.

“Did you grow up here?” he asked.

“Oh, no. My parents were from the mainland — down around the Southern Orchard. I never knew my father. I’ve been in the diplomatic service forever. This is just another posting for me, I’ve been all over the empire.”

Quentin nodded sagely. He wasn’t aware that Fillory had a diplomatic service. He’d have to look into that when he got back.

“So do you get a lot of people coming through here? I mean from outside Fillory? Over the sea?”

“Sadly no. Actually I’ll tell you a terrible secret: no one has ever come through here, not as long as I’ve been at the embassy. In fact in the whole history of this office, three centuries of it, nobody has ever once passed through customs from across the Eastern Ocean. The records are completely blank. In that respect I suppose you’d have to call it a bit of a sinecure.”

“Well, what with there being no work and all.”

“It’s a shame, you should see the customs forms, they’re really magnificent. The letterhead alone. You should take some. And the stamp — I’ll stamp something for you in the morning. The stamp is an absolute masterpiece.”

The tip of her cigarette glowed in the dimness. Quentin was reminded of the last time he’d smoked, during the brief but vigorously hedonistic period when he’d lived in New York, three years ago. Her cigarette was sweet and fragrant. He asked for one. She had to roll it for him, he’d forgotten how. Or had he ever known? No, Eliot had a clever silver device that rolled them for you.

“I hate to bring this up,” Quentin said. “But there’s a reason why I’m here.”

“I thought as much. Is it that magic key business?”

“What? Oh. No, it’s not the magic key.”

She leaned back and put her feet up on a chest she used for a table.

“What then?”

“It’s about the money. The taxes. You didn’t send any last year. I mean the island didn’t.”

She burst out laughing — a big, openmouthed laugh. She leaned back and clapped her hands together once.

“And they sent you? They sent the king?”

“They didn’t send me. I’m the king. I sent myself.”

“Right.” She dabbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. “You’re a bit of a micromanager, aren’t you? Well, I suppose you’re wondering where the money is. We should have sent it. We could have, no one’s in any danger of starving on the Outer Island. Tomorrow I’ll take you out to see the gold beetles. They’re amazing: they eat dirt and poop out gold ore. Their nests are made of gold!” She kicked the chest their feet were resting on. “Take this. It’s full of gold. I’ll throw in the chest for free.”

“Great,” Quentin said. “Thanks. It’s a deal.”

Mission accomplished. He took a drag on the cigarette and stifled a cough. It had been a very brief phase, his smoking period. Maybe he’d had too much of whatever this was. Rum? It was sweet, and they were on a tropical island, so let’s call it rum.

“We hadn’t heard from you for years. There didn’t seem to be any point. I mean, what do you actually do with the stuff?”

Quentin could have answered that, but even he had to admit that the answer wouldn’t have been a very good one. Probably they used it to regild Eliot’s scepter. Taxation without representation. She could start a revolution. She was right. It was all so unreal.

“Anyway look what happened. They sent us a king. I think we might be forgiven for feeling a little pleased with ourselves. But why are you really here? Don’t tell me that’s the whole reason, it’s too, too disappointing. Are you on a quest?”

“I’m afraid I am going to disappoint you. I’m not on a quest.”

“I was sure you were looking for the magic key,” she said. “The one that winds up the world.”

It was hard to tell when she was joking.

“To be honest, Elaine, I don’t really know much about the key. I guess there’s a story about it? Do you get a lot of people looking for it?”

“No. But it’s just about our only claim to fame, aside from the beetles.”

A vast orange moon was rising, as orange as their cigarette tips. It was a crescent moon, hanging so low it looked like it could snag a horn in the Muntjac’s rigging. Fillory’s moon was actually crescent-shaped, not round. Once a day, exactly at noon, it passed between Fillory and the sun, making an eclipse. The birds all went quiet when it happened. It still seemed to take them by surprise. Quentin was so used to it he hardly noticed it anymore.

“It’s not here anyway,” she said.

“I figured that.” Quentin poured himself more rum from a decanter. Not that he needed it, but who cared. He wondered if they’d solved the mystery of Jollyby’s death yet.

“It’s on After. The next island farther out.”

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not following. What’s where?”

“There’s an island farther out from here, called After. Two days’ sail, maybe three. I’ve never been there. But that’s where the key is.”

“The key. You must be joking.”

“Am I laughing?” Was she? She gave him a funny half smile.

“I’m thinking this is a metaphorical key. The key to life. It’s a piece of paper that says ‘haste makes waste’ or ‘early to bed early to rise.’”

“No, Quentin, it’s a real key. Made of gold. Teeth and everything. Very magical, or that’s what people say.”

Quentin stared at the bottom of his glass. He needed to be thinking now, but he’d taken steps to disable his thinking apparatus. Too late. Haste makes waste.

“Who makes a key out of gold?” he said. “It makes no sense. It would be too soft. It would get bent all the time.”

“You’d certainly have to be careful where you stuck it.”

Quentin’s face felt hot. Thank God the night was cooling off, finally, and a night wind was rising in the trees around the embassy.

“So there’s a magic golden key a couple of days’ sail away from here. Why haven’t you gone and gotten it yourself?”

“I don’t know, Quentin. Maybe I haven’t got any magic locks.”

“It never occurred to me that the key might be real.”

It was tempting. It was more than that: it was a big buzzing neon sign in the darkness that read ADVENTURELAND. He could feel the pull of it, from out over the horizon. The Outer Island was a bust, a red herring, but that just meant he hadn’t gone far enough.

Elaine sat forward on the couch, looking more sober and cogent than he felt. Probably she was used to this rum stuff. He wondered what it might be like to kiss her. He wondered what it might be like to get into bed with her. They were all alone on a sweaty tropical night. The moon was up. Though if he’d been serious about that he probably should have stopped drinking a little sooner. And now that he did think about it, he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to kiss those thin, smiling lips.

“Will you let me tell you something, Quentin?” she said. “I would think very hard about whether you want to look for the key. This island is a pretty safe place as islands go, but it’s the jumping-off point. This is the end of Fillory, Quentin.

“Out there”—she pointed out to sea, past the Muntjac’s cozy hurricane lamps, past the faint black-on-blue outlines of the palm trees on the rim of the bay, where the hushing of distant breakers came from—“that’s not Fillory. Your kingdom ends here. Here you’re a king, you’re all-powerful. You’re not king of any of that. Out there you’re just Quentin. Are you sure that’s going to be enough?”

When she said it, he saw what she meant. They were on the very rim of something, the lip. The edge of that meadow in the forest, where Jollyby died. The sill of his office window, when Eliot and the others had come to fetch him on Earth. Here he was powerful. There, he didn’t know what he was.

“Of course I’m not sure,” he said. “That’s why you go. To find out if it’s enough. You just have to be sure you want to find out.”

“Yes, you do, Your Highness,” Elaine said. “Yes, you do.”

Quentin was the last one to bed that night and the last one up in the morning. His sense of time had gotten pleasantly elastic in Fillory, since he wasn’t constantly being assaulted with blinking digital clocks here the way he was in the real world, but it was late enough that the sun was already scorching. Late enough for him to feel the shame that comes with hearing other people going about their business while he was still weakly tangled up in his sweaty sheets. His room was airy and equatorial, with cool white linen and flung-open windows, and it was still suffocatingly hot.

The rum, which had seemed so delightful the night before, so absolutely good and necessary, had now revealed its true nature as a hideous toxin, a drier of mouths and a ravager of brains. He cursed the earlier incarnation of himself that drank so much of it. Then he got up and went in search of water.

There was plenty of it around. Probably there was a beautiful songbird somewhere around here that puked gallons of sparkling springwater every morning, to go with the gold beetles. He ran himself a cool bath and sat in it and sipped more water till his head felt better. You can’t feel fresher and cleaner than when you’re soaking in fresh water within sight of the ocean.

Most of the night before was blotted out, or available to his memory only in the form of mental security-camera footage, grainy figures with blurred voices, but one thing remained bright and clear and high-definition: the golden key. She’d said it was real. He wondered what the magic was. He wondered what it opened. Had she told him, and he’d forgotten? No, that didn’t sound right. But she’d told him where it was: After Island. He needed to know more. They had a choice to make: go on, or go home.

But by the time he came down for breakfast Elaine was already gone. She’d left a note reminding him to take the chest with him, the one with the taxes in it, and wishing him well. She also left him a slender gray book called The Seven Golden Keys. She didn’t say where she’d gone.

I guess she won’t be showing me those gold beetles after all, he thought. Or her fancy stamp. Thank God he hadn’t made a pass at her.

Elaine had left behind her daughter too. Eleanor was back at her mother’s desk, just as they’d found her when they arrived, industriously documenting the habits of the bunny-pegasus in bright primary-colored pencils on official Outer Island Embassy stationery. There seemed to be an unlimited supply of it.

Quentin looked over her shoulder. The letterhead really was nice.

“Good morning, Eleanor. Do you know where your mom went?”

Quentin hadn’t spent a lot of time with little kids in his life. He mostly fell back on treating them like adults. Eleanor didn’t seem to mind.

“No,” she said lightly. She didn’t look up or stop coloring.

“Do you know when she’s coming back?”

She shook her head. What kind of mother would leave a five-year-old to take care of herself? Quentin felt sorry for Eleanor. She was a sweet, earnest little girl. She made him feel paternal, which wasn’t a feeling he had much experience with, but he was finding that he liked it. She obviously didn’t get much attention, and what she got wasn’t exactly dripping with maternal affection.

“All right. We have to go soon, but we’ll wait till she gets back.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Well, we sort of do. Are you still drawing bunny-pegasi?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I think they might be hare-pegasi, not bunnies. Hares are bigger, and much fiercer.”

“They’re bunnies.”

The eternal question. Eleanor changed the subject.

“I made these for you.”

With some effort she pulled open a desk drawer — the humidity made it stick, and when it came unstuck it pulled out all the way and fell on the floor. She rummaged in it and took out some papers, four or five of them, and handed them to Quentin. They were heavily scribbled over in colored pencil.

“They’re passports,” she said, anticipating his question. “You need them if you want to leave Fillory.”

“Who said I’m leaving Fillory?”

“You need them if you’re leaving Fillory,” she said. “If you’re not you don’t need them. They’re just in case.”

And then more quietly: “You have to fold them in half yourself.”

She must have been copying from something official, because they were in their own way impressive documents. They had the Fillorian arms on the front, or a crude facsimile thereof. Inside Quentin’s — once you folded it in half — there was a picture of Quentin, more or less, with a big red smile and a golden crown on his head, and some squiggly lines representing writing. On the back were the arms of the Outer Island: a palm tree and a butterfly. She’d made one for each of them, even the sloth, whom she had never seen but had been extremely interested in. She must be bored stiff without any other kids around, Quentin thought. She must be practically raising herself.

He could relate. He was an only child too, and his parents had never paid much attention to him either. They considered their attitude toward parenting to be rather enlightened: they weren’t going to be the kind of couple whose lives revolved around their child. They gave him a lot of freedom and never asked him for much. Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.

“Thank you, Eleanor. That was very, very sweet of you.” He bent down and kissed her on her blond crown.

“It’s because you brought me cake,” she said shyly.

“I know.”

Poor moppet. Maybe when he got back to Whitespire he could start up some Fillorian equivalent of Child Social Services.

“We’ll wait till your mom comes back before we go.”

“You don’t have to.”

But he did, or he waited as long as possible. They spent the day lounging around the embassy and fishing off the dock. He made another attempt to teach Eleanor to read the palm clock-tree and was again rebuffed. Around four o’clock Quentin called it. He had Benedict take Eleanor into town — over her strident objections — to find somebody responsible to leave her with and ordered everybody else back on the freshly watered and provisioned Muntjac.

Benedict returned an hour later, haggard but victorious. They weighed anchor as the first stars appeared. Playtime was over. They set sail for Castle Whitespire.

CHAPTER 6

A funny thing happened to Julia after that business with her fake social studies paper. A magic trick, you might even call it: where once there had been only one Julia, there were now two Julias, one for each set of memories. The Julia that went with the first set, the normal set, the one where she wrote the paper and went home and had dinner, did normal Julia things. She went to school. She did her homework. She played the oboe. She finally slept with James, which she’d kind of been meaning to do anyway, but for some reason had been putting off.

But there was a second, stranger Julia growing inside the first Julia, like a parasite, or a horrible tumor. At first it was tiny, the size of a bacterium, a single cell of doubt, but it divided and divided and grew and grew. This second Julia wasn’t interested in school, or the oboe, or even James particularly. James backed up the first Julia’s story, he remembered meeting her in the library, but what did that prove? Nothing. It just proved that in addition to writing her paper on intentional communities for her, they’d gotten to James.

And James bought the story, heart and soul. There was only one James.

The problem was that Julia was smart, and Julia was interested in the truth. She didn’t like inconsistencies, and she didn’t let go until they were resolved, ever. When she was five she’d wanted to know why Goofy could talk and Pluto couldn’t. How could one dog have another dog for a pet, and one be sentient and the other not? Likewise she wanted to know who the lazy fucker was who wrote her paper on intentional communities for her and used Wikipedia as a source. Granted that the answer, “the nefarious agents of a secret school for wizards in upstate New York,” was not a league-leadingly plausible answer to her question. But it was the answer that fit her memories, and those memories were getting sharper all the time.

And as they got sharper the second Julia grew stronger and stronger, and every bit of strength she gained she took away from the first Julia, who got weaker and weaker and thinner and thinner, to the point where she was practically transparent, and the parasite behind the mask of her face became almost visible.

The funny thing, or rather one of the many funny things in this haha-hilarious story, was that nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that she had less and less to say to James, or that with three weeks to go before the holiday concert she lost first chair in the oboe section of the wolfishly competitive Manhattan Conservatory Extension School Youth Orchestra, thereby forfeiting the juicy solo in Peter and the Wolf (the duck’s theme) to the demonstrably inferior Evelyn Oh, whose rendition of it did, appropriately enough, sound like a quacking fucking duck, as did everything that came out of Evelyn Oh’s quacking fucking Oh-boe.

The second Julia just wasn’t that interested in James, or in playing the oboe, or in school. So uninterested in school was she that she did something really stupid, which was to pretend she’d applied to college when really she hadn’t. She blew off every single one of her applications. Nobody noticed that either. But they’d notice in April, when brilliant overachieving Julia got into zero colleges. Second Julia had planted a ticking time bomb that was going to blow up first Julia’s life.

That was December. By March she and James were hanging by a thread. She’d dyed her hair black and painted her nails black, in order to more accurately resemble the second Julia. James initially found this sexy and goth, and he stepped up his efforts in the sex department, which wasn’t exactly a welcome side effect, but it made a break from talking to him, which was getting harder and harder. They’d never been as good a couple as they looked — he wasn’t a real bona fide nerd, just nerd-friendly, nerd-compatible, and you could only explain your Gödel, Escher, Bach references so many times before it starts to be a problem. Pretty soon he was going to figure out that she wasn’t role-playing a sexy depressed goth chick, she had actually become a sexy depressed goth chick.

And she was enjoying it. She was dipping a toe in the pool of bad behavior and finding the temperature was just right. It was fun being a problem. Julia had been very very good for a very long time, and the funny thing about that was, if you’re too good too much of the time, people start to forget about you. You’re not a problem, so people can strike you off their list of things to worry about. Nobody makes a fuss over you. They make a fuss over the bad girls. In her quiet way Second Julia was causing a bit of a fuss, for once in her life, and it felt good.

Then Quentin came to visit. The question of where Quentin had gone to after first semester was one she had an inordinate amount of trouble focusing her mind on, but the mist surrounding it was a familiar mist. She’d seen it before: it was the same mist that surrounded her lost afternoon. His cover story, that he’d left high school early to matriculate at some super-exclusive experimental college, smelled like First Julia stuff to her. Made-up stuff.

She’d always liked Quentin, basically. He was sarcastic and spookily smart and, on some level, basically a kind person who just needed a ton of therapy and maybe some mood-altering drugs. Something to selectively inhibit the voracious reuptake of serotonin that was obviously going on inside his skull 24-7. She felt bad about the fact that he was in love with her and that she found him deeply unsexy, but not that bad. Honestly, he was decent-looking, better-looking than he thought he was, but that moody boy-man Fillory shit cut like zero ice with her, and she was smart enough to know whose problem that was, and it wasn’t hers.

But when he came back in March there was something different about him, something otherworldly and glittery-eyed. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. He’d seen things. There was a smell coming off his fingers, the smell you got after they ran the really big Van de Graaff generator at the science museum. This was a man who had handled lightning.

They all went down to the boat launch on the Gowanus Canal, and she smoked cigarette after cigarette and just looked at him. And she knew: He’d gone through to the other side, and she’d been left behind.

She thought she’d seen him there, at the exam at Brakebills, in the hall with the chalk clock, with the glasses of water and the disappearing kids. Now she knew she was right. But it had been very different for him, she realized. When he walked into that room he’d buckled right down and killed that exam, because magic school? That was just the kind of thing he’d been waiting to happen to him his whole life. He practically expected that shit. He’d been wondering when it was going to show up, and when it did he was good and ready for it.

Whereas Julia had been blindsided. She had never expected anything special to just happen to her. Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view, given how unlikely it was that anything as exciting as Brakebills would ever just fall into your lap. So when she got there she had had the presence of mind to step back and make a full appraisal of exactly how weird it all was. She could have handled the math, God knew. She’d been in math classes with Quentin since they were ten years old, and anything he could do she could do just as well, backward and in high heels if necessary.

But she spent too much time looking around, trying to work it through, the implications of it. She didn’t take it at face value the way Quentin did. The uppermost thought in her mind was, why are you all sitting here doing differential geometry and generally jumping through hoops when fundamental laws of thermodynamics and Newtonian physics are being broken left and right all around you? This shit was major. The test was the last of her priorities. It was the least interesting thing in the room. Which she still stood by as the reasonable, intelligent person’s reaction to the situation.

But now Quentin was on the inside, and she was out here chainsmoking on the Gowanus boat dock with her half-orc boyfriend. Quentin had passed the test, and she’d failed. It seemed that reason and intelligence weren’t getting it done anymore. They were cutting, like, zero ice.

It was when Quentin left that day that Julia really fell off a cliff.

It was fair to call it depression. She felt like shit, all the time. If that was depression, she had it. It must have been contagious. She’d caught it from the world.

The shrink they sent her to diagnosed her more specifically with dysthymia, which he defined as an inability to enjoy things that she should be enjoying. Which she recognized the justice of, since she enjoyed nothing, though there was a world of space inside that “should” that a dysthymic semiotician could have argued with, if she had had the energy. Because there was something she did enjoy, or would enjoy, whether or not she should. She just had no access to it. That thing was magic.

The world around her, the straight world, the mundane world, had become to her a blowing wasteland. It was empty, a postapocalyptic world: empty stores, empty houses, stalled cars with the upholstery burned out of them, dead traffic lights swaying above empty streets. That missing afternoon in November had become a black hole that had sucked the entire rest of her life into it. And once you’d fallen past that Schwarzschild radius, it was pretty damn hard to claw your way back out again.

She printed out the first verse of a Donne poem and stuck it on her door:

The sun is spent, and now his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

The world’s whole sap is sunk;

The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,

Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,

Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,

Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Apparently semicolons were the hot new thing in the seventeenth century.

But otherwise it was a pretty good summary of her state of mind. Hydroptic: it meant thirsty. The thirsty earth. The sap had sunk out of the thirsty world, leaving behind a dried husk that weighed nothing, a dead thing that crumbled if you touched it.

Once a week her mother asked her if she’d been raped. Maybe it would have been simpler if she said yes. Her family had never really understood her. They’d always lived in fear of her rapacious intellect. Her sister, a timorous, defiantly unmathematical brunette four years younger, tiptoed around her as if she were a wild animal who would snap rabidly if provoked. No sudden movements. Keep your fingers outside the cage.

As a matter of fact she did consider insanity as a possible diagnosis. She had to. What sane person (ha!) wouldn’t? She definitely looked crazier than she used to. She’d picked up some bad habits, like picking at her cuticles, and not showering, and for that matter not eating or leaving her room for days at a time. Clearly — Doctor Julia explained to herself — she was suffering from some kind of Harry Potter — induced hallucination, with paranoid overtones, most likely schizophrenic in origin.

Except the thing was, doctor, it was all much too orderly. It didn’t have the quality of a hallucination, it was too dry and firm to the touch. For one thing it was her only hallucination. It didn’t spill over into other things. Its borders were stable. And for another thing it wasn’t a hallucination. It fucking happened.

If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic.

Julia broke up with James. Or maybe she just stopped answering his calls and greeting him when they passed each other in the hall. One or the other, she forgot which. She did some careful calculations with her GPA, which until that point had been highly robust, and figured she could go to school two days out of five, eke out straight D’s, and still graduate. It was just a matter of careful brinksmanship, and the brink was where Julia lived now.

Meanwhile she continued to see the shrink regularly. He was a perfectly decent sort, nothing if not well-meaning, with a funny stubbly face and reasonable expectations of what he could hope to achieve in life. She didn’t tell him about the secret school for magic that she hadn’t gotten into, though. Maybe she was crazy, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d seen Terminator 2. She wasn’t going out like Sarah Connor.

Every once in a while Julia did feel her conviction slackening. She knew what she knew, but there just wasn’t a lot to go on, day to day, to keep her belief in what happened strong. The best she could hope for was that every couple of weeks Google might pop up a hit on Brakebills, maybe two, but a few minutes later it would be gone again. As if by magic! Apparently she wasn’t the only person out there who had a Google alert on it, and that person was clever enough to scrub the Google cache when the alert went off. But it gave Julia something to chew on.

Then, in April, they made their first wrong move. They really blew it. Blew it wide open. Because seven envelopes arrived in her mailbox: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech. Congratulations, we are pleased to accept you as a member of the class of ha ha ha ha you must be fucking kidding me! She laughed her fucking head off when she saw them. Her parents laughed too. They were laughing with relief. Julia was laughing because it was so goddamned funny. She kept on laughing as she ripped the letters in half, one after the other, and fed them to the recycling bin.

You goddamned idiots, she thought. Too clever for your own good. No wonder you let Quentin in, you’re just like him: you can’t stop outsmarting yourselves. You think you can buy off my life with this? With a bunch of fat envelopes? You are perhaps under the impression that I will accept these in lieu of the magic kingdom that is my rightful inheritance?

Oh my no. Not on your life, mister. This is a standoff, a waiting game, and I’ve got all day. You’re looking for a quick fix to the Julia problem, but no such fix exists. You’d best settle in, my friend, because Julia is playing the long game.

CHAPTER 7

On the way home, Quentin made it his royal business to orbit the Muntjac and check in on everybody once or twice a day. The morning after they left the Outer Island, Quentin’s first stop was Benedict. The ship was racing along under the tropical sun, its every line and sail twangingly taut and perfect, and Quentin was feeling a little silly that he’d had the Muntjac so thoroughly fitted out for what had amounted to a trip around the block. He found Benedict sitting on a stool in his cabin, hunched over his tiny fold-down writing desk. Spread out on it was a hand-drawn naval chart showing a few jagged little islands and peppered with tiny numbers that might have denoted the depths of the ocean. Somebody had gone over the shallow water with a pale blue wash to make it look more watery.

Benedict hadn’t warmed to Quentin any since they’d left the mainland, but Quentin found himself liking him anyway. There was something bracing about the sheer consistency of his contempt for Quentin, who was, after all, Benedict’s king. It took some backbone to stick to that position. And if nothing else Benedict was about the nerdiest person he’d met in Fillory, of a type that didn’t really exist in the real world: he was a map nerd.

“So what have you been up to?” he said.

Benedict shrugged.

“Seasick mostly.”

He hadn’t seen much of Benedict, though he’d tried a couple of times to tutor him on his math. Benedict was conspicuously skillful at doing arithmetic in his head, but Fillorian mathematics weren’t particularly advanced. It was amazing how far he’d gotten on his own.

“What are you working on?”

“Old map,” Benedict said, without looking up. “Like really old. Like two hundred years ago.”

Quentin peered over his shoulder, hands clasped behind his back.

“Is that from the embassy?”

“Like I would do that. It was on the wall. In a frame.”

“It’s just that it has the Outer Island Embassy seal on it.”

“I copied it.”

“You copied the seal too?”

“I copied the map. The seal was on the map.”

It was a gorgeous map. If he was telling the truth, Benedict had genuine talent. It was detailed, precise, without any hesitations or erasures.

“That’s amazing. You have a real gift.”

Benedict flushed at this and worked even more industriously. He found Quentin’s approval and his disapproval equally unbearable.

“How’ve you found the fieldwork? Must be different from what you’re used to.”

“I hate it,” Benedict said. “It’s a fucking mess. Nothing looks like it’s supposed to. There’s no math for it.” His frustration brought him out of his shell a little. “Nothing’s ever correct, ever. There’s no straight lines! I always got that maps are approximations, I just never understood how much they leave out. It’s chaos. I’m never doing this again.”

“That’s it? You’re giving up?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Look at that—” Benedict waved at the wall, in the general direction of the heaving sea. “And now look at this.” He pointed to the map. “This you can make perfect. That—” He shuddered. “It’s just a mess.”

“But the map isn’t real. So sure, maybe it’s perfect, but what’s the point?”

“Maps don’t make you seasick.”

The irony wasn’t lost on Quentin. He’s the one who’d turned the ship around, back toward Whitespire. He looked at the map Benedict was working on. Sure enough, one of the little islands toward the edge of the page, almost falling into the margin, had the word After written next to it in tiny calligraphic script.

“After Island.” There it was, right there. Quentin touched it lightly with his finger. He half-expected to get a shock. “Is that on our way?”

“It’s east of here. It’s the complete opposite of on our way.”

“How far?”

“Two days, three days. Like I said, the map is really old. And these are outlying islands.”

Benedict explained, rolling his eyes practically up into his head at Quentin’s ignorance, that the islands farther out in the Eastern Ocean didn’t stay still once they caught on that they’d been mapped. They didn’t like it, and through some kind of tectonic magic they wandered around to make sure the maps didn’t stay too accurate. More chaos.

Benedict whispered some calculations to himself, speed and time, then nimbly, precisely — you wouldn’t think it was possible with those black bangs hanging over his eyes — he drew a perfect freehand circle around After Island in light pencil.

“It has to be somewhere inside this circle.”

Quentin gazed at the little island-dot, lost in the web of curving lines of meridians and parallels. A net that wouldn’t catch him if he fell. It wasn’t Fillory out there. But somewhere in that abyss shone a key, a magic key. He could come back with that in his hand.

An image swam into his mind, an album cover from the 1970s, a painting of an old-fashioned sailing ship on the very edge of a cataract over which the green sea was roaring and pouring. The ship was just beginning to tilt, and the current was strong, but still: a bold tack in a strong wind might just save it. A sharp, barked order from the captain and it would slew around and beat back up against the current to safety.

But then where would the ship go? Back home? Not yet.

“Mind if I borrow this?” he said. “I want to show it to the captain.”

With the course change they left the warm blue-green ocean behind and crashed their way into a heaving black one. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. Flail-blows of cold rain clattered on the deck. Quentin couldn’t have pointed to the dividing line, but now the water around them seemed like a completely different element from the one they’d been sailing in before, something opaque and solid that had to be smashed and shoved aside rather than slipped silently through.

The Muntjac bulled its way gamely through the waves ahead of a firm, pressing salt wind. The ship had a surprise for them: below the waterline it seemed — it was hard to see clearly through the chop — to have put out a pair of sleek wooden fins, unfolding from pockets in the hull, which swam them forward. Whether they were animated by magic or a mechanical arrangement, Quentin didn’t know. But he felt a warm surge of gratitude. The old ship was repaying his kindness and more.

He thought the sloth might know something about it, given how much time it spent down there in the hold, but when he visited he found it fast asleep, hanging by its boat-hook claws, rocking gently with the ship’s rolling. If anything it was more serene in the heavy weather. The air in the hold was warm and humid and slothy, and a salad of rotting fruit rinds and less identifiable debris sloshed around in the bilge.

Julia, then. She might know. And he wanted to discuss the magic key with her. She was his only real peer on board the Muntjac, and she had access to sources he didn’t. And he was worried about her.

Julia kept to her cabin even more than usual now that the weather had turned. She may have been spiritually one with Fillory, but the freezing drizzle had hounded even her belowdecks. Quentin lurched down the narrow passage that led to her room, with errant swells flinging him playfully against one bulkhead, then the other.

Her door was shut. For a moment, just as the Muntjac paused weightlessly on the crest of the wave, Quentin had a powerful sense of the romance of the scene, and his crush stirred inside him, unfolding its leathery wings. He knew it was at least partly a fantasy. Julia was so solitary, so wrapped up in Fillory, that it was hard to imagine her wanting him or anyone, or at any rate anyone human. She was missing something, but it probably wasn’t a boyfriend.

Then again they were both here, far out at sea, tempest-tossed, together in a warm berth in the freezing wasteland of the ocean. It was liberating being out from under the snarky, gossipy gazes of Eliot and Janet. Surely Julia couldn’t be so far gone that she didn’t recognize the allure of a shipboard fling. The scene practically wrote itself. She was only human. And they would be home soon. He knocked on her door.

Always at the back of his mind, never spoken but always felt, was his awareness that Julia was from before: before Brakebills, before he knew magic was real, before everything. She’d never known Alice. If he could fall back in love with Julia, it would be like time winding itself back, and he could start over again. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was in love with Julia or just that he wanted to be in love with her, because it would be so comforting, such a relief, to be in love with her. It seemed like such a good idea. Was there really that big of a difference?

Julia opened the door. She was naked.

Or no, she wasn’t naked. She was wearing a dress, sort of, but only to her waist. The top half was hanging down in front of her, and her breasts were bare. They were pale and conical, neither full nor slight. They were perfect. When he was seventeen he’d devoted entire months of his life to constructing a mental image of Julia’s naked upper body based on forensic evidence gathered from furtive surveys of her clothed form. As it turned out he’d been quite close. Only her nipples were different from what he’d expected. Paler, hardly darker than the pale skin around them.

He closed the door again — he didn’t slam it, but he closed it firmly.

“Jesus Christ, Julia!” he said under his breath. Though he said it to himself more than to her.

A long minute passed. He spent it with his back against the bulkhead next to Julia’s door. He could feel his heart beating hard against the hard wood. Sure, he wanted something to happen, but not that. Or at least not like that. What the hell did she mean, waving those things around? What, was this a joke to her? He could hear her moving around in her room. He took a deep breath and knocked again, slowly. When she answered the door again her dress was fully on.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

“Sorry,” she said flatly.

She sat down on a little stool at the other end of the room, facing the windows. She didn’t ask him in, but she hadn’t closed the door either. Warily, he stepped inside.

Julia’s quarters were the mirror image of Quentin’s, but due to an irregularity in the ship’s plan, an errant staircase on his side, they were a little bigger, with room for two people to sit if one of them sat on the bed. Quentin sat on the bed. Light came from a glowing blue ball that bobbed up against the ceiling like a balloon that had lost its string, an odd casting of Julia’s that looked like a trapped will-o’-the-wisp.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I forgot.”

“What did you forget?” It came out angrier than he meant it to. “That your arms go in the sleeves? Look, it’s not like I don’t. .” No good end to that sentence. “Never mind.”

He looked at her, really looked, for the first time in a while. She was still beautiful but thin, much too thin. And her eyes were still black. He wondered if the change was permanent, and if so what else had changed that he couldn’t see.

“I don’t know.” She stared out at the spray. “I forget what I forgot.”

“Well, okay, so, but now you remembered.”

“Look, I forget how things work sometimes. All right? Or not so much how but why. Why people say hello, why they take baths, why they wear clothes, read books, smile, talk, eat. All those human things.” She tugged her mouth to one side.

“I don’t understand this, Julia.” The anger was gone. He kept revising how much trouble Julia was having, and every time he did he revised it upward. “Help me understand. You’re human. Why would you forget that? How would you?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. Then she turned those black eyes on him. “I’m losing it. It’s losing me. It’s going away.”

“What is? What happened to you, Julia? Do you need to go back to Earth?”

“No!” she said sharply. “I’m not going back there. Not ever.”

The idea seemed to frighten her.

“But you remember Brooklyn, right? Where we’re from? And James, and high school, and all that?”

“Remembering.” Her delicate mouth quirked again, bitterly. She spoke in something like her old voice, with contractions and everything. “That’s always been my problem, hasn’t it. I remembered Brakebills. Couldn’t forget it.”

Quentin remembered her remembering. She’d failed the entrance exam at Brakebills, which he’d passed, and she was supposed to forget about it afterward so the school would stay secret. They’d cast spells on her to make sure. But the spells hadn’t held, and she hadn’t forgotten.

But it had brought her here, he reminded himself. To a beautiful ship on a magical ocean. It had made her a queen of a secret world. The path was crooked, but it led to a happy ending, right? It was dawning on him that Fillory was his happy ending, but it might not be Julia’s. She needed something else. She was still out there on the crooked path, and night was coming on.

“Do you wish you hadn’t remembered Brakebills? Do you wish you’d stayed in Brooklyn?”

“Sometimes.” She folded her arms and leaned back against the wall of her cabin in a way that couldn’t have been comfortable. “Quentin, why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t you rescue me, when I came to you for help that day in Chesterton?”

It was a fair question. It’s not like he’d never asked himself that before. He’d even come up with some good answers.

“I couldn’t, Julia. It wasn’t my choice. You know that. I couldn’t get you into Brakebills, I barely got myself in.”

“But you could have come to see me. Showed me what you knew.”

“They would have expelled me.”

“Then after you graduated—”

“Why are we still talking about this now, Julia?” Knowing he was on shaky ground, Quentin counterattacked. Your best defense is a good offense. “Look, you asked me to tell them about you. I did what you asked. I told them. I thought they’d found you and wiped your memory! That’s what they always do.”

“But they didn’t. They couldn’t find me. By the time they came looking for me I was long gone. Into thin air.” She snapped her fingers. “Like magic.”

“And anyway, Julia, how was it supposed to work? What, you were going to be the sorcerer’s apprentice, like Mickey Mouse? And how do you think I felt about it? You didn’t used to give a shit about me, then suddenly I’m Spelly McSpell and you’re all over me. That’s just not how it works.”

“I gave a shit about you, I just didn’t want to sleep with you. God!” She rounded on him in the narrow space. She’d been leaning the stool back on two legs, and now it clunked back down onto four. “Though by the way, I would have, if you’d just given me what I needed.”

“Well, you got it anyway, didn’t you?”

“Oh, I sure did. I got it and a whole lot more. You shouldn’t be surprised about any of this, you of all people. You abandoned me out there in the real world, without magic! Everything that happened to me started with you! You want to know what it was? I’ll tell you. But not until you’ve earned it.”

A heavy silence hung in the room. Outside night was falling hard on the stone-colored waves, and her little window was splashed with seawater.

“I never wanted this for you, Julia. Whatever it is. I’m sorry.”

He had to say it, and it was true. But it wasn’t the only truth. There were other truths in there that weren’t as attractive. Such as: he’d been angry at Julia. He’d been her lapdog in high school, trailing around after her while she screwed his best friend, and he’d quite enjoyed it when the tables turned. Was that why he hadn’t rescued Julia? It wasn’t the only reason. But it was a reason.

“I felt like myself again,” she said dully. “Just then. When I got angry.” The windowpane was beginning to mist over. Julia started drawing a shape on it, then scribbled it out. “It’s going now.”

Never mind the magic key. This was where his attention should be. Julia didn’t need his love. She needed his help.

“Help me understand,” he said. He gathered up her cold fingers in his. “Tell me what I can do. I want to help you. I want to help you remember.”

Something else was glowing in the room, something besides the blue will-o’-the-wisp. He wasn’t sure when it had started. It was Julia — or not Julia, but something inside her. Her heart was glowing: he could see it right through her skin, even through her dress.

“I am remembering, Quentin,” she said. “Out here on the ocean, away from Fillory, it’s coming back to me.” Now she smiled, brightly, and it was worse than when she just looked blank. “I am remembering so much that I never even knew before!”

That night, after a heavy nautical dinner, Quentin went below and unfolded his pallet from against the wall and put himself to bed. The cold, the darkness, the weather, his interview with Julia, everything had combined to accelerate time to the point where he felt like he’d been awake for a week. It wasn’t the hours, it was the mileage. He stared up at the rough red-brown beams over his head in the swaying light of the oil lamp.

He was cold and sticky with salt. He could have washed. He knew how to make fresh water from salt. But the spell was involved, and his fingers were stiff, and he decided he would rather live with the stickiness. He was warming up under the blankets anyway. When he’d come aboard he’d found a regulation navy blanket on the bed, a bristly beast that weighed about ten pounds and could have repelled chain shot. It was like being in bed with the corpse of a wild boar. He’d swapped it out for a foot-thick down comforter that was persistently damp and thoroughly nonregulation but infinitely more comforting.

Quentin waited to see if his mind would tip over into sleep. When it didn’t, and it had made it clear that it wasn’t going to without a fight, he sat up and looked at the books on the bookshelves. In his old life, at a juncture like this one, he would have reached for a Fillory novel, but events had overtaken that particular pleasure. But there was still the book Elaine had given him. The Seven Golden Keys.

Seven. That was more golden keys than he’d bargained for. He would settle for just one. The book wasn’t a novel, it turned out, just a fairy tale set in large type with woodcut illustrations. A children’s book. She must have filched it from Eleanor. What a piece of work that woman was. The back page bore the stamp of the embassy library. He squinched up his pillow enough to prop up his head.

The story was about a man, his daughter, and a witch. He was a widower, and the daughter was hardly more than a toddler when the witch came through town. Jealous of the little girl’s beauty, and with no children of her own, the witch stole her away, cackling as she did that she was going to lock her away in a silver castle on a remote island. The man could free his daughter, but only if he could find the key to the castle, which he never would, because it was at the End of the World.

Undaunted, the man set out to find the key. It was hot, and he walked all day, and as the sun set he stopped by a river to refresh himself. When he bent down to drink he heard a tiny voice calling, open me up! Open me up! He looked around, and soon he saw that the voice belonged to a freshwater oyster that was clinging to a rock in the river. Next to it in the river mud was a minuscule golden key.

The man picked up both oyster and key, and sure enough, there was a tiny keyhole in the oyster shell, on the opposite side from the hinge. He fitted the key into the lock and turned it, and the shell began to open. He worked it farther open with his knife. As he did so the oyster died, as oysters will when their shells are opened. Inside the oyster, in the place where a pearl might have been, was another golden key, slightly larger than the first one.

The man ate the oyster and took the key and went on his way. Soon he arrived at a house in a forest, and he knocked on the door to see if the owners could give him shelter for the night. The door was slightly ajar, so he pushed his way inside. He found the house full of beds, every room was crammed with them, and in each bed a man or a woman was sleeping. He strolled through the house until he finally found an empty one for himself. There was a clock on the wall that had run down. There was no key to wind it with, so he used the key he found in the oyster’s shell. Then he went to bed.

In the morning the clock struck seven, and he awoke. So did the other sleepers in the house. Each of them repeated the same story: they’d come to the house as strangers and taken beds for the night, but they appeared to have slept for years and years, in some cases centuries, right up until the clock struck. As the man packed up his things he found a golden key under his pillow, slightly larger than the one he had used to wind the clock.

It grew colder as the man walked. Perhaps it was colder everywhere since his daughter had been put in the castle. In time the man met a beautiful woman sitting in a pavilion, weeping because her harp was out of tune. He gave her the golden key to tune her harp, and she gave him a larger one in exchange. That one turned out to be the key to a chest buried under a tree root, with yet another, still larger key inside, which let him into a castle — but not the castle with his daughter in it — with a key resting on a table in the highest room of the tallest tower.

The man walked and walked, for weeks or months or years, he couldn’t tell anymore. When he couldn’t walk anymore he sailed, and when he couldn’t sail anymore he was at the End of the World, where sat a dignified man in a dinner suit, dangling his long legs over the edge. He was patting his lapels and turning out his pockets and looking generally perplexed.

“Bother,” said the well-dressed man. “I’ve lost the Key to the World. If I don’t wind it up and set its clockwork going again, the sun and moon and stars won’t turn, and the world will be plunged into an eternal nighttime of miserable cold and darkness. Bother!”

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues. Without a word he drew out the key he’d found in the castle.

“How the devil—?” the man said. “Well, bother. Give it here.”

He took the key and lay full-length on the ground, mussing his fine suit, and reached his arm over the Very Edge of the World and began winding vigorously. A loud ratcheting sound could be heard.

“It’s in my back pocket,” he called over his shoulder as he worked. “You’ll have to get it yourself.”

Hesitantly, the man reached into the pocket — the well-dressed man never stopped winding — and drew out the last key. He retreated to his boat and sailed back the way he came.

A short time later, a surprisingly short time, he arrived at the magical castle where the witch had imprisoned his daughter, how long ago he could no longer tell. It really was an impressive affair, with gleaming silver walls that flashed in the sun, and it floated some ways off the ground, so that you had to ascend to it by way of a narrow winding silver staircase that flexed disquietingly when the wind blew.

The gate was black iron. The man fitted the last key into the lock and turned it.

The moment he finished the doors sprang open to reveal a beautiful woman standing right behind them, just as if she’d been waiting there for him all along. She was as tall as he was, and she must have been doing a great deal of studying with the witch while he was gone, because she absolutely glowed with magical power.

But he still recognized her. She was his daughter.

“Beautiful girl,” the man said, “it’s me. Your father. I’ve come to take you home.”

“My father?” she said. “You’re not my father. My daddy’s not an old man!”

The beautiful woman cackled a not unfamiliar cackle.

“But I am your father,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’ve been searching all this time—”

The woman wasn’t listening.

“Thank you anyway, for setting me free.”

She kissed him on the cheek. Then she handed him a golden key and flew away on the wind.

“Wait!” he called after her. But she didn’t wait. He couldn’t explain. He watched her dwindle in the distance into nothing. Only then did he sit down and weep.

The man never saw his daughter again, and he never used the key either. Because where could he have gone, what door could he have opened, what treasure could he have unlocked that would have been worth more to him than the golden key his daughter gave him?

CHAPTER 8

Quentin was woken up early by the lookout calling out sonorously to the helmsman, like a subway conductor announcing the next stop, that land was in sight. He put a heavy black cloak on over his pajamas and went up on deck.

His dreams had been full of the man and the daughter and the witch and the keys. The story bothered him, not least because he didn’t think it really would have ended that way. Could the man really not have explained? Did his daughter really not understand what had happened? It didn’t add up. If they’d talked about it and figured things out it could have been a happy ending. People in fairy tales never just figured things out.

The clouds hung low and gray and solid, barely higher than the top of the Muntjac’s mainmast. Quentin squinted in the direction the lookout was pointing. There it was: the promised island was barely visible through the mist. Still hours away.

Up on the forecastle deck Bingle was going through his morning exercises. Quentin’s limited interactions with him had made him worry that the greatest swordsman in all of Fillory might possibly be clinically depressed. He never laughed, or even smiled. Two swords lay beside him, still in their leather sheaths, while he performed a series of what looked like isometric exercises involving only his hands, not totally unlike the finger exercises Quentin had learned at Brakebills.

He wondered how you got to be as good at fighting as Bingle. If he was going to get any further in the adventuring business, Quentin thought, he should look into it. He liked the idea of it. A swordfighting sorcerer: the double threat. He didn’t have to get as good as Bingle. He just had to get better than he was, which was none too good.

“Good morning,” Quentin called.

“Good morning, Your Highness,” Bingle said. He never made the mistake of calling Quentin “Your Majesty,” a form of address that was reserved for the High King.

“I hate to interrupt.”

Bingle didn’t stop his routine, which Quentin supposed meant he wasn’t technically interrupting after all. He climbed the short ladder up to where Bingle was standing. Bingle knotted his hands together, then turned the position inside-out in a move that made even Quentin wince.

“I was thinking maybe you could give me some lessons. In swordsmanship. I’ve had a few already, but I haven’t gotten very far.”

Bingle’s expression didn’t change.

“It will be easier to protect you,” he said, “if you can protect yourself.”

“That was my thinking.”

Bingle unwove his fingers, which took some careful doing, and looked Quentin up and down. He reached forward and slid Quentin’s sword out of its sheath. He did this so quickly and fluidly that although Quentin thought he probably could have stopped him — he had a few inches of reach on Bingle — he couldn’t have sworn to it.

Bingle examined Quentin’s sword, first one side then the other, felt its edge and its heft, pouting thoughtfully.

“I’ll provide you with a weapon.”

“I already have a weapon.” Quentin pointed. “That sword.”

“It’s beautiful, but not right for a beginner.” For a second Quentin thought he was going to do something drastic, like chuck it overboard, but he just placed it on the deck next to the two other swords.

Bingle went below and returned to present Quentin with the training sword he would be using, a short, heavy weapon of oiled steel, blunt and nearly black and devoid of any adornment whatsoever. The blade and the hilt were all made out of one single unbroken chunk of metal. It was the most industrial-looking object Quentin had ever seen in Fillory. It weighed half again what his sword weighed. It didn’t even come with a scabbard, so he wouldn’t get to show off his buff sheathing-unsheathing skills.

“Hold it straight out,” Bingle said. “Like this.”

He straightened Quentin’s elbow and brought his arm up parallel to the deck. Quentin was holding the thing at full extension. He could already feel his muscles starting to cramp.

“Point it straight forward. Keep it out there. Long as you can.”

Quentin was expecting further instructions, but Bingle calmly went back to his isometrics. Quentin’s arm stiffened, then glowed with pain, then caught fire. He lasted about two minutes. Bingle had him switch arms.

“What do you call this style?” Quentin asked.

“The mistake people make,” Bingle said, “is thinking that there are different styles.”

“All right.”

“Force, balance, leverage, momentum — these principles never change. They are your style.”

Quentin was pretty sure his knowledge of physics exceeded Bingle’s by a couple of orders of magnitude, but he’d never thought of applying it that way.

Bingle explained that rather than practice a single fighting technique, his technique was to master all techniques and to deploy them as the circumstances and terrain required. A single grand meta-technique, if you will. He’d wandered Fillory and the lands beyond for years, seeking out martial monks in mountain monasteries and street fighters in crowded medinas and extracting their secrets, until he became the man Quentin saw before him: a walking encyclopedia of swordsmanship. Of the oaths he had made and broken, the beautiful women he had seduced and betrayed to obtain these secrets, it was best not to speak.

Quentin switched arms again, and then again. It reminded him of his days as a semi-pro sleight-of-hand magician. The beginning, the laying down of the fundamentals, was always the worst part, which he supposed was why so few people did it. That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect. To take his mind off it he watched Bingle, who was now stalking the deck, staring accusingly ahead of him, whipping his own blade in a complicated pattern, drawing ampersands and Kells knots in the air with it.

A frigid spitting mist was blowing in from the ocean. He could see After Island clearly now; they’d be landing soon. He decided he was done. He should at least change out of his pajamas before he set off in search of the golden key.

“I’m knocking off, Bingle,” he said. He placed his practice blade on the deck next to Bingle’s other two. His arms felt like they were floating.

Bingle nodded, not breaking his own rhythm.

“Come back to me when you can do half an hour,” he said. “With each arm.”

He performed a spectacular no-handed roundoff that looked like it was going to take him right off the forecastle deck, but somehow he swallowed his inertia just in time to stick the landing. He finished with his blade jammed between the ribs of some imaginary assailant. He withdrew it and cleaned the blade on his pants leg.

That was probably a few more lessons down the track.

“Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”

“That’s why I have you,” Quentin said. “So I won’t have to write anything. With my sword.”

“Sometimes I think I am fate’s sword. She wields me cruelly.”

Quentin wondered what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably.

“Right. Well, there won’t be much cruelty on this trip. We’ll be back at Whitespire pretty soon. Then you can go check out your castle.”

Bingle turned to face the wind. He seemed to be living out some story of his own in which Quentin was just a minor character, a chorus member, without even a name in the program.

“I shall never see Fillory again.”

In spite of himself Quentin felt a chill. He didn’t like the feeling. He was chilly enough as it was.

After Island was a low strip of gray rocks and thin grass flocked with sheep. If the Outer Island was a tropical paradise, After could have passed for a stray member of the Outer Hebrides.

They circled it, hugging the shore, until they found a harbor and dropped anchor. A couple of rain-ravaged fishing boats were moored there, and a handful of empty buoys suggested that more were out to sea. It was a hell of a dreary spot. A more enterprising king might have tried to claim it for Fillory, Quentin supposed, except that it didn’t really seem worth it. Not exactly the jewel in the crown.

There was no wharf, and the bay was crowded with surly breakers. They barely managed to get the launch in past the surf without swamping. Quentin jumped out, wetting himself to the waist, and wallowed up onto the rocky beach. A couple of fishermen watched them, smoking and mending a vast tangled net that was stretched out around them on the shale. They had the brick-red complexions of lifelong outdoorsmen, and they shared the same thickheaded look. They didn’t seem to have enough forehead — their hairlines were pulled down too low over their eyebrows. Quentin would have put their age at anything between thirty and sixty.

“Ahoy there,” he said.

They nodded at him and grunted. One of them touched his cap. Over a few minutes’ parley the friendly one was persuaded to divulge the general direction of the nearest and probably only town. Quentin, Bingle, and Benedict thanked the men and slogged their way up the beach through the cold white sand scalloped with black tide marks. Julia trailed silently behind them. Quentin had tried to persuade her to stay on board, but she insisted. Whatever else was going on with her, she was still up for a party.

“You know what I’m waiting for on this trip?” Quentin said. “I’m not waiting for somebody to be happy to see us. I just want someone to look surprised to see us.”

The weather deepened to a light wuthering rain. Quentin’s wet pants chafed. The sand gave way to dunes capped with saw grass and then to a path: grassy sand, then sandy grass, then just grass. They tramped through humpy, unfenced meadows and low hills, past a lost, orphaned well. He tried to summon a heroic feeling, but the setting wasn’t especially conducive. It reminded him of nothing so much as walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn in the freezing rain with James and Julia on the day he took his Brakebills exam. In olden times there was a boy, young and strong and brave-o. .

The town, once they found it, was a thoroughly medieval affair of stone cottages, thatched roofs, and mud streets. Its most marked characteristic was the thorough lack of interest the locals showed in the oddly dressed strangers in their midst. A half dozen of them were sitting at an outdoor table in front of a pub. They were eating sandwiches and drinking beer out of metal tankards in the face of weather Quentin would have made it a major priority to get out of.

“Hi,” he said.

Chorus of grunts.

“I’m Quentin. I’m from Fillory. We’ve come to your island in search of a key.” He glanced at the others and coughed once. It was pretty much impossible to do this without sounding like he was reciting a Monty Python sketch. “Do you know anything about that? A magic key? Made of gold?”

They looked at each other and nodded: agreed, we all know what he’s talking about. They shared a family resemblance. They could all have been brothers.

“Aye, we know the one you mean,” one of them said — a large, brutallooking man encased in a huge woolly coat. His hand on his knee was like a piece of pink granite. “It’s down t’road.”

“Down the road,” Quentin repeated.

Right. Of course. The golden key is down the road. Where else would it be? He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.

“Aye, we know it.” He jerked his head. “Down t’road.”

“All right. Down the road it is. Well, thank you very much.”

He wondered if it was ever warm and sunny here, or if they lived in the permanent equivalent of a New England November. Did they know they were three days’ sail from a tropical zone?

The travelers set off down the road. They would have looked nobler if they’d been riding horses instead of wallowing through the mud like a bunch of peasants, but the Muntjac wasn’t set up for horses. Maybe they could hire local horses. Shaggy, sturdy ponies resigned to always being cold and damp, and to never being sleek and beautiful. He missed Dauntless.

The street changed to cobbles, rounded cubes that turned slick and ankle-breaking in the drizzle. It wasn’t much of a setting for a quest or an adventure or even an errand. Maybe Bingle was right, maybe they were just minor characters in his drama.

Benedict wasn’t even taking notes the way he usually did.

“I’ll just remember it,” he said.

There you had it: an island not even Benedict would bother to map.

It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t a long road. The last building on it was a stone building like a church, though it wasn’t a church, just a boxy structure two stories high, built up out of flat gray local stones, unmortared. It had a blank façade that looked unfinished, or maybe whatever ornamentation had once been there had been stripped away.

Quentin felt like the little boy at the beginning of The Lorax, at the mysterious tower of the dismal Once-ler. They should have been facing down bellowed challenges from black knights bearing the vergescu, or solving thorny theological dilemmas posed by holy hermits. Or at the very least resisting the diabolical temptations of ravishing succubi. Not fighting off seasonal affective disorder.

If he’d had to put his finger on it he would have said that more than anything else the rhythm of it was wrong. It was too soon. They shouldn’t have found it this quick, nor should they obtain it without a fight.

But fuck it. Maybe he was just lucky. Maybe it was destiny. In spite of everything, he felt a rising excitement. This was it. The doors were enormous and made of oak, but there was a smaller, man-sized door set in one of them, presumably for days when you couldn’t be bothered to fling open an entire grand double-height oaken portal. The doorway was flanked by empty niches for statuary, past or future but not present.

They straggled to a stop in front of it, a brave company of knights assembled before the Chapel Perilous. Which of them would brave what lay within? Quentin’s nose was running. His hair was wet from the rain; he did have a hat, but he felt an obstinate urge to face whatever suffering was available for him to face, and that was a cold drizzle. He and Julia sniffled at the same time.

In the end they all braved the chapel, if only to get in out of the wet. It was no warmer inside than outside. The atmosphere was of an old country church from which the verger had stepped away for a few minutes. The air smelled like stone dust. Diffuse gray light misted in through a few narrow, high windows. A collection of rusty gardening implements resided in one corner: a hoe, a shovel, a rake.

In the center of the room stood a stone table, and on the stone table lay a worn red velvet pillow, and on the pillow lay a golden key, with three teeth.

Next to it was a yellowed slip of paper on which was neatly printed:

GOLDEN KEY

The key wasn’t bright, and it wasn’t tarnished. It had the deep matte patina of an authentically old thing. Its dignity was undisturbed by its humble surroundings — the stillness in the room seemed to come from it. Probably the rubes around here just didn’t know enough to take it seriously. Like some European village with a cannon as a war monument, and no one realizes it still has a live round in the chamber, until one day. .

Bingle picked up the key.

“Jesus!” Quentin said. “Careful.”

The guy must have a death wish. Bingle turned it over in his hands, examining both sides. Nothing happened.

Quentin realized what was going on. He’d been given a do-over. He was back on the edge of that meadow in the forest, but this time he was going in. There was more to life than being fat and safe and warm in a clockwork luxury resort. Or maybe there wasn’t more, but he was going to find out. And how did you find out? You had an adventure. That’s how. You picked up a golden key.

“Let me see it,” he said.

Satisfied that it wasn’t lethal, or at least not instantly, Bingle passed it to Quentin. It didn’t buzz, and it didn’t glow. It didn’t come alive in his hand. It felt cool and heavy, but not cooler and heavier than he imagined a golden key should feel.

“Quentin,” Julia said. “There is old magic on that key. A lot of it. I can feel it.”

“Good.”

He grinned at her. He felt elated.

“You do not have to do this.”

“I know. But I want to do this.”

“Quentin.”

“What?”

Julia offered him her hand. God bless Julia. Whatever else she had lost she still had a hell of a lot of human kindness inside her. He took her hand, and with the other he felt around in the air with the key. Maybe if he—? Yes. He felt it click against something hard, something that wasn’t there.

He lost it for a second — he waved the key around but couldn’t find it. And then he had it again, the clack of metal on metal. He stopped with the key resting on it, then pushed and it slipped in, ratcheting past an invisible tumbler and fitting firmly. Experimentally he let go of it. It stayed there: a golden key suspended in midair, parallel to the ground.

“Yes,” he whispered. “This.”

He took a breath, tremblier than he wanted it to be. Bingle did an odd thing, which was to place the point of his sword on the ground and drop to one knee. Quentin gripped the key again and turned it clockwise. Running on instinct, he felt for a doorknob and found it — he could picture it in his mind’s eye, cold white porcelain. He turned it and pulled and an immense cracking, tearing sound filled the room — not a terrible sound, a satisfying sound, the breaking of a seal that had been intact for centuries, waiting to be breached. Julia’s soft hand tightened on his. Air rushed from the room behind him out through the crack he was opening, and hot light flooded over him.

He was opening a door in the air, tall enough for him to walk through without stooping. It was bright in there, and there was warmth, and sunlight, and green. This was it. Already the gray stone of the After Island looked insubstantial. This was what he’d been missing — call it adventure or whatever you wanted to. He wondered if he was going somewhere in Fillory or somewhere else entirely.

He stepped through onto grass, leading Julia through after him. There was light all around them. He blinked. His eyes began to adjust.

“Wait,” he said. “This can’t be it.”

He lunged back for the doorway, but it was already gone. There was nothing to lunge through, no way back, just empty air. He lost his balance and caught himself with his hands, skinning both his palms on the warm concrete sidewalk in front of his parents’ house in Chesterton, Massachusetts.