Though even as they were toweling off, and hugging each other, and making introductions, and securing fresh clothes and hot tea, he could see that not everything aboard the Muntjac was exactly as he’d left it. The ship was older. Not that it was shabby, but it had aged, settled into itself some. What had been glossy—the paint on the railings, the varnish on the deck—was now rubbed to matte. Ropes that had once been bright and prickly were now smooth and soft and dun-colored from having been run through blocks over and over again.
Also Quentin was no longer in charge of the Muntjac. Eliot was.
“Where have you been!” he said, when he was done embracing Quentin. “You ridiculous, ridiculous man. I was starting to think you were dead.”
“I was on Earth. How long have we been gone?”
“A year and a day.”
“God. It was only three days for us.”
“That makes me two years older than you now. How do you think that makes me feel? How was Earth?”
“The same. It ain’t Fillory.”
“Did you bring me back anything?”
“A bed. Josh. An Australian girl named Poppy. I didn’t have a lot of time. And you know how hard you are to shop for.”
Quentin was still in a euphoric state, but the adrenaline was wearing off, and his eyes felt sandy and jet-lagged. Twenty minutes ago it had been midnight, the tail end of a long and arduously alcoholic party, and now it was early afternoon again. They went below to Quentin’s cabin, which was now Eliot’s cabin, and he dried off and changed clothes and cursed Ember that He hadn’t thought to bless Fillory with the miracle of coffee beans.
Then he lay down on Eliot’s bed and looked up at the low woodwork ceiling and told Eliot about everything that had happened. He told him about going back to Brakebills, and about Julia’s safe houses, and how Josh had sold the button. He told him about the Neitherlands being in ruins, and about the dragon, and about the Chatwins’ house.
Eliot sat at the foot of the bed. When Quentin was done Eliot watched him for a minute, slowly tapping the hollow of his upper lip with the tip of his index finger.
“Well,” he said finally. “This is interesting.”
Yes, it was. Although Quentin’s immediate personal interest in it was faltering. He wanted to fall asleep and moreover felt confident of his ability to do so very quickly. Being back in Fillory was a massive dose of comfort, a huge inflatable cushion of relief of the kind stuntmen fall into from great heights without injury, and he sank into it.
Though if Quentin could have had absolutely everything exactly the way he wanted it, he would have asked for one more thing: he didn’t want to be on a boat anymore. He wanted to go home, meaning not just to Fillory but specifically to his room in Castle Whitespire, with its high ceiling and its big bed and its special calm hush. Quentin did not consider himself a great interpreter of signs and wonders, but the lesson of the golden key seemed pretty clear to him. It was this: you’ve already won the game, so quit playing. Remain where you are, in your castle, and you will be safe. No further action on your part is required.
“Eliot,” he said. “Where are we?”
“We’re east. Very far east. Even farther than you went. We left After Island behind two weeks ago.”
“Oh, no.”
“We’re over the horizon.”
“No, no, no.” Quentin closed his eyes. “We can’t be.” He wanted it to be dark, but surly yellow late-afternoon sun continued blasting in through his—Eliot’s—cabin window unabated. “All right. We are. But we’re going back now, right? You found me and Julia. Mission accomplished. End of story.”
“We will go back. We just have to do one more thing first.”
“Eliot, stop. I’m serious. Turn the ship around. I’m never leaving Fillory again.”
“Just one thing. You’ll like it.”
“I don’t think I’m going to like it.”
Eliot smiled broadly, or as broadly as his bad teeth would allow.
“Oh, you’re going to love it,” he said. “It’s an adventure.”
It was unbelievable. Never mind Thomas: he, Quentin, had missed everything. It had started as soon as he left for the Outer Island.
This all came out at a massive feast belowdecks that evening. By then Quentin had almost come to accept that when you were surfing the great interdimensional divide certain days were just destined to stretch out to about thirty-six hours long, and there was nothing you could do except to wait them out till they ended. The new arrivals ate like wolves—their exhaustion had turned into a raging hunger. They’d never had a proper dinner the night before anyway, just the occasional passed hors d’oeuvre. Only Julia picked at her food, managing a bite every few minutes, like her body was an unloved pet that she was being forced to babysit.
“I knew something was up,” Eliot said, cracking open a massive, lethal-looking crimson crab. Like Julia he never seemed to eat, but somehow he got through massive quantities of food anyway, which of course never made him any less skinny. “First off, two days after you left Whitespire, someone tried to kill me in my bath.”
“Really?” Josh said with his mouth full. “And that tipped you off?”
It hadn’t taken long for Josh to get acclimated aboard the Muntjac. Discomfort just wasn’t in his nature. He’d picked up with Eliot exactly where they’d left off two years ago.
“That’s awful,” Quentin said. “Jesus.”
“It was! I was lolling in my bath of an evening, as one does, blameless as a newborn child—more so, if you’ve ever met such a creature, they’re absolutely horrible—and one of my own towel boys came creeping up behind me with a big curvy knife in his hand. He tried to cut my throat.
“I’ll spare you the details”—which is what Eliot said when he was going to march you through everything blow by blow—“but I grabbed his arm, and he went in the water. He’d never been a particularly good towel boy. Perhaps he felt he was meant for better things. But he was no great success as an assassin either, I can tell you. He got his knife against my neck, but nowhere near the artery, and he hadn’t braced himself properly at all. So in he went, and I scrambled out of the water, and I froze it.”
“Dixon’s charm?”
He nodded. “It was no great loss. I was about to get out anyway. I’d put in so many bath salts I didn’t know if it would take, but it froze solid right away. He looked like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. The resemblance was actually quite striking.”
“You and your towel boys,” Josh said. “But I ask for a harem and it’s all, morality this, human rights that.”
“Well, and I spared you a good stabbing, didn’t I?”
Eliot didn’t tan, he was too pale for that, but the sun and the wind had put some texture in his otherwise immaculate pallor, and he’d grown some nicely naval stubble. He’d dropped some of the god-king preciousness that had dominated his persona back at Whitespire, shed some of the gold leaf. He spoke to the crew with an air of easy familiarity and command—even the ones like Bingle whom he’d never met before the ship sailed, and in Quentin’s mind wasn’t supposed to know. Now he knew them better than Quentin did. They’d been at sea together for a year.
“I let him out, of course. I didn’t have the heart to let him suffocate. But would you believe it, he wouldn’t tell us a thing! He was a fanatic of some kind. Or a lunatic, maybe. Same thing. Do you know, some of the generals wanted to torture him? I think Janet would have done it too, but I couldn’t. But I couldn’t just let him go either. He’s in prison now.
“I was shaken, but I suppose you’re not really High King until somebody tries to kill you in your bath. If they ever succeed, by the way, make sure you leave me in there and have a painting done. Like Marat.
“I wanted to let the whole thing drop, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t let me drop. I don’t know what it was. Fillory, I suppose. At any rate, that’s when the wonders started.
“That’s what everyone called them, and I couldn’t think of anoth
er name for them. It started out just as feelings. You would look at something, a carpet, or a bowl of fruit, and the colors would seem different. Brighter, more vivid, more saturated. Sudden rushes of grief or excitement or love would come over you for no reason. Some very unmanly crying jags were observed among the barons.
“It was like drugs more than anything else, but I hadn’t taken any drugs. I remember one night in my bedroom lying there smelling spices in the darkness, one after the other. Cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, something else—something wonderful I couldn’t place. Paintings started to change as I walked by them. Just the backgrounds. The clouds would move, or the sky would go from day to night.
“Then I saw a hunting horn hovering before me at dinner. Some of the others saw it too. And one night in the middle of the night I opened the bathroom door, and it opened onto deep forest instead. It’s all the same when it comes to taking a piss, I suppose, but still. It put me right off my game.
“For a while I thought I was going mad, literally mad, until the tree came. A clock-tree grew up right in the middle of the throne room, right through the carpet, in broad daylight. It did it all at once, all in one go, with the whole court watching. And then it just stood there, silently, like a hallucination, ticking and sort of swaying with the energy of its just having grown. It was as if it were saying, ‘Well, here I am. This is me. What are you going to do about it?’
“After that I knew it wasn’t me that had gone mad. It was Fillory.
“I don’t mind telling you I found the whole business more than a little provoking. I was being called, you understand, and I most definitely did not want to come. I understand the appeal this sort of thing has for you, quests and King Arthur and all that. But that’s you. No offense, but it always seemed a bit like boy stuff to me. Sweaty and strenuous and just not very elegant, if you see what I mean. I didn’t need to be called to feel special, I felt special enough already. I’m clever, rich, and good-looking. I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury.”
“Nicely put,” Quentin said. Eliot must have mounted this set piece before.
“Well, and then that damned Seeing Hare came bolting through the room during our afternoon meeting. Scattered the whiskey service and frightened one of my more sensitive protégés half to death. Everyone has a limit. Next morning I called for my hunting leathers, saddled a horse, and went riding out alone into the Queenswood. And you know, I never go anywhere alone, not anymore, but these things have certain protocols and not even the High King—or I suppose especially not the High King—is exempt.”
“The Queenswood,” Quentin said. “Don’t tell me.”
“But I am telling you.” Eliot finished his wine, and a rangy, shaven-headed young man refilled his glass without his having to ask. “I went back to that ridiculous meadow of yours, the round one. You see, you’d been right to want to go in. It was our adventure after all.”
“I was right.” Quentin felt crestfallen. He stared down at his hands. “I can’t believe it, I was right!”
If he hadn’t been so tired, and a bit drunk, it probably wouldn’t have struck him the way it did. But as it was he felt himself filling up with a sense of—how could he put it? He thought he’d learned a lesson about the world, and now he was realizing that the lesson he learned might have been the wrong one. The right adventure had been offered to him, and he’d walked away. If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale said, he’d missed his. Instead he’d spent three days faffing around on Earth for nothing, and nearly got stuck there forever, while Eliot was off on a real quest.
“It’s true,” Eliot said. “Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don’t spoil it.”
“It was supposed to be me, not you!”
“You should have gone on it when you had the chance.”
“You told me not to!”
“Janet told you not to. I don’t know why you listened to her. But look, I know.” Eliot put a hand on his arm. “I know. I had no choice. Whoever is in charge of handing out quests has a damned peculiar sense of humor.
“At any rate, off I went. And I did feel something, you know, as I set off that morning. Nip in the air, sun on my armor, a knight pricking across the plain. I wished you could have been there.
“Though I looked much better than you would have. I had special questing armor made, just for that day, embossed and damascened within an inch of its life. I won’t lie to you, Quentin. I looked magnificent.”
Quentin wondered what he’d been doing at that moment. At least he’d gotten to drink a Coke. That was something. He wished he had one now. He was exhausted.
“It took me three days to find that fucking meadow, but finally I did. The Seeing Hare was there, of course, waiting for me under the branches of that hideous great tree, which was still thrashing away in its invisible wind.”
“Intangible,” Poppy said in a small voice. “All wind is invisible.”
Good to see she was finding her feet.
“The hare wasn’t alone. The bird was there as well, and the monitor, the Utter Newt, the Kind Wolf, the Parallel Beetle—it does a geometrical thing, it’s so boring I can’t even explain it. All of them, all the Unique Beasts, the full conclave. Well, except the two aquatic ones. The Questing Beast sends you his regards by the way. I think he’s fond of you for some reason, even though you shot him.
“Well, when I saw them all there together, standing in two neat rows, the little ones in front, like they were posing for a class picture, I knew the jig was up. It was the newt that did the talking. He let it be known that the realm was in peril, and nothing else would do but my recovering the Seven Golden Keys of Fillory. I asked him why, what good were they, what were they for, what did they unlock. He wouldn’t say, or he couldn’t. He said I would know when it was time.
“I haggled a bit of course. I wanted to know, for example, how rapidly these keys would have to be recovered. I could imagine doing one every few years. Organize my holidays around it. At that rate I might even look forward to it—it’s always nicer traveling when you have some business to do. But apparently it’s a time-sensitive issue. They were very insistant about that.
“They gave me a Golden Ring that the keys were supposed to go on, and I left. What else could I do? When I got back Whitespire was up in arms. There were all kinds of terrible portents, all over the kingdom. That storm had spread—all the clock-trees had started thrashing the way that first one did. And you know the waterfall at the Red Ruin? The one that flows up? It started flowing down. You know, the regular way. So that was about the last straw.
“And then the Muntjac came screaming into port, and they told me you and Julia had vanished.”
In full hero mode, Eliot took command of the Muntjac. He spent a day repairing and provisioning it while the whole kingdom buzzed with anxiety and excitement. High King Eliot was going on a quest! Apart from everything else it was a public relations triumph. The docks were mobbed by volunteers offering to join the search for the Seven Keys. The dwarves sent over a trunkload of magical keys they happened to have been kicking around in their vaults, in case there was a match in there, but most of them turned out to be useless.
One, though, fit on the key ring. So six to go. Funny how every once in a while the dwarves came up trumps.
Eliot left Janet in sole possession of the castle. He felt bad about making her shoulder everything even more than she already did, but she was practically licking her chops as he left. She would probably be running a fascist dictatorship by the time they got back. So he set off.
Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he’d read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn’t necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and embraced. You lit out
into the wilderness at random, and if your state of mind, or maybe it was your soul, was correct, then adventure would find you through the natural course of events. It was like free association—there were no wrong answers. It worked as long as you weren’t trying too hard.
And Eliot was in no danger of trying too hard. The Muntjac ran fast before a warm wet wind, out past the Outer Island, and After, out of Fillory and out of the known world.
A hush settled over the table. For a moment the creaking of the ship’s ropes and timbers could be heard, and Quentin felt for the first time how far off the map they were. He thought how they would look to someone far above them: a tiny lighted ship, lost in the immensity of an empty uncharted nighttime ocean.
Eliot studied the ceiling. He was actually groping for words. That was a new one on Quentin.
“You wouldn’t have believed it, Q,” he said finally. Something like an expression of actual awe had come over Eliot’s face. “You really wouldn’t. We’ve been all over the Eastern Ocean. The lands we saw. Some of the islands . . . I don’t know where to begin.”
“Tell him about the train,” said the shaven-headed young man. All at once Quentin recognized him. It was Benedict. But a new Benedict, reborn with ropy muscles and flashing white teeth. The floppy bangs and the sullen attitude were long gone. He looked at Eliot with a respect Quentin had never seen him show anybody before.
“Yes, the train. We thought it was a sea serpent at first. We barely brought the ship around in time. But it was a train, one of those slow freight trains that are always about a million cars long, all tankers and boxcars, except that this one never ended. It broke the surface, seawater streaming off the sides of the cars, rumbled along beside us for a couple of miles, then it sank back under the sea again.”
“Just like that?”