The funny thing was that it had worked. Quentin wouldn’t let it alone, he kept hounding them, and eventually, with surprisingly little resistance, they gave in. Today would be the day. Partly they were afraid of him, with his scary glittering pain-eyes, but partly it was because they had to admit he was right: it was time to go, and they’d just been waiting for somebody, even somebody as obviously drunk and demented as Quentin was, to stand up and call it.

Looking back, in a philosophical frame of mind, it occurred to Quen tin that he’d always thought this would be a happy day, the happiest day of his life. Funny how life had its little ways of surprising you. Little quirks of fate.

If he wasn’t happy, he did feel unexpectedly liberated. At least he wasn’t hunched over with shame anymore. This was pure emotion, unalloyed with any misgivings or caveats or qualifications. Alice was no longer the alabaster saint here. It was not so hard to meet her eyes across the circle. And was that a flicker of embarrassment he saw in hers? Maybe she was learning a little something about remorse, what that felt like. They were down in the muck together now.

They had spent the morning gathering up and packing the gear and the supplies that were already basically gathered up and packed anyway, and rounding up whoever was in the bathroom or dithering over which shoes or had just wandered off out onto the lawn for no obvious reason. Finally they were all together in the living room in a circle, shifting their weight from foot to foot and looking at each other and saying:

“Okay?”

“Okay?”

“Everybody okay?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Let’s do this!”

“Okay!”

“Okay!”

“Let’s—”

And then Penny must have touched the button, because they were all rising up together through clear, cold water.

The expensive Persian rug they’d been standing on floated up after them in the water. Somehow it had come through by accident. Had the button mistaken it for their clothing? Funny how these things worked.

Quentin waited while the others straggled out of the fountain one by one. They bunched up at the edge, treading water and hanging on to each other, then heaving their backpacks out and crawling up after them over the stone rim. Janet looked pale. She was stuck in the water, with Josh and Eliot on either side helping her stay afloat. She couldn’t get over the lip of the fountain. Her eyes were unfocused, and her face was chalk.

“I don’t know, I just—” She kept shaking her head and repeating it over and over again: “I don’t know what’s wrong—”

Together they dragged her up out of the water, but there was no strength in her limbs. Her knees buckled and she dropped to all fours, and the weight of her pack tugged her over onto her side on the paving stones. She lay there wet and blinking. It’s not like Quentin had never seen Janet incapacitated before, but this was different.

“I don’t know if I wanna throw up or if I don’t,” she said slowly.

“Something’s wrong,” Alice said. “The City. She’s having an allergic reaction, something like that.”

Her voice was not overburdened with sympathy.

“Is anybody else getting it?” Eliot looked around quickly, assuming command of the operation. “Nobody else, okay. Let’s go to phase two. Let’s hurry.”

“I’m okay, just let me rest. I just—Jesus, don’t you feel it?” Janet looked up helplessly at the others, gulping air. “Doesn’t anybody else feel it?”

Anaïs kneeled down next to her in sisterly solidarity. Alice regarded her inscrutably. Nobody else was affected.

“This is interesting,” Penny said. “Now why doesn’t anybody else—?”

“Hey. Asshole.” Quentin snapped his fingers in Penny’s face. He had no problem with naked hostility right now. He was feeling very uninhibited. “Can’t you see she’s in pain? Phase two, asshole, let’s go.”

He hoped Penny would come after him, maybe they could have a rematch of their little fight club. But Penny just gave Quentin a calm assessing look and turned away. He was taking full advantage of the opportunity to rise above, to be the bigger man, the gracious winner. He rattled a spray can of industrial-orange paint and circled the fountain with it, marking the ground with crosses, then set off in the direction he called palaceward, after the lavish white palazzo on that side of the square. It was no mystery where they were going: the scene in the book was written in Plover’s characteristically clear, unambiguous prose. It had the Chatwins walking three more squares palaceward and then one to the left to get to the fountain that led to Fillory. The rest of the group straggled after him, squelching in their wet clothes. Janet had her arms around Quentin’s and Eliot’s shoulders.

The last jog took them across a stone bridge over a narrow canal. The layout of the city reminded Quentin of a welters board, but writ large. Maybe the game reflected some distant, barely legible rumor of the Neitherlands that had filtered down to Earth.

They halted in a tidy square that was smaller than the one they’d started in, and dominated by a large, dignified stone hall that might have been the mayoral seat of a medieval French village. The clock set at the peak of its facade was frozen at noon, or midnight. The rain was getting heavier. In the center of the square was a round fountain, a figure of Atlas half crushed beneath a bronze globe.

“Okay!” Penny spoke unnecessarily loudly. The big ringmaster. He was nervous, Quentin could see. Not so tough now, loverman. “This is the one they use in the books. So I’m going through to check weather conditions.”

“What do you want, a drum roll?” Janet snapped through clenched teeth. “Go!”

Penny took the white button out of his pocket and gripped it in his fist. Taking a deep breath, he mounted the lip of the pool and stepped off, straight-legged, into the still water. At the last moment he reflexively held his nose with one hand. He dropped into the dark water and disappeared. It had swallowed him up.

There was a long hush. The only sound was Janet’s hoarse panting and the splashing of the fountain. A minute passed. Then Penny’s head broke the surface, sputtering and blowing.

“It worked!” he shouted. “It’s warm! It’s summer! It’s summer there!”

“Was it Fillory?” Josh asked.

“I don’t know!” He dog-paddled over to the lip of the pool, breathing hard. “It’s a forest. Rural. No signs of habitation.”

“Good enough,” Eliot said. “Let’s go.”

“I’m okay,” Janet said.

“No, you’re not. Let’s go, everybody.”

Richard was already going through the packs, tossing out the winter gear, the brand-new parkas and woolly hats and electric socks, in an expensive multicolored heap.

“Line up sitting along the edge,” he said over his shoulder. “Feet in the water, holding hands.”

Quentin wanted to say something sarcastic but couldn’t think of anything. There were heavy rusted iron rings set into the edge of the pool. They had stained the stone around them a dark ferrous brown. He lowered his feet into the inky water. The water felt slightly thinner than real water, more the consistency of rubbing alcohol. He stared down at his submerged shoes. He could barely make them out.

Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel. Everything anybody said sounded to him like a nasty double entendre calculated to remind him of Alice and Penny. Atlas appeared to be leering at him. He was dizzy from lack of sleep. He closed his eyes. His head felt huge and diffuse and empty, like a puff of cloud hanging above his shoulders. The cloud began to drift away. He wondered if he was going pass out. He would dearly love to pass out. There was a dead spot in his brain, and he wanted the dead spot to spread and metastasize over the whole of it and blot out all the painful thoughts.

“Body armor?” Eliot was saying. “Jesus, Anaïs, have you even read the books? We’re not walking into a firefight. We’re probably going to be eating scones with a talking bunny.”

“Okay?” Penny called. “Everybody?”

They were all sitting, all eight of them, in an arc around the edge of the fountain, scooched forward so they could drop in without using their hands, which were tightly clasped. Janet lolled on Eliot’s shoulder, her white neck exposed. She was out cold; she looked terribly vulnerable. To Quen tin’s right, Josh was studying him with concern. His huge hand squeezed Quentin’s.

“It’s okay, man,” he whispered. “Come on. You’re okay. You got this.”

Probably everybody took a last look around, locked eyes, felt a frisson. Eliot quoted Tennyson’s “Ulysses” about seeking new worlds and sailing beyond the sunset. Somebody whooped—maybe Anaïs, the whoop had a Francophone quality. But Quentin didn’t whoop, and he didn’t look. He just stared at his lap and waited for each successive second to impose itself on him in turn like an uninvited guest the way the previous one had. On Penny’s signal they dropped into the fountain together, not quite in sync but almost—it had a Busby Berkeley feel to it. Janet more or less face-planted forward into the water.

It was a falling down, a plunge: outbound from the Neitherlands meant descending. It was like they were parachuting, only it was too rapid for that, somewhere between parachuting and straight free-falling, but with no rushing wind. For a long silent moment they could see everything: a sea of flourishing leafy canopies extending all the way to the horizon, pre-industrially verdant, giving way to square meadows in one direction that Quentin tentatively tagged as north, as reckoned by a pallid sun in a white sky. He tried to keep an eye on it as they went in. The ground rushed up to slam them.

Then, just like that, they were down. Quentin flexed his knees instinctively, but there was no impact or sense of momentum absorbed. All at once they were just standing there.

But where was there? It wasn’t a clearing exactly. It was more like a shallow ditch, a trench running through a forest, the bottom clogged with dead leaves and loam and twiggy arboreal detritus. Quentin steadied himself with one hand on the sloping bank. Light trickled down thinly through the massed branches overhead. A bird chattered and then left off. The silence was deep and thick.

They had been scattered by the transition, like a freshly deployed stick of paratroopers, but they were still in sight of one another. Richard and Penny were fighting their way out of a huge dead bush. Alice and Anaïs were seated on the trunk of a colossal tree that had fallen athwart the ditch, as if they’d been carefully placed there by a giant child arranging dolls. Janet was sitting on the ground with her hands on her thighs, taking deep breaths, the color flooding back into her face.

The whole scene had a deeply uncurated feel to it. This was not a forest that had been culled or thinned. This was primeval. This was the way trees lived when they were left to their own devices.

“Penny?” Josh stood on the edge of the ditch, gazing down at the rest of them, hands in pockets. He looked incongruously natty in a jacket and a nice shirt, no tie, even though they were all soaked to the bone. “It’s cold, Penny. Why the fuck is it cold?”

It was true. The air was dry and bitter; their clothes were freezing fast. Their breath puffed out white in the frigid stillness. Fine light snow sifted down from the white sky. The ground was hard under the fallen leaves. It was deep winter.

“I don’t know.” Penny looked around, frowning. “It was summer before,” he said a little petulantly. “Just a second ago! It was hot!”

“Will someone please help me down, please?” Anaïs was looking down at the ground dubiously from her perch on the giant tree trunk. Josh gallantly took her by her narrow waist and lifted her down; she gave a pleased little squeak.

“It’s the time thing,” Alice said. “I just thought of it. It could be six months since Penny was here, in Fillory time. Or more like sixty years, the way the seasons work. This always happens in the books. There’s no way to predict it.”

“Well, I predict that I’m going to freeze my tits off in five minutes,” Janet said. “Somebody go back for the jackets.”

They all agreed that Penny should go back and get the parkas, and he was an instant away from touching the button when Eliot suddenly lunged at him and grabbed his arm. He pointed out, as calmly as possible, that if the time streams of Fillory and the Neitherlands moved at different speeds, then if Penny went back by himself, it could easily be days, or years, before he got back to Fillory with the gear, at least from the Fillorian point of view, by which time they could have frozen to death or died of old age or accumulated countless other equally serious problems. If they were going to go, they would all have to go together.

“Forget it.” Janet shook her head. She still looked green. “I can’t go back there. Not yet. I’d rather freeze my tits off than puke my guts out.”

Nobody argued. Nobody wanted to leave quite yet anyway, not now that they were finally here in Fillory, or wherever they were. They weren’t going anywhere without at least poking around. Penny began making the rounds with his clothes-drying spell.

“I think I can see a way to go,” said Alice, who was still perched up on the tree trunk. Snow had begun to settle in her dark hair. “On the other side. It sort of turns into a path through the forest. And there’s something else, too. You’re going to want to see this for yourselves.”

If they took off their packs, there was enough space at the bottom of the ditch to scramble under the huge trunk on all fours, single file, their hands and knees sinking into the thick layer of frostbitten leaves. Eliot came through last, passing the packs ahead of him. They stood up on the other side, slapping dirt off their hands. Penny rushed to hand Alice down from where she sat, but she ignored him and jumped down herself, although it meant crashing down on her hands and knees and picking herself up again. She didn’t seem to be particularly relishing her adventure of the night before, Quentin thought.

To one side of the path was a small spreading oak. Its bark was dark gray, almost black, and its branches were gnarled and wiggly and all but empty of leaves. Embedded in its trunk at head height, as if the tree had simply grown up around it, was a round ticking clock face a foot across.

One by one, without speaking, they all scrambled up the sloping bank to get a closer look. It was one of the Watcherwoman’s clock-trees.

Quentin touched the place where the tree’s hard rough bark met the smooth silver bezel around the clock face. It was solid and cold and real. He closed his eyes and followed the curve of it with his finger. He was really here. He was in Fillory. There was no question about it now.

And now that he was here it would finally be all right. He didn’t see how yet, but it would. It had to be. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but hot tears poured helplessly down his cheeks, leaving cold tracks behind them. Against all his own wishes and instincts he got down on his knees and put his head in his hands and pushed his face into the cold leaves. A sob clawed its way out of him. For a minute he lost himself. Somebody, he would never know who, not Alice, put their hand on his shoulder. This was the place. He would be picked up, cleaned off, and made to feel safe and happy and whole again here. How had everything gone so wrong? How could he and Alice have been so stupid? It barely even mattered now. This was his life now, the life he had always been waiting for. It was finally here.

And it flashed into his head with sudden urgency: Richard was right. They had to find Martin Chatwin, if he was somehow still alive. That was the key. Now that he was here, he wasn’t going to give it up again. He must know the secret of how to stay here forever, make it last, make it permanent.

Quentin got to his feet, embarrassed, and blotted his tears on his sleeve.

“Welp,” Josh said finally, breaking the silence. “I guess that pretty much tears it. We’re in Fillory.”

“These clock-trees are supposed to be the Watcherwoman’s thing,” Quentin said, still sniffling. “She must still be around.”

“I thought she was dead,” Janet said.

“Maybe we’re in an earlier time period,” Alice suggested. “Maybe we went back in time. Like in The Girl Who Told Time.”

She and Janet and Quentin didn’t look at each other when they spoke.

“Maybe. I think they left some of these still growing, though, even after they got rid of her. Remember they even see one in The Wandering Dune.”

“I could never finish that book,” Josh said.

“I wonder.” Eliot eyed it appraisingly. “Think we could get this thing back to Brakebills? That would make a hell of a present for Fogg.”

Nobody else seemed inclined to pursue that line of speculation. Josh made double pointy-fingers at Eliot and mouthed the word douche.

“I wonder if that’s the correct time,” Richard said.

Quentin could have stood there and stared at the clock-tree all day, but the chill wouldn’t let them stand still. The girls were already wandering away. He followed them reluctantly, and soon they were all trooping off together in a ragged group along the ditch-cum-path, deeper into Fillory. The sound of their feet shuffling through the dry leaves was deafening in the quiet.

No one spoke. For all their careful practical preparations there had been very little discussion of strategy or objectives, and now they were here it was obvious anyway. Why bother planning an adventure? This was Fillory—adventure would find them! With every step they took they half expected a marvelous apparition or revelation to come trotting out of the woods. But nothing much presented itself. It was almost anticlimactic—or was this just the buildup to something really amazing? The remains of ragged stone walls trailed off into the underbrush. The trees around them remained still and stubbornly inanimate, even after Penny, in the spirit of exploration and discovery, formally introduced himself to several of them. Here and there birds chirped and flitted and perched, high up in the trees, but none of them offered them any advice. Every little detail looked superbright and saturated with meaning, as if the world around them were literally composed of words and letters, inscribed in some magical geographical script.

Richard took out a compass but found the needle stuck, pinned down against its cardboard backing, as if Fillory’s magnetic pole were deep underground, straight down beneath their feet. He flung it away into a bush. Janet hopped up and down as she walked, her hands crammed under her armpits against the cold. Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.

They walked for twenty minutes, half an hour at most. Quentin alternately blew into his hands and withdrew them into the sleeves of his sweater. He was wide awake now, and sober, at least for the moment.

“We need to get some fauns up in this piece,” Josh said, to nobody. “Or some swordfights or whatever.”

The path meandered and then faded out. They were expending more and more effort just to push their way through the foliage. There was some internal disagreement as to whether or not there had ever been an actual path, or whether it was just a strip of thin forest, or even whether—this was Penny’s take—the trees had begun subtly, imperceptibly shifting themselves to get in their way. But before they could arrive at a consensus they came across a stream percolating through the woods.

It was a lovely little winter stream, wide and shallow and perfectly clear, twinkling and lapping along as if it were delighted to have just found this twisty channel. Wordlessly, they gathered at its edge. The rocks were capped with round dollops of snow, and the quieter eddies along the banks had iced over. A branch poking up in the middle of the stream was hung with fabulous Gothic-sculpted icy drops and buttresses all along its length. There was nothing overtly supernatural about it, but it temporarily satisfied their appetite for wonder. On Earth it would have been a charming little rill, nothing more, but the fact that they were seeing it in Fillory, in another world, possibly the first Earth beings ever to do so, made it a glittering miracle.

They had stared at it for a full minute in rapt silence before Quentin realized that right in front of them, emerging from the deepest part of the stream, was a woman’s naked head and shoulders.

“Oh my God,” he said. He took a clumsy, numb step backward, pointing. “Shit. You guys.”

It was surreal. She was almost certainly dead. The woman’s hair was dark and wet and thick with clumped ice. Her eyes—she appeared to be looking right at them—were midnight blue and didn’t move or blink, and her skin was a pale pearlescent gray. Her shoulders were bare. She looked sixteen at most. Her eyelashes were clotted with frost.

“Is she—?” Alice didn’t finish the question.

“Hey!” Janet called. “Are you all right?”

“We should help her. Get her out of there.” Quentin tried to get closer, but he slipped on a frozen rock and went in up to his knee. He scrambled back onto the bank, his foot burning with cold. The woman didn’t move. “We need rope. Get the rope, there’s rope in one of the packs.”

The water didn’t even look deep enough to submerge her that far, and Quentin actually wondered, horribly, if they were looking at a body that had been severed at the waist and then dumped in the water. Rope, what was he thinking? He was a damn magician. He dropped the pack he was rifling through and began a simple kinetic spell to lift her out.

He felt the premonitory warmth of a developing spell in his fingertips, felt the weight and tug of the body in his mind. It felt good to do magic again, to know that he could still focus despite everything. As soon as he started he realized that the Circumstances were scrambled here—different stars, different seas, different everything. Thank God it was a simple spell. The grammar was a shambles—Alice corrected him in a clipped voice as he worked. Gradually the woman rose up dripping out of the water. She was whole, thank God, and naked—her body was slim, her breasts slight and girlish. Her nails and nipples were pale purple. She looked frozen, but she shuddered as the magic took hold. Her eyes focused and came awake. She frowned and raised one hand, somehow halting the spell before he was finished, with her toes still trailing in the freezing water.

“I am a naiad. I cannot leave the stream.” By her voice she could have been in junior high. Her eyes met Quentin’s.

“Your magic is clumsy,” she added.

It was electrifying. Quentin saw now that she wasn’t human, her fingers and toes were webbed. To his left he heard a shuffling noise. It was Penny. He was getting down on his knees on the snowy bank.

“We humbly apologize,” he said, head bowed. “We most humbly seek your pardon.”

“Jesus Christ!” Josh stage-whispered. “Dork!”

The hovering nymph shifted her attention. Stream water rilled down her bare skin. She tilted her head girlishly.

“You admire my beauty, human?” she asked Penny. “I am cold. Would you warm me with your burning skin?”

“Please,” Penny went on, blushing furiously. “If you have a quest to bestow upon us, we would gladly undertake it. We would gladly—”

Mercifully Janet cut him off.

“We’re visitors from Earth,” she said firmly. “Is there a city around here that you could direct us to? Maybe Castle Whitespire?”

“—we would gladly undertake to do your bidding,” Penny finished.

“Do you serve the rams?” Alice asked.

“I serve no false gods, human girl. Or goddesses. I serve the river, and the river serves me.”

“Are there other humans here?” Anaïs said. “Like us?”

“Like you?” The nymph smiled saucily, and the tip of a startling blue tongue appeared for an instant between her rather sharp-looking front teeth. “Oh, no. Not like you. None so cursed!”

At that moment Quentin felt his telekinetic spell cease to exist. She’d abolished it, though he didn’t catch how, without a word or a gesture. In the same instant the naiad flipped head down and dived, her pale periwinkle buttocks flashing in the air, and vanished into dark water that looked too shallow to contain her.

Her head poked up again a moment later.

“I fear for you here, human children. This is not your war.”

“We’re not children,” Janet said.

“What war?” Quentin called.

She smiled again. Between her lavender lips her teeth were pointy and interlocking like a fighting fish’s. She held something dripping in her webbed fist.

“A gift from the river. Use it when all hope is lost.”

She tossed it at them overhand. Quentin caught it one-handed; he was relieved out of all proportion to its actual importance that he didn’t bobble it. Thank God for his old juggling reflexes. When he looked up again, the nymph was gone. They were alone with the chattering brook.

Quentin was holding a small ivory horn chased with silver.

“Oh-kay!” Josh shouted. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “We are definitely not in Kansas anymore!”

The others gathered around to look at the horn. Quentin handed it to Eliot, who turned it over a few times, peered into one end, then the other.

“I don’t feel anything on it at all,” Eliot said. “Looks like something you’d buy in an airport gift shop.”

“You wouldn’t necessarily feel it,” Penny said proprietarily. He took it and stowed the horn in his pack.

“We should have asked her if this is Fillory,” Alice said quietly.

“Of course it’s Fillory,” Penny said.

“I’d like to be sure. And I’d like to know why we’re cursed.”

“And what’s this war?” Richard asked, his heavy brows knotted. “This raises a lot of questions.”

“And I didn’t like those teeth,” Alice added.

“Jesus,” Josh said. “Jesus! That was a naiad, people! We just saw a river nymph! How cool is that? How cool are we? Huh? Fuckin’ Fillory, people!”

He grabbed Quentin’s shoulders and shook him. He ran at Richard and made him bump chests.

“Can I just say that she was pretty hot?” said Janet.

“Shyeah! I’ll take that over a faun any day,” Josh said. Anaïs swatted him.

“Hey, that’s Penny’s girlfriend you’re talking about,” Janet said. “Show some respect.”

The tension faded, and for a minute they all chattered among themselves, giving one another shit and just geeking out on the sheer alien magic of it all. Was she corporeal? Did she become fluid once she entered the stream? How else could she submerge herself in such shallow water? And how had she canceled Quentin’s spell? What was her function in the magical ecosystem? And what about the horn? Alice was already paging through her worn Fillory paperbacks for references to it—didn’t Martin find a magic horn in the first book . . . ?

After a while it began to sink in that they’d been outside for forty-five minutes in deep winter wearing nothing but jeans and sweaters. Even Janet admitted it was time to head back to the City. Eliot corralled the stragglers and chatterers, and they all linked hands on the bank of the stream.

They stood in a circle, still a little giddy, and for a moment happy conspiratorial glances flew between them. There was some bad personal stuff going down, but that didn’t have to ruin everything, did it? They were doing something really important here. This was what every one of them had been waiting for, looking for, their whole lives—what they were meant to do! They’d found the magic door, the secret path through the hidden garden. They’d gotten ahold of something new, a real adventure, and it was only just beginning.

It was in that hush that they heard it for the first time—a dry, rhythmic ticking sound. It was almost lost in the twittering of the brook, but it grew louder and more distinct. One by one they stopped talking to listen. It was snowing more heavily now.

Out of context it was hard to place. Alice was the first to twig.

“It’s a clock,” she said. “That’s a clock ticking.”

She searched their faces impatiently.

“A clock,” she repeated, panicky now. “Watcherwoman, that’s the Watcherwoman!”

Penny fumbled hastily for the button. The tick-tock grew even louder, like a monstrous heart beating, right on top of them, but it was impossible to tell what direction it was coming from. And then it didn’t matter, because they were floating up through cold, clear water to safety.

They were in Fillory again, set down by the stream they’d just left, but the snow was gone. It was an early fall day now, the air full of lukewarm mist. The temperature felt like high sixties. It was like time-lapse photography: the branches of trees that had been bare five minutes ago now swarmed with turning leaves. One golden leaf floated tinily, impossibly high in the gray sky on some fluky updraft. The grass was littered with glassy puddles from a torrential autumn rain that must have ended only minutes earlier. They stood around in the mild air, hugging their bundles of parkas and woolly gloves and feeling foolish.

“Overdressed again,” Eliot said. He dropped his bundle in disgust. “Story of my life.”

No one could think of a reasonable alternative to just leaving the winter gear lying there on the wet grass. They could have gone back to the Neitherlands to store it, but then it might have been winter all over again when they got back. It seemed ridiculous, a bug in the system, but it didn’t matter, they were energized now. They filled their canteens from the stream.

A bridge spanned the creek fifty yards downstream, a gentle arch made of intricate, curly Fillorian ironwork. Quentin was sure it couldn’t have been there before, but Richard insisted they just hadn’t seen it through the snow-laden branches. Quentin looked at the flowing, burbling water. There was no sign of the nymph. How much time had passed since they were last here? he wondered. Seasons in Fillory could last a century. Or had they gone back in time? Was this the same adventure, or were they starting a new one?

Josh practiced a spell that uncurled Anaïs’s hair from a distance. She kept looking around, annoyed but unable to pinpoint the source. Janet linked arms with Quentin and Eliot and made them do a “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” skipping dance. He couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think Eliot had had a drink all day. When was the last time that had happened?

The forest seemed to go on forever. Once in a while the sun appeared long enough to shoot some long, dusty beams down between the trees, then disappeared again.

“This is right,” Penny said, looking around. His eyes were glazed. He had entered a daze of ecstatic certainty. “This feels right to me. We’re supposed to be here.”

Janet rolled her eyes.

“What do you think, Q?” Penny said. “Doesn’t this feel right to you?”

Without knowing how it happened Quentin had Penny’s ratty T-shirt bunched in his fists. Penny weighed more than he’d counted on, but Quen tin still managed to get him off balance and push him backward until his head clunked against the damp trunk of a pine tree.

“Never speak to me,” Quentin said evenly. “Do you understand? You do not address me directly, ever. You do not speak to me.”

“I don’t want to fight you,” Penny said. “That’s exactly what the Watcherwoman wants—”

“Did you not just hear what I said?” Quentin clunked Penny’s head against the tree again, hard this time. Somebody said his name. “You lardy little fucking nub? Did you not just fucking hear what I fucking said? Was I unclear in any way?”

He walked away without waiting for an answer. Fillory had better give him something to fight soon or he was going to lose it completely.

The novelty of actually, physically being in Fillory was wearing thin. In spite of everything a mood of general grumpiness was growing, a spoiled-picnic mood. Every time a bird perched overhead for more than a few seconds Josh would say, “Okay, this is the one,” or “I think it’s trying to tell us something,” or eventually, “Hey asshole, fly away from me, please. Okay, thanks.”

“At least the Watcherwoman hasn’t shown up,” Eliot said.

“If that even was the Watcherwoman before,” Josh said. “Supposedly they got her in the first book, right? So.”

“Yeah, I know.” Eliot had a handful of acorns and was chucking them at trees as they walked. “But something’s a little off here. I don’t understand why that nymph wasn’t boring us about Ember and Umber. They’re always so pushy about Them in the books.”

“If there’s a war between the rams and the Watcherwoman still going on, we’re going to want to get with Ember and Umber stat,” Alice said.

“Oh, yeah,” Janet said. She made quotey-fingers. “ ‘Stat.’ ”

“If They want us on Their side, They will find us,” Penny intoned. “We need have no fear on that score.”

No one answered him. It was becoming increasingly clear that Penny’s encounter with the nymph had put him in an altered state. That was how he was dealing with Fillory. He’d undergone a conversion experience, flipped into full-on Renaissance Faire role-playing mode.

“Watch it, watch it!” Richard yelled. They registered the drumming thuds of hooves on soft earth almost too late. A carriage drawn by two horses tore past them at a full gallop, scattering them into the trees on either side of the road. The carriage was closed and dark; on its side it bore what looked like a coat of arms that had recently been painted over in black.

The coachman was bundled up in a black cloak. He—she? it was impossible to tell—signaled the horses to slow to a walk, then a stop, a hundred feet ahead of them down the road.

“The thick plottens,” Eliot said dryly.

It was about damn time something happened. Quentin, Janet, and Anaïs walked boldly toward it, all competing to be the reckless one, the hero, the one who pushed things forward. In his present state of mind Quentin felt fully prepared to go right up and knock on the shutters, but he found himself pulling up a few yards away. So did the others. The black coach did look ominously funereal.

A muffled voice spoke from inside the carriage.

“Do they bear the Horns?”

This was evidently directed not at them but at the coachman, who had the better vantage point. If the coachman replied, he/she did so inaudibly.

“Do you bear the horns?” This voice was louder and clearer.

The advance party exchanged looks.

“What do you mean, Horns?” Janet called. “We’re not from around here.”

This was ridiculous. It was like talking to the Once-ler in Dr. Seuss.

“Do you serve the Bull?” Now the voice sounded shriller to his ears, with high, twittering overtones.

“Who’s the bull?” Quentin said, loudly and slowly, as if he were talking to somebody who didn’t speak English or was mildly retarded. There was no bull in the Plover books, so—? “We are visitors to your land. We do not serve the bull, or anybody else for that matter.”

“They’re not deaf, Quentin,” Janet said.

Long silence. One of the horses—they were black, too, as was the tackle, and everything else—whickered. The first voice said something inaudible.

“What?” Quentin took a step closer.

A trapdoor banged open on top of the carriage. The sound was like a gunshot. A tiny expressionless head and a long green insect torso popped up out of it—it could only have been a praying mantis, but grown grotesquely to human size. It was so skinny and it had so many long emerald-colored legs and graceful whip antennae that at first Quentin didn’t notice that it was holding a green bow with a green arrow nocked.

“Shit!” Quentin yelped reflexively. His voice cracked. It was close range, and there was no time to run. He cringed violently and fell down.

The horses took off like a shot the moment the mantis released. The trapdoor banged shut again. Dust and twigs spun up into the air in the carriage’s wake, its four big wheels fitting neatly in the ruts in the road.

When Quentin dared to look up again, Penny was standing over him. He held the arrow in one hand. He must have used a spell to speed up his reflexes, Fillorian Circumstances be damned, then plucked it out of the air in midflight. It would have neatly speared Quentin’s kidney.

The others came straggling up to watch the carriage recede into the distance.

“Wait,” Josh said sarcastically. “Stop.”

“Jesus, Penny,” Janet breathed. “Nice catch.”

What, was she going to fuck him now? Quentin thought. He stared at the arrow in Penny’s hand, panting. It was a yard long and fletched in black and yellow like a hornet. The tip had two angry curly steel barbs welded to it. He hadn’t even had time to panic.

He took a shaky breath.

“That all you got?” he yelled after the dwindling carriage, too late for it to be funny.

Slowly he got to his feet. His knees were water and wouldn’t stop shaking.

Penny turned and, in an odd gesture, offered him the arrow. Quentin snorted angrily and walked away, slapping leaf junk off his hands. He didn’t want Penny to see him trembling. It probably would have missed anyway.

“Wow,” Janet said. “That was one angry bug.”

And what kind of political situation were they walking into here? Bugs and bulls, nymphs and witches—who were the good guys and who were the bad guys? Everything was much less entertaining and more difficult to organize than they’d counted on. Quentin’s nerves were thoroughly jangled, and he kept touching the place on his stomach under his sweater where the arrow would have gone in. What, was it mammals vs. insects now? But then why would a praying mantis be fighting for a bull? The nymph had said this wasn’t their war. Maybe she had a point.

Quentin’s feet were killing him breaking in his brand-new hiking boots. He’d never dried off the foot he’d soaked in the stream before, and now it felt hot and blistered and mildewy. He imagined painful fungal spores taking root and flourishing in the warm wetness between his toes. He wondered how far they’d walked. It had been about thirty hours since he’d slept.

Both Penny and Anaïs were adamantly against turning back. What if the Chatwins had turned back? Penny said. They were part of a story now. Had anybody actually ever read a story? This was the hump, the hard part, the part they’d be rewarded for later. You just had to get through it. And not to go on, but who are the good guys here? We are the good guys. And the good guys always survive.

“Wake up!” Alice said. “This isn’t a story! It’s just one fucking thing after another! Somebody could have died back there!” She obviously meant Quentin but didn’t want to say his name.

“Maybe Helen Chatwin was right,” Richard said. “Maybe we’re not supposed to be here.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Janet stared them down. “It’s supposed to be confusing at the beginning. The situation will get explained in time. We just have to keep moving. Keep picking up clues. If we leave now and come back it’ll be like five hundred years from now and we’ll have to start all over again.”

Quentin looked from one to the other of them: Alice smart and skeptical, Janet all action and thoughtless exuberance. He turned to Anaïs to ask her how far she thought they’d walked, on the vague theory that a European person might have a more accurate sense of these things than a bunch of Americans, when he realized he was the only one of the party who wasn’t staring off into the forest to their right. Passing them through the darkening trees, on a parallel course, was the strangest thing Quentin had ever seen.

It was a birch tree, striding along through the forest. Its trunk forked a meter from the ground to form two legs on which it took stiff, deliberate steps. It was so thin that it was hard to keep track of in the half-light, but its white bark stood out from the dark trunks around it. Its thin upper branches whipped and snapped against the trees it pushed past. It looked more like a machine or a marionette than a person. Quentin wondered how it kept its balance.

“Holy crap,” said Josh.

Without speaking they began to trail after it. The tree didn’t hail them, but for a moment its crown of branches twisted in their direction, as if it were glancing over a shoulder it didn’t have. In the stillness they could actually hear it creaking as it foraged along, like a rocking chair. Quentin got the distinct impression it was ignoring them.

After the first five minutes of magical wonderment passed it began to be socially awkward, blatantly following the tree-spirit-thing like this, but it didn’t seem to want to acknowledge them, and they weren’t about to let it go. As a group they clung to it. Maybe this thing was going to put them in the picture, Quentin thought. If it didn’t turn around and beat them all to death with its branches.

Janet kept a close eye on Penny and shushed him whenever he looked like he might be about to say something.

“Let it make the first move,” she whispered.

“Freak show,” Josh said. “What is that thing?”

“It’s a dryad, idiot.”

“I thought those were girl-trees.”

“They’re supposed to be sexy girl-trees,” Josh said plaintively.

“And I thought dryads were oaks,” Alice said. “That’s a birch.”

“What makes you think it’s not a girl-tree?”

“Whatever it is,” Josh said under his breath, “it’s pay dirt. Fuckin’ tree-thing, man. Pay fuckin’ dirt.”

The tree was a fast walker, almost bouncing along on its springy, knee-less legs, to the point where soon they would have to break into a half jog to keep up with it. Just when it looked like they were either going to lose their only promising lead so far or segue into an undignified chase scene, it became obvious where it was heading anyway.