Identical pints stood in front of the others. It was late afternoon, five thirty or so, Quentin guessed, though how could you know? Were there even twenty-four hours in a day here? Why would there be? Despite Penny’s insistence that the tree had been “leading” them here, it was pretty clear they would have found the inn on their own. It was a dark, low-roofed log cabin with a sign outside featuring two crescent moons; a delicate little clockwork mechanism caused the two moons to revolve around each other when the wind blew. The cabin was backed up against, and appeared almost to emerge from, a low hillock that humped up out of the forest floor.

Cautiously pushing inside, through swinging doors, they discovered what could have passed for a period room in a museum of Colonial America: a long narrow chamber with a bar against one wall. It reminded Quentin of the Historick Olde Innes he’d wandered through when he was visiting his parents in Chesterton.

Only one other booth was occupied, by a family(?)—a tall, white-haired old man; a high-cheekboned woman who might have been in her thirties; and a serious little girl. Obviously locals. They sat perfectly silent and erect, staring balefully at the empty cups and saucers in front of them. The little girl’s hooded eyes expressed a precocious acquaintance with adversity.

The walking birch tree had disappeared, presumably into a back room. The bartender wore a curious old-fashioned uniform, black with many brass buttons, something like what an Edwardian policeman might have worn. He had a narrow, bored face and heavy black five o’clock shadow, and he slowly polished pint glasses with a white cloth in the manner of bartenders since time immemorial. Otherwise the room was empty, except for a large brown bear wearing a waistcoat sitting slumped in a sturdy armchair in one corner. It wasn’t clear whether the bear was conscious or not.

Richard had brought along several dozen small gold cylinders in the hope that they would work as a kind of universal interdimensional currency. The bartender accepted one without comment, weighed it expertly in his palm, and returned a handful of change: four dented, wobbly coins stamped with an assortment of faces and animals. Two of them bore mottos in two different unreadable scripts; the third was a well-worn Mexican peso from the year 1936; the fourth turned out to be a plastic marker from a board game called Sorry. He set about filling pewter tankards.

Josh stared into his dubiously and took a fastidious sniff. He was as fidgety as a third-grader.

“Just drink it!” Quentin hissed irritably. God, people were such losers sometimes. He lifted his own tankard. “Cheers.”

He swished the liquid around in his mouth. It was bitter and carbonated and alcoholic and definitely beer. It filled him with confidence and a renewed sense of purpose. He’d had a scare, but it’s funny how it—and the beer—were now focusing his mind wonderfully. Quentin shared his booth with Richard, Josh, and Anaïs—he had successfully avoided sitting next to either Alice or Janet, or Penny—and they exchanged multiple transverse glances over their foamy pints. They were a long way from where they’d started out that morning.

“I don’t think that bear is stuffed!” Josh whispered excitedly. “I think that’s a real bear!”

“Let’s buy it a beer,” Quentin said.

“I think it’s asleep. And anyway it doesn’t look that friendly.”

“Beer might help with that,” Quentin said. He felt punchy. “This could be the next clue. If it’s a talking beer, I mean a talking bear, we could, you know, talk to it.”

“About what?”

Quentin shrugged and took another sip.

“Just get a feel for what’s going on around here. I mean, what else are we doing here?”

Richard and Anaïs hadn’t touched their drinks. Quentin took another big gulp just to spite them.

“We’re playing it safe, is what we’re doing,” Richard said. “This is strictly reconnaissance. We’re avoiding any unnecessary contact.”

“You’re kidding me. We’re in Fillory, and you don’t want to talk to anybody?”

“Absolutely not.” Richard sounded shocked, shocked, at the very idea. “We’ve made contact with another plane of existence. What, that’s not enough for you?”

“As a matter of fact, it’s not. A giant praying mantis tried to kill me earlier today, and I’d like to know why.”

Fillory had yet to give Quentin the surcease from unhappiness he was counting on, and he was damned if he was leaving before he got what he wanted. Relief was out there, he knew it, he just needed to get deeper in, and he wasn’t about to let Richard slow him down. He had to jump the tracks, get out of his Earth-story, which wasn’t going so well, and into the Fillory-story, where the upside was infinitely higher. Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight.

“Barkeep!” Quentin said, louder than necessary. As an afterthought he gave himself a thick Wild West drawl. If it feels right, go with it. He jerked his thumb at the bear. “ ’Nother round fer mah friend the bar there in the corner.”

A bar in a bar. Clever. In the other booth Eliot, Alice, Janet, and Penny all turned around in unison to look at him. The man in the uniform just nodded wearily.

The bear was named Humbledrum, and it was, as its name suggested, a very modest bear. It was a brown bear, it explained in deep sub-subwoofer tones, a species larger than the black bear but much much smaller than the mighty grizzly bear, though the grizzly was in fact a variety of brown bear. It was not, Humbledrum reiterated periodically, half the bear that some of those grizzlies were.

“But it’s not just about who’s the biggest bear,” Quentin offered. They were bonding. He wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted from the bear, but this seemed like a good way to get it. He was drinking Richard’s beer, having finished his own. “There’s other ways to be a good bear.”

Humbledrum’s head bobbed enthusiastically.

“Oh yes. Oh yes. I am a good bear. I never meant to say that I’m a bad bear. I’m a good bear. I respect territories. I’m a respectful bear.” Humbledrum’s terrifyingly huge paw fell on the table emphatically, and it put its black muzzle very close to Quentin’s nose. “I am a very. Respectful. Bear.”

The others were conspicuously silent, or talked among themselves, elaborately play-acting that they were unaware of the fact that Quentin was conversing with a drunk magic bear. Richard had bailed out early, swapping places with the always-game Janet. Josh and Anaïs huddled together, looking trapped. If Humbledrum noticed any of this, it didn’t seem to bother it.

Quentin understood that he was operating outside most of the group’s comfort level. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Eliot was trying to shoot him warning glances from the other table, but he avoided them. He didn’t care. He had to push things forward; he was afraid of staying still. This was his play, and he was playing it, and he was going to play it his way till it was played out. Everybody else could either get on board or button their candy asses on back to Drop City.

It wasn’t like what he was doing was easy. The range of Humbledrum’s interests was suffocatingly narrow, and its depth of knowledge in those areas abysmally profound. Quentin still vaguely remembered being a goose, how laser-focused he’d been on air currents and freshwater greenery, and he realized now that all animals were probably, at heart, insufferable bores. As a hibernating mammal Humbledrum had far more than the layman’s familiarity with cave geology. When it came to honey, it was the subtlest and most sophisticated of gastronomes. Quentin learned quickly to steer the conversation away from chestnuts.

“So,” Quentin said, flatly interrupting a disquisition on the stinging habits of the docile Carniolan honeybee (Apis mellifera carnica) as contrasted with those of the slightly more excitable German honeybee (Apis mellifera mellifera, aka the German black bee). “Just to be clear, this is Fillory we’re in, right?”

The lecture ground to a halt. Under its fur Humbledrum’s massive brow furrowed, producing a vivid equivalent of human befuddlement.

“What is, Quentin?”

“This place we’re in, right now,” Quentin said. “It’s called Fillory.”

A long moment passed. Humbledrum’s ears twitched. It had impossibly cute, round, furry teddy-bear ears.

“Fillory,” it said slowly, cautiously. “That is a word I have heard.” The giant bear sounded like a kid at the blackboard hedging his bets against what might or might not be a trick question.

“And this is it? We’re in Fillory?”

“I think it . . . may once have been.”

“So what do you call it now?” Quentin coaxed.

“No. No. Wait.” Humbledrum held up a paw for silence, and Quentin felt a tiny pang of pity. The enormous hairy idiot really was trying to think. “Yes, it is. This is Fillory. Or Loria? Is this Loria?”

“It has to be Fillory,” Penny said, leaning over from the other booth. “Loria is the evil country. Across the eastern mountains. It’s not like there’s no difference. How can you not know where you live?”

The bear was still shaking its heavy muzzle.

“I think Fillory is somewhere else,” it said.

“But this definitely isn’t Loria,” Penny said.

“Look, who’s the talking bear here?” Quentin snapped. “Is it you? Are you the talking fucking bear? All right. So shut the fuck up.”

Outside the bar the sun had set, and a few other creatures trailed in. Three beavers sipped from a common dish at a round café table in the company of a fat, green, oddly alert-looking cricket. In one corner, by itself, a white goat lapped at what looked like pale yellow wine in a shallow bowl. A slender, shy-looking man with horns jutting through his blond hair sat at the bar. He wore round glasses, and the lower half of his body was covered in thick bushy hair. The whole scene had a dreamlike quality, like a Chagall painting come to life. In passing, Quentin noted how disturbing it was to see a man with goat’s legs. Those backward-bending knees reminded him of the crippled or the gravely deformed.

As the inn filled up the silent family rose as one and shuffled out of their booth, their expressions still somber. Where could they be going? Quentin wondered. He’d seen no sign of a village nearby. It was getting late, and he wondered if they had a long walk ahead of them. He pictured them trudging down the grooved dirt road in the moonlight, the little girl riding on the old man’s narrow shoulders and then later, when she was too tired even for that, drooling drowsily on his lapel. He felt chastened by their gravity. They made him feel like a bumptious tourist, rattling drunkenly around what was, he kept forgetting, their country, a real country with real people in it, not a storybook at all. Or was it? Should he run after them? What secrets were they taking with them? When she reached to open the door, Quentin saw that the woman with the elegant cheekbones had lost her right arm below the elbow.

After another round of schnapps and scintillating persiflage with Humbledrum, the little silver birch sapling emerged from wherever it had been concealing itself and threaded its way through the room toward them, padding on feet of matted roots which still had clods of dirt clinging to them.

“I am Farvel,” it said chirpily.

It looked even stranger in the full light of the bar. It was a literal stick figure. There were talking trees in the Fillory books, but Plover was never very precise in describing their appearance. Farvel spoke through what looked like a lateral cut in its bark, the kind of wedge that a single hatchet blow might have left. The remainder of its features were sketched out by a spray of thin branches covered in fluttering green leaves, which roughly limned the outlines of two eyes and a nose. He looked like a Green Man carving in a church, except that his flat little mouth gave him a comically sour expression.

“Please pardon my rudeness earlier, I was disconcerted. It is so rare to meet travelers from other lands.” It had brought a stool from the bar, and now it bent itself into a rough sitting position. It looked a little like a chair itself. “What brings you here, human boy?”

At last. Here we go. The next level.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Quentin began, casually throwing an arm over the back of the booth. Obviously, he was emerging as the designated point person, the team’s natural first-contact specialist. The bartender joined them as well, having been replaced at his station by a solemn, dignified chimp with a hangdog face. “Curiosity mostly, I guess. We found this button? That let us travel between worlds? And we were all sort of at loose ends on Earth anyway, so we just . . . came over here. See what we could see, that kind of a thing.”

Even half drunk, that sounded a lot lamer than he’d hoped. Even Janet was looking at him with concern. God, he hoped Alice wasn’t listening. He smiled weakly, trying to play it cool. He wished he hadn’t had quite so much beer on quite such an empty, weary stomach.

“Of course, of course,” Farvel said companionably. “And what have you seen so far?”

The bartender watched Quentin steadily. He sat back-to-front on a cane chair, his arms resting on the seat back.

“Well, we ran into a river nymph who gave us a horn. A magic horn, I think. And then this bug—this insect, in a carriage, I guess it was a praying mantis—it shot an arrow at me, that almost hit me.”

He knew he should probably be playing this closer to the vest, but which part should he be leaving out exactly? How did those calculations work? The rigors of keeping pace with Humbledrum had left him a shade less than razor-keen. But Farvel didn’t seem put off, he just nodded sympathetically. The chimp came out from behind the bar to place a lighted candle on their table, along with another round of pints, this time on the house.

Penny leaned over the back of the booth again.

“You guys don’t work for the Watcherwoman, do you? Or I mean, like, secretly? Not like you want to, but you have to?”

“Jesus, Penny.” Josh shook his head. “Smooth.”

“Oh my, oh dear,” Farvel said. A charged glance passed between him and the bartender. “Well, I suppose you could say . . . but no, one shouldn’t say. Oh dear, oh dear.”

Its composure thoroughly disrupted, the little treelet, the picture of arboreal distress, let its branches droop a little, and its green birch leaves fluttered anxiously.

“I like a touch of lavender in my honey,” Humbledrum observed, apropos of nothing. “You want the bees to nest near a good-size field of it. Downwind, if you can manage it. That’s the real trick of it. In a nutshell.”

Farvel wrapped one slender twig-hand around its glass and tipped some beer into its mouth. After a visible struggle with itself, the tree-spirit began again.

“Young human,” Farvel said. “What you suppose is true, in a sense. We do not love her, but we fear her. Everybody does, who knows what’s good for them.

“She has not yet succeeded in slowing the advance of time, not yet.” It glanced at the humid green twilight forest visible through the open doorway, as if to reassure itself that it was still there. “But she hungers to. We see her sometimes, from far away. She moves through the forest. She lives in the treetops. She has lost her wand, they say, but she will find it again soon, or fashion a new one.

“And then what? Can you imagine it, that eternal sunset? All will be confused. With no boundaries to separate them, the day animals and the night creatures will go to war with each other. The forest will die. The red sun will bleed out over the land until it is as white as the moon.”

“But I thought the Witch was dead,” Alice said. “I thought the Chatwins killed her.”

So she was listening. How could she sound so calm? Another glance passed between Farvel and the bartender.

“Well, that’s as may be. It was long ago, and we are far from the capital here. But the rams have not shown themselves here for many a year, and here in the country living and dead are not such simple things. Especially when witches come into it. And she has been seen!”

“The Watcherwoman has.” Quentin was trying to follow. This was it, they were getting into it, the sap was starting to flow.

“Oh yes! Humbledrum saw her. Slender she was, and veiled.”

“We heard her!” Penny said, getting into the spirit of it. “We heard a clock ticking in the woods!”

The bear just stared into his glass of schnapps with small, watery eyes.

“So the Watcherwoman,” Penny said eagerly. “Is this a problem we can, you know, help you with?”

All of a sudden Quentin felt supremely tired. The alcohol in his system, which had thus far been acting as a stimulant, without warning flipped to a chemical isomorph of itself and became a sedative instead. Where before he’d been burning it like rocket fuel, now it was gumming up the works. It was dragging him down. His brain began to shut down nonessential operations. Somewhere in his core the self-destruct countdown had begun.

He sat back in the booth and allowed his eyes to glaze over. This was the moment that should have galvanized him into action, the moment that all those years at Brakebills had been leading up to, but instead he was letting go, sinking down into dysphoria. Whatever, if Penny wanted to take this over, let it be his show from now on. He had Alice, why shouldn’t he have Fillory, too? The time for clever thinking had passed anyway. The tree was clearly taking their bait, or they were taking its bait, or both. Either way, here it was, the adventure had arrived.

There was a time when this had been his most passionate hope, when it would have ravished him with happiness. It was just so weird, he thought sadly. Why now, when it was actually happening, did the seductions of Fillory feel so crude and unwanted? Its groping hands so clumsy? He thought he’d left this feeling behind long ago in Brooklyn, or at least at Brakebills. How could it have followed him here, of all places? How far did he have to run? If Fillory failed him he would have nothing left! A wave of frustration and panic surged through him. He had to get rid of it, break the pattern! Or maybe this was different, maybe there really was something off here. Maybe the hollowness was in Fillory, not in him?

He slid warily out of the booth, rubbing up against Humbledrum’s huge scratchy thigh on his way out, and visited the restroom, a malodorous pit-style affair. He thought for a second that he might be sick into it, and that maybe that wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world, but nothing happened.

When he got back, Penny had taken his seat. He took Penny’s place in the other booth and rested his chin in his hands and his hands on the table. If only they had drugs. Getting high in Fillory, that would really be the ultimate. Eliot had moved to the bar and appeared to be chatting up the horned man.

“What this land needs,” Farvel was saying, leaning into the table conspiratorially and inviting the others to do likewise, “is kings and queens. The thrones in Castle Whitespire have been empty for too long, and they can only be filled by the sons and daughters of Earth. By your kind. But”—he cautioned them, stirringly—“only the stout of heart could hope to win those seats, you understand. Only the stoutest of heart.”

Farvel looked on the verge of squeezing out a viscous, sappy tear. Jesus, what a speech. Quentin could practically have recited his lines for him.

Humbledrum farted mournfully, three distinct notes.

“So what would this involve, exactly?” Josh asked, in a tone of studied skepticism. “Winning, as you say, those seats?”

What it involved, Farvel explained, was a visit to a perilous ruin called Ember’s Tomb. Somewhere within the tomb was a crown, a silver crown that had once been worn by the noble King Martin, centuries ago, when the Chatwins reigned. If they could recover the crown and bring it to Castle Whitespire, then they could occupy the thrones themselves—or four of them could anyway—and become kings and queens of Fillory and end the threat of the Watcherwoman forever. But it wouldn’t be easy.

“So do we absolutely need this crown?” Eliot asked. “Otherwise what? It won’t work?”

“You must wear the crown. There is no other way. But you will have help. There will be guides for you.”

“Ember’s Tomb?” Quentin roused himself for a final effort. “Waitamin nit. Does that mean Ember’s dead? And what about Umber?”

“Oh, no-no-no!” Farvel said hastily. “It is just a name. A traditional name, it means nothing. It has just been so long since Ember was seen in these parts.”

“Ember is the eagle?” Humbledrum rumbled.

“The ram.” The uniformed bartender corrected him, speaking for the first time. “One of them. Widewings was the eagle. He was a false king.”

“How can you not know who Ember is?” Penny asked the bear disgustedly.

“Oh dear,” the tree said, hanging its vernal, garlanded face sadly down toward the table. “Do not judge the bear too harshly. You must understand, we are very far from the capital here, and many have ruled these green hills, or tried, since the last time you children of Earth walked them. The silver years of the Chatwins are long ago now, and the years since have been forged from baser metals. You cannot imagine the chaos we have suffered through. There was Widewings the Eagle, and after him the Wrought Iron Man, the Lily Witch, the Spear-Carrier, the Saint Anselm. There was the Lost Lamb, and the vicious depredations of the Very Tallest Tree.

“And you know,” he finished, “we are so very far from the capital here. And it is very confusing. I am only a birch, you know, and not a very large one.”

A leaf fluttered to the table, a single green tear.

“I have a question,” Janet said, unintimidated as ever. “If this crown is so damn important, and Ember and Umber and Amber or whatever are so powerful, why don’t they just go get it themselves?”

“Ah, well, there’s Laws,” Farvel sighed. “They can’t, you see. There’s Higher Laws that even such as They are bound by. It must be you who retrieve the crown. It can only be you.”

“We have lived too long,” the bartender said glumly, to no one. He’d been putting away his own wares with impressive efficiency.

Quentin supposed it all made sense. Ember and Umber absent, a power vacuum, an insurgent Watcherwoman emerging from whatever witchy quasi-death she’d suffered at the Chatwins’ hands. Penny had been right after all: they’d gotten a quest. Their role was clear. It had a pat, theme-park quality to it, like they were on some fantasy-camp role-playing vacation, but it did make sense. He could still hope. But let’s be sure.

“I don’t want to sound crass,” he said out loud. “But Ember and Umber are the big shots around here, right? I mean, of all those people, things, whatever you mentioned, They’re the most powerful? And morally righteous or whatever? Let’s be clear on this for a second. I want to be sure we’re backing the right horse. Or ram. Whatever.”

“Of course! It would be folly to think otherwise!”

Farvel shushed him, looking worriedly over at the table of beavers, who didn’t seem to be paying them any attention, but you couldn’t be too careful. Bizarrely, Farvel produced a cigarette from somewhere and lit it from the candle on the table, careful not to ignite any part of itself. It protruded jauntily from the tree’s little cleft mouth. The thing must have a death wish. Aromatic smoke rose up through the leafy corona of its face.

“Only do not judge us too harshly. The rams have been absent for many years. We have had to carry on without them. Make our own way. The forest must live.”

Eliot and the horned man had vanished, presumably together. Incorrigible, that man; it cheered Quentin up by a scintilla that somebody at least was having a good time. The white goat slurped its yellow wine loudly in its corner. Humbledrum just gazed sorrowfully into its schnapps. Quentin reminded himself, as if he had almost forgotten the fact, that he was very far from home, in a room full of animals drinking alcohol.

“We have lived too long,” the bartender announced again, sullenly. “The great days are past.”

In the morning they sat at a long table in the bar, eating fresh eggs and toast and drinking cold water out of stone jugs, their backpacks piled up in a heap in one of the booths. Apparently Richard’s gold cylinders went a long way in the Fillorian economy. Quentin felt clear-eyed and miraculously un-hungover. His restored faculties appreciated with a cold new keenness the many painful aspects of his recent personal history, but they also allowed him to really appreciate almost for the first time the reality of his physical presence in actual Fillory. It was all so detailed and vivid compared to his car toonish fantasies. The room had the seedy, humiliated look of a bar seen in direct sunlight, sticky and thoroughly initialed by knife- and claw-wielding patrons. The floor was paved with old round millstones lightly covered with a scattering of straw, the chinks between them filled in with packed dirt. Neither Farvel nor Humbledrum nor the bartender were anywhere in sight. They were served by a brusque but otherwise attentive dwarf.

Also in the dining room were a man and a woman who sat opposite each other by a window, sipping coffee and saying nothing and glancing over at the Brakebills table every once in a while. Quentin had the distinct impression that they were just killing time, waiting for him and the others to finish their breakfast. That proved to be the case.

When the table was cleared, the pair introduced themselves as Dint—the man—and Fen. Both were fortyish and weather-beaten, as if they spent a lot of time outdoors in a professional capacity. They were, Dint explained, the guides. They would take the party to Ember’s Tomb, in search of King Martin’s crown. Dint was tall and skinny, with a big nose and huge black eyebrows that together took up most of his face; he was dressed all in black and wore a long cape, apparently as an expression of the extreme seriousness with which he regarded himself and his abilities. Fen was shorter and denser and more muscular, with close-cropped blond hair. With a whistle around her neck she could have been a gym teacher at a private school for girls. Her clothes were loose-fitting and practical, evidently designed for ease of movement in unpredictable situations. She projected both toughness and kindness, and she wore high boots with fascinatingly complex laces. She was, to the best of Quentin’s ability to gauge these things, a lesbian.

Cool autumn sunlight slotted through the narrow windows cut in the heavy log walls of the Two Moons. Sober, Quentin felt more eager than ever to get on with it. He looked hard at his beautiful, despoiled Alice—his anger at her was a hard nugget he didn’t know if he could ever digest, a kidney stone. Maybe when they were kings and queens. Maybe then he could have Penny executed. A palace coup, and definitely not a bloodless one.

Penny proposed that they all swear an oath together, to celebrate their shared high purpose, but it seemed like overkill, and anyway he couldn’t muster a quorum. They were all shrugging into their packs when Richard abruptly announced that they could go if they wanted, but he would be staying behind at the inn.

No one knew how to react. Janet tried to joke him out of it, then when that didn’t work she pleaded with him.

“But we’ve come this far together!” she said, furious and trying not to show it. Of all of them she hated this kind of disloyalty to the group the most. Any crack in their collective facade was an attack on her personally. “We can always turn back if things get sketchy! Or in an emergency we can use the button as a rip cord! I think you’re way overreacting.”

“Well, and I think you’re underreacting,” Richard said. “And I think you can count on the authorities to overreact when they find out about how far you’re taking this.”

“If they find out about it,” Anaïs put in. “Which they will not.”

“When they find out about it,” Janet said hotly, “this is going to be the discovery of the century, and we are going to make history, and you’re missing out on it. And if you can’t see that, I frankly have no idea why you came along in the first place.”

“I came along to keep you people from doing anything stupid. Which is what I’m trying to do right now.”

“Whatever.” She put a hand in his face, then walked away, her own face crumpling. “Nobody cares if you come or not. There are only four thrones anyway.”

Quentin half expected Alice to join Richard—she looked like she was hanging on to her nerve by the very tips of her fingers. He wondered why she hadn’t bolted already; she was way too sensible for a random lark like this. Quentin felt the opposite way. The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play. They would have to tie him down to keep him from going to Ember’s Tomb.

Richard would not be dislodged, so in the end they set off in a loose pack without him, with Dint and Fen walking ahead. They followed yesterday’s carriage path for only a short while before striking out at an angle into the woods. For all the glory of their high and noble purpose, it felt like they were going on a summer-camp nature hike, or a junior high field trip, with the kids goofing off and the two counselors looking dour and superior and grown-up and glaring them back into line when they strayed too far. For the first time since they came to Fillory everybody was relaxing and being themselves instead of playing intrepid explorer-heroes. Low stone walls traversed the forest floor, and they took turns balancing along them. Nobody knew who had built them, or why. Josh said something about where was the damn Cozy Horse when you needed it. Before long they emerged from the forest into a maze of sunlit meadows, and then into open farmland.

It would not have been hard to get Alice alone. But whenever Quentin rehearsed what he wanted to say, however well it began, he got to a point where he had to ask her what happened with Penny, and then the dream sequence just went white, like a film of a nuclear blast. Instead, he made conversation with the guides.

Neither of them was very talkative. Dint did show a flicker of interest when he learned that the visitors were magicians, too, but they turned out not to have much in common. His entire expertise was in battle magic. He was barely aware that there were other kinds.

Quentin had the impression he was loath to give away any trade secrets. But he did open up about one thing.

“I sewed this myself,” he said, a little shyly, pulling his cape to one side to show Quentin a bandolier-like vest underneath with many small pockets on it in rows. “I keep herbs in here, powders, whatever I might need in the field. If I’m casting something with a material component I can just . . . like this”—he executed a series of rapid pinching-and-dispensing motions that he’d obviously spent a lot of time practicing—“and I’m ready to go!”

Then the dour facade descended again, and he went back to his silent brooding. He carried a wand, which almost nobody at Brakebills did. It was considered slightly embarrassing, like training wheels, or a marital aid.

Fen was more overtly friendly but at the same time harder to read. She wasn’t a magician, and she carried no obvious weapons, but it was understood that of the two of them she was the muscle. As far as Quentin could make out she was some kind of martial artist—she called the discipline she practiced inc aga, an untranslatable phrase from a language Quentin had never heard of. She kept to a strict regimen: she couldn’t wear armor or touch silver or gold, and she ate practically nothing. What inc aga looked like in practice was impossible for Quentin to fathom—she would talk about it only in high-flown, abstract metaphors.

She and Dint were both adventurers by profession.

“There aren’t many of us now,” Fen said, her short sturdy legs somehow devouring distance faster than Quentin’s long skinny ones. She never looked at him as she talked, her bulgy eyes continuously searching the horizon for potential threats. “Humans, I mean. Fillory is a wild place, and getting wilder. The forest is spreading, getting deeper and darker. Every summer we cut down the trees, burn them down sometimes, and then mark the borders of the woods. The next summer the borders are buried a hundred yards deep. The trees eat the farms, and the farmers come to live in the towns. But where will we live when all of Fillory is forest? When I was a girl, the Two Moons was in open country.

“The animals don’t care,” she added bitterly. “They like it this way.”

She lapsed into silence. Quentin thought it might be a good time to change the subject. He felt like a green-as-grass PFC from Dubuque, Iowa, trading banter with the hardened South Vietnamese regular attached to his unit.

“So, I don’t mean to sound crass,” he said, “but are we paying you for this? Or is somebody?”

“If we succeed, that will be payment enough.”

“But why would you want somebody from our world to be king anyway? Who you don’t even know? Why not somebody from Fillory?”

“Only your kind can sit the thrones of Castle Whitespire. It’s the Law. Always has been.”

“But that makes no sense. And this is speaking as the beneficiary of the Law here.”

Fen grimaced. Her protuberant eyes and full lips gave her face a fishy cast.

“Our people have been slaughtering and betraying one another for centuries, Quentin,” she said. “How can you be any worse? The rule of the Chatwins is the last peaceful time anyone can remember. You don’t know anyone here; you have no history, no scores to settle. You belong to no faction.” She stared fixedly at the road ahead of them, biting off her words. The bitterness in her tone was bottomless. “It makes perfect political sense. We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.”

They hiked through slow-rolling hills for the rest of the day, their thumbs hooked in the straps of their backpacks, sometimes along chalk roads, sometimes cutting across fields, crickets jumping up out of the long grass to get out of their way. The air was cool and clean.

It was an easy hike, a beginner’s hike. There was singing. Eliot pointed out a ridge that he said was “positively screaming” to have pinot grapes planted on it. At no point did they see a town or another traveler. The rare tree or fence post they passed cast a crisp shadow on the ground, straight and clear, like it was etched there. It made Quentin wonder how Fillory really worked. There was hardly any central government, so what would a king actually do? The entire political economy appeared to be frozen in the feudal Middle Ages, but there were elements of Victorian-level technology as well. Who had made that beautiful Victorian carriage? What craftsmen wove the innards of the clockwork mechanisms that were so ubiquitous in Fillory? Or were those things done by magic? Either way, they must keep Fillory in its pre-industrial, agrarian state on purpose, by choice. Like the Amish.

At noon they witnessed one of Fillory’s famous daily eclipses, and they observed something that was described in none of the books: instead of being a sphere, the moon of Fillory was formed in the shape of an actual, literal crescent, an elegant silvery arc that sailed through the sky, rotating slowly around its empty center of gravity.

They made camp at sunset in a ragged square scrap of meadow. Ember’s Tomb, Dint told them, was in the next valley over, and they wouldn’t want to spend the night any closer to it. He and Fen divided the watches between them; Penny volunteered to take one, but they declined. They ate some roast-beef sandwiches they’d been saving since the house upstate and unrolled sleeping bags and slept in the open, their bodies pressing flat the tough, coarse green grass underneath.