by Lev Grossman
He grabbed the painter and hauled on it as the others—Eliot, Josh, Poppy, Julia, Bingle, Benedict—scrambled out on both sides. The air was quiet and still. It felt weird to be standing on solid ground again.
“Worst away team ever,” Josh said, wading up onto land. “Not a single redshirt.”
Pretty: that was the impression the island had made from a distance. Chalk cliffs that parted to reveal a small bay with a tidy beach. A row of single trees stood out against the skyline, so fine and still and green against the blue sky they looked like they’d been carved in jade. Vacation paradise.
It was late afternoon; it had taken them most of the day to make landfall. They stood together on the shore in a knot. The sand was as clean as if it had been sifted. Quentin slogged across it and up the first dune to the crest to see what was beyond it. The dune was steep, and just short of the top he flopped down on the slope and peered over the crest. It was like being a kid at the beach. Beyond the dune were more dunes topped with scrub, then a meadow, then a line of trees, then Ember knew what else. So far so good. Pretty.
“Welp,” Quentin said. “Let’s get questin’.”
But first there were more mundane matters to attend to. Quentin and Poppy and Josh had been in Venice three days ago, but this was the first land the men had seen in something like three weeks. They piled ashore in twos and threes; some of them cannonballed off the Muntjac’s sides into the flat green sea. After a suitable interval for goofing off Eliot mustered them on the shore and sent them out in teams to find fresh water, gather wood for fires and new spars, set up tents, harvest the local fruit, hunt for local game.
“We’ve fallen on our feet,” Eliot said, once everybody had a job to do. “Don’t you think? So far I would rate this an above-average island.”
“It’s so beautiful!” Poppy said. “Do you think anybody lives here?” Eliot shook his head.
“I don’t know. We’re two months’ sail out from Castle Whitespire. I’ve never heard of anyone else coming this far. We could be the first human beings ever to set foot here.”
“Think of that,” said Quentin. “So do you want to . . . ?”
“What?”
“You know. Claim it. For Fillory.”
“Oh!” Eliot considered. “We haven’t been doing that. It seems a little imperialist. I’m not sure it’s in good taste.”
“But haven’t you always wanted to say it?”
“Well, yes,” Eliot said. “All right. We can always give it back.” He raised his voice, using the one he used to call meetings to order back at Castle Whitespire. “I, High King Eliot, hereby claim this island for the great and glorious Kingdom of Fillory! Henceforth it will be known as”—he paused—“as New Hawaii!”
Everybody nodded vaguely.
“New Hawaii?” Quentin said. “Really?”
“It’s not really tropical,” Poppy said. “The vegetation’s more temperate.”
“What about Farflung Island?” Quentin said. “Like as one word: Farflung.”
“Relief Island.” Poppy was getting into the spirit of it. “Whitesand Island. Greengrass Island!”
“Skull Island,” Josh said. “No wait, Spider-Skull Island!”
“Okay, the Island to Be Named Later,” Eliot said. “Come on. Let’s find out what’s on it before we name it.”
But by then the sun was low in the sky, so instead they pitched in bringing sticks and dry grass back from the meadow. With five trained magicians on hand, starting a fire wasn’t a problem. They could have made a fire with just sand. But it wouldn’t have smelled as good.
The hunting party came back flushed with pride, hauling two wild goats on their shoulders, and one of the foragers had spotted a patch of something very closely analogous to carrots growing wild at the edge of the woods, that seemed self-evidently safe to eat. They all sat in circles on the cooling sand, the cold sea air at their backs, the warmth of the fire on their faces, and savored the feeling of being on firm ground again, with enough space to stretch out their arms and legs and not touch anything or anybody. The beach was covered with footprints now, and as the sun got lower the light made monkey-puzzle shadow patterns on it. They were very far from home.
The setting sun moved behind a cloud, lighting it up from the inside like a pall of smoke, sunlight leaking out around the edges. Strange stars came swarming across the blackening sky. No one wanted to get back on the Muntjac, not yet, so when the light was all gone the travelers wrapped themselves up in blankets right there on the sand and fell asleep.
The next day everything seemed a little less urgent than it had when they first arrived. Yes, the realm was in peril, but was it in immediate peril? It was hard to imagine a place that felt less imperiled than the Island to Be Named Later. There was a touch of lotus land about it. And anyway adventure would find them when it was ready, or so the theory ran. You couldn’t rush it. You just had to keep the right state of mind. For now they would savor the anticipation, and stay well rested.
Even Julia wasn’t pushing.
“I was afraid we would not get back,” she said. “Now I am afraid of what will happen if we go forward.”
They hiked up to the top of the cliffs on one side of the bay and from there got a good look at more green island, with rocky hills heaped up in the interior. Birds roosted along the clifftops in bunches—they had dull gray feathers on their backs and wings, but they had a way of turning in the air in unison and suddenly showing you their rose-colored chests all at once. Quentin was going to name them rose-breasted swoopers, or something along those lines, when Poppy pointed out that they already had a name. They were galahs. They had them in Australia too.
The cook was a keen fisherman, and he pulled a prodigious number of fat, tiger-striped fish out of the surf, one after the other. In the afternoon Quentin watched Benedict and Bingle fence with foils—they stuck wine corks on the tips for safety. He spent an hour just lying back on his elbows and looking at the waves. They were nothing like the brutally cold, puritan waves of his East Coast youth, which had sternly discouraged anything so frivolous as surfing or frolicking. These waves came sloping in smoothly, building up heads of boiling cream foam on top, reared up for a moment, mint green and paper-thin in the sunlight, then broke in a long line with a sound like fabric tearing.
He wiggled his toes in the hot sand and watched the weird moire optical effects that the miniature sand avalanches created. They went to bed that night hardly having explored more than the thin crescent of island they’d already seen. Tomorrow they would strike inland, into the forest and up into the hills.
Quentin woke early. The sun wasn’t even up yet, though there was a gray blur of predawn to the east. He wondered what happened out there, in the extreme east. The rules were different in Fillory. For all he knew the world was flat, and the sun ran on tracks.
Everything was gray: the sand, the trees, the sea. Deep red embers smoldered under the gray ashes of the bonfires. It was warm out. The sleepers on the beach looked as though they had fallen there from a great height. Poppy had kicked off her blanket—she slept with her arms crossed over her chest, like a knight on a tomb.
He would have gone back to sleep, but he was dying for a piss. He got up and jogged to the top of the dune and down the other side. It didn’t seem quite far enough for hygienic purposes, so he went one farther, and at that point he figured he might as well get as far as the field and pee there.
It was undeniably a vulnerable feeling, as he let fly into the tall grass, but the morning was as still as a painting, and they hadn’t been completely stupid about it. Anybody who knew the proper reveal spells—meaning almost no one—would have seen a gossamer-thin line of magical force, pale blue in color, looped along the edge of the forest like a trip wire. They’d set it up the day before. It wouldn’t hurt anybody who walked into it, not permanently, but the magicians would know they were there, and they wouldn’t be walking anymore. They’d be lucky if they were conscious. They’d already cau
ght a wild pig that way.
Even the insects were hushed. Quentin sneezed—he was mildly allergic to some local plant—and wiped his eyes. On the far side of the meadow something slipped into the forest. It went just as his eye began to track it—it must have been standing there, stock-still, watching him while he pissed. He got an impression of something large, the size of a big boar maybe.
Quentin fastened his trousers—zippers were foreign to Fillory, and so far impossible to reverse-engineer, you just couldn’t explain them to the dwarves—and walked across the meadow to where the animal had been. Standing just on the near side of the blue line, he peered in among the trees. They were thick enough that it was still full night in the forest. Still, he caught the faintest shadow of a pair of heavy animal haunches receding into it.
Is this it? Is it starting? Carefully, like he was stepping over an electric fence, he put one leg over the invisible blue line, then the other, and walked into the forest. He was pretty sure he knew Who he was chasing even before He was fully in view.
“Hey, Ember,” he called. “Ember! Wait up!”
The god looked at him impassively over His shoulder, then continued to trot.
“Oh, come on.”
The ram-god had not been seen in Fillory since the Brakebills took the thrones, or not as far as Quentin knew. He looked fully recovered from the beating He’d taken from Martin Chatwin. Even His hind leg, which had been crippled the last time Quentin saw Him, was restored and could take His weight without a limp.
Quentin had complicated feelings about Ember. He wasn’t like Ember was in the books. Quentin was still angry that He hadn’t been able to save them—to save Alice—in the fight against Martin. He supposed it wasn’t Ember’s fault, but still. What kind of a god wasn’t at the top of the food chain in His own world?
The big woolly kind with horns, apparently. Quentin didn’t have any particular beef with Ember, he just didn’t want to bow down to Him the way He always seemed to expect people to do. If Ember was so great He should have saved Alice, and if He wasn’t that great, Quentin wasn’t bowing. QED.
Still, if Ember was here, it meant they were on the right track. Things were going to get very real soon, or at least very Fillorian. He just didn’t know which Fillory it was going to be—the beautiful, magical Fillory or the dark, frightening one. Either way this would be a good moment for a shipment of divine wisdom to arrive. Guidance from on high. A pillar of fire, a tree of smoke.
Ember led Quentin uphill, into the interior of the island. Quentin was starting to get winded. After five minutes Ember finally slowed down enough to let him catch up. By that time they were halfway up a hill, and the sun had at last pushed a hot-pink sliver of itself up over the horizon. They were high enough that Quentin could look out across the forest canopy.
“Thanks,” Quentin said, taking big heaving breaths. “Jesus.” He leaned on Ember’s flank for a second before wondering if maybe that was too familiar, mortal to god. “Hi, Ember. How’s it going?”
“Hello, my child.”
That resonant bass voice instantly sent Quentin right back to the cavern under Ember’s Tomb. He hadn’t heard it since then, and his guts clenched. That was not a place he wanted to go back to.
He would keep the tone light.
“Fancy meeting You here.”
“We do not meet by chance. Nothing happens by chance.”
That was Ember for you. No small talk. The ram began to climb again. Quentin wondered if He knew that behind His back Quentin and the others called him Ram-bo. And, less kindly, Member.
“No, I guess not,” Quentin said, though he wasn’t actually sure that he agreed. “So. How did You get all the way out here?”
“Fillory is my realm, child. I am everywhere, and therefore anywhere.”
“I see that. But couldn’t You have just magicked us here, instead of making us sail all this way?”
“I could have. I did not.”
Forget it. Quentin could look back now and see the Muntjac at anchor, neat and perfect. You could have put it in a bottle. He could even see the camp on the beach, the bonfires and blankets. But there was no time to admire the view, the ram was taking the rocky slopes of the hill at speed. Which was fine for Him, He was built for it. He was a ram. Quentin panted and eyed the fluffy pale gold wool on His broad back and wondered if Ember would let him ride on Him. Probably not.
“You know,” Quentin went on, “while I’ve got You, I’ve been wondering. About these Seven Keys. If You’re basically omnipresent, and probably omniscient too, why don’t You go around and just collect the keys Yourself? If they’re so important to the realm? I mean, You could probably do it in half an hour, tops.”
“There is Deeper Magic at work here, my child. Even the gods must bow to it. That is the way.”
“Oh, right. The Deeper Magic. I forgot about that.”
The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn’t feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole.
“I do not think you understand, my child. There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”
Quentin stopped, blowing, hands on hips. The horizon to the east was a solid band of orange now. The stars were going out.
“What’s that? What does he become?”
“A hero, Quentin.”
The ram kept going, and he followed.
“Fillory has need of gods, and kings, and queens, and those it has. But it has need of a hero too. And it has need of the Seven Keys.”
“Fillory doesn’t ask for much, does it?”
“Fillory asks for everything.”
With a lumbering lunge, awkward but powerful, Ember surged ahead and surmounted a rocky dome that turned out to be the top of the hill. From there He turned His head and looked down at Quentin with His strange, peanut-shaped eyes. Supposedly sheep evolved that way so they could see wolves coming out of the corners of their eyes. Better peripheral vision. But the effect was disconcerting.
“That’s a big ask.”
“Fillory asks for what it needs. Do you, Quentin? What do you need? What do you ask for?”
The question stopped him. He was used to scolding and pseudo-Socratic interrogation from Ember, but here was a rare gem: a good question. What did he want? He’d wanted to get back to Fillory, and he’d done that. He thought he’d wanted to go back to Castle Whitespire, but now he wasn’t so sure. The terror of almost losing Fillory had been extreme, but he’d found his way back. Now he wanted to find the keys. He wanted to finish the quest. He wanted his life to be exciting and important and to mean something. And he wanted to make Julia better. He felt like he would do anything to help Julia, if he only knew what to do.
“I guess it’s like what You said,” Quentin said. “I want to be a hero.”
Ember turned away again and faced the rising sun.
“Then you will have your chance,” He said.
Quentin scrambled up onto the rocky summit and watched the dawn alongside Him. He was going to ask Ember about it, about the sun, and what it was, and what happened out there at the rim of the world, or whether Fillory even had a rim. But when he turned to ask Him he was alone on top of the hill. Ember was gone.
Just when things were getting interesting. He turned slowly, in a full circle, but there was no sign of Him. Vanished without a trace. Oh, well. Now that He was gone Quentin almost missed Him. There was something special about being in the divine presence, even when the divinity was Ember.
He stretched, standing at the top of the island, and then jumped carefully down from the rocks and began trotting back down the hill to the beach. He couldn’t wait to tell the others what had happened, though the whole thing already felt like a dream, an early morning, half-awake dream tangled up with sheets and pillows and dawn light through closed curtains, the kind you only remembered by chance hours later, for a few seconds, when you were going to sleep again at
the end of the day. He wondered if anyone else was up yet. Maybe he could still go back to bed.
He should have noticed that something had changed, but he’d been distracted on the way up. He’d been practically running, and plus he’d been talking to a god. And he’d never been an especially assiduous observer of flora and fauna. He wouldn’t have noticed a spectacular beech tree or an unusual elm because he didn’t know what the difference between them was, if any.
Still, after a few minutes he began to wonder if he was coming down a different way than he’d come up, because it all seemed a little rockier than he remembered—the ratio of rocks to plants and dirt to grass wasn’t quite what it had been. He didn’t let it worry him too much, because if it worried him too much he would have to climb back up the hill and find a new way down, and that was the kind of thing he wanted to avoid. And besides, he was keeping the rising sun on his right hand, and that’s how navigation works, right? If things really went wrong he could go all the way down to the beach and cut along the coast. No way he could miss the camp that way. He still had hopes of getting back to the beach in time for breakfast.
One thing he couldn’t ignore, though, although he tried to for as long as he could, was that the shadows of things weren’t getting shorter anymore, in the usual manner of shadows cast by a rising sun. They were getting longer. Which would have meant that the orange-red stew boiling at the edge of the sky was somehow no longer a sunrise, but a sunset instead.
And it would mean he was on the wrong side of the island. But that was impossible. The strangest thing was that he didn’t even realize that somebody had hit him with a sword till after it had happened.
All he knew at first was that suddenly he’d lost his balance, and his left arm was numb.
“Shit!” he said.
He staggered and caught himself with his good right hand on the cold turf. There was a man behind him, a large young man with a round pale face and a goatee. The two of them were stuck together somehow. They were connected by a short broad-bladed sword that was stuck in Quentin’s collarbone, and the man was trying to wrench it out.