“Honey! I’m home!”
He threw open the tent flap.
“Keep saying that.” Janet didn’t look up. “One day it might grow up to be funny.”
Janet was bent over a big trestle table covered with the enormous maps of Fillorian terrain that they’d used to keep track of their brief but glorious anti-Lorian campaign. They were littered with miniature figurines—Eliot had had them made up specially to represent both sides of the action. Not strictly necessary, since there were only two armies, and only one front—it wasn’t exactly Axis and Allies here—but they’d had a lot of fun pushing them around the maps with long-handled wooden paddles.
The tent was full of pink light, strained through its red silk walls. Eliot dropped into an armchair. It was hot in the tent, even at this altitude: Fillorian seasons were irregular and unpredictable, and they’d been on a streak of summer months for he didn’t know how long now. It had been rather splendid at first, but it was getting to be a bit much.
“Did you take care of our daddy issues?”
“I did,” Eliot said.
“My hero.” She came around the table and kissed him on the cheek. “Did you kill him?”
“I did not kill him. Knocked his ass out though.”
“I would have killed him.”
“Well, next time you can go.”
“I will.”
“But there won’t be a next time.”
“Sad face.” Janet sat down in the other armchair. “In anticipation of your inevitable victory I summoned a couple of pegasi to take us back to Whitespire. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Want to see my war wound?”
“Show.”
Eliot swiveled around as far as he could without getting up, far enough that she could see the divot Vile Father had gouged out of his deltoid or trapezius or whatever that muscle was.
“Nice,” she said. “It’s ruining the upholstery on that chair.”
“That’s it? ‘It’s ruining the upholstery’?”
“I would ask if you wanted a medal but I already know you want a medal.”
“And I shall have one.” Eliot closed his eyes, suddenly weary even though it was only 9:30 in the morning. The rush was gone, and he was shaking a little. He kept having flashbacks to Vile Father pressed up in his grill, crushing his ribcage. “I’ll give it to myself. Maybe I’ll start an order, the Order of the Broken Spear. It will be for people who are exceptionally valiant. Like me.”
“Congratulations. Are you OK to fly?”
“Yes. I’m OK to fly.”
He and Janet talked like this all the time. The Fillorians didn’t really get it, they thought High King Eliot and Queen Janet hated each other, but the truth was that in Quentin’s absence Janet had become his principal confidante. Eliot supposed it was partly because they both found real romantic intimacy elusive and kind of uninteresting, so usually neither of them had a serious boyfriend, and they had to turn to each other for intelligent companionship. Eliot used to worry that his lack of a long-term life partner meant that he was psychologically unhealthy—emotionally arrested, maybe, or commitment-phobic, or something. But he worried about that less and less. He didn’t feel arrested, or phobic. He just felt like being single.
Not like Josh and Poppy. Six weeks after they took the thrones they were a couple, and after six months they were engaged. No one saw it coming, but now looking back it was hard to remember that they’d ever been apart. Eliot wondered if it was the crowns themselves—if there was some kind of ancient magic at work, that caused any royals who weren’t actually related to couple up and produce heirs to the thrones. Having exhausted itself trying and failing to shove Eliot and Janet together, the spell had turned its attention to Josh and Poppy and had more luck.
Maybe it was true. But Josh and Poppy really did seem to love each other. Eliot thought it spoke well of Poppy that she saw the point of Josh, which not everybody could. He wasn’t handsome, and although he was as clever as any of them he didn’t walk around making sure everybody knew it all the time. No, the point of Josh was that he had a big and noble heart. It had taken Eliot literally years to figure that out. Poppy was a quicker study.
Now the two of them were thoroughly nested, and a week ago they’d told him that Poppy was pregnant. It wasn’t public yet, but she was starting to show. The people would love it. There hadn’t been a prince or princess of Fillory in centuries. It made Eliot feel a little alone, and a little empty, but only a little. Life was long. Plenty of time for that stuff, if he ever found himself wanting it. He was High King in a Great Age. His business right now was logging some Great Deeds.
He heard the thump of hooves on the grass, and a stiff wingtip brushed the coarse silk wall by his head. The pegasi were here. He opened his eyes and heaved himself up; he was pretty sure the wound had stopped bleeding, though he could feel where his shirt was stuck to it. Quentin had been shot with an arrow there once. They’d fix him up back at Whitespire. He would have them leave a nice scar. Without waiting for Janet he put on his king-face and strolled outside.
The pegasi were trotting around on the cold grass, circling each other restlessly, their tremendous white eagle-wings still half extended. They hated to keep still, pegasi. Marvelous beasts they were, pure white and light as air, though they looked as solid as any regular horse, with thick muscles and squiggly blue veins standing out beneath the skin like power cords under a rug. Their silver—platinum? shiny anyway—hooves flashed in the morning sun.
They stopped pacing and stared at him expectantly. They could speak, but they hardly ever deigned to, not to humans, not even to the High King.
“Janet!” he called.
“Coming!”
“Just leave your stuff. They’ll pack it for you.”
“True.”
She exited the tent a moment later, empty-handed; she’d changed into jodhpurs.
“You know, I had a thought,” she said. “With the army all mobilized like this, why don’t we take advantage of the momentum? Keep on pushing them back and take Loria?”
“Take Loria.”
“Right. Then we bring the whole army to the Neitherlands and march it through the fountain and take Earth! Right? It would be so easy!”
“Sometimes,” Eliot said, “I find it so hard to know when you’re joking.”
“I have the same problem.”
The pegasi seemed even more reluctant than usual to remain earthbound. They barely stayed still long enough for Eliot and Janet to mount.
Pegasi wouldn’t wear saddles, so you just hung on to their manes or necks or feathers or whatever you could get ahold of. Eliot felt thick muscles playing under skin as the beast pumped its way up into the air. They spiraled higher and higher, and his ears popped, and the camp shrank below them. He saw the pass where he’d fought Vile Father, the Fillorian host still formed up into crisp lines, the Lorians straggling away back home. When they were maybe a thousand feet up the pegasi leveled off and turned southeast for Whitespire.
Eliot loved Fillory at all times, but never more so than when he saw it from the air, when the land rolled out beneath you like a map in a beloved book that you’d spent your whole childhood gazing at, studying, wishing you could fall into it, feeling like you could. And Eliot had fallen.
From here he could see the old stone walls that crisscrossed Fillory, built by hands unknown, for no known reason. It made the green landscape look quilted. In some places the walls had been broken and scattered by weather or animals or people who needed the stones for more immediate and practical purposes. Dark green hedges followed the main roads for miles, neat double lines from here, but as thick and daunting as Norman hedgerows when you got up close to them. He made a couple of mental notes of where they were getting a bit unruly. He would notify the Master of Hedge.
They charged on and up into white cloud, and Fillory vanished. Clouds in Fillory weren’t clammy and disappointing the way they were in the real world, they brushed past you all warm and soft and cottony, just solid enough to be comforting. Fuck love, fuck marriage, fuck children, fuck fucking itself: this was his romance, this fantasy land at whose helm he sat, steering it on and on into the future, world without end, until he died and tastefully idealized statues were made of him. It was all he needed. It was all he would ever need.
When they emerged from the clouds they were over the Great Northern Marsh. Bad shit down there, he knew. In fact there—the water was disturbed over a wide area as the mottled back of some vast living mass sank from view, into the black bogs. Maybe one day, if he ever got that bored, he would lead an expedition in there and see what was what.
Then again maybe he wouldn’t. He stared down into the marsh for a long time, lost in thought, and when he looked up he found that they were no longer two, but three. Ember had joined them, in between him and Janet, flying in formation.
It had been some time since he’d had an audience with the god.
“High King,” the ram said. “I would have words with you.”
Ember’s deep bass voice was clearly audible even over the rushing of the wind. He had no wings, and He didn’t even bother to gallop, though occasionally the air ruffled His tight woolly curls. He just flew along in between them, stiff ram’s legs tucked up under Him like He was sitting on an invisible flying carpet.
“Hi!” Eliot called out. “I’m listening!”
“You have won a great victory for Fillory today.”
“I know! Thanks!”
Maybe this was the time to bring up Quentin. But Ember went on.
“But this was only one battle. A war is beginning, Eliot, a war we cannot win. The last war.”
“What? Wait, I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
This wasn’t the speech Eliot was expecting. He was expecting the one where Ember praised him to the skies, showered him with fatherly approval, granted him a boon.
“What war are You watching?” Janet shouted. “We crushed those guys! Eliot crushed them! It’s over!”
“Have you not wondered how it is that the Lorians could have crossed the Northern Barrier into Fillory?”
“Well, yeah,” Eliot admitted. “A little.”
“The old spells have weakened. This invasion was merely a portent, foretold long ago. The war we are losing is with time.”
“Oh,” Eliot said. “OK.”
Was it? A war with time. He vaguely remembered something like this in the books, but it had been a long time since he read them. And even then he hadn’t read them too closely. Once again he wished Quentin were here.
“The end is almost here, Eliot,” Ember said.
“The end of what?”
“Of everything,” Ember said. “Of this land. This world. Fillory is dying.”
“What? Oh, come on!” That was ridiculous. A cheap shot, at best. Fillory wasn’t dying. Fillory was kicking ass right now. Time of legends! World without end! “What are you talking about?”
Ember didn’t reply. Instead the pegasus spoke for the first time. Eliot had never heard one speak before.
“Oh no,” it said. It gave a horsey sigh. “Not again.”