CHAPTER 11
Man,” Josh said. “I cannot believe the world is ending.”
“Stop saying that,” Janet said.
“Order,” Eliot said, not for the first time, “in the court.”
Poppy said nothing. She was thinking, her mouth twisted to one side. They were in the high square room in Castle Whitespire where the kings and queens met every day at five o’clock. The flaming ruins of a five-alarm sunset smoldered in the window behind her, which was currently pointing west.
“It can’t really all be going to end,” she said finally.
“And yet.” That was Janet.
“I feel like I just got here. I did just get here! Do we have any other evidence that it’s ending? I mean besides Ember’s say-so?”
“Sweetie, He is the god of us,” Josh said. “He probably knows.”
“He’s not infallible.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if He were infallible,” Janet put in, “He wouldn’t be such a twat all the time.”
Janet never shrank from taking both sides of an argument at once.
“You know,” Josh said, “I bet it’s because of sacrilege like that that the world is ending. Your earthy, irreverent sense of humor has doomed us all.”
“Poppy does have a point,” Eliot said. “Don’t forget that the first time we met Ember He was a prisoner. Martin Chatwin had Him locked away in Ember’s Tomb.”
“So He’s not omnipotent,” Josh said, clinging to his point. “He might still be infallible.”
“Either way, He never tells us everything He knows.” Eliot adjusted his crown, which had gotten crooked. “Not till it’s too late. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s going on now. All Ember is saying so far is that if it continues on its present course, the world is going to end. That doesn’t mean Fillory can’t be saved. Necessarily.”
He waited for somebody to jump in. Nobody did.
“What I’m suggesting is that maybe we, its kings and queens, could save it.”
“Sure,” Janet said. “We could put on a show! We could use the old barn!”
“I’m making a serious point.”
“Yes, and I am mocking your serious point to show how ludicrous it is.”
“Look, Ember is a god,” Eliot said, “but He’s a god only of Fillory. He’s limited. He doesn’t know everything there is to know about the wider universe. I think we should poke around some ourselves, see if He’s missed something. See how far our royal power can stretch. See if we can get an advance look at this so-called apocalypse. Maybe we can head it off at the pass.”
This was met with more silence, while everybody tried to think of a reason why what Eliot was proposing might be plausible or achievable.
“Yeah, no, of course,” Josh said. “I mean, we’re gonna go down fighting, right?”
“Right!” Loyal Poppy gave a swift nod of her sharp chin.
“So—what?” Janet said. “We just head back out into the wilderness? Looking for adventure? In whatever comes our way?”
“That’s right,” Eliot said. “That’s what we do.”
She weighed this suggestion.
“OK. But I’m coming this time. Last time I got stuck babysitting the country and you guys were gone for like a year and a half. When do we leave?”
“ASAP.”
“And what if we can’t?” Poppy said. “What if we can’t head it off?”
Janet shrugged.
“I guess we go back home. I mean, to our other home. Our former home.”
“That’s what the Neitherlands is for,” Josh said.
“Guys, listen.”
Eliot leaned forward. He put on his High King face and his High King voice. At times like this he wanted to look as much as possible like Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, from The Lord of the Rings, and he didn’t think he was a million miles off base. He made eye contact with each one of them in turn.
“I know I don’t speak for all of you. Not in this. But if Ember is right, if Fillory really is ending, I’m going to stay and see it end. This land is where I became who I am, who I was meant to be. Who I am is who I am in Fillory, and if Fillory dies, then I’ll die with it.” He studied his kingly fingernails. “I think I made that choice a long time ago. I don’t expect you to make it with me, but I want you to know, there isn’t any going back. Not for me.”
The crescent moon was already visible, early today, opposite the sunset, hooking a pale horn over the rim of the world. Eliot could picture it, the rim of the world, now that he’d been there, with its endless brick wall and its narrow gray strip of beach and its single door to the Far Side. The tower was high enough that sometimes you could kid yourself that you could really see it, on a clear day, which this was.
Josh cocked his head and screwed up his face and studied Eliot with one eye. He pointed at him, hesitantly.
“Fuck you.”
Eliot cracked his crooked grin. Everybody relaxed.
“Look, it sucks,” he said. “I hate it. But we’ll take it as far as we can, then we’ll walk away. We’ll go back to Earth, have a decent drink for a change. We’ll see what Quentin’s up to.”
“Oh, God,” Janet said. “I think death might be preferable.”
Everybody laughed except for Poppy, who was still thinking.
“I just wish—”
She broke off and gave a shaky sigh, to try to calm herself down. It mostly worked. Josh took her hand under the table.
“What is it, sweetie?”
“It’s just that if it all ends then the baby will never see Fillory! I know it’s silly, but I wanted the baby to be born here. I wanted him to see all this. Or her. I wanted us to have a little prince or princess!”
“They’ll still be one, baby,” Josh said. “Whatever happens. We’ll be royalty in exile. It still counts.”
“No,” Janet said. “It doesn’t.”
—
In the end it was only Janet and Eliot who went, for the simple reason that Josh couldn’t really ride a horse yet, not even a talking one who could coach him, and anyway Poppy was feeling sick, and Josh didn’t want to leave her.
So it was just the two of them. It felt very different from when they’d set out to fight the Lorians, or even from when they’d gone hunting in the old days. It was quieter. More somber. They rode out shortly after dawn through a small stone arch in the rear of the castle that let out on a narrow trail, hardly more than a goat track, that ran along the tops of the cliffs overlooking the bay. No fanfare, no confetti, no loyal retainers. They went alone.
“Which way?” Janet said.
Eliot pointed north. No particular reason, it was just good to be decisive in these situations.
The grass was still wet. The new pink sun hovered low above Whitespire Bay. Eliot felt very small and Fillory felt, for a change, very big and very wild around him. It was a while since it had felt like that. This was a serious quest, maybe the last one. What happened now truly mattered. Eliot had struggled before he found Fillory, he knew that: he drank too much, he found clever ways to be nasty to people, he never seemed to have an emotion that wasn’t either ironic or chemically generated. He’d changed in Fillory, and the thought of going back to that, of becoming that person again, frightened him. He wouldn’t die with Fillory, he’d meant that when he said it, but if Fillory died Eliot knew that something in him, something small but essential, wouldn’t survive either.
He wouldn’t miss this interminable summer though. It had a certain fiery majesty to it, and he appreciated that, but at this point he was dying for the heat to break. A hot early morning wind surged through the trees, thick and strong like a flowing river, combing through the leaves, which were green but yellowing in the drought. The trees must know what was coming, he thought. If Julia were here she could have asked them.
Whitespire—the town as opposed to the castle or the bay—was of modest size, and it didn’t take them long to reach the outskirts. It was surrounded by a wall of irregular height and composition, a patchwork of building materials, brick and stone and mortar and timber and rammed earth, that had been demolished and rebuilt and then buttressed to keep the whole business from falling over as the town expanded and contracted over the centuries. Beyond the wall were fields full of people shoulder-deep in golden grain with huge baskets on their backs, like in a Brueghel painting. They fell silent as Eliot and Janet passed; most of them took a knee as well and bowed their heads. Eliot and Janet nodded—he’d long ago figured out that it was better to accept the fealty; modesty and self-deprecation were just confusing in a king. A half hour later they were through the fields and addressing themselves to the Queenswood north of the city.
They pulled up just short of it. There was no underbrush at the edge; the border with the fields around it was clean and clear. It wasn’t a natural wood. Eliot had a formal feeling, as if they were presenting themselves at a ball. Good evening, my old friend. Shall we dance once more?
“After you,” Janet said.
“Oh, fuck off.”
If you rode with a queen, the queen must enter the Queenswood first. That was the rule. The trees—huge, crotchy, black-barked oaks covered with gnarls and knots that always seemed to be about to form a face but never quite did—slid smoothly apart like stage scenery.
Janet urged her horse forward.
“Any idea where we’re going?”
“We discussed this. That’s not how quests work. We’re not going to think about it, we’re just going to journey.”
“I can’t not think about it.”
“Well, don’t overthink it.”
“I can’t help it!” Janet said. “Whatever, you can do the not-thinking for both of us.”
They left the bright morning behind for the permanent twilight of the deep forest. The clop-clopping of the horses’ hooves became a deeper tom-tom thump-clumping as the way went from cobblestones to ancient packed loam.
“What if nothing happens?” Janet said.
“Nothing is going to happen. At least at first. We have to be patient. That’s part of the quest.”
“Well, just so you know, I’m doing this for a week,” Janet said. “That’s it. Seven days.”
“I know what a week is.”
“The way I think of this,” she went on, “is it’s like we’re taking Fillory’s pulse. This is a diagnostic quest. We’re saying, Are you still functioning, you wondrous magic land you? Are you going to give us an adventure, and is this adventure going to be your way of telling us what’s wrong with you and how to fix you? If so, great. But if by a week we haven’t gotten into shit, I’m calling it. Time of death. Fillory’s flatlining.”
“A week is not a lot of time,” Eliot pointed out, “in which to decide the fate of an entire world.”
“Eliot, I love you like the brother I never had or wanted,” Janet said, “but actually a week is a really long time. After a week you and I are going to be really really sick of each other.”
Their path wound and wended and looped through the Queenswood, drawn apparently on the spur of the moment by the arboreal hivemind. One could try to steer one’s way through it, but this time they set the autopilot and let it ride and took what came. It was eerily quiet: the trees of the Queenswood tended to pick off fauna they didn’t care for—falling branches, strangling roots—which left only some deer and a few decorative birds. The forest floor was furred with vast herds of ferns and striped with light that slipped in through chance gaps in the canopy overhead. There were no fallen trunks. The Queenswood buried its dead.
The trees parted and parted before them—it was vaguely erotic, Eliot thought, like endless pairs of legs spreading, ushering them on and on into more and more intimate spaces. They burrowed deeper and deeper in. Occasionally the path forked and he picked one fork or the other, for no reason but always without hesitating.
Like a magician producing a dove from a hidden pocket, the wood abruptly brought them to the circular meadow with the giant clock-tree inside it, the one where they’d found the Seeing Hare, and where Jollyby had died. The tree had a deep sunken scar where its clock had been, a blinded cyclops, but at least it wasn’t thrashing anymore. It was at peace. The sapling Eliot had extracted the watch from, to give to Quentin had died. He was sorry about that, but not so sorry that he wished he hadn’t done it. It was worth it to know that wherever he was Quentin at least had that with him.
They decided to spend the night there. If history was any guide, it was a good place to await something fantastical and portentous. Janet swung down out of the saddle.
“I’ll get us dinner.”
“They packed us dinner at the castle,” Eliot said.
“I ate it for lunch.”
In businesslike fashion, Janet pulled a short staff from a pair she wore crossed on her back and trotted off into the trees. Eliot had never seen her wield a staff before, but she held it as if she knew what to do with it.
“Hm,” he said.
It was a spooky place to be alone in, especially without his queen. The grass was dotted with wildflowers; he’d always meant to name some of the Fillorian flowers, but he’d never gotten around to it, and now he probably never would. It was too late. He heard a rustling, cracking sound from all sides which alarmed him until he realized that the trees along the edge of the meadow were helpfully dropping dead branches for firewood. They must have accepted his presence, he thought. It was strangely touching.
From one saddlebag Eliot extracted their tent, a neat canvas parcel, and tossed it on the soft grass. It unfolded and erected itself in the deepening twilight, with a sound like a sail being hoisted in a high wind.
—