In the morning a fine mist hung over the meadow, as if a heavy cannonade had just moments ago ceased firing, leaving behind puffs of silent white gunsmoke in the air.
They rode all day without incident—that’s two down, five to go, Janet said—and by sunset they’d reached the end of the green splendor of the Queenswood and entered the adjacent maze of gray firs called the Wormwood. On the third day they forded the Burnt River, never a pleasant experience, though rarely actually dangerous. Its black water was always choked with ashes, nobody knew why, and the nymph who lived in it was the glossy black of a beetle—a terrifying creature with silvery eyes who went up and down the river at night screaming.
Eliot proposed trying to talk to her, but Janet shuddered.
“That’s a last resort,” she said. “That’s like day six.”
“Whatever. It’s not the end of the world.”
“FYI, you only get to make that joke one time, so I hope you enjoyed it.”
Eliot would have preferred to head west from there, toward the lakes called Umber’s Tears, or maybe to Barion, a mellow walled hill-town where they made an incredible clear liquor out of some native grain. Eliot maintained a comfy royal townhouse there that he hardly ever got to visit. But Janet wanted to ride north.
“That would be fine,” Eliot said, “except that there’s this horrible thing called the Northern Marsh. It’s north of here, hence the name.”
“That’s why I want to go north. I want to go there. I’m feeling the marsh.”
“I’m not. I hate that place.”
“Wow, I thought you were supposed to be all Johnny Quest over here. Fine, I’ll meet you in Barion.”
“But I don’t want to go to Barion alone!” Eliot said.
“Your whininess is beyond unattractive. Come with me to the marsh and then we’ll both go to Barion.”
“What if I die in the Northern Marsh? People do, you know.”
“Then I’ll go to Barion alone. I like traveling alone. If you die can I have your townhouse?”
Eliot said nothing. Privately, and very much in spite of himself, Eliot understood that Janet was having a hunch about the marsh, and you couldn’t ignore those. Not in the context of a quest.
“Fine,” he said. “I was just testing your resolve. Gloriously, you have passed. To the marsh we go.”
The Northern Marsh wasn’t actually as far north as all that. By late afternoon the ground had begun to get squishy, and they made camp on its outskirts that same night. The next day dawned gray and brisk, and they picked their way through cattails and coarse grass and chilly puddles until the horses refused to go any farther. Janet’s was a Talking Horse, and he politely explained that he was speaking for both him and his dumb companion when he said that this was not a place you wanted to cross on hooves, not when your legs break as easily as horses’ legs do. Eliot accepted their resignation graciously. The two of them went on on foot.
The air was full of the smell of warm mud and rotting things. They circled around big weedy expanses of standing water and occasionally waded through them when they had to. The Great Northern Marsh was a lonely, quiet place. You would have thought it would be full of frogs and insects and waterfowl, but nothing seemed to live there. Just a lot of plants and smelly microbes.
As they forced their way deeper in, the ground became mud flats and water punctuated by occasional stubborn hummocky tufts of grass. Their boots were getting hopelessly befouled, and Eliot felt the ratio of solid ground to water shifting slowly and inexorably in the water’s favor. The way was bordering on impassable when they found a narrow boardwalk which Janet had been looking for without telling him. It was just two thin weather-beaten gray planks laid flat over the sucking puddles, and in places elevated a few feet off the ground by stilts and pilings and opportunistic tree stumps.
Eliot took a minute to scrape his boots off, though he was pretty sure they weren’t salvageable, then they set off again. There were no railings, and they had to balance their way along like a damn circus act. He tried to remember whether quicksand was a real thing or an urban myth.
“I wonder where all the birds are,” he said, to take his mind off it. “I’ve seen, like, two birds. This place should be covered in them.”
“Makes you wish Julia were still here,” Janet said. “She was good with birds.”
“Mm. Do you? Wish she were here?”
“Of course. I always liked Julia.”
“You didn’t show it very often,” Eliot said.
“If you really got Julia,” Janet said, “you would have understood that she didn’t like people who were too demonstrative with their affections.”
This caused Eliot to retroactively evaluate a lot of the interactions he remembered between Janet and Julia. Their footsteps sounded hollow on the boards in the marshy hush.
“Incredible that this thing is still standing,” Janet went on. “I can’t imagine who keeps it up.”
“How do you even know this place?”
“I was out here once, when you-all were away at sea. I thought somebody should survey it. It looked weird and interesting. I ran into some scary shit and backed off, but not before I met some weird and interesting people.”
Eliot wondered, not for the first time, what exactly Janet had gotten up to while the rest of them were off sailing the ocean blue. He’d gotten the official version of course, which was that she’d been running the country and doing an excellent job of it. But every once in a while Janet said things that made him wonder if that was the whole story.
“Do you ever wish you went with her? Julia, I mean? To that other-side deal, whatever it was called?”
“I think about it sometimes,” Eliot said. “But no. There’s no way I could have gone. Being king here is who I am. I wasn’t joking about that part, before.” He wobbled for a moment on a rocky board. “I wish I knew what it was like though.”
“Probably it’s not as marshy. You know the funny part?”
“Tell me.”
“I know how Poppy feels,” Janet said. “About the baby. I want that little guy to see Fillory too. I want it to rule when we’re gone.”
Eliot wasn’t sure if a person born in Fillory could rule Fillory, but he was more focused at this exact moment on his own possible imminent death at the hands or other extremities of this horrible swamp and whatever lived in it. He supposed that if he sank to the bottom of it his corpse might be perfectly preserved, for later generations, like those bodies that got pulled out of Irish bogs. That would have a certain grandeur to it.
But probably he’d be eaten before that happened. And after that the world would end anyway. So.
“That’s what happens to the birds, by the way.”
Janet pointed. She was having no trouble keeping her balance; she didn’t even look at her feet as she walked. In the distance something pale translucent pink floated, drifting, thirty feet above the cattails. It looked just like a jellyfish, with long floral tentacles dangling down.
It was an unspeakably sinister sight: an alien aerial parasite. A dying sparrow fluttered in one of the tendrils, stuck to it like a fly stuck to flypaper.
“Wow,” he said.
“Don’t touch one, the venom’s really bad. Stops your heart.”
“I wasn’t going to. How do they fly? Helium or hydrogen or hot air or something?”
“Nah. Just magic.”
They must have been getting close to the center of the swamp because the ponds were getting wider and deeper and darker and more still, and they were connecting up with each other, to the point where the swamp was on the point of just being a regular lake. A steamy mist was gathering around them. Here and there a lotus flower poked up above the surface, a rosy-white bulb the size of a softball on a thick green stem. Strange that something so pure and lovely could grow out of all that muck: one clean perfect thing distilled out of the filth.
Eliot had a hard time not thinking about the vast shape he’d seen last time he’d flown over the Northern Marsh. He hoped it stuck to deeper water.
Though that appeared to be where they were headed. The boardwalk rose high up above the marsh now on long spindly pilings, more like a narrow jetty, and it was taking them straight out over the lake. The banks vanished into the fog. Eliot felt disoriented, abandoned by the gods. If this adventure were working the way it should have been they would have learned something by now, he thought. Seen something, felt something. Instead they were nowhere, with nothing ahead of them and nothing behind them, suspended in midair, on dead wood, over a black mirror of dead water.
“How far are we—”
“This far.”
The boardwalk ended abruptly. If Janet hadn’t put her hand on his shoulder he might have walked straight off it. There was a rickety ladder leading down, in case he was overcome by the urge to do some recreational bathing.
“Got a question for an old friend,” Janet said. “Hey!”
She shouted it out over the water.
“Hey!”
There was no echo. She looked around.
“Should have brought a rock to throw. Hey!”
They waited. Something jumped in the stillness, a frog or a fish, but Eliot turned his head too slowly to catch it. When he turned back the water wasn’t still anymore.
The first sign of it was a broad, smooth bow-wave that rushed silently toward them, wetting the stilts halfway up. Eliot instinctively stood on tiptoe as it passed. Then a massive, ridged, warty olive shell broke the surface, fifty feet across, like a submarine breaching. It was a turtle, a snapping turtle by its beak, which was hooked like a falcon’s. Christ. The thing was a leviathan.
No wonder nothing lived here. The jellyfish ate the birds out of the air, and this thing must scour the water of anything with more than two cells to rub together. Huge bubbles of methane were surfacing around it, released from the mud it must have been buried in. The smell was indescribable. Or actually no, it wasn’t indescribable. It smelled like shit.
“Who calls the Prince of the Mud?”
The snapping turtle spoke slowly. Its voice was raspy, an old chain smoker’s. Its head was blunt and blocky and a little bit comic, kind of like a talking thumb. Its piggy eyes were set deep in nests of horny skin, which made it look angry, which Eliot was going to assume it was until it proved otherwise.
“Oh,” it said. “You.”
“Yeah, me. Pooh, you smell.”
“The smell of life.”
“The smell of farts. Got a question for you.”
“What else do you have for me? I cannot eat questions. The hunting has been poor.”
Its huge face was all hide and beak. Its neck was as thick as its head.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Sometimes Eliot wondered if Janet were a little bit sociopathic. How else could she possibly sound bored and casual in this situation? Though Eliot knew she had feelings, she just kept them in different places from most people. “We’ve got a couple of horses. Answer my question and we’ll talk.”
Eliot kept his face blank. She had to be bluffing. No way was Janet giving this thing the horses.
“I’m High King Eliot,” he said.
“He owns this shithole,” Janet said.
“I am Prince—”
“Prince of the Mud,” she cut him off. “Which Eliot owns. We know. You’re a giant turtle.”
“Your kingdom may be wide, but it is spread thin. Mine runs deep.”
It turned its head slowly from side to side, studying them with first one matte-looking eye, then the other. A jellyfish drifted past, its tentacles limply brushing the turtle’s forehead, but the leviathan didn’t appear to notice.
“Ember says Fillory is dying,” Eliot said. “What do you think? Is it true?”
“Death. Life. A fish dies. A billion mites eat it and live. In the swamp there is no difference.”
“There is to the fish,” Janet said. “You’re a shitty philosopher, so don’t try. Is Fillory dying?”
If turtles had shoulders it would have shrugged.
“Yes then. Fillory is dying. Give me horses.”
“Wait, are you serious?” Janet was pissed now. She looked like she hadn’t believed it until this moment. “It’s really ending? Well, can we stop it?”
“You cannot.”
“We can’t,” Eliot said. “But maybe there’s somebody who could?”
“I cannot say. Ask the queen.”
“I’m the queen,” Janet said. “Or I’m a queen. I’m the main queen. I’m asking you.”
“Queen of the dwarves. In the Barrens. Enough. Give me horses or let me be.”
The turtle began to sink, slowly, withdrawing its head under the shelf of its shell, barely disturbing the black water till its chin rested on the surface.
“I don’t know any dwarf queens,” Janet said. “You know any dwarf queens, Eliot?”
“Heck no. Because there aren’t any female dwarfs. They don’t exist.”
“She doesn’t exist,” Janet said to the turtle. “Try again.”
“Listen closer.”
The snapping turtle snapped. Its head shot out to maximum extension—Eliot wouldn’t have believed anything that big could move that fast. It was like a Mack truck coming straight at them. As it bit it turned its head on one side, to take them both in one movement.
Eliot reacted fast. His reaction was to crouch down and cover his face with his arms. From the relative safety of this position he felt the day grow colder around them, and he heard a crackle, which at first he took for the pier splintering in the turtle’s jaws. But the end didn’t come.
“You dare?” Janet said.
Her voice was loud now—it made the boards vibrate sympathetically under his feet. He looked up at her. She’d gone airborne, floating two feet above the pier, and her clothes were rimed with frost. She radiated cold; mist sheeted off her skin as it would off dry ice. Her arms were spread wide, and she had an axe in each hand. They were those twin staves she wore on her back, each one now topped with an axe-head of clear ice.
The turtle was trapped in mid-lunge. She’d stopped it cold; the swamp was frozen solid around it. Janet had called down winter, and the water of the Northern Marsh was solid ice as far as he could see, cracked and buckled up in waves. The turtle was stuck fast in it. It struggled, its head banging back and forth impotently.
“Jesus,” Eliot said. He stood up out of his defensive crouch. “Nice one.”
“You dare?” Janet said again, all imperious power. “Marvel that you live, Prince of Shit.”
The turtle didn’t seem surprised, just mad.
“I’ll have you,” it hissed, and it surged and strained. The ice squeaked and groaned and started to split. Janet leaned into the casting, however she was doing it, and froze the swamp harder and tighter.
“I will freeze your eyes,” she said, “and shatter them! I will split your shell and pick out the meat!”
Jesus, where did she get this stuff? The turtle strained once more and then was still, like a great ship frozen in arctic pack ice. It stared at them furiously, its eyes burning with murder. Janet let herself float down to the wooden boards.
“Fuck you,” Janet said. “You know better. Next time I’ll kill you.”
She spat, and the gob froze in midair and slid across the ice. With that she turned and walked away. Eliot practically fell off the boardwalk getting out of her way. He didn’t want to touch those axes.
He felt like he should say something too, before he went, so he did.
“Dick.”
“Worm,” the turtle rasped back. Its breath smoked in the sudden cold. “You’ll see. It’s turtles all the way down.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’ve heard that before.”
He trotted off after Janet. She left frost footprints behind her.