“Winterwing!” it squawked back at her. She patted its neck again.
“Well flown, Winterwing. Well flown. Fillory is grateful to you this night. Take us higher now.”
No part of Fillory was untouched by the conflict. Here and there along the rivers and streams the nymphs had surfaced, the water around them reflecting the weird mingled light, though they only watched for now. Janet didn’t imagine they’d be drawn into a fight unless their interests were directly threatened. Some of the dryads took the same tack, standing by their trees, leaning against them or twirling their staves the way a cop would twirl a nightstick.
God! She’d totally forgotten about the forests. They were almost into it now. A grove of the forwardmost elms and birch from Corian’s Land (Corian: who he? Another thing she’d never know) had already jumped a big outriding oak from the Darkling Woods. The oak was a monster, and it had uprooted a couple of the lighter trees and was waving them over its head like a kraken, but it was being overrun. A few of its branches were cracked off already, and the leaves were flying. Trees were fucking mental in a fight, it turned out.
Janet looked up to see the moon tumbling overhead. It was still up there but way off course, spinning slowly end over end, aimless, lost in space. For some reason that was what did it. Janet threw her arms around the hippogriff’s neck. She sobbed into its soft feathers, and got snot on them too. Whatever, it probably had bird mites. This was it, she thought. This was my best thing. My best thing. I thought I would always have it, but I was wrong.
The hippogriff’s neck was stiff and proud against her face. It didn’t turn to look at her. Maybe it wasn’t very comfortable with displays of emotion. Well, tough. Since her nights in the desert Janet was all about being in touch with her emotions.
Janet heard and felt a deep boom, and she looked up mid-weep. Half the mountains in the Northern Barrier Range had just erupted, blown their tops off like ripe pimples. She hadn’t even known they were volcanic, but now they were lobbing big seminal gobbets of lava all over their lower slopes, like a drunk prom queen puking on her dress. Shit was getting geological, yo. Fillory was bleeding its hot arterial blood.
She made a visual survey of the coast. Broken Bay was overflowing its banks, drowning the lower reaches of the Chankly Bore in seawater; some of the hills were gone, you could just see the trees poking up out of the water. Farther out to sea she thought she saw a couple of sentient boats trying to ride out the tempest. To the south monstrous dunes from the deep desert were slamming into the headwall of the Copper Mountains and threatening to bury the lush southern plains in sand. No! Keep out! She wanted to stretch out her hands and push the desert back, stick her finger in the dike. Probably the Foremost’s gang were shivering down in their ice caves.
Fillory was under siege, and the boundaries were failing everywhere. The center cannot hold, and the edges are in pretty fucking dire shape too. A crack opened, zigging across two open fields, glowing hot and red, the grass crisping up at the lip. She wanted to throw her arms around Fillory, hug it and squash it back together. But she couldn’t. Nobody could.
Now something was harrying the Darkling Woods in the rear, and Janet focused in on . . . Jane Chatwin, come on down! The former Watcherwoman looked pissed off, gray hair loose and flying, and whenever she pointed her finger at an ambulatory tree it stopped, its shoulders sort of sank, and it rooted itself back down to the ground again. Looks like she was planning to ride this bomb down like Slim Pickens.
All the heavy hitters were checking in now. Up in the Barrier Range the giants—for lack of anybody their own size to pick on, and because they knew they were all going to die anyway—were fighting each other, brawling and weeping huge tears as they did so. Over by Whitespire the battle lines parted to make way for a large flightless bird, proceeding in a stately fashion between the two sides of the Battle of the Animals, and that could only be the Great Bird of Peace, one of the Unique Beasts. It had the gait of a cassowary, or what Janet imagined the gait of a cassowary to be, lifting its feet carefully with its inverted knees and swaying its head backward with every step.
When it reached the center of the field it paused, gazing around it calmly as if to say, now then, my lovelies, isn’t it time to put an end to this foolishness? Do you not feel the love in my heart, and in your own? Then two big cats, a panther and a leopard, swarmed it, and it went down without even a squawk. It might have had love in its heart, Janet thought, but it also had a hell of a lot of blood.
Along with her regular serving of horror Janet felt an extra cold chill. Whatever magic gave the Unique Beasts their mandate, that was the foundation of Fillory, the rebar in the cement. Even the Deeper Magic wasn’t cutting it tonight. If that was failing then all bets were really off.
The Northern Swamp was disgorging its beasts, some real sick fucks, chief among them that snapping turtle, the Prince of the Mud, and some huge wet lizard thing banded in yellow and black, flat and wide and squashed-looking. A grotendous big salamander. Even as she watched it it paused, trying to focus its wide-set eyes on something tiny, or relatively tiny, directly in front of it.
It was a white stag. It was the Questing Beast, standing before it, alone and unafraid. Oh, thank God, she thought. She couldn’t hear, but as she watched it said something. It said it again, and then a third time, like someone trying to strike fire from a wet matchbook. The salamander closed its huge eyes and settled down on its belly. It was dead. The Questing Beast had wished it dead.
It had taken three tries, though, and apparently even the Questing Beast only got three. It had saved its wishes all those years, all those centuries, and now they were gone. It seemed to shrug, if a stag can shrug, and then the snapping turtle snapped, and the beautiful beast’s white legs were sticking out of its mouth for a second, and then it was gone.
That seems unfair, Janet thought. A bad trade. The Questing Beast for some big salamander I never even heard of before. A rook for a knight.
She checked back in on the sun. Still boiling and thrashing on the horizon, spreading out laterally, like dropped ice cream melting on a hot sidewalk; probably it would take like a million years or some other cosmic span of time to expend all its energy and die. She checked back in on Josh and Poppy. Poppy was taking a break on top of one of Whitespire’s walls, which were holding pretty well so far. Janet supposed that if things got bad they’d have to open the gates and retreat into the bailey, but it hadn’t come to that yet. She missed Josh for a minute, till she found him down on the battlefield itself. He was in magic armor, sealed up tight—she was amazed he could even breathe in there—clumping around the field with a mace (always the fat man’s weapon of choice, for some reason), whacking at whatever got in range. An angry elephant put its foot on him, and Janet’s breath caught in her throat, but Josh’s armor held. In fact it was so smooth and frictionless that he squirted out from under the elephant’s foot like a pumpkin seed and flew twenty yards.
Josh picked himself up. He’d dropped his mace, but he was completely invulnerable anyway. Janet wondered what he thought he was doing, if hitting some wildebeests or whatever with a stick was making him feel better.
Let them join the fray, she thought. Let them have their fun. She just hoped the baby was safe. And at that moment, out of nowhere, Janet knew that she herself would never have children. Probably she’d known it for a while, but it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. Let others breed. Let them, and God be with them. She would be the witness—she was tough enough to see everything break and not break herself. They also serve who fly around on hippogriffs and watch.
There was a lot to watch. It was all on now, Fillory had gone all in, the whole fucking pub quiz. Probably even the bugs were fighting each other. Where were the dwarfs, she wondered? Sitting it out underground? A tall and rather august man in a tuxedo had joined the fray, fighting bare-handed, and Janet thought she recognized him from Quentin’s stories about the edge of the world. The battle was dissolving into frantic scrums featuring all kinds of weird shit she’d never even seen before: a burning suit of armor, a man who seemed to be woven out of rope, another who was just built out of pebbles. To the south a towering dune had finally crested the Copper Mountains, and surfing on it like a mad thing was a tremendous clipper ship crewed by—rabbits? For real? Was that something from the books? It had been so long. They came ripping down the steep slopes, heeled over.
It should have been exciting—bunnies! A magic clipper ship! That goes on land!—but all it provoked in Janet was exhaustion. What next? Sir Hotspots? Fuck all this, she said, and she squeezed her eyes shut for a minute. There was no end to Fillory, no end to the beauty and strangeness, except that there was, and this was it. She had to force herself to let go of it, and it felt like tearing off a piece of her own flesh. It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended. How was that fair? Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit.
The chaos itself was momentarily, unfairly beautiful. The thrashing sun, the spinning, looping moon, Fillory half light and half shadow, dotted with flashes of fire, lava and flame and magical strikes from magical beings. Ignorant armies clashing by night. And way off in the distance, but still visible to her far-sighted eyes, came the glow of the Clock Barrens going up in flames and fireworks, all at once. So at least she’d seen that after all.
Then Janet saw maybe the most flat-out marvelous thing she had ever seen or ever would see in her life. Overhead a constellation in the shape of a lanky, loose-jointed person detached itself from the night sky, hung by one stellar hand for a second and then dropped, falling for a long minute and sending up a shower of sparks when it hit on its back, its component orbs embedding themselves in the turf of a meadow. It was immediately engaged there by the only other two-dimensional combatant on the field, the Chalk Man, who had recovered his spirits and repaired his staff. Puffs of limestone flew, and motes of light.
It’s like Revelation, she thought. It’s Revelation, and I’m the Scarlet Woman.
“Winterwing,” Janet said. “Back to Whitespire. It’s time.”
The hippogriff set them down on top of the broad wall of Whitespire, which looked like it was going to finally see the battle it was presumably built to withstand, because the humans and the talking animals were giving ground now, falling back toward the great gates, which even Janet had never seen opened.
She dismounted and walked over to where Poppy stood. Neither of them said anything. The last queens of Fillory.
An almost infrasonic bass rumble had been building for a while, down beneath the general din, and now it rose into the realm of the audible, and they could feel it too. The fighters on the battlefield lost some of their interest in fighting and looked around for the source. Then it became really obvious, because the ground in front of the castle began to hump up and anybody who was caught out in the open on the hump began to run full out, and just in time too.
The ground at the top of the hump broke open, and a spray of something weird and alien erupted out of it. Roots, Janet realized—it was a spreading crown of enormous pale roots, cracking and writhing, and at the center of it stood Julia, eight feet tall and beautiful and glowing with her own magnificent radiance.
“Look,” Janet said. “It’s the Lorax.”
A foolhardy panther sprang at her, and Julia smote it—there was no other word for it—out of the air with her staff one-handed and sent it spinning off and up into the darkness.
“Enough,” she said.
Her voice must have been audible across the entire dying land. She was the brightest thing in Fillory at that moment.
“It is time.”
That word time echoed from coast to coast. Everyone on the battlefield, beasts and humans and whatever else, stood still. Julia commanded bipartisan support.
She walked toward Janet and Poppy; as she walked one of the roots extended and flattened itself and made a bridge to the parapet where they stood. Another root scooped up Josh from where he’d been sitting, exhausted, on the ground in front of the gates, and set him down next to them.
“Insert joke here,” Julia said, in something like her normal, nonamplified, predivine voice, “about how I leave you alone for five minutes and all of Fillory goes to shit.”
Janet didn’t know what to say. She had nothing left. She embraced Julia. It was a bit awkward, what with her being so huge and all, Janet more or less had to throw her arms around Julia’s waist, but it felt wonderful. Her robes were the softest thing ever. Janet thought it might be beneath Julia’s dignity, to be hugged by a mortal, but she allowed it.
“Queens of Fillory,” Julia said. “And king of Fillory. This is it. It is time to go.”
“Where are we going?” It was Josh who asked, in the voice of a lost child. “Can you take us to the Far Side of the World?”
Julia shook her head, no.
“The Far Side is ending too. We are cooling the sun and stilling the waters. We are rolling up the meadows and pulling down the stars.”
“Then where are we going?” he asked again.
“I don’t know,” Julia said. “But you can’t stay here.”
She held out her hands to them. Janet got it; they had to be touching each other for the enchantment to work. Poppy took Janet’s hand on one side, and Julia—her fingers felt big and tingly—took the other.
Janet bent her head and let herself cry. Her face streamed with tears. It wasn’t going to kill her, she thought. She would live. Of course she would, she didn’t have a scratch on her, for Christ’s sake. Everything was going to be fine. It was just that she would never have a home again.