A bridge spanned the creek fifty yards downstream, a gentle arch made of intricate, curly Fillorian ironwork. Quentin was sure it couldn’t have been there before, but Richard inn. He sneezed.
On the far side of the bridge there was a wide, neat path through the forest, dusted with leaves and pine needles but definitely a path in good standing this time, an official path. They made good time, their spirits buoyed up by the perfect weather and a constant, low-level adrenaline drip. It was really on now. No more false starts. It wasn’t that Fillory could wipe out what happened last night—but maybe it could, for all he knew. Anything could happen here. A brown deer ambled out of the forest and walked ahead of them for a stretch, looking back over its shoulder with an air of genuinely exceptional intelligence, they all agreed, but if it could speak it declined to address them. They tried to follow it—maybe it was leading them somewhere? was it a messenger from Ember and Umber?—but it bounded away exactly the way an ordinary non-magical deer would have.
Josh practiced a spell that uncurled Ana?s’s hair from a distance. She kept looking around, annoyed but unable to pinpoint the source. Janet linked arms with Quentin and Eliot and made them do a “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” skipping dance. He couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think Eliot had had a drink all day. When was the last time that had happened?
The forest seemed to go on forever. Once in a while the sun appeared long enough to shoot some long, dusty beams down between the trees, then disappeared again.
“This is right,” Penny said, looking around. His eyes were glazed. He had entered a daze of ecstatic certainty. “This feels right to me. We’re supposed to be here.”
Janet rolled her eyes.
“What do you think, Q?” Penny said. “Doesn’t this feel right to you?”
Without knowing how it happened Quentin had Penny’s ratty T-shirt bunched in his fists. Penny weighed more than he’d counted on, but Quentin still managed to get him off balance and push him backward until his head clunked against the damp trunk of a pine tree.
“Never speak to me,” Quentin said evenly. “Do you understand? You do not address me directly, ever. You do not speak to me.”
“I don’t want to fight you,” Penny said. “That’s exactly what the Watcherwoman wants—”
“Did you not just hear what I said?” Quentin clunked Penny’s head against the tree again, hard this time. Somebody said his name. “You lardy little fucking nub? Did you not just fucking hear what I fucking said? Was I unclear in any way?”
He walked away without waiting for an answer. Fillory had better give him something to fight soon or he was going to lose it completely.
The novelty of actually, physically, being in Fillory was wearing thin; in spite of everything a mood of general grumpiness was growing, a spoiled-picnic mood. Every time a bird perched overhead for more than a few seconds Josh would say, “Okay, this is the one,” or, “I think it’s trying to tell us something,” or eventually, “Hey, asshole, fly away from me, please. Okay, thanks.”
“At least the Watcherwoman hasn’t shown up, took a deep breathR arrivedv with ” Eliot said.
“If that even was the Watcherwoman before,” Josh said. “Supposedly they got her in the first book, right? So.”
“Yeah, I know.” Eliot had a handful of acorns and was chucking them at trees as they walked. “But something’s a little off here. I don’t understand why that nymph wasn’t boring us about Ember and Umber. They’re always so pushy about Them in the books.”
“If there’s a war between the rams and the Watcherwoman still going on, we’re going to want to get with Ember and Umber stat,” Alice said.
“Oh, yeah,” Janet said. She made quotey-fingers. “ ‘Stat.’”
“If They want us on Their side, They will find us,” Penny intoned. “We need have no fear on that score.”
No one answered him. It was becoming increasingly clear that Penny’s encounter with the nymph had put him in an altered state. That was how he was dealing with Fillory. He’d undergone a conversion experience, flipped into full-on Renaissance Faire role-playing mode.
“Watch it, watch it!” Richard yelled. They registered the drumming thuds of hooves on soft earth almost too late. A carriage drawn by two horses tore past them at a full gallop, scattering them into the trees on either side of the road. The carriage was closed and dark; on its side it bore what looked like a coat of arms that had recently been painted over in black.
The coachman was bundled up in a black cloak. He—she? it was impossible to tell—signaled the horses to slow to a walk, then a stop, a hundred feet ahead of them down the road.
“The thick plottens,” Eliot said dryly.
It was about damn time something happened. Quentin, Janet, and Ana?s walked boldly toward it, all competing to be the reckless one, the hero, the one who pushed things forward. In his present state of mind Quentin felt fully prepared to go right up and knock on the shutters, but he found himself pulling up a few yards away. So did the others. The black coach did look ominously funereal.
A muffled voice spoke from inside the carriage.
“Do they bear the Horns?”
This was evidently directed not at them but at the coachman, who had the better vantage point. If the coachman replied, he/she did so inaudibly.
“Do you bear the Horns?” This voice was louder and clearer.
The advance party exchanged looks.
“What do you mean, horns?” Janet called. “We’re not from around here.”
This was ridiculous. It was like talking to the Once-Ler in Dr. Seuss.
“Do you serve the Bull?” Now the voice sounded shriller to his ears, with high, twittering overtones.
“Who’s the bull?” Quentin said, loudly and slowly, as if he were talking to somebody who didn’t speak English or was mildly retarded. There was no bull in the Plover books, so—? “We are visitors to your land. We do not serve the bull, or anybody else for that matter.”
“They’re not deaf, Quentin,” Janet said.
Long silence. One of the horses—they were black glance passed between and the cacodemong, too, as was the tackle, and everything else—whickered. The first voice said something inaudible.
“What?” Quentin took a step closer.
A trapdoor banged open on top of the carriage. The sound was like a gunshot. A tiny expressionless head and a long green insect torso popped up out of it—it could only have been a praying mantis, but grown grotesquely to human size. It was so skinny and had so many long emerald-colored legs and graceful whip antennae that at first Quentin didn’t notice that it was holding a green bow with a green arrow cocked.
“Shit!” Quentin yelped reflexively. His voice cracked. It was close range, and there was no time to run. He cringed violently and fell down.
The horses took off like a shot the moment the mantis released. The trapdoor banged shut again. Dust and twigs spun up into the air in the carriage’s wake, its four big wheels fitting neatly in the ruts in the road.