and surprisingly elegant, with lots of club chairs and dark wood, something like an English gentlemen’s club. It was hard to picture the opulent age in which all this stuff had been shipped out here and assembled. The Outer Island must have had a heyday. They walked out the back gate and along a cart track hacked out of the tropical greenery. Elaine picked a tangy sweet-sour fruit from a low-hanging branch and offered it to Quentin.
“Try this,” she purred. It had dense nests of seeds inside that one spat out into the weeds.
The spicy scent of the seaside gave way to the dense green chlorophyl fug of the jungle. Here and there they passed a wrought-iron gate, painted white but rusting, with a path curving away back into the underbrush. Elaine discoursed about the various histories and scandals of the families that lived in the houses at the ends of the paths. She was handsome and had a bright, appealing manner. Though Quentin wondered why she wasn’t more affectionate to her daughter, the helpful little Eleanor. It didn’t jibe with her otherwise hospitable manner. Bingle stalked ahead of them, sword out, ready to slash or grapple any malefactors who might spring out of the jungle with designs on the king’s person. Quentin thought he was being rude, but Elaine didn’t seem to notice.
They stopped to admire a tropical clock-tree, which took the form of a palm tree instead of an oak. Quentin asked Eleanor if she could tell time, and she said that she couldn’t and what’s more she didn’t want to.
“Aren’t we being a little princess for the king,” said Elaine. Benedict sketched effortfully as they walked, trying not to blot his notebook with sweat. Julia stopped to study a weed, or maybe talk to it, and they left her behind. How much trouble could she get into? Quentin had had some half-formed idea of flirting with Elaine as a way of arousing Julia’s competitive spirit, but if such a spirit dwelled within her it remained unaroused.
After a half mile they came to the center of town. The cart track performed a wobbly loop and rejoined itself. There was a market here, or at least some market stalls, with a fishy reek and a few discarded, trampled fruit of the kind they’d picked on the way there. At the head of the loop stood a grand official building of the town hall variety with a stopped clock on its pediment like a blind Cyclops eye and a faded but still recognizable Fillorian flag hanging limp and exhausted in the damp heat.
In the center of the loop stood a stone monument, a granite obelisk with a statue of a man on top. Monsoons had weathered it badly, and tropical weeds had managed to crack off a corner of the base, but you could still make out the man’s heroic attitude, stoic in the face of what looked like impending misfortune.
“That is Captain Banks,” Elaine said. “He founded the Fillorian settlement on the Outer Island, by which I mean he ran his ship into it.”
Quentin wondered if there was a joke to be made about “founder” and “founder.” If there was it had probably already made the rounds of the Outer Island.
“Where is everybody?”
“Oh, they’re around,” she said. “We keep to ourselves here, mostly.”
Eleanor tried Elaine and was cuffed away. She held up her arms to Quentin, and he hoisted her up onto his shoulders. Elaine rolled her eyes as if to say, don’t say I didn’t warn you. The sun was setting in an absolute bloodbath of a sunset behind the trees, and the evening insects were growing bolder.
Eleanor squealed with delight at how tall Quentin was compared with her usual mount. She pulled the edge of her skirt down over his eyes. He gently lifted it up and she squealed again and pushed it back down. It was a game. She was surprisingly strong. Quentin supposed that there were worse things to be than an easy mark.
He stood there for a long moment, in the tropical darkness that lay beneath the hem of Eleanor’s skirt. Here I am, noble leader of the bold expedition to the Outer Island. King of all I survey. This was it, there really would be no surprise twist, no big reveal. The feeling of resignation was almost pleasurable, a mellow, numbing pleasure, like the first good, stiff drink of the evening.
He sighed. It wasn’t an unhappy sigh, but it included the thought: as soon as I have those taxes I am so out of here.
“You said something before about cocktails,” he said.
Dinner at the embassy was surprisingly good: a frighteningly toothy local fish served whole in a sweet preparation with some kind of mangolike local fruit. Eleanor waited on the guests with towering dignity, conveying salt shakers and glasses and other incidental items from kitchen to table with a straight back and slow, deliberate steps, toe-heel, as if she were walking a balance beam. Around eight thirty she dropped a crystal wineglass.
“For God’s sake, Eleanor,” Elaine said. “Go to bed. No dessert, just go to bed.” The accused wept and demanded cake, but Elaine was unmoved.
Afterward they all sat on wicker couches and chairs on an upper porch and took cautious sips of some appallingly sugary local liquor. The bay was spread out in the darkness below them, with the
Quentin asked where the bathroom was and excused himself. It was a cover story: he stopped by the kitchen, where he found what was left of the cake sitting underneath a glass dome. He cut a slice and took it up to Eleanor’s bedroom.
“Shhhhhh,” he said, closing the door behind him. She nodded seriously, as if he were a spy delivering a wartime communique. He waited while she ate the cake, then returned the evidence—the empty plate and the fork—to the kitchen.
When he got back to the veranda Elaine was alone. Julia had gone to bed. If she felt anything about him, she wasn’t about to fight over him for the sake of it. His grand outing with Julia was slipping away from him. Fine if nothing happened between them—at this point he’d be happy if he could just get her to talk to him. He was worried about her.
“I apologize about earlier,” Elaine said. “Your Highness. About your being king.”
“Forget about it.” He refocused his attention on her with an effort and smiled. “I’m still getting used to it myself.”
“It would have been easier if you were wearing a crown.”
“I did for a while, but it was incredibly uncomfortable. And it always fell off at the most inappropriate moments.”
“I can imagine.”
“Christenings. Cavalry charges.”
Under the influence of the local moonshine he was beginning to find himself insouciantly charming.
“It sounds like a public nuisance.”
“It was practically an enemy of the state. Now I just maintain a kingly bearing. I’m sure you noticed
It was difficult to make out her expression in the twilight. Mobs of exotic eastern stars were filling in the black sky overhead.
“Oh, it was unmistakable.”
She began rolling a cigarette. Were they flirting? She had to be at least fifteen years older than Quentin. Here he was afloat in the wild magical tropics of Fillory and he’d stumbled on the only cougar within 477 nautical miles. He wondered who Eleanor’s daddy was.
“Did you grow up here?” he asked.
“Oh, no. My parents were from the mainland—down around the Southern Orchard. I never knew my father. I’ve been in the diplomatic service forever. This is just another posting for me, I’ve been all over the empire.”
Quentin nodded sagely. He wasn’t aware that Fillory had a diplomatic service. He’d have to look into that when he got back.
“So do you get a lot of people coming through here? I mean from outside Fillory? Over the sea?”
“Sadly no. Actually I’ll tell you a terrible secret: no one has ever come through here, not as long as I’ve been at the embassy. In fact in the whole history of this office, three centuries of it, nobody has ever once passed through customs from across the Eastern Ocean. The records are completely blank. In that respect I suppose you’d have to call it a bit of a sinecure.”
“Well, what with there being no work and all.”
“It’s a shame, you should see the customs forms, they’re really magnificent. The letterhead alone. You should take some. And the stamp—I’ll stamp something for you in the morning. The stamp is an absolute masterpiece.”
