Quentin switched arms again, and then again. It reminded him of his days as a semi-pro sleight-of-hand magician. The beginning, the laying down of the fundamentals, was always the worst part, which he supposed was why so few people did it. That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect. To take his mind off it he watched Bingle, who was now stalking the deck, staring accusingly ahead of him, whipping his own blade in a complicated pattern, drawing ampersands and Kells knots in the air with it.
A frigid spitting mist was blowing in from the ocean. He could see After Island clearly now; they’d be landing soon. He decided he was done. He should at least change out of his pajamas before he set off in search of the golden key.
“I’m knocking off, Bingle,” he said. He placed his practice blade on the deck next to Bingle’s other two. His arms felt like they were floating.
Bingle nodded, not breaking his own rhythm.
“Come back to me when you can do half an hour,” he said. “With each arm.”
He performed a spectacular no-handed roundoff that looked like it was going to take him right off the forecastle deck, but somehow he swallowed his inertia just in time to stick the landing. He finished with his blade jammed between the ribs of some imaginary assailant. He withdrew it and cleaned the blade on his pants leg.
That was probably a few more lessons down the track.
“Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”
“That’s why I have you,” Quentin said. “So I won’t have to write anything. With my sword.”
“Sometimes I think I am fate’s sword. She wields me cruelly.”
Quentin wondered what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably.
“Right. Well, there won’t be much cruelty on this trip. We’ll be back at Whitespire pretty soon. Then you can go check out your castle.”
Bingle turned to face the wind. He seemed to be living out some story of his own in which Quentin was just a minor character, a chorus member, without even a name in the program.
“I shall never see Fillory again.”
In spite of himself Quentin felt a chill. He didn’t like the feeling. He was chilly enough as it was.
After Island was a low strip of gray rocks and thin grass flocked with sheep. If the Outer Island was a tropical paradise, After could have passed for a stray member of the Outer Hebrides.
They circled it, hugging the shore, until they found a harbor and dropped anchor. A couple of rain-ravaged fishing boats were moored there, and a handful of empty buoys suggested that more were out to sea. It was a hell of a dreary spot. A more enterprising king might have tried to claim it for Fillory, Quentin supposed, except that it didn’t really seem worth it. Not exactly the jewel in the crown.
There was no wharf, and the bay was crowded with surly breakers. They barely managed to get the launch in past the surf without swamping. Quentin jumped out, wetting himself to the waist, and wallowed up onto the rocky beach. A couple of fishermen watched them, smoking and mending a vast tangled net that was stretched out around them on the shale. They had the brick-red complexions of lifelong outdoorsmen, and they shared the same thickheaded look. They didn’t seem to have enough forehead—their hairlines were pulled down too low over their eyebrows. Quentin would have put their age at anything between thirty and sixty.
“Ahoy there,” he said.
They nodded at him and grunted. One of them touched his cap. Over a few minutes’ parley the friendly one was persuaded to divulge the general direction of the nearest and probably only town. Quentin, Bingle, and Benedict thanked the men and slogged their way up the beach through the cold white sand scalloped with black tide marks. Julia trailed silently behind them. Quentin had tried to persuade her to stay on board, but she insisted. Whatever else was going on with her, she was still up for a party.
“You know what I’m waiting for on this trip?” Quentin said. “I’m not waiting for somebody to be happy to see us. I just want someone to look surprised to see us.”
The weather deepened to a light wuthering rain. Quentin’s wet pants chafed. The sand gave way to dunes capped with saw grass and then to a path: grassy sand, then sandy grass, then just grass. They tramped through humpy, unfenced meadows and low hills, past a lost, orphaned well. He tried to summon a heroic feeling, but the setting wasn’t especially conducive. It reminded him of nothing so much as walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn in the freezing rain with James and Julia on the day he took his Brakebills exam.
The town, once they found it, was a thoroughly medieval affair of stone cottages, thatched roofs, and mud streets. Its most marked characteristic was the thorough lack of interest the locals showed in the oddly dressed strangers in their midst. A half dozen of them were sitting at an outdoor table in front of a pub. They were eating sandwiches and drinking beer out of metal tankards in the face of weather Quentin would have made it a major priority to get out of.
“Hi,” he said.
Chorus of grunts.
“I’m Quentin. I’m from Fillory. We’ve come to your island in search of a key.” He glanced at the others and coughed once. It was pretty much impossible to do this without sounding like he was reciting a Monty Python sketch. “Do you know anything about that? A magic key? Made of gold?”
They looked at each other and nodded: agreed, we all know what he’s talking about. They shared a family resemblance. They could all have been brothers.
“Aye, we know the one you mean,” one of them said—a large, brutallooking man encased in a huge woolly coat. His hand on his knee was like a piece of pink granite. “It’s down t’road.”
“Down the road,” Quentin repeated.
Right. Of course. The golden key is down the road. Where else would it be? He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.
“Aye, we know it.” He jerked his head. “Down t’road.”
“All right. Down the road it is. Well, thank you very much.”
He wondered if it was ever warm and sunny here, or if they lived in the permanent equivalent of a New England November. Did they know they were three days’ sail from a tropical zone?
The travelers set off down the road. They would have looked nobler if they’d been riding horses instead of wallowing through the mud like a bunch of peasants, but the
The street changed to cobbles, rounded cubes that turned slick and ankle-breaking in the drizzle. It wasn’t much of a setting for a quest or an adventure or even an errand. Maybe Bingle was right, maybe they were just minor characters in his drama.
Benedict wasn’t even taking notes the way he usually did.
“I’ll just remember it,” he said.
There you had it: an island not even Benedict would bother to map.
It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t a long road. The last building on it was a stone building like a church, though it wasn’t a church, just a boxy structure two stories high, built up out of flat gray local stones, unmortared. It had a blank facade that looked unfinished, or maybe whatever ornamentation had once been there had been stripped away.
Quentin felt like the little boy at the beginning of
If he’d had to put his finger on it he would have said that more than anything else the rhythm of it was wrong. It was too soon. They shouldn’t have found it this quick, nor should they obtain it without a fight.
But fuck it. Maybe he was just lucky. Maybe it was destiny. In spite of everything, he felt a rising excitement. This was it. The doors were enormous and made of oak, but there was a smaller, man-sized door set in one of them, presumably for days when you couldn’t be bothered to fling open an entire grand double-height oaken portal.
