The Magician King

Not with the morning sun on his face, and the Muntjac surging and galloping along under him. He’d missed a lot here, but he wasn’t going to miss anything more. Earth was the dream, not Fillory, and it was going to that part of his brain where dreams went—the kind of anxiety-ridden, fiendishly detailed dreams that felt like they lasted for years, through endless meaningless plot twists, which delivered you ultimately to a fate not even of death but merely of permanent embarrassment. Fillory had taken him back. Welcome to the Quest for the Seven Keys. Your adventure is already in progress.

Bingle was atop the forecastle as usual, just like back in the day, but now he was sparring vigorously with another swordsman. It was Benedict, stripped to the waist, lean and brown, grimacing as he gave ground and then, unbelievably, beating Bingle back and pressing his advantage. The whole time he kept his wrist on his hip, swashbuckler-style. The air rang with the loud scraping of steel on steel, like the gnashing of a huge pair of scissors.

Their swords locked. Stalemate. They broke apart, clapping each other on the shoulder and laughing— laughing!—about some point of technical swordsmanship. It was like watching an alternate-timeline version of himself, a timeline in which he’d stayed in Fillory and learned to hold his sword at full extension for more than two minutes. Quentin caught Benedict’s eye, and Benedict saluted him, smiling with those bright white teeth. Quentin saluted back. They squared off again.

Bingle had found his disciple.

“Those guys are amazing.”

He hadn’t heard Poppy come up beside him. She was watching the action too.

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“Are you kidding?” Poppy shook her head. She was not kidding. “I wish I could. The one on the right, the older guy? He’s the best swordsman in Fillory. We had a contest.”

“It all still looks like a movie to me. I can’t believe it’s all real. Wow!” Bingle did one of his signature gymnastic tumbling passes. “Oh my God. I thought he was going over the side.”

“I know. I was going to take lessons with him.”

“That sounds exciting. What happened?”

“I accidentally went back to the real world. Then a year went by here in three days.”

“Well, I can see now why you wanted to come back. It’s beautiful here. I’m sorry I thought it was funny before. I was wrong.”

Quentin had expected Poppy to be miserable on board the Muntjac . After all, she’d effectively been abducted from everything she knew and cared about and brought here. It was an outrage to every principle she lived by.

And all that was true, and she’d spent a day being outraged about it. Well, half a day. Poppy had spent yesterday afternoon sulking, then she showed up at breakfast this morning with a brand-new can-do attitude. She just wasn’t temperamentally suited to long-haul sulking. Sure, all right, she’d been accidentally transported to a magical world that until recently she had understood to be fictional. The situation wasn’t ideal. But it was what she had to work with, so she would work with it. She was a tough one, Poppy.

“I talked to the other one at dinner last night,” she said. “The kid. Benedict. He’s a big fan of yours.”

“Benedict? Really?”

“Did you see how he lit up when he saw you watching him just now? Look at him, he’s killing himself to impress you. You’re a father figure for him.”

Quentin hadn’t seen. How was Poppy here for one day and she’d seen all that?

“To be honest I always thought he hated me.”

“He’s gutted he didn’t get to go to Earth with you.”

“You must be joking. And miss out on all the adventures here?”

Now Poppy directed her guileless blue gaze at him instead of the sword fight.

“What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn’t an adventure?”

Quentin started to answer, and stopped with his mouth open. Because it turned out he had nothing to say.

It was five more days before they sighted land.

They were having breakfast al fresco on deck: Quentin, Eliot, Josh, and Poppy. It was a practice Eliot had instituted: the crew set up a table on the poop deck, with a blinding white tablecloth clipped on to keep it from blowing away. He kept this up in a surprising range of meteorological conditions. Once Quentin saw him up there alone in a squall, munching on marmalade toast that was obviously soaked through with salt spray. It was a matter of principle with him.

But today it was nice out. The weather was almost tropical again. Sunlight flashed off the silverware, and the sky was a perfect blue dome. Though the food itself was getting pretty grim, the kind of unspoilable stuff that came out of deep storage late in an ocean voyage: hard biscuits and meat so salty it was more salt than meat. The only thing that was still good was the jam. Quentin used a lot of it.

“So is this how it works?” he said. “The questing? We just keep sailing east till we hit something?”

“Unless you have a better idea,” Eliot said.

“No. Just remind me why we think it’s going to work?”

“Because that’s how quests always work,” Eliot said. “I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of it, but the lesson seems to be that you just can’t force the issue with a whole lot of detective work. It’s a waste of energy. The ones who go around knocking on doors and looking for clues never find the thing, the Grail or whatever it is. It’s more a matter of having the right attitude.”

“What attitude is that?”

Elliot shrugged.

“I haven’t got a clue. I guess we’re supposed to have faith.”

“I never really took you for the faith-having kind,” Quentin said.

“I didn’t either. But it’s worked out so far. We’ve got five of the seven keys. You can’t argue with results.”

“You can’t,” Quentin said, “but that’s actually not the same thing as having faith.”

“Why do you always try to ruin everything?”

“I’m not ruining it. I just want to understand it.”

“If you had faith you wouldn’t have to understand.”

“And why exactly are you looking for these keys?” Poppy asked brightly. “Or I guess, why are we looking for them?”

“Yeah, why are we?” Josh said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re cool and all. They sound cool. Can I see them?”

“We don’t really know why,” Eliot said. “The Unique Beasts wanted us to find them.”

“But find them and do what with them?” Poppy said.

“I suppose once we have them all they’ll tell us. Or perhaps we’ll know when we have them. Or perhaps we’ll never know. They might just take the keys and pat us on the behind and send us on our way. I don’t know. I’ve never done a quest before.”

“So . . . the journey is the arrival, kind of thing?” Josh said. “I hate that stuff. I’m an old-fashioned arrival-is- the-arrival kind of guy.”

“For what it’s worth, they told me the realm was in peril,” Eliot said. “So there is that. But it’s not like the Holy Grail was actually useful for anything.”

“I told everybody the Neitherlands are jacked, right?” Josh said.

“You think that’s part of this?” Quentin said. “You think they’re connected?”

“No. Well, maybe.” Josh stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “But how?”

“The Neitherlands are down.” Quentin ticked them off. “Jollyby is dead. The realm is supposedly in peril. Seven Golden Keys. A dragon collecting buttons. If there’s a thread running through all that, I’m not seeing it.”

Maybe he didn’t want to see it. That would be a hell of a thread. You’d want to think twice about yanking on it.

Someone up in the rigging shouted that he could see an island.