The boat’s prow scrunched almost soundlessly into the damp white sand. Quentin vaulted over the bow just as it spent the very last of its momentum and landed on his feet on powdery white sand with his boots still dry. He turned back toward the launch, bowed, and received a smattering of applause from its passengers.
He grabbed the painter and hauled on it as the others—Eliot, Josh, Poppy, Julia, Bingle, Benedict—scrambled out on both sides. The air was quiet and still. It felt weird to be standing on solid ground again.
“Worst away team ever,” Josh said, wading up onto land. “Not a single redshirt.”
Pretty: that was the impression the island had made from a distance. Chalk cliffs that parted to reveal a small bay with a tidy beach. A row of single trees stood out against the skyline, so fine and still and green against the blue sky they looked like they’d been carved in jade. Vacation paradise.
It was late afternoon; it had taken them most of the day to make landfall. They stood together on the shore in a knot. The sand was as clean as if it had been sifted. Quentin slogged across it and up the first dune to the crest to see what was beyond it. The dune was steep, and just short of the top he flopped down on the slope and peered over the crest. It was like being a kid at the beach. Beyond the dune were more dunes topped with scrub, then a meadow, then a line of trees, then Ember knew what else. So far so good. Pretty.
“Welp,” Quentin said. “Let’s get questin’.”
But first there were more mundane matters to attend to. Quentin and Poppy and Josh had been in Venice three days ago, but this was the first land the men had seen in something like three weeks. They piled ashore in twos and threes; some of them cannonballed off the
“We’ve fallen on our feet,” Eliot said, once everybody had a job to do. “Don’t you think? So far I would rate this an above-average island.”
“It’s so beautiful!” Poppy said. “Do you think anybody lives here?” Eliot shook his head.
“I don’t know. We’re two months’ sail out from Castle Whitespire. I’ve never heard of anyone else coming this far. We could be the first human beings ever to set foot here.”
“Think of that,” said Quentin. “So do you want to . . . ?”
“What?”
“You know. Claim it. For Fillory.”
“Oh!” Eliot considered. “We haven’t been doing that. It seems a little imperialist. I’m not sure it’s in good taste.”
“But haven’t you always wanted to say it?”
“Well, yes,” Eliot said. “All right. We can always give it back.” He raised his voice, using the one he used to call meetings to order back at Castle Whitespire. “I, High King Eliot, hereby claim this island for the great and glorious Kingdom of Fillory! Henceforth it will be known as”—he paused—“as New Hawaii!”
Everybody nodded vaguely.
“New Hawaii?” Quentin said. “Really?”
“It’s not really tropical,” Poppy said. “The vegetation’s more temperate.”
“What about Farflung Island?” Quentin said. “Like as one word: Farflung.”
“Relief Island.” Poppy was getting into the spirit of it. “Whitesand Island. Greengrass Island!”
“Skull Island,” Josh said. “No wait, Spider-Skull Island!”
“Okay, the Island to Be Named Later,” Eliot said. “Come on. Let’s find out what’s on it before we name it.”
But by then the sun was low in the sky, so instead they pitched in bringing sticks and dry grass back from the meadow. With five trained magicians on hand, starting a fire wasn’t a problem. They could have made a fire with just sand. But it wouldn’t have smelled as good.
The hunting party came back flushed with pride, hauling two wild goats on their shoulders, and one of the foragers had spotted a patch of something very closely analogous to carrots growing wild at the edge of the woods, that seemed self-evidently safe to eat. They all sat in circles on the cooling sand, the cold sea air at their backs, the warmth of the fire on their faces, and savored the feeling of being on firm ground again, with enough space to stretch out their arms and legs and not touch anything or anybody. The beach was covered with footprints now, and as the sun got lower the light made monkey-puzzle shadow patterns on it. They were very far from home.
The setting sun moved behind a cloud, lighting it up from the inside like a pall of smoke, sunlight leaking out around the edges. Strange stars came swarming across the blackening sky. No one wanted to get back on the
The next day everything seemed a little less urgent than it had when they first arrived. Yes, the realm was in peril, but was it in immediate peril? It was hard to imagine a place that felt less imperiled than the Island to Be Named Later. There was a touch of lotus land about it. And anyway adventure would find them when it was ready, or so the theory ran. You couldn’t rush it. You just had to keep the right state of mind. For now they would savor the anticipation, and stay well rested.
Even Julia wasn’t pushing.
“I was afraid we would not get back,” she said. “Now I am afraid of what will happen if we go forward.”
They hiked up to the top of the cliffs on one side of the bay and from there got a good look at more green island, with rocky hills heaped up in the interior. Birds roosted along the clifftops in bunches—they had dull gray feathers on their backs and wings, but they had a way of turning in the air in unison and suddenly showing you their rose-colored chests all at once. Quentin was going to name them rose-breasted swoopers, or something along those lines, when Poppy pointed out that they already had a name. They were galahs. They had them in Australia too.
The cook was a keen fisherman, and he pulled a prodigious number of fat, tiger-striped fish out of the surf, one after the other. In the afternoon Quentin watched Benedict and Bingle fence with foils—they stuck wine corks on the tips for safety. He spent an hour just lying back on his elbows and looking at the waves. They were nothing like the brutally cold, puritan waves of his East Coast youth, which had sternly discouraged anything so frivolous as surfing or frolicking. These waves came sloping in smoothly, building up heads of boiling cream foam on top, reared up for a moment, mint green and paper-thin in the sunlight, then broke in a long line with a sound like fabric tearing.
He wiggled his toes in the hot sand and watched the weird moire optical effects that the miniature sand avalanches created. They went to bed that night hardly having explored more than the thin crescent of island they’d already seen. Tomorrow they would strike inland, into the forest and up into the hills.
Quentin woke early. The sun wasn’t even up yet, though there was a gray blur of predawn to the east. He wondered what happened out there, in the extreme east. The rules were different in Fillory. For all he knew the world was flat, and the sun ran on tracks.
Everything was gray: the sand, the trees, the sea. Deep red embers smoldered under the gray ashes of the bonfires. It was warm out. The sleepers on the beach looked as though they had fallen there from a great height. Poppy had kicked off her blanket—she slept with her arms crossed over her chest, like a knight on a tomb.
He would have gone back to sleep, but he was dying for a piss. He got up and jogged to the top of the dune and down the other side. It didn’t seem quite far enough for hygienic purposes, so he went one farther, and at that point he figured he might as well get as far as the field and pee there.
It was undeniably a vulnerable feeling, as he let fly into the tall grass, but the morning was as still as a painting, and they hadn’t been completely stupid about it. Anybody who knew the proper reveal spells—meaning almost no one—would have seen a gossamer-thin line of magical force, pale blue in color, looped along the edge of the forest like a trip wire. They’d set it up the day before. It wouldn’t hurt anybody who walked into it, not permanently, but the magicians would know they were there, and they wouldn’t be walking anymore. They’d be lucky if they were conscious. They’d already caught a wild pig that way.
Even the insects were hushed. Quentin sneezed—he was mildly allergic to some local plant—and wiped his eyes. On the far side of the meadow something slipped into the forest. It went just as his eye began to track it—it must have been standing there, stock-still, watching him while he pissed. He got an impression of something large, the size of a big boar maybe.
