Quentin fastened his trousers—zippers were foreign to Fillory, and so far impossible to reverse-engineer, you just couldn’t explain them to the dwarves—and walked across the meadow to where the animal had been. Standing just on the near side of the blue line, he peered in among the trees. They were thick enough that it was still full night in the forest. Still, he caught the faintest shadow of a pair of heavy animal haunches receding into it.
Is this it? Is it starting? Carefully, like he was stepping over an electric fence, he put one leg over the invisible blue line, then the other, and walked into the forest. He was pretty sure he knew Who he was chasing even before He was fully in view.
“Hey, Ember,” he called. “Ember! Wait up!”
The god looked at him impassively over His shoulder, then continued to trot.
“Oh, come on.”
The ram-god had not been seen in Fillory since the Brakebills took the thrones, or not as far as Quentin knew. He looked fully recovered from the beating He’d taken from Martin Chatwin. Even His hind leg, which had been crippled the last time Quentin saw Him, was restored and could take His weight without a limp.
Quentin had complicated feelings about Ember. He wasn’t like Ember was in the books. Quentin was still angry that He hadn’t been able to save them—to save Alice—in the fight against Martin. He supposed it wasn’t Ember’s fault, but still. What kind of a god wasn’t at the top of the food chain in His own world?
The big woolly kind with horns, apparently. Quentin didn’t have any particular beef with Ember, he just didn’t want to bow down to Him the way He always seemed to expect people to do. If Ember was so great He should have saved Alice, and if He wasn’t that great, Quentin wasn’t bowing. QED.
Still, if Ember was here, it meant they were on the right track. Things were going to get very real soon, or at least very Fillorian. He just didn’t know which Fillory it was going to be—the beautiful, magical Fillory or the dark, frightening one. Either way this would be a good moment for a shipment of divine wisdom to arrive. Guidance from on high. A pillar of fire, a tree of smoke.
Ember led Quentin uphill, into the interior of the island. Quentin was starting to get winded. After five minutes Ember finally slowed down enough to let him catch up. By that time they were halfway up a hill, and the sun had at last pushed a hot-pink sliver of itself up over the horizon. They were high enough that Quentin could look out across the forest canopy.
“Thanks,” Quentin said, taking big heaving breaths. “Jesus.” He leaned on Ember’s flank for a second before wondering if maybe that was too familiar, mortal to god. “Hi, Ember. How’s it going?”
“Hello, my child.”
That resonant bass voice instantly sent Quentin right back to the cavern under Ember’s Tomb. He hadn’t heard it since then, and his guts clenched. That was not a place he wanted to go back to.
He would keep the tone light.
“Fancy meeting You here.”
“We do not meet by chance. Nothing happens by chance.”
That was Ember for you. No small talk. The ram began to climb again. Quentin wondered if He knew that behind His back Quentin and the others called him Ram-bo. And, less kindly, Member.
“No, I guess not,” Quentin said, though he wasn’t actually sure that he agreed. “So. How did You get all the way out here?”
“Fillory is my realm, child. I am everywhere, and therefore anywhere.”
“I see that. But couldn’t You have just magicked us here, instead of making us sail all this way?”
“I could have. I did not.”
Forget it. Quentin could look back now and see the
“You know,” Quentin went on, “while I’ve got You, I’ve been wondering. About these Seven Keys. If You’re basically omnipresent, and probably omniscient too, why don’t You go around and just collect the keys Yourself? If they’re so important to the realm? I mean, You could probably do it in half an hour, tops.”
“There is Deeper Magic at work here, my child. Even the gods must bow to it. That is the way.”
“Oh, right. The Deeper Magic. I forgot about that.”
The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn’t feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole.
“I do not think you understand, my child. There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”
Quentin stopped, blowing, hands on hips. The horizon to the east was a solid band of orange now. The stars were going out.
“What’s that? What does he become?”
“A hero, Quentin.”
The ram kept going, and he followed.
“Fillory has need of gods, and kings, and queens, and those it has. But it has need of a hero too. And it has need of the Seven Keys.”
“Fillory doesn’t ask for much, does it?”
“Fillory asks for everything.”
With a lumbering lunge, awkward but powerful, Ember surged ahead and surmounted a rocky dome that turned out to be the top of the hill. From there He turned His head and looked down at Quentin with His strange, peanut-shaped eyes. Supposedly sheep evolved that way so they could see wolves coming out of the corners of their eyes. Better peripheral vision. But the effect was disconcerting.
“That’s a big ask.”
“Fillory asks for what it needs. Do you, Quentin? What do you need? What do you ask for?”
The question stopped him. He was used to scolding and pseudo-Socratic interrogation from Ember, but here was a rare gem: a good question. What did he want? He’d wanted to get back to Fillory, and he’d done that. He thought he’d wanted to go back to Castle Whitespire, but now he wasn’t so sure. The terror of almost losing Fillory had been extreme, but he’d found his way back. Now he wanted to find the keys. He wanted to finish the quest. He wanted his life to be exciting and important and to mean something. And he wanted to make Julia better. He felt like he would do anything to help Julia, if he only knew what to do.
“I guess it’s like what You said,” Quentin said. “I want to be a hero.”
Ember turned away again and faced the rising sun.
“Then you will have your chance,” He said.
Quentin scrambled up onto the rocky summit and watched the dawn alongside Him. He was going to ask Ember about it, about the sun, and what it was, and what happened out there at the rim of the world, or whether Fillory even had a rim. But when he turned to ask Him he was alone on top of the hill. Ember was gone.
Just when things were getting interesting. He turned slowly, in a full circle, but there was no sign of Him. Vanished without a trace. Oh, well. Now that He was gone Quentin almost missed Him. There was something special about being in the divine presence, even when the divinity was Ember.
He stretched, standing at the top of the island, and then jumped carefully down from the rocks and began trotting back down the hill to the beach. He couldn’t wait to tell the others what had happened, though the whole thing already felt like a dream, an early morning, half-awake dream tangled up with sheets and pillows and dawn light through closed curtains, the kind you only remembered by chance hours later, for a few seconds, when you were going to sleep again at the end of the day. He wondered if anyone else was up yet. Maybe he could still go back to bed.
He should have noticed that something had changed, but he’d been distracted on the way up. He’d been practically running, and plus he’d been talking to a god. And he’d never been an especially assiduous observer of flora and fauna. He wouldn’t have noticed a spectacular beech tree or an unusual elm because he didn’t know what the difference between them was, if any.
Still, after a few minutes he began to wonder if he was coming down a different way than he’d come up, because it all seemed a little rockier than he remembered—the ratio of rocks to plants and dirt to grass wasn’t quite what it had been. He didn’t let it worry him too much, because if it worried him too much he would have to climb
