“Oh dear,” the tree said, hanging its vernal, garlanded face sadly down toward the table. “Do not judge the bear too harshly. You must understand, we are very far from the capital here, and many have ruled these green hills, or tried, since the last time you children of Earth walked them. The silver years of the Chatwins are long ago now, and the years since have been forged from baser metals. You cannot imagine the chaos we have suffered through. There was Widewings the Eagle, and after him the Wrought Iron Man, the Lily Witch, the Spear-Carrier, the Saint Anselm. There was the Lost Lamb, and the vicious depredations of the Very Tallest Tree.

“And you know,” he finished, “we are so very far from the capital here. And it is very confusing. I am only a birch, you know, and not a very large one.”

A leaf fluttered to the table, a single green tear.

“I have a question,” Janet said, unintimidated as ever. “If this crown is so damn important, and Ember and Umber and Amber or whatever are so powerful, why don’t they just go get it themselves?”

“Ah, well, there’s Laws,” Farvel sighed. “They can’t, you see. There’s Higher Laws that even such as They are bound by. It must be you who retrieve the crown. It can only be you.”

“We have lived too long,” the bartender said glumly, to no one. He’d been putting away his own wares with impressive efficiency.

Quentin supposed it all made sense. Ember and Umber absent, a power vacuum, an insurgent Watcherwoman emerging from whatever witchy quasi-death she’d suffered at the Chatwins’ hands. Penny had been right after all: they’d gotten a quest. Their role was clear. It had a pat, theme-park quality to it, like they were on some fantasy-camp role-playing vacation, but it did make sense. He could still hope. But let’s be sure.

“I don’t want to sound crass,” he said out loud. “But Ember and Umber are the big shots around here, right? I mean, of all those people, things, whatever you mentioned, They’re the most powerful? And morally righteous or whatever? Let’s be clear on this for a second. I want to be sure we’re backing the right horse. Or ram. Whatever.”

“Of course! It would be folly to think otherwise!”

Farvel shushed him, looking worriedly over at the table of beavers, who didn’t seem to be paying them any attention, but you couldn’t be too careful. Bizarrely, Farvel produced a cigarette from somewhere and lit it from the candle on the table, careful not to ignite any part of itself. It protruded jauntily from the tree’s little cleft mouth. The thing must have a death wish. Aromatic smoke rose up through the leafy corona of its face.

“Only do not judge us too harshly. The rams have been absent for many years. We have had to carry on without them. Make our own way. The forest must live.”

Eliot and the horned man had vanished, presumably together. Incorrigible, that man; it cheered Quentin up by a scintilla that somebody at least was having a good time. The white goat slurped its yellow wine loudly in its corner. Humbledrum just gazed sorrowfully into its schnapps. Quentin reminded himself, as if he had almost forgotten the fact, that he was very far from home, in a room full of animals drinking alcohol.

“We have lived too long,” the bartender announced again, sullenly. “The great days are past.”

They stayed at the inn that night. The rooms were carved hobbit-style into the hill behind the main cabin. They were comfortable, windowless, and silent, and Quentin slept like the dead.

In the morning they sat at a long table in the bar, eating fresh eggs and toast and drinking cold water out of stone jugs, their backpacks piled up in a heap in one of the booths. Apparently Richard’s gold cylinders went a long way in the Fillorian economy. Quentin felt clear-eyed and miraculously un-hungover. His restored faculties appreciated with a cold new keenness the many painful aspects of his recent personal history, but they also allowed him to really appreciate almost for the first time the reality of his physical presence in actual Fillory. It was all so detailed and vivid compared to his car toonish fantasies. The room had the seedy, humiliated look of a bar seen in direct sunlight, sticky and thoroughly initialed by knife- and claw-wielding patrons. The floor was paved with old round millstones lightly covered with a scattering of straw, the chinks between them filled in with packed dirt. Neither Farvel nor Humbledrum nor the bartender were anywhere in sight. They were served by a brusque but otherwise attentive dwarf.

Also in the dining room were a man and a woman who sat opposite each other by a window, sipping coffee and saying nothing and glancing over at the Brakebills table every once in a while. Quentin had the distinct impression that they were just killing time, waiting for him and the others to finish their breakfast. That proved to be the case.

When the table was cleared, the pair introduced themselves as Dint—the man—and Fen. Both were fortyish and weather-beaten, as if they spent a lot of time outdoors in a professional capacity. They were, Dint explained, the guides. They would take the party to Ember’s Tomb, in search of King Martin’s crown. Dint was tall and skinny, with a big nose and huge black eyebrows that together took up most of his face; he was dressed all in black and wore a long cape, apparently as an expression of the extreme seriousness with which he regarded himself and his abilities. Fen was shorter and denser and more muscular, with close-cropped blond hair. With a whistle around her neck she could have been a gym teacher at a private school for girls. Her clothes were loose-fitting and practical, evidently designed for ease of movement in unpredictable situations. She projected both toughness and kindness, and she wore high boots with fascinatingly complex laces. She was, to the best of Quentin’s ability to gauge these things, a lesbian.

Cool autumn sunlight slotted through the narrow windows cut in the heavy log walls of the Two Moons. Sober, Quentin felt more eager than ever to get on with it. He looked hard at his beautiful, despoiled Alice—his anger at her was a hard nugget he didn’t know if he could ever digest, a kidney stone. Maybe when they were kings and queens. Maybe then he could have Penny executed. A palace coup, and definitely not a bloodless one.

Penny proposed that they all swear an oath together, to celebrate their shared high purpose, but it seemed like overkill, and anyway he couldn’t muster a quorum. They were all shrugging into their packs when Richard abruptly announced that they could go if they wanted, but he would be staying behind at the inn.

No one knew how to react. Janet tried to joke him out of it, then when that didn’t work she pleaded with him.

“But we’ve come this far together!” she said, furious and trying not to show it. Of all of them she hated this kind of disloyalty to the group the most. Any crack in their collective facade was an attack on her personally. “We can always turn back if things get sketchy! Or in an emergency we can use the button as a rip cord! I think you’re way overreacting.”

“Well, and I think you’re underreacting,” Richard said. “And I think you can count on the authorities to overreact when they find out about how far you’re taking this.”

“If they find out about it,” Anaïs put in. “Which they will not.”

“When they find out about it,” Janet said hotly, “this is going to be the discovery of the century, and we are going to make history, and you’re missing out on it. And if you can’t see that, I frankly have no idea why you came along in the first place.”

“I came along to keep you people from doing anything stupid. Which is what I’m trying to do right now.”

“Whatever.” She put a hand in his face, then walked away, her own face crumpling. “Nobody cares if you come or not. There are only four thrones anyway.”

Quentin half expected Alice to join Richard—she looked like she was hanging on to her nerve by the very tips of her fingers. He wondered why she hadn’t bolted already; she was way too sensible for a random lark like this. Quentin felt the opposite way. The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play. They would have to tie him down to keep him from going to Ember’s Tomb.

Richard would not be dislodged, so in the end they set off in a loose pack without him, with Dint and Fen walking ahead. They followed yesterday’s carriage path for only a short while before striking out at an angle into the woods. For all the glory of their high and noble purpose, it felt like they were going on a summer-camp nature hike, or a junior high field trip, with the kids goofing off and the two counselors looking dour and superior and grown-up and glaring them back into line when they strayed too far. For the first time since they came to Fillory everybody was relaxing and being themselves instead of playing intrepid explorer-heroes. Low stone walls traversed the forest floor, and they took turns balancing along them. Nobody knew who had built them, or why. Josh said something about where was the damn Cozy Horse when you needed it. Before long they emerged from the forest into a maze of sunlit meadows, and then into open farmland.

It would not have been hard to get Alice alone. But whenever Quentin rehearsed what he wanted to say, however well it began, he got to a point where he had to ask her what happened with Penny, and then the dream sequence just went white, like a film of a nuclear blast. Instead, he made conversation with the guides.

Neither of them was very talkative. Dint did show a flicker of interest when he learned that the visitors were magicians, too, but they turned out not to have much in common. His entire expertise was in battle magic. He was barely aware that there were other kinds.

Quentin had the impression he was loath to give away any trade secrets. But he did open up about one thing.

“I sewed this myself,” he said, a little shyly, pulling his cape to one side to show Quentin a bandolier-like vest underneath with many small pockets on it in rows. “I keep herbs in here, powders, whatever I might need in the field. If I’m casting something with a material component I can just . . . like this”—he executed a series of rapid pinching-and-dispensing motions that he’d obviously spent a lot of time practicing—”and I’m ready to go!”

Then the dour facade descended again, and he went back to his silent brooding. He carried a wand, which almost nobody at Brakebills did. It was considered slightly embarrassing, like training wheels, or a marital aid.

Fen was more overtly friendly but at the same time harder to read. She wasn’t a magician, and she carried no obvious weapons, but it was understood that of the two of them she was the muscle. As far as Quentin could make out she was some kind of martial artist—she called the discipline she practiced inc aga, an untranslatable phrase from a language Quentin had never heard of. She kept to a strict regimen: she couldn’t wear armor or touch silver or gold, and she ate practically nothing. What inc aga looked like in practice was impossible for Quentin to fathom—she would talk about it only in high-flown, abstract metaphors.

She and Dint were both adventurers by profession.

“There aren’t many of us now,” Fen said, her short sturdy legs somehow devouring distance faster than Quentin’s long skinny ones. She never looked at him as she talked, her bulgy eyes continuously searching the horizon for potential threats. “Humans, I mean. Fillory is a wild place, and getting wilder. The forest is spreading, getting deeper and darker. Every summer we cut down the trees, burn them down sometimes, and then mark the borders of the woods. The next summer the borders are buried a hundred yards deep. The trees eat the farms, and the farmers come to live in the towns. But where will we live when all of Fillory is forest? When I was a girl, the Two Moons was in open country.

“The animals don’t care,” she added bitterly. “They like it this way.”

She lapsed into silence. Quentin thought it might be a good time to change the subject. He felt like a green-as-grass PFC from Dubuque, Iowa, trading banter with the hardened South Vietnamese regular attached to his unit.

“So, I don’t mean to sound crass,” he said, “but are we paying you for this? Or is somebody?”

“If we succeed, that will be payment enough.”

“But why would you want somebody from our world to be king anyway? Who you don’t even know? Why not somebody from Fillory?”

“Only your kind can sit the thrones of Castle Whitespire. It’s the Law. Always has been.”

“But that makes no sense. And this is speaking as the beneficiary of the Law here.”

Fen grimaced. Her protuberant eyes and full lips gave her face a fishy cast.

“Our people have been slaughtering and betraying one another for centuries, Quentin,” she said. “How can you be any worse? The rule of the Chatwins is the last peaceful time anyone can remember. You don’t know anyone here; you have no history, no scores to settle. You belong to no faction.” She stared fixedly at the road ahead of them, biting off her words. The bitterness in her tone was bottomless. “It makes perfect political sense. We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.”

They hiked through slow-rolling hills for the rest of the day, their thumbs hooked in the straps of their backpacks, sometimes along chalk roads, sometimes cutting across fields, crickets jumping up out of the long grass to get out of their way. The air was cool and clean.

It was an easy hike, a beginner’s hike. There was singing. Eliot pointed out a ridge that he said was “positively screaming” to have pinot grapes planted on it. At no point did they see a town or another traveler. The rare tree or fence post they passed cast a crisp shadow on the ground, straight and clear, like it was etched there. It made Quentin wonder how Fillory really worked. There was hardly any central government, so what would a king actually do? The entire political economy appeared to be frozen in the feudal Middle Ages, but there were elements of Victorian-level technology as well. Who had made that beautiful Victorian carriage? What craftsmen wove the innards of the clockwork mechanisms that were so ubiquitous in Fillory? Or were those things done by magic? Either way, they must keep Fillory in its pre-industrial, agrarian state on purpose, by choice. Like the Amish.