A distant bugle sounded—three polished sterling silver notes, muffled by the heavy silence of the woods. Eliot was sounding a recheat, a hunting call.
He was no Jollyby, but it was a perfectly credible recheat. He wasn’t much for drafting legislation, but Eliot was meticulous about royal etiquette, which included getting all the Fillorian hunting protocol exactly right. (Though he found any actual killing distasteful, and usually managed to avoid it.) His bugling was good enough for Dauntless. She trembled, electrified, waiting for permission to bolt. Quentin grinned at Janet, and she grinned back at him. He yelled like a cowboy and kicked and they were off.
It was insanely dangerous, like a full-on land-speeder chase, with ditches opening up in front of you with no warning, and low branches reaching down out of nowhere to try to clobber your head off (not literally of course, though you could never tell for sure with some of these older, more twisted trees). But fuck it, that’s what healing magic is for. Dauntless was a thoroughbred. They’d been starting and stopping and dicking around all morning, and she was dying to cut loose.
And how often did he get a chance to put his royal person at risk? When was the last time he even cast a spell? His life wasn’t exactly fraught with peril. They lay around on cushions all day and ate and drank their heads off all night. Lately whenever he sat down some unfamiliar interaction had been happening between his abdomen and his belt buckle. He must have gained fifteen pounds since he took the throne. No wonder kings looked so fat in pictures. One minute you’re Prince Valiant, the next you’re Henry VIII.
Janet broke trail, guided by more muffled bugle notes. The horses’ hooves made satisfyingly solid beats on the packed loam of the forest floor. Everything that was cloying about court life, all the safety and the relentless comfort, went away for a moment. Trunks and spinneys and ditches and old stone walls whipped and blurred past. They dodged in and out of hot sun and cool shade. Their speed froze the falling sprays of yellow leaves in midair. Quentin picked his moment, and when they hit open meadow he swung out wide to the right, and for a long minute they were side by side, coursing wildly along in parallel.
Then all at once Janet pulled up. Quickly as he could Quentin slowed Dauntless to a walk and brought her around, breathing hard. He hoped her horse hadn’t pulled up lame. It took him another minute to find his way back to her.
She was sitting still and straight in the saddle, squinting off into the midday gloom of the forest. No more bugle calls.
“What is it?”
“Thought I saw something,” she said.
Quentin squinted too. There was something. Shapes.
“Is that Eliot?”
“The hell are they doing?” Janet said.
Quentin dropped down out of the saddle, unslung his bow again and nocked another arrow. Janet led the horses while he walked in front. He could hear her charging up some minor defensive magic, a light ward-and-shield, just in case. He could feel the familiar staticky buzz of it.
“Shit,” he said under his breath.
He dropped the bow and ran toward them. Julia was down on one knee, her hand pressed against her chest, either gasping or sobbing, he couldn’t tell which. Eliot was bent over talking to her quietly. His clothof-gold jacket had been yanked half off his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he said, seeing Quentin’s white face. “That fucking civet threw her and bolted. I tried to hold it but I couldn’t. She’s okay, she just got the wind knocked out of her.”
“You’re all right.” That phrase again. Quentin rubbed Julia’s back while she took croaking breaths. “You’re okay. I always said you should get a regular horse. I never liked that thing.”
“Never liked you, either,” she managed.
“Look.” Eliot pointed off into the twilight. “That’s what made it bolt. The hare went in there.”
A few yards away a round clearing began, a still pool of grass hidden in the heart of the forest. The trees grew right up to its edge and then stopped, like somebody had cleared it on purpose, nipping out the border precisely. It could have been ruled with a compass. Quentin picked his way toward it. Lush, intensely emerald-green grass grew over lumpy black soil. In the center of the clearing stood a single enormous oak tree with a large round clock set in its trunk.
The clock-trees were the legacy of the Watcherwoman, the legendary—but quite real—time-traveling witch of Fillory. They were a magical folly, benign as far as anyone could tell, and picturesque in a surreal way. There was no reason to get rid of them, assuming you even could. If nothing else they kept perfect time.
But Quentin had never seen one like this. He had to lean back to see its crown. It must have been a hundred feet tall, and it was massively thick, at least fifteen yards around at its base. Its clock was stupendous. The face was taller than Quentin was. The trunk erupted out of the green grass and burst into a mass of wiggly branches, like a kraken sculpted in wood.
And it was moving. Its black, nearly leafless limbs writhed and thrashed against the gray sky. The tree seemed to be caught in the grip of a storm, but Quentin couldn’t feel or hear any wind. The day, the day he could perceive with his five senses, was calm. It was an invisible, intangible storm, a secret storm. In its agony the clock-tree had strangled its clock—the wood had clenched it so tightly that the bezel had finally bent, and the crystal had shattered. Brass clockwork spilled out through the clock’s busted face and down onto the grass.
“Jesus Christ,” Quentin said. “What a monster.”
“It’s the Big Ben of clock-trees,” Janet said behind him.
“I’ve never seen one like that,” Eliot said. “Do you think it was the first one she made?”
Whatever it was, it was a Fillorian wonder, a real one, wild and grand and strange. It was a long time since he’d seen one, or maybe it was just a long time since he’d noticed. He felt a twinge of something he hadn’t felt since Ember’s Tomb: fear, and something more. Awe. They were looking the mystery in the face. This was the raw stuff, the main line, the old, old magic.
They stood together, strung out along the edge of the meadow. The clock’s minute hand poked out at a right angle from the trunk like a broken finger. A yard from its base a little sapling sprouted where the gears had fallen, as if from an acorn, swaying back and forth in the silent gale. A silver pocket watch ticked away in a knot in its slender trunk. A typically cute Fillorian touch.
This was going to be good.
“I’ll go first.”
Quentin started forward, but Eliot put a hand on his arm.
“I wouldn’t.”
“I would. Why not?”
“Because clock-trees don’t just move like that. And I’ve never seen a broken one before. I didn’t think they could break. This isn’t a natural place. The hare must have led us here.”
“I know, right? It’s classic!”
Julia shook her head. She looked pale, and there was a dead leaf in her hair, but she was back on her feet.
“See how regular the clearing is,” she said. “It is a perfect circle. Or at least an ellipse. There is a powerful area-effect spell radiating out from the center. Or from the foci,” she added quietly, “in the case of an ellipse.”
“You go in there, there’s no telling where you’ll end up,” Eliot said.
“Of course there isn’t. That’s why I’m going.”
This, this was what he needed. This was the point—he’d been waiting for it without even knowing it. God, it had been so long. This was an adventure. He couldn’t believe the others would even hesitate. Behind him Dauntless whickered in the stillness.
It wasn’t a question of courage. It was like they’d forgotten who they were, and where they were, and why. Quentin retrieved his bow and took another arrow from his quiver. As an experiment, he set his stance, drew, and shot at the tree trunk. Before it reached its target the arrow slowed, like it was moving through water instead of air. They watched it float, tumbling a little end over end, backward, in slow motion. Finally it gave up the last of its momentum and just stopped, five feet off the ground.
Then it burst, soundlessly, into white sparks.
“Wow.” Quentin laughed. He couldn’t help it. “This place is enchanted as balls!”
He turned to the others.
“What do you think? This looks like an adventure to me. Remember adventures? Like in the books?”
“Yeah, remember them?” Janet said. She actually looked angry. “Remember Penny? We haven’t seen him around lately, have we? I don’t want to spend the rest of my queenhood cutting up your food for you.”
Remember Alice, she could just as well have said. He remembered Alice. She had died, but they’d lived, and wasn’t this what living was about? He bounced on his toes. They tingled and sweated in his boots, six inches from the sharp edge of the enchanted meadow.
He knew the others were right, this place practically reeked of weird magic. It was a trap, a coiled spring that was aching to spring shut on him and snap him up. And he wanted it to. He wanted to stick his finger in it and see what happened. Some story, some quest, started here, and he wanted to go on it. It felt fresh and clean and unsafe, nothing like the heavy warm lard of palace life. The protective plastic wrap had been peeled off.
“You’re really not coming?” he said.
Julia just watched him. Eliot shook his head.
“I’m going to play it safe. But I can try to cover you from here.”
He began industriously casting a minor reveal designed to suss out any obvious magical threats. Magic crackled and spat around his hands as he worked. Quentin drew his sword. The others made fun of him for carrying it, but he liked the way it felt in his hand. It made him feel like a hero. Or at least it made him look like a hero.
Julia didn’t think it was funny. Though she didn’t laugh at much of anything anymore. Anyway, he’d just drop it if magic was called for.
“What are you going to do?” Janet said, hands on her hips. “Seriously, what? Climb it?”
“When it’s time I’ll know what to do.” He rolled his shoulders.
“I do not like this, Quentin,” Julia said. “This place. This tree. If we attempt this adventure it will mean some great change of our fortunes.”
“Maybe a change would do us good.”
“Speak for yourself,” Janet said.
Eliot finished his spell and made a square out of his thumbs and forefingers. He closed one eye and squinted through it, panning around the clearing.
“I don’t see anything . . .”
A mournful bonging came from up in the branches. Near its crown the tree had sprouted a pair of enormous swaying bronze church bells. Why not? Eleven strokes: it still kept time, apparently, even though the works were broken. Then the silence filled back in, like water that had been momentarily displaced.
Everybody watched him. The clock-tree’s branches creaked in the soundless wind. He didn’t move. He thought about Julia’s warning: some great change of our fortunes. His fortunes were riding high right now, he had to admit. He had a goddamned castle, full of quiet courtyards and airy towers and golden Fillorian sunlight that poured like hot honey. Suddenly he wasn’t sure what he was wagering that against. He could die in there. Alice had died.
And he was a king now. Did he even have the right to go galloping off after every magic bunny that wagged its cottontail at him? That wasn’t his job anymore. All at once he felt selfish. The clock-tree was right there in front of him, heaving and thrashing with power and the promise of adventure. But his excitement was slipping away. It was becoming contaminated with doubt. Maybe they were right, his place was here. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
The urge to go into the meadow began to wear off, like a drug, leaving him abruptly sober. Who was he kidding? Being king wasn’t the beginning of a story, it was the end. He didn’t need a magic rabbit to tell him his future, he knew his future because it was already here. This was the happily ever after part. Close the book, put it down, walk away.
Quentin stepped back a pace and replaced his sword in its sheath in one smooth gesture. It was the first thing his fencing master had taught him: two weeks of sheathing and unsheathing before he’d even been allowed to cut the air. Now he was glad he’d done it. Nothing made you look like more of a dick than standing there trying to find the end of your scabbard with the tip of your sword.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. Julia.
“It is all right, Quentin,” she said. “This is not your adventure. Follow it no further.”
He wanted to lean his head down and rub his cheek back and forth against her hand like a cat.
“I know,” he said. He wasn’t going to go. “I get it.”
“You’re really not going?” Janet sounded almost disappointed. Probably she’d wanted to watch him blow up into glitter too.
“Really not.”
They were right. Let somebody else be the hero. He’d had his happy ending. Right then he couldn’t even have said what he was looking for in there. Nothing worth dying for, anyway.
“Come on, it’s almost lunchtime,” Eliot said. “Let’s find some less exciting meadow to eat in.”
“Sure,” Quentin said. “Cheers to that.”
There was champagne in one of the hampers, staying magically chilled, or something like champagne—they were still working on a Fillorian equivalent. And those hampers, with special leather loops for the bottles and the glasses—they were the kind of thing he remembered seeing in catalogs of expensive, useless things he couldn’t afford back in the real world. And now look! He had all the hampers he could ever want. It wasn’t champagne, but it was bubbly, and it made you drunk. And Quentin was going to get good and drunk over lunch.