Though the scene they woke up to was a weird one. Julia stood there transformed, newly beautiful and powerful. She radiated an air of peace and triumph. Quentin wasn’t transformed, but something else was going on with him: he was down on his hands and knees for some reason, just staring at the wooden planks of the deck.
They had flown up and up and up, until gradually Quentin realized that the weightless feeling he had was of them descending instead, but not the way they had come: they dropped down through wet clinging clouds, and then he saw a little chip of wood below them in the ocean that turned out to be the
Muntjac,
the water around it glittering with dawn light. The goddess placed them on the deck, kissed Julia on the cheek, and vanished.
Quentin found that he couldn’t stand on his own; or he could, but he didn’t want to. He got down on all fours and put the key down in front of him. He looked at the good wooden planks the
Muntjac
was made of, really looked at them: after a night spent in hell everything was real and vivid and impossibly detailed. Colors looked superbright, even the grays and browns and blacks and the other undistinguished, intermediate noncolors that he ordinarily would have skipped over and ignored. He followed the lines and striations and tiger stripes of the wood, drawn and arranged with careless perfection, dark and light, order and chaos, all mingled together with little splinters along the edges of the boards that had been scuffed up and set at different angles, each one, by the passage of careless feet.
He absolutely understood how weird and high-seeming he looked, but he didn’t care. He felt like he could stare at the wood forever. Just this: the good, hardy, noble wood. He was never going to lose this, he thought. He was going to enjoy everything exactly as much, to the atom, as Benedict would have enjoyed it if he could have come back from the underworld. And Alice, and all the rest of them. It was all he could do for them. Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Maybe it was all a game, that got crumpled up and thrown away at the end, but while you were here it was real.
He pressed his forehead against the deck, hard, like a penitent pilgrim, and felt the beat of the waves transmitted through it from below like a pulse, and the heat of the sun. He smelled the sour salt smell of seawater, and he heard the hesitant footsteps of baffled people gathering around him, unsure of what to do. He heard all the other meaningless noises reality was always cheerfully making to itself, the squeaks and scrapes and thumps and drones, on and on, world without end.
He took a deep breath and sat up. Away from the warmth of the goddess’s body he shivered in the early morning ocean air. But even the cold felt good to him. This is life, he kept saying to himself. That was being dead, and this is being alive. That was death, this is life. I will never confuse them again.
Then people were hauling him to his feet and guiding him down below to his cabin. He was pretty sure he could have walked on his own, but he let them half carry him—they seemed to want to do it, and who was he to stand in their way? Then he was lying on his side on his bed. He was dead tired, but he didn’t want to close his eyes, not with everything that was going on all around him.
Some time later he felt someone sit down on the edge of the bed. Julia.
“Thank you, Julia,” he said after a while. His lips and tongue felt thick and clumsy. “You saved me. You saved everything. Thank you.”
“The goddess saved us.”
“I’m grateful to Her too.”
“I’ll tell Her.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel finished,” she said simply. “I feel like I am finally finished. I became who I was becoming.”
“Oh,” he said, and he had to laugh at how completely stupid he sounded. “I’m just glad you’re all right. Are you all right?”
“I was stuck in between for so long,” she said, instead of answering his question. “I couldn’t go back—I wanted to, for a long time. A long time. I wanted to go back to before what happened, when I was still human. But I couldn’t, and I couldn’t go forward either. Then somehow in the underworld I realized for the first time, really understood, that I was never going back. So I let go. And that’s when it happened.”
He felt tongue-tied. What did you say to a newly minted supernatural being? He wanted to just stare at her. He’d never been in such close quarters with a spirit before.
“You said you were a dryad.”
“I am. We’re the daughters of the goddess. That makes me a demi-goddess,” she added, by way of clarification. “I’m not literally her daughter of course. It’s more of a spiritual thing.”
Julia was still Julia, but the anger, the sense that she was violently at odds with the world over some crucial point, was gone. And she’d gotten her contractions back.
“So you take care of trees?”
“We take care of the trees, and the goddess takes care of us. There’s a tree that belongs to me, though I’m not sure where it is. I can feel it though. I’ll go there as soon as we’re done.” She laughed. It was good to know she still could. “I know so much about oak trees. I could bore you to death with it.
“Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.
“I feel so powerful, Quentin. It’s like there’s a sun inside me, or a star, that will burn forever.”
“Does that mean—are you immortal?”
“I don’t know.” And here a cloud passed over her face. “In a way, I’ve already died. Julia is dead, Quentin. I’m alive, and I may be alive forever, but the girl I was is dead.”
Sitting this close to Julia, he could see how inhuman she was now. Her flesh was like pale wood. The girl he’d known in high school, with her freckles and her oboe, was gone forever—she’d been destroyed and discarded in the making of this being. Julia would never be mortal again. The Julia sitting next to him on his bed was like a magnificent memorial to the girl she used to be.
At least this Julia was beyond all that. She was out of the game, the living and dying game, that the rest of them were trapped in. She was different. She wasn’t kludgy, rickety flesh and blood anymore. She was magic.
“There are things you should know,” she said. “I can tell you now, how this all began. Why I changed, and why the old gods came back.”
“Really?” Quentin propped himself up on one elbow. “You know?”
“I know,” she said. “I’m going to tell you everything.”
“I want to know.”
“It’s not a happy story.”
“I think I’m ready,” he said.
“I know you think that. But it’s sadder than you think.”
There were no more islands. They were past that now. The
Muntjac
slit its way through calm empty ocean, day after day, farther and farther east, the sun rising in front of them, roaring by overhead, and then extinguishing itself nightly in the water behind them. It was visibly larger in the mornings—they could almost hear the muffled rumble of its burning, like a distant blast furnace.
After a week the wind died, but the sky was clear, and in the afternoons and evenings Admiral Lacker raised the light-sail, and they ran along on the strength of a storm of sunshine. Quentin had been to the far west of Fillory, when he hunted the White Stag over the Western Sea, but the far east was a very different place. It had a polar quality. The sun was bright and hot here, but the air was getting colder. Even in the mornings, when the sun seemed dangerously close, like it was going to light the mast on fire, they could see their breath. The blue of the sky was deep and vivid. It felt like Quentin could fall up into it if he wasn’t careful.
The water was an icy aquamarine, and the
Muntjac
slipped through it almost frictionlessly, barely leaving a ripple. It was different stuff from ordinary seawater—silkier and less dense, with almost no surface tension, more like rubbing alcohol. Only one kind of fish lived in it, long silvery bullets that flashed and dashed through the water in diamond-shaped schools. They caught a few, but they didn’t look edible. They had huge eyes, and no mouths, and their flesh was bright white and smelled like ammonia.
The world around them began to feel thin. It was nothing Quentin could put his finger on, but the material of reality itself seemed to be getting sheer and fragile, stretched taut over its frame. You could feel the chill of the outer dark right through it. They all caught themselves moving slowly and gently, as if they might put a foot through the fabric of space-time by accident.
The sea was getting shallower too. You could see the bottom through the glassy water, and every morning when Quentin checked it, it was closer. This was an interesting phenomenon from an oceanographic point of view, but more to the point it was a problem. The
Muntjac
wasn’t a big ship, but it still drew twenty feet or so, and at this rate they were going to run aground long before they got to wherever the hell they were going.
“Maybe Fillory doesn’t have an End,” Quentin said one night, as they were tucking into their increasingly meager and unappetizing rations.
“What, like it’s infinite?” Josh said. “Or it’s a sphere, like Earth? God, I hope it’s not that. What if we end up back at Whitespire again? Man, I’ll be pissed if all we’ve done is find the Northwest Passage or whatever after all that.”
He licked his fingers, getting the extra salt from a salt biscuit. He was the only one who didn’t seem overawed by the situation.
“I meant more like a Möbius strip. What if it’s all one side, and no edge?”
“I think you mean a Klein bottle,” Poppy said. “A Möbius strip still has edges. Or one edge.”
“You mean a Klein bottle,” Julia confirmed.
Nothing like having a demi-goddess around to settle an argument. Julia didn’t eat anymore, but she still sat at dinner with them.
“Is it a Klein bottle? Do you know?”
Julia shook her head.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“So you’re not omniscient?” Eliot said. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. But you don’t know for sure?”
“No,” Julia said. “But I know this world has an End.”
They all woke up early the next morning when the
Muntjac
ran aground.
It wasn’t like they hit a wall. It was more gradual: a distant grinding sound, gentle at first, then louder, and then suddenly urgent, bone on bone, ending with everything on board, people included, slewing gently but firmly into the nearest forward wall as the ship came to a complete stop. And then, ringing silence.
They all came up on deck in their robes and pajamas to see what had happened.
The stillness was uncanny. All around them the sea was flat and glassy as a coat of fresh varnish. No wind blew. A fish jumped, maybe a quarter-mile away, and it sounded as loud as if it were right next to them. The sails hung slack. The slightest vibration sent circular ripples gliding away toward the horizon in all directions.
“Well,” Eliot said, “that tears it. What do we do now?”
It crossed Quentin’s mind, as it had presumably crossed that of the crew, that they had long ago passed the halfway point of their supplies. If they couldn’t go forward they would die on the way back. Or just die here, marooned in a desert of water.
“I will speak to the ship,” Julia said.
As she had even when she was still human, Julia meant what she said and said what she meant. She went down to the hold, to the heart of the ship, where the clockwork was, knelt down, and began to whisper, stopping now and then to listen. It wasn’t a long conversation. After four or five minutes, she patted the thick base of the
Muntjac
’s mast and stood up.
“It is settled.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what had been settled, or how, but it became apparent. They floated free of the bottom and began gliding forward again as if nothing had happened. Quentin only figured it out when he happened to look back at their wake. Enormous old planks and beams and other assorted carpentry were bobbing and turning in the water behind them. The
Muntjac
was making herself smaller, rebuilding herself from the keel up and discarding the extra wood as she went. She was giving up her body for them.
Quentin’s eyes smarted. He didn’t know what sort of being the
Muntjac
was, whether it had feelings or whether it was just some kind of mechanism, an artificial intelligence constructed out of rope and wood, but he felt a surge of gratitude and sadness. They’d asked so much of it already.
“Thank you, old girl,” he said, just in case it, or she, could hear him. He patted the worn railing. “You’ve saved us one more time.”
The shallower the ocean got the more the
Muntjac
had to alter herself. Quentin told the crew to bring up the sloth, who permitted herself to be slung from a yard, blinking and yawning in the open air. They emptied the cabins and the hold and piled up everything around them on deck.
Banging and groaning sounds came from below, deep in the ship’s guts. Quentin watched as first the
Muntjac
’s high, proud stern dropped into the water, then its bowsprit and its entire forecastle. At around four o’clock in the afternoon the mizzenmast toppled over into the water with a huge splash and was lost astern. The foremast went that evening. They slept on deck that night, shivering under blankets in the chill.
In the morning when they woke up the sea was shallow enough to wade in, and the
Muntjac
had become a flat single-masted raft. Its hull was completely gone; only the deck was left. The ocean mirrored the cloudless dawn light, making an infinite plain of smoky rose. When the sun boiled up over the horizon it was immense—you could see its corona curling around its bright, unbearable face.