“Is she—?” Alice didn’t finish the question.
“Hey!” Janet called. “Are you all right?”
“We should help her. Get her out of there.” Quentin tried to get closer, but he slipped on a frozen rock and went in up to his knee. He scrambled back onto the bank, his foot burning with cold. The woman didn’t move. “We need rope. Get the rope, there’s rope in one of the packs.”
The water didn’t even look deep enough to submerge her that far, and Quentin actually wondered, horribly, if they were looking at a body that had been severed at the waist and then dumped in the water. Rope, what was he thinking? He was a damn magician. He dropped the pack he was rifling through and began a simple kinetic spell to lift her out.
He felt the premonitory warmth of a developing spell in his fingertips, felt the weight and tug of the body in his mind. It felt good to do magic again, to know that he could still focus despite everything. As soon as he started he realized that the Circumstances were scrambled here—different stars, different seas, different everything. Thank God it was a simple spell. The grammar was a shambles—Alice corrected him in a clipped voice as he worked. Gradually the woman rose up dripping out of the water. She was whole, thank God, and naked—her body was slim, her breasts slight and girlish. Her nails and nipples were pale purple. She looked frozen, but she shuddered as the magic took hold. Her eyes focused and came awake. She frowned and raised one hand, somehow halting the spell before he was finished, with her toes still trailing in the freezing water.
“I am a naiad. I cannot leave the stream.” By her voice she could have been in junior high. Her eyes met Quentin’s.
“Your magic is clumsy,” she added.
It was electrifying. Quentin saw now that she wasn’t human, her fingers and toes were webbed. To his left he heard a shuffling noise. It was Penny. He was getting down on his knees on the snowy bank.
“We humbly apologize,” he said, head bowed. “We most humbly seek your pardon.”
“Jesus Christ!” Josh stage-whispered. “Dork!”
The hovering nymph shifted her attention. Stream water rilled down her bare skin. She tilted her head girlishly.
“You admire my beauty, human?” she asked Penny. “I am cold. Would you warm me with your burning skin?”
“Please,” Penny went on, blushing furiously. “If you have a quest to bestow upon us, we would gladly undertake it. We would gladly—”
Mercifully Janet cut him off.
“We’re visitors from Earth,” she said firmly. “Is there a city around here that you could direct us to? Maybe Castle Whitespire?”
“—we would gladly undertake to do your bidding,” Penny finished.
“Do you serve the rams?” Alice asked.
“I serve no false gods, human girl. Or goddesses. I serve the river, and the river serves me.”
“Are there other humans here?” Anaïs said. “Like us?”
“Like you?” The nymph smiled saucily, and the tip of a startling blue tongue appeared for an instant between her rather sharp-looking front teeth. “Oh, no. Not like you. None so cursed!”
At that moment Quentin felt his telekinetic spell cease to exist. She’d abolished it, though he didn’t catch how, without a word or a gesture. In the same instant the naiad flipped head down and dived, her pale periwinkle buttocks flashing in the air, and vanished into dark water that looked too shallow to contain her.
Her head poked up again a moment later.
“I fear for you here, human children. This is not your war.”
“We’re not children,” Janet said.
“What war?” Quentin called.
She smiled again. Between her lavender lips her teeth were pointy and interlocking like a fighting fish’s. She held something dripping in her webbed fist.
“A gift from the river. Use it when all hope is lost.”
She tossed it at them overhand. Quentin caught it one-handed; he was relieved out of all proportion to its actual importance that he didn’t bobble it. Thank God for his old juggling reflexes. When he looked up again, the nymph was gone. They were alone with the chattering brook.
Quentin was holding a small ivory horn chased with silver.
“Oh-
kay!
” Josh shouted. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “We are
definitely
not in Kansas anymore!”
The others gathered around to look at the horn. Quentin handed it to Eliot, who turned it over a few times, peered into one end, then the other.
“I don’t feel anything on it at all,” Eliot said. “Looks like something you’d buy in an airport gift shop.”
“You wouldn’t necessarily feel it,” Penny said proprietarily. He took it and stowed the horn in his pack.
“We should have asked her if this is Fillory,” Alice said quietly.
“Of course it’s Fillory,” Penny said.
“I’d like to be sure. And I’d like to know why we’re cursed.”
“And what’s this war?” Richard asked, his heavy brows knotted. “This raises a lot of questions.”
“And I didn’t like those teeth,” Alice added.
“Jesus,” Josh said. “Jesus! That was a naiad, people! We just saw a river nymph! How cool is that? How cool are we? Huh? Fuckin’ Fillory, people!”
He grabbed Quentin’s shoulders and shook him. He ran at Richard and made him bump chests.
“Can I just say that she was pretty hot?” said Janet.
“Shyeah! I’ll take that over a faun any day,” Josh said. Anaïs swatted him.
“Hey, that’s Penny’s girlfriend you’re talking about,” Janet said. “Show some respect.”
The tension faded, and for a minute they all chattered among themselves, giving one another shit and just geeking out on the sheer alien magic of it all. Was she corporeal? Did she become fluid once she entered the stream? How else could she submerge herself in such shallow water? And how had she canceled Quentin’s spell? What was her function in the magical ecosystem? And what about the horn? Alice was already paging through her worn Fillory paperbacks for references to it—didn’t Martin find a magic horn in the first book . . . ?
After a while it began to sink in that they’d been outside for forty-five minutes in deep winter wearing nothing but jeans and sweaters. Even Janet admitted it was time to head back to the City. Eliot corralled the stragglers and chatterers, and they all linked hands on the bank of the stream.
They stood in a circle, still a little giddy, and for a moment happy conspiratorial glances flew between them. There was some bad personal stuff going down, but that didn’t have to ruin everything, did it? They were doing something really important here. This was what every one of them had been waiting for, looking for, their whole lives—what they were meant to do! They’d found the magic door, the secret path through the hidden garden. They’d gotten ahold of something new, a real adventure, and it was only just beginning.
It was in that hush that they heard it for the first time—a dry, rhythmic ticking sound. It was almost lost in the twittering of the brook, but it grew louder and more distinct. One by one they stopped talking to listen. It was snowing more heavily now.
Out of context it was hard to place. Alice was the first to twig.
“It’s a clock,” she said. “That’s a clock ticking.”
She searched their faces impatiently.
“A clock,” she repeated, panicky now. “Watcherwoman, that’s the Watcherwoman!”
Penny fumbled hastily for the button. The
tick-tock
grew even louder, like a monstrous heart beating, right on top of them, but it was impossible to tell what direction it was coming from. And then it didn’t matter, because they were floating up through cold, clear water to safety.
This time it was all business. Back in the City they gathered up the cold-weather gear—all except for Janet, who lay limply on the ground doing yoga breathing—and then got back in the fountain, where they linked hands along the edge with what was becoming practiced ease. Janet found the strength to make a joke about Anita Ekberg in
La Dolce Vita
. They nodded once all around and slipped back in in unison.
They were in Fillory again, set down by the stream they’d just left, but the snow was gone. It was an early fall day now, the air full of lukewarm mist. The temperature felt like high sixties. It was like time-lapse photography: the branches of trees that had been bare five minutes ago now swarmed with turning leaves. One golden leaf floated tinily, impossibly high in the gray sky on some fluky updraft. The grass was littered with glassy puddles from a torrential autumn rain that must have ended only minutes earlier. They stood around in the mild air, hugging their bundles of parkas and woolly gloves and feeling foolish.
“Overdressed again,” Eliot said. He dropped his bundle in disgust. “Story of my life.”
No one could think of a reasonable alternative to just leaving the winter gear lying there on the wet grass. They could have gone back to the Neitherlands to store it, but then it might have been winter all over again when they got back. It seemed ridiculous, a bug in the system, but it didn’t matter, they were energized now. They filled their canteens from the stream.
A bridge spanned the creek fifty yards downstream, a gentle arch made of intricate, curly Fillorian ironwork. Quentin was sure it couldn’t have been there before, but Richard insisted they just hadn’t seen it through the snow-laden branches. Quentin looked at the flowing , burbling water. There was no sign of the nymph. How much time had passed since they were last here? he wondered. Seasons in Fillory could last a century. Or had they gone back in time? Was this the same adventure, or were they starting a new one?
On the far side of the bridge there was a wide, neat path through the forest, dusted with leaves and pine needles but definitely a path in good standing this time, an official path. They made good time, their spirits buoyed up by the perfect weather and a constant, low-level adrenaline drip. It was really on now. No more false starts. It wasn’t that Fillory could wipe out what happened last night—but maybe it could, for all he knew. Anything could happen here. A brown deer ambled out of the forest and walked ahead of them for a stretch, looking back over its shoulder with an air of genuinely exceptional intelligence, they all agreed, but if it could speak it declined to address them. They tried to follow it—maybe it was leading them somewhere? was it a messenger from Ember and Umber?—but it bounded away exactly the way an ordinary non-magical deer would have.
Josh practiced a spell that uncurled Anaïs’s hair from a distance. She kept looking around, annoyed but unable to pinpoint the source. Janet linked arms with Quentin and Eliot and made them do a “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” skipping dance. He couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think Eliot had had a drink all day. When was the last time that had happened?
The forest seemed to go on forever. Once in a while the sun appeared long enough to shoot some long, dusty beams down between the trees, then disappeared again.
“This is right,” Penny said, looking around. His eyes were glazed. He had entered a daze of ecstatic certainty. “This feels right to me. We’re supposed to be here.”
Janet rolled her eyes.
“What do you think, Q?” Penny said. “Doesn’t this feel right to you?”
Without knowing how it happened Quentin had Penny’s ratty T-shirt bunched in his fists. Penny weighed more than he’d counted on, but Quentin still managed to get him off balance and push him backward until his head clunked against the damp trunk of a pine tree.
“Never speak to me,” Quentin said evenly. “Do you understand? You do not address me directly, ever. You do not speak to me.”
“I don’t want to fight you,” Penny said. “That’s exactly what the Watcherwoman wants—”
“Did you not just hear what I said?” Quentin clunked Penny’s head against the tree again, hard this time. Somebody said his name. “You lardy little fucking nub? Did you not just fucking hear what I fucking said? Was I unclear in any way?”
He walked away without waiting for an answer. Fillory had better give him something to fight soon or he was going to lose it completely.
The novelty of actually, physically being in Fillory was wearing thin. In spite of everything a mood of general grumpiness was growing, a spoiled-picnic mood. Every time a bird perched overhead for more than a few seconds Josh would say, “Okay, this is the one,” or “I think it’s trying to tell us something,” or eventually, “Hey asshole, fly away from me, please. Okay, thanks.”
“At least the Watcherwoman hasn’t shown up,” Eliot said.
“If that even was the Watcherwoman before,” Josh said. “Supposedly they got her in the first book, right? So.”
“Yeah, I know.” Eliot had a handful of acorns and was chucking them at trees as they walked. “But something’s a little off here. I don’t understand why that nymph wasn’t boring us about Ember and Umber. They’re always so pushy about Them in the books.”
“If there’s a war between the rams and the Watcherwoman still going on, we’re going to want to get with Ember and Umber stat,” Alice said.
“Oh, yeah,” Janet said. She made quotey-fingers.
“ ‘Stat.’ ”
“If They want us on Their side, They will find us,” Penny intoned. “We need have no fear on that score.”
No one answered him. It was becoming increasingly clear that Penny’s encounter with the nymph had put him in an altered state. That was how he was dealing with Fillory. He’d undergone a conversion experience, flipped into full-on Renaissance Faire role-playing mode.
“Watch it,
watch it!
” Richard yelled. They registered the drumming thuds of hooves on soft earth almost too late. A carriage drawn by two horses tore past them at a full gallop, scattering them into the trees on either side of the road. The carriage was closed and dark; on its side it bore what looked like a coat of arms that had recently been painted over in black.
The coachman was bundled up in a black cloak. He—she? it was impossible to tell—signaled the horses to slow to a walk, then a stop, a hundred feet ahead of them down the road.