It wasn’t like what he was doing was easy. The range of Humbledrum’s interests was suffocatingly narrow, and its depth of knowledge in those areas abysmally profound. Quentin still vaguely remembered being a goose, how laser-focused he’d been on air currents and freshwater greenery, and he realized now that all animals were probably, at heart, insufferable bores. As a hibernating mammal Humbledrum had far more than the layman’s familiarity with cave geology. When it came to honey, it was the subtlest and most sophisticated of gastronomes. Quentin learned quickly to steer the conversation away from chestnuts.
“So,” Quentin said, flatly interrupting a disquisition on the stinging habits of the docile Carniolan honeybee (Apis mellifera carnica) as contrasted with those of the slightly more excitable German honeybee (Apis mellifera mellifera, aka the German black bee). “Just to be clear, this is Fillory we’re in, right?”
The lecture ground to a halt. Under its fur Humbledrum’s massive brow furrowed, producing a vivid equivalent of human befuddlement.
“What is, Quentin?”
“This place we’re in, right now,” Quentin said. “It’s called Fillory.”
A long moment passed. Humbledrum’s ears twitched. It had impossibly cute, round, furry teddy-bear ears.
“Fillory,” it said slowly, cautiously. “That is a word I have heard.” The giant bear sounded like a kid at the blackboard hedging his bets against what might or might not be a trick question.
“And this is it? We’re in Fillory?”
“I think it . . . may once have been.”
“So what do you call it now?” Quentin coaxed.
“No. No. Wait.” Humbledrum held up a paw for silence, and Quentin felt a tiny pang of pity. The enormous hairy idiot really was trying to think. “Yes, it is. This is Fillory. Or Loria? Is this Loria?”
“It has to be Fillory,” Penny said, leaning over from the other booth. “Loria is the evil country. Across the eastern mountains. It’s not like there’s no difference. How can you not know where you live?”
The bear was still shaking its heavy muzzle.
“I think Fillory is somewhere else,” it said.
“But this definitely isn’t Loria,” Penny said.
“Look, who’s the talking bear here?” Quentin snapped. “Is it you? Are you the talking fucking bear? All right. So shut the fuck up.”
Outside the bar the sun had set, and a few other creatures trailed in. Three beavers sipped from a common dish at a round café table in the company of a fat, green, oddly alert-looking cricket. In one corner, by itself, a white goat lapped at what looked like pale yellow wine in a shallow bowl. A slender, shy-looking man with horns jutting through his blond hair sat at the bar. He wore round glasses, and the lower half of his body was covered in thick bushy hair. The whole scene had a dreamlike quality, like a Chagall painting come to life. In passing, Quentin noted how disturbing it was to see a man with goat’s legs. Those backward-bending knees reminded him of the crippled or the gravely deformed.
As the inn filled up the silent family rose as one and shuffled out of their booth, their expressions still somber. Where could they be going? Quentin wondered. He’d seen no sign of a village nearby. It was getting late, and he wondered if they had a long walk ahead of them. He pictured them trudging down the grooved dirt road in the moonlight, the little girl riding on the old man’s narrow shoulders and then later, when she was too tired even for that, drooling drowsily on his lapel. He felt chastened by their gravity. They made him feel like a bumptious tourist, rattling drunkenly around what was, he kept forgetting, their country, a real country with real people in it, not a storybook at all. Or was it? Should he run after them? What secrets were they taking with them? When she reached to open the door, Quentin saw that the woman with the elegant cheekbones had lost her right arm below the elbow.
After another round of schnapps and scintillating persiflage with Humbledrum, the little silver birch sapling emerged from wherever it had been concealing itself and threaded its way through the room toward them, padding on feet of matted roots which still had clods of dirt clinging to them.
“I am Farvel,” it said chirpily.
It looked even stranger in the full light of the bar. It was a literal stick figure. There were talking trees in the Fillory books, but Plover was never very precise in describing their appearance. Farvel spoke through what looked like a lateral cut in its bark, the kind of wedge that a single hatchet blow might have left. The remainder of its features were sketched out by a spray of thin branches covered in fluttering green leaves, which roughly limned the outlines of two eyes and a nose. He looked like a Green Man carving in a church, except that his flat little mouth gave him a comically sour expression.
“Please pardon my rudeness earlier, I was disconcerted. It is so rare to meet travelers from other lands.” It had brought a stool from the bar, and now it bent itself into a rough sitting position. It looked a little like a chair itself. “What brings you here, human boy?”
At last. Here we go. The next level.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Quentin began, casually throwing an arm over the back of the booth. Obviously, he was emerging as the designated point person, the team’s natural first-contact specialist. The bartender joined them as well, having been replaced at his station by a solemn, dignified chimp with a hangdog face. “Curiosity mostly, I guess. We found this button? That let us travel between worlds? And we were all sort of at loose ends on Earth anyway, so we just . . . came over here. See what we could see, that kind of a thing.”
Even half drunk, that sounded a lot lamer than he’d hoped. Even Janet was looking at him with concern. God, he hoped Alice wasn’t listening. He smiled weakly, trying to play it cool. He wished he hadn’t had quite so much beer on quite such an empty, weary stomach.
“Of course, of course,” Farvel said companionably. “And what have you seen so far?”
The bartender watched Quentin steadily. He sat back-to-front on a cane chair, his arms resting on the seat back.
“Well, we ran into a river nymph who gave us a horn. A magic horn, I think. And then this bug—this insect, in a carriage, I guess it was a praying mantis—it shot an arrow at me, that almost hit me.”
He knew he should probably be playing this closer to the vest, but which part should he be leaving out exactly? How did those calculations work? The rigors of keeping pace with Humbledrum had left him a shade less than razor-keen. But Farvel didn’t seem put off, he just nodded sympathetically. The chimp came out from behind the bar to place a lighted candle on their table, along with another round of pints, this time on the house.
Penny leaned over the back of the booth again.
“You guys don’t work for the Watcherwoman, do you? Or I mean, like, secretly? Not like you want to, but you have to?”
“Jesus, Penny.” Josh shook his head. “Smooth.”
“Oh my, oh dear,” Farvel said. A charged glance passed between him and the bartender. “Well, I suppose you could say . . . but no, one shouldn’t say. Oh dear, oh dear.”
Its composure thoroughly disrupted, the little treelet, the picture of arboreal distress, let its branches droop a little, and its green birch leaves fluttered anxiously.
“I like a touch of lavender in my honey,” Humbledrum observed, apropos of nothing. “You want the bees to nest near a good-size field of it. Downwind, if you can manage it. That’s the real trick of it. In a nutshell.”
Farvel wrapped one slender twig-hand around its glass and tipped some beer into its mouth. After a visible struggle with itself, the tree-spirit began again.
“Young human,” Farvel said. “What you suppose is true, in a sense. We do not love her, but we fear her. Everybody does, who knows what’s good for them.
“She has not yet succeeded in slowing the advance of time, not yet.” It glanced at the humid green twilight forest visible through the open doorway, as if to reassure itself that it was still there. “But she hungers to. We see her sometimes, from far away. She moves through the forest. She lives in the treetops. She has lost her wand, they say, but she will find it again soon, or fashion a new one.
“And then what? Can you imagine it, that eternal sunset? All will be confused. With no boundaries to separate them, the day animals and the night creatures will go to war with each other. The forest will die. The red sun will bleed out over the land until it is as white as the moon.”
“But I thought the Witch was dead,” Alice said. “I thought the Chatwins killed her.”
So she was listening. How could she sound so calm? Another glance passed between Farvel and the bartender.
“Well, that’s as may be. It was long ago, and we are far from the capital here. But the rams have not shown themselves here for many a year, and here in the country living and dead are not such simple things. Especially when witches come into it. And she has been seen!”
“The Watcherwoman has.” Quentin was trying to follow. This was it, they were getting into it, the sap was starting to flow.
“Oh yes! Humbledrum saw her. Slender she was, and veiled.”
“We heard her!” Penny said, getting into the spirit of it. “We heard a clock ticking in the woods!”
The bear just stared into his glass of schnapps with small, watery eyes.
“So the Watcherwoman,” Penny said eagerly. “Is this a problem we can, you know, help you with?”
All of a sudden Quentin felt supremely tired. The alcohol in his system, which had thus far been acting as a stimulant, without warning flipped to a chemical isomorph of itself and became a sedative instead. Where before he’d been burning it like rocket fuel, now it was gumming up the works. It was dragging him down. His brain began to shut down nonessential operations. Somewhere in his core the self-destruct countdown had begun.
He sat back in the booth and allowed his eyes to glaze over. This was the moment that should have galvanized him into action, the moment that all those years at Brakebills had been leading up to, but instead he was letting go, sinking down into dysphoria. Whatever, if Penny wanted to take this over, let it be his show from now on. He had Alice, why shouldn’t he have Fillory, too? The time for clever thinking had passed anyway. The tree was clearly taking their bait, or they were taking its bait, or both. Either way, here it was, the adventure had arrived.
There was a time when this had been his most passionate hope, when it would have ravished him with happiness. It was just so weird, he thought sadly. Why now, when it was actually happening, did the seductions of Fillory feel so crude and unwanted? Its groping hands so clumsy? He thought he’d left this feeling behind long ago in Brooklyn, or at least at Brakebills. How could it have followed him here, of all places? How far did he have to run? If Fillory failed him he would have nothing left! A wave of frustration and panic surged through him. He had to get rid of it, break the pattern! Or maybe this was different, maybe there really was something off here. Maybe the hollowness was in Fillory, not in him?
He slid warily out of the booth, rubbing up against Humbledrum’s huge scratchy thigh on his way out, and visited the restroom, a malodorous pit-style affair. He thought for a second that he might be sick into it, and that maybe that wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world, but nothing happened.
When he got back, Penny had taken his seat. He took Penny’s place in the other booth and rested his chin in his hands and his hands on the table. If only they had drugs. Getting high in Fillory, that would really be the ultimate. Eliot had moved to the bar and appeared to be chatting up the horned man.
“What this land needs,” Farvel was saying, leaning into the table conspiratorially and inviting the others to do likewise, “is kings and queens. The thrones in Castle Whitespire have been empty for too long, and they can only be filled by the sons and daughters of Earth. By your kind. But”—he cautioned them, stirringly—”only the stout of heart could hope to win those seats, you understand. Only the stoutest of heart.”
Farvel looked on the verge of squeezing out a viscous, sappy tear. Jesus, what a speech. Quentin could practically have recited his lines for him.
Humbledrum farted mournfully, three distinct notes.
“So what would this involve, exactly?” Josh asked, in a tone of studied skepticism. “Winning, as you say, those seats?”
What it involved, Farvel explained, was a visit to a perilous ruin called Ember’s Tomb. Somewhere within the tomb was a crown, a silver crown that had once been worn by the noble King Martin, centuries ago, when the Chatwins reigned. If they could recover the crown and bring it to Castle Whitespire, then they could occupy the thrones themselves—or four of them could anyway—and become kings and queens of Fillory and end the threat of the Watcherwoman forever. But it wouldn’t be easy.
“So do we absolutely need this crown?” Eliot asked. “Otherwise what? It won’t work?”
“You must wear the crown. There is no other way. But you will have help. There will be guides for you.”
“Ember’s Tomb?” Quentin roused himself for a final effort. “Waitamin nit. Does that mean Ember’s dead? And what about Umber?”
“Oh, no-no-no!” Farvel said hastily. “It is just a name. A traditional name, it means nothing. It has just been so long since Ember was seen in these parts.”
“Ember is the eagle?” Humbledrum rumbled.
“The ram.” The uniformed bartender corrected him, speaking for the first time. “One of them. Widewings was the eagle. He was a false king.”
“How can you not know who Ember is?” Penny asked the bear disgustedly.