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. “
“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.
