“Every age finds a use for this place,” Fen was saying. “A mine, a fortress, a treasure house, a prison, a tomb. Some dug it deeper. Others walled up the parts they didn’t need or wished to forget. It is one of the Deep Ruins.”
“So you’ve been here before?” Anaïs asked. “I mean, in there?”
Fen shook her head. “Not this one. A hundred places like it.”
“Except that the crown is in this one. And how did it get there exactly?”
Quentin had wondered that same thing. If the crown really had belonged to Martin, maybe that was where he went when he disappeared. Maybe he died down there.
“The crown is there,” Dint snapped. “We will go in and get it. Enough questions.”
He swirled his cape impatiently.
Alice was standing very near Quentin. She looked small and still and cold.
“Quentin, I don’t want to go in there,” she said softly, without looking at him.
Over the past week Quentin had devoted literally hours to fantasizing about what he would say to Alice if she ever spoke to him again. But all his carefully planned speeches fell away at the sound of her voice. She wasn’t going to get a speech. It was so much easier to be angry. Being angry made him feel strong, even though—and this contradiction did nothing to diminish his anger—he was angry only because his position was so weak.
“So go home,” was all he said.
That wasn’t right either. But it was too late, because somebody was running toward them.
The weird thing was that the entrance to the tomb was still a hundred yards off, and Quentin could see the creatures coming the whole way, two of them, running flat out across the wet grass for at least a minute, like they were out doing early-morning wind sprints. It was almost funny. They weren’t human, and they didn’t seem to belong to the same species as each other either, but they were both cute. One was something like a giant hare, squat and covered in gray-brown fur, maybe four feet tall and about that wide. It hopped toward them determinedly, its long ears flattened back. The other one was more like a ferret—or maybe a meerkat? A weasel? Quentin tried to think what the closest equivalent furry animal would be. Whatever it was it ran upright and it was tall, seven feet at least, most of it long silky torso. Its face was chinless, with prominent front teeth.
This odd couple came charging at them across the green grass silently, no battle cry, no sound track, in the still early-morning air. At first it looked like they might be running to greet them, but Bunny had short, stubby swords in both its front paws, held out steady in front of him as he ran, and Ferret was hefting a quarterstaff.
They closed to within fifty yards. The Brakebills crowd shrank back involuntarily, as if the newcomers exerted an invisible force field. This was it: they had come to the end of what was conceivable. Something was about to give. It had to. Dint and Fen didn’t move. Quentin realized there wasn’t going to be any parley or rock-paper-scissors. This was going to be about stabbing. He had thought he was ready, but he wasn’t. Somebody had to stop it. The girls were hanging on to each other as if in a howling wind, even Alice and Janet.
Oh my God, Quentin thought, this is really happening. This is really happening.
Ferret arrived first. It stutter-stepped to a jittery stop, breathing hard. Its huge eyes blinked as it smoothly spun its staff two-handed in a figure-eight pattern. It whickered in the still air.
“Hup!” yelled Fen.
“Ha!” Dint answered.
They set themselves side by side, as if they were getting ready to lift something heavy. Then Dint stepped back, ceding first blood.
“Jesus,” Quentin heard himself say. “Jesus jesus jesus.” He wasn’t ready for this. This wasn’t magic. This was the opposite of magic. The world was ripping open.
Ferret feinted once and snapped a nasty jab at Fen’s face. The two ends of the quarterstaff were now glowing an ominous enchanted orange, like the tip of a cigarette. Somebody shrieked in the silence.
Even as one end of the staff whipped forward, Fen turned away from it, bowing forward at the waist, ducking the jab and turning seamlessly, almost lazily, into a graceful spinning roundhouse kick. She seemed to be moving slowly, but her foot clocked Ferret’s weak chin hard enough to spin its head around a quarter turn.
Ferret grinned, with blood in its big teeth, but it had more bad news coming. Fen was still spinning, and her next kick connected low and hard with the side of its knee. The knee bent in, sideways, wrongly. Ferret staggered and aimed the same jab at Fen’s face, whereupon Fen caught the flashing quarterstaff barehanded—the smack of it hitting her open palm was like a rifle shot. She dropped her slick martial arts elegance and tussled savagely, messily for control.
