“Down the road,” Quentin repeated.
Right. Of course. The golden key is down the road. Where else would it be? He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.
“Aye, we know it.” He jerked his head. “Down t’road.”
“All right. Down the road it is. Well, thank you very much.”
He wondered if it was ever warm and sunny here, or if they lived in the permanent equivalent of a New England November. Did they know they were three days’ sail from a tropical zone?
The travelers set off down the road. They would have looked nobler if they’d been riding horses instead of wallowing through the mud like a bunch of peasants, but the Muntjac wasn’t set up for horses. Maybe they could hire local horses. Shaggy, sturdy ponies resigned to always being cold and damp, and to never being sleek and beautiful. He missed Dauntless.
The street changed to cobbles, rounded cubes that turned slick and ankle-breaking in the drizzle. It wasn’t much of a setting for a quest or an adventure or even an errand. Maybe Bingle was right, maybe they were just minor characters in his drama.
Benedict wasn’t even taking notes the way he usually did.
“I’ll just remember it,” he said.
There you had it: an island not even Benedict would bother to map.
It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t a long road. The last building on it was a stone building like a church, though it wasn’t a church, just a boxy structure two stories high, built up out of flat gray local stones, unmortared. It had a blank façade that looked unfinished, or maybe whatever ornamentation had once been there had been stripped away.
Quentin felt like the little boy at the beginning of The Lorax, at the mysterious tower of the dismal Once-ler. They should have been facing down bellowed challenges from black knights bearing the vergescu, or solving thorny theological dilemmas posed by holy hermits. Or at the very least resisting the diabolical temptations of ravishing succubi. Not fighting off seasonal affective disorder.
If he’d had to put his finger on it he would have said that more than anything else the rhythm of it was wrong. It was too soon. They shouldn’t have found it this quick, nor should they obtain it without a fight.
But fuck it. Maybe he was just lucky. Maybe it was destiny. In spite of everything, he felt a rising excitement. This was it. The doors were enormous and made of oak, but there was a smaller, man-sized door set in one of them, presumably for days when you couldn’t be bothered to fling open an entire grand double-height oaken portal. The doorway was flanked by empty niches for statuary, past or future but not present.
They straggled to a stop in front of it, a brave company of knights assembled before the Chapel Perilous. Which of them would brave what lay within? Quentin’s nose was running. His hair was wet from the rain; he did have a hat, but he felt an obstinate urge to face whatever suffering was available for him to face, and that was a cold drizzle. He and Julia sniffled at the same time.
In the end they all braved the chapel, if only to get in out of the wet. It was no warmer inside than outside. The atmosphere was of an old country church from which the verger had stepped away for a few minutes. The air smelled like stone dust. Diffuse gray light misted in through a few narrow, high windows. A collection of rusty gardening implements resided in one corner: a hoe, a shovel, a rake.
In the center of the room stood a stone table, and on the stone table lay a worn red velvet pillow, and on the pillow lay a golden key, with three teeth.
Next to it was a yellowed slip of paper on which was neatly printed:
GOLDEN KEY
The key wasn’t bright, and it wasn’t tarnished. It had the deep matte patina of an authentically old thing. Its dignity was undisturbed by its humble surroundings—the stillness in the room seemed to come from it. Probably the rubes around here just didn’t know enough to take it seriously. Like some European village with a cannon as a war monument, and no one realizes it still has a live round in the chamber, until one day . . .
Bingle picked up the key.
“Jesus!” Quentin said. “Careful.”
The guy must have a death wish. Bingle turned it over in his hands, examining both sides. Nothing happened.
Quentin realized what was going on. He’d been given a do-over. He was back on the edge of that meadow in the forest, but this time he was going in. There was more to life than being fat and safe and warm in a clockwork luxury resort. Or maybe there wasn’t more, but he was going to find out. And how did you find out? You had an adventure. That’s how. You picked up a golden key.
“Let me see it,” he said.
Satisfied that it wasn’t lethal, or at least not instantly, Bingle passed it to Quentin. It didn’t buzz, and it didn’t glow. It didn’t come alive in his hand. It felt cool and heavy, but not cooler and heavier than he imagined a golden key should feel.
“Quentin,” Julia said. “There is old magic on that key. A lot of it. I can feel it.”
“Good.”
He grinned at her. He felt elated.
“You do not have to do this.”
“I know. But I want to do this.”
“Quentin.”
“What?”
Julia offered him her hand. God bless Julia. Whatever else she had lost she still had a hell of a lot of human kindness inside her. He took her hand, and with the other he felt around in the air with the key. Maybe if he—? Yes. He felt it click against something hard, something that wasn’t there.
He lost it for a second—he waved the key around but couldn’t find it. And then he had it again, the clack of metal on metal. He stopped with the key resting on it, then pushed and it slipped in, ratcheting past an invisible tumbler and fitting firmly. Experimentally he let go of it. It stayed there: a golden key suspended in midair, parallel to the ground.
“Yes,” he whispered. “This.”
He took a breath, tremblier than he wanted it to be. Bingle did an odd thing, which was to place the point of his sword on the ground and drop to one knee. Quentin gripped the key again and turned it clockwise. Running on instinct, he felt for a doorknob and found it—he could picture it in his mind’s eye, cold white porcelain. He turned it and pulled and an immense cracking, tearing sound filled the room—not a terrible sound, a satisfying sound, the breaking of a seal that had been intact for centuries, waiting to be breached. Julia’s soft hand tightened on his. Air rushed from the room behind him out through the crack he was opening, and hot light flooded over him.
He was opening a door in the air, tall enough for him to walk through without stooping. It was bright in there, and there was warmth, and sunlight, and green. This was it. Already the gray stone of the After Island looked insubstantial. This was what he’d been missing—call it adventure or whatever you wanted to. He wondered if he was going somewhere in Fillory or somewhere else entirely.
He stepped through onto grass, leading Julia through after him. There was light all around them. He blinked. His eyes began to adjust.
“Wait,” he said. “This can’t be it.”
He lunged back for the doorway, but it was already gone. There was nothing to lunge through, no way back, just empty air. He lost his balance and caught himself with his hands, skinning both his palms on the warm concrete sidewalk in front of his parents’ house in Chesterton, Massachusetts.
BOOK II
CHAPTER 9
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. It’s disappointing.” He sat on the curb, elbows on his knees, staring up at the power lines, and attempted to reason with himself. His scraped hands smarted and throbbed. It felt like late summer. For some reason it was the power lines more than anything else that looked weird, after two years in Fillory.
That and the cars. They looked wrong, like animals. Angry alien animals. Julia was sitting on the grass, hugging her knees and rocking slightly. She looked worse off than he did.
Quentin’s heart was sinking out of his chest and out of his body and down into the dirt of this goddamned useless planet. I was a king. I had a ship. I had a beautiful ship, my own ship!
It was like somebody was trying to send him a message. If so he got it. Message received.
“I get it,” he said out loud. “I hear you. I get it already.”
I am a king, he thought. Even in the real world I’m still a king. Nothing can take that away.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re going to make this all right.”
It was an experiment in saying what he wanted to be true, to see if that would make it any truer.
Julia was on all fours now. She heaved up something thin and bitter onto the grass. He went over and knelt beside her.
“You’re going to be all right,” he said.
“I don’t feel well.”
“We’re going to fix this. You’ll be all right.”
“Stop saying that.” She coughed, then spat on the lawn. “You do not understand. I cannot be here.” She paused to rummage for words. “I should not. I have to go.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I have to leave!”
Did the key think he wanted to go home? This wasn’t his home. Quentin looked up at the house. There were no signs of life. He was relieved; he wasn’t in the mood to talk to his parents right now. It was a fancy suburb, with big houses that could even afford to have some lawn around them.
A neighbor was peering out at them from her living room window. “Hi!” He waved. “How’s it going?”
The face disappeared. Its owner drew the curtain.
“Come on,” he said to Julia. He breathed out decisively. Let’s be brave. “Let’s go inside, get a shower. Maybe change clothes.”
They were in full Fillorian drag. Not inconspicuous. She didn’t answer.
He was fighting off panic. Jesus, it had taken him twenty-two years to get to Fillory the first time. How was he going to do it again now? He turned back to Julia, but she wasn’t there. She was up and walking unsteadily down the wide, empty suburban road away from him. She looked tiny in the middle of all that asphalt.
That was another weird thing. Asphalt really wasn’t like anything in nature.
“Hey. Come on.” He stood up and trotted after her. “There’s probably mini-Dove bars in the freezer.”
“I cannot stay here.”
“I can’t either. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“I am going back.”
“How?”
She didn’t answer. He caught up, and they walked together in the fading light. It was quiet. Multicolored light from giant televisions flickered in the windows. When had TVs gotten that big?
“I only knew one way to get to Fillory, and that was the magic button. And Josh had that, last we saw. Maybe we can find him. Or maybe Ember could summon us back. Other than that I think we’re kind of screwed.”
Julia was sweating. Her walk had a slight stagger to it. Whatever was wrong with her, this wasn’t making it any better. He made a decision.
“We’ll go to Brakebills,” he said. “Somebody there will help us.”
She didn’t react.
“I know it’s a long shot—”
“I do not want to go to Brakebills.”
“I know,” Quentin said. “I don’t especially want to go there either. But it’s safe, they’ll feed us, and somebody there will have a line on some way to get us back.”
Privately he doubted any of the faculty had a clue about getting around the multiverse, but they might know how to find Josh. Or Lovelady, the junk dealer who’d found the button in the first place.
Julia stared fixedly ahead. For a minute Quentin didn’t think she was going to answer.
“I do not want to go,” she said.
But she stopped walking. A sparkly blue muscle car sat parked by itself at the curb, a snouty, low-slung vehicle with a turbo hood in front and a rear spoiler. Some rich douche bag’s sixteenth birthday present. Julia looked around for a minute, then stepped onto the lawn, where a landscaper had laid down a row of head-sized boulders. She picked one up like a medicine ball, hefting it surprisingly easily in her stick-thin arms, and half threw, half dropped it through the muscle car’s driver-side window.
Quentin didn’t even have time to offer advice or an opinion—something along the lines of, don’t throw the rock through the car window. It had already happened.
It took two tries to get it all the way through—the safety glass starred and stretched before it gave way. The alarm was deafening in the suburban stillness, but incredibly no lights came on in the house. Julia reached through the hole and deftly popped the door open, then heaved the rock back out onto the asphalt and slid herself into the black vinyl bucket seat.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.
She picked up a shard of glass and nicked the pad of her thumb with it. Whispering something under her breath, she jammed her bloody thumb-tip up against the ignition.
The alarm stopped. The car rumbled into life, and the radio came on: Van Halen, “Poundcake.” She lifted up her ass and brushed the rest of the glass off the seat underneath her.
“Get in,” she said.
Sometimes you just have to do things. Quentin walked around to the other side—for form’s sake he really should have slid across the hood—and she peeled out before he even had the door closed. They drove away from his parents’ block at speed. He couldn’t believe nobody had called the police, but he didn’t hear any sirens; it was either really good magic or very dumb luck. She didn’t turn the Van Halen off, or even down. The gray street poured along underneath them. It beat a carriage, anyway.