“Barren, or barrens?” Janet said. “Can you have just one barren? Or multiple barrens? Barrenses?”
“Hush. This is it.”
They drew up a hundred yards from the ring. They were all clock-trees, every one. It was a strange and beautiful tableau. Eliot had never seen more than one full-grown clock-tree at a time; Quentin used to joke that there was probably only one clock-tree in Fillory, it just moved very fast when they weren’t looking. But here were twelve of them, and all different kinds: there was a gnarled oak; a slender birch with a rectangular dial; a needle-straight pine; a melted-looking, morbidly obese baobab.
The house in the middle was perfectly square, with a steeply pitched shingled roof. It was made of a pale stone that looked like it had been brought from a long way off.
“Very Hansel and Gretel,” Janet said.
“It’s not like it’s a candy house.”
“You know what I mean.”
He did actually, there was a fairy-tale feel to it all. Nobody answered when they knocked so they walked around to the back, where they found an old woman on her knees working in a vegetable garden. The resident witch, obviously. Her hair was gray but pulled back in a girlish ponytail. A small woman, she wore a long brown dress, coarse and practical. When she stood up to greet them her face was pleasant and peaceful, though there was something mischievous in it too.
“Greetings,” she said, “to the High King of Fillory. And to Queen Janet, of course.”
“Hi,” Eliot said. “Sorry to drop in like this.”
“Not at all. I knew you were coming.” She crouched down again and went back to what she was doing, which was fixing a little wicker cloche that stood over some sweet peas. “I figured you weren’t trying to be stealthy when you lit those trees on fire. Are you wondering how I know your names?”
“Because we’re famous?” Janet said. “Because we’re the king and queen of you?”
“I know your names,” the woman said, “because I’m a witch. I’m a bit famous too. Jane Chatwin. Or as I used to be known, the Watcherwoman.”
“Jane Chatwin,” Eliot said. He felt something very close to awe. “Well. We meet at last.”
She was right, she was famous: she was one of the first children to come to Fillory, decades ago, and she had haunted it for decades as the mysterious Watcherwoman. It was she who, with the help of a magic watch that controlled time, helped orchestrate their journey to Fillory in the first place, and their disastrous confrontation with the Beast, who had once been her brother, Martin Chatwin.
“Or are you still the Watcherwoman? What shall we call you?”
“Oh, Jane is fine. I haven’t been the Watcherwoman for years now.”
“Somehow I thought you’d be hotter,” Janet said.
“You’ve been talking to Quentin. Why don’t you come inside, we’ll have some tea.”
The cottage was well kept, neat as a pin and swept to within an inch of its life. The décor was a crude Fillorian approximation of the interwar English drawing rooms that Jane must have remembered from her childhood. Funny that for all the effort she’d put into escaping the real world, she’d wound up re-creating it here. She summoned a blue bloom of fire out of her stove and placed a teakettle on it. Hard to say where she got a natural gas hookup out here.
“One could boil the water with magic,” she said, “but it never tastes quite the same.”
While they waited they sat around a sunny-yellow wooden table with a water glass full of wildflowers on it. Now that they were here Eliot thought he’d wait a bit before he popped the big question.
“How long have you been living here?” he asked. “We didn’t even know you were still in Fillory.”
“Oh, I never left. I’ve been here for years, ever since that business with you and Quentin and Martin. Since I broke my watch.”
“I’ve always wondered about that,” Janet said. “Is it really gone?”
“It’s gone. There’s nothing left. I broke it and jumped on the pieces.”
“Darn.”
Eliot hadn’t even thought of that. It might’ve been handy, if they could’ve put it back together. Though he wasn’t sure what they would go back and do differently. Maybe they could just relive the same couple of years forever. Was that how it worked? It was confusing. And irrelevant now.
“Not that I don’t miss it,” Jane said. “As it turned out, it was all that was keeping me young. When I broke it I went from twenty-five to seventy-five overnight, or thereabouts—with all that back-and-forthing I’d lost track of how old I really was. Now I know.” She looked down at the backs of her hands, which were ropy and mottled. “I wish the dwarfs had warned me. They must have known.”
“I’m sorry,” Eliot said. He tasted his tea; it was bitter, and it tingled on his lips. “Fillory owes you a debt.”
“We all owe each other debts. I always thought you must hate me, for the way I used you.”
Janet shrugged.
“You did what you had to. It’s not like you got off easy—your brother’s dead. And without you we never would have found our way to Fillory at all. Call it a wash. Though I did wonder what happened to you. What the hell are you doing all the way out here?”
“I study with the dwarfs now. They’re teaching me clockwork.”
“I didn’t know there were any dwarfs out here,” Eliot said. “I thought they only lived in the mountains.”
“There are dwarfs everywhere. They’re like ants—for every one you see, there’s fifty more you don’t. These ones are underground.” She tapped her foot on the floor. “There’s tunnels all the way under the barrens. You’re sitting over one of the entrances.”
Huh. Janet had the wrong fairy tale, she should have said Snow White. He suppressed an urge to look under his chair. It made him a bit uncomfortable to think that Fillory might be riddled with dwarf-tunnels. They’d never done anybody any harm, yet, but Jesus. They were like termites.
Though it did explain who’d run a gas line into her cottage.
“There’s an entire city down there. I would show you but the dwarfs are touchy about their secrets. They’re terribly polite, but they’d find some reason not to let you in.”
“How come they let you in?” Janet said.
“I’ve paid my dues. Plus I did them a few favors.”
“Like what?”
“Like saving Fillory.”
There was a funny kind of competitiveness in the room, a rivalry: the first generation of Fillorian royalty versus the second. Jane Chatwin didn’t seem especially fazed by Janet’s bluntness. On the evidence it was hard to imagine Jane Chatwin being fazed by anything.
“We saved Fillory,” Janet said.
“Twice,” Eliot said.
“But who’s counting.”
“It’s a start,” Jane said.
When they’d finished their tea she showed them into the next room, which had a pleasant smell of very pure mineral oil and raw-cut metal. The walls were studded with hooks, and on each hook hung a pocket watch. There were brass watches, steel watches, silver and gold and platinum watches. They had white faces with black numbers and black faces with white numbers and clear crystal faces that showed the movements behind them. Some just told the time, some were crowded with tiny subdials that displayed the temperature and the season and the positions of celestial bodies. Some of them were as fat as softballs; some of them were the size of cuff links.
“Did you really make all these?” Janet said. “They’re awesome.”
You could tell she really thought they were. Eliot also got the impression Janet wanted one but wasn’t quite up to asking.
“Most of them,” Jane Chatwin said. “It keeps me out of trouble.”
“Oh my God,” Janet said. “You’re trying to rebuild the watch, aren’t you? The time-travel one! Aren’t you? You’re going to reverse-engineer it or whatever!”
Jane shook her head solemnly.
“Oh. Well, I wish you would.”
“If they don’t control time, what do they do?” Eliot asked.
“They tell time,” Jane said. “That’s enough.”
When the tour was over they went back outside and admired the garden again. Behind it, rusted and half drowned in grass, were the broken remains of what Eliot took to be the Watcherwoman’s famous ormolu clock-carriage, run down at last. He wanted to ask about it, but he sensed that from Jane’s point of view the visit was coming to an end, and he wasn’t leaving without what they came for.
“What are the dwarfs doing all the way out here anyway?” Janet asked. “Why build a bunch of tunnels in the middle of nowhere? Or under the middle of nowhere?”
“I’ll show you.” Jane took a spade that was leaning against the house and stuck it into the ground with a coarse chuff. When she turned over the shovelful there were glints of something in it. “Didn’t you ever wonder why it was called the Clock Barrens?”
“I guess I did.”
Jane bent down with a groan and picked a couple of the shiny things out of the soil, three or four of them, and held them out. In the palm of her hand lay two tiny, perfect gears, a brass wheel as thin as paper, and a delicate coiled mainspring.
“Clockwork,” she said. “It’s naturally occurring here. You should see the big stuff they mine, deep down. You could make Big Ben out of it. I’m not entirely sure that they didn’t.”
She flung them away into the grass. Eliot had to suppress an urge to go after them. This kind of thing, totally inexplicable random strangeness like this, made him want to save Fillory more than ever.
“Plus they like the dwarfiness of the trees,” she added.
“Jane,” Eliot said, “we came here for a reason. Ember says that Fillory is dying. The end of the world is coming.”
She nodded but didn’t answer at first. The setting sun caught the bezel of a clock-tree and flashed off it, orange light on silver.
“I suspected something like that,” she said. “Did you notice the clocks? They don’t agree anymore. They used to keep perfect time, but now look at them. Their hands are going everywhere. It’s like they’re panicking. Little idiots.”
She frowned at the fairy ring of clock-trees like they were disobedient children. He supposed they were all the children she had, or would have.
“What do you think it means?”
“Hard to say.” Lost in thought, for a moment she looked young and beautiful and intensely curious, the way she must have looked to Quentin when she first recruited him back in Brooklyn, dressed as a paramedic, all those years ago. “You know, these were the last clock-trees I ever made. I always thought I’d think of a better name for them.
“Their roots go very deep into Fillory. Not all the way through to the Far Side, I don’t think they’ve made it that far, but more than halfway. They’re like a nervous system, very quick to register systemic change. They’re useful that way.
“But they shouldn’t be able to disagree with each other. It shouldn’t be possible. They’re all one big tree below the surface—they reach out for each other and grow together at the roots. The dwarfs hack through them sometimes, but they grow right back. Except that this time they haven’t. Deep underground, something must be tearing them apart. Tearing Fillory apart.”
Jane walked over to one of the trees, the smallest one, knobby and broken-backed like an olive tree—it was bent over so far she’d had to prop it up with a board. She knocked twice on the crystal face of its clock; it was on a section of trunk that ran parallel to the ground, and its face looked up at the sky. It swung open, first the glass, then the dial, to reveal the works inside, gears and catchments turning and meshing silently.
She bit her lip.
“What should we do?” Eliot said.
“Damned if I know.” She slammed the clock face shut like it was the door of a washing machine. “Listen. Eliot.”
“Your Highness,” Janet prompted. She felt free to disrespect Eliot—very free in fact—but she didn’t like other people doing it. Jane ignored her.
“Look at me: this is what an ended story looks like. I was giving my life for this country, this world, before you were born. Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead. I had my own brother killed. I have no partner, no children. I’ve done my great deed, and it took everything I had. I won’t be dragged back into another adventure. I’ve made a separate peace.”
“Well, and we would rather not drag you,” Janet said. “But, see, apocalypse.”
“Has it occurred to you that you might just accept it?” She was a small woman, but she drew herself up, and there was some Edwardian dignity in her manner. “Has it crossed your minds that you don’t have to go off on a holy crusade every time things don’t go your way? You children and your adventures. Stories have ends! Why don’t you let Fillory die gracefully, in its own time and its own way? Maybe it wants to let go! I was never a real paramedic, but a phrase comes back to me: do not resuscitate. Let it go. Let Fillory die in peace.”
“No.”
“We’re not asking you to come with us,” Eliot said. “Just tell us what you know. There has to be something. Please.”
The High King of Fillory went down on one knee before the Watcherwoman.
“Please. Our stories haven’t ended yet. Yours may have, but ours haven’t. If it’s time, then it’s time, but I am not the last High King of Fillory. I don’t believe it. This land isn’t ready to die.”