They didn’t slow to a walk until they were passing under the portcullis and through the thick outer wall of Castle Whitespire; it was the first time he and Alice had been there together. They stepped out into the courtyard. It had been the longest of long shots—a dot in the shark, Eliot would have said—that Ember would be there waiting for them.
And He wasn’t. But Umber was.
Quentin had never seen Him before, and until a week ago he’d thought Umber was dead, but it couldn’t have been anybody else. He stood quite still, like a tame ram in a meadow, His head down as He cropped a stray weed pushing up between two paving stones, in the twilight of the dying world. He straightened up.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” He said, between chews. “For ages. I made a bet with myself that you’d come, and now look. I’ve won.”
Quentin hadn’t planned for this, but he supposed one was as good as the other, for his purposes. But Umber seemed to know what Quentin was thinking.
“Well, come on. It’s no good with just Me. You’re going to need Us both.”
Umber tossed His horned head at them, come-hither. Under any other circumstances Quentin would have hesitated, but on this day of all days His meaning was unmistakable. Quentin jogged over to Him and, as he’d imagined doing ten thousand times before, at least, he threw an arm and a leg over Umber’s broad soft back and heaved himself up onto it. Alice climbed on behind him and put her arms around his waist. The instant Quentin had his fingers wound into Umber’s cloudy gray wool the god surged forward under them and they were off.
Quentin had always wanted to do this—they all had—and now he knew why. After a few trotting steps to get up to speed Umber bunched all four legs together under Himself and leapt the castle wall, like the cow jumping over the moon. The rush and acceleration were beyond anything. He picked up speed as He bounded through the crumbled city and out of it, touching the ground ever more lightly and at wider intervals, trees and fields and hills and walls and rivers whipping past.
There was a strange fateful joy to it. The scene was catastrophic, his mission could not have been more dire, but Quentin Coldwater had come back to Fillory with Alice, and together they were riding a god.
“Hi ho!” Umber said. And Quentin answered Him:
“Hi ho!”
He still remembered the childish love he’d felt for the two rams, back before he’d known Fillory was real. It hadn’t lasted: he’d met Ember in person, and He wasn’t anything like as strong or as kind or as wise as Plover had made Him out to be. Then when Ember had thrown Quentin out of Fillory his disillusionment had tipped over into anger. But since then he’d learned a few things about acceptance, and his anger had cooled, even if the love hadn’t quite returned. Now he saw the rams as They were: strange, inhuman, somewhat ridiculous beings, as limited by their godhead as They were empowered by it. But They were divine, and There was a majesty to Them that was undeniable.
Even as Quentin felt Umber’s strength beneath him, Fillory was losing the last of its own strength. Its glorious greenery was withering away before their eyes. They passed men and animals bunched together in shivering packs, no longer even fighting, like the remnants of a party that had got out of control and been shut down and broken up by the police, leaving the celebrants suddenly sober and chagrined. Acres of trees lay knocked down and uprooted. Overhead the stars were beginning to fall, one by one, some in rapid arcs like meteors, others more slowly and gracefully, twirling and sparking and pinwheeling down.
Alice hugged him tight. A series of deep booming cracks sounded, like distant artillery fire, signaling that the land itself had begun to disintegrate. It was losing cohesion, losing even the strength to hold on to itself. Great crevasses opened in Fillory’s surface, and widened into canyons, and in the depths of the deepest of them Quentin could see all the way down to the pale struggling dead of the Underworld, writhing in a mass like larvae inside a rotten log. Now Umber’s great gallop found them hurdling enormous gaps in the land, which grew wider and wider until in places nothing connected the component shards of Fillory at all, and Quentin began to see stars between them. They were leaping from island to island in the dark of space, flying as much as jumping, soaring through the void.
He saw where they were heading. A single fragment of land lay dead ahead of them, an uprooted divot of enchanted turf with just a field and a pond and a tree, orphaned in the disaster, no longer linked to anything at all. On it, alone, stood Ember.
Umber touched down lightly and trotted away His excess speed. Quentin and Alice slid off. Quentin was just thankful that Alice was with him. She believed in him, or she once had anyway. That would make it easier to believe in himself during what was coming next.
Ember stood staring down at the pond, a round pool bristling with bullrushes around its edge, eyes locked with His reflection. His face was unreadable as ever, but there was something lonely about Him, something despairing and abandoned, as His world came apart around Him. For the first time Quentin felt a little sorry for the old ram.
“Ember,” he said.
No answer.
“Ember, You know what You have to do. I think You’ve always known, since the beginning.”
Quentin knew. He hadn’t put it all together till those last moments in the library, but it had been coming to him, slowly, for much longer than that. He’d been thinking about parents and children and power and death. After his father died Quentin had gained a new kind of strength, and Mayakovsky, with his own kind of sacrifice, had given him a new strength too. That’s what parents did for their children. Then Alice told him the story of how Fillory began. It began with death, the death of a god.
It was the oldest story there was, the deepest of all the deeper magicks. Fillory didn’t have to die, it could be renewed and live again, but there was a price, and the price was holy blood. It was the same in all mythologies: for a dying land to be reborn, its god must die for it. There was power in that divine paradox, the death of an immortal, enough power to restart the stopped heart of a world.
“It’s time, Ember. The bird isn’t coming. The spell is gone. This is the only way left.”
The old ram blinked. He could hear Quentin.
“I’m not pretending it’s easy, but You’ll die anyway when Fillory dies. You know this. There must be only a few minutes left. Give Your own life now, before it’s too late. While it still matters.”
The truly sad thing was that Ember actually wanted to do it. Quentin saw that too: He had come here intending to drown Himself, the way the god before Him had, but He couldn’t quite manage it. He was brave enough to want to, but not brave enough to do it. He was trying to find the courage, longing for the courage to come to Him, but it wouldn’t, and while He waited for it, ashamed and alone and terrified, the whole cosmos was coming crashing down around Him.
Quentin wondered if he would have been brave enough. He would never know. But if Ember couldn’t sacrifice himself, Quentin would have to do it for Him.
He took a step forward. He was a man proposing to kill a god. It was an impossibility, a contradiction in terms, but if it meant saving Fillory then there had to be a way. He held on to that knowledge tightly. If magic was for anything it was for this. He’d faced up to his dead father and Mayakovsky. He’d faced losing Fillory and losing Brakebills. He’d even faced Alice. He was circling back to all the things he’d fought and lost over the years, and one by one he was putting them to rest. Now it was time for him to face Ember.
He took another step and now Ember turned on him. The god’s eyes were wild, blank with panic. His nostrils flared. Ember was out of His mind with fear. Quentin felt a surge of pity and even of love for the ridiculous old beast, but it didn’t change what he had to do.
He’d hoped inspiration would come to him, but it didn’t. It came to Alice instead.
“Your turn this time,” she said, and then she did something strange: she bit the back of her left hand, scraping skin off the knuckles, and then touched Quentin’s cheek with it.
It wasn’t a spell Quentin knew, or would ever know—the technicalities were too much for him, and the raw power too, probably, but he’d seen Alice do it once before. As she chanted the words his arms burst with masses of muscle, and his skin thickened and toughened at the same time. He felt the special force that belonged to Alice’s magic alone transforming him. His legs exploded with strength, he was rising upward on two pillars, and his neck lengthened and the base of his spine flowed out into a long sinuous tail. His head was stretching forward into a snout, and his flat grinding omnivore’s teeth grew and sharpened until they interlocked with each other, the way teeth were always meant to do.
His nails sprouted into claws. His vertebrae threw up a ridge of spines—it was like his back being scratched only even better. He was made of power, and there was a furnace in his belly. He opened his mouth and roared a word, and the word was made of fire. He was a dragon, and he was ready. He was going to blast the immortal living shit out of Ember.
The fire bent and flowed around Ember’s horns, but it scorched Him too—Quentin smelled the burning wool. Maybe as His world crumbled the god was losing some of His imperviousness. Well, bad luck. Quentin bounded forward, and Ember bolted, but it was all slow motion to Quentin’s draconian reflexes. He pinned Ember to the ground with one massive taloned forefoot—none of your puny T. rex arms for this dragon—and tried to get his jaws around Ember’s thick muscled neck while the god writhed frantically in his grip. Quentin’s scales, he couldn’t help but notice in passing, were the shiny metallic blue of a bitchin’ muscle car.
He was a dragon, not a god, but he was huge and tough and strong, and this body was made for epic scrapping. Whereas Ember, for whatever divine reason, was a god with the body of an animal that occasionally took part in ritualized male dominance contests but spent most of its time grazing. Ember rolled and flipped Quentin over Him, Quentin lashing his tail crazily, hoping Alice was well clear. Then he was on top again.
“Enough!” Ember roared, and Quentin was blown back into the air.
Spreading his wings—his wings!—like an angry angel Quentin checked his flight and power-dived back at the god, who dodged before Quentin could crush Him. They circled for a minute, pacing, the pond spouting steam whenever Quentin’s overheated tail touched it, then he darted forward again and had Ember in his teeth. Lightning struck his back, once and then three, four, five times, jangling his nerves and blowing off half a dozen scales, and probably crippling his delicate bat-wings, but pain was something a dragon noted only in passing and then dismissed with contempt.
Any love or pity he might have felt for Ember was a human thing. There was no room in his dragon-heart for any such feelings. This was a job for a monster, and that’s what he was now. Die, he thought. Die, you selfish bastard, you miserable coward, you old goat. Die and give us life.
Now he had a proper grip, and he held on and ground Ember between his molars like a cheap cigar, and the air bleated out of Him. He held on for Alice, for Eliot, for Julia, for Benedict, for his useless hopeless father, for everyone he’d ever loved or disappointed or betrayed. He held on out of pride and anger and hope and stubbornness, and he felt what was left of Fillory holding on too and waiting to see if it would be enough. Quentin blew white-hot fire between his teeth, and his saliva was toxic acid. The ram’s ribs bent and groaned, and Quentin felt Him try to inflate His lungs, felt Him fail. He tasted burned skin, and he felt the skin tear.
Quentin held Him there, and when the ram had gone five minutes without a breath he spat Him out onto the ground. He’d done all a dragon could do.
Suddenly Quentin was human again, standing over the steaming, smoking body of the ram, flopped out on the grass like a sleeping dog the size of a bull. But it wasn’t over. Ember’s foreleg stirred. He was beaten, but some tenacious spark of life was refusing to leave His body. If Fillory was going to live Quentin would have to tear that spark out of Him and quench it.
This was what the knife was for, he realized, the one Asmodeus had gotten away with. Shit. Fate had practically shoved it into his damn hands, and he’d fumbled it away! He was in a fight with a god and he had no weapon.
Except that he did have one. Sometimes when you finally figure out what you have to do, you discover that you already have what you need. He’d always had it. Quentin felt around in his pocket, and his fingers found a thick round coin. Mayakovsky’s last coin.
This was the last of his inheritance. He felt a twinge of sadness, just a twinge, at the knowledge that he would never make his land now. That would have been nice. But he felt no bitterness.
What Quentin did now he’d already done once, a long time ago, but then he’d done it in anger and confusion. Now he did it calmly, with a full sense of who he was and what he was doing. He still had some nickels in his pockets, the ones he’d brought back from the mirror-house. He went to one knee and made a little stack of them on a patch of bare ground, and on top of it he balanced the golden coin, goose-side up. Then he gripped the stack in his fist and it became the hilt of a burning silver sword, which he drew up out of the ground as if it had been embedded there all along, placed there for him centuries ago.
He held it up in front of him. The last time he’d held it had been on the day he arrived at Brakebills.
“It’s good to see you again,” he whispered.
Pale, almost transparent fire played along its length, surprisingly bright in the eerie half-darkness, as if the sword had been dipped in brandy and touched with a match. He adjusted his grip on the hilt. He tried to remember something, anything, from his fencing lessons with Bingle.