They had been scattered by the transition, like a freshly deployed stick of paratroopers, but they were still in sight of one another. Richard and Penny were fighting their way out of a huge dead bush. Alice and Anaïs were seated on the trunk of a colossal tree that had fallen athwart the ditch, as if they’d been carefully placed there by a giant child arranging dolls. Janet was sitting on the ground with her hands on her thighs, taking deep breaths, the color flooding back into her face.
The whole scene had a deeply uncurated feel to it. This was not a forest that had been culled or thinned. This was primeval. This was the way trees lived when they were left to their own devices.
“Penny?” Josh stood on the edge of the ditch, gazing down at the rest of them, hands in pockets. He looked incongruously natty in a jacket and a nice shirt, no tie, even though they were all soaked to the bone. “It’s cold, Penny. Why the fuck is it cold?”
It was true. The air was dry and bitter; their clothes were freezing fast. Their breath puffed out white in the frigid stillness. Fine light snow sifted down from the white sky. The ground was hard under the fallen leaves. It was deep winter.
“I don’t know.” Penny looked around, frowning. “It was summer before,” he said a little petulantly. “Just a second ago! It was hot!”
“Will someone please help me down, please?” Anaïs was looking down at the ground dubiously from her perch on the giant tree trunk. Josh gallantly took her by her narrow waist and lifted her down; she gave a pleased little squeak.
“It’s the time thing,” Alice said. “I just thought of it. It could be six months since Penny was here, in Fillory time. Or more like sixty years, the way the seasons work. This always happens in the books. There’s no way to predict it.”
“Well, I predict that I’m going to freeze my tits off in five minutes,” Janet said. “Somebody go back for the jackets.”
They all agreed that Penny should go back and get the parkas, and he was an instant away from touching the button when Eliot suddenly lunged at him and grabbed his arm. He pointed out, as calmly as possible, that if the time streams of Fillory and the Neitherlands moved at different speeds, then if Penny went back by himself, it could easily be days, or years, before he got back to Fillory with the gear, at least from the Fillorian point of view, by which time they could have frozen to death or died of old age or accumulated countless other equally serious problems. If they were going to go, they would all have to go together.
“Forget it.” Janet shook her head. She still looked green. “I can’t go back there. Not yet. I’d rather freeze my tits off than puke my guts out.”
Nobody argued. Nobody wanted to leave quite yet anyway, not now that they were finally here in Fillory, or wherever they were. They weren’t going anywhere without at least poking around. Penny began making the rounds with his clothes-drying spell.
“I think I can see a way to go,” said Alice, who was still perched up on the tree trunk. Snow had begun to settle in her dark hair. “On the other side. It sort of turns into a path through the forest. And there’s something else, too. You’re going to want to see this for yourselves.”
If they took off their packs, there was enough space at the bottom of the ditch to scramble under the huge trunk on all fours, single file, their hands and knees sinking into the thick layer of frostbitten leaves. Eliot came through last, passing the packs ahead of him. They stood up on the other side, slapping dirt off their hands. Penny rushed to hand Alice down from where she sat, but she ignored him and jumped down herself, although it meant crashing down on her hands and knees and picking herself up again. She didn’t seem to be particularly relishing her adventure of the night before, Quentin thought.
To one side of the path was a small spreading oak. Its bark was dark gray, almost black, and its branches were gnarled and wiggly and all but empty of leaves. Embedded in its trunk at head height, as if the tree had simply grown up around it, was a round ticking clock face a foot across.
One by one, without speaking, they all scrambled up the sloping bank to get a closer look. It was one of the Watcherwoman’s clock-trees.
Quentin touched the place where the tree’s hard rough bark met the smooth silver bezel around the clock face. It was solid and cold and real. He closed his eyes and followed the curve of it with his finger. He was really here. He was in Fillory. There was no question about it now.
And now that he was here it would finally be all right. He didn’t see how yet, but it would. It had to be. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but hot tears poured helplessly down his cheeks, leaving cold tracks behind them. Against all his own wishes and instincts he got down on his knees and put his head in his hands and pushed his face into the cold leaves. A sob clawed its way out of him. For a minute he lost himself. Somebody, he would never know who, not Alice, put their hand on his shoulder. This was the place. He would be picked up, cleaned off, and made to feel safe and happy and whole again here. How had everything gone so wrong? How could he and Alice have been so stupid? It barely even mattered now. This was his life now, the life he had always been waiting for. It was finally here.
And it flashed into his head with sudden urgency: Richard was right. They had to find Martin Chatwin, if he was somehow still alive. That was the key. Now that he was here, he wasn’t going to give it up again. He must know the secret of how to stay here forever, make it last, make it permanent.
Quentin got to his feet, embarrassed, and blotted his tears on his sleeve.
“Welp,” Josh said finally, breaking the silence. “I guess that pretty much tears it. We’re in Fillory.”
“These clock-trees are supposed to be the Watcherwoman’s thing,” Quentin said, still sniffling. “She must still be around.”
“I thought she was dead,” Janet said.
“Maybe we’re in an earlier time period,” Alice suggested. “Maybe we went back in time. Like in The Girl Who Told Time.”
She and Janet and Quentin didn’t look at each other when they spoke.
“Maybe. I think they left some of these still growing, though, even after they got rid of her. Remember they even see one in The Wandering Dune.”
“I could never finish that book,” Josh said.
“I wonder.” Eliot eyed it appraisingly. “Think we could get this thing back to Brakebills? That would make a hell of a present for Fogg.”
Nobody else seemed inclined to pursue that line of speculation. Josh made double pointy-fingers at Eliot and mouthed the word douche.
“I wonder if that’s the correct time,” Richard said.
Quentin could have stood there and stared at the clock-tree all day, but the chill wouldn’t let them stand still. The girls were already wandering away. He followed them reluctantly, and soon they were all trooping off together in a ragged group along the ditch-cum-path, deeper into Fillory. The sound of their feet shuffling through the dry leaves was deafening in the quiet.
No one spoke. For all their careful practical preparations there had been very little discussion of strategy or objectives, and now they were here it was obvious anyway. Why bother planning an adventure? This was Fillory—adventure would find them! With every step they took they half expected a marvelous apparition or revelation to come trotting out of the woods. But nothing much presented itself. It was almost anticlimactic—or was this just the buildup to something really amazing? The remains of ragged stone walls trailed off into the underbrush. The trees around them remained still and stubbornly inanimate, even after Penny, in the spirit of exploration and discovery, formally introduced himself to several of them. Here and there birds chirped and flitted and perched, high up in the trees, but none of them offered them any advice. Every little detail looked superbright and saturated with meaning, as if the world around them were literally composed of words and letters, inscribed in some magical geographical script.
Richard took out a compass but found the needle stuck, pinned down against its cardboard backing, as if Fillory’s magnetic pole were deep underground, straight down beneath their feet. He flung it away into a bush. Janet hopped up and down as she walked, her hands crammed under her armpits against the cold. Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
They walked for twenty minutes, half an hour at most. Quentin alternately blew into his hands and withdrew them into the sleeves of his sweater. He was wide awake now, and sober, at least for the moment.
“We need to get some fauns up in this piece,” Josh said, to nobody. “Or some swordfights or whatever.”
The path meandered and then faded out. They were expending more and more effort just to push their way through the foliage. There was some internal disagreement as to whether or not there had ever been an actual path, or whether it was just a strip of thin forest, or even whether—this was Penny’s take—the trees had begun subtly, imperceptibly shifting themselves to get in their way. But before they could arrive at a consensus they came across a stream percolating through the woods.
It was a lovely little winter stream, wide and shallow and perfectly clear, twinkling and lapping along as if it were delighted to have just found this twisty channel. Wordlessly, they gathered at its edge. The rocks were capped with round dollops of snow, and the quieter eddies along the banks had iced over. A branch poking up in the middle of the stream was hung with fabulous Gothic-sculpted icy drops and buttresses all along its length. There was nothing overtly supernatural about it, but it temporarily satisfied their appetite for wonder. On Earth it would have been a charming little rill, nothing more, but the fact that they were seeing it in Fillory, in another world, possibly the first Earth beings ever to do so, made it a glittering miracle.
They had stared at it for a full minute in rapt silence before Quentin realized that right in front of them, emerging from the deepest part of the stream, was a woman’s naked head and shoulders.
“Oh my God,” he said. He took a clumsy, numb step backward, pointing. “Shit. You guys.”
It was surreal. She was almost certainly dead. The woman’s hair was dark and wet and thick with clumped ice. Her eyes—she appeared to be looking right at them—were midnight blue and didn’t move or blink, and her skin was a pale pearlescent gray. Her shoulders were bare. She looked sixteen at most. Her eyelashes were clotted with frost.
“Is she—?” Alice didn’t finish the question.
“Hey!” Janet called. “Are you all right?”
“We should help her. Get her out of there.” Quentin tried to get closer, but he slipped on a frozen rock and went in up to his knee. He scrambled back onto the bank, his foot burning with cold. The woman didn’t move. “We need rope. Get the rope, there’s rope in one of the packs.”
The water didn’t even look deep enough to submerge her that far, and Quentin actually wondered, horribly, if they were looking at a body that had been severed at the waist and then dumped in the water. Rope, what was he thinking? He was a damn magician. He dropped the pack he was rifling through and began a simple kinetic spell to lift her out.
He felt the premonitory warmth of a developing spell in his fingertips, felt the weight and tug of the body in his mind. It felt good to do magic again, to know that he could still focus despite everything. As soon as he started he realized that the Circumstances were scrambled here—different stars, different seas, different everything. Thank God it was a simple spell. The grammar was a shambles—Alice corrected him in a clipped voice as he worked. Gradually the woman rose up dripping out of the water. She was whole, thank God, and naked—her body was slim, her breasts slight and girlish. Her nails and nipples were pale purple. She looked frozen, but she shuddered as the magic took hold. Her eyes focused and came awake. She frowned and raised one hand, somehow halting the spell before he was finished, with her toes still trailing in the freezing water.
“I am a naiad. I cannot leave the stream.” By her voice she could have been in junior high. Her eyes met Quentin’s.
“Your magic is clumsy,” she added.
It was electrifying. Quentin saw now that she wasn’t human, her fingers and toes were webbed. To his left he heard a shuffling noise. It was Penny. He was getting down on his knees on the snowy bank.
“We humbly apologize,” he said, head bowed. “We most humbly seek your pardon.”
“Jesus Christ!” Josh stage-whispered. “Dork!”
The hovering nymph shifted her attention. Stream water rilled down her bare skin. She tilted her head girlishly.
“You admire my beauty, human?” she asked Penny. “I am cold. Would you warm me with your burning skin?”
“Please,” Penny went on, blushing furiously. “If you have a quest to bestow upon us, we would gladly undertake it. We would gladly—”
Mercifully Janet cut him off.
“We’re visitors from Earth,” she said firmly. “Is there a city around here that you could direct us to? Maybe Castle Whitespire?”
“—we would gladly undertake to do your bidding,” Penny finished.
“Do you serve the rams?” Alice asked.
“I serve no false gods, human girl. Or goddesses. I serve the river, and the river serves me.”
“Are there other humans here?” Anaïs said. “Like us?”
“Like you?” The nymph smiled saucily, and the tip of a startling blue tongue appeared for an instant between her rather sharp-looking front teeth. “Oh, no. Not like you. None so cursed!”
At that moment Quentin felt his telekinetic spell cease to exist. She’d abolished it, though he didn’t catch how, without a word or a gesture. In the same instant the naiad flipped head down and dived, her pale periwinkle buttocks flashing in the air, and vanished into dark water that looked too shallow to contain her.