Still, there were a lot of them, and they knew how to do damage—doing damage was pretty much these guys’ skill set. It was late spring when the Lorians came pouring through Grudge Gap and onto Fillorian soil. They wore steel caps and mail shirts, and carried notched old swords and war axes. Some rode big shaggy horses. They were met by a nightmare.

See, the Lorians had made a mistake. On their way down from the Northern Barrier Range they set some trees on fire, and an outlying farm, and they killed a hermit.

Even Janet was surprised by Eliot’s anger. I mean, she was furious, but she was Janet. She was pissed off all the time. Poppy and Josh looked grim, which was how they got angry. But Eliot’s rage was crazy, over the top. They burned trees? His trees? They killed a hermit? They killed a hermit? Where Fillory and the Fillorians were concerned Eliot no longer had any irony. His heart went out to that weird, solitary man in his uncomfortable hut. He’d never met him. They wouldn’t have had much to say to each other if they had. But whoever that hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that meant he was OK in Eliot’s book, and now he was dead. Eliot was going to destroy the Lorians, he would annihilate them, he would murder them!

Not murder-murder. But he was going to mess them up good.

He was tempted to let them try to cross the Great Northern Marsh, where the sunken horrors that dwelt there would deal with them, with extreme prejudice, but he didn’t want to give them even another day’s march on his grass. Besides, there were a couple more farms in the way. Instead he let the Lorians march part of one day, till noon, till they were hot and dusty and ready to knock off for lunch. Probably it was blowing their minds how easy it was all turning out to be. They were going to do it, lads, they were the ones, they were going to take fucking Fillory, dudes! He let them ford the Great Salt River. He met them on the other side.

Eliot went alone, disguised as a peasant. He waited in the middle of the road. He didn’t move. He let them notice him gradually. First the guys in front, who when they realized he wasn’t going to get out of the way called a halt. He waited while the guys behind those guys got crowded into them, soccer-stadium-style, and they called a halt, and all the way back down the line in a ripple effect. There must have been, he didn’t know, maybe a thousand of them.

The man leading the front line stepped out to invite him—not very politely—to kindly get out of the way or one thousand Lorian linebackers would pull his guts out and strangle him with them.

Eliot smiled, shuffled his feet humbly for a second and then punched the guy in the face. It took the man by surprise.

“Get the fuck out of my country, asshole,” Eliot said.

That one was on the level, no magic. He’d been taking boxing lessons, and he got the drop on the guy with an off-hand jab. Probably the Lorian wasn’t expecting what amounted to a suicide attack from some random peasant. Eliot knew he hadn’t done much damage, and that he wouldn’t get another shot, so he held up his left hand and force-pushed the man back so hard he brought six ranks of Lorians down with him.

It felt good. Eliot had no children, but this must be what protecting your child felt like. He just wished Quentin could have seen it.

He dropped the cloak and stood up straight in his royal raiment, so it was clear that he was a king and not a peasant. A couple of eager-beaver arrows came arcing over from back in the ranks, and he burned them up in flight: puff, puff, puff. It was easy when you were this angry, and this good, and God he was angry. And good. He tapped the butt of his staff once on the ground: earthquake. All thousand Lorians fell down on their stupid violent asses, in magnificent synchrony.

He couldn’t just do that at will, he’d been out here all last night setting up the spells, but it was a great effect, especially since the Lorians didn’t know that. Eliot allowed it to sink in.

Then he undid a spell: he made the army behind him visible, or most of it. Take a good look, gentlemen. Those ones with the horse bodies are the hippogriffs. The griffins have the lion bodies. It’s easy to mix them up.

Then—and he indulged himself here—he made the giants visible. You do not appreciate at all from fairy tales how unbelievably terrifying a giant is. These players were seven-story giants, and they did not mess around. In real life humans didn’t slay giants, because it was impossible. It would be like killing an apartment building with your bare hands. They were even stronger than they looked—had to be, to beat the square-cube law that made land organisms that big physically impossible in the real world—and their skin was half a foot thick. There were only a couple dozen giants in all of Fillory, because even Fillory’s hyperabundant ecosystem couldn’t have fed more of them. Six of them had come out for the battle.

Nobody moved. Instead the Great Salt River moved.

It was right behind them, they’d just crossed it, and the nymphs took it out of its banks and straight into the mass of the Lorian army like an aimable tsunami. A lot of the soldiers got washed away; he’d made the nymphs promise to drown as few of them as possible, though they were free to abuse them in any other way they chose.

Some of the ones who weren’t swept away wanted to fight anyway, because they were just that valiant. Eliot supposed they must have had difficult childhoods or something like that. Join the club, he thought, it’s not that exclusive. He and his friends gave them a difficult adulthood to go with it.

—

It took them four days to harry the Lorians back to Grudge Gap—you could only kick their asses along so fast and no faster. That was where Eliot stopped and called out their champion. Now it was dawn, and the pass made a suitably desolate backdrop, with dizzyingly steep mountainsides ascending on either side, striped with spills of loose rock and runnels of meltwater. Above them loomed icebound peaks that had as far as he knew never been climbed, except by the dawn rays that were right now kissing them pink.

Single combat, man to man. If Eliot won, the Lorians would go home and never come back. That was the deal. If the Lorian champion won—his name for some reason was Vile Father—well, whatever. It wasn’t like he was going to win.

The lines were about fifty yards apart, and it was marvelously quiet out there between them. The pass could have been designed for this; the walls made a natural amphitheater. The ground was perfectly level—firm packed coarse gray sand, from which any rocks larger than a pebble had been removed overnight. Eliot kicked it around a little, like a batter settling into the batter’s box.

Vile Father didn’t look like somebody waiting to begin the biggest fight of his life. He looked like somebody waiting for a bus. He hadn’t adopted anything like a fighting stance. He just stood there, with his soft shoulders sloping and his gut sticking out. Weird. His hands were huge, like two king crabs.

Though Eliot supposed he didn’t look much less weird. He wasn’t wearing armor either, just a floppy white silk shirt and leather pants. For weapons he carried a long knife in his right hand and a short metal fighting stick in his left. He supposed it was pretty clear that he had no idea how to use either of them, apart from the obvious. He nodded to Vile Father. No response.

Time passed. It was actually a teensy bit socially awkward. A soft cold wind blew. Vile Father’s brown nipples, on the ends of his pendulous man-cans, were like dried figs. He had no scars at all on his smooth skin, which somehow was scarier than if he were all messed up.

Then Vile Father wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t magic, he had some kind of crazy movement style that was like speed-skating over solid ground. Just like that he was halfway across the distance between them and thrusting his blade, whatever it was, straight at Eliot’s Adam’s apple at full extension. Eliot barely got out of the way in time.

He shouldn’t have been able to get out of the way at all. Like an idiot he’d figured V.F. was going to swing the blade at him like a sword, on the end of that long pole, thereby giving him plenty of time to see it coming. Which would have been stupid, but all right, I get it already, it’s a thrusting weapon. By rights it should have been sticking out of the nape of Eliot’s neck by now, slick and shiny with clear fluid from his spine.

But it wasn’t, because Eliot was sporting a huge amount of invisible magical protection in the form of Fergus’s Spectral Armory, which by itself would have saved his life even if the blade had hit home, but in addition to that he was sporting Fergus’s A Whole Lot of Other Really Useful Combat Spells, which had amped his strength up a few times over, and most important had cranked his reflexes up by a factor of ten, and his perception of time down by that same factor.

What? Look, Vile Father spent his whole life learning to kill people with a knife on a stick. Was that cheating? Well, while he was doing his squats and whatever else, Eliot had spent his whole life learning magic.

When he and Janet had first finished up the casting, a couple of hours earlier, in the chilly predawn, he’d been so covered in spellcraft that he glowed like a life-size neon sign of himself. But they’d managed to tamp that down so that the armor was only occasionally visible, maybe once every couple of minutes and only for a moment at a time, a flash of something translucent and mother-of-pearly.

The trigger for the time/reflexes part of the enchantment system was Eliot twitching his nose. He did it now, and everything in the world abruptly slowed down. He leaned back and away from the slowly, gracefully thrusting blade, lost his balance and put a hand down on the sand, rolled away, then got back on his feet while V.F. was still completing the motion.

Though you didn’t get to be as big and fat as Vile Father was without learning a thing or two along the way. He didn’t look impressed or even surprised, just converted his momentum into a spin move meant to catch Eliot in the stomach with the butt of the pole. I guess it doesn’t pay to stand around looking all impressed on the battlefield.

Though Eliot was impressed. Watching it slowed down like this, you had to admire the man’s athleticism. It was balletic, was what it was. Eliot watched the wooden staff slowly approaching his midriff, set himself and, all in good time, hammered down on it as hard as he could with his metal baton. The wood snapped cleanly about three feet from the end. Fergus, whoever you were, I heart you.

V.F. course-corrected once again, reaching out with a free hand to snag the snapped-off bit while it spun in midair. Eliot batted it away before he could get to it, and he watched it drift off out of V.F.’s reach, moving at a stately lunar velocity. Then, seeing as how he had some time to kill, he dropped the baton and slapped Vile Father’s face with his open hand.

Personal violence did not come naturally to Eliot; in fact he found it distasteful. What could he say, he was a sensitive individual, fate had blessed and cursed him with a tender heart; plus V.F.’s cheek was really oily/sweaty. He wished he’d worn gloves, or gauntlets even. He thought of that dead hermit, and those burned trees, but even so he pulled the punch. With his strength and his speed all jacked up like this he had no idea how to calibrate the blow. For all he knew he was going to take the guy’s face off.

He didn’t, thank God, but Vile Father definitely felt it. In slow motion you could see his jowls wrap halfway around his face. That would leave a mark. Emboldened, Eliot dropped the knife too, moved in closer and delivered a couple of quick body blows to Vile Father’s ribcage—the hook, his instructor had told him, was his punch. Vile Father absorbed them and danced away to a safe distance to do some heavy breathing and reconsider his life choices.

Eliot followed, jabbing and slapping, both ways, left-right. My sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter. His blood was up now. This was in every way his fight. He hadn’t come looking for it, but by God he was going to finish it.

It was awfully calming, being sped up like this. It gave you time to think about things, to consider your own life choices. Mostly Eliot was satisfied with the ones he’d made. He was in the right place. He was living his best life. How many other people in the multiverse could say that? He woke up every morning knowing what he wanted to do, and then he went and did it, and when he was done he felt proud. He believed himself to be a good High King, and he had a lot of evidence to back it up. The people were happy. When it wasn’t falling apart Fillory was a good place, a great place. It took a substantial amount of malicious mismanagement to make Fillory a lousy place to live in, and nobody was going to get away with that on Eliot’s watch, ever again. Least of all the Lorians.

If he had a major unfulfilled ambition, currently, it related to Quentin. It had been a year since Quentin was dethroned and expelled from Fillory and Julia had gone over to the Far Side. That had come as a shock to everybody, but to Eliot most of all, or second after Quentin anyway.

The year since then had been peaceful and prosperous, and in some ways the mood was lighter in the castle with Josh and Poppy installed as King and Queen in place of Quentin and Julia, Fillory’s brooders-in-chief. But Eliot missed Quentin. He wanted Quentin by his side. For all his faults Quentin had been his best friend here, and really he’d just been coming into his own. That last adventure had been good for him. It had worn away the last of his adolescent self-consciousness, letting his better nature—his curiosity, his intelligence, his fanatical loyalty, his wounded heart—show through.

Fillory wasn’t the same without him. Nobody loved Fillory the way Quentin did, not even its High King. Nobody understood it like he did. Nobody enjoyed it like he did, and nobody could troubleshoot it like him when things went south.

And Quentin was missing out on so much. The passing of Martin Chatwin and the subsequent crisis of magic had given way to a glorious period in Fillory’s history, a new Golden Age unlike anything since the time of the Chatwins. It was an age of legends, of noble deeds and great wonders and high adventure, unfolding in a golden summer that went on and on and on. Already this year Eliot and the others had ousted a great barbed dragon from a box canyon out in the Cock’s Teeth and recovered two Named Blades from its hoard. They’d hunted a pair of fifty-headed trolls through the Darkling Woods, and forced them into the open and held them down and heard the sputtering crackle, like ice cracking in a nice vodka tonic, as they turned to stone in the morning sun. Eliot had brought back a bristling, spitting black troll-cat for a pet. Quentin would have loved that!