But nuclear winter was coming, and magic wasn’t keeping her warm. It was getting cold, tainted snow was falling, and the earth was getting thirsty again, thirsty for balm. The black dog was hunting. Julia was feeling it again, the blackness.

Or really blackness would have been a relief, blackness would have been a field trip compared with where she was headed, which was despair. That stuff had no color. She wished it were made of blackness, velvety soft blackness, that she could curl up and fall asleep in, but it was so much worse than that. Think of it as the difference between zero and the empty set, the set that contains nothing, not even zero. These but the trappings and the suits of woe. All these seem to laugh,/Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

December came, and the days shortened. Snow quietened the traffic on Throop Avenue. And then one day, St. Lucy’s Day as it should happen, the day of the Donne poem, it all went down. And when it did, it went down Western-style: a stranger came to town.

She had a nice look about her, the stranger, an Ivy League look. Twenty-nine maybe, dark suit, dark hair pulled back and secured with crossed chopsticks. A round face, baby fat, nerd glasses, but hard: there might once have been a time when she was pushed around, but that time was long past. As per Throop Avenue protocol, as soon as she was in the door the big gun stepped to her, the big gun being Julia.

Well. Ivy League took off her jacket and unbuttoned her cuffs. Both arms were sleeved in stars up to the shoulders. She spread them wide, in the manner of our savior, to show a 100-spot on the inside of each wrist. The room got very quiet. Julia showed Ivy League her stars. Then Ivy League made her prove it.

This had never happened to Julia before, but she knew the drill. She would have to walk through every spell she knew, every test she’d ever passed, to satisfy Ivy that she had earned her stars. Step-by-step, level by level, coins, nails, fires, magnets, the whole utility belt, from level one to level seventy-seven, which was as far as Julia had gotten. It took four hours, while the sun set and the short-timers and day students went home.

Of course Julia lived for this shit. She only flubbed a couple, in the midfifties, but the bylaws allowed her a few retakes, and she got through it, shaking but still fierce. Whereupon Ivy League nodded coldly, rolled down her sleeves, put her jacket back on, and left.

It took all of Julia’s pride not to run after her, shouting, “Take me with you, mysterious stranger!” She knew who that must have been. That was one of the Others, the people who had a line on real magic, the pure shit. Ivy League had been to the source, where the spells came from. Julia had known they were out there just by the way they perturbed the universe, like a black planet, and she’d been right. Finally they’d shown themselves to her. They’d tested her.

And just as Brakebills had, they’d found her wanting. There must be a flaw in her, one that she couldn’t see, but obvious to those who looked for it.

It wasn’t till she got home that she found the card in her pocket. It was blank, but a complex unlocking enchantment revealed a message printed on it in Old Church Slavonic: Burn This. She burned it in an ashtray, using not a simple conflagration spell but rather the forty-third-level one, which did basically the same thing but did it in fourteenth position and in Old Church Slavonic.

The flame flashed violet and orange, rhythmically. The flashes were Morse code. The Morse code spelled out a pair of GPS coordinates, which turned out to correspond to a microscopic hamlet in the south of France. The hamlet was called Murs. It was all very Free Trader Beowulf.

At last, Julia had been called. The fat envelope had arrived. This time she was really going. She had put down her bet a long time ago, and finally, finally, it was showing signs of paying off.

How to explain all this to her parents, who you would have thought would have been way past caring. She was twenty-two now, how many times were these people going to make her break their hearts? But as much as she dreaded the conversation, it went better than she expected. She hid a lot from her parents, but one thing she couldn’t hide from them was that she actually felt hopeful for once. She believed that she had a shot at happiness now, and she was taking it. It seemed like—it was—years since she’d felt that way. Her parents understood that somehow, and they weren’t upset. They were happy for her. They let her go.

Speaking of letting people go, she dumped owlish Jared, the not-socunning linguist, on his pale and bony ass. Call me when you finish that dissertation, porkpie.

One fine day in April Julia boarded a plane, bringing with her none of her worldly possessions, and flew to Marseille, on the lurid blue Mediterranean Sea. She felt so light and free, she could have flown there under her own power.

She rented a Peugeot that she would never return and drove north for an hour, negotiating a typically French rond-point every one hundred meters, turned right at Cavaillon, and got lost eighty times near Gordes, a spectacular village perché that clung vertiginously to the side of the Luberon Valley as if it had been plastered there with a trowel. She rolled into sleepy, tiny Murs at three in the afternoon, in the heart of photogenic Provence.

And lo and behold, it was a little gem, a largely untouristed clump of old houses built from strangely light-emitting bleached-brown southern French stone. It had one church and one castle and one hotel. The streets were medieval and paint-scrapingly narrow. Julia stopped the car in the town square and took in the heartbreaking World War I memorial. Half of the dead had the same last name.

The GPS coordinates were ten minutes outside of town. They corresponded to a handsome farmhouse afloat all by itself in a sea of hay and lavender fields. It had sky-blue shutters and a white gravel driveway in which she parked her scraped-up Peugeot. A clean-cut man only a little older than Julia answered the door. He was handsome—you got the impression that he hadn’t always been clean-cut, that he’d lost a lot of weight at some point in his life. It had left behind some interesting lines on his face.

“Hello Circe,” he said. “I’m Pouncy Silverkitten. Welcome home.”

CHAPTER 19

Standing at the bow with Eliot the next morning, two kings of Fillory plowing eastward into the unknown, into the rising sun, never knowing what God or Fate or Magic was going to send rearing up at them over the horizon next, this now: this was much more like it. This was the stuff.

At first it had been hard to admit it, to change gears, again, and just go with it, but then suddenly it wasn’t. Not with the morning sun on his face, and the Muntjac surging and galloping along under him. He’d missed a lot here, but he wasn’t going to miss anything more. Earth was the dream, not Fillory, and it was going to that part of his brain where dreams went—the kind of anxiety-ridden, fiendishly detailed dreams that felt like they lasted for years, through endless meaningless plot twists, which delivered you ultimately to a fate not even of death but merely of permanent embarrassment. Fillory had taken him back. Welcome to the Quest for the Seven Keys. Your adventure is already in progress.

Bingle was atop the forecastle as usual, just like back in the day, but now he was sparring vigorously with another swordsman. It was Benedict, stripped to the waist, lean and brown, grimacing as he gave ground and then, unbelievably, beating Bingle back and pressing his advantage. The whole time he kept his wrist on his hip, swashbuckler-style. The air rang with the loud scraping of steel on steel, like the gnashing of a huge pair of scissors.

Their swords locked. Stalemate. They broke apart, clapping each other on the shoulder and laughing—laughing!—about some point of technical swordsmanship. It was like watching an alternate-timeline version of himself, a timeline in which he’d stayed in Fillory and learned to hold his sword at full extension for more than two minutes. Quentin caught Benedict’s eye, and Benedict saluted him, smiling with those bright white teeth. Quentin saluted back. They squared off again.

Bingle had found his disciple.

“Those guys are amazing.”

He hadn’t heard Poppy come up beside him. She was watching the action too.

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“Are you kidding?” Poppy shook her head. She was not kidding. “I wish I could. The one on the right, the older guy? He’s the best swordsman in Fillory. We had a contest.”

“It all still looks like a movie to me. I can’t believe it’s all real. Wow!” Bingle did one of his signature gymnastic tumbling passes. “Oh my God. I thought he was going over the side.”

“I know. I was going to take lessons with him.”

“That sounds exciting. What happened?”

“I accidentally went back to the real world. Then a year went by here in three days.”

“Well, I can see now why you wanted to come back. It’s beautiful here. I’m sorry I thought it was funny before. I was wrong.”

Quentin had expected Poppy to be miserable on board the Muntjac . After all, she’d effectively been abducted from everything she knew and cared about and brought here. It was an outrage to every principle she lived by.

And all that was true, and she’d spent a day being outraged about it. Well, half a day. Poppy had spent yesterday afternoon sulking, then she showed up at breakfast this morning with a brand-new can-do attitude. She just wasn’t temperamentally suited to long-haul sulking. Sure, all right, she’d been accidentally transported to a magical world that until recently she had understood to be fictional. The situation wasn’t ideal. But it was what she had to work with, so she would work with it. She was a tough one, Poppy.

“I talked to the other one at dinner last night,” she said. “The kid. Benedict. He’s a big fan of yours.”

“Benedict? Really?”

“Did you see how he lit up when he saw you watching him just now? Look at him, he’s killing himself to impress you. You’re a father figure for him.”

Quentin hadn’t seen. How was Poppy here for one day and she’d seen all that?

“To be honest I always thought he hated me.”

“He’s gutted he didn’t get to go to Earth with you.”

“You must be joking. And miss out on all the adventures here?”

Now Poppy directed her guileless blue gaze at him instead of the sword fight.

“What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn’t an adventure?”

Quentin started to answer, and stopped with his mouth open. Because it turned out he had nothing to say.

It was five more days before they sighted land.

They were having breakfast al fresco on deck: Quentin, Eliot, Josh, and Poppy. It was a practice Eliot had instituted: the crew set up a table on the poop deck, with a blinding white tablecloth clipped on to keep it from blowing away. He kept this up in a surprising range of meteorological conditions. Once Quentin saw him up there alone in a squall, munching on marmalade toast that was obviously soaked through with salt spray. It was a matter of principle with him.

But today it was nice out. The weather was almost tropical again. Sunlight flashed off the silverware, and the sky was a perfect blue dome. Though the food itself was getting pretty grim, the kind of unspoilable stuff that came out of deep storage late in an ocean voyage: hard biscuits and meat so salty it was more salt than meat. The only thing that was still good was the jam. Quentin used a lot of it.

“So is this how it works?” he said. “The questing? We just keep sailing east till we hit something?”

“Unless you have a better idea,” Eliot said.

“No. Just remind me why we think it’s going to work?”

“Because that’s how quests always work,” Eliot said. “I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of it, but the lesson seems to be that you just can’t force the issue with a whole lot of detective work. It’s a waste of energy. The ones who go around knocking on doors and looking for clues never find the thing, the Grail or whatever it is. It’s more a matter of having the right attitude.”

“What attitude is that?”

Elliot shrugged.

“I haven’t got a clue. I guess we’re supposed to have faith.”

“I never really took you for the faith-having kind,” Quentin said.

“I didn’t either. But it’s worked out so far. We’ve got five of the seven keys. You can’t argue with results.”

“You can’t,” Quentin said, “but that’s actually not the same thing as having faith.”

“Why do you always try to ruin everything?”

“I’m not ruining it. I just want to understand it.”

“If you had faith you wouldn’t have to understand.”

“And why exactly are you looking for these keys?” Poppy asked brightly. “Or I guess, why are we looking for them?”

“Yeah, why are we?” Josh said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re cool and all. They sound cool. Can I see them?”

“We don’t really know why,” Eliot said. “The Unique Beasts wanted us to find them.”

“But find them and do what with them?” Poppy said.

“I suppose once we have them all they’ll tell us. Or perhaps we’ll know when we have them. Or perhaps we’ll never know. They might just take the keys and pat us on the behind and send us on our way. I don’t know. I’ve never done a quest before.”

“So . . . the journey is the arrival, kind of thing?” Josh said. “I hate that stuff. I’m an old-fashioned arrival-is-the-arrival kind of guy.”

“For what it’s worth, they told me the realm was in peril,” Eliot said. “So there is that. But it’s not like the Holy Grail was actually useful for anything.”

“I told everybody the Neitherlands are jacked, right?” Josh said.