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At this level of mastery the action went too fast for Quentin to follow The precise details of the otiations were lost on everybody but the combatants Their shared style was all arcs and spins and constant s and found only dead ends You got the i each other down to an atoht The passes would start beautifully, set sequences that sometimes even included a flip or a so would be chaos until the blades tangled up and locked, and they disengaged and started all over again

Jesus, Quentin thought And he was going to get on a boat with one of these people It was a little too real But it was electrifying too: these were people who knew exactly what they were meant to do and never hesitated to do it, whether they won or lost

Then all at once it was over: Aral overextended herself with a huge overhand chop that Bingle just ed to roll out from under, and by blind chance her blade stuck fast in the floor, in a crack between two flagstones Cole kicked at it, reflexively, and it snapped neatly halfway along its length Aral stepped back, not bothering to conceal her frustration, and indicated that she conceded the le shook his head Apparently he wasn’t happy with the grounds of his victory He wanted to keep fighting He looked at Quentin for a ruling So did everybody else

Well, if he wanted to play by good-guy rules, then by allhimself He drew his sword and offered it to Aral hilt-first She felt the balance, nodded grudgingly, then resu stance The le juot tangled up in Aral’s ninja wrappings He wound up right next to her, inside her guard, and she punched hiered backward toward the chalk line, and Quentin was sure he was going to ring out, but at the last second he realized where he was He spun around and leaped balletically for the wall, pushed off it, turned head over heels, and landed lightly on his feet just in bounds

The crowd gasped and applauded It was a circus y and over the top Aral irritably pulled off her headscarf and shook out a surprisingher stance

"Bet you anything she practiced that in a ht had changed Now Bingle dropped the for Quentin had assu was, but it soon became apparent that he was some kind of technical freak, because he seemed to be able to shift styles at will He went at her like a berserker, fast and furious, then cycled rapidly through a courtly dueling rew increasingly flule was after

Breaking her silence, she shouted sole met her attack with a parry so implausible it was vaudevillian: he stopped her blade--Quentin’s blade--with the tip of his, so that the tords met point to point

They bent ominously, almost double, for an unendurably tense second--there was a worrying saw-blade sound of flexed le’s sword snapped with a sharp, vibrant twang He had to jerk his head to one side to avoid a flying shard

He threw his useless hilt at Aral in disgust The poed it off She paused, evidently considering offering hito do with honor and principles and castles, she aile’s shoulder, the coup de grâce

Bingle closed his eyes and dropped rapidly to one knee As the blade descended he didn’t dodge, just brought his hands together smoothly and decisively in front of him And then time stopped

At first Quentin wasn’t sure what had happened, but the rooet a better view Bingle had stopped the blade between the palainst sharp steel Heand arc and nanosecond It took a le didn’t waste it With the advantage of surprise he jerked the blade toward hirip He flipped it s solidly into his palm, and placed the blade at her throat The match was over

"Oh my God," Eliot said "Did you see that? Oh ot their noble reserve They got to their feet, huzzahing, andwith thele didn’t seeed their expression He pushed his way through the crowd to Quentin’s throne, where he kneeled and offered Quentin back his sword

The next ti orkmen, like piranhas on an unlucky A the Muntjac back together--bringing it back to life There was no part of it that wasn’t being aggressively sanded or varnished or tightened or reinforced or replaced They’d got it up into drydock, propped it up on a forest of stilts, fixed the sprung boards, caulked and tarred and painted it Out-of-sync hammer blows clattered from all quarters of the hull

As it turned out the ship’s structural eleood, because the shipwrights didn’t think they could have reproduced what they found Deep in the hold, pieced into some of the complex joins near the prow, they’d found a complicated lu off into various parts of the ship They couldn’t figure out what it was for, so Quentin told them to leave it alone

The Muntjac’s hull was now a sht white tri sewn by an arly technical process that took place in a vast, airy sail loft the size of an airplane hangar The sharp, honest fragrances of sawdust and wet paint bloomed in the air Quentin breathed the back to life too Not that he’d been dead, justnot quite alive So else

With only two or three more days till the Muntjac could be floated, Quentin paid a visit to Castle Whitespire’s map room to see what he could learn about his destination The Outer Island was the least exciting part of this whole undertaking, but he’d better at least be able to find it After the clamor of the docks the map room was a reservoir of cool quiet One whole indows, and the other was taken up with a glorious floor-to-ceilingDesert in the south The et right up close to the part you wanted to study, and the closer you looked, the more detail resolved itself, to the point where you could pick out individual trees in the Queenswood No dryads though

The ic You could follow tiny combers in as they pounded the Swept Coast, one after the other Quentin leaned in: you could even hear them, faintly, like the roar in a shell A line of shadoas advancing across the ht and where it was day in Fillory Overhead on the vaulted ceiling, tiny stars twinkled in the velvety blue-black of a celestial map that showed the Fillorian constellations

This was Quentin’s kingdoical like this This was Fillory the way he’d thought of it as a little kid, before he’d ever been here--it looked like the maps printed on the endpapers of the Fillory and Further books He could have watched it all day

The map room wasn’t exactly a hive of activity The only visible staff was a surly teenager with thick black bangs that fell over his eyes He was bent over a table furiously working soraphical instruments It took him a minute to look up and realize that he had a patron

The boy gave his naht have been sixteen Quentin had a feeling that not a lot of people cah the s; at any rate Benedict was out of practice at showing the appropriate amount of deference Quentin sy and scraping But he still needed a map

"What can you show me that has the Outer Island on it?"

Benedict’s eyes went blank for a second as he queried soed himself over to a wall that was honeycombed with little square drawers He yanked one out--they turned out to be thin but very deep--and extracted the single scroll it contained

The centerpiece of the map room was a heavy wooden table with an elaborate brass mechanism bolted to it Benedict nimbly fitted the scroll into it and cranked a handle It was the only thing he did with anything re alacrity The crank unrolled the scroll and spread it out flat so you could get a good look at the section you wanted