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"You told me not to!"

"Janet told you not to I don’t knohy you listened to her But look, I know" Eliot put a hand on his ar out quests has a damned peculiar sense of hu, you know, as I set off thatacross the plain I wished you could have been there

"Though I lookedarmor made, just for that day, embossed and damascened within an inch of its life I won’t lie to you, Quentin I lookedat that otten to drink a Coke That was so He wished he had one now He was exhausted

"It tookHare was there, of course, waiting for reat tree, which was still thrashing away in its invisible wind"

"Intangible," Poppy said in a small voice "All wind is invisible"

Good to see she was finding her feet

"The hare wasn’t alone The bird was there as well, and the monitor, the Utter Newt, the Kind Wolf, the Parallel Beetle--it does a geo I can’t even explain it All of them, all the Unique Beasts, the full conclave Well, except the two aquatic ones The Questing Beast sends you his regards by the way I think he’s fond of you for soh you shot hi in two neat rows, the little ones in front, like they were posing for a class picture, I knew the jig was up It was the newt that did the talking He let it be known that the real the Seven Golden Keys of Fillory I asked hiood were they, ere they for, what did they unlock He wouldn’t say, or he couldn’t He said I would knohen it was tiled a bit of course I wanted to know, for example, how rapidly these keys would have to be recovered I could ianize ht even look forward to it--it’s always nicer traveling when you have some business to do But apparently it’s a time-sensitive issue They were very insistant about that

"They gave o on, and I left What else could I do? When I got back Whitespire was up in arms There were all kinds of terrible portents, all over the kingdom That stor the way that first one did And you know the waterfall at the Red Ruin? The one that flows up? It started flowing down You know, the regular way So that was about the last straw

"And then the Muntjac ca into port, and they told me you and Julia had vanished"

In full hero mode, Eliot took co and provisioning it while the whole kingdooing on a quest! Apart fro else it was a public relations triu to join the search for the Seven Keys The dwarves sent over a trunkload ofaround in their vaults, in case there was a match in there, but h, fit on the key ring So six to go Funny how every once in a while the dwarves came up trumps

Eliot left Janet in sole possession of the castle He felt bad aboutevenher chops as he left She would probably be running a fascist dictatorship by the tiot back So he set off

Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he’d read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn’t necessarily a handicap on a quest It was soht accepted and embraced You lit out into the wilderness at random, and if your state of mind, or maybe it was your soul, was correct, then adventure would find you through the natural course of events It was like free association--there were no wrong answers It worked as long as you weren’t trying too hard

And Eliot was in no danger of trying too hard The Muntjac ran fast before a ind, out past the Outer Island, and After, out of Fillory and out of the knoorld

A hush settled over the table For aof the ship’s ropes and timbers could be heard, and Quentin felt for the first tiht how they would look to sohted ship, lost in the ihtti for words That was a new one on Quentin

"You wouldn’t have believed it, Q," he said finally So like an expression of actual awe had come over Eliot’s face "You really wouldn’t We’ve been all over the Eastern Ocean The landsSoin"

"Tell hi nized him It was Benedict But a new Benedict, reborn with ropy s and the sullen attitude were long gone He looked at Eliot with a respect Quentin had never seen hiht it was a sea serpent at first We barely brought the ship around in tiht trains that are always about a , all tankers and boxcars, except that this one never ended It broke the surface, seawater strea beside us for a couple of ain"

"Just like that?"

"Just like that Bingle hopped onto it for a while, but we could never get any of the cars open

"And we found a castle floating on the ocean At first we just heard it, bells ringing in thewe ca wooden barges No one inside, just bells tolling in one of the toith the rocking of the waves

"What else? There was an island where no one could tell a lie Goodness that ard for a while We aired a lot of dirty laundry there, I can tell you"

Rueful s the crew

"There was one where the people were really waves, ocean waves, which I know, but I just can’t explain it anymore than that There was a place where the ocean poured into a huge chase that we had to sail across"

"Like an aqueduct," Benedict put in

"Like an aqueduct It was all so strange I think ets wilder, and it creates all sorts of impossible places, all by itself We spent a week trapped in the Doldrulass, and there was a Sargasso Sea there, a big swirl of flotsah it Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said Toys, tables, whole houses And people end up there too They get forgotten as well