The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(105)

“Ember’s Tomb?” Quentin roused himself for a final effort. “Waitaminnit. Does that mean Ember’s dead? And what about Umber?”

“Oh, no-no-no!” Farvel said hastily. “It is just a name. A traditional name, it means nothing. It has just been so long since Ember was seen in these parts.”

“Ember is the eagle?” Humbledrum rumbled.

“The ram.” The uniformed bartender correctn. He sneezed.

“How can you not know who Ember is?” Penny asked the bear disgustedly.

“Oh dear,” the tree said, hanging its vernal, garlanded face sadly down toward the table. “Do not judge the bear too harshly. You must understand, we are very far from the capital here, and many have ruled these green hills, or tried, since the last time you children of Earth walked them. The silver years of the Chatwins are long ago now, and the years since have been forged from baser metals. You cannot imagine the chaos we have suffered through. There was Widewings the Eagle, and after him the Wrought Iron Man, the Lily Witch, the Spear-Carrier, and Saint Anselm. There was the Lost Lamb, and the vicious depredations of the Very Tallest Tree.

“And you know,” he finished, “we are so very far from the capital here. And it is very confusing. I am only a birch, you know, and not a very large one.”

A leaf fluttered to the table, a single green tear.

“I have a question,” Janet said, unintimidated as ever. “If this crown is so damn important, and Ember and Umber and Amber or whatever are so powerful, why don’t they just go get it themselves?”

“Ah, well, there’s Laws,” Farvel sighed. “They can’t, you see. There’s Higher Laws that even such as They are bound by. It must be you who retrieve the crown. It can only be you.”

“We have lived too long,” the bartender said glumly, to no one. He’d been putting away his own wares with impressive efficiency.

Quentin supposed it all made sense. Ember and Umber absent, a power vacuum, an insurgent Watcherwoman emerging from whatever witchy quasi-death she’d suffered at the Chatwins’ hands. Penny had been right after all: they’d gotten a quest. Their role was clear. It had a pat, theme-park quality to it, like they were on some fantasy-camp role-playing vacation, but it did make sense. He could still hope. But let’s be sure.

“I don’t want to sound crass,” he said out loud. “But Ember and Umber are the big shots around here, right? I mean, of all those people, things, whatever you mentioned, They’re the most powerful? And morally righteous or whatever? Let’s be clear on this for a second. I want to be sure we’re backing the right horse. Or ram. Whatever.”

“Of course! It would be folly to think otherwise!”

Farvel shushed him, looking worriedly over at the table of beavers, who didn’t seem to be paying them any attention, but you couldn’t be too careful. Bizarrely, Farvel produced a cigarette from somewhere and lit it from the candle on the table, careful not to ignite any part of itself. It protruded jauntily from the tree’s little cleft mouth. The thing must have a death wish. Aromatic smoke rose up through the leafy corona of its face.

“Only do not judge us too harshly. The rams have been absent for many years. We have had to carry on without Them. Make our own way. The forest must live.”

Eliot and the horned man had vanished, presumably together. Incorrigible, that man; it cheered Quentin up by a scintilla that somebody at least was having a good time. The white goat slurped its yellow wine loudly in its corner. Humbledrum just gazed sorrowfully into its schnapps. Quentin reminded himself, as if he had almost forgotten the fact, that h?mime=image/jpg" class="imagefix" alt="images" height="bplausiblege was very far from home, in a room full of animals drinking alcohol.

“We have lived too long,” the bartender announced again, sullenly. “The great days are past.”

They stayed at the inn that night. The rooms were carved hobbit-style into the hill behind the main cabin. They were comfortable, windowless, and silent, and Quentin slept like the dead.

In the morning they sat at a long table in the bar, eating fresh eggs and toast and drinking cold water out of stone jugs, their backpacks piled up in a heap in one of the booths. Apparently Richard’s gold cylinders went a long way in the Fillorian economy. Quentin felt clear-eyed and miraculously unhungover. His restored faculties appreciated with a cold new keenness the many painful aspects of his recent personal history, but they also allowed him to really appreciate almost for the first time the reality of his physical presence in actual Fillory. It was all so detailed and vivid compared to his cartoonish fantasies. The room had the seedy, humiliated look of a bar seen in direct sunlight, sticky and thoroughly initialed by knife-and-claw-wielding patrons. The floor was paved with old round millstones lightly covered with a scattering of straw, the chinks between them filled in with packed dirt. Neither Farvel nor Humbledrum nor the bartender were anywhere in sight. They were served by a brusque but otherwise attentive dwarf.

Also in the dining room were a man and a woman who sat opposite each other by a window, sipping coffee and saying nothing and glancing over at the Brakebills table every once in a while. Quentin had the distinct impression that they were just killing time, waiting for him and the others to finish their breakfast. That proved to be the case.

When the table was cleared, the pair introduced themselves as Dint—the man—and Fen. Both were fortyish and weatherbeaten, as if they spent a lot of time outdoors in a professional capacity. They were, Dint explained, the guides. They would take the party to Ember’s Tomb, in search of King Martin’s crown. Dint was tall and skinny, with a big nose and huge black eyebrows that together took up most of his face; he was dressed all in black and wore a long black cape, apparently as an expression of the extreme seriousness with which he regarded himself and his abilities. Fen was shorter and denser and more muscular, with close-cropped blond hair. With a whistle round her neck she could have been a gym teacher at a private school for girls. Her clothes were loose-fitting and practical, evidently designed for ease of movement in unpredictable situations. She projected both toughness and kindness, and she wore high boots with fascinatingly complex laces. She was, to the best of Quentin’s ability to gauge these things, a lesbian.