by Lev Grossman
The woman wasn’t listening.
“Thank you anyway, for setting me free.”
She kissed him on the cheek. Then she handed him a golden key and flew away on the wind.
“Wait!” he called after her. But she didn’t wait. He couldn’t explain. He watched her dwindle in the distance into nothing. Only then did he sit down and weep.
The man never saw his daughter again, and he never used the key either. Because where could he have gone, what door could he have opened, what treasure could he have unlocked that would have been worth more to him than the golden key his daughter gave him?
CHAPTER 8
Quentin was woken up early by the lookout calling out sonorously to the helmsman, like a subway conductor announcing the next stop, that land was in sight. He put a heavy black cloak on over his pajamas and went up on deck.
His dreams had been full of the man and the daughter and the witch and the keys. The story bothered him, not least because he didn’t think it really would have ended that way. Could the man really not have explained? Did his daughter really not understand what had happened? It didn’t add up. If they’d talked about it and figured things out it could have been a happy ending. People in fairy tales never just figured things out.
The clouds hung low and gray and solid, barely higher than the top of the Muntjac’s mainmast. Quentin squinted in the direction the lookout was pointing. There it was: the promised island was barely visible through the mist. Still hours away.
Up on the forecastle deck Bingle was going through his morning exercises. Quentin’s limited interactions with him had made him worry that the greatest swordsman in all of Fillory might possibly be clinically depressed. He never laughed, or even smiled. Two swords lay beside him, still in their leather sheaths, while he performed a series of what looked like isometric exercises involving only his hands, not totally unlike the finger exercises Quentin had learned at Brakebills.
He wondered how you got to be as good at fighting as Bingle. If he was going to get any further in the adventuring business, Quentin thought, he should look into it. He liked the idea of it. A swordfighting sorcerer: the double threat. He didn’t have to get as good as Bingle. He just had to get better than he was, which was none too good.
“Good morning,” Quentin called.
“Good morning, Your Highness,” Bingle said. He never made the mistake of calling Quentin “Your Majesty,” a form of address that was reserved for the High King.
“I hate to interrupt.”
Bingle didn’t stop his routine, which Quentin supposed meant he wasn’t technically interrupting after all. He climbed the short ladder up to where Bingle was standing. Bingle knotted his hands together, then turned the position inside-out in a move that made even Quentin wince.
“I was thinking maybe you could give me some lessons. In swordsmanship. I’ve had a few already, but I haven’t gotten very far.”
Bingle’s expression didn’t change.
“It will be easier to protect you,” he said, “if you can protect yourself.”
“That was my thinking.”
Bingle unwove his fingers, which took some careful doing, and looked Quentin up and down. He reached forward and slid Quentin’s sword out of its sheath. He did this so quickly and fluidly that although Quentin thought he probably could have stopped him—he had a few inches of reach on Bingle—he couldn’t have sworn to it.
Bingle examined Quentin’s sword, first one side then the other, felt its edge and its heft, pouting thoughtfully.
“I’ll provide you with a weapon.”
“I already have a weapon.” Quentin pointed. “That sword.”
“It’s beautiful, but not right for a beginner.” For a second Quentin thought he was going to do something drastic, like chuck it overboard, but he just placed it on the deck next to the two other swords.
Bingle went below and returned to present Quentin with the training sword he would be using, a short, heavy weapon of oiled steel, blunt and nearly black and devoid of any adornment whatsoever. The blade and the hilt were all made out of one single unbroken chunk of metal. It was the most industrial-looking object Quentin had ever seen in Fillory. It weighed half again what his sword weighed. It didn’t even come with a scabbard, so he wouldn’t get to show off his buff sheathing-unsheathing skills.
“Hold it straight out,” Bingle said. “Like this.”
He straightened Quentin’s elbow and brought his arm up parallel to the deck. Quentin was holding the thing at full extension. He could already feel his muscles starting to cramp.
“Point it straight forward. Keep it out there. Long as you can.”
Quentin was expecting further instructions, but Bingle calmly went back to his isometrics. Quentin’s arm stiffened, then glowed with pain, then caught fire. He lasted about two minutes. Bingle had him switch arms.
“What do you call this style?” Quentin asked.
“The mistake people make,” Bingle said, “is thinking that there are different styles.”
“All right.”
“Force, balance, leverage, momentum—these principles never change. They are your style.”
Quentin was pretty sure his knowledge of physics exceeded Bingle’s by a couple of orders of magnitude, but he’d never thought of applying it that way.
Bingle explained that rather than practice a single fighting technique, his technique was to master all techniques and to deploy them as the circumstances and terrain required. A single grand meta-technique, if you will. He’d wandered Fillory and the lands beyond for years, seeking out martial monks in mountain monasteries and street fighters in crowded medinas and extracting their secrets, until he became the man Quentin saw before him: a walking encyclopedia of swordsmanship. Of the oaths he had made and broken, the beautiful women he had seduced and betrayed to obtain these secrets, it was best not to speak.
Quentin switched arms again, and then again. It reminded him of his days as a semi-pro sleight-of-hand magician. The beginning, the laying down of the fundamentals, was always the worst part, which he supposed was why so few people did it. That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect. To take his mind off it he watched Bingle, who was now stalking the deck, staring accusingly ahead of him, whipping his own blade in a complicated pattern, drawing ampersands and Kells knots in the air with it.
A frigid spitting mist was blowing in from the ocean. He could see After Island clearly now; they’d be landing soon. He decided he was done. He should at least change out of his pajamas before he set off in search of the golden key.
“I’m knocking off, Bingle,” he said. He placed his practice blade on the deck next to Bingle’s other two. His arms felt like they were floating.
Bingle nodded, not breaking his own rhythm.
“Come back to me when you can do half an hour,” he said. “With each arm.”
He performed a spectacular no-handed roundoff that looked like it was going to take him right off the forecastle deck, but somehow he swallowed his inertia just in time to stick the landing. He finished with his blade jammed between the ribs of some imaginary assailant. He withdrew it and cleaned the blade on his pants leg.
That was probably a few more lessons down the track.
“Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”
“That’s why I have you,” Quentin said. “So I won’t have to write anything. With my sword.”
“Sometimes I think I am fate’s sword. She wields me cruelly.”
Quentin wondered what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably.
“Right. Well, there won’t be much cruelty on this trip. We’ll be back at Whitespire pretty soon. Then you can go check out your castle.”
Bingle turned to face the wind. He seemed to be living out some story of his own in which Quentin was j
ust a minor character, a chorus member, without even a name in the program.
“I shall never see Fillory again.”
In spite of himself Quentin felt a chill. He didn’t like the feeling. He was chilly enough as it was.
* * *
After Island was a low strip of gray rocks and thin grass flocked with sheep. If the Outer Island was a tropical paradise, After could have passed for a stray member of the Outer Hebrides.
They circled it, hugging the shore, until they found a harbor and dropped anchor. A couple of rain-ravaged fishing boats were moored there, and a handful of empty buoys suggested that more were out to sea. It was a hell of a dreary spot. A more enterprising king might have tried to claim it for Fillory, Quentin supposed, except that it didn’t really seem worth it. Not exactly the jewel in the crown.
There was no wharf, and the bay was crowded with surly breakers. They barely managed to get the launch in past the surf without swamping. Quentin jumped out, wetting himself to the waist, and wallowed up onto the rocky beach. A couple of fishermen watched them, smoking and mending a vast tangled net that was stretched out around them on the shale. They had the brick-red complexions of lifelong outdoorsmen, and they shared the same thickheaded look. They didn’t seem to have enough forehead—their hairlines were pulled down too low over their eyebrows. Quentin would have put their age at anything between thirty and sixty.
“Ahoy there,” he said.
They nodded at him and grunted. One of them touched his cap. Over a few minutes’ parley the friendly one was persuaded to divulge the general direction of the nearest and probably only town. Quentin, Bingle, and Benedict thanked the men and slogged their way up the beach through the cold white sand scalloped with black tide marks. Julia trailed silently behind them. Quentin had tried to persuade her to stay on board, but she insisted. Whatever else was going on with her, she was still up for a party.
“You know what I’m waiting for on this trip?” Quentin said. “I’m not waiting for somebody to be happy to see us. I just want someone to look surprised to see us.”
The weather deepened to a light wuthering rain. Quentin’s wet pants chafed. The sand gave way to dunes capped with saw grass and then to a path: grassy sand, then sandy grass, then just grass. They tramped through humpy, unfenced meadows and low hills, past a lost, orphaned well. He tried to summon a heroic feeling, but the setting wasn’t especially conducive. It reminded him of nothing so much as walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn in the freezing rain with James and Julia on the day he took his Brakebills exam. In olden times there was a boy, young and strong and brave-o . . .
The town, once they found it, was a thoroughly medieval affair of stone cottages, thatched roofs, and mud streets. Its most marked characteristic was the thorough lack of interest the locals showed in the oddly dressed strangers in their midst. A half dozen of them were sitting at an outdoor table in front of a pub. They were eating sandwiches and drinking beer out of metal tankards in the face of weather Quentin would have made it a major priority to get out of.
“Hi,” he said.
Chorus of grunts.
“I’m Quentin. I’m from Fillory. We’ve come to your island in search of a key.” He glanced at the others and coughed once. It was pretty much impossible to do this without sounding like he was reciting a Monty Python sketch. “Do you know anything about that? A magic key? Made of gold?”
They looked at each other and nodded: agreed, we all know what he’s talking about. They shared a family resemblance. They could all have been brothers.
“Aye, we know the one you mean,” one of them said—a large, brutallooking man encased in a huge woolly coat. His hand on his knee was like a piece of pink granite. “It’s down t’road.”
“Down the road,” Quentin repeated.
Right. Of course. The golden key is down the road. Where else would it be? He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.
“Aye, we know it.” He jerked his head. “Down t’road.”
“All right. Down the road it is. Well, thank you very much.”
He wondered if it was ever warm and sunny here, or if they lived in the permanent equivalent of a New England November. Did they know they were three days’ sail from a tropical zone?
The travelers set off down the road. They would have looked nobler if they’d been riding horses instead of wallowing through the mud like a bunch of peasants, but the Muntjac wasn’t set up for horses. Maybe they could hire local horses. Shaggy, sturdy ponies resigned to always being cold and damp, and to never being sleek and beautiful. He missed Dauntless.
The street changed to cobbles, rounded cubes that turned slick and ankle-breaking in the drizzle. It wasn’t much of a setting for a quest or an adventure or even an errand. Maybe Bingle was right, maybe they were just minor characters in his drama.
Benedict wasn’t even taking notes the way he usually did.
“I’ll just remember it,” he said.
There you had it: an island not even Benedict would bother to map.
It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t a long road. The last building on it was a stone building like a church, though it wasn’t a church, just a boxy structure two stories high, built up out of flat gray local stones, unmortared. It had a blank façade that looked unfinished, or maybe whatever ornamentation had once been there had been stripped away.
Quentin felt like the little boy at the beginning of The Lorax, at the mysterious tower of the dismal Once-ler. They should have been facing down bellowed challenges from black knights bearing the vergescu, or solving thorny theological dilemmas posed by holy hermits. Or at the very least resisting the diabolical temptations of ravishing succubi. Not fighting off seasonal affective disorder.
If he’d had to put his finger on it he would have said that more than anything else the rhythm of it was wrong. It was too soon. They shouldn’t have found it this quick, nor should they obtain it without a fight.
But fuck it. Maybe he was just lucky. Maybe it was destiny. In spite of everything, he felt a rising excitement. This was it. The doors were enormous and made of oak, but there was a smaller, man-sized door set in one of them, presumably for days when you couldn’t be bothered to fling open an entire grand double-height oaken portal. The doorway was flanked by empty niches for statuary, past or future but not present.
They straggled to a stop in front of it, a brave company of knights assembled before the Chapel Perilous. Which of them would brave what lay within? Quentin’s nose was running. His hair was wet from the rain; he did have a hat, but he felt an obstinate urge to face whatever suffering was available for him to face, and that was a cold drizzle. He and Julia sniffled at the same time.
In the end they all braved the chapel, if only to get in out of the wet. It was no warmer inside than outside. The atmosphere was of an old country church from which the verger had stepped away for a few minutes. The air smelled like stone dust. Diffuse gray light misted in through a few narrow, high windows. A collection of rusty gardening implements resided in one corner: a hoe, a shovel, a rake.
In the center of the room stood a stone table, and on the stone table lay a worn red velvet pillow, and on the pillow lay a golden key, with three teeth.
Next to it was a yellowed slip of paper on which was neatly printed:
GOLDEN KEY
The key wasn’t bright, and it wasn’t tarnished. It had the deep matte patina of an authentically old thing. Its dignity was undisturbed by its humble surroundings—the stillness in the room seemed to come from it. Probably the rubes around here just didn’t know enough to take it seriously. Like some European village with a cannon as a war monument, and no one realizes it still has a live round in the chamber, until one day . . .
Bingle picked up the key.
“Jesus!” Quentin said. “Careful.”
The guy must have a death wish. Bingle turned it over in his hands, examining both sid
es. Nothing happened.
Quentin realized what was going on. He’d been given a do-over. He was back on the edge of that meadow in the forest, but this time he was going in. There was more to life than being fat and safe and warm in a clockwork luxury resort. Or maybe there wasn’t more, but he was going to find out. And how did you find out? You had an adventure. That’s how. You picked up a golden key.
“Let me see it,” he said.
Satisfied that it wasn’t lethal, or at least not instantly, Bingle passed it to Quentin. It didn’t buzz, and it didn’t glow. It didn’t come alive in his hand. It felt cool and heavy, but not cooler and heavier than he imagined a golden key should feel.
“Quentin,” Julia said. “There is old magic on that key. A lot of it. I can feel it.”
“Good.”
He grinned at her. He felt elated.
“You do not have to do this.”
“I know. But I want to do this.”
“Quentin.”
“What?”
Julia offered him her hand. God bless Julia. Whatever else she had lost she still had a hell of a lot of human kindness inside her. He took her hand, and with the other he felt around in the air with the key. Maybe if he—? Yes. He felt it click against something hard, something that wasn’t there.
He lost it for a second—he waved the key around but couldn’t find it. And then he had it again, the clack of metal on metal. He stopped with the key resting on it, then pushed and it slipped in, ratcheting past an invisible tumbler and fitting firmly. Experimentally he let go of it. It stayed there: a golden key suspended in midair, parallel to the ground.
“Yes,” he whispered. “This.”
He took a breath, tremblier than he wanted it to be. Bingle did an odd thing, which was to place the point of his sword on the ground and drop to one knee. Quentin gripped the key again and turned it clockwise. Running on instinct, he felt for a doorknob and found it—he could picture it in his mind’s eye, cold white porcelain. He turned it and pulled and an immense cracking, tearing sound filled the room—not a terrible sound, a satisfying sound, the breaking of a seal that had been intact for centuries, waiting to be breached. Julia’s soft hand tightened on his. Air rushed from the room behind him out through the crack he was opening, and hot light flooded over him.
