Eliot shuffled his notes, looking for another item of business, but business was in short supply these days.

“It is time,” Julia said. “We must go to the window.”

Every day after the afternoon meeting they went out on the balcony and waved to the people.

“Damn it,” Eliot said. “All right.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t today,” Janet said. “It feels wrong.”

Quentin knew what she meant. The thought of standing out there on the narrow balcony, frozen smiles on their faces, princess-waving at the Fillorians who gathered for the daily ritual, felt a little off. Still.

“We should to do it,” he said. “Today of all days.”

“We’re accepting congratulations for doing nothing.”

“We’re reassuring the people of continuity in the face of tragedy.”

They filed out onto the narrow balcony. In the castle courtyard far below, at the bottom of a vertiginous drop, a few hundred Fillorians had gathered. From this height they looked unreal, like dolls. Quentin waved.

“I wish we could do something more for them,” he said.

“What do you want to do?” Eliot said. “We’re the kings and queens of a magic utopia.”

Cheers drifted up from far below, faintly. The sound was tinny and far away—it had the audio quality of a musical greeting card.

“Some progressive reforms? I want to help somebody with something. If I were a Fillorian I would depose me as an aristocratic parasite.”

When Quentin and the others took the thrones, they hadn’t known exactly what to expect. The details of what was involved were vague—there would be some ceremonial duties, Quentin supposed, and presumably a lead role in policy making, some responsibility for the welfare of the nation they ruled. But the truth was that there just wasn’t much actual work to do.

The weird thing was that Quentin missed it. He’d expected Fillory to be something like medieval England, because it looked like medieval England, at least on casual inspection. He figured he’d just use European history, to the extent that he remembered it, as a crib sheet. He would pursue the standard enlightened humanitarian program, nothing extraordinary, greatest hits only, and go down in history as a force for good.

But Fillory wasn’t England. For one thing the population was tiny—there couldn’t have been more than ten thousand humans in the whole country, plus that many talking animals and dwarves and spirits and giants and such. So he and the other monarchs—or tetrarchs, whatever—were more like small-town mayors. For another, while magic was very real on Earth, Fillory was magical. There was a difference. Magic was part of the ecosystem. It was in the weather and the oceans and the soil, which was wildly fertile. If you wanted your crops to fail you had to work pretty hard at it.

Fillory was a land of hyperabundance. Anything that needed making could be gotten from the dwarves, sooner or later, and they weren’t an oppressed industrial proletariat, they actually enjoyed making things. Unless you were an actively despicable tyrant, the way Martin Chatwin had been, there were just too many resources and too few people to create anything much in the way of civil strife. The only shortage that the Fillorian economy suffered from was a chronic shortage of shortages.