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

Rueful smiles went around the room among 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 chasm, and there was only a narrow bridge across it. A water-bridge that we had to sail across.”

“Like an aqueduct,” Benedict put in.

“Like an aqueduct. It was all so strange. I think magic gets magnified out here, gets wilder, and it creates all sorts of impossible places, all by itself. We spent a week trapped in the Doldrums. There was no wind, and the water was as smooth as glass, and there was a Sargasso Sea there, a big swirl of flotsam in the ocean. People lived there, picking through 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.

“We were almost trapped there, but the Muntjac sprouted a bank of oars to help us get away. Didn’t you, old thing?” Eliot knocked familiarly on the bulkhead with his fist. “You could take things away with you, from the Sargasso Sea, but you had to leave something behind. That was the deal. Bingle took a magic sword. Show them your sword, Bing.”

Bingle, sitting at the far end of the table, stood up and drew his sword halfway out of its sheath, almost shyly. It was a narrow length of bright steel chased with swirly silver patterns that glowed white.

“He won’t say what he left behind for it. What did you leave, Bing?”

Bingle smiled and touched the side of his nose and said nothing.

Quentin was weary. He’d woken up in Venice that morning, and spent the day in England, and another half day in Fillory. He’d already been drunk once and sobered up, and now he was getting drunk again, sitting there on a hard splintery bench in the Muntjac’s galley. Probably Eliot would have enjoyed a little jaunt back to Earth, he thought, where the wine and coffee were better. Though who knows, maybe it wouldn’t have worked if it had been the other way around. Maybe he couldn’t have done it—maybe he would have gotten trapped in the Sargasso Sea. And maybe Eliot wouldn’t have found his way to Josh, wouldn’t have gone to see the dragon, wouldn’t have played with Thomas. Maybe he would have failed where Quentin succeeded, and vice versa. Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.