She rented a Peugeot that she would never return and drove north for an hour, negotiating a typically French rond-point every one hundred meters, turned right at Cavaillon, and got lost eighty times near Gordes, a spectacular village perché that clung vertiginously to the side of the Luberon Valley as if it had been plastered there with a trowel. She rolled into sleepy, tiny Murs at three in the afternoon, in the heart of photogenic Provence.

And lo and behold, it was a little gem, a largely untouristed clump of old houses built from strangely light-emitting bleached-brown southern French stone. It had one church and one castle and one hotel. The streets were medieval and paint-scrapingly narrow. Julia stopped the car in the town square and took in the heartbreaking World War I memorial. Half of the dead had the same last name.

The GPS coordinates were ten minutes outside of town. They corresponded to a handsome farmhouse afloat all by itself in a sea of hay and lavender fields. It had sky-blue shutters and a white gravel driveway in which she parked her scraped-up Peugeot. A clean-cut man only a little older than Julia answered the door. He was handsome—you got the impression that he hadn’t always been clean-cut, that he’d lost a lot of weight at some point in his life. It had left behind some interesting lines on his face.

“Hello Circe,” he said. “I’m Pouncy Silverkitten. Welcome home.”

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 19

Standing at the bow with Eliot the next morning, two kings of Fillory plowing eastward into the unknown, into the rising sun, never knowing what God or Fate or Magic was going to send rearing up at them over the horizon next, this now: this was much more like it. This was the stuff.

At first it had been hard to admit it, to change gears, again, and just go with it, but then suddenly it wasn’t. Not with the morning sun on his face, and the Muntjac surging and galloping along under him. He’d missed a lot here, but he wasn’t going to miss anything more. Earth was the dream, not Fillory, and it was going to that part of his brain where dreams went—the kind of anxiety-ridden, fiendishly detailed dreams that felt like they lasted for years, through endless meaningless plot twists, which delivered you ultimately to a fate not even of death but merely of permanent embarrassment. Fillory had taken him back. Welcome to the Quest for the Seven Keys. Your adventure is already in progress.