“I’m not ruining it. I just want to understand it.”

“If you had faith you wouldn’t have to understand.”

“And why exactly are you looking for these keys?” Poppy asked brightly. “Or I guess, why are we looking for them?”

“Yeah, why are we?” Josh said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re cool and all. They sound cool. Can I see them?”

“We don’t really know why,” Eliot said. “The Unique Beasts wanted us to find them.”

“But find them and do what with them?” Poppy said.

“I suppose once we have them all they’ll tell us. Or perhaps we’ll know when we have them. Or perhaps we’ll never know. They might just take the keys and pat us on the behind and send us on our way. I don’t know. I’ve never done a quest before.”

“So . . . the journey is the arrival, kind of thing?” Josh said. “I hate that stuff. I’m an old-fashioned arrival-is-the-arrival kind of guy.”

“For what it’s worth, they told me the realm was in peril,” Eliot said. “So there is that. But it’s not like the Holy Grail was actually useful for anything.”

“I told everybody the Neitherlands are jacked, right?” Josh said.

“You think that’s part of this?” Quentin said. “You think they’re connected?”

“No. Well, maybe.” Josh stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “But how?”

“The Neitherlands are down.” Quentin ticked them off. “Jollyby is dead. The realm is supposedly in peril. Seven Golden Keys. A dragon collecting buttons. If there’s a thread running through all that, I’m not seeing it.”

Maybe he didn’t want to see it. That would be a hell of a thread. You’d want to think twice about yanking on it.

Someone up in the rigging shouted that he could see an island.

The boat’s prow scrunched almost soundlessly into the damp white sand. Quentin vaulted over the bow just as it spent the very last of its momentum and landed on his feet on powdery white sand with his boots still dry. He turned back toward the launch, bowed, and received a smattering of applause from its passengers.

He grabbed the painter and hauled on it as the others—Eliot, Josh, Poppy, Julia, Bingle, Benedict—scrambled out on both sides. The air was quiet and still. It felt weird to be standing on solid ground again.

“Worst away team ever,” Josh said, wading up onto land. “Not a single redshirt.”

Pretty: that was the impression the island had made from a distance. Chalk cliffs that parted to reveal a small bay with a tidy beach. A row of single trees stood out against the skyline, so fine and still and green against the blue sky they looked like they’d been carved in jade. Vacation paradise.