Even the insects were hushed. Quentin sneezed—he was mildly allergic to some local plant—and wiped his eyes. On the far side of the meadow something slipped into the forest. It went just as his eye began to track it—it must have been standing there, stock-still, watching him while he pissed. He got an impression of something large, the size of a big boar maybe.

Quentin fastened his trousers—zippers were foreign to Fillory, and so far impossible to reverse-engineer, you just couldn’t explain them to the dwarves—and walked across the meadow to where the animal had been. Standing just on the near side of the blue line, he peered in among the trees. They were thick enough that it was still full night in the forest. Still, he caught the faintest shadow of a pair of heavy animal haunches receding into it.

Is this it? Is it starting? Carefully, like he was stepping over an electric fence, he put one leg over the invisible blue line, then the other, and walked into the forest. He was pretty sure he knew Who he was chasing even before He was fully in view.

“Hey, Ember,” he called. “Ember! Wait up!”

The god looked at him impassively over His shoulder, then continued to trot.

“Oh, come on.”

The ram-god had not been seen in Fillory since the Brakebills took the thrones, or not as far as Quentin knew. He looked fully recovered from the beating He’d taken from Martin Chatwin. Even His hind leg, which had been crippled the last time Quentin saw Him, was restored and could take His weight without a limp.

Quentin had complicated feelings about Ember. He wasn’t like Ember was in the books. Quentin was still angry that He hadn’t been able to save them—to save Alice—in the fight against Martin. He supposed it wasn’t Ember’s fault, but still. What kind of a god wasn’t at the top of the food chain in His own world?

The big woolly kind with horns, apparently. Quentin didn’t have any particular beef with Ember, he just didn’t want to bow down to Him the way He always seemed to expect people to do. If Ember was so great He should have saved Alice, and if He wasn’t that great, Quentin wasn’t bowing. QED.

Still, if Ember was here, it meant they were on the right track. Things were going to get very real soon, or at least very Fillorian. He just didn’t know which Fillory it was going to be—the beautiful, magical Fillory or the dark, frightening one. Either way this would be a good moment for a shipment of divine wisdom to arrive. Guidance from on high. A pillar of fire, a tree of smoke.