The Muntjac ran fast ahead of a freezing gale. It drove them across vast, island-less stretches of ocean, punishing the sails, which meekly accepted the abuse and ran even faster. Enormous emerald-green swells urged them onward from below, rising up under them and then rolling on ahead of them, as if even the sea had had enough of them and couldn’t wait for this to be over. Eliot had made the voyage out sound like nonstop riches and wonders, islands of mystery twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five, but now the ocean was a complete blank, scrubbed mercifully free of anything remotely fantastical. A clean miss.

Maybe the islands were moving out of their way. They had become untouchable. They didn’t see land once—it was as if they were taking a grand leap outward into nothingness.

The only miracle that happened, happened on board. It was a small miracle, but it was a real one. Two nights after Benedict died, Poppy came to Quentin’s cabin to say she was sorry about what had happened and to see how he was. She didn’t leave till the next morning.

It was a strange time to have something nice happen. It was the wrong time, it wasn’t appropriate, but maybe it was the only time it could have happened. Their emotions were raw and close to the surface. Quentin was surprised to say the least, and one of the things that surprised him was how much he wanted her. Poppy was pretty, and Poppy was smart, at least as smart as Quentin, probably more so. And she was kind, and funny when she let her guard down a little, and her long legs were as absolutely wondrous as anything Quentin had ever seen in this or any world.

But beyond that Poppy had something Quentin wanted almost as badly as the wordless physical forgetting of sex—which would have been enough, God knows, it really would—and that was a sense of perspective. She wasn’t completely caught up in the grand myths of quests and adventures and whatever else. Deep down she didn’t especially give a shit about Fillory. She was a tourist here. Fillory wasn’t her home, and it wasn’t the repository of all her childhood hopes and dreams. It was just a place, and she was just passing through it. It was a relief to not take Fillory too seriously for a while. When he’d imagined something like this might happen, he’d always imagined it with Julia. But Julia didn’t need him, not this way. And when it came right down to it, the person he needed wasn’t Julia either.