The boy gave his name, grudgingly, as Benedict. He might have been sixteen. Quentin had a feeling that not a lot of people came through the map room, and still less often were those people kings; at any rate Benedict was out of practice at showing the appropriate amount of deference. Quentin sympathized. Personally he could take or leave the bowing and scraping. But he still needed a map.

“What can you show me that has the Outer Island on it?”

Benedict’s eyes went blank for a second as he queried some mental database. Then he turned away and dragged himself over to a wall that was honeycombed with little square drawers. He yanked one out—they turned out to be thin but very deep—and extracted the single scroll it contained.

The centerpiece of the map room was a heavy wooden table with an elaborate brass mechanism bolted to it. Benedict nimbly fitted the scroll into it and cranked a handle. It was the only thing he did with anything remotely resembling alacrity. The crank unrolled the scroll and spread it out flat so you could get a good look at the section you wanted.

It was a lot longer than Quentin expected. Yards of almost-blank parchment scrolled by as Benedict cranked, showing curves and arcs of latitude and longitude or whatever the Fillorian equivalents were, traversing miles of open ocean. Finally he stopped at a tiny, irregular nugget of land with its name underneath it in italic script: The Outer Island.

“That must be the place,” Quentin said dryly.

Benedict would neither confirm nor deny this. He was painfully uncomfortable making eye contact. Quentin couldn’t think who Benedict reminded him of until he realized that this was what he had probably looked like to other people when he was sixteen. Fear of everybody and everything, hidden behind a mask of contempt, with the greatest contempt of all reserved for himself.

“It looks pretty far out,” Quentin said. “How many days’ sail?”

“Dunno,” Benedict said, which wasn’t quite true, because he added, obviously in spite of himself: “Three maybe. It’s four hundred and seventy-seven miles. Nautical miles.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Nautical’s longer.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred and sixty-five yards longer,” Benedict said automatically. “And a bit.”

Quentin was impressed. Somebody must have managed to beat some information into Benedict somehow. The brass map reader had many articulated arms that extended seductively outward, each one with a posable lens on it. Quentin swiveled one around, and a magnified version of the Outer Island swam into view. It was roughly peanut-shaped, with a star marked on it at one end. Its border was a thick dark line, with a fainter outline around it, doubling it, as if to suggest waves, or maybe the submerged edge of the landmass under the water.

It was about what he expected. A fine black thread, a single lonely stream, wandered from the interior down to the coast. Next to the star was the word Outer, in smaller letters. Presumably that was the name of the island’s one town. The lens failed to reveal anything else. All it did was make the fine grain of the parchment look coarse.