“That’s it? You’re giving up?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Look at that—” Benedict waved at the wall, in the general direction of the heaving sea. “And now look at this.” He pointed to the map. “This you can make perfect. That—” He shuddered. “It’s just a mess.”

“But the map isn’t real. So sure, maybe it’s perfect, but what’s the point?”

“Maps don’t make you seasick.”

The irony wasn’t lost on Quentin. He’s the one who’d turned the ship around, back toward Whitespire. He looked at the map Benedict was working on. Sure enough, one of the little islands toward the edge of the page, almost falling into the margin, had the word After written next to it in tiny calligraphic script.

“After Island.” There it was, right there. Quentin touched it lightly with his finger. He half-expected to get a shock. “Is that on our way?”

“It’s east of here. It’s the complete opposite of on our way.”

“How far?”

“Two days, three days. Like I said, the map is really old. And these are outlying islands.”

Benedict explained, rolling his eyes practically up into his head at Quentin’s ignorance, that the islands farther out in the Eastern Ocean didn’t stay still once they caught on that they’d been mapped. They didn’t like it, and through some kind of tectonic magic they wandered around to make sure the maps didn’t stay too accurate. More chaos.

Benedict whispered some calculations to himself, speed and time, then nimbly, precisely—you wouldn’t think it was possible with those black bangs hanging over his eyes—he drew a perfect freehand circle around After Island in light pencil.

“It has to be somewhere inside this circle.”

Quentin gazed at the little island-dot, lost in the web of curving lines of meridians and parallels. A net that wouldn’t catch him if he fell. It wasn’t Fillory out there. But somewhere in that abyss shone a key, a magic key. He could come back with that in his hand.

An image swam into his mind, an album cover from the 1970s, a painting of an old-fashioned sailing ship on the very edge of a cataract over which the green sea was roaring and pouring. The ship was just beginning to tilt, and the current was strong, but still: a bold tack in a strong wind might just save it. A sharp, barked order from the captain and it would slew around and beat back up against the current to safety.

But then where would the ship go? Back home? Not yet.

“Mind if I borrow this?” he said. “I want to show it to the captain.”

With the course change they left the warm blue-green ocean behind and crashed their way into a heaving black one. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. Flail-blows of cold rain clattered on the deck. Quentin couldn’t have pointed to the dividing line, but now the water around them seemed like a completely different element from the one they’d been sailing in before, something opaque and solid that had to be smashed and shoved aside rather than slipped silently through.