The gate was black iron. The man fitted the last key into the lock and turned it.

The moment he finished the doors sprang open to reveal a beautiful woman standing right behind them, just as if she’d been waiting there for him all along. She was as tall as he was, and she must have been doing a great deal of studying with the witch while he was gone, because she absolutely glowed with magical power.

But he still recognized her. She was his daughter.

“Beautiful girl,” the man said, “it’s me. Your father. I’ve come to take you home.”

“My father?” she said. “You’re not my father. My daddy’s not an old man!”

The beautiful woman cackled a not unfamiliar cackle.

“But I am your father,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’ve been searching all this time—”

The woman wasn’t listening.

“Thank you anyway, for setting me free.”

She kissed him on the cheek. Then she handed him a golden key and flew away on the wind.

“Wait!” he called after her. But she didn’t wait. He couldn’t explain. He watched her dwindle in the distance into nothing. Only then did he sit down and weep.

The man never saw his daughter again, and he never used the key either. Because where could he have gone, what door could he have opened, what treasure could he have unlocked that would have been worth more to him than the golden key his daughter gave him?

CHAPTER 8

Quentin was woken up early by the lookout calling out sonorously to the helmsman, like a subway conductor announcing the next stop, that land was in sight. He put a heavy black cloak on over his pajamas and went up on deck.

His dreams had been full of the man and the daughter and the witch and the keys. The story bothered him, not least because he didn’t think it really would have ended that way. Could the man really not have explained? Did his daughter really not understand what had happened? It didn’t add up. If they’d talked about it and figured things out it could have been a happy ending. People in fairy tales never just figured things out.

The clouds hung low and gray and solid, barely higher than the top of the Muntjac’s mainmast. Quentin squinted in the direction the lookout was pointing. There it was: the promised island was barely visible through the mist. Still hours away.

Up on the forecastle deck Bingle was going through his morning exercises. Quentin’s limited interactions with him had made him worry that the greatest swordsman in all of Fillory might possibly be clinically depressed. He never laughed, or even smiled. Two swords lay beside him, still in their leather sheaths, while he performed a series of what looked like isometric exercises involving only his hands, not totally unlike the finger exercises Quentin had learned at Brakebills.

He wondered how you got to be as good at fighting as Bingle. If he was going to get any further in the adventuring business, Quentin thought, he should look into it. He liked the idea of it. A swordfighting sorcerer: the double threat. He didn’t have to get as good as Bingle. He just had to get better than he was, which was none too good.