He was cold and sticky with salt. He could have washed. He knew how to make fresh water from salt. But the spell was involved, and his fingers were stiff, and he decided he would rather live with the stickiness. He was warming up under the blankets anyway. When he’d come aboard he’d found a regulation navy blanket on the bed, a bristly beast that weighed about ten pounds and could have repelled chain shot. It was like being in bed with the corpse of a wild boar. He’d swapped it out for a foot-thick down comforter that was persistently damp and thoroughly nonregulation but infinitely more comforting.

Quentin waited to see if his mind would tip over into sleep. When it didn’t, and it had made it clear that it wasn’t going to without a fight, he sat up and looked at the books on the bookshelves. In his old life, at a juncture like this one, he would have reached for a Fillory novel, but events had overtaken that particular pleasure. But there was still the book Elaine had given him. The Seven Golden Keys.

Seven. That was more golden keys than he’d bargained for. He would settle for just one. The book wasn’t a novel, it turned out, just a fairy tale set in large type with woodcut illustrations. A children’s book. She must have filched it from Eleanor. What a piece of work that woman was. The back page bore the stamp of the embassy library. He squinched up his pillow enough to prop up his head.

The story was about a man, his daughter, and a witch. He was a widower, and the daughter was hardly more than a toddler when the witch came through town. Jealous of the little girl’s beauty, and with no children of her own, the witch stole her away, cackling as she did that she was going to lock her away in a silver castle on a remote island. The man could free his daughter, but only if he could find the key to the castle, which he never would, because it was at the End of the World.

Undaunted, the man set out to find the key. It was hot, and he walked all day, and as the sun set he stopped by a river to refresh himself. When he bent down to drink he heard a tiny voice calling, open me up! Open me up! He looked around, and soon he saw that the voice belonged to a freshwater oyster that was clinging to a rock in the river. Next to it in the river mud was a minuscule golden key.