“Hi,” he said.

Chorus of grunts.

“I’m Quentin. I’m from Fillory. We’ve come to your island in search of a key.” He glanced at the others and coughed once. It was pretty much impossible to do this without sounding like he was reciting a Monty Python sketch. “Do you know anything about that? A magic key? Made of gold?”

They looked at each other and nodded: agreed, we all know what he’s talking about. They shared a family resemblance. They could all have been brothers.

“Aye, we know the one you mean,” one of them said—a large, brutallooking man encased in a huge woolly coat. His hand on his knee was like a piece of pink granite. “It’s down t’road.”

“Down the road,” Quentin repeated.

Right. Of course. The golden key is down the road. Where else would it be? He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.

“Aye, we know it.” He jerked his head. “Down t’road.”

“All right. Down the road it is. Well, thank you very much.”

He wondered if it was ever warm and sunny here, or if they lived in the permanent equivalent of a New England November. Did they know they were three days’ sail from a tropical zone?

The travelers set off down the road. They would have looked nobler if they’d been riding horses instead of wallowing through the mud like a bunch of peasants, but the Muntjac wasn’t set up for horses. Maybe they could hire local horses. Shaggy, sturdy ponies resigned to always being cold and damp, and to never being sleek and beautiful. He missed Dauntless.

The street changed to cobbles, rounded cubes that turned slick and ankle-breaking in the drizzle. It wasn’t much of a setting for a quest or an adventure or even an errand. Maybe Bingle was right, maybe they were just minor characters in his drama.

Benedict wasn’t even taking notes the way he usually did.

“I’ll just remember it,” he said.

There you had it: an island not even Benedict would bother to map.

It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t a long road. The last building on it was a stone building like a church, though it wasn’t a church, just a boxy structure two stories high, built up out of flat gray local stones, unmortared. It had a blank façade that looked unfinished, or maybe whatever ornamentation had once been there had been stripped away.

Quentin felt like the little boy at the beginning of The Lorax, at the mysterious tower of the dismal Once-ler. They should have been facing down bellowed challenges from black knights bearing the vergescu, or solving thorny theological dilemmas posed by holy hermits. Or at the very least resisting the diabolical temptations of ravishing succubi. Not fighting off seasonal affective disorder.