“It’s just that if it all ends then the baby will never see Fillory! I know it’s silly, but I wanted the baby to be born here. I wanted him to see all this. Or her. I wanted us to have a little prince or princess!”

“They’ll still be one, baby,” Josh said. “Whatever happens. We’ll be royalty in exile. It still counts.”

“No,” Janet said. “It doesn’t.”

—

In the end it was only Janet and Eliot who went, for the simple reason that Josh couldn’t really ride a horse yet, not even a talking one who could coach him, and anyway Poppy was feeling sick, and Josh didn’t want to leave her.

So it was just the two of them. It felt very different from when they’d set out to fight the Lorians, or even from when they’d gone hunting in the old days. It was quieter. More somber. They rode out shortly after dawn through a small stone arch in the rear of the castle that let out on a narrow trail, hardly more than a goat track, that ran along the tops of the cliffs overlooking the bay. No fanfare, no confetti, no loyal retainers. They went alone.

“Which way?” Janet said.

Eliot pointed north. No particular reason, it was just good to be decisive in these situations.

The grass was still wet. The new pink sun hovered low above Whitespire Bay. Eliot felt very small and Fillory felt, for a change, very big and very wild around him. It was a while since it had felt like that. This was a serious quest, maybe the last one. What happened now truly mattered. Eliot had struggled before he found Fillory, he knew that: he drank too much, he found clever ways to be nasty to people, he never seemed to have an emotion that wasn’t either ironic or chemically generated. He’d changed in Fillory, and the thought of going back to that, of becoming that person again, frightened him. He wouldn’t die with Fillory, he’d meant that when he said it, but if Fillory died Eliot knew that something in him, something small but essential, wouldn’t survive either.

He wouldn’t miss this interminable summer though. It had a certain fiery majesty to it, and he appreciated that, but at this point he was dying for the heat to break. A hot early morning wind surged through the trees, thick and strong like a flowing river, combing through the leaves, which were green but yellowing in the drought. The trees must know what was coming, he thought. If Julia were here she could have asked them.