“You didn’t show it very often,” Eliot said.

“If you really got Julia,” Janet said, “you would have understood that she didn’t like people who were too demonstrative with their affections.”

This caused Eliot to retroactively evaluate a lot of the interactions he remembered between Janet and Julia. Their footsteps sounded hollow on the boards in the marshy hush.

“Incredible that this thing is still standing,” Janet went on. “I can’t imagine who keeps it up.”

“How do you even know this place?”

“I was out here once, when you-all were away at sea. I thought somebody should survey it. It looked weird and interesting. I ran into some scary shit and backed off, but not before I met some weird and interesting people.”

Eliot wondered, not for the first time, what exactly Janet had gotten up to while the rest of them were off sailing the ocean blue. He’d gotten the official version of course, which was that she’d been running the country and doing an excellent job of it. But every once in a while Janet said things that made him wonder if that was the whole story.

“Do you ever wish you went with her? Julia, I mean? To that other-side deal, whatever it was called?”

“I think about it sometimes,” Eliot said. “But no. There’s no way I could have gone. Being king here is who I am. I wasn’t joking about that part, before.” He wobbled for a moment on a rocky board. “I wish I knew what it was like though.”

“Probably it’s not as marshy. You know the funny part?”

“Tell me.”

“I know how Poppy feels,” Janet said. “About the baby. I want that little guy to see Fillory too. I want it to rule when we’re gone.”

Eliot wasn’t sure if a person born in Fillory could rule Fillory, but he was more focused at this exact moment on his own possible imminent death at the hands or other extremities of this horrible swamp and whatever lived in it. He supposed that if he sank to the bottom of it his corpse might be perfectly preserved, for later generations, like those bodies that got pulled out of Irish bogs. That would have a certain grandeur to it.

But probably he’d be eaten before that happened. And after that the world would end anyway. So.

“That’s what happens to the birds, by the way.”

Janet pointed. She was having no trouble keeping her balance; she didn’t even look at her feet as she walked. In the distance something pale translucent pink floated, drifting, thirty feet above the cattails. It looked just like a jellyfish, with long floral tentacles dangling down.

It was an unspeakably sinister sight: an alien aerial parasite. A dying sparrow fluttered in one of the tendrils, stuck to it like a fly stuck to flypaper.

“Wow,” he said.