“I guess I can see your point.”

Plum picked up the book that Betsy had tossed aside. It had a blank leather cover—it looked like a notebook or a diary.

“Are you sure gods can even die?” she said.

“I’m going to kill one and find out and then maybe I’ll let you know.” Betsy pushed the knife through her belt. “I’ll see you guys around. Don’t look for me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Quentin said. “Take care of yourself, Betsy.”

“Yeah,” Stoppard chimed in. “Take care of yourself!”

“The name’s Asmodeus, bitches,” she said. “And if you see Julia, tell her I’ve gone fox hunting.”

She turned around and walked away into the night.

CHAPTER 15

Following a restorative stop in Barion, Eliot and Janet forded the Great Salt River, half a mile wide and six inches deep, a vast gray-brown ribbon spilling through the green countryside like somebody left a hose on somewhere. They passed a low, grassy hill on which an enormous white figure was etched; the grass and soil had been cleared away in lines so that the white chalky substrate underneath showed through. It was a simple cartoon of a man holding a staff horizontally above his head. He was usually there, or thereabouts—sometimes he wandered, but he was there today. It was good to see him still at his post.

They trotted through open country, following paths in the grass like an old carpet that had worn thin. They crossed sun-blessed fields with stone walls crisscrossing them, real classics, almost pristine. Every way you looked the landscape of Fillory composed itself into even lines, ridgelines and tree lines, near, middle and far distance, each one a shade paler than the last, gently sloping to the left and the right and the left. A long, heavy tranche of cloud lay above the horizon, utterly still, its outline etched finely against the sky, like the silhouette of a breaking wave cut out of paper.

“Look at it all,” Janet said. “Just look at it. It’s almost like the world isn’t ending.”

“Almost.”

Even now it still felt unreal. With so much beauty everywhere it was easy to forget that Fillory was a dying land. Maybe this was Fillory’s hectic glow.