“Most of them,” Jane Chatwin said. “It keeps me out of trouble.”

“Oh my God,” Janet said. “You’re trying to rebuild the watch, aren’t you? The time-travel one! Aren’t you? You’re going to reverse-engineer it or whatever!”

Jane shook her head solemnly.

“Oh. Well, I wish you would.”

“If they don’t control time, what do they do?” Eliot asked.

“They tell time,” Jane said. “That’s enough.”

When the tour was over they went back outside and admired the garden again. Behind it, rusted and half drowned in grass, were the broken remains of what Eliot took to be the Watcherwoman’s famous ormolu clock-carriage, run down at last. He wanted to ask about it, but he sensed that from Jane’s point of view the visit was coming to an end, and he wasn’t leaving without what they came for.

“What are the dwarfs doing all the way out here anyway?” Janet asked. “Why build a bunch of tunnels in the middle of nowhere? Or under the middle of nowhere?”

“I’ll show you.” Jane took a spade that was leaning against the house and stuck it into the ground with a coarse chuff. When she turned over the shovelful there were glints of something in it. “Didn’t you ever wonder why it was called the Clock Barrens?”

“I guess I did.”

Jane bent down with a groan and picked a couple of the shiny things out of the soil, three or four of them, and held them out. In the palm of her hand lay two tiny, perfect gears, a brass wheel as thin as paper, and a delicate coiled mainspring.

“Clockwork,” she said. “It’s naturally occurring here. You should see the big stuff they mine, deep down. You could make Big Ben out of it. I’m not entirely sure that they didn’t.”

She flung them away into the grass. Eliot had to suppress an urge to go after them. This kind of thing, totally inexplicable random strangeness like this, made him want to save Fillory more than ever.

“Plus they like the dwarfiness of the trees,” she added.

“Jane,” Eliot said, “we came here for a reason. Ember says that Fillory is dying. The end of the world is coming.”

She nodded but didn’t answer at first. The setting sun caught the bezel of a clock-tree and flashed off it, orange light on silver.

“I suspected something like that,” she said. “Did you notice the clocks? They don’t agree anymore. They used to keep perfect time, but now look at them. Their hands are going everywhere. It’s like they’re panicking. Little idiots.”

She frowned at the fairy ring of clock-trees like they were disobedient children. He supposed they were all the children she had, or would have.

“What do you think it means?”