“Let us fly then, you and I, brave beast,” she said. “Though it be for the last time, on the last day.”

Whatever, she told herself. Don’t judge. If there was ever a time for this kind of talk, this was it. She wasn’t sure if it was tears or the wind or both, but her eyes were streaming as they took to the sky, and she had to blot them with her sleeve.

Janet gave the hippogriff its head, and it spiraled up over the Chankly Bore (was it a tidal bore? No, that was something else, she was almost sure) and turned south. The light was indescribably weird: dying, flickering sunlight from the west, on her right, and on her left the light of the rising moon, the two meeting and mingling into a silver-gold radiance unlike anything she’d ever seen.

“Higher, higher!” she called, and the hippogriff obeyed. As it did Janet laid a few spells on herself, specifically on her eyes: distance, focus, resolution, night vision. If she was going to witness this she wanted to see everything, to spare herself nothing. Ears too; she jacked up her hearing. She would be the recording angel, this night.

The effect was disconcerting—data came flooding in, more than her brain was really meant to process, and she literally jerked her head back as her vision exploded with detail. But she had to see it all. It was on her now, no one else.

Fillory seethed with motion—it was a restless night for the magic land, and everybody was out on the town. Even the trees were moving: the huge inky mass of the Darkling Woods to the west was no longer keeping to its customary outline. The trees, or the animate ones anyway, had pulled up their roots and were marching east in the direction of Castle Whitespire, cracking their gnarly knuckles as if to say, oh yeah, at last, we’re going to get this done. It must have some ancient beef with the Queenswood, she thought, and now they were going to throw down. The trees left behind them a five-o’clock shadow of regular inanimate trees, a skeleton crew where the original forest was.

Yup: the Queenswood was in turn adopting a defensive crouch, elongating itself into a protective crescent around the borders of Whitespire. Moving from the south to intercept the Darklings (presumably, it was what she would have done) were the smaller but no less game trees of Corian’s Land, bolstered by the plucky little apple and pear trees of the Southern Orchard.

Fateful. Like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. It’s so Macbeth. Or Hamlet, I forget which.