The pegasi were trotting around on the cold grass, circling each other restlessly, their tremendous white eagle-wings still half extended. They hated to keep still, pegasi. Marvelous beasts they were, pure white and light as air, though they looked as solid as any regular horse, with thick muscles and squiggly blue veins standing out beneath the skin like power cords under a rug. Their silver—platinum? shiny anyway—hooves flashed in the morning sun.

They stopped pacing and stared at him expectantly. They could speak, but they hardly ever deigned to, not to humans, not even to the High King.

“Janet!” he called.

“Coming!”

“Just leave your stuff. They’ll pack it for you.”

“True.”

She exited the tent a moment later, empty-handed; she’d changed into jodhpurs.

“You know, I had a thought,” she said. “With the army all mobilized like this, why don’t we take advantage of the momentum? Keep on pushing them back and take Loria?”

“Take Loria.”

“Right. Then we bring the whole army to the Neitherlands and march it through the fountain and take Earth! Right? It would be so easy!”

“Sometimes,” Eliot said, “I find it so hard to know when you’re joking.”

“I have the same problem.”

The pegasi seemed even more reluctant than usual to remain earthbound. They barely stayed still long enough for Eliot and Janet to mount.

Pegasi wouldn’t wear saddles, so you just hung on to their manes or necks or feathers or whatever you could get ahold of. Eliot felt thick muscles playing under skin as the beast pumped its way up into the air. They spiraled higher and higher, and his ears popped, and the camp shrank below them. He saw the pass where he’d fought Vile Father, the Fillorian host still formed up into crisp lines, the Lorians straggling away back home. When they were maybe a thousand feet up the pegasi leveled off and turned southeast for Whitespire.

Eliot loved Fillory at all times, but never more so than when he saw it from the air, when the land rolled out beneath you like a map in a beloved book that you’d spent your whole childhood gazing at, studying, wishing you could fall into it, feeling like you could. And Eliot had fallen.

From here he could see the old stone walls that crisscrossed Fillory, built by hands unknown, for no known reason. It made the green landscape look quilted. In some places the walls had been broken and scattered by weather or animals or people who needed the stones for more immediate and practical purposes. Dark green hedges followed the main roads for miles, neat double lines from here, but as thick and daunting as Norman hedgerows when you got up close to them. He made a couple of mental notes of where they were getting a bit unruly. He would notify the Master of Hedge.