In the morning they sat at a long table in the bar, eating fresh eggs and toast and drinking cold water out of stone jugs, their backpacks piled up in a heap in one of the booths. Apparently Richard’s gold cylinders went a long way in the Fillorian economy. Quentin felt clear-eyed and miraculously un-hungover. His restored faculties appreciated with a cold new keenness the many painful aspects of his recent personal history, but they also allowed him to really appreciate almost for the first time the reality of his physical presence in actual Fillory. It was all so detailed and vivid compared to his cartoonish fantasies. The room had the seedy, humiliated look of a bar seen in direct sunlight, sticky and thoroughly initialed by knife- and claw-wielding patrons. The floor was paved with old round millstones lightly covered with a scattering of straw, the chinks between them filled in with packed dirt. Neither Farvel nor Humbledrum nor the bartender were anywhere in sight. They were served by a brusque but otherwise attentive dwarf.

Also in the dining room were a man and a woman who sat opposite each other by a window, sipping coffee and saying nothing and glancing over at the Brakebills table every once in a while. Quentin had the distinct impression that they were just killing time, waiting for him and the others to finish their breakfast. That proved to be the case.

When the table was cleared, the pair introduced themselves as Dint—the man—and Fen. Both were fortyish and weather-beaten, as if they spent a lot of time outdoors in a professional capacity. They were, Dint explained, the guides. They would take the party to Ember’s Tomb, in search of King Martin’s crown. Dint was tall and skinny, with a big nose and huge black eyebrows that together took up most of his face; he was dressed all in black and wore a long cape, apparently as an expression of the extreme seriousness with which he regarded himself and his abilities. Fen was shorter and denser and more muscular, with close-cropped blond hair. With a whistle around her neck she could have been a gym teacher at a private school for girls. Her clothes were loose-fitting and practical, evidently designed for ease of movement in unpredictable situations. She projected both toughness and kindness, and she wore high boots with fascinatingly complex laces. She was, to the best of Quentin’s ability to gauge these things, a lesbian.

Cool autumn sunlight slotted through the narrow windows cut in the heavy log walls of the Two Moons. Sober, Quentin felt more eager than ever to get on with it. He looked hard at his beautiful, despoiled Alice—his anger at her was a hard nugget he didn’t know if he could ever digest, a kidney stone. Maybe when they were kings and queens. Maybe then he could have Penny executed. A palace coup, and definitely not a bloodless one.