Fen was more overtly friendly but at the same time harder to read. She wasn’t a magician, and she carried no obvious weapons, but it was understood that of the two of them she was the muscle. As far as Quentin could make out she was some kind of martial artist—she called the discipline she practiced inc aga, an untranslatable phrase from a language Quentin had never heard of. She kept to a strict regimen: she couldn’t wear armor or touch silver or gold, and she ate practically nothing. What inc aga looked like in practice was impossible for Quentin to fathom—she would talk about it only in high-flown, abstract metaphors.

She and Dint were both adventurers by profession.

“There aren’t many of us now,” Fen said, her short sturdy legs somehow devouring distance faster than Quentin’s long skinny ones. She never looked at him as she talked, her bulgy eyes continuously searching the horizon for potential threats. “Humans, I mean. Fillory is a wild place, and getting wilder. The forest is spreading, getting deeper and darker. Every summer we cut down the trees, burn them down sometimes, and then mark the borders of the woods. The next summer the borders are buried a hundred yards deep. The trees eat the farms, and the farmers come to live in the towns. But where will we live when all of Fillory is forest? When I was a girl, the Two Moons was in open country.

“The animals don’t care,” she added bitterly. “They like it this way.”

She lapsed into silence. Quentin thought it might be a good time to change the subject. He felt like a green-as-grass PFC from Dubuque, Iowa, trading banter with the hardened South Vietnamese regular attached to his unit.

“So, I don’t mean to sound crass,” he said, “but are we paying you for this? Or is somebody?”

“If we succeed, that will be payment enough.”

“But why would you want somebody from our world to be king anyway? Who you don’t even know? Why not somebody from Fillory?”

“Only your kind can sit the thrones of Castle Whitespire. It’s the Law. Always has been.”

“But that makes no sense. And this is speaking as the beneficiary of the Law here.”

Fen grimaced. Her protuberant eyes and full lips gave her face a fishy cast.

“Our people have been slaughtering and betraying one another for centuries, Quentin,” she said. “How can you be any worse? The rule of the Chatwins is the last peaceful time anyone can remember. You don’t know anyone here; you have no history, no scores to settle. You belong to no faction.” She stared fixedly at the road ahead of them, biting off her words. The bitterness in her tone was bottomless. “It makes perfect political sense. We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.”