They stopped and huddled a hundred yards away, miserable and unshowered, to pull themselves together. The morning was chilly. Quentin rubbed his hands together and tried a warmth spell that only left him feeling feverish and slightly queasy. He couldn’t seem to get oriented to Fillory’s Circumstances. He had slept heavily the night before, with vivid dreams, the weight of his fatigue sinking him down into dark, primal realms haunted by roaring winds and tiny furry beasts, early mammals hiding fearfully in the long grass. He wished he could just stand here a little longer and look at the pink light on the dew. Everybody had a heavy hunting knife, which back on Earth had seemed beyond overkill but now felt pathetically inadequate.

The shape of the hill tugged at something in his deep memory. He thought of the hill they’d seen in that enchanted mirror, in that musty little storeroom back at Brakebills, where he and Alice and Penny had studied together, so long ago. It looked like the same hill. But so did a thousand hills. It was just a hill.

“So just to be clear,” Eliot was saying to Dint and Fen. “It’s called Ember’s Tomb, but Ember isn’t buried here. And he’s not dead.”

He sounded exactly as relaxed and unworried as he ever had back at Brakebills. Just dotting the i’s, clearing up the details, the way he would have insouciantly picked apart one of Bigby’s problem sets, or decoded a closely written wine label. He was in control. The deeper they rolled into Fillory, the shakier Quentin felt, but Eliot was the opposite: he just got calmer and more sure of himself, exactly the way Quentin had thought that he, Quentin, would, and exactly the way that he wasn’t.

“Every age finds a use for this place,” Fen was saying. “A mine, a fortress, a treasure house, a prison, a tomb. Some dug it deeper. Others walled up the parts they didn’t need or wished to forget. It is one of the Deep Ruins.”

“So you’ve been here before?” Anaïs asked. “I mean, in there?”

Fen shook her head. “Not this one. A hundred places like it.”

“Except that the crown is in this one. And how did it get there exactly?”

Quentin had wondered that same thing. If the crown really had belonged to Martin, maybe that was where he went when he disappeared. Maybe he died down there.

“The crown is there,” Dint snapped. “We will go in and get it. Enough questions.”

He swirled his cape impatiently.

Alice was standing very near Quentin. She looked small and still and cold.

“Quentin, I don’t want to go in there,” she said softly, without looking at him.