The silver mouthpiece tasted metallic against his lips, like a nickel or a battery. The breath he took was so deep that pain lanced hotly into his arrow-stuck shoulder as his ribs expanded. He wasn’t sure exactly what to do—purse his lips like a trumpeter, or just blow into it like a kazoo?—but the ivory horn produced a clear, even, high note as gentle and round as a French horn winded by a seasoned symphony player in a concert hall. Everybody stopped talking and turned to look at him. It wasn’t loud, exactly, but it made everything else quiet around it, so that it was instantly the only sound in the room, and everything resonated with its pure, simple strength. It was natural and perfect, a single note that sounded like a grand chord. It went on and on. He blew until his lungs were empty.

The sound echoed and faded away, gone as if it had never been. The cavern was still. For a moment Quentin felt ridiculous, like he’d just blown a noisemaker. What was he expecting, anyway? He really didn’t know.

There was a snuffling sound from Ember’s pedestal.

“O child,” came the ram’s deep voice. “Don’t you know what you have done?”

“I just got us out of this mess. That’s what I’ve done.”

The ram drew Himself up.

“I am sorry you came here,” Ember said. “Children of Earth. No one asked you to come. I am sorry that our world is not the paradise you were looking for. But it was not created for your entertainment. Fillory”—the old ram’s jowls shook—“is not a theme park, for you and your friends to play dress-up in, with swords and crowns.”

He was visibly mastering some powerful emotion. It took Quentin a moment to recognize it. It was fear. The old ram was choking on it.

“That’s not why we came here, Ember,” Quentin said quietly.

“Is it not?” Ember said, basso profundo. “No, of course it is not.” His alien eyes were hard to meet, with their molten yellow whites and black pupils like figure eights on their sides, symbols of infinity. “You came here to save us. You came here to be our King.

“But tell me something, Quentin. How could you hope to save us when you cannot even save yourself?”

Quentin was spared the necessity of answering, because that was when the catastrophe began.