Eliot climbed back into the saddle and swung Julia up behind him. It looked like the civet was gone for good. There was still a large patch of damp black earth on Julia’s rump from the fall. Quentin had a foot in Dauntless’s stirrup when they heard a shout.

“Hi!”

They all looked around.

“Hi!” It was what Fillorians said instead of “hey.”

The Fillorian saying it was a hale, vigorous man in his early thirties. He was striding toward them, right across the circular clearing, practically radiating exuberance. He broke into a jog at the sight of them. He totally ignored the branches of the broken clock-tree that were waving wildly over his head; he couldn’t have cared less. Just another day in the magic forest. He had a big blond mane and a big chest, and he’d grown a big blond beard to cover up his somewhat moony round chin.

It was Jollyby, Master of the Hunt. He wore purple-and-yellow striped tights. His legs really were pretty impressive, especially considering that he’d never even been in the same universe as a leg press or a StairMaster or whatever. Eliot was right, he must have been following them the whole time.

“Hi!” Janet shouted back happily. “Now it’s a party,” she added to the others, sotto voce.

In one huge leather-gloved fist Jollyby held up a large, madly kicking hare by its ears.

“Son of a bitch,” Dauntless said. “He caught it.”

Dauntless was a talking horse. She just didn’t talk much.

“He sure did,” Quentin said.

“Lucky thing,” Jollyby called out when he was close enough. “I found him sitting up on a rock, happy as you please, not a hundred yards from here. He was busy keeping an eye on you lot, and I got him to bolt the wrong way. Caught him with my bare hands. Would you believe it?”

Quentin would believe it. Though he still didn’t think it made sense. How do you sneak up on an animal that can see the future? Maybe it saw other people’s but not its own. The hare’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets.

“Poor thing,” Eliot said. “Look how pissed off it is.”

“Oh, Jolly,” Janet said. She crossed her arms in mock outrage. “You should have let us catch it! Now it’ll only tell your future.”

She sounded not at all disappointed by this, but Jollyby—a superb all-around huntsman but no National Merit Scholar—looked vexed. His furry brows furrowed.

“Maybe we could pass it around,” Quentin said. “It could do each of us in turn.”

“It’s not a bong, Quentin,” Janet said.

“No,” Julia said. “Do not ask it.”

But Jollyby was enjoying his moment as the center of royal attention.

“Is that true, you useless animal?” he said. He reversed his grip on the Seeing Hare and hoisted it up so that he and the hare were nose to nose.

It gave up kicking and hung down limp, its eyes blank with panic. It was an impressive beast, three feet long from its twitching nose to its tail, with a fine gray-brown coat the color of dry grass in winter. It wasn’t cute. This was not a tame hare, a magician’s rabbit. It was a wild animal.

“What do you see then, eh?” Jollyby shook it, as if this were all its idea and therefore its fault. “What do you see?”

The Seeing Hare’s eyes focused. It looked directly at Quentin. It bared its huge orange incisors.

“Death,” it rasped.

They all stood there for a second. It didn’t seem scary so much as inappropriate, like somebody had made a dirty joke at a child’s birthday party.

Then Jollyby frowned and licked his lips, and Quentin saw blood in his teeth. He coughed once, experimentally, as if he were just trying it out, and then his head lolled forward. The hare dropped from his nerveless fingers and shot away across the grass like a rocket.

Jollyby’s corpse fell forward onto the grass.

“Death and destruction!” the hare called out as it ran, in case it hadn’t made itself clear before. “Disappointment and despair!”

CHAPTER 2

There was a special room in Castle Whitespire where the kings and queens met. That was another thing about being a king: everything you had was made specially for you.

It was a marvelous room. It was square, the top of a square tower, with four windows facing in four directions. The tower turned, very slowly, as some of the towers in the castle did—Castle Whitespire was built on complicated foundations of enormous brass clockwork, cleverly designed by the dwarves, who were absolute geniuses at that kind of thing. The tower completed one rotation every day. The movement was almost imperceptible.

In the center of the room was a special square table with four chairs—they were thrones, or thronelike, but made by someone who had the knack, pretty rare in Quentin’s experience, of making chairs that looked like thrones but were also reasonably comfortable to sit in. The table was painted with a map of Fillory, sealed under many layers of lacquer, and at each of the four seats, pieced into the wood, were the names of the rulers who’d sat there along with little devices appropriate to said rulers. Quentin got an image of the White Stag, and the vanquished Martin Chatwin, and a deck of playing cards. Eliot’s place was the most elaborately embellished, as befitted the High King. It was a square table, but there wasn’t any question which side was the head.

The chairs didn’t feel comfortable today. The scene of Jollyby’s death was still very clear and present in Quentin’s mind’s eye; in fact it replayed itself more or less constantly, with showings every thirty seconds or so. As Jollyby collapsed Quentin had lurched forward and caught him and eased him to the ground. He groped helplessly at Jollyby’s huge chest, as if he’d hidden his life somewhere about his person, in some secret inside pocket, and if Quentin could only find it he could give it back to him. Janet screamed: a full-throated, uncontrollable horror-movie scream that wouldn’t stop for a full fifteen seconds until Eliot grasped her shoulders and physically turned her away from Jollyby’s corpse.

At the same time the clearing filled with ghostly green light—a bleak, alien spell of Julia’s that Quentin still didn’t get the details of, or even the broad outlines of, that was intended to reveal any bad actors who might be present. It turned her eyes all black, no whites or iris at all. She was the only one who’d thought to go on the attack. But there was no one to attack.

“All right,” Eliot said. “So let’s talk about it. What do we think happened today?”

They looked at each other, feeling jittery and shell-shocked. Quentin wanted to do something, or say something, but he didn’t know what. The truth was, he hadn’t really known Jollyby all that well.

“He was so proud,” he said finally. “He thought he’d saved the day.”

“It had to be the rabbit,” Janet said. Her eyes were red from crying. She swallowed. “Right? Or hare, whatever. That’s what killed him. What else?”

“We can’t assume that. The hare predicted his death but it may not have caused it. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. It’s a logical fallacy.”

If he’d waited even another second he would have realized that Janet wasn’t interested in the Latin name of the logical fallacy that she might or might not have been committing.

“Sorry,” he said. “That’s my Asperger’s flaring up again.”

“So it’s just a coincidence?” she snapped. “That he died right then, right after it said that about death? Maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe the hare doesn’t predict the future, maybe it controls it.”

“Perhaps it does not like being caught,” Julia said.

“I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”

It was five o’clock in the afternoon, their regular meeting time. For the first few months after they’d arrived at Castle Whitespire Eliot had left them to do their own things, on the theory that they’d naturally find their own courses as rulers, and take charge of the things that best suited their various gifts. This had resulted in total chaos, and nothing getting done, and the things that did get done got done twice by two different people in two different ways. So Eliot instituted a daily meeting at which they sorted through whatever business of the realm seemed most pressing as a foursome. The five o’clock meeting was traditionally accompanied by what may have been the most gloriously comprehensive whiskey service ever seen on any of the possibly infinite worlds of the multiverse.

“I told the family we’d take care of the funeral,” Quentin said. “It’s just his parents. He was an only child.”

“I should say something,” Eliot said. “He taught me bugling.”

“Did you know he was a were-lion?” Janet smiled sadly. “True story. It went on a solar calendar—he changed only at equinoxes and solstices. He said it helped him understand the animals. He was hairy everywhere.”

“Please,” Eliot said. “I would give anything to not know how you know that.”

“It helped with lots of things.”

“I have a theory,” Quentin said quickly. “Maybe the Fenwicks did it. They’ve been pissed at us ever since we got here.”

The Fenwicks were the most senior of the several families who were running things at the time when the Brakebills returned to Fillory. They weren’t happy about being kicked out of Castle Whitespire, but they didn’t have the political capital to do much about it. So they satisfied themselves with making mischief around the court.

“Assassination would be a big step up for the Fenwicks,” Eliot said. “They’re pretty small-time.”

“And why would they kill Jollyby?” Janet said. “Everybody loved Jollyby!”

“Maybe they were trying for one of us, not him,” Quentin said. “Maybe one of us was supposed to catch the hare. You know they’re already trying to put it around that we killed him?”

“But how would they have done it?” Eliot said. “You’re saying they sent a rabbit assassin?”

“They could not turn the Seeing Hare,” Julia said. “Unique Beasts do not intervene in the affairs of men.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the Seeing Hare at all, maybe it was a person in hare form. A were-hare. Look, I don’t know!”

Quentin rubbed his temples. If only they’d hunted that stupid lizard instead. He was annoyed at himself for forgetting what Fillory was like. He’d let himself believe that things were all better after Alice had killed Martin Chatwin, no more death and despair and disillusionment and whatever else the hare had said. But there was more. It wasn’t like the books. There was always more. Et in Arcadia ego.

And even though he knew it was crazy, in a childishly elegant way, he couldn’t escape a vague feeling that Jollyby’s death was his fault, that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been tempted by that adventure. Or maybe he wasn’t tempted enough? What were the rules? Maybe he should have gone into the clearing after all. Maybe Jollyby’s death had been meant for him. He was supposed to go into the meadow and die there, but he didn’t, so Jollyby had to instead.

“Maybe there isn’t an explanation,” he said out loud. “Maybe it’s just a mystery. Just another crazy stop on Fillory’s magical mystery tour. No reason for it, it just happened. You can’t explain it.”

This didn’t satisfy Eliot. He was still Eliot, the languid lush of Brakebills, but becoming High King had uncovered a dismayingly rigorous streak in him.

“We can’t have unexplained deaths in the kingdom,” he said. “It won’t do.” He cleared his throat. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll put the fear of Ember into the Fenwicks, just in case. It won’t take much. They’re a bunch of pussy dandies. And I say that as a pussy dandy myself.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” Janet said.

“Then, Janet, you’ll go lean on the Lorians.” That was Fillory’s neighbor to the north. Janet was in charge of relations with foreign powers—Quentin called her Fillory Clinton. “They’re always behind everything bad in the books. Maybe they were trying to decapitate the leadership. Stupid pseudo-Viking fuckers. Now for Christ’s sake let’s talk about something else for a while.”

But they had nothing else to talk about, so they lapsed into silence. Nobody was especially happy with Eliot’s plan, least of all Eliot, but they didn’t have a better one, or even a worse one. Six hours after the fact Julia’s eyes were still flooded with black from the spell she’d cast in the forest. The effect was disconcerting. She had no pupils. He wondered what she could see that they couldn’t.

Eliot shuffled his notes, looking for another item of business, but business was in short supply these days.

“It is time,” Julia said. “We must go to the window.”

Every day after the afternoon meeting they went out on the balcony and waved to the people.

“Damn it,” Eliot said. “All right.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t today,” Janet said. “It feels wrong.”

Quentin knew what she meant. The thought of standing out there on the narrow balcony, frozen smiles on their faces, princess-waving at the Fillorians who gathered for the daily ritual, felt a little off. Still.

“We should to do it,” he said. “Today of all days.”

“We’re accepting congratulations for doing nothing.”

“We’re reassuring the people of continuity in the face of tragedy.”