“Death. Life. A fish dies. A billion mites eat it and live. In the swamp there is no difference.”

“There is to the fish,” Janet said. “You’re a shitty philosopher, so don’t try. Is Fillory dying?”

If turtles had shoulders it would have shrugged.

“Yes then. Fillory is dying. Give me horses.”

“Wait, are you serious?” Janet was pissed now. She looked like she hadn’t believed it until this moment. “It’s really ending? Well, can we stop it?”

“You cannot.”

“We can’t,” Eliot said. “But maybe there’s somebody who could?”

“I cannot say. Ask the queen.”

“I’m the queen,” Janet said. “Or I’m a queen. I’m the main queen. I’m asking you.”

“Queen of the dwarves. In the Barrens. Enough. Give me horses or let me be.”

The turtle began to sink, slowly, withdrawing its head under the shelf of its shell, barely disturbing the black water till its chin rested on the surface.

“I don’t know any dwarf queens,” Janet said. “You know any dwarf queens, Eliot?”

“Heck no. Because there aren’t any female dwarfs. They don’t exist.”

“She doesn’t exist,” Janet said to the turtle. “Try again.”

“Listen closer.”

The snapping turtle snapped. Its head shot out to maximum extension—Eliot wouldn’t have believed anything that big could move that fast. It was like a Mack truck coming straight at them. As it bit it turned its head on one side, to take them both in one movement.

Eliot reacted fast. His reaction was to crouch down and cover his face with his arms. From the relative safety of this position he felt the day grow colder around them, and he heard a crackle, which at first he took for the pier splintering in the turtle’s jaws. But the end didn’t come.

“You dare?” Janet said.

Her voice was loud now—it made the boards vibrate sympathetically under his feet. He looked up at her. She’d gone airborne, floating two feet above the pier, and her clothes were rimed with frost. She radiated cold; mist sheeted off her skin as it would off dry ice. Her arms were spread wide, and she had an axe in each hand. They were those twin staves she wore on her back, each one now topped with an axe-head of clear ice.

The turtle was trapped in mid-lunge. She’d stopped it cold; the swamp was frozen solid around it. Janet had called down winter, and the water of the Northern Marsh was solid ice as far as he could see, cracked and buckled up in waves. The turtle was stuck fast in it. It struggled, its head banging back and forth impotently.

“Jesus,” Eliot said. He stood up out of his defensive crouch. “Nice one.”

“You dare?” Janet said again, all imperious power. “Marvel that you live, Prince of Shit.”

The turtle didn’t seem surprised, just mad.

“I’ll have you,” it hissed, and it surged and strained. The ice squeaked and groaned and started to split. Janet leaned into the casting, however she was doing it, and froze the swamp harder and tighter.

“I will freeze your eyes,” she said, “and shatter them! I will split your shell and pick out the meat!”

Jesus, where did she get this stuff? The turtle strained once more and then was still, like a great ship frozen in arctic pack ice. It stared at them furiously, its eyes burning with murder. Janet let herself float down to the wooden boards.

“Fuck you,” Janet said. “You know better. Next time I’ll kill you.”

She spat, and the gob froze in midair and slid across the ice. With that she turned and walked away. Eliot practically fell off the boardwalk getting out of her way. He didn’t want to touch those axes.

He felt like he should say something too, before he went, so he did.

“Dick.”

“Worm,” the turtle rasped back. Its breath smoked in the sudden cold. “You’ll see. It’s turtles all the way down.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’ve heard that before.”

He trotted off after Janet. She left frost footprints behind her.

CHAPTER 12

It wasn’t until a couple of hours later, when they were back on their horses and heading southwest, the direction of blessedly solid dry ground and, eventually, Barion and its clear alcoholic balm, that Janet cleared her throat and said:

“So I guess you’re probably wondering how I all of a sudden turned into an amazing ice goddess with magic axes just now.”

Eliot was, actually. But he was going to see how long he could go without mentioning it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know, they both knew he did. It was a game they played.

They both knew he would cave eventually.

“With what now?” he said airily. “Oh. Sure. I guess so.”

“I call the right axe Sorrow,” she said. “You know what I call the left one?”

“Happiness?”

“Sorrow. I can’t tell them apart.”

“Mmm. Mm-hm.”

They rode together in silence for another five minutes. They were both seasoned players. Eliot kept looking over his shoulder—he was paranoid that one of those pink jellyfish things was going to come up on him from behind and drape its tentacles all over him. After it stopped his heart it would probably reel him up into its innards and you’d be able to see him being digested through its translucent flesh. It would all be very public.

Though again: what did it matter, if the world was ending? But it did matter. He knew that. Everything still mattered. Now more than ever. He decided to concede the loss.

“OK, so how did you all of a sudden become etcetera and so on?”

“I’m so happy you asked! Remember that time when you guys went off to sea and left me in charge of Fillory for like a year and a half?”

“And saved magic and by extension the entire world? I do.”

“Well, it was fun running everything and making all the decisions and implementing long-overdue reforms, but then after a month things got a little slow, and I needed a project. So you know that desert that’s south of Fillory, across the Copper Mountains?”

“I know of it.”

“I annexed it.”

“Wait.” Eliot reined in his horse, and they both stopped. “You invaded the desert?”

“I annexed it. I was thinking how in the books other countries are always coming after Fillory and threatening it and so on. I figured why not turn it around? Let’s go expansionist! Preempt some shit! I mean, we have all the magic and freaky monsters in the world. Just the giants alone are basically the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal. Oh and plus we have our own god, who’s actually real. It’s practically a moral imperative. Manifest destiny.”

Eliot heeled his horse, and it ambled into motion again. He loved Janet, but she really was beyond belief. He waited what felt like a suitable interval.

“Don’t think that because I’m not saying anything I’m not stricken with shock and regret,” the High King said. “Because I am. That’s why I’m not saying anything.”

“Well, if you didn’t want me to invade the desert, you shouldn’t have gone off and saved the world,” Janet said. “It was a very popular initiative internally. The people loved it. And our standing army was just standing there, and the lesser nobility were spinning their wheels looking for a way to climb the ladder. Earn some honors and titles and whatever. You have to use that stuff or it ends up going bad on you, like with the Fenwicks.”

Eliot snorted.

“Well, this is why you don’t understand politics,” Janet said.

“Politics doesn’t understand me!”

“And think of the mineral resources out there. Our raw materials are crap in this country.”

“Please forbear to insult the High King’s minerals.”

“They’re crap. So I took a regiment and a bunch of Talking Elephants and that ninja lady Aral—you know, the one Bingle beat in the tournament, which don’t get me started on that travesty of justice—and we crossed the Copper Mountains. Which by the way, have you ever seen them? It’s amazing. They really are practically all copper, and they’ve turned this great green oxidized color. There’s even a special word for it: aeruginous. Aral taught me that. Turns out she’s a demon at Scrabble.”

“Copper is a mineral. And we call them brigades, not regiments.”

“And I’ve never really been sure whether or not we owned the Copper Mountains, you know? It’s not clear on the maps.” It was like Janet couldn’t hear him. “So now we do, because I annexed them on my way to the desert. It only took a couple of days. An elephant fell off a cliff, a copper cliff, which practically broke my heart. Elephants and gravity, not a great mix. But you know what? The other elephants immediately stopped and went down and found what was left of it and stood around it in a ring. I couldn’t see what they did, but when they were done—it took a day—the one that fell was all back together and up and running again. They resurrected him. I’ve never seen anything like it. Elephants, they know some shit. I don’t know why we rule them, they should rule us.”

“That’s treason,” Eliot said lightly. “True, though. What was the desert like?”

“The desert? The desert was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Having spent a lot of time around Janet, Eliot was used to the way she shifted smoothly and without warning from irony and aggression to honest expressions of actual authentic human emotion.

“You must go, Eliot. Go in winter. The Wandering Desert is like an ocean of sand, which I realize is a cliché, but it literally is like an ocean. The dunes move along like big swells in the open sea. Slowly, but you can see it. We spent a day just sitting on the slopes of the Copper Mountains watching them roll in and smash themselves against the foothills, all in silence, like humongous breakers.”

“And then,” Eliot said, “realizing that you were about to invade a beautiful but otherwise useless and wholly innocent desert, you took stock of your tactical and ethical errors and turned around . . .”

“But I didn’t. I didn’t turn around. In fact that was when I knew why I’d come.

“I sent the elephants back. Elephants—God, I don’t know what I was thinking, bringing a bunch of elephants over the mountains. Hannibal, I guess. They were nice about it, but it was no place for them. I told them they could go graze the Southern Orchards. That seemed to square it.

“I sent the regiment back too. Brigade, whatever. They were good sports, very valiant, and they didn’t want to go, but I ordered them and they had to. I guess they were hoping for a fight, but there was nobody to fight. Once they were gone I walked out into the desert alone.”

“Why,” Eliot said, “the hell would you do that?”

As they rode the landscape around them was turning back from bogs into meadows again, going from squashy to firm, the dry land sorting itself out from the wet like it was waking up from a bad dream. But Janet was far away and seeing a different landscape entirely.

“You know, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain it. It was just so pure. Suddenly all this life, all this greenery, seemed so needlessly elaborate and wet and messy. The desert was honest and real: just dry sand making smooth curves against an empty sky. It was like I’d been floundering in the mud my whole life and here was the way out.

“I suppose I was taking my life in my hands, but it didn’t feel like it at all. I felt safe there. Safer than I’d ever felt anywhere. I didn’t have to seem anymore, I could just be.” She sighed in frustration. “I’m not explaining it right. God knows I’m not a spiritual person or anything. I just felt like I could breathe out there.”

“No, I get it. Keep going.”

For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet’s mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her. No wonder she liked it out there by herself.

“That night the most amazing thing happened: the stars came down from out of the sky. They weren’t used to seeing human beings, so they weren’t afraid. They were like tame birds—they were all around me, a few feet off the ground, each one about the size of a softball. Spiky, and a little warm, and they sort of squeaked. You could hold them.” She sighed again. “I know that sounds weird even for Fillory. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.

“I walked for three days, till my supplies ran out, but it never crossed my mind to go back. Not once. I kept waiting to lose my nerve, but I never did. I kept going south. The swells get big out there in the middle, in the deep desert, big as hills. At the top you could see a long way, but I never did see the edge. Maybe they go on forever.

“Well, you can guess what came next. I passed out from hunger and exhaustion and woke up in some guy’s sand-boat, sailing across the desert.”

“Really?” Eliot said. “I was going to guess that you realized you were going to die and went back the way you came. Either that or that one elephant who fell off the cliff before and came back to life showed up, galumphing majestically through the dunes, and rescued you. With Aral riding it maybe. I figured you were setting that up as a surprise twist.”

“Well, I wasn’t. I woke up on this guy’s boat. It wasn’t much of a boat—basically it was a board with a pole stuck in it and a sheet tied to the pole. It was more like a windsurfer. He sat cross-legged on it, with one hand on the tiller and one on the mainsheet—his forearms were like bowling pins—and the whole business went flying across the sand.