No one spoke. For all their careful practical preparations there had been very little discussion of strategy or objectives, and now they were here it was obvious anyway. Why bother planning an adventure? This was Fillory—adventure would find them! With every step they took they half expected a marvelous apparition or revelation to come trotting out of the woods. But nothing much presented itself. It was almost anticlimactic—or was this just the buildup to something really amazing? The remains of ragged stone walls trailed off into the underbrush. The trees around them remained still and stubbornly inanimate, even after Penny, in the spirit of exploration and discovery, formally introduced himself to several of them. Here and there birds chirped and flitted and perched, high up in the trees, but none of them offered them any advice. Every little detail looked superbright and saturated with meaning, as if the world around them were literally com- posed of words and letters, inscribed in some magical geographical script.
Richard took out a compa** but found the needle stuck, pinned down against its cardboard backing, as if Fillory's magnetic pole were deep underground, straight down beneath their feet. He flung it away into a bush. Janet hopped up and down as she walked, her hands crammed under her armpits against the cold. Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary p**n magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
They walked for twenty minutes, half an hour at most. Quentin alternately blew into his hands and withdrew them into the sleeves of his sweater. He was wide awake now, and sober, at least for the moment.
“We need to get some fauns up in this piece,” Josh said, to nobody. “Or some swordfights or whatever.”
The path meandered and then faded out. They were expending more and more effort just to push their way through the foliage. There was some internal disagreement as to whether or not there had ever been an actual path, or whether it was just a strip of thin forest, or even whether—this was Penny's take—the trees had begun subtly, imperceptibly shifting themselves to get in their way. But before they could arrive at a consensus they came across a stream percolating through the woods.
It was a lovely little winter stream, wide and shallow and perfectly clear, twinkling and lapping along as if it were delighted to have just found this twisty channel. Wordlessly, they gathered at its edge. The rocks were capped with round dollops of snow, and the quieter eddies along the banks had iced over. A branch poking up in the middle of the stream was hung with fabulous Gothic-sculpted icy drops and bu*tresses all along its length. There was nothing overtly supernatural about it, but it temporarily satisfied their appetite for wonder. On Earth it would have been a charming little rill, nothing more, but the fact that they were seeing it in Fillory, in another world, possibly the first Earth beings ever to do so, made it a glittering miracle.
They had stared at it for a full minute in rapt silence before Quentin realized that right in front of them, emerging from the deepest part of the stream, was a woman's naked head and shoulders.
“Oh my God,” he said. He took a clumsy, numb step backward, pointing. “sh**. You guys.”
It was surreal. She was almost certainly dead. The woman's hair was dark and wet and thick with clumped ice. Her eyes—she appeared to be looking right at them—were midnight blue and didn't move or blink, and her skin was a pale pearlescent gray. Her shoulders were bare. She looked sixteen at most. Her eyelashes were clotted with frost.
“Is she—?” Alice didn't finish the question. “Hey!” Janet called. “Are you all right?”
“We should help her. Get her out of there.” Quentin tried to get closer, but he slipped on a frozen rock and went in up to his knee. He scrambled back onto the bank, his foot burning with cold. The woman didn't move. “We need rope. Get the rope, there's rope in one of the packs.”
The water didn't even look deep enough to submerge her that far, and Quentin actually wondered, horribly, if they were looking at a body that had been severed at the waist and then dumped in the water. Rope, what was he thinking? He was a damn magician. He dropped the pack he was rifling through and began a simple kinetic spell to lift her out.
He felt the premonitory warmth of a developing spell in his finger- tips, felt the weight and tug of the body in his mind. It felt good to do magic again, to know that he could still focus despite everything. As soon as he started he realized that the Circumstances were scrambled here—different stars, different seas, different everything. Thank God it was a simple spell. The grammar was a shambles—Alice corrected him in a clipped voice as he worked. Gradually the woman rose up dripping out of the water. She was whole, thank God, and naked—her body was slim, her breasts slight and girlish. Her nails and nipples were pale purple. She looked frozen, but she shuddered as the magic took hold. Her eyes focused and came awake. She frowned and raised one hand, somehow halting the spell before he was finished, with her toes still trailing in the freezing water.
“I am a naiad. I cannot leave the stream.” By her voice she could have been in junior high. Her eyes met Quentin's.
“Your magic is clumsy,” she added.
It was electrifying. Quentin saw now that she wasn't human, her fingers and toes were webbed. To his left he heard a shuffling noise. It was Penny. He was getting down on his knees on the snowy bank.
“We humbly apologize,” he said, head bowed. “We most humbly seek your pardon.”
“Jesus Christ!” Josh stage-whispered. “Dork!”
The hovering nymph shifted her attention. Stream water rilled down her bare skin. She tilted her head girlishly.
“You admire my beauty, human?” she asked Penny. “I am cold. Would you warm me with your burning skin?”
“Please,” Penny went on, blushing furiously. “If you have a quest to bestow upon us, we would gladly undertake it. We would gladly—”
Mercifully Janet cut him off.
“We're visitors from Earth,” she said firmly. “Is there a city around here that you could direct us to? Maybe Castle Whitespire?”
“—we would gladly undertake to do your bidding,” Penny finished. “Do you serve the rams?” Alice asked.
“I serve no false gods, human girl. Or goddesses. I serve the river, and the river serves me.”
“Are there other humans here?” Anaïs said. “Like us?”
“Like you?” The nymph smiled saucily, and the tip of a startling blue tongue appeared for an instant between her rather sharp-looking front teeth. “Oh, no. Not like you. None so cursed!”
At that moment Quentin felt his telekinetic spell cease to exist. She'd abolished it, though he didn't catch how, without a word or a gesture. In the same instant the naiad flipped head down and dived, her pale periwinkle bu*tocks flashing in the air, and vanished into dark water that looked too shallow to contain her. Her head poked up again a moment later.
“I fear for you here, human children. This is not your war.” “We're not children,” Janet said.
“What war?” Quentin called.
She smiled again. Between her lavender lips her teeth were pointy and interlocking like a fighting fish's. She held something dripping in her webbed fist.
“A gift from the river. Use it when all hope is lost.”
She tossed it at them overhand. Quentin caught it one-handed; he was relieved out of all proportion to its actual importance that he didn't bobble it. Thank God for his old juggling reflexes. When he looked up again, the nymph was gone. They were alone with the chattering brook. Quentin was holding a small ivory horn chased with silver.
“Oh-kay! ” Josh shouted. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “We are definitely not in Kansas anymore!”
The others gathered around to look at the horn. Quentin handed it to Eliot, who turned it over a few times, peered into one end, then the other. “I don't feel anything on it at all,” Eliot said. “Looks like something you'd buy in an airport gift shop.”
“You wouldn't necessarily feel it,” Penny said proprietarily. He took it and stowed the horn in his pack.
“We should have asked her if this is Fillory,” Alice said quietly. “Of course it's Fillory,” Penny said.
“I'd like to be sure. And I'd like to know why we're cursed.”
“And what's this war?” Richard asked, his heavy brows knotted. “This raises a lot of questions.”
“And I didn't like those teeth,” Alice added.
“Jesus,” Josh said. “Jesus! That was a naiad, people! We just saw a river nymph! How cool is that? How cool are we? Huh? f**in' Fillory, people!”
He grabbed Quentin's shoulders and shook him. He ran at Richard and made him bump chests.
“Can I just say that she was pretty hot?” said Janet.
“Shyeah! I'll take that over a faun any day,” Josh said. Anaïs swatted him.
“Hey, that's Penny's girlfriend you're talking about,” Janet said. “Show some respect.”
The tension faded, and for a minute they all chattered among them- selves, giving one another sh** and just geeking out on the sheer alien magic of it all. Was she corporeal? Did she become fluid once she entered the stream? How else could she submerge herself in such shallow water? And how had she canceled Quentin's spell? What was her function in the magi- cal ecosystem? And what about the horn? Alice was already paging through her worn Fillory paperbacks for references to it—didn't Martin find a magic horn in the first book . . . ?
After a while it began to sink in that they'd been outside for forty-five minutes in deep winter wearing nothing but jeans and sweaters. Even Janet admitted it was time to head back to the City. Eliot corralled the stragglers and chatterers, and they all linked hands on the bank of the stream. They stood in a circle, still a little giddy, and for a moment happy conspiratorial glances flew between them. There was some bad personal stuff going down, but that didn't have to ruin everything, did it? They were doing something really important here. This was what every one of them had been waiting for, looking for, their whole lives—what they were meant to do! They'd found the magic door, the secret path through the hidden garden. They'd gotten ahold of something new, a real adventure, and it was only just beginning.
It was in that hush that they heard it for the first time—a dry, rhythmic ticking sound. It was almost lost in the twittering of the brook, but it grew louder and more distinct. One by one they stopped talking to listen. It was snowing more heavily now. Out of context it was hard to place. Alice was the first to twig. “It's a clock,” she said. “That's a clock ticking.”
She searched their faces impatiently.
“A clock,” she repeated, panicky now. “Watcherwoman, that's the Watcherwoman!”
Penny fumbled hastily for the bu*ton. The tick-tock grew even louder, like a monstrous heart beating, right on top of them, but it was impossible to tell what direction it was coming from. And then it didn't matter, because they were floating up through cold, clear water to safety.