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He put the spurs to his black charger, which whinnied and reared obligingly and hoofed the e off the path into the woods after the hare The crashing sound of his progress through the trees faded al back into place behind hi
Janet watched hio
“Hi ho, Silver,” she said “What are we even doing out here?”
It was a fair question The point wasn’t really to catch the hare The point as the point? What were they looking for? Back at the castle their lives were overfloith pleasure There was a whole staff there whose job it was to make sure that every day of their lives was absolutely perfect It was like being the only guests at a twenty-star hotel that you never had to leave Eliot was in heaven It was everything he’d always loved about Brakebills—the wine, the food, the cere
Quentin loved it too, but he was restless He was looking for so Hare was spotted in the greater Whitespirenothing all day He wanted to try to catch it
The Seeing Hare was one of the Unique Beasts of Fillory There were a dozen of theranted Quentin three wishes, was one of thehtless bird like a cassowary that could stop a battle by appearing between the two opposing armies There was only one of each of theift The Unseen Monitor was a large lizard who could turn you invisible for a year, if that’s what you wanted
People hardly ever saw theot talked about them No one knehere they came from, or what the point of them was, if any They’d always been there, permanent features of Fillory’s enchanted landscape They were apparently iift was to predict the future of any person who caught it, or so the legend went It hadn’t been caught for centuries
Not that the future was a question of towering urgency right now Quentin figured he had a pretty fair idea of what his future was like, and it wasn’t ood
They’d picked up the hare’s trail early, when thechoruses of “Kill the Wabbit” to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” in their best Elh the forest forback, hiding in the bushes and then suddenly zipping across their paths, again and again
“I do not think he is co back,” Julia said
She didn’t speak iven up using contractions
“Well, if we can’t track the hare we can track Eliot anyway” Janet gently urged her mount off the track and into the trees She wore a low-cut forest-green blouse andhad been the scandal of the season at court this year
Julia didn’t ride a horse at all but an enormous furry quadruped that she called a civet, which looked like an ordinary civet, long and brown and vaguely feline, with a fluidly curving back, except that it was the size of a horse Quentin suspected it could talk—its eyes gleamed with a bit more sentience than they should have, and it always seemed to follow their conversations with too much interest
Dauntless didn’t want to follow the civet, which exuded a musky, un-equine odor, but she did as she was told, albeit at a spiteful, stiff-legged walk
“I haven’t seen any dryads,” Janet said “I thought there’d be dryads”
“Me neither,” Quentin said “You never see them in the Queenswood anymore”
It was a shame He liked the dryads, the mysterious nymphs atched over oak trees You really knew you were in aa skimpy dress made of leaves suddenly jumped out of a tree
“I thought maybe they could help us catch it Can’t you call one or su, Julia?”
“You can call them all you want They will not come”
“I spend enough ti to them bitch about land allocation,” Janet said “And where are they all if they’re not here? Is there soical-er forest so?”
“They are not ghosts,” Julia said “They are spirits”
The horses picked their way carefully over a berht to be natural An old earthwork froe
“Maybe we could islate some incentives Or just detain them at the border It’s bullshit that there’s not more dryads in the Queenswood”
“Good luck,” Julia said “Dryads fight Their skin is like wood And they have staves”
“I’ve never seen a dryad fight,” Quentin said
“That is because nobody is stupid enough to fight one”
Recognizing a good exit line when it heard one, the civet chose that moment to scurry on ahead Two sturdy oak trees actually leaned aside to let Julia pass between the Janet and Quentin to go the long way around
“Listen to her,” Janet said “She has so totally gone native! I’m tired of herto that fucking bird?”
“Oh, leave her alone,” Quentin said “She’s all right”
But if he was being honest, Quentin was fairly sure that Queen Julia wasn’t all right
Julia hadn’t learned her h the safe, orderly systeether, but she hadn’t gotten into Brakebills, so she’d becoe witch instead: she’d learned it on her own, on the outside It wasn’t official e chapters of lore, and her technique was so sloppy and loopy that sometimes he couldn’t believe it even worked at all
But she also knew things Quentin and the others didn’t She hadn’t had the Brakebills faculty standing over her for four yearssure she colored inside the lines She’d talked to people Quentin never would have talked to, picked up things his professors would never have let hies on it that had never been filed down
It was a different kind of education, and it made her different She talked differently Brakebills had taught theic, but Julia took it seriously She played it fully goth, in a black wedding dress and black eyeliner Janet and Eliot thought it was funny, but Quentin liked it He felt drawn to her She eird and dark, and Fillory had ht, Quentin included He liked it that she wasn’t quite all right and she didn’t care who knew it
The Fillorians liked it too Julia had a special rapport with them, especially with the more exotic ones, the spirits and eles—the fringe eleical and the entirely ical She was their witch-queen, and they adored her
But Julia’s education had cost her soer on what, but whatever it was had left its mark on her She didn’t seem to want or need human company anymore In the middle of a state dinner or a royal ball or even a conversation she would lose interest and wander away It happened more and more Sometimes Quentin wondered exactly how expensive her education had been, and how she’d paid for it, but whenever he asked her, she avoided the question Soain