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BOOK I

CHAPTER 1

Quentin rode a gray horse hite socks named Dauntless He wore black leather boots up to his knees, different-colored stockings, and a long navy-blue topcoat that was richly embroidered with seed pearls and silver thread On his head was a platinu—not the ceremonial kind, the real kind, the kind that would actually be useful in a fight It was ten o’clock in the ust He was everything a king of Fillory should be He was hunting a ic rabbit

By King Quentin’s side rode a queen: Queen Julia Up ahead were another queen and another king, Janet and Eliot—the land of Fillory had four rulers in all They rode along a high-arched forest path littered with yellow leaves, perfect little sprays of them that looked like they could have been cut and placed by a florist They ether but lost in their separate thoughts, gazing out into the green depths of the late summer woods

It was an easy silence Everything was easy Nothing was hard The dream had become real

“Stop!” Eliot said, at the front

They stopped Quentin’s horse didn’t halt when the others’ did—Dauntless wandered a little out of line and halfway off the trail before he persuaded her for good and all to quit walking for a da of Fillory and he was still shit at horseback riding

“What is it?” he called

They all sat for another minute There was no hurry Dauntless snorted once in the silence: lofty horsey conteht they were pursuing

“Thought I saw so”

“I’ to wonder,” Quentin said, “if it’s even possible to track a rabbit”

“It’s a hare,” Eliot said

“Same difference”

“It isn’t, actually Hares are bigger And they don’t live in burrows, they round”

“Don’t start,” both Julia and Janet said, in unison

“Here’sreally can see the future won’t it knoe’re trying to catch it?”

“It can see the future,” Julia said softly, beside hiue this much when you were at Brakebills?”

She wore a sepulchral black riding dress and an actual riding hood, also black She alore black, like she was in h Quentin couldn’t think of anyone she should have been inover a waiter, Julia subird to her wrist and raised it up to her ear It chipped, chirruped soain

Nobody noticed, except for Quentin She was always giving and getting little secretanimals It was like she was on a different wireless network from the rest of them

“You should have let us bring Jollyby,” Janet said She yawned, holding the back of her hand against her mouth Jollyby was Master of the Hunt at Castle Whitespire, where they all lived He usually supervised this kind of excursion

“Jollyby’s great,” Quentin said, “but even he couldn’t track a hare in the woods Without dogs When there’s no snow”

“Yes, but Jollyby has very well-developed calf hts”

“I wearto be affronted Eliot snorted

“I i the trees “Discreet distance and all that Can’t keep that man away from a royal hunt”

“Careful what you hunt,” Julia said, “lest you catch it”

Janet and Eliot looked at each other: more inscrutable wisdom from Julia But Quentin frowned Julia made her own kind of sense

Quentin hadn’t always been a king, of Fillory or anywhere else None of theical, non-royal person in Brooklyn, in what he still in spite of everything thought of as the real world He’d thought Fillory was a fiction, an enchanted land that existed only as the setting of a series of fantasy novels for children But then he’d learned to do e called Brakebills, and he and his friends had found out that Fillory was real

It wasn’t what they expected Fillory was a darker and erous place in real life than it was in the books Bad things happened there, terrible things People got hurt and killed and worse Quentin went back to Earth in disgrace and despair His hair turned white

But then he and the others had pulled theone back to Fillory They faced their fears and their losses and took their places on the four thrones of Castle Whitespire and were s and queens And it onderful Soh it all when Alice, the girl he loved, had died It was hard to accept all the good things he had nohen Alice hadn’t lived to see them

But he had to Otherhat had she died for? He unslung his bow and stood up in the stirrups and looked around Bubbles of stiffness popped satisfyingly in his knees There was no sound except for the hush of falling leaves slipping through other leaves

A gray-brown bullet flickered across the path a hundred feet in front of them and vanished into the underbrush at full tilt With a quick fluid motion that had cost him a lot of practice Quentin nocked an arrow and drew He could have used ath of the bow, and released

The arrow burrowed into the loa paws had been about five seconds ago

“Almost,” Janet said, deadpan

There was no way in hell they were going to catch this thing

“Toy with me, would you?” Eliot shouted “Yah!”