Janet watched him go.
“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 was—what was the point? What were they looking for? Back at the castle their lives were overflowing with 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 ceremony—with none of the work. Eliot loved being a king.
Quentin loved it too, but he was restless. He was looking for something else. He didn’t know what it was. But when the Seeing Hare was spotted in the greater Whitespire metropolitan area, he knew he wanted a day off from doing nothing 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 them—the Questing Beast, who had once granted Quentin three wishes, was one of them, as was the Great Bird of Peace, an ungainly flightless bird like a cassowary that could stop a battle by appearing between the two opposing armies. There was only one of each of them, hence the name, and each one had a special gift. 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 them, let alone caught them, so a lot of guff got talked about them. No one knew where 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 immortal. The Seeing Hare’s gift 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 much different from his present. Life was good.
They’d picked up the hare’s trail early, when the morning was still bright and dewy, and they rode out singing choruses of “Kill the Wabbit” to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” in their best Elmer Fudd voices. Since then it had zigzagged them through the forest for miles, stopping and starting, looping and doubling back, hiding in the bushes and then suddenly zipping across their paths, again and again.
“I do not think he is coming back,” Julia said.
She didn’t speak much these days. And for some reason she’d mostly given 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 and men’s chaps. Her penchant for mild cross-dressing had 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.