That last adventure had been good for him. For all his faults Quentin had been his best friend here, and really he’d just been coming into his own. The year since then had been peaceful and prosperous, and in some ways the mood was lighter in the castle with Josh and Poppy installed as King and Queen in place of Quentin and Julia, Fillory’s brooders-in-chief. ![]() That had come as a shock to everybody, but to Eliot most of all, or second after Quentin anyway. It had been a year since Quentin was dethroned and expelled from Fillory and Julia had gone over to the Far Side. If he had a major unfulfilled ambition, currently, it related to Quentin. It took a substantial amount of malicious mismanagement to make Fillory a lousy place to live in, and nobody was going to get away with that on Eliot’s watch, ever again. When it wasn’t falling apart Fillory was a good place, a great place. He believed himself to be a good High King, and he had a lot of evidence to back it up. How many other people in the multiverse could say that? He woke up every morning knowing what he wanted to do, and then he went and did it, and when he was done he felt proud. Mostly Eliot was satisfied with the ones he’d made. It gave you time to think about things, to consider your own life choices. It was awfully calming, being sped up like this. He hadn’t come looking for it, but by God he was going to finish it. My sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter. Vile Father absorbed them and danced away to a safe distance to do some heavy breathing and reconsider his life choices.Įliot followed, jabbing and slapping, both ways, left-right. Emboldened, Eliot dropped the knife too, moved in closer and delivered a couple of quick body blows to Vile Father’s ribcage-the hook, his instructor had told him, was his punch. In slow motion you could see his jowls wrap halfway around his face. He didn’t, thank God, but Vile Father definitely felt it. For all he knew he was going to take the guy’s face off. With his strength and his speed all jacked up like this he had no idea how to calibrate the blow. He thought of that dead hermit, and those burned trees, but even so he pulled the punch. He wished he’d worn gloves, or gauntlets even. What could he say, he was a sensitive individual, fate had blessed and cursed him with a tender heart plus V.F.’s cheek was really oily/sweaty. Personal violence did not come naturally to Eliot in fact he found it distasteful. Then, seeing as how he had some time to kill, he dropped the baton and slapped Vile Father’s face with his open hand. Eliot batted it away before he could get to it, and he watched it drift off out of V.F.’s reach, moving at a stately lunar velocity. course-corrected once again, reaching out with a free hand to snag the snapped-off bit while it spun in midair. The wood snapped cleanly about three feet from the end. Eliot watched the wooden staff slowly approaching his midriff, set himself and, all in good time, hammered down on it as hard as he could with his metal baton. ![]() Watching it slowed down like this, you had to admire the man’s athleticism. ![]() I guess it doesn’t pay to stand around looking all impressed on the battlefield. He didn’t look impressed or even surprised, just converted his momentum into a spin move meant to catch Eliot in the stomach with the butt of the pole. Though you didn’t get to be as big and fat as Vile Father was without learning a thing or two along the way. He leaned back and away from the slowly, gracefully thrusting blade, lost his balance and put a hand down on the sand, rolled away, then got back on his feet while V.F. He did it now, and everything in the world abruptly slowed down. The trigger for the time/reflexes part of the enchantment system was Eliot twitching his nose. But they’d managed to tamp that down so that the armor was only occasionally visible, maybe once every couple of minutes and only for a moment at a time, a flash of something translucent and mother-of-pearly. When he and Janet had first finished up the casting, a couple of hours earlier, in the chilly predawn, he’d been so covered in spellcraft that he glowed like a life-size neon sign of himself. Was that cheating? Well, while he was doing his squats and whatever else, Eliot had spent his whole life learning magic. What? Look, Vile Father spent his whole life learning to kill people with a knife on a stick. But it wasn’t, because Eliot was sporting a huge amount of invisible magical protection in the form of Fergus’s Spectral Armory, which by itself would have saved his life even if the blade had hit home, but in addition to that he was sporting Fergus’s A Whole Lot of Other Really Useful Combat Spells, which had amped his strength up a few times over, and most important had cranked his reflexes up by a factor of ten, and his perception of time down by that same factor.
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