“As far as husbands went, and I’ve had too many to count, Henry was one of the better ones.”

The pie crust turned a golden brown as I watched anxiously through the oven window. I waited a few more minutes and then, mitts in hand, I removed the pie and set on the windowsill in the kitchen, the cool autumn air drafting in through a crack.

Quest complete. Well, almost. Just needed to drop this baby off under a bench in town and the tokens would be mine.

No, really.

It was early Saturday afternoon and the house was quiet. Duncan was upstairs sleeping, having landed early this morning from Hong Kong and needing to get rested for his boss’s party tonight. We had rented a small house for the weekend in Northampton, a very old East End hamlet with a very new name. Evidently an enterprising real estate agent had started advertising his listings as being located in the then non-existent town of Northampton to foreign buyers looking to stash their cash in the U.S. and suddenly, prices began skyrocketing, trendy shops began filling the downtown strip, and the town council was considering multiple petitions to change the town’s name.

Fortunately, the new eight-figure homes that had popped up hadn’t yet fully pushed out the quaint cottages that dotted the town’s winding roads, it had only made their owners jack up the weekend rental price. But Duncan didn’t flinch at the cost, his most recent bonus plentiful enough to absorb the hit.

Speaking of, the man had still not made his way downstairs. Which gave me time to make another pie. I cut up the apples I had picked earlier into slices, poured the sugary filling into the crust, and laid the top over the whole thing. I slid it into of the oven and pulled up the details of the Quest:

“One apple pie, made with Mutsu apples picked from the 17th row of trees at Running Brook Orchard. Reward: Seven iron.”

I wasn’t planning on Questing this weekend, as I needed a break from, well, everything. The last four months had been an unrelenting grind. If not for the mandatory three-day wait between Quests, I would have tried to do one every single day. Even with the gaps, I still managed to rake in 40 wood and 16 iron for a grand total of 72 experience, leaving me just a hair over level three. The day I reached that milestone should have been a happy one, but Duncan had been away and I hadn’t felt like drinking by myself (again). So I splurged on a spa day and tried to forget that to get to level four, at my current rate, would take at least eight months. If the Council, whoever they were, wanted some new blood, this incessant grinding was not the way to go about it.

And I hadn’t had any luck tracking down the mystery library books either. Several visits to branches in all five boroughs had yielded nothing, hours of online searching had been fruitless, and if I set foot in another used bookstore, I was going to shoot myself.

So it was a nice surprise when I woke up to an email from Duncan the other day that not only would he be coming home a few days early, we were going away for the weekend to boot. A whole weekend with Duncan was a rare occurrence and I wanted to be present, rather than thinking about alchemy, prima materia, and the scar.

Unfortunately, my curiosity and boredom got the best of me after five minutes, as I really had nothing else to do when I got to the house yesterday evening. I had innocently pulled up the Quest Board to see if there was anyone out here who had taken the red pill. Turned out that the East End was not a Questing hotbed, with only a smattering of rinky-dink fetch Quests offering a few iron at most. I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than six iron, so seven iron was right on the line, but the opportunity to take in the fresh fall air at a scenic farm was enough of an incentive for me, so I accepted.

The orchard was practically empty when I arrived and I paid the ridiculous $40 for the right to fill a bag with more apples than I would be able to eat in a month and set off for the designated row. The few orchard employees out among the trees eyed me suspiciously. I suspected that they were used to seeing happy couples arm-in-arm, or parents swinging their kids in the air as they meandered about. The pathetic sight of a girl picking apples by herself at 8:45 in the morning couldn’t be countered by an argument that the apples tasted better or there was something satisfying about foraging for your own food.

But I didn’t need to justify my presence; I just needed to find the frakking trees so I could go make my pies.

Yes, pies, plural. If this wasn’t yet another errand for someone, then there was something different about these apples and I was damn sure going to figure out what that was. Which was easy enough. I would just make a second pie, take a bite, and see what happened.

I walked down the path that ran through the center of the rows of trees, until I reached a very threatening piece of yellow tape that was strung across the gap at the 17th row. I looked around to see if anyone was nearby and seeing no one I stepped leisurely over the tape and into the forbidden section.

I knew something was wrong immediately when my right foot sunk into the soil down to my ankle as soon as it hit the ground. My left foot remained planted on the other side, and I stood there, stradling the tape, trying to reclaim my foot and my freedom. But the soil had turned rock hard, almost as if it was cement. I struggled without success for a minute or two, all the while looking back to see if anyone had noticed my predicament. Luckily I remained undetected, but unluckily for my favorite hiking boots, I quickly determined that the only way to wrest myself free was to leave my right boot trapped in the dirt.

I gave the trapped boot a good pull just in case the dirt had decided to play nice, but it wouldn’t budge and I reluctantly parted ways with it and walked away from the yellow tape.

The ground was slightly damp from recent rains and my right sock soon was covered in dirt. I contemplated wrapping the empty apple bag around my foot and trudging back to the front of the orchard, but the sight of stray apples in the grass gave me an idea.

I backtracked one row and took a hard left away from the center path. The trees in the 17th row abutted their siblings in the 16th row, the only difference being there was no yellow tape separating the two. Apples littered the ground at the base of the trees. I stopped at a random spot and pushed my way in as far as I could manage. The corresponding tree in the 17th row was still a bit out of reach, but luckily, its fallen apples weren’t. Careful not to step too close to the weird soil, I began collecting the Mutsu until I had a decently full bag and then retreated to safety.

I looked down at my spoils. The apples were green like regular green apples. I put the bag down and removed one of the apples. It weighed what you would expect an apple to weigh, no magic golden apples here. I brought it up to my mouth, held it there for a few seconds, and then took a small bite.

Nothing happened.

I swallowed and took another bite, swirling the apple pieces around in my mouth like a sip of wine.

Still nothing.

Maybe it was one of those slow-acting apples. You know the ones where you take a bite, go to sleep, and then don’t wake up for a hundred years. Well, if that was the case, the damage was already done. Or maybe the apples needed to be heated for the effects to kick in, hence the request for a pie. In any event, my facilities remained unimpaired so I figured I might as well get the hell out of Dodge before I was discovered. I put the half-eaten apple back in my bag, stopped at a row of trees with yellow apples to cover over the Mutsu, and trudged off back to the rental car. It was late enough in the morning now that the throngs of apple pickers had began to arrive, and so none of the staff noticed the one-booted girl slip by with a bag of potentially magic apples.

When I arrived back at the house, I laid out my haul on the counter: 14 Mutsu apples, enough for two pies with a few leftover. I set to work, nibbling on the extras as I went, all the while hoping that whatever magic they held would kick in eventually. If necessary, I was prepared to eat the whole pie, stomach consequences be damned, to figure out what was so special about these apples. I imagined the answers neatly laid out in the Compendium, hidden on a shelf somewhere in the city.

There would be pages of maps, showing the location of flora and fauna that had magical properties. Tables of recipes and experiments on how to mix disparate ingredients to make something new. A whole chapter on the uses of rats. The pages would be brown and make a satisfying crinkly noise as you turned them. I imagined that each family had a copy that had been passed down from generation to generation, each successive one scribbling notes in the margin with new ideas and new things they’d tried.

Without the Compendium, though, I would need to figure everything out for myself, one Quest at a time. The first pie would be for the Quest and the second one for me (and Duncan if he ever woke up). Just a few more minutes and I would be able to find out if these apples were worth losing my boot over.

The creak of the old wooden stairs betrayed Duncan’s descent into the kitchen. He wore a tattered t-shirt and sweats, the back of his hair was sticking up, and I’m sure he hadn’t brushed his teeth yet, but I didn’t care. It had been so long that I almost had forgotten what it was like to have someone else in my life.

Duncan surveyed the scene in the kitchen with a quizzical look.

“One day in the country and you’ve gone domestic on me.”

“And hello to you too. I didn’t think you were going to wake up in time for the party.”

Duncan walked over to me and gave me a kiss. It was short, more than a peck but less than a haven’t-seen-your-longtime-girlfriend-in-three-weeks type of kiss. He pulled back slightly and I wondered if he was waiting for me to press forward, as if testing me to see if I would continue the kiss, to see if I had missed him more than he had missed me. But then suddenly his hands were around my waist, his lips back against mine, his fingers trying to untie the apron. Our lips never parted as we made our way up to the bedroom, and the distance that had separated us was gone.

We lay together in bed afterward, the sheets and blankets strewn about haphazardly, my head resting on his shoulder, his arm around me. For the first time in a while, I felt content and calm, as if the world outside the room didn’t exist, as if the Quests were just a bizarre daydream I had created. I closed my eyes and pretended that this could last as long as I didn’t open them.

But the kitchen smoke detector had other plans.

Next: Jen attends a swanky Hamptons soiree and shenanigans ensue.