The Magician King

CHAPTER 9

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. It’s disappointing.” He sat on the curb, elbows on his knees, staring up at the power lines, and attempted to reason with himself. His scraped hands smarted and throbbed. It felt like late summer. For some reason it was the power lines more than anything else that looked weird, after two years in Fillory.

That and the cars. They looked wrong, like animals. Angry alien animals. Julia was sitting on the grass, hugging her knees and rocking slightly. She looked worse off than he did.

Quentin’s heart was sinking out of his chest and out of his body and down into the dirt of this goddamned useless planet. I was a king. I had a ship. I had a beautiful ship, my own ship!

It was like somebody was trying to send him a message. If so he got it. Message received.

“I get it,” he said out loud. “I hear you. I get it already.”

I am a king, he thought. Even in the real world I’m still a king. Nothing can take that away.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re going to make this all right.”

It was an experiment in saying what he wanted to be true, to see if that would make it any truer.

Julia was on all fours now. She heaved up something thin and bitter onto the grass. He went over and knelt beside her.

“You’re going to be all right,” he said.

“I don’t feel well.”

“We’re going to fix this. You’ll be all right.”

“Stop saying that.” She coughed, then spat on the lawn. “You do not understand. I cannot be here.” She paused to rummage for words. “I should not. I have to go.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I have to leave!”

Did the key think he wanted to go home? This wasn’t his home. Quentin looked up at the house. There were no signs of life. He was relieved; he wasn’t in the mood to talk to his parents right now. It was a fancy suburb, with big houses that could even afford to have some lawn around them.

A neighbor was peering out at them from her living room window. “Hi!” He waved. “How’s it going?”

The face disappeared. Its owner drew the curtain.

“Come on,” he said to Julia. He breathed out decisively. Let’s be brave. “Let’s go inside, get a shower. Maybe change clothes.”

They were in full Fillorian drag. Not inconspicuous. She didn’t answer.

He was fighting off panic. Jesus, it had taken him twenty-two years to get to Fillory the first time. How was he going to do it again now? He turned back to Julia, but she wasn’t there. She was up and walking unsteadily down the wide, empty suburban road away from him. She looked tiny in the middle of all that asphalt.

That was another weird thing. Asphalt really wasn’t like anything in nature.

“Hey. Come on.” He stood up and trotted after her. “There’s probably mini-Dove bars in the freezer.”

“I cannot stay here.”

“I can’t either. I just don’t know what to do about it.”

“I am going back.”

“How?”

She didn’t answer. He caught up, and they walked together in the fading light. It was quiet. Multicolored light from giant televisions flickered in the windows. When had TVs gotten that big?

“I only knew one way to get to Fillory, and that was the magic button. And Josh had that, last we saw. Maybe we can find him. Or maybe Ember could summon us back. Other than that I think we’re kind of screwed.”

Julia was sweating. Her walk had a slight stagger to it. Whatever was wrong with her, this wasn’t making it any better. He made a decision.

“We’ll go to Brakebills,” he said. “Somebody there will help us.”

She didn’t react.

“I know it’s a long shot—”

“I do not want to go to Brakebills.”

“I know,” Quentin said. “I don’t especially want to go there either. But it’s safe, they’ll feed us, and somebody there will have a line on some way to get us back.”

Privately he doubted any of the faculty had a clue about getting around the multiverse, but they might know how to find Josh. Or Lovelady, the junk dealer who’d found the button in the first place.

Julia stared fixedly ahead. For a minute Quentin didn’t think she was going to answer.

“I do not want to go,” she said.

But she stopped walking. A sparkly blue muscle car sat parked by itself at the curb, a snouty, low-slung vehicle with a turbo hood in front and a rear spoiler. Some rich douche bag’s sixteenth birthday present. Julia looked around for a minute, then stepped onto the lawn, where a landscaper had laid down a row of head-sized boulders. She picked one up like a medicine ball, hefting it surprisingly easily in her stick-thin arms, and half threw, half dropped it through the muscle car’s driver-side window.

Quentin didn’t even have time to offer advice or an opinion — something along the lines of, don’t throw the rock through the car window. It had already happened.

It took two tries to get it all the way through — the safety glass starred and stretched before it gave way. The alarm was deafening in the suburban stillness, but incredibly no lights came on in the house. Julia reached through the hole and deftly popped the door open, then heaved the rock back out onto the asphalt and slid herself into the black vinyl bucket seat.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

She picked up a shard of glass and nicked the pad of her thumb with it. Whispering something under her breath, she jammed her bloody thumb-tip up against the ignition.

The alarm stopped. The car rumbled into life, and the radio came on: Van Halen, “Poundcake.” She lifted up her ass and brushed the rest of the glass off the seat underneath her.

“Get in,” she said.

Sometimes you just have to do things. Quentin walked around to the other side — for form’s sake he really should have slid across the hood — and she peeled out before he even had the door closed. They drove away from his parents’ block at speed. He couldn’t believe nobody had called the police, but he didn’t hear any sirens; it was either really good magic or very dumb luck. She didn’t turn the Van Halen off, or even down. The gray street poured along underneath them. It beat a carriage, anyway.

Julia rolled down what was left of the broken window so that it didn’t look so broken.

“How the hell did you do that?” he said.

“You know about hot-wiring?” she said. “That is ‘not-wiring.’ That is what we used to call it, in the old days.”

“In what old days did you go around stealing cars? And who is ‘we’?”

She didn’t answer, just took a corner too fast, so that the car heeled over on its ridiculously too-bouncy suspension.

“That was a stop sign,” Quentin said. “I still think we should go to Brakebills.”

“We are going to Brakebills.”

“You changed your mind.”

“It happens.” Her thumb was still bleeding. She sucked it and wiped it on her pants. “Can you drive?”

“No. I never learned.”

Julia swore. She turned up the radio.

It was four hours from Chesterton to Brakebills, or as close as you could get to Brakebills by car. Julia did it in three. They shot west across Massachusetts the long way, whipping along old New England interstates that had been cut through pine forests and blasted through low green hills, the sides of which showed bare red rock. The rock faces were slick with water from underground springs exposed by the blasting.

The sun set. The car smelled of its owner’s cigarette smoke. Everything was toxic and chemical and unnatural: the plastic walnut trim, the electric lights, the burning gasoline that was shoving them forward. This whole world was a processed petroleum product. Julia kept the radio on classic rock the whole way. It would be an exaggeration to say that she knew every single lyric of every single song that came on, but not by much.

They crossed the Hudson River at Beacon, New York, and turned off the interstate onto a two-lane local highway, winding and humped up with old frost heaves. Apart from Julia’s singing they didn’t speak. Quentin was still trying to make sense of what had just happened to them. It was too dark to make the trek to Brakebills tonight, so Julia showed him how to extract cash without a card from an ATM at a bug-swarmed gas station. They bought sunglasses for her, to hide her weird eyes, and they spent the night — separate rooms — at a motel. Quentin mentally dared the clerk to say something about their clothes, but no dice.

In the morning Quentin took a genuine hot shower in an actual Western-style bathroom. Score one for reality. He stayed there till all the sea salt was finally out of his hair, even though the tub was made of plastic and there were spiders in the corners and it reeked of detergents and “fresheners.” By the time he cleaned up, checked out, and harvested a bona fide actual sixteen-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola from the vending machine, Julia was waiting for him, sitting on the hood of their car.

She’d skipped the shower, but she’d doubled up on the Coke. The car spit gravel on its way out of the parking lot.

“I thought you did not know where it was,” Julia said. “That was what you told me when I asked you.”

“I told you that,” Quentin said, “because it’s true. I don’t know where it is. But I think there’s a way to find it. At least I know someone who did it once.”

He meant Alice. She’d done it as a high school senior, so they ought to be able to manage it. Strange to think of it now. He was going to follow in her footsteps.

“We’ll have to walk a couple of miles through the woods,” he said.

“That does not bother me.”

“A vision spell should reveal it. It’s veiled, but just to keep civilians out. There’s an Anasazi spell. Or Mann. Maybe just a Mann reveal.”

“I know the Anasazi.”

“Okay. Great. Then I’ll let you know when.”

Quentin kept his tone carefully neutral. Nothing made Julia angrier than the feeling that she was being condescended to by a Brakebills graduate. At least she wasn’t blaming him for getting them shunted back to Earth. Or probably she was, but she wasn’t doing it out loud.

It was a hot late August morning. The air was saturated with bronze sunlight. A mile off, at the bottom of the valley, they caught glimpses of the huge blue Hudson River. They parked at a bend in the road.

He got that it hurt her pride, and maybe something even more vital, to be dragged back to Brakebills begging for help. It didn’t change the fact that it was their first and best and possibly only option. He was not fucking staying on Earth. He wanted a quest? Now he had one. The quest was to get back to where he was when he started his goddamned quest. That ought to learn him, but good.

Before they set off Julia spent fifteen minutes on a spell that she curtly informed him would cause the car to wait an hour and then drive itself back home to Chesterton. Quentin didn’t see how that was even remotely possible, on any number of levels, but he kept his doubts to himself. If he’d thought to keep more of the glass he could have at least fixed the window, but he hadn’t, so hard cheese on whoever’s muscle car it was. He tucked two hundred dollars in twenties into the glove compartment, then they drank the rest of the Coke and climbed over the sheet-metal guardrail.

These weren’t recreational woods, meant to be hiked through and picnicked in. They hadn’t been curated and made user-friendly by helpful park rangers. They were dense, and the light was dim, and walking through them wasn’t fun. Quentin was constantly ducking his head too late to avoid being slashed across the face by a branch. Every five minutes he was convinced that he’d walked through a spiderweb, but he could never find the spider.

And he wasn’t sure what would happen if they walked into the Brakebills perimeter without knowing it. Nothing in theory, of course, but Quentin had watched Professor Sunderland lay down the barrier after the Beast attacked. He’d seen some of the things she’d ground into those powders. Any second they could be running smack into it. The idea made his face tingle. After half an hour he called a halt.

The woods were still. There was no sign of the school, but he felt it somewhere around here, as if it were hiding behind a tree waiting to jump out at him. And he imagined he could feel older tracks running through the woods too. Like Alice’s — poor cursed teenage Alice, wandering all night looking for the way in. It would have been better for her if she’d never found it. Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.

“Let’s try it here,” he said.

Julia launched into the Anasazi spell in her rough, fierce casting style, clearing invisible layers away from the air in a square in front of her, like wiping fog off a windshield. He winced, inwardly, to watch some of her upper hand positions, but it didn’t make her castings any less forceful. Sometimes it seemed to make them more so.

He began work on the Mann instead. It was a lot easier, but it wasn’t a contest. Best to diversify.

He never finished. He heard the usually imperturbable Julia squeak and skip a step backward. Suspended in the air in front of her, in the square she’d cleared, was a face. It belonged to an older man with a goatee wearing a royal-blue tie and an appalling yellow blazer.

It was Dean Fogg, the head of Brakebills. His face was in the square because he was standing right in front of Julia.

“Soooooo,” the dean said, drawing out the vowel until he practically burst into song. “The prodigal has returned.”

Not five minutes later they were walking across the Sea, which was as lush and green and immense as ever. It rolled out around them, the size of half a dozen football fields. The summer sun beat down on them from directly overhead. It was June here, inside the magic walls.

It was incredible. Quentin hadn’t been back here for three years, not since he’d gone to Fogg and asked to be stricken from the rolls of the magical world, but nothing had changed at all. The smells, the lawns, the trees, the kids — this place was like Shangri-la, forgotten by time, abiding in an eternal present.

“We were watching you from when you left the road. The defenses go far beyond what we had in your day. Far beyond. Double-braided lines of force — we have a remarkable young man in our theoretical department, even I don’t understand half of what he does. You can see a map of the entire forest now, in real time, showing anybody in it. It’s even color-coded by their intentions and state of mind. Remarkable.”

“Remarkable.” Quentin felt shell-shocked. On his other side Julia said nothing. God knew what she was feeling, he couldn’t have guessed within a thousand miles. She hadn’t been here since her failed exam in high school. She hadn’t spoken since Fogg had appeared, though she had managed to shake his hand when being introduced.

Fogg rattled on about the school and the grounds and Quentin’s classmates and all the impressive and respectable things they were up to. None of them seemed to have gotten themselves accidentally exiled to the wrong dimension. There was plenty of hot local news too. Brakebills had become a force to be reckoned with on the international welters circuit, thanks to the efforts of one especially sporty young professor. One of the topiary animals, an elephant calf, had broken free of its hedge and was running amok around the grounds, albeit very slowly, at the rate of about a yard a day. The Natural group was laboring mightily to corral it and bring it to justice, but no luck so far.

The library was still plagued by outbreaks of flying books — three weeks ago a whole flock of Far Eastern atlases had taken wing, terrifyingly broad, muscular volumes like albatrosses, and wrecked the circulation area, sending students crawling under tables. The books actually found their way out through the front door and roosted in a tree by the welters board, from which they raucously heckled passersby in a babel of languages until they got rained on and dragged themselves sulkily back to the stacks, where they were being aggressively rebound.

All Quentin could think was how weird it was that all this was still going on. It shouldn’t be possible, it must violate a law of physics. A few students dotted the grass, girls mostly, sunning their light-starved bodies to the extent that the school uniform would permit. Classes were out for the semester, but the seniors hadn’t graduated yet. If Quentin were to turn left here and walk five minutes, past that stand of live oaks, he’d get to the Cottage. And it would be full of strangers, lolling in the window seats, drinking the wine, reading the books, screwing each other in the beds. He’d wondered if he would want to see it, but now that he was here he really didn’t.

The students watched the three of them pass, propped up on their elbows, full of lofty pity for those who had been stupid enough to graduate and get older. He knew how they felt. They felt like kings and queens. Enjoy it while it lasts.

“I wasn’t sure we would ever see you again.” Fogg was still talking. “After your — what shall we call it — your retirement? Not many people who make that choice ever come back, you know. When we lose them we lose them forever. But you, I take it you saw the — how shall I put it — the error of your ways?”

Fogg had evidently decided to take the high road, and it certainly sounded like he was enjoying the view from up there. They left the burning expanse of the Sea for the cool paths of the Maze, which opened up at unexpected intervals into little squares and circles inside of which were nestled pale stone fountains. The same fountains he’d lounged around with Alice, though the paths were different. The Maze would have been redrawn since his day — once a year every year. He followed Fogg’s lead.

“I had a change of heart.” The high road was wide enough for two. “But it was very generous of you to accommodate me, in my — what shall I call it — my hour of need?”

“Just as you say.”

Fogg removed a handkerchief from inside his lapel and patted his forehead with it. He did look older. The goatee was new, and it was mostly white. He’s been here all this time, every day, doing what he’d always done, to other kids who then moved on and left. Quentin felt claustrophobic after only five minutes. Fogg still saw him as the boy he used to be, but that boy was gone.

They walked into the House and up to Fogg’s office. Before Quentin followed him inside he turned to Julia.

“Do you want to just wait out here?”

“Fine.”

“Might be better tactically for me to do this man-to-man.”

Julia formed a mirthless “OK” sign with her thumb and forefinger. Great. She seated herself on the bench beside Fogg’s door, the one usually reserved for naughty and/or failing undergraduates. She’d be fine. He hoped.

The dean sat down and clasped his hands in front of him on the desktop. The rich, leathery, familiar smells clawed at Quentin, trying to drag him back into the past. He wondered what he would say if he could talk to the boy he had been, sitting in what looked like this exact same chair, all those years ago, wearing the rumpled clothes that he’d slept in, joggling his knee with nerves, and trying to figure out if this was all a joke. Proceed with caution? Take the blue pill? Maybe something more practical. Don’t sleep with Janet. Don’t go touching strange keys.

And what would his younger self say? He would look back at him the way Benedict looked at Quentin and say: like I would do that.

“So,” Fogg said. “What can I do for you? What brings you back to your humble alma mater?”

The problem was how to ask for help without giving away more than he should about Fillory. Its existence — its reality — was still a secret, and Fogg was the last person he wanted to know about it. If he found out, then everybody would hear about it, and next thing you know it’s the hot spot for Brakebills kiddies on spring break, the Fort Lauderdale of the magical multiverse.

But he had to start somewhere. Just pretend to be as ignorant as he is.

“Dean Fogg, how much do you know about travel between worlds?”

“A little. More theory than practice, of course.” Fogg chuckled. “Some years back we had a student with an interest along those lines. Penny, I think his name was. Can’t have been his real name.”

“He was in my year. William was his real name.”

“Yes, he and Melanie — Professor Van der Weghe — spent quite a bit of time working on that very subject. She’s retired now, of course. What would be the nature of your interest, exactly—?”

“Well, I always liked him,” Quentin said, improvising haplessly. “Penny. William. And I’ve been asking around, but nobody’s seen him in a while.” Since he got his hands bitten off by an insane godling. “And I thought you might have some idea about where he is.”

“You thought he might have — crossed over?”

“Sure.” Why not. “Yeah.”

“Well,” Fogg said. He stroked his goatee, mulling, or appearing to mull. “No, no, I can’t go around handing out information about students left and right without their consent. It wouldn’t be proper.”

“I’m not asking for his cell number. I just thought you might have heard something.”

The springs of Fogg’s chair squawked as he leaned forward.

“My dear boy,” he said, “I hear all sorts of things, but I can’t repeat them. When I arranged for you to recuse yourself with that firm in Manhattan, you don’t suppose I went around telling people where you’d ended up?”

“I suppose not.”

“But if you’re really interested in Penny’s whereabouts, I’d advise you to start your search in this reality”—dry chuckle! — “rather than some other. Will you be staying for lunch?”

Julia was right. They shouldn’t have come. Obviously Fogg didn’t know anything, and being around him wasn’t good for Quentin. He could feel himself regressing in the direction of an adolescent tantrum — it was like trying to talk to his parents. He lost all perspective on who he was and how far he’d come. He really couldn’t believe the awe in which he used to hold this man. The towering, Gandalfian wizard he once cowered before had been swapped out and replaced with a smug hidebound bureaucrat.

“I can’t. But thanks, Dean Fogg.” Quentin clapped his hands on his knees. “Actually I think we’d better be moving on.”

“Before you do, Quentin.” Fogg hadn’t moved. “I’d like to prolong this conversation a little further. I’ve heard some pretty exotic rumors about what you and your friends have been up to these past few years. The undergraduates talk about it. You’re quite the campus legend, you know.”

Now Quentin did stand up.

“Well,” he said. “Kids. Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“I assure you I don’t.” Fogg’s eyes had regained their old flinty spark from somewhere. “But a word of advice from your old dean, if I may. Notwithstanding my regrettable ignorance of interdimensional travel, I don’t know what your interest in Penny might be, but I do know perfectly well that you never liked him. And no one’s heard from him in years. No one’s heard from Eliot Waugh or Alice Quinn in years, either. Or Janet Pluchinsky.”

Quentin noticed that Josh didn’t figure in Fogg’s memory. He should have asked about Josh first. Though he probably would have gotten the same answer.

“And now you’ve turned up dressed very oddly, and you’ve brought a civilian onto the grounds, one of our rejections if I’m not mistaken, which is — well, it’s just not something we ordinarily tolerate. I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, but I’ve put myself out for you over the years, quite a bit, and I have the reputation and the security of the school to think of.”

Aha. There’s the Fogg he used to know and fear. Not gone, he’d just been playing possum. But Quentin wasn’t the naughty schoolboy he used to be.

“Oh, I do know that, Dean Fogg. Believe me.”

“Well, good. Don’t go digging too deep, Quentin. Don’t stir. Shit. Up.” Fogg enunciated the obscenity crisply. “Right now you have the air of somebody who thinks he knows better. Humility is a useful quality in a magician, Quentin. Magic knows better, not you. Do you remember what I told you the night before you graduated? Magic isn’t ours. I don’t know whose it is, but we’ve got it on loan, on loan at best. It’s like what poor Professor March used to say about the turtles. Don’t bait them, Quentin. One world ought to be enough for anyone.”

Easy for you to say. You’ve only ever seen one.

“Thank you. I’ll try to remember that.”

Fogg sighed tragically, like Cassandra warning the Trojans, destined never to be heeded.

“Well, all right. Professor Geiger should be in the junior common room, if you need a portal. Unless you’d rather walk out the way you came.”

“A portal would be great. Thank you.” Quentin stood up. “By the way, that ‘rejection’ sitting in the hall? She’s a better magician than most of your students. Most of your faculty too.”

Quentin walked with Julia down to the junior common room. He had to get out of here. Everything was smaller than he remembered it — it was like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and he’d drunk the magic tonic. He felt like his head was sticking out the chimney, and his arm was out the window.

“Not going here?” he said. “You didn’t miss much.”

“Really?” Julia said. “You did.”

CHAPTER 10

Julia was playing the long game. But the problem with the long game, it turned out, was that it was long. They knew she was out here, and sooner or later they would have to deal with her. All she had to do was wait them out. But meanwhile weeks passed. People graduated. Julia included, probably, although she didn’t go to the ceremony.

The summer turned her darkened room into a convection oven, baking its contents to a hard hydroptic crisp, and then fall came and the weather relented. The ivy that ran up the house in back of them changed color and ruffled in the wind, and rain spattered the window. She could feel the neighborhood empty out as her classmates all went off to college. She didn’t. She was eighteen now, a responsible adult. Her coming-ofage story was over. Nobody could make her do anything anymore.

She could breathe easier with all her old friends, First Julia’s friends, out of town, but at the same time it made her nervous. She was all alone on this one. Very alone. She had made her way out to the edge of the world, hung by her fingers from the lip, and let go into free fall. Would she fall forever?

Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies. She threw her days in bunches onto the bonfire with both hands and watched them go up in fragrant smoke. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes it felt like the hours had ground to a halt. They fought her as they passed, one after the other, like stubborn stools. Online Scrabble helped ease them on their way, and movies. But you could only watch The Craft a finite number of times, and that number turned out to be about three.

And yes, all right, she did spend six weeks in an insane asylum. There, she said it. It was awful, but she knew it was probably coming, and you couldn’t blame her parents, not really. They gave her a choice, junior college or the laughing academy, and she picked door number two. What could she say, she thought they were bluffing, and she called them on it. Read ’em and weep.

So that happened. Bad as she thought it was going to be, it was worse. Six weeks of bad smells, bad food, and listening to her roommate, whose arms were crocheted with razor scars from cuff line to armpit, toss and turn and talk in her sleep about transformers, transformers, everything is a transformer, why won’t they just transform?

Who’s crazy now? Those movies were even worse than The Craft.

So she talked her shrinks in circles and took her meds, which helped to nudge the calendar along. Time sure flies when you’re having fun, and by fun she meant Nardil. Sometimes she really did think death would be preferable, except she wasn’t going to give those bastards the satisfaction. They couldn’t wear her down. No they couldn’t. No they couldn’t.

Eventually she was simply returned to sender. The doctors couldn’t keep her. She was no danger to herself or to others. She just wasn’t that crazy.

So that was another exclusive institution she’d been kicked out of. Badum-ching. Thanks very much, you’ve been a great audience. I’ll be here all week, all month, all year, indefinitely, until further notice.

Eventually, given that she had a little spare time on her hands, she opened up another front in the war. If magic was real, it stood to reason that some genuine information about how to work it must be in circulation. The Brakebills couldn’t have it all to themselves. It was inevitable; anybody who knew anything about information theory would know that. You just couldn’t contain a body of data that large completely hermetically. There would be too much of it, and too many pores it could leak out through. She would start tunneling from her side of the wall.

She began a systematic survey. It was good to give her always-hungry brain something to chew on — it kept it, if not happy, then at least busy. She drew up a list of the major magical traditions, and the minor ones. She compiled bibliographies of the major texts for same. She then read every one in turn, centrifuging out the practical information and ditching all the rest — the matrix of useless mystical crap in which it was suspended. This required some leaving of the house, some furtive forays into the Big Blue Room. But that had the extra effect of placating her parents a bit, so whatever, it’s all good.

She ground and boiled. She sniffed and daubed. It was fun, like a scavenger hunt. She haunted head shops and organic herb sections and familiarized herself with the restaurant supply stores on Bowery — a great source for cheap hardware — and online mail-order laboratory supply houses. It was amazing what they would send you through the mail if you had a fake ID, a PayPal account, and a P.O. box. If this magic thing didn’t pan out she could definitely go into domestic terrorism.

Once she spent a solid week tying like a thousand knots in a piece of string before she read ahead and realized that the string was supposed to have a strand of her hair woven into it, and she had to do it all over. She had always been a workaholic — she just couldn’t get enough of that workahol, was James’s joke — but even she had her limits. Twice she even killed something small, a mouse and a frog, quietly, in the backyard, under the cover of darkness. Hey, it was the circle of life. Hakuna matata. Which by the way is a Swahili phrase of modern origin and does absolutely fuck-all no matter how many times you chant it.

In fact, everything did fuck-all. It continued to do fuck-all as she moved out of her parents’ house to a studio apartment above a bagel store, which she had to temp to pay for, but it meant she had more space to lay out pentagrams, and her sister wouldn’t steal her charms and bang on her door and run away while she was chanting. (The fear effect having somewhat abated, unfortunately.) It did fuck-all even after she jacked off a simian twentysomething who couldn’t believe his luck in the bathroom at a party just because he said he could get her into the Prospect Park Zoo after hours, the zoo being like one-stop shopping for some of those African preparations, let me tell you. And besides she needed some semen for a couple of things, though fortunately for the zookeeper neither of them worked.

One time, only once, did she ever get a whiff of something real. It didn’t come out of a musty old codex, it came off the Internet, though it was ancient by online standards — the Internet equivalent of a musty old codex bound in finest fetal calfskin.

She’d been trolling through the archives of an old BBS run out of Kansas City in the mid-1980s. She was trying the usual search keywords, as one does, and getting the usual mountain of junk, as one does. It was like combing through stellar radiation for signs of extraterrestrial life. But one hit looked suspiciously like signal and not noise.

It was an image file. In the bad old days of 2400 baud modems, image files had to be posted in hexadecimal code in tranches of ten or twenty parts, since the amount of data in an image was many times the allowable length for a single post. You saved all the files together in a folder and then used a little utility to zip them together into a single document and decode them. Half the time a character or two got cut off along the way, and the entire frame got thrown off, and you ended up with nothing. Noise, static, snow crash. The other half of the time you wound up with a photograph of a thirtysomething stripper with baby fat and a cesarean scar, wearing only the bottom part of a high school cheerleader’s uniform.

But if she was going to crack the magic racket, it wasn’t going to be by half measures.

What this image was, once she had zipped and decoded it, was a scan of a handwritten document. A couplet — two lines of words in a language she didn’t recognize, transcribed phonetically. Above each syllable was a musical staff indicating rhythm and (in a couple of cases) intonation. Below it was a drawing of a human hand performing a gesture. There was no indication of what the document was, no title or explanation. But it was interesting. It had a purposeful quality, draftsmanlike and precise. It didn’t look like an art project, or a joke. Too much work, and not enough funny.

She practiced them separately first. Thank God for ten years of oboe lessons, on the strength of which she could sight-sing. The words were simple, but the hand positions were murder. Halfway through she went back to thinking it was a joke, but she was too stubborn to quit. She would have even then, but as an experiment she tried the first few syllables, and she discovered that something was different about this one. It made her fingertips feel hot. They buzzed like she’d touched a battery. The air resisted her, as if it had become slightly viscous. Something stirred in her chest that had never stirred there before. It had been sleeping her whole life, and now somehow, by doing this, she had poked it, and it stirred.

The effect went away as soon as she stopped. It was two in the morning, and she had a word processing shift at a law firm in Manhattan at eight. (Word processing was all she got anymore. She could type like a demon, but her appearance and phone manner had degenerated to the point where at her last receptionist assignment they’d shitcanned her on sight.) She hadn’t showered or slept in two days or washed her sheets in two months. Her eyes were full of sand. She stood at her desk and tried it again.

It was two more hours before she got all the way through it for the first time. The words were right, and the pitch, and the rhythm. The hand positions were still a joke, but she was onto something. This was not fuck-all. When she stopped, her fingers left trails in the air. It was like a hallucination, the kind of optical effect you’d get from botched laser surgery, or maybe from staying up all night two nights in a row. She waved her hand and it left streaks of color across her vision: red from her thumb, yellow, green, blue, and then purple from her pinky.

She smelled that electric smell. It was Quentin’s smell.

Julia went up to the roof. She didn’t want to touch anything with the spell going — it was like having fresh fingernail polish on — but she had to go somewhere, so she climbed the steel ladder and cracked the trap door and emerged out into the jungle of tar paper and air conditioners. She stood on the roof and made rainbow patterns with her hands against the rapidly bluing predawn sky until it stopped working.

It was magic. Real magic! And she was doing it! Hakuna fucking matata. Either she wasn’t crazy, or she’d finally gone well and truly around the bend, and she wasn’t coming back. Either way she could have died for joy.

Then she went downstairs and slept for an hour. When she woke up she saw that her fingers had left multicolored stains on the sheets. Her chest felt painfully hollowed out, as if somebody had gone in and scraped out all the organs with a table knife, like scraping the pith out of a jack-o’-lantern. It wasn’t until then that she thought to try to trace the poster from the BBS, but when she checked the archive the post was already gone.

But the spell still worked. She set it going again, and it worked again. Then, careful not to touch her face with her candy-colored fingers, she put her head down on her desk and sobbed like a child who’d been beaten.

CHAPTER 11

Quentin had Professor Geiger send them back to Chesterton. They materialized smoothly in the center of town. Geiger — a middle-aged woman, cheerfully overstuffed — had offered to send them directly to Quentin’s house, but he’d forgotten his parents’ address.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Quentin didn’t even know what day it was. They sat on a bench on a historic green where a minor battle had been fought in the Revolutionary War. Sun-dazed tourists drifted past them. It was not a time for able-bodied twentysomethings like him to be out and about with nothing to do. He should have been at the office, or acquiring a graduate degree, or at the very least playing touch football stoned. Quentin felt the daylight bleaching the energy out of him. God, he thought, looking down at his leggings. I really have to get out of these clothes.

Though Chesterton was one of the East Coast’s premier venues for colonial reenactments. That ought to make them a little less conspicuous.

“So that went well,” he said. “Starbucks?”

Julia didn’t laugh.

They were becalmed. They sat in silence under the old oaks: the king and queen of Fillory, with nothing to do. The air was full of weird modern hums and drones he never used to notice before he lived in Fillory: cars, power lines, sirens, distant construction, planes in the jet stream laying double-ruled lines across the clear blue sky. It never stopped.

He’d met Julia here once, he reminded himself, or not that far from here, in the graveyard behind the church. That was when she told him that she still remembered Brakebills.

“You do not have a plan, do you?” Julia stared straight ahead.

“No.”

“I do not know why I thought you would.” That haughty anger was back. She was waking up again. “You have never really been here. Out here in the real world.”

“Well, I’ve visited.”

“You think magic is what you learned at Brakebills. You have no idea what magic is.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s say I don’t. What is it?”

“I am going to show you.”

Julia stood up. She looked around, as if she were sniffing the wind, then set off abruptly across the street at a scary angle. A silver Passat honked and scritched to a stop to avoid hitting her. She kept walking. Quentin followed more cautiously.

She led them away from Chesterton’s main drag, such as it was. The neighborhood turned residential fast. The din of traffic and commerce died away, and big trees and houses bloomed on either side of the street. The sidewalk became bumpy and irregular. Julia was paying a lot of attention to the telephone poles for some reason. Every time they passed one she stopped and studied it.

“Been a while since I did this,” she said, mostly to herself. “Has to be one around here somewhere.”

“One what? What are we looking for?”

“I could tell you. But you would not believe me.”

She was full of surprises, was Julia. Well, he happened to have some free time just now. Five more minutes went by before she stopped at one particular telephone pole. It had a couple of blobs of fluorescent pink spray paint on it, which might have been left there by a sloppy lineman.

She stared at it, her lips moving silently. She was reading the world in a way that he, Quentin, could not.

“Not ideal,” she said finally. “But it will do. Come on.”

They kept walking.

“We are going to a safe house,” she added.

They walked for literally two miles through the suburban afternoon light, in the process crossing the town line from Chesterton into the less posh but still desirable town of Winston. Children trailing home from school eyed them curiously. Sometimes Julia would stop and study a chalk mark on a curb, or a stray spray of roadside wildflowers, then she would press on. Quentin didn’t know whether to feel hopeful or not, but he would wait for Julia’s plan to unfurl itself, especially since he didn’t have any suggestions of his own. Though his feet hurt, and he was on the point of suggesting they steal another car. Except that that would have been wrong.

Like Chesterton, Winston was an old Massachusetts suburb, and some of the houses they passed were not just colonial-style but genuinely colonial. You could recognize them because they were more compact than the other kind, denser and set back from the road in damp, rotting pine hollows, where raggedy grass lawnlets were locked in an endless running battle with encroaching rings of pines armed with their acid needles. The newer houses, by contrast, the colonial-inspired McMansions, were bright and enormous, and their lawns had gone completely shock-and-awe on the pine trees, of which one or at most two examples still stood, shivering and traumatized, to provide compositional balance.

The house they stopped at was the first kind, authentically colonial. It was starting to get dark out. Julia had logged another couple of telephone-pole paint blobs, one of which she’d stopped and studied quite closely using some kind of visual cantrip that he hadn’t caught because she hadn’t wanted him to catch it — she actually hid it with one hand as she cast it with the other.

The driveway dived down sharply into the hollow. Generations of kids must have murdered themselves on skateboards and scooters trying to go down it and stop before they slammed into the garage. Student drivers must have martyred themselves on it practicing hill starts in standard-transmission cars.

They clomped down it on foot. Quentin felt like a Seventh-Day Adventist, or an overaged trick-or-treater. At first he thought the lights were off, but when he got close enough he saw that they were in fact all on. The windows were papered over with butcher paper to keep them dark.

“I give up,” Quentin said. “Who lives here?”

“I don’t know,” Julia said brightly. “Let’s find out!”

She rang the doorbell. The man who opened the door was in his midtwenties, tall and fat, with a hair helmet and a red caveman face. He wore a T-shirt tucked into sweatpants.

He played it cool.

“What up?” he said.

By way of answering Julia did an odd thing: she turned around and pushed up her long, wavy black hair with one hand, giving the man a quick look at something on the nape of her neck. A tattoo? Quentin didn’t catch it.

“All right?” she said.

It must have been because the bouncer grunted and stepped aside. When Quentin followed the man narrowed his already piggy eyes further and put a hand on Quentin’s chest.

“Hang on.”

He took up a pair of ridiculously tiny opera glasses, toylike, that hung on a thong around his neck, and studied Quentin through them.

“Jesus.” He turned to Julia, genuinely aggrieved. “Who the hell is this?”

“Quentin,” Quentin said. “Coldwater.”

Quentin stuck out his hand. The man — whose T-shirt said POTIONS MASTER on it — left him hanging.

“He is your brand-new boyfriend,” Julia said. She took Quentin’s hand and dragged him inside.

Bass was bumping somewhere in the house, which had been a nice house before somebody did a profoundly shitty renovation job on its interior and then somebody else beat the crap out of the shitty renovation. Said renovation must have happened in the 1980s, as that was the era of chic on offer: white walls, black-and-chrome furniture, track lighting. The air was heavy with stale cigarette smoke. There were chips and divots in the plaster everywhere. This didn’t look like a place where he wanted to spend a lot of time. He was doing his best to remain hopeful, but it was hard to see how this was getting them any closer to Fillory.

Warily, Quentin followed Julia up a half flight of stairs and into the living room, which contained a weird assortment of people. The place could have passed for a halfway house for teenage runaways if it weren’t also a halfway house for twentysomething, middle-aged, and elderly runaways. There were your standard goth casualties, pale and skinny and worryingly scabby, but there was also a guy with five-o’clock shadow in a wrecked business suit of not negligible quality talking on a cell phone, saying “yah, yah, uh-huh” in a tone of voice that suggested that there was actually somebody on the other end who cared whether he said uh-huh or nuh-uh. There was a sixtysomething woman with an arctic-white Gertrude Stein haircut. An old Asian guy was sitting on the floor with no shirt on, all by himself. In front of him on the white pile carpet stood a burned-out brazier surrounded by a ring of ashes. Guess the cleaning lady hadn’t come today.

Quentin stopped on the threshold.

“Julia,” Quentin said. “Tell me where we are.”

“Have you not guessed yet?” She practically glittered with pleasure. She was relishing his discomfort. “This is where I got my education. This is my Brakebills. It is the anti-Brakebills.”

“These people do magic?”

“They try.”

“Please tell me you’re joking, Julia.” He took her arm, but she shook it off. He took it again and pulled her back down the stairs. “I’m begging you.”

“But I am not joking.”

Julia’s smile was wide and predatory. The trap had sprung and the prey was writhing in it.

“These people can’t do magic,” he said. “They’re not — there’s no safeguards. They aren’t qualified. Who’s even supervising them?”

“No one. They supervise each other.”

He had to take a deep breath. This was wrong — not morally wrong, just out of order. The idea that just anybody could mess around with magic — well, for one thing it was dangerous. That’s not how it worked. And who were these people? Magic was his, he and his friends were the magicians. These people were strangers, they were nobody. Who told them they could do magic? As soon as Brakebills found out about this place they’d shut it down with a goddamned vengeance. They’d send a SWAT team, a flying wedge with Fogg at the head of it.

“Do you actually know these people?” he said.

She rolled her eyes.

“These guys?” She snorted. “These guys are just losers.”

Julia led the way back into the living room.

The only thing the denizens of the safe house had in common, besides their general seediness, was that a lot of them had the same tattoo: a little blue star, seven-pointed, the size of a dime. A heptagram, but solid, colored in. It winked at Quentin from the backs of their hands, or their forearms, or the meaty part between their thumb and forefinger. One of them had two, one on each side of his neck, like Frankenstein’s neck bolts. The shirtless Asian guy had four. As Quentin watched he started in on some involved casting Quentin didn’t recognize, staring glazedly through the web of his working hands. Quentin couldn’t even look.

A redheaded man with freckles, a pint-sized Dennis the Menace type, was sitting up on the gray slate mantelpiece by himself, monitoring the scene, but when he saw them he boosted himself down and strutted over. He wore an oversized army jacket and carried a beat-up clipboard.

“Hi folks!” he said. “I’m Alex, welcome to my dojo. You are—?”

“I am Julia. This is Quentin.”

“Okay. Sorry about the housekeeping. Tragedy of the commons.” In contrast to everybody else in the room, Alex was chipper and businesslike. “Check your stars, please?”

Julia did the thing again where she showed him the nape of her neck.

“Right.” Alex’s ginger eyebrows went up. Whatever he saw impressed him. He turned to Quentin. “And you—?”

“He does not have any,” Julia said.

“I don’t have any.” He could speak for himself.

“So did he want to take the test? Because otherwise he can’t stay here.”

“I understand,” Julia said.

The really incredible thing was that she wasn’t even mouthing off to this guy. She was being civil! She, a queen of Fillory, respected the fucked-up protocol of this place.

“Quentin, he wants you to take a test,” she said. “To show you do magic.”

“I want lots of things too. Do I have to do it?”

“Yes, you have to fucking do it,” she said evenly. “So do it. It is just the first level, everybody who comes here does it their first time. You just make a flash. You probably have a fancy name for it.”

“Show me.”

Julia ran through three well-rehearsed hand positions, lickety-split, snapped her fingers, and said:

“ışık!”

The snap produced a little pop of light, like a flashbulb.

“Okay?”

“Hang on,” Quentin said. “Those hand positions weren’t quite generic. Can you—?”

“Come on, people,” Alex said, not so chipper now. “Are we doing this?”

Quentin saw now that Alex had eight stars, four on the back of each hand. That must make him king of the flophouse.

“Come on, Quentin.”

“Okay, okay. Show me again.”

She did the spell again. Quentin came at it, trying to crook his fingers the way she did. Brakebills taught you all straight lines, your hands approximating platonic geometry, but these positions were loose and organic. Nothing lined up. And it had been two years since he’d worked with real-world Circumstances. He tried it once, snap, and got nothing. Then nothing again.

This earned him a round of ironic applause. The locals were taking an interest in this transaction.

“I’m sorry, one more try and then you’re out,” Alex said. “You can come back in a month.” Julia began to show him again, but Alex put a hand over hers. “Just let him try.”

The bouncer, Potions Master, had come in from the front door and was watching with his arms folded. Quentin could hear other people saying “ışık!” Every time they did, a flashbulb would go off.

Screw this. He wasn’t going to pick up some corrupt hedge-witch spell in thirty seconds that would probably screw up his technique. He was classically trained, and a master sorcerer, and a king to boot. Let there be light.

“,” he said. “”

Let’s see who here’s got good Aramaic. He closed his eyes and clapped his hands loudly.

The light was white and blinding — a flashbulb at close range, right up in your face. For a second the whole room — shitty carpet, listing torchiere lamps, staring faces — was frozen, all the color driven out of it. Quentin had to blink his vision back to normal, and he’d had his eyes closed.

There was a beat of silence.

“Holeeee. .” someone said. Then everybody started talking at once. Alex didn’t look happy, but he didn’t throw them out either.

“Sign in,” he said. He blinked and blotted his eyes on his sleeve. “I don’t know where you learned that, but just get your flash working next time.”

“Cheers,” Quentin said.

Alex peeled a blue star sticker off a sheet and stuck it on the back of Quentin’s hand. Then he handed Quentin the clipboard. Where it said “Name” he wrote King Quentin and handed it to Julia.

When she was done Quentin dragged her out through the kitchen, with its bumpy linoleum floor and its fifteen-year-old Easy-Bake-looking range and its countertops crowded with a multicolored metropolis of unwashed glassware. Enough was enough.

“What the hell are we doing here?” he hissed.

“Come on.”

She led him deeper into the house, down a hall that in another, saner universe would have accessed Daddy’s study and a TV room and a laundry room, until she found the cheap hollow-core door that opened on the basement staircase.

He closed it behind them. The chilly mildewed silence of suburban basements everywhere embraced them. The stairs were unfinished pine planks, shaggy with cobwebs.

“I don’t understand this, Julia,” he said. “You don’t belong here any more than I do. You’re not like these people. You didn’t learn what you know from a bunch of unlicensed losers in a frat house. You can’t have.”

They were alone except for a roomful of taped-up cardboard boxes, a dead TV the size of a washing machine and half a Ping-Pong table.

“Maybe I am not who you think I am. Maybe I am an unlicensed loser too.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Was it? He was still trying to get his head around this place. “I can’t believe they haven’t burned this whole house down by now.”

“I think what you are trying to say is that you do not think they are good enough. They do not meet your standards.”

“This isn’t about standards!” Quentin said, though he felt the ground getting marshy under him. “This is about — look, I paid my dues, that’s all I’m saying. You have to earn this kind of power. You don’t just pick it up at the 7-Eleven with your Big Gulp and your Pokémon trading cards.”

“And what did I do? You think I did not pay dues?”

“I know you paid your dues.” He took a deep breath. Slow down. This place wasn’t the problem. The problem was getting back to Fillory.

“What did he call this house? A ‘dojo’?”

“Dojo, safe house, same thing. They are safe houses. He is just a dork.”

“Are there a lot of them?”

“A hundred maybe, in this country. There are more on the coasts.” Jesus Christ. It was an epidemic.

“What was that test back there?”

“You mean the one you flunked? That is the test to be a first-level magician. You have to be one to come in here. You pass the test, you get a star tattooed on you, you can stay. Most people get them on their hands, somewhere obvious. The more tests you pass, the more levels you go up, the more stars you get.”

“But who runs all this? That Alex guy?”

“He is just a den mother. Takes care of the house. The ranking system is self-policed. Any magician can ask another magician of equal or lower level to demonstrate the test corresponding to their level or any of the levels below that,” she recited. “To prove they know their shit. If you do not know your shit, you get busted down pretty fast.”

“Huh.” He wanted to find fault with the idea but couldn’t quite do it on the spur of the moment. He filed it away for later discrediting. “So what level are you?”

By way of an answer she turned around and showed him what she’d shown the doorman, and Alex: there was a blue seven-pointed star tattooed on the nape of her neck. Its upper points disappeared into the roots of her hair; she must have had to shave to get it done. It was like the ones he’d seen upstairs except bigger, a silver dollar, and it had a circle in the middle. Inside the circle was a number 50.

“Wow.” He couldn’t help but be impressed. “Ginger Balls back there only had eight. So you’re a fiftieth-level magician?”

“No.”

She took hold of the hem of her blouse, crossing her arms in front of her.

“Wait a minute—”

“Relax, playa.” She yanked the back of her shirt up, but only halfway. It was covered in blue stars, dozens of them in neat straight rows. He counted ten across — there must have been at least a hundred. She dropped her blouse and turned back to him.

“What level am I? I am the best there is, that is what level I am, and fuck you for asking. Come on. I am getting us back to Fillory.”

She knocked on a heavy fireproofed door, the kind that in most basements leads to a furnace room. It slid sideways on rollers. The man sliding it sideways looked like a by-the-numbers prepster, with short blond hair and a salmon-colored polo shirt, except that he was only about four feet tall. Dry prickly heat billowed from the room.

“What can I do for you this fine evening?” he said. His teeth were bright and even.

“We need to go to Richmond.”

The small man wasn’t completely solid either. He was translucent around the edges. Quentin didn’t notice at first, until he realized that his eyes were tracking things behind the man’s fingers that he shouldn’t have been able to see. They were well and truly through the looking glass now.

“Full fare tonight, I’m afraid. It’s the weather. Stresses the lines.” He had the twinkly mannerisms of an old-timey train conductor. He gestured for her to come inside.

“Only the lady, please,” said the translucent prepster. “Not the gentleman.”

Deference to Julia’s secret extra-Brakebills magic scene notwithstanding, enough was enough. Quentin’s grasp of real-world Circumstances was rusty but not that rusty. He whispered a quick, clipped series of Chinese syllables, and an invisible hand gripped the man by the back of the neck and yanked him back against the cinder-block wall behind him so that his head bonked against it.

If Julia was surprised she didn’t show it. The man just shrugged and rubbed the back of his head with one hand.

“I’ll get the book,” he managed. “You have credit?”

It was a furnace room, hot and made of unplastered cinder blocks. There was an actual furnace in it, with a fire bucket full of sand next to it, but there were also two old-looking full-length mirrors leaning against one wall. They looked like pier glasses that had been salvaged from an old house: fogged in places, with wooden frames.

Julia had credit. The book was a leather-bound volume in which she wrote something, stopping in the middle to do mental arithmetic. When she was finished the man looked it over and handed them each a string of paper tickets, the kind you’d get if you won at skee-ball at a carnival. Quentin counted his: nine.

Julia took hers and stepped into the mirror. She disappeared like she’d been swallowed by a bathtub full of mercury.

He thought she would. Mirrors were easy to enchant, being somewhat unearthly by nature anyway. Now that he looked at them more closely he saw the telltale sign: they were true mirrors that didn’t invert right and left. Even though he’d just seen Julia walk right through it, he couldn’t help closing his eyes and bracing himself to bang his forehead against it. Instead he passed through with an icy sensation.

Crude, he thought. A cleanly cast portal shouldn’t make you feel anything.

What followed had the feeling of a movie montage: a series of shabby, nondescript back rooms and basements, with an attendant in each one to take one of their tickets, and another portal to step through. They were traveling on a makeshift magical public transit system, basement to basement. These amateurs must have ginned it up piecemeal. Quentin prayed that somebody out there was doing quality assurance on something other than a strictly voluntary basis, so they wouldn’t end up materializing two miles in the air, or directly into the mesosphere two miles underground. That would be a real tragedy of the fucking commons.

In some cases whoever set the portal up had had a sense of humor. One was in a TARDIS-style English phone booth. One portal had a mural on the wall around it: a giant circus fat lady bending over and lifting up her dress, so that you had to step right into her ass.

One stop was completely unlike the others: a hushed executive suite somewhere high up in a skyscraper in some unidentifiable nighttime metropolis. From this height, at this hour, it could have been anywhere, Chicago or Tokyo or Dubai. Through a smoky pane of glass, possibly one-way, Quentin and Julia could see a roomful of men in suits deliberating around a table. There was no attendant here. You were on the honor system: you dropped your ticket into a little bronze idol with an open mouth, and you hit the mirror.

“There are rooms like this all over the world,” Julia said as they walked. “People set them up, keep them running. Mostly they are fine. Sometimes you get a bad one.”

“Jesus.” They’d done all this, and nobody at Brakebills had a clue about it. Julia was right, they wouldn’t have believed it was possible. “Who was that see-through prepster guy?”

“Some kind of fairy. Lower fairy. They are not allowed upstairs.”

“Where are we going?”

“We are going my way.”

“Sorry, that’s not good enough.” He stopped walking. “Where, specifically, are we going, and what are we doing there?”

“We are going to Richmond. Virginia. To talk to somebody. Good enough?”

It was. But only because the bar for good enough had gotten very, very low.

One portal was unexpectedly dead, the room empty and dark, the mirror smashed. They backtracked and haggled with an attendant who rerouted them around the dead node. They gave the last of their tickets to a meek, pretty young flower child with dishwater hair, center-parted. Julia marked the woman’s ledger.

“Welcome to Virginia,” she said.

They’d slipped in time as well as space somehow. When they came upstairs the first thing they saw was morning sunlight in the windows. They were in a big house, nicely appointed and immaculately kept, with a Victorian feel: lots of dark wood and oriental carpets and comfortable silence. They’d definitely traded up from the Winston house.

Julia seemed to know the layout. He followed her as she prowled through empty rooms as far as the doorway of a generous living room, which revealed another face of what Quentin had mentally tagged as the underground magic scene. An older man in jeans and a tie was holding court from an overstuffed couch to three teenagers, undergraduate-type girls in yoga pants who watched him with expressions of awe and adoration.

My God, he thought. These people were absolutely everywhere. Magic had gotten out. The antimatter containment field had collapsed. Maybe there had never been one.

The man was demonstrating a spell for his audience: simple cold magic. He had a glass of water in front of him, and he was working on freezing it. Quentin recognized the spell from his first year at Brakebills. Having completed it, in what Quentin thought was a basically correct but overly showy style, the man cupped his hands around the glass. When he took them away it had a skim of ice on it. He’d managed not to break the glass, which the expanding ice often did.

“Now you try it,” he said.

The girls had their own glasses of water. They repeated the words in unison and tried to imitate his hand positions. Predictably, nothing happened. They had no idea what they were doing — their soft pink fingers were nowhere near where they needed to be. They hadn’t even cut their nails.

When the man noticed Julia standing in the doorway, his face went to shock and horror for about a half second before he was able to bring up a facsimile of delighted surprise. He might have been forty, with carefully mussed brown hair and a fringe of beard. He looked like a large, handsome bug.

“Julia!” he called. “What an amazing surprise! I can’t believe you’re here!”

“I need to talk to you, Warren.”

“Of course!” Warren was working hard to seem like the master of the situation, for the benefit of the room, but it was clear that Julia was very low on his list of people he wanted surprise visits from.

“Hang tight for a minute?” he told his acolytes. “I’ll be right back.”

When his back was to the undergrads Warren dropped the smile. They crossed the hall into a den. He had an odd, rolling gait, as if he were managing a clubfoot.

“What’s this all about, Julia? I’ve got a class,” he said. “Warren,” he added to Quentin, with a wary smile. They shook hands.

“I need to talk to you.” Julia’s tone was stretched thin.

“All right.” And before she could answer, he said under his breath: “Not here. In my office, for God’s sake.”

He ushered Julia toward a door across the hall.

“I’ll just wait in the hall,” Quentin said. “Call me if—”

Julia closed the door behind them.

He supposed it was fair play, considering that he’d parked Julia in the hall outside Fogg’s office. This must be as weird for her as going back to Brakebills had been for him. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, not without putting his ear to the door, which would have attracted even more attention from the girls in the living room, who were peering at him curiously, probably because he was still dressed in the raiment of a Fillorian king.

“Hi,” he said. They all found something else to peer at.

Raised voices, but still indistinct. Warren was placating her, playing the reasonable one, but eventually Julia got under his skin and he got loud too.

“. . everything I taught you, everything I gave you. .”

“Everything you gave me?” Julia shouted back. “What I gave you. .”

Quentin cleared his throat. Mommy and Daddy are fighting. The whole scene was starting to seem funny to him, a clear sign that he was becoming dangerously detached from reality. The door opened and Warren appeared. His face was flushed; Julia’s was pale.

“I’d like you to leave,” he said. “I gave you what you wanted. Now I want you out of here.”

“You gave me what you had,” she spat back. “Not what I wanted.” He opened his eyes wide and spread out his arms: what do you want me to do.

“Just set the gate,” she said.

“I can’t afford it,” he said, through his teeth.

“God, you are path-et-ic!”

Julia walked stiff-legged back through the house, back the way they came, with Warren trailing after. Quentin caught up with them in the mirror room. Julia was scribbling furiously in the ledger. Warren was busy with his own issues. Something odd was happening to him. A long twig was poking through his shirt at the elbow. It seemed to be attached to him.

It was like a dream that just went on and on. Quentin ignored it. They seemed to be leaving anyway.

“You see what you do to me?” Warren said. He was trying to twist and snap off the twig, but it was green and bendy, and there seemed to be another branch sticking out from his ribs, under his shirt. “Just by being here, you see what you do?”

He finally wrenched it off and waved it at her, accusingly, in his fist. “Hey,” Quentin said. He stepped in front of Julia. “Take it easy.” They were the first words Quentin had addressed to him.

Julia finished writing and stared at the mirror.

“I cannot wait to get out of here,” she said, not looking at Warren.

The meek dishwater woman looked horrified by all this. Another of Warren’s acolytes, without a doubt. She had faded even farther into her corner.

“Come on, Quentin.”

He got the freezing shock again, and this time when they stepped through the transition wasn’t instantaneous. They were somewhere else, somewhere dim and in-between. Beneath their feet was masonry, old stone blocks. It was a narrow bridge with no guardrails. Behind them was the bright oblong of the mirror they’d come through; ahead of them, twenty feet away, was another one. Beneath them and on either side was only darkness.

“Sometimes they pull apart like this,” Julia said. “Whatever you do do not lose your balance.”

“What’s down there? Under the bridge?”

“Trolls.”

It was hard to tell if she was joking.

The room they emerged into was dark, a storeroom full of boxes. There was barely room for them to push their way out of the mirror. The air smelled good, like coffee beans. No one was there to meet them.

The coffee smell explained itself when he found a door and opened it onto a cramped restaurant kitchen. A cook barked at them in Italian to move along. They squeezed past him, trying not to burn themselves on anything, and out into the dining room of a café.

Threading their way out through the tables, they emerged onto a wide stone square. A beautiful square, defined by sleepy stone buildings of indeterminate age.

“If I didn’t know better I’d think we were in Fillory,” Quentin said. “Or the Neitherlands.”

“We are in Italy. Venice.”

“I want some of that coffee. Why are we in Venice?”

“Coffee first.”

Bright sunlight on paving stones. Clumps of tourists standing around, taking pictures and studying guidebooks, looking both overwhelmed and bored by it all at the same time. Two churches fronted the square; the other buildings were a weird Venetian jumble of old stone and old wood and irregular windows. Quentin and Julia walked over to the other café on the square, the one out of whose kitchen they had not just magically burst.

It was an oasis of bright yellow umbrellas. Quentin felt like he was floating. He’d never been through so many portals in one day, and it was disorienting. They’d already ordered before they realized they had no euros.

“Fuck it,” Quentin said. “I woke up in Fillory this morning, or maybe it was yesterday morning, either way I need a macchiato. Why are we in Venice?”

“Warren gave me an address. Someone who might be able to help us — a fixer, kind of. He can get things. Maybe he can get us a button.”

“So that’s the plan. Good. I like it.” He was up for whatever as long as coffee was involved.

“Great. After that we can try your amazing plan which you do not have.”

They sipped their coffee in silence. Dreamily Quentin studied the chaotic surface of his macchiato. They hadn’t drawn a milky leaf on it the way they would have in America. Pigeons strutted in between the café tables, picking up unspeakably soiled crumbs, their clawed toes looking livid and pink this close up. Sunlight washed over it all. The light in Venice was like the light in Fillory: stone-light.

The world had changed again. It wasn’t as neatly divided as he remembered it, between the magical and the non-magical. There was this grubby, anarchical in-between now. He didn’t much care for it; it was chaotic and unglamorous and he didn’t know the rules. Probably Julia didn’t like it either, he reflected, but she hadn’t gotten to choose, not the way he did.

Well, his world hadn’t done them any good. They would go rooting around in hers for a while.

“So who was that Warren guy?” Quentin said. “Seems like you guys have some history.”

“Warren is nobody. He knows a little magic, so he hangs around the college and tries to impress undergraduates and teach them some things so he can bang them.”

“Really.”

“Really.”

“What happened to him at the end there? With his arm — what was that?”

“Warren is not human. He is something else, wood spirit of some kind. He just has a thing for humans. When he gets upset he cannot keep up the disguise.”

“So did Warren ‘bang’ you?” he said.

Who knew where it came from. It just bubbled up out of nowhere: a flash of jealousy, sour and hot like acid reflux. He didn’t see it coming. He’d had a lot to absorb in one day, or night, whatever it had just been, and it was just a little too much too fast. It spilled over.

Julia leaned across the table and slapped Quentin. She only did it once, but she did it hard.

“You have no idea what I had to do to get what was handed to you on a plate,” she hissed. “And yeah, I banged Warren. I did a lot worse things too.”

You could almost see the waves of anger coming off her, like fumes off gasoline. Quentin touched his cheek where she’d hit him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not sorry enough.”

A few people looked over, but just a few. It was Italy after all. People probably hit each other all the time.

CHAPTER 12

It was another year and a half before Julia saw Quentin again. He’d become a hard boy to find. He didn’t seem to have a cell phone, or even a phone, or even an e-mail address. His parents talked in vaguenesses. She wasn’t convinced that even they knew how to find him. But she knew how to find them, and he had to come back home once in a while, like a dog to its vomit. Quentin wasn’t close to his parents, but he wasn’t the type to cut them off all the way. Frankly he wouldn’t have the stones for it.

Julia, though. Julia had the stones for it. She was a flight risk, no strong ties to the community. When she heard that the Coldwaters had sold up and moved to Massachusetts, she pulled up stakes and followed them. Even a suburban cultural sump like Chesterton had Internet connections and temp agencies — no, especially a suburban cultural sump like Chesterton — and that was all she needed to get by. She rented a room over a garage from a retired guy with a janitor mustache who probably had a Web cam hidden in the bathroom. She bought a beat-up Honda Civic with a wired-shut trunk.

She didn’t hate Quentin. That wasn’t it. Quentin was fine, he was just in the way. He had gotten it so easy, and she had it so hard, and why? There was no good reason. He passed a test, and she failed it. That was a judgment on the test, not on her, but now her life was a waking nightmare, and he had everything he ever wanted. He was living a fantasy. Her fantasy. She wanted it back.

Or not even that. She wasn’t going to take anything away from him. She just needed him to confirm that Brakebills was real, and to open a chink in the wall of the secret garden just wide enough for her to squeeze through. He was her man on the inside. Though he didn’t know it yet.

So here’s how it worked: every morning before work she drove past the Coldwaters’ house. Every night around nine o’clock she drove by again, and got out and quietly walked the perimeter of the lawn, looking for traces of her quarry. A McMansion like that, all double-glazed picture windows, broadcast the goings-on inside it out into the night like a drive-in movie. It was summer again, and the summer nights smelled like murdered grass and sounded like crickets fucking. At first all she learned was that Mrs. Coldwater was a predictable but technically sound amateur painter in a sadly dated Pop art mode, and that Mr. Coldwater had a weakness for porn and crying jags.

It wasn’t till September that the beast showed himself.

Quentin had changed: he’d always been lanky, but now he looked like a skeleton. His cheeks were sunken, his cheekbones jagged. His clothes hung on him. His hair — cut your fucking hair already, you’re not Alan Rickman — was lank.

He looked like shit. Poor baby. Actually what he looked like was Julia.

She didn’t approach him right away. She had to psych herself up for it. Now that she had him where she wanted him, she was suddenly afraid to touch him. She quit taking temp assignments and went fulltime on Quentin. But she stayed under the radar.

Around eleven every morning she watched him slam out of the house in a brown study and whiz into town on a hilariously antique white tenspeed. She followed him at a distance. Good thing he was completely oblivious and self-obsessed or he would have noticed a red Honda with a death rattle shadowing his every move. There he was, the living, breathing forensic trace of everything she’d ever wanted. If he couldn’t help her, or wouldn’t, it would be over. She’d have given two years of her life for nothing. The fear of finding out paralyzed her, but every day she waited the risk that he would vanish again grew and grew. She would be back to square zero.

All Julia could think was that if it came right down to it she would sleep with him. She knew how he felt about her. He would do anything to sleep with her. It was the nuclear option, but it would work. No risk. It was her ace in the hole. So to speak.

Who knows, it might not even be so bad. Different, doubtless, from James’s smartly paced gymnastic exhibitions. She didn’t even know anymore why she was so determined not to like Quentin. Maybe he’d been right, maybe he was the one for her after all. It was hard to know anymore, it was tangled up with everything else, and she was out of practice at having feelings for other people. At this point it had been a long time since anybody had even touched her. Not since the zookeeper in the bathroom at the party, and that was mostly just spastic overclothes pawing, entirely clinical in its intent. The patient struggling under the knife, while she performed the operation. She felt out of touch with her body, with pleasure of any kind. Doctor Julia noted, purely for the record, that it was scary how unloving she’d become, and how unlovable. She’d locked all that stuff away and melted down the key for scrap.

It was in a cemetery behind a church, whither Quentin had retired for more sulking, that she sprang the trap. Looking back on it she was proud of herself. She could have lost it but she didn’t. She got it out. She said her piece, and hung on to her pride, and showed him that she was every bit as good as he was. She made the case. She even showed him the spell, the one with the rainbow trails, which she’d gotten down pat over the previous six months. Even those murderous hand positions, even the one with the thumbs, she had hit with icy precision. She’d never shown it to anybody before, and it felt great to finally unveil it for an audience. She took that beach like a goddamned Marine.

And when it came down to the nuclear option, when the red phone rang in the war room, Julia hadn’t flinched. Oh, no. She took that call. If that’s what it took, she would go there, sister.

But here was the thing: he wouldn’t. She hadn’t counted on that. She’d offered, as plainly as she knew how. She’d run herself through with the hook and dangled herself before him, pink and wriggling, but he hadn’t taken the bait. Julia knew she’d let herself go a bit lookswise, but still. Come on. It didn’t add up.

The problem wasn’t her, it was him. Something or someone had gotten to him. He wasn’t the Quentin she remembered. Funny: she’d almost forgotten people could change. Time had stopped for her the day she’d gotten her social studies paper back from Mr. Karras, but outside the dark, musty interior of her room, time had gone on hurtling forward. And in that time Quentin Makepeace Coldwater had managed to get a boner for somebody else besides Julia.

Well, good for him.

When he left she lay down on the cold, soft, wet grass of the graveyard. It rained on her and she let it. It wasn’t that she was wrong. She’d been right. He’d confirmed everything that she’d ever suspected, about Brakebills and magic and everything else. It was all real, and it was extraordinary. It was everything she wanted it to be. Her theoretical work had been admirably rigorous, and she had been rewarded with full experimental validation.

It was just that there was nothing he could do for her. It was all real — it wasn’t a dream or a psychotic hallucination — but they weren’t going to let her have it. There was a place out there that was so perfect and magical that it had made even Quentin happy. There wasn’t just magic there, there was love too. Quentin was in love. But Julia wasn’t. She was out in the cold. Hogwarts was fully subscribed, and her eligibility had lapsed. Hagrid’s motorcycle would never rumble outside her front door. No creamy-enveloped letters would ever come flooding down her chimney.

She lay there thinking, on the rich, wet graveyard grass, before the tomb of some random parishioner — Beloved Son, Husband, Father — and what she thought was this: she’d been right about almost everything. She’d gotten nearly full marks. A minus again. Blew only one question.

Here’s the one thing I got wrong, she thought. I thought that they could never wear me down.

CHAPTER 13

Shoplifting a city map from a tourist trap wasn’t a particularly spiritually enlarging activity — where was Benedict when you needed him? — and the magic involved was trivial. But it gave Quentin enough time to pull himself together. He wished he hadn’t said that about Warren. He wished he weren’t so tired. And so stupid. He wished he could either fall back in love with Julia or get over her all the way. Maybe he was stuck in between forever, like the space between the portals. Food for the trolls.

Quentin took a deep breath. He was surprised at himself. He knew that he was being weird and kind of a dick. So what if she’d slept with Warren and whoever and whatever else? She didn’t owe him anything. God knows he was in no position to judge her. It was partly his fault that she had to do what she did.

He could have used someone stable to hang on to right now, but as it happened, through no particular fault of her own, Julia was not a person one could hang on to. She needed one of those warning decals that they put on airplane parts: NO STEP. He would have to be that person, the stable, reliable person, the one who had his shit together, for both of them. They could either do this together or separately, except they had to do this together, because he was out of leads and she was very nearly out of her mind. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous role — it wasn’t the Bingle role — but it was his role. It was time he accepted it.

Though so far she’d been a lot more help than he had. When he got back to the table at the café she had undergone yet another unexpected transformation. She was smiling.

“You look happy.” He sat down. “Maybe you should slap me more often.”

“Maybe I should,” she said. She sipped her coffee. “This is good.”

“The coffee.”

“I had forgotten how good it can be.” She turned her pale face into the light and closed her eyes, like a cat sunning herself. “Did you ever miss it? Being here?”

“I honestly never did.”

“Me neither. Not until now. I had forgotten.”

Warren had written the address on a blue Post-it, which Julia had kept clutched in her fist all the way from Richmond. Now they pored over the city map together, like all the other tourists in the square were doing, until they’d figured out where they were and where they were going. Their destination was in a neighborhood called Dorsoduro, on a street a block off the Grand Canal. Not far. A bridge crossing away.

Quentin guessed it was probably only around nine or ten at night by their internal clocks, but it was midafternoon in Venice, and he felt like they’d been up for days. It was hot in the square but cool up on the bridge, in the seaborne jet stream that blew down the Grand Canal, so they stopped there to orient themselves. There were no cars in Venice, or not in this part anyway. The bridge was a wooden footbridge, disappointingly modern. It would be a hundred years at least until it started looking like it belonged in Venice.

Beneath them oily black gondolas poled along, spinning off miniature spiral whirlpools after them, and sturdy vaporetti chugged, and long thin barges glided, roiling the green water behind them into milky smoothness. Debauched, listing palazzi lined the canal, all tiles and terraces and colonnades. Venice was the only city he’d ever seen that looked the same in real life as it did in pictures. It was consoling that something in this world met expectations. The one factoid Quentin remembered about the Grand Canal was that after Byron was done screwing his mistresses he used to like to swim home along it, carrying a lighted torch in one hand so that boats wouldn’t run him over.

He wondered what was happening in Fillory. Would they wait around on After Island for them? Hold an investigation? Put the locals to the sword? Or would they go back to Whitespire? The truth was, whatever was going to happen had probably already happened. Weeks could have gone by already, or years, you never knew how the time difference would work. He could feel Fillory floating away from him, into its future, leaving him behind. Hell must have broken loose when they vanished, but life would go on, they’d get back to normal. Right now Janet and Eliot could be growing old without him. They’d miss him but they’d live. Quentin, king of Fillory, needed Fillory more than Fillory needed him.

In Dorsoduro the streets were narrow and quiet. It was less like a stage set and more like a real city than the part they’d come from — people actually seemed to live and work here, they weren’t just putting on a show for the tourists. As much as Quentin wanted to hurry through it, to get on with getting back to Fillory, even he couldn’t ignore how conspicuously beautiful Venice was. People had been living here for what, a thousand years? More? God only knew whose crazy idea it was to build a city in the middle of a lagoon, but you couldn’t argue with the results. Everything was made of old brick and stone, with carved blocks of even older stone stuck into the walls at random intervals as ornaments. Old windows had been bricked up, and then new windows had been bashed through the brick, affording glimpses of silent, secret courtyards. Every time they thought they’d left the sea behind they’d stumble on it again — a dark angular vein of water branching in between the buildings, lined on both sides with bright-colored skiffs.

Just being here made Quentin feel better. It was more suitable for a king and a queen than suburban Boston. He didn’t know yet whether they were getting any closer to Fillory, but he felt closer.

Julia kept her pace brisk and her eyes fixed straight ahead. It should have been a short walk, ten minutes at most, but the street plan was so chaotic they had to stop at literally every corner to reorient themselves. They took turns snatching the map from each other and getting lost and having it snatched back. Only about one building in five had a number on it, and the numbers didn’t even seem to be in sequential order. It was a city built for wandering, which was all well and good unless you had urgent business at one very particular location.

Finally they stopped at a wooden door, painted brown, that was barely as tall as they were. It was an open question whether they were on the right street, but if nothing else the door had the right number on a little stone plaque above it. It had a tiny window set in it, which had been painted over. There was no knob.

Quentin put his hand on the warm stone wall next to it. He counted a rhythmic sequence under his breath, and a thick fabric of lines the deep orange of a heating filament flashed for a minute over the old stone.

“The wards on this place are ironclad,” he said. “If your fixer doesn’t live here, whoever does knows what they’re doing.”

Either they were about to improve their situation or significantly worsen it. There being no buzzer, Quentin knocked. The door didn’t resonate under his knuckles — there could have been a solid mile of rock behind it. But the window swung open promptly.

“Sì,” Darkness inside.

“We’d like to talk to your boss,” Quentin said.

The window shut immediately. He looked at Julia and shrugged. What else was he supposed to say? She looked back at him impassively from behind her black glasses. Quentin wanted to walk away. He wanted to go back, but there was no back to go to. The only way out was through. Onward and downward.

The street was silent. It was narrow, practically an alley, with buildings going up four stories on either side. Nothing happened. After five minutes Quentin muttered some words in Icelandic and held his palm an inch away from the door. He felt the wall around it, which was in the shade but still warm.

“Stand back,” he said.

Whoever made the wards knew what they were doing. But they didn’t know everything Quentin knew. He moved the heat from the wall, all of it, into the little glass window, which expanded, as glass will when it’s heated. The wards were good enough that the heat didn’t want to go, but Quentin had ways of encouraging it. When the glass couldn’t expand anymore it popped with a ping like a lightbulb. Warren’s students would have been impressed.

“Stronzo!” he called through the empty frame. “Facci parlare contuo direttore del cazzo!”

A minute passed. Quentin’s thermal transfer spell had made a sheen of frost appear on the old stone wall. The door opened. It was dark inside.

“See?” he said. “I did learn something in college.”

A short, heavyset man met them in the foyer, a tiny room lined with brown ceramic tiles. He was surprisingly gracious. They must have to replace that little window a lot.

“Prego.”

He ushered them up a short flight of stairs into one of the most beautiful rooms Quentin had ever seen.

He’d been snowed by Venice’s bizarre topography. He’d assumed they’d be shown into some crap Euro-trash crash pad, with white walls and uncomfortable couches and tiny geometrical lamps, but the building’s exterior was pure camouflage. They were in one of the big palaces on the Grand Canal. They’d come in the back way.

The entire front wall was a row of tall windows with Moorish peaks, all looking out onto the water. The obvious intention was to awe guests into a state of trembling submissiveness, and Quentin surrendered immediately. It was like a full-scale mural, a Tintoretto maybe, with vivid green water and boats of all shapes and sizes, imaginable and unimaginable, crossing back and forth. Three hideous, glittering Murano chandeliers lit the room, translucent octopuses dripping with crystals. The walls were stacked with ranks of paintings, classical landscapes and scenes of Venice. The floor was old marble tiles, their lumps and scars smothered under overlapping oriental carpets.

Everything in the room was very much just so. It was the kind of room you wanted to spend years in. It wasn’t Fillory, but things were definitely looking up. It felt like Castle Whitespire.

Their escort departed, and for the moment they were left to their own devices. Quentin and Julia sat on a sofa together; its legs were so deeply carved it looked like it was going to walk away. There were four or five other people in the room, but it was so huge that it seemed private and empty. Three men in shirtsleeves were talking in low tones over a tiny table, sipping something clear out of tiny glasses. A broad-shouldered old woman stared out at the water with her back to them. A butler, or whatever they were called in Italy, stood at the foot of the stairs.

Everyone ignored them. Julia squished herself into one corner of the couch. She pulled her feet up, putting her shoes on the nice antique upholstery.

“I guess we take a number,” Quentin said.

“We have to wait,” Julia said. “He will call us.”

She took off her glasses and closed her eyes. She was starting to withdraw again. He could see it. It seemed to come in waves. Maybe it was because she felt safe here, she could let herself go for a while. He hoped so. He would take it from here.

“I’m going to get you some water.”

“Mineral water,” she said. “Fizzy. And ask him for rye.”

If there was one thing being a king prepared you for, it was talking to domestic staff. The butler had both mineral water—frizzante—and rye. He brought the rye neat, which seemed to be how Julia wanted it. She ignored the water. He worried about her drinking. Quentin liked a drop here and there, God knew, but the volume of alcohol Julia could consume was heroic. He thought of what Eliot told him, about what he’d seen at the spa. It was like Julia was trying to anesthetize herself, or cauterize a wound, or fill in some part of her that was missing.

“Warren’s fixer must be pretty good at fixing things,” Quentin said. “This place is nice even by magician standards.”

“I cannot stay here” was all Julia said.

She sat there sipping the rye and shivering, cupping it between her hands as if it were a magic healing cordial. She drank without opening her eyes, like a baby. Quentin had the butler bring her a wrap. She had the butler bring her another rye.

“I can’t even get drunk anymore,” she said bitterly.

After that she didn’t speak. Quentin hoped she could rest. He occupied the other end of the couch, sipping a Venetian spritz (Prosecco, Aperol, soda water, twist of lemon, olive) and looking out at the canal and not thinking about what they’d do if this didn’t work out. The palace directly opposite them was pink; the setting sun was turning it salmon. Its windows were all shuttered. Over the years it had settled unevenly — one half had sunk slightly while the other half stayed where it was, creating a fault line up the middle. It must have run through the whole building, all the rooms, Quentin thought. People were probably always tripping on it. Stripy poles stuck up at odd angles from the water in front of the pink palace.

It was strange to be in a place and not be king of it. He’d gotten out of the habit. It was like Elaine had said: nothing made him special here. Nobody noticed him. He had to admit it was strangely relaxing. It was an hour, and Quentin had cut himself off after his third spritz, before a small, intense young Italian in a pale suit, no tie, came and invited them upstairs. It was the kind of outfit an American couldn’t have gotten away with in a million years.

He showed them into a small all-white salon with three delicate wooden chairs set around a table. There was a plain silver bowl on the table.

No one sat in the third chair. Instead a voice spoke to them out of the air — a man’s voice, but high and whispery, almost androgynous. It was hard to tell where it was coming from.

“Hello, Quentin. Hello, Julia.”

That was creepy. He hadn’t told anybody their names.

“Hi.” He didn’t know where to look. “Thanks for seeing us.”

“You’re welcome,” the voice said. “Why have you come here?”

I guess he doesn’t know everything.

“We’d like to ask for your help with something.”

“What would you like me to help you with?”

Showtime. He wondered if the fixer was even human, or some kind of spirit like Warren, or worse. Julia was doing her thousand-yard stare, a million miles away.

“Well, we’ve just come from another world. From Fillory. Which as it turns out is a real place. You probably knew that.” Ahem. Start again. “We didn’t mean to leave — it was kind of an accident — and we want to go back there.”

“I see.” Pause. “And why would I want to help you with that?”

“Maybe I can help you too. Maybe we can help each other.”

“Oh, I doubt that, Quentin.” The voice dropped an octave. “I doubt that very much.”

“Okay.” Quentin looked behind him. “Right, look, where are you?”

He was starting to feel painfully aware of how vulnerable they were. He didn’t have much of an exit strategy. And the fixer shouldn’t have known their names. Maybe Warren had called ahead. That wasn’t a comforting thought.

“I know who you are, Quentin. There are circles in which you are not a very popular man. Some people think you abandoned this world. Your own world.”

“All right. I wouldn’t say abandoned, but okay.”

“And then Fillory abandoned you. Poor little rich king. It doesn’t seem like anyone wants you, Quentin.”

“You can look at it like that if you want. If we can just get back to Fillory everything will be fine. Or at any rate it’s not your problem, is it?”

“I will be the judge of what is and is not my problem.”

The back of Quentin’s neck prickled. He and the fixer weren’t getting off to a roaring start. He weighed the advantages of laying on some basic defensive magic. Prudent, but it might spook the fixer into trying a preemptive strike. He shot Julia a glance, but she was barely following.

“All right. I’m just here to do business.”

“Look in the bowl.”

Looking in the silver bowl at this juncture seemed like a bad idea. Quentin stood up.

“Listen. If you can’t help us, fine. We’ll go. But if you can help us, give us a price. We’ll pay it.”

“Oh, but I don’t have to give you anything at all. I did not invite you here, and I will decide when you can go. Look in the bowl.”

Now there was steel in that high, whispery voice.

“Look in the bowl.”

This was going south fast. It felt all wrong. He took Julia’s arm and pulled her to her feet.

“We’re leaving,” he said. “Now.”

He backhanded the silver bowl off the table and it clanged against the wall. A slip of paper fluttered out of it. Against his better judgment Quentin glanced at it. There were spells you could set off just by reading them. The paper had the words I.O.U. ONE MAGIC BUTTON written on it in crude magic marker.

The door opened behind them, and Quentin scrambled to get them both behind the table.

“Oh, shit! He looked in the bowl!”

The voice was a lot lower than the one that had been speaking before. It was a voice Quentin knew well. It belonged to Josh.

Quentin hugged him.

“Jesus!” he said into Josh’s broad, comforting shoulder. “What the hell, man?”

He didn’t understand how it was even possible that Josh was here, but it didn’t matter. Probably it would, but not yet. He didn’t even care that Josh had messed with their heads. What mattered now was that they weren’t going to have a new disaster. They weren’t going to have a fight. Quentin’s knees were shaking. It was like he’d sailed so far from the safe, orderly world he knew that he was coming back around the other way, from the other side, and there was Josh: an island of warmth and familiarity.

Josh disengaged himself tactfully.

“So,” he said, “welcome to the suck, man!”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Me? This is my house! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Fillory?”

He was the same Josh: round-faced, overweight, grinning. He looked like a beer-brewing abbot, not visibly older than the last time Quentin had seen him, which was more than three years now. Josh carefully closed the door behind him.

“Can’t be too careful,” he said. “Got an image to protect. Kind of a Wizard of Oz thing going on, if you see what I mean.”

“What’s with the bowl?”

“Eh, I didn’t have a lot of time. I just thought it was creepy. You know. ‘Look in the bowl. . look in the bowl. .’ ” He did the voice.

“Josh, Julia. You guys know each other.”

They’d met once before, in the chaotic run-up before the great return to Fillory, before Josh had set off into the Neitherlands on his own.

“Hi, Julia.” Josh kissed her on both cheeks. He must really have gone Euro over here.

“Hi.”

Josh waggled both eyebrows at Quentin lewdly in a way that didn’t seem like it should be physically possible. It was starting to sink in for Quentin just what a colossal stroke of luck this was. Josh would have the magic button. He was their ticket back to Fillory. Their wandering days were over.

“So listen,” he said. “We’ve got some problems.”

“Yeah, you must if you came here.”

“We don’t even really know where here is.”

“You’re in my house, that’s where here is.” Josh waved his arms grandly. “Here is a huge fuck-off pa-lots-o on the Grand Canal.”

He gave them the tour. The palazzo was four floors, the lower two for business, the upper two for Josh’s private apartments, to which they retreated. The floor was massive pink-swirled marble slabs, the walls crumbling plaster. All the rooms were odd sizes and seemed to have been built as they were needed, on a series of whimsical impulses that it was now impossible to reconstruct.

All glory to the great quest for Fillory, but they needed a break. Julia requested a hot bath, which frankly she badly needed. Quentin and Josh retired to the tremendous dining room, which was lit by a single modest chandelier. Over plates of black spaghetti, Quentin explained as best he could what had happened and why they were here. When he was done Josh explained what had happened to him.

With Quentin, Eliot, Janet, and Julia safely installed on the thrones of Fillory, Josh had taken the button and embarked on an exploration of the Neitherlands. He’d seen as much as he ever wanted to see of Fillory, and it hadn’t been pretty, and anyway he was sick of scraping along in the others’ shadows. He didn’t want to be co-king of Fillory, he wanted to do his own thing his own way. He wanted to find his own Fillory. He wanted to get laid.

Josh could be careless about a lot of things — what he ate, wore, smoked, said, did — but you don’t get into Brakebills without being a genius of some kind or another, and given the right stakes he was fully capable of being highly methodical, even meticulous. In this case the stakes were just right. He began a careful survey of the Neitherlands.

This was not a thing to be undertaken lightly. As far as anyone knew the squares and fountains of the Neitherlands extended an infinite distance in all directions, never repeating themselves, and each one led to a different world, and maybe a whole different universe. It would take no effort at all to get so lost that you could never find your way home.

Josh had it in mind to go to Middle Earth, as in the setting of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Because if Fillory was real, why not Middle Earth? And if Middle Earth was real, that meant a lot of other things were probably real: lady elves and lembas wafers and pipe-weed and Eru Ilúvatar knew what else. But practically speaking anywhere would have done as long as it was reasonably warm and life-supporting and inhabited by people endowed with the appropriate organs and a willingness to make them available to Josh. The multiverse was his TGI Friday’s.

He had it in mind to spiral outward from Earth’s fountain, square by square, mapping carefully as he went. He wouldn’t need much. You didn’t really get hungry in the Neitherlands. He brought a loaf of bread, a good bottle of wine, warm clothes, six ounces of gold, and a stun gun.

“The first world was a complete bust,” he said. “Desert everywhere. Incredible dunes, but no people at all that I could find, so I buttoned right back out of there. Next one was ice. Next one was pine forest. That one was inhabited — sort of a Native American thing. I stayed there two weeks. No love, but I lost about ten pounds. Also scored a fuck-ton of wampum.”

“Wait, hang on. These worlds were the same all over? Like each one had a single climate and that’s it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t even know if these other worlds are spheres, you know? Or discworlds or ringworlds whatever else. Maybe they don’t work the same way. Maybe they don’t have latitude. But I wasn’t about to hike to another climatic zone just to find out. Much easier just to hit the next fountain.

“God, the things I saw. Really, you should do it sometime. Some days I would hit a dozen worlds. I was just like free-falling through the multiverse. A giant tree that didn’t have any beginning or end. A sort of magnetic world, where everything stuck to you. One was all stretchy. One was just stairs, stairs and stairs and stairs. What else? There was an upside-down one. A weightless one, where you drifted around in outer space, except that space was warm and humid and smelled sort of like rosemary.

“And you know what’s real? Teletubbies! I know, right? Crazy, crazy stuff.”

“You didn’t. .”

“No, I did not hit that shit. Totally could have. Anyway. Not everything was that exotic. Sometimes I’d find a world that was just like ours only one tiny thing would be different — like the economy was all based on strontium, or sharks were mammals, or there was more helium in the air so everybody had little high voices.

“I did meet a girl, after all that. Man, it was so beautiful. This world was mostly mountains, like one of those Chinese paintings, just rising out of the mist, and actually everybody looked kind of Asian. They lived in these ornate hanging pagoda cities. But there were hardly any of them left — they were always fighting these endless wars with other people on other mountains, for no special reason. Plus they fell off cliffs a lot.

“I was probably the fattest person they’d ever seen, but they didn’t care about that. I think they thought it was hot. Like it meant I was a good hunter, something like that. They’d also never seen magic before, so that went a long way. I was kind of a celebrity for a while.

“I started hanging out with this one girl, big-time warrior for one of the cities. She was very into the magic thing. And also I guess their menfolk weren’t especially well-endowed in the hardware aisle, if you take my meaning.”

“I believe I grasp the essence of it, yes,” Quentin said.

“Anyway she died. Got killed. It was awful. Really, really sad. At first I wanted to stay and fight and try to get the people who killed her, but then I couldn’t do it. It was all so stupid. I just couldn’t get into the war thing the way they did, and that was shameful to them, I guess, so they kicked me out.”

“God. I’m sorry.”

Poor Josh. The way he talked all the time, you sometimes forgot he had feelings. But they were all there, if you dug deep enough.

“No, it doesn’t matter. I mean it did, but what can you do. It was never going to work out. I think she wanted to die that way. Those people weren’t that into life, or maybe they were and that’s what life is, I don’t fucking know.

“That’s when it all went to shit. All the fun was gone. I went to this kind of Greek world, all white cliffs and hot sun and dark seas. I slept with a harpy there.”

“You had rebound sex with a harpy?”

“I don’t know if that’s what she was. Wings for arms, basically. Her feet were kind of talon-y too.”

“Right.”

“She practically took off in the middle of it. Feathers going everywhere. Way more trouble than it was worth. I still have a scar from where she clawed me. I can—”

“I don’t want to see it.”

Josh sighed. All the humor had drained out of his face, leaving it gray under the stubble. Now Quentin saw those years that he’d missed before.

“I mean, all I was looking for basically was some kind of Y: The Last Man setup, right? Where I was the only dude in a world of chicks. I know it’s out there. They could even all have been lesbians, and I would just watch. I’d be good with whatever.

“Anyway after that I started just sliding through worlds. Worlds worlds worlds. I stopped caring. It was like when you’ve surfed too much porn on the Web and none of it seems real but you keep going anyway. I’d get to a world and immediately start looking for any excuse to quit and go on to the next one. As soon as I’d see one wrong thing — oh, this one has flies, or the sky is a weird color, or no beer, anything that wasn’t perfect — I’d bail.

“Then one of those times I came back and the whole Neitherlands was busted.”

“What? How do you mean, busted?”

“Broken. Fucked up. Do you know about this? If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

He drained his wineglass. A man came to refill it, and Josh waved him off. “Whiskey,” he said.

He went on.

“At first I thought it was me, I must have broken it. I used it too much, something like that. When my head broke the water that last time it was like the cold punched me in the face. The air was freezing, and the wind was just whipping this dry powdery snow through the squares.”

“How is that even possible?” Quentin said. “I didn’t think the Neitherlands even had weather.”

It made him think of that silent storm, the one that had thrashed the clock-tree back in Fillory. Maybe it was the same wind?

“Something’s deeply messed up there, Quentin. Something’s wrong, something basic. Like systemic. Half the buildings were in ruins. It looked like the place had been bombed. All those beautiful stone buildings just laid open to the sky. Do you remember how Penny said once that they were all full of books? I think he was right, because the air was full of pages, blowing along through the city.”

Josh shook his head.

“I guess I should have grabbed a few, to see what was on them. You would have. I never even thought of it till after.

“You know what I was thinking about? Not dying. I was pretty far from the Earth fountain at that point, a mile maybe. I’d brought warm clothes, but I ditched them when I met the harpy. It was hot as hell there. And she kinda tore at my clothes a lot of the time anyway.

“So I was practically naked, and a lot of my landmarks were gone. A lot of the fountains were gone too. Some of them were leveled, some of them were frozen. You know how you can’t really do magic there? A couple of times I just squatted down in a corner. I thought maybe I’d wait out the storm, but really I just wanted to go to sleep. I didn’t think I could go on. I could have died, easily. I was out there for about half an hour. It’s a miracle I found the Earth fountain at all. I really thought I wouldn’t make it.”

“It’s incredible that you did.” Good old Josh. Just when you were ready to write him off he kicked into gear, and when he did he really was indomitable. Like that time in Fillory, when he’d beaten the red-hot giant with his black hole spell. He’d probably outlive them all.

“I keep trying to figure it out,” Josh said. “It was like somebody’d attacked the Neitherlands, or cursed it, except who could do that? I didn’t see anybody there. It was just as empty as it always was. I thought maybe — I know it’s silly — I thought maybe I’d see Penny.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, not that I wanted to. I couldn’t stand that guy. But it’d be nice to know he’s not dead.”

“Yeah. It would.”

Quentin was already trying to calculate whether this meant he and Julia couldn’t get back to Fillory through the Neitherlands. It was still possible, in theory. They’d just suit up for cold weather. Bring an ice ax.

“I always thought the Neitherlands were invulnerable,” Quentin said. “They felt like they were outside time, I didn’t think they ever changed. But it sounds like an earthquake hit them, an earthquake and a blizzard at the same time.”

“I know, right? What are the odds?”

“I don’t suppose you noticed whether the Fillory fountain was still there?” Quentin said. “I thought maybe we’d go back that way. Back to Fillory.”

“No. So you are going back? I didn’t exactly pop in while I was passing through. But listen, I don’t know if you can go back that way anyway.”

“Why not? I realize the Neitherlands is a disaster area, but it’s worth a try. You got back to Earth. You seem pretty settled here. We’ll just borrow the button and be on our way.”

“Yeah, see, that’s the thing.”

Josh didn’t meet Quentin’s eyes. He studied a painting hanging on the flaking wall behind Quentin as if he’d never seen it before.

“What?”

“I don’t have the button anymore.”

“You don’t—?”

“Yeah. I sold it. I didn’t realize you still wanted it.”

Quentin could not be hearing this.

“You didn’t. Tell me you did not do that.”

“I totally did!” Josh said, indignant. “How the hell do you think I could afford a fucking Venetian palazzo?”

CHAPTER 14

The old wood of Josh’s dining room table felt cool against Quentin’s forehead. In a few more seconds he’d sit up again. That’s how long it would take to roll his brain back to the state it was in before it thought that their troubles were over. Until that happened Quentin would just enjoy the cool solidity of the table for a second more. He let the despair wash over him. The button was gone. He thought about banging his head a few times, just lightly, but that would have been overdoing it.

He was aware for the first time of how quiet the city had gotten. After dark the streets and canals seemed to empty out. As if Venice felt less of an obligation to pretend to be part of this millennium at night, and had reverted to its medieval self again.

All right. He sat up. The blood drained back out of his face. Back to work.

“Okay. You sold the button.”

“Look, you must have had some other plan,” Josh said. “I mean, don’t tell me you were actually planning on randomly running into me in Venice and bumming the button off me. That’s not a plan.”

“Well, no,” Quentin said, “it’s not a plan. The plan was not to get booted out of Fillory, but that ship has sailed, so I’m working on a new plan. Who the hell did you sell the button to?”

“Well, that’s a story too!” Josh launched straight into the tale, untroubled by any further self-reproach. If Quentin had moved on then so could he, and this was obviously a much happier story than the one about his sojourn in the Neitherlands. “See, I realized I was through with that button. I was done with the Neitherlands and Fillory and all that stuff. If I was going to get laid — and I was — I was going to get laid right here in the real world. So I looked around for something to do on Earth, and I started picking up on this underground scene. The safe houses, all that stuff. Have you heard about that?”

“Julia’s been catching me up.”

“I mean, I always knew there were hedge witches out there, a few of them, but this thing goes deep, man. I had no idea. There are a lot of those guys. And a lot of them come through Venice — they figure it’s really old, so, hey, magic. They think maybe they’ll pick something up. It’s kinda sad, really. Some of them are the business, they’ve figured out a lot of what we know, and some stuff we don’t, but most of them have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re desperate. They’ll try anything.

“You gotta watch yourself around the desperate ones. They don’t know enough to be dangerous, most of them, but they attract scavengers. Fairies and demons and whatever. Fucking jackals. That’s where you get problems. The predators don’t mess around with us because we’re too much trouble, but those poor bastards, the hedge magicians, they want power and they’ll do anything to get it. I’ve heard of them striking some pretty bad bargains.

“But you know what? I like them. You know I never fit in that well at Brakebills. That whole fake Oxford thing, with the wine tasting and the fancy dress and all that — that was always more your scene, you and Eliot. And, and Janet.” He almost mentioned Alice but swerved away at the last second. “And it was great, don’t get me wrong. But it’s just not my style.

“I get along better with the underground people. People thought I was a joke at Brakebills, but here I’m a big wheel. I guess I just got tired of being the bottom of the food chain. Nobody really appreciated me there — no, not even you, Quentin. Not really. But here I’m like the king.”

Quentin could have denied it — but no, he couldn’t really. It was true. Everybody loved Josh, but nobody took him seriously. He’d allowed himself to think that it was because Josh didn’t want to be taken seriously, but that wasn’t true at all, of Josh or probably of anybody. Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief. Josh had probably been carrying that around as long as Quentin had known him. No wonder he gave them a hard time in that room with the bowl.

“So is that why you sold the button? Because you felt like we didn’t take you seriously?”

Josh looked wounded. “I sold the button because I got offered a fuckload of money for it. But would that have been a bad reason? Look, I had a little anger to deal with. They treat me with respect here. I never knew what that was like before. I’m the bridge between the two worlds. There’s things you can’t get in the underground that I know how to find and vice versa. So people come to me with problems from both sides.

“It’s actually pretty wild. The underground scene has shit we never could have gotten our hands on, and they don’t even know it. They have these sad little swap meets, and then something really legendary turns up, totally at random, and they don’t even recognize it. One time I found a Cherenkov sphere. Nobody knew what it was, I had to show them how to hold it.”

“So what about the button? Did you sell that at a swap meet?”

“Aha, yeah, you might well ask that,” Josh said, unfazed. “That was more of a special transaction. A one-off. High-status client.”

“Yeah, I bet. Maybe you could put me in touch with your high-status client. Maybe he’ll want to have a special transaction with me too.”

“No harm in trying, but I can’t say I love your chances.” Josh was grinning like a lunatic. There was obviously a secret there that he was dying to blow.

“Tell me.”

“Okay!” Josh held up his hands, setting the scene. “So. After I get back from the Neitherlands I’m knocking around New York, just enjoying that I still have all my extremities, when I get a call on my cell from this guy, he says meet me tomorrow in Venice. Business to discuss, confidential matter, whatever. I’m like fine, I guess, but I’m kinda short on cash, so how’s that going to work. I’m just walking along the sidewalk having this conversation. And even as I’m saying it this Bentley slides up next to me, and the door opens. Like an idiot I get in, and we’re off to LaGuardia where there’s a private jet waiting. I mean, how does he even know where I am? How does he know I don’t have something important going on that day?”

“Yeah, how would he have ever guessed that.” Old habits die hard. Josh didn’t catch the irony anyway.

“I know, right?” Clean miss. “Plus there’s an overnight bag for me with all these clothes and things in it. Really nice clothes that fit me. And that toothpaste that costs like seven dollars.

“Anyway, I’m supposed to meet the guy on such and such a dock at such and such a time, so I basically do, though the day when good old-fashioned green-and-white American street signs come to this continent will be a merry fuckin’ occasion, let me just say. A guy pulls up to the dock in this fancy-pants launch. Not one of your usual Venice craporetto fart-buckets. This thing is sleek. It’s like a giant knife made out of wood. Totally soundless. It glides up to the dock, this guy jumps out. He doesn’t even tie up, the boat just waits for him.

“And he’s a midget. Little person — sorry, little person. But way highend little person. He’s so well dressed you don’t even notice he’s a little person. He’s from this old Venetian family, a marchese of whatever whatever. It takes him about an hour just to say his name.

“But after that things go pretty quick. He says he represents somebody who wants to buy the button. I don’t even know how they know about it, but I say who is it. He’s all, I can’t say. I say, how much, and he’s all: one hundred million dollars. And I’m all: two hundred million. Fifty. Two hundred fifty million.

“Right? Check that out! And I want to know who the buyer is. Right? Now who wasted his childhood watching like a million hours of TV? That shit is practically second nature to me.

“So the midget takes out an envelope and inside the envelope is a cashier’s check for two hundred and fifty million. It’s like he knew what I was going to say. And I’m all, and? And he waves me over with his little stubby fingers. I figured he was going to whisper something in my ear, so I stop and bend down, and he’s all, no, and he keeps waving me right up to the edge of the dock, and then he points down into the water. And this face looms up at me.

“It just comes floating up toward the surface of the water. It’s enormous — it looks like the front of a truck coming up at me. I practically shit my pants.”

“What was it?”

“It was a dragon. There’s a dragon that lives in the Grand Canal! That’s who bought the button.”

Quentin knew about dragons, at least in theory. There weren’t many of them, and they mostly lived in rivers, one to a river — they were highly territorial. They hardly ever came out or spoke to anyone. They hardly ever did anything at all, just dreamed away the lifetime of the planet in secret fluvial oblivion. Except one of them had woken up long enough to talk to an aristocratic little person, apparently. And it had bestirred itself to show its face to Josh, and to buy his — their — magic button for two hundred fifty million dollars.

“So we go to the bank, we verify that the check is valid, then we walk back to the dock. I take out the button and hand it to the little guy, who’s put on one white glove, Michael Jackson — style. He looks at the button through a jeweler’s loupe, then he walks to the edge and chucks it in the water. Just like that. Then he gets in his launch and drives away.”

“That is pretty astonishing,” Quentin said. It was hard to even be mad about it. Though not impossible.

“Can you believe a dragon bought our button?” Josh said. “He knows who we are! Or who I am anyway. I don’t even think people knew there was a dragon in the Grand Canal. I mean, it’s salt water. You know that, right? It’s not actually a river, it’s a tidal estuary or whatever. I don’t think people know about saltwater dragons!”

“Josh, how would I go about getting in touch with that dragon?”

That brought him up short.

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t think you can.”

“You did.”

“He got in touch with me.”

“Well, how would you try?”

Josh heaved an exasperated sigh.

“All right, there is this one girl I know who knows a lot about dragons. I guess I’d ask her.”

“Okay, good. Listen. This is what’s going to happen.” Quentin focused his will on Josh. Now hear this. He met Josh’s gaze and held it. “All due respect to your being king here, but Julia and I are king and queen of Fillory, and we have to get back there. For all intents and purposes we are on a fucking quest here. You are now on the quest team too. I am deputizing you. We have to get back to Fillory, and we don’t know how we’re going to do it. That’s the problem.”

Josh considered.

“That’s a big problem.”

“Yeah, and you’re the big fixer. Right? So let’s fix it.”

He’d give Josh this: maybe he blew their only chance to get back to the secret magical land where Quentin was a king, but he bought a very nice palazzo with the money. It was a glorious, grotesque heap of fifteenth-century marble. The façade on the canal side was white, with its own tidy little dock out front. The interior teemed with curly plasterwork ornaments. Old oil paintings clung to the walls like lichen. Josh had accidentally acquired a minor Canaletto when he bought the place.

It was a serious palace, and it must have taken serious work to get it back on its feet. Josh had replumbed it and rewired it and put in a restaurant-caliber kitchen and done some work below the waterline, shoring up the foundations to keep the whole thing from slumping forward into the canal. He’d done it carefully, too, so that you wouldn’t know the place had been touched until you turned on the shower.

And all it had cost was $25 million, plus $10 million more for the renovation. Not that Quentin was a math genius or anything, but he figured that that left Josh with a pretty tidy nest egg. No doubt it would be a great comfort to him during his golden years.

It was all a reminder that Josh had a capable and determined side that really did deserve respect, even though for his own private reasons he worked hard to keep that side hidden most of the time. Now that Quentin looked, really looked, something had changed about Josh. He was more confident. He stood differently. He’d lost weight in the Neitherlands, and he’d kept it off. People changed. Time didn’t stand still for you, while you lounged around on cushions in Fillory.

And he could learn something from Josh. Here was somebody who was having a good time. He was doing what he wanted and enjoying himself. He’d been through everything Quentin had been through: he lost the girl he loved, and he nearly died. He didn’t sit around moaning and philosophizing about it. He bounced back and set himself up in a palazzo.

Quentin slept like the dead till noon the next day, when he enjoyed a formal breakfast in the dining room. (Josh was exceptionally proud of the table he set. “Over here they use spoons for their jam. Amazing, right? Tiny spoons! It’s ‘fit for a king’!” Wink, wink.) They were joined by Julia, who kept her sunglasses on and ate only marmite, straight from the jar, which if anything seemed like further proof of her declining humanity.

They were also joined by Poppy, Josh’s friend, the one who was supposed to know something about dragons. She was a beanpole, tall and skinny, with wide blue eyes and curly blond hair. Poppy had been to Brakebills as it happened, but only in a postgraduate capacity as a research fellow. She’d learned her magic at a college in Australia, which was where she was from.

Quentin had some idea that Australians were fun-loving and easygoing, and if that was true he could why see Poppy had gotten the hell out of Australia. She had a bright, sharp manner and a quick little voice and a lot of confidence. She was especially confident when it came to pointing out other people’s mistakes. Not that she was a know-it-all — it didn’t seem to be an ego thing with her. She just assumed that everybody shared her desire for everybody to be clear on everything, and she’d expect you to do the same for her. Apparently at Esquith, which was the Australian magic school in Tasmania, she’d been the academic superstar of her year. This according to Josh, but Poppy didn’t contradict him, which if it weren’t true would have gone against her error-hating nature.

Poppy was an academic at heart, but she wasn’t the ivory tower type. She was into the real world. She was into fieldwork. Specifically she was into dragons.

Quentin supposed it was an extension of the general Australian preoccupation with fatally dangerous animals. Start with saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump up the food chain before you got to dragons. Poppy knew about as much about them as it was possible to know with actually ever having seen one. She’d followed leads all over the world, and now she’d followed one here. Josh had put out feelers for an expert on the topic, and he’d been very pleased indeed when his expert had turned out to be as good-looking as Poppy was. She’d been there for three weeks, and Josh didn’t feel she’d worn out her welcome.

He introduced her as his friend, but given who Josh was, and given Poppy’s undeniable prettiness, Quentin didn’t think it was uncharitable to assume that Josh was trying to sleep with her or had already slept with her. He was new and improved, but he was still Josh.

Frankly Poppy got on Quentin’s nerves a bit, but she was about to come in extremely handy. Josh had yet to give her the full download about the dragon of the Grand Canal. He told Quentin he’d been slowplaying it in an attempt to prolong her visit. But now the moment had arrived. They needed her. Needless to say Poppy was beyond excited. Her wide blue eyes got even wider.

“Well, okay,” she said, talking at a runaway clip. “So most of the dragons have a place where you’re supposed to be able to jump into their river and they’ll notice. They monitor it just in case somebody worth their while wants to talk to them. If they want to talk to you, they’ll take you down to where they live. But it’s not a well-understood process at all. There are a lot of urban legends around it. Lots of people say they’ve talked to dragons, but it’s very hard to verify. Supposedly the Thames dragon wrote most of Pink Floyd’s stuff. At least after Syd Barrett left. But there’s no way to prove it.

“Traditionally you approach them via the first bridge upstream from the sea, in this case I guess the Accademia. Haven’t you guys heard all this stuff? I can’t believe you haven’t heard about this. Go at midnight. Go to the middle of the bridge. Take a copy of today’s newspaper and a nice steak. Wear something nice. And that’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. And then you jump in. It’s all just tradition. I mean, God knows if any of it helps. There’s so little data, and so little of it is reliable.”

And then you jump in. That was all.

“But it does sometimes work?” Quentin said.

“Sure!” Poppy nodded brightly. “Uh-huh. Some dragons like to talk more than others. The valedictorian of the magic school in Calcutta makes a run at the Ganges dragon every year, and it works about half the time.

“A dragon in the Grand Canal, though. That’s new. I mean, really new. I was starting to think you were full of shit.” She gave Josh a sharp, reappraising look.

“Starting?” Quentin said.

“So when are you going?”

“Tonight. But listen, do me one favor. Don’t tell anybody about this yet.”

Poppy frowned prettily, which seemed to the only way she knew how. “Why not?”

“Just give us a week,” Quentin said. “That’s all I ask. The dragon isn’t going anywhere, and I need to get a decent chance with it. If word gets out there’s going to be a mob scene.”

She thought for a second.

“All right,” she said.

Something about the way she said it suggested to Quentin that she might actually keep her promise.

Recovering her high spirits immediately, Poppy addressed herself to her jam and toast. Thin as she was, she ate more than Josh, presumably burning it all in whatever inner furnace kept her at such a pitch of eager excitement all the time.

That left the rest of the day to dispense with. Life at the Palazzo Josh (formerly the Palazzo Barberino, after the sixteenth-century clan that built it and eventually sold it to a dot-com jillionaire, who never set foot in it, and who blew his jillions on Ponzi schemes and a trip to the International Space Station, after which he sold it to Josh) wasn’t exactly taxing. He felt disloyal for thinking it, disloyal to Fillory, but he could almost get used to this. The palazzo’s comforts were many. You could spend the morning in bed, reading and watching the Venetian light track slowly over an oriental carpet that was so fractally ornate it practically scintillated right there on the floor in front of you. Then there was all of Venice to wander around — the structural spells alone, the titanic bonds that kept the whole place from drowning itself in the lagoon, were a must-see for any tourist of the world’s magical wonders.

Then there was the daily late-afternoon spritz. Taken altogether it was enough to make Quentin forget for minutes at a time that once upon a time he used to be the king of a magical otherworld.

Not Julia, though. Not quite. She found him nursing his drink on the piano nobile and admiring the cityscape over its heavy stone railing. Together they looked down at the traffic on the canal, much of which consisted of tourists on boats looking up at them and wondering who they were and whether they were famous.

“You like it here,” Julia said.

“It’s amazing. I’d never even been to Italy before. I had no idea it was like this.”

“I lived in France for a while,” she said.

“You did? When did you live in France?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Was that where you learned to steal cars?”

“No.”

Having brought it up, she didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

“It is nice here,” she conceded.

“Do you want to stay here?” Quentin asked. “Do you still want to go back to Fillory?”

She set her glass down on the wide marble parapet. More whiskey, still neat. A muscle twinged in her jaw.

“I have to go back. I cannot stay here.” Before when she said this she sounded angry and desperate. Now she sounded regretful. “I must keep going. Are you coming with me?”

It made Quentin’s heart ache, to hear Julia ask him for something. Anything. She needed his help. People needing him: it was a new feeling. He was starting to like it.

“Of course I am.” It was what she’d said when he asked her to come along to the Outer Island.

She nodded, never taking her eyes off the view.

“Thank you.”

That night at five minutes to midnight Quentin was remembering that conversation and trying to hold on to that feeling as he loitered on the Ponte dell’Accademia, holding copies of Il Gazzettino and the International Herald Tribune, just to cover all the bases, and a really great, amazingly expensive raw steak, doing his very best impression of somebody who wasn’t about to jump into the Grand Canal.

After the crushing, malodorous heat of the day, the night air was surprisingly frigid. From the point of view of someone who was planning to immerse himself in it, the creamy green water of the Grand Canal looked about as enticing as glacial runoff. It also looked a lot farther away than it had looked from the banks. It also looked clean, which Quentin knew it wasn’t.

But somewhere under all that water there was a button. And a dragon. It didn’t seem real. He half-suspected Josh of having lost the button in a sofa and making up the story about the dragon because it was less embarrassing.

“This is going to be really wretched, dude,” Josh said. “You are not going to be a happy puppy in there.”

“No kidding.” He’d hoped Josh would offer to do it himself, or go in with him, but no such luck.

“You’ll get used to it,” Poppy said, hugging herself.

“Why are you here, again?” Quentin said.

“Interests of science. Plus I want to see if you’ll actually go through with it.”

It was a personal tic of Poppy’s that she never seemed to lie when other people would. It was either tactless or admirable, depending on how you looked at it.

Quentin took some deep breaths and leaned against the splintery wooden railing, which still retained some of the fading heat of the sun. Remember what’s at stake. Julia wouldn’t hesitate. She’d be over the railing like a damn Olympic hurdler. At his request they hadn’t told her they were going tonight, but slipped out after she went to bed. She would have insisted on going in.

“They hardly ever eat people,” Poppy said. “I mean like twice a century. That we know of.”

Quentin didn’t respond to this.

“How deep do you think it is?” Josh said. He dragged on a cigarette. Of the three of them he looked the most nervous.

“Twenty feet maybe,” Quentin said. “I read it on the Internet.”

“Jesus. Well, whatever you do don’t dive.”

“If I break my neck and end up paralyzed just let me drown.”

“Two minutes,” Poppy said. An empty vaporetto churned by underneath them, off duty, lights off except for one in the cozy pilot’s cabin. That water must be ninety percent E. coli, and the rest was probably diesel fuel. This was not a body of water intended for swimming in.

Somebody had carved what might have been a stylized dragon, or just a fancy s, into the wood right at the apex of the bridge.

“Are you going to take off your clothes?” Josh asked.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for you to ask me that.”

“Seriously, are you?”

“No.”

Poppy said it at the same time he did.

“Seriously,” she added.

Their little group fell silent. Somewhere far away glass broke. Beer bottle versus wall. Quentin wondered if he was actually going to do this. Maybe he could just drop a note in. Message in a bottle. Call me.

“Hey, remember when that little person called your cell?” he said. “Did you get his number? Maybe we could just—”

“It was blocked.”

“Time!” Poppy said.

“Damn it!”

Just don’t think about it. He backed up to the middle of the bridge, scrunched the papers and the bag with the steak in it up in one hand, ran at the railing, and vaulted over it sidewise. He surprised himself by how spryly he did it. Must be the adrenaline. Even so he almost clipped a sticking-out support beam going down.

Some primal instinct caused him to flap his arms and let go of the steak and the papers in midair. They separated from him and disappeared into the night. So much for that. To his left he caught a glimpse of something falling in parallel with him. Somebody — it was Poppy! She was jumping in too.

He hit hard, feetfirst more or less, and went under. His only thought as he went down was to clench or snort out air from all possible orifices to try to avoid taking in any water or other fluids. The canal was freezing and powerfully salty. For an instant he felt relief — it wasn’t that cold — then his clothes soaked through and turned to frozen lead, and the cold pressed in on him from all sides. He panicked and thrashed — his clothes were too heavy. They were going to drag him under! Then his head broke the surface.

He’d lost a shoe. Poppy surfaced at the same moment a couple of yards away, spitting and blowing, her round face shining pale in the sodium light of the streetlights. He should have been mad at her, but the gonzo jolliness of swimming in the Grand Canal in the middle of the night made him laugh crazily instead.

“What the hell are you doing?” he stage-whispered.

If nothing else the freezing shock had taken away his irritation at her. He had to give her credit for a degree of physical courage he wouldn’t have thought she possessed. They were in it together.

“Twice the chances, right? If there’s two of us?” She was grinning a loony grin too. She lived for this shit. “I was wrong, we should have taken our clothes off.”

He treaded water. It took about thirty seconds before he was exhausted and shivering uncontrollably. The current was sweeping them under the bridge — not the current, the tide, it must be, he reminded himself, since the canal wasn’t really a river. Jesus, there could be sharks in this bitch. Somebody yelled at them from the bank, in Italian. He hoped it wasn’t a cop.

Quentin peed in his pants and felt warmer for ten seconds, then even colder afterward. He tried not to think of what PCBs and other industrial toxins must be leaching their way into him upstream. From down here the canal looked enormous, the banks miles away. How did he get here, so far from where he started? How had he gone so far off track? He felt like he would never claw his way back to where he should be, back onto his cozy throne. A wavelet popped up out of nowhere and slapped him in the face. He was ready to call it a night. At least he could say he tried.

“How long are we supposed to wait?” he asked Poppy.

Just then an iron handcuff locked around his ankle and jerked him under.

He should have died right then. Surprise made him blurt out all his air in one heave, and he went down with his lungs completely empty.

But there was a spell in effect to keep him alive. It was obviously something the dragon had developed over many years for the comfort of its human visitors. It was comprehensive. It was user-friendly. It had the feel of magic finely milled by long centuries of use and cast by a past-master with wings and a tail. Quentin wasn’t going to die. Or at least not by accident.

In fact he felt warm, for the first time in what seemed like hours, and he could see clearly, if dimly, which he shouldn’t have been able to do. He was breathing the water. It wasn’t quite like breathing air — it had more heft to it, more push and shove was required to get it in and out of his chest — but it got the job done. Oxygen continued to reach his brain. He heaved it in and out gratefully, in big gulps. He felt relaxed. Somebody was taking care of him. He was flying first-class.

Quentin had always had reservations about dragons, the real ones anyway, the ones that actually existed. He’d been raised on the tradition of high-flying, gold-hoarding, fire-breathing dragons. Beowulf dragons, Tolkien dragons, Dungeons & Dragons dragons. The news that real dragons lived in rivers, and didn’t go thundering around the countryside setting trees on fire, had come as a disappointment to him. River dragons sounded colder and slimier and more newtlike than what he’d been hoping for.

So he was happy to see that the dragon that had hold of his ankle with its short but powerful right forelimb, drawing him down and placing him gently on the canal floor, like a puppy to whom it was saying “stay,” was thoroughly, almost quintessentially draconian. It looked sinister and coldly calculating and like it could eat him without noticing, but it was canonical. Its massive saurian head was the size of a compact car. Its eyes flashed silver when you caught them at the right angle. Its scales were a delicate watery green. Having settled him on the soft sand, the dragon of the Grand Canal released him and crouched down in a catlike pose, resting its head on the tip of its tail. Its vast body humped up in the dimness behind it.

Quentin sneezed. His sinuses had flooded with filthy water when the dragon yanked him down, but the water around him now was clean. He was enclosed, with the dragon, in a quiet green-black dome of water. The canal bed, which should have been a swamp of trash and scrap metal and sewage, was smooth. The dragon kept its patch of sand well tended.

Quentin sat cross-legged. It was just the two of them; the dragon hadn’t taken Poppy, apparently. Quentin was having a little trouble not floating away, but he found something round and heavy next to him — an old cannonball, maybe — and settled it in his lap to hold him down.

He let a minute go by, but the dragon didn’t talk. All right. Game on.

“Hello,” Quentin said. His voice sounded basically normal. Just distant, as if he were eavesdropping on himself from another room. “Thank you for seeing me.”

The huge face didn’t move. It was as unreadable as a skull. Though there went the eyes, flashing again.

“Probably you know why I came here. I want to talk to you about the button, the one you bought from my friend Josh.” He felt like a kid asking the school bully for his lunch money back. He straightened his spine. “The thing is, it wasn’t entirely his to sell. It also belonged to me, and some other people, and we need it. I need it to get back to my home, and my friend Julia does too.”

“I know.”

The dragon’s voice was like some vast string instrument two levels below double bass. An octuple bass maybe, playing a perfect fifth. He felt the vibrations in his ribs and in his balls.

“Will you help us? Will you give us back the button? Or sell it back to us?”

The rest of the canal was a solid wall of darkness around them. There was a distant rumble, and Quentin risked a glance up: a late-night barge was thundering by overhead. It felt like the water was getting chillier, or maybe he was cooling off. He scooched a little closer to the dragon, who was giving off heat. If it was going to eat him it was going to eat him, and at least he’d die warm.

“No,” came the reply.

The dragon’s eyes closed and opened.

The door back to Fillory was shutting. He had to stick his foot in it. That world, the world of his real life, the life he was supposed to be living, was drifting away, or he was drifting away from it. The moorings had been cut, and the tide was flowing out. They never should have gone to After Island. They never should have left Castle Whitespire.

“Maybe you could loan it to us?” He willed the desperation out of his voice. “A one-time trip. If there’s anything I have that you want, I’m offering it. I’m a king, in Fillory at least. I have a lot of resources there.”

“I did not bring you here to listen to you boast.”

“I’m not—”

“I have lived in this canal for ten centuries. Everything that enters it is mine. I have swords and crowns. I have popes and saints and kings and queens. I have brides on their wedding day and children on Christmas. I have the Holy Lance and the noose that hung Judas. I have every lost thing.”

Fair enough. Quentin wondered if Byron had ever been down here. If he had, he probably thought of something clever to say.

“Okay. All right. But I don’t understand, why did you bring me here if you don’t want to sell me back the button?”

The dragon’s pupils widened until they were almost a foot across, and it seemed to come awake and really notice him for the first time. Its head lifted off its tail. He was close enough that it had to go slightly cross-eyed to focus on him. Now that Quentin’s eyes had adjusted to the dark he could make out the big scales on the dragon’s back. They looked as thick as encyclopedias, and a few of them had things carved into them, sigils and pictograms that Quentin didn’t recognize.

“You will not speak again, human, except to thank me,” the dragon said. “You wish to be a hero, but you do not know what a hero is. You think a hero is one who wins. But a hero must be prepared to lose, Quentin. Are you? Are you prepared to lose everything?”

“I’ve already lost everything,” he said.

“Oh, no. You have so much more left to lose.”

The dragon was a lot scoldier than he expected. And disappointingly cryptic. Somehow in the back of his mind he’d vaguely thought that the dragon might want to be his friend, and they would fly around the world solving mysteries together. The chances of that happening now looked vanishingly small. He waited. Maybe the dragon would give him something they could use.

“The old gods are returning to take back what is theirs. I will play my part. Best you prepare to play yours.”

“That sounds like a good idea, but how exactly—”

“You will not speak. The button is useless to you. The Neitherlands are closed. But the first door is still open. It always has been.”

Quentin’s knees suddenly felt stiff from sitting cross-legged. He wanted to spit the salt water out of his mouth, but there was nothing but more salt water to spit into. The dragon whipped its tail out from under its chin, back into the darkness, slashing up a cloud of silt.

“You may thank me now.”

Wait, what? Quentin opened his mouth to speak — to thank the Dragon of the Grand Canal like a good boy, or to ask him what he meant, or tell him to fuck off for talking in riddles, he would never know, because he choked instead. He couldn’t breathe. The spell was gone, and he was gagging on filthy, freezing canal water. He was drowning.

He left his one remaining shoe stuck in the mud and kicked his way crazily up toward the surface.

CHAPTER 15

Oh, the return of the prodigal! The rapture with which Julia was received back into the domestic fold! The blurry, beaming faces of her parents, a pair of rain-soaked headlights trained upon her, as she presented herself to them in the form of a reprobate reformed. She had disappointed them so many times, in so many ways, they hardly dared to hope anymore. They’d been through so many stages of grief they’d lost count.

Now here she was, returned from Chesterton, her spirit crushed, ready to be part of the family again, and they let her. They actually let her. With a kindness utterly unlike anything she recognized in herself, they took her back, even though she could not have deserved it less. The wreck of the good ship Julia, out of Brooklyn, carrying the precious cargo of Their Love, was ready to be hauled off the Reef of Life and salvaged and refloated, and they did it. They took her back without a word of reproach.

Now it was Julia’s turn to grieve, and they let her, which was another gift. She mourned her lost life, and she mourned the death of the magician she would never be. She buried that mighty sorceress with full honors. And with the grief, unbidden, came its ghostly golden cousin, relief. She had been trying so hard, for so long, to be something the world did not want her to be. Now she could finally stop. The world had won. She yielded to her family’s embraces, and she was grateful for them. What was so great about magic anyway, compared to love? Seriously, what?

Oh, the timorous overtures of her sister, the humanist! By now she was a senior in high school herself. As she labored over her college applications, Julia reactivated her own. They worked on them together, side by side at the kitchen table, swapping tips, her sister coaching her on her essay, Julia dragging her sister through basic calculus by main force. They were a team again, the two of them. Julia had forgotten what it felt like to be part of a family. She’d forgotten how good it could feel, and how much she needed it.

Of Julia’s legendary seven acceptances, only Stanford’s could be salvaged, but that was enough. There was a gap or three in her résumé, sure, but if you cocked your head and blurred your eyes you could take her magical research for some sort of worthy independent ethnographic project. So it was sunny California for her. Just what she needed. Fun in the sun. Put some color in her cheeks. She’d spend a year saving up cash and matriculate in the fall. It was all arranged.

Because Julia had given up. She was packing it in. She washed her hands of the realms invisible that had so thoroughly washed their hands of her. She would take a page from the holy book of those child-raping utopian socialists she’d written about for Mr. Karras: when your sacred intentional community collapses, it’s time to suck it up and sell silverware instead.

Julia would take a page from Jack Donne. At the end of the poem, hadn’t he run to the Goat (by which he meant the constellation Capricorn, a footnote gallantly informed her) to find New Love? Or was it lust? Or maybe it turned out it was too late for him. Maybe that was somebody else. That poem was pretty fucking unintelligible. Anyway it had a happy ending. Ish.

She still had her bad days, no question, when the black dog of depression sniffed her out and settled its crushing weight on her chest and breathed its pungent dog breath in her face. On those days she called in sick to the IT shop where, most days, she untangled tangled networks for a song. On those days she pulled down the shades and ran dark for twelve or twenty-four or seventy-two hours, however long it took for the black dog to go on home to its dark master.

She couldn’t go back, she knew that now. The magic kingdom was closed to her. But some days she couldn’t see a way forward either.

She always righted herself in the end, with the help of a dandy cateyed new shrink, a woman this time, and her dandy 450 milligrams of Wellbutrin and 30 milligrams of Lexapro daily, and her dandy new online support group for the depressed.

Actually the support group really was pretty dandy. It was something special. It was founded by a woman who’d worked successively at Apple, and then Microsoft, and then Google. She blazed a glittering arc in the firmament at each firm for about four or five years, piling up tranches of stock options, before she rolled neurochemical snake eyes and a bout of clinical depression knocked her out of the sky. By the time Google was done with her she was forty-four and had her fuck-you money in the bank. So she retired early and started Free Trader Beowulf instead.

Free Trader Beowulf — you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it. FTB was an online support group for depressed people. But not your common run of depressed person. Oh, no.

To get in the door you first had to show them your prescriptions. They wanted credentials, solid ones. A bunch of nerds like this, they didn’t want to hear your whining, and they didn’t want to read your poems — sorry, Jack — or look at your doomy watercolors. This crowd wasn’t softcore. If you were depressed, they wanted to see the hard stuff, a diagnosis from an actual psychiatrist and hard-core chemical-on-neuron action. And if you were rocking double-neurochemical-penetration, like Julia was, all the better.

If that all worked out, then they sent you a video invitation. It was meaningless in itself, a red herring, just a bunch of new-agey platitudes delivered by a sympathetic hippie-type actor. But buried in it, for those who thought to look, was a clue: a single frame of what looked like white noise but which turned out to be hard data. The black-and-white pixels stood for ones and zeros that, when laid end to end, formed a sound file. The audio was of somebody speaking the phone number of an old-school dial-up BBS, which when you called it up, frog-marched you through a pretty chunky series of pure math problems, which if you solved them in six hours or less yielded a sequence of numbers that turned out to be Ulam numbers, Ulam being the password to the Web site at the IP address they gave you if you beat the test, where there was a Flash game that made absolutely no sense unless you could think in four spatial dimensions, but if you could you got a pair of GPS coordinates in South Dakota that turned out to be a geo-caching site from which you could recover a grotesquely complicated three-dimensional wooden puzzle, inside of which was etc. etc. etc.

All good clean all-American fun. A childless, clinically depressed, forty-four-year-old retiree with a genius IQ and an eight-figure bank account had nothing if not time on her hands. It was obnoxious, but nobody was twisting Julia’s arm, and she had time on her hands too, as it happened. It took Julia three weeks to work her way through the intellectual obstacle course — she would’ve liked to see Quentin try it — but at the end of it all she recovered, on the strength of many quarters, a plastic bubble from the claw machine in a neglected video arcade on the Jersey Shore. The bubble contained a flash drive. The flash drive contained the real invitation. No tricks this time. She was in.

Free Trader Beowulf had fourteen members, and Julia made it fifteen. It was only a message board, but it felt more like home than anything had since the two hours Julia had spent at Brakebills four years earlier. The people in FTB got her. She didn’t have to explain herself. They understood her gallows humor and her Gödel, Escher, Bach references, her sudden rages and her long silences. She picked up their arcane in-jokes and running gags pretty quickly. Her whole life she’d felt like the last living member of a lost Amazonian tribe, speaking her own extinct dialect, but here, finally, was her ethnic group. They were a bunch of depressed, overeducated shut-ins, but they seemed human to her. Or maybe not human, but whatever Julia was, they were too.

References to real life were tacitly discouraged on FTB. You didn’t use real names. In most cases she had only the vaguest sense of where the other members lived or what they did for a living, whether they were married or in a few cases even what gender they were. As far as Julia knew they never met in person. FTB just wasn’t a meatspace thing. Outing another member’s real-world identity was an offense punishable by expulsion, or it would have been if it ever happened, but it never did. Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network.

That spring was the happiest time Julia had lived through since her old life ended. She chattered away to the Free Traders all day every day. They hung around her in an invisible crowd, bantering and kibitzing on her work projects. She typed while she ate her breakfast. She typed walking down the street. The last thing she saw before she fell asleep was the Free Trader app on her smartphone on the pillow next to her, and it was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes in the morning. She opened herself up to them in a way she never had to anyone: no irony, no caveats, no regrets. She poured out her broken heart to the Free Traders, and they took it and cleaned it up and fixed it up and gave it back to her fresh and bloody and pumping again.

She never said a thing about Brakebills — that would have been beyond the pale even for FTB — but she found to her relief that she didn’t really have to. Whatever was wrong, the details didn’t matter. It was enough for them to know that there was an enormous piece missing from her world, and they understood what that felt like because they were missing pieces too. Didn’t matter what shape it was. Julia wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that there were a few Brakebills also-rans among the Free Traders. But she never asked.

She had warm feelings for all the Free Traders, but inevitably there were a few with whom she formed tighter bonds: a little clique, a circle within the circle, comprising herself and three others. Failstaff, a gentle poster whose cultural references put him three or four decades older than Julia; Pouncy Silverkitten, whose acid sarcasm was extreme even for FTB, but who chose his targets humanely, mostly; and Asmodeus, who understood Julia’s feelings with telepathic completeness, and whose facility with theoretical physics was so extraordinary, she seemed to be posting from somewhere off-planet.

Julia posted as ViciousCirce. They’d been a trio before she came along, but they were happy to accept her as one of them, and to make their never-ending conversations four-handed.

It was acceptable on FTB to take a thread private, if all parties agreed, and once in a while she and Asmo and Pouncy and Failstaff would recede into their own highly abstract world together. In those private threads they would get a little more concrete about their personal lives, though it was still considered gauche to drop any geo-specific details. That became part of the game, keeping their identities obscure, and another part of the game was constructing elaborate fictional biographies and résumés for each other. Julia did an FBI serial killer profile for each of the other three, complete with police sketches.

Another game they were fond of was called Series. It was simple: somebody would provide three words, or three numbers, or names, or molecules, or shapes, or whatever. Those were the first three terms in the series. Then you had to figure out what the next term in the series was, and what principle generated it. You wanted to make your series maximally difficult but still theoretically solvable, while also making sure there was only one possible solution, i.e., only one guiding principle that could be extrapolated from the three examples. Once the solution was cracked, second prize went to the first person who could iterate the series ten times.

FTB took over her life, and she let it. Sometimes even when she was offline it was as if FTB was running by itself in her head — her brain had spent so much time with these invisible personalities that they’d calved off little clones of themselves in her brain, pirate software versions of Asmo and Pouncy and Failstaff and all the others, that ran on Julia’s hardware. She wasn’t demented — she wasn’t! — it was just a game she played with herself. It was a little insane, but hey, whatever got you through, right? And everything else was going fine. She’d gained weight, stopped scratching herself, barely even bit her cuticles anymore. She hadn’t done the rainbow spell in ages. She knew she was obsessed, but it was turning out that she was the kind of person who needed to be obsessed with something, and she could have done a lot worse. God knows she had before.

She figured, let the fever run its course. It would break, and the patient would wake up clammy but clearheaded, and the fever dreams would fade. She’d head off to Stanford in the fall, get a new life, get some real-world, visible, analog friends. Wipe the slate clean.

But first she’d give it its head, let it run a little. Which is how Julia found herself late on a weekend afternoon in March wandering through Prospect Heights toward Bed-Stuy. She’d become a prodigious walker of late, because she needed some kind of exercise, and exposure to sunlight improved her mood. And she could take the Free Traders with her, not only in their capacity as spectral presences in her brain but as actual presences on her smartphone, for which Failstaff had ginned up a clever little app. (No iPhones, natch, Android only. The Free Traders were huge open-source snobs.) She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.

Julia typed as she walked; she had developed a great facility in doing this, using her peripheral vision to weave around fire hydrants and dogshit land mines and other pedestrians. A key part of successfully being Julia, it seemed, was not giving a shit if you looked weird. Today she halflistened via the app’s text-to-speech feature while Pouncy and Asmodeus went back and forth on the validity of Hofstadter’s strange-loop theory of consciousness as derived from Gödel numbers, or something like that.

The other half of her consciousness, Hofstadterian or no, was deployed in looking at the front doors of the houses she passed. Specifically she was looking at the way they were divided up into square and rectangular panels of different sizes. Most of them were anyway. This was not on the face of it an overwhelmingly interesting activity; in fact she would have been hard-pressed to explain to anybody exactly why she was doing it. It was just that the doors had begun to remind her of a game of Series they’d played the other day.

Pouncy had offered up a geometrical puzzle, painstakingly executed in ASCII characters, consisting of simple patterns of squares on a small grid. It had turned out — Failstaff nailed it — that the patterns could be understood as successive states of a very simple cellular automaton, so simple that they could nut out the rules in their heads once they had the general idea. Or Failstaff could anyway.

The funny thing was, Julia fancied that as she walked she could spot sequences from the series in the different configurations of the doors she was passing. It seemed like if she kept going long enough she could always find the next term.

It was just a goofy mental exercise. Sometimes the pattern was in wood, sometimes in glass, or a wrought-iron gate. Once it was in cinder blocks in a blocked-up window, which was cheating, but it was weird how often she found it. She started setting rules for herself — she would stop walking if it took her more than a block to find the next term in the series, then it had to be within a block and on the same side of the street, and so on — but the right pattern always turned up just in time. She wasn’t sure if this was a significant discovery or not, but she felt a compulsion to see how long she could keep it going. She could imagine the acidity of the sarcasm Pouncy would slather all over her if she told the others what she was doing. It would be seriously corrosive, pH 0 sarcasm.

It was all working out very neatly though. The only difference between her and Pouncy’s cellular automata was that hers was running backward — the rules were being applied in reverse, so it was winding back down to its initial state. That was another reason she kept walking: the series was finite. It would be over soon, whatever happened. Once she got lost for a block, but then she realized she’d munged the transformation, and once she fixed it then sure enough, there it was, an old wooden door with inset panels, three of them slightly lighter in color to pick out the right configuration. It was a will-o’-the-wisp leading her onward, farther into the perilous marsh of Bed-Stuy, deeper into a dreamlike, hypnagogic state.

A small but vigilant sector of Julia’s brain wasn’t that stoked about how far into Bed-Stuy she was getting. Row houses were giving way to vacant lots and chop shops and half-built apartment houses that the recession had killed off before they were finished. She had about an hour before dark, and it was no longer possible to tell herself that some of the houses were boarded up because they were undergoing very ambitious gut renovations, because those houses weren’t being renovated, they were crack houses. But it wouldn’t be long before she found the door that corresponded to Pouncy’s starting configuration, and then the series would be at an end — which is to say, at its beginning — and she could turn around and head back to Park Slope.

And sure enough, just past Throop (pronounced “troop”) Avenue, there it was. It was not a pretty house, but it wasn’t a crack house, either. It was a two-story lime-green clapboard house with an antique rabbit-ears antenna on top and a surly gang of aluminum garbage cans in the cracked cement yard out front. The front door was an eight-paned glass affair. One pane, the top left corner, had been punched out and plastic-wrapped, thereby completing the series.

And that was that. It was finished. The sight of that final pattern, the initial state, released Julia from the spell. The dream logic had iterated itself out. She looked around like a sleepwalker awakened, wondering where the hell she was, exactly. Somebody was still babbling in her ear in a computer-generated voice about Hofstadter. Exhaustion broke over her in a wave. She must have walked for miles, and the sun was setting. She sat down on the stoop.

She needed a ride home. A car service would be expensive, but being mugged and/or assaulted would be even more expensive. Plus she felt like she would literally drop in her tracks if she had to take another step. She killed the FTB app and took out her earbuds, and the voices died away. Silence. Reality.

Behind her she heard the door open. She got up again and held up a hand — okay, okay, she was going. She didn’t suppose that a lecture on cellular automata would really pass for an excuse for trespassing with the residents of some random lime-green shitbox house on Throop Avenue.

But the guy in the door wasn’t shooing her away. He was a white guy, owlish-looking, maybe thirty, in a vintage blazer and jeans and an insta-annoying porkpie hat.

He just looked at her, assessing. Behind him she could see other people in the house, sitting and standing, chatting and moping, and doing things with their hands. Only they didn’t have anything in their hands. A weird acid-green light flared for a second in the doorway, from somewhere she couldn’t see, like there was welding going on in there. Somebody gave an ironic cheer. The air absolutely reeked of magic. You could barely breathe, it was so thick.

Julia squatted down on her haunches on the sidewalk, like a toddler, and put her head in her hands and laughed and cried at the same time. She felt like she was going to pass out or throw up or go insane. She had tried to walk away from the disaster, to run away from it, she really, truly had. She’d broken her staff and drowned her book and sworn off magic forever. She’d moved on and left no forwarding address. But it hadn’t been enough. Magic had come looking for her. She hadn’t run far enough or fast enough, or hid herself well enough, and the disaster had tracked her down and it had found her. It wasn’t going to let her go.

It was about to start all over again.

CHAPTER 16

During everything that followed, all the time while he nearly got creamed by a vaporetto as he swam to shore, while he dragged himself up some ancient stone steps out of the water (the Grand Canal was well-appointed with means of egress for those who fell or flung themselves into it) and trudged back to Josh’s palazzo alone — Josh having had his hands full keeping Poppy out of the clutches of the carabinieri, who showed up shortly after Quentin went under — Quentin’s mind was on fire with the only piece of useful information the dragon had given him: that there was still a way back to Fillory. They weren’t going to get the button, but he could let go of that now, because there was a way back. If they could just figure out what the dragon meant.

He thought about it while he rinsed off salt and oil and heavy-metal particles and worse in a half-hour shower at high temperature and high pressure and washed his hair three times and dried off and finally tossed his ruined clothes, his beloved Fillorian clothes, his royal clothes, into the trash and crawled into bed. The first door, the dragon had said. The first door. The first door. What did it mean?

Of course there were other words in there to think about. There was a lot to take away from that brief conversation. The old gods were returning. Something about being a hero. All definitely important. Of paramount importance. But the first door: that was the action item. He had the scent. He was going to do it, he was going to follow the clues, and get them out of here and back where they belonged. He was going to be a hero, damn it all, whatever the dragon said. He would lose whatever he had to lose, if that’s what it took to win.

Poppy woke him up the next morning at seven. It was like Christmas morning for her. She was just so excited, and she’d waited as long as she could. She wasn’t even jealous. She’d already had three cappuccinos, and she’d brought him one. Australians. He thought she was going to start bouncing on his bed.

They all worked through the possibilities together over breakfast.

“The first door,” Josh said. “So it’s some primal, like, door. Like Stonehenge.”

“Stonehenge is a calendar,” Poppy said. “It’s not a door.”

In the course of general orientation Poppy had almost incidentally been brought up to speed on the existence of Fillory. Irritatingly, she took it in stride, the way she did everything else. She was interested in it from an intellectual point of view. She assimilated the information. But it didn’t set her imagination burning the way it had Quentin’s.

“Maybe it’s like a time-lock. Like on a vault.”

“Dude!” Quentin said. “Forget Stonehenge! It must be something in Venice, like a sea-gate or something.”

“Venice is a port. That’s a kind of door. A portal. The whole city is a door.”

“Yeah, but the first?”

“Or it’s a metaphorical door,” Poppy said. “The Bible or something. Like in Dan Brown.”

“You know, I bet it’s something about the pyramids,” Josh said.

“It means the Chatwins’ house,” Julia said.

The conversation stopped.

“What do you mean?” Poppy said.

“Their aunt’s house. In Cornwall. Where they discovered Fillory. That was the first door.”

It was nice to see Poppy beaten to the punch for once.

“But how do you know?” Poppy asked.

“I know,” Julia said. Quentin hoped that she wouldn’t say what she was about to say next, but she said it anyway. “I can feel it.”

“What do you mean, feel it?” Poppy said.

“Why do you care?” Julia said.

“Because I’m curious.”

Quentin intervened. Julia seemed to have taken an instinctive, prickly dislike to Poppy.

“It makes sense. What’s the first way people got into Fillory? Through the Chatwins’ house. The clock in the back hall.”

“I don’t know,” Josh said. He rubbed his round stubbly chin. “I thought you could never get in the same way twice. And anyway, Martin Chatwin was a little kid. That’s fine for him, but no way I could fit through the door of a grandfather clock. Not even you could.”

“All right,” Quentin said. “Sure, but—”

“Plus it was supposed to be a personal invitation, specific to the Chatwins,” Josh went on. “Like, those particular kids were particularly awesome in some way, so Ember summoned them so they could use their awesome personal qualities to fix shit in Fillory.”

“We have awesome personal qualities,” Quentin said. “I think we should go. It’s our best lead.”

“I am going,” Julia said.

“Road trip!” Josh said, turning on a dime.

“All right.” It felt good to be making decisions anyway, whatever they were based on. It felt good to get moving again. “We’ll go tomorrow morning. Unless anybody has a better idea before then.”

It was getting increasingly hard to not notice that Poppy was helpless with laughter.

“I’m sorry!” she said. “I really am. It’s just that — I mean, I know it’s real, or I mean I guess it’s real, but you do realize that this is a kids’ thing? Fillory? It’s like you’re worried about how to get to Candy Land! Or I don’t know, Smurftown.”

Julia got up and left. She didn’t even bother to get annoyed. She took Fillory seriously, and she had no patience for, and no interest in, anyone who didn’t. He hadn’t noticed till now, but Julia could be pretty unpleasant when she wanted to be.

“You think Candy Land is real?” Josh said. “’Cause I would ditch Fillory in a red-hot minute for that shit. Chocolate Swamp and all. And have you seen Princess Frostine?”

“Maybe it’s not real to you,” Quentin said, a little stiffly. “It’s just that it’s very real to us. Or to me anyway. It’s where I live. It’s my home.”

“I know, I know! I’m sorry. I really am.” Poppy wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. Maybe you just have to see it.”

“Maybe you do.”

But, Quentin thought, you probably never will.

The next day they all went to Cornwall.

That’s where the Chatwins’ house was: the house where in 1917 the Chatwin children went to stay with their aunt Maude, and met Christopher Plover, and found their way into Fillory, and the whole magnificent, wretched story began. It was incredible that the house still existed, and had been sitting there all this time, and that you could just go there.

But in a way it was incredible that he hadn’t been there already. The Chatwin house wasn’t open to the public, but its general whereabouts weren’t a secret. It was a matter of historical-slash-Wikipedian record. Nobody had torn it down. It’s not like somebody was going to stop them, other than possibly the current owners and the local constabulary. It was about time he went there, if only to pay his respects at what was basically the Trinity test site of the Fillorian mythos.

As far as getting there went, Josh swore up and down that he’d been doing serious work with opening portals lately, and he was pretty sure he could get one through to Cornwall. Quentin asked Josh where he thought Cornwall was, then immediately rephrased and said he would give Josh a hundred dollars if he could tell him whether Cornwall was in England, Ireland, or Scotland. Smelling a trick question, Josh went nonlinear and guessed Canada.

But when Quentin actually showed Josh where it was on a map, way down at the southwestern tip of England, Josh redoubled his swearing — that shit’s practically next door! it’s in Europe—and went into a very technically sophisticated disquisition on lines of magnetic force and astral folding. It really was time Quentin got out of the habit of underestimating him.

Poppy said she wanted to come too.

“I’ve never been to Cornwall,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to meet a native speaker.”

“Of English?” Josh said. “Because you know, I can probably introduce you.”

“Of Cornish, jackass. It’s a Brythonic language. Meaning it’s indigenous to Britain, like Welsh and Breton. And Pictish. Before everything was polluted by the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. There’s tons of power in those old languages. Cornish died out a couple hundred years ago, but there’s a big revival happening now. Where are we going exactly?”

They were still sitting around the breakfast table, which over the course of the morning had become the lunch table. Espresso cups and wobbly towers of plates and silverware had been transferred to the floor to make room for a massive atlas Josh retrieved from the library, along with the Fillory books and a biography of Christopher Plover.

“It’s called Fowey,” Quentin said. “It’s on the south coast.”

“Hm,” Poppy said. She put a fingertip on the map. “We could come in through Penzance. It’s a couple of hours’ drive from there, tops.”

“Penzance?” Josh said. “Like as in the pirates of? Since when is that a real place?”

“See, okay, I want to say something about this,” Poppy said. She pushed the atlas away and sat back in her chair. “If I could have the floor for just a moment. Yes, Penzance is a real place. It’s a town. It’s in Cornwall. And it’s real, as in it exists on Earth. You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here! I mean, forget Penzance, Tintagel is real!”

“Is that — didn’t King Arthur live there?” Quentin said weakly.

“King Arthur lived in Camelot. But he was conceived at Tintagel, supposedly. It’s a castle in Cornwall.”

“Fuck it,” Josh said. “Poppy’s right, let’s go there.”

It was amazing. Quentin had never met a magician like Poppy. How could someone so utterly literal-minded, so resolutely uninterested in anything beyond mundane reality, work magic?

“Yes, but you see,” he said, “the fact is, King Arthur probably wasn’t conceived at Tintagel. Because he probably didn’t exist. Or if he did exist he was probably some depressing Pictish warlord who was always killing people and breaking them on the wheel and raping their widows. He probably died of the plague at thirty-two. See, that’s my problem with this world, if you really want to know. I’m pretty sure that when you say that King Arthur was ‘real,’ you don’t mean King Arthur like in the books. You don’t actually mean the good King Arthur.

“Whereas, in Fillory — and feel free to find this hilarious, Poppy, but it’s true — there are actual real kings who aren’t bullshit. And I’m one of them. Plus there are unicorns and pegasi and elves and dwarves and all that.”

He could have added that some very bad things were real in Fillory that weren’t real here. But that wouldn’t have strengthened his argument.

“There are not elves,” Julia said.

“Whatever! That’s not the point! The point is, I could pretend I don’t have a choice, and just live here my whole life. I could even go live in Tintagel. But I do have a choice, and I only have one life, and if it’s all right with you I’m going to spend it in Fillory, in my castle, chilling with dwarves and sleeping on pegasus feathers.”

“Because it’s easier,” Poppy said. “And why not do the easiest possible thing? Because isn’t that always the best thing?”

“Yes, why not? Why not?”

Quentin had absolutely no idea why Poppy aggravated him so much, and so efficiently, with such great precision. And he didn’t know why he sounded so much like Benedict right now either.

“All right already,” Josh said. “Stop. You live here. You live in Fillory. Everybody’s happy.”

“Sure,” Poppy chirped.

God, Quentin thought. It’s like Janet all over again.

They assembled two hours later in the narrow street behind the palazzo. The building was too heavily warded to cast a portal inside it.

“I thought maybe we could do it down there.” Josh peered doubtfully down the street. “There’s one of those tiny Venetian micro-alleys down there. Nobody ever uses it.”

Nobody else had a better suggestion. Quentin felt shifty — it was like they were looking for a place to shoot up, or have sex outside. Josh led them twenty yards down the street, which itself wasn’t much more than an alley, then cut left into a gap between buildings. There was barely room for two people to walk next to each other. At the end of the alley was a bright ribbon of water and sunlight: the Grand Canal. It was deserted, but Josh hadn’t been completely right about nobody ever using the alley, because somebody had definitely used it as a urinal not too long ago.

It reminded Quentin of when he used to catch a portal back to Brakebills at the end of summer. Usually they’d send him down some random local alley and put the portal at the end. The thought of it ignited a hot coal of nostalgia in his chest, for a time when he didn’t know better.

“Let me just see how much of this I remember. .”

Josh pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, on which he’d scribbled neat columns of coordinates and vectors. Poppy, who was taller than him, kibitzed over his shoulder.

“See, it’s not direct,” he said, “but there’s a junction you can use, it’s out in the English Channel somewhere.”

“Why don’t you go through Belfast?” Poppy said. “Everybody does. Then you double back south. It’s actually shorter in astral geometry.”

“Nah, nah.” Josh squinted at his writing. “This is way more elegant. You’ll see.”

“I’m just saying, if you miss the junction and we go in the water, it’s a long swim to Guernsey. .”

Josh stuffed the paper in his back pocket and squared off into his spellcasting stance. He spoke the words quietly and clearly, without hurrying. With a lot more confidence than Quentin ever remembered him having, he made a series of symmetrical movements with his arms, shifting his fingers rapidly through different positions. Then he squared his shoulders, bent his knees, and hooked his fingers firmly underhand into the air, like he was preparing to haul open an especially heavy garage door.

Sparks flew. Poppy yipped in surprise and stepped back in a hurry. Josh straightened his back and heaved upward. Reality cracked, and the crack slowly widened revealing behind it something else — green grass and brighter, whiter sunlight. When the portal was halfway open Josh stopped and shook out his hands, which smoked. He outlined the top of the doorway with his fingers, then the sides — one side wasn’t quite straight, and he accidentally snipped off some of the alley wall. Then he got under it again and pulled and pushed it open the rest of the way.

Quentin kept glancing at the mouth of the alley while all this was going on. He heard voices, but nobody walked by. Josh stopped to check his work. Now in the middle of the bright Venetian afternoon there stood a rectangle of cooler, somehow higher-definition English noon. Josh bunched his sleeve in his fist and rubbed off a last smudge of Venice.

“All right?” he said. “Pretty good?” His pants were scored with pinhole burns from the sparks.

Everyone had to admit it looked pretty good.

They stepped through, one by one, gingerly — the bottom of the doorway wasn’t quite flush with the pavement, and you could shear off toes on the edge if you weren’t careful. But the connection was tight, with no sensation as you went through. It was a totally other level of workmanship, Quentin thought with satisfaction, from the crude portals they’d gone through between the safe houses.

They had skipped Penzance after all, as well as Belfast: Josh brought them out in a public park not far from the center of Fowey. This kind of precision over that much distance hadn’t been possible even a few years ago, but Google Street View was an absolute boon to the art and craft of creating long-distance portals. Josh went through last and scrubbed it out behind them.

Quentin didn’t think he’d ever seen anywhere as quintessentially English-looking as Fowey. Or maybe he meant Cornish-looking, he wasn’t sure what the difference was. Poppy would know. Either way it was a small town at the mouth of a river that was also called Fowey, and Beatrix Potter could have drawn it. The air was cool and fresh after the summer fug of Venice. The streets were narrow and winding and shinsplintingly steep. The sheer volume of floral window boxes overhead almost blocked out the sun.

At the little office of tourism in the center of town they learned that the various Foweys were all pronounced “Foy,” and that even aside from Christopher Plover the town was something of a hotbed of fictional settings. Manderley from Rebecca was supposed to be nearby, as was Toad Hall from The Wind in the Willows. Plover’s house was a few miles out of town. The National Trust owned it now; it was enormous, and some days it was open to tourists. The Chatwins’ house was privately owned, and not on any tourist maps, but it couldn’t be far away. According to legend, and all the biographies, it abutted Plover’s property directly.

They sat on a bench in the thin English sunlight, like clarified butter, while Poppy went off to rent a car — she was the only one of them who carried the full complement of valid IDs and credit cards. (When Julia pointed out that she could have stolen one just as easily, Poppy looked at her with wordless horror.) She returned in a peppy silver Jag — who would have thought you could even get one out here in Smurftown? she said. They knocked back a pub lunch and set out.

It was Quentin’s first time in England, and he was amazed. Once they got up the coastal slope and out of town, out into the lumpy, uneven pastures dotted with sheep and stitched together with dense dark hedges, it looked more like Fillory than he’d thought anywhere on Earth could. Even more than Venice. Why hadn’t anybody told him? Except of course they had, and he hadn’t believed them. Poppy, in the driver’s seat, grinned at him via the rearview mirror as if to say, see?

Maybe she was right, he hadn’t given this world enough credit. Zipping along the narrow highways and shady lanes of rural Cornwall, the four of them could have been regular people, civilians, and would they have been any less happy? Even without magic they had the grass and that blessed country solitude and the sun flickering past between the branches and the solace of an expensive car that somebody else was paying for. What kind of an asshole wouldn’t be satisfied with that? For the first time in his life Quentin seriously considered the idea that he could be happy without Fillory — not just resigned, but happy.

They were certainly as close to Fillory as you could get on Earth. They were closing in on the Chatwins’ house. Even the place names sounded Fillorian: Tywardreath, Castle Dore, Lostwithiel. It was as if the green landscape of Fillory was hidden right behind this one, and this was a thin place, where the other world showed through.

Cornwall was certainly having a good effect on Julia. She was almost lively. She was the only one of them with the gift of not getting carsick while she read, so as they drove she paged through the Fillory books, applying stickies to certain passages, reading others out loud. She was compiling a list of all the different ways the children had gotten through: a practical traveler’s guide to leaving this world behind.

“In The World in the Walls Martin gets in through the grandfather clock, and so does Fiona. In the second one Rupert gets in from his school, so that does not help us, and I believe Helen does too, but I cannot find it. In The Flying Forest they get in by climbing a tree. That might be our best bet.”

“We wouldn’t have to break into the house,” Quentin said. “And we could all fit.”

“Exactly. And in The Secret Sea they ride a magic bicycle, so let us keep an eye out for that. Maybe there is a garage or a shed with old things in it.”

“You realize the fans have probably picked this place clean like years ago,” Josh said. “We can’t be the first people to think of this.”

“Then in The Wandering Dune Helen and Jane are painting in a meadow somewhere nearby. Which seems like a long shot, but if we have to we can go back to Fowey for art supplies. And that is it.”

“It’s not quite it.” Sorry, but nobody one-upped Quentin on Fillory trivia, not even Julia. “Martin gets back in in The Flying Forest, at the end, though Plover doesn’t say how he did it. And there’s a book you’re missing, The Magicians, which is Jane’s book about how she went back to Fillory to find Martin. She used the magic buttons to get in, which she found in the well, where Helen threw a whole box of them. Jane only used one to get back, so there may be more lying around.”

Julia turned around in her seat.

“How do you know that?”

“I met her. Jane Chatwin. It was in Fillory. I was getting better from my injuries after we fought Martin. After Alice died.”

There was silence in the car, broken by the ticking of the turn signal as Poppy took a fork in the road. Julia studied him with those empty, unreadable eyes.

“Sometimes I forget everything you have been through,” she said finally, and turned around to face forward.

It only took them forty-five minutes to find Plover’s house, aka Darras House, which must have once been in the deep countryside, but now you could get there on a well-maintained two-lane road. Poppy pulled over on the other side. There was no shoulder, and the Jag tilted at a perilous angle.

All four of them got out and straggled across the road. There was no traffic. It was about three-thirty in the afternoon. The grounds were surrounded by a formidable stone wall, and the gate framed, with an almost fussy architectural perfection, a view of a palatial Georgian country house set back deep in carefully tended grounds. Darras House was one of those rectangular English houses made of gray stone that probably conformed to some nutjob eighteenth-century theory about symmetry and ideal proportions and perfect ratios.

Quentin knew Plover had been rich — he’d made one fortune in America already, selling dry goods, whatever they were, before he came to Cornwall and wrote the Fillory novels — but the scale of it was still stunning. It wasn’t so much a house as a cliff with windows in it.

“Jeez,” Josh said.

“Yeah,” said Poppy.

“Hard to imagine somebody living there all by themselves,” Quentin said.

“He probably had servants.”

“Was he gay?”

“Dude, totally,” Josh said.

There was a sign on the gate, DARRAS HOUSE/PLOVER FARM, with a schedule of hours and tours and entrance fees. A blue plaque gave them a capsule biography of Plover. It was a Thursday, and the house was open. A large black bird retched loudly in the underbrush.

“So are we going in?” Poppy asked.

He’d thought they would, on the off chance that they might stumble on something, and so they could say they had. But now that they’d arrived the place felt empty. Nothing here called to Quentin. Plover had never gone to Fillory. All he’d done was write books. The magic was somewhere else.

“Nah,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Nobody disagreed. They could come back tomorrow. If they were still on Earth.

They trooped back across the road and spread out the map on the hood of the car. The exact location of the house the Chatwins had stayed at near Fowey was a matter for speculation, but not wild speculation. There was a limited number of places it could be. Plover’s books were full of enchanting descriptions of how the Chatwin kids, singly and en masse, ran and skipped and cycled over from their aunt Maude’s house to visit their beloved “uncle” Christopher. Plover had even famously had a little child-size gate built in the wall that separated their properties to let them through.

They had two Plover biographies with them, one a soft-focus hagiography from the 1950s, authorized by the family, the other a hardnosed psychoanalytic exposé from the early 1990s that anatomized Plover’s complex and “problematic” sexuality, as symbolically dramatized in the various Fillory novels. They stuck to that one. It had better geography.

They knew that the Chatwin house was on one Darrowby Lane, which helped, although the Cornish were even less interested in signage than the Venetians. Fortunately Poppy turned out to be excellent at this kind of cross-country dead-reckoning navigation. At first they thought she must be using some kind of advanced geographical magic until Josh noticed that she had an iPhone in her lap.

“Yeah, but I used magic to jailbreak it,” she said.

It was late afternoon, and they’d traversed what seemed like several hundred verdant and Watership Down—esque but stubbornly unmarked and unidentifiable rural byways, and the light was turning bluish, before they settled on a target property, which sat on a narrow lane that wasn’t definitely not called Darrowby and as near as they could tell pretty much had to back onto Plover’s enormous estate.

There was no wall or gate, just a gravel track curving back through the late-summer trees. A square stone post next to it supported a NO TRESPASSING sign. They couldn’t see the house from here.

Quietly Julia read out the relevant passage from The World in the Walls:

The house was very grand — three stories tall, with a façade made of brick and stone, and enormous windows, and endless numbers of fireplaces and window seats and curving back stairs and other advantages, which their London house distinctly lacked. Among those advantages were the sprawling grounds around the house, which included long straight alleys and white gravel paths and dark-green pools of grass.

There was a time when Quentin could probably have said it along with her from memory.

Quentin sat in the car and stared across the road. He couldn’t see much evidence of anything as nice as that. The place didn’t exactly scream “portal to another world” either. He tried to imagine the Chatwins arriving here for the first time, the five of them crammed into the backseat of some sputtering black proto-automobile, more carriage than car, and with a fair amount of locomotive DNA in it as well, their luggage tied to the boot with twine and Victorian leather strappage. They would have been funereally silent, resigned to exile from London. The youngest, five-year-old Jane, the future Watcherwoman, reclining on her older sister’s lap as on a chaise longue, lost in a fog of longing for her parents, who were respectively fighting World War I and raving in a posh rest home. Martin (who would grow up to become a monster who would kill Alice) keeping his composure for the sake of the youngsters, his soft boy’s jaw set in grim preadolescent determination.

They’d been so young and innocent and hopeful, and they’d found something more wonderful than they could ever have hoped for, and it had destroyed them.

“What do you think?” he said. “Julia?”

“This is the place.”

“All right. I’m going to go in. Look around.”

“I’ll come,” Poppy said.

“No,” Quentin said. “I want to go alone.”

To his surprise it worked. She stayed put.

Becoming invisible was a simple idea in theory, but in practice it was a lot harder than you’d think. It had been done, but it took years of meticulous self-erasure, and once accomplished it was practically impossible to undo; apart from anything else you could never be sure you’d reinstated your visible self completely accurately. You came out looking like a portrait of yourself. The best work-around Quentin knew was more like an animal’s protective coloring. If you were standing in front of some leaves, you looked drab and leafy. If you weren’t moving or jumping around, an observer’s eye tended to skate over you. Usually. If the light wasn’t too good. The car door chunked shut in the stillness. He felt the others’ eyes on his back as he crossed the road.

There was something on top of the stone post: buttons. They were scattered in the grass around it too. Big ones, small ones, pearly ones, tortoiseshells. It must be a fan ritual. You come by, you leave a button, the way people left joints on Jim Morrison’s grave.

Still, he stopped and touched each of them, one by one, just to make sure none of them were genuine.

The camouflage spell was unbelievably crude. He picked up a big leathery oak leaf, snapped off a shingle of bark from a tree, plucked a blade of the scanty grass, and collected a granite pebble from the edge of the road. He whispered a rhyming chant in French over them, spat on them, and — the glamorous life of the modern sorcerer — stuffed them in his pocket.

Further up and further in. He stayed off the gravel driveway and picked his way through the trees for five minutes, until there were no more, and then he was looking at Aunt Maude Chatwin’s house.

It was like he was looking back through time. The unpromising driveway had been a feint, a hustle. It really was a grand house; it probably would have qualified as magnificent if they hadn’t just come from Plover’s house. As Quentin got closer the gravel track pulled itself together and became a proper driveway, which clove in two and formed a circle with a modest but still entirely effective fountain at the center. Three rows of tall windows adorned the front, and the gray slate roof was a beautiful profusion of chimneys and gables.

Quentin hadn’t known what to expect. A ruin, maybe, or some appalling new Modernist façade. But the Chatwin house was perfectly appointed and restored, and the lawns looked like they’d been trimmed that morning. It was everything Quentin had hoped for, except for one thing. It wasn’t empty.

That well-maintained lawn was littered with cars. They were nice cars that made the rental Jag look poky by comparison. Yellow light spilled out of the lower floors and out into the mellowing dusk, chased by some nicely judged, not-overamplified early Rolling Stones. Whoever’s private hands the house was in, they were having a party.

Quentin stood there, on the outside looking in, as a little convocation of evening gnats began to gather over his head. It seemed sacrilegious — he wanted to barge in and order everybody out, like Jesus ridding the temple of moneylenders. This was ground zero for the primal fantasy of the twentieth century, the place where Earth and Fillory had first kissed like two cosmic billiard balls. Over the chatter a roar went up, and a woman shrieked and then laughed uncontrollably.

But looking on the bright side, it was a tactical windfall. It was a big enough party that they could mingle in, the girls especially. They wouldn’t sneak in at all, they would walk in the front door. Brazen it out. Then when any suspicions had been allayed they would slip upstairs and see what they could see. He walked back to the car to get the others.

They found a spot for the car on the lawn. They weren’t the least plausible bunch of partygoers imaginable. Quentin had invested in some nice clothes in Venice, charged to Josh’s bottomless credit card.

“If anybody asks just say John brought you.”

“Good one. Dude, are you gonna. .?” Josh gestured at Quentin’s appearance.

Oh, right. Probably better not to show up looking like a pile of mulch. He killed the camouflage spell. Crossing the threshold, Quentin closed his eyes for just a moment. He thought of little Jane Chatwin, still alive and at large somewhere. Maybe she would be at the party too.

Josh made straight for the bar.

“Dude!” Quentin hissed. “Stay on mission!”

“We’re in deep cover. I’m getting into character.”

For all that it was a party at Maude Chatwin’s house, it was also just a party like any other party. There were pretty people and unpretty people, drunk people and undrunk people, people who didn’t care what anybody thought about them and people standing in corners afraid to open their mouths lest somebody look directly at them.

Deep cover notwithstanding, Josh revealed himself to be conspicuously American by asking the bartender for beer. He wound up settling for a Pimm’s Cup, which he consumed with an air of disappointed bafflement. But he and Poppy made themselves agreeable to the other guests with an ease and skill that Quentin found awe-inspiring. Genuinely social people never ceased to amaze him. Their brains seemed to generate an inexhaustible fund of things to say, naturally, with no effort, out of nothing at all. It was a trick Quentin had never figured out.As an unattached American male among English strangers, he felt inherently suspicious. He did his best to affiliate himself with small groups and nod along politely in response to people who weren’t especially talking to him.

Julia found a wall to put her slender back against and looked decorously mysterious. Only one man dared to approach her, a tall Cantabridgian type with a half-grown beard, and she sent him packing in terms so uncertain he had to salve his wounds with cucumber sandwich. After a half hour of this Quentin felt he could begin a slow drift toward the stairs — not the grand Tara-style ones in front but a more unassuming, utilitarian staircase toward the back of the house. One by one he caught the others’ eyes in turn and inclined his head. We were just looking for a bathroom? All four of us? Too bad they didn’t have drugs; that would have made a better cover story.

The staircase performed a tight switchback up to the second floor, a hushed and darkened maze of white walls and parquet. The rumble and tinkle of the party was still clearly audible, but hushed now, like distant surf. There were a few kids up here, helling along the hallways and racketing in and out of rooms, laughing a little too hysterically, playing some game nobody knew the rules of, flopping down on the coats when they got tired, the kind of forced pack of one-shot friends that exists on the margins of all grown-up parties.

The World in the Walls wasn’t a how-to manual, and it was irritatingly vague as to the precise location of the famous clock. “One of the back corridors of one of the upper floors” was all the detail Plover gave them. Maybe it would have been better to split up, except that would have violated the basic teaching of every movie ever made. Quentin would have worried that everybody else would slip through into Fillory without him, leaving him behind in reality like the last man standing in a game of Sardines.

Whoever lived here now didn’t use the top floor at all, and it had gone unrestored. Another piece of luck. They hadn’t even refinished the floors — the varnish had worn off them, and the walls were old wallpaper, with even older wallpaper showing through in places. The ceilings were low. The rooms were full of mismatched and broken furniture under sheets. The quieter it got the realer Fillory began to feel. It loomed in the shadows, under beds, behind the wallpaper, in the corner of his eye, just out of view. Ten minutes from now they could be back on the Muntjac.

This was the place. This was where the children played, where Martin vanished, where Jane watched, where the whole terrible fantasy began. And there in the hallway, the back hallway — as it had been written, as the prophecy foretold — stood a grandfather clock.

It was a beast of a clock, with a big fat brass face orbited by four smaller dials tracking the months and the phases of the moon and the signs of the zodiac and God knew what else, all framed in plain, uncarved dark wood. The works must have been hellishly complex, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a supercomputer. The wood was the wood of a Fillorian sunset tree, it said in the book, which shed its flaming orange leaves every day at sundown, endured a leafless winter overnight, and then sprouted fresh green new ones at dawn.

Quentin, Julia, Josh, and Poppy gathered around it. It was like they were re-enacting a Fillory book — no, they were in one, a new one, and they were writing it together. The pendulum wasn’t moving. Quentin wondered if the connection could still be live, or whether it had broken after the children went through. He couldn’t feel anything. But it had to work, he would make it work. He was going back to Fillory if he had to cram himself into every fucking piece of cabinetry in this house.

Even so it was going to be a tight fit. Maybe if he breathed out all his air and wriggled through sideways. Not how he planned to make his triumphant return to Fillory, but at this point he’d take whatever worked.

“Quentin,” Josh said.

“Yeah.”

“Quentin, look at me.”

He had to tear his eyes away from the clock. When he did he found Josh watching him with a gravity that didn’t suit him. It was a new-Josh gravity.

“You know I’m not going, right?”

He did know. He’d just let himself forget in all the excitement. Things were different now. They weren’t kids. Josh was part of a different story.

“Yeah,” Quentin said. “I guess I do know. Thanks for coming this far. What about you, Poppy? Chance of a lifetime.”

“Thank you for asking me.” She seemed to mean it, to take it in the spirit in which it was offered. She put a hand on her chest. “But I’ve got my whole life here. I can’t go to Fillory.”

Quentin looked at Julia, who’d taken off her shades in deference to the gloom of the top floor. Just you and me, kid. Together they stepped forward. Quentin got down on one knee. The roar of their imminent escape thundered in his ears.

As soon as he got up close he could see that it wasn’t going to work. The thing wasn’t ticking, but more than that it just looked too solid. The clock was what it was and nothing more — it was brute, mundane matter, wood and metal. He turned the little knob and opened the glass case and looked in at the hanging pendulum and chimes and whatnot other brass hardware, dangling there impotently. His heart had already gone out of it.

It was dark in here. He reached in and rapped the back of the case with his knuckles. Nothing. He closed his eyes.

“Goddamn it,” he said.

Never mind. It wasn’t over. They could always try climbing trees. Though at that moment he felt less like climbing a tree than he’d ever felt like doing anything in his entire life.

“You’re doing it wrong, you know.”

Their heads turned in unison. It was a little kid’s voice, a boy. He was standing at the end of the corridor in his pajamas, watching them. He might have been eight years old.

“What am I doing wrong?” Quentin said.

“You have to set it going first,” the boy said. “It says in the book. But it doesn’t work anymore, I tried it.”

The boy had fine tousled brown hair and blue eyes. A more quintessential English moppet it would have been hard to find, right down to his having a spot of trouble pronouncing his l’s and r’s. He could have been cloned from Christopher Robin’s toenail clippings.

“Mummy says she’s going to send it to the shop, but she never does. I climbed the trees too. And I did a painting. Lots of them actually. D’you want to see?”

They stared at him. Not finding himself rebuffed, he walked over on bare feet. He had that dismal air of sprightly self-possession that some English children have. Just looking at him, you knew you were going to have to play a game with him.

“I even had Mummy pull me round in an old wagon we found in the garage.” He said it garage. “It’s not the same as a bicycle, but I had to try it.”

“I can see that,” Quentin said. “I can see where you would have to do that.”

“But we can keep looking though,” he said. “I like it. My name’s Thomas.”

He actually held out his little paw for Quentin to shake, like a tiny alien ambassador. Poor kid. It wasn’t his fault. He must be so chronically neglected by his parents that he had taken to press-ganging random party guests into paying attention to him. He made Quentin think of faraway Eleanor, the little girl on the Outer Island.

The really awful thing was that Quentin was going to go along with it, and not for the right reasons. He took the proffered paw. It wasn’t that he felt bad for Thomas, though he did. It was that Thomas was a valuable ally. Adults never got into Fillory by themselves, at least not without a magic button. It was always the kids. What Quentin needed, he realized, was a native guide to act as bait. Maybe if he let young Thomas here course along ahead of him, like a hound across the moors, he just might flush out a portal or two. He was going to use Thomas to chum the waters.

“Just get me a drink,” Quentin said to Josh as Thomas pulled him away. As they passed Poppy, Quentin firmly grabbed her hand. The misery train was leaving the station, and Quentin wasn’t going to travel alone.

It emerged, with remarkably little prompting from Quentin or Poppy, that Thomas’s parents had bought the Chatwin house a couple of years ago from the children of Fiona Chatwin; Thomas and his parents were themselves, through some connection that Quentin couldn’t follow, distantly related to Plover. Maybe that was where the money came from. Thomas had been simply mad with excitement when he heard the news. Weren’t all his friends at school jealous! Of course now he had all new friends, because before he’d been in London, and now they were in Cornwall. But his friends here were much nicer, and he only missed London when he thought about the Rainforest Life exhibit at the zoo. Had Quentin ever been to the zoo in London? If he could choose, would he be an Asian lion or a Sumatran tiger? And did he know that there was a monkey called a red titi monkey? It wasn’t rude, you could say it because it was a real kind of monkey. And didn’t he agree that, under certain extreme circumstances, the murder of children was completely ethically justifiable?

Towed by Thomas the tank engine, they toured the grounds. As a threesome they conducted a deep-cavity search of the top floor, including closets and attics. They made seven or eight circuits of the enormous green behind the house, with special attention paid to rodent burrows and spooky trees and copses large enough for a human being to infiltrate. Meanwhile Josh kept up an underground railroad of gin-and-tonics, handing them off to Quentin whenever he happened to pass by, like a spectator handing Gatorade to a marathoner.

It could have been worse. The view from the back terrace was even grander than the front. An orderly English estate had been hacked out of the rough Cornish countryside by main force, including a flat, still swimming pool that by some landscaper’s artifice had mostly escaped looking anachronistic. Beyond it a perfect Constable vista rolled down and away, green hills and fallow hay fields and pocket villages, all slowly dissolving in the viscous light of a golden English sunset.

Thomas enjoyed the attention. And Poppy — he’d give her this — was a heroically good sport. She had no real stake in how all this turned out, but she pitched right in. She was nothing if not game. Moreover she was better at it than he was, hardened as she was by many tours in the babysitting trenches.

It all finished up, predictably, in Thomas’s bedroom. By ten thirty even Thomas, with his titanically fresh-faced lust for life, couldn’t be coaxed into one more round of Find Fillory. They all sat or sprawled on the rainbow-colored woolly yarn rug in Thomas’s room. It was a huge room, a little kingdom all Thomas’s own. It even had an extra bed in it, in the shape of a space rocket, as if to cruelly emphasize Thomas’s only-childhood, the hilarious sleepovers he wasn’t having. Josh and Julia joined them there. The party raged on beneath them, into the night, having degenerated from a cocktail party into a regular party party.

They should leave, obviously. At this point Thomas had gone from harasser to harassed. Maybe Josh was right, maybe they’d try Stonehenge next. But not before they’d burned this bridge right down to its charred pilings.

So they played other games. They ground out rounds of Animal Snap and rummy and Connect 4. They played board games, Cluedo and Monopoly and Mouse Trap, until Thomas was too tired and they were too drunk to follow the rules. They dug deeper into Thomas’s toy closet, and thus further back into Thomas’s childhood, for games so mathematically simple they were barely games at all, lacking as they did almost any strategic element: War and Snakes and Ladders and Hi Ho! Cherry-O and finally High C’s, a primally simple alphabet game in which the main goal seemed to be to win the pregame argument with your fellow players over who got to be the dolphin. After that everything else was blind chance and cartoon fish.

Quentin took a slug of flat, warm gin-and-tonic. It tasted like defeat. This was how the dream died, in a welter of plastic primary-colored board game pieces, upstairs at a bad party. They would keep looking, they would knock on all the first doors they could think of, but for the first time, lying there sprawled on the spare bed, his long legs flat out, with his back against Thomas’s rocketship headboard, Quentin took seriously the possibility that he wasn’t going back after all. Probably hundreds of years had gone by in Fillory anyway. The ruins of Whitespire were dissolving in the rain, white stones softening like sugar cubes under green moss, by a now nameless bay. The tombs of King Eliot and Queen Janet were probably long since overgrown with ivy, twin clock-trees rising from their twin plots. Perhaps he was remembered as a legend, King Quentin the Missing. The Once and Future King, like King Arthur. Except unlike Arthur he wasn’t coming back from Avalon. Just the Once King.

Well, it was a fitting place to end it, in the Chatwins’ house, where everything started. The first door. The really funny thing was that even though he’d hit bottom, he couldn’t honestly say that it was all that bad there. He had his friends, or some of them. They had Josh’s money. They still had magic, and alcohol, and sex, and food. They had everything. He thought of Venice, and the pure green Cornish landscape they’d just driven through. There was so much more to this world than he thought. What the hell did he have to complain about?

Fuck-all was the answer. One day he’d have a house like this too, and a kid like Thomas, who lay fast asleep with the lights on and his arms thrown up over his head, a marathon runner breaking the tape in his dreams. He and some lovely and talented Mrs. Quentin (Who? Poppy? Surely not) would get married, and Fillory would fade away like the dream it so fundamentally was. So what if he wasn’t a king. It had been lovely for a while, but here was real life, and he would make the most of it like everybody else. What kind of a hero was he, if he couldn’t do that?

Julia kicked his foot. By unspoken agreement they were all grimly determined to finish the game of High C’s, and it was his turn. He flicked the spinner and moved forward two waves. Josh, who was playing as the whale, had a commanding lead, but Julia (the squid) was making a late charge, leaving Poppy (fish) and Quentin (jellyfish) to battle it out for a distant third place.

Josh spun. He was on a charade square.

“Caw!” Josh said. “Caw! Caw!”

“Seagull,” they all said in unison. It was like when they were geese. Josh spun again. Julia belched.

Quentin slumped over behind Poppy’s warm back, onto the infinitely soft and sweet-smelling pillows. From this point of view it was apparent that Poppy was wearing a thong. The bed was not entirely stable. The drinks were catching up with him. It wasn’t clear whether the spins were going to spin themselves out or gather speed and power and wreak a terrible vengeance upon him for his many transgressions. Well, time would undoubtedly tell.

“Caw!” Josh said.

“Enough already,” Quentin said.

“Caw! Caw!”

“Seagull! I said seagull!”

The light hurt his eyes. It was uncomfortably bright in Thomas’s room. That was enough drinking for tonight. Quentin sat up.

“I know, man,” Josh said. “I heard you.”

“Caw!”

The cawing didn’t stop, nor did the spinning. The bed was definitely in motion, not so much spinning as rocking gently. They all froze.

Poppy reacted first.

“No way.” She lunged off the bed and landed in water. “Goddamn it! No fucking way!”

The sun was hot overhead. A curious albatross was circling over them, making respectful inquiries.

Quentin jumped up on the bed.

“Oh my God! We did it. We did it!”

They had broken through. It wasn’t the end, it was all about to start all over again. He spread his arms wide to the daylight and let the hot sun slam straight down into his face. He was a man reborn. Julia was looking around her and sobbing as though her heart would break. They were back. The dream was real again. They were adrift on the high seas of Fillory.