The Magician King

CHAPTER 17

“Thomas will be so disappointed,” Poppy said. “He missed everything.”

She sat glumly on a sail locker on the deck of the Muntjac, wrapped in a rough ship’s blanket. Her curly hair was flat from the salt water. She’d tried to swim away, back to Earth, back to Thomas’s little-boy bedroom, but when she saw that she had no shot she stroked back to the bed instead, and they’d hauled her dripping back up onto it to await rescue. She was a strong, easy swimmer, which was somehow not surprising.

The bed, while a top-quality bed that contained a fair amount of actual bona fide wood — Thomas’s parents had spared no expense — was only so-so as a raft and had trended downward rapidly as the bedclothes and then the mattress soaked through and lost their buoyancy. Josh sat heavily on it, crisscross applesauce, resigned, Buddha going down with the ship, while the bed gradually swamped, and the cold seawater lapped up over his knees.

But the Muntjac was already in view by then, sheering keenly through the waves toward them, the force of a fresh wind setting it at a rakish angle. Its sails — his sails, Quentin’s sails, with the pale blue ram of Fillory — stood out in taut, proud curves. The power of it, the color, the solidity, the reality of it, were almost too thrilling. A tiny action-figure sailor was already at the railing, pointing in their direction.

Quentin hadn’t for a second doubted that the Muntjac would be there. It seemed like years since he’d seen it. They had come to take him home.

As it bore down on them he’d had a moment of worry: what if centuries had passed, what if Eliot and Janet really were dead, and the Muntjac was the last survivor of the Brakebills era, and he was going home to a court of strangers? But no, there was Bingle at the railing, looking just as he always had, ready to haul his royal body back on board and get back to guarding it.

Though even as they were toweling off, and hugging each other, and making introductions, and securing fresh clothes and hot tea, he could see that not everything aboard the Muntjac was exactly as he’d left it. The ship was older. Not that it was shabby, but it had aged, settled into itself some. What had been glossy — the paint on the railings, the varnish on the deck — was now rubbed to matte. Ropes that had once been bright and prickly were now smooth and soft and dun-colored from having been run through blocks over and over again.

Also Quentin was no longer in charge of the Muntjac. Eliot was.

“Where have you been!” he said, when he was done embracing Quentin. “You ridiculous, ridiculous man. I was starting to think you were dead.”

“I was on Earth. How long have we been gone?”

“A year and a day.”

“God. It was only three days for us.”

“That makes me two years older than you now. How do you think that makes me feel? How was Earth?”

“The same. It ain’t Fillory.”

“Did you bring me back anything?”

“A bed. Josh. An Australian girl named Poppy. I didn’t have a lot of time. And you know how hard you are to shop for.”

Quentin was still in a euphoric state, but the adrenaline was wearing off, and his eyes felt sandy and jet-lagged. Twenty minutes ago it had been midnight, the tail end of a long and arduously alcoholic party, and now it was early afternoon again. They went below to Quentin’s cabin, which was now Eliot’s cabin, and he dried off and changed clothes and cursed Ember that He hadn’t thought to bless Fillory with the miracle of coffee beans.

Then he lay down on Eliot’s bed and looked up at the low woodwork ceiling and told Eliot about everything that had happened. He told him about going back to Brakebills, and about Julia’s safe houses, and how Josh had sold the button. He told him about the Neitherlands being in ruins, and about the dragon, and about the Chatwins’ house.

Eliot sat at the foot of the bed. When Quentin was done Eliot watched him for a minute, slowly tapping the hollow of his upper lip with the tip of his index finger.

“Well,” he said finally. “This is interesting.”

Yes, it was. Although Quentin’s immediate personal interest in it was faltering. He wanted to fall asleep and moreover felt confident of his ability to do so very quickly. Being back in Fillory was a massive dose of comfort, a huge inflatable cushion of relief of the kind stuntmen fall into from great heights without injury, and he sank into it.

Though if Quentin could have had absolutely everything exactly the way he wanted it, he would have asked for one more thing: he didn’t want to be on a boat anymore. He wanted to go home, meaning not just to Fillory but specifically to his room in Castle Whitespire, with its high ceiling and its big bed and its special calm hush. Quentin did not consider himself a great interpreter of signs and wonders, but the lesson of the golden key seemed pretty clear to him. It was this: you’ve already won the game, so quit playing. Remain where you are, in your castle, and you will be safe. No further action on your part is required.

“Eliot,” he said. “Where are we?”

“We’re east. Very far east. Even farther than you went. We left After Island behind two weeks ago.”

“Oh, no.”

“We’re over the horizon.”

“No, no, no.” Quentin closed his eyes. “We can’t be.” He wanted it to be dark, but surly yellow late-afternoon sun continued blasting in through his — Eliot’s — cabin window unabated. “All right. We are. But we’re going back now, right? You found me and Julia. Mission accomplished. End of story.”

“We will go back. We just have to do one more thing first.”

“Eliot, stop. I’m serious. Turn the ship around. I’m never leaving Fillory again.”

“Just one thing. You’ll like it.”

“I don’t think I’m going to like it.”

Eliot smiled broadly, or as broadly as his bad teeth would allow.

“Oh, you’re going to love it,” he said. “It’s an adventure.”

It was unbelievable. Never mind Thomas: he, Quentin, had missed everything. It had started as soon as he left for the Outer Island.

This all came out at a massive feast belowdecks that evening. By then Quentin had almost come to accept that when you were surfing the great interdimensional divide certain days were just destined to stretch out to about thirty-six hours long, and there was nothing you could do except to wait them out till they ended. The new arrivals ate like wolves — their exhaustion had turned into a raging hunger. They’d never had a proper dinner the night before anyway, just the occasional passed hors d’oeuvre. Only Julia picked at her food, managing a bite every few minutes, like her body was an unloved pet that she was being forced to babysit.

“I knew something was up,” Eliot said, cracking open a massive, lethal-looking crimson crab. Like Julia he never seemed to eat, but somehow he got through massive quantities of food anyway, which of course never made him any less skinny. “First off, two days after you left Whitespire, someone tried to kill me in my bath.”

“Really?” Josh said with his mouth full. “And that tipped you off?”

It hadn’t taken long for Josh to get acclimated aboard the Muntjac. Discomfort just wasn’t in his nature. He’d picked up with Eliot exactly where they’d left off two years ago.

“That’s awful,” Quentin said. “Jesus.”

“It was! I was lolling in my bath of an evening, as one does, blameless as a newborn child — more so, if you’ve ever met such a creature, they’re absolutely horrible — and one of my own towel boys came creeping up behind me with a big curvy knife in his hand. He tried to cut my throat.

“I’ll spare you the details”—which is what Eliot said when he was going to march you through everything blow by blow—“but I grabbed his arm, and he went in the water. He’d never been a particularly good towel boy. Perhaps he felt he was meant for better things. But he was no great success as an assassin either, I can tell you. He got his knife against my neck, but nowhere near the artery, and he hadn’t braced himself properly at all. So in he went, and I scrambled out of the water, and I froze it.”

“Dixon’s charm?”

He nodded. “It was no great loss. I was about to get out anyway. I’d put in so many bath salts I didn’t know if it would take, but it froze solid right away. He looked like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. The resemblance was actually quite striking.”

“You and your towel boys,” Josh said. “But I ask for a harem and it’s all, morality this, human rights that.”

“Well, and I spared you a good stabbing, didn’t I?”

Eliot didn’t tan, he was too pale for that, but the sun and the wind had put some texture in his otherwise immaculate pallor, and he’d grown some nicely naval stubble. He’d dropped some of the god-king preciousness that had dominated his persona back at Whitespire, shed some of the gold leaf. He spoke to the crew with an air of easy familiarity and command — even the ones like Bingle whom he’d never met before the ship sailed, and in Quentin’s mind wasn’t supposed to know. Now he knew them better than Quentin did. They’d been at sea together for a year.

“I let him out, of course. I didn’t have the heart to let him suffocate. But would you believe it, he wouldn’t tell us a thing! He was a fanatic of some kind. Or a lunatic, maybe. Same thing. Do you know, some of the generals wanted to torture him? I think Janet would have done it too, but I couldn’t. But I couldn’t just let him go either. He’s in prison now.

“I was shaken, but I suppose you’re not really High King until somebody tries to kill you in your bath. If they ever succeed, by the way, make sure you leave me in there and have a painting done. Like Marat.

“I wanted to let the whole thing drop, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t let me drop. I don’t know what it was. Fillory, I suppose. At any rate, that’s when the wonders started.

“That’s what everyone called them, and I couldn’t think of another name for them. It started out just as feelings. You would look at something, a carpet, or a bowl of fruit, and the colors would seem different. Brighter, more vivid, more saturated. Sudden rushes of grief or excitement or love would come over you for no reason. Some very unmanly crying jags were observed among the barons.

“It was like drugs more than anything else, but I hadn’t taken any drugs. I remember one night in my bedroom lying there smelling spices in the darkness, one after the other. Cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, something else — something wonderful I couldn’t place. Paintings started to change as I walked by them. Just the backgrounds. The clouds would move, or the sky would go from day to night.

“Then I saw a hunting horn hovering before me at dinner. Some of the others saw it too. And one night in the middle of the night I opened the bathroom door, and it opened onto deep forest instead. It’s all the same when it comes to taking a piss, I suppose, but still. It put me right off my game.

“For a while I thought I was going mad, literally mad, until the tree came. A clock-tree grew up right in the middle of the throne room, right through the carpet, in broad daylight. It did it all at once, all in one go, with the whole court watching. And then it just stood there, silently, like a hallucination, ticking and sort of swaying with the energy of its just having grown. It was as if it were saying, ‘Well, here I am. This is me. What are you going to do about it?’

“After that I knew it wasn’t me that had gone mad. It was Fillory.

“I don’t mind telling you I found the whole business more than a little provoking. I was being called, you understand, and I most definitely did not want to come. I understand the appeal this sort of thing has for you, quests and King Arthur and all that. But that’s you. No offense, but it always seemed a bit like boy stuff to me. Sweaty and strenuous and just not very elegant, if you see what I mean. I didn’t need to be called to feel special, I felt special enough already. I’m clever, rich, and good-looking. I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury.”

“Nicely put,” Quentin said. Eliot must have mounted this set piece before.

“Well, and then that damned Seeing Hare came bolting through the room during our afternoon meeting. Scattered the whiskey service and frightened one of my more sensitive protégés half to death. Everyone has a limit. Next morning I called for my hunting leathers, saddled a horse, and went riding out alone into the Queenswood. And you know, I never go anywhere alone, not anymore, but these things have certain protocols and not even the High King — or I suppose especially not the High King — is exempt.”

“The Queenswood,” Quentin said. “Don’t tell me.”

“But I am telling you.” Eliot finished his wine, and a rangy, shaven-headed young man refilled his glass without his having to ask. “I went back to that ridiculous meadow of yours, the round one. You see, you’d been right to want to go in. It was our adventure after all.”

“I was right.” Quentin felt crestfallen. He stared down at his hands. “I can’t believe it, I was right!”

If he hadn’t been so tired, and a bit drunk, it probably wouldn’t have struck him the way it did. But as it was he felt himself filling up with a sense of — how could he put it? He thought he’d learned a lesson about the world, and now he was realizing that the lesson he learned might have been the wrong one. The right adventure had been offered to him, and he’d walked away. If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale said, he’d missed his. Instead he’d spent three days faffing around on Earth for nothing, and nearly got stuck there forever, while Eliot was off on a real quest.

“It’s true,” Eliot said. “Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don’t spoil it.”

“It was supposed to be me, not you!”

“You should have gone on it when you had the chance.”

“You told me not to!”

“Janet told you not to. I don’t know why you listened to her. But look, I know.” Eliot put a hand on his arm. “I know. I had no choice. Whoever is in charge of handing out quests has a damned peculiar sense of humor.

“At any rate, off I went. And I did feel something, you know, as I set off that morning. Nip in the air, sun on my armor, a knight pricking across the plain. I wished you could have been there.

“Though I looked much better than you would have. I had special questing armor made, just for that day, embossed and damascened within an inch of its life. I won’t lie to you, Quentin. I looked magnificent.”

Quentin wondered what he’d been doing at that moment. At least he’d gotten to drink a Coke. That was something. He wished he had one now. He was exhausted.

“It took me three days to find that fucking meadow, but finally I did. The Seeing Hare was there, of course, waiting for me under the branches of that hideous great tree, which was still thrashing away in its invisible wind.”

“Intangible,” Poppy said in a small voice. “All wind is invisible.”

Good to see she was finding her feet.

“The hare wasn’t alone. The bird was there as well, and the monitor, the Utter Newt, the Kind Wolf, the Parallel Beetle — it does a geometrical thing, it’s so boring I can’t even explain it. All of them, all the Unique Beasts, the full conclave. Well, except the two aquatic ones. The Questing Beast sends you his regards by the way. I think he’s fond of you for some reason, even though you shot him.

“Well, when I saw them all there together, standing in two neat rows, the little ones in front, like they were posing for a class picture, I knew the jig was up. It was the newt that did the talking. He let it be known that the realm was in peril, and nothing else would do but my recovering the Seven Golden Keys of Fillory. I asked him why, what good were they, what were they for, what did they unlock. He wouldn’t say, or he couldn’t. He said I would know when it was time.

“I haggled a bit of course. I wanted to know, for example, how rapidly these keys would have to be recovered. I could imagine doing one every few years. Organize my holidays around it. At that rate I might even look forward to it — it’s always nicer traveling when you have some business to do. But apparently it’s a time-sensitive issue. They were very insistant about that.

“They gave me a Golden Ring that the keys were supposed to go on, and I left. What else could I do? When I got back Whitespire was up in arms. There were all kinds of terrible portents, all over the kingdom. That storm had spread — all the clock-trees had started thrashing the way that first one did. And you know the waterfall at the Red Ruin? The one that flows up? It started flowing down. You know, the regular way. So that was about the last straw.

“And then the Muntjac came screaming into port, and they told me you and Julia had vanished.”

In full hero mode, Eliot took command of the Muntjac. He spent a day repairing and provisioning it while the whole kingdom buzzed with anxiety and excitement. High King Eliot was going on a quest! Apart from everything else it was a public relations triumph. The docks were mobbed by volunteers offering to join the search for the Seven Keys. The dwarves sent over a trunkload of magical keys they happened to have been kicking around in their vaults, in case there was a match in there, but most of them turned out to be useless.

One, though, fit on the key ring. So six to go. Funny how every once in a while the dwarves came up trumps.

Eliot left Janet in sole possession of the castle. He felt bad about making her shoulder everything even more than she already did, but she was practically licking her chops as he left. She would probably be running a fascist dictatorship by the time they got back. So he set off.

Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he’d read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn’t necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and embraced. You lit out into the wilderness at random, and if your state of mind, or maybe it was your soul, was correct, then adventure would find you through the natural course of events. It was like free association — there were no wrong answers. It worked as long as you weren’t trying too hard.

And Eliot was in no danger of trying too hard. The Muntjac ran fast before a warm wet wind, out past the Outer Island, and After, out of Fillory and out of the known world.

A hush settled over the table. For a moment the creaking of the ship’s ropes and timbers could be heard, and Quentin felt for the first time how far off the map they were. He thought how they would look to someone far above them: a tiny lighted ship, lost in the immensity of an empty uncharted nighttime ocean.

Eliot studied the ceiling. He was actually groping for words. That was a new one on Quentin.

“You wouldn’t have believed it, Q,” he said finally. Something like an expression of actual awe had come over Eliot’s face. “You really wouldn’t. We’ve been all over the Eastern Ocean. The lands we saw. Some of the islands. . I don’t know where to begin.”

“Tell him about the train,” said the shaven-headed young man. All at once Quentin recognized him. It was Benedict. But a new Benedict, reborn with ropy muscles and flashing white teeth. The floppy bangs and the sullen attitude were long gone. He looked at Eliot with a respect Quentin had never seen him show anybody before.

“Yes, the train. We thought it was a sea serpent at first. We barely brought the ship around in time. But it was a train, one of those slow freight trains that are always about a million cars long, all tankers and boxcars, except that this one never ended. It broke the surface, seawater streaming off the sides of the cars, rumbled along beside us for a couple of miles, then it sank back under the sea again.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Bingle hopped onto it for a while, but we could never get any of the cars open.

“And we found a castle floating on the ocean. At first we just heard it, bells ringing in the middle of the night. The next morning we came up on it: a stone castle, riding on a fleet of groaning wooden barges. No one inside, just bells tolling in one of the towers with the rocking of the waves.

“What else? There was an island where no one could tell a lie. Goodness that was awkward for a while. We aired a lot of dirty laundry there, I can tell you.”

Rueful smiles went around the room among the crew.

“There was one where the people were really waves, ocean waves, which I know, but I just can’t explain it anymore than that. There was a place where the ocean poured into a huge chasm, and there was only a narrow bridge across it. A water-bridge that we had to sail across.”

“Like an aqueduct,” Benedict put in.

“Like an aqueduct. It was all so strange. I think magic gets magnified out here, gets wilder, and it creates all sorts of impossible places, all by itself. We spent a week trapped in the Doldrums. There was no wind, and the water was as smooth as glass, and there was a Sargasso Sea there, a big swirl of flotsam in the ocean. People lived there, picking through it. Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said. Toys, tables, whole houses. And people end up there too. They get forgotten as well.

“We were almost trapped there, but the Muntjac sprouted a bank of oars to help us get away. Didn’t you, old thing?” Eliot knocked familiarly on the bulkhead with his fist. “You could take things away with you, from the Sargasso Sea, but you had to leave something behind. That was the deal. Bingle took a magic sword. Show them your sword, Bing.”

Bingle, sitting at the far end of the table, stood up and drew his sword halfway out of its sheath, almost shyly. It was a narrow length of bright steel chased with swirly silver patterns that glowed white.

“He won’t say what he left behind for it. What did you leave, Bing?”

Bingle smiled and touched the side of his nose and said nothing.

Quentin was weary. He’d woken up in Venice that morning, and spent the day in England, and another half day in Fillory. He’d already been drunk once and sobered up, and now he was getting drunk again, sitting there on a hard splintery bench in the Muntjac’s galley. Probably Eliot would have enjoyed a little jaunt back to Earth, he thought, where the wine and coffee were better. Though who knows, maybe it wouldn’t have worked if it had been the other way around. Maybe he couldn’t have done it — maybe he would have gotten trapped in the Sargasso Sea. And maybe Eliot wouldn’t have found his way to Josh, wouldn’t have gone to see the dragon, wouldn’t have played with Thomas. Maybe he would have failed where Quentin succeeded, and vice versa. Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

That was the hard part, accepting that you didn’t get to choose which way you went. Except of course he had chosen.

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” he said. “Did you find the keys?” Eliot nodded.

“We found some of them. It was always either a fight or a riddle, one or the other. One was a huge beast like a giant spiny lobster. It had the key inside its heart. Then there was a beach that was all made of keys, millions of them, and we had to go through them till we found the right one. There was probably a trick to that one, but no one could think what it was, so we brute-forced it instead — took shifts, trying keys on the key ring, round the clock. After a couple of weeks we got a fit.

“Now I’m sorry if I’m a bit direct about this, but you have to remember, we’ve been at this for a full year, week in and week out, and frankly all this questing is wearing pretty thin. So here it is: we have five of the seven keys. One the dwarves gave us, and four we found. Do you have one? The one from After Island?”

“No,” Quentin said. “Julia and I left it behind when we went through the door. Didn’t somebody take it?”

Quentin looked at Bingle, then at Benedict. Neither one of them met his eye.

“No? But we don’t have it either.”

“Damn,” Eliot said. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“But what happened? It can’t just have disappeared. It must still be on After Island.”

“It’s not,” Benedict said. “We looked everywhere.”

“Well, we’ll just have to keep looking.” Eliot sighed and raised his glass to be refilled. “So it looks like you’re going to see some adventuring after all.”

CHAPTER 18

The house in Bed-Stuy was Julia’s first safe house, and it was the end of Stanford. She was never going to college now. It was her parents’ hearts broken for the second and final time. It was too terrible to think about, so she dealt with it by not thinking about it.

She could have said no, of course. She could have finished dialing the number of the car service, and turned her back on the man with the porkpie hat, and waited till the black town car came, and gotten in and repeated her home address to the Guatemalan highlander behind the wheel until he finally understood and whisked her away from it all. Or she couldn’t have, but she wished she could. She wished it then, and she would rewish it many times in the years to come.

But she couldn’t walk away, because the dream, the dream of magic, wasn’t dead. She’d tried to kill it, to beat the life out of it with work and drugs and therapy and family and the Free Traders, but she couldn’t. It was stronger than she was.

The owlish young man who was working the door of the Bed-Stuy safe house that night was named Jared. He was about thirty, not tall, with a bright smile and heavy black stubble and heavy black glasses. He’d been working on a doctorate in linguistics at NYU for the past nine years. Nights and weekends, he worked magic.

They weren’t all like that — nerdy, academic, what you’d think. It was a surprisingly heterogeneous crowd. There was a twelve-year-old prodigy from the neighborhood, and a sixty-five-year-old widow who drove down from Westchester County in a BMW SUV on weekends. In all there was a rotating cast of about twentyfive: physicists and receptionists and pipe fitters and musicians and undergrads and hedge-fund guys and barely functional, socially marginal nutjobs. And now there was Julia.

Some of them came in once a month to work on spells, and some of them showed up at six in the morning every morning and stayed till ten at night, or slept there, though house rules kept that to a minimum. Some of them were high-functioning in their daily lives, had careers and families and no obvious signs of eccentricity or physical debilitation. But doing magic alongside all that other stuff was a tricky balancing act, and when you lost it and fell you hit the floor hard. Even if you got up again, you got up limping. And everybody fell sooner or later.

See, when you had magic in your life, it turned out, when you lived the double life of a secret underground magician, you paid a certain price, which was that your secret other life pulled at you always. Your magician self, that loopy doppelgänger, was always with you, tugging at your sleeve, whispering silently that your real life was a fake life, a crude and undignified and inauthentic charade that nobody was really buying anyway. Your real self, the one that mattered, was the other one, the one waving her hands around and chanting in a dead Slavic dialect on the busted-ass couch in the lime-green clapboard house on Throop Avenue.

Julia kept her job, but she was at the house most nights and all day on weekends. The lust was back, and this time it looked like she could slake it. She had the scent, and she was going to make the kill. She went quiet on FTB. The Free Traders could wait. They were used to members dropping off the grid unexpectedly for months or years at a time. In the chronic mood disorder community, that was well within normal operating parameters.

As for her parents. . Julia cut herself off. She knew what she was doing, and she knew how hard it would be for them, watching her fall back into the obsession and get skinny again and stop bathing and all the rest of it, and she did it anyway. She felt like she had no choice. It was an addiction. Thinking about the consequences for her family, really thinking about them, would have annihilated her with remorse. So she didn’t. The first morning she caught herself absentmindedly, almost sensuously, running a thumbnail along her arm at the breakfast table, leaving a red line behind, or rather when she caught her mother catching her doing it, no words were spoken. But she saw part of her mother die that morning. And Julia did not take heroic measures to resuscitate her.

Julia could have died that morning too, she knew. She almost did. But you let a drowning woman cling to you, she’ll drag you down with her, and what’s the point of that? That’s what she told herself, anyway. You have to look her in the eye and pry her fingers off your arm and watch her sink down into the airless green depths and perish there. It’s either that or you’ll both die. What’s the point?

Her sister knew that. You could see the disappointment in her quick brown foxy eyes, then you could see it change and harden into something clear and smooth and protective. She was young enough, she could still swerve around the wreck and keep moving. She let Julia go, her sister with her black secrets. Smart kid. She had made a sensible deal. Julia made one too.

And what did Julia get, for her deal? When you put your family and your heart and your life and your future up on the block, how much does that net you? What do you walk away with in return? Show her what she’s won, Bob!

A lot, it turns out. A motherfuckingload of arcane lore is what it gets you, for starters.

That first day they tested her. From the second you got in the door — Jared actually started up the stopwatch widget on his iPhone as she crossed the threshold — you had fifteen minutes to learn and execute the flash spell that Quentin punted at the Winston safe house, or you had to leave, and you couldn’t come back for a month. They called it, boringly, the First Flash. You could try again at another safe house, of course — they didn’t share information — but there were only two in New York City, so if you wanted to get your magic on in the five boroughs you had to go big or go home.

Tired as she was Julia did it in eight minutes flat. If she’d had any muscle tone left over from her rainbow-witch phase she wouldn’t even have needed that long.

As it turned out, they didn’t know the rainbow spell, so she printed out the scan she’d downloaded from the Internet that one time, it was already two years ago now, and brought it in. Jared the linguist, with great pomp and ceremony, encased it in a transparent plastic sleeve, punched the sleeve with a three-hole punch, and added it to a tatty duct-taped three-ring binder in which they kept the club’s spell list. A three-ring binder: that’s what they had by way of a spellbook.

And they called it the Spellbinder. That should have tipped Julia off.

Still, it increased twentyfold the sum of Julia’s information about magic, and that was a joy beyond measuring. Under Jared’s tutelage, or whoever the senior magician in the house on any given day happened to be, she worked her way through the book. She learned how to stick things together with magic. She learned how to light a fire at a distance. She learned a spell to guess a coin flip, and to keep a nail from rusting, and to take a magnetic charge off a magnet. They competed with each other to see how many everyday tasks they could do with magic: opening jars, tying their shoes, buttoning buttons.

It was a bit random, and it was a bit small potatoes, but it was a start. Nail by nail, magnet by magnet, she began to force the world to conform to her specifications. Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.

There was another binder, of hand exercises, much battered from having been thrown across the room in frustration, and she started work on them too. Soon she had the book memorized, and she did the exercises all the time: in the shower, under the table at mealtimes, under her desk at work, at night as she lay in bed. And she got serious about her languages. Magic wasn’t just a math thing, it turned out.

As she learned spells, she gained levels. Yes, levels: that’s what they called them. The lameness of the level system, borrowed wholesale from Dungeons & Dragons (which must have borrowed it from Freemasonry, she supposed), was not deniable, but it did keep things orderly, and it kept the hierarchies clearly defined, which Julia liked more and more the higher she rose in them. She began the tattoos on her back. She took care to leave a lot of room, because she was learning fast.

It took her a month to realize that she was learning faster than the other regulars at the safe house, and another three months to realize just how much faster. By that point she had seven stars, which was as many as Jared had, and he’d been at it for three years. Probably at Brakebills she would have been just another apprentice, but she wasn’t at Brakebills, was she, she was here, and here she stood out. The others just didn’t seem to have any flare for the theoretical side of magic. They learned their spells by rote, but they weren’t interested in the basic patterns that underlay them. Only a few of them went into the deeper linguistic work, the grammars and the root systems. They preferred to just memorize the syllables and gestures and forget the rest.

They were wrong. It sapped the power of their casting, and it meant that every time they started a new spell they were starting over from scratch. They didn’t see the connections between them. And you could forget about doing any original work, which Julia was already looking forward to. Along with Jared she started an ancient languages working group. They only got four other members, and most of those were there because Julia was hot. She kicked them out one by one when they didn’t keep up with the homework.

As for the hand exercises, she worked doubly hard at those, because she knew she wasn’t naturally gifted at them. Nobody kept up with her on the hand exercises, not even Jared. They didn’t have her taste for pain.

Much as she hated Brakebills, with a red glowing hatred that she kept carefully burning in some inner brazier, blowing on it if it ever sank too low, she could see why they kept things exclusive there. A lot of riffraff came through the Throop Avenue safe house.

Julia had always had a nasty competitive streak. In the past she’d done her best to keep it under wraps. Now she reversed that policy. With no one to check her, she nurtured it and let it flower. As Brakebills had humiliated her, so she would humiliate anybody who couldn’t keep up with her. Hey, magic’s not a popularity contest. Throop Avenue would be her own private Brakebills. Any visitor who came to the Throop Avenue safe house rocking a level equal to or less than Julia’s had better come to play. Any bullshit you were walking around with, you would be called on.

It didn’t matter if you were black or white or tired or sick or twelve. It was amazing, truly incredible, how many magicians were faking their way through this shit. It made Julia furious. Who issued these people their stars? You gave some of these other safe houses a little push and they fell over like houses of cards. It was dispiriting, is what it was. She’d finally found a magic school, of sorts, to call her very own, and it was barfing out a bunch of fakers and cheats.

On the strength of Julia’s bedside manner, the Throop Avenue safe house began to get a bit of a reputation. They didn’t get quite so many drop-ins anymore, and some of the drop-ins they did get got ugly. As in physical. Bullshitters don’t like being called on their bullshit, and there was a considerable Venn diagram overlap between people who were into magic and people who were into martial arts.

But I’m sorry, where did you think you were, motherfucker? Connecticut? You’re in a magic safe house in Bed-Stuy, borough of Brooklyn. There was a considerable Venn diagram overlap between people who lived in Bed-Stuy and people who had motherfucking guns. Fool. Welcome to New Dork City.

Still, even with Julia’s crusade for magical rigor bringing up the general tone of things, there was a problem at the Bed-Stuy safe house, and that was its three-ring binder. The Spellbinder. Every once in a while a visitor would drop by who meant business, and they’d know a spell that wasn’t in the book, and if that was the case, and if the book contained a spell that they didn’t know, a swap might be arranged, and the book would grow.

But such transactions were frustratingly infrequent. Julia needed to grow faster than that. It didn’t make sense: where did these spells come from in the first place? What was the source? Nobody knew. Turnover was high at safe houses, and institutional memory was short. But more and more Julia suspected that somebody out there was operating on a much higher level than she was, and she wanted to know who, and where, and how, and now.

So Julia turned it around. She became a visitor. She’d hung on to the Civic from her Chesterton days, and she quit her job troubleshooting networks and started putting miles on it, sometimes by herself, sometimes with Jared riding shotgun. Safe houses weren’t easy to find — they hid their locations from the wider world, but also from one another, because safe houses had been known to go to war, and that usually resulted in mutual annihilation. But sometimes you could coax an address out of a friendly visitor. She’d gotten good at coaxing. If all else failed she had the power of the bathroom handjob, and she wielded it with an iron fist.

And some safe houses were bigger than others, and some were big enough and safe enough that they’d allowed themselves to get a little famous, at least within the scene, on the strength of their belief that they were big enough that nobody could fuck with them. The binder she was handed in an old repurposed bank building in Buffalo was so thick it made her fall on her knees and weep. She stayed there for a week, uploading magical knowledge into her starving brain by the terabyte.

All that summer she roamed north into Canada, west as far as Chicago, south to Tennessee and Louisiana and all the way down to Key West, a back-breaking, clutch-grinding, vinyl-sticky trip that yielded a face-palmingly disappointing twelve-page spellbook in a cat-infested bungalow next door to the Hemingway Home. It was Julia’s wandering period. She crashed on spare beds and in motels and in the Civic. When the Civic quit on her, she got into not-wiring cars off the street. She met a lot of people, and some people who weren’t people. The more rural houses occasionally played host to minor demons and lesser fairies and local geo-specific nature spirits and elementals who lent street cred to the establishment in return for God knows what in the way of goods and services, she didn’t ask. There was a certain romance to these beings; they seemed to embody the very promise of magic, which was to deliver unto her a world greater than the one into which she had been born. The moment when you walk into a room, and the guy playing pool has a pair of red leather wings sticking out of his back, and the chick smoking on the balcony has eyes of liquid golden fire — at that moment you think you’ll never be sad or bored or lonely again.

But Julia got to the bottom of those beings pretty fast, and once she got there she often found someone who was just as desperate and confused as she was. That was how Julia got mixed up with Warren, and that was the lesson she learned.

At any rate her back was filling up with seven-pointed stars. She had to put the big 50-spot on her neck to save space. It was unconventional, but conventions were there to make it easy on the fakers and cheats. You had to bend conventions to make room for somebody like Julia.

But Julia was running out of steam. She was a freight train of magical pedagogy, but that train ran on information, new data, and fuel was growing scarce, and what there was wasn’t of the best quality. The potatoes were too small. Every time she walked into a new safe house she did so with her hopes high, but her hopes were dashed more and more often. It went like this: she pushed open the door, accepted the ogling gazes of the local males, showed off her stars, intimidated the ranking officer into showing her the binder, which she leafed through listlessly, expecting to find and finding nothing she didn’t already know, whereupon she dropped the binder on the floor and walked out, letting Jared make her apologies for her.

This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself. There’s your proof, Mr. Hofstadter: I am a strange loop.

Sure, she could have lit out for the West Coast, or made a run for the Mexican border, but she had a feeling she already knew what she would find there. In the looking-glass world of the great magical underground, perspective appeared to be reversed: the closer you got to things, the smaller they looked. Objects in mirror were farther away than they appeared. Put another way: how many coin flips could one girl predict? How many nails could she protect from rust? The world was not in urgent need of more demagnetized magnets. This was magic, but it was chickenshit magic. She had tuned in to the choir invisible, and it was singing game-show jingles. She’d put her entire life down as a deposit on this stuff, and it was starting to look like she’d been taken.

After all she’d been through, all she’d sacrificed, that was more than she could stand. She wondered for a while if Jared could be holding out on her, if he knew something she didn’t, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t the case. Just to make sure she deployed the nuclear option. Nope. Zero. Oh, well.

To be absolutely honest, she’d deployed the nuclear option a few times on her travels, and she was starting to feel a bit like a nuclear wasteland herself: irradiated and toxic. She didn’t like to think about it. She didn’t even name it to herself: nuclear was the code word, and she kept those memories encoded, never to be decrypted. She’d done what she had to do, that was the end of it. She no longer even fantasized about real love. She couldn’t imagine it anymore, her and it being in the same world. She’d given it up for magic.

But nuclear winter was coming, and magic wasn’t keeping her warm. It was getting cold, tainted snow was falling, and the earth was getting thirsty again, thirsty for balm. The black dog was hunting. Julia was feeling it again, the blackness.

Or really blackness would have been a relief, blackness would have been a field trip compared with where she was headed, which was despair. That stuff had no color. She wished it were made of blackness, velvety soft blackness, that she could curl up and fall asleep in, but it was so much worse than that. Think of it as the difference between zero and the empty set, the set that contains nothing, not even zero. These but the trappings and the suits of woe. All these seem to laugh,/Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

December came, and the days shortened. Snow quietened the traffic on Throop Avenue. And then one day, St. Lucy’s Day as it should happen, the day of the Donne poem, it all went down. And when it did, it went down Western-style: a stranger came to town.

She had a nice look about her, the stranger, an Ivy League look. Twenty-nine maybe, dark suit, dark hair pulled back and secured with crossed chopsticks. A round face, baby fat, nerd glasses, but hard: there might once have been a time when she was pushed around, but that time was long past. As per Throop Avenue protocol, as soon as she was in the door the big gun stepped to her, the big gun being Julia.

Well. Ivy League took off her jacket and unbuttoned her cuffs. Both arms were sleeved in stars up to the shoulders. She spread them wide, in the manner of our savior, to show a 100-spot on the inside of each wrist. The room got very quiet. Julia showed Ivy League her stars. Then Ivy League made her prove it.

This had never happened to Julia before, but she knew the drill. She would have to walk through every spell she knew, every test she’d ever passed, to satisfy Ivy that she had earned her stars. Step-by-step, level by level, coins, nails, fires, magnets, the whole utility belt, from level one to level seventy-seven, which was as far as Julia had gotten. It took four hours, while the sun set and the short-timers and day students went home.

Of course Julia lived for this shit. She only flubbed a couple, in the midfifties, but the bylaws allowed her a few retakes, and she got through it, shaking but still fierce. Whereupon Ivy League nodded coldly, rolled down her sleeves, put her jacket back on, and left.

It took all of Julia’s pride not to run after her, shouting, “Take me with you, mysterious stranger!” She knew who that must have been. That was one of the Others, the people who had a line on real magic, the pure shit. Ivy League had been to the source, where the spells came from. Julia had known they were out there just by the way they perturbed the universe, like a black planet, and she’d been right. Finally they’d shown themselves to her. They’d tested her.

And just as Brakebills had, they’d found her wanting. There must be a flaw in her, one that she couldn’t see, but obvious to those who looked for it.

It wasn’t till she got home that she found the card in her pocket. It was blank, but a complex unlocking enchantment revealed a message printed on it in Old Church Slavonic: Burn This. She burned it in an ashtray, using not a simple conflagration spell but rather the forty-third-level one, which did basically the same thing but did it in fourteenth position and in Old Church Slavonic.

The flame flashed violet and orange, rhythmically. The flashes were Morse code. The Morse code spelled out a pair of GPS coordinates, which turned out to correspond to a microscopic hamlet in the south of France. The hamlet was called Murs. It was all very Free Trader Beowulf.

At last, Julia had been called. The fat envelope had arrived. This time she was really going. She had put down her bet a long time ago, and finally, finally, it was showing signs of paying off.

How to explain all this to her parents, who you would have thought would have been way past caring. She was twenty-two now, how many times were these people going to make her break their hearts? But as much as she dreaded the conversation, it went better than she expected. She hid a lot from her parents, but one thing she couldn’t hide from them was that she actually felt hopeful for once. She believed that she had a shot at happiness now, and she was taking it. It seemed like — it was — years since she’d felt that way. Her parents understood that somehow, and they weren’t upset. They were happy for her. They let her go.

Speaking of letting people go, she dumped owlish Jared, the not-socunning linguist, on his pale and bony ass. Call me when you finish that dissertation, porkpie.

One fine day in April Julia boarded a plane, bringing with her none of her worldly possessions, and flew to Marseille, on the lurid blue Mediterranean Sea. She felt so light and free, she could have flown there under her own power.

She rented a Peugeot that she would never return and drove north for an hour, negotiating a typically French rond-point every one hundred meters, turned right at Cavaillon, and got lost eighty times near Gordes, a spectacular village perché that clung vertiginously to the side of the Luberon Valley as if it had been plastered there with a trowel. She rolled into sleepy, tiny Murs at three in the afternoon, in the heart of photogenic Provence.

And lo and behold, it was a little gem, a largely untouristed clump of old houses built from strangely light-emitting bleached-brown southern French stone. It had one church and one castle and one hotel. The streets were medieval and paint-scrapingly narrow. Julia stopped the car in the town square and took in the heartbreaking World War I memorial. Half of the dead had the same last name.

The GPS coordinates were ten minutes outside of town. They corresponded to a handsome farmhouse afloat all by itself in a sea of hay and lavender fields. It had sky-blue shutters and a white gravel driveway in which she parked her scraped-up Peugeot. A clean-cut man only a little older than Julia answered the door. He was handsome — you got the impression that he hadn’t always been clean-cut, that he’d lost a lot of weight at some point in his life. It had left behind some interesting lines on his face.

“Hello Circe,” he said. “I’m Pouncy Silverkitten. Welcome home.”

CHAPTER 19

Standing at the bow with Eliot the next morning, two kings of Fillory plowing eastward into the unknown, into the rising sun, never knowing what God or Fate or Magic was going to send rearing up at them over the horizon next, this now: this was much more like it. This was the stuff.

At first it had been hard to admit it, to change gears, again, and just go with it, but then suddenly it wasn’t. Not with the morning sun on his face, and the Muntjac surging and galloping along under him. He’d missed a lot here, but he wasn’t going to miss anything more. Earth was the dream, not Fillory, and it was going to that part of his brain where dreams went — the kind of anxiety-ridden, fiendishly detailed dreams that felt like they lasted for years, through endless meaningless plot twists, which delivered you ultimately to a fate not even of death but merely of permanent embarrassment. Fillory had taken him back. Welcome to the Quest for the Seven Keys. Your adventure is already in progress.

Bingle was atop the forecastle as usual, just like back in the day, but now he was sparring vigorously with another swordsman. It was Benedict, stripped to the waist, lean and brown, grimacing as he gave ground and then, unbelievably, beating Bingle back and pressing his advantage. The whole time he kept his wrist on his hip, swashbuckler-style. The air rang with the loud scraping of steel on steel, like the gnashing of a huge pair of scissors.

Their swords locked. Stalemate. They broke apart, clapping each other on the shoulder and laughing — laughing! — about some point of technical swordsmanship. It was like watching an alternate-timeline version of himself, a timeline in which he’d stayed in Fillory and learned to hold his sword at full extension for more than two minutes. Quentin caught Benedict’s eye, and Benedict saluted him, smiling with those bright white teeth. Quentin saluted back. They squared off again.

Bingle had found his disciple.

“Those guys are amazing.”

He hadn’t heard Poppy come up beside him. She was watching the action too.

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“Are you kidding?” Poppy shook her head. She was not kidding. “I wish I could. The one on the right, the older guy? He’s the best swordsman in Fillory. We had a contest.”

“It all still looks like a movie to me. I can’t believe it’s all real. Wow!” Bingle did one of his signature gymnastic tumbling passes. “Oh my God. I thought he was going over the side.”

“I know. I was going to take lessons with him.”

“That sounds exciting. What happened?”

“I accidentally went back to the real world. Then a year went by here in three days.”

“Well, I can see now why you wanted to come back. It’s beautiful here. I’m sorry I thought it was funny before. I was wrong.”

Quentin had expected Poppy to be miserable on board the Muntjac. After all, she’d effectively been abducted from everything she knew and cared about and brought here. It was an outrage to every principle she lived by.

And all that was true, and she’d spent a day being outraged about it. Well, half a day. Poppy had spent yesterday afternoon sulking, then she showed up at breakfast this morning with a brand-new can-do attitude. She just wasn’t temperamentally suited to long-haul sulking. Sure, all right, she’d been accidentally transported to a magical world that until recently she had understood to be fictional. The situation wasn’t ideal. But it was what she had to work with, so she would work with it. She was a tough one, Poppy.

“I talked to the other one at dinner last night,” she said. “The kid. Benedict. He’s a big fan of yours.”

“Benedict? Really?”

“Did you see how he lit up when he saw you watching him just now? Look at him, he’s killing himself to impress you. You’re a father figure for him.”

Quentin hadn’t seen. How was Poppy here for one day and she’d seen all that?

“To be honest I always thought he hated me.”

“He’s gutted he didn’t get to go to Earth with you.”

“You must be joking. And miss out on all the adventures here?”

Now Poppy directed her guileless blue gaze at him instead of the sword fight.

“What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn’t an adventure?”

Quentin started to answer, and stopped with his mouth open. Because it turned out he had nothing to say.

It was five more days before they sighted land.

They were having breakfast al fresco on deck: Quentin, Eliot, Josh, and Poppy. It was a practice Eliot had instituted: the crew set up a table on the poop deck, with a blinding white tablecloth clipped on to keep it from blowing away. He kept this up in a surprising range of meteorological conditions. Once Quentin saw him up there alone in a squall, munching on marmalade toast that was obviously soaked through with salt spray. It was a matter of principle with him.

But today it was nice out. The weather was almost tropical again. Sunlight flashed off the silverware, and the sky was a perfect blue dome. Though the food itself was getting pretty grim, the kind of unspoilable stuff that came out of deep storage late in an ocean voyage: hard biscuits and meat so salty it was more salt than meat. The only thing that was still good was the jam. Quentin used a lot of it.

“So is this how it works?” he said. “The questing? We just keep sailing east till we hit something?”

“Unless you have a better idea,” Eliot said.

“No. Just remind me why we think it’s going to work?”

“Because that’s how quests always work,” Eliot said. “I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of it, but the lesson seems to be that you just can’t force the issue with a whole lot of detective work. It’s a waste of energy. The ones who go around knocking on doors and looking for clues never find the thing, the Grail or whatever it is. It’s more a matter of having the right attitude.”

“What attitude is that?”

Elliot shrugged.

“I haven’t got a clue. I guess we’re supposed to have faith.”

“I never really took you for the faith-having kind,” Quentin said.

“I didn’t either. But it’s worked out so far. We’ve got five of the seven keys. You can’t argue with results.”

“You can’t,” Quentin said, “but that’s actually not the same thing as having faith.”

“Why do you always try to ruin everything?”

“I’m not ruining it. I just want to understand it.”

“If you had faith you wouldn’t have to understand.”

“And why exactly are you looking for these keys?” Poppy asked brightly. “Or I guess, why are we looking for them?”

“Yeah, why are we?” Josh said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re cool and all. They sound cool. Can I see them?”

“We don’t really know why,” Eliot said. “The Unique Beasts wanted us to find them.”

“But find them and do what with them?” Poppy said.

“I suppose once we have them all they’ll tell us. Or perhaps we’ll know when we have them. Or perhaps we’ll never know. They might just take the keys and pat us on the behind and send us on our way. I don’t know. I’ve never done a quest before.”

“So. . the journey is the arrival, kind of thing?” Josh said. “I hate that stuff. I’m an old-fashioned arrival-is-the-arrival kind of guy.”

“For what it’s worth, they told me the realm was in peril,” Eliot said. “So there is that. But it’s not like the Holy Grail was actually useful for anything.”

“I told everybody the Neitherlands are jacked, right?” Josh said.

“You think that’s part of this?” Quentin said. “You think they’re connected?”

“No. Well, maybe.” Josh stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “But how?”

“The Neitherlands are down.” Quentin ticked them off. “Jollyby is dead. The realm is supposedly in peril. Seven Golden Keys. A dragon collecting buttons. If there’s a thread running through all that, I’m not seeing it.”

Maybe he didn’t want to see it. That would be a hell of a thread. You’d want to think twice about yanking on it.

Someone up in the rigging shouted that he could see an island.

The boat’s prow scrunched almost soundlessly into the damp white sand. Quentin vaulted over the bow just as it spent the very last of its momentum and landed on his feet on powdery white sand with his boots still dry. He turned back toward the launch, bowed, and received a smattering of applause from its passengers.

He grabbed the painter and hauled on it as the others — Eliot, Josh, Poppy, Julia, Bingle, Benedict — scrambled out on both sides. The air was quiet and still. It felt weird to be standing on solid ground again.

“Worst away team ever,” Josh said, wading up onto land. “Not a single redshirt.”

Pretty: that was the impression the island had made from a distance. Chalk cliffs that parted to reveal a small bay with a tidy beach. A row of single trees stood out against the skyline, so fine and still and green against the blue sky they looked like they’d been carved in jade. Vacation paradise.

It was late afternoon; it had taken them most of the day to make landfall. They stood together on the shore in a knot. The sand was as clean as if it had been sifted. Quentin slogged across it and up the first dune to the crest to see what was beyond it. The dune was steep, and just short of the top he flopped down on the slope and peered over the crest. It was like being a kid at the beach. Beyond the dune were more dunes topped with scrub, then a meadow, then a line of trees, then Ember knew what else. So far so good. Pretty.

“Welp,” Quentin said. “Let’s get questin’.”

But first there were more mundane matters to attend to. Quentin and Poppy and Josh had been in Venice three days ago, but this was the first land the men had seen in something like three weeks. They piled ashore in twos and threes; some of them cannonballed off the Muntjac’s sides into the flat green sea. After a suitable interval for goofing off Eliot mustered them on the shore and sent them out in teams to find fresh water, gather wood for fires and new spars, set up tents, harvest the local fruit, hunt for local game.

“We’ve fallen on our feet,” Eliot said, once everybody had a job to do. “Don’t you think? So far I would rate this an above-average island.”

“It’s so beautiful!” Poppy said. “Do you think anybody lives here?” Eliot shook his head.

“I don’t know. We’re two months’ sail out from Castle Whitespire. I’ve never heard of anyone else coming this far. We could be the first human beings ever to set foot here.”

“Think of that,” said Quentin. “So do you want to. .?”

“What?”

“You know. Claim it. For Fillory.”

“Oh!” Eliot considered. “We haven’t been doing that. It seems a little imperialist. I’m not sure it’s in good taste.”

“But haven’t you always wanted to say it?”

“Well, yes,” Eliot said. “All right. We can always give it back.” He raised his voice, using the one he used to call meetings to order back at Castle Whitespire. “I, High King Eliot, hereby claim this island for the great and glorious Kingdom of Fillory! Henceforth it will be known as”—he paused—“as New Hawaii!”

Everybody nodded vaguely.

“New Hawaii?” Quentin said. “Really?”

“It’s not really tropical,” Poppy said. “The vegetation’s more temperate.”

“What about Farflung Island?” Quentin said. “Like as one word: Farflung.”

“Relief Island.” Poppy was getting into the spirit of it. “Whitesand Island. Greengrass Island!”

“Skull Island,” Josh said. “No wait, Spider-Skull Island!”

“Okay, the Island to Be Named Later,” Eliot said. “Come on. Let’s find out what’s on it before we name it.”

But by then the sun was low in the sky, so instead they pitched in bringing sticks and dry grass back from the meadow. With five trained magicians on hand, starting a fire wasn’t a problem. They could have made a fire with just sand. But it wouldn’t have smelled as good.

The hunting party came back flushed with pride, hauling two wild goats on their shoulders, and one of the foragers had spotted a patch of something very closely analogous to carrots growing wild at the edge of the woods, that seemed self-evidently safe to eat. They all sat in circles on the cooling sand, the cold sea air at their backs, the warmth of the fire on their faces, and savored the feeling of being on firm ground again, with enough space to stretch out their arms and legs and not touch anything or anybody. The beach was covered with footprints now, and as the sun got lower the light made monkey-puzzle shadow patterns on it. They were very far from home.

The setting sun moved behind a cloud, lighting it up from the inside like a pall of smoke, sunlight leaking out around the edges. Strange stars came swarming across the blackening sky. No one wanted to get back on the Muntjac, not yet, so when the light was all gone the travelers wrapped themselves up in blankets right there on the sand and fell asleep.

The next day everything seemed a little less urgent than it had when they first arrived. Yes, the realm was in peril, but was it in immediate peril? It was hard to imagine a place that felt less imperiled than the Island to Be Named Later. There was a touch of lotus land about it. And anyway adventure would find them when it was ready, or so the theory ran. You couldn’t rush it. You just had to keep the right state of mind. For now they would savor the anticipation, and stay well rested.

Even Julia wasn’t pushing.

“I was afraid we would not get back,” she said. “Now I am afraid of what will happen if we go forward.”

They hiked up to the top of the cliffs on one side of the bay and from there got a good look at more green island, with rocky hills heaped up in the interior. Birds roosted along the clifftops in bunches — they had dull gray feathers on their backs and wings, but they had a way of turning in the air in unison and suddenly showing you their rose-colored chests all at once. Quentin was going to name them rose-breasted swoopers, or something along those lines, when Poppy pointed out that they already had a name. They were galahs. They had them in Australia too.

The cook was a keen fisherman, and he pulled a prodigious number of fat, tiger-striped fish out of the surf, one after the other. In the afternoon Quentin watched Benedict and Bingle fence with foils — they stuck wine corks on the tips for safety. He spent an hour just lying back on his elbows and looking at the waves. They were nothing like the brutally cold, puritan waves of his East Coast youth, which had sternly discouraged anything so frivolous as surfing or frolicking. These waves came sloping in smoothly, building up heads of boiling cream foam on top, reared up for a moment, mint green and paper-thin in the sunlight, then broke in a long line with a sound like fabric tearing.

He wiggled his toes in the hot sand and watched the weird moire optical effects that the miniature sand avalanches created. They went to bed that night hardly having explored more than the thin crescent of island they’d already seen. Tomorrow they would strike inland, into the forest and up into the hills.

Quentin woke early. The sun wasn’t even up yet, though there was a gray blur of predawn to the east. He wondered what happened out there, in the extreme east. The rules were different in Fillory. For all he knew the world was flat, and the sun ran on tracks.

Everything was gray: the sand, the trees, the sea. Deep red embers smoldered under the gray ashes of the bonfires. It was warm out. The sleepers on the beach looked as though they had fallen there from a great height. Poppy had kicked off her blanket — she slept with her arms crossed over her chest, like a knight on a tomb.

He would have gone back to sleep, but he was dying for a piss. He got up and jogged to the top of the dune and down the other side. It didn’t seem quite far enough for hygienic purposes, so he went one farther, and at that point he figured he might as well get as far as the field and pee there.

It was undeniably a vulnerable feeling, as he let fly into the tall grass, but the morning was as still as a painting, and they hadn’t been completely stupid about it. Anybody who knew the proper reveal spells — meaning almost no one — would have seen a gossamer-thin line of magical force, pale blue in color, looped along the edge of the forest like a trip wire. They’d set it up the day before. It wouldn’t hurt anybody who walked into it, not permanently, but the magicians would know they were there, and they wouldn’t be walking anymore. They’d be lucky if they were conscious. They’d already caught a wild pig that way.

Even the insects were hushed. Quentin sneezed — he was mildly allergic to some local plant — and wiped his eyes. On the far side of the meadow something slipped into the forest. It went just as his eye began to track it — it must have been standing there, stock-still, watching him while he pissed. He got an impression of something large, the size of a big boar maybe.

Quentin fastened his trousers — zippers were foreign to Fillory, and so far impossible to reverse-engineer, you just couldn’t explain them to the dwarves — and walked across the meadow to where the animal had been. Standing just on the near side of the blue line, he peered in among the trees. They were thick enough that it was still full night in the forest. Still, he caught the faintest shadow of a pair of heavy animal haunches receding into it.

Is this it? Is it starting? Carefully, like he was stepping over an electric fence, he put one leg over the invisible blue line, then the other, and walked into the forest. He was pretty sure he knew Who he was chasing even before He was fully in view.

“Hey, Ember,” he called. “Ember! Wait up!”

The god looked at him impassively over His shoulder, then continued to trot.

“Oh, come on.”

The ram-god had not been seen in Fillory since the Brakebills took the thrones, or not as far as Quentin knew. He looked fully recovered from the beating He’d taken from Martin Chatwin. Even His hind leg, which had been crippled the last time Quentin saw Him, was restored and could take His weight without a limp.

Quentin had complicated feelings about Ember. He wasn’t like Ember was in the books. Quentin was still angry that He hadn’t been able to save them — to save Alice — in the fight against Martin. He supposed it wasn’t Ember’s fault, but still. What kind of a god wasn’t at the top of the food chain in His own world?

The big woolly kind with horns, apparently. Quentin didn’t have any particular beef with Ember, he just didn’t want to bow down to Him the way He always seemed to expect people to do. If Ember was so great He should have saved Alice, and if He wasn’t that great, Quentin wasn’t bowing. QED.

Still, if Ember was here, it meant they were on the right track. Things were going to get very real soon, or at least very Fillorian. He just didn’t know which Fillory it was going to be — the beautiful, magical Fillory or the dark, frightening one. Either way this would be a good moment for a shipment of divine wisdom to arrive. Guidance from on high. A pillar of fire, a tree of smoke.

Ember led Quentin uphill, into the interior of the island. Quentin was starting to get winded. After five minutes Ember finally slowed down enough to let him catch up. By that time they were halfway up a hill, and the sun had at last pushed a hot-pink sliver of itself up over the horizon. They were high enough that Quentin could look out across the forest canopy.

“Thanks,” Quentin said, taking big heaving breaths. “Jesus.” He leaned on Ember’s flank for a second before wondering if maybe that was too familiar, mortal to god. “Hi, Ember. How’s it going?”

“Hello, my child.”

That resonant bass voice instantly sent Quentin right back to the cavern under Ember’s Tomb. He hadn’t heard it since then, and his guts clenched. That was not a place he wanted to go back to.

He would keep the tone light.

“Fancy meeting You here.”

“We do not meet by chance. Nothing happens by chance.”

That was Ember for you. No small talk. The ram began to climb again. Quentin wondered if He knew that behind His back Quentin and the others called him Ram-bo. And, less kindly, Member.

“No, I guess not,” Quentin said, though he wasn’t actually sure that he agreed. “So. How did You get all the way out here?”

“Fillory is my realm, child. I am everywhere, and therefore anywhere.”

“I see that. But couldn’t You have just magicked us here, instead of making us sail all this way?”

“I could have. I did not.”

Forget it. Quentin could look back now and see the Muntjac at anchor, neat and perfect. You could have put it in a bottle. He could even see the camp on the beach, the bonfires and blankets. But there was no time to admire the view, the ram was taking the rocky slopes of the hill at speed. Which was fine for Him, He was built for it. He was a ram. Quentin panted and eyed the fluffy pale gold wool on His broad back and wondered if Ember would let him ride on Him. Probably not.

“You know,” Quentin went on, “while I’ve got You, I’ve been wondering. About these Seven Keys. If You’re basically omnipresent, and probably omniscient too, why don’t You go around and just collect the keys Yourself? If they’re so important to the realm? I mean, You could probably do it in half an hour, tops.”

“There is Deeper Magic at work here, my child. Even the gods must bow to it. That is the way.”

“Oh, right. The Deeper Magic. I forgot about that.”

The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn’t feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole.

“I do not think you understand, my child. There are things that a man must do, that a god may not. He who completes a quest does not merely find something. He becomes something.”

Quentin stopped, blowing, hands on hips. The horizon to the east was a solid band of orange now. The stars were going out.

“What’s that? What does he become?”

“A hero, Quentin.”

The ram kept going, and he followed.

“Fillory has need of gods, and kings, and queens, and those it has. But it has need of a hero too. And it has need of the Seven Keys.”

“Fillory doesn’t ask for much, does it?”

“Fillory asks for everything.”

With a lumbering lunge, awkward but powerful, Ember surged ahead and surmounted a rocky dome that turned out to be the top of the hill. From there He turned His head and looked down at Quentin with His strange, peanut-shaped eyes. Supposedly sheep evolved that way so they could see wolves coming out of the corners of their eyes. Better peripheral vision. But the effect was disconcerting.

“That’s a big ask.”

“Fillory asks for what it needs. Do you, Quentin? What do you need? What do you ask for?”

The question stopped him. He was used to scolding and pseudo-Socratic interrogation from Ember, but here was a rare gem: a good question. What did he want? He’d wanted to get back to Fillory, and he’d done that. He thought he’d wanted to go back to Castle Whitespire, but now he wasn’t so sure. The terror of almost losing Fillory had been extreme, but he’d found his way back. Now he wanted to find the keys. He wanted to finish the quest. He wanted his life to be exciting and important and to mean something. And he wanted to make Julia better. He felt like he would do anything to help Julia, if he only knew what to do.

“I guess it’s like what You said,” Quentin said. “I want to be a hero.”

Ember turned away again and faced the rising sun.

“Then you will have your chance,” He said.

Quentin scrambled up onto the rocky summit and watched the dawn alongside Him. He was going to ask Ember about it, about the sun, and what it was, and what happened out there at the rim of the world, or whether Fillory even had a rim. But when he turned to ask Him he was alone on top of the hill. Ember was gone.

Just when things were getting interesting. He turned slowly, in a full circle, but there was no sign of Him. Vanished without a trace. Oh, well. Now that He was gone Quentin almost missed Him. There was something special about being in the divine presence, even when the divinity was Ember.

He stretched, standing at the top of the island, and then jumped carefully down from the rocks and began trotting back down the hill to the beach. He couldn’t wait to tell the others what had happened, though the whole thing already felt like a dream, an early morning, half-awake dream tangled up with sheets and pillows and dawn light through closed curtains, the kind you only remembered by chance hours later, for a few seconds, when you were going to sleep again at the end of the day. He wondered if anyone else was up yet. Maybe he could still go back to bed.

He should have noticed that something had changed, but he’d been distracted on the way up. He’d been practically running, and plus he’d been talking to a god. And he’d never been an especially assiduous observer of flora and fauna. He wouldn’t have noticed a spectacular beech tree or an unusual elm because he didn’t know what the difference between them was, if any.

Still, after a few minutes he began to wonder if he was coming down a different way than he’d come up, because it all seemed a little rockier than he remembered — the ratio of rocks to plants and dirt to grass wasn’t quite what it had been. He didn’t let it worry him too much, because if it worried him too much he would have to climb back up the hill and find a new way down, and that was the kind of thing he wanted to avoid. And besides, he was keeping the rising sun on his right hand, and that’s how navigation works, right? If things really went wrong he could go all the way down to the beach and cut along the coast. No way he could miss the camp that way. He still had hopes of getting back to the beach in time for breakfast.

One thing he couldn’t ignore, though, although he tried to for as long as he could, was that the shadows of things weren’t getting shorter anymore, in the usual manner of shadows cast by a rising sun. They were getting longer. Which would have meant that the orange-red stew boiling at the edge of the sky was somehow no longer a sunrise, but a sunset instead.

And it would mean he was on the wrong side of the island. But that was impossible. The strangest thing was that he didn’t even realize that somebody had hit him with a sword till after it had happened.

All he knew at first was that suddenly he’d lost his balance, and his left arm was numb.

“Shit!” he said.

He staggered and caught himself with his good right hand on the cold turf. There was a man behind him, a large young man with a round pale face and a goatee. The two of them were stuck together somehow. They were connected by a short broad-bladed sword that was stuck in Quentin’s collarbone, and the man was trying to wrench it out.

What had saved him was this: half of Quentin’s collarbone was made of hardwood, put there by the centaurs to replace what Martin Chatwin had bitten out of him. The man with the sword, not knowing this, had unluckily chosen that side when he attempted to cut Quentin in half from behind.

“Son of a bitch!” Quentin said. He didn’t mean the man specifically; he didn’t know who, or Who, he meant.

If he’d been thinking clearly Quentin might have actually tried to win the tug-of-war over the sword, but in the moment he just wanted it out of him, badly. They both did — their interests were temporarily aligned. In a state of almost disembodied fear Quentin reached up and gripped it with the opposite-side hand. It cut his palm. The man planted a booted foot on Quentin’s back and yanked the sword out with a grunt.

They faced each other, both panting. The quietness of it was weird: real fights happened without a sound track. The man was lightly armored, wearing some kind of blue livery, and not even as old as Quentin. It felt strangely personal — there, alone in a clearing on a silent island, in low-angle morning (evening) light, Quentin felt the youness of the man intensely. For an endless second they stared at each other while Quentin, like everyone else who has ever faced a blade unarmed, made little feinting motions in either direction, as if he were a defender and the man with the sword was going to try to cut past him to the basket. Just in case he lost that matchup, Quentin whispered the opening words to a spell, a Persian fainting charm, he could do it with one hand, which was lucky because he still couldn’t feel his left—

Rudely, the man didn’t wait for him to finish. He advanced, cutting off Quentin’s angles, then lunged appallingly fast, stabbing this time rather than chopping. Quentin twisted desperately to his right and away, but not quite far enough because the sword cut into him. It was incredible that he hadn’t made it, in his mind he was so absolutely sure he would make it, but instead the metal went right into his right side, through his clothes and into his body.

He’d twisted so far around that it went in from behind. At first the sensation was just strange, this hard, awkward presence taking up space where usually his body was, grinding against his ribs. Then it felt warm, almost pleasantly warm, then almost immediately hot, searing hot, as if the sword wasn’t just sharp but glowing white from a forge.

“Ahhhh. .” Quentin said under his breath, and he sucked air through his clenched teeth, exactly as if he’d cut himself chopping an onion.

The man was obviously a soldier, but Quentin had never really thought about what that meant. He was a professional killer, efficient and businesslike. He had none of Bingle’s elegance. He was like a baker, except instead of making bread he made corpses, and he wanted to make Quentin into one. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He jerked the sword out so he could go in again, right away, this time aiming for something more vital. Time to make the donuts. Quentin couldn’t think.

“ışık!” he shouted. He snapped his fingers.

It was just what came to him; it had been nagging at the back of his mind ever since the safe house. He’d gotten it right this time: light flared between them in the clearing. Startled, the man fell back a step. He must have thought Quentin had hurt him somehow. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he was all right, but it didn’t take Quentin long to blurt out the Persian fainting charm either.

The man dropped his sword and fell forward onto the thin grass. Quentin stood there panting and holding his side. Blood soaked his shirt. That was too close. Too close. He almost died. The pain was amazing, like a pulsing flare hanging there in the softening early evening, an evening star. Not looking, he couldn’t have said with absolute confidence if the pain was even located inside his body. When it couldn’t get any worse he threw up. Sour fish from last night’s dinner. Then it got even worse than that.

Gingerly he took off his shirt, detaching it in one go from the wounded place, and ripped off one of the sleeves. He folded the sleeve into a pad and pressed it against the wound, then tried as best he could to tie the rest of the shirt around him to hold it in place. When it was done he spent a minute just gritting his teeth and trying not to pass out. His heart was fluttering in his chest like a trapped sparrow. He kept repeating the phrase damage control under his breath. It helped for some reason.

When he could inspect it again he saw that the wound was bleeding but not pumping blood. There seemed to be a sharp limit to how deep a breath he could take without his vision going gray with pain. He tried to think what was in there. From the pain when he moved the sword must have cut muscle, but it couldn’t have reached his lung. Could it? What the hell else was over there? Probably it had just gone into the flank meat.

Adrenaline was flooding his system, dimming the pulsing flare of pain, pulling oxygen away from it. It was there, but he started to be able to bear it. As he did he realized what was happening. It dawned on him with a terrible, fiery power. He was having an adventure. A real one this time. That’s what the pain was.

He looked at his hands. He could feel his left one again. He made fists with both of them. There was a chunky notch in his wooden collarbone, but no deep structural damage. The kind of thing you’d fill in with Bondo. He shook his head. It seemed clear. Or clearish.

He looked at the man snoring facedown on the stubby island grass. He picked up his sword and began walking in the direction the man had come from.

The castle was a small three-part affair: a stodgy boxy keep with two outlying watchtowers, all built out of gray stone, with enormous trees growing around them. The whole layout was visible from where he stood on the rocky hillside. It was built on a grassy knob of land at the foot of the hills that Quentin could now see dominated one coast of the island, screening the castle from other angles of view. No wonder he and the others had missed it.

Quentin crept from rock to rock, keeping out of sight of whoever might be monitoring the hillside, zigzagging downhill toward the castle. He didn’t meet any more soldiers. Maybe it had just been bad luck. Not wanting to push it, he picked his way down a rocky defile to the edge of the sea. He would approach by creeping along the shore.

A narrow crust of rocky beach ran along it, barely enough to keep his feet dry. The sea lapped at it excitedly with dark, rapid wavelets. Quentin wasn’t even thinking about what he was doing. If he had to explain it to anybody, that he was preparing a one-man Die Hard magical assault on a castle, it would have been difficult to justify. He might have said that he was performing vital reconnaissance, probing its defenses, but all that meant was that if he got scared enough he was going to run away. What he was really thinking was that this was what Ember had meant, what Ember had given him. His chance. Something was in there, something to do with the keys, or Jollyby, or Julia, or all of them, and he was going to get it and bring it back.

And then he stopped. A boat was drawn up on the thin shingled beach, a gray, weathered rowboat. The oars were there, laid neatly inside it like the folded wings of a dragonfly. It was in good repair. The painter was knotted around an overhanging branch.

Just like that Quentin got stuck, mentally stuck. It felt like no force on Earth could compel him to walk past the boat without getting in it. He was going to get into it and retreat. He would row back around to the other side of the island, to where his friends were. His sword wound would compromise his rowing ability, but not fatally. The sudden sense of inertia was overwhelming. No one could reproach him for cowardice; indeed it would be foolhardy to keep going, selfish even.

He was actually untying the thin rope from the tree branch — he had to do it with his left hand, since he couldn’t lift his right arm above his head — when a pale face appeared at the far end of the beach. Another soldier.

It was eerie how long it took them both to react. Quentin didn’t want to believe that the man could see him, or if he did that he would recognize Quentin as an intruder, but even though the daylight was going by the minute there was no actual way that either of those things was possible. A cold wavelet broke over Quentin’s foot.

If the man had run and raised the alarm, that would have been the end of it. But he didn’t. Instead he advanced — he strode down the beach toward Quentin, drawing a short stubby sword as he came, the twin of the one Quentin was holding. Guess everybody wants to be a hero. Quentin supposed he didn’t look especially imposing.

But appearances were deceiving. Quentin stuck the first soldier’s sword point-down in the sand and squared off.

Kinetics: he was good with them. He was a Physical Kid. Whispering fast, reaching back to a Brakebills seminar he hadn’t thought about in, what, five years, he held out both hands, palms up, and waved them toward the soldier as if he were shooing away a flock of pigeons. As one, the black pebbles on the shore rose up at the man in a dark stream, like a swarm of angry bees, pelting him in the chest and the face with a rattling sound like a gravel truck dumping its load. Confused, the man turned to run, but he fell after only a few steps, and the rocks buried him into unconsciousness.

There now. All at once the fear was gone again, and the pain was gone, and the inertia was gone. Quentin was free to move. He could pass the boat. He’d been free his whole life, if only he’d known it.

He walked over to where the man lay half-covered. A warm, damp wind was coming in from offshore. Quentin kicked some rocks away from his face: a narrow sunburned face, ravaged by acne scars. His story was over for now. Quentin picked up his sword and chucked it as hard as he could out to sea. It skipped once, twice, and sank.

He picked up a small flat stone and slipped it into his pocket.

A skinny, windy path led up from the end of the beach through the trees toward the near watchtower. The grade was steep, and he walked up it bent over; it made his burning side feel better. He was afraid of nothing except losing momentum. He rehearsed spells to himself under his breath without actually casting them, feeling the energy build and then letting it die away again.

The watchtower was round and built on a steep slope, so coming up on it even the ground floor was above him. He put a hand on the old exposed foundation. He wondered who’d built it. The bricks felt cool and permanent. Who had placed them in this careful, elegant way, rectangular bricks approximating a smooth circle? Who was inside it? Was it enough that fate, or Ember, or whoever, had stuck these people in his way, that he was now going to hurt or kill them? After all he couldn’t keep this nonlethal shit up all night. Was it enough that one or really two of them had tried to kill him — one of them had even gone so far as to stick a sword in him?

Enough thinking. Sometimes it felt like all he did was think, and all other people did was act. He was going to do the other thing for a while. See how that felt.

He blew five minutes on a silent ritual that was supposed to enhance his senses, at least in theory, though he hadn’t done it since he was an undergraduate, and even then he’d never done it sober. His best bet would be to fly up the outside of the tower and surprise whoever was inside from above. Flight was a surprisingly major arcanum, bigger than you’d think, and he worried that using it would leave him with too little juice for a fight. But on the other hand, huge points for style. Nothing made you feel more like a fucking sorcerer than aviating under your own power. Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers.

Up he rose through the twilight air. The ancient brick rushed by his face in the dimness. There was no noise. He felt his chest empty out a little with the effort. It wasn’t so much a feeling of being weightless as one of being supported, touchlessly, somewhere around your shoulders. You were a baby being lifted up by a giant parent. Who’s a good boy?

Quentin’s long legs hung down as he cleared the treetops. He wished the others could see him. He shot up above the rim of the tower, arms spread out, one hand holding his stolen sword, the other lit up and crackling with violet witchery in the dimness. At the last second he cocked one knee up, the way superheroes did in comic books.

The man on the rooftop had time to stop swinging his arms back and forth and crane his neck back in shock, squinting, all blond hair and buckteeth, before Quentin extended his hand toward him, two fingers pointed. Two deep indigo pulses shot out of them and caught the man in the forehead and dropped him; the pulses ricocheted off into the darkness to points unknown. Quentin had had a long time to tinker with Penny’s old Magic Missile spell, and now it ran smooth and precise, with glowy special effects on top. The man’s head snapped back and then forward, and he went down on his hands and knees. Another shot, to the ribs, sent him sprawling over on his side.

Three down. Quentin landed lightly on the stone roof, which had a low wall around it. Again he felt the absence of a sound track keenly. There was a gun up here, a squat black cannon with a neat pyramid of cannonballs next to it. He took the flat rock that he’d collected from the beach out of his pocket. Drawing a dagger from the belt of the unconscious lookout — it was all the man was armed with — he began scratching a rune on it. It was a complicated business, but he could see the rune in his mind — could picture the page of the book where he’d read about it, a left-hand page. It didn’t have to be exact, straight lines and right angles, but the structure of it had to be right. You couldn’t mung up the topology.

When it was done, when he connected the last line to the first one, Quentin felt the join in his gut. It was good enough. The power was locked in there. The stone buzzed and jumped in his hand as if it were alive.

He waited for just a moment at the top of the stairs. Once he threw that rock there would be no going back, no slipping off into the darkness. The warm ocean wind poured over him under the darkening sky. The weather was picking up, and the sea was flecked with combers. A storm was rolling in. He had a sudden worry about the man he’d left down on the beach. What if the tide came in? Quentin was pretty sure the water would wake him up before it drowned him.

A quick, soundless flicker of blue-white light caught Quentin’s eye, in his peripheral vision. It came from the other watchtower, on the far side of the keep, through the trees — it was exactly as if somebody had taken a flash photo inside it. He squinted into the half darkness. Had he been spotted? Had he imagined it? A long moment passed. Ten seconds. Twenty. He relaxed again.

The other tower ripped open. Something hot and bright and white exploded inside it. The whole top floor blew out, and arcs of power flashed out in all directions, setting the treetops around it on fire. Stones went crashing away through the underbrush. The tower’s roof pancaked down onto the floor below it.

Just then, out at sea, the rough, bold shape of the Muntjac came heeling silently around the point. It was like an enormous friendly dog he hadn’t seen for weeks and weeks, bounding toward him. The others had come. It was all happening.

Grinning like a loon, Quentin threw his stone down the stairs and stepped away.

A colossal whump made the roof under his feet resonate like a drum, as the stone gave up the energy he’d locked inside it all at once, explosively. Dust spurted up from between the roof tiles, and air blasted out of the mouth of the stairs. Instinctively Quentin half squatted, and for a second he wondered if he’d overdone it, but the tower held together. He ran down the steps, prepping another spell, the tip of his sword scraping the wall. The room was dark — he could just make out two men, one lying prone under a broken table, the other trying to get to his feet.

Quentin kept running. His mind was clear and ringing with excitement. As he ran he blew into his hand and shook it to get another spell charged up. Not a moment too soon, because yet another man came pelting up the stairs, hurriedly tugging on gloves. Quentin stiff-armed him straight in the chest, which might or might not have worked anyway, but Quentin’s hand was amped up like a Taser, and the charge blew the man back down the stairs.

Quentin hurdled the groaning body and kept on running, out into the square in front of the castle.

It had four sides: the keep on the left, watchtowers on either end, ocean on the right. There was a small obelisk in the middle. A moment later Poppy came walking into the open air from the opposite corner. He hadn’t realized what he must look like, shirtless and bloody, until she saw him and he saw her expression. He waved in what he hoped was a cheerful and not moribund way. He was about to jog across to her when a stick clattered across the cobblestones next to him. He looked at it curiously, then scrambled violently backward out of the courtyard when he saw that it was an arrow.

Poppy saw it at the same time he did. She darted behind the pedestal, singing something in rapid-fire Polish, and a green tracer appeared in the air, like a green laser, connecting the arrow to the roof of the castle. She had back-traced its path through the air.

She didn’t faze easily. It must be an Australian thing. Probably she grew up fighting off snakes and dingoes and whatever else. He’d never seen her cast anything before, and it was amazing. He’d never in his life seen anybody move their hands that quickly.

“Oy!” she called, her back to the stone obelisk. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right!”

“Eliot and Benedict are finishing in the tower!” she shouted.

“I’m going in!” He pointed to the keep.

“Wait! No! Bingle’s coming too!”

“I’m going in!”

He didn’t hear what she said next. He was overjoyed to see them, and somehow weirdly Poppy, good old Poppy, most of all, but he felt a surge of longing at the same time. This was his chance. If he didn’t stay ahead of them, if he didn’t get there first, he would lose it, and he didn’t want to be selfish about it, but if it was all the same to them he wanted this one to be his show. Quentin whispered a few words to his sword and struck it twice on the ground. It took on a golden sheen. Poppy was working on the end of the green trail from the arrow now. The end became a spark, and the spark raced along the trail like a lit fuse. It disappeared over the parapet, and there was a crack of thunder.

Quentin ran for the doorway of the keep. The feeling was absolutely glorious. He didn’t know how he knew what to do, but he did. With the others at his back, his last doubt was gone.

The doors were made of foot-thick iron-bound beams. He took a skip-step, wound up with the sword, and smashed it into them overhand. The spell he’d put on it didn’t affect the way the sword felt to him, but it acted on everything else as if it weighed about half a ton. The whole structure vibrated, and the wood cracked and split. More dust. The boom echoed out into the night. Another hit smashed the door halfway in, and another cleared the doorway.

Striding into the castle Quentin felt so full of power it was almost painful. It was bursting out of him. He didn’t know where it was coming from — his chest felt huge, its contents under maximum pressure. He was a walking bomb. Five men stood in the hall behind the broken door, pointing swords and spears at him, and a shout of wind rushed out of Quentin’s hands and blew them backward. He blinded them with a flash of light and then threw them bodily down the great hall. It was just so obvious.

He turned and put one hand on the ruins of door he’d just knocked out, and it began to burn. This seemed like a good idea, and very dramatic, but just in case it caused problems later he hardened his skin against fire.

He was discovering, in a way for the first time, what it felt like to truly be a Magician King. That fat bastard he’d been when he was sitting around Castle Whitespire, playing with swords and getting drunk every night? That was no king. This was a king. Master and commander. This was the culmination of everything that had started the day he’d walked into that frozen garden in Brooklyn, all those years ago. He had at last come into his own. Maybe all he’d needed was Ember’s permission. You have to have faith.

The ritual he’d done to ramp up his senses was actually working: he was so wired, he could feel where people were through the walls — he could sense the electricity in their bodies, the way a shark does. Time, that dull mechanism that usually reliably stamped out one second after another, like parts on a conveyor belt, erupted into a glorious melody. He was getting it all back now, everything that he’d missed and more. Poppy was right, that time on Earth, it had been an adventure after all. It wasn’t just blundering around, it was the buildup to this. And this was living. He would live like this from now on.

“This is me,” he whispered. “This is me.”

He trotted up the front stairs and through a series of grand rooms. When people approached him, objects flew at them and battered them to the floor — chairs, tables, urns, chests, whatever he could get traction on with a spell. Lightning struck and stunned them. Lazily, he stopped a thrown ax in midair with one outstretched hand, and sent it back the way it came. Breathing in, he sucked the oxygen out of rooms until the people in them choked and passed out, lips blue, eyes bulging. Pretty soon they began to run when they saw him coming.

He felt altered, like he had grown physically giant. It didn’t stop the spells pouring out of him, one after another, effortlessly. The enemy troops were mixed, human and fairy and a few exotics: a stone golem of some sort, a water elemental, a red-bearded dwarf, a rather tatty talking panther. It didn’t matter, he was an equal-opportunity hero. He was a gusher, a fire hose. He barely even felt the wound in his side anymore. He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him. All he had to do was be who he was: the Magician King.

He had no idea where he was going, he just worked room to room, clearing the building. Twice he heard the Muntjac’s guns boom in the distance. Once he threw open a door and found Bingle and Julia backing down a crowd of soldiers amid the wreckage of a drawing room full of ornate furniture. Bingle’s magic sword flickered in front of him, as fast and precise as an industrial machine, its glowing tracery leaving hypnotic neon tracks in the air. He seemed to be in a state of martial ecstasy, his tunic wringing with sweat but his face calm, his hooded eyes having drooped almost to slits.

But the real terror was Julia. She’d summoned a kind of transformative magic Quentin didn’t know, or maybe whatever it was in her that wasn’t human had come to the surface in the fight. He hardly recognized her. Her skin was shining with that phosphorescent silver, and she’d grown at least six inches. She fought bare-handed — she advanced on the soldiers till somebody was foolish enough to thrust a spear at her, at which point she simply grabbed it like he was moving in slow motion and began beating the shit out of him and his friends with it. Her strength looked enormous, and metal blades just skated off her skin.

She didn’t look like she needed help. Quentin found the stairs up to the top floor. He kicked open the first door he saw and almost died when a massive fireball rolled over him.

It was a colossally powerful casting. Someone had spent a long time setting it up and pumping energy into it. It enveloped him completely, and he felt the flames licking him, icy through the fireproofing spell. But the spell held. When the fire had dissipated his limbs were smoking but undamaged.

He was standing in the doorway of a darkened library. Inside, sitting at a desk with two lanterns on it, was a skeleton in a nice brown suit. Or not quite a skeleton, a man, but an obviously dead one. He still had flesh on him, but it had shrunk and turned leathery.

It was very still in the library. Bookshelves smoldered and crackled quietly on either side of Quentin, from the fireball. The corpse watched him with eyes like hard dry nuts.

“No?” it said finally. Its voice buzzed and flapped, a blown-out speaker. It obviously didn’t have much left in the way of vocal cords. Some unnatural force was keeping it alive, long after its sell-by date. “Well. That was my only spell.”

Quentin waited. The thing’s face was immobile, unreadable. Its dried lips didn’t cover its teeth completely. It wasn’t pretty to look at, but for some reason Quentin didn’t feel angry at it. Why were they fighting again? For a second Quentin really couldn’t remember. He wondered if he’d gotten too far ahead of the others. But no, this was on him. He’d started it. And this was the boss fight.

The corpse came to convulsive life again and whipped a throwing knife at him with one skinny, loose-jointed marionette arm. Quentin ducked, purely out of instinct, but it was a wild throw, nowhere near him. It went through the open door behind him and skittered on the flagstones.

“All right,” it said. “Now I’m really done.”

The corpse might have sighed.

“Where’s the key?” Quentin said. “You have one, don’t you?” For a terrible second he worried that it might not.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore,” the corpse said wheezily. It pushed a small wooden box toward him with one shriveled hand. The skin had worn off some of the knuckles, like the leather off the arms of an old chair. “It used to be my daughter’s.”

“Your daughter’s,” Quentin repeated. “Who are you?”

“Don’t you know the story?” It sighed again. It seemed much more resigned to its fate than Quentin expected. He didn’t know if it had to breathe anymore, but apparently it could still suck air in and out of its leathery chest like a bellows when it wanted to. “I thought everybody knew it.”

Now that he’d stopped moving he realized he was covered with sweat. It was cold in the nighttime island air.

“Wait. You’re not going to tell me you’re him. The man from the fairy tale. The Seven Golden Keys.”

“Is that what they’re calling it? A fairy tale?” Air hissed between its teeth. Was that laughter? “I suppose it’s a little late to quibble about things like that.”

“I don’t understand. I thought you were one of the good guys.”

“We can’t all be heroes. Then who would the heroes fight? It’s a matter of numbers really. Just work out the sums.”

“But isn’t this the key your daughter gave you?” Quentin had a terrible feeling he’d grasped the wrong end of something. “That’s what the story said. You set her free, from the witch, and she didn’t remember you, but she gave you the key.”

“That was no witch, that was her mother.” More hissing laughter. Only its lower jaw moved when it talked. It was like talking to an animatronic president at a theme park. “I left them to look for the Seven Keys. I suppose I wanted to be a hero. They never forgave me for it. When I finally came back my own daughter didn’t know me. Her mother told her I was dead.

“The key kept me alive. It’s just as well, your taking it like this. It’s terrible living in a dead body, I can’t feel anything. You should see how the others look at me.”

Quentin opened the wooden box. A golden key lay inside it. He was part of the fairy tale now, he supposed. He’d crashed through a shared wall into an adjoining story. Enter the Magician King.

“Just tell me,” the corpse said. “What is it for? I never knew.”

“I don’t know either. I’m sorry.”

Footsteps behind him. Quentin risked a glance back. Just Bingle, catching up at last.

“Don’t be sorry. You’ve paid for it. You paid the price.” The life had started going out of it as soon as it let go of the box. It slumped forward, and its head hit the table with a bang. It muttered the last words directly into the wooden desktop. “Like me. You just don’t know it yet.”

It didn’t move again.

Quentin snapped the box shut. He heard Bingle walk in beside him. Together they stared at the dome of the corpse’s head, which was as bald and mottled and seamed as a globe.

“Well done,” Bingle said.

“I don’t think I killed him,” Quentin said. “I think he just died.”

“It is all good.” He must have picked that up from Josh.

Quentin’s crazy power levels were dropping rapidly toward normal again, leaving him feeling wrung out and shaky. He was vaguely aware that he was giving off a nasty burnt-hair smell. The fireproofing hadn’t been perfect.

“It was that man,” Quentin said. “The one from the fairy tale. But his version was different. How did you know to come get me?”

“The cook caught a talking fish. It told us what to do. It had a bottle in its belly, with a map inside. What happened to you?”

“Ember came.”

That was enough explanation for now. Together they walked back down the hall toward the stairs, Bingle eyeing every doorway and alcove for holdouts and dead-enders.

They’d done it: another key found. One to go. Quentin was on the scoreboard. They met a chattering Poppy, flush with her first Fillorian outing—“We did it!”—and a silent, still-fluorescent Julia wandering the halls. Quentin showed them the prize and hugged them both, Julia a bit awkwardly, since she didn’t really hug him back, and moreover had retained the extra height from her battle form. Poppy was right, they had done it, and Quentin had led the way. He held on to that victorious feeling, weighed it in his hands, felt its warmth and its heft, making sure he would always remember it. Bingle rooted a straggler out from behind a curtain, but he’d already laid down his weapons. He didn’t have a lot of fancy ideas about dying for lost causes.

Outside the Muntjac had drawn right up to the wharf — it loomed up abruptly over the stone square. The bay must have been deeper than it looked. Somebody — Eliot, probably — had conjured some floating lights, basketball-sized globes that hovered over the courtyard, bathing it in soft yellow-rosy illumination and giving it a country-fair atmosphere. The wind had picked up even more, and the glowing spheres trembled and bobbed as they tried to stay in position.

And there was Eliot, standing with Josh out on the pier, with the great comforting bulk of the Muntjac behind them. Why were they just standing there? The high was all gone now, and Quentin’s knees were weak. It was tiring work, being a hero. He felt hollowed out, a limp empty skin of himself. The ache in his side was getting hot again. The thought of his cozy shipboard berth was crushingly comforting. Now that they had the key he could curl up in it and the great beast would bear him away. He raised a weary hand in greeting. There would be talking now, and explanations, and congratulations — the hero’s welcome — but for now he just wanted to get past them and back aboard.

Eliot and Josh didn’t greet him. Their faces were grave. They were looking down at something on the pier. Josh spoke, but the wind snatched his words away, spirited them off and out over the black ocean. They were both waiting for Quentin to notice Benedict lying there on the rough wet wood.

There was an arrow through his throat. He was dead. He’d barely made it off the boat. He lay curled around himself, and his face was dark. He hadn’t died right away. It looked like he’d clawed at the arrow for a while first, before he finally choked on his own blood.

CHAPTER 20

The house at Murs was the best thing that had ever happened to Julia in her entire life. In any of her entire lives.

Pouncy was right, she had come home. Her life up until now had been one vicious, un-fun, never-ending game of tag, where everyone else was it and you could never stop running. Only now had she finally found home base. She could rest. Unlike the safe houses, this house was actually safe. This was her Brakebills, for real this time. She had made a separate peace.

There were ten people at Murs, counting Julia. Some were from Free Trader Beowulf, some weren’t. Pouncy was there, and Asmodeus, and Failstaff. So were Gummidgy and Fiberpunk: timid, infrequent posters who were the last people Julia would have figured were involved with magic. Now she realized they’d probably spent most of their time trading spells in private threads.

Asmodeus and Failstaff and Pouncy weren’t who she thought they were either, at all. She’d figured Pouncy for a girl, or a gay man, but she didn’t get a gay vibe off him in person, and either way she didn’t think he’d be so good-looking. Online he came across as somebody with something to be angry about, who was always on the edge of losing it in the face of some intolerable outrage against his person, and who kept it together through sheer force of will. Julia’s pet theory had been that he was an accident victim of some kind, a paraplegic maybe, or somebody in chronic pain who was struggling to be philosophical about his condition. No way she would have pegged him as all Abercrombie & Fitch like that.

Failstaff wasn’t handsome. In Julia’s mind he’d been a silver-haired retiree, a gentleman of the old school. In fact he was about thirty, and he might have been a gentleman, but if he was he was one of the largest gentlemen she’d ever seen. Six foot five, maybe, and built like a butte. He wasn’t fat, exactly, there was just a shitload of him. He must have weighed four hundred pounds. His voice was a subsonic rumble.

As for Asmodeus, she turned out to be even younger than Julia, seventeen at the most, a fast talker with a big smile and heavy V-shaped eyebrows that gave her a naughty-schoolgirl look. She had a bit of a Fairuza Balk thing going on. Shades of The Craft. They were her best friends, and Julia didn’t even recognize them.

They were also magicians, and good ones, better than she was. And they lived in a big house in the south of France. It would take her a while to get used to them.

And to forgive them.

“When were you going to tell me?” she demanded, as they sat ranged around some deep glasses of local red at a stylish reclaimed-wood table on the stone patio behind the house. A blue swimming pool shimmered in the late afternoon sun. It was like a goddamned cigarette ad.

“Really! I’d like to know! You were here all this time, doing magic and scarfing humane local foie gras and I don’t even know what else and you didn’t even tell me? Instead you made me pass a test. Another test! As if I haven’t passed enough tests in my life!”

Maddeningly, a tear coursed down her cheek. She snapped her hand to her face like she’d been stung.

“Julia.” You could practically feel it when Failstaff talked, his voice was that deep. It practically rattled the silverware.

“We’re sorry,” Asmodeus said, all sisterly. “We all went through it.”

“Believe me, it gave us no pleasure to think about you at that Bed-Stuy safe house.” Pouncy set his wine glass aside. “But think about it. When you dropped off the radar on FTB we had a pretty good sense that you’d hooked up with the magic scene. So we waited. We gave you time to get your feet under you, get the basics out of the way, all that low-level crap. Get your finger positions straight, crack the major language groups. To see if this was for you or not.”

“Well, thanks a fucking million. That was really thoughtful of you.” All that time she’d spent wandering in the wilderness, wondering if there was anything out there, and they’d been here this whole time, watching her. She took a shaky breath. “You don’t know what I went through.”

“We know,” Failstaff said.

She looked at them, sipping their wine, a fancy Rhône red so dark it was almost black, lolling in the golden fucking Merchant-Ivory sunlight. The house was surrounded by hay fields gone to seed. They seemed to absorb sound, leaving them alone in an ocean of hush.

“You were paying your dues,” Pouncy said. “Call it a rite of passage.”

“Let’s call it what it is,” Julia said. “You were testing me. Who do you think you are? To test me?”

“Yes, we fucking tested you!” Pouncy was exasperated, but in a decorous, good-natured way. “You would have done the same thing to us! We tested the shit out of you. Not to see if you were smart. We know you’re smart. You’re a goddamned genius, though Iris says your Old Church Slavonic is crap. But we had to know why you were here. It wouldn’t work if you were just here to play with us. It wasn’t enough for you to love us. You had to love magic.”

“We all did it, Julia,” Asmodeus repeated. “Everybody here did, and we were all pissed when we found out the truth, and we all got over it.”

Julia snorted. “You’re what, seventeen? Are you going to tell me you paid your dues?”

“I paid, Julia,” she said evenly. A challenge.

“And to answer your question,” Pouncy said, “who do we think we are? We are us. And you’re one of us now, and we’re damn glad you’re here. But we don’t take chances on people.” He waited for that to sink in. “There’s too much at stake.”

Julia crossed her arms fiercely, or with all the ferocity she could muster, to avoid giving them the impression that they were entirely forgiven. But God damn them all to Hades, she was curious. She wanted to know what the hell this place was, and what they were up to. She wanted to know what the game was, so she could play too.

“So whose house is this?” she said. “Who paid for all this?”

Obviously there was a lot of money washing around here. She’d stood by while Pouncy called the rental car company and, in fluent French, simply bought the scraped-up Peugeot with a credit card.

“It’s Pouncy’s,” Asmodeus said. “Mostly. He was a day trader for a while. He was pretty good at it.”

“Pretty good?” Pouncy lifted his finely drawn eyebrows.

Asmo shook her head. “If you’d gone into the math just a little further you could have done so much better. I keep telling you, if you look at the market as a chaotic system—”

“Whatever. It wasn’t an interesting problem. It was a means to an end.”

“If you’d just stake me—”

“We all put in money when we came here,” Failstaff said. “I put in all mine. What was I saving it for? What else is money for except to live like this, with them, somewhere like Murs?”

“No offense, but it all sounds kind of culty.”

“That’s exactly what it is!” Asmodeus said, clapping her hands. “The Cult of Pouncy!”

“I think of it more like CERN,” Pouncy said. “It’s an institute for high-energy magical studies.”

Julia hadn’t touched her wine. More than wine right now, she wanted control, a thing that was not fully compatible with wine.

“So I’m looking around for like a Large Hadron Collider or its magical equivalent.”

“Bup-bup-bup,” Pouncy said. “Baby steps. First we power-level you up to two hundred fifty. And then we shall see what we shall see.”

It emerged that the house at Murs was, in its way, a natural outgrowth of the safe-house scene. The scene was a filter: it caught a very few, rather unusual people, culled them out of the everyday world and into the safe houses, and gave them magic to chew on. Murs filtered the filtered, double-distilled them. Most people in the magic scene were happy chilling in the safe houses, faffing around with three-ring binders. It was a social thing for them. They liked the double-life aspect of it. They’d gone behind the veil. They liked knowing they had a secret. It was what they needed, and it was all they needed.

But some people, a very few people, were different. Magic meant something else to them, something more primal and urgent. They didn’t have a secret, the secret had them. They wanted more. They wanted to penetrate the veil behind the veil. They did not faff, they learned. And when they hit the ceiling of what they could learn in the safe-house scene, they banged on it till somebody in the attic opened up a trap door.

That’s when they ended up in Murs. Pouncy and his gang skimmed off the cream of the safe houses and brought them here.

Life was easy in Murs, at least at first. There was a living wing and a working wing. Julia was assigned a beautiful bedroom with a high ceiling and wide floorboards and big stripey-curtained windows that let in floods of that champagne-y French light. Everybody cooked and everybody cleaned, but they’d worked out a lot of magic to smooth the way — it was amazing to watch the floors repel dust and herd it into neat little piles, like iron filings in a magnetic field. And the produce was second to none.

The others didn’t welcome her with open arms, exactly. They weren’t open-arms types. But there was respect there. She was geared up to prove herself all over again, since based on her life thus far she was used to having to prove herself to a new gang of assholes every six months or so. And she would have, she really would have. But they weren’t going to make her. The proving was done with. The journey was the test, and she had arrived. She was in.

It wasn’t Brakebills. It was better. She felt like she’d finally won — she’d won ugly, but she’d won.

They knew about Brakebills at Murs. Not much, but they knew. Their attitude toward it was bracingly snobbish. They considered Brakebills — to the extent that they considered it at all — rather cute: a sanitized, safety-wheeled playpen for those who didn’t have the grit and the will to make it on the outside. They called it Fakebills, and Breakballs. At Brakebills you sat in classrooms and followed the rules. Perfectly fine if you like that kind of thing, but here at Murs you made your own rules, no adult supervision. Brakebills was the Beatles, Murs was the Stones. Brakebills was for Marquis of Queensberry types. Murs was more your stone-cold street-fighting man.

Most of them had even been in for the Brakebills exam, like her, though unlike her they didn’t realize that till they’d gotten to Murs and Failstaff, who had a special touch with memory spells, had wafted away the magic that was fogging their brains. They took a certain pride in it, the refuseniks. Gummidgy (Julia never did figure out what the deal with her name was) even claimed to have beaten the exam and then — a historic first — declined Fogg’s offer to matriculate and walked away. She’d chosen the life of a hedge witch instead.

Privately Julia thought that that was completely demented, and that the Brakebills crowd probably had slightly more on the ball than the others were giving them credit for. But she enjoyed the snobbism nonetheless. She’d earned that much.

They were an odd bunch at Murs. It was a menagerie — you needed a genius IQ to get into Murs, but eccentricity was not an impediment, and you’d have to be some kind of outlier to go through the grinder of the safe-house scene and not come out a little skewy. A lot of their magic was home-brewed, and as a result the range of different styles and techniques on display was bewildering. Some of them were graceful and balletic, some were so minimalist they barely moved at all. One guy was so herky-jerky he looked like he was practically break dancing. There was some popping and locking going on there.

There were specialists too. One guy mostly made magic artifacts. Gummidgy was a dedicated psychic. Fiberpunk — a short, thickset specimen almost as wide as he was tall — self-identified as a metamagician: he dealt in magic that acted on other magic, or on itself. He rarely spoke and spent a lot of time drawing. The one time Julia looked over his shoulder he explained, in a whisper, that he was drawing two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional shadows cast by four-dimensional objects.

Life was easy in Murs, but work was hard. They gave her a day to deal with her jet lag and her personal baggage, then Pouncy told her to report to the East Wing first thing the next morning. Julia didn’t fancy being told to report anywhere by Pouncy Silverkitten, whom she was accustomed to thinking of as a friend and an equal. But he just unbuttoned his shirt and showed her his stars. (Also his annoyingly smooth, well-muscled chest.) He had a lot of them. Equals they might be, but only in some abstract philosophical sense. Practically speaking he could still kick her ass at magic.

Which was why, swallowing her pride, and possibly some other feelings, she obeyed Pouncy and reported to an upstairs room in the East Wing called the Long Study at eight o’clock in the morning.

The Long Study was a narrow room lined with windows along one side — more of a gallery, really. There was nothing obvious to study with there. There were no books, or desks, or furniture of any kind in the Long Study. What there was was Iris.

Baby-faced, chopstick-haired, Ivy League Iris, last seen breaking Julia down into her component parts back at the Bed-Stuy safe house. It was almost like meeting an old friend. On her home turf Iris went casual: jeans and a white T-shirt that showed off her stars.

“Hi,” Julia said. It came out a tad querulous. She cleared her throat and tried again. “How are you?”

“Let’s do it again,” Iris said. “From the top. Start with the flash.”

“The flash?”

“We’re going to run your levels. Start with the flash. You miss one, you go back to the beginning. You do them all, one to seventy-seven, no mistakes, three times in a row, and then we can start work.”

“You mean start leveling me?”

“Start with the flash.”

For Iris, meeting Julia again was not like meeting an old friend. For Iris meeting Julia was more like when the grizzled sergeant in the Vietnam movie meets the newbie private fresh from Parris Island. Eventually the private will lose his cherry and become a man, but first the sergeant is going to have to drag him through the jungle until such time as the private can unfold his entrenching tool without shooting his balls off.

Of course Iris had every right. That’s how the system worked. She was doing Julia a fucking favor. Babysitting the noob was evidently not considered a premium assignment at Murs, and she wasn’t going to pretend to enjoy it. Which whatever, but this did not oblige Julia to pretend to be grateful either. Really she ought to dog it a few times, she thought, just to piss Iris off. Show her that Julia had nothing to prove. See how long it took her to lose her shit. ışık her and her flash.

But in truth it was not necessary for Julia to dog it. She screwed it up the old-fashioned way, involuntarily, four times before she made it to seventy-seven even once. Twice she muffed the same spell, level fifty-six, a thumb-cracking affair rich in Welsh ll’s that was designed to toughen glass against breakage. Even averaging a bit more than two minutes a level, which was really machinelike efficiency, they were two and a half hours into it when she went down for the second time. Iris sat down cross-legged on the floor.

But Julia had decided that she was not going to swear or twitch or sigh in front of Iris, whether she muffed level fifty-six twice or two hundred times. She was going to be all sweetness and light. How do you llike them apples.

At two in the afternoon Julia spiked spell number sixty-eight on an otherwise perfect run-through. Iris rolled her eyes and groaned and lay down full-length on the wooden floor and stared up at the ceiling. She couldn’t even look at Julia anymore. Julia didn’t pause but went right back to the beginning, whereupon she stuffed level fourteen, a gimme spell that even Jared knew cold.

“God!” Iris shouted at the ceiling. “Get it right!”

By the time Julia rattled off two perfect runs, right through to seventy-seven, it was six thirty in the evening. They hadn’t broken for lunch. Julia hadn’t even sat down. The setting sun, angling in from the west, painted the long wall a chalky pink. Her feet were killing her.

“All right,” Iris said. “That’s it. Same time tomorrow.”

“But we’re not done.”

Iris levered herself up off the floor.

“Nope, we’re done. Finish tomorrow.”

“We’re not done.”

Iris stopped and stared at Julia through her nerd glasses. Maybe Iris was annoyed at having to babysit the new fish, but Julia had so much more anger than Iris did at her disposal. She was making a withdrawal from her stockpile now, spending a little of the principal, and it hardly made a dent. She walked over to a window and punched it. It would have broken if she hadn’t already cast level fifty-six on it three times that day.

“All right, Julia, I get it. I was tough on you. I’m sorry. Come on. Let’s get some dinner.”

“We’re done when I say we’re done.”

Julia cast a locking spell on the door (level seventy-two). It was a symbolic gesture, as there were in fact two doors out of the Long Study, and Iris could probably have unpicked her level seventy-two in a couple of minutes anyway. That wasn’t the point. The point was that Julia had been waiting four years to get to Murs. Iris could skip dinner.

Iris sat back down and put her head in her hands.

“Whatever.”

She could stand to skip a few meals anyway, Julia thought. She’s working on a muffin-top situation with those jeans.

Julia started again. She was going slower now, and when she was done the room was dark. It was almost nine o’clock. Iris stood up. She tried the door Julia had locked, swore, and walked the length of the Long Study to the other door without looking back or saying a word. Julia watched her go.

There was no touching moment of female bonding. The grizzled sergeant didn’t chuck her on the shoulder and grudgingly admit that the rookie might make a hell of a soldier one day after all. But when she reported to the Long Study at eight o’clock the following morning it was tacitly understood that they could now skip the alpha-chick bullshit.

Let the power-leveling begin. Here come the big secrets. At least she didn’t have to fuck anybody this time.

She didn’t have to stand up, either: apparently she now qualified for some furniture. She and Iris sat on chairs and faced each other across an actual table, a sturdy chunk of old butcher block. On the table was, yes, a three-ring binder, but it was the most beautiful three-ring binder Julia had ever seen: leather-bound, with those sturdy steel rings — none of this bendy aluminum Trapper Keeper shit — and above all thick, thick, thick. It was stuffed with neatly transcribed spells.

Under Iris’s steady gaze Julia went up two levels that day. The next day she did five. Every level she gained wiped out a little bit of what she’d been through in Brooklyn. Julia had a hungry mind, she always had, and she’d been on starvation rations for longer than she cared to think about. She’d even worried that her brain might be starving to death, losing its plasticity, that she’d been running on fumes for so long she might not have the mental muscle tone to wrangle large tranches of hard data. But she didn’t think so. If anything, wandering in the information jungle had made her tough and efficient. She was used to doing a lot with a little. Now that she had a lot, she was going to work wonders with it. And she did.

It was frustrating having to pound levels while the others were off doing God knew what. She was running through new fields of power, frisking through them, but she was already eager to get on to whatever it was the rest of them were up to. She kept trying to run ahead, and Iris had to drag her back and make her trudge through the levels in order. I mean, it was so blindingly obvious that if you took the kinetic elements from level 112, and borrowed the reflexive bits from the self-warming spell at level 44, then you had a basic working model for how to make yourself hover a few feet off the ground. But that wasn’t till 166, and level 166 was 54 more levels away.

And meanwhile she was being treated like a little kid around whom everybody had to watch their language. Whenever she looked out the window of the Long Study it seemed like Pouncy and Asmodeus were walking by, heatedly engaged in what was obviously the most interesting conversation in the history of spoken communication. Either they were sleeping together — though even in France Asmodeus was practically jailbait, so whatever — or there was some deal going on here that Julia was not yet senior enough to be cut in on. Conversations went quiet whenever she walked into the dining room. It’s not that they weren’t glad to see her, it’s just that she had apparently developed the ability to instantly make people forget what they’d been about to say, causing them instead to make some remark about the weather or the coffee or Asmo’s eyebrows.

One night she woke up from a dead sleep at two in the morning — she was so tired from running levels with Iris that she’d gone straight up to her room and slept through dinner. At first she thought there was a phone ringing in her room on vibrate, except that she didn’t have a phone. Then the vibrations got stronger than that, stronger and stronger to the point where the whole house was throbbing every five seconds or so. It sounded like when cars rolled down her street in Brooklyn with the bass cranked up and too much funk in the trunk. Things were starting to rattle. It was like giant footsteps were approaching the house, over the sleeping fields of Murs.

The whole thing took maybe two minutes. The pulses got bigger and bigger until whatever it was was right on top of her. The windows rattled till she thought the old glass would crack. On the final beat her bed vibrated a foot to the left, and she could feel three-hundred-year-old plaster dust sift down from the ceiling onto her face. Somewhere in the house something did shatter, a window or a plate. Light burst soundlessly out of the lower floors of the house, illuminating the row of cypresses across the lawn.

And then it was gone, just like that, leaving behind it only a ringing, burnt-out silence. Later, it might have been an hour later, she heard the others coming up to bed. Asmo said something in a furious whisper, something about how they were wasting their time, and somebody else shushed her.

The next morning everything was as it had been. Nobody copped to anything having happened at all. Though Fiberpunk was now sporting a ripe purple bruise on his temple. Hmmmmmmmm.

When Julia hit level 200 they baked her a cake. Two weeks later, six weeks after she’d driven into Murs, she went to bed having hit level 248, and she knew that tomorrow would be it. And it was: at three in the afternoon Iris walked her through a complex casting that, when properly done, rolled back entropy in a local area by five seconds. The effect was very local, a circle a yard across, but no less spectacular for that.

The theory behind it was a rat’s nest of interwoven effects. She could hardly believe something that kludgy even worked, but Iris could do it, and after a few hours so could Julia. She knocked down a pile of blocks. She cast the spell. The blocks knocked themselves back up again.

And that was level 250. When she dropped her hands Iris kissed her on both cheeks—zo Fransh—and told her they were finished. She could hardly believe it. Just to be sure she offered to run the full set, 1 through 250, to Iris’s satisfaction, but Iris declined. She’d seen enough.

Julia spent the rest of the afternoon just walking the shady lanes that ran in comforting right angles between the sun-baked fields that surrounded the farmhouse. Her brain felt bloated and replete, like after a big meal — it was the first time she could ever remember it not being hungry. She spent an hour playing computer games, then that night Fiberpunk cooked them an elaborate bouillabaisse, with monkfish and saffron, and they opened a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape with dust on its shoulders and a really boring-looking label that didn’t even have a little line drawing on it, which meant it must have been hair-raisingly expensive. Before they went to bed Pouncy told her to come to the Library the next morning. Not the Long Study, the Library.

She woke up early. It was midsummer, but the heat hadn’t come up yet. She haunted the lumpy, un-landscaped grounds for an hour, startling weird French bugs out of her way, studying the tiny white snails that were everywhere, getting her shoes soaked with dew, waiting for everybody else to wake up. It was like morning on her birthday. Superstitiously Julia avoided the dining room while the others ate breakfast. At 7:55 she snatched a roll out of the kitchen and gnawed it nervously on her way over to the Library.

The day she’d stepped into that elevator in the library in Brooklyn, she’d dropped into the void. It might as well have been an empty shaft. She’d been falling ever since. But it was almost over. She was about to touch solid ground again. She could barely even remember what it felt like to be where she belonged, on the same side of the glass as everybody else.

She’d tried the door to the Library once before but it hadn’t opened for her, and she hadn’t bothered trying to hack the locking charm. She was tired of picking locks. She stood in front of the door for a minute, plucking at the fabric of her summer dress, watching the second hand of the clock in the hall.

At the appointed hour the door opened by itself. Julia lowered her chin and went inside.

They were all there, sitting around a long worktable. The Library was clearly the crowning achievement of whoever had renovated the Murs farmhouse. They’d hollowed out the space completely, cut away three floors and exposed the roof beams thirty feet up. Morning sunlight lasered in through tall thin windows. Bookshelves soared along the walls, all the way up, which would have been totally impractical except for some tasteful oak platforms that floated magically alongside them, ready to hoist the browser up to whatever level he or she wanted to be at.

They stopped talking when she came in. Nine faces turned to look up at her. Some of them had books and folders of notes in front of them. They could have been a corporate board meeting, if the corporation were Random Genius Freaks LLC. Pouncy sat at the head of the table. There was an open seat at the foot.

She pulled out the chair and sat down, almost demurely. Why weren’t they talking? They just looked at her calmly, like a parole board.

So. She’d met their expectations. It was time they met hers. Cards on the table. Show me whatcha got. Read ’em and weep.

“All right,” she said. “So what are we doing?”

“What would you like to do?”

It wasn’t Pouncy who spoke, it was Gummidgy. You tell me, Julia wanted to say. You’re the pyschic. She was built like a model, tall and skinny, though her face was too long and severe to be really beautiful. Julia couldn’t place her ethnicity. Persian?

“Whatever comes next. Whatever comes after level two hundred fifty. Two hundred fifty-one. I’m ready.”

“What makes you think there is a level two hundred fifty-one?”

Her eyes narrowed. “The fact that there were levels one through two hundred fifty?”

“There is no level two hundred fifty-one.”

Julia looked at Pouncy, Failstaff, Asmodeus. They looked back at her patiently. Asmo nodded.

“How can there be no level two hundred fifty-one?”

“There’s nothing after two hundred fifty,” Pouncy said. “Oh, you can craft more spells. We do it all the time. But at this point you have all the building blocks, all the basic components, that you’re going to have. The rest is just permutations. After two hundred fifty you’re just rearranging base pairs on the double helix. The power levels plateau.”

Julia had a weightless, floating feeling. Not a bad feeling, but like she’d been cut adrift. So this was it. As mysteries went it wasn’t exactly a showstopper.

“That’s it? That’s all there is?”

“That’s it. You’re done leveling.”

Well. You could do a lot with what she had. She already had some ideas about spells involving extreme temperatures, extreme states of matter. Plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, that sort of thing. She didn’t think they’d ever been tried. Maybe Pouncy would front her some money for equipment.

“So that’s what you’re doing here. Running the permutations.”

“No. That’s not what we’re doing.”

“Though we have run a hell of a lot of permutations,” Asmo put in.

She took over the narrating.

“Once we realized that the way forward consisted of an indefinite series of incremental advances, we began to wonder if there was an alternative to that. A way to break the cycle. To take the power curve nonlinear.”

“Nonlinear,” Julia said slowly. “You want to find a magical singularity, kind of thing.”

“Exactly!” Asmodeus grinned her wide Cheshire grin at Pouncy, as if to say, see? I told you she’d get it. “A singularity. An advance so radical that it takes us into another league, power-wise. Exponentially bigger energies.”

“We think there’s more to magic than what we’ve seen so far,” Pouncy said. “A lot more. We think we’re just dicking around in the minors while there’s power sources out there that could put us in the bigs. If we could just access the right power grid.”

“So that’s what you’re doing here. Trying to get on the big power grid.”

She realized she was repeating their words while her mind tried to take in what they meant. So there was more to it. Funny, she had almost been relieved for a minute there, when she thought that that was it, that was all there was.

She’d crammed a lifetime’s worth of magical study into the last four years, and the rest of her, the non-magical parts, was feeling somewhat neglected. Empty. She wouldn’t have minded spending some time filling in those blanks in a big French farmhouse with some close friends. The big energies could wait. Or they could have. But her close friends didn’t want to wait. And Julia would go with them, because — and it was so painfully tender to say it, even to herself, that she didn’t say it, even to herself — she loved them. They were what she had instead of a family. So excelsior. Onward and upward.

“That’s what we’re doing here.” Pouncy sat back and laced his hands behind his head. It was early, but there were already dark patches of sweat under his arms. “Unless you have any better ideas.”

Julia shook her head. Everybody was watching her.

“All right,” she said. “Well, show me what you’ve got so far.”

Read ’em and weep.

CHAPTER 21

They carried Benedict’s body up the gangplank, all together, Quentin and Josh and Eliot, struggling awkwardly with his heavy ragdoll limbs. Death seemed to have made his lanky adolescent body strangely dense. Slipping on the wet wood, they had none of the gravitas that would have been appropriate for pallbearers. Nobody had worked up the courage to take the arrow out of his throat, and it pointed crazily in all directions.

Once Benedict was laid out on the deck Quentin went and got a blanket from his cabin and spread it over the body. His side was throbbing hotly, in sync with his pulse. Good. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to feel pain.

It was Bingle who drew the arrow expertly out of Benedict’s throat; he had to snap it in half to get it out, because one end was barbed and the other feathered. It began to rain steadily, the drops tapping and splashing on the deck and on Benedict’s pale unflinching face. They moved the body inside, into the surgery, although there was no surgery to be done.

“We’re going,” Quentin said aloud, to nobody and everybody.

“Quentin,” Eliot said. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“I don’t want to stay here. We’ve got a good wind. We should go.”

Eliot was officially in charge, but Quentin didn’t care. This was his ship first and he didn’t want to spend another night on this island. It’s all fun and games till somebody gets an arrow through the throat.

“What about the prisoners?” somebody said.

“Who cares? Leave them here.”

“But where are we going to go?” Eliot said, reasonably.

“I don’t know! I just don’t want to stay here! Do you?”

Eliot had to admit he didn’t especially want to stay either.

There was no way Quentin was going to bed. Benedict wasn’t going to get warm tonight, so how could he? He was going to get the ship ready. Looking down at Benedict’s blank, unfeeling face, Quentin was almost angry at him for dying. Things had been going so well. But that was being a hero, wasn’t it? For every hero, don’t legions of foot soldiers have to die in the background? It was a matter of numbers, like the corpse in the castle said. Just work out the sums.

So Quentin, the Magician King, leader of men, helped corral the rest of the defeated soldiers and got the crew watering and provisioning the Muntjac, even if it was the middle of the night and pissing rain. Somebody else would have to plot the course, since Benedict was dead, but that wasn’t a problem because they didn’t know where they were going. It didn’t matter. He didn’t understand what they were doing anymore. It was obviously a very effective way to procure magic keys, but how was that going to help Julia? Or rebuild the Neitherlands? Or calm the clock-trees? What could the keys possibly be good for that was worth this — Benedict curled up on the dock like a little boy trying to get warm?

They all worked together through the night, whey-faced and industrious. Julia sat with the corpse, slowly reassuming her human form, her mourning dress for once entirely appropriate for the occasion. Also fully in character was Bingle, whose haunted demeanor had darkened to funereal. He spent the night by himself haunting the ship’s bow, hunched in on himself in his cloak like a hurt bird.

Once Quentin went forward to see if he was all right, but he heard Bingle mumble to himself:

“Not again. I must go where I can do no further harm.”

And Quentin thought, maybe I’ll leave him to work that out by himself.

The sky was paling through the rain clouds when Quentin went out alone into the square in front of the castle to finish the job. He was chilled through and bone tired. He felt like the living corpse in the library. He wasn’t the best person for this job, but it was his job to do. He got down on one knee in front of the little obelisk with a hammer and a chisel, which he’d borrowed from the ship’s carpenter.

Probably this could be done by magic, except he couldn’t remember how just now, and he didn’t want to do it by magic anyway. He wanted to feel it. He set the point of the chisel against the stone and started chipping. When he was done there were two words there, ragged but legible:

BENEDICT ISLAND

Back on the ship he gave the order — eastward ho — though everybody knew what the order was before he gave it. Then he went below. Quentin heard the anchor being weighed. The world tilted and came unmoored, and he was finally gone.

The Muntjac ran fast ahead of a freezing gale. It drove them across vast, island-less stretches of ocean, punishing the sails, which meekly accepted the abuse and ran even faster. Enormous emerald-green swells urged them onward from below, rising up under them and then rolling on ahead of them, as if even the sea had had enough of them and couldn’t wait for this to be over. Eliot had made the voyage out sound like nonstop riches and wonders, islands of mystery twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five, but now the ocean was a complete blank, scrubbed mercifully free of anything remotely fantastical. A clean miss.

Maybe the islands were moving out of their way. They had become untouchable. They didn’t see land once — it was as if they were taking a grand leap outward into nothingness.

The only miracle that happened, happened on board. It was a small miracle, but it was a real one. Two nights after Benedict died, Poppy came to Quentin’s cabin to say she was sorry about what had happened and to see how he was. She didn’t leave till the next morning.

It was a strange time to have something nice happen. It was the wrong time, it wasn’t appropriate, but maybe it was the only time it could have happened. Their emotions were raw and close to the surface. Quentin was surprised to say the least, and one of the things that surprised him was how much he wanted her. Poppy was pretty, and Poppy was smart, at least as smart as Quentin, probably more so. And she was kind, and funny when she let her guard down a little, and her long legs were as absolutely wondrous as anything Quentin had ever seen in this or any world.

But beyond that Poppy had something Quentin wanted almost as badly as the wordless physical forgetting of sex — which would have been enough, God knows, it really would — and that was a sense of perspective. She wasn’t completely caught up in the grand myths of quests and adventures and whatever else. Deep down she didn’t especially give a shit about Fillory. She was a tourist here. Fillory wasn’t her home, and it wasn’t the repository of all her childhood hopes and dreams. It was just a place, and she was just passing through it. It was a relief to not take Fillory too seriously for a while. When he’d imagined something like this might happen, he’d always imagined it with Julia. But Julia didn’t need him, not this way. And when it came right down to it, the person he needed wasn’t Julia either.

Quentin hadn’t been celibate since Alice died, but he hadn’t exactly been cutting a swath either. The problem with sleeping with people who weren’t Alice was that somehow it made Alice even more gone. It meant really, truly knowing and admitting that she was never coming back. With Poppy he let himself know it a little more, and that should have made it hurt more, but strangely it made it hurt a little less.

“Why don’t you stay?” he said one day, while they were eating lunch in his cabin, cross-legged on his bed. Fish again. “Come live in a castle for a while. I realize you’re not a Fillory nerd like me, but haven’t you ever wanted to live in a castle? Haven’t you ever wanted to be a queen?”

If or when they eventually made it back to Castle Whitespire, with or without that last key, it was going to be something less than a triumphant homecoming. It would be good to have Poppy beside him when he sailed back into that harbor, for moral support. And for immoral support too.

“Mmmm.” Poppy salted her fish within an inch of its life, then drenched it in lemon juice. No amount of flavor seemed to be too much for her. “You make it sound romantic.”

“It is romantic. That’s not just me. Living in a castle is objectively romantic.”

“See, this is spoken like somebody who didn’t grow up in a monarchy. Australia still has a queen. There’s a lot of history there. Remind me to tell you about the constitutional crisis of 1975 sometime. Very unromantic.”

“I can promise you there will be no constitutional crises if we go to Whitespire. We don’t even have a constitution. Or if we do I promise you nobody’s ever read it.”

“I know, Quentin.” She pressed her lips together. “But I don’t think so. I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.”

“Why not? What do you have to get back to?”

“My entire life? Everybody I know? The real world?”

“This world is real.” He scooched over next to her, so that their hips touched. “Here. Feel.”

“That is not what I meant.”

She put her plate on the floor and lay back on the bunk. She hit her head on the wall. It wasn’t made for a tall person, let alone two.

“I know.” Quentin didn’t know why he was fighting her on this. He knew she wasn’t going to stay. Maybe that’s what made this so easy, that he knew the outcome in advance. There was no chance that she would get too close. He was playing to lose. “But seriously, what’s back there for you? Your dissertation? On dragon-ology, or whatever? Or tell me you don’t have a boyfriend.”

He took her foot in his lap to rub. She had new calluses from walking around the ship barefoot, and he picked at one. She snatched the foot back.

“No. But yes, my dissertation on dracology. I’m sorry if that seems very boring to you, but it’s my thing and I happen to like it.”

“There are dragons in Fillory. I think. Well, maybe there aren’t. I’ve never see one.”

“You don’t know?”

“You could find out. You could apply for a royal research grant. I can promise you your application would be looked upon favorably.”

“I would have to start all over again. I’m not ripping up four chapters of my dissertation.”

“Anyway, what’s wrong with a little unreality?” Quentin said. “Unreality is underrated. Do you know how many people would kill to be where you are?”

“What, in bed with you?”

He pushed up her shirt and kissed her stomach, which was flat and covered in very fine downy hair.

“I meant here in Fillory,” he said.

“I know.” She sighed, prettily and genuinely. “I just wish I were one of them.”

It was all very well to decide that Poppy was going back to the real world — or not very well, but it was what it was — but it was an open question how they were going to get her there. They could be confident that at some point Ember would turn up to kick her out of Fillory, as He always did with any visitors. But that could take weeks, or months, you never knew, and she didn’t want to wait. Quentin might have been in paradise, but Poppy was in exile.

In the end they decided to try the keys. They didn’t have the one from After, which had gotten Quentin and Julia to Earth so efficiently, but they all looked more or less the same apart from the size. They started with the last and biggest, the one they’d found on Benedict Island. It was stowed in Quentin’s cabin, still in the wooden box it came in. They brought it up on deck. Poppy had come with nothing, and she had nothing to pack. Quentin supposed Josh would want to go back too, in the fullness of time, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He was already talking about which room he’d get back at Whitespire. And Quentin preferred to give Poppy a private send-off.

The key had lain in its box so long, its three-toothed jaw had worn a shadow of itself into the red velvet. He offered it to her, like a fancy cigar. She picked it up.

“Careful.”

“It’s heavy.” Poppy turned it over in her fingers, weighing it. “Wow. It’s not just the gold, it’s magic. The spellwork on this thing is thick. Dense.”

They looked at it, then at each other.

“I sort of felt around with it in the air,” Quentin said. “You should find an invisible keyhole. It’s hard to explain, it’s more a learn-by-doing thing.”

She nodded. She got it.

“Well.”

“Wait.” He took both of her hands. “I didn’t ask you properly before. Stay here. Please stay. I want you to.”

She shook her head and kissed him softly on the lips. “I can’t. Call me next time you’re in reality.”

He knew she would say that. But it made him feel better, knowing he’d really asked.

Poppy made a few experimental, self-conscious pokes in the air with the key. Quentin wondered idly if the key understood that they were on a moving ship. Suppose it opened a door in the air and then got stuck and they immediately left it behind — the key tugged out of Poppy’s hands, the door lost behind them in midair and midocean. He halfway hoped it would happen.

But no such luck. Old magic usually had any obvious bugs or loopholes like that worked out long ago. Quentin didn’t hear the click, but he saw when her hand met resistance in the air. The key slid in. Keeping one hand on it, she gave him another kiss, this time with some extra sugar in it, then she turned the key. With her other hand she found the doorknob.

A crack opened, and there was a poof of air pressure equalizing. The sun didn’t shine through like it had before. It was dark. It was odd to see an oblong of night standing upright like that, on the deck of a ship in broad daylight. Quentin walked around behind her and tried to peer through it. He felt a cold draft. Winter air. She looked back at him: so far so good?

He wondered what month it was on Earth, or what year even. Maybe the time-streams had gone haywire and she’d be walking into a far-future Earth, an apocalypse Earth, a cold dead world orbiting an extinguished sun. His arms goose-bumped, and a couple of errant snowflakes spun out and melted on the warm wood of the Muntjac’s deck. I had a dream, which was not all a dream. Good old Byron. Something for every occasion.

Poppy let go of the key, ducked her head — the portal was slightly too low for her beanpole frame — and stepped through. He saw her look around and shiver in her summer dress, and he caught a glimpse of what she was looking at. A stone square. The door began to close. The key must have let her out at her last known permanent residence, namely Venice. It made sense. She could crash at Josh’s for a bit. She would know people. She would be safe there.

Or no, she wouldn’t. That wasn’t Venice, and she was all alone. Quentin lunged forward through the closing door after her.

“Poppy!”

She’d stopped just over the threshold, and he barreled into her from behind. She squeaked, and he grabbed her around the shoulders to keep them both from falling over. Then he reached back to keep the door from closing, but it was already gone. The air was freezing. The sky was full of strange stars. It was night, and they were not on Earth. They were in the Neitherlands.

For a second Quentin was almost glad to see them. He hadn’t been to the Neitherlands for two years, not since he and the others had traveled to Fillory. They made him feel nostalgic. The first time he’d seen the Neitherlands he’d felt, maybe for the last time in his life, pure joy: the kind of uncut, pharmacy-grade, white-hot joy that comes with believing, or not just believing but knowing, that everything was going to be all right, not just then or for the next two weeks, but forever.

He’d been wrong, of course. In actuality that knowledge had lasted about five seconds — just up until Alice had punched him in the face for cheating on her with Janet. It turned out that everything was not going to be all right. Everything was chance and nothing was perfect and magic didn’t make you happy, and Quentin had learned to live with it, which it turned out that most people he knew were already doing anyway, and it was time he caught up with them. But you didn’t forget that kind of happiness. Something that bright leaves a permanent afterimage on your brain.

But the Neitherlands he knew had always been warm and peaceful and twilit. This Neitherlands was pitch-dark, and bitter cold, and it was snowing here. More snow had drifted in the corners of the square, huge creamy swaths of it.

And the skyline was different. Of the buildings around the square, the ones on one side looked exactly the way they always had, but the ones on the other side were half-gone. Their black silhouettes stood out jagged against the deep-blue sky, and the snow in front of them was mixed with big blocks of fallen stone. You could see all the way through to the next square over, and through that into the next.

“Quentin,” Poppy said. She looked back for the door too, trying to account for both his presence and her surroundings. “I don’t understand. What are you — where are we?”

She hugged herself against the cold. They really weren’t dressed for this. She wasn’t panicking though.

“This isn’t Earth,” Quentin said. “This is the Neitherlands. Or these are the Neitherlands, I’ve never really made up my mind which it is. This is the world in between Earth and Fillory and all the other worlds.”

“Right.” He’d told her about the Neitherlands. “Okay. Well, it’s nice and all, but it’s cold as hell. Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m not actually sure how we’re going to do that. You’re supposed to come in through the fountains, but you need a button to do that.”

“Okay.” Their voices vanished in the frozen air as soon as they spoke. “Well, but do a spell or something. Why did it take us here?”

“I don’t know. They’ve got a sense of humor, those keys.” It was hard to think in the bitter cold. He studied the empty air they’d just appeared out of, his breath smoking. There was really nothing left of the portal back to Fillory. Poppy walked stiff-legged over to the fountain. They were in the Fillory square; the fountain had a statue of Atlas in it, coiled and braced under the crushing weight of a marble globe.

The water in the fountain was frozen. The level of the ice was actually above the stone rim. She felt it with her hand.

“What the shit,” she said quietly. She didn’t sound like herself.

It was dawning on Quentin how much trouble they were in. It was cold here, really cold. It couldn’t have been more than 15 or 20 degrees. There was no wood, nothing to make a fire with, nothing but stone. Quentin remembered Penny’s warning not to do magic here. They might have to test that.

“Let’s go over to the Earth fountain,” he said. “It’s a couple of squares from here.”

“Why? What good would it do if we don’t have a button?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s somebody there. I don’t know what else to do, and we have to start moving or we’re going to freeze to death.”

Poppy nodded and sniffed. Her nose was running. She looked more frightened now than she had back on the island, when they were fighting for the key.

They started to walk but immediately broke into a jog instead, to warm up. Apart from their footsteps the silence was absolute. The only light was starlight, but their eyes were adjusting rapidly. All Quentin could think was that this wasn’t going to work, and after it didn’t work things would get very bad. He tried to do mental calculations about thermodynamics. There were too many variables, but hypothermia wasn’t far in their future. A few hours at most, maybe not even that.

They trotted through the broken cityscape. Nothing moved. They crossed a bridge over a frozen canal. The air smelled like snow. A stupid mistake, and now they were both dead, he thought giddily.

The Earth square was bigger than the Fillory one, but it was in no better shape. One of the buildings showed a row of empty windows through which the stars were visible. The façade had survived the catastrophe, but the building behind it was gone.

This fountain was frozen too. The ice had plugged the great bronze lotus flower and cracked it all down one side. They stopped in front of it, and Poppy slipped on black ice under the snow and just managed to catch herself. She popped back up, slapping the wet off her hands.

“Same,” she said. “All right. We need a way out of here. Or we need shelter and something to burn.”

She was rattled, but she was hanging on to her nerve. Good old Poppy. She set a good example, and it woke him up a little.

“The doors on some of these buildings look like wood,” he said. “And there are books inside the buildings. I think. Maybe we could get some and burn them.”

Together they walked the square till they found a broken door, a Gothic-arched monster that had been knocked askew. Quentin touched it. He broke off a splinter. It felt like ordinary wood. They would have to try a fire spell. He explained about how magic acted in the Neitherlands: it was supercharged, explosive. Penny had said never to use it at all. Desperate times.

“How far away can you cast a fire spell from?” he said. “Because we’d better be as far away as we can get when it goes up.”

“It goes up” came out of his numb lips sounding like “id go dup.” He said it again, enunciating a little more clearly, but only a little. This was going downhill faster than he’d thought. They didn’t have long at all. Maybe fifteen minutes more in which they could plausibly get a spell off.

“Let’s find out,” she said.

She began pacing backward away from the door, back toward the center of the square. He couldn’t help thinking that this was just a stopgap, a way station on the road to the inevitable. After they’d figured out how to light a fire, they’d have to find shelter. After they found shelter they’d need food, and there wasn’t any food. His mind churned uncontrollably. They could melt snow to drink, but they couldn’t eat it. Maybe they could find some leather bookbindings to chew on. Maybe there were fish under the ice in the canals. And even if they could survive indefinitely — which they couldn’t — how long till whatever broke the Neitherlands came along and broke them?

“All right!” Poppy called. “Quentin, move!”

He pressed his palm against the wood, if that’s what it was. If this didn’t work, could they make a magic button from scratch? Not in fifteen minutes. Not in fifteen years.

There was a crack between the two doors. Thin blue light shone faintly through it. Starlight. But it wasn’t starlight. It flickered.

“Hang on!” he said.

“Quentin!” He caught a note of desperation in her voice. She had her hands jammed in her armpits. “We don’t have much time!”

“I thought I saw something. There’s something in here.”

He pressed his face up against the frozen wood, but he couldn’t see anything more. He went from window to window, but they were all dark. Maybe from the other side. He yelled at Poppy to come on and ran through an archway to the next square over.

The building was a huge Italianate palace with evenly spaced windows. He considered for a moment the possibility that they might be even worse off if whatever was in there making blue light came out here, but it seemed unlikely that it could offer them a more lingering, unpleasant death than the one they were about to experience anyway. He wondered if, before he died, he’d sink so low that he would pray to Ember to save him. He thought he probably would.

There was no door at all on this side of the palace, but the façade was broken: it ended in jagged stone above the second rank of windows. He could probably get over it if he had to, which he did. A frozen wind was coming up. He wondered what had happened here. It had been so still and protected before, a world under glass. Someone had cut the power and smashed the windows and let the elements come roaring in.

A running jump got him up on the first window ledge. He thanked God, or Ember, or whoever, for the architect of the Neitherlands’ excessive fondness for baroque ornamentation. He could tell the rough stone was taking skin off his cold fingers, but he couldn’t feel it.

“Stand there,” he said, and pointed. He put a foot on Poppy’s shoulder, which she accepted with good grace. From there he could get a foot on the upper molding, and a hand on the window ledge above it, which wasn’t enough for a good grip but was all he was going to get. From there he jumped and grabbed the top of the broken wall. He had to will his fingers to bend.

With his cheek pressed against the cold stone, Quentin risked a look down. Poppy was watching him expectantly. Her lovely face was pale and grave in the starlight. Slowly he hauled himself up until he got a forearm over the wall, then clumsily hiked his knee up onto it. He looked down for the first time into the interior of the Neitherlands.

It looked like he remembered pictures from the London Blitz looking. There was no roof, and most of what had been the second floor had fallen in and lay in ruins on top of the first. The floor was awash with paper, stirred in slow circles by the wind. Books large and small lay sprawled in various states of intactness, some whole, some spread-eagled and eviscerated.

At the far end, where remnants of the upper floor formed a partial shelter, someone had arranged some of the more intact books into tall, neat stacks. The man who presumably had arranged them stood among them. Or no, he wasn’t standing, he was floating a foot off the ground, with his arms spread out.

That’s where the blue light was coming from. There were runes on the floor below him that gave off a faint cold glow. Either he was a fellow refugee from the destruction or the author of it. It seemed like a good moment to take a bad risk.

“There’s someone inside!” he called down to Poppy. He raised his voice. “Hey!”

The man didn’t look up.

“Hey!” Quentin yelled again. “Hi!” Maybe he was Fillorian.

“Quentin,” Poppy said.

“Hang on. Hi! Hi!”

“Quentin, the doors are opening.”

He looked down. So they were. The doors were opening outward, all by themselves.

“Okay. I’m coming down.”

It wasn’t much easier coming down; he’d lost all feeling in his fingers. He took Poppy’s numb hand in his own. This really was their last chance.

“Shall we?” he said. It sounded even thinner than he meant it to.

CHAPTER 22

They picked their way through the rubble, trying out of politeness to step on as few pages as possible. Quentin almost turned an ankle on a stone that rolled under his foot.

The blue light from the runes seemed to be what was supporting the man. His bare feet hung a yard off the ground. He had sandy hair and a large round face — his round head could almost have been what was holding him up, like a balloon. Around him in a cloud hung a dozen books, and a few more single sheets of paper, all opened in his direction, presumably so he could consult them simultaneously. The pages of two of the books were turning slowly.

He didn’t greet them or even look at them as they approached. He had long sleeves that fell over his hands, but there was something odd about the way the material hung. As Quentin got closer it became obvious what it was: the man had no hands. It was Penny.

Quentin hadn’t recognized him without the mohawk, and his hair fully grown in. He’d never known what Penny’s natural hair color was, only that it probably wasn’t metallic green. Penny rotated in place to face them, gazing down from where he hung in midair. He was thinner than he once was, much. He didn’t used to have cheekbones.

Quentin stood at the edge of the eerie blue letters etched in the ground. The cold had gotten into his core. He couldn’t stop his shoulders from shaking.

“Penny,” he said lamely. “It’s you.”

Penny watched him calmly.

“This is my friend Poppy,” Quentin said. “It’s good to see you, Penny. I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Hello, Quentin.”

“What happened to you? What happened here?”

“I joined the Order.”

He spoke softly and calmly. Penny didn’t seem to feel the cold at all.

“What is that, Penny? What’s the Order?”

“We care for the Neitherlands. The Neitherlands is not a natural phenomenon, it is a made thing. An artifact. It was built long ago by magicians whose understanding of magic went far, far deeper than yours does.”

Not mine, mind you. Just yours. Good old Penny. His losing his hands the way he did was a catastrophe Quentin would never really get over, but if anybody was born to be a mystical floating monk with no hands, it was Penny. They were going to freeze to death before he was done with his dramatic exposition.

“Ever since then men and women like myself have watched over it. We repair it and defend it.”

“Penny, I’m sorry, but we’re really cold,” Quentin said. “Can you help us?”

“Of course.”

When Penny lost his hands Quentin thought he would never do magic again. Counting Penny out was a mistake he apparently couldn’t stop making. Hanging in the air in front of them, Penny joined his empty wrists together in front of him and began rhythmically reciting something in a language Quentin didn’t know. He was making some kind of physical effort under his robe, but Quentin couldn’t tell what.

All at once the air around them went from frigid to warm. Quentin shook even more uncontrollably as he warmed up. The relief was immense. He couldn’t help himself, he bent over, and his mouth filled with saliva. He thought he might throw up, and that seemed incredibly funny, and he started laughing. Beside him he could hear Poppy moaning as her body recovered.

He didn’t throw up. But it was a minute before either of them could talk again.

“What happened here?” Poppy said finally. “Who destroyed this place?”

“It was not destroyed.” Penny corrected her with a trace of his old touchiness. “But it was damaged, badly. Perhaps irreparably. And there is worse to come.”

The books and papers that surrounded Penny closed and zipped off to their places in various stacks and piles. Penny began floating in the direction of the open doors of the palazzo. Apparently those blue runes weren’t all that was holding him up. The Order seemed to adhere to the principle of suckers walk, players ride.

“It is better if I show you,” Penny said.

Quentin took Poppy’s hand, and they followed him out into the square. Quentin was coasting on an endorphin high. He wasn’t going to die — probably — and after that all news was good news. Penny talked as he floated along. His head was still a couple of feet above theirs. It was like having a conversation with somebody who was riding a Segway.

“Did you ever wonder,” Penny said, “where magic comes from?”

“Yes, Penny,” Quentin said dutifully. “I did wonder about that.”

“Henry had a theory. He told me about it when we were at Brakebills.”

He meant Dean Fogg. Penny only ever referred to the Brakebills faculty by their first names, to show that he thought of himself as their equal.

“It seemed wrong to him that humans should have access to magic. Or not wrong, but strange. It didn’t make sense. He thought it was too good to be true. As magicians we were taking advantage of some kind of cosmic loophole to wield power that by rights we were never meant to have. The inmates had found the keys to the asylum, and we were running amok in the pharmacy.

“Or think of the universe as a vast computer. We are end users who have gained admin-level access to the system, and are manipulating it without authorization. Henry has a whimsical mind. He isn’t a rigorous theorist, by any means, but he does have moments of insight. This was one of them.”

They had left the square, Poppy and Quentin walking with their arms around each other now, pooling their heat. The zone of warm air was centered around Penny and moved with him, so that the cold nudged them along if they lagged too far behind him. He had a captive audience. Even being lectured by Penny was preferable to freezing to death.

“Now push Henry’s theory a little. If magicians are hackers who broke into the system, then who are the system’s rightful administrators? Who built the system — the universe — into which we have broken?”

“God?” Poppy asked.

It was good to have her here when dealing with Penny. Penny didn’t get on her nerves. He didn’t push Poppy’s buttons the way he pushed Quentin’s. She just wanted to know what he knew.

“Precisely. Or more precisely, the gods. There’s no need to get overly theological about it: any magician who could work magic on such a fundamental scale would be, almost by definition, a god. But where are they? And why haven’t they caught us and kicked us out of their system? They must have worked spells on an energy scale that to us is no longer conceivable. Their power would have dwarfed even that of the mages who built the Neitherlands.

“You should see it, Quentin. I mean really see the Neitherlands, the way I have. It’s not infinite, you know, but it goes on for thousands of miles in all directions. It’s wonderful. They show you everything when you get in the Order.”

It was funny about Penny. He was an arrogant prick — notice the way he all but ignored Poppy — and he’d suffered terribly, but deep down under it he was still very innocent, and every once in a while his innocence overpowered his arrogance. Quentin didn’t quite have it in him to like Penny, but he felt he understood Penny. Penny was the only person he’d ever met who loved magic, really loved it, the same way he did: naively, romantically, completely.

“After a while you get to be able to read the squares, like a language. Each one is an expression of the world it leads to, if you understand the grammar of it. No two are the same. There’s one square, just one, that’s a mile on each side, and it has a golden fountain in the center. They say the world it leads to is like heaven. They haven’t let me go through yet.”

Quentin wondered what heaven would be like for Penny. Probably in heaven you were always right and you never had to stop talking. God, he could be a dick where Penny was concerned. Probably in heaven you had hands.

They were silent for a bit, as they crossed a stone bridge over a canal. Little whirling snow-devils chased each other across the ice.

“Where did the gods go?” Poppy asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe they’ve been in heaven. But they’re back. They’ve come back to close the loophole. They’re taking magic back, Quentin. They’re going to take it all away from us.”

They’d come to a square that looked no different from any of the others except that the fountain in the center was closed. A tarnished bronze cover, ornately inscribed, fitted over the basin. It was held shut by a simple latch. Penny glided over to the fountain, over the snow, the tips of his bare toes brushing it. He let himself float gently to the ground.

Quentin was trying to process what Penny had said. This must have been what the dragon had meant, back in Venice. This must be the mystery at the root of it all. But it couldn’t be real. It had to be a mistake. The end of magic: that would mean the end of Brakebills, of Fillory, of everything that had happened to him since Brooklyn. He wouldn’t be a magician anymore, nobody would be. All of their double lives would become single ones again. The spark would go out of the world. He tried to work out how they’d gotten here. A trip to the Outer Island, that’s all it was supposed to be. He’d pulled a thread, and now the whole world was coming unraveled. He wanted to unpull it, to put it back, weave it back together again.

Penny was waiting for something.

“Open this for me, please,” he said. “You have to undo the catch.”

Right. No hands. Numb, but not from cold now, Quentin unhooked the bronze hook that held the cover on, then worked his fingertips between the cover and the stone. It was heavy — the metal was an inch thick — but with Poppy’s help he heaved it up and part of the way to one side. They peered in.

It took a second for the perspective to resolve, and when it did they both backed away instinctively. It was a long way down.

There was no water in the fountain. Instead it was just a vast, echoing darkness. It was like they were looking down through the oculus of an enormous dome. This must be what lay beneath the Neitherlands. Far down, Quentin would have guessed a mile, was a flat pattern of glowing white lines, like a schematic diagram of circuitry, or a maze with no solution. Among the lines, waist deep in them, stood a silvery figure. It was bald and muscled, and it must have been enormous. It was dark, but the giant made its own light. It glowed with a lovely steady silvery luminescence.

The giant was busy. It was at work. It was changing the pattern. It grasped one line, disconnected it, bent it, connected it to another line. Because they were the size of derricks, its arms moved slowly, traversing enormous distances, but they never stopped moving. Its handsome face showed no expression.

“Penny? What are we looking at?”

“Is that God?” Poppy said.

“That is a god,” Penny corrected her. “Though that is really just a term to describe a magician operating on a titanic power scale. We’ve seen at least a dozen of them; it’s hard to tell them apart. There’s one at each of these access points. But we know what they’re doing. They’re fixing it. They’re rewiring the world.”

Quentin was staring down at the exposed circuitry of creation, and at the master of it. It looked a little like the Silver Surfer.

“I suppose,” Quentin said slowly, “you’re going to say that that is a being of sublime beauty and power, and he only looks like that because my fallen mortal eyes are incapable of perceiving his true magnificence.”

“No. We think that’s actually pretty much it.”

“Come on,” Poppy said. She tilted her head. “He is pretty impressive. He’s big. And silvery.”

“A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can’t be how the universe works.”

“In the Order we call it ‘inverse profundity.’ We’ve observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.”

So that was him. The biggest bastard of them all, top of the food chain. That’s where magic came from. Did he even understand what he’d made, how beautiful it was, how much people loved it? He didn’t look like he loved anything. He just was. Though how could you make anything as beautiful as magic and not love it?

“I wonder how he found out,” Poppy said. “About us using magic. I wonder who tipped him off.”

“Maybe we should talk to him,” Quentin said. “Maybe we can change his mind. We could, I don’t know, prove ourselves worthy of magic or something. Maybe they have a test.”

Penny shook his head.

“I don’t think they can change their minds. When you get to that level of power and knowledge and perfection, the question of what you should do next gets increasingly obvious. Everything is very rule-governed. All you can ever do in any given situation is the most gloriously perfect thing, and there’s only one of them. Finally there aren’t any choices left to make at all.”

“You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.”

“The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.”

They watched the god work for a while without talking. It never paused or hesitated. Its hands moved and moved, bending lines, breaking one connection, making another. Quentin couldn’t see why one pattern was better than another, but he supposed that was his mortal fallibility. He felt a little sorry for it. He supposed it was happy, never doubting, never hesitating, eternally certain of its absolute righteousness. But it was like a giant divine robot.

“Let’s cover it up,” he said. “I don’t want to look at it anymore.”

The bronze cover grated against the stone, then dropped with a clang back into place. Quentin latched it. Though who the latch was going to keep in or out, he couldn’t imagine. They stood around it as if it were a grave they’d just finished filling.

“Why is this happening now?” he said.

Penny shook his head.

“Something caught their attention. Somebody somewhere must have tripped an alarm and summoned them back from wherever they were. They may not even have realized they were doing it. We didn’t know they were here until the cold started. Then the sun went out, and the snow came, and the wind. The buildings started to collapse. It’s all ending.”

“Josh was here,” Quentin said. “He told us about it.”

“I know,” Penny said. He shifted uncomfortably under his robe. He forgot himself and spoke in his old voice again. “The cold makes my stumps ache.”

“What’s going to happen?” Poppy asked.

“The Neitherlands will be destroyed. It was never part of the divine plan. My predecessors built it in the space between universes. The gods will clear it away, like a wasp’s nest in an old wall. If we’re still here we’ll die with it. But it won’t stop there. It’s not even the Neitherlands they’re after, it’s what it runs on.”

You could say one thing for Penny, he could look a hard truth in the face. He had a weird integrity about things like that. He was calm and collected. He didn’t flinch. It wouldn’t occur to him to.

“Magic is the problem. We’re not supposed to have it. They’re going to close whatever loophole they left open that lets us use it. When they’re done it will go dead, not just here but everywhere, in every world. That power will belong to the gods only.

“Most worlds will simply lose magic. I think Fillory may fall apart and cease to exist entirely. It’s a bit special that way — it’s magical all the way through. I have a theory that Fillory itself might be the loophole, the leak through which magic first got out. The hole in the dike.

“The change would have started already. You may have seen signs.”

The thrashing clock-trees. They must be something like Fillory’s early warning system, sensitive to any signs of trouble. Jollyby’s death: maybe Fillorians can’t live without magic. Ember and the Unique Beasts up in arms.

They were fixing the world. But Quentin preferred it broken. He wondered how long it would take. Years, maybe — maybe he could go home and not think about it and it would all happen after he was dead. But he wasn’t getting that impression. Quentin wondered what he would do if magic went away. He didn’t know how he would live in that world. Most people wouldn’t even notice the change, of course, but if you knew about it, knew what you’d lost, it would eat away at you. He didn’t know if he could explain it to a non-magician. Everything would simply be what it was and nothing else. All there would be was what you could see. What you felt and thought, all the longing and desire in your heart and mind, would count for nothing. With magic you could make those feelings real. They could change the world. Without it they would be stuck inside you forever, figments of your own imagination.

And Venice. Venice would drown. Its weight would crush those wooden pilings, and it would disappear into the sea.

You could see the gods’ point of view. They made magic. Why would they want an ignorant insect like Quentin playing around with it? But he couldn’t accept it. He wasn’t going to. Why should the gods be the only ones who got magic? They didn’t appreciate it. They didn’t even enjoy it. It didn’t make them happy. It was theirs, but they didn’t love it, not the way he, Quentin, loved it. The gods were great, but what good was greatness if you didn’t love?

“So is it going to happen?” he asked. For now he would be stoic like Penny. “Is there any way to stop it?”

He was warm again, but the chill kept creeping back in through the soles of his boots.

“Probably not.” Penny began to walk, like a regular mortal, with his actual feet. The snow didn’t seem to bother him. Quentin and Poppy walked with him. “But there is a way. We always knew this might happen. We prepared for it. Tell me, what’s the first thing a hacker does once he breaks into a system?”

“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “He steals a bunch of credit card numbers and subscribes to a lot of really premium porn sites?”

“He sets up a back door.” It was good to know that even having attained enlightenment Penny was still impervious to humor. “So that if he’s ever locked out, he can get back in.”

“The Order did that?”

“So they say. A back door was built into the system, metaphorically speaking, that would let magic back out into the universe, if the gods ever returned to claim it. It just has to be opened.”

“Oh my God.” Quentin didn’t know whether he should dare to hope or not. It would almost be too painful if it turned out not to be true. “So you can fix this? You’re going to fix this?”

“The ‘back door’ exists.” Penny mimed doing quotey-fingers, which he couldn’t actually do. “But the keys to it were hidden a long time ago. So long ago now that not even we know where they are.”

Quentin and Poppy looked at each other. It couldn’t be that simple, it just couldn’t. No way were they that lucky.

“Penny, there wouldn’t by any chance be seven of these keys?” Quentin said.

“Seven, yes. Seven golden keys.”

“Penny. Jesus Christ, Penny, I think we have them. Or six of them. We have them back in Fillory. It has to be them!”

Quentin had to sit down on a block of stone, even though it was a little outside Penny’s circle of warmth. He put his head in his hands. That was the quest. It wasn’t fake, and it wasn’t a game, it was real. It mattered after all. They’d been fighting for magic all along. They just hadn’t known it.

Of course Penny took this in stride. He would never be so uncool as to give Quentin credit for saving the universe or anything.

“That’s very good. That’s excellent. But you must recover the seventh key.”

“Right. I got that far. We’ll find the seventh key. And then what?”

“Then take them all to the End of the World. The door is there.”

This was it. He knew what to do now. He’d received his cue. It was like how he felt back on the island, in the castle, but calmer this time. This must be what the gods felt like, he thought. Absolute certainty. They had arrived at Penny’s building, back where they’d started.

“Penny, we have to get back to Fillory, back to our ship, to finish the quest. Can you send us back? I mean, even with the fountains frozen over?”

“Of course. The Order has made me privy to all the secrets of interdimensional travel. If you think of the Neitherlands as a computer, then the fountains are merely—”

“Awesome. Thanks, man.” He turned to Poppy. “Are you in on this? Or do you still want to go back to the real world?”

“Are you kidding?” She grinned and pressed herself against him. “Fuck reality, baby. Let’s go save the universe.”

“I will prepare the spell to send you back,” Penny said.

It was snowing harder, the flakes blowing slantwise through their little dome of warmth, but Quentin felt invulnerable now. They were going to fight this, and they were going to win. Penny began chanting in that same incomprehensible language he’d used before. It had some vowel sounds that Quentin barely recognized as human.

“It needs a minute to take effect,” he said when he was done. “Of course, from this point forward the journey will be undertaken by members of the Order.”

Wait.

“What do you mean?”

“My colleagues and I will return with you to your ship and carry out the remainder of the quest. You may observe, of course.” Penny gave them a moment to take that in. “You didn’t think we would leave a mission of this importance to a group of amateurs, did you? We appreciate the good work you’ve done to get us this far, we truly do, but it’s out of your hands now. It’s time for the professionals take over.”

“Sorry, but no,” Quentin said. “It isn’t.”

He wasn’t giving this up. And he definitely wasn’t inviting Penny along.

“I suppose you’ll find your own way back to Fillory then,” Penny said. He crossed his handless arms. “I take back the spell.”

“You can’t take it back!” Poppy said. “What are you, nine? Penny!”

He’d finally gotten under even Poppy’s skin.

“You don’t understand,” Quentin said, though he wasn’t totally sure he understood himself. “This is our job. Nobody else can do it for us. That’s not how it works. You have to send us back.”

“I have to? Are you going to make me?”

“Jesus! Penny, you are unbelievable! Literally unbelievable! You know, I actually thought you’d changed, I really did. Do you even get that this isn’t about you?”

“Not about me?” Penny lost his grip on his interdimensional monk voice again and spoke in his old, higher-pitched voice, the one he used to use when he felt especially aggrieved and self-righteous. “Spare me that, Quentin. You haven’t spared me much during our long acquaintance, but spare me that. I found the Neitherlands. I found the button. I took us to Fillory. You didn’t do all that, Quentin, I did.

“And I got my hands bitten off by the Beast. And I came here. And now I’m going to finish this, because I started it.”

Quentin imagined it: Penny and his fellow Blue Oyster Cult members showing up on the Muntjac and ordering everybody — ordering Eliot! — around. Probably they were better magicians than he was, technically. But still, no, he couldn’t do it. It was impossible.

They glared at each other. It was a stalemate.

“Penny, can I ask you something?” Quentin said. “How do you do magic now? I mean, without your hands?”

The funny thing about Penny was that you knew questions like that weren’t going to make him uncomfortable, and it didn’t. In fact his mood brightened immediately.

“At first I thought I would never do magic again,” Penny explained. “But when the Order took me in they taught me another technique that does not depend on hand motions. Think about it: what’s special about hands? What if you were to use other muscles in your body to cast spells? The Order showed me how. Now I can see how limiting it was. To be honest I’m a little surprised you’re still doing it the old way.”

Penny wiped his chin with his sleeve. He always used to spit a little when he got excited. Quentin took a deep breath.

“Penny, I don’t think you or the Order can finish this quest. I’m sorry. Ember assigned this one to us, and He must have had His reasons. I think that may just be the way it works. It’s His will. I don’t think it would work for anybody else.”

Penny mulled this for a minute.

“All right,” he said finally. “All right. I can see there is a certain logic to it. And there is a great deal for the Order to do in the Neitherlands. In fact in many respects the crucial effort will take place here, while you retrieve the keys.”

Quentin had a feeling that was the best he was going to get.

“Great. I appreciate that. If you wanted to, you could take this opportunity to say that you’re sorry about sleeping with my girlfriend.”

“You were on a break.”

“Okay, look, just get us the hell out of here, we have to go save magic.” If they stayed here any longer Quentin was going to doom the universe all over again by killing Penny with his bare hands. Though it would almost be worth it. “What are you going to do while we do that?”

“We — the Order and I — are going to engage the gods directly. This will delay them while you recover the last key.”

“But what could you possibly do?” Poppy asked. “Aren’t they all-powerful? Or practically?”

“Oh, the Order can do things you wouldn’t believe. We’ve spent millennia studying in the library of the Neitherlands. We know secrets that you never dreamed of. We know secrets that would drive you mad if I whispered them to you.

“And we’re not alone. We’ll have help.”

A deep, muffled thump filled the square from over by the fountain that led back to Earth. It shook the air — they felt it in their knees. A stone fell somewhere. Another thump followed it, and another, as if something was knocking, trying to force its way into the world from somewhere underneath it. Was it the gods? Maybe they were too late.

There was a final thump, and all at once the ice in the fountain exploded upward. Quentin and Poppy ducked as chunks of it shot in all directions and went skittering across the paving stones. With a metallic groan the great bronze lotus flower tore open, the petals spreading out in all directions as if it were blooming, and a huge, sinuous form came surging and wriggling up out of it. The thing lunged violently up into the air, spreading its wings and shaking off water and beating its way into the night sky, whipping the falling snow into great whorls and circles around it.

Another one followed it, and then a third.

“It’s the dragons!” Poppy shouted. She clapped her hands like a little girl. “Quentin, it’s the dragons! Oh, look at them!”

“It’s the dragons,” Penny said. “The dragons are going to help us.”

Poppy kissed him on the cheek, and Penny smiled for the first time. You could tell he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help himself.

The dragons kept coming, one after the other. They must have emptied out every river in the world. The square lit up as one of them roared a gout of flame at the misty sky.

How did he know that was going to happen right then?

“You planned that, didn’t you,” Quentin said, or tried to say, but just then Penny’s spell took effect, and Quentin was no longer in the same world as the person he was talking to.