The Magician King

CHAPTER 23

That morning in Murs, sitting around the table in the library, they gave Julia the full download.

In a way she was lucky she was only getting in now. She’d missed the early days, when they spent a lot of time just ruling things out. For example: they’d blown six months on a theory that spells picked up extra power the closer you got to the center of the Earth. A minor effect, barely measurable, but if it could be verified it would open up huge, ripe fields of new theory. It would change everything.

That had kicked off a barnstorming tour of abandoned mines and salt domes and other deep subterranean topography, not excluding an expensive sequence involving a rented tramp steamer and a secondhand bathysphere. But all they’d learned from half a year’s hard spelunking and deep-ocean diving was that Asmodeus’s spellwork performed slightly better once you got half a mile underground, and that the most probable explanation for that was that spelunking got Asmodeus really excited.

They pushed on into astrology and ocean magic and even oneiromancy — dream magic. Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it.

They worked with the Earth’s magnetic field, using apparatus cribbed from some Nikola Tesla drawings, right up until the night when Failstaff almost flipped the planet’s magnetic poles, whereupon they dropped that whole line of investigation and backed away slowly. Gummidgy spent a sleepless week developing a witheringly abstract hypothesis related to cosmic rays and quantum effects and the Higgs boson, which in the end even she only half-understood. She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot.

That’s when they turned to religion.

At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in.

“I know,” Pouncy said. “But it’s not what you think. Hear us out.”

Failstaff began unrolling a huge, closely annotated diagram that was almost as big as the table.

Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds. As far as she knew, or thought she knew, her views on this matter were shared by the other Free Traders.

“There was a piece missing,” Pouncy went on. “We thought we’d gone back to first principles. But what if we hadn’t? What if there were principles before the first principles we’d gone back to?

“We were assuming, until it could be proved otherwise, that there were bigger energies out there, far bigger, and that there was a technique by which those energies could be manipulated. Humans have not, so far as we know, in the modern era, gained access to those energies. But suppose there were another class of beings who did have access to them. Maybe not humans.”

“Another class of beings,” Julia said flatly. “You’re talking about God.”

“Gods. I wanted to find out more about them.”

“That’s insane. There’s no such thing as gods. Or God. You know, Pouncy, one of the things I love about the fact that I didn’t go to college is that I didn’t have to sit around a freshman dorm getting high and arguing about shit like this.”

But Pouncy was not withered by her scorn.

“‘Once you’ve eliminated the possible, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the truth.’ Sherlock Holmes.”

“That’s not actually the quote. And it doesn’t mean that gods are real, Pouncy. It means you need to go back and check your work, because you screwed it up somewhere.”

“We checked it.”

“Then maybe you should give up,” Julia said.

“But I don’t give up,” Pouncy said. His eyes had a wintry, sleety gray to them that was distinctly un — Abercrombie & Fitch. “And neither do they.” He indicated the others sitting around the table. “And neither do you. Do you, Julia.”

Julia blinked and held his gaze to indicate that she would keep listening, but that she made no promises. Pouncy went on.

“We’re not talking about monotheism. Or at least not in its latter-day form. We’re talking about old-time religion. Paganism, or more precisely polytheism.

“Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.”

Fastidiously at first, with rubber gloves and tweezers and haughty distaste, as if they were handling the intellectual equivalent of medical waste, Pouncy and the others took up the study of comparative religion. Much as Julia had done with magic back in her apartment above the bagel store, they began combing the world’s religious narratives and traditions for practical information. They called it Project Ganymede.

“What the hell were you hoping to find?” Julia said.

“I wanted to learn their techniques. I wanted to be able to do what gods did. I don’t see any real distinction between religion and magic, or for that matter between gods and magicians. I think divine power is just another form of magical praxis. You know what Arthur C. Clarke said about technology and magic, right? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Turn it around. What is advanced magic indistinguishable from? Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from the miraculous.”

“The fire of the gods,” Failstaff rumbled. Jesus, he was a true believer too.

But despite herself — and she took care not to show it — Julia felt her curiosity stirring. She reminded herself that she knew these people well. They were as smart as she was, and they were at least as big intellectual snobs as she was. She probably wasn’t going to come up with a lot of objections that they hadn’t already thought of.

“Look, Pouncy,” she said. “I know enough about religion to know that even if there are gods, they don’t exactly hand out holy fire like candy. There’s only one way this story ends. It’s Prometheus all over again. Phaëthon. Icarus. Pick your sucker. You fly too close to the sun, the thermal energy from the sun overwhelms the weak attractive forces that allow the wax in your wings to maintain its solid form, and down you go, into the sea. No fire for you. And that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky you end up like Prometheus. Birds eat your liver forever.”

“Usually,” Failstaff said. “There are exceptions.”

“For example, not everybody is such a complete dink that they make their wings out of wax,” Asmodeus said.

Briskly, Failstaff walked Julia through the enormous diagram on the table in front of them, sketching arcs and connections with his thick, soft fingers. The diagram showed the primary narratives of the major and minor religious traditions, collated and cross-referenced — and color-coded! — to highlight areas where they overlapped and confirmed one another. Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.

“The hubristic scenario, the pride that challenges the gods and leads to the death of the challenger, is only one of a number of possible scenarios. And usually the bad outcome can be traced to poor preparation on the part of the principals. It does not at all imply that it is categorically impossible for a mortal to gain access to divine power.”

“Hm,” Julia said. “Theoretically.”

“No, not theoretically,” Asmodeus said sharply. “Practically. Historically. Technically the process is called ascension, or sometimes assumption, or my favorite word for it is translation. They all mean the same thing: the process by which a human being is brought bodily into heaven, without dying, and accorded some measure of divine status. And then there’s apotheosis, which is related, whereby a human actually becomes a god. It’s been done, tons of times.”

“Give me examples.”

“Mary.” She ticked off a finger. “As in Jesus’s mom. She was born mortal and ended up divine. Galahad. Arthurian legend. He was Lancelot’s son. He found the Holy Grail and was taken directly up into heaven. So was Enoch — he was an early descendant of Adam’s.”

“There’s a couple of Chinese generals,” Gummidgy said. “Guan Yu. Fan Kuai. There’s the Eight Immortals of Taoism.”

“Dido, Buddha, Simon Magus. .” Pouncy chimed in. “It just goes on and on.”

“Or look at Ganymede,” Asmo said. “Greek legend. He was a mortal, but of such great beauty that Zeus brought him up to Olympus to be a cupbearer. Hence the project name.”

“We think cupbearer was probably a euphemism,” Failstaff added.

“No kidding,” Julia said. “Okay, I get the point. Not everybody ends up like Icarus. But these are just stories. There’s immortals in Highlander, but that doesn’t mean they’re real.”

“Those aren’t gods,” Failstaff said. “Sheezus, have you even seen the movie?”

“And these aren’t just ordinary mortals you’re talking about. They were all special in some way. Like you said, Enoch was a descendant of Adam.”

“And you’re not?” Asmo said.

“Galahad was inhumanly virtuous. Ganymede was inhumanly beautiful. Which I don’t think anybody here exactly qualifies for either. You all seem pretty human to me.”

“Very true,” Pouncy said. “Very true. It’s an issue. Listen, for the moment we’re talking proof of concept. We’re in initial trials. We’re nowhere near drawing definitive conclusions yet. We just don’t want to rule anything out.”

Like a professor showing around a prospective graduate student, Pouncy took Julia on a tour of the parts of the East Wing she hadn’t been allowed into before. She passed room after room stuffed with the paraphernalia of a hundred churches and temples. There were raiments and vestments. There were altars and torches and censers and miters. There were a thousand flavors of incense.

She picked up a bundle of sacred staffs tied together with twine — she recognized a bishop’s crosier among them, and a druidical shillelagh. This was a different class of hardware from what she was used to handling, to the say least. It looked like rubbish to her. But who could tell for sure without testing? Maybe this was the industrial-strength stuff. Maybe this really was the big iron, the magical equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider. You couldn’t rule it out till you’d ruled it out. Could you?

So Julia joined Project Ganymede. She pitched in with the others, doing what nerds do: she sliced and diced, organized and spreadsheeted, drew up checklists and then checked the hell out of them. The magicians of Murs chanted, drank, sacrificed, fasted, bathed, painted their faces, consulted the stars, and huffed odd gases from bubbling liquids.

It was hard to assimilate the sight of the solemn, gawky Gummidgy ululating and tripping on peyote, topless and in full face paint, but as Pouncy pointed out, in the context of their present field of study, this was what rigor looked like. (Asmodeus swore, in hushed tones, glittering with suppressed merriment, that Pouncy and Gummidgy were running Bacchic sex rituals on the sly, but if she had proof she declined to make it available to Julia.) They had to find out if there was a magical technique behind all this messy crap, and if there was, who knew, maybe it would make the stuff in the three-ring binders look like bar mitzvah magic.

At the point when Julia joined Project Ganymede, Pouncy didn’t have much to show by way of results, but he’d seen enough to keep hoping that it wasn’t a complete waste of time, all red herring and no white whale. Apparently Iris had been trying a new transcription of a Sumerian chant the other night when something like a swarm of insects issued — no other word really applied — from her mouth. It hovered in the middle of the room for a second, buzzing fiercely, and then broke a window and disappeared outside. Iris couldn’t speak for two days afterward. The thing had scorched her throat coming out.

There were other hints too, scattered manifestations of something, nobody even had a theory as to what. Objects moving by themselves. Glasses and pots shattering. There were those phantom giant footsteps that had woken Julia up. Fiberpunk — the fireplug metamagician — had fasted and meditated for three days, and on the morning of the fourth he swore he’d seen a hand in a ray of sunshine, felt it reach down and gently touch his pudgy face with its hot fingers.

But nobody else could make it happen. That’s what was frustrating. Magic wasn’t a perfect linear grid or anything, but compared with magic religion was just chaos, a complete junk pile. Sure, it was plenty ritualized, and formalized, and codified, but the rituals didn’t deliver consistent, reproducible results. The thing about real magic was, once you learned a spell, and you cast it properly, and you weren’t too tired, and the Circumstances hadn’t shifted while you weren’t looking, then it worked, generally speaking. But this religious stuff didn’t give good data. Pouncy was convinced that if they could drill down far enough, parse the underlying grammar, they’d have the basis for an entirely new and radically more powerful magical technique, but the further down they drilled the more chaotic and less grammatical it got. Sometimes it felt like there was some capricious, mischievous presence on the other side that was pressing buttons and pulling levers at random, just to piss them off.

Pouncy had the patience for it, to sit and wait out the noisy data until the patterns emerged, but Pouncy was a singular individual. So while he and his acolytes pored over sacred texts, and filled hard drive after hard drive with chaotic pseudo-data, Asmodeus took a smaller group out into the field in search of a shortcut. She went looking for a live specimen.

Pouncy wasn’t thrilled to find Asmo leading a splinter movement, but she stood up to him with the icy firmness of a seventeen-year-old corporate vice president. There was, she explained, although everybody already knew, a population of magical beings on Earth. It was a modest population, as Earth wasn’t an especially hospitable environment for them. Magically speaking, the soil was rocky and bitter, the air thin, the winters harsh. Life on Earth for a fairy was analogous to life in the Arctic for a human. They survived, but they did not thrive. And yet some few remained — the Inuits, by analogy, of the magical world.

Among those few there was a hierarchy. Some were more powerful, some less so. At the bottom were the vampires, seedy serial killers from whose population the non-sociopaths had been bred hundreds of generations ago by natural selection. Empathy was not a survival trait among the strigoi. They were not well liked.

But above them were any number of orders of fairies and elementals and lycanthropes and one-off oddities, leading up the power chain. And this was where Asmodeus saw her opportunity: if she worked her way up the ladder, patiently, rung by rung, who knows where she might get. She might not get all the way to gods, but she might meet somebody who knew somebody who had the gods’ fax number. It beat fasting.

To begin with they kept things local: day trips to hot spots within easy striking distance. Enough of Provence was still farmland and parkland that they could still ferret out indigenous sprites, minor river sirens, even the odd wyvern without much trouble. But that was small-fry. As July turned to August, and the hills around Murs lit up with lavender fields so idyllically beautiful they looked like something you’d see on a calendar in a dentist’s office, Asmodeus and her handpicked team, which now included Failstaff as well, disappeared into the field for days at a time.

Their efforts were not at first conspicuously successful. Asmo would knock on Julia’s door at three in the morning, dead leaves in her hair and holding a two-thirds-full bottle of Prosecco, and they would sit on Julia’s bed while Asmo described a night of fruitless bullshitting in Old Provençal with a bunch of lutins — basically the French equivalent of your common leprechaun — who kept trying to crawl up under her (admittedly invitingly short) skirt.

But there was progress. Failstaff kept a special room, neatly swept, with a white tablecloth set with fresh food, as a kind of honeypot for local spirits called fadas, who would come bearing good luck in their right hands, bad in their left. Asmo woke her up crowing about having gotten an audience with the Golden Goat, a being usually seen only by shepherds, and from a distance.

It wasn’t all good luck and Golden Goats. One night Asmo came back with wet hair, shivering in the early autumn chill, after a drac, in the middle of an otherwise perfectly civil interview, had abruptly pulled her right into the Rhône. The next day she saw the thing in the supermarket in the shape of a man, stocking its shopping cart with jars of anchovies. It winked at her merrily.

Plus somebody was stealing their hubcaps. Asmo thought it must be a local trickster-deity called Reynard the Fox. He was supposed to be some kind of anti-gentry, anti-clerical hero of the peasantry, but she just considered Him a pain in the ass.

One morning Julia saw Failstaff at breakfast looking as grim as she’d ever seen him. Over espresso and muesli he swore to her that he’d seen a black horse with a back as long as a school bus, with thirty crying children mounted on it, match speeds with them last night as they drove home in the van. It paced them for two solid minutes, sometimes trotting on the ground, sometimes galloping along up on power lines or across the treetops. Then it leaped straight into a river, kids and all. They stopped and waited, but it never came back up. Real, or illusion? They searched the papers for stories about missing kids, but they never found anything.

Most days the two groups would debrief at noon, over lunch for Pouncy’s team and breakfast for Asmo’s, who were out all night in the field most nights and got up late. Each side presented its data, and each side would feed what the other side had learned back into the next stage of its investigations. There was a certain amount of healthy competition between the two sides. Also some unhealthy competition.

“For fuck’s sake, Asmo,” Pouncy said one day in September, interrupting her mid-report. The hay fields all around the house were turning a toasted brown. “How is this getting us anywhere? If I have to hear one more word about that Golden fucking Goat I’m going to go mental. Absolutely mental. The Goat knows nothing. This whole region is just chickenshit! I would kill for something Greek. Anything. God, demigod, spirit, monster, I don’t even care what. A cyclops. There’s got to be a few of those things left. We’re practically on the Mediterranean!”

Asmodeus stared at him balefully across a table strewn with baguette crusts and smears of local jam. Her eyes looked hollow. She was wiped out from lack of sleep. A huge wasp, its legs dangling limply, airlifted from one jam smear to the next.

“No cyclops,” she said. “Sirens. I could get you a siren.”

“Sirens?” Pouncy brightened up. He banged the table with the flat of his hand. “Why didn’t you say so! That’s great!”

“They’re not Greek sirens though. They’re French. They’re half-snake, from the waist down.”

Pouncy frowned. “So like a gorgon.”

“No. Gorgons have snakes for hair. Except anyway, I don’t think gorgons are real.”

“A half-snake woman,” Julia said, “would be a lamia.”

“She would be,” Asmodeus snapped, “if she were in Greece. But we’re in France, so she’s a siren.”

“All right, but maybe she knows a lamia,” Pouncy said. “Maybe they’re related. Like cousins. You gotta think all the snake-bodied women have a network—”

“She doesn’t know a lamia.” Asmodeus put her head down on the table. “God, you have no idea what you’re asking.”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, you’ve got to widen your search. I’m so sick of this cutesy Frenchy-French shit. Ever wonder why Clash of the Lutins was never a movie? The power levels around here are nothing! We can fly you to Greece, the money isn’t a problem. We can all go to Greece. But you’ve hit a wall here and you’re too stubborn to admit it.”

“You don’t know!” Asmodeus sat up, her red eyes flaming. “You don’t understand what I’m doing! You can’t just go knocking on doors like you’re taking a census. You have to build up trust. I’m running a network of agents here now. Some of these things haven’t talked to a human for centuries. The Golden Goat—”

“God!” He stuck a finger in Asmodeus’s face. “No more with the Goat!”

“Asmo’s right, Pouncy.”

All eyes turned to Julia. She could see that Pouncy had expected her to back him up. Well, she wasn’t here to play power games. If there’s one thing magic had taught her it was that power wasn’t a game.

“You’re thinking about this the wrong way. The answer isn’t wider, it’s deeper. If we start hopping around the globe cherry-picking myths and legends we’re going to burn through all our time and money and end up with nothing.”

“Well, so far we’ve got Golden fucking Goat cheese.”

“Hey now,” Failstaff said. “That stuff was perfectly edible.”

“You’re missing the point. If we go out there looking for something specific we’ll never find anything. But if we focus on someplace rich and really deep-dive it, work our way down through what’s there, we’re bound to hit something solid eventually. If there’s anything solid to hit.”

“Someplace rich. Like Greece. It’s like I was saying—”

“We don’t need to go to Greece,” Julia said. “We don’t need to go anywhere. All this stuff has to be connected at the roots. Everybody came through Provence: the Celts were here, the Romans, the Basques. The Buddhists sent missionaries. The Egyptians had colonies, and so did the Greeks, Pouncy, if you absolutely need the Greeks to get you hard. They even had Jews. Sure, it all got covered over with Christianity, but the mythology goes all the way down. If we can’t find a god in all that, there are no gods to be found.”

“So what are you saying?” Pouncy regarded her skeptically, not pleased by her display of disloyalty. “We should drop all the world religion stuff and just do local folk and myth?”

“That’s what I’m saying. That’s where our sources are. Let’s bear down on those and see what they get us.”

Pouncy pursed his lips, considering. Everyone looked at him.

“All right.” He threw up his hands. “All right! Fine. Let’s do a month just on Provençal stuff and see what it gets us.” He glared around the table. “But no more dicking around with leprechauns. Take us up the food chain, Asmo. I want to know who runs this area. Find out who all these small players are afraid of and then get that guy’s number. That’s who we want to talk to.”

Asmodeus heaved a sigh. She looked years older than she had in June.

“I’ll try,” she said. “I really will, Pouncy. But you don’t know what you’re asking.”

You’d never hear Pouncy cop to it, but Julia turned out to be right. When they narrowed their focus to the local mythology only, Project Ganymede began to get traction. Once they started looking at just one corner of the puzzle — and stuck all the rest of the pieces back in the box — everything started to fit together.

Poring through Gregory of Tours and other, nameless medieval chroniclers, Julia began to get a feel for the local magic. Like wine, Provençal magic had its own distinctive terroir. It was rich and chaotic and romantic. It was a night-magic, confabulated out of moons and silver, wine and blood, knights and fairies, wind and rivers and forests. It concerned itself with good and evil but also with the vast intermediate realm in between, the realm of mischief.

It was also mother-magic. Gradually Julia began to become aware of something, or someone, who was standing behind the old dead pages, just out of view. Julia couldn’t see her, or name her, or not yet, but she felt her. She must have been old, very old. She must have gotten here early, long before the Romans. Nothing Julia read spoke of her directly — you couldn’t look straight at her, but you knew she was there because of the small ways she perturbed the universe around her. Julia picked up on her only by triangulation, via tiny traces, little glimpses, like the curious Black Madonna figures you saw scattered around Europe, and especially around Provence. Black Madonnas were otherwise ordinary images of the Virgin Mary, but with an inexplicably dark complexion.

But she was older than the Virgin Mary, and wilder. Julia thought she must be some kind of local fertility goddess from out of the darkness of the region’s deep, preliterate past, before the cosmopolitan conquerors came in and scraped everything smooth and clean and paved it over with official homogenizing Christianity. A distant cousin of Diana or Cybele or Isis, ethnographically speaking. When the Christians arrived they would have lumped her in with Mary, but Julia thought she might still be out there on her own. She sensed the goddess looking out from behind the mask of Christian dogma, the way the second Julia had looked out from behind the mask of the first Julia.

The goddess called to Julia — Julia, who had turned her back on her own mother to save herself, and now heard about her only in oblique and infrequent e-mails from her sister, sent from the safe bosom of a small, top-flight liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. Julia remembered the grace and forgiveness with which she had been received back into her home, when she came crawling back from Chesterton. It was like nothing else she had ever experienced, before or since. It was the closest to the divine she’d ever been.

The more Julia read and cross-checked and deduced and collated, the more she was convinced her goddess was real. Nothing she longed for that ardently could fail to exist — it was like the goddess was just on the other side of all these useless words, trying to find Julia as Julia was searching for her. She wasn’t a great and grand world-ruling goddess, a Hera or a Frigga. She was more of a middleweight, a team player on a big pantheon. She wasn’t a grain-goddess like Ceres — Provence was rocky and Mediterranean, not wheat country at all. Julia’s goddess dealt in grapes and olives, the dark, intense fruit of hard, gnarled trees and vines. And she had daughters too: the dryads, ferocious defenders of the forests.

The goddess was warm, even humorous, and loving, but she had a second aspect, terrible in its bleakness: a mourning aspect that she assumed in winter, when she descended to the underworld, away from the light. There were different versions of the story. In some she grew angry at mankind and hid herself underground half the year out of rage. In some she lost one of her dryad-daughters and retired to Hades in grief. In others the goddess was fooled by some Loki-type trickster-god and bound to spend half the year hiding her warmth and fruitfulness in the underworld, against her will. But in each version her dual nature was clear. She was a goddess of darkness as well as light. A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.

Julia wasn’t the only one to hear the call of the goddess. The others talked about her too. The Free Trader Beowulf alumni in particular, who tended not to have been the beneficiaries of world-class mothering as children, felt drawn to her. In the crypt under Chartres Cathedral there was an ancient druidical well, and nearby a famous statue of the Black Madonna that was known as Notre Dame Sous Terre. So that’s what they called the goddess, for lack of a real name: Our Lady Underground. Or sometimes, when they were being familiar, just O.L.U.

Asmo began to take Julia out on some of the nighttime raids. These were conducted in Julia’s former rental Peugeot or, in the event that they were considering extracting and transporting someone or something, a long-suffering Renault Trafic van. One night they followed a tip deep into the Camargue, the vast swampy delta of the Rhône River where it flowed into the Mediterranean: three hundred square miles of salt marshes and lagoons.

It was a two-hour drive. The Camargue was, allegedly, home to a creature called the tarasque. When Julia asked Asmodeus for details she just said, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She was right. Having squelched through miles of rotten, boot-sucking ground, they finally tracked the thing down and chivvied it out of its hiding place in a hollow full of stunted, broken marsh pines. It faced them in the moonlight, making a miserable whuffling sound, like it had a nagging cold.

“What,” Julia said, “the fuck.”

“Holy shit,” said Failstaff.

“This is exceeding expectations,” Asmo said.

The tarasque was a beast about the size of a hippo, but with six legs. It had a scorpion tail, a kind of lion-human head with stringy long hair, and on its back a turtle shell with spikes coming out of it. It was the turtle shell that did it. It looked like Bowser from Super Mario Bros.

The tarasque crouched low to the ground, wheezing, its chin resting on a wet stump, looking up at them with its unbelievably ugly face. Its posture was not so much defensive as resigned.

“Leave it to the French to come up with the most fucked-up-est dragon ever,” Asmodeus sighed.

Once the tarasque realized they weren’t going to attack it, it began to talk. In fact they couldn’t get it to shut up. The thing didn’t need a roving strike team of folklorist-wizards, it needed a therapist. They sat there all night on tree stumps listening to it complain about how lonely and insufficiently damp it was. Not till dawn did it lumber back into its hollow.

But the tarasque turned out to be worth it. It was a champion whiner, and if they were trying to figure out who people around here were afraid of, well, it was afraid of practically everyone. They were spoiled for choice. The tarasque was too big for the small fry to pick on, but reading between the lines it was clear that it was a whipping boy for the upper ranks of mythological society. Apparently Reynard the Fox teased it a great deal, though it begged them not to mention anything about that to Reynard, for fear of reprisals. More interestingly, the tarasque was subjected to periodic beatings by a holy man of some kind who had been haunting the slopes of Mont Ventoux for the past millennium or so.

It was the tarasque’s terrifying appearance, see, that caused it to be so often misunderstood. A being of such ferocious magnificence as itself was too often assumed to be evil, and scourged and vilified should it devour even so much as six or seven village folk! That was why it had taken to spending its days wallowing in the salt bogs of the Camargue, nomming the occasional wild horse to stay alive. Why not join it? It was cool and safe here. And you know, it so rarely found anyone nice to talk to. Not like that nasty holy man. They were so much nicer than he was.

Driving back along empty predawn highways, squinting out at the flatness of the swamp through gummy eyes, they all agreed that the holy hermit sounded like a very nasty customer indeed. Exactly the kind of nasty customer they should get to know better.

A new atmosphere had settled over the house at Murs. It had always been a basic tenet there that luxury and comfort were integral parts of the magical lifestyle, not just for its own sake but as a matter of principle. As magicians — Murs magicians! — they were the secret aristocracy of the world, and Goddamn it, they were going to live like it.

Now that was changing. Nobody said anything, and certainly no edicts came down from Pouncy, but the atmosphere became more spartan. The serious nature of their investigation was cooling and tempering their collective mood. Less wine came out with dinner, and sometimes none at all. The food became plainer. Conversations were conducted in hushed tones, as they would be in the halls of a monastery. An attitude of seriousness and austerity was taking root among them. Julia suspected some of the others of fasting. From a high-energy magical research center Murs was turning into something more like a religious retreat.

Julia felt it too. She began getting up at dawn. She spoke only when necessary. Her mind was clear and sharp, her thoughts like birds calling to one another in an empty sky. At night she slept heavily — deep-ocean sleep, calm and dark, adrift with strange, silent, luminous creatures.

One night she dreamed that Our Lady Underground visited her in her room. She came in the form of a statue of herself, the one from the crypt at Chartres, stiff and cold. The statue gave Julia a wooden cup. Sitting up, Julia lifted it to her lips and drank like a feverish child being given medicine in bed. The liquid was cool and sweet, and she thought of the Donne poem about the thirsty Earth. Then she lowered the cup, and the goddess leaned down and kissed her, with her hard, gilded icon’s face.

Then the statue broke apart, its outside crumbling like an eggshell, and from inside it stepped the true goddess, clear at last. She was grave and unbearably lovely, and she held her attributes in either hand: a gnarled olive staff in her right, a bird’s nest with three eggs in it in her left. Half of her face was in shadow, for the half of the year she spent underground. Her eyes were full of love and forgiveness.

“You are my daughter,” she said. “My true daughter. I will come for you.”

Julia woke to the sound of Pouncy pounding on her door.

“Come look,” he whispered when she opened it. “You have to see this.”

Still drowsy in her nightgown, Julia followed him through the darkened house. She felt as if she were still dreaming. The floor creaked loudly, as it always did when one tried to creep through a house by night. They padded down stone steps to a basement room reserved for high-impact experiments. Pouncy practically ran ahead of her.

The lights were off. A single coherent shaft of moonlight entered the room through a high window, which was at ground level outside. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes.

“Okay,” Pouncy said. “Before we lose the light.”

There was a table in the room, with a white tablecloth and a small round mirror on it. Pouncy drew a sigil on it three times with his finger.

“Hold out your hands, like this.” He cupped his hands.

When Julia cupped hers, he held the mirror so that it reflected the moonbeam into them. She gasped. Immediately she felt her hands fill with something cold and hard. Coins. They made a sound like rain.

“They’re silver,” Pouncy said. “I think they’re real.”

One of the coins jingled on the floor and rolled away. This was powerful magic. It felt like nothing else she’d ever seen.

“Let me try,” she whispered.

She copied the sign he’d made on the mirror. This time instead of silver the moonbeam became something white and liquid. It pooled on the table, soaking into the cloth. She touched a finger to it and tasted it. Milk.

“How did you do this?” she said.

“I’m not sure,” Pouncy said, “but I think I prayed.”

“Oh God.” She forced down a hysterical giggle. “Who did you pray to?”

“I found it in one of these old Provençal books. Langue d’oc stuff. The language looked like an incantation, but I was wondering why there were no gestures to go with it. So I just got on my knees and clasped my hands and said the words.” Pouncy flushed. “I thought about — well, I thought about O.L.U.”

“Let’s have a look under the hood.”

There were simple spells to make magic visible: they showed you the ways the energy was running in and around an object with an enchantment on it. But what Julia saw when she cast one on the mirror defied explanation. It was the densest weave of magic she’d ever seen: a tracery of fine lines in an ornate pattern like a tapestry, so dense that it almost obscured the mirror underneath it. It should have taken a team of magicians a year at least to put all those channels in place. Instead Pouncy had done it alone, in one night, with a simple chant. It was unlike any working she’d ever heard of.

“You did this? Just now?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. I said the words, but I think somebody else must have done the work.”

Her hands and her body felt strangely light. There was a sweet smell in the air. Acting on an impulse, she dabbed a little of the milk on each of her eyelids. Instantly her vision sharpened and clarified, like when they change the settings at the ophthalmologist’s.

“We’re getting close, Julia,” Pouncy said. “We’re getting close to the divine praxis. I can feel it.”

“I don’t like feeling things,” she said. “I like knowing them.”

But she had to admit, she felt it too. The only word she could think of to describe this magic was grave. There was nothing light or playful about it: it was dead fucking sober magic. Serious as a heart attack. Where was the line between a spell and a miracle? Turning moonlight into silver coins wasn’t exactly parting the Red Sea, but the effortlessness with which it was accomplished spoke of much larger possibilities. It was a minor effect running off an enormous power source.

The next morning Asmodeus was at breakfast. Real breakfast, not her usual lunch-breakfast. She was practically vibrating with excitement. She refused any food.

“I found him,” she said, with finality.

“Who?” Julia said. It was a little early for Asmodeus in her maximum-intensity mode. “Whom did you find?”

“The hermit. The tarasque’s holy man. He’s a saint. Or not a saint, exactly, not in the strictly Christian sense. But he calls himself one.”

“Explain,” Pouncy said around a hunk of the almost penitentially coarse bread they’d been eating.

“Well,” and here Asmodeus shook off her manic fatigue for a minute and entered her business mode, “as close as I can figure out, this guy is about two thousand years old. Right? He calls himself Amadour — says he used to be a saint, but they defrocked him.

“I found him living in a cave. Red hair, beard down to here. Says he serves the goddess, the old one, the one we’re always hearing about. He wouldn’t name her, but it has to be her. Our Lady, O.L.U. For a while he passed as a Christian saint, he told me, saying he worshipped the Virgin Mary, but eventually he got outed as a pagan and they tried to crucify him. He’s been living in a cave ever since.

“And at first I was all, sure, buddy, saint or crazy homeless guy, it’s a fine line. But he showed me things. Weird things, guys, things we don’t know how to do. He can shape rock with his hands. He heals animals. He knew things about me, things nobody knows. He — he healed a scar I have. Had. He made it go away.”

Her voice faltered. Julia had never seen Asmodeus look so serious. She glared at them, angry that she’d let a secret slip. Julia had never seen Asmodeus’s scar. She wondered if she meant a physical one or something else.

“Can you take us to him?” Pouncy’s voice was gentle. He seemed to sense how close to the edge she was.

She shook her head quickly, trying to recover herself and not succeeding.

“You only see him once,” she said. “You could go find him yourself, maybe, but I can’t tell you where the cave was. I mean, I remember, but I can’t tell you. Literally — I tried just now.” She shrugged helplessly. “Nothing comes out.”

They all looked at each other over the cold crusts and dead coffee.

“I almost forgot,” she said. “He gave me something.” She unzipped her backpack and rummaged in it for a sheet of parchment, closely written. “It’s a palimpsest. Can you believe it? So old-school. I watched him scrape the ink off some priceless ancient hymnal or something to make it. Probably a Dead Sea Scroll or something. He wrote out how to call on the goddess. Our Lady Underground.”

Pouncy took the paper from her. His fingers shook slightly.

“An invocation,” he said.

“So that’s it then,” Julia said. “The Lady’s phone number.”

“That’s it. It’s in Phoenician, I think, if you can believe it. He didn’t know if she’d come, but. .”

Asmo picked up the heel of Pouncy’s loaf and started chewing it, without seeming to know she was doing it. She closed her eyes.

“Shit,” she said. “I have to go to bed.”

“Go.” Pouncy didn’t look up from the paper. “Go. We’ll talk after you’ve slept.”

CHAPTER 24

The Muntjac was becalmed, tossing on the gentle swell in the restless, unsettled way that boats do when they’re built for speed but making no headway. Its slack ropes and tackle jostled and banged against the masts. It didn’t like standing still.

Rain fuzzed the surface of the sea into a cloudy gray blur. Nobody spoke. A week had gone by since Quentin and Poppy came back from the Neitherlands, bearing news of the coming magical apocalypse and the true nature of the keys. The long, low-ceilinged cabin where they ate their meals was filled with the sound of drops drumming on the deck overhead, so that they would have had to practically yell at each other to be understood anyway.

They were going to find the last key. Definitely. They just weren’t sure yet precisely how they were going to do it.

“Let’s go over it again,” Eliot said, raising his voice to be heard over the rain. “These things always work by rules, you just have to figure out what they are. You went through with Julia.” He pointed at Quentin. “But you didn’t take the key with you.”

“No.”

“Could it have fallen through before the door closed? Could it be in the grass on your parents’ lawn?”

“No. Impossible.” He was almost sure. No, he was sure. The grass was like a damn putting green, they would have seen it.

“But then you”—he turned to Bingle—“you searched the room and found no key.”

“No key.”

“But just now when you two”—Quentin and Poppy—“went through to the Neitherlands, that key remained behind, here, on this side.”

“Correct,” Poppy said. “Don’t tell me it’s gone too.”

“No, we have it.”

“What happened to it when the door closed?” Quentin asked. “Did it stay hanging there in midair?”

“No, it fell on the deck when the door closed. Bingle heard it and picked it up.”

The conversation stopped, and the drumming rain filled in the silence. It was neither warm nor cold. The deck overhead was watertight, but the air was so wet that Quentin felt like he was soaked through anyway. Every surface was sticky. Everything wooden was swollen. His damn collarbone was swollen. There was a glum scraping as people shifted in their wooden chairs. Above his head Quentin heard the footsteps of whatever poor bastard was standing watch on deck.

“Maybe there was some space in between,” Quentin said. “One of those gaps between dimensions. Maybe it fell in there.”

“I thought the Neitherlands was the gap between dimensions,” Poppy said.

“It is, but there’s a different gap too. When a portal pulls apart. But we would have seen that.”

The Muntjac groaned softly as it swayed in place. Quentin wished Julia were here, but she was below with a fever that might or might not have been related to whatever else was going on with her. She’d been down ever since the fight for the last key. She lay on her bed with her eyes closed but not sleeping, breathing quickly and shallowly. Quentin went down there a few times a day to read to her or hold her hand or make her drink water. She didn’t seem to care much, but Quentin kept it up anyway. You never knew what might make a difference.

“So you searched the whole After Island,” Quentin said.

“We did,” Eliot said. “Look, maybe we should call on Ember.”

“Call Him!” Quentin said it more vehemently than he meant to. “I doubt if it’ll do much good. If that fucking ruminant could get the key He would just do it and leave us out of it.”

“But would He?” Josh asked.

“Probably. He’ll die too if Fillory goes.”

“What is Ember, anyway?” Poppy said. “I mean, I thought He was a god, but He’s not like those silver guys.”

“I think He’s a god in this world, but nowhere else,” Quentin said. “That’s my theory. He’s just a local god. The silver gods are gods of all the worlds.”

Although Quentin was still in close touch with the exalted frame of mind he’d been in when he came back from the Neitherlands, his connection to it had grown more tenuous. The urgency was still there: every morning he woke up expecting to find magic shut off everywhere like an unpaid power bill and Fillory collapsing around him on all sides like the last days of Pompeii. And they were certainly making good time, or they had been till this morning. Admiral Lacker had found, tucked away in a secret wooden locker, a marvelous sail that caught light as well as wind. Quentin recognized it: the Chatwins had one aboard the Swift. It hung slack through most of the night, limping along on whispers of moon-and starlight, but during the day it billowed out like a spinnaker in a gale and hauled the ship forward almost singlehandedly, needing only to be trimmed according to the angle of the sun.

That was all fine. But Fillory wasn’t doing its part. It wasn’t giving up the key. All the wonders seemed to be in hiding. In the past week they had reached heretofore unknown islands, stepped out onto virgin beaches, infiltrated choked mangrove swamps, even scaled a rogue drifting iceberg, but no keys presented themselves. They weren’t getting traction. It wasn’t working. Something was missing. It was almost as if something had gone out of the air: a tautness had gone slack, an electric charge had dissipated. Quentin racked his brain to think what it was.

Also it wouldn’t stop raining.

After the meeting Quentin forced himself to take a break. He lay down in his damp berth and waited for the heat from his body to propagate its way through the clammy, tepid bedclothes. It was too late to take a nap and too early to go to sleep. Outside his window the sun was dropping over the rim of the world, or it must have been, but you couldn’t tell. Sky and ocean were indistinguishable from each other. The world was the uniform gray of a brand-new Etch A Sketch the knobs of which hadn’t yet been twiddled.

He stared out at it, gnawing the edge of his thumb, a bad habit left over from childhood, his mind adrift in the emptiness.

Somebody spoke.

“Quentin.”

He opened his eyes. He must have fallen asleep. The window was dark now.

“Quentin,” the voice said again. He hadn’t dreamed it. The voice was muffled, directionless. He sat up. It was a gentle voice, soft and androgynous and vaguely familiar. It didn’t sound completely human. Quentin looked around the cabin, but he was alone.

“Who are you?” he said.

“I’m down here, Quentin. You’re hearing me through a grating in the floor. I’m down in the hold.”

Now he placed the voice. He’d forgotten it was even on board.

“Sloth? Is that you?” Did it have a name other than Sloth?

“I thought you might like to pay me a visit.”

Quentin couldn’t imagine what would have given the sloth that idea. The Muntjac’s hold was dark and smelled of damp and rot and bilge, and for that matter it smelled of sloth. All in all he would have been fine talking to the sloth just where he was. Or not talking to it at all.

And Jesus, if he could hear the sloth that clearly it must have overheard everything that happened in this cabin since they’d left Whitespire.

But he did feel bad about the sloth. He hadn’t paid very much attention to it. Frankly it was a tiny bit of a bore. But he owed it some respect, as the shipboard representative of the talking animals, and it was warm down in the hold, and it wasn’t like he had somewhere more pressing to be just now. He sighed and peeled the bedclothes off himself and fetched a candle and found the ladder that went down below.

The hold was emptier than he remembered it. A year at sea would have that effect. Black water sloshed around in a channel that ran along the floor. The sloth was a weird-looking beast, maybe four feet long, with a heavy coat of greenish-gray fur. It hung upside down by its ropy arms at about eye level, its thick curved claws hooked up over a wooden beam. Its appearance smacked of evolution gone too far. The usual pile of fruit rinds and sloth droppings lay below it in an untidy heap.

“Hi,” Quentin said.

“Hello.”

The sloth raised its small, oddly flattened head so that it was looking at Quentin right-side up. The position looked uncomfortable, but the sloth’s neck seemed pretty well designed for it. It had black bands of fur over its eyes that gave it a sleepy, raccoony look.

It squinted at the light from Quentin’s candle.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been down to see you very often,” Quentin offered.

“It’s all right, I don’t mind. I’m not a very social animal.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Abigail.”

She was a girl sloth. Quentin hadn’t realized. A hard wooden chair had been brought down to the hold, presumably in case someone was enjoying their conversation with the sloth so much that he or she just had to sit down to enjoy it even more.

“And you’ve been very busy,” she added charitably.

A long silence ensued. Once in a while the sloth masticated something, Quentin wasn’t sure what, with its blunt yellow teeth. It must be somebody’s job to come down here and feed it. Her.

“Do you mind if I ask,” Quentin said finally, “why you came on this voyage? I’ve always wondered.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Abigail the Sloth said calmly. “I came because nobody else wanted to, and we thought we should send someone. The Council of Animals decided that I would mind it the least. I sleep a great deal, and I don’t move around very much. I enjoy my solitude. In a way I am hardly in this world at all, so it doesn’t very much matter where I am in it.”

“Oh. We thought the talking animals wanted a representative on the ship. We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t take one of you along.”

“We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t send someone. It is humorous how rife with misunderstanding the world is, is it not?”

It sure was.

The sloth didn’t find the long silences awkward. Maybe animals didn’t experience awkwardness the way humans did.

“When a sloth dies, it remains hanging in its tree,” the sloth said, apropos of nothing. “Often well into the process of decomposition.”

Quentin nodded sagely.

“I did not know that.”

It wasn’t an easy ball to throw back.

“This is by way of telling you something about the way sloths live. It is different from the way humans live, and even from the way other animals live. We spend our lives in between worlds, you might say. We suspend ourselves between the earth and the sky, touching neither. Our minds hover between the sleeping world and the waking. In a sense we live on the borderline between life and death.”

“That is very different from how humans live.”

“It must seem strange to you, but it is where we feel most comfortable.”

The sloth seemed like somebody you could be frank with.

“Why are you telling me this?” he said. “I mean, I’m sure you have a reason, but I’m not making the connection. Is this about the key? Do you have an idea about how to find it?”

He didn’t know how much the sloth knew about what was going on above deck. Maybe she didn’t even know they were on a quest.

“It is not about the key,” Abigail said in her liquid, unhurried voice. “It is about Benedict Fenwick.”

“Benedict? What about him?”

“Would you like to speak with him?”

“Well, sure. Of course. But he’s dead. He died two weeks ago.”

It was still as unthinkable, almost unsayable, as it had been that first night.

“There are paths that are closed to most beings that are open to a sloth.”

Quentin supposed it went without saying that patience was a big deal when having a conversation with a sloth.

“I don’t understand. You’re going to hold a séance, and we can talk to Benedict’s ghost?”

“Benedict is in the underworld. He is not a ghost. He is a shade.” The sloth returned her head to its inverted position, a maneuver she accomplished without once dropping Quentin’s gaze.

“The underworld.” Jesus Christ. He hadn’t even realized Fillory had an underworld. “He’s in hell?”

“He is in the underworld, where dead souls go.”

“Is he all right there? Or I mean, I know he’s dead, but is he at peace? Or whatever?”

“That I cannot tell you. My understanding of human moods is imprecise. A sloth knows only peace, nothing else.”

It must be nice to be a sloth. Quentin was unsettled by the idea of Benedict in the underworld. It bothered him that Benedict could be dead but still — not alive, but what? Conscious? Awake? It was like he was buried alive. It sounded awful.

“But he’s not being tortured, right? By red guys with horns and pitchforks?” It never did to assume anything was impossible in Fillory.

“No. He is not being tormented.”

“But he’s not in heaven either.”

“I do not know what ‘heaven’ is. Fillory has only an underworld.”

“So how can I talk to him? Can you — I don’t know, put in a call? Patch me through?”

“No, Quentin. I am not a medium. I am a psychopomp. I do not speak to the dead, but I can show you the path to the underworld.”

Quentin was not sure he wanted to be shown that. He studied the sloth’s upside-down face. It was unreadable.

“Physically? I could physically go there?”

“Yes.”

Deep breath.

“Okay. I would really love to help Benedict, but I don’t want to leave the world of the living.”

“I will not force you. Indeed, I could not.”

It was spooky down in the hold, which was lightless except for the flame of Quentin’s candle, which stayed perfectly upright as the ship pitched forward and back. The hanging sloth did too — she swayed slightly, like a pendulum. Quentin’s eyes kept wandering off into the darkness. It was otherworldly down here. The ship’s curved sides were like the ribs of some huge animal that had swallowed them. Where was the underworld? Was it underground? Underwater?

The sloth chose this moment to engage in some self-grooming, which she did with her customary slowness and thoroughness, first with her tongue and then with a thick, woody claw, which she slowly and laboriously unhooked from around the beam.

“In a way”—she said, as she licked and clawed—“we sloths are like. . small worlds. . unto ourselves.”

Nobody could wait out a pause like a sloth. Or survive on less conversational encouragement. He wondered if to a sloth the human world appeared to move past at blinding, flickering speed — if humans looked twitchy and sped-up to her, the same way the sloth looked slowed-down to Quentin.

“There is a species of algae,” she said, “that grows only. . in sloth fur. It accounts for our unique. . greenish tint. The algae helps us blend in with the leaves. But it also serves. . to nourish an entire ecological system. There is a species of moth that lives only. . in the thick, algaerich fur. . of the sloth. Once a moth arrives on its chosen sloth”—here she tussled with a particularly gristly knot of fur for a long minute before continuing—“its wings break off. It does not need them. It will never leave.”

Finally finished, she rehooked her claw over the beam and returned to her quiescent, upside-down state.

“They are called sloth moths.”

“Look,” Quentin said. “I want to be clear. I don’t have time to go to the underworld right now. At any other time grieving for Benedict would be the biggest thing in my life, but the universe is going through a crisis. We’re searching for a key, and there’s a lot riding on that. A lot. It could be the end of Fillory if we don’t find it. This will have to wait.”

“No time will pass while you are in the other realm. For the dead there is no change, and therefore no time.”

He couldn’t afford to get distracted. “Even if it takes no time. Anyway what good would it do? I can’t bring him back.”

“No.”

“So I hate to be blunt, but what’s the point?”

“You could offer Benedict comfort. Sometimes the living can give something to the dead. And perhaps he could offer you something too. My understanding of human emotions is. .”

The sloth paused to ponder her choice of words.

“Imprecise?” Quentin said.

“Precisely. Imprecise. But I do not think Benedict was happy with his death.”

“It was a terrible death. He must feel very unhappy.”

“I think perhaps he wants to tell you that.”

Quentin hadn’t considered that.

“I think perhaps he could give you something too.”

The sloth regarded him with her gelatinous, glittering eyes, which seemed to pick up light from somewhere other than in the room. Then she closed them.

The ship grunted patiently as the waves beat against its hull, over and over again, monotonously. Quentin watched the sloth. By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it. He pictured Benedict, trapped and languishing in a poorly drawn cartoon netherworld. Would he want someone to come visit him? He probably would.

Quentin felt responsible for him. It was part of being a king. And Benedict had died before he found out what the keys were for. He thought that he’d died for no reason. Imagine chewing on that for eternity.

One of the things Quentin remembered from reading about King Arthur was that the knights who had sins on their consciences never did very well on the quest for the Grail. The thing was to go to confession before you set out. You had to face yourself and deal with your shit, that’s how you got somewhere. At the time Quentin thought that that was obvious, and he never understood why Gawain and the rougher knights didn’t just suck it up, get shriven, and get on with it. Instead they blundered around getting into fights and succumbing to temptation and eventually ended up nowhere near the Grail.

But being in the middle of it, it wasn’t that obvious. Maybe Benedict’s death was — if not a sin on his conscience, exactly, then something unresolved. The sloth was right. It was weighing on his soul, slowing them all down. Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.

Well, bottom line, no time is the perfect time to visit the dead in the underworld. And if the sloth was telling the truth, he could be back before anyone knew he was gone.

“So I can do this in no time at all?” he said. “I mean, literally no time will pass here?”

“Perhaps I exaggerated. No time will pass while you are in the underworld. But you will have to make certain preparations before you go.”

“And I can come back.”

“You can come back.”

“Okay. All right.” Unless he changed he was going to be visiting the underworld in his pajamas. “Let’s get started. What do I need to do?”

“I neglected to mention, the ritual must be performed on land.”

“Oh. Right.” Thank God, he could go back to bed after all. Hell could wait. “I thought we were going right here and now. Well, so I’ll just pop down next time we get—”

There was a distant clatter of boots overhead, and a bell rang.

“We just sighted land, didn’t we,” Quentin said.

The sloth gravely closed her eyes and then opened them again: indeed, yes, we just sighted land. Quentin was going to ask her how she did that but stopped himself, because asking would mean that he’d have to sit through the answer, and he’d had about enough slothly wisdom for the time being.

Not more than an hour later Quentin was standing on a flat gray beach in the middle of the night. He’d wanted to slip off to the underworld and back quietly, unbeknownst to the rest of the gang. Then maybe he would bring it up later, just drop it into conversation that by the way, he’d been to hell and back, no big thing, why do you ask? Benedict says hi. He hadn’t planned on doing this in front of an audience.

But an audience had assembled: Eliot, Josh, Poppy, and even Julia, who had roused herself from her stupor to observe. Bingle and one of the sailors stood nearby with a long oar resting between them on their shoulders, and from the oar dangled the sloth. They had carried it out to the beach like that, like a side of beef. It had seemed the easiest way.

Of them all only Poppy didn’t seem convinced he should go.

“I don’t know, Quentin,” she said. “I’m just trying to picture it. It’s not like visiting somebody in the hospital. Get well soon, here’s a bunch of balloons to tie to the bedpost. Imagine if you were dead. Would you want the living to visit you, when you knew you couldn’t go back with them? I’m not a thousand percent sure I would. It seems a little like rubbing it in. Maybe you should let him rest in peace.”

But he wasn’t going to. What’s the worst that could happen? Benedict could send him away if he wanted. The others hugged themselves in robes and overcoats in the chilly air. The island wasn’t much more than an overgrown sandbar, flat and featureless. The tide was out, and the sea was not so much calm as limp. Every few minutes it worked up enough energy for a wave that rose up half a foot and then flopped onto the strand with a startling smack, as if to remind everyone that it was still there.

“I’m ready,” Quentin said. “Tell me what to do.”

The sloth had asked them to bring a ladder and a long, flat board from the ship. Now it instructed them to stand them up and lean the two together to form a triangle. The ladder and board didn’t want to stay like that, the triangle kept collapsing, so Josh and Eliot had to hold them up. As a former Physical Kid Quentin was used to making magic out of unpromising raw materials, but this was crude even by his standards. The crescent moon of Fillory looked down on them, flooding the scene with silver light. It rotated eerily swiftly, once every ten minutes or so, so that its horns were always pointing in a different direction.

“Now climb the ladder.”

Quentin did. Eliot grunted with the effort of keeping it upright. Quentin got to the top.

“Now slide down the slide.”

It was clear what the sloth meant. He was supposed to slide down the plank like a playground slide. Though this wasn’t a playground slide, and it was a bit of a circus act to get into position without any bars to hang on to. The slide wobbled and at one point almost collapsed, but Josh and Eliot managed to hold it together.

Quentin sat at the top of the triangle. He hadn’t imagined that his journey to the underworld would be quite this ridiculous. He’d rather hoped it would involve drawing unholy sigils in the sand in letters of fire ten feet high, and flinging open the portal to hell. You can’t win them all.

“Slide down the slide,” the sloth said again.

It was a raw pine board, so he had to scooch himself along for a few feet, but eventually he managed to slide the rest of the way to the bottom. He was ready at any moment for a splinter to stab him in the ass, but none did. His bare feet planted in the firm cold sand. He stopped.

“Now what?” he called.

“Be patient,” said the sloth.

Everyone waited. A wave flopped. A gust of wind ruffled the fabric of his pajamas.

“Should I—?”

“Try wiggling your toes a little.”

Quentin wiggled them deeper into the cold, damp beach. He was about to get up and call it a night when he felt his toes break through something into nothing, and the sand gave way, and he slid down through it.

The moment he passed beneath the sand the slide became a real slide, made of metal, with metal guardrails. A playground slide. He slid down it in total darkness, with nothing around him as far as he could tell. It wasn’t a perfect system — every time he got up a decent head of speed he would get stuck and have to scooch again, his butt squeaking loudly in the pitch-black.

A light appeared, far ahead and below him. He wasn’t moving very fast, so he had plenty of time to check it out on his way down. It was an ordinary unshaded electric light set in a brick wall. The brickwork was old and uneven and could have used some repointing. Below the light was a pair of metal double doors painted a gray-brown. They were absolutely ordinary, the kind that might have opened onto a school auditorium.

In front of it stood someone who looked too small to be standing in front of the entrance to hell. He might have been eight years old. He was a sharp-looking little boy, with short black hair and a narrow face. He wore a little-boy-sized gray suit with a white shirt, but no tie. He looked like he’d gotten fidgety in church and come outside for a minute to blow off steam.

He didn’t even have a stool to sit on, so he just stood in place as well as an eight-year-old boy can. He tried and failed to whistle. He kicked at nothing in particular.

Quentin thought it prudent to slow down and stop about twenty feet from the bottom of the slide. The boy watched him.

“Hi,” the boy said. His voice sounded loud in the silence.

“Hi,” Quentin said.

He slid down the rest of the way and then stood up, as gracefully as he could.

“You’re not dead,” the boy said.

“I’m alive,” Quentin said. “But is this the entrance to the underworld?”

“You know how I could tell you were alive?” The boy pointed behind Quentin. “The slide. It works much better if you’re dead.”

“Oh. Yes, I got stuck a few times.”

Quentin’s skin prickled just standing there. He wondered if the boy was alive. He didn’t look dead.

“Dead people are lighter,” the boy said. “And when you die they give you a robe. It’s better for sliding than regular pants.”

The bulb made a bubble of light in the darkness. Quentin had a sense of towering emptiness all around them. There was no sky or ceiling. The brick wall seemed to go up forever — did go up forever, as far as he could see. He was in the subbasement of the world.

Quentin pointed behind him at the double doors. “Is it all right if I go inside?”

“You can only go inside if you’re dead. That’s the rule.”

“Oh.”

This was a setback. You’d think Abigail the Sloth would have briefed him on that wrinkle. He didn’t relish the thought of trying to climb back up that long slide, if that was how you got back to the upper world. He seemed to remembered from being a kid that it was possible, just about, but that slide must have been half a mile long. What if he fell off? Or what if somebody died and came sliding down it while he was going up?

But it would also be a relief. He could get back to business. Back to the search for the key.

“The thing is, my friend Benedict is inside. And I need to tell him something.”

The boy thought for a minute.

“Maybe you could tell me, and then I’ll tell him.”

“I think it should come from me.”

The boy chewed his lip.

“Do you have a passport?”

“A passport? I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you do. Look.”

The boy reached up and took something out of the shirt pocket of Quentin’s pajamas. It was a piece of paper folded in half. It took Quentin a beat to recognize it: it was the passport the little girl had made for him, what was her name, Eleanor, all the way back on the Outer Island. How had it gotten into his pocket?

The little boy studied it with an eight-year-old’s version of intense bureaucratic scrutiny. He looked up at Quentin’s face to compare it with the picture.

“Is this how you spell your name?”

The boy pointed. Under his picture Eleanor had written in colored pencil, all capitals: KENG. The K was backward.

“Yes.”

The boy sighed, exactly as if Quentin had just bested him at a game of Chinese checkers.

“All right. You can go in.”

He rolled his eyes to make sure that Quentin knew that he didn’t really care if Quentin went in or not.

Quentin opened one of the doors. It wasn’t locked. He wondered what the boy would have done if he’d just barged in past him. Probably he would have transformed into some unspeakably horrible Exorcist thing and eaten him. The door opened onto a vast open space dimly lit by banks of buzzing fluorescent lights overhead.

It was full of people. Stale air and the muttering roar of thousands of conversations washed over him. The place was a gymnasium, or that was the closest analogy he could come up with off the cuff. A recreation center. The people in it were standing and sitting and walking around, but mostly what they were doing was playing games.

Right in front of him a foursome was listlessly swatting a shuttlecock back and forth over a badminton net. Farther off he could see a volleyball net set up that no one was using, and some Ping-Pong tables. The floor was heavily varnished wood and striped with the overlapping curving lines of various indoor sports, painted over each other at odd angles, in odd colors, the way they were in school gyms. The air had the empty, echoing quality of large stadiums, where sound travels a long way but doesn’t have much to bounce off of, so it just gets gray and ragged and indistinct.

The people — the shades, he supposed — all looked solid, though the artificial light washed all the color out of them. Everybody wore loose white exercise clothing. His pajamas wouldn’t look that out of place after all.

The dry air pressure pushed into his ears. Quentin resolved to take everything as it came, not think too hard, not try to figure it out, just try to find Benedict. That’s why he was here. This was a situation where you really needed a Virgil to show you around. He looked behind him, but the doors had already closed. They even had those long metal bars on them that you pressed to open instead of a doorknob.

Just then one of the doors opened, and Julia slipped inside. She looked around the room, the same way Quentin had, but without his air of utter bewilderment. Her ability to take things in stride was just awesome. Her fever and her listlessness seemed to be gone. The door closed behind her with a metallic clunk.

For a second he thought she was dead, and his heart stopped.

“Relax,” she said. “I thought you might want company.”

“Thank you.” His heart started up again. “You were right. I do. I’m so happy you’re here.”

The shades didn’t seem especially happy to be in the underworld. They mostly looked bored. Nobody was running for shots on the badminton court. They were swinging limp-wristed, and when somebody netted a shot his partner didn’t look especially pissed off about it. Mildly chagrined, maybe. At most. They didn’t care. There was a scoreboard next to the court, but no one was keeping score. It showed the final score of the game before it, or maybe the game before that.

In fact a lot of them weren’t playing the games at all, they were just talking or lying on their backs staring up at the buzzing fluorescent lights, saying nothing. The lights hardly even made sense. There was no electricity in Fillory.

“Did he take your passport?” Quentin said.

“No. He didn’t say anything at all. He did not even look at me.”

Quentin frowned at that. Weird.

“We’d better start looking,” he said.

“Let us stay together.”

Quentin had to force himself to start walking. The deeper they went into the throng, it felt like, the greater the risk that they would get stuck here forever, whatever the sloth said. They threaded their way between the different groups, sometimes stepping over people’s legs, trying not to tread on people’s hands, like it was a crowded picnic. He was worried he would attract attention by being alive, but people just glanced up at him and then looked away. It wasn’t an underworld like in Homer or Dante, where everybody was dying to talk to you.

It was more depressing than spooky, really. It was like visiting a summer camp, or a senior center, or somebody else’s office: it’s all well and good, but the knowledge that you don’t have to stay there, that you can go home at the end of the day and never come back, makes you so relieved you get dizzy. Not all the equipment was in its first youth. Some of it was actually fairly shabby — the board games had cracked leathery creases across the center where they folded up, and some of the badminton rackets were waving a loose string or two. He got his first real shock when he saw Fen.

He should have expected it. She’d been one of his guides on their trip down into Ember’s Tomb. She was the good one, the one who didn’t betray them. He barely knew her in life, but she was unmistakable, with her fishy lips and her short dykey haircut. The last time he’d seen her she was being simultaneously crushed and set on fire by a giant made of red-hot iron. Now she looked as healthy as she ever had, if a little wan, playing a slow-paced, low-pressure game of Ping-Pong. If she recognized him she didn’t show it.

Now he allowed himself to wonder the thing he’d been trying not to wonder ever since the sloth first brought it up: whether Alice was here. Part of him was yearning to see her, would have given anything if one of the faces in the crowd could just belong to her. Another part of him hoped that she wasn’t here. She was a niffin now. Maybe that counted as still alive.

There were big metal pillars here and there holding up the ceiling, and Benedict was sitting leaning against one of them, staring off into the pale, empty distance. Half a game of solitaire was arranged in front of him, but he’d lost interest in it, even though it was pretty obvious he wasn’t stuck. He could put a red five of diamonds on a six of clubs.

He looked more like the Benedict Quentin had first met in the map room, than the suntanned bravo he’d become on board the Muntjac. He was pale and thin-armed, with his old black bangs falling over his eyes. His hair had grown back. He looked like a sullen Caravaggio youth. Death made him seem younger.

Quentin stopped.

“Hello, Benedict.”

“Hello,” Julia said.

Benedict’s eyes flicked over to Quentin, then back to the distance.

“I know you can’t take me with you,” he said quietly.

The dead didn’t mince words.

“You’re right,” Quentin said. “I can’t. That’s what the sloth said.”

“So why did you come?”

Now he did look at Quentin, accusingly. Quentin had worried that he would have a gaping wound in his neck, but it was smooth and whole. He’s not a zombie, he’s a ghost, Quentin reminded himself. No, a shade.

“I wanted to see you again.”

Quentin sat down next to him and leaned back against the pillar too. Julia sat down on his other side. Together the three of them looked out at the milling throngs of dead people.

A period of time passed, maybe five minutes, maybe an hour. It was hard to keep track in the underworld. Quentin would have to watch that.

“How are you, Benedict?” Julia said.

Benedict didn’t answer.

“Did you see what happened to me?” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. Bingle said to stay on the ship, but I thought—” He didn’t finish, just frowned helplessly and shook his head. “I wanted to try some of the stuff we’d been practicing. For real, in a real fight. But the minute I stepped off the boat, tschoooo! Right in my throat. Right in the hollow of it.”

He pressed his index finger into the soft part below his Adam’s apple, where the arrow went in.

“It didn’t even hurt that much. That’s the funny thing. I thought they could pull it out. I turned around to get back on the boat. Then I realized I couldn’t breathe, so I sat down. My mouth was full of blood. My sword fell in the water. Can you believe I was worried about that? I was trying to figure out whether we could dive down later and get my sword back. Did anybody get it?”

Quentin shook his head.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Benedict said. “It was just a practice sword.”

“What happened next? You went down the slide?”

Benedict nodded.

Quentin was evolving a theory about that. The slide was humiliating, that’s what it was. Deliberately embarrassing. That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

“So did you get the key?” Benedict said.

“I wanted to tell you about that,” Quentin said. “We did get the key. There was a big fight, and we got the key, and it turned out to be really important. I wanted you to know that.”

“But nobody else got killed. Just me.”

“Nobody else died. I got stabbed in the side.” Not much to brag about under the circumstances. “But what I wanted to tell you is that it was important, what we were doing. You didn’t die for nothing. Those keys — we’re going to use them to save Fillory. There was a point to it all. Without them all magic is going to go away, and the whole world will collapse. But we can use the keys to fix it.”

Benedict’s expression didn’t change.

“But I didn’t do anything,” he said. “My dying didn’t make a difference. I could have just stayed on the boat.”

“We do not know what would have happened,” Julia said.

Benedict ignored her again.

“He cannot hear me,” Julia said to Quentin. “Something strange is going on. No one here can see or hear me. He does not know I am here.”

“Benedict? Can you see Julia? She’s sitting right next to you.”

“No.” Benedict frowned the way he used to, like Quentin was embarrassing him. “I don’t see anybody. Just you.”

“I am like a ghost here,” she said. “A ghost among ghosts. A reverse ghost.”

What was different about Julia, that the dead couldn’t see her? It was a serious question, but not one they were going to answer right now. Instead they watched the crowd some more, and listened to the kuh-tik kuh-tak of the Ping-Pong games. For all the time they had to practice, the dead didn’t seem to be that good at it. Nobody ever tried for a slam, or a fancy serve, and the rallies only ever went a few shots before the ball hit the net or went bouncing off into the crowd.

“This whole place,” Benedict said. “It’s like somebody almost tried to make it nice, with all the games and stuff, but then they didn’t quite care enough to think it through. You know? I mean, who gives a shit? Who wants to play games forever? I’m just so bored of everything, and I haven’t even been here that long.”

Somebody. Those silvery gods, probably. Benedict kicked at his solitaire game, messing up the nice straight rows.

“You don’t even get powers. You can’t even fly. I’m not even see-through.” He held up his hand, to demonstrate his opacity, and let it drop again. “Because you know, that would have been too cool or whatever.”

“What else can you do here? Besides the games and such?”

“Not a lot.” Benedict put his hands in his hair and looked up at the ceiling. “Talk to the other shades. There’s nothing to eat, but you don’t get hungry. A few people fight or have sex or whatever. You can totally watch them do it even. But after a while, I mean, what’s the point? It’s just the new people who do it.

“Once they did a human pyramid, to try to reach up to the lights. But you can’t reach them. They’re too high. I never had sex,” he added. “In the real world. Now I don’t even want to.”

Quentin talked on for a while, filling Benedict in on everything that had been happening.

“Did you have sex with that Poppy girl yet?” Benedict said, interrupting.

“Yes.”

“Everybody said you were going to.”

They did? Julia, a ghost’s ghost, smirked.

Out of the corner of his eye Quentin couldn’t help but notice that they were attracting some attention. Nothing obvious, but a couple of people were pointing at them. A kid — he might have been thirteen — stood there watching him fixedly. Quentin wondered how he died.

“I am starting to understand,” Julia said. “It is really gone. The part of me that was human, the part of me that could die — it is gone, Quentin. I have lost it forever. That is why they canot see me.” She was talking to him, but her black eyes were fixed on the distance. “I am never going to be human again. I did not understand it till now. I have lost my shade. I suppose I knew it. I just did not want to believe it.”

He started to answer, to tell her he was sorry for what she had lost, sorry he couldn’t do more, sorry for everything that had and hadn’t happened, whatever it was. But there was so much he didn’t understand. What did it mean, losing your shadow? How did it happen? How did it feel? Was she less than human now, or more? But she held up her hand, and then Benedict spoke.

“I hope you fail,” he said suddenly, as if he’d just made a decision about it. “I hope you never find the key, and everybody dies, and the world ends. You know why? Because then maybe this place would end too.”

Then Benedict was crying. He was sobbing so hard he wasn’t making any noise. He caught his breath and started sobbing more.

Quentin put a hand on his back. Say something. Anything.

“I’m so sorry, Benedict. You died too soon. You didn’t have your chance.”

Benedict shook his head.

“It’s good I died.” He took a shuddering breath. “I was useless. It’s good it was me and not anybody else.” His voice went away to a squeak at the end.

“No,” Quentin said firmly. “That’s bullshit. You were a great mapmaker, and you were going to be a great swordsman, and it’s a fucking tragedy that you died.”

Benedict nodded at this too.

“Will you — will you say hi to her for me? Tell her I liked her.”

“Who do you mean?”

Even though his face was red from crying, and dripping with tears, Benedict’s face had all its old adolescent contempt.

“Poppy. She was nice to me. Do you think she could come visit? Down here I mean?”

“I don’t think she has a passport. I’m sorry, Benedict.”

Benedict nodded. There were more shades around the two of them now. A group was definitely gathering, and it wasn’t at all clear that their intentions were friendly.

“I’ll come back,” Quentin said.

“You can’t. That’s the rule. You can only come one time. Didn’t they take your passport? They didn’t give it back, did they?”

“No. I guess they didn’t.”

Benedict took a shaky breath and wiped his eyes on his white sleeve.

“I wish I could have stayed. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s so stupid! If I’d just waited on the boat I’d still be up there. I looked at that arrow and thought, this little stick, this little piece of wood, is taking my whole life away. That’s all my life is worth. One little stick can erase it all. That’s the last thing I thought.” He looked directly at Quentin. It was the one moment when he didn’t seem angry or ashamed. “I miss it so much. You don’t understand how much I miss it.”

“I’m so sorry, Benedict. We miss you too.”

“Listen, you better go. I don’t think they want you here.”

A whole crowd was standing around them now, silently, in a rough semicircle. Maybe it was Quentin’s nonstandard pajamas. Maybe they could just see that he was alive somehow. That kid was one of them, who’d been staring at him before. Quentin wished the shades weren’t so solid-looking.

Quentin and Benedict both stood up, with their backs to the pillar. So did Julia.

“I have something,” Benedict said, suddenly shy again. “I was going to give it back.”

He dug something out of his pocket and pressed it into Quentin’s hand. His fingers were cold, and the thing was hard and cold too. It was the golden key.

“Oh. My God.” It was the last one. Quentin held it up in both hands. “Benedict, how did you get this?”

“Quentin,” Julia said. “Is that it?”

“I had it all along,” Benedict said. “After you and Queen Julia went through the door I picked it up when no one was looking. I don’t know why. I didn’t know how to give it back. I thought maybe I’d pretend to find it. I’m sorry. I wanted to be a hero.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Quentin’s heart was hammering in his chest. This was it. They were going to win after all. “Don’t be sorry at all. It doesn’t matter.”

“Then it came down here with me when I died. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You did the right thing, Benedict.” He’d been so wrong about everything. After all that, he hadn’t had to kill a monster or solve a riddle. He just had to come down here, to see how Benedict was doing. “Thank you. You are a hero. You really are. You always will be.”

Quentin laughed out loud and clapped poor Benedict on the shoulder. Benedict laughed too, reluctantly, and then not so reluctantly. Quentin wondered when the last time was that anybody laughed down here.

“It is time,” Julia said. “I am ready.”

It was. It was time to go, if that’s what she meant. But the shades didn’t seem to want them to leave. They stood around them in a semicircle, maybe a hundred of them, blocking the way back to the door. He couldn’t push his way through them, there were too many. He backed up, hoping to get the pillar in between him and the mob, trying to think. His heart leaped for a second when he spotted Jollyby sitting on the floor, maybe fifty yards away, with his good legs and his big beard. But he was just watching, too apathetic even to stand up. He wasn’t going to do anything.

The key. He could open a portal. Quentin jabbed at the air with it frantically, but it didn’t catch on anything. He couldn’t find the lock. He jabbed more vigorously and more wildly. God knew where it would take them, but anywhere was better than here.

“That won’t work down here,” someone called out, in a schoolboy English accent. “Magic doesn’t work.” It was that kid, and Quentin recognized him now. It was Martin Chatwin himself. But young — his shade looked about thirteen. That must have been what he looked like just before he became a monster, before he died for the first time.

“I don’t see your girlfriend,” Martin said nastily. “She’ll not save you.”

Maybe it was that Quentin could still die — that’s what attracted them. By killing him they could change something, do something, however terrible, that made a difference in the world above.

A couple of shades in the front row started forward, the first wave of the inevitable rush, but Benedict stepped forward to meet them and they hesitated. He grabbed a badminton racket out of somebody’s hand and brandished it at them like a sword.

“Come on, you bastards!” There he was: the warrior Benedict should have been. He assumed the perfect dueling stance he’d learned from Bingle and pointed the racket at Martin Chatwin. “Come on, who’s first?” he shouted. “You? Come on then!”

Quentin stepped up next to him, though with nothing in his hands and no magic in play, he was painfully aware that he didn’t look very dangerous. Too bad he didn’t bring a sword. He squared off and put up his fists and did his best to look like he had the faintest idea what to do with them.

“I am changing,” Julia said matter-of-factly behind him. And then she repeated, “It is time.”

Not now. Please not now. Let nothing new happen now. Quentin stole a glance back at Julia, then stopped and stared. Everyone else was staring too. Julia was taller, and her eyes had become a brilliant green. Something was happening. She was staring down at her arms with a small, deliberate frown on her face as she watched them become longer, and stronger, watched her skin take on a lustrous, pearly luminescence. It was like she’d looked in the fight at the castle, but more so. She was becoming something else.

Then she was smiling, really smiling. She looked past him at the assembled shades, and they fell back like they were facing a strong wind. Benedict gaped.

“Can you see me now?” she said.

He nodded, goggling.

She was something else now, something no longer human. A spirit? She had been beautiful before, but now she was magnificent. Something about being here must have caused her, or allowed her, to finish becoming what she’d been becoming all this time. She was as tall as Quentin now, though she seemed to be stopping there. With an air of curiosity she picked up a stick from the floor, a hockey stick it looked like. When she touched it, it grew. It came to life and became a long staff with a knobby crown. She hefted it, and the shades scrambled back even farther, even Martin Chatwin.

“Come,” she said to him. Her voice was Julia’s voice, but amplified, and with reverb. “Come fight.”

Martin didn’t come any closer. He didn’t have to, Julia came to him. In a flash, quicker than a human could move, like a poison fish striking, she had him by his shirt front. She picked him up and threw him overhand into the crowd, his arms and legs splayed out like a starfish. Her strength was surreal. Quentin wasn’t sure if she could hurt Martin — it’s not like he could die a third time — but he sure as hell must have found it daunting.

The crowd was like a soccer crowd: the front ranks scrambled back, but behind them the shades were flooding in from all directions, pushing them forward again. Their voices and the sound of their feet were loud in the enormous room. Word had gone out. Something was happening. There was no end to them. Julia could probably fight her way to the door through them, but he didn’t think she could save them all.

Julia saw it too.

“Do not worry,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.”

Quentin had said that to her on his parents’ lawn in Chesterton. He wondered if she remembered too. It certainly sounded better coming from her now.

Julia thumped the end of her staff on the floor, and then Quentin had to look away. The light was that bright. He couldn’t see, but he heard the massed shades of the underworld of Fillory gasp in unison. The light was different — it wasn’t the thin fluorescent gruel that passed for light down here, it was real rich white-gold sunlight, with all its wavelengths intact. It was like a gap had opened in the clouds.

A voice spoke.

“Enough,” it said. Or she said: it was a woman’s voice. It was a thrilling thing that harmonized with itself.

When Quentin could look again, he saw a woman standing in front of Julia, where her staff had struck the floor. She was a vision of power. Her face was lovely, warm and humorous and proud and fierce all at once. It was the face of a goddess. And there was something else there too — half Her face was in shadow. There was gravity there, and an understanding of grief. Everything will be all right, She seemed to say, and whatever is not, we will mourn.

In one hand She held a gnarled staff like Julia’s. In the other She carried, oddly, a bird’s nest with three blue eggs in it.

“Enough,” She said again.

The shades did what She said and kept still. Julia knelt in front of the goddess, her face buried in her hands.

“My daughter,” the goddess said. “You are safe now. It is over.”

Julia nodded and looked up at Her. Her face was streaming with tears.

“You’re Her,” she said. “Our Lady.”

“I have come to take you home.”

The goddess motioned to Quentin. She wasn’t glowing exactly, but it was hard to look at Her, the same way it’s hard to look at the sun — She was that intense. Only now did Quentin really register the scale of Her. She must have been ten feet tall.

The dead watched them mutely. No more Ping-Pong. For a moment the entire underworld was silent.

Julia rose to her feet, drying her tears.

“What happened to you?” Quentin said. “You’ve changed.”

“It is over,” Julia said. “I am a daughter of the goddess now. A dryad.” I am partially divine,” she added, almost shyly.

He looked at her. She looked magnificent. She was going to be all right.

“It suits you,” he said.

“Thank you. We must go now.”

“I’m not going to argue with you.”

The goddess gathered them both in with one tremendous arm. She held them, and together they all began to rise into the air. Someone cried out, and Quentin felt Benedict’s hand grab his ankle and hang on.

“Don’t leave me here! Please!”

It was like the last chopper out of Saigon. Quentin reached down to grab Benedict’s wrist and for a moment he had it.

“I’ve got you!” he yelled.

He didn’t know what he was doing, but he knew he was going to hold on to Benedict with all the strength he had. They were ten feet up, twenty. They could do this. They were going to steal one soul back. They were going to reverse entropy. Death would win the war, but it wasn’t going to do it with a perfect record.

“Hang on!”

But Benedict couldn’t hang on. His hand slipped from Quentin’s and he fell back down among the shades without a word.

Then they were flying up past the fluorescent lights, and then up through where the ceiling would have been. There was nothing more he could do. Without Benedict to hang onto, Quentin gripped the key so hard it bit into his palm. He had lost Benedict, but he wasn’t going to lose that. They rose up into the darkness, through fire, through earth, through water, and then out into the light again.

CHAPTER 25

Before they did it they took a vacation. It would take a week to order some of the necessary materials: mistletoe, more mirrors, some iron tools, chemically pure water, a few exotic powders. The ritual was pretty involved, more so than Julia would have thought, given the source. She’d expected something crude and pagan, a brute force play, but the reality was more complex and technical than that. They would have to clear a lot of space.

So while they waited for the FedEx guy to arrive, and for a few slowrolling preparatory spells to mature, the magicians of Murs, the secret genius-aspirants to the sacred mysteries of the godhead, played tourist. It was the final furlough before their unit shipped out overseas — some last-minute R&R. They went to Sénanque Abbey, which despite being familiar from a million advertisements and in-flight magazines and five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzles, was stunningly beautiful, the oldest, stillest place Julia had ever been. They went to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which really had been the pope’s new castle at some point, though all that was left of it now was a single scrap of wall with a few empty windows in it that stood out above the flat vineyards around it like an old, rotten tooth. They drove down to Cassis.

It was October, the ass-end of the season, and Cassis was the ass-end of the Côte d’Azur, barely part of it at all, lowrent and chock-full of teenage day-trippers out of Marseille. But the sun was hot, and the water, while it was colder than Julia thought water could be and still remain in liquid form, was a legitimate and spectacular azure. There was a small hotel there, not far from the beach, in a grove of stone pines full of invisible cicadas that trilled incessantly and amazingly loudly. When they sat on the porch they could barely hear each other talk.

They drank the local rosé, which supposedly lost its flavor if you drank it anywhere besides Cassis, and took a boat tour of the calanques, the hullshredding limestone fingers that stuck out into the sea all along the coast. Nobody noticed the magicians. Nobody looked at them twice. Julia felt wonderfully normal. The beaches were all pebbles, no sand, but they spread out their towels over them and did their best to get comfortable, alternating long stretches of sunbathing with terrified, hilarious dashes into the water. It was so freezing it felt like it would stop your heart.

They all looked pale in their swimsuits. Following the local custom, Asmodeus took off her top, and Julia thought Failstaff’s heart would stop just from that. And it wasn’t just Asmodeus’s breasts, which were indeed small and high and remarkably jiggly. Failstaff was obviously in love with Asmodeus. Six months in a house with them, and how the hell had Julia missed that? These were her friends, the closest thing she had to a family now. All this business about being gods was impairing Julia’s ability to think like a human. Which was never her strong suit to begin with. She’d have to watch that. Something was getting lost in translation.

Julia watched the seafoam draw webs and Hebrew letters on the surface of the water and then erase them again. She shook her head and closed her eyes against the hot white Mediterranean sunlight. She felt happy and contented, like a seal on a rock, with her seal family around her. She was coming out of a dream, and all her friends were here with her — it was like the end of The Wizard of Oz. But the frightening thing was that she knew she was about to sink down into the dream again. It wasn’t over. This was just a brief lucid interval. The anesthetic was going to kick back in in a second, the dream would take her, and she didn’t know if she would ever wake up again.

That was why, that night in the hotel, when everybody else was asleep, she found herself walking the halls. She wanted something — she wanted Pouncy. She knocked on his door. When he answered she kissed him. And after she kissed him, they slept together. She wanted to feel like a human being, a creature of stormy, messy emotions, one more time. Even if it was a slightly slutty human being.

She’d slept with people in the past because she thought she should — like James — or to get something out of them that she needed — Jared, Warren, fill in your own examples. She didn’t think she’d ever done it just because she wanted to before. It felt good. No, it felt fantastic. This was the way it was supposed to work.

She seemed more into it than Pouncy did. When she’d first gotten a look at him, that first day, she’d thought, aha, yes, let’s not jump to any conclusions, but by all means, this could happen. She’d always gone for the clean-cut type, viz James, and Pouncy fell well within the acceptable parameters. But whenever she looked into Pouncy’s flat slate eyes, and steeled herself for the drop as she fell for him, it never quite came. There wasn’t quite enough of him there.

There was someone in there, she knew there was. She could see him perfectly clearly when they were online. But when they were together in person, face-to-face, Pouncy retreated somewhere far below the surface, deep under the ice. His security was too tight to crack, even for a hacker of her credentials.

She told Pouncy all this afterward, lying in bed, with those cicadas still shrilling away outside, though thankfully muted by the shutters. For a long time he didn’t answer.

“I know,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry.”

It was the easy answer. Though at least he’d given it a shot.

“Don’t be sorry. It doesn’t matter.” It really didn’t. They looked at the ceiling and listened to the cicadas some more. She felt pleasantly fleshly. She was mind and body both, for once.

“But just so I know, is that why you want this so much?” she asked, sitting up. “The power? Like, if one day you’re that strong, then maybe you’ll be safe enough that the rest of you can come out?”

“Maybe.” He grimaced, incidentally showing off those interesting lines around his mouth. She traced one with her finger. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you won’t say?”

Nothing. Blue screen of death: she’d crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized. She flopped back down on the thin hotel pillow.

“So where would you put Project Ganymede’s chances of success?” she said, just making conversation now. “Percentage-wise?”

“Oh, I like our chances,” Pouncy said, his personality, such as it was, coming back online now that he was back on safe ground. “I’m gonna go seventy-thirty us. You?”

“More like even steven. Fifty-fifty. What are you going to do if it doesn’t work out?”

“Try again somewhere else. I still think Greece is ground zero for this stuff. Would you come if I did?”

“Maybe.” She wasn’t going to reassure him just for the sake of it. “The wine’s better here though. I’m not an ouzo girl.”

“That’s what I like about you.”

He played with her fingers on top of the scratchy hotel blanket, studying them.

“Listen, I lied before,” he said. “I think I do know why I’m doing this — what’s in it for me. Or part of it. It’s not about power for me, not really.”

“Okay. What then?”

This oughta be good. Julia propped herself up on an elbow, and the sheet slid down off her shoulders. It was strange to be naked in front of Pouncy after all the time they’d spent together clothed. It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

“I was in Free Trader before you. You weren’t there when I came in.”

“So?”

“So to be crude about it, you haven’t seen my prescriptions.” Pouncy grinned, ruefully, a different smile from his regular smile. “In terms of raw dosage, I am the official all-time record-holder for Free Trader Beowulf. At first they didn’t even think they were real.”

“And they’re for. . depression?”

He nodded. “Ever notice how I never drink coffee? Or eat chocolate? Can’t. Not with this much Nardil in my system. I’ve had a half dozen courses of ECT. I tried to kill myself when I was twelve. My brain chemistry, it’s just hosed. Not viable, in the long term.”

Now it was Julia who felt panicky. She wasn’t good in these moments, and she knew it. Hesitantly she put her hand on his smooth chest. It was all she could think of. It seemed to work well enough. God, did he actually manscape?

“So you think Our Lady Underground can heal you? Like with Asmo, that scar, whatever that was?”

It was sinking in, what he was saying. This wasn’t an intellectual exercise for him, or a power grab.

“I don’t know.” He said it lightly, like he didn’t care. “I really don’t. It would be a miracle, and I guess miracles are O.L.U.’s business. But to be honest I wasn’t thinking of it that way.”

“How then?”

“If you laugh I swear to God that I will kill you.”

“Careful, She might be listening.”

“I’ll plead insanity. I can back it up.”

Pouncy’s face wasn’t a naturally expressive one. His cut cheekbones might have worked for a model, if he’d been a little taller, but never for an actor. But for a second she could really see what he was feeling, as he felt it.

“I want Her to take me home with Her,” he said. “I want Her to take me back with Her, into heaven.”

Julia didn’t laugh. She understood that she was looking at another person like herself, a broken person, but Pouncy was even more broken than she was. She was used to feeling sorry for herself, and angry at other people. She was less used to feeling sorry for someone else, but she felt it now. She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.

“I hope she does, Pouncy,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I truly hope she does. But we’ll miss you if you go.”

Back at Murs Julia did something she hadn’t done since she’d gotten there in June. She went online.

None of them had been on Free Trader Beowulf in ages. It took them a while to crack the new log-in routine, which changed every couple of months. They raced each other, alone in their bedrooms but yelling trash talk back and forth. (Except for Failstaff, who was too much the gentle giant to talk trash, which may have contributed to his eventual victory. Asmo quit early and futzed around hacking the router instead, so she could kick Pouncy offline at will.) Once she was in Julia didn’t announce her presence — you didn’t have to, you could slip in without the system pinging everybody — because she didn’t want a blizzard of IMs from Free Traders wanting to catch up after her long absence. For a couple of hours she just lurked, cruising through old threads, and new ones that had sprung up while she was offline. There had been some turnover in the membership — there were a couple of new fish, and a couple of old fish were gone, or in hiding.

It seemed like years since she’d been there. She felt so much older now. You could customize the Free Trader interface any number of ways, but Julia had always gone for a bare-bones look, ASCII characters only, approximating the look and feel of an olde-timey Unix shell. Her eyes filled with tears just looking at everybody’s user names, picked out in green-on-black text. So much had changed since then, since she’d been living a life of quiet desperation in a mundane universe, racking up hours at the IT shop and killing time till she could take off for Stanford. So much that couldn’t be changed back. But not much had changed here.

Pouncy, Asmo, and Failstaff were running a private thread just like back in the day. She checked in.

[ViciousCirce has joined this thread!]

PouncySilverkitten: hey VC!

Asmodeus: hey

Failstaff: hey

ViciousCirce: hey

Electric silence for a minute. And then:

Asmodeus: so. big damn show tomorrow huh?

ViciousCirce: maybe

Failstaff: don’t come much bigger

Asmodeus: waddaya mean maybe?

ViciousCirce: big show if OLU shows up

Asmodeus: why wouldn’t she?

ViciousCirce:. .

ViciousCirce: she might not exist? the summoning might fail? she might be on the rag? there are 10K reasons why not. just saying.

PouncySilverkitten: yes but what about the mirror/silver coins/milk/etc???

Asmodeus: and she fixed my scar

ViciousCirce: yeah yeah yeah look I don’t want o be the asshole. just, I’ve seen some serious major league spellwork. no actual gods yet tho.

PouncySilverkitten: but you do believe that there is a higher praxis

ViciousCirce: believe there might be. = why I’m still here

ViciousCirce: and anyway

ViciousCirce: what if OLU does come. what if she is real. what next. how does it go down. what if she won’t teach us. I mean do you want to just summon a god or do you want to be a god?

PouncySilverkitten: be. but this = necessary first step

Failstaff: but OK good point VC. maybe OLU isn’t looking for interns

ViciousCirce: seriously say she manifests tomorrow. how does the conversation go pouncy?

It was weird that they hadn’t talked about this stuff openly before: what they would actually say and do if she came. Maybe it was easier to do it online than face-to-face. There was less pressure. The stakes seemed lower. Keep it casual.

PouncySilverkitten: since you ask I’ve thought a lot about this

Asmodeus: you better have

PouncySilverkitten: so. ahem. yr standard issue god follows one of two protocols, right?

Failstaff: uh. splain.

PouncySilverkitten: protocol #1 = prayer. this is more yr modern christian deity. you pray for X. god listens then judges you. if you’re deemed worthy/good/whatever you get what you prayed for. you get X. if not then not.

Asmodeus: OOOOOPS I forgot to be good

PouncySilverkitten: now yr ancient pagan deity follows protocol #2. more a basic transactional kinda deal. demands a sacrifice in return for goods and services.

Failstaff: those were the days

PouncySilverkitten: and then the nature of the sacrifice itself follows one of two protocols. symbolic or real.

Asmodeus: testify my bruthaaaaa

PouncySilverkitten: #1 symbolic = something you don’t really need but that signifies yr devotion to the deity. a fatted calf or whatever etc. #2 real = something you do need, that proves yr devotion to the deity. ie your hand, foot, blood, child, etc

ViciousCirce: like abraham & isaac. sometimes God wants your son. sometimes He’ll settle for a ram.

PouncySilverkitten: exactly. that’s my rough n ready take

ViciousCirce: fine so run the numbers gents and you get three different scenarios and we’re screwed 2 out of 3.

ViciousCirce: modern deity: we’re screwed because we are presumably unworthy hence our prayers go unanswered

ViciousCirce: pagan deity #2: if she demands

a real sacrifice we’re screwed because hello pouncy I need my foot or whatever

ViciousCirce: pagan deity #1 is our only shot. symbolic sacrifice. fatted calf in exchange for the divine praxis. one in three. that’s my take. rough n ready

Failstaff: AND SORRY BUT WHAT IF I REALLY NEED MY FATTED CALF WHAT THEN P WHAT THEN

Asmodeus: sorry pouncy but do I really have to be the one to say that you have no FUCKEN idea what you’re talking about

Asmodeus: literally none

PouncySilverkitten: o rly?

Failstaff:?

ViciousCirce:. .

Asmodeus: you think this is a male god you are dealing with ie you writ large. wrong. OLU is a godDESS. a lady god. this is NOT about PROTOCOLS

Asmodeus: I believe in Our Lady Underground and I believe that she will help us not because it is in her interest to do so or because she wants to eat your fucking foot or whatever but because she is KIND. pouncy u twat

Asmodeus: this is not a transaction bitches this is about mercy. this is about forgiveness. this is about divine grace. if Our Lady comes, that is what will save us.

Long silence. Dead air. The next message was time-stamped a full two minutes later.

PouncySilverkitten: so how about it VC. r you in or r you out or what r u?

[ViciousCirce has left this thread]

They did it in the Library. It was the only room big enough. They’d had to pack up all the books and stack them in the Long Study and elsewhere — the halls were overflowing with them — and dismantle those beautiful floating shelves. The walls were bare, the way they would have been when this was a farmhouse. The windows were flung open to the cold, quiet late-autumn air. The early evening sky was an unnaturally amazing blue, almost a royal blue.

It was all arranged very precisely according to ex-Saint Amadour’s Phoenician invocation, down to the letter. The floor was a maze of chalk runes and patterns. Gummidgy would take the role of mistress of ceremonies and high priestess. Any of them could have handled the technicalities, but it had to be a woman, and of the women, dour, towering Gummidgy was the player deemed least likely to crack up at a crucial moment. She wore a simple flowing white gown. So did everybody else. Gummidgy also wore a crown of mistletoe.

So your basic Golden Bough deal, Julia thought. Fucking mistletoe. She never saw what all the fuss was about. Sure, it’s pretty enough, but at the end of the day it’s still a botanical parasite that strangles its host.

All the old furniture had been exiled from the room. In its place there was only a thick yew table, constructed to exacting specifications, and a huge hewn stone altar that would have cracked the floor if they hadn’t braced it up from below and put some structural spells on the brace. The entire place had been purified in half a dozen ways, as had they — they’d fasted, and then drunk some nasty teas that made their pee change color and smell weird, and burned herbs in clay pots.

They’d done just about everything but actually bathe. The purification was symbolic, not hygienic. Actual medical hygiene didn’t seem to be of great interest to the goddess.

“This isn’t a patriarchal, Old Testament show,” Asmodeus said sharply, when people complained. “Get it? Dirt does not contaminate, it generates. O.L.U. doesn’t care if we’re menstruating. She embraces the body.”

This was followed by ribald witticisms from the menfolk signifying their willingness to offer themselves as symbolic husbands to the goddess. I got yer chthonic sacrifice right here in my pants, etc. etc. But Asmodeus’s famous sense of humor was temporarily in remission for the occasion. Maybe it was nerves. Asmodeus wasn’t high priestess material, but she seemed to have appointed herself the goddess’s chief political compliance officer. She’d even argued that they should all go off their various medications for the occasion too, a suggestion that was universally ridiculed.

The yew table supported three beeswax candles and a big silver bowl full of rainwater; the bowl had cost about as much as the entire swimming pool had. The stone, a massive block of local marble, supported nothing. To be honest they weren’t totally sure what it was for. Gummidgy took her place before the table while the others stood along the walls on either side, four and five. It was asymmetrical, but there was nothing specifically against it in Amadour’s palimpsest, which was otherwise pretty lucid for a document prepared by a guy who lived in a cave and was pushing two millennia at least.

Julia’s mind was a hot, churning mix of excitement and nerves, which she kept from boiling over with lashings of cool skepticism. But she remembered the rough, stiff feel of the statue’s kiss in her dream. As creepy and Freudian as it sounded, she had felt so loved. She’d hoped she’d dream it again last night, but there had been nothing. Just dead air.

Pouncy was to her left. Asmodeus and Failstaff were opposite her so she could see them, but she avoided their eyes. They needed a full hour of silence before the summoning could begin, and tittering had to be kept to an absolute minimum. From outside they could hear the lowing and bleating of the sacrificial animals they’d brought in for the occasion: two sheep, two goats, and two calves, one of each pure black and all white, all shampooed within an inch of their imminently endangered lives. Should a symbolic sacrifice be required, they wanted to make sure the cupboard wasn’t bare.

By seven o’clock the sun was down and the moon was on the rise, lipping up over the hills and fields behind Murs. Once it cleared the trees, a huge white arc light that seemed to be trained on their house alone, Gummidgy moved from her station in the center of the room and lit their candles one by one with the tip of her finger. Julia angled her candle so the wax wouldn’t run down it and onto her hand. A hot droplet pricked her bare foot.

Gummidgy returned to the table and began the invocation. Somehow the candles on the table had been lit in the meantime, without anybody noticing.

Julia was glad it wasn’t her in the hot seat. For one thing the invocation was long, and who knew what would happen if you munged it. Maybe it would just fizzle, but maybe it would snap back at you. Some spells did that.

For another it wasn’t a spell, exactly. There was a lot of beseeching in it, and in Julia’s opinion a magician did not beseech, she commanded. The grammar of it was all weird too. It kept repeating and circling back on itself, working through the same phrases over and over again. Frankly it sounded like junk to Julia. There was no proper structure to it, just a lot of talk about mothers and daughters and grain and earth and honey and wine, all that Song of Solomon stuff.

But it wasn’t bullshit, that was the really crazy thing. Gummidgy was getting traction with this crap. Julia couldn’t see anything, there were no visual phenomena, but she didn’t have to. It was blindingly obvious that magic was happening. Gummidgy’s voice was getting deeper and more echoey. Certain words made the air vibrate, or caused sudden rushes of wind.

Julia’s candle started flaring up like a torch. She wished it wouldn’t — she had to hold it at arm’s length to keep it from singeing her hair, which she had left loose, because it had seemed more feminine and O.L.U.-like. Something was happening. Something was on its way. She could feel it coming like a freight train.

It was only then that Julia realized something, something absolutely terrible, that it would have been hard to admit to Pouncy or the others even if it weren’t too late: she didn’t want it to work. She wanted the spell to fail. She had made a grave mistake — she had misunderstood something about herself, something so basic she couldn’t understand how she’d missed it until now. She didn’t need this, and she didn’t want it. She didn’t want the goddess to come.

Pouncy had told her when she first got to Murs that it wasn’t enough for her to love him and the others, she had to love magic more. But she didn’t. She came to Murs looking for magic, but she was also looking for a new home, and a new family, and she’d found them all, all three, and it was enough. She was content; she didn’t need anything else, least of all more power. Her quest had ended and she hadn’t even known it till this moment. She didn’t want to become a goddess. All she’d wanted was to become human, and here at Murs it had finally happened.

Now it was too late. She couldn’t stop what was happening. The goddess was coming. She wanted to throw down her candle and run around the room shouting at them, breaking up the flow, telling them it was okay, they didn’t have to do this, they had all they needed right there all around them if they could only see it. Our Lady Underground would understand that — O.L.U., goddess of mercy and fruitfulness, she above all would understand what Julia had only just figured out.

But there was no way Julia could make the others understand. And there were titanic energies in the room with them now, giant forces, and there was no telling what would happen if she tried to disrupt the casting. Julia’s whole body was goose bumps. Gummidgy’s voice was getting louder. She was building up to the big finish. Her eyes were closed, and she was swaying from side to side and singing — it wasn’t in the invocation, the melody must have come to her straight over the transom, out of the ether, via the heavenly wireless. The windows on one side of the room were solid moonlight now, as if the moon had come down from its orbit and was hovering right outside, peering in at them.

It was hard to tear her eyes away from Gummidgy, but Julia risked a glance to her left, at Pouncy. He looked back at her and smiled. He wasn’t nervous. He looked calm. He looked happy. Please, if nothing else, please let her give him what he needs, she thought. Julia clung to this truth: that O.L.U. would never ask them for something they couldn’t give. Julia knew her, and she would never do that.

One of the candles on the table had started to spit and crackle and flare. It produced a gout of flame, a big one that went halfway up to the ceiling and made a deep guttural woof, and then it spat out something huge and red that landed standing on the table. Gummidgy gave a choking cough and dropped to the floor like she’d been shot — Julia could hear the crack as her head hit.

In the sudden silence the god struck a triumphant pose, arms wide, and held it. It was a giant, twelve feet tall and lithe and covered with red hair. It had the shape of a man and the head of a fox. It was not Our Lady Underground.

It was Reynard the Fox. They’d been tricked, but good.

“Shit!”

It was Asmodeus’s voice. Always quick, was Asmo. In the same moment came the rifle shot of all the windows slamming shut at once, and the door, as if something invisible had just left in an almighty huff. The moonlight went out like a switch had been flipped.

Oh God oh God oh God. The fear was instant and electric, her whole body was almost spasming with it. They’d stuck out their thumbs and they had gotten into the wrong car. They’d been tricked, just the way O.L.U. had been in the story, tricked and sent to the underworld, if She even existed at all. Maybe She didn’t. Maybe it was all just a joke. Julia threw her candle at the fox. It bounced off His leg and went out. She’d pictured Reynard the Fox as a playful, spritely figure. He was not that. He was a monster, and they were shut in here with Him.

Reynard jumped lightly down from the table, a carnival showman. Now that He had moved she found she could move too. She was crap at offensive magic, but she knew her shields, and she knew some sledgehammer dismissals and banishments. Just in case, she began piling up wards and shields between herself and the god, so thick that the air turned amber and wavy, tinted glass and heat ripples. Next to her she could hear Pouncy, still calm, preparing a banishment. The situation was salvageable. It didn’t work, so let’s get rid of this shithead and get out of here. Let’s go to Greece.

There was hardly any time. Reynard’s mouth was a nest of pointy teeth. That’s the thing about those tricksters, isn’t it: they’re never really all that fucking funny. She knew if He went for her, if He even looked at her, she would drop whatever she was casting and run, even though there was nowhere to run to. She stuttered twice, her voice broke, and she had to start a spell over. It must have been a trick all along. It was sinking in. There never was an Our Lady Underground at all. Was there. She didn’t exist. It made Julia want to weep with terror and sorrow.

The fox was looking around Him, counting His winnings. Failstaff — oh, Failstaff — made the first move, advancing on Him from behind, soft-footed for a big man. He’d amped up his candle into something like a flamethrower and was aiming it two-handed. Big as he was, he looked tiny next to a real giant. He’d barely got the thing flaming when Reynard turned suddenly, grabbed his robe, and pulled him over with one huge hand and put him in the crook of His arm, like He was going to give him a Dutch rub. But He didn’t give him a Dutch rub. He broke Failstaff’s neck like a farmer killing a hen and dropped him on the floor.

He lay on top of Gummidgy, who still hadn’t moved. His legs shook like he was being electrocuted. All the breath went out of Julia’s chest and got stuck there. She couldn’t inhale. She was going to pass out. At the other end of the room a party of three was already going at the door, trying to unseal it. They were working together, Iris in the middle: big magic, six-handed. Warming to His task, humming what might have been a jolly Provençal folk song, Reynard hefted the big block of stone with both hands and heaved it into them. Two of them went down hard under it. The third — it was Fiberpunk the Metamagician, him of the four-dimensional shapes — kept gamely at it, ice-cold under fire, taking all three parts himself without dropping a stitch. Julia always thought he must be a bit of a fraud, with all that shit he talked, but he had chops. He was rattling off some sick self-reflexive unlocking sequence like it was no big thing.

Reynard took him with His two big hands, around the chest, like a doll, and threw him up against the ceiling, thirty feet up. He hit hard — maybe Reynard was trying to make him stick — but he was probably still alive when his head clipped the table on the way down. His skull burst like a cantaloupe, spilling a fan of bloody slurry across the smooth parquet. Julia thought of all the metamagical secrets that must have been locked in that orderly brain, now catastrophically, irreversibly disordered.

It was all over now. All ruined. Julia was ready to die now, she just hoped it wouldn’t hurt too much. Reynard squatted and put His hands in the blood and whatever else and smeared it sensually on His luxurious fox-fur chest, matting it. You couldn’t tell if He was grinning like a mad thing or if that’s just how foxes’ mouths looked.

Two minutes after the fox-god arrived Pouncy, Asmodeus, and Julia were the last of the Murs magicians, the cream of the safe-house scene, left alive on the planet. For a moment Julia felt her feet leave the floor — it must have been Pouncy, trying to buy them a minute by taking them up to that high ceiling, but Reynard cut the spell off when they were only a couple of feet off the floor, and they dropped back down hard. He picked up the heavy silver bowl, dumping out the rainwater, and threw it at Pouncy like a discus. Just as He did, Asmodeus finished up something she’d been working on since the god arrived, a Maximal Dismissal maybe, with a little something extra on it, something sharp that actually tweaked Reynard’s attention.

It didn’t hurt Him, but He felt it. You could see His big pointy ears twitch with annoyance. The cup struck Pouncy hard, but off-center. It crunched his left hip and went rocketing away. Pouncy groaned and folded in two.

“Stop!” Julia said. “Stop it!”

Fear: Julia was all out of it. A dead woman didn’t feel fear. And she was all out of magic too. She was going to say some regular words for a change, non-magic words. She was going to talk to this asshole.

“You took our sacrifice,” she said. She swallowed. “Now give us what we paid for.”

It felt like she was trying to breathe at thirty thousand feet. The fox looked down His narrow muzzle at her. With His doggy head and human body He looked like the Egyptian death-god Anubis.

“Give it to us!” Julia shouted. “You owe it to us!”

Asmo watched her from the other side of the room, frozen. All her knowing, savvy Asmo attitude had fallen away. She looked about ten years old.

Reynard gave a loud bark before He spoke.

“A sacrifice is not to be taken,” He said, in a deep, reasonable voice, with only a very slight French accent. “A sacrifice is to be freely given. I took their lives. They did not offer them to me.” It was like He couldn’t believe the rudeness of it. “I had to take them.”

Pouncy had pushed himself up into a sitting position against the wall. The pain must have been appalling. Sweat stood out all over his face.

“Take my life. I’m giving it to you. Take it.”

Reynard cocked His head. Fantastic Mr. Fox. He fingered His whiskers.

“You are dying. You will be dead soon. It is not the same.”

“You can have mine,” Julia said. “I’m giving it to you. If you let the others live.”

Reynard groomed Himself, licking blood and brains off the back of His paw-hand.

“Do you know what you have done here?” He said. “I am just the beginning. When you call on a god, all gods hear. Did you know that? And no human has called down a god in two thousand years. The old gods will have heard too, you know. Better to be dead when they come back. Better never to have lived, when the old gods return.”

“Take me!” Pouncy moaned. He gasped as something inside him gave way, and he whispered the rest. “Take me. I’m giving you my life.”

“You are dying,” Reynard said again, dismissively.

He paused. Pouncy said nothing.

“He has died,” Reynard announced.

The fox-god turned to Julia and raised His eyebrows, studying her. A real fox wouldn’t have those, Julia thought meaninglessly.

“I accept,” He said. “The other one can live, if you give yourself to me. And I will give you something more. I will give you what you wanted, what you summoned me for.”

“We didn’t summon you,” Asmo said in a small voice. “We summoned Our Lady.” Then she bit her lip and fell silent.

Reynard regarded Julia critically, and then He went for her. He went right through her wards like they weren’t there. Julia was ready to die — she closed her eyes and let her head fall back, baring her throat for Him to rip it out. But He didn’t. His hairy hands were on her, He dragged her across the room and forced her upper body down so she was bent over the yew table. Julia didn’t understand, and then she did and she wished she hadn’t.

She fought Him. He pinned her torso down on the wood with one hard, heavy hand, and she tore at his fingers but they were like stone. She had agreed, but she hadn’t agreed to this. Let Him kill her if He wanted. It hurt when He tore her robe off — the fabric burned against her skin. She tried to look behind her at what was happening, and she saw — no, no, she didn’t see that, she saw nothing — the god’s big hand working casually between His legs as He positioned Himself behind her. He kicked her bare feet apart with a practiced kick. This wasn’t His first time at the rodeo.

Then He pushed Himself inside her. She had wondered if He would be too big, if He would tear her open and leave her gutted and flopping like a fish. She strained against Him. Exhausted, she rested her hot forehead on her arm in what she supposed was the manner of rape victims since the beginning of time. Her own hoarse panting was the only sound.

It took a long time. It was not a timeless period; she didn’t pass out or lose track of time. She would have said it took between seven and ten minutes for the god to finish raping her, and she was there for every second of it. From her vantage point she could see Failstaff’s thick legs on the floor, not moving anymore, overlapping Gummidgy’s long brown ones, and she could see where the two who had died by the door lay, a huge continent of blood having flowed out from under the stone block and joined into one shape.

Better me than Asmo. She couldn’t see Asmodeus, because she couldn’t look at her, but she could hear her. She was crying loudly. She sounded like the little girl she still essentially was, a little girl who had lost her way. Where was home for her? Who were her parents? Julia didn’t even know. Hot tears flowed down Julia’s cheeks too, and slicked her arm, and wet the brown wood.

The only other noises were those made by Reynard the Fox, the trickster-god, grunting softly and hoarsely behind her. At one point a couple of rebel nerve endings attempted to send pleasure signals to her brain, whereupon her brain burned them out with a pulse of neuro-chemical electricity, never to feel again.

Before He was done with Julia, Asmodeus doubled over and threw up, splat, on the floor. Then she ran, slipping once on vomit, once again on blood. She reached the door, and it opened for her. It took a long time to close behind her. Through it, and through a window across the hall, Julia caught a glimpse of the innocent green-black world outside, impossibly far away.

The fox-god barked loudly when He came. She felt it. The terrible, unspeakable thing, which she would never tell anybody, not even herself, was that it felt wonderful. Not in a sexual way — God no. But it filled her up with power. It flowed into every part of her, up through her trunk, down her legs, and out through her arms. She clenched her teeth and shut her eyes to try and stop it, but it even reached her brain, lighting her up from within with divine energy. She opened her eyes and watched it fill her hands. When it reached the tips of her fingers her fingernails glowed.

And then He took something from her. As He withdrew His penis from her, something came out with it. It was like it caught on something — a transparent film, it felt like, something inside her, the same shape as her. It was something invisible that had been with her always, and Reynard ripped it away. She didn’t know what it was, but she felt it go, and she shuddered when she felt it. Without it she was something different, something other than what she had been before. Reynard had given her power, and taken something in payment that she would have died rather than give up. But she didn’t get to choose.

Finally, it might have been ten minutes later, she raised her head. The moon was back up in the sky where it belonged, as if it were blameless, and had taken no part in this. It was just a regular moon now, a sterile rock, frozen and suffocated to death in the vacuum, that was all.

Julia stood up and turned around. She looked at Pouncy. He was still sitting up against the wall, steely eyes still open, but very definitely dead. Maybe he was in heaven now. She knew she should feel something, but she felt nothing, and that in itself was horrifying. She walked to the door and out through it, her bare feet splatting lightly in the cool blood. She didn’t look back. All the lights were off. The house was empty. Nobody home.

Thinking and feeling nothing, because there was nothing left to think or feel except the unpleasant stickiness of blood and God knew what else on her feet, and between her toes, she stepped out onto the lawn. Something terrible has happened, she thought, but no emotions attached to those words. The sacrificial animals were all gone, escaped somehow and fled, except for the two sheep, who wouldn’t meet her eyes. For some reason the sun was coming up. They must have been in there all night. She rubbed her feet in the cold dew, then bent down and put her hands in it and rubbed them on her face.

Then she uttered a word she had never heard before and flew, naked and bloody as a newborn baby, up into the lightening sky.

CHAPTER 26

The others had stayed out on the beach until dawn, waiting for Quentin and Julia to come back up from the underworld. Finally they’d given up and gone back to their berths aboard the Muntjac, chilled and exhausted, to sleep. When they woke up a few hours later they were relieved, and then overjoyed, to find Quentin and Julia waiting for them on deck.

Though the scene they woke up to was a weird one. Julia stood there transformed, newly beautiful and powerful. She radiated an air of peace and triumph. Quentin wasn’t transformed, but something else was going on with him: he was down on his hands and knees for some reason, just staring at the wooden planks of the deck.

They had flown up and up and up, until gradually Quentin realized that the weightless feeling he had was of them descending instead, but not the way they had come: they dropped down through wet clinging clouds, and then he saw a little chip of wood below them in the ocean that turned out to be the Muntjac, the water around it glittering with dawn light. The goddess placed them on the deck, kissed Julia on the cheek, and vanished.

Quentin found that he couldn’t stand on his own; or he could, but he didn’t want to. He got down on all fours and put the key down in front of him. He looked at the good wooden planks the Muntjac was made of, really looked at them: after a night spent in hell everything was real and vivid and impossibly detailed. Colors looked superbright, even the grays and browns and blacks and the other undistinguished, intermediate noncolors that he ordinarily would have skipped over and ignored. He followed the lines and striations and tiger stripes of the wood, drawn and arranged with careless perfection, dark and light, order and chaos, all mingled together with little splinters along the edges of the boards that had been scuffed up and set at different angles, each one, by the passage of careless feet.

He absolutely understood how weird and high-seeming he looked, but he didn’t care. He felt like he could stare at the wood forever. Just this: the good, hardy, noble wood. He was never going to lose this, he thought. He was going to enjoy everything exactly as much, to the atom, as Benedict would have enjoyed it if he could have come back from the underworld. And Alice, and all the rest of them. It was all he could do for them. Earth or Fillory, did it even matter? What was the huge conundrum? Everywhere you looked there was so much richness, you could never exhaust it. Maybe it was all a game, that got crumpled up and thrown away at the end, but while you were here it was real.

He pressed his forehead against the deck, hard, like a penitent pilgrim, and felt the beat of the waves transmitted through it from below like a pulse, and the heat of the sun. He smelled the sour salt smell of seawater, and he heard the hesitant footsteps of baffled people gathering around him, unsure of what to do. He heard all the other meaningless noises reality was always cheerfully making to itself, the squeaks and scrapes and thumps and drones, on and on, world without end.

He took a deep breath and sat up. Away from the warmth of the goddess’s body he shivered in the early morning ocean air. But even the cold felt good to him. This is life, he kept saying to himself. That was being dead, and this is being alive. That was death, this is life. I will never confuse them again.

Then people were hauling him to his feet and guiding him down below to his cabin. He was pretty sure he could have walked on his own, but he let them half carry him — they seemed to want to do it, and who was he to stand in their way? Then he was lying on his side on his bed. He was dead tired, but he didn’t want to close his eyes, not with everything that was going on all around him.

Some time later he felt someone sit down on the edge of the bed. Julia.

“Thank you, Julia,” he said after a while. His lips and tongue felt thick and clumsy. “You saved me. You saved everything. Thank you.”

“The goddess saved us.”

“I’m grateful to Her too.”

“I’ll tell Her.”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel finished,” she said simply. “I feel like I am finally finished. I became who I was becoming.”

“Oh,” he said, and he had to laugh at how completely stupid he sounded. “I’m just glad you’re all right. Are you all right?”

“I was stuck in between for so long,” she said, instead of answering his question. “I couldn’t go back — I wanted to, for a long time. A long time. I wanted to go back to before what happened, when I was still human. But I couldn’t, and I couldn’t go forward either. Then somehow in the underworld I realized for the first time, really understood, that I was never going back. So I let go. And that’s when it happened.”

He felt tongue-tied. What did you say to a newly minted supernatural being? He wanted to just stare at her. He’d never been in such close quarters with a spirit before.

“You said you were a dryad.”

“I am. We’re the daughters of the goddess. That makes me a demi-goddess,” she added, by way of clarification. “I’m not literally her daughter of course. It’s more of a spiritual thing.”

Julia was still Julia, but the anger, the sense that she was violently at odds with the world over some crucial point, was gone. And she’d gotten her contractions back.

“So you take care of trees?”

“We take care of the trees, and the goddess takes care of us. There’s a tree that belongs to me, though I’m not sure where it is. I can feel it though. I’ll go there as soon as we’re done.” She laughed. It was good to know she still could. “I know so much about oak trees. I could bore you to death with it.

“Do you know, I had almost lost faith in the goddess? I almost stopped believing in Her. But I realized I had to become something. I had to take what was done to me and use it to make myself into what I wanted to be. And I wanted this. And when I called Her, the goddess came.

“I feel so powerful, Quentin. It’s like there’s a sun inside me, or a star, that will burn forever.”

“Does that mean — are you immortal?”

“I don’t know.” And here a cloud passed over her face. “In a way, I’ve already died. Julia is dead, Quentin. I’m alive, and I may be alive forever, but the girl I was is dead.”

Sitting this close to Julia, he could see how inhuman she was now. Her flesh was like pale wood. The girl he’d known in high school, with her freckles and her oboe, was gone forever — she’d been destroyed and discarded in the making of this being. Julia would never be mortal again. The Julia sitting next to him on his bed was like a magnificent memorial to the girl she used to be.

At least this Julia was beyond all that. She was out of the game, the living and dying game, that the rest of them were trapped in. She was different. She wasn’t kludgy, rickety flesh and blood anymore. She was magic.

“There are things you should know,” she said. “I can tell you now, how this all began. Why I changed, and why the old gods came back.”

“Really?” Quentin propped himself up on one elbow. “You know?”

“I know,” she said. “I’m going to tell you everything.”

“I want to know.”

“It’s not a happy story.”

“I think I’m ready,” he said.

“I know you think that. But it’s sadder than you think.”

There were no more islands. They were past that now. The Muntjac slit its way through calm empty ocean, day after day, farther and farther east, the sun rising in front of them, roaring by overhead, and then extinguishing itself nightly in the water behind them. It was visibly larger in the mornings — they could almost hear the muffled rumble of its burning, like a distant blast furnace.

After a week the wind died, but the sky was clear, and in the afternoons and evenings Admiral Lacker raised the light-sail, and they ran along on the strength of a storm of sunshine. Quentin had been to the far west of Fillory, when he hunted the White Stag over the Western Sea, but the far east was a very different place. It had a polar quality. The sun was bright and hot here, but the air was getting colder. Even in the mornings, when the sun seemed dangerously close, like it was going to light the mast on fire, they could see their breath. The blue of the sky was deep and vivid. It felt like Quentin could fall up into it if he wasn’t careful.

The water was an icy aquamarine, and the Muntjac slipped through it almost frictionlessly, barely leaving a ripple. It was different stuff from ordinary seawater — silkier and less dense, with almost no surface tension, more like rubbing alcohol. Only one kind of fish lived in it, long silvery bullets that flashed and dashed through the water in diamond-shaped schools. They caught a few, but they didn’t look edible. They had huge eyes, and no mouths, and their flesh was bright white and smelled like ammonia.

The world around them began to feel thin. It was nothing Quentin could put his finger on, but the material of reality itself seemed to be getting sheer and fragile, stretched taut over its frame. You could feel the chill of the outer dark right through it. They all caught themselves moving slowly and gently, as if they might put a foot through the fabric of space-time by accident.

The sea was getting shallower too. You could see the bottom through the glassy water, and every morning when Quentin checked it, it was closer. This was an interesting phenomenon from an oceanographic point of view, but more to the point it was a problem. The Muntjac wasn’t a big ship, but it still drew twenty feet or so, and at this rate they were going to run aground long before they got to wherever the hell they were going.

“Maybe Fillory doesn’t have an End,” Quentin said one night, as they were tucking into their increasingly meager and unappetizing rations.

“What, like it’s infinite?” Josh said. “Or it’s a sphere, like Earth? God, I hope it’s not that. What if we end up back at Whitespire again? Man, I’ll be pissed if all we’ve done is find the Northwest Passage or whatever after all that.”

He licked his fingers, getting the extra salt from a salt biscuit. He was the only one who didn’t seem overawed by the situation.

“I meant more like a Möbius strip. What if it’s all one side, and no edge?”

“I think you mean a Klein bottle,” Poppy said. “A Möbius strip still has edges. Or one edge.”

“You mean a Klein bottle,” Julia confirmed.

Nothing like having a demi-goddess around to settle an argument. Julia didn’t eat anymore, but she still sat at dinner with them.

“Is it a Klein bottle? Do you know?”

Julia shook her head.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“So you’re not omniscient?” Eliot said. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. But you don’t know for sure?”

“No,” Julia said. “But I know this world has an End.”

They all woke up early the next morning when the Muntjac ran aground.

It wasn’t like they hit a wall. It was more gradual: a distant grinding sound, gentle at first, then louder, and then suddenly urgent, bone on bone, ending with everything on board, people included, slewing gently but firmly into the nearest forward wall as the ship came to a complete stop. And then, ringing silence.

They all came up on deck in their robes and pajamas to see what had happened.

The stillness was uncanny. All around them the sea was flat and glassy as a coat of fresh varnish. No wind blew. A fish jumped, maybe a quarter-mile away, and it sounded as loud as if it were right next to them. The sails hung slack. The slightest vibration sent circular ripples gliding away toward the horizon in all directions.

“Well,” Eliot said, “that tears it. What do we do now?”

It crossed Quentin’s mind, as it had presumably crossed that of the crew, that they had long ago passed the halfway point of their supplies. If they couldn’t go forward they would die on the way back. Or just die here, marooned in a desert of water.

“I will speak to the ship,” Julia said.

As she had even when she was still human, Julia meant what she said and said what she meant. She went down to the hold, to the heart of the ship, where the clockwork was, knelt down, and began to whisper, stopping now and then to listen. It wasn’t a long conversation. After four or five minutes, she patted the thick base of the Muntjac’s mast and stood up.

“It is settled.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what had been settled, or how, but it became apparent. They floated free of the bottom and began gliding forward again as if nothing had happened. Quentin only figured it out when he happened to look back at their wake. Enormous old planks and beams and other assorted carpentry were bobbing and turning in the water behind them. The Muntjac was making herself smaller, rebuilding herself from the keel up and discarding the extra wood as she went. She was giving up her body for them.

Quentin’s eyes smarted. He didn’t know what sort of being the Muntjac was, whether it had feelings or whether it was just some kind of mechanism, an artificial intelligence constructed out of rope and wood, but he felt a surge of gratitude and sadness. They’d asked so much of it already.

“Thank you, old girl,” he said, just in case it, or she, could hear him. He patted the worn railing. “You’ve saved us one more time.”

The shallower the ocean got the more the Muntjac had to alter herself. Quentin told the crew to bring up the sloth, who permitted herself to be slung from a yard, blinking and yawning in the open air. They emptied the cabins and the hold and piled up everything around them on deck.

Banging and groaning sounds came from below, deep in the ship’s guts. Quentin watched as first the Muntjac’s high, proud stern dropped into the water, then its bowsprit and its entire forecastle. At around four o’clock in the afternoon the mizzenmast toppled over into the water with a huge splash and was lost astern. The foremast went that evening. They slept on deck that night, shivering under blankets in the chill.

In the morning when they woke up the sea was shallow enough to wade in, and the Muntjac had become a flat single-masted raft. Its hull was completely gone; only the deck was left. The ocean mirrored the cloudless dawn light, making an infinite plain of smoky rose. When the sun boiled up over the horizon it was immense — you could see its corona curling around its bright, unbearable face.

At noon they ran aground again — the front edge of the raft crunched to a stop on the sandy bottom. That was it; the Muntjac was going no farther. She had nothing more to give.

But by now they could see that their journey did in fact have a destination. A low, dark line had materialized out of the distance, running the full width of the horizon. It was impossible to guess how far away it was.

“Looks like we’ll have to walk,” Quentin said.

One by one Quentin, Eliot, Josh, Julia, and Poppy swung over the side and dropped into the water. It was cold but shallow, not even kneedeep.

They had already set off when they heard a splash behind them. Bingle had climbed over the railing — he was coming too. Evidently he did not consider his bodyguarding duties fully discharged. And Abigail the Sloth: he was carrying her piggyback, her long arms around his neck like a fur wrap, her claws hooked together in front of him.

The loneliness of the scene was beyond anything. After an hour the ship was virtually invisible behind them, and the only sound was the steady soft slosh-slosh of their footsteps. Sometimes the mouthless fish came and bumped harmlessly against their ankles. The thin water was easier to walk through than regular seawater would have been; it put up less resistance. Julia walked along on the surface as befitted a demi-goddess. No one spoke, not even Abigail, who was almost never at a loss for words. The ocean was smooth as glass to the horizon.

The sun was hot on the tops of their heads. After a while Quentin gave up staring at the horizon and looked only down, at his familiar black boots taking step after step after step. Each step took them closer to the end of the story. They were going to finish this. Something could still go wrong now, probably, but he had no idea what. He could gauge their progress by the gradual shallowing of the water, from his calf down to his ankle and finally to a thin film of water that splatted underfoot. The sun was low in the sky behind them. Far off to their right a single evening star had appeared, with its twin shimmering below it in the water.

“Let’s hurry,” Julia said. “I can feel the magic going.”

By that time the wall in front of them was very clear. It might have been ten feet high and was made from old, thin bricks — it looked like the same bricks they’d used to build the wall in hell. They must have used the same contractor. It stood at the back of a thin gray sandy beach that stretched off to the vanishing point in both directions. A huge old wooden door was set in it, bleached and worn by time and weather. As they came closer they could see that the door had seven keyholes of different sizes.

On either side of the door were two plain wooden chairs, the kind of old chairs that might have gotten exiled to the porch because they were too shabby for the dining room, but were still too good and sturdy to throw away. They didn’t match; one of them had a wicker seat. In the chairs sat a man and a woman. The man was tall and thin, fiftyish, with a stern, narrow face. He wore a black dinner suit, complete with tails. He looked a little like Lincoln on his way to the theater.

The woman was younger by a decade or so, pale and lovely. As they stepped onto dry land she raised a hand to greet them. It was Elaine, the Customs Agent from the Outer Island. She looked a lot more serious than she had the last time he’d seen her. She had something in her lap: the Seeing Hare. She was petting it.

She stood up, and the hare jumped down and skittered off down the beach. Quentin watched it go. It made him think of little Eleanor and her winged bunnies. He wondered where she was, and who was taking care of her. Before this was over he would ask.

“Good evening,” Elaine said. “Your Majesty. Your Highnesses. Good evening, all of you. I am the Customs Agent. I tend to the borders of Fillory. Borders of all kinds,” she added pointedly, to Quentin. “I believe you met my father? I hope he didn’t inconvenience you too greatly.”

Her father? Ah. More fairy tale. He supposed that fit together neatly.

“Bother, it’s almost time,” the man said. “The gods are finishing their work. Magic is almost gone, and without it Fillory will fold up like a box with us in it. Do you have the keys?”

Quentin looked to Eliot.

“You do it,” the High King said. “It was your adventure first.”

Eliot held out the ring with the seven keys, and Quentin took it and walked over to the big wooden door. He kept his back straight and his gut sucked in. This was the moment, he thought. This was the triumph. People would tell this story forever. Though they might leave out how melancholy the twilit beach seemed, like all beaches in the early evening, when the fun is over. Time to slap the sand off your feet and pile into the station wagon and go home.

“Smallest to largest,” said the man in the tuxedo, sternly but not unkindly. “Go ahead. Leave them in the locks as you go.”

Quentin slipped each one off the key ring in turn. The first, tiniest lock turned easily — you could feel a mechanism of fine, well-oiled gears meshing and interlocking and turning inside the door. But each successive key put up more resistance. The fourth one was set so high up that he had to stand on his tiptoes to turn it. He could barely budge the sixth, and when he finally got it going, his fingers bending back and his knuckles white with the effort, light flashed inside the keyhole, and it spat out sparks that stung his wrist.

The last one wouldn’t turn at all, and in the end Quentin had to ask Bingle for his sword, which he stuck through the metal ring at the end of the key and used as a lever. Even then the man in the formal suit had to get up from his chair and help him.

When it finally gave and began to move, it was like he’d fitted a key into a hole in the hub at the center of the universe. Together he and the man put their backs into it — Quentin’s face was crushed into his shoulder. His suit smelled faintly of mothballs. As the key turned, the stars turned overhead. The whole cosmos was rotating around them, or maybe it was Fillory that was turning, or maybe there was no difference. The night sky spun above them until the day sky replaced it overhead. They kept turning, and the day sky sank below the horizon again, and the stars rushed back out.

Full circle. They were back where they started. There was a deep click that seemed to echo forever, the sound bouncing off the outer walls of the world, a bank vault opening in a cathedral. The door swung slowly inward. Behind it, through the doorway, was empty space, black sky, stars. Quentin took an involuntary step back. Everybody on the beach, even Bingle, even the sloth, let out a breath they didn’t know they’d been holding.

“Well,” Elaine said shakily. She was flushed, and she even laughed a little. “I have to admit, I wasn’t sure that would work.”

“Did it work?” Quentin said. He looked around for a sign that things were different. “I can’t tell.”

“It worked.”

“It worked,” Julia said.

Somebody caught Quentin from behind in a huge bear hug. It was Josh. They fell down on the chilly sand together, Josh on top.

“Dude!” Josh yelled. “Look at you! We just saved magic!”

“I guess we did.” Quentin started laughing, and then he couldn’t stop. It was all over. Magic wasn’t going to leave them after all. They had their own magic now, and it was safe. Not just in Fillory but everywhere. Nobody could take it away from them. Probably a little more dignity befitted the Saviors of All Magic, but fuck it. Poppy whooped and piled onto them too.

“You losers,” Eliot said, but he was grinning his crazed, jagged grin. “We should have brought champagne.”

Quentin lay back on the sand and looked up at the darkening sky. He could have fallen asleep right then and there on the sand, and slept all the way back to Whitespire. He closed his eyes. He heard Elaine’s voice.

“If you like,” she said, “you can go through it.”

Quentin opened his eyes again. He sat up.

“Wait,” he said. “Really? Through the door? What’s back there?”

“The Far Side of the World,” the Customs Agent said simply.

“The Far Side,” Eliot said. “We don’t know what that means.”

“I should explain,” she said. She settled herself back on her chair. “Fillory is not a sphere, like the world where you were born. Fillory is flat.”

“So not a Klein bottle?” Josh said.

“I have so many questions,” Poppy said. “Like how does gravity work?”

“As such,” Elaine went on, ignoring them, “Fillory has another side. A verso, if you will.”

“What’s on it?” Quentin asked. “What’s over there?”

“Nothing. And everything.”

When this was over Quentin was ready for a long vacation from gods and demons and all their cryptic utterances.

“There is another world there, waiting to be born. A world for which Fillory was in a sense merely a rough draft. You might make an analogy: the Far Side is to Fillory as Fillory is to your Earth. A greener place. A realer, more magical place.”

This was a new wrinkle. He and Poppy and Josh got up from the sand, feeling a little silly. They brushed themselves off and stood at attention.

“Each of you has a choice, whether to go or to stay. I cannot guarantee that anyone who passes through the door will be able to return here. But if you do not go now, there will never be another chance.”

“But what’s really there?” Quentin said. “What’s it like?”

She looked at Quentin, calmly and directly.

“It’s what you want, Quentin. It’s everything you’re looking for. It is the adventure of all adventures.”

There it was. The real end of the story, the happy ending. All he could think was: Alice. She could be waiting for him there. Elaine surveyed the group, where they stood in a loose half circle in front of the door. Her eyes met Eliot’s first. He shook his head slowly.

“I’m High King.” His voice was as serious as Quentin had ever heard it. “I can’t go. I’m not going to leave Fillory.”

She turned to Bingle, who still had the sloth on his back, peeking over his shoulder like a baby koala. Bingle closed his hooded eyes.

“It was never my destiny to return,” he said. He stepped forward. So he was right after all. Quentin supposed that by now Bingle had earned a free pass on the dramatics.

“I also will go,” the sloth said over his shoulder, in case anybody had forgotten about her.

Elaine stood aside and indicated that they should proceed. Without hesitating Bingle walked up to the doorway and opened it all the way.

He was silhouetted against the immense twinkling emptiness. In the night sky beyond him a comet rocketed past, sparking and sputtering merrily like a cheap firework. This was what passed for outer space in Fillory, Quentin supposed. At the bottom of the doorway he could see just the tip of one of the silver moon’s horns. It was rising, on its way to its regular appearance in the night sky of Fillory.

It felt like you could be sucked out through the doorway if you got too close, like through an air lock. But Bingle just stood there, looking around.

“It’s down,” Elaine said. “You have to climb.”

There must have been a ladder. Bingle turned to face them, got to his knees, moving slowly to avoid dislodging the sloth, and felt around with his foot till he evidently got it on a rung. He nodded goodbye to Quentin and began to climb down, step by step. His narrow olive face disappeared below the edge.

“Once you get halfway gravity turns around,” Elaine called after him. “And you start climbing up. It’s not as tricky as it sounds,” she added to the rest of them.

She turned to Quentin.

Two times before Quentin had made this same decision. He’d stood on the threshold of a new world and then stepped over it. When he’d arrived at Brakebills he’d thrown his whole life away, his whole world and everyone he knew, in exchange for a shiny magical new one. It had been easy, he’d had nothing worth keeping. He’d done it again when he came to Fillory, and it wasn’t much harder the second time. But it was harder now, the third time, very hard. Now he had something to lose.

But he was stronger now too. He knew himself better. It turned out his journey wasn’t over after all. He wasn’t going to go back. He looked at Eliot.

“Go,” Eliot said. “One of us should.”

God, was he that easy to read?

“Go,” Poppy said. “This is for you, Quentin.”

He put his arms around her.

“Thank you, Poppy,” he whispered. Then he said it to all of them: “Thank you.”

His voice caught on the phrase. He didn’t care.

Standing in the doorway, he took a deep breath as if he were about to climb down into a pool. He could look out and survey it all: he was backstage at the cosmos. Far below he could see Bingle and the sloth, tiny, still climbing down what looked like an endless column of iron rungs. The entirety of the moon was hanging right there in front of him, bright and glorious in the abyss, glowing with its own light. It looked like he could jump to it. It was smooth and white, no craters. He hadn’t realized the tips of the horns were so sharp.

He knelt down to start his climb.

“That’s odd.” The Customs Agent frowned. “Wait a moment. Where’s your passport?”

Quentin stopped, on one knee.

“My passport?” he said. This again. “I don’t have it. I gave it to the kid in hell.”

“In hell? The underworld?”

“Well, yes. I had to go there. That’s where the last key was.”

“Oh.” She pursed her lips. “I’m sorry, but you can’t go through without a passport.”

She couldn’t be serious.

“Well, but hang on,” Quentin said. “I have a passport. Eleanor made it for me. I just don’t have it on me. They have it in the underworld.”

Elaine smiled, a tired smile that wasn’t completely devoid of sympathy, but wasn’t exactly brimming over with it either.

“Eleanor can only make you one passport, Quentin. You’ve used yours. I’m sorry. I can’t let you through.”

This couldn’t be happening. He looked past her to the others, who were standing watching him blankly, the way the passengers in a car look at the driver when he’s been pulled over for speeding. He tried to make his face communicate something, something on the order of, can you believe this shit? But it wasn’t easy. He was being asked to be a good sport, but this cut deeper than that. This was his destiny here, and she wasn’t going to take it away on a technicality.

“There has to be a loophole.” He was still kneeling on the threshold, looking up at her, halfway out the door. He could feel the Far Side pulling at him, bright and joyful, with its own gravity. This was where his story led. “Something. I had no choice, I had to go to the underworld. And not to put too fine a point on it, but if I hadn’t we never would have opened the door. We wouldn’t be here. The world would’ve ended—”

“That is what makes this all the harder.”

“—so you know,” Quentin kept talking, louder, “if I hadn’t gone to the underworld there wouldn’t be any going to the Far Side of the World.” He knew if he stood up it would be over. “There wouldn’t be any Far Side left. All of this would be gone.”

Her expression didn’t change. The woman was psychotic. She wasn’t going to give in, no matter what he said.

“All right,” he said. He waited as long as he could, then he stood up. He held up his hands. “All right.”

If there was one thing he’d learned on this fucking quest it was how to take a punch. He dropped his hands. He was still a king, for Christ’s sake. That would do for a destiny. He had no complaining to do. He’d had more than his fair share of adventures. He knew that. Quentin went over and stood next to Poppy, the woman he’d just tried to abandon. She put her arm around his waist and kissed him on the cheek.

“You’ll be okay,” she said. Her hands felt cool on his. Elaine was closing the door.

“Wait,” Julia said. “I want to go through.”

The agent stopped, but she didn’t look as if she thought she’d made a mistake.

“I’m going through,” Julia said. “My tree is waiting for me there. I can feel it.”

Elaine conferred with her partner quietly, but when they were done they both shook their heads.

“Julia, you must take some blame for the catastrophe that nearly occurred. You and your friends invoked the gods, and drew their attention to us, and brought them back. You betrayed this world, however unknowingly, in order to increase your own power. There must be consequences.”

For a long moment Julia stood perfectly still, staring not at the Customs Agent but at the half-open door. Her skin began to glow, and her hair crackled. The signs weren’t hard to read. She was prepared to fight her way through if necessary.

“Wait.” Quentin said. “Hang on a minute. I think you’re missing something.” It was almost dark out now, and the sky was a riot of stars. “Do you two have any idea what she’s been through? What she lost? And you’re talking about consequences? She’s had plenty of consequences. And oh, by the way, not that it counts for much apparently, but she saved the world too. You’d think she was due a bit of a reward.”

“She made her own decisions,” the man who sat by the door said. “All is in balance.”

“You know, I’ve noticed that you people, or whatever you are, are pretty free with assigning that kind of responsibility. Well, Julia wouldn’t have done what she did if I’d helped her learn magic.”

“Quentin,” Julia said. “Cease.” She was still powered up, ready to make her move.

“If you want to play that game, let’s play it. Julia did what she did because of me. So if you want to blame somebody, blame me. Put that wrong on me where it belongs and let her go through to the Far Side. Where she belongs.”

The silence of the beach at the end of the world descended again. They saw by starlight now, and by the light of the impending moon, leaking through the half-open door, and by Julia-light: she was glowing softly, with a warm white light that threw their shadows behind them on the sand and glimmered on the water.

Elaine and the well-dressed man conferred again for a long minute. At least they weren’t quibbling about passports. Probably Julia hadn’t needed hers to get into the underworld. She slipped in under the radar.

“All right,” the man said, when they were finished. “We agree. Julia’s fault will be upon you, and she will pass through.”

“All right,” Quentin said. Sometimes you win one when you least expect it. He felt strangely light. Buoyant. “Great. Thank you.”

Julia turned her head and smiled at him, her beautiful unearthly smile. He felt free. He’d thought he would carry his share of that unhappiness for the rest of his life. Now, suddenly, he had shed it when he least expected it, and he felt like he was going to float up into the air. He had atoned, that was the word for it.

Julia took both his hands in hers and kissed him on the mouth, a long kiss, full at last of something like real love. Demi-goddess or no, at that moment she seemed fully herself to him in a way she hadn’t for years, not since their last day together in Brooklyn, when both their lives had been changed beyond recognition. Whatever losses she’d suffered, this was Julia, all of her. And Quentin felt pretty whole now too.

She stepped up to the doorway, but she didn’t kneel. She straightened and squared herself like an Olympic diver and then, disdaining the ladder, she dove off the edge, straight down, and disappeared.

When she was gone the beach was a little darker.

It was over and done with at last. He was ready for the curtain to come down. He wasn’t looking forward to the all-night slog back to the Muntjac, and God knew how they were going to get home from there. Surely there must be some trick, some more magic lying around somewhere that would enable them to skip over that part. Maybe Ember would come.

“Where’s the damn Cozy Horse when you need it?” Josh must have been thinking the same thing.

“And how should Quentin pay?” the Customs Agent said. She was speaking to the man in the black suit.

Suddenly Quentin felt less tired.

“What do you mean?” he said. They were whispering again.

“Hang on,” Eliot said. “That’s not how it works.”

“It is,” said the man, “how it works. Julia’s debt is now upon Quentin, and he must settle it. What is it that Quentin holds most dear?”

“Well,” Quentin said, “I’m already not going to the Far Side.”

Brilliant. He should have been a lawyer. A thought froze him: they were going to take Poppy. Or do something to her. He was afraid to even look at her in case it gave them ideas.

“His crown,” Elaine announced. “I am sorry, Quentin. As of this moment you are no longer a king of Fillory.”

“You exceed your authority,” Eliot said hotly.

Quentin had been braced for devastation, but when it came he didn’t feel anything at all. That was what they were taking, and they would take it. Had taken it. He didn’t feel any different. It was all very abstract, kingliness, in the end. He supposed what he would miss most was his big, quiet bedroom at Castle Whitespire. He faced the others, but none of them looked at him any differently. He took a deep breath.

“Well,” he said stupidly. “Easy come.”

That was the end of Quentin the Magician King, just like that. He was somebody else now. It was a silly thing to be sad about, really. For God’s sake they’d just saved magic, saved all their lives. Julia had found her peace. They had finished the quest. He hadn’t lost, he’d won.

Elaine and the man in the suit had resumed their stations, on their chairs, like a pair of seated caryatids. Job well done. God, he couldn’t believe he’d flirted with her back on the Outer Island. She wasn’t so different from her father, in the end.

He had high hopes for her daughter, anyway.

“Give my best to Eleanor,” he said.

“Oh, Eleanor,” Elaine said in the dismissive tone she reserved for her daughter. “She still talks about the time you picked her up, how far she could see. You made quite an impression on her.”

“She’s a sweet girl.”

“Can’t tell time yet. Do you know, she’s absolutely obsessed with Earth now? She asked me to send her away to school there, and I’m sorely tempted to do it, I can tell you. I’m counting the days.”

Good for Eleanor, Quentin thought. She was getting off the Outer Island. She would be all right.

“Imagine that,” he said. “When she’s old enough for college, drop me a line. I might be able to recommend one.”

It was time to go.

The sea was no longer empty. Something was coming toward them across it: it was Ember, late as usual, trotting neatly across the skim of water. Wouldn’t be like Him to miss a good dethroning.

“So,” Quentin said. “Back to the Muntjac? Or?” Maybe the magic sheep would be good for a ride home. He really did hope so. Ember took His place by Eliot’s side.

“Not for you, Quentin,” He said.

And then Eliot did something Quentin had never seen him do before, even after everything they’d been through together. He sobbed. He turned away and walked a few steps down the beach with his back to them, arms crossed, head down.

“It is a dark day for Fillory,” Ember said, “but you will always be remembered here. And all good things must come to an end.”

“Wait a minute.”

Quentin recognized this little speech. It was the canned farewell that Ember delivered in the books, every time He did what He did best, which was to kick visitors out of Fillory at the end.

“I don’t understand. Look, enough is enough.”

“Yes, Quentin, enough is enough. It is exactly that.”

“I’m sorry, Quentin.” Eliot couldn’t look at him. He took a rattling breath. “There’s nothing I can do. It’s always been the rule.”

Fortunately Eliot had a gorgeous embroidered handkerchief to blot his eyes with. He’d probably never had to use it before.

“For God’s sake!” Quentin might as well get angry, there was nothing else left to do. “You can’t send me back to Earth, I live here now! I’m not some schoolkid who has to get back in time for curfew or fifth form or whatever, I’m a fucking grown-up. This is my home! I’m not from Earth anymore, I’m a Fillorian!”

Ember’s face was impassive beneath His massive stony horns. They curled back from His woolly forehead, ribbed like ancient seashells.

“No.”

“This isn’t how it ends!” Quentin said. “I am the hero of this goddamned story, Ember! Remember? And the hero gets the reward!”

“No, Quentin,” the ram said. “The hero pays the price.”

Eliot put a hand on Quentin’s shoulder.

“You know what they say,” Eliot said. “Once a king in Fillory, always—”

“Save it.” Quentin shook him off. “Save it. That’s bullshit and you know it.”

He sighed. “I guess I do.”

Eliot had himself back under control now. He held something out, small and pearly, pinched in his handkerchief.

“It’s a magic button. Ember brought it. It will take you to the Neitherlands. You can travel back to Earth from there, or wherever you want to go. It just won’t take you back here.”

“I can hook you up, Quentin!” Josh said, trying to sound cheerful. “Seriously, I practically own the Neitherlands now. You want Teletubbies? I’ll draw you a map!”

“Oh, forget it.” He still felt angry. “Come on. Let’s go back to our home fucking planet.”

It was all over. He always hated these parts, even when they were just stories, even when they weren’t about him. He would think about the future soon. It wouldn’t be that bad. He and Josh could live in Venice. And Poppy. It wouldn’t be bad at all. It was just that he felt like he’d just had a limb severed, and he was looking down at the stump waiting to start bleeding to death.

“We aren’t coming, Quentin,” Poppy said. She was standing by Eliot.

“We’re staying,” Josh said. Even in the cold and the darkness, Quentin could see him blushing furiously. “We’re not going back.”

“Oh, Quentin!” He’d never seen Poppy look so upset, not even when they were freezing to death. “We can’t go! Fillory needs us. With you and Julia gone there are two empty thrones. One king, one queen. We have to take them.”

Of course. A king and a queen. King Josh. Queen Poppy. Long live. He was going back alone.

This, now, this stopped him. He’d known that adventures were supposed to be hard. He’d understood that he would have to go a long way and solve difficult problems and fight foes and be brave and whatever else. But this was hard in a way he hadn’t counted on. You couldn’t kill it with a sword or fix it with a spell. You couldn’t fight it. You just had to endure it, and you didn’t look good or noble or heroic doing it. You were just the guy people felt sorry for, that was all. It didn’t make a good story — in fact he saw now that the stories had it all wrong, about what you got, and what you gave. It’s not that he wasn’t willing. He just hadn’t understood. He wasn’t ready for it.

“I feel like an asshole, Quentin,” Josh said.

“No, listen, you’re totally right.” Quentin’s lips were numb. He kept talking. “I should have thought of it. Listen, you’re going to love it.”

“You can have the palazzo.”

“Great, man, thanks, that’ll be great.”

“I’m sorry, Quentin!” Poppy threw her arms around him. “I had to say yes!”

“It’s okay! Jesus!”

You didn’t want to be a grown man saying come on, it isn’t fair. But it didn’t feel all that fair.

“It is time,” Ember said, standing there on His stupid little ballerina hoofs.

“Listen, we have to do this now,” Eliot said. His face was white. This was costing him too.

“Fine. Okay. Give me the button.”

Josh hugged him fiercely, and then Poppy. She kissed him too, but he could hardly feel it. He knew he would be sorry later, but it was just too much. He had to do this right now or he was going to implode.

“I’ll miss you,” he said. “Be a good queen.”

“I have something for you,” Eliot said. “I was saving it for when this was all over, but. . well, I guess it’s all over.”

From inside his jacket Eliot brought out a silver pocket watch. Quentin would have known it anywhere: it was from the little clock-tree that had been growing in the magic clearing in the Queenswood, where all this began. Eliot must have harvested it when he went back there. It ticked away merrily, as if it were happy to see him again.

He put it in his pocket. He wasn’t in the mood for merriness. Too bad it wasn’t a gold watch: the classic retirement present.

“Thank you. It’s beautiful.” It was.

The huge horned moon of Fillory was up now, clearing the wall at the edge of the world with its nightly leap. It didn’t rumble, like the sun, but this close it rang faintly, like a struck tuning fork. Quentin looked at it long and hard. Probably he would never see it again.

Then Eliot hugged him, a long hug, and when he was done he kissed Quentin on the mouth. That Quentin felt.

“Sorry,” Eliot said. “But you were kissing everybody else.”

He held out the button. Quentin’s hand shook. Even as he took it, almost before he touched it, he was floating up through cold water.

It had always been cold, going to the Neitherlands, but he never remembered it being this cold. The water burned against his skin — it was Antarctic cold, like when he’d had to run to the South Pole from Brakebills South, years ago. The wound in his side ached. Hot tears leaked out from under his eyelids and mingled with the frigid water. For a long second he hung there, weightless. It felt like he was motionless, but he must have been rising up through the water because with no warning something rough clonked him on the top of his head, hard enough that he saw silver sparkles.

Insult to injury: the fountain was frozen over. Quentin groped frantically at the ice above him, almost losing the button in the process. Nobody thought of this? Could you drown in magic water? Then his fingers found an edge. They’d cut a hole in the ice, he’d just missed it.

The hole was frozen over too, but only lightly. He cracked it satisfyingly with his fist. It was good to punch something and feel it break. He wanted to break it again. He wriggled up and out — he had to sprawl awkwardly on the slick ice with his upper body, like a seal, and then grab the stone rim of the basin and pull himself the rest of the way out of the hole. He lay there for a minute, gasping and shivering.

For a second he’d forgotten everything that had just happened. Nothing like a brush with death to take your mind off your troubles. The magic water was already evaporating. His hair was dry before his feet were even out of the water.

He was alone. The stone square was silent. He felt dizzy, and not just because he’d hit his head. It was all crashing in on him now. He’d thought he’d known what his future looked like, but he’d been mistaken. His life would be something else now. He was starting over, only he didn’t think he had the strength to start over. He didn’t know if he could stand up.

Feeling like an old man, he boosted himself down off the edge of the fountain and leaned back against it. He’d always liked the Neitherlands — there was something comforting about their in-between-ness. They were nowhere, and as such they relieved you of the burden of being anywhere in particular. They were a good place to be miserable in. Though God help him, Penny would probably come floating by in a minute.

The Neitherlands had changed since he and Poppy had been there last. The buildings were still broken, and there was still a little snow in the corners of the square, in the shadows, but it wasn’t coming down anymore. It wasn’t freezing. Magic really was flowing again: you could see it here. The ruins were coming back to life.

Though they weren’t going back to normal. A warm breeze blew. He’d never felt that in the Neitherlands before. They’d always been asleep, but now they were waking up.

Quentin felt ruined too. He had that in common with the Neitherlands. He felt like a frozen tundra where nothing grew and nothing would ever grow again. He had finished his quest, and it had cost him everything and everyone he’d done it for. The equation balanced perfectly: all canceled out. And without his crown, or his throne, or Fillory, or even his friends, he had no idea who he was.

But something had changed inside him too. He didn’t understand it yet, but he felt it. Somehow, even though he’d lost everything, he felt more like a king now than he ever did when he was one. Not like a toy king. He felt real. He waved to the empty square the way he used to wave to the people from the balcony in Fillory.

Overhead the clouds were breaking apart. He could see a pale sky, and the sun was pushing through. He hadn’t even known there was a sun here. The silver watch Eliot gave him was ticking along in an inside pocket of his best topcoat, the one with the seed pearls and the silver thread, like a cat purring, or a second heart. The air was chilly but it was warming up, and the ground was littered with puddles of meltwater. Stubborn green shoots were forcing themselves up between the paving stones, cracking the old rock, in spite of everything.