It was perfectly harmless unless you walked into it, in which case you’d be dead before you knew it. One of the kids who cast it lost a hand that way, or so it was said. Eventually the faculty just shrugged their shoulders and walled it off. Supposedly the lost, frozen hand was still in there.

Likewise, it was true: the clock was powered by a gear made of metal reclaimed from the body of the Silver Golem of Białystok. It was also true that there was a childishly humorous anagram for Brakebills, that it was Biker Balls, and that the chalkboards would squeak painfully if you tried to write it on them. It was true that ivy wouldn’t grow on that one bare patch of wall behind the kitchens because one of the stones had been violently cursed in a really ugly incident involving a student who’d slipped through the admissions protocols meant to screen out sociopaths and other people mentally unfit to handle magic. On humid days it sweated acid.

There was also a secret seventh fountain, underground, accessible through a door set in the dusty plank floor of a gardening shed; it was kept cordoned off because the water teemed with hungry, sharp-toothed fish. And Quentin had never known how the Maze was redrawn over the summer, but apparently every year in June the groundskeeper goaded the topiary animals into such a feeding frenzy that they fell upon and devoured each other in a kind of ghastly slow-motion vegetarian holocaust. The Maze was built up again out of cuttings from the survivors. Only the strongest made it through. They must have been some of the most highly evolved topiary animals on Earth.

This was Quentin’s world now, and it was amazing to him how quickly he came to accept it, even embrace it. He’d gone from king to schoolteacher, been forcibly transplanted from the grand magical cosmos of Fillory to this hole in the wall that he thought he’d escaped forever, and lo and behold he was adjusting. It turns out you can go home again, if you have to. His future was here; the years he’d spent in Fillory were gone now as if they’d never happened. He mourned them alone, the only person on Earth who knew that once upon a time he used to wear a crown and sit on a throne. But you couldn’t mourn forever. Or you could, but as it turned out there were better things to do.

Pacing the aisles of a silent classroom, surveying the exposed napes of rows and rows of students bent over their fall exams, he realized he’d lost his old double vision, the one that was always looking for something more, somewhere else, the world behind the world. It was his oldest possession, and he’d let it slip away without even noticing it was gone. He was becoming someone else, someone new.

It was crazy to think that the others were still over there, riding out on hunts, receiving people in their receiving rooms, meeting every afternoon in the tallest tower of Castle Whitespire. And Julia was on the Far Side of the World doing God knew what. But that had nothing to do with him now. After all that it turned out that wasn’t his story. It had all been a temporary aberration, and in due time it had corrected itself.

Though he did still look up at the moon once in a while, expecting to find the clean, crisp crescent of Fillory. By comparison Earth’s moon looked as pale and shabby and worn as an old dime.

—

They were only a hundred miles north of Manhattan, but the winters at Brakebills had a different quality from winter in the city: deeper, heavier, firmer, more decisive. It was as if, because it came three months late, Brakebills winter was determined to sock you in for good and all. It was February on the outside, and the birds and plants were beginning to show glimmers of cautious optimism, but Brakebills was still wallowing in a foot and a half of deep silent November snow.

Now that he was teaching Quentin could see why the faculty didn’t bother trying to improve the climate. It kept people amazingly focused. You saw the undergrads try to jog their way through the snow, kicking up puffs of powder, then give up and just slog. You could actually watch as the determination to seize the moment and live life to the fullest ebbed right out of them, and they resigned themselves to lonely, silent, indoor study instead. There was a perennial proposal on the table, never quite adopted, to keep it winter at Brakebills all year round.

Quentin was doing quite a bit of studying himself. He’d transcribed the whole page, 402 words arranged in twenty sentences, plus an incomplete one at the beginning and another at the end, and papered his walls with it. Each word got its own separate sheet, which he filled up with annotations and connected to other words with long curvy chalk lines to indicate related concepts. He was literally living inside the page.

He kept up with his teaching, but other than that decrypting the page was his full-time occupation. As he got deeper into it he began to run into a lot of mathematics, which he had to work out with a pencil and paper—you couldn’t do magical equations with computers, they just spat out inconsistent answers before hanging completely. Magical math had to be thought through with a brain.

But the page was beginning to open up—like tightly furled buds the words began to bloom and reveal the ideas locked inside them. The concepts unfolded for him, displaying hidden dimensions and interacting with one another in unexpected ways. As they took shape they also gave up clues as to the much larger, more shadowy whole of which they were just a tiny fragment: the book that the page came from. It appeared to be a treatise on the interactions between magic and matter.

On Earth, magic and matter were distinct things: you could cast a spell on an object, and it became enchanted, but the object and the spell remained separate entities—the object was like a piece of metal on which you’d put a magnetic charge. But in Fillory, Quentin knew, or at least strongly suspected, magic and thing were somehow one and the same. Magic existed on Earth, sure, but Fillory was magic. It was a fundamental difference.

This was all very theoretical, and Quentin wasn’t that into theory. He was still a Physical Kid at heart, and he was more into practice. Under the right conditions, with enough energy, could you make something on Earth magic? Infuse it with magic, melt them together till the seams were gone, like they were in Fillory? It felt like a forbidden idea, a boundary you weren’t supposed to cross, but it was too delicious not to at least try.

He requisitioned an empty basement lab, but even with his newly enhanced magical abilities it was difficult to force the delicate abstractions of the page into the crude actual world. Either he came up with nothing, or one of the spells would release a huge wad of energy that lit up the room with icy blue light and practically blew out the wards he’d set up to keep himself from being vaporized. As a precaution he worked the enchantments inside increasingly large, heavy, gluey globes of force, like bubbles blown from a thick viscous translucent liquid, which made it hard to tell what exactly was going on.

And what would he do with it anyway, even if it did work? What good was something magic? This was a powerful enchantment, but it needed a purpose. It was an answer in search of a question. He was getting older, and it was time he thought about making something, building something that would last. But what? He couldn’t see how this was getting him any closer.

One evening, standing alone in the senior common room, drinking his first glass of wine for the night and sketching diagrams in his head, he reached into his jacket pocket for his Fillorian watch—which still didn’t work, but he liked having it with him anyway—and found an envelope there along with it. Inside was a letter typed on a manual typewriter inviting him politely, even decorously, to show up at such and such a bookstore on such and such a night in March if he was interested in a job. The signature was illegible—bird scratchings.

Huh. It was intriguing, and Quentin felt a little of the old restlessness. Here it was, another mystery to be solved. Your classic passport to adventure, just like back in the old days.

But that was the thing about the old days: they were old. This was his life now. He was content, and if not happy then happier than he ever thought he’d be again. He had work to do. He crumpled up the letter and winged it into the fire. It caught, and a heavy log shifted, sending up sparks. The past was what it was, his home was here, and anything else was a fantasy.

CHAPTER 5

Eliot frowned. The Lorian champion was a squat fellow, practically as wide as he was tall and of some slightly different ethnic background from most of his compatriots. The Lorians were Vikings, basically, Thor types: tall, long blond hair, big chins, big chests, big beards. But this character came in at about five foot six, with a shaved head and a fat round Buddha face like a soup dumpling and a significant admixture of some Asiatic DNA. He was stripped to the waist even though it was about 40 degrees out, and his latte-colored skin was oiled all over. Or maybe he was just really sweaty.

The champion’s heavy round gut hung down over his waistband, but he was still a pretty scary-looking bastard. He had a huge saddle of muscle across his upper back, and his biceps were like thighs, and there must have been some muscle in there, just by volume, even if they did look kind of chubby. His weapon was weird-looking enough—a pole arm with a big curvy cross of sharp metal on the end—that you just knew he could do something really outstandingly dangerous with it.

When he stepped forward the Lorian army went nuts for him. They bashed their swords and shields together and looked at each other as if to say: yes, he may look a little funny, but our fellow is definitely going to kill the other fellows’ fellow, so three cheers for him, by Crom or whoever it is we worship! It almost made you like them, the Lorians. They were more multicultural than you would have thought.

Though there was no chance that their champion was actually going to kill the Fillorian champion, Eliot’s champion. Because Eliot’s champion was Eliot.

There had been some debate, when the idea was first mooted, about whether it made sense to send the High King of Fillory into single combat with the handpicked designated hitter of the invading Lorian army. But it rapidly became clear that Eliot was set on it, though his reasons were as much personal as they were tactical. He had begun his stint as High King in a rather decadent vein—louche, you might even say. But as his reign lengthened he had grown into the role, and become more serious about it, and it was time he showed everybody—himself included—how serious he was. Kingship was not an affectation, it was who he was. Very publicly, very literally, he was going to put some skin in the game.

He stepped forward from the front rank of his army, who, predictably but gratifyingly, also went nuts. Eliot smiled—his smile was twisted by his uneven jaw, but his happiness was the real stuff. His heart was in it.

The sound of the king’s regiment of the Fillorian army cheering was unlike anything else in the known universe. You had men and women shouting and banging their weapons together, good enough, but then you had a whole orchestra of nonhuman sounds going on around it. At the top end you had some fairies squeeing at supersonic pitches; fairies thought all this military stuff was pretty silly, but they went along with it for the same reason that fairies ever did anything, namely, for the lulz. Then you had bats squeaking, birds squawking, bears roaring, wolves howling, and anything with a horse-head whinnying: pegasi, unicorns, regular talking horses.

Griffins and hippogriffs squawked too, but lower—baritone squawking, a horrible noise. Minotaurs bellowed. Stuff with humans heads yelled. Of all the mythical creatures of Fillory, they were the only ones who still creeped Eliot out. The satyrs and dryads and such were cool, but there were a couple of manticores and sphinxes who were just uncanny as hell.

And so on down the line till you got to the bass notes, which were provided by the giants grunting and stomping their feet. It was silly really: he could have picked a giant as his champion, and then this thing would have been over in about ten seconds flat, pun intended. But that wouldn’t have sent the same message.

When Eliot first got the news that the Lorians were invading it had been grimly exciting. Rally the banners, Fillory’s at war! Antique formulas and protocols were invoked. A lot of serious-looking non-ceremonial armor and weapons and flags and tack had come up out of storage and been polished and sharpened and oiled. They brought up with them a lot of dust too, and a thrilling smell of great deeds and legendary times. An epic smell. Eliot breathed it in deep.

The invasion wasn’t a complete surprise. The Lorians were always up to some kind of bad behavior in the books: kidnapping princes, forcing talking horses to plow fields, trying to get everybody to believe in their slate of quasi-Norse gods. But it had been centuries since they actually crossed the border in force. They were usually too busy fighting among themselves to get that organized.

More to the point, the peaks of the Northern Barrier Range were supposed to be enchanted to keep the Lorians out. That was the Barrier part. Eliot wasn’t sure what had happened there. When this was all over he’d have to remember to figure out exactly why those spells had crapped out.

Eliot moved rapidly to expel the Lorians, though he found himself reluctant to be the direct cause of any actual killing. This wasn’t Tolkien—these weren’t orcs and trolls and giant spiders and whatever else, evil creatures that you were free to commit genocide on without any complicated moral ramifications. Orcs didn’t have wives and kids and backstories. But he was pretty sure the Lorians were human, and killing them would be basically murder, and that wasn’t going to happen. Some of them were even kind of hot. And anyway those Tolkien books were fiction, and Eliot, as High King of Fillory, didn’t deal in fiction. He was in the messy business of writing facts.

It was a tricky, ticklish business. There was nothing—in Eliot’s admittedly limited experience—more tedious than virtue.

Fortunately the Fillorians had an advantage, which was that they had every possible advantage. They outmatched the Lorians in every stat you could name. The Lorians were a bunch of guys with swords. The Fillorians were every beast in the Monster Manual, led by a clique of wizard kings and queens, and Eliot was very sorry but you knew that when you invaded us.