LOVELADY. MARIE BYRD LAND. EMILY GREENSTREET

ALICE

Quentin didn’t spend any time in Brooklyn that summer because his parents didn’t live there anymore. Abruptly and without consulting him, they’d sold off their Park Slope town house for a colossal sum and semiretired to a faux-Colonial McMansion in a placid suburb of Boston called Chesterton, where Quentin’s mother could paint full time and his father could do God only knew what.

The shock of being severed from the place he grew up in was all the more surprising because it never really came. Quentin looked for the part of him that should have missed his old neighborhood, but it wasn’t there. He supposed he must have been shedding his old identity and his old life all along, without noticing it. This just made the cut cleaner and neater. Really, it was probably easier this way. Not that his parents had made the move out of kindness, or any logic other than the obvious financial one.

The Chesterton house was yellow with green shutters and sat on an acre so aggressively landscaped that it looked like a virtual representation of itself. Though it was trimmed and detailed in a vaguely Colonial style, it was so enormous—bulging in all directions with extra wings and gables and roofs—that it looked like it had been inflated rather than constructed. Huge cement air-conditioning bunkers hummed outside night and day. It was even more unreal than the real world usually was.

When Quentin arrived home for summer vacation—Brakebills summer, September for the rest of the world—his parents were alarmed at his gaunt appearance, his hollow, shell-shocked eyes, his haunted demeanor. But their curiosity about him was, as always, mild enough to be easily manageable, and he started gaining weight back quickly with the help of their massive, ever-full suburban refrigerator.

At first it was a relief just to be warm all the time, and to sleep in every day, and to be free of Mayakovsky and the Circumstances and that merciless white winter light. But after seventy-two hours Quentin was already bored again. In Antarctica he’d fantasized about having nothing to do except lie on his bed and sleep and stare into space, but now those empty hours were here, and they were getting old amazingly fast. The long silences at Brakebills South had made him impatient with small talk. He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway. Real life—or was it fantasy life? whichever one Brakebills was—that was what mattered, and that was happening somewhere else.

As he usually did when he was stuck at home, he went on a Fillory binge. The old 1970s-era covers looked more and more dated every time he saw them, with their psychedelic Yellow Submarine palette, and on a couple of them the covers had come off completely and been tucked back between the pages as bookmarks. But the world inside the books was as fresh and vital as ever, unfaded and unironized by time. Quentin had never before really appreciated the cleverness of the second book. The Girl Who Told Time, in which Rupert and Helen are abruptly shanghaied into Fillory straight out of their respective boarding schools, the only time the Chatwins cross over in winter instead of summer. They end up back in an earlier time period, one that overlaps with the storyline of the first book. With the aid of foreknowledge, Rupert dogs Martin’s and Helen’s footsteps—the earlier Helen’s—as they repeat the action of The World in the Walls, note for note. He keeps just out of view, dropping clues and helping them out without their knowledge (the mysterious character known only as the Wood One turns out to have been Rupert in disguise); Quentin wondered if Plover wrote The Girl Who Told Time just to shore up all the plot holes in The World in the Walls.

Meanwhile Helen embarks on a hunt for the mysterious Questing Beast of Fillory, which according to legend can’t be caught, but if you do catch it—all logic aside—it’s supposed to give you your heart’s desire. The Beast leads her on a tricksy, circuitous chase that somehow winds in and out of the enchanted tapestries that adorn the library of Castle Whitespire. She only ever catches a glimpse of it, peeking coyly out at her from behind an embroidered shrub before vanishing in a flicker of cloven hoofs.

At the end the twin rams Ember and Umber show up as usual, like a pair of sinister ruminant constables. They were a force for good, of course, but there was a slightly Orwellian quality to their oversight of Fillory: they knew everything that went on, and there was no obvious limit to their powers, but they rarely bestirred themselves to actively intervene on behalf of the creatures in their charge. Mostly they just scolded everybody involved for the mess they’d made, finishing each other’s sentences, then made everyone renew their vows of fealty before wandering away to crop some luckless farmer’s alfalfa fields. They firmly usher Rupert and Helen back into the real world, back into the damp, chilly, dark-wood-paneled halls of their boarding schools, as if they had never left it.

Quentin even plowed through The Wandering Dune, the fifth and last book in the series (that is, the last as far as anybody but Quentin knew) and not a fan favorite. It was longer by half than any of the other books and starred Helen and the youngest Chatwin, clever, introverted Jane. The tone of The Wandering Dune is different from earlier books: having spent the last two volumes searching fruitlessly for their vanished brother, Martin, the Chatwins’ usual cheery English indomitability has been tempered by a wistful mood. On entering Fillory the two girls encounter a mysterious sand dune being blown through the kingdom, all by itself. They climb the dune and find themselves riding it through the green Fillorian countryside and on out into a dreamy desert wasteland in the far south, where they spend most of the rest of the book.

Almost nothing happens. Jane and Helen fill up the pages with interminable conversations about right and wrong and teenage Christian metaphysics and whether their true obligations lie on Earth or in Fillory. Jane is desperately worried about Martin but also, like Quentin, a little jealous: whatever iron law kept the Chatwins from staying in Fillory forever, he had found a loophole, or it had found him. Alive or dead, he had managed to overstay his tourist visa.

But Helen, who has a scoldy streak, heaps scorn on Martin—she thinks he’s just hiding in Fillory so he won’t have to go home. He’s the child who doesn’t want to leave the playground, or who won’t go to bed. He’s Peter Pan. Why can’t he grow up and face the real world? She calls him selfish, self-indulgent, “the biggest baby of us all. ”

In the end the sisters are picked up by a majestic clipper ship that sails through the sand as if it were water. The ship is crewed by large bunnies who would be overly cutesy (the Wandering Dune -haters always compared them to Ewoks) if it weren’t for their impressively hard-assed attention to the technical details of operating their complex vessel.

The bunnies leave Jane and Helen with a gift, a set of magical buttons they can use to zap themselves from Earth to Fillory and back at will. On returning to England, Helen, in a fit of self-righteousness, promptly hides the buttons and won’t tell Jane where they are, upon which Jane excoriates her in fine period vernacular and turns the entire household upside down and inside out. But she never finds the buttons, and on that unsatisfying note the book, and the whole series, ends.

Even if it didn’t turn out to be the final book in the series, Quentin wondered where Plover could possibly have gone with the story in The Magicians. For one thing he was out of Chatwins: the books always featured two Chatwin children, an older one from the previous book and a new, younger one. But pretty, dark-haired Jane was the last and youngest Chatwin. Would she have gone back to Fillory alone? It broke the pattern.

For another, half of the fun of the books was waiting for the Chatwins to find their way into Fillory, for the magic door that opens for them and them only to appear. You always knew it would, and it always surprised you when it did. But with the buttons you could shuttle back and forth at will. Where was the miracle in that? Maybe that was why Helen hid them. They might as well have built a subway to Fillory.

Quentin’s conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater. In the mornings he lay in bed as long as he could stand it, in an attempt to avoid breakfast with them, but they always waited him out. He couldn’t win: they had even less to do than he did. Sometimes he wondered if it was a perverse game they played, that they were in on and he wasn’t.

He would come down to find them sitting at a table littered with crusts and crumbs and clementine peels and cereal bowls. While he pretended to be interested in the Chesterton Chestnut, he would furiously search for some even remotely plausible topic of conversation:

“So. Are you guys still going on that trip to South America? ”

“South America? ” His dad looked up, startled, as if he’d forgotten Quentin was there.

“Aren’t you going to South America? ”

A look passed between Quentin’s parents.

“Spain. We’re going to Spain and Portugal. ”

“Oh, Portugal. Right. I was thinking Peru for some reason. ”

“Spain and Portugal. It’s for your mother. There’s an artists’ exchange with the university in Lisbon. Then we’re going to take a boat trip down the Tigris. ”

“Tagus, darling! ” Quentin’s mother said, with her tinkling I-married-an-idiot! laugh. “The Tagus! The Tigris is in Iraq. ”

She bit into a piece of raisin toast with her large straight teeth.

“Well, I don’t think we’ll be sailing down the Tigris anytime soon! ” Quentin’s father laughed loudly at this, exactly as if it were funny, and then paused for thought. “Darling, do you remember that week we spent in a houseboat on the Volga. . . ? ”

An extended Russian reminiscence followed, a duet punctuated by significant silences that Quentin interpreted as allusions to sexual activities that he didn’t want to know about. It was enough to make you envy the Chatwins, with Dad in the army and Mum in the madhouse. Mayakovsky would have known what to do with this kind of conversation. He would have silenced it. He wondered how hard that spell was to learn.

By about eleven every morning Quentin would hit his limit and flee the house for the relative safety of Chesterton, which stubbornly refused to reveal even the slightest hint of mystery or intrigue beneath its green, self-satisfied exterior. He had never learned to drive, so he rode his father’s white 1970s-era ten-speed, which weighed approximately one metric ton, to the center of town. Out of deference to its glorious Colonial heritage the town was governed by a set of draconian zoning laws that kept everything in a state of permanent unnatural quaintness.

Knowing no one, caring about nothing, Quentin took a tour of the low-ceilinged, heavy-timbered residence of some Revolutionary luminary. He inspected a boxy white-painted Unitarian church, est. 1766. He surveyed the lush flat lawns where amateur Continental irregulars had faced off against well-drilled, well-armed Redcoats, with predictable results. There was one pleasant surprise, hidden behind the church: a lovely half-vanished seventeenth-century graveyard, a little square glebe of ultra-green grass scattered with wet saffron-colored elm leaves, with a bent wrought-iron fence around it. Inside, it was cool and hushed.

The gravestones were all winged skulls and bad devotional quatrains about whole families carried off by fever, weathered in places into illegibility. Quentin crouched down on the wet grass to try to decipher one very old one, a rectangle of blue slate that had split in half and sunk halfway into the green turf, which rose up to meet it like a wave.

“Quentin. ”

He straightened up. A woman about his age had come in through the cemetery gate.

“Hi? ” he said cautiously. How did she know his name?

“I guess you didn’t think I would find you, ” she said unsteadily. “I guess you didn’t think of that. ”

She walked right up to him. At the last possible moment, too late to do anything about it, he realized that she wasn’t going to stop. Without breaking stride she grabbed the front of his barn jacket and marched him stumbling backward over a low footstone right into the aromatic branches of a cypress tree. Her face, pushed right up in front of his, dangerously close, was an angry mask. It had been raining off and on all afternoon, and the needles were damp.

He resisted the impulse to struggle. He wasn’t going to be caught fighting a girl in a churchyard.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa! ” he said. “Stop. Just stop. ”

“Now I’m here, ” she said, clinging precariously to her composure, “now I’m here, and we are going to talk. You are going to deal with me. ”

Now that he had a closer look at her he could see she was covered in warning signs. Her whole body screamed unbalance. She was too pale and too thin. Her eyes were too wild. Her long dark hair was lank and smelled unwashed. She was dressed in a raggedy goth outfit—her arms were wrapped in what looked like black electrical tape. There were scabby red scratches on the backs of her hands.

He almost didn’t recognize her.

“I was there, and you were there, ” Julia said, locking eyes with him. “Weren’t you. In that place. That school, or whatever it was. You got in, didn’t you? ”

He got it then. She had been at the Exam after all, he hadn’t been mistaken, but she hadn’t made the cut. They’d culled her in the first round, during the written test.

But this was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to happen, there were safeguards against it. Anybody who flunked the Exam was supposed to have their memory gently, lovingly clouded by a faculty member and then overwritten with a plausible alibi. It wasn’t simple, nor was it outrageously ethical, but the spells were humane and well understood. Except in her case they hadn’t worked, or not completely.

“Julia, ” he said. Their faces were very close together. There was nicotine on her breath. “Julia, what are you doing here? ”

“Don’t pretend with me, don’t you dare pretend! You go to that school, don’t you? The magic school? ”

Quentin kept his face blank. It was a basic rule at Brakebills not to discuss the school with outsiders. He could get expelled. But whatever, if Fogg screwed up the memory spells it wasn’t Quentin’s problem. And this was Julia. Her lovely freckly face, so close to his, looked much older. Her skin was blotchy. She was in agony.

“All right, ” he said. “Okay. Sure. I go there. ”

“I knew it! ” she shrieked. She stamped her booted foot on the graveyard grass. From her reaction he guessed that she’d been at least halfway bluffing. “I knew it was real, I knew it was real, ” she said, mostly to herself. “I knew it wasn’t a dream! ” She bent over, with her hands over her face, and one convulsive sob escaped her.

Quentin took a deep breath. He readjusted his jacket.

“Listen, ” he said gently. She was still doubled over. He bent down, putting a hand on her narrow back. “Julia. You’re not supposed to remember any of that stuff. They’re supposed to make you forget if you don’t get in. ”

“But I should have! ” She straightened up with the flashing red eyes and cold crystal seriousness of the true nutjob. “I was supposed to get in. I know I was. It was a mistake. Believe me, it was. ” Her large eyes tried to burn into his. “I’m like you, I can do real magic. I’m like you. See? That’s why they couldn’t make me forget. ”

Quentin saw. He could see everything. No wonder she’d been so altered the last time he saw her. That one glimpse through the curtain, of the world behind the world, had knocked her completely out of orbit. She’d seen it once, and she couldn’t let go. Brakebills had ruined her.

There was a time when he would have done anything for her. And he still would, he just didn’t know what to do. Why did he feel so guilty? He took a deep breath.

“But that’s not how it works. Even if you really can do magic, that wouldn’t make you any more resistant to memory spells than anybody else. ”

She was staring at him hungrily. Everything he was saying just confirmed what she wanted to believe: that magic was real. He backed away, just to put some distance between them, but she grabbed his sleeve.

“Oh, no-no-no-no-no, ” she said with a brittle smile. “Q. Please. Wait. No. You’re going to help me. That’s why I came here. ”

She had dyed her hair black. It looked dry and burnt.

“Julia, I want to. I just don’t know what I can do. ”

“Just watch this. Watch. ”

She let go of his arm, reluctantly, as if she expected him to vanish or run away the instant she did. Incredibly, Julia launched into a basically correct version of a simple Basque optical spell called Ugarte’s Prismatic Spray.

She must have found it online. Some genuine magical information did circulate in the straight world, mostly on the Internet, though it was buried in so much bogus crap that nobody could tease out the real stuff, even if they could have used it. Quentin had even seen a Brakebills blazer for sale on eBay. It was extremely rare, but not unheard of, for civilians to work up a spell or two on their own, but as far as Quentin knew they never got into anything serious. Real magicians called them hedge witches. A few of them had careers as stage magicians, or set themselves up as cult demi-deities, gathering around themselves congregations of Wiccans and Satanists and oddball Christian outliers.

Julia proclaimed the words of the spell theatrically, overarticulating like she was doing summer-stock Shakespeare. She had no idea what she was doing. Quentin glanced nervously at the doorway at the back of the church.

“Look! ” She held up her hand defiantly. The spell had actually worked, sort of. Her bitten-down fingertips left faint radiant rainbow trails in the air. She waved them around, making mystical gestures like an interpretive dancer. Ugarte’s Prismatic Spray was a totally useless spell. Quentin felt a pang when he thought about how many months, if not years, it must have cost her to figure it out.

“See? ” she demanded, close to tears. “You see it too, right? It’s not too late for me. I won’t go back to college. Tell them. Tell them I could still come. ”

“Does James know? ”

She shook her head tightly. “He wouldn’t understand. I don’t see him anymore. ”

He wanted to help her, but there was no way to. It was far, far too late. Better to be blunt about it. This could have been me, he thought. This was almost me.

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do, ” he said. “It’s not up to me. I’ve never heard of them changing their minds—no one ever gets a second Exam. ”

But Alice got an Exam, he thought, even though she wasn’t Invited.

“You could tell them, though. You can’t decide, but you can tell them I’m here, right? That I’m still out here? You can at least do that! ”

She grabbed his arm again, and he had to mutter a quick counterspell to snuff out the Prismatic Spray. That stuff could eat into fabric.

“Just tell them you saw me, ” she said urgently, her eyes full of dying hope. “Please. I’ve been practicing. You can teach me. I’ll be your apprentice. I’ll do whatever you need. I have an aunt who lives in Winchester, I can live with her.

“Or what do you need, Quentin? ” She moved closer to him, just slightly, so that her knee touched his knee. In spite of himself he felt the old electrical field form between them. She hazarded a curvy, sardonic smile, letting the moment hang in the air. “Maybe we can help each other. You used to want my help. ”

He was angry at himself for being tempted. He was angry at the world for being this way. He wanted to yell obscenities. It would have been terrible to see anybody scrape the bottom like this, but her. . . it should have been anybody but her. She has already seen more unhappiness, Quentin thought, than I will ever see in my life.

“Listen to me, ” he said. “Julia. If I tell them, they’re just going to find you and wipe your memory. For real this time. ”

“They can try, ” she snarled, suddenly fierce. “They tried once already. ”

She breathed hard through pinched white nostrils.

“Just tell me where it is. Where we were. I’ve been looking for it. Just tell me where the school is, and I’ll leave you alone. ”

Quentin could only imagine the kind of shit he’d be in if Julia showed up at the House hell-bent on matriculating and dropped his name.

“It’s in upstate New York. On the Hudson somewhere, I don’t know exactly where. I really don’t. It’s near West Point. They make it invisible. Even I don’t know how to find it. But I’ll tell them about you, if that’s truly what you want. ”

He was just making it worse. Maybe he should have bluffed her after all, he thought. Tried harder to lie. Too late.

She put her arms around him, as if she were too exhausted by relief and despair to stand anymore, and he held her. There was a time when this was everything he wanted.

“They couldn’t make me forget, ” she whispered into his chest. “Do you understand that? They couldn’t make me forget. ”

He could feel her heart beating, and the word he heard when it beat was shame, shame, shame. He wondered why they hadn’t taken her. If anybody should have gone to Brakebills, it was her, not him. But they really would wipe her memory, he thought. Fogg would make sure this time. She’d be happier that way anyway. She could get back on track, go back to college, get back together with James, get on with her life. It would all be for the best.

By next morning he was back at Brakebills. The others were already there; they were surprised he’d lasted as long as he did. The most any of them had spent at home was forty-eight hours. Eliot hadn’t gone home at all.

It was cool and quiet in the Cottage. Quentin felt safe again. He was back where he belonged. Eliot was in the kitchen with a dozen eggs and a bottle of brandy, trying to make flips, which nobody wanted but which he was determined to make anyway. Josh and Janet were playing an idiotic card game called Push—it was basically the magical equivalent of War—that was wildly popular at Brakebills. Quentin just used it as a chance to show off his card-handling skills, which was why nobody ever wanted to play with him anymore.

While they played Janet told the story of Alice’s Antarctic ordeal, despite the fact that everybody except Quentin had heard it already, and Alice herself was right there in the room, silently paging through an old herbal in the window seat. Quentin didn’t know how he would feel about seeing Alice again, after he’d made such a comprehensive mess of their last conversation, but to his amazed relief, and despite every possible reason to the contrary, it wasn’t awkward at all. It was perfect. His heart clenched with silent happiness when he saw her.

“And then when Mayakovsky tried to give her the bag of sheep fat, she threw it back in his face! ”

“I meant to hand it back to him, ” Alice said quietly from the window seat. “But it was so cold and I was shaking so badly, I sort of flung it at him. He was all ‘chyort vozmi! ’ ”

“Why didn’t you just take it? ”

“I don’t know. ” She put the book down. “I’d made all these plans for getting by without it, it just threw me off. Plus I wanted him to stop looking at me naked. And anyway I didn’t know he was going to have mutton fat for us. I hadn’t even prepared the Chkhartishvili. ”

That was a white lie. Like Alice couldn’t have cast Chkhartishvili cold. He had missed her so much.

“So what did you do for heat? ” he said.

“I tried using some of those German thermogenesis charms, but they kept fading away whenever I fell asleep. By the second night I was waking myself up every fifteen minutes just to make sure I was still alive. By the third day I was losing my mind. So I ended up using a tweaked Miller Flare. ”

“I don’t get it. ” Josh frowned. “How is that supposed to help? ”

“If you kind of mangle it a little it becomes inefficient. The extra energy comes out as heat instead of light. ”

“You know you could have cooked yourself by accident? ” Janet said.

“I know. But when I realized the German thing wasn’t going to work, I couldn’t think of anything else. ”

“I think I saw you once, ” Quentin said quietly. “At night. ”

“You couldn’t have missed me. I looked like a road flare. ”

“A naked road flare, ” Josh said.

Eliot came in with a tureen full of viscous, unappetizing flip and began ladling it into teacups. Alice picked up her book and headed for the stairs.

“Hang on, I’m coming back with the hot ones! ” Eliot called, busily grating nutmeg.

Quentin didn’t hang on. He followed Alice.

At first he’d thought everything would be different between him and Alice. Then he thought everything was back to normal. Now he understood that he didn’t want things to be back to normal. He couldn’t stop looking at her, even after she’d looked at him, seen him looking at her, and looked away in embarrassment again. It was like she’d become charged in some way that drew him to her uncontrollably. He could sense her naked body inside her dress, smell it like a vampire smells blood. Maybe Mayakovsky hadn’t quite managed to get all the fox out of him.

He found her in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was lying on one of a pair of twin beds, on top of the bedspread, reading. It was dim and hot. The roof slanted in at an odd angle. The room was full of odd, old furniture—a wicker chair with a staved-in seat, a dresser with a stuck drawer—and it had deep red wallpaper that didn’t match any other room in the house. Quentin yanked up the window halfway—it made an outraged squawk—and flopped down on the other twin bed.

“Can you believe they have these here? It’s a full set—they were in the bookcase in the bathroom. ” She held up the book she was reading. Incredibly, it was an old copy of The World in the Walls.

“I had that exact same edition. ” The cover showed Martin Chatwin halfway through the old grandfather clock, with his feet still in this world and his amazed head poking into Fillory, which was drawn as a groovy 1970s disco winter wonderland.

“I haven’t looked at them for years. God, remember the Cozy Horse? That big velvet horse that would just carry you around? I wanted one so badly when I was that age. Did you read them? ”

Quentin wasn’t sure how much to reveal about his Fillory obsession.

“I may have taken a look. ”

Alice smirked and went back to the book. “Why is it that you still think you can keep secrets from me? ”

Quentin folded his hands behind his head and lay back on the pillow and looked up at the low, tilted ceiling. This wasn’t right. There was something brother-sister about it.

“Here. Budge over. ”

He switched beds and lay down next to Alice, hip-checking her sideways to make room on the narrow bed. She held up the paperback, and they read together silently for a few pages. Their shoulders and upper arms touched. Quentin felt like the bed was on a train moving very fast, and if he looked out the window he’d see the landscape racing past. They were both breathing very carefully.

“I never got it about the Cozy Horse, ” Quentin said after a while. “First of all, there’s only one of it. Is there a whole herd of Cozy Horses somewhere? And then it’s too useful. You’d think somebody would have domesticated it by now. ”

She whacked his head with the spine, not completely gently.

“Somebody evil. You can’t break the Cozy Horse, the Cozy Horse is a free spirit. Anyway it’s too big. I always figured it was mechanical—somebody made it somehow. ”

“Like who? ”

“I don’t know. A magician. Somebody in the past. Anyway the Cozy Horse is a girl thing. ”

Janet stuck her head in. Apparently the exodus downstairs was general.

“Ha! ” Janet brayed. “I can’t believe you’re reading that. ”

Alice scooched an inch away from him, instinctively, but he didn’t move.

“Like you didn’t, ” Quentin said.

“Of course I did! When I was nine I made my family call me ‘Fiona’ for two weeks. ”

She vanished, leaving behind a comfortable, echoless silence. The room was cooling down as hot air ascended out through the half-open window. Quentin imagined it rising in an invisible braided plume into the blue summer day.

“Did you know there really was a Chatwin family? ” he asked. “In real life? Supposedly they lived next door to Plover. ”

Alice nodded. She unscooched now that Janet was gone. “It’s sad though. ”

“Sad how. ”

“Well, do you know what happened to them? ”

Quentin shook his head.

“There’s a book about it. Most of them grew up to be pretty boring. Housewives and insurance magnates and whatnot. I think one of the boys married an heiress. I know one got killed in World War Two. But you know the thing about Martin? ”

Quentin shook his head.

“Well, you know how he disappears in the book? He really did disappear. He ran away or had an accident or something. One day after breakfast he just vanished, and they never saw him again. ”

“The real Martin? ”

“The real Martin. ”

“God. That is sad. ”

He tried to imagine it, a big fresh-faced, floppy-haired English family—he pictured them in a sepia-toned family portrait, in tennis whites—suddenly with a gaping hole opening in the middle of it. The somber announcement. The slow, decorous acceptance. The lingering damage.

“It makes me think of my brother, ” Alice said.

“I know. ”

At this she looked at him sharply. He looked back. It was true, he did know.

He propped himself up on one elbow so he could look down at her, the air around him whirling with excited dust motes. “When I was little, ” he said slowly, “and even when I was not so little, I used to envy Martin. ”

She smiled up at him.

“I know. ”

“Because I thought he’d finally done it. I know it was supposed to be a tragedy, but to me it was like he broke the bank, beat the system. He got to stay in Fillory forever. ”

“I know. I get it. ” She put a restraining hand on his chest. “That’s what makes you different from the rest of us, Quentin. You actually still believe in magic. You do realize, right, that nobody else does? I mean, we all know magic is real. But you really believe in it. Don’t you. ”

He felt flustered. “Is that wrong? ”

She nodded and smiled even more brightly. “Yes, Quentin. It’s wrong. ”

He kissed her, softly at first. Then he got up and locked the door.

And that’s how it started, though of course it had been starting for a long time. At first it was like they were getting away with something, as if they half expected someone or something to stop them. When nothing happened, and there were no consequences, they lost control—they ravenously, roughly pulled each other’s clothes off, not just out of desire for each other but out of a pure desire to lose control. It was like a fantasy. The sound of breathing and rustling cloth was thunderous in the little chaste bedroom. God only knew what they could hear downstairs. He wanted to push her, to see if she had it as bad as he did, to see how far she’d go and how far she’d let him go. She didn’t stop him. She pushed him ever further. It wasn’t his first time, or even his first time with Alice, technically, but this was different. This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals—because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.

They tried to be discreet about it—they barely even discussed it between themselves—but the others knew, and they came up with excuses to leave the two of them alone, and Quentin and Alice took them. Probably they were relieved that the tension between them was finally over. In its way the fact that Alice wanted Quentin as much as he wanted her was as much of a miracle as anything else he’d seen since he came to Brakebills, and no easier to believe, though he had no choice but to believe it. His love for Julia had been a liability, a dangerous force that lashed him to cold, empty Brooklyn. Alice’s love was so much more real, and it bound him finally and for good to his new life, his real life, at Brakebills. It fixed him here and nowhere else. It wasn’t a fantasy. It was flesh and blood.

And she understood that. She seemed to know everything about Quentin, everything he was thinking and feeling, sometimes before he did, and she wanted him in spite of it—because of it. Together they rudely colonized the upstairs at the Cottage, running back to the dorms only for indispensable personal items, and letting it be known that trespassers would be exposed to displays of mutual affection, verbal and otherwise, and the sight of their scattered underthings.

That wasn’t the only miraculous event that summer. Astoundingly, the three older Physical Kids had graduated from Brakebills. Even Josh, with his lousy grades. The official ceremony would happen in another week; it was a private affair to which the rest of the school was not invited. By tradition they would be allowed to stay at Brakebills for the rest of the summer, but after that they would be ushered out into the world.

Quentin was stunned by this turn of events. They all were. It was hard to imagine life at Brakebills without them; it was hard for Quentin to imagine life after Brakebills at all. There hadn’t been much discussion of what they were going to do next, or at least not around Quentin.

It wasn’t necessarily a cause for alarm. The passage from Brakebills to the outside world was a well-traveled one. There was an extensive network of magicians operating in the wider world, and, being magicians, they were in no danger of starving. They could do more or less whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t interfere with one another. The real problem was figuring out to their own satisfaction what that was. Some of the student body went into public service—quietly promoting the success of humanitarian causes, or subtly propping up the balance of various failing ecosystems, or participating in the governance of magical society, such as it was. A lot of people just traveled, or created magical artworks, or staged elaborate sorcerous war games. Others went into research: many magical schools (although not Brakebills) offered programs of post-graduate study, with various advanced degrees conferred at the end. Some students even chose to matriculate at a regular, nonmagical university. The application of conventional science, chemistry especially, to magical techniques was a hot field. Who knew what exotic spells you could create using the new trans uranic elements?

“I was thinking of trying to talk to the Thames dragon about it, ” Eliot said airily one afternoon. They were sitting on the floor in the library. It was too hot for chairs.

“The who? ” Quentin said.

“You think he would see you? ” Josh asked.

“You never know till you ask. ”

“Wait a minute, ” Quentin said. “Who or what is the Thames dragon? ”

“The Thames dragon, ” Eliot said. “You know. The dragon who lives in the Thames. I’m sure he has another name, a dragon name, but I doubt we could pronounce it. ”

“What are you saying. ” Quentin looked around for help. “An actual dragon? Are you saying there are real dragons? ” He hadn’t quite reached the point where he always knew when he was being made fun of.

“Come on, Quentin, ” Janet scoffed. They’d gotten to the part of Push where they flipped cards across the room into a hat. They were using a mixing bowl from the kitchen.

“I’m not kidding. ”

“You really don’t know? Didn’t you read the McCabe? ” Alice looked at him incredulously. “It was in Meerck’s class. ”

“No, I did not read the McCabe, ” Quentin said. He didn’t know whether to be angry or excited. “You could have just told me there were real dragons. ”

She sniffed. “It never came up. ”

Apparently there really were such things as dragons, though they were rare, and most of them were water dragons, solitary creatures who rarely broke the surface and spent a lot of their time asleep, buried in river mud. There was one—no more—in each of the world’s major rivers, and being smart and practically immortal, they tended to stash away all kinds of odd bits of wisdom. The Thames dragon was not as sociable as the Ganges dragon, the Mississippi dragon, or the Neva dragon, but it was said to be much smarter and more interesting. The Hudson River had a dragon of its own—it spent most of its time curled up in a deep, shadowy eddy less than a mile from the Brakebills boathouse. It hadn’t been seen for almost a century. The largest and oldest known dragon was a colossal white who lived coiled up inside a huge freshwater aquifer under the Antarctic ice cap, and who had never once in recorded history spoken to anyone, not even its own kind.

“But you really think the Thames dragon is going to give you free career advice? ” Josh said.

“Oh, I don’t know, ” Eliot said. “Dragons are so weird about these things. You want to ask them deep, profound questions, like where does magic come from, or are there aliens, or what are the next ten Mersenne primes, and half the time they just want to play Chinese checkers. ”

“I love Chinese checkers! ” Janet said.

“Well, okay, maybe you should go talk to the Thames dragon, ” Eliot said irritably.

“Maybe I will, ” she said happily. “I think we’d have a lot to talk about. ”

Quentin felt like all the Physical Kids were falling in love with each other, not just him and Alice, or at least with who they were when they were around each other. In the mornings they slept late. In the afternoons they played pool and boated on the Hudson and interpreted each other’s dreams and debated meaningless points of magical technique. They discussed the varying intensities and timbres of their hangovers. There was an ongoing competition, hotly contested, as to who could make the single most boring observation.

Josh was teaching himself to play the rinky-tink upright piano in the upstairs hallway, and they lay on the grass and listened to his halting rendition of “Heart and Soul, ” over and over and over again. It should have been annoying, but somehow it wasn’t.

By this point they had thoroughly co-opted the butler, Chambers, who regularly furnished them with extra-special bottles from the Brakebills cellars, which were overcrowded anyway and needed to be drunk up. Eliot was the only one with any real sophistication in oenological matters, and he tried to teach the rest of them, but Quentin’s tolerance was low, and he refused to spit as a matter of principle, so he just ended up getting drunk every night and forgetting whatever he was supposed to be learning and starting over from scratch the next night. Every morning when he woke up it seemed impossible that he could ever consume another drop of alcohol, but that conviction had always evaporated by five o’clock in the afternoon.

EMILY GREENSTREET

One afternoon all five of them were sitting cross-legged in a circle in the vast empty middle of the Sea. It was a baking hot summer day, and they had gone out there with the intention of attempting a ridiculously elaborate piece of collaborative magic, a five-person spell that, if it worked, would sharpen their vision and hearing and increase their physical strength for a couple of hours. It was Viking magic, battlefield magic designed for a raiding party, and as far as any of them knew it hadn’t been tried in roughly a millennium. Josh, who was directing their efforts, confessed that he wasn’t completely sure it had ever worked in the first place. Those Viking shamans did a lot of for empty boasting.

They had started drinking early, over lunch. Even though Josh said everything was ready at noon—done deal, good to go, let’s hook it up—by the time he actually gave them their handouts, spiral-ring pages of Old Norse chants scratched out in ballpoint in Josh’s neat, tiny runic script, and prepared the ground by pouring out a weaving, branching knot in black sand on the grass, it was almost four. There was singing involved, and neither Janet nor Quentin could carry a tune, and they kept cracking each other up and having to start over.

Finally they got all the way through it, and they sat around staring at the grass and the sky and the backs of their hands and the clock tower in the distance, trying to tell if anything was different. Quentin jogged to the edge of the forest to pee, and when he got back Janet was talking about somebody named Emily Greenstreet.

“Don’t tell me you knew her, ” Eliot said.

“I didn’t. But remember I roomed with that cow Emma Curtis during First Year? I was talking to her cousin last week when I was home, she lives near my parents in L. A. She was here then. Told me the whole story. ”

“Really. ”

“And now you’re going to tell us, ” Josh said.

“It’s all a big secret, though. You can’t tell anybody. ”

“Emma wasn’t a cow, ” Josh said. “Or if she was she was a hot cow. She’s like one of those wagyu cows. Did she ever pay you back for that dress she threw up on? ” He was lying on his back, staring up into the cloudless sky. He didn’t seem to care if the spell had worked or not.

“No, she didn’t. And now she’s gone to Tajikistan or something to save the vanishing Asiatic grasshopper. Or something. Cow. ”

“Who’s Emily Greenstreet? ” Alice asked.

“Emily Greenstreet, ” Janet said grandly, savoring the rich, satisfying piece of gossip she was about to impart, “was the first person to leave Brakebills voluntarily in one hundred fifty years. ”

Her words floated up and drifted away like cigarette smoke in the warm summer air. It was hot out in the middle of the Sea, with no shade, but they were all too lazy to move.

“She came to Brakebills about eight years ago. I think she was from Connecticut, but not fancy Connecticut, with the money and the Kennedy cousins and the Lyme disease. I think she was from New Haven, or Bridgeport. She was quiet, sort of mousy-looking—”

“How do you know she was mousy-looking? ” Josh asked.

“Sh! ” Alice whacked Josh on the arm. “Don’t antagonize her. I want to hear the story. ” They were all lying on a stripy blanket spread out over the ruins of Josh’s sand pattern.

“I know because Emma’s cousin told me. Anyway, it’s my story, and if I say she was mousy, then she had a tail and she lived on Swiss fucking cheese.

“Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins or chicken-pox scars, or their glasses are too big. I know I’m being mean. But you know, they’re just sort of at the edge of everything.

“She was a good student. She kept busy and got by in her boring little way until her Third Year, when she finally distinguished herself by falling in love with one of her professors.

“Everybody does it, of course. Or at least the girls do, since we all have daddy complexes. But usually it’s just a crush, and we get over it and move on to some loser guy our own age. But not our Emily. She was deeply, passionately, delusionally in love. Wuthering Heights love. She stood outside his window at night. She drew little pictures of him in class. She looked at the moon and cried. She drew little pictures of the moon in class and cried at them.

“She become moody and depressed. She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus in the original whatever. Her eyes became interestingly pouchy and sunken. She started hanging out at Woof. ”

All groaned. Woof was a fountain in the Maze; its official name was Van Pelt, after an eighteenth-century Dean, but it depicted Romulus and Remus suckling from a she-wolf with many dangling wolf-boobs, hence Woof. It was the chosen hangout of the goths and the artsy crowd.

“Now she had a Secret, capital S, and ironically it made her more attractive to people, because they wanted to know what her Secret was. And sure enough, before long a boy, some deeply unfortunate boy, fell in love with her.

“She didn’t love this boy back, since she was savin’ all her lovin’ for Professor Sexyman, but he made her feel pretty damn good, since nobody had ever been in love with her before. She strung him along and flirted with him in public in the hope that it would make her real love interest jealous.

“Now we turn to the third point in our little triangle of love. By all rights the professor should have been completely impervious to our Emily’s charms. He should have had an avuncular little chuckle over it in the Senior Common Room and then forgotten about it. She wasn’t even that hot. Maybe he was having a midlife crisis, maybe he thought a liaison with Ms. Greenstreet could restore to him some of his long-vanished youth. Who knows. He was married, too, the idiot.

“We’ll never know exactly what happened or how far it went, except that it went too far, and then Professor Sexyman came to his senses, or got what he wanted, and he called it off.

“Needless to say our Emily became even gothier and weepier and more like a Gorey drawing than she already was, and her boy became even more besotted and brought her presents and flowers and was Supportive.

“Maybe you knew this, I don’t know, I didn’t, but Woof used to be different from the other fountains. That’s why the doomers started hanging out there in the first place. You wouldn’t notice what was off about it, at first, but after a while you’d realize that when you looked into it, you wouldn’t see your own reflection, just empty sky. And maybe if the sky was cloudy on that particular day, the sky in the fountain would be blue, or the other way around. It definitely wasn’t a normal reflection. And every once in a while you’d look into it and you’d see other faces looking up at you, looking puzzled, as if they were looking into some other fountain somewhere else and were weirded out because they were seeing your face and not their own. Somebody must have figured out a way to switch the reflections in two fountains, but who did it and why, and how, and why the Dean didn’t change them back, I have no idea.

“You have to wonder, too, if it was more than just the reflections—if you could dive down into one pool and come up in the other one, in this world or some other world. There’s always been something off about those fountains. Did you know they were here before Brakebills? They built the school to be near them, and not the other way around. Or that’s what people say. ”

Eliot snorted.

“Well that’s what people say, darling. Anyway, ” Janet went on, “the thing is, Emily started spending a lot of time at Woof, just smoking and hanging out, and I guess mooning over her little affair. She spent so much time there that she started to recognize one of the faces in the fountain. Somebody like her, who was spending a lot of time at the other fountain, the one in the reflection. Let’s call her Doris. After a while Emily and Doris got to noticing each other. They’d acknowledge each other, a little wave, you know, just to be polite. Probably Doris was a little mopey, too. They got to feeling like kindred spirits.

“Emily and Doris worked out a way to communicate. Again, the exact details have eluded your intrepid correspondent. Maybe they held up signs or something. They must have had to be in mirror writing, to make sense as reflections, or am I getting that wrong?

“I don’t know how things worked in Woofland, where Doris lived, maybe magic is different there. Or maybe Doris was fucking with our Emily, maybe she was sick of hearing Emily whine about her love life. Maybe there was something really wrong with Doris, maybe she was something genuinely evil. But one day Doris suggested that if Emily wanted her lover back, maybe her appearance was the problem, and she should try changing it? ”

A chill settled over the group, where they lay on the sun-warm turf. Even Quentin knew that using magic to alter one’s physical appearance never ended well. In the world of magical theory it was a dead spot: something about the inextricable, recursive connection between your face and who you were—your soul, for lack of a better word—made it hellishly difficult and fatally unpredictable. When Quentin had first gotten to Brakebills, he’d wondered why everybody didn’t just make themselves ridiculously good-looking. He’d looked at the kids with an obviously flawed feature—like Gretchen with her leg, or Eliot with his twisted jaw—and wondered why they didn’t get somebody to fix them up, like Hermione with her teeth in Harry Potter. But in reality it always ended in disaster.

“Poor Emily, ” Janet said. “When she took down the spell that Doris taught her through the fountain, she actually thought she’d found it, the secret technique everybody else had missed. It was elaborate and costly, but it really looked like it might work. After a few weeks of laying the groundwork, she put it together one night by herself in her room.

“How do you think she felt when she looked in the mirror and saw what she’d done to herself? ” You could almost hear a note of genuine sympathy in Janet’s hard voice. “I can’t imagine. I really can’t. ”

It was late enough in the afternoon now that the shadows from the forest had almost stretched out from the western edge of the Sea far enough to lap at the edge of their blanket.

“Must have been she could still talk, because she got word to her boy that she was in trouble, and he came to her room, and after much preliminary whispering through the keyhole she let him in. And we have to give our boy credit. It must have been bad, very bad, but he stuck by her. She wouldn’t let him go to the faculty—Dunleavy was still Dean, and she would have kicked Emily out without thinking about it.

“So he told her to stay there, don’t move, don’t do anything to make it worse, he would go to the library and see what he could find.

“He came back just before dawn, thinking he had it pretty much worked out. You can imagine the scene. They’d both been up all night. They’re sitting cross-legged on her little bed, her with her scrambled head, him with about eight books open around him on the covers. He’s mixed up a few reagents in cereal bowls from the dining hall. She’s leaning what’s left of her forehead against the wall, trying to keep cool. The blue in the window is getting brighter and brighter, they’ve got to take care of this soon. She’d probably gone past panic and regret at this point. But not past hope.

“But then think about his state of mind. In a way, for him, it was the perfect thing to have happen. This is his golden moment, his chance to be the hero, to save her and win her love, or at least some pity sex. It’s his chance to be strong for her, which is the only thing he’s ever wanted to do.

“But I don’t know, I think he’d had enough time at this point, maybe he’d figured out what was really going on. I’m guessing the dime had finally dropped. She’d taken a terrible chance, and he had to know she hadn’t done it for him.

“Either way he was in no shape to be doing major wizardry. He was tired and scared and in over his head, and I think his heart must have been broken a little, too. Maybe he just wanted it too badly. He launched into the repair spell, which I happen to know which one it was, it was from the Major Arcana, Renaissance stuff. Big energies. It got away from him in the worst possible way. It took him over, took his body away. Right in front of her eyes, he burned up screaming. Blue fire. He became a niffin. ”

That’s what Fogg was talking about that night in the infirmary, Quentin thought. About losing control. Apparently the others knew what the word meant, niffin. They stared at Janet like they’d been turned to stone.

“Well. Emily freaked out, I mean freaked out. Barricaded the door, wouldn’t let anybody in until her beloved professor himself showed up. By that point the whole school was awake. I can only imagine how he felt, since in a way the whole thing was his fault. He can’t have been too proud of himself. I suppose he would have had to try to banish the niffin if it didn’t want to leave. I don’t know if even he could have. I don’t think those things really have an upper limit.

“Anyway, he kept his head, kept everybody else out of the room. He put her face back, right there on the spot, which cannot have been easy. Whatever else he was he must have been some magician, because that spell that came through the fountain, that was a nasty piece of work. And she probably twisted it up even more in the casting, too. But he parsed it on the fly and made her reasonably presentable, though I hear she’s never been quite the way she was. Not like she’s deformed or anything, just different. Probably if you hadn’t met her you would never know.

“And that’s pretty much it. I can’t even imagine what they told the boy’s parents. I hear he was from a magical family, so they probably got some version of the truth. But, you know, the clean version. ”

There was a long silence. A bell was clanging far away, a boat on the river. The shadow from the trees had flooded all the way over them, deliciously cool in the late-summer afternoon.

Alice cleared her throat. “What happened to the professor? ”

“You haven’t figured it out? ” Janet didn’t bother to conceal her glee. “They gave him a choice: resign in disgrace. . . or transfer to Antarctica. Brakebills South. Guess which one he took. ”

“Oh my God, ” Josh said. “It was Mayakovsky. ”

“That explains a hell of a lot, ” Quentin said.

“Doesn’t it though? Doesn’t it just? ”

“So what happened to Emily Greenstreet? ” Alice asked. “She just left school? ” There was a trace of ground steel in her voice. Quentin wasn’t totally sure where it was coming from. “What happened to her? Did they send her to a normal school? ”

“I hear she does something businessy in Manhattan, ” Janet said. “They set her up with an easy corporate job, I don’t know, management consulting or something. We own part of some big firm. Lots of magic to cover up the fact that she doesn’t do anything. She just sits in an office and surfs the Web all day. I think part of her just didn’t survive what happened, you know? ”

After that even Janet stopped talking. Quentin let himself drift among the clouds. He felt spinny from the wine, like the Earth had come untightened and was wobbling loose on its gimbaled base. Apparently he wasn’t the only one, because when Josh stood up after a few minutes he immediately lost his balance and fell over again on the turf. There was scattered applause.

But then he stood up again, steadied himself, did a slow, deep knee bend, and executed a perfect standing backflip. He stuck the landing and straightened up, beaming.

“It worked, ” he said. “I can’t believe it. I take back everything bad I ever said about Viking shamans! It fucking worked! ”

The spell had worked, though for some reason Josh was the only one who got anything out of it. As they picked up the picnic things and shook the sand out of the blanket, Josh did laps around the field, whooping and making huge superhero leaps in the fading light.

“I am a Viking warrior! Cower before my might! Cower! The strength of Thor and all his mighty hosts flows through me! And I fucked your mother! I. . . fucked. . . your. . . motherrrrrrrrrr! ”

“He’s so happy, ” Eliot said dryly. “It’s like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook. ”

Eventually Josh disappeared in search of other people to show off to, loudly singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic. ” Janet and Eliot straggled off in the direction of the Cottage, Alice and Quentin toward the House, sunburnt and sleepy and still half drunk. Quentin had already made up his mind to nap through dinner.

“He’s going to hurt somebody, ” he said. “Probably himself. ”

“There’s some damage resistance built in. Strengthening the skin and the skeleton. He could put his fist through a wall and probably not break anything. ”

“Probably. If he can, he will. ”

Alice was even more quiet than usual. It wasn’t until they were deep in the twilight alleys of the Maze that Quentin saw that her face was slick with tears. His heart went cold.

“Alice. Alice, sweetheart. ” He stopped and turned her to face him. “What is it? ”

She pressed her face miserably into his shoulder.

“Why did she have to tell that story? ” she said. “Why? Why is she like that? ”

Quentin immediately felt guilty for having enjoyed it. It was a horrible story. But there was something irresistibly gothic about it, too.

“She’s just a gossip, ” he said. “She doesn’t mean anything. ”

“Doesn’t she? ” She pulled back, fiercely wiping her tears with the backs of her hands. “Doesn’t she? I always thought my brother died in a car crash. ”

“Your brother? ” Quentin froze. “I don’t understand. ”

“He was eight years older than me. My parents told me he died in a car crash. But that was him, I’m sure it was. ”

“I don’t understand. You think he was that boy in the story? ”

She nodded. “I think he was. I know he was. ” Her eyes were red and rubbed with rage and hurt.

“Jesus. Look, it’s just a story. There’s no way she could know. ”

“She knows. ” Alice kept walking. “It all works out, the timing of it. And he was like that. Charlie—he was always falling in love with people. He would have tried to save her himself. He would have done that. ” She shook her head bitterly. “He was stupid that way. ”

“Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe Janet didn’t realize it was him. ”

“That’s what she wants everybody to think! So you won’t realize what a howling cunt she is! ”

Howling was a big word at Brakebills that year. Quentin was about to keep defending Janet when something else clicked.

“That’s why you weren’t Invited here, ” he said quietly. “It has to be. Because of what happened to your brother. ”

She nodded, her eyes unfocused now, her relentless brain chewing away at this wrinkle, fitting other things into the bleak new picture it created.

“They didn’t want anything to happen to me. As if it would. God, why is everybody else in the world but us so fucking stupid? ”

They stopped a few yards short of the edge of the Maze, in the deep shadow that pooled where the hedges grew close together, as if they couldn’t face the daylight again, not quite yet.

“At least now I know, ” she said. “But why did she tell that story, Q? She knew it would hurt me. Why would she do that? ”

He shook his head. The idea of conflict within their little clique made him uncomfortable. He wanted to explain it away. He wanted everything to be perfect.

“She’s just bitter, ” he said finally, “because you’re the pretty one. ”

Alice snorted.

“She’s bitter because we’re happy, ” she said, “and she’s in love with Eliot. Always has been. And he doesn’t love her. ”

She started walking again.

“What? Wait. ” Quentin shook his head, as if that would make all the pieces fit together again. “Why would she want Eliot? ”

“Because she can’t have him? ” Alice said bitterly, without looking back at him. “And she has to have everything? I’m surprised she hasn’t come after you. What, you think she hasn’t slept with Josh? ”

They left the Maze and climbed the stairs to the rear terrace, lit by the yellow light coming through the French doors and littered with premature autumn leaves. Alice cleaned herself up as best she could with the heels of her hands. She didn’t wear much makeup anyway. Quentin stood by and silently handed her tissues to blow her nose with, adrift in his own thoughts. It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view.

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