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CHAPTER 1

The letter had said to meet in a bookstore

It wasn’tand cold but not quite cold enough for snow It wasn’t much of a bookstore either Quentin spent fifteen e of the e the asphalt shine in the streetlights Not one of your charer cat on the sill and a shelf of rare signed first editions and an eccentric, bewhiskered proprietor behind the counter This was just another strip- chain, squeezed in between a nail salon and a Party City, twenty minutes outside Hackensack off the New Jersey Turnpike

Satisfied, Quentin crossed the parking lot The enormous bearded cashier didn’t look up froled Inside you could still hear the noise of cars on the wet road, like long strips of paper tearing, one after another The only unexpected touch was a wire birdcage in one corner, but where you would have expected a parrot or a cockatoo inside there was a fat blue-black bird instead That’s how un-chare

Quentin didn’t care It was a bookstore, and he felt at hoto enjoy it He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses stea on the thin carpet It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home

The store should have been eht, but instead it was full of people They browsed the shelves silently, each one on his or her own, sloandering the aisles like sleepwalkers A jewel-faced girl with a pixie cut was reading Dante in Italian A tall boy with large curious eyes who couldn’t have been older than sixteen was absorbed in a Toed black raphies through thick, iridescent glasses You would alht they’d come there to buy books But Quentin knew better

He wondered if it would be obvious, if he would know right away, or if there would be a trick to it If they’d —he’d be thirty this year—but this particular game was new to him

At least it arlasses and wiped theo, the price of a lifeti fine print, and they were still an unfamiliar presence on his face: a windshield between hi sain When he put theirl-next-door pretty, if you happened to live next door to a grad student in astrophysics She was standing in a corner paging through a big, expensive architectural-looking volus: vast shadowy vaults and cellars and prisons, haunted by great wooden engines

Quentin knew her Her na her eyebrows in —you’re in on this thing too?

He shook his head once, very slightly, and looked away, keeping his face carefully blank Not to say no, I’s and their trenchant commentary on the little ironies of everyday life What he meant was: let’s pretend we don’t know each other

It was looking like he had so the spines for so to read The Fillory books were there, of course, shelved in the young adult section, repackaged and rebranded with slick new covers that made them look like supernatural roht now Not tonight, not here He took down a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold instead and spent ten contented ray 1950s Berlin

“Attention, Bookbuh the store was sh that Quentin could hear his unamplified voice perfectly clearly “Attention! Bookbu in five minutes! Please make your final selections!”

He put the book back An old woht a copy of The Priht So not her The skinny kid who’d been ca the So not hinon hair and a face like a stu cards, pretty clearly overthinking his decision, finally bought one But he didn’t leave

At nine o’clock exactly the big cashier closed the door and locked it with a final, fateful jingle, and suddenly Quentin was all nerves He was on a carnival ride, and the safety bar had dropped, and noas too late to get off He took a deep breath and frowned at hio away The bird shuffled its feet in the seeds and droppings on the bottoe and squawked once It was a lonely kind of squawk, the kind you’d hear if you were out by yourself on a rainyin fast

The cashier walked to the back of the store—he had to excuse hiray metal door marked STAFF ONLY

“Through here”

He sounded bored, like he did this every night, which for all Quentin knew he did Now that he was standing up Quentin could see that he really was huge—six foot four or five and deep-chested Not pumped, but with broad shoulders and that aura of slow inexorability that naturally enored out on one side as if he’d been slightly overinflated He looked like a gourd

Quentin took the last spot in line He counted eight others, all of theerated care not to jostle one another, as if they ht explode on contact He worked a tiny revelation char weird about the door—he er and held it up to one eye like a monocle

“No ers at Quentin “Guy Hey No spells No ic”

Heads turned

“Sorry?”

Quentin played dumb Nobody called him Your Majesty anyuy yet He finished his inspection It was a door and nothing more

“Cut it out No ic”

Pushing his luck, Quentin turned and studied the clerk Through the lens he could see soht have been related to sexual performance The rest of hiae Weird

“Sure” He dropped his hands and the lens vanished “No problem”

Someone rapped on the pane A face appeared, indistinct through the wet glass The cashier shook his head, but whoever it was rapped again, harder

He sighed

“What the shit”

He unlocked the front door and after a whispered argu wet, red-faced but otherwise sportscaster-handsoht for the weather Quentin wondered where he’d et a sunburn in March

They all filed into the back rooer too; real estate must come cheap out here on the turnpike There were steel shelves craed with fluorescent-colored stickies; a couple of desks in one corner, the walls in front of theled with shift schedules and taped-up New Yorker cartoons; stacks of cardboard shipping boxes; a busted couch; a busted are—it must have doubled as the break room Half of it was just wasted space The back as a steel shutter that opened onto a loading dock

A handful of other people were co just as wary Quentin could see another bookstore behind theinger cat too He didn’t need ic to know that it wasn’t a door at all but a portal to soht a telltale hairline sea behind that wall in reality was Party City

Who were they all? Quentin had heard ruray-market cattle calls, work for hire, but he’d never seen one hio to one, not in a ht it would coes of the et in, or who’d lost their footing sos, all the way out to the cold ins of the real world All the way out to a strip s like this weren’t for people like him

Except now they were It had come to that He was one of the in a ic land, another world, but that was all over He’d been kicked out of Fillory, and he’d been kicked around a fair bit since then, and noas just another striver, trying to scraht and the warmth

Plulasses sat on the couch Red Face took the busted are Stoppard reader sat on boxes The rest of them stood—there were twelve, thirteen, fourteen in all The cashier shut the gray door behind the off the last of the noise from the outside world, and snuffed out the portal

He’d brought the birdcage with him; now he placed it on top of a cardboard box and opened it to let the crow out It looked around, shaking first one foot then the other the way birds do