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But nuclear winter was co cold, tainted snoas falling, and the earth was getting thirsty again, thirsty for balain, the blackness

Or really blackness would have been a relief, blackness would have been a field trip compared here she was headed, which was despair That stuff had no color She wished it were made of blackness, velvety soft blackness, that she could curl up and fall asleep in, but it was so much worse than that Think of it as the difference between zero and the e, not even zero These but the trappings and the suits of woe All these seeh,/Compared with me, who am their epitaph

December came, and the days shortened Snow quietened the traffic on Throop Avenue And then one day, St Lucy’s Day as it should happen, the day of the Donne poem, it all went down And when it did, it went down Western-style: a stranger caer, an Ivy League look Twenty-nine maybe, dark suit, dark hair pulled back and secured with crossed chopsticks A round face, baby fat, nerd glasses, but hard: there ht once have been a ti past As per Throop Avenue protocol, as soon as she was in the door the big gun stepped to her, the big gun being Julia

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

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

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

It took all of Julia’s pride not to run after her, shouting, "Take er!" She kneho that must have been That was one of the Others, the people who had a line on real ue had been to the source, where the spells came from Julia had known they were out there just by the way they perturbed the universe, like a black planet, and she’d been right Finally they’d shown themselves to her They’d tested her

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

It wasn’t till she got home that she found the card in her pocket It was blank, but a coe printed on it in Old Church Slavonic: Burn This She burned it in an ashtray, using not a siration spell but rather the forty-third-level one, which did basically the sa but did it in fourteenth position and in Old Church Slavonic

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

At last, Julia had been called The fat envelope had arrived This ti ti off

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

Speaking of letting people go, she duuist, on his pale and bony ass Call me when you finish that dissertation, porkpie

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

She rented a Peugeot that she would never return and drove north for an hour, negotiating a typically French rond-point every one hundred hty tie perché that clung vertiginously to the side of the Luberon Valley as if it had been plastered there with a trowel She rolled into sleepy, tiny Murs at three in the afternoon, in the heart of photogenic Provence

And lo and behold, it was a little geely light-e bleached-brown southern French stone It had one church and one castle and one hotel The streets were ly narrow Julia stopped the car in the town square and took in the heartbreaking World War I memorial Half of the dead had the same last name

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

"Hello Circe," he said "I’ at the boith Eliot the nexteastward into the unknown, into the rising sun, never knohat God or Fate or Magic was going to send rearing up at them over the horizon next, this now: this was much more like it This was the stuff

At first it had been hard to ado with it, but then suddenly it wasn’t Not with thealong under hi toto that part of his brain where dreams went--the kind of anxiety-ridden, fiendishly detailed dreah endless less plot twists, which delivered you ultimately to a fate not even of death but merely of permanent embarrassment Fillory had taken him back Welcome to the Quest for the Seven Keys Your adventure is already in progress

Bingle was atop the forecastle as usual, just like back in the day, but noas sparring vigorously with another swordsrile back and pressing his advantage The whole time he kept his wrist on his hip, swashbuckler-style The air rang with the loud scraping of steel on steel, like the gnashing of a huge pair of scissors

Their swords locked Stale each other on the shoulder and laughing--laughing!--about so an alternate-timeline version of himself, a timeline in which he’d stayed in Fillory and learned to hold his sword at full extension for ht Benedict’s eye, and Benedict saluted hiht white teeth Quentin saluted back They squared off again

Bingle had found his disciple

"Those guys are a"

He hadn’t heard Poppy co the action too

"Can you do that?" she asked

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

"It all still looks like a le did one of his signature gy over the side"

"I knoas going to take lessons with hi What happened?"

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

"Well, I can see nohy you wanted to coht it was funny before I rong"

Quentin had expected Poppy to be miserable on board the MuntjacAfter all, she’d effectively been abducted froht here It was an outrage to every principle she lived by

And all that was true, and she’d spent a day being outraged about it Well, half a day Poppy had spent yesterday afternoon sulking, then she showed up at breakfast thiswith a brand-new can-do attitude She just wasn’t teht, she’d been accidentally transported to a ical world that until recently she had understood to be fictional The situation wasn’t ideal But it hat she had to ith, so she would ith it She was a tough one, Poppy