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The kid looked confused His lips moved

“I don’t get it,” he said “Wouldn’t the C come last?”

“It’s a oes in the middle”

The Indian guy was rubbing his chin

“Chatwin” He was trying to place the name “Chatwin But isn’t that—?”

It sure is, Quentin thought, though he didn’t say anything He didn’t move a muscle It sure as hell is

Chatwin: that naht and the rain and the bird and the cards had By rights he should have gone the rest of his life without hearing it again It had no claim on hih

Except it seeood-bye and buried them and mourned them—the Chatwins, Fillory, Plover, Whitespire—but therethe The wound had healed, but the scar wouldn’t fade, not quite Quentin felt like an addict who’d just caught the faintest whiff of his drug of choice, the pure stuff, after a long ti on with a mixture of despair and anticipation

That naht, sent specifically for him, across tiht warm center of the world

CHAPTER 2

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way Quentin had tried to go straight

It started in the Neitherlands, the silent city of Italianate fountains and locked libraries that lies somehow behind and between everywhere else The fountains were really doorways to other worlds, and Quentin stood leaning against the one that led to Fillory He had just been forcibly ejected from it

He stood there for a long tihness of the stone rily solid The fountain was his last connection to his old life, the one where he’d been a king in a ical land He didn’t want it to be over; it wouldn’t really be over till he let go and walked away He could still have it for a little longer

But no, he couldn’t It was done He patted the fountain one h the ehtless and e who he was, but he wasn’t sure yet who he was going to be next His head was still full of the End of the World: the setting sun, the endless thin curving beach, the twocrescentoff the edge of Fillory, straight down to the Far Side of the World, down into her future

It was a new beginning for her, but he’d hit a dead end No more Fillory No further

Though he wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t notice how ed Before this it had always been quiet and serene, trapped under a bell jar of stillness and silence beneath a cloudy twilight sky But soods had coic, and in the crisis that followed the bell jar broke, and ti in Now the air sed clouds streamed by overhead, and patches of blue sky werepools of snow water was everywhere Reluctantly, resentfully, the Neitherlands was having its first spring

It was a season of wreckage and ruin All around Quentin roofless buildings lay open to the ele in do carcasses Stray pages torn froh in the troubled air overhead Crossing a bridge over a canal Quentin saw that the water was almost level with the banks on either side He wondered ould happen if it overflowed

Probably nothing Probably he’d get wet

The fountain that led to Earth had changed too The sculpture at its center was of a great brass lotus, but in the struggle over ons had used it to enter the Neitherlands, and when they cah it, the flower had ripped open at the seaht maybe somebody would have come by and repaired it by now, but instead the fountain was repairing itself The old flower had withered and flopped over to one side, and a new brass lotus was budding open in its place

Quentin was studying the bud fountain, wondering if even his narrow, bony hips were narrow and bony enough to fit through it, when so brushed his shoulder By reflex he snatched it out of the air: it was a piece of paper, a page ripped froraive it back to the wind, but then he didn’t He folded it in quarters and shoved it in his back pocket instead

Then he fell to Earth

—

It was raining on Earth, or at least it was in Chesterton: bucketing down, hard and freezing cold, a Noveland ic button had chosen to place him in the lush Massachusetts suburb where his parents lived, on the wide flat lawn in front of their too-large house Rain hammered on the roof and streamed down the s and voh his clothes almost immediately—in the Neitherlands he’d still been able to smell the sea salt of Fillory on his clothes, but now the rain dissolved it and washed it away forever Instead he s, wooden decks swelling, wet dogs, hedges breathing

He took the silver watch out of his pocket, the one Eliot had given hilanced at it before—he’d been too shocked and angry when they told him he had to leave—but now that he did he saw that its face was studded with a really glorious profusion of detail: two extra dials, astar chart, the phases of the ht about how Eliot had harvested it hi in the Queenswood, and then carried it and kept it safe for hiift He wished he’d appreciated it more at the time

Though it had stopped ticking Being on Earth didn’t seeree with it Maybe it was the weather

Quentin stared at his parents’ darkened house for a long tie never caravitational pull on hiht of his parents it was almost like they were old lovers, so distant now that he couldn’t even reent They’dup a child ho in co none of the it