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But by the next sued between Martin and Fillory The roone over once, and then the ra, uneventful days He spent those days sulking, ruining theh he knew they would likely be his last He barely left the palace library The rams shunned his company He was on the way out, and we all knew it

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that out of all of us it was Martin who needed Fillory the most Honestly by that time I think Fiona could have taken or left it She was already growing out of Fillory For Jane, as five when it began, it was just norine life without it—it was barely even special If the rams had turned Helen out, she would have accepted it, no questions asked, thy will be done She would have taken a perverse pleasure in her martyrdom

As for me, I never believed it would last anyway Every day, every second, I expected it to end On some level I would have been relieved

Maybe it was just that Martin was older, that he had lived longer without Fillory He remembered what life was like without it, and he understood better than the rest of us did how strange and precious it was The rest of us made friends outside the faly Martin did not He shirked his lessons, and filled his exercise books inged bears—they’d been seen circling over the Hen’s Teeth—and Fillorian coats of ara in this world, heaped contempt on it He even ate less and less, as if a bite of shepherd’s pie would trap him down here in the darkness, like Persephone He lived for Fillory

But Fillory didn’t live for him In my later life I have known alcoholics, nized in their faces some of what I saw in Martin’s Loyal prophets of an indifferent god

Martin ht have fallen out of favor with Fillory, but never with Plover—whatever happened at Whitespire, at Darras House he was always the favorite If anything Plover’s affection for hirow in inverse proportion to that of the rams, or maybe it was the other way round Whatever the reason, Martin was the only one of us whom Mr Plover ever invited to visit him alone What they discussed in their private lunches and teas Martin never told ive him any special pleasure He often returned from them in a brown study, and soether

Now of course, as a grown e of the world, I cannot help but wonder whether Plover’s interest in my brother was entirely appropriate Such speculation is inevitable, but as both parties are dead, or as good as, I suppose we should be charitable, and assuht, sensitive, fatherless boy A mentor’s interest

And yet Martin and I only ever spoke about it once, and the memory is not a pleasant one I asked him what they talked about, the two of them, on his visits, and he snapped at o Never go to that house alone” He h Plover never did ask

At the tiht he was jealously protecting his status as the favorite But now I think it is possible that he was trying to warn me, even protect me I wish I knew I haven’t seen my brother in twenty-five years But I so on the past, that that must have been part of Martin’s need for Fillory, his addiction to it He went there to escape from our saintly benefactor Christopher Plover, and to find better, wiser, or at least safer mentors in the form of the rams

And if that is the case I cannot help but wonder too if, in a terrible irony, that was precisely why the ra from Plover, but Fillory didn’t want him anymore Because Plover had sullied him

—

At the time these worries and doubts didn’t trouble h In the years since then the shadows have grown deep and long, but at the time the sun of Fillory was at its zenith, and I was a child, and any shadoere barely visible

That summer the topic of Martin’s mysterious exile was e, cru bedrooms at Dockery, especially when he wasn’t there What was the cause? And what could be done about it?

We’d all tried to raise the matter with the rams, but with no success “This is not his time,” They would say “When he coreat deal of that kind of talk, and what a lot of trash it all was

Pious Helen thought it was a shame, but it was the ra Their wisdoret when she was older Fiona didn’t like to take sides against Eht that if we for Martin back, or at least tell us what his offense had been and give hireat deal of service for the raht on Their behalf, risked our lives for Them They owed us that much

To Martin we reat show of sympathetic concern, and ere sympathetic, and ere concerned, but so older He was on the cusp of puberty, which was so we knew very little about, but we knew that adulthood followed hard on its heels, and we had never heard of any adultsthe journey from our world to Fillory We understood instinctively that Fillory was a world that ran on innocence, de out

Sooner or later ould all run out Adulthood would come for Helen next, and then me Like all children ere selfish little creatures I hope that this will in some way explain, if not excuse, e did next

Martin did what he did, but we helped him We wanted him to do it, because ere afraid We made a pact: the next time any of us were summoned, ould do e could to hold the doorway open, and ould try to get Martin through We would jae that connected Earth and Fillory, and force Martin across it Probably it wouldn’t work, but who could say till we tried? It was counter to the spirit of the enchantment, but you could never tell with enchantments Sometimes the spirit hat e, words in the air, and it was only a question, as Humpty Dumpty said, of which is to be master

CHAPTER 18

This is a story we never told to Christopher Plover

So on To everyone else the day ht be sunny and clear, but to us five the air would feel claed the way it does before a stor, screwing itself to the sticking point Then ould look at each other conspiratorially and pull our ears—that was the agreed-upon sign—and fro else The et feverishly, unable to sit still or read or follow our lessons Nothing else mattered until someone vanished and the tension finally broke

On other days Fillory would wrong-foot everyone You wouldn’t see it coht not even be in the mood for it, but suddenly there it would be, and all you could do was give in to its spell as it tore you free of this world

It was one of those days, the second kind, when it happened: a lazy Saturday when the suy fro us listless and immobile We couldn’t play, we couldn’t study, we couldn’t stop yawning Even the effort of going outside to visit the giant, bug-eyed goldfish in the stone-riinable

Fiona and I were in the library, which was a pleasant rooh, with two h rate of speed produced a very satisfying bang But as a library it was largely useless The books were locked away in cabinets—you could see their spines through le, but you couldn’t get at them As far as I knew no one could: the keys were lost

There was exactly one book in the library that you could read—so incarcerated with the rest of thee volume I could barely lift, and its spine cracked like a pistol shot when you opened it The photographs were black-and-white, but about one in fifty pages had been hand-tinted in full color, and those shells had a special vivid feel to them A Fillorian feel

That es were thick and sticky in the heat; they were lossy paper that was ale tropical plant As usual we debated the aesthetic merits of the various shells, and the possible poisonous properties of their various residents, until suddenly Fiona stopped She’d slipped her hand under the next page, hoping it would be a colored one, but her fingers found only eh the book had suddenly become hollow

She looked at e turned all by itself, flipped over by a gust of wind from beneath it From Fillory