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Lying on the hard floor s had gone Things so often rong Was it hiain? Or differentdifferent mistakes

Pluht there on the floor, with her face smushed into her black parka from the limo for a pillow But Quentin didn’t, not yet

The journal had affected the, a massive correction, that finally forced her to see that Fillory was real and that in some inescapable way she was part of it On the train he’d told her the whole story of his life there, froes and stations and other trains flashed by in the , and lots full of idle municipal snos, and backyards full of overturned play structures He told her about everything, Alice and Julia and all the rest

But for hiainst the wall, and read the journal again There was news in it: if Rupert was to be believed then Umber was the one who’d turned Martin into the Beast, in exchange for sorotesque sacrifice That threw Quentin aswith one of Fillory’s gods, or at least there had been And if Umber did help Martin, ould Martin have killed him, as Jane Chatwin said he did? It made no sense

None of it got him any closer to Alice either, or not that he could see They needed a new plan, a way forward, maybe even another job They’d be ready next time—the bird had betrayed theot that there never had been any rules But first they had to rest and build theain He also had so to do

Pluain—she was indefatigable that way She always had to be doing so outside seemed like a bad idea, with the whereabouts and intentions of the bird still unknown, so they stayed in They ordered in a lot of take-out food and so up her house

Somebody had disco-ized it in the 1970s, and then later it had been de-disco-ized, mostly, but there were still trace a, and the outlines of e chandelier that looked like Sputnik had escaped the purge too But the house had good bones, and it still had its broad-planked wooden floors, and its elegant y-inefficient wooden-framed ith nice old shutters There were a lot of nice twiddly plaster ornarity, this house

Pluic than Quentin did, and Quentin was hobbled by his bad back, so he acted as seeneral contractor Under her direction they arrested the slow collapse of the back wall, which was being undermined by rainwater because the drainpipe was busted and the drain in the back patio was clogged No one had updated the electrics and plu since approximately the 1930s, and the walls were stuffed full of ancient cloth-wrapped wiring and lead pipes that were right on the point of dissolving They shored everything up as best they could It felt good to be doing so simple and concrete and achievable

They cast all the cleaning spells they could think of, until they’d reh dust and dirt and scum and nicotine residue from the walls and floors and sinks and tubs to , and the gas and water But while Quentin orking with his hands his s All his enterprises were in ruins He should have been thrashed by this, flattened, but insteadwith all of that gone, and his father dead, and Mayakovsky’s coins in his pocket, he felt strangely free It was time to take stock

At soh the top floor of the house and de behind only four lonely load-bearing colu to the cha overalls and work gloves, attacking and repairing targets of opportunity; she didn’t want his help, andhim So he went up there to clear his mind

Using a chunk of kids’ street chalk recovered from a locker under the stairs Quentin traced out a classical labyrinth pattern on the floor He did it from memory, based on the ancient Greek Leeometry of it work out, but that itself was a solid meditative exercise The path wound and coiled around the four pillars Labyrinths were old sorcery, and subtle: good for recharging one’slow

When it was done he hung sheets over the hich looked cheap and tatty but produced a di and slowly lihts; it also made his back feel a bit better

His mind wandered back to Rupert’s journal, and on the spell bound into the back of it Rupert had never cast it, as far as Quentin could tell, nor had he been able to figure out what it did Now Quentin wondered It was a treasure pillaged fro valuable

And there was so fateful in the way it had cos? Maybe it arthat could help the deep and strange and strong enough that it could help Alice

He went and got the spell and read through it as he walked Before long he could walk the e froo to waste, that was for sure, at least in terical rhetoric in languages that he had a very di time since he tried to read archaic Fillorian, let alone its associated notations for estures

The further into it he got the less it looked like what he’d expected He was anticipating so military: either a very powerful shield or a very deadly weapon or both Maybe concealment, maybe some kind of cataclysmic weather effect But it didn’t feel like any of those It wasn’t shaped right somehow

For one thing the spell was long as hell—you could transcribe es, max, because there just wasn’t that ood twenty There was a lot of for that looked purely ceremonial, but you never knew for sure what you could leave out, so you had to do it all

What’ssome pretty exotic items All in all it was a bear, and it would have cost somebody a lot of time and effort andspell (which they’d never even got to cast at all, dammit)

Still, there was soant about it too It was a mess, a rat’s nest, but under all the fiddly bits and the ornaes of the enchant effect on effect, each oneof real beauty For a while he wondered if itused to harvest his cacodemons, or the spell that Julia and her friends had attempted at Murs with such disastrous results

But he didn’t think so This wasn’t like anyabout the spell ers twitch—it was as if it wanted to be cast He left the labyrinth and took it to Plum

“I’ve been reading through that spell,” he said “The one your great-grandfather left you”

“Uh-huh”

Plu so involved to the joists, Quentin couldn’t tell exactly what

“It’s interesting,” he said

“I would iine”