The man was demonstrating a spell for his audience: simple cold magic. He had a glass of water in front of him, and he was working on freezing it. Quentin recognized the spell from his first year at Brakebills. Having completed it, in what Quentin thought was a basically correct but overly showy style, the man cupped his hands around the glass. When he took them away it had a skim of ice on it. He’d managed not to break the glass, which the expanding ice often did.

“Now you try it,” he said.

The girls had their own glasses of water. They repeated the words in unison and tried to imitate his hand positions. Predictably, nothing happened. They had no idea what they were doing—their soft pink fingers were nowhere near where they needed to be. They hadn’t even cut their nails.

When the man noticed Julia standing in the doorway, his face went to shock and horror for about a half second before he was able to bring up a facsimile of delighted surprise. He might have been forty, with carefully mussed brown hair and a fringe of beard. He looked like a large, handsome bug.

“Julia!” he called. “What an amazing surprise! I can’t believe you’re here!”

“I need to talk to you, Warren.”

“Of course!” Warren was working hard to seem like the master of the situation, for the benefit of the room, but it was clear that Julia was very low on his list of people he wanted surprise visits from.

“Hang tight for a minute?” he told his acolytes. “I’ll be right back.”

When his back was to the undergrads Warren dropped the smile. They crossed the hall into a den. He had an odd, rolling gait, as if he were managing a clubfoot.

“What’s this all about, Julia? I’ve got a class,” he said. “Warren,” he added to Quentin, with a wary smile. They shook hands.

“I need to talk to you.” Julia’s tone was stretched thin.

“All right.” And before she could answer, he said under his breath: “Not here. In my office, for God’s sake.”

He ushered Julia toward a door across the hall.

“I’ll just wait in the hall,” Quentin said. “Call me if—”

Julia closed the door behind them.

He supposed it was fair play, considering that he’d parked Julia in the hall outside Fogg’s office. This must be as weird for her as going back to Brakebills had been for him. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, not without putting his ear to the door, which would have attracted even more attention from the girls in the living room, who were peering at him curiously, probably because he was still dressed in the raiment of a Fillorian king.

“Hi,” he said. They all found something else to peer at.