The room they emerged into was dark, a storeroom full of boxes. There was barely room for them to push their way out of the mirror. The air smelled good, like coffee beans. No one was there to meet them.

The coffee smell explained itself when he found a door and opened it onto a cramped restaurant kitchen. A cook barked at them in Italian to move along. They squeezed past him, trying not to burn themselves on anything, and out into the dining room of a café.

Threading their way out through the tables, they emerged onto a wide stone square. A beautiful square, defined by sleepy stone buildings of indeterminate age.

“If I didn’t know better I’d think we were in Fillory,” Quentin said. “Or the Neitherlands.”

“We are in Italy. Venice.”

“I want some of that coffee. Why are we in Venice?”

“Coffee first.”

Bright sunlight on paving stones. Clumps of tourists standing around, taking pictures and studying guidebooks, looking both overwhelmed and bored by it all at the same time. Two churches fronted the square; the other buildings were a weird Venetian jumble of old stone and old wood and irregular windows. Quentin and Julia walked over to the other café on the square, the one out of whose kitchen they had not just magically burst.

It was an oasis of bright yellow umbrellas. Quentin felt like he was floating. He’d never been through so many portals in one day, and it was disorienting. They’d already ordered before they realized they had no euros.

“Fuck it,” Quentin said. “I woke up in Fillory this morning, or maybe it was yesterday morning, either way I need a macchiato. Why are we in Venice?”

“Warren gave me an address. Someone who might be able to help us—a fixer, kind of. He can get things. Maybe he can get us a button.”

“So that’s the plan. Good. I like it.” He was up for whatever as long as coffee was involved.

“Great. After that we can try your amazing plan which you do not have.”

They sipped their coffee in silence. Dreamily Quentin studied the chaotic surface of his macchiato. They hadn’t drawn a milky leaf on it the way they would have in America. Pigeons strutted in between the café tables, picking up unspeakably soiled crumbs, their clawed toes looking livid and pink this close up. Sunlight washed over it all. The light in Venice was like the light in Fillory: stone-light.

The world had changed again. It wasn’t as neatly divided as he remembered it, between the magical and the non-magical. There was this grubby, anarchical in-between now. He didn’t much care for it; it was chaotic and unglamorous and he didn’t know the rules. Probably Julia didn’t like it either, he reflected, but she hadn’t gotten to choose, not the way he did.