He let a minute go by, but the dragon didn’t talk. All right. Game on.

“Hello,” Quentin said. His voice sounded basically normal. Just distant, as if he were eavesdropping on himself from another room. “Thank you for seeing me.”

The huge face didn’t move. It was as unreadable as a skull. Though there went the eyes, flashing again.

“Probably you know why I came here. I want to talk to you about the button, the one you bought from my friend Josh.” He felt like a kid asking the school bully for his lunch money back. He straightened his spine. “The thing is, it wasn’t entirely his to sell. It also belonged to me, and some other people, and we need it. I need it to get back to my home, and my friend Julia does too.”

“I know.”

The dragon’s voice was like some vast string instrument two levels below double bass. An octuple bass maybe, playing a perfect fifth. He felt the vibrations in his ribs and in his balls.

“Will you help us? Will you give us back the button? Or sell it back to us?”

The rest of the canal was a solid wall of darkness around them. There was a distant rumble, and Quentin risked a glance up: a late-night barge was thundering by overhead. It felt like the water was getting chillier, or maybe he was cooling off. He scooched a little closer to the dragon, who was giving off heat. If it was going to eat him it was going to eat him, and at least he’d die warm.

“No,” came the reply.

The dragon’s eyes closed and opened.

The door back to Fillory was shutting. He had to stick his foot in it. That world, the world of his real life, the life he was supposed to be living, was drifting away, or he was drifting away from it. The moorings had been cut, and the tide was flowing out. They never should have gone to After Island. They never should have left Castle Whitespire.

“Maybe you could loan it to us?” He willed the desperation out of his voice. “A one-time trip. If there’s anything I have that you want, I’m offering it. I’m a king, in Fillory at least. I have a lot of resources there.”

“I did not bring you here to listen to you boast.”

“I’m not—”

“I have lived in this canal for ten centuries. Everything that enters it is mine. I have swords and crowns. I have popes and saints and kings and queens. I have brides on their wedding day and children on Christmas. I have the Holy Lance and the noose that hung Judas. I have every lost thing.”

Fair enough. Quentin wondered if Byron had ever been down here. If he had, he probably thought of something clever to say.