He just looked at her, assessing. Behind him she could see other people in the house, sitting and standing, chatting and moping, and doing things with their hands. Only they didn’t have anything in their hands. A weird acid-green light flared for a second in the doorway, from somewhere she couldn’t see, like there was welding going on in there. Somebody gave an ironic cheer. The air absolutely reeked of magic. You could barely breathe, it was so thick.

Julia squatted down on her haunches on the sidewalk, like a toddler, and put her head in her hands and laughed and cried at the same time. She felt like she was going to pass out or throw up or go insane. She had tried to walk away from the disaster, to run away from it, she really, truly had. She’d broken her staff and drowned her book and sworn off magic forever. She’d moved on and left no forwarding address. But it hadn’t been enough. Magic had come looking for her. She hadn’t run far enough or fast enough, or hid herself well enough, and the disaster had tracked her down and it had found her. It wasn’t going to let her go.

It was about to start all over again.

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 16

During everything that followed, all the time while he nearly got creamed by a vaporetto as he swam to shore, while he dragged himself up some ancient stone steps out of the water (the Grand Canal was well-appointed with means of egress for those who fell or flung themselves into it) and trudged back to Josh’s palazzo alone—Josh having had his hands full keeping Poppy out of the clutches of the carabinieri, who showed up shortly after Quentin went under—Quentin’s mind was on fire with the only piece of useful information the dragon had given him: that there was still a way back to Fillory. They weren’t going to get the button, but he could let go of that now, because there was a way back. If they could just figure out what the dragon meant.

He thought about it while he rinsed off salt and oil and heavy-metal particles and worse in a half-hour shower at high temperature and high pressure and washed his hair three times and dried off and finally tossed his ruined clothes, his beloved Fillorian clothes, his royal clothes, into the trash and crawled into bed. The first door, the dragon had said. The first door. The first door. What did it mean?