“See, okay, I want to say something about this,” Poppy said. She pushed the atlas away and sat back in her chair. “If I could have the floor for just a moment. Yes, Penzance is a real place. It’s a town. It’s in Cornwall. And it’s real, as in it exists on Earth. You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here! I mean, forget Penzance, Tintagel is real!”

“Is that—didn’t King Arthur live there?” Quentin said weakly.

“King Arthur lived in Camelot. But he was conceived at Tintagel, supposedly. It’s a castle in Cornwall.”

“Fuck it,” Josh said. “Poppy’s right, let’s go there.”

It was amazing. Quentin had never met a magician like Poppy. How could someone so utterly literal-minded, so resolutely uninterested in anything beyond mundane reality, work magic?

“Yes, but you see,” he said, “the fact is, King Arthur probably wasn’t conceived at Tintagel. Because he probably didn’t exist. Or if he did exist he was probably some depressing Pictish warlord who was always killing people and breaking them on the wheel and raping their widows. He probably died of the plague at thirty-two. See, that’s my problem with this world, if you really want to know. I’m pretty sure that when you say that King Arthur was ‘real,’ you don’t mean King Arthur like in the books. You don’t actually mean the good King Arthur.

“Whereas, in Fillory—and feel free to find this hilarious, Poppy, but it’s true—there are actual real kings who aren’t bullshit. And I’m one of them. Plus there are unicorns and pegasi and elves and dwarves and all that.”

He could have added that some very bad things were real in Fillory that weren’t real here. But that wouldn’t have strengthened his argument.

“There are not elves,” Julia said.

“Whatever! That’s not the point! The point is, I could pretend I don’t have a choice, and just live here my whole life. I could even go live in Tintagel. But I do have a choice, and I only have one life, and if it’s all right with you I’m going to spend it in Fillory, in my castle, chilling with dwarves and sleeping on pegasus feathers.”

“Because it’s easier,” Poppy said. “And why not do the easiest possible thing? Because isn’t that always the best thing?”

“Yes, why not? Why not?”

Quentin had absolutely no idea why Poppy aggravated him so much, and so efficiently, with such great precision. And he didn’t know why he sounded so much like Benedict right now either.

“All right already,” Josh said. “Stop. You live here. You live in Fillory. Everybody’s happy.”

“Sure,” Poppy chirped.