Pouncy was right, she had come home. Her life up until now had been one vicious, un-fun, never-ending game of tag, where everyone else was it and you could never stop running. Only now had she finally found home base. She could rest. Unlike the safe houses, this house was actually safe. This was her Brakebills, for real this time. She had made a separate peace.

There were ten people at Murs, counting Julia. Some were from Free Trader Beowulf, some weren’t. Pouncy was there, and Asmodeus, and Failstaff. So were Gummidgy and Fiberpunk: timid, infrequent posters who were the last people Julia would have figured were involved with magic. Now she realized they’d probably spent most of their time trading spells in private threads.

Asmodeus and Failstaff and Pouncy weren’t who she thought they were either, at all. She’d figured Pouncy for a girl, or a gay man, but she didn’t get a gay vibe off him in person, and either way she didn’t think he’d be so good-looking. Online he came across as somebody with something to be angry about, who was always on the edge of losing it in the face of some intolerable outrage against his person, and who kept it together through sheer force of will. Julia’s pet theory had been that he was an accident victim of some kind, a paraplegic maybe, or somebody in chronic pain who was struggling to be philosophical about his condition. No way she would have pegged him as all Abercrombie & Fitch like that.

Failstaff wasn’t handsome. In Julia’s mind he’d been a silver-haired retiree, a gentleman of the old school. In fact he was about thirty, and he might have been a gentleman, but if he was he was one of the largest gentlemen she’d ever seen. Six foot five, maybe, and built like a butte. He wasn’t fat, exactly, there was just a shitload of him. He must have weighed four hundred pounds. His voice was a subsonic rumble.

As for Asmodeus, she turned out to be even younger than Julia, seventeen at the most, a fast talker with a big smile and heavy V-shaped eyebrows that gave her a naughty-schoolgirl look. She had a bit of a Fairuza Balk thing going on. Shades of The Craft. They were her best friends, and Julia didn’t even recognize them.

They were also magicians, and good ones, better than she was. And they lived in a big house in the south of France. It would take her a while to get used to them.

And to forgive them.

“When were you going to tell me?” she demanded, as they sat ranged around some deep glasses of local red at a stylish reclaimed-wood table on the stone patio behind the house. A blue swimming pool shimmered in the late afternoon sun. It was like a goddamned cigarette ad.