“I felt utterly tawdry spying on her, but I couldn’t look away. Finally she ran out of precious things, and then she started crying, and then she put herself into the fire. She crawled over the hearth and collapsed, half in and half out of the flames, sobbing her little heart out. Her legs were sticking out. It was awful to see. Her clothes went up right away, of course, and her face got black with soot, but the fire never touched her skin. She was absolutely sobbing. Her shoulders shook and shook . . .”

Eliot stood up and went to the window. He struggled with one of the little panes for a second, then he must have found a catch Quentin had never noticed because he pulled the whole window open. Quentin couldn’t see how he did it. He put his glass on the sill.

“I don’t know if you’re falling in love with her or if you just think you are or what it is you’re doing,” he said. “I suppose I can’t blame you, you always did like to make things as hard as possible on yourself. But just listen to what I’m telling you.

“That was how it all started, how we knew she was one of us. The spell was something very strong. I could hear the hum of it even over the fire, and the light in the room had gone a funny color. But so much of her magic is just impossible to parse. I knew right away she’d never been to Brakebills, because it sounded like gibberish to me, and I couldn’t get within a thousand miles of how it worked or what she was trying to do, and she never said, and I never asked.

“But if I absolutely had to guess I’d say she was attempting a summoning. I’d say she was trying to bring back something that she’d lost, or that was taken away from her, something that was very precious to her indeed. And if I had another guess, I’d have to say that it wasn’t working.”

CHAPTER 3

The next morning, Quentin rode down to the docks in a black carriage with velvet curtains and plushly padded velvet seats. It was safe and musty inside, like a living room on wheels. Next to him, swaying loosely with the rocking of the carriage, sat Queen Julia. Across from them, their knees practically touching, was the admiral of the Fillorian navy.

Quentin had decided that if he was going on a trip to the island at the ass end of the universe, he should do it properly. He should make preparations. There were rules for this kind of thing. Such as: if you were going on a journey you needed a stout vessel.

All ships were available to the crown, in theory, but most of the ones they kept just lying around on call were warships, and those turned out to be scarily spartan on the inside. Rows of hammocks and racks of hard pallets. Not a stateroom in sight. Not really suitable at all for the Voyage of King Kwentin, as Eliot liked to spell Quentin’s name in official documents. So they were going down to the docks to find a ship that was suitable.