“It didn’t even hurt that much. That’s the funny thing. I thought they could pull it out. I turned around to get back on the boat. Then I realized I couldn’t breathe, so I sat down. My mouth was full of blood. My sword fell in the water. Can you believe I was worried about that? I was trying to figure out whether we could dive down later and get my sword back. Did anybody get it?”

Quentin shook his head.

“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Benedict said. “It was just a practice sword.”

“What happened next? You went down the slide?”

Benedict nodded.

Quentin was evolving a theory about that. The slide was humiliating, that’s what it was. Deliberately embarrassing. That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

“So did you get the key?” Benedict said.

“I wanted to tell you about that,” Quentin said. “We did get the key. There was a big fight, and we got the key, and it turned out to be really important. I wanted you to know that.”

“But nobody else got killed. Just me.”

“Nobody else died. I got stabbed in the side.” Not much to brag about under the circumstances. “But what I wanted to tell you is that it was important, what we were doing. You didn’t die for nothing. Those keys—we’re going to use them to save Fillory. There was a point to it all. Without them all magic is going to go away, and the whole world will collapse. But we can use the keys to fix it.”

Benedict’s expression didn’t change.

“But I didn’t do anything,” he said. “My dying didn’t make a difference. I could have just stayed on the boat.”

“We do not know what would have happened,” Julia said.

Benedict ignored her again.

“He cannot hear me,” Julia said to Quentin. “Something strange is going on. No one here can see or hear me. He does not know I am here.”

“Benedict? Can you see Julia? She’s sitting right next to you.”

“No.” Benedict frowned the way he used to, like Quentin was embarrassing him. “I don’t see anybody. Just you.”

“I am like a ghost here,” she said. “A ghost among ghosts. A reverse ghost.”