The Neitherlands had changed since he and Poppy had been there last. The buildings were still broken, and there was still a little snow in the corners of the square, in the shadows, but it wasn’t coming down anymore. It wasn’t freezing. Magic really was flowing again: you could see it here. The ruins were coming back to life.

Though they weren’t going back to normal. A warm breeze blew. He’d never felt that in the Neitherlands before. They’d always been asleep, but now they were waking up.

Quentin felt ruined too. He had that in common with the Neitherlands. He felt like a frozen tundra where nothing grew and nothing would ever grow again. He had finished his quest, and it had cost him everything and everyone he’d done it for. The equation balanced perfectly: all canceled out. And without his crown, or his throne, or Fillory, or even his friends, he had no idea who he was.

But something had changed inside him too. He didn’t understand it yet, but he felt it. Somehow, even though he’d lost everything, he felt more like a king now than he ever did when he was one. Not like a toy king. He felt real. He waved to the empty square the way he used to wave to the people from the balcony in Fillory.

Overhead the clouds were breaking apart. He could see a pale sky, and the sun was pushing through. He hadn’t even known there was a sun here. The silver watch Eliot gave him was ticking along in an inside pocket of his best topcoat, the one with the seed pearls and the silver thread, like a cat purring, or a second heart. The air was chilly but it was warming up, and the ground was littered with puddles of meltwater. Stubborn green shoots were forcing themselves up between the paving stones, cracking the old rock, in spite of everything.

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ALSO BY LEV GROSSMAN

ALSO BY LEV GROSSMAN

Codex
The Magicians