“Before you do, Quentin.” Fogg hadn’t moved. “I’d like to prolong this conversation a little further. I’ve heard some pretty exotic rumors about what you and your friends have been up to these past few years. The undergraduates talk about it. You’re quite the campus legend, you know.”

Now Quentin did stand up.

“Well,” he said. “Kids. Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“I assure you I don’t.” Fogg’s eyes had regained their old flinty spark from somewhere. “But a word of advice from your old dean, if I may. Notwithstanding my regrettable ignorance of interdimensional travel, I don’t know what your interest in Penny might be, but I do know perfectly well that you never liked him. And no one’s heard from him in years. No one’s heard from Eliot Waugh or Alice Quinn in years, either. Or Janet Pluchinsky.”

Quentin noticed that Josh didn’t figure in Fogg’s memory. He should have asked about Josh first. Though he probably would have gotten the same answer.

“And now you’ve turned up dressed very oddly, and you’ve brought a civilian onto the grounds, one of our rejections if I’m not mistaken, which is—well, it’s just not something we ordinarily tolerate. I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, but I’ve put myself out for you over the years, quite a bit, and I have the reputation and the security of the school to think of.”

Aha. There’s the Fogg he used to know and fear. Not gone, he’d just been playing possum. But Quentin wasn’t the naughty schoolboy he used to be.

“Oh, I do know that, Dean Fogg. Believe me.”

“Well, good. Don’t go digging too deep, Quentin. Don’t stir. Shit. Up.” Fogg enunciated the obscenity crisply. “Right now you have the air of somebody who thinks he knows better. Humility is a useful quality in a magician, Quentin. Magic knows better, not you. Do you remember what I told you the night before you graduated? Magic isn’t ours. I don’t know whose it is, but we’ve got it on loan, on loan at best. It’s like what poor Professor March used to say about the turtles. Don’t bait them, Quentin. One world ought to be enough for anyone.”

Easy for you to say. You’ve only ever seen one.

“Thank you. I’ll try to remember that.”

Fogg sighed tragically, like Cassandra warning the Trojans, destined never to be heeded.

“Well, all right. Professor Geiger should be in the junior common room, if you need a portal. Unless you’d rather walk out the way you came.”

“A portal would be great. Thank you.” Quentin stood up. “By the way, that ‘rejection’ sitting in the hall? She’s a better magician than most of your students. Most of your faculty too.”