“You don’t know?” It was the first time the teenage boy had spoken. “Why the hell do you want it then?”

“In order to find out.”

“Huh. What do the initials stand for?”

“Rupert John Chatwin,” the bird said crisply.

The kid looked confused. His lips moved.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Wouldn’t the C come last?”

“It’s a monogram, dumbass,” Pixie said. “The last name goes in the middle.”

The Indian guy was rubbing his chin.

“Chatwin.” He was trying to place the name. “Chatwin. But isn’t that—?”

It sure is, Quentin thought, though he didn’t say anything. He didn’t move a muscle. It sure as hell is.

Chatwin: that name chilled him even more than the night and the rain and the bird and the cards had. By rights he should have gone the rest of his life without hearing it again. It had no claim on him anymore, and vice versa. He and the Chatwins were through.

Except it seemed that they weren’t. He’d said good-bye and buried them and mourned them—the Chatwins, Fillory, Plover, Whitespire—but there must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them to him. Something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed, but the scar wouldn’t fade, not quite. Quentin felt like an addict who’d just caught the faintest whiff of his drug of choice, the pure stuff, after a long time sober, and he felt his imminent relapse coming on with a mixture of despair and anticipation.

That name was a message—a hot signal flare shot up into the night, sent specifically for him, across time and space and darkness and rain, all the way from the bright warm center of the world.

CHAPTER 2

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Quentin had tried to go straight.

It started in the Neitherlands, the silent city of Italianate fountains and locked libraries that lies somehow behind and between everywhere else. The fountains were really doorways to other worlds, and Quentin stood leaning against the one that led to Fillory. He had just been forcibly ejected from it.

He stood there for a long time, feeling the cool roughness of the stone rim. It was reassuringly solid. The fountain was his last connection to his old life, the one where he’d been a king in a magical land. He didn’t want it to be over; it wouldn’t really be over till he let go and walked away. He could still have it for a little longer.