She was right, she was famous: she was one of the first children to come to Fillory, decades ago, and she had haunted it for decades as the mysterious Watcherwoman. It was she who, with the help of a magic watch that controlled time, helped orchestrate their journey to Fillory in the first place, and their disastrous confrontation with the Beast, who had once been her brother, Martin Chatwin.

“Or are you still the Watcherwoman? What shall we call you?”

“Oh, Jane is fine. I haven’t been the Watcherwoman for years now.”

“Somehow I thought you’d be hotter,” Janet said.

“You’ve been talking to Quentin. Why don’t you come inside, we’ll have some tea.”

The cottage was well kept, neat as a pin and swept to within an inch of its life. The décor was a crude Fillorian approximation of the interwar English drawing rooms that Jane must have remembered from her childhood. Funny that for all the effort she’d put into escaping the real world, she’d wound up re-creating it here. She summoned a blue bloom of fire out of her stove and placed a teakettle on it. Hard to say where she got a natural gas hookup out here.

“One could boil the water with magic,” she said, “but it never tastes quite the same.”

While they waited they sat around a sunny-yellow wooden table with a water glass full of wildflowers on it. Now that they were here Eliot thought he’d wait a bit before he popped the big question.

“How long have you been living here?” he asked. “We didn’t even know you were still in Fillory.”

“Oh, I never left. I’ve been here for years, ever since that business with you and Quentin and Martin. Since I broke my watch.”

“I’ve always wondered about that,” Janet said. “Is it really gone?”

“It’s gone. There’s nothing left. I broke it and jumped on the pieces.”

“Darn.”

Eliot hadn’t even thought of that. It might’ve been handy, if they could’ve put it back together. Though he wasn’t sure what they would go back and do differently. Maybe they could just relive the same couple of years forever. Was that how it worked? It was confusing. And irrelevant now.

“Not that I don’t miss it,” Jane said. “As it turned out, it was all that was keeping me young. When I broke it I went from twenty-five to seventy-five overnight, or thereabouts—with all that back-and-forthing I’d lost track of how old I really was. Now I know.” She looked down at the backs of her hands, which were ropy and mottled. “I wish the dwarfs had warned me. They must have known.”

“I’m sorry,” Eliot said. He tasted his tea; it was bitter, and it tingled on his lips. “Fillory owes you a debt.”