“Has it occurred to you that you might just accept it?” She was a small woman, but she drew herself up, and there was some Edwardian dignity in her manner. “Has it crossed your minds that you don’t have to go off on a holy crusade every time things don’t go your way? You children and your adventures. Stories have ends! Why don’t you let Fillory die gracefully, in its own time and its own way? Maybe it wants to let go! I was never a real paramedic, but a phrase comes back to me: do not resuscitate. Let it go. Let Fillory die in peace.”

“No.”

“We’re not asking you to come with us,” Eliot said. “Just tell us what you know. There has to be something. Please.”

The High King of Fillory went down on one knee before the Watcherwoman.

“Please. Our stories haven’t ended yet. Yours may have, but ours haven’t. If it’s time, then it’s time, but I am not the last High King of Fillory. I don’t believe it. This land isn’t ready to die.”

Jane stared at him for a long time. Then she made a disgusted noise in her throat and turned away and boosted herself up onto the bent trunk of the clock-tree.

“All right,” she said. “All right. I’ll tell you what I know, but it isn’t much. I feel like I know less and less every day. Maybe it’s the time travel—some days I wonder if I’m starting to live backward, like Merlin. God, I think I would kill myself. Or would I already have killed myself? My brother could have helped you, but he’s dead. Long ago.”

“What, Martin? Not likely.”

“Not him, the other one. Rupert. He spent a lot of time in Fillory. He was close to Martin.”

“That’s not actually a huge plus in our book,” Janet said.

“It should be. Martin was an asshole, but he was smart. He found out things about Fillory that you and I will never know, and he was only thirteen when he did it. Have you ever wondered where he got all that power from? How he became what he was?”

“I guess I have wondered that,” Eliot said.

“I have too. I never knew. But I think Rupert did. He was with Martin the day he disappeared. He always said he didn’t see anything, but I think he did. He was an open book, our Rupes, no good at keeping secrets, though he thought he was.