Anyone who has led a secret life—spies, criminals, fugitives, adulterers—knows that a façade is not an easy thing to maintain, and some people are better at it than others. I, as it turned out, had something of a gift for lying to adults; I sometimes wonder if I was left out of certain expeditions simply because I could be relied on to cover for the others. I don’t know how many times I found myself forced to invent stories—outlandish but far more mundane than the reality—to explain why one sibling or another hadn’t turned up for Mass or lessons or tea.

We were always scrambling to change in and out of our Fillorian things before they could be discovered. Our feats of arms often left us covered with scratches and bruises that had to be accounted for too. Martin’s shin was split wide open once by an arrow, hunting bandits near Corian’s Land, and he spent a month in Fillory convalescing.

Perhaps the greatest indignity was having to pretend that we didn’t know things that we’d learned in Fillory. I still remember falling over laughing watching Fiona, the great huntress of the Queenswood, laying it on thick at the archery range, getting tangled up and finally sitting down on her bum trying to string a bendy little schoolgirl’s bow.

We gave that up, in the end. Jane just didn’t care enough to dissemble, and one day she simply galloped away from her riding class, hallooing wildly in centaur as she cleared the stone wall at the end of the meadow and disappeared into the forest. After that we all stopped caring. Let people be amazed, if they absolutely must.

Very often, when the way to Fillory was closed to us, and we had exhausted the limited possibilities of Aunt Maude, her house, her library, her staff and the grounds, we crossed the road and picked our way through the trees and through a gap in the hedge to Mr. Plover’s house. I know now that he cannot have been over forty, but we thought of him as a very old man because his hair was already grey. I think he was quite terrified of us at first—he had no children himself and was not much used to their company. And as children went we were very childish indeed. At that time in our lives Martin was the closest thing we had to a parent, and although he did his best he was still only twelve. We were loud and obstreperous and very nearly feral.