Plover has the stories divided up very neatly into five different volumes, but the reality wasn’t anything like that tidy or simple. Plover conveniently has us going to Fillory only during the summer hols—except the once, in The Girl Who Told Time—but really we went there all year round. It was never our decision, not after that first night, we went whenever it suited Fillory to summon us. We never knew when the door would open, summer or winter, day or night. Sometimes months would pass without a portal opening, and we would start to wonder if it was all over, this grand hallucination, and it was as if one of our senses had gone dead. We would grow increasingly snappish, turning on each other, everybody blaming someone else for having ruined it, for having offended Ember or Umber or broken one or other of Their laws, thereby queering the deal for the rest of us.

Sometimes, during these long lulls, I would start to suspect the others of sneaking off to Fillory behind my back without telling me. I imagined them freezing me out of the game.

And then with no warning it would all start again as if it had never stopped. On some otherwise nondescript afternoon, devoid of hope or interest of any kind, Fiona or Helen would come rushing into the nursery wearing a formal gown we’d never seen before, color in her cheeks, hair in outlandish court braids, shouting “guess where I’ve been!” And we would know it wasn’t over after all.

It was feast or famine. One year, I think it must have been 1918, it seemed as if we spent half the summer in Fillory. It even became unnerving. You’d go to the closet for a clean shirt and you’d find yourself staring through it at one of those beautiful lumpy Fillorian meadows, or one of its curving shell beaches, or into the still heart of a forest at night. To my knowledge none of us ever refused; I don’t know if we even could have. Once or twice it was a genuine nuisance—you’d be about to go into town with nanny, you’d have been given a shilling for sweets, and the groom had promised you a turn with the good grey mare after, and you’d bend down to look under the bed for your other boot, and before you knew it you were picking yourself up off the floor of Castle Whitespire. And by the time you got back—three weeks later for you, five minutes later for everyone else—you’d have lost the money and forgotten what you’d been doing in the first place, and everyone would be cross with you for keeping them waiting.