That summer it was as if Fillory was hungry for us, reaching out and grabbing us greedily whenever it could. It was an insatiable lover. I remember riding into town on our bicycles and seeing a little whirlwind of leaves wandering in our direction. All Martin had time to say was “bloody—!” before it was on him. It whirled him away, and Helen too, off to the other side.

That was the adventure of the Hog Knight, which I don’t know whether Plover records or not. I’ve forgotten now, it all runs together, and here in Africa I haven’t got the books with me. I do remember that the bicycles never came back. Even Aunt Maude was cross about that.

—

In some ways Fillory drew us together, but in many ways too it pushed us apart. We got into terrible disagreements over silly things. Fiona told us once that Umber had taken her on a special trip, just for her, to the Far Side of the World. He showed her a wonderful garden, where all the thoughts and feelings that had ever been thought and felt existed in the form of plants, blooming and green as they passed through people’s minds and lived in their hearts, and then drying up and turning brown and crisp as they passed out of mind, sometimes to bloom again in another season, sometimes gone forever.

It was a lovely story, and it must have been true, Fiona couldn’t have made it up. She didn’t have that sort of imagination. But it left a sour taste in my mouth. Why her and not us? And not me?

Privately we argued about Ember and Umber. If we believed in Them, and we certainly did, then was it not blasphemous to go to church in the real world, and mouth prayers to God, who had after all never showed us a secret magic garden, or a castle all our own, or even so much as a single pegasus? Or did each world have its own God or gods, and one should simply worship the God of whatever world one happened to be in? Or were all the gods one God, really? Different aspects of each other?

Nonsense, Jane said, she’d never heard such rot. We had furious, hissing quarrels about this, and in the end we splintered into the Ramsians, as we called those who worshipped only the rams Ember and Umber, namely Martin and Helen and Jane, and the more pragmatic Anyone-ists, namely myself and Fiona, who prayed to the twin rams in Fillory and God in the real world.

After that Helen was always finding reasons not to go to church. Jane, who had the zeal of the martyr, would go on purpose and cause the most awful scenes with her laughing and have to be removed.