But by the next summer it was clear that something had changed between Martin and Fillory. The romance was over. In all that school year he’d only gone over once, and then the rams let him stay only two mingy, grudging, uneventful days. He spent those days sulking, ruining them out of spite, even though he knew they would likely be his last. He barely left the palace library. The rams shunned his company. He was on the way out, and we all knew it.

It wouldn’t have been so bad except that out of all of us it was Martin who needed Fillory the most. Honestly by that time I think Fiona could have taken or left it. She was already growing out of Fillory. For Jane, who was five when it began, it was just normal. She couldn’t imagine life without it—it was barely even special. If the rams had turned Helen out, she would have accepted it, no questions asked, thy will be done. She would have taken a perverse pleasure in her martyrdom.

As for me, I never believed it would last anyway. Every day, every second, I expected it to end. On some level I would have been relieved.

Maybe it was just that Martin was older, that he had lived longer without Fillory. He remembered what life was like without it, and he understood better than the rest of us did how strange and precious it was. The rest of us made friends outside the family, in the real world, but increasingly Martin did not. He shirked his lessons, and filled his exercise books with winged bears—they’d been seen circling over the Hen’s Teeth—and Fillorian coats of arms. A natural athlete who barely had to try at games, he stopped trying at all. He scorned everything in this world, heaped contempt on it. He even ate less and less, as if a bite of shepherd’s pie would trap him down here in the darkness, like Persephone. He lived for Fillory.

But Fillory didn’t live for him. In my later life I have known alcoholics, more than a few, and I recognized in their faces some of what I saw in Martin’s. Loyal prophets of an indifferent god.