Martin might have fallen out of favor with Fillory, but never with Plover—whatever happened at Whitespire, at Darras House he was always the favorite. If anything Plover’s affection for him seemed to grow in inverse proportion to that of the rams, or maybe it was the other way round. Whatever the reason, Martin was the only one of us whom Mr. Plover ever invited to visit him alone. What they discussed in their private lunches and teas Martin never told me, but as far as I can tell those occasions didn’t give him any special pleasure. He often returned from them in a brown study, and sometimes he made excuses to avoid them altogether.

Now of course, as a grown man with some knowledge of the world, I cannot help but wonder whether Plover’s interest in my brother was entirely appropriate. Such speculation is inevitable, but as both parties are dead, or as good as, I suppose we should be charitable, and assume that Plover merely took a fatherly interest in this bright, sensitive, fatherless boy. A mentor’s interest.

And yet. Martin and I only ever spoke about it once, and the memory is not a pleasant one. I asked him what they talked about, the two of them, on his visits, and he snapped at me. “If Plover ever asks you to come by yourself, don’t go. Never go to that house alone.” He made me promise, and I did. Though Plover never did ask.

At the time I thought it was his pride—I thought he was jealously protecting his status as the favorite. But now I think it is possible that he was trying to warn me, even protect me. I wish I knew. I haven’t seen my brother in twenty-five years. But I sometimes think, when I am brooding on the past, that that must have been part of Martin’s need for Fillory, his addiction to it. He went there to escape from our saintly benefactor Christopher Plover, and to find better, wiser, or at least safer mentors in the form of the rams.

And if that is the case I cannot help but wonder too if, in a terrible irony, that was precisely why the rams stopped bringing Martin to Fillory. Martin was fleeing from Plover, but Fillory didn’t want him anymore. Because Plover had sullied him.

—

At the time these worries and doubts didn’t trouble me, or not much. Not enough. In the years since then the shadows have grown deep and long, but at the time the sun of Fillory was at its zenith, and I was a child, and any shadows were barely visible.

That summer the topic of Martin’s mysterious exile was much whispered about in the relative privacy of our large, crumbling bedrooms at Dockery, especially when he wasn’t there. What was the cause? And what could be done about it?