We’d all tried to raise the matter with the rams, but with no success. “This is not his time,” They would say. “When he comes, he will come.” And so forth. There was a great deal of that kind of talk, and what a lot of trash it all was.

Pious Helen thought it was a shame, but it was the rams’ will, and we had no business questioning Their wisdom. Jane sided with Helen, something I believe she came to regret when she was older. Fiona didn’t like to take sides against Ember and Umber, but she thought that if we formally petitioned Them, as a group, They might agree to bring Martin back, or at least tell us what his offense had been and give him a chance to atone for it. We had all done a great deal of service for the rams, fought on Their behalf, risked our lives for Them. They owed us that much.

To Martin we made a great show of sympathetic concern, and we were sympathetic, and we were concerned, but some of the concern was for ourselves, too. Martin was getting older. He was on the cusp of puberty, which was something we knew very little about, but we knew that adulthood followed hard on its heels, and we had never heard of any adults making the journey from our world to Fillory. We understood instinctively that Fillory was a world that ran on innocence, demanded it as an engine demands fuel, and Martin was running out.

Sooner or later we would all run out. Adulthood would come for Helen next, and then me. Like all children we were selfish little creatures. I hope that this will in some way explain, if not excuse, what we did next.

Martin did what he did, but we helped him. We wanted him to do it, because we were afraid. We made a pact: the next time any of us were summoned, we would do what we could to hold the doorway open, and we would try to get Martin through. We would jam the door, take control of the bridge that connected Earth and Fillory, and force Martin across it. Probably it wouldn’t work, but who could say till we tried? It was counter to the spirit of the enchantment, but you could never tell with enchantments. Sometimes the spirit was what mattered. But sometimes they were just letters on a page, words in the air, and it was only a question, as Humpty Dumpty said, of which is to be master.

CHAPTER 18

This is a story we never told to Christopher Plover.