She looked at me and pulled her ear. The page turned all by itself, flipped over by a gust of wind from beneath it. From Fillory.

The portal was set directly into the book’s enormous page. Appropriately enough it opened onto the seaside—I recognized it right away as the coast north of Whitespire, where there was a long, graceful bridge of living rock that led to a nearby island. We were looking straight down onto the powdery white sand from above, and the urge to clamber through immediately was almost overpowering. As I watched Fiona actually did—forgetting Martin, forgetting our pact, she stepped up onto her chair and onto the table and dropped through the page as neatly as if she were jumping off a high bank into a pond.

I didn’t. With a titanic effort I pulled myself away, feeling like I was leaving skin behind, and ran to find my brother.

He was by himself in an empty spare room. He was supposed to be working on a sketch of a vase for a drawing class, but when I came in he was just watching listlessly as the wind pushed a blind in and then sucked it out again. He stood up as soon as I entered. No words were necessary. He knew why I’d come.

I was sure the portal would be closed, but when we came pelting into the library together it was still there, waiting for us, or at any rate waiting for me. From a distance the view of the beach through the open book was a perspectival impossibility, a trompe l’oeil. It did strange things to my depth perception.

When Martin approached it the book shifted on the table and tried to shut itself—it seemed affronted, as if we’d surprised it in a state of undress. But Martin was ready for that. He pointed at it with three fingers and shouted a phrase I didn’t understand—it might have been dwarfish, it had those scraping fricatives dwarfs use. Until then I hadn’t understood that he’d been studying magic. Perhaps he hadn’t just been sulking there in the library at Whitespire after all.

The book trembled, straining now to shut itself. Martin and the book, Martin and Fillory itself, were fighting, and it was an awful sight, because I loved them both.

Martin gripped it in both hands and pulled, grunting, trying to rip it in half—I suppose he thought that then it couldn’t close at all. But it was too thick, and the binding was too strong, so instead he forced its jaws back open like a man wrestling an alligator and pinned it down. He climbed up on the table and slowly, awkwardly, he got his feet and then his legs and hips through the door in the page.