As he did it the book began to groan horribly, as if the wrongness of it, the violation, hurt it physically. When he was all the way through I thought it would snap closed but instead it fell back open again, limp and unhappy at having been force-fed a meal it didn’t want.

Ashamed, I climbed through quickly and dropped onto the beach. Looking back I saw Jane appear in the doorway of the library, and our eyes met across the gap between worlds, but it was too late for her. The book had had enough Chatwins for one day, and it closed over my head. The portal vanished.

The tide was out and the wind was slack. The sea was flat as a made bed. It looked about eleven in the morning.

Martin was halfway up the dunes already. He had had plenty of time to think through what he would do in Fillory, if he ever got the chance. He was here on borrowed time, and he wasn’t going to waste it.

“Hey!” I called after him. “Wait for us!”

Fiona was watching him too, but she wasn’t following. The joke had gone far enough for her.

“He’s not going to Whitespire,” she said quietly.

“He’s not? Martin!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

“I think you should go with him,” Fiona said. “Someone should.”

Martin had paused at the crest and was considering us.

“Well, come on then,” he said, “if you’re coming.”

I did. Fiona stayed where she was.

—

Nothing happened the way Plover said it did later. All that business with Sir Hotspots in The Flying Forest is his invention—pure fiction. In reality it was just me and Martin. I was the only witness.

Martin’s gait was a stolid, purposeful tramp, and I had to skip every few strides to keep up with him.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m not going back,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m not going back to England, Rupes. I hate it, I hate England, and everybody there hates me. You know that. And if I go home I’ll never get back here again, we both know it. You saw the book, it almost had my legs off. If the rams want me out They’ll have to throw me out, and when They try by God They’ll have a fight on Their hands.”

There was no point in arguing with him. There was a bit of our father in Martin, and just then he sounded like Father cursing the Germans, something he used to do often and at great length.

“What are you going to do?”

“Anything,” he said. “Everything. Whatever I have to.”

“But what?”

“There’s something I want to try. I had an idea about a trade.”

“A trade. With who? What have you got to trade?”