Then it all went blurry, because Plum’s eyes were full of tears. She had denied it all her life, that any of it was real, but not anymore. Not after this, and not after what the girl in the mirror had shown her. It had really happened. It wasn’t just a story, it was a true story. It had found her, drawn her into its pages, and now it was time for her to play her part in it. Fillory had chewed up her ancestors and spat them out. Now it was hungry again and coming for her, and she would have to find a way to face it.

She put her head in her hands and leaked some more tears, there in the lobby of the Amenia train station. After five minutes she got up and went to the snack bar for some napkins to blow her nose on.

“Quentin,” she said when she got back. “I think Fillory was real.” It was hard to force the words out. They didn’t want to be said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think he was telling the truth. I think it was all real.”

Quentin only nodded. He didn’t look surprised. If anything she suspected him of having dabbed away a tear or two when she wasn’t looking.

“It is real, Plum,” he said. “I’ve been there.”

CHAPTER 19

The townhouse stood on a back street in the West Village, one of the oddly angled ones where the orderly grid of Manhattan starts to break down into chaos below Fourteenth Street. It didn’t get much traffic, which was part of the point: it was a discreet address. Plum said she’d bought it with money from her grandparents, her share of the Fillory royalties that they’d put in trust, intending to use it as a crash pad during her glorious postgraduation future in New York. Now she and Quentin were crashing there a little early.

From the outside it looked dark and deserted, and they were careful to maintain that appearance. A lot of people wanted that suitcase, and Quentin didn’t know who they would come after first, him and Plum or Asmodeus, but they would be coming sooner or later, and probably they would hit the softer target first, and that was not Asmodeus. For now they would lose themselves in the big city.