He actually laughed out loud when he thought of it. It was too funny—too insane. But now that he saw it he couldn’t un-see it. He could follow it like a story that wound crookedly through the various sections and paragraphs and subclauses of the spell like a thread of DNA. This thing was intended to make a little world.

It was ruthlessly ingenious. It wasn’t a cosmic act of creation, a thunderbolt from Olympus, it was much more subtle than that. It was more like a seed, the dry, tear-shaped germ of a little world—tiny, the kind of thing that could fall through a crack in a sidewalk, but full of sand and rain and stars and physics and life, all flattened and dried and compressed into words on a page. If you cast it right it would expand and unfold into a place, somewhere hidden away from the real world. A secret garden.

Quentin could already see it in his mind’s eye, fresh and new and still undiscovered. Green fields of matted grass, deep silent lakes, the shadows of clouds, all spread out beneath him like an Escher etching, the way the Earth looked when he was a goose. Birds flitted between bushes, deer stalked stiff-legged through the woods. You wouldn’t own it, or rule it, but you could take care of it. You could have stewardship of it.

Lying there in bed in the half-light, rain spattering on the window, he forgot all about the bird and the Couple and the money. All that seemed beside the point now. He forgot about Brakebills. He even let himself forget Alice for a minute. This was new magic: half enchantment, half work of art. He’d spent too long searching for new kingdoms. He wanted to make one of his own, a magical place, a place like Fillory.

But not in Fillory. He would build it here on Earth.

—

“I don’t want to make you sound like a crazy person,” Plum said, “but just then it sounded like you said you were going make a land.”

“I am. Or we are. We could. That’s what it does, Rupert’s spell.”

Plum frowned.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “You can’t just make a land.”

“It helps if you don’t say it like that.”

“You mean with rocks and trees and stuff?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Wow.” She stretched, then plunked her chin in her hands. They were having breakfast at their brand new Ikea dining table. “Wow. Well, that would be a hell of a spell. Great granddad wasn’t much of a writer, but you gotta admit he was a pretty good thief. Do you think it’s actually possible?”

“I think we should find out.”

“But I don’t get it. Why? I mean it’s cool and all, but it sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass.”