Quentin dug seven long lines of Fillorian script into the hardwood floor of the workshop with a gouge and a mallet. He went at the ceiling too, embedding long curls of platinum wire in the plaster. In places he stripped the walls and nailed more wire along the bare studs. The only piece of the puzzle that was completely missing in action was that damned plant, the one from the Neitherlands page. Incredibly it had turned up in Rupert’s spell as well. Quentin wasn’t sure it was absolutely crucial, but either way he still couldn’t identify it, so they’d just have to scrape by without it.

One night, after they’d both worked themselves into a state of exhaustion, he and Plum were lying limply on couches in the ex-disco room like they’d been flung there in the aftermath of an explosion. They were too tired to go to bed.

“So how big is this land of yours even supposed to be?” Plum said.

“I don’t know yet. Not giant, I don’t think. Ten acres maybe. Like the Hundred Acre Wood in Winnie-the-Pooh.”

“Except with ten.”

“Yeah. I’m trying to specify it in a couple of places,” Quentin said, “but it’s hard to know exactly what goes where.”

“But it won’t take up any space in the real world.”

“I hope not.”

“Quentin, why are you doing this?”

He recognized the importance of the question. He was going to fall asleep right there on the couch, he felt like he was melting into it. But he tried to answer it before that happened.

“What do you think magic is for?”

“I dunno. Don’t answer a question with a question.”

“I used to think about this a lot,” Quentin said. “I mean, it’s not obvious like it is in books. It’s trickier. In books there’s always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world’s in danger, evil’s on the rise, but if you’re really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine.

“But in real life that guy never turns up. He’s never there. He’s busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone’s just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you’ve figured it out and done it, you’ll never know whether you were right or wrong. You’ll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn’t. There’s no answers in the back of the book.”

Plum was silent so long that Quentin wondered if she’d dozed off while he was talking. But then she said: