The hippogriff’s neck was stiff and proud against her face. It didn’t turn to look at her. Maybe it wasn’t very comfortable with displays of emotion. Well, tough. Since her nights in the desert Janet was all about being in touch with her emotions.

Janet heard and felt a deep boom, and she looked up mid-weep. Half the mountains in the Northern Barrier Range had just erupted, blown their tops off like ripe pimples. She hadn’t even known they were volcanic, but now they were lobbing big seminal gobbets of lava all over their lower slopes, like a drunk prom queen puking on her dress. Shit was getting geological, yo. Fillory was bleeding its hot arterial blood.

She made a visual survey of the coast. Broken Bay was overflowing its banks, drowning the lower reaches of the Chankly Bore in seawater; some of the hills were gone, you could just see the trees poking up out of the water. Farther out to sea she thought she saw a couple of sentient boats trying to ride out the tempest. To the south monstrous dunes from the deep desert were slamming into the headwall of the Copper Mountains and threatening to bury the lush southern plains in sand. No! Keep out! She wanted to stretch out her hands and push the desert back, stick her finger in the dike. Probably the Foremost’s gang were shivering down in their ice caves.

Fillory was under siege, and the boundaries were failing everywhere. The center cannot hold, and the edges are in pretty fucking dire shape too. A crack opened, zigging across two open fields, glowing hot and red, the grass crisping up at the lip. She wanted to throw her arms around Fillory, hug it and squash it back together. But she couldn’t. Nobody could.

Now something was harrying the Darkling Woods in the rear, and Janet focused in on . . . Jane Chatwin, come on down! The former Watcherwoman looked pissed off, gray hair loose and flying, and whenever she pointed her finger at an ambulatory tree it stopped, its shoulders sort of sank, and it rooted itself back down to the ground again. Looks like she was planning to ride this bomb down like Slim Pickens.