She checked back in on the sun. Still boiling and thrashing on the horizon, spreading out laterally, like dropped ice cream melting on a hot sidewalk; probably it would take like a million years or some other cosmic span of time to expend all its energy and die. She checked back in on Josh and Poppy. Poppy was taking a break on top of one of Whitespire’s walls, which were holding pretty well so far. Janet supposed that if things got bad they’d have to open the gates and retreat into the bailey, but it hadn’t come to that yet. She missed Josh for a minute, till she found him down on the battlefield itself. He was in magic armor, sealed up tight—she was amazed he could even breathe in there—clumping around the field with a mace (always the fat man’s weapon of choice, for some reason), whacking at whatever got in range. An angry elephant put its foot on him, and Janet’s breath caught in her throat, but Josh’s armor held. In fact it was so smooth and frictionless that he squirted out from under the elephant’s foot like a pumpkin seed and flew twenty yards.

Josh picked himself up. He’d dropped his mace, but he was completely invulnerable anyway. Janet wondered what he thought he was doing, if hitting some wildebeests or whatever with a stick was making him feel better.

Let them join the fray, she thought. Let them have their fun. She just hoped the baby was safe. And at that moment, out of nowhere, Janet knew that she herself would never have children. Probably she’d known it for a while, but it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. Let others breed. Let them, and God be with them. She would be the witness—she was tough enough to see everything break and not break herself. They also serve who fly around on hippogriffs and watch.

There was a lot to watch. It was all on now, Fillory had gone all in, the whole fucking pub quiz. Probably even the bugs were fighting each other. Where were the dwarfs, she wondered? Sitting it out underground? A tall and rather august man in a tuxedo had joined the fray, fighting bare-handed, and Janet thought she recognized him from Quentin’s stories about the edge of the world. The battle was dissolving into frantic scrums featuring all kinds of weird shit she’d never even seen before: a burning suit of armor, a man who seemed to be woven out of rope, another who was just built out of pebbles. To the south a towering dune had finally crested the Copper Mountains, and surfing on it like a mad thing was a tremendous clipper ship crewed by—rabbits? For real? Was that something from the books? It had been so long. They came ripping down the steep slopes, heeled over.