It made her wonder if they’d undersold Fillory too. She felt herself very close to Fillory now, just one fountain away, closer than she’d ever been. When she was kicked out of Brakebills Plum thought her life had gone straight off the rails, right into the muddy and unsanitary ditch by the side of the tracks, and maybe it had—like Quentin said, there’s no one to tell you what would have happened, after the fact. But it had also brought her here, to Fillory’s very threshold. She wanted to see it. It was time.

Plum spotted a narrow, olive-green volume with silver type on its spine dangling above her. It was so tempting, like ripe fruit . . .

“Ah ah ah!”

Penny practically slapped her hand away. It was a measure of how out of her depth she felt that she actually blushed. But Penny was off and away again.

“I’ve already instituted some improvements that have been very well received. I don’t know if you’ve noticed . . . ?”

He pointed up at one of the cat doors, through which books were entering and exiting at irregular intervals.

“Yes, very nice,” Eliot said.

“Some of your best work,” Quentin chimed in.

Plum was picking up a significant frenemy vibe off the Quentin-Penny dynamic.

“They’ve been adopted by several other libraries.”

“Good for cats, too,” Plum said. “Though they’d have to be flying cats.”

“No animals, domestic or otherwise, are allowed in the building,” Penny said, without humor.

“We really have to go,” Eliot said. “Really.”

“I’ve set aside a special room here for problem formats.”

Curious in spite of herself, Plum poked her head in through the open door. It was the weirdest bibliographical menagerie she’d ever seen. Books so tall and yet so narrow that they looked like yardsticks; she supposed they must be illustrated guides to snakes, or arrows, or maybe yardsticks. One book was kept in a glass terrarium—a librarium?—the better to contain the words that kept crawling out of it like ants. One lay slightly open on a table, but only slightly, so you could see that its pages emitted an intolerably bright radiance; a welding mask lay next to it. One book appeared to be all spine along all of its edges. It was unopenable, its pages sealed inside it.

“Honestly, you wonder who publishes these things.” Penny shook his head, and they kept walking.

It was a little like touring a chocolate factory, except with books, and starring Penny as a wonky Willy Wonka. Other adepts wearing robes that were similar to Penny’s but not as nice bustled by them, nodding deferentially to him as they passed. Some of them had the golden hands too. Hm. She would wait for the right moment.

“There are catacombs underneath the library,” Penny said. “That’s another special collection: it’s all the novels people meant to write but didn’t.”