The page, with what seemed to Plum like a certain lack of sentimentality, slipped out of Quentin’s hand of its own volition and through the air and onto Penny’s desk like a toddler rushing to embrace its parent.

“Thank you.”

Instantly a door opened and a robed woman entered, eyes on the floor as if to avoid gazing directly at Penny’s magnificence. She took the page, bearing it in both hands as gingerly as if it were a limb in urgent need of reattaching. Which Plum supposed in some sense it was.

Penny leaned over and pulled up one of the floor tiles next to his chair, which turned out not to be a tile at all but the cover of a large book. It was embedded in the floor. Plum looked around: they were standing on books, big, dusty, thickly bound tomes fitted together like flagstones. Penny leafed through the tissue-thin pages, which contained columns of minute numbers, nodded, and then let the cover fall closed with a thump.

“Now,” he said, “there is the matter of the fine.”

“A fine?” Quentin said. “You mean like a late fee?”

“I do. You will be detained here for one year to work in the stacks until your debt is repaid.”

Oh my God, what an ass!

“Don’t be an ass,” Plum said.

“You’re not going to detain me,” Quentin said. “Penny, Fillory is dying. We might be able to save it, but it can’t wait. We have to go.”

“There are thousands of worlds. They live and they die. But knowledge is power, Quentin, and wisdom is eternal.” He actually talked like that. “You took some of ours.”

“I gave it back.”

“But you had the use of it for a year. A page from the Arcana arcanorum, in the hand of the Zwei Vögel scribe herself. Think what we could have done with it in that time.”

“Almost certainly nothing. You have like a dillion books here, probably nobody would have even looked at it.”

Penny stood up and walked around from behind the desk, raising his hands. His fingers—hey, those were spellcasting positions!

“The books must be balanced, Quentin. You always did have trouble accepting that. We will also have to remove from your mind the memory of what you read—”

He was going into Quentin’s head now? No. Plum took a step back and raised her hands too. Everybody did; in one second they went from a loose clump of people with complicated feelings about one another to a single defensive phalanx. Quentin moved the fastest: he held up a hand and a tight, blinding shaft of light shone out of his palm, straight into Penny’s face.