Quentin held Him there, and when the ram had gone five minutes without a breath he spat Him out onto the ground. He’d done all a dragon could do.

Suddenly Quentin was human again, standing over the steaming, smoking body of the ram, flopped out on the grass like a sleeping dog the size of a bull. But it wasn’t over. Ember’s foreleg stirred. He was beaten, but some tenacious spark of life was refusing to leave His body. If Fillory was going to live Quentin would have to tear that spark out of Him and quench it.

This was what the knife was for, he realized, the one Asmodeus had gotten away with. Shit. Fate had practically shoved it into his damn hands, and he’d fumbled it away! He was in a fight with a god and he had no weapon.

Except that he did have one. Sometimes when you finally figure out what you have to do, you discover that you already have what you need. He’d always had it. Quentin felt around in his pocket, and his fingers found a thick round coin. Mayakovsky’s last coin.

This was the last of his inheritance. He felt a twinge of sadness, just a twinge, at the knowledge that he would never make his land now. That would have been nice. But he felt no bitterness.

What Quentin did now he’d already done once, a long time ago, but then he’d done it in anger and confusion. Now he did it calmly, with a full sense of who he was and what he was doing. He still had some nickels in his pockets, the ones he’d brought back from the mirror-house. He went to one knee and made a little stack of them on a patch of bare ground, and on top of it he balanced the golden coin, goose-side up. Then he gripped the stack in his fist and it became the hilt of a burning silver sword, which he drew up out of the ground as if it had been embedded there all along, placed there for him centuries ago.

He held it up in front of him. The last time he’d held it had been on the day he arrived at Brakebills.

“It’s good to see you again,” he whispered.

Pale, almost transparent fire played along its length, surprisingly bright in the eerie half-darkness, as if the sword had been dipped in brandy and touched with a match. He adjusted his grip on the hilt. He tried to remember something, anything, from his fencing lessons with Bingle.

Ember’s eye half opened, but He didn’t stir. Maybe He couldn’t. But if Quentin had had to put a name to what he saw in Ember’s eye it would have been not fear, or rage, but relief. Quentin felt it too.

“I’m sorry,” he said.