He wasn’t alone. When he was a god the particular names of Fillory’s many inhabitants hadn’t greatly concerned him, but now he was in the company of a woman and a demigoddess, and after a few seconds their names came back to him. They were Alice and Julia.

CHAPTER 30

You let go of the power,” Julia said.

Dawn was breaking over the raw, ragged, still-healing horizon, and he was losing it all already, everything but the faintest, most transparent memory of what it had meant to be a god. He savored the very last of it—the certainty, the power, that sense of total knowledge and well-being and control, forever and ever. It evaporated from his mind and was gone. It wasn’t the kind of memory that a mortal brain could hang on to.

He was just Quentin again, nothing more. But he would always know that it had happened, that he’d known what it was like, both for a few seconds and, in the life of a god, a thousand years.

“I let it go,” he said. “It wasn’t mine.”

Julia nodded thoughtfully.

“You’re right, it wasn’t yours. A more jealous god, or a more jealous man, might have tried to keep it, though I think the outcome would have been the same. Thank you for doing that, Quentin, for mending Fillory. I might have done it myself, but the fiddly stuff like coastlines always takes me ages. I don’t have the knack for it. Also I thought you might enjoy it.”

“Thank you. I did. Or I think I did.” Already he wasn’t crystal clear on what exactly he’d enjoyed.

She was recognizably her old self, still the Julia of Brooklyn, or directly descended from her, with her freckly face and her long black hair. But at the same time she was unmistakably divine: her height had been somewhat variable in the past, but at the moment she was seven feet tall. She wore a rather dramatic dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a presidential inauguration, even though it was made of equal parts bark and green leaves.

“Walk with me,” Julia said.

They walked, the three of them together. Fillory was Fillory again, though it was a wan and wasted Fillory, waking again piece by piece after its catastrophic illness. The meadow was still brown, the ground still dry and cracked. The new age was still in its first minutes.

Quentin was light-headed. He still had the blood of Ember and Umber on his shoes. It was hard to connect the brutal, bloody thing he’d just done with the renewal of Fillory. But this world was rudely, potently alive again, you could feel it.

“I have a question,” Alice said. “Julia, why didn’t you kill Ember yourself? I mean, it all worked out fine in the end, but you would have done a quicker job than we did.”