He remembered the first time he saw Fillory. He’d cried his eyes out in front of a clock tree. Not much chance of Plum doing that, but still: he’d give her some time.

“No more spinning,” Janet said. “That’s all I ask. The spinning thing was always bullshit. I don’t know how the dwarfs sold them on that in the first place.”

“I hear you,” Eliot said. “I’m not arguing. We’ll take it up with them when they get back. If they come back.”

“But listen, what about the color?” Josh said. “Is that on the table? Because I gotta tell you, the white never did it for me. A bird took a crap on that thing, you could see it a mile away. I know Castle Blackspire was a house of unspeakable evil or whatever, but you have to admit it looked pretty badass.”

“What about the name, though?” Poppy said. “We’d have to change that too.”

“Ooh, good point,” Josh said. “I guess we can’t live in Castle Mauvespire or whatever. Or could we? Hi, Quentin!”

“Hi, guys. Don’t let me interrupt.”

They didn’t. They kept talking, and he just listened. It was good seeing them all together in Fillory again, it made him happy, but there was a distance between him and them now too: a thin, almost undetectable gap, even between him and Eliot. They never would have admitted it—they would have hotly denied it if he said anything—but the truth was that he wasn’t quite in the club anymore. He would always be part of Fillory, especially now that he’d held the entire world in his temporarily divine hands—it would always have his vast, invisible fingerprints on it, forever, like the paths of spiral labyrinths. But he knew his place too, and he was starting to think it wasn’t here. He’d come back one day, or he hoped he would, but they were the kings and queens now.

He had a different role to play. Maybe he and Alice could be a club. He walked back to where she stood talking with Julia.

“It’s too bad James never made it here,” Quentin said. “He would have liked it. I sometimes wonder what happened to him.”

“Hedge fund, Hoboken. He’ll die in a skiing accident in Vail, age seventy-seven.”

“Ah.”

“Wait,” Alice said. “But does that mean you know how we’re going to die too?”

“Some people’s deaths are harder to predict than others. James is easy. Yours I can’t see. You’re too complicated. Too many twists and turns left to come.”