“Actually I thought I might pay a visit to my great-aunt Jane. It’s way past time I got to know that side of the family, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only relative she’s got left. I don’t know, maybe she’ll teach me how to make clock-trees. From what I hear about her I think we might get along.”

Quentin thought she might be right. It was all beginning for Plum—he could almost see the plans forming in her head—but it reminded him again that for him things were ending. A cool breeze blew through the clearing. He wondered if Alice would come with him.

“I keep thinking about something,” Alice said. “If Ember and Umber are dead, and Quentin’s not the god of Fillory anymore, then it must be somebody else. But who? Is it you, Julia?”

“It’s not me,” Julia said.

Alice was right, the power must have gone somewhere, but Quentin didn’t know where either. He’d felt it flow out of him, and he could tell that it knew where it was going, but it hadn’t told him. If not Julia then who? Probably it was one of the talking animals, the way it had been before. The sloth, maybe. The others were listening—they wanted to know too.

“Fillory’s always had a god,” Quentin said. “It has to be someone.”

“Does it?” Julia said. “When you were a god you mended Fillory, Quentin. You don’t remember it, but you did. You did it well. Fillory’s in tune now—it’s perfectly balanced and calibrated. It could run on its own for a few millennia without any trouble at all. Maybe Fillory doesn’t need a god right now. I think this age might just be a godless one.”

A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them and helping or not according to his or her divine mood. There would be nobody to praise them and nobody to condemn them. They would have to do it all themselves.

The cold wind was blowing steadily now, and the temperature was dropping. Quentin hugged himself.

“Fillory will have you, though,” Alice pointed out.