“Oh, I spend most of my time on the Far Side,” Julia said. “I’ll look in now and then. Fillory will have to make do with a part-time three-quarters god, but I have a feeling that will be enough. Things are different now. It’s a new age.”

“A new age.”

It was very different. Very new. Fillory was a land reborn, and he’d been there, he’d assisted at the birth, but he wasn’t going to see it grow up. He looked around: it was all really ending, the great love affair of his youth, and it was as if he were already gone, and he was seeing Fillory without him in it. Somewhere along the way he’d finally outgrown it, the way people always said he would. Long or short, great or terrible, Fillory’s new age would happen without him. He belonged to the last age, the one he’d just ended with two strokes of a sword. This age would have its own heroes. Maybe Plum would be one of them.

Time to go, before he lost his composure in front of everybody. Eliot was staring up at the sky. It was covered over with a thick blanket of cloud.

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “Or whatever the appropriate expression is now. Finally.”

Out of a sky blank and pale as a clean sheet of paper, white snow began to fall. The flakes settled on the warm ground and melted there, like a cool hand on the forehead of a feverish child. The long summer was over at last.

CHAPTER 31

A week later Quentin and Alice stood together in the fourth-floor workroom of Plum’s townhouse in Manhattan. A door to somewhere else stood in front of them. They felt neither comfortable nor uncomfortable with each other, or maybe they felt both at once. They both knew each other and they didn’t. They were old lovers, and they were practically strangers.

It was just them now. Everybody else had stayed behind in Fillory.

“Are you sure you didn’t want to stay too?” Alice said, frowning at him doubtfully. “I mean, obviously you’re not a king anymore, but I’m sure you could have. Eliot would have loved it, and there’s no Ember and Umber to kick you out anymore, and they never would anyway. Not after everything that happened.”

“Really. I’m sure. This feels right.”

She shook her head.

“I still don’t get it. Back in the day you were the biggest Fillory weenie around.”

“That is true. I was a huge Fillory weenie.”

“I have this awful feeling,” Alice said, “that you left for me. And/or that you left because you’re pissed that you’re not a king anymore.”