Maybe nothing would come of it, but Quentin thought it was worth finding out, and he thought it wasn’t impossible that Alice thought so too. It was pretty clear to him now that if she’d ever loved him, back then, it wasn’t just for the person he was, it was for the person that he might one day become. Maybe that’s who he was now.

When they finished casting the spell, and the dust and smoke cleared, there was a brand-new door on the far wall of the room. They studied it for another minute. There was no hurry.

“The door knocker,” she said. “Nice touch. Was that you?”

Quentin looked closer. He was going to have to get new glasses, his eyes were getting even worse. But sure enough: it was in the shape of a blue whale’s tail.

“Remind me to tell you about that sometime.”

The whale seemed like a good sign. He walked up to the door and opened it. Cool white sunlight spilled through. It wasn’t another ghost house; this world had a proper outdoors. His first impression was of cool, sweet air and a dark vegetable green.

The curse was lifted. They really had made a land, alive and brand new. A bird called. He stepped through.

“Atmosphere’s breathable,” he said.

“Dork.”

She joined him.

“So this is your secret garden,” Alice said.

The weather wasn’t much: a trifle brisk and with clouds moving in. They were looking down an orderly corridor of trees, fruit trees: there really was an orchard this time. What they could see of the sky contained three moons of various sizes, like stray marbles: one white, one pale pink, and a tiny bluish one.

“You are going to have some freak-show tides,” Alice said.

“If there’s even an ocean,” he said. “And I wish you’d say ‘we’ and not ‘you.’ We made this together, you know.”

“It’s your land, Quentin. It came out of your head. But I like it here. Looks like Scotland, sort of.”

“Want an apple? Or whatever these are?” They were hard and round and red anyway.

“I really don’t. Feels like I’d be eating your fingernail or something.”

They strolled through the orchard and stepped out into open country. Quentin’s land was an uneven land, covered with grassy humps and hillocks like ocean swells. They passed a copse of thin trees that resembled aspens, but with their trunks woven together more like banyan trees. The clouds were curious shapes, not cumulus and cirrus, new varietals of cloud that didn’t occur on Earth. Something shot through the air overhead with a fast whirring sound, leaving a fleeting impression of gray feathers, but they turned their heads too late to catch it.

“Interesting,” Quentin said.

For no particular reason there was a rainbow low above the horizon. Alice pointed it out.

“Nice art direction. Bit of a cliché, but nice.”