“Like I’m sure your magic land is totally original.”

Alice booted a pebble.

“You’ll have to think of some clever secret way kids can find their way in here,” she said.

“That should be fun.”

“Don’t make it too easy, though.”

“No, not too easy. And not for a while.” He took her hand; she didn’t take it back. “I want us to have it to ourselves for a bit.”

Their cheeks were turning red, and they had to stop and warm each other up with spells to keep going. Then they resumed tramping along, over short bristly grass, through sprays of tiny phosphorescent wildflowers that shut up frantically when they got too near, like sea anemones. It was a big country, bigger than Quentin expected: there were mountains in the distance, and soon they were skirting a sizable forest. When Quentin kicked up a clod of grass the soil underneath was smooth and rich as black butter.

Something tickled his breastbone, and he reached inside his jacket. His old Fillorian pocket watch: it was ticking. He thought it would never run again. It must like it here.

“Hang on, I want to do something.”

He’d always half expected that the watch would turn out to have some sort of amazing magical power—turning back time, maybe, or slowing it, or freezing it, or something. It certainly looked magical enough. But if it had any powers at all he’d never found them. Funny how some things you’re sure will pay off never do.

Slipping it off its chain, he approached a tree on the edge of the forest, this world’s answer to a beech tree, and placed the watch against its trunk and pressed. After a moment’s hesitation the tree accepted it: the watch sank into the smooth gray bark as if it were warm clay and stuck there, embedded, still ticking. He left it there. A homemade clock-tree. Maybe it would breed more.

Quentin recognized this land and yet at the same time he didn’t. Could this be home? He didn’t see any reason why not. But it was a strange, wild country. It was no utopia. It wasn’t a tame land.

He’d come a long way to get here. He was very far from the bitter, angry teenager he’d been in Brooklyn, before this all started, and thank God for that. But the funny thing was that after all this time he still didn’t think that that miserable teenager had been wrong. He didn’t disagree with him—he still felt solidarity with him on the major points. The world was fucking awful. It was a wretched, desolate place, a desert of meaninglessness, a heartless wasteland, where horrific things happened all the time for no reason and nothing good lasted for long.