You couldn’t talk about the Fillory stuff at Brakebills. Everybody loved Fillory. It was their most precious childhood fantasy, they used to run around their backyards or basement rec rooms or whatever they ran around in pretending they were Martin Chatwin, boy-hero of a magical world of green fields and talking animals where they would attain total and complete self-actualization. And Plum got that, totally and completely. It was their fantasy, and it was perfect and innocent and true, at least in the way that such things were true. She would never try to take that away from them.

And literally everybody at Brakebills grew up on Fillory. The place was one big five-year Fillory convention.

But Plum, through whose very veins the mighty blood of the Chatwins flowed, did not grow up on Fillory. They didn’t even have the books; Plum had only read the first one, The World in the Walls, and that was on the sly, in snatches, at the public library. Plum’s parents didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and they didn’t read Christopher Plover.

Plum didn’t mind. Once you found out that magic was real, fictional wonderlands were pretty small change by comparison. So she quietly opted out of a public life as the last scion of the Chatwin line. She could do without the fuss: being the living incarnation of the most innocent, ardent childhood fantasies of pretty much everybody you met was not actually a gift from the gods.

But there was more to it than that, there always had been. Underneath her mother’s scorn and indifference there was something else, and Plum wasn’t completely sure but she thought it might be fear. Fillory had made the Chatwin family famous, but most people didn’t know—or they knew but chose not to think about it—that it had ruined them too. Martin, Plum’s great-uncle, high king and hero of the Fillory books, had disappeared when he was thirteen. He was never found. Jane, the youngest, the moppet, vanished when she was the same age. The others survived, more or less, but no one came out of it unscathed. Helen changed her name and ended her life as an evangelical Christian in Texas. Fiona Chatwin got along by never once mentioning Fillory as an adult; when pressed on the subject she exhibited faint surprise and claimed she’d never heard of it.

As for Rupert, Plum’s great-grandfather, he was by all accounts a wreck of a man who spent his adult life in neurotic seclusion until Field Marshal Erwin Rommel came along to put him out of his misery.