Something had happened to that family. There was a curse on them, and its name was Fillory—Plum’s mom talked about Fillory like it was almost real. Maybe it was the books, maybe it was Plover, maybe it was the parents, or the war, or fate, but when Fillory and Earth touched the collision was pure damage, and the Chatwins were the point of contact. They were right there at ground zero and they were blown to vapor, like the human shadows at Hiroshima. Plum was pretty sure that none of them had attained total or even partial self-actualization.

Plum’s mother wanted no part of that. And a good thing too, as far as Plum was concerned, because deep down she felt the fear too. When Plum discovered magic it was the most magnificent kind of surprise, the kind that never got less surprising. The world was even more interesting than she thought it was! But it also made her uneasy. Because just speaking logically here, if magic was real then could you still be absolutely one-hundred-percent positive that Fillory wasn’t? And if Fillory was real—which it almost certainly wasn’t—then whatever it was that had torn through an entire generation of her family like a lion through a flock of loitering gazelle was real too, and it might still be out there. Plum dug into magic with both hands, but always at the back of her mind was the thought that she might go too far, dig too deep, and dig up something that she would wish had stayed buried.

She especially thought about that when those depressive, anhedonic chemicals were singing in her bloodstream, because then she kind of wanted to dig it up. She wanted to look it in the face. She could hear Fillory calling to her, or if not Fillory then something—somewhere beautiful and distant and sirenlike where she had never been but that was also somehow home. And she knew what side of the family her depressive streak came from. That was her Chatwin inheritance, right there.

So she kept her Chatwinity to herself. She didn’t want people pushing at it, picking at it, lest its ragged, unstable edges start to unravel. Sometimes Plum wondered if there was a way to use her Discipline to hide not just things but words, facts, names, feelings, hide them so well that even she couldn’t find them. What she wanted was to hide herself from herself.

But she couldn’t. That was stupid. You were who you were. You lived your life. You didn’t brood—ruminative thinking, that’s what her shrink had called it. You got on with things. You founded the League. You pranked the hell out of Wharton.