In fact now she realized that these upper floors must be built to false perspective, to make the tower look taller than it was, because it was very tiny indeed, barely a balcony, like one of those tiny houses that mad kings built for their royal dwarfs. She had to navigate it on her hands and knees; she felt like Alice in Wonderland, grown too big. The books looked real enough though, their brown leather spines flaking like pastry, with letters stamped on them in gold. Some interminable many-volume reference work about ghosts.

The other weird thing was that they weren’t quite inanimate: they poked themselves out at her from the shelves, butted her as she crawled past, as if they were inviting her to open them and read, or daring her to, or begging her. A couple of them actually jabbed her in the ribs pretty hard. They must not get a lot of visitors, she thought. Probably this is like when you visit the puppies at the shelter and they all jump up and want to be petted.

No, thank you. If she wished to consult them she would be in touch via the usual channels. It was a relief to crawl through the miniature door at the far end of the balcony—it was practically a cat-door—and back into a normal corridor. This was taking longer than she thought.

But it wasn’t too late. The main course would be half over, but there was still dessert, and she thought there was cheese tonight too. She could still make it if she hurried.

This corridor was tight, almost a crawl space. In fact it was one—as near as she could tell she was inside one of the walls of Brakebills. On the other side was the dining hall: she could hear the warm hum of talk and the clank of heavy silverware, and she could look out through a couple of the paintings—there were peepholes in the eyes, like in old movies about haunted houses. In fact they were just serving the main, a nice rare lamb spiked with spears of rosemary, and the sight of it made her hungry. She felt like she was a million miles away from everyone and everything she knew. She was a ghost herself, the skeleton at the feast, the world in the walls. She already felt nostalgic, like one of those teary alums, for back when she was sitting at the table with her bland crab cakes, half an hour ago, back when she knew exactly where she was.

And there was Wharton, showily pouring his mingy glasses of red, totally unrepentant. The sight emboldened her. That was why she was here. She was going to get through this. For the League.