It was about as difficult as it sounded, and messy and expensive to boot. Four-dimensional paperweights didn’t grow on trees, or at least not in this plane of existence they didn’t. Incorporate bonds were the last word in magical security, and the Couple must have gone through a good deal of trouble to cast the spell, but in doing so they’d rendered the case unstealable. Except that the bird thought it wasn’t.

In Quentin’s experience magical creatures like the bird didn’t tend to know a lot about magic from a technical point of view. They didn’t work magic themselves, they just were magic, so the theory of it didn’t really matter. Also a lot of them weren’t terribly bright. But the bird had some ideas about it, or someone had supplied it with ideas, and on the face of it they weren’t demonstrably nonsense. But carrying them out posed a raft of thorny practical issues, and the bird had generously left the working out of said problems to Quentin and Plum.

At first it was fun: it was a dense, rich, genuinely hard problem, and they attacked it with a will. The issue of the suitcase’s Chatwin connection receded to the back of Quentin’s mind as they scribbled flow charts on hotel stationery, then on reams of printer paper filched from the business center, then finally on a fat roll of butcher’s paper from an art supply shop. The spell kept ramifying into more and more secondary and tertiary and quaternary spells, to the point where they had to color-code them, and the color-coding eventually ran to a full 120-count pack of Crayolas. Quentin and Plum argued more vehemently than was strictly necessary over which colors should go with which spells.

That should probably have been a warning sign. After a week they’d drilled down far enough that they were staring at some real bedrock problems, questions that looked like they ought to have answers but which kicked back everything they threw at them. He might have given up if it hadn’t been for Alice.

For years, seven of them, he’d thought of Alice as someone who belonged to the past. She wasn’t dead, but she was gone. He was resigned to living his life without her. But when he saw her that night in the mirror at Brakebills all that ended, and she came surging roughly back into his present.