He hadn’t seen her since Ember’s Tomb, and their reunion was so chaotic and unexpected that in the moment he didn’t know what to think or feel or do—Fogg was right, he hadn’t followed protocol, because the protocol was designed to banish or kill anything that made it inside the Brakebills cordon, and he wasn’t going to do that. And he hadn’t wanted to say why. Just like that Alice was there, right there, close enough to talk to, close enough to kill him. Or to kill Plum, whom until that night he knew only as a face in the crowd. But she hadn’t.

There was a part of him that wished he hadn’t seen Alice at all, that he hadn’t been in the Senior Common Room that night, that it hadn’t been his turn to eat with the First Years. It wasn’t enough that he’d lost her once and spent seven years getting over it—now Alice had to hunt him down, cross worlds to find him and get him thrown out of the only home he had? When he kicked in that mirror part of him had meant it: he wanted to send her back, push her back down. He knew Brakebills was over for him even before Fogg fired him. He knew it as soon as he saw her.

Because he’d felt her presence. He was sure he had. She wasn’t gone: her body had burned, but the essence of Alice was in there somewhere, the Alice he knew, trapped inside that toxic blue flame like a fly in amber. He’d recognized her, the old Alice, the one he used to love, twisted and distorted but real, and he couldn’t leave her there. If there was some way to get her out, he would find it. That was his job now. Teaching would have to wait.

He was ready. The whole business of getting kicked out of Fillory had been good for him. It made him tougher, more grounded in reality, to the point where he could deal with getting kicked out of Brakebills. He was basically homeless, and getting increasingly less respectable, but he knew who he was and what he had to do.

He just needed a plan. He needed to get himself together—he needed resources, he needed somewhere to live. He needed to find out everything he could about niffins. For that he needed money, and to get money they would have to break this damn bond.

They weren’t going to do that without help. Unfortunately the only magician Quentin could think of who was smart enough to help them was very far away, on another continent in fact. It was a place that he and Alice had known well.