“No, I don’t think you’re stupid, Alice.” Quentin felt like a boxer who was knocked out standing, out on his feet, crosses for eyes, just wishing to God that he could fall down. She was right, a thousand times right, but if he could just make her see what he saw—if she could only put things in proper perspective. Fucking women. She was walking away now, toward one of the alleys that led to another square, leaving a trail of damp squashing foot prints behind her. “But will you please look around you?” He was begging, trailing after her, his voice ragged with exhaustion. “Will you please acknowledge for a second that something more important than who stuck what body part where is going on around you?”

She wasn’t listening, or maybe she was just determined to say what she was going to say.

“You know,” she said, almost conversationally, crossing into the next square, “I bet you actually thought fucking her was going to make you happy. You just go from one thing to the next, don’t you, and you think it’s going to make you happy. Brakebills didn’t. I didn’t. Did you really think Janet would? It’s just another fantasy, Quentin.”

She stopped and hugged her arms over her midsection, like the pain was a gastric ulcer, and sobbed bitterly. Her wet clothes clung to her; a little pool was forming around her. He wanted to comfort her, but he didn’t dare touch her. The stillness of the square was almost tangible around them. The Fillory books had described them as all exactly identical, but he could see they weren’t, far from it. They shared the same crypto-Italian style, but this one had a colonnade on one side, and the fountain in the center was rectangular, not round like the one they’d come in through. At one end a white marble face vomited water into it.

Footsteps on stone. Quentin thought he would have welcomed any interruption, anything, especially if it was carnivorous and would eat him alive.

“Kind of a reunion, isn’t it?”

Penny came stepping briskly across the flagstones toward them. The gray facade of a stone piazza loomed above them, with heraldic inlays: an anchor and three flames. Penny looked as happy and relaxed as Quentin had ever seen him. He was in his element and glowing with pride. His clothes were dry.

“Sorry. I’ve spent so much time here, but I’ve never had anybody to show it to. You wouldn’t think that would matter, but it does. When I first came through there was a corpse lying right there on the ground. Right over there.”

He pointed like a campus tour guide.