“I turned the other cheek.” Quentin didn’t feel like talking, but he was hungry. He got a plate from the kitchen and sat down at the far end of the table and served himself leftovers.

“We were talking about what to do next,” Richard said. “Making up an actions list.”

“Right.” Josh pounded authoritatively on the heavy table. “Who’s got some action items for me? We need to enumerate our deliverables!”

“Food,” Richard said, straight-faced. “And if we’re really going to Fillory, we all need to reread all the books.”

“Gold,” Anaïs chipped in gamely. “And trade items. What do Fillorians want? Cigarettes?”

“We’re not going to Brezhnev-era Russia, Anaïs. Steel?”

“Gunpowder?”

“My God,” Eliot said. “Listen to you people. I am not going to be the man who brought the gun to Fillory.”

“We should bring overcoats,” Richard said. “Tents. Cold-weather gear. We have no idea what season it is there. We could be walking into deep winter.”

Yesterday—meaning before his nap—Fillory was going to make everything all right. Now it was hard to focus on it: it seemed like a dream again. Now the mess with Janet and Alice was the real thing. It would drag everything else down with it.

He pulled himself together with an effort.

“How long are we talking about going for?”

“A couple of days? Look, we can just come back if we forget something,” Eliot said. “With the button it’s a snap. We’ll just stay till it gets boring.”

“What should we do when we get there?”

“I think they’ll probably give us a quest,” Penny said. “That’s what always happened to the Chatwins.”

Heads turned. Penny was standing in the doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants, blinking like an owl, looking like he’d just woken up, too.

“I don’t know if we can count on that, Penny.” For some reason it annoyed Quentin, how starry-eyed and optimistic Penny was being about this. “It’s not like the rams summoned us. It might not even be like the books. Maybe there never were any quests. Plover probably just put that stuff in so there would be a good story. Maybe we’ll just suck around Fillory like we’re sucking around here.”

“Don’t be a killjoy,” Josh said, “just because your girlfriend beats you up.”

Penny was shaking his head. “I just don’t see Plover coming up with all that stuff on his own. It’s not rational. He was a gay dry-cleaning magnate with a background in practical chemistry. He didn’t have a creative bone in his body. No way. It’s Occam’s razor. It’s much more likely that he was writing it as it happened.”

“So what do you think,” Eliot said, “we’re going to meet a damsel in distress?”