His mind was an icy pond constantly in danger of thawing. He trod on it only lightly—its surface was perilously slick and who knew how thin. To break through would mean immersion in what was below: cold, dark anaerobic water and angry, toothy fish. The fish were memories. He wanted to put them away somewhere and forget where he’d put them, but he couldn’t. The ice gave way at the oddest moments: when a fluffy talking chipmunk looked up at him quizzically, when a centaur nurse was inadvertently kind to him, when he caught a glimpse of his face in a mirror. Something hideous and saurian would rise up and his eyes would flood and he would wrench himself away.

The grief he felt for Alice kept unfolding new dimensions he hadn’t known were there. He felt like he’d only seen and loved her, really loved her, all of her, for those last few hours. Now she was gone, broken like the glass animal she’d made that first day they’d met, and the rest of his life lay in front of him like a barren, meaningless postscript.

For the first few weeks after his resurrection Quentin still felt deep aches in his chest and shoulder, but they faded as more weeks piled on top of those first few. He was at first shocked and subsequently kind of fascinated to discover that the centaurs had replaced the skin and muscle tissue he’d lost to the Beast with something that looked very much like dark fine-grained wood. Two-thirds of his collarbone, and most of his right shoulder and biceps, now appeared to be composed of a smooth, highly polished fruitwood—cherry maybe, or possibly apple. The new tissue was completely numb—he could rap on it with his knuckles and not feel a thing—but it was perfectly able to flex and bend when and where he needed it to, and it merged gracefully with the flesh around it, without a seam. He liked it. Quentin’s right knee was wooden now, too. He couldn’t actually remember having injured that particular part of him, but whatever, maybe something untoward had happened to it on the way back.

And there was another change: his hair had gone completely white, even his eyebrows, like the man in Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom.” He looked like he was wearing an Andy Warhol wig.

He would do anything to keep from sitting still. He practiced with a bow and arrow on a wide, disused, weed-grown archery range. When he could get his attention, he had one of the younger centaurs teach him the rudiments of riding and fencing with a saber, in the name of physical therapy. Sometimes he pretended his sparring partner was Martin Chatwin, sometimes he didn’t; either way, he never once landed a hit. A small contingent of talking animals had discovered Quentin’s presence at the Retreat, a badger and some oversize talking rabbits. Excited by the sight and smell of a human, and from Earth at that, they had gotten it into their heads that he was the next High King of Fillory, and when he angrily insisted that he wasn’t, and that he’d lost all interest in that particular ambition, they dubbed him the Reluctant King and left tributes of nuts and cabbages outside his windows, and constructed pathetic handmade (or pawmade) crowns for him woven out of twigs and adorned with worthless quartz pebbles. He tore them apart.