And those nice, surprisingly Pottery Barn-y curtains, the color of the stems of plants. They were coarse-woven, but it wasn’t the familiar, depressing fake-authentic coarseness of high-end Earth housewares, which merely imitated the real coarseness of fabrics that were woven by hand out of genuine necessity. As he lay there Quentin’s uppermost thought was that these were authentically coarse-woven curtains, woven by people who didn’t know any other way of making curtains, who didn’t even know that their way was special, and whose way was therefore not discounted and emptied of meaning in advance. This made him very happy. It was as if he’d been looking for these curtains forever, as if he’d been waiting his whole life to wake up one morning in a room in which those coarse-woven, stem-green curtains hung over the windows.

From time to time a horsy clippety-clopping could be heard from the hall outside. This mystery solved itself when a woman with the body of a horse stepped partway into the room. The effect was surprisingly unsurprising. She was a sturdy, sun-kissed woman with short brown hair who just happened to be attached to the chassis of a sleek black mare.

“You are conscious?” she asked.

Quentin cleared his throat. He couldn’t get it all the way clear. It was horribly dry, too dry to speak, so he just nodded.

“Your recovery is nearly complete,” the centauress said, with the air of a busy senior resident doing rounds who didn’t have time to waste rejoicing over medical miracles. She began the slow process of reversing herself, daintily, purposefully, back out into the hall.

“You have been asleep for six months and two days,” she added before she disappeared.

Quentin listened to her clippety-clop away. It was quiet again. He did his best to hang on to the blissful feeling. But it didn’t last.

The six months of his recovery were practically a blank—just a quickly evaporating impression of blue depths and complex, enchanted dreams. But Quentin’s memories of what happened in Ember’s Tomb were very clear. He might reasonably have expected that day (or had it been night?) to fall in a blackout period, or at least be veiled in merciful post-traumatic haziness. But no, not at all. He could remember it with perfect fidelity, deep focus, full force, from any angle, right up until the moment he lost consciousness.

The shock of it snapped his chest flat. It emptied out his lungs the way the Beast’s jaws had, not just once but over and over again. He was helpless against it. He lay in his bed and sobbed until he choked. His weak body spasmed. He made noises he’d never heard a human being make. He ground his face into his flat, prickly straw pillow until it was wet with tears and snot. She had died for him, for all of them, and she was never coming back.