WE WANTED TO STAY, Q, BUT IT WAS HARD, AND GETTING HARDER EVERY DAY. THE CENTAURS SAID IT WASN’T WORKING. BUT IF YOU’RE READING THIS THEN YOU WOKE UP AFTER ALL. I’M SORRY ABOUT EVERYTHING. I KNOW YOU ARE TOO. I KNOW I SAID I DIDN’T NEED A FAMILY TO BECOME WHO I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE, BUT IT TURNED OUT THAT I DID. AND IT WAS YOU.

WE’LL MEET AGAIN.

—E

The other envelope contained a notebook. It was thick and old-looking and squashed around the corners. Quentin recognized it instantly, even though he hadn’t seen it since a chilly November afternoon six years ago.

With a cold, clear mind he sat down on his bed and opened The Magicians.

The book was disappointingly short, maybe fifty handwritten pages, some of them smudged and water-damaged, and it was not written in Christopher Plover’s usual plain, simple, open-hearted prose. It was cruder, funnier, more arch, and it showed signs of having been scribbled in haste, with a generous assortment of misspellings and missing words. This was because it wasn’t written by Christopher Plover at all. It was—the author explained in the first paragraph—the first book of Fillory and Further by somebody who had actually been there. That person was Jane Chatwin.

The story of The Magicians picked up immediately after the end of The Wandering Dune, after Jane, the youngest, and her sister Helen (“that dear, self-righteous busybody”) quarreled over Helen’s hiding of the magic buttons that could take them to Fillory. Having failed to unearth them herself, Jane was forced to wait, but no further invitations to Fillory arrived. She and her siblings seemed fated to live out the rest of their lives on Earth as ordinary children. She supposed it was all right—after all, most children never got to go to Fillory at all—but it hardly seemed fair. The others had all gone to Fillory at least twice, and she’d only gotten to go once.

And there was the matter of Martin: he was still missing after all this time. Their parents had long since given up hope, but the children hadn’t. At night Jane and the other little Chatwins crept into each other’s bedrooms and whispered about him, wondering what adventures he was getting up to in Fillory, and when he would finally come home to them, as they knew he one day would.