Years passed. Jane was thirteen, no longer a girl, as old as Martin was when he’d disappeared, when the call finally came. She was visited by a cooperative and industrious hedgehog named Prickleplump, who helped her recover an old cigar box containing the buttons from the old dry well down which Helen had dropped it. She could have enlisted one of the others to come with her, but instead Jane returned to Fillory alone, by way of the City, the only Chatwin ever to enter the other world without a sibling to keep her company.

She found Fillory beset by a powerful wind. It blew and blew and never stopped blowing. At first it was amusing, and everybody flew kites, and a craze for flowy clothing that billowed out on the breeze swept through the royal court at Whitespire. But over time the wind became relentless. The birds were exhausted from struggling with it, and everybody’s hair was getting tangled. The leaves were being stripped from the forest, and the trees were complaining. Even when you went inside and closed the door you could still hear it groaning, and feel it blowing on your face for hours afterward. Castle Whitespire’s wind-powered clockwork heart threatened to spin out of control, and had to be decoupled from its windmills and halted for the first time in living memory.

A group of eagles and griffins and pegasi allowed themselves to be borne away on the wind, convinced that it would blow them away to a fantastical land, one even more magical than Fillory. They returned a week later coming from the other direction, hungry and disheveled and windburned. They refused to discuss what they had seen.

Jane belted on a rapier, put her hair up in a tight bun, and set off into the Darkling Woods alone, resolute, bent forward against the gale, heading upwind in search of its source. Soon she came across Ember, alone in a clearing. He was injured and distraught. He told her of Martin’s transformation, and his efforts to expel the child, which had ended with the death of Umber. They held a council of war.

With a bellowing bleat Ember summoned the Cozy Horse, and together they mounted its broad velvet back and set off to see the dwarves. Swing players at the best of times, the dwarves could never be relied upon to cooperate with anybody, but even they were convinced that Martin was dangerous, and besides, all that wind was blowing the topsoil off their beloved underground warrens. They fashioned for Jane a silver pocket watch, a work of consummate horological mastery, so dense with tiny gears and cams and glorious spiral springs that its interior was a solid teeming mass of gleaming clockwork. With it, the dwarves explained, Jane could control the flow of time itself—turn it forward, turn it back, speed it up, slow it down—as she liked.