Jane and Ember left with the pocket watch, shaking their heads. Honestly, there was never any telling what the dwarves were capable of. If they could build a time machine, you wondered why they didn’t run the whole kingdom. Except, she supposed, that they couldn’t be bothered.

Quentin turned the last page. The book ended there. It was signed on the bottom of the last page by Jane herself.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Quentin said out loud.

“The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it? But I think I tied up most of the loose threads. I’m sure you can fill in the rest, if you really think about it.”

Quentin practically jumped out of what was left of his skin. Sitting on top of his desk on the other side of the room, very still, long legs crossed, was a small, pretty woman with dark hair and pale skin.

“At least I try to make a good entrance.”

She had gone native: she wore a light brown cloak over a practical gray traveling dress that was slit up the sides far enough to show some leg. But it was unmistakably her. The paramedic, and the woman who’d visited him in the infirmary. And yet that wasn’t who she was at all.

“You’re Jane Chatwin, aren’t you?”

She smiled brightly and nodded.

“I autographed it.” She pointed to the manuscript. “Imagine what it would be worth. Sometimes I think about turning up at a Fillory convention just to see what would happen.”

“They’d probably think you were a cosplayer,” Quentin said, “and getting a little old for it.”

He set aside the manuscript on the bed. He had been very young when he met her for the first time, but he wasn’t young anymore. As her brother Martin would have said: My, how he’d grown. Her smile was not as irresistible as it used to be.

“You were the Watcherwoman, too, weren’t you?”

“Was and am.” Still sitting, she sketched a curtsy. “I suppose I could retire now that Martin is gone. Though really, I’ve only just started to enjoy myself.”

He expected himself to smile back at her, but the smile did not materialize. He didn’t feel like smiling. Quentin couldn’t have said exactly what he was feeling.

Jane remained very still, studying him as she had that first day they met. Her presence was so laden with magic and meaning and history that she almost glowed. To think she had spoken to Plover himself, and told him the stories Quentin had grown up on. The circularity of it all was dizzying. The sun was setting, and the light stained Quentin’s white bedspread a dusky orange-pink. The edges of everything were softening in the twilight.