It was the kind of thing people always said about Fillory. She placed something cool on his burning forehead, and he lost consciousness.

When he woke up again she was gone. But he wasn’t alone.

“You had a concussion,” somebody said.

It might have been the voice that finally woke him up. It had been calling his name. He recognized it, but he couldn’t place it. It was calm and familiar in a way he found comforting.

“Hey, Q. Q? Are you awake? Professor Moretti said you had a concussion.”

It was Penny’s voice. He could even see the pale oval of Penny’s face, propped up on pillows, across the aisle from him and one bed down.

“That’s why you threw up. It must have been when we fell over that bench. You hit your head on the ground.” All the crazy anger had drained out of Penny. He was positively chatty now.

“Yeah. I know I hit my head,” Quentin said slowly, thickly. “It was my head.”

“It won’t affect your mental functioning, if you’re wondering about that. That’s what Moretti said. I asked.”

“Well that’s a relief.”

A long silence passed. A clock ticked somewhere. There was a lovely sequence in the last Fillory book, The Wandering Dune, when little Jane, the youngest Chatwin, catches a bad cold and spends a week in bed talking to the Drawing Master on board the good ship Windswept, attended to by soft, sympathetic bunnies. Quentin had always liked Jane. She was different from the other Chatwins: more thoughtful, with an unpredictable sense of humor and a sharper edge than her slightly saccharine, Dick-and-Jane siblings.

He wondered what time it was.

“What about you?” he said numbly. He wasn’t so sure he was willing to make nice just yet. “Did you get hurt?”

“I cut open my forehead on your tooth. And you broke my nose when you head-butted me. They fixed it with a Pulaski’s Mending. I’ve never seen it done like that before, at least not on a human being. She used goat’s milk.”

“I didn’t even know I head-butted you.”

Penny was quiet again. Quentin counted thirty ticks of the clock.

“Do you have a black eye?” Penny said. “I can’t see.”

“Huge one.”

“Thought so.”

There was a glass of water on the bedside table. Quentin gulped it gratefully and fell back on the pillow. Hot veins of pain flashed through his head. Whatever the paramedic had done, or whoever she was, he still had some healing to do.

“Penny. Why the hell did you hit me like that?”

“Well, I think I had to,” Penny said. He sounded a little shocked that Quentin would even ask.

“You had to.” Maybe he wasn’t too tired after all. “But I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t do anything. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t do anything.” Penny chuckled woodenly. His voice was oddly cool, as if he’d rehearsed this speech, his closing argument, many times. Behind it Quentin could hear that weird manic anger ramping back up. “You could have talked to me, Quentin. You could have shown me a little respect. You and your little girlfriend.”