“We thought he was trying to starve us out.” Janet poured out the rest of a bottle of red wine into two glasses standing on a sideboard and handed them to Quentin and Alice. Two more empty bottles stood on the floor, though the others didn’t seem especially drunk.

They were in a shabby but comfortable library lined with threadbare rugs and lit by candles and firelight. Quentin realized that the little house must be larger on the inside than it was on the outside; it was also a lot cooler—the atmosphere was that of a nice, chilly fall evening. Books overflowed the bookcases and stood in wobbly stacks in the corners and even on the mantelpiece. The furniture was distinguished but mismatched, and in places it was severely battered. In between the bookcases the walls were hung with the usual inexplicable artifacts that accumulate in private clubs: African masks, dreary landscape paintings, retired ceremonial daggers, glass cases full of maps and medals and the deteriorating corpses of exotic moths that had presumably been captured at great effort and expense. Quentin felt overheated and underdressed but mostly just relieved to finally be inside.

There were only five of them, counting himself and Alice. Eliot was there, scanning one of the bookshelves and acting like he hadn’t noticed them yet. He seemed to be trying to make a serious argument about magical theory to somebody, but nobody was listening

“Tinkerbell, we have guests,” Janet said. “Please turn around and face the room.” She was lean and animated, with a serious, somewhat anachronistic pageboy haircut. She was the loud one: Quentin had seen her holding forth to the others on walks through the Maze and making speeches over dinner in the dining room.

Eliot broke off his monologue and turned around. He was wearing an apron.

“Hello,” he said, not missing a beat. “Glad you could make it. Alice, I understand you burned our door in half.”

“Quentin helped.”

“We watched you out the window,” Josh said. “You’re hella lucky Brzezinski didn’t catch you with that axe.”

“What’s the correct solution?” Alice asked. “I mean, I know it worked, but there must be a better way.”

She took a timid sip of her wine, immediately followed by a less timid one.

“There isn’t one,” Janet said. “Or not a good one, anyway. That’s part of the point. This is Physical Magic. It’s messy. It’s crude. As long as you don’t knock the building down, it counts. And if you did it would probably still count.”

“How did you do it?” Alice asked shyly. “I mean, when it was your turn?”

“Froze and shattered it. I do a special kind of cold magic, that’s my Discipline. Sixty-three minutes. And that is a record.”

“It used to be you could say ‘friend’ in Elvish and it would let you in,” Josh said. “Now too many people have read Tolkien.”