“Eliot, darling, I think our dinner must be ready,” Janet said. Her attitude toward Eliot was hard to read, a weird combination of tenderness and contempt. She clapped her hands. “Josh, maybe you could do something about . . . ?” She gestured in the direction of the half-demolished door. “The mosquitoes are getting in.”

Still dazed, Quentin trailed Eliot into the kitchen, which was, again, larger and nicer than really seemed plausible from the outside, with white cabinets up to the high ceiling and soapstone counters and an aerodynamic-looking 1950s refrigerator. Eliot sloshed some wine from his glass into a pan of red sauce on the stove.

“Never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink,” he said. “Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn’t drink.”

He didn’t seem at all embarrassed by the fact that he’d ignored Quentin for the past year. It was like it never happened.

“So you have this whole place to yourself?” Quentin didn’t want to let on how much he wanted to belong here, even now that he did, officially, belong here.

“Pretty much. So do you, now.”

“Do all the Disciplines have their own clubhouses?”

“It’s not a clubhouse,” Eliot said sharply. He dumped a huge clump of fresh pasta into a tall pot of boiling water and stirred it to break it up. “This’ll cook in about a minute flat.”

“Then what is it?”

“Well, all right, it is a clubhouse. But don’t call it that. We call it the Cottage. We have the seminars here, and the library isn’t bad. Sometimes Janet paints in the bedroom upstairs. Only we can get in here, you know.”

“What about Fogg?”

“Oh, and Fogg, though he never bothers. And Bigby. You know Bigby, right?”

Quentin shook his head.

“I can’t believe you don’t know Bigby!” Eliot said, chuckling. “God, you’re going to love Bigby.”

He tasted the sauce, then glugged in a slug of heavy cream and stirred it in in widening circles. The sauce paled and thickened. Eliot had a jaunty, off handed confidence at the stove.

“All the groups have a place like this. The Naturals have this deeply lame treehouse off in the forest. The Illusionists have a house just like this one, though only they know where it is. You have to find it to get in. Knowledge just has the library, the poor suckers. And Healing has the clinic—”

“Eliot!” Janet’s voice came from the other room. “We’re starving.” Quentin wondered how Alice was faring out there.