Quentin and Eliot stood at the edge of a large round underground chamber, blinking at bright torchlight. It was different from the rooms they’d already seen in that it appeared to be naturally occurring. The floor was sandy, the ceiling craggy and irregular and unworked, with stalactites and other rocky excrescences poking down that you wouldn’t want to hit your head on. The air was chilly and damp and still. Quentin could hear an underground stream gurgling somewhere, he couldn’t see where. The sound had no origin or direction.

The others were here, too, all of them except for poor Fen. Josh and Alice were in an entrance a little ways over. Janet stood in another archway looking lost and bedraggled, Dint and Anaïs were in the next one over, and Penny was alone in the one after that. They stood in the doorways like contestants framed in the spangled, lightbulbed archways of a game show.

It was a miracle. It even looked like they’d all just arrived at the exact same moment. Quentin took a deep breath. Relief flooded through him like a warm liquid transfusion. He was just so fucking glad to see every last one of them. Even Dint—good old Dint, you hound dog! Even Penny, and only partly because he still had his pack, presumably with the button still inside. The story’s outcome was still in play after all. Even after everything that had gone wrong it could still all turn out basically okay—it was a disaster, but a mitigated disaster. It was still possible that five years from now, when they were more or less over their post-traumatic stress disorder, they’d all get a big kick out of getting together and talking about it. Maybe the real Fillory wasn’t that different from the Fillory he’d always wanted after all.

Kings and queens, Quentin thought. Kings and queens. Glory has its price. Did you not know that?

A block of stone stood in the center of room. On it was a large shaggy sheep—or no, it had horns, so that made it a ram. It lay with its eyes closed, its legs folded under it, its chin resting on a crown, a simple golden circlet snuggled between its two shaggy front knees. Quentin wasn’t sure if it was asleep or dead or just a very lifelike statue.

He took a tentative, exploratory step into the room, feeling like a man setting foot on shore after a long and grievous afternoon on a storm-tossed yacht. The sandy floor felt reassuringly solid.

“I didn’t know—” he called hoarsely to Alice. “I wasn’t sure if you were still alive or not!”

Josh thought Quentin was talking to him. His comical face was ashen. He looked like a ghost seeing a ghost.

“I know.” He coughed wetly into his fist.

“What the hell happened? Did you fight that thing?”

Josh nodded shakily. “Sort of. I felt a big spell coming on, so I just went with it. I think I finally felt what you guys feel. I called up one of those swirly black holes. He looked at it, then he looked at me with those freaky gold eyes, then it just sucked him in. Headfirst. Just ate him. I saw his big red legs sticking out kicking, and I just booked it out of there.

“Did you check out his dick though? That guy was hung!”

Quentin and Alice embraced without speaking. The others made their way over. Stories were exchanged. It was a reunion. Somehow everybody had managed to make it out of the banquet hall unscathed, or at least not too badly scathed. Anaïs showed everybody where her golden curls got crisped off in the back as she ran. Janet was the only one who hadn’t escaped out a side door; instead she ran all the way to the end of the hall, which it turned out did have an end after all, though it took her an hour to get there (“Three years of cross country,” she said proudly). She’d even had a glass of the wine with no ill effects, apart from mild intoxication.

They all shook their heads. What they’d all been through. Nobody would ever believe it. Quentin was so tired he could hardly think, except to think: we did it, we really did it. Eliot passed the flask, and everybody drank. It had been a game at first, and then it all got horribly real, but now it was starting to feel like a game again, something like what they’d been imagining on that terrible, wonderful morning back in Manhattan. Good fun. A real adventure. After a while they ran out of things to say, just stood in a circle looking at each other and shaking their heads with silly punch-drunk smiles on their faces.

A deep, dry cough interrupted them.

“Welcome.”

It was the ram. He had opened His eyes.

“Welcome, children of Earth. Welcome, too”—here he acknowledged Dint—“you valiant child of Fillory. I am Ember.”

He was sitting up. He had the strange, horizontal, peanut-shaped pupils that sheep have. His thick wool was the color of pale gold. His ears stuck out comically beneath the heavy horns that curled back magnificently from His forehead.

Of them all, only Penny knew what to do. He dropped his backpack and walked over to stand in front of the ram. He got down on his knees in the sand and bowed his head.

“We sought a crown,” he said grandly, “but we have found a king. My lord Ember, it is my honor and privilege to offer You my fealty.”

“Thank you, My child.”

The ram’s eyes half closed, gravely and joyfully. Thank God, was all Quentin could think. Literally, thank God. It was really Him. It was the only explanation. It wasn’t like they’d done anything especially heroic to deserve this re-reversal of fortune. Ember must have brought them here. He had saved them. This was it, the closing credits. They’d won. The coronation could begin.

He looked from Penny to the ram and back. He could hear feet shuffling on the sandy floor. Somebody else besides Penny was kneeling, Quen tin didn’t turn to see who. He stayed standing. For some reason he wasn’t ready to kneel down, not yet. He would in a minute, but somehow this didn’t feel like the moment. Though it would have been nice—he’d been walking for so long. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands, so he clasped them together over his crotch.

Ember was talking, but Quentin’s mind glossed over the words. They had a certain boilerplate quality—he’d always skipped over Ember’s and Umber’s speeches in the books, too. Come to think of it, if this was Ember, where was Umber? Normally you never saw them apart.

“. . . with your help. It is time We resumed our rightful stewardship over this land. Together We shall go forth from this place and restore glory to Fillory, the glory of the old days, the great days . . .”

The words washed over him. Alice could fill him in later. In the books Ember and Umber had always come off as slightly sinister, but in person Ember didn’t seem that bad at all. He was nice, even. Warm. Quentin could see why the Fillorians didn’t mind Him that much. He was like a kindly, crinkly-eyed department-store Santa. You didn’t take Him too seriously. He didn’t look any different from an ordinary ram, except that He was larger and better groomed, and He gave off more of an air of alert, alien intelligence than you would expect from your average sheep. The effect was unexpectedly funny.

Quentin found it hard to focus on what Ember was saying. He was drunk on exhaustion and relief and Eliot’s flask. He would be happy to stipulate to any big speeches. He just wished he knew where that tantalizing, tinkling, trickling sound was coming from, because he was perishing of thirst.

There was the crown right there, between Ember’s hooves. Should somebody ask for it? Or would he just give it to them when He was ready? It was ridiculous, like a question of dinner-party etiquette. But he supposed the ram would give it to Penny now, as a reward for his prompt display of sycophancy, and they’d all have to be his underlings. Maybe that was all it took. Quentin didn’t particularly want to see Penny crowned as High King of Fillory. After all this, was Penny going to turn out to be the hero of this little adventure?

“I have a question.”

A voice interrupted the old ram midstream. Quentin was surprised to find that it was his own.

Ember paused. He was quite a large animal, easily five feet at the withers. His lips were black, and His wool looked pleasantly soft and cloudlike. Quen tin would have liked to bury his face in that wool, to weep in it and then fall asleep in it. Penny craned his neck around and bulged his eyes warningly at Quentin.

“I don’t mean to sound overly inquisitive, but if You’re, you know, Ember, how come You’re down here in this dungeon, and not up there on the surface helping Your people?”

In for a penny. It wasn’t that he wanted to make a huge point about it. He just wanted to know why they’d all had to go through so much. He wanted to square it away before they went any further.

“I mean—and this is already coming out more dramatically than I meant it to—You are a god, and things are really falling apart up there. I mean, I think a lot of people are wondering where You’ve been all this time. That’s all. Why would You let Your people suffer like that?”

This would have worked better with a big ballsy shit-eating grin attached to it, but instead it was coming out shivery and a little teary. He was saying “I mean” too much. But he wasn’t backing down. Ember made an odd, nonverbal bleating sound. His mouth worked more sideways than a human mouth would. Quentin could see His thick, stiff, pink ram’s tongue.

“Show some respect,” Penny muttered, but Ember raised one black hoof.

“We should not have to remind you, human child, that We are not your servant.” Ember spoke less gently than He had before. “It is not your needs that We serve, but Our own. We do not come and go at your whim.

“It is true, We have been here under the Earth for some time. It is difficult to know how long, this far from the sun and his travels, but some months at least. Evil has come to Fillory, and evil must be fought, and there is no fighting without cost. We have suffered, as you see, an embarrassment to our hindquarters.”

He turned His long, golden head half a degree. Quentin now saw that one of the ram’s hind legs was in fact lame. Ember held it stiffly, so that the hoof only just brushed the stone. It wouldn’t take His weight.

“Well, but I don’t understand,” Janet spoke up. “Quentin’s right. You’re the god of this world. Or one of them. Doesn’t that make You basically all-powerful?”

“There are Higher Laws that are past your understanding, daughter. The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.”

“Well, but why would You create something that had the power to hurt You? Or any of Your creatures? Why don’t You help us? Do You have any idea how much we hurt? How much we suffer?”

A stern glance. “I know all things, daughter.”

“Well, okay, then know this.” Janet put her hands on her hips. She had struck an unexpected vein of bitterness in herself, and it was running away with her. “We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You or Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world or any other shit-ass world. Do You realize that? So next time You might think about not doing such a half-assed job.”

A ringing silence followed her outburst. The torches guttered against the walls. They’d left streaks of black soot all the way up to the domed ceiling. It was true, what she was saying. It made him angry. But there was something about it that made him nervous too.

“You are incensed, daughter.” Ember’s eyes were full of kindness.

“I’m not Your daughter.” She crossed her arms. “And yeah, no shit I’m incensed.”

The great old ram sighed deeply. A tear formed in His great liquid eye, spilled over, and was absorbed into the golden wool on his cheek. In spite of himself, Quentin thought of the proud Indian in the old anti-littering commercials. From behind him Josh leaned into Quentin’s shoulder and whispered: “Dude! She made Ember cry!”

“The tide of evil is at the full,” the ram was saying, a politician staying relentlessly on message. “But now that you have come, the tide will turn.”

But it wouldn’t. Suddenly Quentin knew it. It all came to him in one sick flash.

“You’re here against Your will,” he said. “You’re a prisoner down here. Aren’t You?”

This wasn’t over after all.

“Human, there is so much you do not understand. You are still but a child.”

Quentin ignored him. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why You’re down here? Somebody put You down here, and You can’t get out. This wasn’t a quest, this was a rescue mission.”

Next to him Alice had both her hands over her mouth.

“Where’s Umber?” she asked. “Where is Your brother?”

Nobody moved. The ram’s long muzzle and black lips were still and unreadable.

“Mmmm.” Eliot rubbed his chin, calmly assessing. “It is possible.”

“Umber’s dead, isn’t He?” Alice said dully. “This place isn’t a tomb, it’s a prison.”

“Or a trap,” Eliot said.

“Human children, listen to Me,” Ember said. “There are Laws that go far beyond anything in your understanding. We—”

“I’ve heard pretty much enough about my understanding,” Janet snapped.

“But who did it?” Eliot stared down at the sand, thinking fast. “Who even has the muscle to do this to Ember? And why? I suppose it was the Watcherwoman, but this is all very odd.”

Quentin felt a prickling in his shoulders. He looked around at the dark corners of the cave they were in. It wouldn’t be long before whatever had broken Ember’s leg turned up, and they would have to fight again. He didn’t know if he could take another fight. Penny was still on his knees, but the back of his neck as he looked up at Ember was flushed crimson.

“Maybe it’s time to hit the ol’ panic button,” Josh said. “Back to the Neitherlands.”

“I have a better idea,” Quentin said.

They had to get control of the situation. They could quit now, but the crown was right there, right in front of them. They were so close. They were almost home, they could still win it all if they could just figure out a way to push through to the end of the story. If they could gut it out through one more scene.

And he realized he knew how.

Penny had dropped his pack on the sandy floor. Quentin bent down and rummaged through it. Of course Penny had webbed and bungeed the fucking thing to within an inch of its life, but in among the Power Bars and the Leatherman and the spare tighty whiteys, wrapped in a red bandanna, he found what he was looking for.

The horn was smaller than he remembered it.

“Right? Remember what the nymph said?” He held it up. “ ‘When all hope is lost’? Or something like that?”

“I wouldn’t say all hope is lost . . .” Josh said.

“Let me see that,” Dint said imperiously. He had been conspicuously silent since Ember woke up. Anaïs clung to his arm.

Quentin ignored him. Everybody was talking at once. Penny and the ram were locked in some kind of intense lover’s quarrel.

“Interesting,” Eliot said. He shrugged. “It might work. I’d rather try that than go back to the City. Who do you think will come?”

“Human child,” the ram said loudly. “Human child!”

“Go for it, Q,” Janet said. She looked paler than she should have. “It’s time. Go for it.”

Alice just nodded gravely.

The silver mouthpiece tasted metallic against his lips, like a nickel or a battery. The breath he took was so deep that pain lanced hotly into his arrow-stuck shoulder as his ribs expanded. He wasn’t sure exactly what to do—purse his lips like a trumpeter, or just blow into it like a kazoo?—but the ivory horn produced a clear, even, high note as gentle and round as a French horn winded by a seasoned symphony player in a concert hall. Everybody stopped talking and turned to look at him. It wasn’t loud, exactly, but it made everything else quiet around it, so that it was instantly the only sound in the room, and everything resonated with its pure, simple strength. It was natural and perfect, a single note that sounded like a grand chord. It went on and on. He blew until his lungs were empty.

The sound echoed and faded away, gone as if it had never been. The cavern was still. For a moment Quentin felt ridiculous, like he’d just blown a noisemaker. What was he expecting, anyway? He really didn’t know.

There was a snuffling sound from Ember’s pedestal.

“O child,” came the ram’s deep voice. “Don’t you know what you have done?”

“I just got us out of this mess. That’s what I’ve done.”

The ram drew Himself up.

“I am sorry you came here,” Ember said. “Children of Earth. No one asked you to come. I am sorry that our world is not the paradise you were looking for. But it was not created for your entertainment. Fillory”—the old ram’s jowls shook—“is not a theme park, for you and your friends to play dress-up in, with swords and crowns.”

He was visibly mastering some powerful emotion. It took Quentin a moment to recognize it. It was fear. The old ram was choking on it.

“That’s not why we came here, Ember,” Quentin said quietly.

“Is it not?” Ember said, basso profundo. “No, of course it is not.” His alien eyes were hard to meet, with their molten yellow whites and black pupils like figure eights on their sides, symbols of infinity. “You came here to save us. You came here to be our King.

“But tell me something, Quentin. How could you hope to save us when you cannot even save yourself ?”

Quentin was spared the necessity of answering, because that was when the catastrophe began.

A small man in a neat gray suit appeared in the cave. His face was obscured by a leafy branch that hung in front of it in midair. He looked exactly the way Quentin remembered. The same suit, the same club tie. His face was no less illegible. He held his pink, manicured hands clasped urbanely in front of him. It was as if Quentin had never left the classroom where he first appeared. In a way he supposed he never had. The terror was so absolute, so all-encompassing, that it was almost like calm: not a suspicion but the absolute certainty that they were all about to die.

The Beast spoke.

“I believe that was my cue.” His tone was mild, his accent patrician English.

Ember roared. The sound was colossal. It shook the room, and a stalactite fell and shattered. The inside of Ember’s mouth was mottled pink and black. At that moment the ram no longer looked quite so ridiculous. There were great humps of muscle under all that fluffy wool, like boulders under moss, and His ribbed horns were thick and stony—they curled all the way around so that the two sharp tips pointed forward. Head down, He surged down off the stone plinth at the man in the gray suit.

The Beast slapped Him aside with a smooth, unhurried backhand motion. The gesture was almost casual. Ember shot sideways like a rocket and hit the rock wall with a sickening, boneless smack. The physics of it looked wrong, as if the ram were as light as a leaf and the Beast as dense as dwarf star matter. Ember dropped motionless to the sandy floor.

He lay where He fell. The Beast flicked woolly fluff off one immaculate gray sleeve with the backs of his fingers.

“It’s a funny thing about the old gods,” he said. “You think that just because they’re old they must be difficult to kill. But when the fighting starts, they go down just like anybody else. They aren’t stronger, they’re just older.”

There was a sandy shuffling from behind Quentin. He risked a glance: Dint had turned on his heel and walked out of the room. The Beast did nothing to stop him. Quentin suspected the rest of them wouldn’t get off that easily.

“Yes, he was one of mine,” the Beast said. “Farvel was, too, if you want to know the whole truth. The birch tree, you remember him? They mostly are. The rams’ time is over. Fillory is my world now.”

It wasn’t a boast, just a statement of fact. Fucking Dint, Quentin thought. And I pretended to like his stupid vest.

“I knew you’d come for me. It’s hardly a surprise. I’ve been waiting for you for ages. But is this really all of you? It’s a bad joke, you know.” He gave an incredulous snort. “You’ve no chance at all.”

He sighed.

“I suppose I won’t be needing this anymore. I’d almost gotten used to it.”

Almost absentmindedly the Beast plucked the branch that hung in front of his face with a thumb and forefinger, as if he were taking off a pair of sunglasses, and tossed it lightly aside.

Quentin cringed—he didn’t want to see its real face—but it was too late. And it turned out he had nothing to worry about, because it was an utterly ordinary face. It could have been the face of an insurance adjuster: round, mild, soft-chinned, boyish.

“Nothing? You don’t recognize me?”

The Beast strode over to the stone plinth, picked up the crown that still lay there, and placed it on his graying temples.

“My God,” Quentin said. “You’re Martin Chatwin.”

“In the flesh,” the Beast announced cheerfully. “And my, how I’ve grown!”

“I don’t understand,” Alice said shakily. “How can you be Martin Chatwin?”

“But surely you knew? Isn’t that why you’re here?” He searched their faces but got no answer. They were frozen in place—not magically this time, just paralyzed the regular way, with fear. He frowned. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters. But I would have thought that was the whole point. It’s a little insulting, really.”

He pouted for show, a sad clown. It was disturbing to see a middle-aged man with the mannerisms of a little English schoolboy. It really was him. He hadn’t grown up at all. He even had a curiously miniature, asexual quality, as if he’d stopped growing the moment he’d run away into that forest.

“What happened to you?” Quentin asked.

“What happened?” The Beast spread his arms triumphantly. “Why, I got what I wanted. I went to Fillory, and I never came back!”

It was all becoming clear. Martin Chatwin hadn’t been stolen by monsters, he had become one. He had found what Quentin thought he wanted, a way to stay in Fillory, to leave the real world behind forever. But the price had been high.

“I wasn’t going to go back to Earth after I’d seen Fillory. I mean, you can’t show a man paradise and then snatch it back again. That’s what gods do. But I say: down with gods.”

“It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you put your mind to it. I made some very interesting friends in the Darkling Woods. Very helpful chaps.” He spoke genially, expansively, like a toastmaster at a dinner party. “Mind you, the kinds of things you have to do to work that kind of magic—well, your humanity is the first thing to go. You don’t stay a man once you’ve done the things I’ve done. Once you know the things I know. I hardly miss it now.”

“Friends,” Quentin said dully. “You mean the Watcherwoman.”

“The Watcherwoman!” Martin seemed to find this hilarious. “Oh, my! That is amusing. Sometimes I forget what’s in those books. I’ve been here a very long time, you know. I haven’t read them in centuries.

“No, not the Watcherwoman. Goodness, the crowd I run with make her look like—well, they make her look like you. Amateurs.

“But enough chit-chat. Who’s got the button?”

The button was, of course, in Penny’s bag, which lay right at Quentin’s feet. I did this, he thought, with a pang that ran all the way through him. This is twice. Twice I’ve summoned the Beast. I’m a curse on everyone around me.

“Button, button, who’s got the button? Who’s got it?”

Penny began backing away from the thing in the gray suit, at the same time starting up a spell—another secret weapon, maybe, Quen tin didn’t recognize it. But Martin moved invisibly fast, like a poisonous fish striking. In a blur he had both of Penny’s wrists in the grip of one hand. Penny struggled wildly; he bent at the waist and kicked Martin in the stomach, then braced his legs against his chest and pushed to try to get free, grunting with the effort. The Beast barely seemed to notice.

“I’m afraid not, dear boy,” he said.

He opened his mouth wide, too wide, as if his jaw were unhinging like a snake’s, and placed both of Penny’s hands in his mouth. He bit them off at the wrists.

It wasn’t a clean bite. Martin Chatwin had blunt human teeth, not fangs, and it took an extra shake of his calm, middle-aged head to fully crush the wrist bones and detach Penny’s hands. Then the Beast dropped him, chewing busily, and Penny fell back on the sand. Arterial blood sprayed crazily from the stumps, then he rolled over and they were underneath him. His legs thrashed like he was being electrocuted. He didn’t scream, but frantic snuffling noises came from where his face was pushed into the sandy floor. His sneakers scrabbled in the dirt.

The Beast swallowed once, twice, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He grinned, almost embarrassed, holding up one finger while he chewed: give me a moment. His eyes narrowed with pleasure.

“Shit shit shit shit shit . . .” somebody wailed, high and desperate. Anaïs.

“Now,” Martin Chatwin said, when he could speak again. “I’d like the button, please.”

They stared at him.

“Why,” Eliot said numbly. “What are you?”

Martin took out his handkerchief and dabbed Penny’s blood from the corner of his mouth.

“Why, I’m what you thought that was.” He indicated Ember’s motionless body. “I’m a god.”

Quentin’s chest was so tight that he kept taking tense irregular little breaths, in and out.

“But why do you want it?” he asked.

Talking was good. Talking was better than killing.

“Just tying up loose ends,” Martin said. “I would have thought it was obvious. The buttons are the only things I know of that could force me to return to Earth. I’ve got almost all of them rounded up. Just one more after this. Goodness knows where the bunnies got them. I still haven’t figured that out.

“Do you know, when I first ran away, they hunted me like an animal? My own siblings? They wanted to bring me home. Like an animal!” His urbane manner cracked for an instant. “Later Ember and Umber came looking for me, too, to try to deport me, but by then it was much too late for that. Much too late. I was too strong even for them.

“That bloody cunt of a Watcherwoman is still at it, with her damned clock-trees. Mucking about with time. Even now their roots go halfway through this bloody world. She’s next after you, she’s still got a button. The last one. Once I’ve got hers I really don’t think there’ll be any way to get rid of me at all.”

Penny rolled over onto his side. He looked up at Quentin, his face strangely ecstatic, though paler than ever and covered in sand. His eyes were closed. He had the stumps of his wrists pressed tight against his chest. His shirt was wringing wet with blood.

“Is it bad, Q?” Penny asked. “I’m not going to look. You tell me. How bad is it?”

“You’re all right, man,” Quentin muttered.

Martin could not suppress a joyless clubman’s chuckle at that. He went on.

“I’ve been back once or twice, of course, by myself. Once to kill the old bugger, Plover.” His smooth brow crinkled, and he looked thoughtful. “He earned that. That and more. I wish I had him to kill again.

“And I nipped through once when your Professor March bungled a spell. Just to keep an eye on things. I thought somebody at Brakebills might be planning something—I get a sort of sense of the future sometimes. It appears that I was right. Though I must have eaten the wrong student.”

Martin clapped his hands together and rubbed them in anticipation.

“Well, that’s all bygones,” he said, perking up. “Let’s have it.”

“We hid it again,” Alice said. “Like your sister Helen. We buried the button. Kill us and you’ll never find it.”

My brave Alice. Quentin gripped her hand. I brought this on us. His knees were trembling uncontrollably.

“Oh, well played, my girl. Shall I start ripping people’s heads off, one by one? I think you’ll tell me before it comes to that.”

“Wait, why would you kill us at all?” Quentin asked. “Fuck it, we’ll just give you the button. Just leave us alone!”

“Oh, I wish I could do that, Quentin. I truly do. But you see, this place changes you.” Martin sighed and waggled his extra fingers, his hands like pale spiders. “It’s why the rams didn’t like humans staying here too long. As it is, I’ve almost gone too far. I’ve got quite a taste for human flesh now. Don’t you go anywhere, William,” he added, nudging Penny’s twitching body with the toe of his shoe. “Fauns just don’t have the same savor.”

William, Quentin thought. That must be Penny’s real name. He never knew it before.

“And you know, I can’t have you lot running around trying to overthrow me. Treason, that is. Everybody notice that I’ve crippled your principal spellcaster? You got that?”

“You pathetic fucker.” Quentin said evenly. “It wasn’t even worth it, was it? That’s the funny part. You came here for the same reason we did. And are you happy now? You found out, didn’t you? There’s no getting away from yourself. Not even in Fillory.”

Martin snarled and made an enormous bound forward, covering the thirty feet that separated them in a single leap. At the last second Quen tin turned to run, but the monster was already on his back, his teeth in Quentin’s shoulder, his arms hugging Quentin’s chest. The Beast’s jaws were like a huge hungry pliers gripping his collarbone. It bent and cracked sickeningly.

The jaws regripped, getting a better hold on him. Quentin heard himself make an involuntary groan as the air was crushed out of his lungs. He was so afraid of the pain, but when it came down to it it wasn’t so much the pain as the pressure, the incredible, unbearable pressure. He couldn’t breathe. Quentin thought for an instant he might be able to manage some magic, maybe something grand and strange like he had that first day at Brakebills, in his Examination, but he couldn’t speak to cast a spell. He reached back with his hands—maybe he could find Martin’s eyes with his thumbs, or rip his ears—but all he could do was pull Martin’s thin gray English hair.

Martin’s panting breath roared in Quentin’s ear like a lover’s. He still looked mostly human, but at this range he was pure animal, snuffling and growling and reeking of alien musk. Tears started from Quentin’s eyes. It was all ending now, this was the big finale. Eaten alive by a Chatwin, for the sake of a button. It was almost funny. He’d always assumed he’d survive, but everybody assumes that, don’t they? He thought it would all be so different. There must have been a better way. What had been his first mistake? There were so many.

But then the pressure was gone, and his ears were ringing. Alice had her pale fingers wrapped in a double fist around Janet’s blue-black revolver. Her face was white, but her hands were steady. She fired two more shots, broadside, into Martin’s ribs, then he turned to face her and she fired straight into his chest. Pulverized bits of the Beast’s suit and tie spun and floated in the air.

Quentin thrashed forward, a primordial fish heaving itself up onto a sandy bank, sucking wind, anything to get away. Now the real pain was coming. His right arm was numb and dragging and not quite as firmly attached to him as he was used to. He tasted blood in his mouth. He heard Alice fire twice more.

When he thought he was far enough away, he risked a look back. His peripheral vision was going gray around the edges. It was closing in in a circle, like the final moments of a Porky Pig cartoon. But he could see Alice and Martin Chatwin facing each other across ten empty paces of sand.

Out of bullets. She tossed the revolver backhand back to Janet.

“All right,” she said quietly. “Let’s see what else your friends taught you.”

Her voice sounded very small in the silent cave, but not afraid. Martin regarded her with bemused curiosity. He cocked his head at an angle. What was she thinking? Was she really going to try to fight him? Ten long, still seconds ticked by.

When he rushed her, Alice was ready. She was the only one. There was no warning: he went at her from a standing start—first he was still, then he was a blur. Quentin didn’t know how she could react so fast, when he could barely track Martin’s movements, but before the Beast was even halfway to her she had him up in the air, his legs churning pathetically, gripped in an iron kinetic spell. She slammed him to the ground so hard he bounced.

He was on his feet again almost at once, smoothing out his suit, and he came at her again without even seeming to set himself. This time she stepped to one side like a matador, and he blew past her. Alice was moving like the Beast now—she must have sped up her own reaction time, the way Penny had with the arrow. With a massive effort Quentin pushed himself up till he was half sitting, then something gave in his chest and he collapsed back down again.

“Are you following this?” Alice asked Martin. There was a growing confidence in her voice, as if she were trying bravado on for size and finding that she liked it. “You didn’t see it coming, did you? And this is just straight Flemish praxis. Nothing else. I haven’t even gotten to any Eastern material yet.”

With a crack the Beast snapped off a stalagmite at the base and whipped it sidearm at Alice, but the stone spear burst in midair before it reached her. Fragments whined away in all directions. Quentin wasn’t tracking it all, but he didn’t think she’d done that. The others must be backing her up, a phalanx with Alice at the head.

Though Alice was way ahead of them. Maybe poor Penny could have followed what she was doing, but Alice was in a place Quentin hadn’t known she could go. He was a magician, but she was something else, a true adept. He had no idea she was so far beyond him. There was a time when he might have felt envious of her, but now he felt only pride. That was his Alice. Sand rushed hissing from the floor in a shroud, like a swarm of enraged bees, and wrapped itself around Martin’s head, trying to penetrate his mouth and nose and ears. He twisted and flailed his arms frantically.

“Oh, Martin.” A smile played at the corners of her mouth. It was almost wicked. “That’s the trouble with monsters. No theoretical rigor. No one ever made you iron out your fundamentals, did they? If they had, you certainly wouldn’t fall for this . . .”

In his blinded state Martin walked straight into a fireball à la Penny that burst over him. But Alice didn’t wait. She couldn’t afford to. Her lips never stopped moving, and her hands never stopped their fluid, unhurried motions, one spell rolling right over into the next. It was high-stakes blitz chess. The fireball was followed by a glimmering spherical prison, then by a toxic hail of Magic Missiles—she must have taken apart that spell and supercharged it so that it yielded a whole flock of them. The sand she’d whipped up from the floor gathered and fused into a faceless glass golem, which landed two jabs and a roundhouse punch before Martin shattered it with a counterpunch. But he seemed disoriented. His round English face was an ominous flustered red. A colossal, crushing weight seemed to settle on his shoulders, some kind of invisible yoke that took him down to one knee.

Anaïs projected an ocher lightning strike at Martin that left behind a bloodshot afterimage on Quentin’s retinas, and Eliot and Josh and Janet had joined hands and were sending a hail of rocks that beat on his back. The room was full of a babel of incantations, but Martin didn’t seem to notice. Alice was the only one he saw.

From a half crouch he lunged at her across the sand, and some kind of phantasmal armor materialized around her, like nothing Quentin had ever seen before, silvery and translucent—it flickered in and out of visibility. The Beast’s fingers slid off it. The armor came with a shimmery pole arm that Alice spun in one hand, then set and thrust at Martin’s stomach. Sparks flew between them.

“Fergus’s Spectral Armory!” she shouted. She was breathing hard. His eyes were red and fixed on her grimly. “Like it? Do you? Very basic principles. Second Year stuff! But then you never bothered with school, did you, Martin? You wouldn’t have lasted an hour at Brakebills!”

Seeing her fight alone like this was intolerable. Quentin lifted his cheek from the sandy floor and tried to speak a spell, anything, even to create a distraction, but his lips wouldn’t shape words. His fingers were going numb. He beat his hands against the ground in frustration. He had never loved Alice more. He felt like he was sending her his strength, even though he knew she couldn’t feel it.

Alice and Martin sparred savagely for a solid minute. The armor spell must have come with a bonus of martial arts savvy, because Alice whipped her faerie glaive around in a complicated pattern, two-handed now; it had a small, vicious spike on its butt end that drew blood. Sweat matted her hair to her forehead, but she never lost focus. After another minute the armor vanished—the spell must have expired—and she did something that froze the air around the Beast into an intricate frostwork mummy. Even his clothes froze and fell to pieces in shards, leaving him naked and fish-belly white.

But by then he was close enough to seize her arm. Suddenly she was a girl again, small and vulnerable.

But not for long. She spat out a ferocious sequence of syllables and transformed into a tawny lioness with a white scruff of beard under her chin. She and Martin went down grappling, mouths gaping, trying to get their teeth into each other. Alice worked with her huge back legs to scratch and disembowel, caterwauling angrily.

Janet was circling the fight, trying to cram bullets into the revolver and dropping them freely on the sand, but there was nowhere to aim anyway. They were all tangled up together. The next moment the Beast was in the coils of a massive spotted anaconda, then Alice was an eagle, then a huge brindled bear, then a horrific man-size scorpion with pincing legs and its venomous sting, the size of a crane hook, lodged in Martin Chatwin’s back. Light flashed and crackled around them as they fought, and their struggling bodies rose from the ground. The Beast was on top of her, and Alice expanded hugely to become a limber, sinuous white dragon on its back, her enormous wings slapping the sand and sending everybody scrambling. The Beast grew with her, so that she was wrestling a giant. She gripped him in her talons and screamed a torrent of blue fire like jet exhaust straight into his face.

For a minute he writhed in Alice’s grip. His eyebrows were gone, and his face was comically blackened. Quentin could hear the Alice-dragon panting raggedly. The Beast shuddered and was still for a moment. Then he appeared to compose himself, and he punched Alice once, hard, in the face.

Instantly she was human again. Her nose was bleeding. Martin rolled neatly to one side and got to his feet. Naked though he was, he produced a clean handkerchief from somewhere and used it to dab some of the soot from his face.

“Dammit,” Quentin rasped. “Somebody do something! Help her!”

Janet got one last bullet in and fired, then she threw the pistol overhand. It bounced off the back of Martin Chatwin’s head without mussing his hair.

“Fuck you!” she shouted.

Martin took a step toward Alice. No. This had to end.

“Hey, asshole!” Quentin managed. “You forgot one thing.”

He spat blood and switched to his best Cubano accent, his voice cracking hysterically: “Say hello to my leel friend!”

Quentin whispered the catchword Fogg had given him the night of graduation. He’d imagined it in his head a hundred times, and now as he pronounced the final syllable something big and hard was struggling and thrashing under his shirt, scrabbling at the skin of his back.

Looking up at it, Quentin noticed that his cacodemon was wearing a little pair of round spectacles hooked over its pointy ears. What the fuck, his cacodemon had glasses? It stood over him, uncertain, looking learned and thoughtful. It didn’t know whom to fight.

“The naked guy,” Quentin said in a hoarse whisper. “Go! Save the girl!”

The demon skidded to a stop ten feet from its prey. It feinted left, then left again, like it was playing one-on-one with Martin, trying to break his ankles, before it gathered itself and sprang directly for his face. Wearily, as if to express to them the unfairness of the trouble they were putting him through, Martin put up a hand to catch it in flight. The demon tore at his fingers, hissing. Martin began slowly stuffing it into his mouth, like a gecko eating a spider, while it pulled his hair and gouged at his eyes.

Quentin waved at Alice frantically to run—maybe if they all split up?—but she wasn’t looking at him. She licked her lips and tucked her hair behind her ears with both hands. She got to her feet.

Something had changed in her face. She had made a decision. She began to work with her hands, the preliminaries to something very advanced. At the sound both Martin and the cacodemon looked at her. Martin took the opportunity to break the demon’s neck and push the rest of its body into his mouth.

“So,” she said. “So you think you’re the biggest monster in this room?”

“Don’t,” Janet said, but Alice didn’t stop. She was trying something. Everybody seemed to get it except Quentin.

“No, no, no!” Eliot said angrily. “Wait!”

“You’re not even a magician at all, are you, Martin?” Alice said quietly. “You’re just a little boy. That’s all you are. That’s all you ever were.” She bit back a sob. “Well, I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes and began to recite. Quentin could see it all in Alice’s face, everything they’d been through, everything they’d done to each other, everything they’d gotten past. She was letting it all come out. It was a big spell, Renaissance, very academic magic. Big energies. He couldn’t imagine what good it would do, but a moment later he realized the spell wasn’t the point. The side effects were the point.

He began scratching his way toward her, anything he could do to get closer. He didn’t care if it killed him.

“No!” he shouted. “No!”

The blue fire began in her fingertips and spread, inexorably, through her hands and up her wrists. It lit up her face. Alice opened her eyes again. She regarded it with fascination.

“I’m on fire,” she said, almost in her normal voice. “I didn’t think—I’m burning.” And then in a rising shriek that could have been agony or could have been ecstasy: “I’m burning! Oh, God! Oh, Quentin, I’m burning! It’s burning me!”

Martin halted his slow advance to observe as Alice became a niffin. Quentin couldn’t see his expression. Alice took a step backward and sat down, still staring at her arms. They were now blue fire up to the shoulders. They were like two highway flares; her flesh was not consumed but, strangely, replaced by the fire that was chewing through it. She stopped speaking, just moaned on an ever-higher, ever-louder note. Finally as the blue fire rose up her neck she threw back her head and opened her mouth wide, but no more sound came out.

The fire left behind it a new Alice, one that was smaller and made of something like blue glowing glass, fresh and hot from the furnace. The process flooded the cavern with blue light. Even before the transformation was complete Alice had left the ground. She was pure fire now, her face full of that special madness belonging to things that are neither living nor dead. She floated above the floor as easily as if she were floating in a swimming pool.

The spirit that had replaced Alice, the niffin, regarded them neutrally with furious, insane, empty sapphire eyes. For all her power she looked delicate, like she was blown from Murano glass. From where he lay Quen tin watched with detached, academic interest through a red haze of agony. The capacity for terror or love or grief or anything but pain had gone along with his peripheral vision.

She was not Alice. She was a righteous destroying angel. She was blue and nude and wore an expression of irrepressible hilarity.

Quentin had stopped breathing. For a moment Alice hovered before the Beast, incandescent with anticipation. At the last instant he appeared to sense that the odds had shifted and began a step backward, then he bolted in a blur. But even then he was too slow. The angel had him by his gray, conservatively cut hair. Bracing her other hand on his shoulder, she tore Martin Chatwin’s head off his neck with a crisp, dry ripping sound.

All of this action had become too exhausting for Quentin to watch. He clung to it like a faltering radio signal, but it was so hard to maintain clear reception. He rolled languorously over onto his back.

His mind had become a loopy parody of itself, stretched thin as taffy, translucent as cellophane. Something unspeakable had happened, but he couldn’t keep hold of it. Somehow the world as he knew it was no longer there. He’d managed to find a reasonably soft, sandy patch of floor to recline on—it was thoughtful of Martin, really, to have brought them to a room where the sand was so deliciously fine and cool. Although it was a shame that this clean white sand was now almost entirely saturated with blood, his and Penny’s. He wondered if Penny was still alive. He wondered if it would be at all possible to pass out. He wanted to fall asleep and never wake up.

Quentin heard the scuff of a fine leather shoe, and Eliot loomed into the patch of ceiling directly above him, then passed by.

From somewhere ambiguous in space and time, Ember’s voice reached Quentin. Not dead yet, he thought. Tough bastard. Or maybe he was just imagining it.

“You have won,” the ram’s voice bleated from the shadows. “Take your prize, hero.”

Eliot picked up the golden crown of the High King of Fillory. With an inarticulate cry he threw it like a discus off into the darkness.

The last dream was broken. Quentin either fainted or died, he didn’t know which.