That was creepy. He hadn’t told anybody their names.
“Hi.” He didn’t know where to look. “Thanks for seeing us.”
I guess he doesn’t know everything.
“We’d like to ask for your help with something.”
Showtime. He wondered if the fixer was even human, or some kind of spirit like Warren, or worse. Julia was doing her thousand-yard stare, a million miles away.
“Well, we’ve just come from another world. From Fillory. Which as it turns out is a real place. You probably knew that.” Ahem. Start again. “We didn’t mean to leave—it was kind of an accident—and we want to go back there.”
“Maybe I can help you too. Maybe we can help each other.”
“Okay.” Quentin looked behind him. “Right, look, where are you?”
He was starting to feel painfully aware of how vulnerable they were. He didn’t have much of an exit strategy. And the fixer shouldn’t have known their names. Maybe Warren had called ahead. That wasn’t a comforting thought.
“All right. I wouldn’t say abandoned, but okay.”
“You can look at it like that if you want. If we can just get back to Fillory everything will be fine. Or at any rate it’s not your problem, is it?”
The back of Quentin’s neck prickled. He and the fixer weren’t getting off to a roaring start. He weighed the advantages of laying on some basic defensive magic. Prudent, but it might spook the fixer into trying a preemptive strike. He shot Julia a glance, but she was barely following.
“All right. I’m just here to do business.”
Looking in the silver bowl at this juncture seemed like a bad idea. Quentin stood up.
“Listen. If you can’t help us, fine. We’ll go. But if you can help us, give us a price. We’ll pay it.”
Now there was steel in that high, whispery voice.
This was going south fast. It felt all wrong. He took Julia’s arm and pulled her to her feet.
“We’re leaving,” he said. “Now.”
He backhanded the silver bowl off the table and it clanged against the wall. A slip of paper fluttered out of it. Against his better judgment Quentin glanced at it. There were spells you could set off just by reading them. The paper had the words I.O.U. ONE MAGIC BUTTON written on it in crude magic marker.
The door opened behind them, and Quentin scrambled to get them both behind the table.
“Oh, shit! He looked in the bowl!”
The voice was a lot lower than the one that had been speaking before. It was a voice Quentin knew well. It belonged to Josh.
Quentin hugged him.
“Jesus!” he said into Josh’s broad, comforting shoulder. “What the hell, man?”
He didn’t understand how it was even possible that Josh was here, but it didn’t matter. Probably it would, but not yet. He didn’t even care that Josh had messed with their heads. What mattered now was that they weren’t going to have a new disaster. They weren’t going to have a fight. Quentin’s knees were shaking. It was like he’d sailed so far from the safe, orderly world he knew that he was coming back around the other way, from the other side, and there was Josh: an island of warmth and familiarity.
Josh disengaged himself tactfully.
“So,” he said, “welcome to the suck, man!”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Me? This is my house! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Fillory?”
He was the same Josh: round-faced, overweight, grinning. He looked like a beer-brewing abbot, not visibly older than the last time Quentin had seen him, which was more than three years now. Josh carefully closed the door behind him.
“Can’t be too careful,” he said. “Got an image to protect. Kind of a Wizard of Oz thing going on, if you see what I mean.”
“What’s with the bowl?”
“Eh, I didn’t have a lot of time. I just thought it was creepy. You know.
“Josh, Julia. You guys know each other.”
They’d met once before, in the chaotic run-up before the great return to Fillory, before Josh had set off into the Neitherlands on his own.
“Hi, Julia.” Josh kissed her on both cheeks. He must really have gone Euro over here.
“Hi.”
Josh waggled both eyebrows at Quentin lewdly in a way that didn’t seem like it should be physically possible. It was starting to sink in for Quentin just what a colossal stroke of luck this was. Josh would have the magic button. He was their ticket back to Fillory. Their wandering days were over.
“So listen,” he said. “We’ve got some problems.”
“Yeah, you must if you came here.”
“We don’t even really know where here is.”
“You’re in my house, that’s where here is.” Josh waved his arms grandly. “Here is a huge fuck-off pa-
He gave them the tour. The palazzo was four floors, the lower two for business, the upper two for Josh’s private apartments, to which they retreated. The floor was massive pink-swirled marble slabs, the walls crumbling plaster. All the rooms were odd sizes and seemed to have been built as they were needed, on a series of whimsical impulses that it was now impossible to reconstruct.
All glory to the great quest for Fillory, but they needed a break. Julia requested a hot bath, which frankly she badly needed. Quentin and Josh retired to the tremendous dining room, which was lit by a single modest chandelier. Over plates of black spaghetti, Quentin explained as best he could what had happened and why they were here. When he was done Josh explained what had happened to him.
With Quentin, Eliot, Janet, and Julia safely installed on the thrones of Fillory, Josh had taken the button and embarked on an exploration of the Neitherlands. He’d seen as much as he ever wanted to see of Fillory, and it hadn’t been pretty, and anyway he was sick of scraping along in the others’ shadows. He didn’t want to be co-king of Fillory, he wanted to do his own thing his own way. He wanted to find his own Fillory. He wanted to get laid.
Josh could be careless about a lot of things—what he ate, wore, smoked, said, did—but you don’t get into Brakebills without being a genius of some kind or another, and given the right stakes he was fully capable of being highly methodical, even meticulous. In this case the stakes were just right. He began a careful survey of the
