She didn’t look like she needed help. Quentin found the stairs up to the top floor. He kicked open the first door he saw and almost died when a massive fireball rolled over him.

It was a colossally powerful casting. Someone had spent a long time setting it up and pumping energy into it. It enveloped him completely, and he felt the flames licking him, icy through the fireproofing spell. But the spell held. When the fire had dissipated his limbs were smoking but undamaged.

He was standing in the doorway of a darkened library. Inside, sitting at a desk with two lanterns on it, was a skeleton in a nice brown suit. Or not quite a skeleton, a man, but an obviously dead one. He still had flesh on him, but it had shrunk and turned leathery.

It was very still in the library. Bookshelves smoldered and crackled quietly on either side of Quentin, from the fireball. The corpse watched him with eyes like hard dry nuts.

“No?” it said finally. Its voice buzzed and flapped, a blown-out speaker. It obviously didn’t have much left in the way of vocal cords. Some unnatural force was keeping it alive, long after its sell-by date. “Well. That was my only spell.”

Quentin waited. The thing’s face was immobile, unreadable. Its dried lips didn’t cover its teeth completely. It wasn’t pretty to look at, but for some reason Quentin didn’t feel angry at it. Why were they fighting again? For a second Quentin really couldn’t remember. He wondered if he’d gotten too far ahead of the others. But no, this was on him. He’d started it. And this was the boss fight.

The corpse came to convulsive life again and whipped a throwing knife at him with one skinny, loose-jointed marionette arm. Quentin ducked, purely out of instinct, but it was a wild throw, nowhere near him. It went through the open door behind him and skittered on the flagstones.

“All right,” it said. “Now I’m really done.”

The corpse might have sighed.

“Where’s the key?” Quentin said. “You have one, don’t you?” For a terrible second he worried that it might not.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore,” the corpse said wheezily. It pushed a small wooden box toward him with one shriveled hand. The skin had worn off some of the knuckles, like the leather off the arms of an old chair. “It used to be my daughter’s.”

“Your daughter’s,” Quentin repeated. “Who are you?”

“Don’t you know the story?” It sighed again. It seemed much more resigned to its fate than Quentin expected. He didn’t know if it had to breathe anymore, but apparently it could still suck air in and out of its leathery chest like a bellows when it wanted to. “I thought everybody knew it.”

Now that he’d stopped moving he realized he was covered with sweat. It was cold in the nighttime island air.

“Wait. You’re not going to tell me you’re him. The man from the fairy tale. The Seven Golden Keys.”

“Is that what they’re calling it? A fairy tale?” Air hissed between its teeth. Was that laughter? “I suppose it’s a little late to quibble about things like that.”

“I don’t understand. I thought you were one of the good guys.”

“We can’t all be heroes. Then who would the heroes fight? It’s a matter of numbers really. Just work out the sums.”

“But isn’t this the key your daughter gave you?” Quentin had a terrible feeling he’d grasped the wrong end of something. “That’s what the story said. You set her free, from the witch, and she didn’t remember you, but she gave you the key.”

“That was no witch, that was her mother.” More hissing laughter. Only its lower jaw moved when it talked. It was like talking to an animatronic president at a theme park. “I left them to look for the Seven Keys. I suppose I wanted to be a hero. They never forgave me for it. When I finally came back my own daughter didn’t know me. Her mother told her I was dead.

“The key kept me alive. It’s just as well, your taking it like this. It’s terrible living in a dead body, I can’t feel anything. You should see how the others look at me.”

Quentin opened the wooden box. A golden key lay inside it. He was part of the fairy tale now, he supposed. He’d crashed through a shared wall into an adjoining story. Enter the Magician King.

“Just tell me,” the corpse said. “What is it for? I never knew.”

“I don’t know either. I’m sorry.”

Footsteps behind him. Quentin risked a glance back. Just Bingle, catching up at last.

“Don’t be sorry. You’ve paid for it. You paid the price.” The life had started going out of it as soon as it let go of the box. It slumped forward, and its head hit the table with a bang. It muttered the last words directly into the wooden desktop. “Like me. You just don’t know it yet.”

It didn’t move again.

Quentin snapped the box shut. He heard Bingle walk in beside him. Together they stared at the dome of the corpse’s head, which was as bald and mottled and seamed as a globe.

“Well done,” Bingle said.

“I don’t think I killed him,” Quentin said. “I think he just died.”

“It is all good.” He must have picked that up from Josh.

Quentin’s crazy power levels were dropping rapidly toward normal again, leaving him feeling wrung out and shaky. He was vaguely aware that he was giving off a nasty burnt-hair smell. The fireproofing hadn’t been perfect.

“It was that man,” Quentin said. “The one from the fairy tale. But his version was different. How did you know to come get me?”

“The cook caught a talking fish. It told us what to do. It had a bottle in its belly, with a map inside. What happened to you?”

“Ember came.”

That was enough explanation for now. Together they walked back down the hall toward the stairs, Bingle eyeing every doorway and alcove for holdouts and dead-enders.

They’d done it: another key found. One to go. Quentin was on the scoreboard. They met a chattering Poppy, flush with her first Fillorian outing—“We did it!”—and a silent, still-fluorescent Julia wandering the halls. Quentin showed them the prize and hugged them both, Julia a bit awkwardly, since she didn’t really hug him back, and moreover had retained the extra height from her battle form. Poppy was right, they had done it, and Quentin had led the way. He held on to that victorious feeling, weighed it in his hands, felt its warmth and its heft, making sure he would always remember it. Bingle rooted a straggler out from behind a curtain, but he’d already laid down his weapons. He didn’t have a lot of fancy ideas about dying for lost causes.

Outside the Muntjac had drawn right up to the wharf—it loomed up abruptly over the stone square. The bay must have been deeper than it looked. Somebody—Eliot, probably—had conjured some floating lights, basketball-sized globes that hovered over the courtyard, bathing it in soft yellow-rosy illumination and giving it a country-fair atmosphere. The wind had picked up even more, and the glowing spheres trembled and bobbed as they tried to stay in position.

And there was Eliot, standing with Josh out on the pier, with the great comforting bulk of the Muntjac behind them. Why were they just standing there? The high was all gone now, and Quentin’s knees were weak. It was tiring work, being a hero. He felt hollowed out, a limp empty skin of himself. The ache in his side was getting hot again. The thought of his cozy shipboard berth was crushingly comforting. Now that they had the key he could curl up in it and the great beast would bear him away. He raised a weary hand in greeting. There would be talking now, and explanations, and congratulations—the hero’s welcome—but for now he just wanted to get past them and back aboard.

Eliot and Josh didn’t greet him. Their faces were grave. They were looking down at something on the pier. Josh spoke, but the wind snatched his words away, spirited them off and out over the black ocean. They were both waiting for Quentin to notice Benedict lying there on the rough wet wood.

There was an arrow through his throat. He was dead. He’d barely made it off the boat. He lay curled around himself, and his face was dark. He hadn’t died right away. It looked like he’d clawed at the arrow for a while first, before he finally choked on his own blood.

CHAPTER 20

The house at Murs was the best thing that had ever happened to Julia in her entire life. In any of her entire lives.

Pouncy was right, she had come home. Her life up until now had been one vicious, un-fun, never-ending game of tag, where everyone else was it and you could never stop running. Only now had she finally found home base. She could rest. Unlike the safe houses, this house was actually safe. This was her Brakebills, for real this time. She had made a separate peace.

There were ten people at Murs, counting Julia. Some were from Free Trader Beowulf, some weren’t. Pouncy was there, and Asmodeus, and Failstaff. So were Gummidgy and Fiberpunk: timid, infrequent posters who were the last people Julia would have figured were involved with magic. Now she realized they’d probably spent most of their time trading spells in private threads.

Asmodeus and Failstaff and Pouncy weren’t who she thought they were either, at all. She’d figured Pouncy for a girl, or a gay man, but she didn’t get a gay vibe off him in person, and either way she didn’t think he’d be so good-looking. Online he came across as somebody with something to be angry about, who was always on the edge of losing it in the face of some intolerable outrage against his person, and who kept it together through sheer force of will. Julia’s pet theory had been that he was an accident victim of some kind, a paraplegic maybe, or somebody in chronic pain who was struggling to be philosophical about his condition. No way she would have pegged him as all Abercrombie & Fitch like that.

Failstaff wasn’t handsome. In Julia’s mind he’d been a silver-haired retiree, a gentleman of the old school. In fact he was about thirty, and he might have been a gentleman, but if he was he was one of the largest gentlemen she’d ever seen. Six foot five, maybe, and built like a butte. He wasn’t fat, exactly, there was just a shitload of him. He must have weighed four hundred pounds. His voice was a subsonic rumble.

As for Asmodeus, she turned out to be even younger than Julia, seventeen at the most, a fast talker with a big smile and heavy V-shaped eyebrows that gave her a naughty-schoolgirl look. She had a bit of a Fairuza Balk thing going on. Shades of The Craft. They were her best friends, and Julia didn’t even recognize them.

They were also magicians, and good ones, better than she was. And they lived in a big house in the south of France. It would take her a while to get used to them.

And to forgive them.

“When were you going to tell me?” she demanded, as they sat ranged around some deep glasses of local red at a stylish reclaimed-wood table on the stone patio behind the house. A blue swimming pool shimmered in the late afternoon sun. It was like a goddamned cigarette ad.

“Really! I’d like to know! You were here all this time, doing magic and scarfing humane local foie gras and I don’t even know what else and you didn’t even tell me? Instead you made me pass a test. Another test! As if I haven’t passed enough tests in my life!”

Maddeningly, a tear coursed down her cheek. She snapped her hand to her face like she’d been stung.

“Julia.” You could practically feel it when Failstaff talked, his voice was that deep. It practically rattled the silverware.

“We’re sorry,” Asmodeus said, all sisterly. “We all went through it.”

“Believe me, it gave us no pleasure to think about you at that Bed-Stuy safe house.” Pouncy set his wine glass aside. “But think about it. When you dropped off the radar on FTB we had a pretty good sense that you’d hooked up with the magic scene. So we waited. We gave you time to get your feet under you, get the basics out of the way, all that low-level crap. Get your finger positions straight, crack the major language groups. To see if this was for you or not.”

“Well, thanks a fucking million. That was really thoughtful of you.” All that time she’d spent wandering in the wilderness, wondering if there was anything out there, and they’d been here this whole time, watching her. She took a shaky breath. “You don’t know what I went through.”

“We know,” Failstaff said.

She looked at them, sipping their wine, a fancy Rhône red so dark it was almost black, lolling in the golden fucking Merchant-Ivory sunlight. The house was surrounded by hay fields gone to seed. They seemed to absorb sound, leaving them alone in an ocean of hush.

“You were paying your dues,” Pouncy said. “Call it a rite of passage.”

“Let’s call it what it is,” Julia said. “You were testing me. Who do you think you are? To test me?”

“Yes, we fucking tested you!” Pouncy was exasperated, but in a decorous, good-natured way. “You would have done the same thing to us! We tested the shit out of you. Not to see if you were smart. We know you’re smart. You’re a goddamned genius, though Iris says your Old Church Slavonic is crap. But we had to know why you were here. It wouldn’t work if you were just here to play with us. It wasn’t enough for you to love us. You had to love magic.”

“We all did it, Julia,” Asmodeus repeated. “Everybody here did, and we were all pissed when we found out the truth, and we all got over it.”

Julia snorted. “You’re what, seventeen? Are you going to tell me you paid your dues?”

“I paid, Julia,” she said evenly. A challenge.

“And to answer your question,” Pouncy said, “who do we think we are? We are us. And you’re one of us now, and we’re damn glad you’re here. But we don’t take chances on people.” He waited for that to sink in. “There’s too much at stake.”