The group, all eight of them now, stepped through together onto a vast, frost-burnt front lawn. The serious mood on the roof was instantly broken as Janet and Anaïs and Josh raced one another inside and squealed and bounced on the sofas and ran around arguing over the bedrooms. Anaïs had been mostly right about the house: it was certainly large and comfortable, and at least a few bits of it were old. Apparently it was once a generously proportioned Colonial farmhouse, but somebody with progressive architectural ideas had gotten hold of it and remixed its old timber and fieldstone with glass and titanium and poured cement and added flat-screen TVs and a high-end audio system and an Aga range.
Alice went directly and silently up to the master bedroom, which took up almost half the third floor, and closed the door, glaring away any rival claimants with burning, red-rimmed eyes. Suddenly exhausted after his mostly sleepless night, followed by his magically extended day, Quentin found a small guest bedroom at the back of the house. Its hard, antiseptic twin bed felt like all he deserved.
It was dark when he woke up. The cool blue digits of the clock radio said 10:27. In the darkness they could have been phosphorescent squiggles on the side of a deep-sea fish. He couldn’t find the light switch, but his groping hands encountered the door to a small half bath and managed to turn on the light over the mirror. Quentin splashed water on his face and wandered out into the strange house.
He found the others, except for Alice and Penny, in the dining room, where they had already made and demolished a meal of heroic proportions, the remains of which lay spread out on a stupendous table that looked like it was built from the beams of the True Cross, handsomely varnished and nailed together with authentic iron spikes. Large pieces of modern art the color and texture of dried, crusted blood hung on the walls.
“Q!” they shouted.
“Where’s Alice?”
“Came and went,” Josh said. “What’s going on? You guys fighting or what?”
He shadowboxed a jab or two. He obviously didn’t know what had happened. Anaïs, sitting next to him, delivered a mock knockout punch to his stubbly chin. They were all drunk again, same as last night, same as every night. Nothing had changed.
“Seriously,” Janet said. “Did she give you that shiner? Seems like somebody’s always punching you in the face, Q.”
Her manner was as bright and toxic as ever, but her eyes were rimmed with red. Quentin wondered if she’d come out of last night’s holocaust quite as unscathed as he’d thought.
“It was Ember and Umber,” he said. “The magic rams. Didn’t Alice tell you? They punished me for being sinful.”
“Yeah?” Josh said. “Did you kick their woolly asses?”
“I turned the other cheek.” Quentin didn’t feel like talking, but he was hungry. He got a plate from the kitchen and sat down at the far end of the table and served himself leftovers.
“We were talking about what to do next,” Richard said. “Making up an actions list.”
“Right.” Josh pounded authoritatively on the heavy table. “Who’s got some action items for me? We need to enumerate our deliverables!”
“Food,” Richard said, straight-faced. “And if we’re really going to Fillory, we all need to reread all the books.”
“Gold,” Anaïs chipped in gamely. “And trade items. What do Fillorians want? Cigarettes?”
“We’re not going to Brezhnev-era Russia, Anaïs. Steel?”
“Gunpowder?”
“My God,” Eliot said. “Listen to you people. I am not going to be the man who brought the gun to Fillory.”
“We should bring overcoats,” Richard said. “Tents. Cold-weather gear. We have no idea what season it is there. We could be walking into deep winter.”
Yesterday—meaning before his nap—Fillory was going to make everything all right. Now it was hard to focus on it: it seemed like a dream again. Now the mess with Janet and Alice was the real thing. It would drag everything else down with it.
He pulled himself together with an effort.
“How long are we talking about going for?”
“A couple of days? Look, we can just come back if we forget something,” Eliot said. “With the button it’s a snap. We’ll just stay till it gets boring.”
“What should we do when we get there?”
“I think they’ll probably give us a quest,” Penny said. “That’s what always happened to the Chatwins.”
Heads turned. Penny was standing in the doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants, blinking like an owl, looking like he’d just woken up, too.
“I don’t know if we can count on that, Penny.” For some reason it annoyed Quentin, how starry-eyed and optimistic Penny was being about this. “It’s not like the rams summoned us. It might not even be like the books. Maybe there never were any quests. Plover probably just put that stuff in so there would be a good story. Maybe we’ll just suck around Fillory like we’re sucking around here.”
“Don’t be a killjoy,” Josh said, “just because your girlfriend beats you up.”
