“He didn’t say anything, but he was incredibly good-looking. Tall, lean, big nose, brown skin. He took me back to his home, which was in a huge rock outcropping sticking up out of the sand. At the top was a big crater full of black earth with things growing in it. A whole tribe lived in little cells carved out of the rock in a ring around it.”

“Where did they get water?” Eliot asked.

“I wondered that too. I found out. But I’ll get to that.

“They were a pretty hard crew. This guy who saved me, he was the leader, they called him the Foremost. I tried to explain to him that we were invading him, or that I was, and that this desert was all part of Fillory now. I thought about letting it go, since he saved my life and all, but come on: an invasion’s an invasion. Or an annexation. Anyway I figured I’d better put it out there up front, that they were now free to enjoy the benefits of being a semiautonomous quasi-national territory within the larger embrace of the Fillorian empire.

“But the Foremost was having none of it! He was very firm. Said he’d never even heard of Fillory. I know right? It pissed me off, but it impressed me at the same time. So I hung around.

“I liked it there. For a bunch of people with no obvious enemies they had this dope fighting style: they all carried a personal weapon made out of this wicked black metal. Light and strong, and when it hit something it struck blue sparks—very mysterious, I couldn’t figure out where it came from. The Foremost had a whole spear made out of it. He had a big speech about how great it was. Forged in the desert, slew a god, that kind of talk. He said it acted as a focus for magic—amped up your discipline—but I never saw him use it like that.

“I decided I was going to win them over. The charm offensive. I started helping out around the place, trying to get into the rhythms of the tribe. You wouldn’t have believed it, a queen of Fillory on her hands and knees pulling parsnips out of the ground, eating these gross grubs they sieved out of the sand—I tried to think of them as lobsters, but they were grubs. And you know what? I didn’t even mind it. It didn’t make me angry. I can’t remember when I’ve ever felt less angry than I did out there.

“And I slept with the Foremost. I didn’t love him, but I liked him a lot, and I loved his world. I wanted to be part of that place. And God knows he was easy on the eyes. Sex with him was amazing. Like going to bed with the desert.

“After about three months—”

“Wait,” Eliot said. “You’ve been in Rockville for three months at this point? What was going on in Fillory?”

“In Fillory matters were unfolding according to protocol. What did you think was going to happen? You set up a country right, it runs itself. I got those people thinking I could hear their thoughts, for Christ’s sake. They were scared to piss in the shower. No way were they going to try anything.

“Anyway after about three months the Foremost told me that if I was going to stay any longer I had to undergo their initiation rites. It was a major deal, every year a couple of people died. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t ready to leave. And if you passed, you got one of those black-metal weapons. Never say I do things by halves.”

“I will never say that,” Eliot solemnly promised. “Janet, this is kind of intense.”

“I know. And you haven’t even heard the intense part. So I’m breaking a sacred oath by telling you about it, but what the hell, here’s what it was. The Foremost took me out of the city, back out into the desert, and then he kneeled down with me and picked up a handful of sand and told me that what I sought was in there. Well, what the hell right? But so I looked at the damn sand.

“And after a while I began to notice that there were little glittery bits in it. Not a lot of them, but every once in a while you’d come across a black grain with a shiny sheen to it. I started to get it. That was the black metal the weapons were made out of. It was all around us, in the sand. One grain in a thousand, the Foremost said.

“He gave me a canvas sack and told me that I had to sit alone in the desert until I’d filled the whole sack with just metal grains, one by one. I was like, filled-filled? Like overflowing? Or just, you know, a nice amount? He said I’d know because when I was finished, when the sack was full, something called the Smelter would come. It would turn the ore I’d collected into pure metal and fashion a weapon for me.”

“Really?” Eliot said. “How incredibly nice of it.”

“Well, I know. Pretty convenient. You’d think I would have been suspicious. But I had to have one of these things. Had to.

“So I stayed out there. I would take a handful of sand, make a little pile in my palm, pick out the black specks and sort of brush them off my palm into the sack. No magic, it was just me and my sack and my bare hands. After a few hours my eyes were red and streaming and just about crossed. By the time the sun rose the next day I was hallucinating. The bag was filling up, you could weigh it in your hand, but it was going to be a race to see whether I finished or went insane first.

“It was pretty bad. All the usual stuff happened that happens in an ordeal. I peed myself. I practically went blind. I threw up at one point. It was really, really unpleasant. But at the same time I could feel the ordeal remaking me. You know? Like the desert itself was smelting me, melting away weaknesses and impurities and extracting what was hard and true. I thought a lot of that kind of crap while I was collecting my grains.”

“Janet.” Eliot didn’t know what to say. He’d never heard her talk this openly about her feelings. Whatever happened out there, something about her really had changed. He hadn’t seen it till now. “Janet, how could you do that to yourself?”

“I don’t know, I just knew I had to. I picked and I picked and I picked. My hands were shaking like crazy. The sun was going down the third day when I started to feel like maybe I was pretty close to done. It wasn’t a huge sack—more of a bag, really—but it was looking pretty full. If somebody asked you for a sack of ore you wouldn’t be embarrassed to give it to them.

“Supposedly if you had even one grain of regular sand in there the Smelter wouldn’t come, and I don’t know if I believed that or not, but I kept shaking the bag and fishing around in it to see if somehow one had gotten in. I really loved my bag of black metal. It felt cool, and oily, and so dense. It had a special smell. I was proud of it. I just could not wait to see what kind of weapon came out of it. I knew that whatever it was would be like the sharp, unbreakable expression of my innermost will. It would be what I’d been waiting for my whole life.

“I guess my defenses were low, because a lot of stuff came back to me out there that I’d been pretty much avoiding thinking about for a long time. Like I thought about Alice coming to Brakebills for the first time, thrashing through the woods, not even knowing if they’d let her in. I thought about how shitty I was to her before she died or whatever. I thought about Julia waiting for Brakebills to come and get her, waiting and waiting alone in her room, and Brakebills never coming.

“I thought about you, and how I used to feel about you, and how bad that felt. I thought about how far you’ve come. You really got yourself together when you came here, Eliot, and I respect that. I guess I never told you that. Everybody does.”

“Thank you.” She hadn’t. It felt good.

“I thought about this one time when I was at boarding school. I never think about my childhood, ever, but that night it all just came oozing out. You know my parents sent me away to boarding school when I was eight? Now I think it was too early, but at the time I just assumed it was normal. I don’t even think the school takes students that young anymore. And as it turned out it was a rough year for my family—I had a baby brother die of SIDS—and I think they kind of forgot about me for a while there. What with all the grieving and such. They just figured I’d take care of myself.

“Which I guess I must have. But it was a pretty bad year.”

“Why haven’t you ever told me this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I never really let myself feel how much it hurt. But I kind of relived the whole experience that fourth night, waiting for this Smelter thing to come. I literally regressed to being eight years old.

“Anyway then it was June, and the school year was all over. Time to go home. But on the last day there was some kind of mix-up, my dad thought he sent a car for me, I guess, but his assistant forgot, or the driver never showed, either way nobody came for me. I sat on my suitcase in the lobby all day, while the other kids got picked up one by one, and I kicked my legs and read one of those big floppy Peanuts books over and over again, and nobody came. That was before cell phones, and they couldn’t track down my parents. The staff were whispering behind my back. They felt sorry for me, but I could tell they kind of wanted me the hell out of there too so they could go home.

“I can still remember the view from the lobby: the line of palm trees through the glass doors, the sunset highlights on the wobbly linoleum tiles, the smell of the varnish on the wooden benches. I’ll never forget it. I’d look at the shadows and think, definitely he’ll have come by the time the shadow of the window frame hits that corner of the bench, but then he wouldn’t come, and I’d pick a new spot. I was realizing for the first time what a small part of my parents’ world I was. They were everything to me, but I wasn’t everything to them.

“The staff let me eat dinner with them, which ordinarily students never got to do. They ordered in from Popeye’s. I felt so excited and special.”

Eliot wished he could go back in time and get that mini-Janet, scoop her up and take her home. But he couldn’t.

“Then after dinner my dad finally showed up. He came striding through the door, stiff-arming it open without breaking stride, tie loose, walking too fast. He was probably pissed off at himself, about the mix-up, but it came off like he was pissed off at me somehow. Like it was my fault. He was pretty much of an asshole about the whole thing.

“I guess you can see where this is going. I was seriously weak at that point. I had the spins. I was falling asleep every five minutes. I woke up at dawn on day five and I knew that the Smelter wasn’t coming. And I gave up. It was over.

“Somebody stronger would have stayed out there till they died. Julia might have. Alice, maybe. I guess if somebody really wants to break me, it turns out I can be broken. There it is. I didn’t know. Now I know.

“I walked back to the rock. I still had my sack of metal. I couldn’t let go of it—maybe they could use it for something else, I don’t know. I was not in good shape, I can tell you. I was so dehydrated I couldn’t even cry. It was pretty much of a mad scene, like Ophelia in Hamlet. Except, you know, a lot drier.

“And then I was back in the city, and they were taking care of me, helping me to a table where there was all this food and drink. They were having a party. The whole tribe was there. Everybody was smiling. The Smelter hadn’t come, but somehow it was all right. I’d failed, but that was just the way of things. The desert was eternal, and I had fought it and done my best and lost and that was all I could do. Everybody sat there smiling at me and after a while I was smiling too.

“The Foremost asked me to come up to where he was, at the head of the table, in front of everybody. He told me to kneel, and he took the sack of metal from me and held it up.

“You are an outsider, he said. But you came to us, and you bowed before the desert, and you combed through its sands with your fingers.

“Dramatic pause.

“You thought the desert would grant you its treasures. The treasures of our people. You thought it would give up our secrets. Our metal. Our strength. You thought you would take our desert from us, and rule over us.

“Here is what the desert has given you: a bag of worthless sand.

“And he poured my sack out onto the floor.

“You will never find our metal. The desert guards its secrets. It shares them only with its sons and daughters. You may take this sand back to your High King of Fillory and tell him that I let you live. Tell him that he may send us more whores if he chooses, this one was adequate.”

Janet rode in silence for a minute. Her back was to Eliot. He didn’t know if she was composing herself at the memory or just lost in thought. He saw her touch her face once, that was all.

“Janet,” he said.

“The Foremost got a good laugh out of that last one, believe me.” Her voice was unchanged. “He knew his audience. All that black sand was in front of me on the floor in a little pile. It had seemed a lot bigger out in the desert. I still couldn’t believe it wasn’t metal. I almost died for it.

“But I didn’t finish the story before, about when I was at boarding school. You know what I did that day, when my father came for me? I fucking spat on him. I told him I would never go home again. I tore his expensive shirt. He slapped me and dragged me out to the car kicking and screaming.

“But I’m not eight anymore. I’m not a little girl. And the Foremost wasn’t half the man my father was.

“I whispered something to him. He had to lean down to hear me. I whispered: I don’t need your secrets, Foremost. But I’ll take your weapons. And I’ll take your desert too.

“Then I threw a handful of that fine black sand right in his eyes. And I got up off my knees. And I stopped whispering.

“And you can tell your god when you see him that I didn’t let you live. But I guess that’ll be kind of obvious.

“See, he’d made a big mistake. He thought when he sent me out there that he was going to crush me, but he was wrong. He made me stronger. The desert made me look at my own secrets, the ones I kept from myself, and I did. When I came back I didn’t have a weapon, I was a weapon.