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one
Jane startles when she sees him, here where no one knows she's hiding, nearly dropping her ritual components. The boy gives her a trembling smile, and his face is drawn and pale, with several nasty scratches down the left side, a couple of the larger ones still sluggishly bleeding, and his shoulder-length hair damp with sweat and more blood.
“Who the devil are you and what are you doing here?”
“Um, hi. My name is- uh. I'm Quentin Coldwater. You're trying to- trying to stop the monster, right? The one who took over Fillory? I want to help.”
There is something- familiar about the way the boy talks, something in the cadence and the timbre of his voice, in the precise shading of his grating American accent. Something in the way he stands.
“Sorry, what did you say your name was?” Jane asks. She glances around but the boy appears to have come alone.
“Quentin Coldwater,” he repeats, with a little hand wave that, she suspects, means he's been teased about it in the past. She's never heard the name before, but if the boy knows Fillory is real, perhaps he can help her.
“All right, Quentin,” she says. She isn't quite ready to give him her secrets, so she shares the name she'd taken after deciding it would be best if 'Jane Chatwin' stayed missing. “I'm Eliza. How much do you know?”
His whole face... collapses. “Um. The monster-”
“The Beast,” Jane corrects quietly, because she's certain now that this tragedy – sad, lost Martin – is the Beast the old man at the Mosaic had warned her about.
“The Beast? Um, okay. He- My friends and I- we found our way to Fillory and- uh-” He blinks rapidly, trying not to cry. “I couldn't-”
They'd died. All of them? The poor boy. How many people has Martin killed by now? Gentle, kind Martin. She can still hardly believe him capable of it, even after all this time and everything he's done.
“Anyway, we weren't able to- to stop him, but I found- found.” He holds out a faded blue ribbon, worn and tattered at the edges – oh, goodness. Could it possibly be one of her old hair ribbons from when she was a child? Martin had kept that? Even as he was now? Her hand shakes as she takes it from Quentin. “The locator spell I cast on it led me to you.”
“Well, then, I suppose you can assist me in this matter,” Jane says. “Since you're here already.”
Three days later, Quentin Coldwater is dead. Jane possibly could – should – fight on alone.
But he'd been so brave. Not a terribly powerful magician, true, but ever so brave.
Perhaps Jane could keep fighting Martin on her own.
Instead, for the first time in all these years, she resets the watch.
Time unspools around her.
Reforms into a day she remembers clearly, months before she ever met Quentin.
She has her second chance.
two
She's determined to keep young Quentin and his friends out of things, this time around. She tracks him down to Brakebills in upstate New York, where she runs into an additional complication.
Henry Fogg, the Dean of the school, remembers their original timeline.
“Why are you spying on my students?” That's how he starts the conversation, after he catches her... well, spying on his students. He's quite a fierce protector of this group because, she learns over the course of their not-quite-friendly chat, they'd all mysteriously vanished and then, a few days later, time had rewound itself with only him the wiser. He seems especially pained by the disappearance of the girl he names as Quentin's best friend – Julia Wicker, an exceedingly talented Knowledge specialist.
It's seeing Julia that prompts Jane to remember where she'd seen Quentin before.
Oh dear. The Witch and the Fool.
“I was hoping to keep them away from all of this,” Jane tells Henry. “But if I've met Julia and Quentin in my past, then I'm not sure how much we can do.”
“We can try,” Henry says, resolutely.
And so they try.
She learns quite a bit about the group as she and Henry do their best to safeguard them: about Quentin, of course, who takes antidepressants and had gotten into a spot of trouble at school for telling his father about magic. Quentin's best friend, Julia, the most talented student currently enrolled at Brakebills, who Henry is mentoring personally. Quentin's boyfriend, Eliot Waugh, who is sardonic and languid and doesn't trust “Eliza” one bit. Julia's boyfriend, Penny Adiyodi, a traveller who rolls his eyes more often than anyone Jane has ever met before, but is every bit as devoted to Julia as Eliot is to Quentin.
They're playful and selfish and naïve, and she and Henry desperately want to keep them that way.
After they fail and those bright, foolish children are dead all over again, Jane spends twenty minutes crying into Henry's arms, the way she hasn't cried since she was a child herself.
Then, she resets the watch.
three through nine
Jane does what she can to keep the Brakebills lot from ever getting involved.
No matter what variable she changes, they find Fillory anyway, and Martin remembers them, remembers that they'd tried to stop him, in past timelines.
Most of them die, in various painful and bloody ways.
Quentin always dies.
And Jane resets the watch.
ten
“It won't work,” she says, exhausted. “We can't keep them out of it. Quentin will make certain they get involved, no matter what we do. We need a new strategy. Perhaps, we need to work on ways of making sure they survive the Beast's assaults, instead of trying to keep them out of his path entirely.”
“Give them more firepower,” Henry muses, playing with his globe, spinning it around and tapping the points of magic.
“If you insist on being stereotypically American about it, I suppose,” Jane says. Henry harrumphs but doesn't challenge the statement. “Do you have something specific in mind?”
“There's a girl who tends to run neck-and-neck with Julia in her classwork. Alice Quinn. But she's a prickly one. Keeps to herself. We'll have to find a way to integrate her into the group.”
“That could prove tricky. They're tightly-knit, that set.”
Still, they have to try.
“Once more unto the breach,” Henry suggests.
Jane sighs.
Resets the watch.
eleven through thirteen
Henry switches first-year room assignments, puts Alice and Julia together.
Alice shows no interest in befriending Julia, nor Julia in her. Alice ends up spending all her time in the library, while Julia spends hers in Quentin and Penny's room.
Next time, Henry changes the rules of the secrets trial so that the students can't choose their own partners. Puts Alice and Quentin together.
Quentin has a panic attack and falls off the roof, breaking a leg.
Henry encourages Eliot to mentor Alice, giving him a card with her name on it the day of the entrance exam.
She rebuffs Eliot, quite firmly, says she doesn't need his help, and he gives up and volunteers to take Quentin under his wing instead, where the inevitable romance happens, as has happened in every previous timeline.
“Alice isn't going to work, I'm afraid,” Jane admits. “What other options do we have?”
“If you can go further back in time-”
Jane nods.
“-there's another strong magician. Physical discipline. Janet Hanson.”
Jane thinks for a moment. Short girl, yells rather a lot and... hmm. “Doesn't Eliot hate her?”
“I don't think so,” Henry says, thoughtfully. “They're both competitive and they haven't had any reason to see each other as anything except rivals. If we can get them interested in cooperating instead of being at odds, Janet could add quite a forceful presence to the group.”
“Well, I suppose it's worth a try,” Jane says. She feels rather doubtful, but goes ahead and resets the watch anyway.
fourteen
'Operation: Get Janet', as Henry likes to call it, is a roaring success – Eliot comes back from Brakebills South with a new best friend and they genuinely seem to be good for each other, in Jane's opinion. Janet is also quick to adopt Quentin and his friends when they arrive the next year.
The feeling of hope that beats unfamiliarly in Jane's breast, however, comes to a crashing halt one day, as she talks to Penny. Jane and Henry, it seems, have not been the only ones learning new tricks.
Her brother has learned how to exploit a weakness inherent in travellers, can psychically whisper to them, even through strong warding, and has been talking to Penny and a girl named Victoria, telling them lies and half-truths.
fifteen through eighteen
Jane sets the time on the watch back further and further, races backwards years and years, tries to stop Martin before he can begin.
She fails and fails and fails.
The children die and Martin lives.
By the time she gives up on that path, she's somehow misplaced nearly an entire Brakebills class – including Victoria – and Janet has started going by 'Margo' instead.
Henry is not particularly pleased, but Jane's getting used to that.
She tries again.
nineteen through twenty-two
“Maybe now that Margo's part of the group, Alice will be easier to integrate,” Jane suggests. “We could give that a try.”
Unfortunately, Alice seems offended by the very idea of Margo mentoring her, something about Margo apparently rubbing her the wrong way.
But Jane notices – during the time when Alice had been, however unwillingly, under Margo's care – Alice does steal a longing glance or two over in Quentin's direction.
“You want us to sabotage Quentin and Eliot's relationship to see if being Quentin's girlfriend is enough to bring Alice into the fold?” Henry stares at her, incredulous.
“It sounds rather horrid when you put it like that,” Jane says, with a frown. “I'm simply suggesting we influence events so that Quentin falls in love with Alice instead of Eliot. Quentin can be quite impressionable, after all, and we won't be hurting anyone. You cannot truly miss what you never had, Henry.”
twenty-three
It works.
It seems like it works, at first.
Alice becomes part of the group, stabilizes them at six. Alice and Quentin, Penny and Julia, and Eliot and Margo. Perfectly balanced, in its own way.
And then Quentin goes and sleeps with Eliot anyway, and everything falls apart.
twenty-four through thirty-two
“It's a ridiculous hypothesis,” Jane scoffs. “None of the children are gifted enough with time magic to even detect the loops.”
“I'm not saying they remember anything consciously, just that some part of Quentin... some part of his soul or shade... knows that he's fallen in love with Eliot before,” Henry says, in that overly-patient manner of his that she grew annoyed with ages ago. “Jane... just consider it. They've all become friends more and more easily, each time you loop them through. Some part of them recognizes that they already know each other.”
“Nonsense.”
“Then what's your explanation for why Quentin consistently gravitates towards Eliot, no matter what?”
“That's simple. It's just base animal attraction,” Jane says, with a wave of her hand. “I'll get it right next time. I just need to fiddle with things a bit more in the starting gate.”
“Jane, you have 'fiddled' with this set of variable for... almost ten loops,” Henry says, and- she hadn't realized how long it had been. She's losing track. “We need to try something new, not just a variation on the old. I have- a suggestion. There's a girl – Kady Orloff-Diaz. She doesn't go to Brakebills. She has the talent for it, but she has a prior obligation to a rather nasty hedge witch named Marina, one that I've had dealings with before. If Kady comes here, she'll almost certainly be spying for Marina but- well, she is extremely talented with battle magic. Maybe she can tip us over the edge and we can ease off on Alice.”
“What year would she be in?”
“With Quentin's group.”
“All right, let's give Kady a chance to impress us.”
Jane resets the watch.
thirty-three and thirty-four
Penny falls in love with Kady and Julia at the same time.
Jane expects it to be a disaster akin to the various cheating scandals that Alice and Quentin have gone through. Oddly, it seems to work well enough.
Kady helps, she thinks.
But not enough.
The children still die, and Martin survives.
thirty-five
“Wait, it's Quentin's fault they get dragged into this, right?” Henry says, with the tone of a man having an epiphany. Jane has grown... weary with the idea of epiphanies, somewhere along the way, but she nods at him to continue. “So, simple solution. We keep him out of Brakebills entirely. Never invite him.”
“But his magic-”
“We always have to coax visible magic out of Quentin,” Henry says. “His magic is- shy, not flashy. He's been using it half his life and never noticed. All we have to do is... let him keep living his ordinary life.”
“And Julia?”
“That won't work with her,” Henry says. “Her magic is flashy. We keep her out of Brakebills and she'll eventually attract a hedge witch. End up in a safe house. No, Julia still gets her invitation.”
“Are you sure you aren't saying that because she's your favorite?” Jane teases, but there's a fondness to it.
She doesn't like the idea of keeping Quentin out of Brakebills, to be honest. It feels wrong. But her instincts have not proven themselves to be all that spectacular in recent days.
Nervous and hesitant, Jane resets the watch. Hopes for the best.
thirty-six through thirty-eight
Quentin finds his way back, even without the exam, without Brakebills.
Dies anyway.
Exhausted and heartsick, Jane gives up for a while. Lets events play out without her guiding hand.
Because of the changes in previous loops, Janet is still Margo. The third-year class is missing. There's a voice in Penny's head that gets louder every time she turns time around. Kady causes a little trouble at first, but falls into the group, settles down and stops doing Marina's bidding. Alice drifts in and out, never fully attached to anyone.
Quentin and Eliot fall in love. Peacefully, without any complications from Jane's interference.
They are a sweet couple; she admits that.
But peace doesn't save them. Sweetness doesn't save them. Happiness and friendship and love don't save them.
Martin still finds them, every time.
thirty-nine
“I'm tired,” Jane admits. “The Beast is getting better and better at getting to Penny. It's hard to keep up. We have to do something... bold, something he can't predict.” She has a thought but she is... hesitant to share it with Henry. For all that they've become partners of a sort, he is still the Dean of Brakebills. He has an obligation to the students.
He might object.
“I'm certainly open to suggestions,” Henry says.
She doesn't want to share all her secrets but, perhaps...
“I think we should keep Julia out of Brakebills, this next time,” she says. She holds her hand up to stop his protest. “I know, she'll catch the attention of a hedge witch. But maybe that's what we need. Magic- magic is forged out of pain, Henry, you know this. Perhaps we've been coddling them.”
“How can you possibly- they have died in front of our eyes so many fucking times, Jane,” Henry says, and he sounds as exhausted as she feels.
“Yes, they have. And we have tried to protect them,” Jane says. “Too much, I fear. Let's try not protecting them.”
Instead, Jane would- encourage them to invite Martin in. Accelerate the process. Perhaps, perhaps, catch him off guard. Perhaps it will be enough.
“It's worth a try,” she says. “If it fails, we can always do it differently the next time.”
Henry stares at her, then sighs. Nods.
Jane resets the watch.