She makes contact with Free Trader Beowulf, a group of people like her: self taught magicians with significant psychological issues.

Julia and the others in Murs, in order to attain significantly more magical power, attempt to summon Our Lady Underground, a local goddess.

Seeking a quest, Quentin and Julia travel to the outer islands of Fillory to collect back taxes, where they discover a golden key and are accidentally returned to Earth.

Searching for a way back, Quentin and Julia discover Josh in Venice, where he has sold the button he had which allowed travel between worlds to the dragon in the grand canal.

The founders of the Neitherlands did build a back door through which magic could come if the gods ever returned to shut it down, and it is locked by the same seven golden keys Quentin and Eliot have been searching for.

Quentin cannot go through as he used his passport in visiting the underworld, and when he accepts the debt Julia owes for causing the catastrophe, allowing her through, he is forced to give up his throne and leave Fillory.

Club, who gave it an A, writing that the sequel was "clearly the middle book in a trilogy, but it’s that rare creature that bridges the gap between tales and still stands on its own.

Writing in ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg criticised the way that sexual violence was depicted as something that Julia could not heal from, noting "What bothers me about this is less that it’s graphic than that it’s final.