The Magicians - 'The Flying Forest'

"Yes, I have wood. My shoulder is made of teak."

And this is where things get weird.

In the aftermath of the battle against the Beast, Quentin is in a bad way. His injured shoulder has been replaced with a wooden one and he is comatose, forcing Eliot and Margot to leave him and look to their other problems; like Eliot being high king of a dying land (the god dump in the wellspring is almost as bad as the Beast, but sings fewer showtunes,) and married to a horny Filorian girl who does nothing to float his boat. As a workaround for his inability to leave Filory, Margot creates a golem-Eliot, modifying the Margolem's mind-link so that Eliot can occupy his golem as an Earth body while he sleeps in Filory. Until, that is, his wife wakes him up for barely-consensual nooky(1) and sort of gets his mind wedged between the two worlds.

Penny hits the clinic, but Dr Centaur won't try to undo a curse set by the Riverwatcher. Instead, once Quentin comes to and has been a misery for a while, Penny gets him to cut his hands off again, and then they go after the White Lady, a questing beast that must grant one wish for the person who catches her. They manage to make it through the Flying Forest - so called because its atmosphere makes you high as anything - but although Penny is able to get his hands back, the White Lady can't bring Alice back to life. In fact, nothing in Filory can help him. This realisation is a key one for Quentin, who asks simply to be sent home.

It's the woman again!

Elsewhere, Julia finds Kady in a drugged stupour, having retreated into drugs over her guilt at leaving Julia to Renard, and dries her out to help fight the trickster. Kady sneaks her into Brakebills and guides her around the library to grab a particular book. As the book is tagged, Julia hides in the physical cottage to copy the text. Margot finds her, but gives her a blank to mate with the book and whelp a copy.

Had you forgotten how books in this magical library do?

From this they drew a spell to raise Marina temporarily from some kind of hellish afterlife, to tell them that 'hey, Renard was banished by a Hedge, hence his beef, so find her and she can tell you how she did it.'

Despite some lighter moments, 'The Flying Forest' is a bleak encounter overall, as Team Filory deal with Alice's death and Team Julia - which is basically Julia plus a rotating and highly ablative extra body - takes a more measured and less deal-with-the-Devil approach to god hunting. Honestly, it isn't just Quentin realising that he was shooting for easy answers. It's good to see Kady back again. She has one of the brightest relationships with Julia, which keeps the series from getting too deep in melancholy, and that's all to the good. Presumably Team Filory's quest to keep magic from dying altogether will tie back into the hunt for Renard at some point, but at the moment it's the latter that's most interesting.

(1) It's played lightly, but literally creepy AF.