The Magician King (6 page)

Of course if this were a Fillory novel the ship he needed would already be tied up at the docks, awaiting his command, just like that. But this wasn’t a Fillory novel. This was Fillory. So it was up to him.

“I need something not too big and not too small,” he said. “Mediumsized. And it should be comfortable. And quick. And sturdy.”

“I see. Will you require guns?”

“No guns. Well, maybe a few guns. A few guns.”

“A few guns.”

“If you please, Admiral, don’t be a cock. I’ll know it when I see it, and if for some reason I don’t, you tell me. All right?”

Admiral Lacker inclined his head almost imperceptibly to indicate that they had a deal. He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.

Whitespire stood on the shore of a wide, curving bay of oddly pale green sea. It was almost too perfect: it could have been carved out of the coastline on purpose by some divine being who took a benevolent interest in mortals having somewhere to put their ships when they weren’t using them. For all Quentin knew it had been. He had the driver drop them at one end of the waterfront. They clambered out, all three of them, blinking in the early morning sun after the swaying dimness of the carriage.

The air was ripe with the smell of salt and wood and tar. It was intoxicating, like huffing pure oxygen.

“All right,” Quentin said. “Let’s do this.” He clapped his hands together.

They walked, slowly, all the way from one end of the docks to the other, stepping over taut guy ropes and squashed and dried fish carcasses and weaving their way around massive stanchions and windlasses and through labyrinths of stacked crates. The waterfront was home to an astounding variety of vessels from all points in the Fillorian Empire and beyond. There was a gargantuan dreadnought made of black wood, with nine masts and a bounding panther for a figurehead, and a square-snouted junk with a brick-red sail crimped into sections by battens. There were sloops and cutters, galleons and schooners, menacing corvettes and tiny darting caravels. It was like a bathtub full of expensive bath toys.

It took an hour to reach the far end. Quentin turned to Admiral Lacker.

“So what did you think?”

“I think the
Hatchet,
the
Mayfly,
or the
Morgan Downs
would suffice.”

“Probably. I’m sure you’re right. Julia?”

Julia had said almost nothing the entire time. She was detached, like she was sleepwalking. He thought about what Eliot had told him last night. He wondered if Julia had found whatever it was she’d been looking for. Maybe she was hoping she’d find it on the Outer Island.

“It does not matter. They are all fine, Quentin. It makes no difference.”

They were both right, of course. There were plenty of decent-looking ships. Beautiful even. But they weren’t the
Swift.
Quentin folded his arms and squinted down the length of the docks in the late-morning glare. He looked out at the ships floating in the bay.

“What about those ones out there?”

Lacker pursed his lips. Julia looked too. Her eyes were still black from the day before, and she didn’t have to shade them against the sun. She looked right into it.

“They are at your disposal as well, Your Highness,” Lacker said. “Of course.”

Julia walked out along the nearest pier, straight-backed and sure-footed, to where a humble fishing smack was tied up. She jumped the gap neatly and began untying it.

“Come on,” she called.

Lacker gestured to Quentin to precede him.

“Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”

It was good to get out on the open water, but there wasn’t much wind, and as it warmed up the smack began to smell. Amazingly its owner emerged from belowdecks, where he must have been asleep. He was a sun- and windburned man with a gray beard, wearing overalls with nothing obviously on underneath them. Lacker addressed him in a language Quentin didn’t recognize. He didn’t seem at all put out or even surprised to discover that his boat had been commandeered by two monarchs and an admiral.

As for Lacker, he looked unfairly comfortable in the heat in his full dress uniform as they toured an even greater variety of inappropriate vessels. Most of them were out there because their drafts were too deep to anchor any farther in: a great bruiser of a ship of the line, some nobleman’s bloated party yacht, a fat, butter-colored merchant tub.

“What about that one?” Quentin said. He pointed.

“I beg your indulgence, Your Highness, my eyesight has suffered in the service of our great nation. You do not mean—”

“I do.” Enough with the period drama. “That one. There.”

A flat sandbar projected from one of the horns of Whitespire’s great bay. A ship lay near it in a few feet of water. The low tide had laid it gently down on one side on the sandy bottom, its underbelly exposed like a beached whale.

“That ship, Your Highness, has not left the bay for a very long time.”

“Nevertheless.”

It was partly out of thoroughness, partly out of a perverse desire to pay the admiral back for being, his promise notwithstanding, a little bit of a cock. The owner of the smack exchanged a long look with Admiral Lacker: this man, the look said, lubs his land.

“Let us return to the
Morgan Downs
.”

“And we will,” Julia said. “But King Quentin wishes to see that ship first.”

It took ten minutes to tack over to it, the sails flapping as the fisherman gamely worked his way upwind. Quentin reminded himself to pay the man something for this after. They circled the wreck listlessly in the shallow water. Its hull had been painted white, but the paint had been weathered and blasted down to the gray wood. There was something odd about its lines—something curiously swoopy about them. It finished in a long slender bowsprit that had been snapped off halfway.

He liked it. It was neither harsh and blocky like a warship, nor soft and too pretty like a yacht. It was elegant, but it meant business. Too bad it was a carcass and not a ship. Maybe if he’d gotten here fifty years earlier.

“What do you think?”

The smack’s keel scraped the sandy bottom loudly in the stillness. Admiral Lacker regarded the horizon line. He cleared his throat.

“I think,” he said, “that that ship has seen better days.”

“What do you think it was?”

“Workhorse,” the smack’s owner piped up huskily. “Deer Class. Ran the route between here and Longfall.”

Quentin hadn’t even realized he spoke English.

“It looks nice,” Quentin said. “Or it looked nice.”

“That was,” Admiral Lacker said solemnly, “one of the most beautiful ships that was ever made.”

He couldn’t tell if Lacker was joking or not. Except that it was pretty obvious that he never joked.

“Really?” Quentin said.

“Nothing moved like the Deer Class,” Lacker said. “They were built to carry bergspar from Longfall, then coldspice on the way back. Fast and tough. You could ride them to hell and back.”

“Huh. So why aren’t there more of them?”

“Longfall ran out of bergspar,” the fisherman said. Now he’d gone all chatty. “So we stopped sending them coldspice. That was the end of the Deer Class. Most were broken up for the clockwood in them, sold for scrap. It was the Lorians built them. Every shipwright in Fillory tried to copy them, but there was a trick to it. Trick’s been lost.”

“My first command,” Lacker said, “was a Very Fast Picket out of Hartheim. Nothing in the service could have caught us, but I saw a Deer Class blow by me once on its way north. We had studding sails set on both sides. Made us look like we were standing still.”

Quentin nodded. He stood up in the boat. A halo of little birds lifted off from the ship’s blasted hull, stalled for a moment on a puff of wind, and then settled back down again. The smack had come around to the far side, and they could see the deck, which was stove in in at least two places. The ship’s name was painted across the stern: MUNTJAC.

This wasn’t a Fillory novel. If it were, this was the kind of boat he’d have.

“Well, I think that settles it,” he said. “Take us back to the
Morgan Downs,
please.”

“The
Morgan Downs,
Highness.”

“And when we get there tell the captain of the
Morgan Downs
to get his floating rattrap over here and haul that thing”—he pointed at the
Muntjac
—“into dry dock. We’re taking it.”

That felt good. Some things it was never too late for.

 

 

Getting the
Muntjac
—it turned out to be the name of a species of deer—into anything like seaworthy condition was going to take a couple of weeks, even if Quentin exercised his royal prerogatives and press-ganged all the best shipwrights in the city, which he did. But that was fine. It gave him time for more preparations.

He’d been sitting on his nervous energy for so long, it was good to have something to do with it, and he was discovering how much of it he had. He could have powered a small city with it. The next day Quentin had an announcement posted in every town square in the country. He was going to hold a tournament.

In all honesty Quentin had only a very vague idea of how tournaments worked, or even what they were, except that they were something kings used to do at some point between when Jesus was alive and when Shakespeare was alive, which was as close as Quentin could get to placing when the Middle Ages had actually happened. He knew that tournaments were supposed to involve jousting, and he also knew that he wasn’t interested in jousting. Too weird and phallic, plus it was hard on the horses.

Sword fighting, though, that was interesting. Not fencing, or not just fencing—he didn’t want anything that formal. He had in mind something more like mixed martial arts. Ultimate fighting. He wanted to know who the best swordsman in the realm was: the no-buts, fuck-you, all-Fillory champion of sword fighting. So he put the word out: a week from now anyone who thought he could handle a blade should turn up at Castle Whitespire and start whacking till there was no one left to whack. Winner gets a small but very choice castle in the Fillorian boondocks and the honor of guarding the king’s royal person on his upcoming journey to an undisclosed location.

Eliot walked in while Quentin was clearing the grand banquet hall. A column of footmen was filing out, carrying a chair each.

“Pardon me, Your Highness,” Eliot said, “but what the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry. It’s the only room that was big enough for the matches.”

“This is the part where I’m supposed to say, ‘Matches, what matches?’”

“For the tournament. Sword fighting. You didn’t see the posters? The table goes too,” Quentin said to the housekeeper who was directing the move. “Just put it in the hall. I’m having a tournament to find the best swordsman in Fillory.”

“Well, can’t you have it outside?”

“What if it rains?”

“What if I want to eat something?”

“I told them to serve dinner in your receiving room. So you’ll have to do your receiving somewhere else. Maybe you can do that outside.”

A man was on his hands and knees on the floor ruling out the piste with a lump of chalk.

“Quentin,” Eliot said, “I just heard from someone in the shipwrights’ guild. Do you have any idea what that ship of yours is costing us? The
Jackalope
or whatever it is?”

“No. The
Muntjac.
”

“About twenty years’ worth of Outer Island taxes, that’s how much it’s costing us,” Eliot said, answering his own question. “Just in case you were curious how much it’s costing us.”

“I wasn’t that curious.”

“But you do see the irony.”

Quentin considered this.

“I do. But it’s not about the money.”

“What’s it about then?”

“It’s about observing good form,” Quentin said. “You of all people know all about that.”

Eliot sighed.

“I suppose I can see that,” he said.

“And I need this. That’s all I can tell you.”

Eliot nodded. “I can see that too.”

Contestants began trickling into the city a few days later. They were a bizarre menagerie: men and women, tall and short, haunted and feral, scarred and branded and shaved and tattooed. There was an ambulatory skeleton and an animated suit of armor. They carried swords that glowed and buzzed and burned and sang. A handsome pair of conjoined twins offered to enter individually and, in the event that they vanquished the field, gallantly declared themselves willing to fight each other. An intelligent sword arrived, borne on a silk pillow, and explained that it wished to enter, it merely required somebody willing to wield it.

On the first day of the tournament there were so many pairings that some of the bouts had to be held outside after all, on wooden stages set up in the courtyards. A circus atmosphere prevailed. The weather was just turning—it was the first cold morning of the year—and the fighters’ breath smoked in the dawn air. They performed all kinds of weird stretches and warm-ups on the wet grass.

It was everything Quentin had hoped for. He couldn’t sit still long enough to watch a whole match, there was always something unmissable going on in the next ring over. Shouts and clashes and weird war cries and even less easily identifiable noises broke the early morning calm. It was like being in a battle, but minus all the death and suffering.

It was three full days before the contestants worked their way through the draw to the final pairing. There were a few incidents and explosions along the way, where forbidden weaponry or major magic overpowered the safeguards they’d put in place, but no one was hurt too badly, thank God. Before it started he’d had a romantic idea about entering the tournament himself in disguise, but he could see now what a disaster that would have been. He wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds.