The Magicians (57 page)

She shook her head, as if Plover’s flights of fancy were the most incredible part of all this.

“And you know, I was only thirteen when I started out. I had no training in magic at all. I had to figure everything out on my own. I suppose I’m a bit of a hedge witch that way.”

“So all those things the Watcherwoman did—”

“A lot of it did actually happen. But I was careful. The Watcherwoman never killed anyone. I cut corners, sometimes at other people’s expense, but I had other things on my mind. My job was to stop Martin, and I did what I had to. Even those clock-trees.” She snorted ruefully. “Brilliant idea those were. They never did a bloody thing. The funniest part is that Martin was terrified of them! He couldn’t figure them out.”

For a moment her face lost its composure, just for a moment. Her eyes welled with tears, and she blinked rapidly.

“I keep telling myself that we lost him that first night, when he walked away into the forest. It was never him after that, not really. He died a long time ago. But I’m the only Chatwin left now. He was a monster, but he was the last family I had.”

“And we killed him,” Quentin said coldly. His heart was palpitating. The feeling he’d had trouble identifying earlier was clarifying itself: it was rage. This woman had used him, used them all like toys. And if some of the toys got broken, oh well. That had been the real point of the whole story all along. She had manipulated him, sent him and the others into Fillory to find Martin. She had made sure he got there. For all he knew she’d planted the button for Lovelady to find in the first place. It didn’t matter now. It was over, and Alice was dead.

He stood up. A cool, grassy evening breeze stirred the green curtains.

“Yes,” Jane Chatwin said carefully. “You killed him. We won.”

“We won?” He was incredulous. He couldn’t hold back anymore. All the grief and guilt he’d been salting away so carefully was coming back to him as anger. The ice was cracking. The pond was boiling. “We won? You have a damn time machine in your pocket, and that’s the best you could do? You set us up, Jane, or whoever the fuck you are. We thought we were going on an adventure, and you sent us on a suicide mission, and now my friends are dead. Alice is dead.” Here he had to swallow hard before he could go on. “Is that really the best you could do?”

She dropped her eyes to the floor. “I am sorry.”

“You’re sorry.” The woman was unbelievable. “Good. Show me how sorry you are. Take me back. Use the watch, we’ll go back in time. We’ll do it all again. Let’s go back and fix this.”

“No, Quentin,” she said gravely. “We can’t go back.”

“What do you mean, no? We can go back. We can and we will!”

He was talking at her louder and louder, staring at her, as if by talking and staring he could force her into doing what he needed her to do. She had to! And if talking wouldn’t do it, he could make her. She was a small woman, and apart from that watch he was willing to bet that he was twice the magician she’d ever be.

She was shaking her head sadly.

“You have to understand.” She didn’t back away. She spoke softly, as if she could soothe him, placate him into forgetting what she’d done. “I’m a witch, I’m not a god. I’ve tried this so many ways. I’ve gone down so many different timelines. I’ve sent so many other people to fight Martin. Don’t make me lecture you on the practicalities of chronological manipulation, Quentin. Change one variable and you change them all. Did you think you were the first one to face Martin in that room? Do you think that was even the first time
you
faced him? That battle has been fought again and again. I’ve tried it so many different ways. Everyone always died. And I always wound back the clock.

“As bad as it was, as bad as it is, this is by far the best outcome I’ve ever achieved. No one ever stopped him but you and your friends, Quentin. You were the only ones. And I’m sticking with it. I can’t risk losing everything we’ve gained.”

Quentin folded his arms. Muscles were jumping in his back. He was practically vibrating with fury. “Well, then. We’ll go back all the way. To before
The World in the Walls.
Stop him before it all starts. Find a timeline where he doesn’t even go to Fillory.”

“I’ve tried, Quentin! I’ve tried!” She was pleading with him. “He always does! I’ve tried it a thousand times. There is no world where he doesn’t.

“I’m tired. I know you lost Alice. I lost my brother. I’m tired of fighting that thing that used to be Martin.”

Suddenly she did look very tired, and her eyes lost their focus, as if she were seeing into some other world, one she would never get to. It made it hard for him keep up his high-pressure rage. It kept bleeding away even as he stoked it.

This wasn’t over. He lunged, but she saw it coming. He was quick, but she was quicker. Maybe they’d played this scene already, in another timeline, or maybe he was just that obvious. Before he was halfway across the room she spun on her heel and threw the silver watch as hard as she could at the wall.

It was hard enough. The wall was stone, and the watch squashed like an overripe fruit. It made a sound like a bag of nickels. The delicate crystal face shattered, and tiny gears and wheels skittered away across the floor like pearls from a broken necklace.

Jane turned back to him defiantly, breathing hard. He stared down at the corpse of the broken timepiece.

“No more,” she said. “Put an end to it. It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost. I wish I could have told you more before it was too late, but I needed you too much to tell you the truth.”

In a curious gesture she placed her hands on his cheeks, drew his face down to hers, and kissed him on the forehead. The room was almost dark now. The door creaked in the quiet spring evening as she opened it.

“Try not to judge Martin too harshly,” she said from the doorway. “Plover used to diddle him whenever he could get him alone. I think that’s why he went to Fillory in the first place. Why else would he try to crawl into a grandfather clock? He was looking for somewhere to hide.”

With that she was gone.

Quentin didn’t go after her, just stared at the doorway for a long minute. When he walked over to the door to close it, pieces of the broken watch scrunched under his feet.

It just went down and down. Had he finally gotten to the bottom of it? In the last of the dying light he looked down at the notebook on the hard centaur bed. There was a note tucked into the pages, the same one the wind had snatched away from him the first time he tried to read it. But all it said was:

 

 

He sat back down. In the end he and Alice had just been bit players, extras who had the bad luck to wander into a battle scene. A brother and sister at war with each other in their nightmare nursery fantasyland. No one cared that Alice was dead, and no one cared that he wasn’t.

Now he had answers, but they weren’t doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren’t making things simpler or easier. They weren’t helping. Sitting there on his bed, he thought about Alice. And poor, stupid Penny, and miserable Eliot. And that poor bastard Martin Chatwin. He got it now, of course, finally. He’d been going about this all wrong. He should never have come here at all. He should never have fallen in love with Alice. He should never even have come to Brakebills. He should have stayed in Brooklyn, in the real world. He should have nursed his depression and his grudge against the world from the relative safety of mundane reality. He never would have met Alice, but at least she would be alive, somewhere. He could have eked out his sad wasted life with movies and books and masturbation and alcohol like everybody else. He would never have known the horror of really getting what he thought he wanted. He could have spared himself and everybody else the cost of it. If there was a moral to the story of Martin Chatwin, that was it in a nutshell. Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster. Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead.

It was partly Jane’s fault, of course. She had lured him on at every turn. Well, he wouldn’t get fooled again. He wouldn’t give anybody the chance. Quentin felt a new attitude of detachment descend on him. His molten anger and grief were cooling into a glossy protective coating, a hard transparent lacquer of uncaring. If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.

The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered. Over the next few weeks the new Quentin, with his white Warhol hair and his wooden Pinocchio shoulder, took up his magical studies again. What was wanted now was control. He wanted to be untouchable.

In his little cell Quentin practiced things he’d never had time to master before, or never dared to try. He went back to the most advanced Popper exercises—gruesomely difficult, only theoretically executable etudes that he’d faked his way through back at Brakebills. Now he repeated them over and over again, smoothing out the rough edges. He invented new, even crueler versions and mastered them as well. He relished the pain in his hands, ate it up. His enchantments took on a power and precision and fluency they’d never had before. His fingertips left tracks of fire and sparks and neon indigo smears in the air, that buzzed and whined, too bright to look at directly. His brain glowed with cold, brittle triumph. This was what Penny had been looking for when he went to Maine, but Quentin was actually doing it. Only now, he thought, now that he had killed off his human emotions, only now that he didn’t care anymore, could he wield truly superhuman power.

As the sweet spring air drifted through his room, and then the oven-hot summer air, and sweat poured down his face, and the centaurs trotted by outside his door, lofty and incurious, he came to see how Mayakovsky had performed some of the feats Quentin had found so baffling. In an empty meadow he carefully reverse-engineered Penny’s flashy Fireball spell. He found and corrected the mistakes he’d made in his senior project, the trip to the moon, and he finished Alice’s project, too, in memoriam, isolating and capturing a single photon and even observing it, Heisenberg be damned: an infinitely furious, precious, incandescent little wave-spark.

Seated in the lotus position on top of the sun-faded Florida desk, he allowed his mind to expand until it encompassed one, then three more, then six field mice in all as they went about their tiny urgent business in the grass outside his window. He summoned them to sit before him and, with a thought, gently extinguished the electrical current that lived within each of them. Their little fluffy bodies went still and cold. Then, just as easily, he touched each of them with magic, instantly relighting their tiny souls as if he were touching a match to the pilot light of a stove.

Panicked, they scrambled in all directions. He let them go. Alone in his room, he smiled at his secret greatness. He felt lordly and munificent. He had tampered with the sacred mystery of life and death. What else was there in this world that could engage his attention? Or in any world?

June ripened into July, then burst and withered and dried and became August. One morning Quentin woke up early to find a cool mist hanging low over the lawn outside his first-floor window. Standing there in plain view, looking huge and ethereal, was a white stag. It bent to crop the grass with its small mouth, tilting its grand, top-heavy rack of antlers, and he could see the muscles working in its neck. Its ears were bigger and floppier than he would have expected. It raised its head again when Quentin appeared in the window, conscious of being observed, then sauntered off across the lawn and disappeared unhurriedly from view. Frowning, Quentin watched it go. He went back to bed but couldn’t sleep.

Later in the day he sought out Alder Acorn Agnes Allison-fragrant-timber. He found her working an elaborate, room-size loom built to harness both the pumping power of her muscular back legs and the delicate manipulations of her human fingers.

“The Questing Beast,” she said, breathing hard, still pumping, her hands still weaving. “It is a rare sight. Undoubtedly it was drawn here by the positive energies radiated by our superior values. You are fortunate that it offered itself to some centaur’s sight while you happened to be watching.”

The Questing Beast. From
The Girl Who Told Time.
So that was what it looked like. Somehow he’d expected something more ferocious. Quentin patted Agnes on her glossy black hindquarters and left. He knew what he had to do.

That night he took out the leafy branch he had found in the writing desk. It was the branch that had hung in front of the Beast’s face, which it had tossed aside right before their battle. The branch was dead and dried now, but its leaves were still olive and rubbery. He stuck its hard stem in the moist turf and mounded up some dirt to make sure it stayed upright.

The next morning Quentin woke to find a fully grown tree outside his window. Set into its trunk was the face of a softly ticking clock.

He put his hand on the tree’s hard gray trunk, feeling its cool, dusty bark, then let it drop. His time here was over. He packed a few possessions, abandoned others, stole a bow and a quiver of arrows from the shed by the archery range, liberated a horse from the centaurs’ feral sex-herd, and left the Retreat.

The hunt for the Questing Beast took him to the edge of the vast Northern Marsh, then back south, skirting the edge of the Great Bramble, then north again, angling west through the Darkling Woods as far as the vast, gently gurgling expanse of the Lower Slosh. It was like visiting places he’d seen in dreams. He drank from streams and slept on the ground and ate fire-roasted game—he had become a passable archer, and when he couldn’t hit something on his own he used magic to cheat.