The Magician’s Land (41 page)

He had a different role to play. Maybe he and Alice could be a club. He walked back to where she stood talking with Julia.

“It’s too bad James never made it here,” Quentin said. “He would have liked it. I sometimes wonder what happened to him.”

“Hedge fund, Hoboken. He’ll die in a skiing accident in Vail, age seventy-seven.”

“Ah.”

“Wait,” Alice said. “But does that mean you know how we’re going to die too?”

“Some people’s deaths are harder to predict than others. James is easy. Yours I can’t see. You’re too complicated. Too many twists and turns left to come.”

The first dawn was over, and the sun was up now, and Quentin had the distinct feeling it was getting to be time to go. He never thought he’d leave Fillory again, not of his own free will, but he understood now, with steadily increasing keenness, that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Not yet. He had a bit farther to go.

“Julia,” Quentin said. “Before I leave I should tell you: Plum and I ran into an old friend of yours. She called herself Asmodeus.”

Quentin knew this might be hard for Julia to hear, but he thought she would want to know.

“Asmo,” she said. “Yes. We were friends, back in Murs.”

“When we found Rupert’s suitcase, the one with the spell in it, there was a knife there too. She took it. She said it was a weapon for killing gods. She said to tell you she was going fox hunting.”

“Oh, I know.” Julia’s great goddess’s eyes had become distant. “I know all about it. Did you ever notice how Asmo always had a little more information than she was supposed to? That was me, keeping an eye on her. I didn’t want to be too obvious, but I made sure she found what she needed.”

“What about Reynard?” Quentin said. “Do you know if she caught him?”

“Caught him?” Now she half smiled, though her eyes remained at the same distance. “She gutted him like a furry red fish.”

Quentin hoped that a three-quarters-goddess wasn’t so lofty and divine that she couldn’t enjoy some bloody and well-deserved revenge. He didn’t think she was. He was enjoying it just by association.

Plum joined them. She was ready to talk now.

“This is kind of amazing.” She still couldn’t stop staring at everything; she held up her own hands and wiggled her fingers, as if she were looking at them underwater. “I mean, really amazing.”

“Is it what you expected?”

“It is and it isn’t,” she said. “I mean, so far all I’ve seen is a whole lot of trees and grass. I haven’t gotten to any of the exotic stuff, so it’s not like it’s that different from Earth. Except for you,” she added, to Julia. “You’re different.”

“How do you feel?”

“Floaty, sort of. If that makes any sense. But in a good way. Like something incredibly interesting could possibly happen to me at literally any second.”

“Do you want to stay?” Julia asked.

“I think so, if that’s all right. For a while at least.” Julia inspired a certain instinctive deference even in Plum. “I like it here. I feel whole.”

“I’m sure they can put you up in Whitespire,” Quentin said, “or whatever’s left of it.”

“Actually I thought I might pay a visit to my great-aunt Jane. It’s way past time I got to know that side of the family, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only relative she’s got left. I don’t know, maybe she’ll teach me how to make clock-trees. From what I hear about her I think we might get along.”

Quentin thought she might be right. It was all beginning for Plum—he could almost see the plans forming in her head—but it reminded him again that for him things were ending. A cool breeze blew through the clearing. He wondered if Alice would come with him.

“I keep thinking about something,” Alice said. “If Ember and Umber are dead, and Quentin’s not the god of Fillory anymore, then it must be somebody else. But who? Is it you, Julia?”

“It’s not me,” Julia said.

Alice was right, the power must have gone somewhere, but Quentin didn’t know where either. He’d felt it flow out of him, and he could tell that it knew where it was going, but it hadn’t told him. If not Julia then who? Probably it was one of the talking animals, the way it had been before. The sloth, maybe. The others were listening—they wanted to know too.

“Fillory’s always had a god,” Quentin said. “It has to be someone.”

“Does it?” Julia said. “When you were a god you mended Fillory, Quentin. You don’t remember it, but you did. You did it well. Fillory’s in tune now—it’s perfectly balanced and calibrated. It could run on its
own for a few millennia without any trouble at all. Maybe Fillory doesn’t need a god right now. I think this age might just be a godless one.”

A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them and helping or not according to his or her divine mood. There would be nobody to praise them and nobody to condemn them. They would have to do it all themselves.

The cold wind was blowing steadily now, and the temperature was dropping. Quentin hugged himself.

“Fillory will have you, though,” Alice pointed out.

“Oh, I spend most of my time on the Far Side,” Julia said. “I’ll look in now and then. Fillory will have to make do with a part-time three-quarters god, but I have a feeling that will be enough. Things are different now. It’s a new age.”

“A new age.”

It was very different. Very new. Fillory was a land reborn, and he’d been there, he’d assisted at the birth, but he wasn’t going to see it grow up. He looked around: it was all really ending, the great love affair of his youth, and it was as if he were already gone, and he was seeing Fillory without him in it. Somewhere along the way he’d finally outgrown it, the way people always said he would. Long or short, great or terrible, Fillory’s new age would happen without him. He belonged to the last age, the one he’d just ended with two strokes of a sword. This age would have its own heroes. Maybe Plum would be one of them.

Time to go, before he lost his composure in front of everybody. Eliot was staring up at the sky. It was covered over with a thick blanket of cloud.

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “Or whatever the appropriate expression is now. Finally.”

Out of a sky blank and pale as a clean sheet of paper, white snow began to fall. The flakes settled on the warm ground and melted there, like a cool hand on the forehead of a feverish child. The long summer was over at last.

A
week later Quentin and Alice stood together in the fourth-floor workroom of Plum’s townhouse in Manhattan. A door to somewhere else stood in front of them. They felt neither comfortable nor uncomfortable with each other, or maybe they felt both at once. They both knew each other and they didn’t. They were old lovers, and they were practically strangers.

It was just them now. Everybody else had stayed behind in Fillory.

“Are you sure you didn’t want to stay too?” Alice said, frowning at him doubtfully. “I mean, obviously you’re not a king anymore, but I’m sure you could have. Eliot would have loved it, and there’s no Ember and Umber to kick you out anymore, and they never would anyway. Not after everything that happened.”

“Really. I’m sure. This feels right.”

She shook her head.

“I still don’t get it. Back in the day you were the biggest Fillory weenie around.”

“That is true. I was a huge Fillory weenie.”

“I have this awful feeling,” Alice said, “that you left for me. And/or that you left because you’re pissed that you’re not a king anymore.”

“I’m really not pissed about it. At all. It wasn’t that.” He was a bit surprised himself at how untempted he’d been. “Fillory is who I used to be, but I’m somebody different now.”

“I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that. Though it does beg the question, who the hell are you?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

She considered that.

“Maybe the answer’s in there,” she said.

Alice indicated the door. It wasn’t a grand or even particularly unusual-looking door, though it was handsome enough: tall and narrow, made of weathered wood painted a pale green. It was the kind of thing you’d find leaning up against the back wall of a vintage furniture store.

“Well,” she said, “if we fuck up our lives completely we can always go crawling back to Eliot.”

“Right,” Quentin said. “We’ll always have that.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“You do know we’re not going out anymore, right?”

“I do know that.”

“I don’t want you to have the wrong idea.”

“I really don’t have any ideas at all. Right or wrong.”

That last part wasn’t strictly true. He had a lot of ideas, of both kinds, most of them about Alice. But he could keep them to himself for a little longer.

As soon as he was back in New York Quentin had thrown himself right back into the process of making a new land. He knew right away that he was going to try it again. He’d thought that particular dream was gone forever, after he used the last of Mayakovsky’s coins, but now that he had the seedpod from the Far Side it seemed worth a try at least. He didn’t have Rupert’s book anymore, or the page either, but he was pretty sure he knew them by heart; at this point he doubted he could forget them if he tried.

And he had Alice to help him. She seemed content to stay in the townhouse for now, and even seven years out of practice she was a better magician than he’d ever been, or ever would be. She kibitzed.

Whatever came out of it, it was good for him and Alice to have a project to do together. It took some of the pressure off. It was a chance to get to know each other again, and for that matter for Alice to get to know herself again. She still had a lot of healing to do, and they needed something to talk about that wasn’t of life-or-death importance,
something to bicker over, something concrete to focus on other than their own bruised, confused feelings.

Maybe nothing would come of it, but Quentin thought it was worth finding out, and he thought it wasn’t impossible that Alice thought so too. It was pretty clear to him now that if she’d ever loved him, back then, it wasn’t just for the person he was, it was for the person that he might one day become. Maybe that’s who he was now.

When they finished casting the spell, and the dust and smoke cleared, there was a brand-new door on the far wall of the room. They studied it for another minute. There was no hurry.

“The door knocker,” she said. “Nice touch. Was that you?”

Quentin looked closer. He was going to have to get new glasses, his eyes were getting even worse. But sure enough: it was in the shape of a blue whale’s tail.

“Remind me to tell you about that sometime.”

The whale seemed like a good sign. He walked up to the door and opened it. Cool white sunlight spilled through. It wasn’t another ghost house; this world had a proper outdoors. His first impression was of cool, sweet air and a dark vegetable green.

The curse was lifted. They really had made a land, alive and brand new. A bird called. He stepped through.

“Atmosphere’s breathable,” he said.

“Dork.”

She joined him.

“So this is your secret garden,” Alice said.

The weather wasn’t much: a trifle brisk and with clouds moving in. They were looking down an orderly corridor of trees, fruit trees: there really was an orchard this time. What they could see of the sky contained three moons of various sizes, like stray marbles: one white, one pale pink, and a tiny bluish one.

“You are going to have some freak-show tides,” Alice said.

“If there’s even an ocean,” he said. “And I wish you’d say ‘we’ and not ‘you.’ We made this together, you know.”

“It’s your land, Quentin. It came out of your head. But I like it here. Looks like Scotland, sort of.”

“Want an apple? Or whatever these are?” They were hard and round and red anyway.

“I really don’t. Feels like I’d be eating your fingernail or something.”

They strolled through the orchard and stepped out into open country. Quentin’s land was an uneven land, covered with grassy humps and hillocks like ocean swells. They passed a copse of thin trees that resembled aspens, but with their trunks woven together more like banyan trees. The clouds were curious shapes, not cumulus and cirrus, new varietals of cloud that didn’t occur on Earth. Something shot through the air overhead with a fast whirring sound, leaving a fleeting impression of gray feathers, but they turned their heads too late to catch it.

“Interesting,” Quentin said.

For no particular reason there was a rainbow low above the horizon. Alice pointed it out.

“Nice art direction. Bit of a cliché, but nice.”

“Like I’m sure your magic land is totally original.”

Alice booted a pebble.

“You’ll have to think of some clever secret way kids can find their way in here,” she said.

“That should be fun.”

“Don’t make it too easy, though.”

“No, not too easy. And not for a while.” He took her hand; she didn’t take it back. “I want us to have it to ourselves for a bit.”

Their cheeks were turning red, and they had to stop and warm each other up with spells to keep going. Then they resumed tramping along, over short bristly grass, through sprays of tiny phosphorescent wildflowers that shut up frantically when they got too near, like sea anemones. It was a big country, bigger than Quentin expected: there were mountains in the distance, and soon they were skirting a sizable forest. When Quentin kicked up a clod of grass the soil underneath was smooth and rich as black butter.

Something tickled his breastbone, and he reached inside his jacket. His old Fillorian pocket watch: it was ticking. He thought it would never run again. It must like it here.

“Hang on, I want to do something.”

He’d always half expected that the watch would turn out to have some sort of amazing magical power—turning back time, maybe, or slowing it, or freezing it, or something. It certainly looked magical enough. But if it had any powers at all he’d never found them. Funny how some things you’re sure will pay off never do.

Slipping it off its chain, he approached a tree on the edge of the forest, this world’s answer to a beech tree, and placed the watch against its trunk and pressed. After a moment’s hesitation the tree accepted it: the watch sank into the smooth gray bark as if it were warm clay and stuck there, embedded, still ticking. He left it there. A homemade clock-tree. Maybe it would breed more.

Quentin recognized this land and yet at the same time he didn’t. Could this be home? He didn’t see any reason why not. But it was a strange, wild country. It was no utopia. It wasn’t a tame land.

He’d come a long way to get here. He was very far from the bitter, angry teenager he’d been in Brooklyn, before this all started, and thank God for that. But the funny thing was that after all this time he still didn’t think that that miserable teenager had been wrong. He didn’t disagree with him—he still felt solidarity with him on the major points. The world was fucking awful. It was a wretched, desolate place, a desert of meaninglessness, a heartless wasteland, where horrific things happened all the time for no reason and nothing good lasted for long.

He’d been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring—a moving oasis. He wasn’t desolate, and he wasn’t empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it that’s what being a magician was. They weren’t ordinary feelings—they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.

They walked and walked, and they kept waiting for the land to end (how? A bottomless cliff? A sea? A brick wall?) but it went back and back and back. It was a lot more than a hundred acres. Some weather was
coming on: they could see it advancing down the valley, clouds trailing smudgy gray rain.

“I didn’t realize there would be so much of it,” Quentin said.

“How deep do you think it goes?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

They passed a tree stump that must have been ten yards across. They climbed over a fence (built by who?) using a stile. Wind rumpled the grass and pushed at the trees; the leaves seemed to turn pale when the wind blew, until Quentin realized they just flipped over in the breeze, showing their white undersides.

He caught the deep thump of hooves, and a rustling and snapping in the trees. Something big was coming. Alice heard it too.

“What the hell is that?” she said.

He didn’t know. Some monster that had escaped out of his unconscious, into this pristine new land? He hoped they weren’t going to have to fight, he’d had enough of that for now. It was coming at them through the forest, and he could see disturbances in the canopy as whatever it was bulled its way closer. He looked back: they’d never make it back to the door in time. He couldn’t even see it anymore.

Out of the woods, leaves spraying and branches springing back in its wake, burst an enormous equine beast. It was a horse the size of a house. It came trotting up to them and stopped a few feet away, breath steaming, as if it were awaiting their pleasure. Quentin’s head was just about level with its massive, balding knees.

It was unquestionably a horse, a chocolate-colored horse, complete with a black mane and glossy, watery brown eyes as big as bowling balls. But it appeared to be covered in something softer than horsehair—it looked like it was part horse, part sofa. In fact—

“Is that velveteen?” Alice touched the thing’s shin lightly.

“You know what?” Quentin said. “I think this must be the Cozy Horse.”

“Has to be!” Alice’s face lit up, and she laughed.

In all his time in Fillory he’d never once seen it. No one had, and Quentin had started to think it didn’t exist, whatever Rupert said. It was easily the silliest single inhabitant of Fillory, a total nursery fantasy, but
as it turned out it was extremely real. Uncomfortably real, even, to the point where it was currently blotting out the sky above them in an intimidating manner.

“But what’s it doing here? Why isn’t it in Fillory?”

The Cozy Horse regarded them dumbly. It wasn’t going to tell. It flared its nostrils and gazed off over their heads in that supremely unconcerned way horses have. Quentin was pleased that it was here: he’d made a land, and the Cozy Horse’s presence seemed like a stamp of approval.

“I have a theory about this place,” Alice said. “Are you ready? I’m starting to think this land isn’t an island after all, Quentin. I think it must go all the way through. You meant to make an island, but you also made a bridge. A bridge connecting Fillory and Earth. This big fellow must have come across it to welcome us.”

She couldn’t reach its muzzle so she patted its broad shin instead. Its coat looked worn in places, like that of a well-loved toy, and from below you could see it had a big stitched seam running along its tummy.

Alice smiled at him, and he noticed it again—that slight difference.

“Were your eyes always that blue?”

“I know,” she said, “I saw it too. Do you think it’s possible that you didn’t put me all the way back? I’ve been wondering if I’ve still got a little niffin left in me after all. Just a touch. Just enough to make it interesting.”

The Cozy Horse snorted at them, impatiently now, and tossed its massive head as if to say: Enough with the chit-chat, I’ve got places to be. Are you in or are you out?

“I always wanted to ride it,” Alice said. “Where shall we go? To Fillory?”

“I don’t think so. One day. But not yet. Let’s go further.”

“Let’s.”

“I never pictured it this big,” Quentin said.

“Me neither. How the hell are we even going to get up there?”

He looked up at the Cozy Horse. It was the strangest thing, but he was looking forward to everything so much, he could hardly stand it. He never would have believed it. He never thought he would.

“You know what?” He took Alice’s hand. “Let’s
fly.”