The Magician's Land

by Lev Grossman

  “Look, Ember is a god,” Eliot said, “but He’s a god only of Fillory. He’s limited. He doesn’t know everything there is to know about the wider universe. I think we should poke around some ourselves, see if He’s missed something. See how far our royal power can stretch. See if we can get an advance look at this so-called apocalypse. Maybe we can head it off at the pass.”

  This was met with more silence, while everybody tried to think of a reason why what Eliot was proposing might be plausible or achievable.

  “Yeah, no, of course,” Josh said. “I mean, we’re gonna go down fighting, right?”

  “Right!” Loyal Poppy gave a swift nod of her sharp chin.

  “So—what?” Janet said. “We just head back out into the wilderness? Looking for adventure? In whatever comes our way?”

  “That’s right,” Eliot said. “That’s what we do.”

  She weighed this suggestion.

  “OK. But I’m coming this time. Last time I got stuck babysitting the country and you guys were gone for like a year and a half. When do we leave?”

  “ASAP.”

  “And what if we can’t?” Poppy said. “What if we can’t head it off?”

  Janet shrugged.

  “I guess we go back home. I mean, to our other home. Our former home.”

  “That’s what the Neitherlands is for,” Josh said.

  “Guys, listen.”

  Eliot leaned forward. He put on his High King face and his High King voice. At times like this he wanted to look as much as possible like Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, from The Lord of the Rings, and he didn’t think he was a million miles off base. He made eye contact with each one of them in turn.

  “I know I don’t speak for all of you. Not in this. But if Ember is right, if Fillory really is ending, I’m going to stay and see it end. This land is where I became who I am, who I was meant to be. Who I am is who I am in Fillory, and if Fillory dies, then I’ll die with it.” He studied his kingly fingernails. “I think I made that choice a long time ago. I don’t expect you to make it with me, but I want you to know, there isn’t any going back. Not for me.”

  The crescent moon was already visible, early today, opposite the sunset, hooking a pale horn over the rim of the world. Eliot could picture it, the rim of the world, now that he’d been there, with its endless brick wall and its narrow gray strip of beach and its single door to the Far Side. The tower was high enough that sometimes you could kid yourself that you could really see it, on a clear day, which this was.

  Josh cocked his head and screwed up his face and studied Eliot with one eye. He pointed at him, hesitantly.

  “Fuck you.”

  Eliot cracked his crooked grin. Everybody relaxed.

  “Look, it sucks,” he said. “I hate it. But we’ll take it as far as we can, then we’ll walk away. We’ll go back to Earth, have a decent drink for a change. We’ll see what Quentin’s up to.”

  “Oh, God,” Janet said. “I think death might be preferable.”

  Everybody laughed except for Poppy, who was still thinking.

  “I just wish—”

  She broke off and gave a shaky sigh, to try to calm herself down. It mostly worked. Josh took her hand under the table.

  “What is it, sweetie?”

  “It’s just that if it all ends then the baby will never see Fillory! I know it’s silly, but I wanted the baby to be born here. I wanted him to see all this. Or her. I wanted us to have a little prince or princess!”

  “They’ll still be one, baby,” Josh said. “Whatever happens. We’ll be royalty in exile. It still counts.”

  “No,” Janet said. “It doesn’t.”

  —

  In the end it was only Janet and Eliot who went, for the simple reason that Josh couldn’t really ride a horse yet, not even a talking one who could coach him, and anyway Poppy was feeling sick, and Josh didn’t want to leave her.

  So it was just the two of them. It felt very different from when they’d set out to fight the Lorians, or even from when they’d gone hunting in the old days. It was quieter. More somber. They rode out shortly after dawn through a small stone arch in the rear of the castle that let out on a narrow trail, hardly more than a goat track, that ran along the tops of the cliffs overlooking the bay. No fanfare, no confetti, no loyal retainers. They went alone.

  “Which way?” Janet said.

  Eliot pointed north. No particular reason, it was just good to be decisive in these situations.

  The grass was still wet. The new pink sun hovered low above Whitespire Bay. Eliot felt very small and Fillory felt, for a change, very big and very wild around him. It was a while since it had felt like that. This was a serious quest, maybe the last one. What happened now truly mattered. Eliot had struggled before he found Fillory, he knew that: he drank too much, he found clever ways to be nasty to people, he never seemed to have an emotion that wasn’t either ironic or chemically generated. He’d changed in Fillory, and the thought of going back to that, of becoming that person again, frightened him. He wouldn’t die with Fillory, he’d meant that when he said it, but if Fillory died Eliot knew that something in him, something small but essential, wouldn’t survive either.

  He wouldn’t miss this interminable summer though. It had a certain fiery majesty to it, and he appreciated that, but at this point he was dying for the heat to break. A hot early morning wind surged through the trees, thick and strong like a flowing river, combing through the leaves, which were green but yellowing in the drought. The trees must know what was coming, he thought. If Julia were here she could have asked them.

  Whitespire—the town as opposed to the castle or the bay—was of modest size, and it didn’t take them long to reach the outskirts. It was surrounded by a wall of irregular height and composition, a patchwork of building materials, brick and stone and mortar and timber and rammed earth, that had been demolished and rebuilt and then buttressed to keep the whole business from falling over as the town expanded and contracted over the centuries. Beyond the wall were fields full of people shoulder-deep in golden grain with huge baskets on their backs, like in a Brueghel painting. They fell silent as Eliot and Janet passed; most of them took a knee as well and bowed their heads. Eliot and Janet nodded—he’d long ago figured out that it was better to accept the fealty; modesty and self-deprecation were just confusing in a king. A half hour later they were through the fields and addressing themselves to the Queenswood north of the city.

  They pulled up just short of it. There was no underbrush at the edge; the border with the fields around it was clean and clear. It wasn’t a natural wood. Eliot had a formal feeling, as if they were presenting themselves at a ball. Good evening, my old friend. Shall we dance once more?

  “After you,” Janet said.

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  If you rode with a queen, the queen must enter the Queenswood first. That was the rule. The trees—huge, crotchy, black-barked oaks covered with gnarls and knots that always seemed to be about to form a face but never quite did—slid smoothly apart like stage scenery.

  Janet urged her horse forward.

  “Any idea where we’re going?”

  “We discussed this. That’s not how quests work. We’re not going to think about it, we’re just going to journey.”

  “I can’t not think about it.”

  “Well, don’t overthink it.”

  “I can’t help it!” Janet said. “Whatever, you can do the not-thinking for both of us.”

  They left the bright morning behind for the permanent twilight of the deep forest. The clop-clopping of the horses’ hooves became a deeper tom-tom thump-clumping as the way went from cobblestones to ancient packed loam.

  “What if nothing happens?” Janet said.

  “Nothing is going to happen. At least at first. We have to be patient. That’s part of the quest.”

/>   “Well, just so you know, I’m doing this for a week,” Janet said. “That’s it. Seven days.”

  “I know what a week is.”

  “The way I think of this,” she went on, “is it’s like we’re taking Fillory’s pulse. This is a diagnostic quest. We’re saying, Are you still functioning, you wondrous magic land you? Are you going to give us an adventure, and is this adventure going to be your way of telling us what’s wrong with you and how to fix you? If so, great. But if by a week we haven’t gotten into shit, I’m calling it. Time of death. Fillory’s flatlining.”

  “A week is not a lot of time,” Eliot pointed out, “in which to decide the fate of an entire world.”

  “Eliot, I love you like the brother I never had or wanted,” Janet said, “but actually a week is a really long time. After a week you and I are going to be really really sick of each other.”

  Their path wound and wended and looped through the Queenswood, drawn apparently on the spur of the moment by the arboreal hivemind. One could try to steer one’s way through it, but this time they set the autopilot and let it ride and took what came. It was eerily quiet: the trees of the Queenswood tended to pick off fauna they didn’t care for—falling branches, strangling roots—which left only some deer and a few decorative birds. The forest floor was furred with vast herds of ferns and striped with light that slipped in through chance gaps in the canopy overhead. There were no fallen trunks. The Queenswood buried its dead.

  The trees parted and parted before them—it was vaguely erotic, Eliot thought, like endless pairs of legs spreading, ushering them on and on into more and more intimate spaces. They burrowed deeper and deeper in. Occasionally the path forked and he picked one fork or the other, for no reason but always without hesitating.

  Like a magician producing a dove from a hidden pocket, the wood abruptly brought them to the circular meadow with the giant clock-tree inside it, the one where they’d found the Seeing Hare, and where Jollyby had died. The tree had a deep sunken scar where its clock had been, a blinded cyclops, but at least it wasn’t thrashing anymore. It was at peace. The sapling Eliot had extracted the watch from, to give to Quentin had died. He was sorry about that, but not so sorry that he wished he hadn’t done it. It was worth it to know that wherever he was Quentin at least had that with him.

  They decided to spend the night there. If history was any guide, it was a good place to await something fantastical and portentous. Janet swung down out of the saddle.

  “I’ll get us dinner.”

  “They packed us dinner at the castle,” Eliot said.

  “I ate it for lunch.”

  In businesslike fashion, Janet pulled a short staff from a pair she wore crossed on her back and trotted off into the trees. Eliot had never seen her wield a staff before, but she held it as if she knew what to do with it.

  “Hm,” he said.

  It was a spooky place to be alone in, especially without his queen. The grass was dotted with wildflowers; he’d always meant to name some of the Fillorian flowers, but he’d never gotten around to it, and now he probably never would. It was too late. He heard a rustling, cracking sound from all sides which alarmed him until he realized that the trees along the edge of the meadow were helpfully dropping dead branches for firewood. They must have accepted his presence, he thought. It was strangely touching.

  From one saddlebag Eliot extracted their tent, a neat canvas parcel, and tossed it on the soft grass. It unfolded and erected itself in the deepening twilight, with a sound like a sail being hoisted in a high wind.

  —

  In the morning a fine mist hung over the meadow, as if a heavy cannonade had just moments ago ceased firing, leaving behind puffs of silent white gunsmoke in the air.

  They rode all day without incident—that’s two down, five to go, Janet said—and by sunset they’d reached the end of the green splendor of the Queenswood and entered the adjacent maze of gray firs called the Wormwood. On the third day they forded the Burnt River, never a pleasant experience, though rarely actually dangerous. Its black water was always choked with ashes, nobody knew why, and the nymph who lived in it was the glossy black of a beetle—a terrifying creature with silvery eyes who went up and down the river at night screaming.

  Eliot proposed trying to talk to her, but Janet shuddered.

  “That’s a last resort,” she said. “That’s like day six.”

  “Whatever. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “FYI, you only get to make that joke one time, so I hope you enjoyed it.”

  Eliot would have preferred to head west from there, toward the lakes called Umber’s Tears, or maybe to Barion, a mellow walled hill-town where they made an incredible clear liquor out of some native grain. Eliot maintained a comfy royal townhouse there that he hardly ever got to visit. But Janet wanted to ride north.

  “That would be fine,” Eliot said, “except that there’s this horrible thing called the Northern Marsh. It’s north of here, hence the name.”

  “That’s why I want to go north. I want to go there. I’m feeling the marsh.”

  “I’m not. I hate that place.”

  “Wow, I thought you were supposed to be all Johnny Quest over here. Fine, I’ll meet you in Barion.”

  “But I don’t want to go to Barion alone!” Eliot said.

  “Your whininess is beyond unattractive. Come with me to the marsh and then we’ll both go to Barion.”

  “What if I die in the Northern Marsh? People do, you know.”

  “Then I’ll go to Barion alone. I like traveling alone. If you die can I have your townhouse?”

  Eliot said nothing. Privately, and very much in spite of himself, Eliot understood that Janet was having a hunch about the marsh, and you couldn’t ignore those. Not in the context of a quest.

  “Fine,” he said. “I was just testing your resolve. Gloriously, you have passed. To the marsh we go.”

  The Northern Marsh wasn’t actually as far north as all that. By late afternoon the ground had begun to get squishy, and they made camp on its outskirts that same night. The next day dawned gray and brisk, and they picked their way through cattails and coarse grass and chilly puddles until the horses refused to go any farther. Janet’s was a Talking Horse, and he politely explained that he was speaking for both him and his dumb companion when he said that this was not a place you wanted to cross on hooves, not when your legs break as easily as horses’ legs do. Eliot accepted their resignation graciously. The two of them went on on foot.

  The air was full of the smell of warm mud and rotting things. They circled around big weedy expanses of standing water and occasionally waded through them when they had to. The Great Northern Marsh was a lonely, quiet place. You would have thought it would be full of frogs and insects and waterfowl, but nothing seemed to live there. Just a lot of plants and smelly microbes.

  As they forced their way deeper in, the ground became mud flats and water punctuated by occasional stubborn hummocky tufts of grass. Their boots were getting hopelessly befouled, and Eliot felt the ratio of solid ground to water shifting slowly and inexorably in the water’s favor. The way was bordering on impassable when they found a narrow boardwalk which Janet had been looking for without telling him. It was just two thin weather-beaten gray planks laid flat over the sucking puddles, and in places elevated a few feet off the ground by stilts and pilings and opportunistic tree stumps.

  Eliot took a minute to scrape his boots off, though he was pretty sure they weren’t salvageable, then they set off again. There were no railings, and they had to balance their way along like a damn circus act. He tried to remember whether quicksand was a real thing or an urban myth.

  “I wonder where all the birds are,” he said, to take his mind off it. “I’ve seen, like, two birds. This place should be covered in them.”

  “Makes you wish Julia were still here,” Janet said. “She
was good with birds.”

  “Mm. Do you? Wish she were here?”

  “Of course. I always liked Julia.”

  “You didn’t show it very often,” Eliot said.

  “If you really got Julia,” Janet said, “you would have understood that she didn’t like people who were too demonstrative with their affections.”

  This caused Eliot to retroactively evaluate a lot of the interactions he remembered between Janet and Julia. Their footsteps sounded hollow on the boards in the marshy hush.

  “Incredible that this thing is still standing,” Janet went on. “I can’t imagine who keeps it up.”

  “How do you even know this place?”

  “I was out here once, when you-all were away at sea. I thought somebody should survey it. It looked weird and interesting. I ran into some scary shit and backed off, but not before I met some weird and interesting people.”

  Eliot wondered, not for the first time, what exactly Janet had gotten up to while the rest of them were off sailing the ocean blue. He’d gotten the official version of course, which was that she’d been running the country and doing an excellent job of it. But every once in a while Janet said things that made him wonder if that was the whole story.

  “Do you ever wish you went with her? Julia, I mean? To that other-side deal, whatever it was called?”

  “I think about it sometimes,” Eliot said. “But no. There’s no way I could have gone. Being king here is who I am. I wasn’t joking about that part, before.” He wobbled for a moment on a rocky board. “I wish I knew what it was like though.”

  “Probably it’s not as marshy. You know the funny part?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I know how Poppy feels,” Janet said. “About the baby. I want that little guy to see Fillory too. I want it to rule when we’re gone.”

  Eliot wasn’t sure if a person born in Fillory could rule Fillory, but he was more focused at this exact moment on his own possible imminent death at the hands or other extremities of this horrible swamp and whatever lived in it. He supposed that if he sank to the bottom of it his corpse might be perfectly preserved, for later generations, like those bodies that got pulled out of Irish bogs. That would have a certain grandeur to it.