by Lev Grossman
But not so bad that she shut up. Never let it be said Plum was without a plan. She wouldn’t let Fillory be dead. It wasn’t getting off that easily. No more hiding. The two halves of her life would become one.
“You could do the night sky!” she said. “The stars! You could have a bunch of navy books with silver dots on them. You could do that thing where you hang them from the ceiling!” She favored Penny with her most winning beam. “You love that thing!”
Penny was not a man much used to being beamed at. It had an effect.
“It’s not complete,” he said, half to himself. “It’s not nearly complete. We’re going to need more books, a lot more. Quentin, you have to save Fillory.”
“That’s what I keep saying,” Quentin said. “And I think I’ve figured out how. I think I finally know how to fix everything.”
CHAPTER 29
Historically speaking,” Alice said, “when people have said that they’ve almost always been wrong.”
Quentin loved having Alice alive again. It was absolutely the greatest thing ever. Whether or not she loved him, whether or not she could stand the sight of him, the world, any world, was just so much better with her in it.
“What are you going to do?” Eliot said.
“Something stupid. Penny, where’s the Fillory fountain from here?”
It had come over him slowly, but he’d been pretty sure for a while now. It was something Alice said. He’d been thinking about Fillory, trying to picture its dying agonies, what it would look like—but of course he knew what a dying Fillory would look like. Alice had told them. Alice had seen Fillory’s beginning, and the end of the world that came before it. The dead ocean, the dead land, the dying god. Even if he wasn’t completely sure how to do it, he knew what to do.
Of course it was also true what Alice said about people who thought they could fix everything, and it was quite possible that he was about to get himself killed for nothing, but he was going to try, and now was the time. It was six Neitherlandish blocks from the library to the Fillory fountain and they took it at a run. The Neitherlandish moon, which was small and strangely squarish, like an old-fashioned TV screen, was low in the sky ahead of them. As he ran Quentin felt that he was at the heart of a vast cosmic drama, as if the universe had chosen very briefly to turn around just him. Everything was happening at once but very slowly, as if time were both speeding up and slowing down at the same time. He noticed little details: the outlines of things, the texture of the stones, glimpses of water in canals, shadows in windows. Everything depended on his doing this right.
The Fillory fountain was in the shape of the titan Atlas struggling under the weight of a globe, which was a bit of poetic license since Fillory wasn’t a globe at all, it was flat. Quentin had planned to hurdle the rim without breaking stride and hope Fillory’s security was completely shot by now, but instead he pulled up short, because as he got closer to the fountain he saw that someone was getting out of it.
It was Janet, and she had Josh and Poppy right behind her. Janet and Poppy pushed themselves briskly up and over the side, as if they’d just completed Olympic dives; Josh threw an arm and then a leg over and sort of rolled out onto the pavement. Their clothes dried instantly, but their faces stayed shocked and haggard.
“It’s over,” Janet said. “Fillory’s dead.”
The words glanced harmlessly off Quentin’s mind. It wouldn’t let them in.
“Quentin, we just watched it,” Josh said. “It was horrible.”
The others straggled up behind him, in the darkness of the square. It was the first time in seven years that the five original Physical Kids—Eliot, Janet, Josh, Alice, Quentin—were in the same place at the same time, but the mood wasn’t celebratory.
“What happened?” Eliot said. “What did you see?”
Josh and Janet were staring at Alice.
Janet grabbed her hand. Josh hugged her. Poppy, in the spirit of the moment, grabbed her other hand, even though they’d never actually met before.
“Oh my God,” Janet said. “Oh my God, Alice.”
“I know,” Alice said gravely. “But just tell us.”
“OK. OK.” Janet didn’t let go of her hand; it was like she needed a lifeline to hang on to. “The sun fell down. Everything started fighting everything else, even the trees. It was terrible. Then Julia came back from the Far Side and sent us back here.”
“Shit.” Eliot looked up at the night sky and shouted: “Shit!”
The city sent him back a faint echo.
“Where’s Julia?” Quentin asked.
“She must have stayed behind.”
Janet couldn’t meet his eyes.
“So that’s it?” Plum said. She looked as stricken as the rest of them did. Quentin stepped up to the fountain. If he was going to try, he’d better try.
“Quentin, stop,” Janet said. “It’s dead.”
“In that case I’ll view the body.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“The fountain’s still here. There has to be something left.”
“No, there doesn’t,” Janet said. “And there isn’t. Please, Quentin.”
Even as she said it the statue of Atlas in the fountain began to move. It bent forward slowly and reached up to the enormous black marble globe it supported on one shoulder. It was preparing, at long last, to set its burden down.
“Hey!” Quentin said. “Not so fucking fast!”
If Fillory was going to be dead it was going to have to prove it to him personally, to his face. He side-vaulted over the rim into the water—it should have been cold, but it was hot and getting hotter. Probably in a few minutes it would start boiling away to nothing. Josh grabbed his arm, but Quentin shook him off. Atlas glared at him, but even though he was twice as tall as Quentin and made of stone he must have seen something truly murderous in Quentin’s face because he straightened up a little and grudgingly shrugged the globe back into position.
Everybody was shouting at him.
“Don’t be an idiot, Quentin!” Janet yelled. “For once!”
“Quentin, don’t,” Eliot said. “You don’t have to.”
“But I do.”
Quentin fumbled awkwardly in his coat pocket for the button while trying to tread water at the same time. Somebody had his arm again, and he tried to jerk away, but at the same moment his finger touched the button and the bottom dropped out.
Once again he was free-falling down toward the magic land of Fillory. He never thought he’d see it again. It made him feel almost painfully tender—after all this, everything that had happened, Fillory was taking him back. The whole country was spread out below him, and he was inbound like a deorbiting space capsule.
He definitely never thought he’d see it like this. Far to the west he caught a smeary glimpse of a crash-landed sun like an egg yolk on a skillet, melting and burning in a steaming, boiling sea at the edge of the world. He had a close booming fly-by with a massive object which he only realized after it was gone was the moon itself, spinning low and off its axis. Fires blazed and dark armies surged across the surface of the world. Something colossal was slowly surmounting Fillory’s rim, peering up over it with its enormous curious face: one of the great turtles that formed the foundation of the world, coming up at last to have a look at what it had been carrying on its back all these thousands of years. Fillory, his beautiful Fillory, was ruined and dying.
But it wasn’t dead. Not quite. Not until there was nothing left.
Then he was down. The ground shook under his feet, and the air was full of rumbling and tearing and distant cries and the smell of smoke. Burning ash from somewhere whipped by on a hot wind.
His arm: someone still had hold of it. It was Alice.
“What are you doing?” he shouted over the noise.
“Being an idiot,” she said.
She actually managed a slight smile, her first of the new era. He smiled too.
“Come on then. We have to find Ember.”
The button had set them down outside the city gates of Whitespire. The wall around the city was half collapsed, and one half of the great gate hung askew. Some of the towers of the castle still stood, for now, but they were swaying. Quentin pointed to them; Alice nodded. There was no way they’d find Ember in all this unless He at least halfway wanted to be found, and if He wanted to be found at all that’s where He’d be.
“I’ll do shields, you do speed,” Alice shouted.
They spent an intense minute casting on themselves and each other, then they held hands and ran through the gate together.
The streets were deserted. The town looked like it had been bombed, and the inhabitants were either dead or gone or huddled in their cellars. Quentin and Alice ran carelessly, bounding along with exaggerated magical strength. Sometimes they cut through ruins and leveled lots to save time; once a tremor sent a teetering wall of stone flopping down heavily right onto them, which would have killed them if Alice’s spellwork hadn’t been top-notch. Instead it just slammed them face down into the dust, and they shrugged off the heavy blocks and picked themselves up and caught their breath and ran on.
They didn’t slow to a walk until they were passing under the portcullis and through the thick outer wall of Castle Whitespire; it was the first time he and Alice had been there together. They stepped out into the courtyard. It had been the longest of long shots—a dot in the shark, Eliot would have said—that Ember would be there waiting for them.
And He wasn’t. But Umber was.
Quentin had never seen Him before, and until a week ago he’d thought Umber was dead, but it couldn’t have been anybody else. He stood quite still, like a tame ram in a meadow, His head down as He cropped a stray weed pushing up between two paving stones, in the twilight of the dying world. He straightened up.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” He said, between chews. “For ages. I made a bet with myself that you’d come, and now look. I’ve won.”
Quentin hadn’t planned for this, but he supposed one was as good as the other, for his purposes. But Umber seemed to know what Quentin was thinking.
“Well, come on. It’s no good with just Me. You’re going to need Us both.”
Umber tossed His horned head at them, come-hither. Under any other circumstances Quentin would have hesitated, but on this day of all days His meaning was unmistakable. Quentin jogged over to Him and, as he’d imagined doing ten thousand times before, at least, he threw an arm and a leg over Umber’s broad soft back and heaved himself up onto it. Alice climbed on behind him and put her arms around his waist. The instant Quentin had his fingers wound into Umber’s cloudy gray wool the god surged forward under them and they were off.
Quentin had always wanted to do this—they all had—and now he knew why. After a few trotting steps to get up to speed Umber bunched all four legs together under Himself and leapt the castle wall, like the cow jumping over the moon. The rush and acceleration were beyond anything. He picked up speed as He bounded through the crumbled city and out of it, touching the ground ever more lightly and at wider intervals, trees and fields and hills and walls and rivers whipping past.
There was a strange fateful joy to it. The scene was catastrophic, his mission could not have been more dire, but Quentin Coldwater had come back to Fillory with Alice, and together they were riding a god.
“Hi ho!” Umber said. And Quentin answered Him:
“Hi ho!”
He still remembered the childish love he’d felt for the two rams, back before he’d known Fillory was real. It hadn’t lasted: he’d met Ember in person, and He wasn’t anything like as strong or as kind or as wise as Plover had made Him out to be. Then when Ember had thrown Quentin out of Fillory his disillusionment had tipped over into anger. But since then he’d learned a few things about acceptance, and his anger had cooled, even if the love hadn’t quite returned. Now he saw the rams as They were: strange, inhuman, somewhat ridiculous beings, as limited by their godhead as They were empowered by it. But They were divine, and There was a majesty to Them that was undeniable.
Even as Quentin felt Umber’s strength beneath him, Fillory was losing the last of its own strength. Its glorious greenery was withering away before their eyes. They passed men and animals bunched together in shivering packs, no longer even fighting, like the remnants of a party that had got out of control and been shut down and broken up by the police, leaving the celebrants suddenly sober and chagrined. Acres of trees lay knocked down and uprooted. Overhead the stars were beginning to fall, one by one, some in rapid arcs like meteors, others more slowly and gracefully, twirling and sparking and pinwheeling down.
Alice hugged him tight. A series of deep booming cracks sounded, like distant artillery fire, signaling that the land itself had begun to disintegrate. It was losing cohesion, losing even the strength to hold on to itself. Great crevasses opened in Fillory’s surface, and widened into canyons, and in the depths of the deepest of them Quentin could see all the way down to the pale struggling dead of the Underworld, writhing in a mass like larvae inside a rotten log. Now Umber’s great gallop found them hurdling enormous gaps in the land, which grew wider and wider until in places nothing connected the component shards of Fillory at all, and Quentin began to see stars between them. They were leaping from island to island in the dark of space, flying as much as jumping, soaring through the void.
He saw where they were heading. A single fragment of land lay dead ahead of them, an uprooted divot of enchanted turf with just a field and a pond and a tree, orphaned in the disaster, no longer linked to anything at all. On it, alone, stood Ember.
Umber touched down lightly and trotted away His excess speed. Quentin and Alice slid off. Quentin was just thankful that Alice was with him. She believed in him, or she once had anyway. That would make it easier to believe in himself during what was coming next.
Ember stood staring down at the pond, a round pool bristling with bullrushes around its edge, eyes locked with His reflection. His face was unreadable as ever, but there was something lonely about Him, something despairing and abandoned, as His world came apart around Him. For the first time Quentin felt a little sorry for the old ram.
“Ember,” he said.
No answer.
“Ember, You know what You have to do. I think You’ve always known, since the beginning.”
Quentin knew. He hadn’t put it all together till those last moments in the library, but it had been coming to him, slowly, for much longer than that. He’d been thinking about parents and children and power and death. After his father died Quentin had gained a new kind of strength, and Mayakovsky, with his own kind of sacrifice, had given him a new strength too. That’s what parents did for their children. Then Alice told him the story of how Fillory began. It began with death, the death of a god.
It was the oldest story there was, the deepest of all the deeper magicks. Fillory didn’t have to die, it could be renewed and live again, but there was a price, and the price was holy blood. It was the same in all mythologies: for a dying land to be reborn, its god must die for it. There was power in that divine paradox, the death of an immortal, enough power to restart the stopped heart of a world.
“It’s time, Ember. The bird isn’t coming. The spell is gone. This is the only way left.”
The old ram blinked. He could hear Quentin.
“I’m not pretending it’s easy, but You’ll die anyway when Fillory dies. You know this. There must be only a few minutes left. Give Your own life now, before it’s too late. While it still matters.”
The truly sad thing was that Ember actually wanted to do it. Quentin saw that too: He had come here intending to drown Himself, the way the god before Him had, but He couldn’t quite manage it. He was brave enough to want to, but not brave enough
to do it. He was trying to find the courage, longing for the courage to come to Him, but it wouldn’t, and while He waited for it, ashamed and alone and terrified, the whole cosmos was coming crashing down around Him.
Quentin wondered if he would have been brave enough. He would never know. But if Ember couldn’t sacrifice himself, Quentin would have to do it for Him.
He took a step forward. He was a man proposing to kill a god. It was an impossibility, a contradiction in terms, but if it meant saving Fillory then there had to be a way. He held on to that knowledge tightly. If magic was for anything it was for this. He’d faced up to his dead father and Mayakovsky. He’d faced losing Fillory and losing Brakebills. He’d even faced Alice. He was circling back to all the things he’d fought and lost over the years, and one by one he was putting them to rest. Now it was time for him to face Ember.
He took another step and now Ember turned on him. The god’s eyes were wild, blank with panic. His nostrils flared. Ember was out of His mind with fear. Quentin felt a surge of pity and even of love for the ridiculous old beast, but it didn’t change what he had to do.
He’d hoped inspiration would come to him, but it didn’t. It came to Alice instead.
“Your turn this time,” she said, and then she did something strange: she bit the back of her left hand, scraping skin off the knuckles, and then touched Quentin’s cheek with it.
It wasn’t a spell Quentin knew, or would ever know—the technicalities were too much for him, and the raw power too, probably, but he’d seen Alice do it once before. As she chanted the words his arms burst with masses of muscle, and his skin thickened and toughened at the same time. He felt the special force that belonged to Alice’s magic alone transforming him. His legs exploded with strength, he was rising upward on two pillars, and his neck lengthened and the base of his spine flowed out into a long sinuous tail. His head was stretching forward into a snout, and his flat grinding omnivore’s teeth grew and sharpened until they interlocked with each other, the way teeth were always meant to do.