by Lev Grossman
“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 hundr
ed 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.”