by Lev Grossman
There was some murmuring among the upper servants that such a spartan chamber was not entirely suitable for a king of Fillory, but Quentin had decided that one of the good things about being a king of Fillory was that you got to decide what’s suitable for a king of Fillory.
And anyway, if it was high royal style they wanted, the High King was their man. Eliot had a bottomless appetite for it. His bedroom was the gilded, diamond-studded, pearl-encrusted rococo lair of a god-king. Whatever else it was, it was entirely suitable.
“You know in the Fillory books you could actually get into the tapestries?” It was late, after midnight, and Eliot was standing eye-to-eye with the woven griffin and sipping from a tumbler of something amber.
“I know.” Quentin was stretched out on the bed, wearing silk pajamas. “Believe me, I’ve tried. If they really did it I have no idea how they did it. They just look like ordinary tapestries to me. They don’t even move like in Harry Potter.”
Eliot had brought a tumbler for Quentin too. Quentin hadn’t drunk any yet, but he hadn’t ruled out the possibility either. At any rate he wasn’t going to let Eliot drink it, which he would inevitably try to do when he was done with his own. Quentin made a nest for the tumbler in the blankets next to him.
“I’m not sure I’d want to get into this one,” Eliot said.
“I know. Sometimes I wonder if he’s trying to get out.”
“Now this fellow,” he said, moving on to a full-length portrait of a knight in armor. “I wouldn’t mind getting into his tapestry, if you get what I mean.”
“I get what you mean.”
“Pull that sword out of its scabbard.”
“I get it.”
Eliot was building up to something, but there was no rushing him. Though if he took much longer Quentin was going to fall asleep.
“Do you think if I did you’d see a little tapestry version of me running around in there? I don’t know how I’d feel about that.”
Quentin waited. Since he’d made the decision to go to the Outer Island he felt calmer than he had in ages. The windows were open, to the extent that they could be opened, and warm night air flowed in, smelling like late summer grass and the sea, which wasn’t far off.
“So about this trip of yours,” Eliot said finally.
“About it.”
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
“Do you have to?”
“Something about quests and adventures and whatever. Sailing beyond the sunset. It doesn’t matter. We don’t need you here for the Jollyby thing. One of us really should go out there anyway, they probably don’t even know they have kings and queens again. Just pass along any prurient details as a matter of state security.”
“Will do.”
“But I want to talk to you about Julia.”
“Oh.” Whiskey time. Trying to drink lying down, Quentin took a bigger swallow than he meant to, and it ignited a brush fire in his guts. He suppressed a cough. “Look, you’re only High King,” he gasped, “you’re not my dad. I’ll figure it out.”
“Don’t get defensive, I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Did I ever tell you,” Eliot said, sitting on one of the two chairs, “how Julia and I met?”
“Well, sure.” Had he? The exact particulars were fuzzy. “I mean, not in granular detail.”
The truth was that they hardly ever talked about that time. They talked around it. No good memories there for anybody. It was after the big disaster in Ember’s Tomb. Quentin had been half-dead and had to be left in the care of some irritating but ultimately very medically effective centaurs while Eliot and Janet and the others returned to the real world. Quentin had spent a year recovering in Fillory, then he went back to Earth and gave up magic. He spent another six months working in an office in Manhattan until Janet and Eliot and Julia finally came and got him. If they hadn’t he’d probably still be there. He was grateful, and he always would be.
Eliot stared out the window into the black moonless night, like an oriental potentate in his dressing gown, which looked too heavily embroidered to be comfortable.
“You know Janet and I were in pretty rough shape when we left Fillory?”
“Yes. Though at least Martin Chatwin hadn’t chewed you practically in half.”
“It’s not a contest, but yes, that is true. But we were shaken up. We loved Alice, too, you know, in our way. Even Janet did. And we thought we’d lost you as well as her. We were well and truly done with Fillory and all its goods and chattels, I can tell you.
“Josh went home to his parents in New Hampshire, and Richard and Anaïs went off somewhere to do whatever it was they’d been doing before they went to Fillory. Not big mourners, those two. I couldn’t face New York again, nor could I face my grotesque so-called family in Oregon, so I went home with Janet to L.A.
“That turned out to be an excellent decision. You know her parents are lawyers? Entertainment lawyers. Fantastically rich, huge house in Brentwood, working all the time, no discernible emotional life whatsoever. So we sucked around Brentwood for a week or two until Janet’s parents got tired of the sight of our post-traumatic faces shuffling off to bed as they were getting up for a predawn squash match. They packed us off to a fancy spa in Wyoming for a couple of weeks.
“You wouldn’t have heard of it, it was that kind of place. Impossible to get into and ludicrously expensive, but money means nothing to these people, and I wasn’t about to argue. Janet practically grew up there—the staff all knew her from when she was a little girl. Imagine that—our Janet, a little girl! She and I had a bungalow to ourselves and positively legions of people to wait on us. I think Janet had a manicurist for every nail.
“And they did a thing with mud and hot stones—I swear to you there was magic in it. Nothing feels that good without magic.
“Of course, the terrible secret of places like that is that they’re horrifically boring. You have no idea the extremes we were driven to. I played tennis. Me! They got very scoldy when it came to drinking on the court, I can tell you. I told them it’s just part of my form. You can’t relearn technique, not at my age.
“Well, by the third day Janet and I were considering having sex with each other just to relieve the tedium. And then, like a dark angel of mercy come to safeguard my virtue, Julia appeared.
“It was like one of those Poirot mysteries set at a posh country seat. There was some accident down by the pool—I was never clear on the details, but an enormous fuss was made. I suppose that’s one of the things you pay for: first-class fuss. At any rate the first time I laid eyes on our Julia she was being carried through the lobby strapped to a backboard, soaking wet and cursing a blue streak and insisting that she was fine, absolutely fine. Take your paws off me, you damned dirty apes.
“The next day I came down to the bar around three or four in the afternoon and there she was again, drinking alone, all in black. Vodka gimlets I believe. The mysterious lady. It was painfully obvious that she didn’t belong at the spa. Her hair was a rat’s nest, you literally can’t imagine. Worse than now even. Her cuticles were bitten down to the quick. Shoulders hunched. Nervous stutter. And then she had no grasp of how things worked. She tried to tip the staff. She pronounced the names of French wines with an actual French accent.
“Of course I was drawn to her at once. I figured she must be Russian. Daughter of a jailed oligarch, that sort of thing. No one but a Russian could afford to stay there and still have hair that bad. Janet thought she was just out of rehab and from the looks of it headed right back in. Either way we fell upon her like starving people.
“The approach was subtle. The trick was not setting off her alarms, which were all obviously set to a hair trigger. It was Janet, that mistress of seduction, who cracked her in the end—she planted herself in a public lounge and complained loudly about a rather involved computer issue. You could watch our Julia wrestle with herself, but it was a
fait accompli.
“After that—well, you know how it is on those vacations. As soon as you learn another person’s name they become inescapable. We ran into each other everywhere. You wouldn’t think a place like that was her style, would you? But there she was, up to her neck in mud, with cucumber slices over her eyes. She was constantly plunging in and out of baths and things. Once Janet tried to go in a steam bath with her, but she’d turned it up so high everybody else had to flee. Probably she had them thrash her with birch twigs. It was like she was trying to rid herself of some stubborn taint.
“It came out that she had a weakness for cards, so we spent hours just drinking and playing three-handed bridge. Not talking. We didn’t know she was a magician, of course. How could we? But you could tell she was bursting with some terrible secret. And she had those things that one likes about magicians: she was disgustingly bright and rather sad and slightly askew. To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you.
“Well, you know how in the Poirot books he always goes on vacation to get away from it all, the mysteries and whatever else, only to have a murder committed on the very island he’s fled to for peace and quiet and some civilized gastronomy? It was exactly like that, except that we were fleeing magic. One night I wandered over to her bungalow around ten or eleven at night. Janet and I had had a fight, and I was looking for someone to complain about her to.
“When I passed Julia’s window I saw that she was building a fire. That was odd to begin with. The fireplaces were absolutely enormous in those bungalows, but it was the middle of summer and nobody in their right mind was using them. But Julia had a roaring blaze going. She was building it very methodically, placing the logs very carefully. She marked each log before she put it on—scraped away some of the bark with a little silver knife.
“And then as I watched . . . I don’t know how to describe it so you’ll understand. She kneeled down in front of the fire and began putting things in it. Some of the things were obviously valuable—a rare shell, an old book, a handful of gold dust. Some of them must just have been precious to her. A piece of costume jewelry. An old photograph. Each time she put one in she’d stop and wait a minute, but nothing happened, except that whatever it was burned or melted and gave off a nasty smell. I don’t know what she was waiting for, but whatever it was it never came. Meanwhile she got more and more agitated.
“I felt utterly tawdry spying on her, but I couldn’t look away. Finally she ran out of precious things, and then she started crying, and then she put herself into the fire. She crawled over the hearth and collapsed, half in and half out of the flames, sobbing her little heart out. Her legs were sticking out. It was awful to see. Her clothes went up right away, of course, and her face got black with soot, but the fire never touched her skin. She was absolutely sobbing. Her shoulders shook and shook . . .”
Eliot stood up and went to the window. He struggled with one of the little panes for a second, then he must have found a catch Quentin had never noticed because he pulled the whole window open. Quentin couldn’t see how he did it. He put his glass on the sill.
“I don’t know if you’re falling in love with her or if you just think you are or what it is you’re doing,” he said. “I suppose I can’t blame you, you always did like to make things as hard as possible on yourself. But just listen to what I’m telling you.
“That was how it all started, how we knew she was one of us. The spell was something very strong. I could hear the hum of it even over the fire, and the light in the room had gone a funny color. But so much of her magic is just impossible to parse. I knew right away she’d never been to Brakebills, because it sounded like gibberish to me, and I couldn’t get within a thousand miles of how it worked or what she was trying to do, and she never said, and I never asked.
“But if I absolutely had to guess I’d say she was attempting a summoning. I’d say she was trying to bring back something that she’d lost, or that was taken away from her, something that was very precious to her indeed. And if I had another guess, I’d have to say that it wasn’t working.”
CHAPTER 3
The next morning, Quentin rode down to the docks in a black carriage with velvet curtains and plushly padded velvet seats. It was safe and musty inside, like a living room on wheels. Next to him, swaying loosely with the rocking of the carriage, sat Queen Julia. Across from them, their knees practically touching, was the admiral of the Fillorian navy.
Quentin had decided that if he was going on a trip to the island at the ass end of the universe, he should do it properly. He should make preparations. There were rules for this kind of thing. Such as: if you were going on a journey you needed a stout vessel.
All ships were available to the crown, in theory, but most of the ones they kept just lying around on call were warships, and those turned out to be scarily spartan on the inside. Rows of hammocks and racks of hard pallets. Not a stateroom in sight. Not really suitable at all for the Voyage of King Kwentin, as Eliot liked to spell Quentin’s name in official documents. So they were going down to the docks to find a ship that was suitable.
Quentin was feeling good. He was full of energy and a determination that he hadn’t felt for long time. This is what he’d been waiting for. The admiral was an almost alarmingly short man named Lacker with a thin gray face that looked like it had been hollowed out of schist by the action of fifty years of wind and spray.
It wasn’t that Quentin couldn’t have said what he was looking for, it’s just that he didn’t want to, because if he did it would have been embarrassing. What he was looking for was a ship from one of the Fillory novels, specifically the Swift, which figured in the fourth book, The Secret Sea. Pursued by the Watcherwoman, Jane and Rupert—he could have explained to Admiral Lacker, but didn’t—had stowed away on the Swift, which turned out to be run by pirates, except they were only pretending to be pirates. They were really a party of Fillorian noblemen, wrongly accused, who were seeking to clear their names. You never got a particularly nautically rigorous look at the Swift, but you nonetheless came away with a powerful impression of it: it was a plucky but cozy little vessel, elegant to look at but game in a fight, with sleek lines and glowing yellow portholes through which one glimpsed snug, shipshape cabins.
Of course if this were a Fillory novel the ship he needed would already be tied up at the docks, awaiting his command, just like that. But this wasn’t a Fillory novel. This was Fillory. So it was up to him.
“I need something not too big and not too small,” he said. “Mediumsized. And it should be comfortable. And quick. And sturdy.”
“I see. Will you require guns?”
“No guns. Well, maybe a few guns. A few guns.”
“A few guns.”
“If you please, Admiral, don’t be a cock. I’ll know it when I see it, and if for some reason I don’t, you tell me. All right?”
Admiral Lacker inclined his head almost imperceptibly to indicate that they had a deal. He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.
Whitespire stood on the shore of a wide, curving bay of oddly pale green sea. It was almost too perfect: it could have been carved out of the coastline on purpose by some divine being who took a benevolent interest in mortals having somewhere to put their ships when they weren’t using them. For all Quentin knew it had been. He had the driver drop them at one end of the waterfront. They clambered out, all three of them, blinking in the early morning sun after the swaying dimness of the carriage.
The air was ripe with the smell of salt and wood and tar. It was intoxicating, like huffing pure oxygen.
“All right,” Quentin said. “Let’s do this.” He clapped his hands together.
They walked, slowly, all the way from one end of the docks to the other, stepping over taut guy ropes and squashed and dried fish carcasses and weaving their way around massive stanchions and windlasses and through labyrinths of stacked crates. The waterfront was home to an astounding variet
y of vessels from all points in the Fillorian Empire and beyond. There was a gargantuan dreadnought made of black wood, with nine masts and a bounding panther for a figurehead, and a square-snouted junk with a brick-red sail crimped into sections by battens. There were sloops and cutters, galleons and schooners, menacing corvettes and tiny darting caravels. It was like a bathtub full of expensive bath toys.
It took an hour to reach the far end. Quentin turned to Admiral Lacker.
“So what did you think?”
“I think the Hatchet, the Mayfly, or the Morgan Downs would suffice.”
“Probably. I’m sure you’re right. Julia?”
Julia had said almost nothing the entire time. She was detached, like she was sleepwalking. He thought about what Eliot had told him last night. He wondered if Julia had found whatever it was she’d been looking for. Maybe she was hoping she’d find it on the Outer Island.
“It does not matter. They are all fine, Quentin. It makes no difference.”
They were both right, of course. There were plenty of decent-looking ships. Beautiful even. But they weren’t the Swift. Quentin folded his arms and squinted down the length of the docks in the late-morning glare. He looked out at the ships floating in the bay.
“What about those ones out there?”
Lacker pursed his lips. Julia looked too. Her eyes were still black from the day before, and she didn’t have to shade them against the sun. She looked right into it.
“They are at your disposal as well, Your Highness,” Lacker said. “Of course.”