The Magician King

by Lev Grossman

  “Why don’t you go through Belfast?” Poppy said. “Everybody does. Then you double back south. It’s actually shorter in astral geometry.”

  “Nah, nah.” Josh squinted at his writing. “This is way more elegant. You’ll see.”

  “I’m just saying, if you miss the junction and we go in the water, it’s a long swim to Guernsey . . .”

  Josh stuffed the paper in his back pocket and squared off into his spellcasting stance. He spoke the words quietly and clearly, without hurrying. With a lot more confidence than Quentin ever remembered him having, he made a series of symmetrical movements with his arms, shifting his fingers rapidly through different positions. Then he squared his shoulders, bent his knees, and hooked his fingers firmly underhand into the air, like he was preparing to haul open an especially heavy garage door.

  Sparks flew. Poppy yipped in surprise and stepped back in a hurry. Josh straightened his back and heaved upward. Reality cracked, and the crack slowly widened revealing behind it something else—green grass and brighter, whiter sunlight. When the portal was halfway open Josh stopped and shook out his hands, which smoked. He outlined the top of the doorway with his fingers, then the sides—one side wasn’t quite straight, and he accidentally snipped off some of the alley wall. Then he got under it again and pulled and pushed it open the rest of the way.

  Quentin kept glancing at the mouth of the alley while all this was going on. He heard voices, but nobody walked by. Josh stopped to check his work. Now in the middle of the bright Venetian afternoon there stood a rectangle of cooler, somehow higher-definition English noon. Josh bunched his sleeve in his fist and rubbed off a last smudge of Venice.

  “All right?” he said. “Pretty good?” His pants were scored with pinhole burns from the sparks.

  Everyone had to admit it looked pretty good.

  They stepped through, one by one, gingerly—the bottom of the doorway wasn’t quite flush with the pavement, and you could shear off toes on the edge if you weren’t careful. But the connection was tight, with no sensation as you went through. It was a totally other level of workmanship, Quentin thought with satisfaction, from the crude portals they’d gone through between the safe houses.

  They had skipped Penzance after all, as well as Belfast: Josh brought them out in a public park not far from the center of Fowey. This kind of precision over that much distance hadn’t been possible even a few years ago, but Google Street View was an absolute boon to the art and craft of creating long-distance portals. Josh went through last and scrubbed it out behind them.

  Quentin didn’t think he’d ever seen anywhere as quintessentially English-looking as Fowey. Or maybe he meant Cornish-looking, he wasn’t sure what the difference was. Poppy would know. Either way it was a small town at the mouth of a river that was also called Fowey, and Beatrix Potter could have drawn it. The air was cool and fresh after the summer fug of Venice. The streets were narrow and winding and shinsplintingly steep. The sheer volume of floral window boxes overhead almost blocked out the sun.

  At the little office of tourism in the center of town they learned that the various Foweys were all pronounced “Foy,” and that even aside from Christopher Plover the town was something of a hotbed of fictional settings. Manderley from Rebecca was supposed to be nearby, as was Toad Hall from The Wind in the Willows. Plover’s house was a few miles out of town. The National Trust owned it now; it was enormous, and some days it was open to tourists. The Chatwins’ house was privately owned, and not on any tourist maps, but it couldn’t be far away. According to legend, and all the biographies, it abutted Plover’s property directly.

  They sat on a bench in the thin English sunlight, like clarified butter, while Poppy went off to rent a car—she was the only one of them who carried the full complement of valid IDs and credit cards. (When Julia pointed out that she could have stolen one just as easily, Poppy looked at her with wordless horror.) She returned in a peppy silver Jag—who would have thought you could even get one out here in Smurftown? she said. They knocked back a pub lunch and set out.

  It was Quentin’s first time in England, and he was amazed. Once they got up the coastal slope and out of town, out into the lumpy, uneven pastures dotted with sheep and stitched together with dense dark hedges, it looked more like Fillory than he’d thought anywhere on Earth could. Even more than Venice. Why hadn’t anybody told him? Except of course they had, and he hadn’t believed them. Poppy, in the driver’s seat, grinned at him via the rearview mirror as if to say, see?

  Maybe she was right, he hadn’t given this world enough credit. Zipping along the narrow highways and shady lanes of rural Cornwall, the four of them could have been regular people, civilians, and would they have been any less happy? Even without magic they had the grass and that blessed country solitude and the sun flickering past between the branches and the solace of an expensive car that somebody else was paying for. What kind of an asshole wouldn’t be satisfied with that? For the first time in his life Quentin seriously considered the idea that he could be happy without Fillory—not just resigned, but happy.

  They were certainly as close to Fillory as you could get on Earth. They were closing in on the Chatwins’ house. Even the place names sounded Fillorian: Tywardreath, Castle Dore, Lostwithiel. It was as if the green landscape of Fillory was hidden right behind this one, and this was a thin place, where the other world showed through.

  Cornwall was certainly having a good effect on Julia. She was almost lively. She was the only one of them with the gift of not getting carsick while she read, so as they drove she paged through the Fillory books, applying stickies to certain passages, reading others out loud. She was compiling a list of all the different ways the children had gotten through: a practical traveler’s guide to leaving this world behind.

  “In The World in the Walls Martin gets in through the grandfather clock, and so does Fiona. In the second one Rupert gets in from his school, so that does not help us, and I believe Helen does too, but I cannot find it. In The Flying Forest they get in by climbing a tree. That might be our best bet.”

  “We wouldn’t have to break into the house,” Quentin said. “And we could all fit.”

  “Exactly. And in The Secret Sea they ride a magic bicycle, so let us keep an eye out for that. Maybe there is a garage or a shed with old things in it.”

  “You realize the fans have probably picked this place clean like years ago,” Josh said. “We can’t be the first people to think of this.”

  “Then in The Wandering Dune Helen and Jane are painting in a meadow somewhere nearby. Which seems like a long shot, but if we have to we can go back to Fowey for art supplies. And that is it.”

  “It’s not quite it.” Sorry, but nobody one-upped Quentin on Fillory trivia, not even Julia. “Martin gets back in in The Flying Forest, at the end, though Plover doesn’t say how he did it. And there’s a book you’re missing, The Magicians, which is Jane’s book about how she went back to Fillory to find Martin. She used the magic buttons to get in, which she found in the well, where Helen threw a whole box of them. Jane only used one to get back, so there may be more lying around.”

  Julia turned around in her seat.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I met her. Jane Chatwin. It was in Fillory. I was getting better from my injuries after we fought Martin. After Alice died.”

  There was silence in the car, broken by the ticking of the turn signal as Poppy took a fork in the road. Julia studied him with those empty, unreadable eyes.

  “Sometimes I forget everything you have been through,” she said finally, and turned around to face forward.

  It only took them forty-five minutes to find Plover’s house, aka Darras House, which must have once been in the deep countryside, but now you could get there on a well-maintained two-lane road. Poppy pulled over on the other side. There was no shoulder, and the Jag tilted at a perilous angle.

  All four of them got out and straggled across the road. There was no traffic. It was
about three-thirty in the afternoon. The grounds were surrounded by a formidable stone wall, and the gate framed, with an almost fussy architectural perfection, a view of a palatial Georgian country house set back deep in carefully tended grounds. Darras House was one of those rectangular English houses made of gray stone that probably conformed to some nutjob eighteenth-century theory about symmetry and ideal proportions and perfect ratios.

  Quentin knew Plover had been rich—he’d made one fortune in America already, selling dry goods, whatever they were, before he came to Cornwall and wrote the Fillory novels—but the scale of it was still stunning. It wasn’t so much a house as a cliff with windows in it.

  “Jeez,” Josh said.

  “Yeah,” said Poppy.

  “Hard to imagine somebody living there all by themselves,” Quentin said.

  “He probably had servants.”

  “Was he gay?”

  “Dude, totally,” Josh said.

  There was a sign on the gate, DARRAS HOUSE/PLOVER FARM, with a schedule of hours and tours and entrance fees. A blue plaque gave them a capsule biography of Plover. It was a Thursday, and the house was open. A large black bird retched loudly in the underbrush.

  “So are we going in?” Poppy asked.

  He’d thought they would, on the off chance that they might stumble on something, and so they could say they had. But now that they’d arrived the place felt empty. Nothing here called to Quentin. Plover had never gone to Fillory. All he’d done was write books. The magic was somewhere else.

  “Nah,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  Nobody disagreed. They could come back tomorrow. If they were still on Earth.

  They trooped back across the road and spread out the map on the hood of the car. The exact location of the house the Chatwins had stayed at near Fowey was a matter for speculation, but not wild speculation. There was a limited number of places it could be. Plover’s books were full of enchanting descriptions of how the Chatwin kids, singly and en masse, ran and skipped and cycled over from their aunt Maude’s house to visit their beloved “uncle” Christopher. Plover had even famously had a little child-size gate built in the wall that separated their properties to let them through.

  They had two Plover biographies with them, one a soft-focus hagiography from the 1950s, authorized by the family, the other a hardnosed psychoanalytic exposé from the early 1990s that anatomized Plover’s complex and “problematic” sexuality, as symbolically dramatized in the various Fillory novels. They stuck to that one. It had better geography.

  They knew that the Chatwin house was on one Darrowby Lane, which helped, although the Cornish were even less interested in signage than the Venetians. Fortunately Poppy turned out to be excellent at this kind of cross-country dead-reckoning navigation. At first they thought she must be using some kind of advanced geographical magic until Josh noticed that she had an iPhone in her lap.

  “Yeah, but I used magic to jailbreak it,” she said.

  It was late afternoon, and they’d traversed what seemed like several hundred verdant and Watership Down–esque but stubbornly unmarked and unidentifiable rural byways, and the light was turning bluish, before they settled on a target property, which sat on a narrow lane that wasn’t definitely not called Darrowby and as near as they could tell pretty much had to back onto Plover’s enormous estate.

  There was no wall or gate, just a gravel track curving back through the late-summer trees. A square stone post next to it supported a NO TRESPASSING sign. They couldn’t see the house from here.

  Quietly Julia read out the relevant passage from The World in the Walls:

  The house was very grand—three stories tall, with a façade made of brick and stone, and enormous windows, and endless numbers of fireplaces and window seats and curving back stairs and other advantages, which their London house distinctly lacked. Among those advantages were the sprawling grounds around the house, which included long straight alleys and white gravel paths and dark-green pools of grass.

  There was a time when Quentin could probably have said it along with her from memory.

  Quentin sat in the car and stared across the road. He couldn’t see much evidence of anything as nice as that. The place didn’t exactly scream “portal to another world” either. He tried to imagine the Chatwins arriving here for the first time, the five of them crammed into the backseat of some sputtering black proto-automobile, more carriage than car, and with a fair amount of locomotive DNA in it as well, their luggage tied to the boot with twine and Victorian leather strappage. They would have been funereally silent, resigned to exile from London. The youngest, five-year-old Jane, the future Watcherwoman, reclining on her older sister’s lap as on a chaise longue, lost in a fog of longing for her parents, who were respectively fighting World War I and raving in a posh rest home. Martin (who would grow up to become a monster who would kill Alice) keeping his composure for the sake of the youngsters, his soft boy’s jaw set in grim preadolescent determination.

  They’d been so young and innocent and hopeful, and they’d found something more wonderful than they could ever have hoped for, and it had destroyed them.

  “What do you think?” he said. “Julia?”

  “This is the place.”

  “All right. I’m going to go in. Look around.”

  “I’ll come,” Poppy said.

  “No,” Quentin said. “I want to go alone.”

  To his surprise it worked. She stayed put.

  Becoming invisible was a simple idea in theory, but in practice it was a lot harder than you’d think. It had been done, but it took years of meticulous self-erasure, and once accomplished it was practically impossible to undo; apart from anything else you could never be sure you’d reinstated your visible self completely accurately. You came out looking like a portrait of yourself. The best work-around Quentin knew was more like an animal’s protective coloring. If you were standing in front of some leaves, you looked drab and leafy. If you weren’t moving or jumping around, an observer’s eye tended to skate over you. Usually. If the light wasn’t too good. The car door chunked shut in the stillness. He felt the others’ eyes on his back as he crossed the road.

  There was something on top of the stone post: buttons. They were scattered in the grass around it too. Big ones, small ones, pearly ones, tortoiseshells. It must be a fan ritual. You come by, you leave a button, the way people left joints on Jim Morrison’s grave.

  Still, he stopped and touched each of them, one by one, just to make sure none of them were genuine.

  The camouflage spell was unbelievably crude. He picked up a big leathery oak leaf, snapped off a shingle of bark from a tree, plucked a blade of the scanty grass, and collected a granite pebble from the edge of the road. He whispered a rhyming chant in French over them, spat on them, and—the glamorous life of the modern sorcerer—stuffed them in his pocket.

  Further up and further in. He stayed off the gravel driveway and picked his way through the trees for five minutes, until there were no more, and then he was looking at Aunt Maude Chatwin’s house.

  It was like he was looking back through time. The unpromising driveway had been a feint, a hustle. It really was a grand house; it probably would have qualified as magnificent if they hadn’t just come from Plover’s house. As Quentin got closer the gravel track pulled itself together and became a proper driveway, which clove in two and formed a circle with a modest but still entirely effective fountain at the center. Three rows of tall windows adorned the front, and the gray slate roof was a beautiful profusion of chimneys and gables.

  Quentin hadn’t known what to expect. A ruin, maybe, or some appalling new Modernist façade. But the Chatwin house was perfectly appointed and restored, and the lawns looked like they’d been trimmed that morning. It was everything Quentin had hoped for, except for one thing. It wasn’t empty.

  That well-maintained lawn was littered with cars. They were nice cars that made the rental Jag look poky by comparison. Yellow light spilled ou
t of the lower floors and out into the mellowing dusk, chased by some nicely judged, not-overamplified early Rolling Stones. Whoever’s private hands the house was in, they were having a party.

  Quentin stood there, on the outside looking in, as a little convocation of evening gnats began to gather over his head. It seemed sacrilegious—he wanted to barge in and order everybody out, like Jesus ridding the temple of moneylenders. This was ground zero for the primal fantasy of the twentieth century, the place where Earth and Fillory had first kissed like two cosmic billiard balls. Over the chatter a roar went up, and a woman shrieked and then laughed uncontrollably.

  But looking on the bright side, it was a tactical windfall. It was a big enough party that they could mingle in, the girls especially. They wouldn’t sneak in at all, they would walk in the front door. Brazen it out. Then when any suspicions had been allayed they would slip upstairs and see what they could see. He walked back to the car to get the others.

  They found a spot for the car on the lawn. They weren’t the least plausible bunch of partygoers imaginable. Quentin had invested in some nice clothes in Venice, charged to Josh’s bottomless credit card.

  “If anybody asks just say John brought you.”

  “Good one. Dude, are you gonna . . . ?” Josh gestured at Quentin’s appearance.

  Oh, right. Probably better not to show up looking like a pile of mulch. He killed the camouflage spell. Crossing the threshold, Quentin closed his eyes for just a moment. He thought of little Jane Chatwin, still alive and at large somewhere. Maybe she would be at the party too.

  Josh made straight for the bar.

  “Dude!” Quentin hissed. “Stay on mission!”

  “We’re in deep cover. I’m getting into character.”

  For all that it was a party at Maude Chatwin’s house, it was also just a party like any other party. There were pretty people and unpretty people, drunk people and undrunk people, people who didn’t care what anybody thought about them and people standing in corners afraid to open their mouths lest somebody look directly at them.