The Magician King m-2

by Lev Grossman

  “We will go back. We just have to do one more thing first.”

  “Eliot, stop. I’m serious. Turn the ship around. I’m never leaving Fillory again.”

  “Just one thing. You’ll like it.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to like it.”

  Eliot smiled broadly, or as broadly as his bad teeth would allow.

  “Oh, you’re going to love it,” he said. “It’s an adventure.”

  It was unbelievable. Never mind Thomas: he, Quentin, had missed everything. It had started as soon as he left for the Outer Island.

  This all came out at a massive feast belowdecks that evening. By then Quentin had almost come to accept that when you were surfing the great interdimensional divide certain days were just destined to stretch out to about thirty-six hours long, and there was nothing you could do except to wait them out till they ended. The new arrivals ate like wolves—their exhaustion had turned into a raging hunger. They’d never had a proper dinner the night before anyway, just the occasional passed hors d’oeuvre. Only Julia picked at her food, managing a bite every few minutes, like her body was an unloved pet that she was being forced to babysit.

  “I knew something was up,” Eliot said, cracking open a massive, lethal-looking crimson crab. Like Julia he never seemed to eat, but somehow he got through massive quantities of food anyway, which of course never made him any less skinny. “First off, two days after you left Whitespire, someone tried to kill me in my bath.”

  “Really?” Josh said with his mouth full. “And that tipped you off?”

  It hadn’t taken long for Josh to get acclimated aboard the Muntjac. Discomfort just wasn’t in his nature. He’d picked up with Eliot exactly where they’d left off two years ago.

  “That’s awful,” Quentin said. “Jesus.”

  “It was! I was lolling in my bath of an evening, as one does, blameless as a newborn child—more so, if you’ve ever met such a creature, they’re absolutely horrible—and one of my own towel boys came creeping up behind me with a big curvy knife in his hand. He tried to cut my throat.

  “I’ll spare you the details”—which is what Eliot said when he was going to march you through everything blow by blow—“but I grabbed his arm, and he went in the water. He’d never been a particularly good towel boy. Perhaps he felt he was meant for better things. But he was no great success as an assassin either, I can tell you. He got his knife against my neck, but nowhere near the artery, and he hadn’t braced himself properly at all. So in he went, and I scrambled out of the water, and I froze it.”

  “Dixon’s charm?”

  He nodded. “It was no great loss. I was about to get out anyway. I’d put in so many bath salts I didn’t know if it would take, but it froze solid right away. He looked like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. The resemblance was actually quite striking.”

  “You and your towel boys,” Josh said. “But I ask for a harem and it’s all, morality this, human rights that.”

  “Well, and I spared you a good stabbing, didn’t I?”

  Eliot didn’t tan, he was too pale for that, but the sun and the wind had put some texture in his otherwise immaculate pallor, and he’d grown some nicely naval stubble. He’d dropped some of the god-king preciousness that had dominated his persona back at Whitespire, shed some of the gold leaf. He spoke to the crew with an air of easy familiarity and command—even the ones like Bingle whom he’d never met before the ship sailed, and in Quentin’s mind wasn’t supposed to know. Now he knew them better than Quentin did. They’d been at sea together for a year.

  “I let him out, of course. I didn’t have the heart to let him suffocate. But would you believe it, he wouldn’t tell us a thing! He was a fanatic of some kind. Or a lunatic, maybe. Same thing. Do you know, some of the generals wanted to torture him? I think Janet would have done it too, but I couldn’t. But I couldn’t just let him go either. He’s in prison now.

  “I was shaken, but I suppose you’re not really High King until somebody tries to kill you in your bath. If they ever succeed, by the way, make sure you leave me in there and have a painting done. Like Marat.

  “I wanted to let the whole thing drop, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t let me drop. I don’t know what it was. Fillory, I suppose. At any rate, that’s when the wonders started.

  “That’s what everyone called them, and I couldn’t think of another name for them. It started out just as feelings. You would look at something, a carpet, or a bowl of fruit, and the colors would seem different. Brighter, more vivid, more saturated. Sudden rushes of grief or excitement or love would come over you for no reason. Some very unmanly crying jags were observed among the barons.

  “It was like drugs more than anything else, but I hadn’t taken any drugs. I remember one night in my bedroom lying there smelling spices in the darkness, one after the other. Cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, something else—something wonderful I couldn’t place. Paintings started to change as I walked by them. Just the backgrounds. The clouds would move, or the sky would go from day to night.

  “Then I saw a hunting horn hovering before me at dinner. Some of the others saw it too. And one night in the middle of the night I opened the bathroom door, and it opened onto deep forest instead. It’s all the same when it comes to taking a piss, I suppose, but still. It put me right off my game.

  “For a while I thought I was going mad, literally mad, until the tree came. A clock-tree grew up right in the middle of the throne room, right through the carpet, in broad daylight. It did it all at once, all in one go, with the whole court watching. And then it just stood there, silently, like a hallucination, ticking and sort of swaying with the energy of its just having grown. It was as if it were saying, ‘Well, here I am. This is me. What are you going to do about it?’

  “After that I knew it wasn’t me that had gone mad. It was Fillory.

  “I don’t mind telling you I found the whole business more than a little provoking. I was being called, you understand, and I most definitely did not want to come. I understand the appeal this sort of thing has for you, quests and King Arthur and all that. But that’s you. No offense, but it always seemed a bit like boy stuff to me. Sweaty and strenuous and just not very elegant, if you see what I mean. I didn’t need to be called to feel special, I felt special enough already. I’m clever, rich, and good-looking. I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury.”

  “Nicely put,” Quentin said. Eliot must have mounted this set piece before.

  “Well, and then that damned Seeing Hare came bolting through the room during our afternoon meeting. Scattered the whiskey service and frightened one of my more sensitive protégés half to death. Everyone has a limit. Next morning I called for my hunting leathers, saddled a horse, and went riding out alone into the Queenswood. And you know, I never go anywhere alone, not anymore, but these things have certain protocols and not even the High King—or I suppose especially not the High King—is exempt.”

  “The Queenswood,” Quentin said. “Don’t tell me.”

  “But I am telling you.” Eliot finished his wine, and a rangy, shaven-headed young man refilled his glass without his having to ask. “I went back to that ridiculous meadow of yours, the round one. You see, you’d been right to want to go in. It was our adventure after all.”

  “I was right.” Quentin felt crestfallen. He stared down at his hands. “I can’t believe it, I was right!”

  If he hadn’t been so tired, and a bit drunk, it probably wouldn’t have struck him the way it did. But as it was he felt himself filling up with a sense of—how could he put it? He thought he’d learned a lesson about the world, and now he was realizing that the lesson he learned might have been the wrong one. The right adventure had been offered to him, and he’d walked away. If being a hero is a matter of knowing your cues, like the fairy tale said, he’d missed his. Instead he’d spent three days faffing around on Earth for nothing, and nearly got stuck there forever, while Eliot was off on a real quest.<
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  “It’s true,” Eliot said. “Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don’t spoil it.”

  “It was supposed to be me, not you!”

  “You should have gone on it when you had the chance.”

  “You told me not to!”

  “Janet told you not to. I don’t know why you listened to her. But look, I know.” Eliot put a hand on his arm. “I know. I had no choice. Whoever is in charge of handing out quests has a damned peculiar sense of humor.

  “At any rate, off I went. And I did feel something, you know, as I set off that morning. Nip in the air, sun on my armor, a knight pricking across the plain. I wished you could have been there.

  “Though I looked much better than you would have. I had special questing armor made, just for that day, embossed and damascened within an inch of its life. I won’t lie to you, Quentin. I looked magnificent.”

  Quentin wondered what he’d been doing at that moment. At least he’d gotten to drink a Coke. That was something. He wished he had one now. He was exhausted.

  “It took me three days to find that fucking meadow, but finally I did. The Seeing Hare was there, of course, waiting for me under the branches of that hideous great tree, which was still thrashing away in its invisible wind.”

  “Intangible,” Poppy said in a small voice. “All wind is invisible.”

  Good to see she was finding her feet.

  “The hare wasn’t alone. The bird was there as well, and the monitor, the Utter Newt, the Kind Wolf, the Parallel Beetle—it does a geometrical thing, it’s so boring I can’t even explain it. All of them, all the Unique Beasts, the full conclave. Well, except the two aquatic ones. The Questing Beast sends you his regards by the way. I think he’s fond of you for some reason, even though you shot him.

  “Well, when I saw them all there together, standing in two neat rows, the little ones in front, like they were posing for a class picture, I knew the jig was up. It was the newt that did the talking. He let it be known that the realm was in peril, and nothing else would do but my recovering the Seven Golden Keys of Fillory. I asked him why, what good were they, what were they for, what did they unlock. He wouldn’t say, or he couldn’t. He said I would know when it was time.

  “I haggled a bit of course. I wanted to know, for example, how rapidly these keys would have to be recovered. I could imagine doing one every few years. Organize my holidays around it. At that rate I might even look forward to it—it’s always nicer traveling when you have some business to do. But apparently it’s a time-sensitive issue. They were very insistant about that.

  “They gave me a Golden Ring that the keys were supposed to go on, and I left. What else could I do? When I got back Whitespire was up in arms. There were all kinds of terrible portents, all over the kingdom. That storm had spread—all the clock-trees had started thrashing the way that first one did. And you know the waterfall at the Red Ruin? The one that flows up? It started flowing down. You know, the regular way. So that was about the last straw.

  “And then the Muntjac came screaming into port, and they told me you and Julia had vanished.”

  In full hero mode, Eliot took command of the Muntjac. He spent a day repairing and provisioning it while the whole kingdom buzzed with anxiety and excitement. High King Eliot was going on a quest! Apart from everything else it was a public relations triumph. The docks were mobbed by volunteers offering to join the search for the Seven Keys. The dwarves sent over a trunkload of magical keys they happened to have been kicking around in their vaults, in case there was a match in there, but most of them turned out to be useless.

  One, though, fit on the key ring. So six to go. Funny how every once in a while the dwarves came up trumps.

  Eliot left Janet in sole possession of the castle. He felt bad about making her shoulder everything even more than she already did, but she was practically licking her chops as he left. She would probably be running a fascist dictatorship by the time they got back. So he set off.

  Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he’d read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn’t necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and embraced. You lit out into the wilderness at random, and if your state of mind, or maybe it was your soul, was correct, then adventure would find you through the natural course of events. It was like free association—there were no wrong answers. It worked as long as you weren’t trying too hard.

  And Eliot was in no danger of trying too hard. The Muntjac ran fast before a warm wet wind, out past the Outer Island, and After, out of Fillory and out of the known world.

  A hush settled over the table. For a moment the creaking of the ship’s ropes and timbers could be heard, and Quentin felt for the first time how far off the map they were. He thought how they would look to someone far above them: a tiny lighted ship, lost in the immensity of an empty uncharted nighttime ocean.

  Eliot studied the ceiling. He was actually groping for words. That was a new one on Quentin.

  “You wouldn’t have believed it, Q,” he said finally. Something like an expression of actual awe had come over Eliot’s face. “You really wouldn’t. We’ve been all over the Eastern Ocean. The lands we saw. Some of the islands . . . I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Tell him about the train,” said the shaven-headed young man. All at once Quentin recognized him. It was Benedict. But a new Benedict, reborn with ropy muscles and flashing white teeth. The floppy bangs and the sullen attitude were long gone. He looked at Eliot with a respect Quentin had never seen him show anybody before.

  “Yes, the train. We thought it was a sea serpent at first. We barely brought the ship around in time. But it was a train, one of those slow freight trains that are always about a million cars long, all tankers and boxcars, except that this one never ended. It broke the surface, seawater streaming off the sides of the cars, rumbled along beside us for a couple of miles, then it sank back under the sea again.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. Bingle hopped onto it for a while, but we could never get any of the cars open.

  “And we found a castle floating on the ocean. At first we just heard it, bells ringing in the middle of the night. The next morning we came up on it: a stone castle, riding on a fleet of groaning wooden barges. No one inside, just bells tolling in one of the towers with the rocking of the waves.

  “What else? There was an island where no one could tell a lie. Goodness that was awkward for a while. We aired a lot of dirty laundry there, I can tell you.”

  Rueful smiles went around the room among the crew.

  “There was one where the people were really waves, ocean waves, which I know, but I just can’t explain it anymore than that. There was a place where the ocean poured into a huge chasm, and there was only a narrow bridge across it. A water-bridge that we had to sail across.”

  “Like an aqueduct,” Benedict put in.

  “Like an aqueduct. It was all so strange. I think magic gets magnified out here, gets wilder, and it creates all sorts of impossible places, all by itself. We spent a week trapped in the Doldrums. There was no wind, and the water was as smooth as glass, and there was a Sargasso Sea there, a big swirl of flotsam in the ocean. People lived there, picking through it. Everything people forget about ends up there one day, they said. Toys, tables, whole houses. And people end up there too. They get forgotten as well.

  “We were almost trapped there, but the Muntjac sprouted a bank of oars to help us get away. Didn’t you, old thing?” Eliot knocked familiarly on the bulkhead with his fist. “You could take things away with you, from the Sargasso Sea, but you had to leave something behind. That was the deal. Bingle took a magic sword. Show them your sword, Bing.”

  Bingle, sitting at the far end of the table, stood up and drew
his sword halfway out of its sheath, almost shyly. It was a narrow length of bright steel chased with swirly silver patterns that glowed white.

  “He won’t say what he left behind for it. What did you leave, Bing?”

  Bingle smiled and touched the side of his nose and said nothing.

  Quentin was weary. He’d woken up in Venice that morning, and spent the day in England, and another half day in Fillory. He’d already been drunk once and sobered up, and now he was getting drunk again, sitting there on a hard splintery bench in the Muntjac’s galley. Probably Eliot would have enjoyed a little jaunt back to Earth, he thought, where the wine and coffee were better. Though who knows, maybe it wouldn’t have worked if it had been the other way around. Maybe he couldn’t have done it—maybe he would have gotten trapped in the Sargasso Sea. And maybe Eliot wouldn’t have found his way to Josh, wouldn’t have gone to see the dragon, wouldn’t have played with Thomas. Maybe he would have failed where Quentin succeeded, and vice versa. Maybe this was the only way it could have gone. You didn’t get the quest you wanted, you got the one you could do.

  That was the hard part, accepting that you didn’t get to choose which way you went. Except of course he had chosen.

  “Don’t keep us in suspense,” he said. “Did you find the keys?” Eliot nodded.

  “We found some of them. It was always either a fight or a riddle, one or the other. One was a huge beast like a giant spiny lobster. It had the key inside its heart. Then there was a beach that was all made of keys, millions of them, and we had to go through them till we found the right one. There was probably a trick to that one, but no one could think what it was, so we brute-forced it instead—took shifts, trying keys on the key ring, round the clock. After a couple of weeks we got a fit.

  “Now I’m sorry if I’m a bit direct about this, but you have to remember, we’ve been at this for a full year, week in and week out, and frankly all this questing is wearing pretty thin. So here it is: we have five of the seven keys. One the dwarves gave us, and four we found. Do you have one? The one from After Island?”