by Lev Grossman
“I can’t, Eliot. Not now. I’m needed here.”
Alice snorted at the notion that anybody anywhere might need Quentin.
“I was afraid of that,” Eliot said. “Well look, just come with me as far as the Neitherlands. That’s all I ask. For all I know there’s a smoking crater where the Fillory fountain was. I don’t want to face that alone.”
“Ooooh,” Plum said. Her eyes went round. “I want to go to the Eitherlands!”
“Neitherlands,” Eliot said, suddenly peevish. “And it’s not a field trip for interns.”
They were interrupted by something scratching at the front door. The room fell silent. They weren’t expecting visitors. Nobody knew they were here, or nobody should have. Quentin put a finger to his lips.
More scratching. It stopped and then started again. He got up and walked as quietly as he could over to the door and peered through the spy hole. Empty street. There was nobody there. He looked at the others. Eliot shrugged.
He cracked the door a few inches, keeping the chain on, and something small and frantic burst in past him, and he reeled back a step. It was the blackbird.
It flapped crazily around the room for thirty long seconds, with that special horror that birds have of being indoors, before it settled on the Sputnik chandelier. Even then its gaze darted everywhere, constantly, like it was expecting danger from any and all directions. It looked different: thinner and more bedraggled. It was missing some feathers, and the ones it still had had lost their gloss.
“Do not kill me!” it said.
Plum and Eliot were on their feet. Only Alice hadn’t moved.
“What are you doing here?” Quentin said. “Are you alone?”
“I am alone!”
“Why should we believe you?” Plum said. “You fucking asshole. You betrayed us. And you probably murdered Pushkar. He had a family, you know. Quentin, should we kill it?”
“Maybe. Not yet.” If this was a trap, or a feint, or a diversion, it was a weird one, if only because he figured the bird for a physical coward. It wasn’t like it to lead from the front. “Plum, watch it. I’m going to look around for anybody else.”
But there was no one else, not in front or in back or on the roof or in any immediately adjacent planes of existence, not that he could detect. Maybe it really was alone.
“I take it this is that bird,” Eliot said. “The one who hired you.”
“It’s that bird. What are you doing here?”
“I have no more money,” it said. “I tried to hire more magicians, but without Lionel it went poorly.”
“No money, no magicians,” Quentin said. “Those are the breaks. I think you should leave now.”
“I did not want Lionel to kill Pushkar! I did not tell him to. I don’t know why he did. I was afraid of him!”
It already seemed incredible that they’d been so scared of the blackbird. It wasn’t very frightening now. It must have run through all its resources staging their job, and without Lionel and its hired hands it was just a talking bird, nothing more.
It didn’t appear to want to leave.
“You have to help me.”
“No,” Plum said, looking up at it. “We really don’t.”
“The birds here despise me. I am very hungry. I have eaten garbage.”
“I don’t care what you’ve eaten,” Quentin said. “We’ve got more important things to worry about. Leave or we’ll throw you out.”
Though he wasn’t exactly sure yet how they were going to catch and expel the thing. He wasn’t looking forward to that chase scene.
“Please,” it said again. “He will kill me!”
“Who?”
The blackbird didn’t answer, just stared around the room anxiously, from one to the other of them. It didn’t want to say. Quentin didn’t feel the slightest bit sorry for it.
“It’s talking about Ember.”
Even the bird jumped, as if it hadn’t realized Alice could talk. Her expression didn’t change. She wanted everybody to know that her emotional investment in this drama was nil.
“What did you say?”
“That’s Ember’s bird. I met it in the mirrors. It begged me not to kill it. I can’t think why I didn’t. I’m going to bed.”
On her way out she nearly walked into a wall out of habit—as a niffin she would have gone right through it. She left an uncomfortable silence behind her. From behind the drawn curtains they heard a truck come rattling slowly down the narrow street. Quentin waited for it to pass by.
“Is that true? Ember sent you?”
“Please.” It had lost all of its avian loftiness now. It trembled. “He will kill me.”
“He won’t,” Plum said, “because we’ll kill you first.”
“He sent me to get the suitcase. I do not know why. He would have sent a bigger animal,” it added almost apologetically, “but He needed one capable of flight. To go through the mirrors. He gave me some money, and the spell to make Lionel once I got here.”
“Why did He want the case? Was it the knife, or the book? Or both?”
“I don’t know!” the blackbird wailed. “I don’t know! I didn’t know what was in it! Truly!”
And it began to cry. Quentin thought he had never heard a more pathetic sound. The bird fluttered down from its perch on the chandelier like a pheasant creased by a bullet. It landed on the coffee table and squatted there, sobbing.
Something coherent was forming in Quentin’s exhausted brain, like a crystal forming in a murky liquid. He’d been looking at chaos for so long, he barely remembered what a pattern looked like, but now he thought he saw at least a fragment of one.
“Hang on,” he said slowly. “Let’s think this through. Rupert stole the stuff in the case, Ember wants it back. He sends a bird to Earth to recover it for Him. The bird hires us to find it.”
Plum picked up the thread. “The stuff in the case was Umber’s, not Ember’s, according to Rupert, but I guess they’re brothers so it’s all in the family. But so why would Ember want it?”
“Why wouldn’t he? Cool knife? Spell for making a magic land? Who wouldn’t want that?”
“A god?” Eliot said. “Who already has a whole magic world?”
“Except He doesn’t.” All the lights came on in Quentin’s head at once. “He doesn’t though. Fillory is dying, and Ember has nowhere to go. He wants the spell so he can use it to make a new world! He’s going to give up on Fillory—abandon it and start over!”
It came out in a rush, which was followed by a pause. Plum made a skeptical face.
“But it fits!” Quentin said. “He’s not even trying to save Fillory! He’s a rat who won’t go down with his ship!”
“That,” Eliot said, “is a mixed metaphor. And listen to me: I know you’ve got no reason to love Ember, but that seems a little cowardly.”
“Yes, because He’s a coward!”
“Plus you know the spell doesn’t make a whole world, right?” Plum said. “Just like a land?”
“Maybe that’s just us. Maybe a god could do more with it.”
She looked up at the ceiling, considering. The blackbird watched all three of them desperately.
“Even if that’s true,” Eliot said, “what would we do about it? It’s kind of depressing me actually. Just more proof that there’s no way out of this.”
Quentin sat down. Maybe he was getting ahead of himself.
“We still have the spell,” he said.
“Destroy it,” Eliot said.
“No.” He couldn’t do that.
“We have the bird,” Eliot said. “We could turn the tables. Take it hostage.”
“Oh, come on. Ember doesn’t give a crap about the bird, the bird’s expendable.” The bird didn’t object to this; it would’ve been hard to argue with. “We should go to Fillory, confro
nt Him, make Him stay there and try and save it. He is the god of it. And we’ve got the spell. God, what a bastard!”
“Or,” Eliot said, cautiously, “maybe we want to get in on this shit. Maybe he’s got the right idea. Maybe we should give Him the spell and tell Him to make a new world and take us with Him.”
“Eliot,” Quentin said.
“I know, I know. It would be a lot easier though.” Eliot heaved himself wearily to his feet. “Fine. Come on, let’s go yell at a god. If nothing else I want to hear Him admit it. I want Him to say it to my face.”
“I’m coming.” Plum got up too.
“Somebody should stay here with Alice,” Quentin said.
“Somebody young and inexperienced in the field,” Eliot said.
“No.” Plum glared at him, uncowed. “No way. I’m not babysitting the Blue Meanie.”
“Maybe Alice will come with us. Maybe she can help. Alice!” Quentin shouted up the stairs. No answer. “I’ll go talk to her.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Give me an hour.”
“I can help!” the bird said.
Quentin’s reflexes were good, but it still only worked because he had the element of surprise. He darted his hand out and caught the bird around the neck. Ignoring its hysterical thrashing, he walked over to a window, opened it, and threw the blackbird out.
—
Alice lay on her back on the bed with her eyes open. She heard the sounds of the house below her—walking, talking, shouting, slamming—but they were very far away. She stared at the ceiling. She felt like a marble figure carved on a tomb, her own tomb. This body was her coffin. She breathed shallowly; even that was an imposition she could barely tolerate.
She would not indulge this body. She didn’t owe it anything. She wanted to feel it as little as possible.
Clumping footsteps coming up the stairs. The door opened.
“Alice.”
It was Quentin, of course. She didn’t turn her head. She heard the scrape of a stool as he pulled it over and sat down. She couldn’t stop him.
“Alice. We’re going to go to the Neitherlands. We have a theory about what might be going on. We’re going to try to find Ember and talk to Him.”
“OK.” She felt her tongue, the worm in her head, lightly kiss the roof of her mouth to make the K.
She didn’t feel angry anymore. She wondered why she’d even bothered with all that anger, all that talking. Something had come over her, but now her rage was gone, a storm that had blown out to sea leaving behind a great peace. A flat strand swept smooth by the violence of the waves, dotted with sea wrack churned up from the depths. She just didn’t care.
“I don’t want to leave you here. I’d like you to come with us. I think you could help.”
Very slightly, she shook her head. She closed her eyes. Sometimes when she closed her eyes she felt weightless again. The whiskey helped—it was better when she was drunk. And it gave her pleasure to poison this body.
“I don’t think so.”
Seven years ago he’d watched as she made a blue bonfire of her flesh. For seven long years her human self had slept, and she had roamed Fillory as a dream of rage and power. The dream was over now, Quentin had ended it, he’d woken her up and forced her back into her body. But he couldn’t force her soul, her self. Did he actually hate her? That much? He said he loved her, once. That was both seven years ago and yesterday.
She wondered if she could burn again. Maybe she was like a spent match, to be struck only once, but she didn’t think so. It would take time to get ready, to relearn the skills, but soon. She didn’t mind if she died trying. Suicide was in everything she did now, and everything she thought. Suicide was her home: if she could find nothing else, then suicide would always have her.
And if it did work they would never catch her again. Never again.
“I’m going to touch your hand now.” She felt him take her fingers; she left hers limp. It was the first time anyone had touched her since she’d come back, and it made her skin crawl. “You’re going to get through this. It’s not as bad as you think. I’m going to try to help you. But you have to try too.”
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t.”
Something happened in the silence that followed. Her eyes opened again. Something was pulling her back. It was something in the air, coming in through her nose and invading her mind. It was doing something to her. Magic? Not magic.
“What is that?” she said.
“What?”
“That smell.”
“You know what it is,” Quentin said. “Think.”
For an instant she lowered her guard, and forgot to fight, and in that instant her body sat up and inhaled. Neurons were firing in her brain that hadn’t fired for seven years. After eons of disuse, mental furniture was being uncovered, dusty drop cloths yanked back. Mental windows were being thrown open to let in the hot sun.
“Bacon,” she said.
He had a tray with him. Now he picked up a plate and held it in front of her. It was good bacon, quarter-inch-thick strips, and it had warped and bubbled as he fried it; he’d let one end of it char a little because he knew she liked it burned. Had liked it.
Well, he’d done something with his seven years. He didn’t used to be able to cook worth a damn.
She was tired, and she was famished—she wasn’t, her mind wasn’t, it was clear as a bell, but this body was hungry, this doll made of meat. It was weak, and it reached out and picked up the food and put it in her mouth. The meat took over and ate the other meat, and God it was fucking unbelievable, salty and fatty and smoky. When she was done she licked her thumbs and wiped her greasy hands on the sheets. It revolted her, she revolted herself, but there was so much pleasure in it. She was trying to reject her body like a bad organ transplant but she could feel herself trapped in its sticky embrace. It was trying to adhere to her, trying to become her, and Quentin was helping it. He was on its side.
“I hope,” she said, “that you don’t think you’re going to keep me here with bacon.”
“Not just bacon.”
He handed her a plate with fresh slices of mango on it, intensely orange, like little arcs carved off a tiny sweet sun. She fell on them like an animal. She was an animal.
No, she was not. She was pure and beautiful and blue.
“Why did you do it?” she asked with her mouth full. “Why did you do this to me?”
“Because this is who you are. Because you’re human. You’re a person, you’re not a demon.”
“Prove it.”
“I am proving it.”
She looked at him, really looked for the first time since she’d been back. He had a narrow, symmetrical face, rendered interesting by a slightly too-large nose and an expressive, too-wide mouth. He never knew it, which had saved him from developing one of those pretty-boy personalities, but objectively he’d always been handsome. And he still was.
But he was different now too. He didn’t stutter or duck her gaze the way he used to. He was right, he had changed.
“You could’ve got oysters,” she said.
“You hate oysters.”
“Do I?”
“You used to say they were like cold snot.”
“I can’t remember. What else do I like?”
“Hot baths. Fresh socks. Really big sneezes. That feeling when you successfully flip a pancake. And this.”
He gave her a square of chocolate—good chocolate—and when she tasted it she actually shed tears. Jesus, she was losing all control. All control. Was the flesh going to win? It was getting harder to disentangle herself from it. The triumphant, righteous niffin in her shrieked defiance. She thought of flying, of plunging into the earth and flying again, of burning things, making them hurt the way she hurt, showing them how glorious the pain was. She shuddered.
“Why did you come here?” he said.
“To kill you.” She said it without hesitating, because it was true.
“No. You came here so I could save you.”
She laughed—yes, that sick wicked niffin laugh, she still had it. She loved it. But she couldn’t let the food alone either. They were forcing her, making her give it up.
“I’m going to make my new body fat,” she said. “I’m going to eat until it is morbidly obese and I die.”
“You can if you want to. Here.”
A noise. What was it? Her body seethed with pleasure at it. He had opened a cold, sweating bottle of champagne and was pouring some into a wineglass.
“This is hardly fair,” she said.
“I never said it was.”
“You want me to drink champagne out of a wineglass? You’ve gone downhill, Quentin Coldwater.” Where were these words coming from?
“I’ve adjusted my priorities.”
When she had drunk it, sitting up in bed, taking quick little sips like a child taking her medicine, she burped loudly.
“That might be my favorite part,” she said. “Is this all you have?”
“That’s all I have.”
“No, it’s not,” she said.
Abruptly, awkwardly, like an inexperienced schoolgirl, she kissed him. She did it roughly and hard, without knowing she was going to do it. She leaned forward and mashed her lips against his, felt a tooth grind into her lip, tasted blood. As she did something warmed and melted between her legs. She shoved her tongue into his mouth, let him taste the champagne. The dike that kept her mind separate from her body was leaking in a hundred places. Somewhere far away her glass smashed on the floor.
She wanted him. She was remembering things—afternoons upstairs at the Cottage, in the stifling heat. He was lean and strong, stronger than he used to be, and she wanted him.
“Show me, Quentin.” She ordered him. “Show me what bodies are for.”
She was unbuttoning his shirt, but clumsily. She’d forgotten how. He trapped her hands.
“No,” he said. “Not yet. Too soon.”
