by Lev Grossman
“I can’t show you everything,” Julia said. “Not even I have those permissions. But there’s something in particular I think you might like.”
When they moved the wind moved with them, so that the air around them remained still as they flew. Down below there were dark rivers and pale chalk roads. Quentin spotted what might have been an elaborate tree house in a forest, and a castle on an island in a moonlit lake.
“Are those fireflies?” he asked. “The lights?”
“No, the air is just kind of sparkly here. It’s a thing. You don’t notice it during the daytime.”
Tiny lights were bobbing along in their wake, too, streaming out behind them, like the phosphorescent trail of a ship in a tropical sea. The sunset was in different colors from a terrestrial or even a Fillorian sunset: it ran more to greens and purples.
She set them down in the center of a grand, rambling garden. It must once have been laid out according to a precise design, like a French formal garden, all ruled lines and perfect curves and complex symmetries. But it had been left to go to seed, shrubs overflowing onto paths, vines winding themselves lasciviously through wrought iron, rose beds dying off into withered brown traceries, exquisite in their own way. It reminded him of nothing so much as the frozen community garden he’d wandered into long, long ago in Brooklyn, chasing the paper note that Jane Chatwin had given him, before he came out the other side and into Brakebills.
“I thought you’d like it. Of course it was different when it was new, but then when it started to get overrun everyone thought it looked better this way, and they let it go. But it’s more than a garden, it’s deep magic. Keep your eye on one spot and you’ll see.”
Quentin did, and he saw. Slowly, but far faster than they would have in nature, some of the plants were dying and reviving, crisping up before his eyes and bursting back into bloom, rising up and sinking down in slow motion, making tiny crackles and whispers as they did. It made him think of something, but he couldn’t quite place it.
Julia could.
“Rupert mentions it in his memoir,” she said. “We call it the Drowned Garden, though I don’t know why. The plants aren’t just plants, they’re thoughts and feelings. A new thought happens and a new plant springs up. A feeling fades away and the plant dies. Some of the more common ones are always in bloom—fear, anger, happiness, love, envy. They’re quite unruly, they grow like weeds. Certain basic mathematical ideas never go away either. But others are quite rare. Complex concepts, extreme or subtle emotions. Awe and wonder are harder to find than they once were. Though there—I think those irises are a kind of awe. Once in a while you even see a new one.”
The peace in the garden was inexpressibly calming. It made Quentin never want to leave, and at the same time he supposed that that feeling was itself manifested in vegetable form somewhere in the garden. He wondered where, and whether he’d know it if he saw it.
Julia stooped to one knee—an awesome sight, given the scale of her divine frame.
“Look. This one is very rare.”
Quentin kneeled down too, and a few of the sparkly motes gathered around them helpfully, for illumination. It was a humble little plant, fragile, a fledgling shrub with a few sprays of leaves—a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. As Quentin watched it wobbled, losing heart, and its leaves browned and spotted, but then it caught itself, filled out again and stiffened and even grew an inch. A couple of seedpods sprouted from its branches.
He recognized it. It was the plant he’d seen drawn on the page from the Neitherlands, and again in Rupert’s spell. He’d given up on ever finding it, and now here it was, right in front of him. Julia must have known. All unexpectedly his eyes were full of hot tears, and he sniffled and wiped them away. It was ridiculous, crying over a plant—he hadn’t cried when he killed Ember—but it was like seeing a loyal old friend he’d never even met before. He reached down and touched one leaf, gently.
“This is a feeling that you had, Quentin,” she said. “Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That’s where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.
“Years later you went to Fillory, and the Fillory you found was a much more difficult, complicated place than you expected. The Fillory you dreamed of as a little boy wasn’t real, but in some ways it was better and purer than the real one. That hopeful little boy you once were was a tremendous dreamer. He was clever, too, but if you ever had a special gift, it was that.”
Quentin nodded—he couldn’t quite talk yet. He felt full of love for that little boy he’d once been, innocent and naive, as yet unscuffed and unmarred by everything that was to come. He was such a ridiculous, vulnerable little person, with so many strenuous disappointments and wonders ahead of him. Quentin hadn’t thought of him in years.
He wasn’t that boy anymore, that boy was lost long ago. He’d become a man instead, one of those crude, weather-beaten, shopworn things, and he’d almost forgotten he’d ever been anything else—he’d had to forget, to survive growing up. But now he wished he could reassure that child and take care of him. He wished he could tell him that none of it was going to turn out anything like the way he hoped, but that everything was going to be all right anyway. It was hard to explain, but he would see.
“Someone must be feeling it now,” Quentin said. “What I felt. That’s why it’s green.”
Julia nodded. “Someone somewhere.”
Though even now the plant shrank and dried and died again. Delicately, Julia pinched off one hard seedpod and straightened up.
“Here. Take this with you. I think you should have it.”
It looked like a seedpod from any ordinary plant anywhere, brown and stiff and rattly, but it was unmistakably the one from the page. He’d have to find a way to show it to Hamish. He put it in his pocket. The plant didn’t seem to mind. It would grow again, sooner or later.
“Thank you, Julia.” Quentin dried his eyes and took a last look around. It was almost night. “I think I’m ready to go back now.”
—
They found Alice where they’d left her, but she wasn’t alone now. The others had come through while he was off on the Far Side—Eliot, Janet, Josh, Poppy—and they were standing around talking animatedly about plans to rebuild Castle Whitespire. Penny had stayed at his post in the Neitherlands, but Plum was there. She was off by herself, just looking around and trying to take it all in. She was seeing Fillory for the first time in her life. Quentin caught her eye, and she smiled, but he thought she probably wanted to be alone with it for a few minutes.
He remembered the first time he saw Fillory. He’d cried his eyes out in front of a clock tree. Not much chance of Plum doing that, but still: he’d give her some time.
“No more spinning,” Janet said. “That’s all I ask. The spinning thing was always bullshit. I don’t know how the dwarfs sold them on that in the first place.”
“I hear you,” Eliot said. “I’m not arguing. We’ll take it up with them when they get back. If they come back.”
“But listen, what about the color?” Josh said. “Is that on the table? Because I gotta tell you, the white never did it for me. A bird took a crap on that thing, you could see it a mile away. I know Castle Blackspire was a house of unspeakable evil or whatever, but you have to admit it looked pretty badass.”
“What about the name, though?” Poppy said. “We’d have to change that too.”
“Ooh, good point,” Josh said. “I guess we can’t live in Castle Mauvespire or whatever. Or could we? Hi, Quentin!”
“Hi, guys. Don’t let me interrupt.”
They didn’t. They kept talking, and
he just listened. It was good seeing them all together in Fillory again, it made him happy, but there was a distance between him and them now too: a thin, almost undetectable gap, even between him and Eliot. They never would have admitted it—they would have hotly denied it if he said anything—but the truth was that he wasn’t quite in the club anymore. He would always be part of Fillory, especially now that he’d held the entire world in his temporarily divine hands—it would always have his vast, invisible fingerprints on it, forever, like the paths of spiral labyrinths. But he knew his place too, and he was starting to think it wasn’t here. He’d come back one day, or he hoped he would, but they were the kings and queens now.
He had a different role to play. Maybe he and Alice could be a club. He walked back to where she stood talking with Julia.
“It’s too bad James never made it here,” Quentin said. “He would have liked it. I sometimes wonder what happened to him.”
“Hedge fund, Hoboken. He’ll die in a skiing accident in Vail, age seventy-seven.”
“Ah.”
“Wait,” Alice said. “But does that mean you know how we’re going to die too?”
“Some people’s deaths are harder to predict than others. James is easy. Yours I can’t see. You’re too complicated. Too many twists and turns left to come.”
The first dawn was over, and the sun was up now, and Quentin had the distinct feeling it was getting to be time to go. He never thought he’d leave Fillory again, not of his own free will, but he understood now, with steadily increasing keenness, that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Not yet. He had a bit farther to go.
“Julia,” Quentin said. “Before I leave I should tell you: Plum and I ran into an old friend of yours. She called herself Asmodeus.”
Quentin knew this might be hard for Julia to hear, but he thought she would want to know.
“Asmo,” she said. “Yes. We were friends, back in Murs.”
“When we found Rupert’s suitcase, the one with the spell in it, there was a knife there too. She took it. She said it was a weapon for killing gods. She said to tell you she was going fox hunting.”
“Oh, I know.” Julia’s great goddess’s eyes had become distant. “I know all about it. Did you ever notice how Asmo always had a little more information than she was supposed to? That was me, keeping an eye on her. I didn’t want to be too obvious, but I made sure she found what she needed.”
“What about Reynard?” Quentin said. “Do you know if she caught him?”
“Caught him?” Now she half smiled, though her eyes remained at the same distance. “She gutted him like a furry red fish.”
Quentin hoped that a three-quarters-goddess wasn’t so lofty and divine that she couldn’t enjoy some bloody and well-deserved revenge. He didn’t think she was. He was enjoying it just by association.
Plum joined them. She was ready to talk now.
“This is kind of amazing.” She still couldn’t stop staring at everything; she held up her own hands and wiggled her fingers, as if she were looking at them underwater. “I mean, really amazing.”
“Is it what you expected?”
“It is and it isn’t,” she said. “I mean, so far all I’ve seen is a whole lot of trees and grass. I haven’t gotten to any of the exotic stuff, so it’s not like it’s that different from Earth. Except for you,” she added, to Julia. “You’re different.”
“How do you feel?”
“Floaty, sort of. If that makes any sense. But in a good way. Like something incredibly interesting could possibly happen to me at literally any second.”
“Do you want to stay?” Julia asked.
“I think so, if that’s all right. For a while at least.” Julia inspired a certain instinctive deference even in Plum. “I like it here. I feel whole.”
“I’m sure they can put you up in Whitespire,” Quentin said, “or whatever’s left of it.”
“Actually I thought I might pay a visit to my great-aunt Jane. It’s way past time I got to know that side of the family, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only relative she’s got left. I don’t know, maybe she’ll teach me how to make clock-trees. From what I hear about her I think we might get along.”
Quentin thought she might be right. It was all beginning for Plum—he could almost see the plans forming in her head—but it reminded him again that for him things were ending. A cool breeze blew through the clearing. He wondered if Alice would come with him.
“I keep thinking about something,” Alice said. “If Ember and Umber are dead, and Quentin’s not the god of Fillory anymore, then it must be somebody else. But who? Is it you, Julia?”
“It’s not me,” Julia said.
Alice was right, the power must have gone somewhere, but Quentin didn’t know where either. He’d felt it flow out of him, and he could tell that it knew where it was going, but it hadn’t told him. If not Julia then who? Probably it was one of the talking animals, the way it had been before. The sloth, maybe. The others were listening—they wanted to know too.
“Fillory’s always had a god,” Quentin said. “It has to be someone.”
“Does it?” Julia said. “When you were a god you mended Fillory, Quentin. You don’t remember it, but you did. You did it well. Fillory’s in tune now—it’s perfectly balanced and calibrated. It could run on its own for a few millennia without any trouble at all. Maybe Fillory doesn’t need a god right now. I think this age might just be a godless one.”
A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them and helping or not according to his or her divine mood. There would be nobody to praise them and nobody to condemn them. They would have to do it all themselves.
The cold wind was blowing steadily now, and the temperature was dropping. Quentin hugged himself.
“Fillory will have you, though,” Alice pointed out.
“Oh, I spend most of my time on the Far Side,” Julia said. “I’ll look in now and then. Fillory will have to make do with a part-time three-quarters god, but I have a feeling that will be enough. Things are different now. It’s a new age.”
“A new age.”
It was very different. Very new. Fillory was a land reborn, and he’d been there, he’d assisted at the birth, but he wasn’t going to see it grow up. He looked around: it was all really ending, the great love affair of his youth, and it was as if he were already gone, and he was seeing Fillory without him in it. Somewhere along the way he’d finally outgrown it, the way people always said he would. Long or short, great or terrible, Fillory’s new age would happen without him. He belonged to the last age, the one he’d just ended with two strokes of a sword. This age would have its own heroes. Maybe Plum would be one of them.
Time to go, before he lost his composure in front of everybody. Eliot was staring up at the sky. It was covered over with a thick blanket of cloud.
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “Or whatever the appropriate expression is now. Finally.”
Out of a sky blank and pale as a clean sheet of paper, white snow began to fall. The flakes settled on the warm ground and melted there, like a cool hand on the forehead of a feverish child. The long summer was over at last.
CHAPTER 31
A week later Quentin and Alice stood together in the fourth-floor workroom of Plum’s townhouse in Manhattan. A door to somewhere else stood in front of them. They felt neither comfortable nor uncomfortable with each other, or maybe they felt both at once. They both knew each other and they didn’t. They were old lovers, and they
were practically strangers.
It was just them now. Everybody else had stayed behind in Fillory.
“Are you sure you didn’t want to stay too?” Alice said, frowning at him doubtfully. “I mean, obviously you’re not a king anymore, but I’m sure you could have. Eliot would have loved it, and there’s no Ember and Umber to kick you out anymore, and they never would anyway. Not after everything that happened.”
“Really. I’m sure. This feels right.”
She shook her head.
“I still don’t get it. Back in the day you were the biggest Fillory weenie around.”
“That is true. I was a huge Fillory weenie.”
“I have this awful feeling,” Alice said, “that you left for me. And/or that you left because you’re pissed that you’re not a king anymore.”
“I’m really not pissed about it. At all. It wasn’t that.” He was a bit surprised himself at how untempted he’d been. “Fillory is who I used to be, but I’m somebody different now.”
“I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that. Though it does beg the question, who the hell are you?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
She considered that.
“Maybe the answer’s in there,” she said.
Alice indicated the door. It wasn’t a grand or even particularly unusual-looking door, though it was handsome enough: tall and narrow, made of weathered wood painted a pale green. It was the kind of thing you’d find leaning up against the back wall of a vintage furniture store.
