by Lev Grossman
In the center of the room was a special square table with four chairs—they were thrones, or thronelike, but made by someone who had the knack, pretty rare in Quentin’s experience, of making chairs that looked like thrones but were also reasonably comfortable to sit in. The table was painted with a map of Fillory, sealed under many layers of lacquer, and at each of the four seats, pieced into the wood, were the names of the rulers who’d sat there along with little devices appropriate to said rulers. Quentin got an image of the White Stag, and the vanquished Martin Chatwin, and a deck of playing cards. Eliot’s place was the most elaborately embellished, as befitted the High King. It was a square table, but there wasn’t any question which side was the head.
The chairs didn’t feel comfortable today. The scene of Jollyby’s death was still very clear and present in Quentin’s mind’s eye; in fact it replayed itself more or less constantly, with showings every thirty seconds or so. As Jollyby collapsed Quentin had lurched forward and caught him and eased him to the ground. He groped helplessly at Jollyby’s huge chest, as if he’d hidden his life somewhere about his person, in some secret inside pocket, and if Quentin could only find it he could give it back to him. Janet screamed: a full-throated, uncontrollable horror-movie scream that wouldn’t stop for a full fifteen seconds until Eliot grasped her shoulders and physically turned her away from Jollyby’s corpse.
At the same time the clearing filled with ghostly green light—a bleak, alien spell of Julia’s that Quentin still didn’t get the details of, or even the broad outlines of, that was intended to reveal any bad actors who might be present. It turned her eyes all black, no whites or iris at all. She was the only one who’d thought to go on the attack. But there was no one to attack.
“All right,” Eliot said. “So let’s talk about it. What do we think happened today?”
They looked at each other, feeling jittery and shell-shocked. Quentin wanted to do something, or say something, but he didn’t know what. The truth was, he hadn’t really known Jollyby all that well.
“He was so proud,” he said finally. “He thought he’d saved the day.”
“It had to be the rabbit,” Janet said. Her eyes were red from crying. She swallowed. “Right? Or hare, whatever. That’s what killed him. What else?”
“We can’t assume that. The hare predicted his death but it may not have caused it. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. It’s a logical fallacy.”
If he’d waited even another second he would have realized that Janet wasn’t interested in the Latin name of the logical fallacy that she might or might not have been committing.
“Sorry,” he said. “That’s my Asperger’s flaring up again.”
“So it’s just a coincidence?” she snapped. “That he died right then, right after it said that about death? Maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe the hare doesn’t predict the future, maybe it controls it.”
“Perhaps it does not like being caught,” Julia said.
“I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”
It was five o’clock in the afternoon, their regular meeting time. For the first few months after they’d arrived at Castle Whitespire Eliot had left them to do their own things, on the theory that they’d naturally find their own courses as rulers, and take charge of the things that best suited their various gifts. This had resulted in total chaos, and nothing getting done, and the things that did get done got done twice by two different people in two different ways. So Eliot instituted a daily meeting at which they sorted through whatever business of the realm seemed most pressing as a foursome. The five o’clock meeting was traditionally accompanied by what may have been the most gloriously comprehensive whiskey service ever seen on any of the possibly infinite worlds of the multiverse.
“I told the family we’d take care of the funeral,” Quentin said. “It’s just his parents. He was an only child.”
“I should say something,” Eliot said. “He taught me bugling.”
“Did you know he was a were-lion?” Janet smiled sadly. “True story. It went on a solar calendar—he changed only at equinoxes and solstices. He said it helped him understand the animals. He was hairy everywhere.”
“Please,” Eliot said. “I would give anything to not know how you know that.”
“It helped with lots of things.”
“I have a theory,” Quentin said quickly. “Maybe the Fenwicks did it. They’ve been pissed at us ever since we got here.”
The Fenwicks were the most senior of the several families who were running things at the time when the Brakebills returned to Fillory. They weren’t happy about being kicked out of Castle Whitespire, but they didn’t have the political capital to do much about it. So they satisfied themselves with making mischief around the court.
“Assassination would be a big step up for the Fenwicks,” Eliot said. “They’re pretty small-time.”
“And why would they kill Jollyby?” Janet said. “Everybody loved Jollyby!”
“Maybe they were trying for one of us, not him,” Quentin said. “Maybe one of us was supposed to catch the hare. You know they’re already trying to put it around that we killed him?”
“But how would they have done it?” Eliot said. “You’re saying they sent a rabbit assassin?”
“They could not turn the Seeing Hare,” Julia said. “Unique Beasts do not intervene in the affairs of men.”
“Maybe it wasn’t the Seeing Hare at all, maybe it was a person in hare form. A were-hare. Look, I don’t know!”
Quentin rubbed his temples. If only they’d hunted that stupid lizard instead. He was annoyed at himself for forgetting what Fillory was like. He’d let himself believe that things were all better after Alice had killed Martin Chatwin, no more death and despair and disillusionment and whatever else the hare had said. But there was more. It wasn’t like the books. There was always more. Et in Arcadia ego.
And even though he knew it was crazy, in a childishly elegant way, he couldn’t escape a vague feeling that Jollyby’s death was his fault, that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been tempted by that adventure. Or maybe he wasn’t tempted enough? What were the rules? Maybe he should have gone into the clearing after all. Maybe Jollyby’s death had been meant for him. He was supposed to go into the meadow and die there, but he didn’t, so Jollyby had to instead.
“Maybe there isn’t an explanation,” he said out loud. “Maybe it’s just a mystery. Just another crazy stop on Fillory’s magical mystery tour. No reason for it, it just happened. You can’t explain it.”
This didn’t satisfy Eliot. He was still Eliot, the languid lush of Brakebills, but becoming High King had uncovered a dismayingly rigorous streak in him.
“We can’t have unexplained deaths in the kingdom,” he said. “It won’t do.” He cleared his throat. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll put the fear of Ember into the Fenwicks, just in case. It won’t take much. They’re a bunch of pussy dandies. And I say that as a pussy dandy myself.”
“And if that doesn’t work?” Janet said.
“Then, Janet, you’ll go lean on the Lorians.” That was Fillory’s neighbor to the north. Janet was in charge of relations with foreign powers—Quentin called her Fillory Clinton. “They’re always behind everything bad in the books. Maybe they were trying to decapitate the leadership. Stupid pseudo-Viking fuckers. Now for Christ’s sake let’s talk about something else for a while.”
But they had nothing else to talk about, so they lapsed into silence. Nobody was especially happy with Eliot’s plan, least of all Eliot, but they didn’t have a better one, or even a worse one. Six hours after the fact Julia’s eyes were still flooded with black from the spell she’d cast in the forest. The effect was disconcerting. She had no pupils. He wondered what she could see that they couldn’t.
Eliot shuffled his notes, looking for another item of business, but business was in short supply these days.<
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“It is time,” Julia said. “We must go to the window.”
Every day after the afternoon meeting they went out on the balcony and waved to the people.
“Damn it,” Eliot said. “All right.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t today,” Janet said. “It feels wrong.”
Quentin knew what she meant. The thought of standing out there on the narrow balcony, frozen smiles on their faces, princess-waving at the Fillorians who gathered for the daily ritual, felt a little off. Still.
“We should to do it,” he said. “Today of all days.”
“We’re accepting congratulations for doing nothing.”
“We’re reassuring the people of continuity in the face of tragedy.”
They filed out onto the narrow balcony. In the castle courtyard far below, at the bottom of a vertiginous drop, a few hundred Fillorians had gathered. From this height they looked unreal, like dolls. Quentin waved.
“I wish we could do something more for them,” he said.
“What do you want to do?” Eliot said. “We’re the kings and queens of a magic utopia.”
Cheers drifted up from far below, faintly. The sound was tinny and far away—it had the audio quality of a musical greeting card.
“Some progressive reforms? I want to help somebody with something. If I were a Fillorian I would depose me as an aristocratic parasite.”
When Quentin and the others took the thrones, they hadn’t known exactly what to expect. The details of what was involved were vague—there would be some ceremonial duties, Quentin supposed, and presumably a lead role in policy making, some responsibility for the welfare of the nation they ruled. But the truth was that there just wasn’t much actual work to do.
The weird thing was that Quentin missed it. He’d expected Fillory to be something like medieval England, because it looked like medieval England, at least on casual inspection. He figured he’d just use European history, to the extent that he remembered it, as a crib sheet. He would pursue the standard enlightened humanitarian program, nothing extraordinary, greatest hits only, and go down in history as a force for good.
But Fillory wasn’t England. For one thing the population was tiny—there couldn’t have been more than ten thousand humans in the whole country, plus that many talking animals and dwarves and spirits and giants and such. So he and the other monarchs—or tetrarchs, whatever—were more like small-town mayors. For another, while magic was very real on Earth, Fillory was magical. There was a difference. Magic was part of the ecosystem. It was in the weather and the oceans and the soil, which was wildly fertile. If you wanted your crops to fail you had to work pretty hard at it.
Fillory was a land of hyperabundance. Anything that needed making could be gotten from the dwarves, sooner or later, and they weren’t an oppressed industrial proletariat, they actually enjoyed making things. Unless you were an actively despicable tyrant, the way Martin Chatwin had been, there were just too many resources and too few people to create anything much in the way of civil strife. The only shortage that the Fillorian economy suffered from was a chronic shortage of shortages.
As a result whenever any of the Brakebills—as they were called, even though Julia had never even been to Brakebills, as she wasn’t slow to point out—tried to get serious about something, there turned out not to be much to be serious about. It was all ritual and pomp and circumstance. Even money was just for show. It was toy money. Monopoly money. The others had all but given up on trying to make themselves useful, but Quentin couldn’t quite let it go. Maybe that was what had been nagging at him, as he stood on the edge of that meadow in the woods. There must be something real somewhere out there, but he could never quite seem to get his hands on it.
“All right,” he said. “What next?”
“Well,” Eliot said, as they filed back inside. “There is this situation with the Outer Island.”
“The where?”
“The Outer Island.” He picked up some royal-looking documents. “That’s what it says. I’m king of it, and even I don’t know where it is.”
Janet snorted. “Outer is off the east coast. Way off, a couple of days’ sail. God, I can’t believe they even let you be king. It’s the easternmost point in the Fillorian Empire. I think.”
Eliot peered at the map painted on the table. “I don’t see it.”
Quentin studied the map too. On his first visit to Fillory he’d sailed deep into the Western Sea, on the other side of the Fillorian continent, but his knowledge of the east was pretty sketchy.
“It’s not big enough.” She pointed to Julia’s lap. “That’s where it would be if we had a bigger table.”
Quentin tried to imagine it: a little slip of white tropical sand, embellished with a decorative palm tree, embedded in an ocean of blue-green calm.
“Have you been there?” Eliot said.
“No one’s ever been there. It’s just a dot on the map. Somebody started a fishing colony there after his ship collided with it like a million years ago. Why are we talking about the Outer Island?”
Eliot went back to his papers. “Looks like they haven’t paid their taxes in a couple of years.”
“So?” Janet said. “Probably that’s because they don’t have any money.”
“Send them a telegram,” Quentin said. “DEAR OUTER ISLANDERS STOP SEND MONEY STOP IF YOU HAVE NO MONEY THEN DO NOT SEND MONEY STOP.”
The meeting flagged while Eliot and Janet tried to outdo each other in composing the most useless possible telegram to the Outer Islanders.
“All right,” Eliot said. The turning tower had rotated to where the flaming Fillorian sunset lit up the sky behind him. Ladders of pink cloud were stacked up above his shoulders. “I’ll lean on the Fenwicks about Jollyby. Janet will speak to the Lorians.” He waved vaguely. “And somebody will do something about the Outer Island. Who wants scotch?”
“I’ll go,” Quentin said.
“It’s just there on the sideboard.”
“No, I mean to the Outer Island. I’ll go there. I’ll see about the taxes.”
“What?” Eliot sounded annoyed by the idea. “Why? It’s the ass end of nowhere. And anyway, it’s a treasury matter. We’ll send an emissary. That’s what emissaries are for.”
“Send me instead.”
Quentin couldn’t have said what the impulse was exactly, he just knew that he had to do something. He thought of the circular meadow and the broken clock-tree and the film clip of Jollyby dying started up again. What was the point of all this when you could just drop dead, just like that? That’s what he wanted to know. What was even the fucking point?
“You know,” Janet said, “we’re not invading it. We don’t need to send a king to the Outer Island. They haven’t paid their taxes, which by the way is like eight fish. They’re not exactly powering the whole economy.”
“I’ll be back before you know it.” He could already tell he’d gotten it right. The tension inside him broke as soon as he said it. Relief was flooding through him, at what he didn’t even know. “Who knows, maybe I’ll learn something.”
This would be his quest: collecting taxes from a bunch of backwater yokels. He had skipped the adventure of the broken tree, and that was fine. He would have this one instead.
“Could look weak, with the Jollyby thing.” Eliot fingered his royal chin. “You taking off at the first sign of trouble.”
“I’m a king. It’s not like they’re going to not re-elect me.”
“Wait,” Janet said. “You didn’t kill Jollyby, did you? Is that what this is about?”
“Janet!” Eliot said.
“No, really. It would all fit together—”
“I didn’t kill Jollyby,” Quentin said.
“All right. Fine. Great.” Eliot ticked the item off on his agenda. “Outer Island, check. That’s it then.”
“Well, I hope you’re not going alone,” Janet said. “God knows what they’re like out there. It could be Captain Cook all over again.”
Eliot and Janet both stared at him. How long had it been since he surprised those two? Or anybody? He must be on to something. He smiled at Julia, and she looked back at him, though with her all-black pupils her expression was unreadable.
“Of course I am,” was all she said.
That night Eliot paid Quentin a visit in his bedroom.
When he first found it the room had been stuffed with an appalling amount of hideous quasi-medieval junk. It had been literally centuries since all four of Whitespire’s thrones had been filled at the same time, and in the meantime the extra royal suites had been invaded and occupied by creeping armies of superfluous candelabras, defunct chandeliers listing and deflated like beached jellyfish, unplayable musical instruments, unreturnable diplomatic gifts, chairs and tables so piteously ornamental they would break if you looked at them, or even if you didn’t, dead animals ruthlessly stuffed in the very act of begging for mercy, urns and ewers and other even less easily identifiable vessels that you didn’t know whether to drink out of or go to the bathroom in.
Quentin had had the room cleared out to the bare walls. Everything must go. He left the bed, one table, two chairs, a few of the better rugs, and some pleasing and/or politically expedient tapestries, that was all. He liked one tapestry in particular that depicted a marvelously appointed griffin frozen in the act of putting a company of foot soldiers to flight. It was supposed to symbolize the triumph of some group of long-dead people over some other group of long-dead people whom nobody had liked, but for some reason the griffin had cocked its head to one side in the midst of its rampage and was gazing directly out of its woven universe at the viewer as if to say, yes, granted, I’m good at this. But is it really the best use of my time?
When it was finally empty the room had grown by three times its size. It could breathe again. You could think in it. It turned out to be about as big as a basketball court, with a smooth stone floor, towering timbered ceilings where light got lost in the upper reaches and made interesting shadows, and soaring Gothic lead-glass windows a few little panels of which actually opened. It was so gloriously still and empty that when you scuffed your foot on the stone it echoed. It had the kind of hushed stillness that on Earth you saw only from a distance, on the other side of a velvet rope. It was the stillness of a closed museum, or a cathedral at night.
