The Magician King

by Lev Grossman

  It was an oasis of bright yellow umbrellas. Quentin felt like he was floating. He’d never been through so many portals in one day, and it was disorienting. They’d already ordered before they realized they had no euros.

  “Fuck it,” Quentin said. “I woke up in Fillory this morning, or maybe it was yesterday morning, either way I need a macchiato. Why are we in Venice?”

  “Warren gave me an address. Someone who might be able to help us—a fixer, kind of. He can get things. Maybe he can get us a button.”

  “So that’s the plan. Good. I like it.” He was up for whatever as long as coffee was involved.

  “Great. After that we can try your amazing plan which you do not have.”

  They sipped their coffee in silence. Dreamily Quentin studied the chaotic surface of his macchiato. They hadn’t drawn a milky leaf on it the way they would have in America. Pigeons strutted in between the café tables, picking up unspeakably soiled crumbs, their clawed toes looking livid and pink this close up. Sunlight washed over it all. The light in Venice was like the light in Fillory: stone-light.

  The world had changed again. It wasn’t as neatly divided as he remembered it, between the magical and the non-magical. There was this grubby, anarchical in-between now. He didn’t much care for it; it was chaotic and unglamorous and he didn’t know the rules. Probably Julia didn’t like it either, he reflected, but she hadn’t gotten to choose, not the way he did.

  Well, his world hadn’t done them any good. They would go rooting around in hers for a while.

  “So who was that Warren guy?” Quentin said. “Seems like you guys have some history.”

  “Warren is nobody. He knows a little magic, so he hangs around the college and tries to impress undergraduates and teach them some things so he can bang them.”

  “Really.”

  “Really.”

  “What happened to him at the end there? With his arm—what was that?”

  “Warren is not human. He is something else, wood spirit of some kind. He just has a thing for humans. When he gets upset he cannot keep up the disguise.”

  “So did Warren ‘bang’ you?” he said.

  Who knew where it came from. It just bubbled up out of nowhere: a flash of jealousy, sour and hot like acid reflux. He didn’t see it coming. He’d had a lot to absorb in one day, or night, whatever it had just been, and it was just a little too much too fast. It spilled over.

  Julia leaned across the table and slapped Quentin. She only did it once, but she did it hard.

  “You have no idea what I had to do to get what was handed to you on a plate,” she hissed. “And yeah, I banged Warren. I did a lot worse things too.”

  You could almost see the waves of anger coming off her, like fumes off gasoline. Quentin touched his cheek where she’d hit him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Not sorry enough.”

  A few people looked over, but just a few. It was Italy after all. People probably hit each other all the time.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was another year and a half before Julia saw Quentin again. He’d become a hard boy to find. He didn’t seem to have a cell phone, or even a phone, or even an e-mail address. His parents talked in vaguenesses. She wasn’t convinced that even they knew how to find him. But she knew how to find them, and he had to come back home once in a while, like a dog to its vomit. Quentin wasn’t close to his parents, but he wasn’t the type to cut them off all the way. Frankly he wouldn’t have the stones for it.

  Julia, though. Julia had the stones for it. She was a flight risk, no strong ties to the community. When she heard that the Coldwaters had sold up and moved to Massachusetts, she pulled up stakes and followed them. Even a suburban cultural sump like Chesterton had Internet connections and temp agencies—no, especially a suburban cultural sump like Chesterton—and that was all she needed to get by. She rented a room over a garage from a retired guy with a janitor mustache who probably had a Web cam hidden in the bathroom. She bought a beat-up Honda Civic with a wired-shut trunk.

  She didn’t hate Quentin. That wasn’t it. Quentin was fine, he was just in the way. He had gotten it so easy, and she had it so hard, and why? There was no good reason. He passed a test, and she failed it. That was a judgment on the test, not on her, but now her life was a waking nightmare, and he had everything he ever wanted. He was living a fantasy. Her fantasy. She wanted it back.

  Or not even that. She wasn’t going to take anything away from him. She just needed him to confirm that Brakebills was real, and to open a chink in the wall of the secret garden just wide enough for her to squeeze through. He was her man on the inside. Though he didn’t know it yet.

  So here’s how it worked: every morning before work she drove past the Coldwaters’ house. Every night around nine o’clock she drove by again, and got out and quietly walked the perimeter of the lawn, looking for traces of her quarry. A McMansion like that, all double-glazed picture windows, broadcast the goings-on inside it out into the night like a drive-in movie. It was summer again, and the summer nights smelled like murdered grass and sounded like crickets fucking. At first all she learned was that Mrs. Coldwater was a predictable but technically sound amateur painter in a sadly dated Pop art mode, and that Mr. Coldwater had a weakness for porn and crying jags.

  It wasn’t till September that the beast showed himself.

  Quentin had changed: he’d always been lanky, but now he looked like a skeleton. His cheeks were sunken, his cheekbones jagged. His clothes hung on him. His hair—cut your fucking hair already, you’re not Alan Rickman—was lank.

  He looked like shit. Poor baby. Actually what he looked like was Julia.

  She didn’t approach him right away. She had to psych herself up for it. Now that she had him where she wanted him, she was suddenly afraid to touch him. She quit taking temp assignments and went fulltime on Quentin. But she stayed under the radar.

  Around eleven every morning she watched him slam out of the house in a brown study and whiz into town on a hilariously antique white tenspeed. She followed him at a distance. Good thing he was completely oblivious and self-obsessed or he would have noticed a red Honda with a death rattle shadowing his every move. There he was, the living, breathing forensic trace of everything she’d ever wanted. If he couldn’t help her, or wouldn’t, it would be over. She’d have given two years of her life for nothing. The fear of finding out paralyzed her, but every day she waited the risk that he would vanish again grew and grew. She would be back to square zero.

  All Julia could think was that if it came right down to it she would sleep with him. She knew how he felt about her. He would do anything to sleep with her. It was the nuclear option, but it would work. No risk. It was her ace in the hole. So to speak.

  Who knows, it might not even be so bad. Different, doubtless, from James’s smartly paced gymnastic exhibitions. She didn’t even know anymore why she was so determined not to like Quentin. Maybe he’d been right, maybe he was the one for her after all. It was hard to know anymore, it was tangled up with everything else, and she was out of practice at having feelings for other people. At this point it had been a long time since anybody had even touched her. Not since the zookeeper in the bathroom at the party, and that was mostly just spastic overclothes pawing, entirely clinical in its intent. The patient struggling under the knife, while she performed the operation. She felt out of touch with her body, with pleasure of any kind. Doctor Julia noted, purely for the record, that it was scary how unloving she’d become, and how unlovable. She’d locked all that stuff away and melted down the key for scrap.

  It was in a cemetery behind a church, whither Quentin had retired for more sulking, that she sprang the trap. Looking back on it she was proud of herself. She could have lost it but she didn’t. She got it out. She said her piece, and hung on to her pride, and showed him that she was every bit as good as he was. She made the case. She even showed him the spell, the one with the rainbow trails, which she’d gotten down pat over
the previous six months. Even those murderous hand positions, even the one with the thumbs, she had hit with icy precision. She’d never shown it to anybody before, and it felt great to finally unveil it for an audience. She took that beach like a goddamned Marine.

  And when it came down to the nuclear option, when the red phone rang in the war room, Julia hadn’t flinched. Oh, no. She took that call. If that’s what it took, she would go there, sister.

  But here was the thing: he wouldn’t. She hadn’t counted on that. She’d offered, as plainly as she knew how. She’d run herself through with the hook and dangled herself before him, pink and wriggling, but he hadn’t taken the bait. Julia knew she’d let herself go a bit lookswise, but still. Come on. It didn’t add up.

  The problem wasn’t her, it was him. Something or someone had gotten to him. He wasn’t the Quentin she remembered. Funny: she’d almost forgotten people could change. Time had stopped for her the day she’d gotten her social studies paper back from Mr. Karras, but outside the dark, musty interior of her room, time had gone on hurtling forward. And in that time Quentin Makepeace Coldwater had managed to get a boner for somebody else besides Julia.

  Well, good for him.

  When he left she lay down on the cold, soft, wet grass of the graveyard. It rained on her and she let it. It wasn’t that she was wrong. She’d been right. He’d confirmed everything that she’d ever suspected, about Brakebills and magic and everything else. It was all real, and it was extraordinary. It was everything she wanted it to be. Her theoretical work had been admirably rigorous, and she had been rewarded with full experimental validation.

  It was just that there was nothing he could do for her. It was all real—it wasn’t a dream or a psychotic hallucination—but they weren’t going to let her have it. There was a place out there that was so perfect and magical that it had made even Quentin happy. There wasn’t just magic there, there was love too. Quentin was in love. But Julia wasn’t. She was out in the cold. Hogwarts was fully subscribed, and her eligibility had lapsed. Hagrid’s motorcycle would never rumble outside her front door. No creamy-enveloped letters would ever come flooding down her chimney.

  She lay there thinking, on the rich, wet graveyard grass, before the tomb of some random parishioner—Beloved Son, Husband, Father—and what she thought was this: she’d been right about almost everything. She’d gotten nearly full marks. A minus again. Blew only one question.

  Here’s the one thing I got wrong, she thought. I thought that they could never wear me down.

  CHAPTER 13

  Shoplifting a city map from a tourist trap wasn’t a particularly spiritually enlarging activity—where was Benedict when you needed him?—and the magic involved was trivial. But it gave Quentin enough time to pull himself together. He wished he hadn’t said that about Warren. He wished he weren’t so tired. And so stupid. He wished he could either fall back in love with Julia or get over her all the way. Maybe he was stuck in between forever, like the space between the portals. Food for the trolls.

  Quentin took a deep breath. He was surprised at himself. He knew that he was being weird and kind of a dick. So what if she’d slept with Warren and whoever and whatever else? She didn’t owe him anything. God knows he was in no position to judge her. It was partly his fault that she had to do what she did.

  He could have used someone stable to hang on to right now, but as it happened, through no particular fault of her own, Julia was not a person one could hang on to. She needed one of those warning decals that they put on airplane parts: NO STEP. He would have to be that person, the stable, reliable person, the one who had his shit together, for both of them. They could either do this together or separately, except they had to do this together, because he was out of leads and she was very nearly out of her mind. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous role—it wasn’t the Bingle role—but it was his role. It was time he accepted it.

  Though so far she’d been a lot more help than he had. When he got back to the table at the café she had undergone yet another unexpected transformation. She was smiling.

  “You look happy.” He sat down. “Maybe you should slap me more often.”

  “Maybe I should,” she said. She sipped her coffee. “This is good.”

  “The coffee.”

  “I had forgotten how good it can be.” She turned her pale face into the light and closed her eyes, like a cat sunning herself. “Did you ever miss it? Being here?”

  “I honestly never did.”

  “Me neither. Not until now. I had forgotten.”

  Warren had written the address on a blue Post-it, which Julia had kept clutched in her fist all the way from Richmond. Now they pored over the city map together, like all the other tourists in the square were doing, until they’d figured out where they were and where they were going. Their destination was in a neighborhood called Dorsoduro, on a street a block off the Grand Canal. Not far. A bridge crossing away.

  Quentin guessed it was probably only around nine or ten at night by their internal clocks, but it was midafternoon in Venice, and he felt like they’d been up for days. It was hot in the square but cool up on the bridge, in the seaborne jet stream that blew down the Grand Canal, so they stopped there to orient themselves. There were no cars in Venice, or not in this part anyway. The bridge was a wooden footbridge, disappointingly modern. It would be a hundred years at least until it started looking like it belonged in Venice.

  Beneath them oily black gondolas poled along, spinning off miniature spiral whirlpools after them, and sturdy vaporetti chugged, and long thin barges glided, roiling the green water behind them into milky smoothness. Debauched, listing palazzi lined the canal, all tiles and terraces and colonnades. Venice was the only city he’d ever seen that looked the same in real life as it did in pictures. It was consoling that something in this world met expectations. The one factoid Quentin remembered about the Grand Canal was that after Byron was done screwing his mistresses he used to like to swim home along it, carrying a lighted torch in one hand so that boats wouldn’t run him over.

  He wondered what was happening in Fillory. Would they wait around on After Island for them? Hold an investigation? Put the locals to the sword? Or would they go back to Whitespire? The truth was, whatever was going to happen had probably already happened. Weeks could have gone by already, or years, you never knew how the time difference would work. He could feel Fillory floating away from him, into its future, leaving him behind. Hell must have broken loose when they vanished, but life would go on, they’d get back to normal. Right now Janet and Eliot could be growing old without him. They’d miss him but they’d live. Quentin, king of Fillory, needed Fillory more than Fillory needed him.

  In Dorsoduro the streets were narrow and quiet. It was less like a stage set and more like a real city than the part they’d come from—people actually seemed to live and work here, they weren’t just putting on a show for the tourists. As much as Quentin wanted to hurry through it, to get on with getting back to Fillory, even he couldn’t ignore how conspicuously beautiful Venice was. People had been living here for what, a thousand years? More? God only knew whose crazy idea it was to build a city in the middle of a lagoon, but you couldn’t argue with the results. Everything was made of old brick and stone, with carved blocks of even older stone stuck into the walls at random intervals as ornaments. Old windows had been bricked up, and then new windows had been bashed through the brick, affording glimpses of silent, secret courtyards. Every time they thought they’d left the sea behind they’d stumble on it again—a dark angular vein of water branching in between the buildings, lined on both sides with bright-colored skiffs.

  Just being here made Quentin feel better. It was more suitable for a king and a queen than suburban Boston. He didn’t know yet whether they were getting any closer to Fillory, but he felt closer.

  Julia kept her pace brisk and her eyes fixed straight ahead. It should have been a short walk, ten minutes at most, but the street plan was so chaotic they had to st
op at literally every corner to reorient themselves. They took turns snatching the map from each other and getting lost and having it snatched back. Only about one building in five had a number on it, and the numbers didn’t even seem to be in sequential order. It was a city built for wandering, which was all well and good unless you had urgent business at one very particular location.

  Finally they stopped at a wooden door, painted brown, that was barely as tall as they were. It was an open question whether they were on the right street, but if nothing else the door had the right number on a little stone plaque above it. It had a tiny window set in it, which had been painted over. There was no knob.

  Quentin put his hand on the warm stone wall next to it. He counted a rhythmic sequence under his breath, and a thick fabric of lines the deep orange of a heating filament flashed for a minute over the old stone.

  “The wards on this place are ironclad,” he said. “If your fixer doesn’t live here, whoever does knows what they’re doing.”

  Either they were about to improve their situation or significantly worsen it. There being no buzzer, Quentin knocked. The door didn’t resonate under his knuckles—there could have been a solid mile of rock behind it. But the window swung open promptly.

  “Sì,” Darkness inside.

  “We’d like to talk to your boss,” Quentin said.

  The window shut immediately. He looked at Julia and shrugged. What else was he supposed to say? She looked back at him impassively from behind her black glasses. Quentin wanted to walk away. He wanted to go back, but there was no back to go to. The only way out was through. Onward and downward.

  The street was silent. It was narrow, practically an alley, with buildings going up four stories on either side. Nothing happened. After five minutes Quentin muttered some words in Icelandic and held his palm an inch away from the door. He felt the wall around it, which was in the shade but still warm.