by Lev Grossman
She woke up early. It was midsummer, but the heat hadn’t come up yet. She haunted the lumpy, un-landscaped grounds for an hour, startling weird French bugs out of her way, studying the tiny white snails that were everywhere, getting her shoes soaked with dew, waiting for everybody else to wake up. It was like morning on her birthday. Superstitiously Julia avoided the dining room while the others ate breakfast. At 7:55 she snatched a roll out of the kitchen and gnawed it nervously on her way over to the Library.
The day she’d stepped into that elevator in the library in Brooklyn, she’d dropped into the void. It might as well have been an empty shaft. She’d been falling ever since. But it was almost over. She was about to touch solid ground again. She could barely even remember what it felt like to be where she belonged, on the same side of the glass as everybody else.
She’d tried the door to the Library once before but it hadn’t opened for her, and she hadn’t bothered trying to hack the locking charm. She was tired of picking locks. She stood in front of the door for a minute, plucking at the fabric of her summer dress, watching the second hand of the clock in the hall.
At the appointed hour the door opened by itself. Julia lowered her chin and went inside.
They were all there, sitting around a long worktable. The Library was clearly the crowning achievement of whoever had renovated the Murs farmhouse. They’d hollowed out the space completely, cut away three floors and exposed the roof beams thirty feet up. Morning sunlight lasered in through tall thin windows. Bookshelves soared along the walls, all the way up, which would have been totally impractical except for some tasteful oak platforms that floated magically alongside them, ready to hoist the browser up to whatever level he or she wanted to be at.
They stopped talking when she came in. Nine faces turned to look up at her. Some of them had books and folders of notes in front of them. They could have been a corporate board meeting, if the corporation were Random Genius Freaks LLC. Pouncy sat at the head of the table. There was an open seat at the foot.
She pulled out the chair and sat down, almost demurely. Why weren’t they talking? They just looked at her calmly, like a parole board.
So. She’d met their expectations. It was time they met hers. Cards on the table. Show me whatcha got. Read ’em and weep.
“All right,” she said. “So what are we doing?”
“What would you like to do?”
It wasn’t Pouncy who spoke, it was Gummidgy. You tell me, Julia wanted to say. You’re the pyschic. She was built like a model, tall and skinny, though her face was too long and severe to be really beautiful. Julia couldn’t place her ethnicity. Persian?
“Whatever comes next. Whatever comes after level two hundred fifty. Two hundred fifty-one. I’m ready.”
“What makes you think there is a level two hundred fifty-one?”
Her eyes narrowed. “The fact that there were levels one through two hundred fifty?”
“There is no level two hundred fifty-one.”
Julia looked at Pouncy, Failstaff, Asmodeus. They looked back at her patiently. Asmo nodded.
“How can there be no level two hundred fifty-one?”
“There’s nothing after two hundred fifty,” Pouncy said. “Oh, you can craft more spells. We do it all the time. But at this point you have all the building blocks, all the basic components, that you’re going to have. The rest is just permutations. After two hundred fifty you’re just rearranging base pairs on the double helix. The power levels plateau.”
Julia had a weightless, floating feeling. Not a bad feeling, but like she’d been cut adrift. So this was it. As mysteries went it wasn’t exactly a showstopper.
“That’s it? That’s all there is?”
“That’s it. You’re done leveling.”
Well. You could do a lot with what she had. She already had some ideas about spells involving extreme temperatures, extreme states of matter. Plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, that sort of thing. She didn’t think they’d ever been tried. Maybe Pouncy would front her some money for equipment.
“So that’s what you’re doing here. Running the permutations.”
“No. That’s not what we’re doing.”
“Though we have run a hell of a lot of permutations,” Asmo put in.
She took over the narrating.
“Once we realized that the way forward consisted of an indefinite series of incremental advances, we began to wonder if there was an alternative to that. A way to break the cycle. To take the power curve nonlinear.”
“Nonlinear,” Julia said slowly. “You want to find a magical singularity, kind of thing.”
“Exactly!” Asmodeus grinned her wide Cheshire grin at Pouncy, as if to say, see? I told you she’d get it. “A singularity. An advance so radical that it takes us into another league, power-wise. Exponentially bigger energies.”
“We think there’s more to magic than what we’ve seen so far,” Pouncy said. “A lot more. We think we’re just dicking around in the minors while there’s power sources out there that could put us in the bigs. If we could just access the right power grid.”
“So that’s what you’re doing here. Trying to get on the big power grid.”
She realized she was repeating their words while her mind tried to take in what they meant. So there was more to it. Funny, she had almost been relieved for a minute there, when she thought that that was it, that was all there was.
She’d crammed a lifetime’s worth of magical study into the last four years, and the rest of her, the non-magical parts, was feeling somewhat neglected. Empty. She wouldn’t have minded spending some time filling in those blanks in a big French farmhouse with some close friends. The big energies could wait. Or they could have. But her close friends didn’t want to wait. And Julia would go with them, because—and it was so painfully tender to say it, even to herself, that she didn’t say it, even to herself—she loved them. They were what she had instead of a family. So excelsior. Onward and upward.
“That’s what we’re doing here.” Pouncy sat back and laced his hands behind his head. It was early, but there were already dark patches of sweat under his arms. “Unless you have any better ideas.”
Julia shook her head. Everybody was watching her.
“All right,” she said. “Well, show me what you’ve got so far.”
Read ’em and weep.
CHAPTER 21
They carried Benedict’s body up the gangplank, all together, Quentin and Josh and Eliot, struggling awkwardly with his heavy ragdoll limbs. Death seemed to have made his lanky adolescent body strangely dense. Slipping on the wet wood, they had none of the gravitas that would have been appropriate for pallbearers. Nobody had worked up the courage to take the arrow out of his throat, and it pointed crazily in all directions.
Once Benedict was laid out on the deck Quentin went and got a blanket from his cabin and spread it over the body. His side was throbbing hotly, in sync with his pulse. Good. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to feel pain.
It was Bingle who drew the arrow expertly out of Benedict’s throat; he had to snap it in half to get it out, because one end was barbed and the other feathered. It began to rain steadily, the drops tapping and splashing on the deck and on Benedict’s pale unflinching face. They moved the body inside, into the surgery, although there was no surgery to be done.
“We’re going,” Quentin said aloud, to nobody and everybody.
“Quentin,” Eliot said. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I don’t want to stay here. We’ve got a good wind. We should go.”
Eliot was officially in charge, but Quentin didn’t care. This was his ship first and he didn’t want to spend another night on this island. It’s all fun and games till somebody gets an arrow through the throat.
“What about the prisoners?” somebody said.
“Who cares? Leave them here.”
“But where are we going to go?” Eliot said, reasonably.
“I don’t know! I j
ust don’t want to stay here! Do you?”
Eliot had to admit he didn’t especially want to stay either.
There was no way Quentin was going to bed. Benedict wasn’t going to get warm tonight, so how could he? He was going to get the ship ready. Looking down at Benedict’s blank, unfeeling face, Quentin was almost angry at him for dying. Things had been going so well. But that was being a hero, wasn’t it? For every hero, don’t legions of foot soldiers have to die in the background? It was a matter of numbers, like the corpse in the castle said. Just work out the sums.
So Quentin, the Magician King, leader of men, helped corral the rest of the defeated soldiers and got the crew watering and provisioning the Muntjac, even if it was the middle of the night and pissing rain. Somebody else would have to plot the course, since Benedict was dead, but that wasn’t a problem because they didn’t know where they were going. It didn’t matter. He didn’t understand what they were doing anymore. It was obviously a very effective way to procure magic keys, but how was that going to help Julia? Or rebuild the Neitherlands? Or calm the clock-trees? What could the keys possibly be good for that was worth this—Benedict curled up on the dock like a little boy trying to get warm?
They all worked together through the night, whey-faced and industrious. Julia sat with the corpse, slowly reassuming her human form, her mourning dress for once entirely appropriate for the occasion. Also fully in character was Bingle, whose haunted demeanor had darkened to funereal. He spent the night by himself haunting the ship’s bow, hunched in on himself in his cloak like a hurt bird.
Once Quentin went forward to see if he was all right, but he heard Bingle mumble to himself:
“Not again. I must go where I can do no further harm.”
And Quentin thought, maybe I’ll leave him to work that out by himself.
The sky was paling through the rain clouds when Quentin went out alone into the square in front of the castle to finish the job. He was chilled through and bone tired. He felt like the living corpse in the library. He wasn’t the best person for this job, but it was his job to do. He got down on one knee in front of the little obelisk with a hammer and a chisel, which he’d borrowed from the ship’s carpenter.
Probably this could be done by magic, except he couldn’t remember how just now, and he didn’t want to do it by magic anyway. He wanted to feel it. He set the point of the chisel against the stone and started chipping. When he was done there were two words there, ragged but legible:
BENEDICT ISLAND
Back on the ship he gave the order—eastward ho—though everybody knew what the order was before he gave it. Then he went below. Quentin heard the anchor being weighed. The world tilted and came unmoored, and he was finally gone.
The Muntjac ran fast ahead of a freezing gale. It drove them across vast, island-less stretches of ocean, punishing the sails, which meekly accepted the abuse and ran even faster. Enormous emerald-green swells urged them onward from below, rising up under them and then rolling on ahead of them, as if even the sea had had enough of them and couldn’t wait for this to be over. Eliot had made the voyage out sound like nonstop riches and wonders, islands of mystery twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five, but now the ocean was a complete blank, scrubbed mercifully free of anything remotely fantastical. A clean miss.
Maybe the islands were moving out of their way. They had become untouchable. They didn’t see land once—it was as if they were taking a grand leap outward into nothingness.
The only miracle that happened, happened on board. It was a small miracle, but it was a real one. Two nights after Benedict died, Poppy came to Quentin’s cabin to say she was sorry about what had happened and to see how he was. She didn’t leave till the next morning.
It was a strange time to have something nice happen. It was the wrong time, it wasn’t appropriate, but maybe it was the only time it could have happened. Their emotions were raw and close to the surface. Quentin was surprised to say the least, and one of the things that surprised him was how much he wanted her. Poppy was pretty, and Poppy was smart, at least as smart as Quentin, probably more so. And she was kind, and funny when she let her guard down a little, and her long legs were as absolutely wondrous as anything Quentin had ever seen in this or any world.
But beyond that Poppy had something Quentin wanted almost as badly as the wordless physical forgetting of sex—which would have been enough, God knows, it really would—and that was a sense of perspective. She wasn’t completely caught up in the grand myths of quests and adventures and whatever else. Deep down she didn’t especially give a shit about Fillory. She was a tourist here. Fillory wasn’t her home, and it wasn’t the repository of all her childhood hopes and dreams. It was just a place, and she was just passing through it. It was a relief to not take Fillory too seriously for a while. When he’d imagined something like this might happen, he’d always imagined it with Julia. But Julia didn’t need him, not this way. And when it came right down to it, the person he needed wasn’t Julia either.
Quentin hadn’t been celibate since Alice died, but he hadn’t exactly been cutting a swath either. The problem with sleeping with people who weren’t Alice was that somehow it made Alice even more gone. It meant really, truly knowing and admitting that she was never coming back. With Poppy he let himself know it a little more, and that should have made it hurt more, but strangely it made it hurt a little less.
“Why don’t you stay?” he said one day, while they were eating lunch in his cabin, cross-legged on his bed. Fish again. “Come live in a castle for a while. I realize you’re not a Fillory nerd like me, but haven’t you ever wanted to live in a castle? Haven’t you ever wanted to be a queen?”
If or when they eventually made it back to Castle Whitespire, with or without that last key, it was going to be something less than a triumphant homecoming. It would be good to have Poppy beside him when he sailed back into that harbor, for moral support. And for immoral support too.
“Mmmm.” Poppy salted her fish within an inch of its life, then drenched it in lemon juice. No amount of flavor seemed to be too much for her. “You make it sound romantic.”
“It is romantic. That’s not just me. Living in a castle is objectively romantic.”
“See, this is spoken like somebody who didn’t grow up in a monarchy. Australia still has a queen. There’s a lot of history there. Remind me to tell you about the constitutional crisis of 1975 sometime. Very unromantic.”
“I can promise you there will be no constitutional crises if we go to Whitespire. We don’t even have a constitution. Or if we do I promise you nobody’s ever read it.”
“I know, Quentin.” She pressed her lips together. “But I don’t think so. I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.”
“Why not? What do you have to get back to?”
“My entire life? Everybody I know? The real world?”
“This world is real.” He scooched over next to her, so that their hips touched. “Here. Feel.”
“That is not what I meant.”
She put her plate on the floor and lay back on the bunk. She hit her head on the wall. It wasn’t made for a tall person, let alone two.
“I know.” Quentin didn’t know why he was fighting her on this. He knew she wasn’t going to stay. Maybe that’s what made this so easy, that he knew the outcome in advance. There was no chance that she would get too close. He was playing to lose. “But seriously, what’s back there for you? Your dissertation? On dragon-ology, or whatever? Or tell me you don’t have a boyfriend.”
He took her foot in his lap to rub. She had new calluses from walking around the ship barefoot, and he picked at one. She snatched the foot back.
“No. But yes, my dissertation on dracology. I’m sorry if that seems very boring to you, but it’s my thing and I happen to like it.”
“There are dragons in Fillory. I think. Well, maybe there aren’t. I’ve never see one.”
“You don’t know?”
“You could find out. You
could apply for a royal research grant. I can promise you your application would be looked upon favorably.”
“I would have to start all over again. I’m not ripping up four chapters of my dissertation.”
“Anyway, what’s wrong with a little unreality?” Quentin said. “Unreality is underrated. Do you know how many people would kill to be where you are?”
“What, in bed with you?”
He pushed up her shirt and kissed her stomach, which was flat and covered in very fine downy hair.
“I meant here in Fillory,” he said.
“I know.” She sighed, prettily and genuinely. “I just wish I were one of them.”
It was all very well to decide that Poppy was going back to the real world—or not very well, but it was what it was—but it was an open question how they were going to get her there. They could be confident that at some point Ember would turn up to kick her out of Fillory, as He always did with any visitors. But that could take weeks, or months, you never knew, and she didn’t want to wait. Quentin might have been in paradise, but Poppy was in exile.
In the end they decided to try the keys. They didn’t have the one from After, which had gotten Quentin and Julia to Earth so efficiently, but they all looked more or less the same apart from the size. They started with the last and biggest, the one they’d found on Benedict Island. It was stowed in Quentin’s cabin, still in the wooden box it came in. They brought it up on deck. Poppy had come with nothing, and she had nothing to pack. Quentin supposed Josh would want to go back too, in the fullness of time, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He was already talking about which room he’d get back at Whitespire. And Quentin preferred to give Poppy a private send-off.
