by Lev Grossman
With the course change they left the warm blue-green ocean behind and crashed their way into a heaving black one. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. Flail-blows of cold rain clattered on the deck. Quentin couldn’t have pointed to the dividing line, but now the water around them seemed like a completely different element from the one they’d been sailing in before, something opaque and solid that had to be smashed and shoved aside rather than slipped silently through.
The Muntjac bulled its way gamely through the waves ahead of a firm, pressing salt wind. The ship had a surprise for them: below the waterline it seemed—it was hard to see clearly through the chop—to have put out a pair of sleek wooden fins, unfolding from pockets in the hull, which swam them forward. Whether they were animated by magic or a mechanical arrangement, Quentin didn’t know. But he felt a warm surge of gratitude. The old ship was repaying his kindness and more.
He thought the sloth might know something about it, given how much time it spent down there in the hold, but when he visited he found it fast asleep, hanging by its boat-hook claws, rocking gently with the ship’s rolling. If anything it was more serene in the heavy weather. The air in the hold was warm and humid and slothy, and a salad of rotting fruit rinds and less identifiable debris sloshed around in the bilge.
Julia, then. She might know. And he wanted to discuss the magic key with her. She was his only real peer on board the Muntjac, and she had access to sources he didn’t. And he was worried about her.
Julia kept to her cabin even more than usual now that the weather had turned. She may have been spiritually one with Fillory, but the freezing drizzle had hounded even her belowdecks. Quentin lurched down the narrow passage that led to her room, with errant swells flinging him playfully against one bulkhead, then the other.
Her door was shut. For a moment, just as the Muntjac paused weightlessly on the crest of the wave, Quentin had a powerful sense of the romance of the scene, and his crush stirred inside him, unfolding its leathery wings. He knew it was at least partly a fantasy. Julia was so solitary, so wrapped up in Fillory, that it was hard to imagine her wanting him or anyone, or at any rate anyone human. She was missing something, but it probably wasn’t a boyfriend.
Then again they were both here, far out at sea, tempest-tossed, together in a warm berth in the freezing wasteland of the ocean. It was liberating being out from under the snarky, gossipy gazes of Eliot and Janet. Surely Julia couldn’t be so far gone that she didn’t recognize the allure of a shipboard fling. The scene practically wrote itself. She was only human. And they would be home soon. He knocked on her door.
Always at the back of his mind, never spoken but always felt, was his awareness that Julia was from before: before Brakebills, before he knew magic was real, before everything. She’d never known Alice. If he could fall back in love with Julia, it would be like time winding itself back, and he could start over again. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was in love with Julia or just that he wanted to be in love with her, because it would be so comforting, such a relief, to be in love with her. It seemed like such a good idea. Was there really that big of a difference?
Julia opened the door. She was naked.
Or no, she wasn’t naked. She was wearing a dress, sort of, but only to her waist. The top half was hanging down in front of her, and her breasts were bare. They were pale and conical, neither full nor slight. They were perfect. When he was seventeen he’d devoted entire months of his life to constructing a mental image of Julia’s naked upper body based on forensic evidence gathered from furtive surveys of her clothed form. As it turned out he’d been quite close. Only her nipples were different from what he’d expected. Paler, hardly darker than the pale skin around them.
He closed the door again—he didn’t slam it, but he closed it firmly.
“Jesus Christ, Julia!” he said under his breath. Though he said it to himself more than to her.
A long minute passed. He spent it with his back against the bulkhead next to Julia’s door. He could feel his heart beating hard against the hard wood. Sure, he wanted something to happen, but not that. Or at least not like that. What the hell did she mean, waving those things around? What, was this a joke to her? He could hear her moving around in her room. He took a deep breath and knocked again, slowly. When she answered the door again her dress was fully on.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
“Sorry,” she said flatly.
She sat down on a little stool at the other end of the room, facing the windows. She didn’t ask him in, but she hadn’t closed the door either. Warily, he stepped inside.
Julia’s quarters were the mirror image of Quentin’s, but due to an irregularity in the ship’s plan, an errant staircase on his side, they were a little bigger, with room for two people to sit if one of them sat on the bed. Quentin sat on the bed. Light came from a glowing blue ball that bobbed up against the ceiling like a balloon that had lost its string, an odd casting of Julia’s that looked like a trapped will-o’-the-wisp.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I forgot.”
“What did you forget?” It came out angrier than he meant it to. “That your arms go in the sleeves? Look, it’s not like I don’t . . .” No good end to that sentence. “Never mind.”
He looked at her, really looked, for the first time in a while. She was still beautiful but thin, much too thin. And her eyes were still black. He wondered if the change was permanent, and if so what else had changed that he couldn’t see.
“I don’t know.” She stared out at the spray. “I forget what I forgot.”
“Well, okay, so, but now you remembered.”
“Look, I forget how things work sometimes. All right? Or not so much how but why. Why people say hello, why they take baths, why they wear clothes, read books, smile, talk, eat. All those human things.” She tugged her mouth to one side.
“I don’t understand this, Julia.” The anger was gone. He kept revising how much trouble Julia was having, and every time he did he revised it upward. “Help me understand. You’re human. Why would you forget that? How would you?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. Then she turned those black eyes on him. “I’m losing it. It’s losing me. It’s going away.”
“What is? What happened to you, Julia? Do you need to go back to Earth?”
“No!” she said sharply. “I’m not going back there. Not ever.”
The idea seemed to frighten her.
“But you remember Brooklyn, right? Where we’re from? And James, and high school, and all that?”
“Remembering.” Her delicate mouth quirked again, bitterly. She spoke in something like her old voice, with contractions and everything. “That’s always been my problem, hasn’t it. I remembered Brakebills. Couldn’t forget it.”
Quentin remembered her remembering. She’d failed the entrance exam at Brakebills, which he’d passed, and she was supposed to forget about it afterward so the school would stay secret. They’d cast spells on her to make sure. But the spells hadn’t held, and she hadn’t forgotten.
But it had brought her here, he reminded himself. To a beautiful ship on a magical ocean. It had made her a queen of a secret world. The path was crooked, but it led to a happy ending, right? It was dawning on him that Fillory was his happy ending, but it might not be Julia’s. She needed something else. She was still out there on the crooked path, and night was coming on.
“Do you wish you hadn’t remembered Brakebills? Do you wish you’d stayed in Brooklyn?”
“Sometimes.” She folded her arms and leaned back against the wall of her cabin in a way that couldn’t have been comfortable. “Quentin, why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t you rescue me, when I came to you for help that day in Chesterton?”
It was a fair question. It’s not like he’d never asked himself that before. He’d even come up with some good answers.
“I couldn’t, Julia. It wasn’t my choice. You know that. I couldn’t get you into Brakebills,
I barely got myself in.”
“But you could have come to see me. Showed me what you knew.”
“They would have expelled me.”
“Then after you graduated—”
“Why are we still talking about this now, Julia?” Knowing he was on shaky ground, Quentin counterattacked. Your best defense is a good offense. “Look, you asked me to tell them about you. I did what you asked. I told them. I thought they’d found you and wiped your memory! That’s what they always do.”
“But they didn’t. They couldn’t find me. By the time they came looking for me I was long gone. Into thin air.” She snapped her fingers. “Like magic.”
“And anyway, Julia, how was it supposed to work? What, you were going to be the sorcerer’s apprentice, like Mickey Mouse? And how do you think I felt about it? You didn’t used to give a shit about me, then suddenly I’m Spelly McSpell and you’re all over me. That’s just not how it works.”
“I gave a shit about you, I just didn’t want to sleep with you. God!” She rounded on him in the narrow space. She’d been leaning the stool back on two legs, and now it clunked back down onto four. “Though by the way, I would have, if you’d just given me what I needed.”
“Well, you got it anyway, didn’t you?”
“Oh, I sure did. I got it and a whole lot more. You shouldn’t be surprised about any of this, you of all people. You abandoned me out there in the real world, without magic! Everything that happened to me started with you! You want to know what it was? I’ll tell you. But not until you’ve earned it.”
A heavy silence hung in the room. Outside night was falling hard on the stone-colored waves, and her little window was splashed with seawater.
“I never wanted this for you, Julia. Whatever it is. I’m sorry.”
He had to say it, and it was true. But it wasn’t the only truth. There were other truths in there that weren’t as attractive. Such as: he’d been angry at Julia. He’d been her lapdog in high school, trailing around after her while she screwed his best friend, and he’d quite enjoyed it when the tables turned. Was that why he hadn’t rescued Julia? It wasn’t the only reason. But it was a reason.
“I felt like myself again,” she said dully. “Just then. When I got angry.” The windowpane was beginning to mist over. Julia started drawing a shape on it, then scribbled it out. “It’s going now.”
Never mind the magic key. This was where his attention should be. Julia didn’t need his love. She needed his help.
“Help me understand,” he said. He gathered up her cold fingers in his. “Tell me what I can do. I want to help you. I want to help you remember.”
Something else was glowing in the room, something besides the blue will-o’-the-wisp. He wasn’t sure when it had started. It was Julia—or not Julia, but something inside her. Her heart was glowing: he could see it right through her skin, even through her dress.
“I am remembering, Quentin,” she said. “Out here on the ocean, away from Fillory, it’s coming back to me.” Now she smiled, brightly, and it was worse than when she just looked blank. “I am remembering so much that I never even knew before!”
That night, after a heavy nautical dinner, Quentin went below and unfolded his pallet from against the wall and put himself to bed. The cold, the darkness, the weather, his interview with Julia, everything had combined to accelerate time to the point where he felt like he’d been awake for a week. It wasn’t the hours, it was the mileage. He stared up at the rough red-brown beams over his head in the swaying light of the oil lamp.
He was cold and sticky with salt. He could have washed. He knew how to make fresh water from salt. But the spell was involved, and his fingers were stiff, and he decided he would rather live with the stickiness. He was warming up under the blankets anyway. When he’d come aboard he’d found a regulation navy blanket on the bed, a bristly beast that weighed about ten pounds and could have repelled chain shot. It was like being in bed with the corpse of a wild boar. He’d swapped it out for a foot-thick down comforter that was persistently damp and thoroughly nonregulation but infinitely more comforting.
Quentin waited to see if his mind would tip over into sleep. When it didn’t, and it had made it clear that it wasn’t going to without a fight, he sat up and looked at the books on the bookshelves. In his old life, at a juncture like this one, he would have reached for a Fillory novel, but events had overtaken that particular pleasure. But there was still the book Elaine had given him. The Seven Golden Keys.
Seven. That was more golden keys than he’d bargained for. He would settle for just one. The book wasn’t a novel, it turned out, just a fairy tale set in large type with woodcut illustrations. A children’s book. She must have filched it from Eleanor. What a piece of work that woman was. The back page bore the stamp of the embassy library. He squinched up his pillow enough to prop up his head.
The story was about a man, his daughter, and a witch. He was a widower, and the daughter was hardly more than a toddler when the witch came through town. Jealous of the little girl’s beauty, and with no children of her own, the witch stole her away, cackling as she did that she was going to lock her away in a silver castle on a remote island. The man could free his daughter, but only if he could find the key to the castle, which he never would, because it was at the End of the World.
Undaunted, the man set out to find the key. It was hot, and he walked all day, and as the sun set he stopped by a river to refresh himself. When he bent down to drink he heard a tiny voice calling, open me up! Open me up! He looked around, and soon he saw that the voice belonged to a freshwater oyster that was clinging to a rock in the river. Next to it in the river mud was a minuscule golden key.
The man picked up both oyster and key, and sure enough, there was a tiny keyhole in the oyster shell, on the opposite side from the hinge. He fitted the key into the lock and turned it, and the shell began to open. He worked it farther open with his knife. As he did so the oyster died, as oysters will when their shells are opened. Inside the oyster, in the place where a pearl might have been, was another golden key, slightly larger than the first one.
The man ate the oyster and took the key and went on his way. Soon he arrived at a house in a forest, and he knocked on the door to see if the owners could give him shelter for the night. The door was slightly ajar, so he pushed his way inside. He found the house full of beds, every room was crammed with them, and in each bed a man or a woman was sleeping. He strolled through the house until he finally found an empty one for himself. There was a clock on the wall that had run down. There was no key to wind it with, so he used the key he found in the oyster’s shell. Then he went to bed.
In the morning the clock struck seven, and he awoke. So did the other sleepers in the house. Each of them repeated the same story: they’d come to the house as strangers and taken beds for the night, but they appeared to have slept for years and years, in some cases centuries, right up until the clock struck. As the man packed up his things he found a golden key under his pillow, slightly larger than the one he had used to wind the clock.
It grew colder as the man walked. Perhaps it was colder everywhere since his daughter had been put in the castle. In time the man met a beautiful woman sitting in a pavilion, weeping because her harp was out of tune. He gave her the golden key to tune her harp, and she gave him a larger one in exchange. That one turned out to be the key to a chest buried under a tree root, with yet another, still larger key inside, which let him into a castle—but not the castle with his daughter in it—with a key resting on a table in the highest room of the tallest tower.
The man walked and walked, for weeks or months or years, he couldn’t tell anymore. When he couldn’t walk anymore he sailed, and when he couldn’t sail anymore he was at the End of the World, where sat a dignified man in a dinner suit, dangling his long legs over the edge. He was patting his lapels and turning out his pockets and looking generally perplexed.
“Bother,” said the well-dressed man. “I’ve lost the
Key to the World. If I don’t wind it up and set its clockwork going again, the sun and moon and stars won’t turn, and the world will be plunged into an eternal nighttime of miserable cold and darkness. Bother!”
Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues. Without a word he drew out the key he’d found in the castle.
“How the devil—?” the man said. “Well, bother. Give it here.”
He took the key and lay full-length on the ground, mussing his fine suit, and reached his arm over the Very Edge of the World and began winding vigorously. A loud ratcheting sound could be heard.
“It’s in my back pocket,” he called over his shoulder as he worked. “You’ll have to get it yourself.”
Hesitantly, the man reached into the pocket—the well-dressed man never stopped winding—and drew out the last key. He retreated to his boat and sailed back the way he came.
A short time later, a surprisingly short time, he arrived at the magical castle where the witch had imprisoned his daughter, how long ago he could no longer tell. It really was an impressive affair, with gleaming silver walls that flashed in the sun, and it floated some ways off the ground, so that you had to ascend to it by way of a narrow winding silver staircase that flexed disquietingly when the wind blew.
The gate was black iron. The man fitted the last key into the lock and turned it.
The moment he finished the doors sprang open to reveal a beautiful woman standing right behind them, just as if she’d been waiting there for him all along. She was as tall as he was, and she must have been doing a great deal of studying with the witch while he was gone, because she absolutely glowed with magical power.
But he still recognized her. She was his daughter.
“Beautiful girl,” the man said, “it’s me. Your father. I’ve come to take you home.”
“My father?” she said. “You’re not my father. My daddy’s not an old man!”
The beautiful woman cackled a not unfamiliar cackle.
“But I am your father,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’ve been searching all this time—”
