The Magician King m-2

by Lev Grossman

  He was opening a door in the air, tall enough for him to walk through without stooping. It was bright in there, and there was warmth, and sunlight, and green. This was it. Already the gray stone of the After Island looked insubstantial. This was what he’d been missing—call it adventure or whatever you wanted to. He wondered if he was going somewhere in Fillory or somewhere else entirely.

  He stepped through onto grass, leading Julia through after him. There was light all around them. He blinked. His eyes began to adjust.

  “Wait,” he said. “This can’t be it.”

  He lunged back for the doorway, but it was already gone. There was nothing to lunge through, no way back, just empty air. He lost his balance and caught himself with his hands, skinning both his palms on the warm concrete sidewalk in front of his parents’ house in Chesterton, Massachusetts.

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER 9

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. It’s disappointing.” He sat on the curb, elbows on his knees, staring up at the power lines, and attempted to reason with himself. His scraped hands smarted and throbbed. It felt like late summer. For some reason it was the power lines more than anything else that looked weird, after two years in Fillory.

  That and the cars. They looked wrong, like animals. Angry alien animals. Julia was sitting on the grass, hugging her knees and rocking slightly. She looked worse off than he did.

  Quentin’s heart was sinking out of his chest and out of his body and down into the dirt of this goddamned useless planet. I was a king. I had a ship. I had a beautiful ship, my own ship!

  It was like somebody was trying to send him a message. If so he got it. Message received.

  “I get it,” he said out loud. “I hear you. I get it already.”

  I am a king, he thought. Even in the real world I’m still a king. Nothing can take that away.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “We’re going to make this all right.”

  It was an experiment in saying what he wanted to be true, to see if that would make it any truer.

  Julia was on all fours now. She heaved up something thin and bitter onto the grass. He went over and knelt beside her.

  “You’re going to be all right,” he said.

  “I don’t feel well.”

  “We’re going to fix this. You’ll be all right.”

  “Stop saying that.” She coughed, then spat on the lawn. “You do not understand. I cannot be here.” She paused to rummage for words. “I should not. I have to go.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I have to leave!”

  Did the key think he wanted to go home? This wasn’t his home. Quentin looked up at the house. There were no signs of life. He was relieved; he wasn’t in the mood to talk to his parents right now. It was a fancy suburb, with big houses that could even afford to have some lawn around them.

  A neighbor was peering out at them from her living room window. “Hi!” He waved. “How’s it going?”

  The face disappeared. Its owner drew the curtain.

  “Come on,” he said to Julia. He breathed out decisively. Let’s be brave. “Let’s go inside, get a shower. Maybe change clothes.”

  They were in full Fillorian drag. Not inconspicuous. She didn’t answer.

  He was fighting off panic. Jesus, it had taken him twenty-two years to get to Fillory the first time. How was he going to do it again now? He turned back to Julia, but she wasn’t there. She was up and walking unsteadily down the wide, empty suburban road away from him. She looked tiny in the middle of all that asphalt.

  That was another weird thing. Asphalt really wasn’t like anything in nature.

  “Hey. Come on.” He stood up and trotted after her. “There’s probably mini-Dove bars in the freezer.”

  “I cannot stay here.”

  “I can’t either. I just don’t know what to do about it.”

  “I am going back.”

  “How?”

  She didn’t answer. He caught up, and they walked together in the fading light. It was quiet. Multicolored light from giant televisions flickered in the windows. When had TVs gotten that big?

  “I only knew one way to get to Fillory, and that was the magic button. And Josh had that, last we saw. Maybe we can find him. Or maybe Ember could summon us back. Other than that I think we’re kind of screwed.”

  Julia was sweating. Her walk had a slight stagger to it. Whatever was wrong with her, this wasn’t making it any better. He made a decision.

  “We’ll go to Brakebills,” he said. “Somebody there will help us.”

  She didn’t react.

  “I know it’s a long shot—”

  “I do not want to go to Brakebills.”

  “I know,” Quentin said. “I don’t especially want to go there either. But it’s safe, they’ll feed us, and somebody there will have a line on some way to get us back.”

  Privately he doubted any of the faculty had a clue about getting around the multiverse, but they might know how to find Josh. Or Lovelady, the junk dealer who’d found the button in the first place.

  Julia stared fixedly ahead. For a minute Quentin didn’t think she was going to answer.

  “I do not want to go,” she said.

  But she stopped walking. A sparkly blue muscle car sat parked by itself at the curb, a snouty, low-slung vehicle with a turbo hood in front and a rear spoiler. Some rich douche bag’s sixteenth birthday present. Julia looked around for a minute, then stepped onto the lawn, where a landscaper had laid down a row of head-sized boulders. She picked one up like a medicine ball, hefting it surprisingly easily in her stick-thin arms, and half threw, half dropped it through the muscle car’s driver-side window.

  Quentin didn’t even have time to offer advice or an opinion—something along the lines of, don’t throw the rock through the car window. It had already happened.

  It took two tries to get it all the way through—the safety glass starred and stretched before it gave way. The alarm was deafening in the suburban stillness, but incredibly no lights came on in the house. Julia reached through the hole and deftly popped the door open, then heaved the rock back out onto the asphalt and slid herself into the black vinyl bucket seat.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

  She picked up a shard of glass and nicked the pad of her thumb with it. Whispering something under her breath, she jammed her bloody thumb-tip up against the ignition.

  The alarm stopped. The car rumbled into life, and the radio came on: Van Halen, “Poundcake.” She lifted up her ass and brushed the rest of the glass off the seat underneath her.

  “Get in,” she said.

  Sometimes you just have to do things. Quentin walked around to the other side—for form’s sake he really should have slid across the hood—and she peeled out before he even had the door closed. They drove away from his parents’ block at speed. He couldn’t believe nobody had called the police, but he didn’t hear any sirens; it was either really good magic or very dumb luck. She didn’t turn the Van Halen off, or even down. The gray street poured along underneath them. It beat a carriage, anyway.

  Julia rolled down what was left of the broken window so that it didn’t look so broken.

  “How the hell did you do that?” he said.

  “You know about hot-wiring?” she said. “That is ‘not-wiring.’ That is what we used to call it, in the old days.”

  “In what old days did you go around stealing cars? And who is ‘we’?”

  She didn’t answer, just took a corner too fast, so that the car heeled over on its ridiculously too-bouncy suspension.

  “That was a stop sign,” Quentin said. “I still think we should go to Brakebills.”

  “We are going to Brakebills.”

  “You changed your mind.”

  “It happens.” Her thumb was still bleeding. She sucked it and wiped it on her pants. “Can you drive?”

  “No. I never learned.”

  Julia swore. She turned up the radio.
r />   It was four hours from Chesterton to Brakebills, or as close as you could get to Brakebills by car. Julia did it in three. They shot west across Massachusetts the long way, whipping along old New England interstates that had been cut through pine forests and blasted through low green hills, the sides of which showed bare red rock. The rock faces were slick with water from underground springs exposed by the blasting.

  The sun set. The car smelled of its owner’s cigarette smoke. Everything was toxic and chemical and unnatural: the plastic walnut trim, the electric lights, the burning gasoline that was shoving them forward. This whole world was a processed petroleum product. Julia kept the radio on classic rock the whole way. It would be an exaggeration to say that she knew every single lyric of every single song that came on, but not by much.

  They crossed the Hudson River at Beacon, New York, and turned off the interstate onto a two-lane local highway, winding and humped up with old frost heaves. Apart from Julia’s singing they didn’t speak. Quentin was still trying to make sense of what had just happened to them. It was too dark to make the trek to Brakebills tonight, so Julia showed him how to extract cash without a card from an ATM at a bug-swarmed gas station. They bought sunglasses for her, to hide her weird eyes, and they spent the night—separate rooms—at a motel. Quentin mentally dared the clerk to say something about their clothes, but no dice.

  In the morning Quentin took a genuine hot shower in an actual Western-style bathroom. Score one for reality. He stayed there till all the sea salt was finally out of his hair, even though the tub was made of plastic and there were spiders in the corners and it reeked of detergents and “fresheners.” By the time he cleaned up, checked out, and harvested a bona fide actual sixteen-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola from the vending machine, Julia was waiting for him, sitting on the hood of their car.

  She’d skipped the shower, but she’d doubled up on the Coke. The car spit gravel on its way out of the parking lot.

  “I thought you did not know where it was,” Julia said. “That was what you told me when I asked you.”

  “I told you that,” Quentin said, “because it’s true. I don’t know where it is. But I think there’s a way to find it. At least I know someone who did it once.”

  He meant Alice. She’d done it as a high school senior, so they ought to be able to manage it. Strange to think of it now. He was going to follow in her footsteps.

  “We’ll have to walk a couple of miles through the woods,” he said.

  “That does not bother me.”

  “A vision spell should reveal it. It’s veiled, but just to keep civilians out. There’s an Anasazi spell. Or Mann. Maybe just a Mann reveal.”

  “I know the Anasazi.”

  “Okay. Great. Then I’ll let you know when.”

  Quentin kept his tone carefully neutral. Nothing made Julia angrier than the feeling that she was being condescended to by a Brakebills graduate. At least she wasn’t blaming him for getting them shunted back to Earth. Or probably she was, but she wasn’t doing it out loud.

  It was a hot late August morning. The air was saturated with bronze sunlight. A mile off, at the bottom of the valley, they caught glimpses of the huge blue Hudson River. They parked at a bend in the road.

  He got that it hurt her pride, and maybe something even more vital, to be dragged back to Brakebills begging for help. It didn’t change the fact that it was their first and best and possibly only option. He was not fucking staying on Earth. He wanted a quest? Now he had one. The quest was to get back to where he was when he started his goddamned quest. That ought to learn him, but good.

  Before they set off Julia spent fifteen minutes on a spell that she curtly informed him would cause the car to wait an hour and then drive itself back home to Chesterton. Quentin didn’t see how that was even remotely possible, on any number of levels, but he kept his doubts to himself. If he’d thought to keep more of the glass he could have at least fixed the window, but he hadn’t, so hard cheese on whoever’s muscle car it was. He tucked two hundred dollars in twenties into the glove compartment, then they drank the rest of the Coke and climbed over the sheet-metal guardrail.

  These weren’t recreational woods, meant to be hiked through and picnicked in. They hadn’t been curated and made user-friendly by helpful park rangers. They were dense, and the light was dim, and walking through them wasn’t fun. Quentin was constantly ducking his head too late to avoid being slashed across the face by a branch. Every five minutes he was convinced that he’d walked through a spiderweb, but he could never find the spider.

  And he wasn’t sure what would happen if they walked into the Brakebills perimeter without knowing it. Nothing in theory, of course, but Quentin had watched Professor Sunderland lay down the barrier after the Beast attacked. He’d seen some of the things she’d ground into those powders. Any second they could be running smack into it. The idea made his face tingle. After half an hour he called a halt.

  The woods were still. There was no sign of the school, but he felt it somewhere around here, as if it were hiding behind a tree waiting to jump out at him. And he imagined he could feel older tracks running through the woods too. Like Alice’s—poor cursed teenage Alice, wandering all night looking for the way in. It would have been better for her if she’d never found it. Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.

  “Let’s try it here,” he said.

  Julia launched into the Anasazi spell in her rough, fierce casting style, clearing invisible layers away from the air in a square in front of her, like wiping fog off a windshield. He winced, inwardly, to watch some of her upper hand positions, but it didn’t make her castings any less forceful. Sometimes it seemed to make them more so.

  He began work on the Mann instead. It was a lot easier, but it wasn’t a contest. Best to diversify.

  He never finished. He heard the usually imperturbable Julia squeak and skip a step backward. Suspended in the air in front of her, in the square she’d cleared, was a face. It belonged to an older man with a goatee wearing a royal-blue tie and an appalling yellow blazer.

  It was Dean Fogg, the head of Brakebills. His face was in the square because he was standing right in front of Julia.

  “Soooooo,” the dean said, drawing out the vowel until he practically burst into song. “The prodigal has returned.”

  Not five minutes later they were walking across the Sea, which was as lush and green and immense as ever. It rolled out around them, the size of half a dozen football fields. The summer sun beat down on them from directly overhead. It was June here, inside the magic walls.

  It was incredible. Quentin hadn’t been back here for three years, not since he’d gone to Fogg and asked to be stricken from the rolls of the magical world, but nothing had changed at all. The smells, the lawns, the trees, the kids—this place was like Shangri-la, forgotten by time, abiding in an eternal present.

  “We were watching you from when you left the road. The defenses go far beyond what we had in your day. Far beyond. Double-braided lines of force—we have a remarkable young man in our theoretical department, even I don’t understand half of what he does. You can see a map of the entire forest now, in real time, showing anybody in it. It’s even color-coded by their intentions and state of mind. Remarkable.”

  “Remarkable.” Quentin felt shell-shocked. On his other side Julia said nothing. God knew what she was feeling, he couldn’t have guessed within a thousand miles. She hadn’t been here since her failed exam in high school. She hadn’t spoken since Fogg had appeared, though she had managed to shake his hand when being introduced.

  Fogg rattled on about the school and the grounds and Quentin’s classmates and all the impressive and respectable things they were up to. None of them seemed to have gotten themselves accidentally exiled to the wrong dimension. There was plenty of hot local news too. Brakebills had become a force to be reckoned with on the international welters circuit, thanks to the efforts of one especially sporty young professor. One of the topiary animals, an elephan
t calf, had broken free of its hedge and was running amok around the grounds, albeit very slowly, at the rate of about a yard a day. The Natural group was laboring mightily to corral it and bring it to justice, but no luck so far.

  The library was still plagued by outbreaks of flying books—three weeks ago a whole flock of Far Eastern atlases had taken wing, terrifyingly broad, muscular volumes like albatrosses, and wrecked the circulation area, sending students crawling under tables. The books actually found their way out through the front door and roosted in a tree by the welters board, from which they raucously heckled passersby in a babel of languages until they got rained on and dragged themselves sulkily back to the stacks, where they were being aggressively rebound.

  All Quentin could think was how weird it was that all this was still going on. It shouldn’t be possible, it must violate a law of physics. A few students dotted the grass, girls mostly, sunning their light-starved bodies to the extent that the school uniform would permit. Classes were out for the semester, but the seniors hadn’t graduated yet. If Quentin were to turn left here and walk five minutes, past that stand of live oaks, he’d get to the Cottage. And it would be full of strangers, lolling in the window seats, drinking the wine, reading the books, screwing each other in the beds. He’d wondered if he would want to see it, but now that he was here he really didn’t.

  The students watched the three of them pass, propped up on their elbows, full of lofty pity for those who had been stupid enough to graduate and get older. He knew how they felt. They felt like kings and queens. Enjoy it while it lasts.

  “I wasn’t sure we would ever see you again.” Fogg was still talking. “After your—what shall we call it—your retirement? Not many people who make that choice ever come back, you know. When we lose them we lose them forever. But you, I take it you saw the—how shall I put it—the error of your ways?”