Quentin lay back on the rug and stared up at the ceiling. He needed sleep, but this was no time for sleep. Wild emotions competed for possession of his brain, like rival armies taking and retaking the same hill: excitement, remorse, anticipation, foreboding, grief, anger. He tried to focus on Fillory, to make the good feeling come back. This would change everything. Yes, his universe had just expanded times a million, but Fillory was the key to it all. That creeping, infectious sense of futility that had been incubating in his brain even since before graduation had met its magic bullet. Alice didn’t see it yet, but she would. This was what they’d been waiting for. This is what her parents had never found. A bleary grin kept smearing itself across his face, and the years fell away from him like layers of dead skin. They weren’t wasted years exactly, he could never say that, but they were years in which, in spite of all his amazing gifts, he’d been conscious of somehow not quite getting the gift he wanted. Enough to get by on, maybe. Sure. But this, this was everything. Now the present had a purpose, and the future had a purpose, and even the past, their whole lives, retroac tively, had meaning. Now they knew what it was for.
If only it hadn’t happened now. If Penny could just have shown up a day earlier. Fucking Penny. Everything had been completely ruined and then completely redeemed in such rapid succession that he couldn’t tell which state ultimately applied. But if you looked at it a certain way, what happened between him and Janet wasn’t about him and Janet at all, or even him and Alice. It was a symptom of the sick, empty world they were all in together. And now they had the medicine. The sick world was about to be healed.
The others stayed sitting on the floor, leaning back on their elbows, lounging with their backs against the couch, glancing at one another every once in a while and breaking out in incredulous giggles. It was like they were stoned. Quentin wondered if they were feeling what he was feeling. This was what they’d been waiting for, too, without knowing it, he thought. The thing that was going to save them from the ennui and depression and meaningless busywork that had been stalking them ever since graduation, with its stale, alcoholic breath. It was finally here, and not a moment too soon. They couldn’t go on like this, and now they wouldn’t have to.
It was Eliot who finally took control of the situation. He almost seemed like his old self again. Calendars were cleared. Nobody had any serious obligations pending, not compared to this, nothing that couldn’t be delayed or sicked out of or blatantly welched on. He clapped his hands and gave orders, and everybody seemed to enjoy being serious and efficient for a change.
Nobody knew Anaïs especially well—not even Josh, really—but she turned out to be a highly useful individual. Her circle of acquaintance included somebody who knew somebody who owned a place upstate, a comfortable old farmhouse on a hundred acres, somewhere private enough and defensible enough to use as a staging area for whatever it was they were going to do next. And that first somebody was also a magician senior enough to open a portal to get them there. She would come by later that afternoon, as soon as the Nets game was over.
They had to do it on the roof, because the very effective and thorough triple-triple wards they’d just that morning set up (and were now about to abandon) prevented any magical transport directly in or out of the apartment. By five thirty that afternoon they were looking out over the crowded cocktail-tray skyline of lower Manhattan. No one else was up there in winter. The roof was littered with windblown, overturned plastic lawn furniture and char-encrusted barbecue implements. A lonely wind chime burbled to itself from the eaves of a utility shed.
They hugged themselves against the cold and scuffed the gravel with their feet as they watched a hale, gray-haired Belgian sorceress with nicotine-stained fingers and a rather sinister wicker fetish on a string around her neck pull open the portal. It was a five-sided portal, the bottom edge running parallel to the ground, and its vertices shed tiny sputtering actinic blue-white sparks—a purely cosmetic touch, Quentin suspected, but they gave the scene an air that was both melancholy and festive at the same time.
There was a sense of momentous occasion. They were embarking on a grand adventure on the spur of the moment. Isn’t that what it means to be alive, Goddamn it? When the portal was finished and stable, the gray-haired witch kissed Anaïs on both cheeks, said something in French, and left hurriedly, but not before Janet made her take a picture of all of them together with their trunks and bundles and bags full of groceries piled up behind them, using a disposable camera.
The group, all eight of them now, stepped through together onto a vast, frost-burnt front lawn. The serious mood on the roof was instantly broken as Janet and Anaïs and Josh raced one another inside and squealed and bounced on the sofas and ran around arguing over the bedrooms. Anaïs had been mostly right about the house: it was certainly large and comfortable, and at least a few bits of it were old. Apparently it was once a generously proportioned Colonial farmhouse, but somebody with progressive architectural ideas had gotten hold of it and remixed its old timber and fieldstone with glass and titanium and poured cement and added flat-screen TVs and a high-end audio system and an Aga range.
Alice went directly and silently up to the master bedroom, which took up almost half the third floor, and closed the door, glaring away any rival claimants with burning, red-rimmed eyes. Suddenly exhausted after his mostly sleepless night, followed by his magically extended day, Quentin found a small guest bedroom at the back of the house. Its hard, antiseptic twin bed felt like all he deserved.
It was dark when he woke up. The cool blue digits of the clock radio said 10:27. In the darkness they could have been phosphorescent squiggles on the side of a deep-sea fish. He couldn’t find the light switch, but his groping hands encountered the door to a small half bath and managed to turn on the light over the mirror. Quentin splashed water on his face and wandered out into the strange house.
He found the others, except for Alice and Penny, in the dining room, where they had already made and demolished a meal of heroic proportions, the remains of which lay spread out on a stupendous table that looked like it was built from the beams of the True Cross, handsomely varnished and nailed together with authentic iron spikes. Large pieces of modern art the color and texture of dried, crusted blood hung on the walls.
“Q!” they shouted.
“Where’s Alice?”
“Came and went,” Josh said. “What’s going on? You guys fighting or what?”
He shadowboxed a jab or two. He obviously didn’t know what had happened. Anaïs, sitting next to him, delivered a mock knockout punch to his stubbly chin. They were all drunk again, same as last night, same as every night. Nothing had changed.
“Seriously,” Janet said. “Did she give you that shiner? Seems like somebody’s always punching you in the face, Q.”
Her manner was as bright and toxic as ever, but her eyes were rimmed with red. Quentin wondered if she’d come out of last night’s holocaust quite as unscathed as he’d thought.
“It was Ember and Umber,” he said. “The magic rams. Didn’t Alice tell you? They punished me for being sinful.”
“Yeah?” Josh said. “Did you kick their woolly asses?”
“I turned the other cheek.” Quentin didn’t feel like talking, but he was hungry. He got a plate from the kitchen and sat down at the far end of the table and served himself leftovers.
“We were talking about what to do next,” Richard said. “Making up an actions list.”
“Right.” Josh pounded authoritatively on the heavy table. “Who’s got some action items for me? We need to enumerate our deliverables!”
“Food,” Richard said, straight-faced. “And if we’re really going to Fillory, we all need to reread all the books.”
“Gold,” Anaïs chipped in gamely. “And trade items. What do Fillorians want? Cigarettes?”
“We’re not going to Brezhnev-era Russia, Anaïs. Steel?”
“Gunpowder?”
“My God,” Eliot said. “Listen to y
ou people. I am not going to be the man who brought the gun to Fillory.”
“We should bring overcoats,” Richard said. “Tents. Cold-weather gear. We have no idea what season it is there. We could be walking into deep winter.”
Yesterday—meaning before his nap—Fillory was going to make everything all right. Now it was hard to focus on it: it seemed like a dream again. Now the mess with Janet and Alice was the real thing. It would drag everything else down with it.
He pulled himself together with an effort.
“How long are we talking about going for?”
“A couple of days? Look, we can just come back if we forget something,” Eliot said. “With the button it’s a snap. We’ll just stay till it gets boring.”
“What should we do when we get there?”
“I think they’ll probably give us a quest,” Penny said. “That’s what always happened to the Chatwins.”
Heads turned. Penny was standing in the doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants, blinking like an owl, looking like he’d just woken up, too.
“I don’t know if we can count on that, Penny.” For some reason it annoyed Quentin, how starry-eyed and optimistic Penny was being about this. “It’s not like the rams summoned us. It might not even be like the books. Maybe there never were any quests. Plover probably just put that stuff in so there would be a good story. Maybe we’ll just suck around Fillory like we’re sucking around here.”
“Don’t be a killjoy,” Josh said, “just because your girlfriend beats you up.”
Penny was shaking his head. “I just don’t see Plover coming up with all that stuff on his own. It’s not rational. He was a gay dry-cleaning magnate with a background in practical chemistry. He didn’t have a creative bone in his body. No way. It’s Occam’s razor. It’s much more likely that he was writing it as it happened.”
“So what do you think,” Eliot said, “we’re going to meet a damsel in distress?”
“We might. Not necessarily a damsel, but . . . you know, a nymph maybe. Or a dwarf, or a pegasus. You know, that needs help with something.” Everybody was laughing, but Penny kept on going. It was almost touching. “Seriously, it happens in the books, every time.”
Josh pushed a tiny doll glass of something clear and alcoholic in front of Quentin, and he took a sip. It was some kind of fiery fruit eau-de-vie, and it tasted like a vital nutrient that his body had been chronically deprived of his entire life.
“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”
“Maybe your world doesn’t, Earth man,” Josh said. He winked. “We’re not in your world anymore.”
“And I don’t want to turn this into a theological discussion,” Richard added, with towering dignity, “but there is room for disagreement on that score.”
“And even if you don’t believe that this world has a god,” Penny finished up, “you must admit that Fillory has one. Two even.”
“This does bring us back, albeit in an insane way, to what is actually a pretty reasonable question,” Eliot said. “Which is what do we do when we get there?”
“We should go after that magic flower,” Josh suggested. “You know, the one that when you smell it it automatically makes you happy? Remember that? That thing would be worth bank here.”
While nobody was watching, Janet caught Quentin’s eye and waggled her eyebrows and did something lewd with her tongue. Quentin eyed her back, unblinking. She was actually enjoying this, he thought. She’d sabotaged him and Alice, and she was loving it. Little montage flashes of last night—it couldn’t possibly have just been last night—cycled through his brain, snapshots that had stubbornly survived the merciful angel of alcoholic erasure. Everything about sex with Janet had been so different from Alice. The smell, the feel of her skin, her businesslike know-how. The shame and the fear had caught up with him even before it was over, before he came, but he hadn’t stopped.
And had Eliot really been awake for the whole thing? His brain dealt out a sloppy fan of mental Polaroids, out of sequence: an image of Janet kissing Eliot, of her hand working diligently between Eliot’s legs. Had she really been weeping? Had he kissed Eliot? A vivid sense memory of somebody else’s stubble, surprisingly scratchy, chafing his cheek and upper lip.
Good God, he thought wearily. What goes on.
He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so. Poor Alice. He needed a hair shirt, or ashes, or a scourge—there should be some ritual that he could perform to show her how desperately sorry he was. He would do anything, if she would just tell him what to do.
He shoved the pictures back down wherever they came from, back into the mental shuffle, speeding them on their way with some more of that yummy eau-de-vie. An idea was germinating in his tired, bruised brain.
“We could find Martin Chatwin,” Richard volunteered. “The way the other children were always trying to.”
“I’d like to bring something back for Fogg,” Eliot said. “Something for the school. An artifact or something.”
“That’s it?” Josh said. “You’re going to Fillory to bring back an apple for teacher? God, you’re so unbelievably lame sometimes.”
Oddly, Eliot didn’t take the bait. This was affecting them all in different ways.
“Maybe we could find the Questing Beast,” Quentin said quietly.
“The what?” Josh wrinkled his forehead. No Fillory scholar he.
“From The Girl Who Told Time. Remember? The beast that can’t be caught. Helen chases it.”
“What do you do with it if you do catch it? Eat it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it leads you to treasure? Or gives you some secret wisdom? Or something?” He hadn’t thought this through completely. It had seemed important to the Chatwins, but now he couldn’t remember why.
“You never find out,” Penny said. “Not in the books. They never catch it, and Plover never mentions it again. It’s a good idea. But I was thinking, you know, maybe they’ll make us kings. Kings and queens. The way the Chatwins were.”
As soon as Penny said it, Quentin wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself. It was so obvious. They’d be kings and queens. Of course they would. If the City was real, why not all the rest of it, even that? They could live in Castle Whitespire. Alice could be his queen.
God, he was agreeing with Penny. That was a danger sign if there ever was one.
“Huh.” Janet mulled this over, her ever-alert brain ticking over. She was actually taking it seriously, too. “Would we have to marry each other?”
“Not necessarily. The Chatwins didn’t. Then again, they were all siblings.”
“I don’t know,” said Anaïs. “It sounds like a big job, being queen. There is probably bureaucracy. Administration.”
“Lucrative though. Think of the perks.”
“If the books are even accurate,” Eliot said. “And if the thrones are vacant. That’s two big ifs. Plus there’s seven of us and only four thrones. Three people get left out.”
“I’ll tell you what we need,” Anaïs said. “We need war magic. Battle magic. Offense, defense. We need to be able to hurt people if we have to.”
Janet looked amused.
“Shit’s illegal, babe,” she said, obviously impressed despite herself. “You know that.”
“I don’t care if it is.” Anaïs shook her precious blond curls. “We need it. We have no idea what we will be seeing when we cross over. We have to be ready. Unless any of you big strong men knows how to use a sword?” There was silence, and she smirked. “Alors.”
“Did they teach you that stuff wh
ere you went?” Josh asked. He looked a little afraid of her.
“We are not so pure in Europe as you Americans, I guess.”
Penny was nodding. “Battle magic isn’t illegal in Fillory.”
“Out of the question,” Richard said crisply. “Do you realize the kind of heat you’d bring down on us? Who here besides me has dealt with the Magicians’ Court? Anybody?”
“We’re already in the shit, Richard,” Eliot said. “You think that button would be legal if the court knew about it? If you want out, get out now, but Anaïs is right. I’m not going over there with just my dick in my hand.”
“We can get a dispensation for small arms,” Richard went on primly. “There are precedents for that. I know the forms.”
“Guns?” Eliot made a sour face. “What is wrong with you? Fillory is a pristine society. Have you ever even watched Star Trek? This is basic Prime Directive stuff. We have a chance to experience a world that has not yet been fucked up by assholes. Do any of you get how important that is? Any of you?”
Quentin kept expecting Eliot to declare himself too cool for the whole Fillory project and start making snarky jokes about it, but he was turning out to be surprisingly focused and unironic about it. Quentin couldn’t remember the last time Eliot had been openly enthusiastic about anything. It was a relief to see that he could still admit that he cared about something.
“I do not want to be around Penny with a gun,” Janet said firmly.
“Look, Anaïs is right,” Eliot said. “We’ll work up some basic attack spells, just in case. Nothing too insane. We’ll just have a couple of aces in the hole. And we have those cacodemons in our backs, don’t forget. And the button.”