The Magicians
Page 56

For the first few weeks after his resurrection Quentin still felt deep aches in his chest and shoulder, but they faded as more weeks piled on top of those first few. He was at first shocked and subsequently kind of fascinated to discover that the centaurs had replaced the skin and muscle tissue he’d lost to the Beast with something that looked very much like dark fine-grained wood. Two-thirds of his collarbone, and most of his right shoulder and biceps, now appeared to be composed of a smooth, highly polished fruit-wood—cherry maybe, or possibly apple. The new tissue was completely numb—he could rap on it with his knuckles and not feel a thing—but it was perfectly able to flex and bend when and where he needed it to, and it merged gracefully with the flesh around it, without a seam. He liked it. Quentin’s right knee was wooden now, too. He couldn’t actually remember having injured that particular part of him, but whatever, maybe something untoward had happened to it on the way back.
And there was another change: his hair had gone completely white, even his eyebrows, like the man in Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom.” He looked like he was wearing an Andy Warhol wig.
He would do anything to keep from sitting still. He practiced with a bow and arrow on a wide, disused, weed-grown archery range. When he could get his attention, he had one of the younger centaurs teach him the rudiments of riding and fencing with a saber, in the name of physical therapy. Sometimes he pretended his sparring partner was Martin Chatwin, sometimes he didn’t; either way, he never once landed a hit. A small contingent of talking animals had discovered Quentin’s presence at the Retreat, a badger and some oversize talking rabbits. Excited by the sight and smell of a human, and from Earth at that, they had gotten it into their heads that he was the next High King of Fillory, and when he angrily insisted that he wasn’t, and that he’d lost all interest in that particular ambition, they dubbed him the Reluctant King and left tributes of nuts and cabbages outside his windows, and constructed pathetic handmade (or pawmade) crowns for him woven out of twigs and adorned with worthless quartz pebbles. He tore them apart.
A small herd of tame horses roamed the wide lawns of the Retreat at will. At first Quentin thought they were just pets, but the arrangement turned out to be slightly more complex than that. Centaurs of both sexes frequently copulated with the horses, publicly and loudly.
Quentin had found his few meager possessions stacked in little piles along one wall of his room. He stowed them in a dresser; they took up exactly half of one of its five drawers. His room also held a battered old Florida-style writing desk, painted white and pale green, and one day Quen tin went rummaging through its warped, poorly fitted drawers to see what previous inmates might have left behind. It had occurred to him to attempt some written magic, a basic scrying technique, to try to learn something about what had happened to the others. It almost certainly wouldn’t work between planes, but you never knew. Along with an assortment of odd buttons and dried-out chestnuts and exotic Fillorian insect corpses he found two envelopes. Also in the desk was a dry, tough, leafy branch.
The envelopes were thick and made of the coarse bleached-white paper the centaurs made. On the first his name was written in an elegant calligraphic handwriting that Quentin recognized as Eliot’s. His vision swam; he had to sit down.
Inside it was a note. It was rolled around the flattened, dehydrated remains of what was once a single Merit Ultra Light cigarette, and it read as follows:
DEAR Q,
HELL OF A THING GETTING YOU OUT OF THAT DUNGEON. RICHARD SHOWED UP, FINALLY, FOR WHICH I SUPPOSE WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL, THOUGH G-D KNOWS HE DOESN’T MAKE IT EASY.
WE WANTED TO STAY, Q, BUT IT WAS HARD, AND GETTING HARDER EVERY DAY. THE CENTAURS SAID IT WASN’T WORKING. BUT IF YOU’RE READING THIS THEN YOU WOKE UP AFTER ALL. I’M SORRY ABOUT EVERYTHING. I KNOW YOU ARE TOO. I KNOW I SAID I DIDN’T NEED A FAMILY TO BECOME WHO I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE, BUT IT TURNED OUT THAT I DID. AND IT WAS YOU.
WE’LL MEET AGAIN.
-E
The other envelope contained a notebook. It was thick and old-looking and squashed around the corners. Quentin recognized it instantly, even though he hadn’t seen it since a chilly November afternoon six years ago.
With a cold, clear mind he sat down on his bed and opened The Magicians.
The book was disappointingly short, maybe fifty handwritten pages, some of them smudged and water-damaged, and it was not written in Christopher Plover’s usual plain, simple, open-hearted prose. It was cruder, funnier, more arch, and it showed signs of having been scribbled in haste, with a generous assortment of misspellings and missing words. This was because it wasn’t written by Christopher Plover at all. It was—the author explained in the first paragraph—the first book of Fillory and Further by somebody who had actually been there. That person was Jane Chatwin.
The story of The Magicians picked up immediately after the end of The Wandering Dune, after Jane, the youngest, and her sister Helen (“that dear, self-righteous busybody”) quarreled over Helen’s hiding of the magic buttons that could take them to Fillory. Having failed to unearth them herself, Jane was forced to wait, but no further invitations to Fillory arrived. She and her siblings seemed fated to live out the rest of their lives on Earth as ordinary children. She supposed it was all right—after all, most children never got to go to Fillory at all—but it hardly seemed fair. The others had all gone to Fillory at least twice, and she’d only gotten to go once.
And there was the matter of Martin: he was still missing after all this time. Their parents had long since given up hope, but the children hadn’t. At night Jane and the other little Chatwins crept into each other’s bedrooms and whispered about him, wondering what adventures he was getting up to in Fillory, and when he would finally come home to them, as they knew he one day would.
Years passed. Jane was thirteen, no longer a girl, as old as Martin was when he’d disappeared, when the call finally came. She was visited by a cooperative and industrious hedgehog named Prickleplump, who helped her recover an old cigar box containing the buttons from the old dry well down which Helen had dropped it. She could have enlisted one of the others to come with her, but instead Jane returned to Fillory alone, by way of the City, the only Chatwin ever to enter the other world without a sibling to keep her company.
She found Fillory beset by a powerful wind. It blew and blew and never stopped blowing. At first it was amusing, and everybody flew kites, and a craze for flowy clothing that billowed out on the breeze swept through the royal court at Whitespire. But over time the wind became relentless. The birds were exhausted from struggling with it, and everybody’s hair was getting tangled. The leaves were being stripped from the forest, and the trees were complaining. Even when you went inside and closed the door you could still hear it groaning, and feel it blowing on your face for hours afterward. Castle Whitespire’s wind-powered clockwork heart threatened to spin out of control, and had to be decoupled from its windmills and halted for the first time in living memory.
A group of eagles and griffins and pegasi allowed themselves to be borne away on the wind, convinced that it would blow them away to a fantastical land, one even more magical than Fillory. They returned a week later coming from the other direction, hungry and disheveled and windburned. They refused to discuss what they had seen.
Jane belted on a rapier, put her hair up in a tight bun, and set off into the Darkling Woods alone, resolute, bent forward against the gale, heading upwind in search of its source. Soon she came across Ember, alone in a clearing. He was injured and distraught. He told her of Martin’s transformation, and his efforts to expel the child, which had ended with the death of Umber. They held a council of war.
With a bellowing bleat Ember summoned the Cozy Horse, and together they mounted its broad velvet back and set off to see the dwarves. Swing players at the best of times, the dwarves could never be relied upon to cooperate with anybody, but even they were convinced that Martin was dangerous, and besides, all that wind was blowing the topsoil off their beloved underground warrens. They fashioned for Jane a silver pocket watch, a work of consummate horological mastery, so dense with tiny gears and cams and glorious spiral springs that its interior was a solid teeming mass of gleaming clockwork. With it, the dwarves explained, Jane could control the flow of time itself—turn it forward, turn it back, speed it up, slow it down—as she liked.
Jane and Ember left with the pocket watch, shaking their heads. Honestly, there was never any telling what the dwarves were capable of. If they could build a time machine, you wondered why they didn’t run the whole kingdom. Except, she supposed, that they couldn’t be bothered.
Quentin turned the last page. The book ended there. It was signed on the bottom of the last page by Jane herself.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Quentin said out loud.
“The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it? But I think I tied up most of the loose threads. I’m sure you can fill in the rest, if you really think about it.”
Quentin practically jumped out of what was left of his skin. Sitting on top of his desk on the other side of the room, very still, long legs crossed, was a small, pretty woman with dark hair and pale skin.
“At least I try to make a good entrance.”
She had gone native: she wore a light brown cloak over a practical gray traveling dress that was slit up the sides far enough to show some leg. But it was unmistakably her. The paramedic, and the woman who’d visited him in the infirmary. And yet that wasn’t who she was at all.
“You’re Jane Chatwin, aren’t you?”
She smiled brightly and nodded.
“I autographed it.” She pointed to the manuscript. “Imagine what it would be worth. Sometimes I think about turning up at a Fillory convention just to see what would happen.”
“They’d probably think you were a cosplayer,” Quentin said, “and getting a little old for it.”
He set aside the manuscript on the bed. He had been very young when he met her for the first time, but he wasn’t young anymore. As her brother Martin would have said: My, how he’d grown. Her smile was not as irresistible as it used to be.
“You were the Watcherwoman, too, weren’t you?”
“Was and am.” Still sitting, she sketched a curtsy. “I suppose I could retire now that Martin is gone. Though really, I’ve only just started to enjoy myself.”
He expected himself to smile back at her, but the smile did not materialize. He didn’t feel like smiling. Quentin couldn’t have said exactly what he was feeling.
Jane remained very still, studying him as she had that first day they met. Her presence was so laden with magic and meaning and history that she almost glowed. To think she had spoken to Plover himself, and told him the stories Quentin had grown up on. The circularity of it all was dizzy ing. The sun was setting, and the light stained Quentin’s white bedspread a dusky orange-pink. The edges of everything were softening in the twilight.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said. He had never felt less tempted by a pretty woman’s charms. “If you were the Watcherwoman, why did you do all those things? Stop time and all that?”
She smiled wryly.
“This item”—she produced a silver pocket watch as thick and round as a pomegranate from somewhere in her cloak—”did not come with an instruction manual. It took a bit of experimenting before I got the hang of it, and some of those experiments weren’t so successful. There was one long afternoon in particular . . .” She grimaced. Her accent was the twin of Martin’s. “People took it the wrong way. And anyhow, Plover embroidered all that stuff. What an imagination that man had.”
She shook her head, as if Plover’s flights of fancy were the most incredible part of all this.
“And you know, I was only thirteen when I started out. I had no training in magic at all. I had to figure everything out on my own. I suppose I’m a bit of a hedge witch that way.”
“So all those things the Watcherwoman did—”
“A lot of it did actually happen. But I was careful. The Watcherwoman never killed anyone. I cut corners, sometimes at other people’s expense, but I had other things on my mind. My job was to stop Martin, and I did what I had to. Even those clock-trees.” She snorted ruefully. “Brilliant idea those were. They never did a bloody thing. The funniest part is that Martin was terrified of them! He couldn’t figure them out.”
For a moment her face lost its composure, just for a moment. Her eyes welled with tears, and she blinked rapidly.
“I keep telling myself that we lost him that first night, when he walked away into the forest. It was never him after that, not really. He died a long time ago. But I’m the only Chatwin left now. He was a monster, but he was the last family I had.”
“And we killed him,” Quentin said coldly. His heart was palpitating. The feeling he’d had trouble identifying earlier was clarifying itself: it was rage. This woman had used him, used them all like toys. And if some of the toys got broken, oh well. That had been the real point of the whole story all along. She had manipulated him, sent him and the others into Fillory to find Martin. She had made sure he got there. For all he knew she’d planted the button for Lovelady to find in the first place. It didn’t matter now. It was over, and Alice was dead.
He stood up. A cool, grassy evening breeze stirred the green curtains.
“Yes,” Jane Chatwin said carefully. “You killed him. We won.”
“We won?” He was incredulous. He couldn’t hold back anymore. All the grief and guilt he’d been salting away so carefully was coming back to him as anger. The ice was cracking. The pond was boiling. “We won? You have a damn time machine in your pocket, and that’s the best you could do? You set us up, Jane, or whoever the fuck you are. We thought we were going on an adventure, and you sent us on a suicide mission, and now my friends are dead. Alice is dead.” Here he had to swallow hard before he could go on. “Is that really the best you could do?”