The Magician King

and sipped more water till his head felt better. You can’t feel fresher and cleaner than when you’re soaking in fresh water within sight of the ocean.

Most of the night before was blotted out, or available to his memory only in the form of mental security- camera footage, grainy figures with blurred voices, but one thing remained bright and clear and high-definition: the golden key. She’d said it was real. He wondered what the magic was. He wondered what it opened. Had she told him, and he’d forgotten? No, that didn’t sound right. But she’d told him where it was: After Island. He needed to know more. They had a choice to make: go on, or go home.

But by the time he came down for breakfast Elaine was already gone. She’d left a note reminding him to take the chest with him, the one with the taxes in it, and wishing him well. She also left him a slender gray book called The Seven Golden Keys. She didn’t say where she’d gone.

I guess she won’t be showing me those gold beetles after all, he thought. Or her fancy stamp. Thank God he hadn’t made a pass at her.

Elaine had left behind her daughter too. Eleanor was back at her mother’s desk, just as they’d found her when they arrived, industriously documenting the habits of the bunny-pegasus in bright primary-colored pencils on official Outer Island Embassy stationery. There seemed to be an unlimited supply of it.

Quentin looked over her shoulder. The letterhead really was nice.

“Good morning, Eleanor. Do you know where your mom went?”

Quentin hadn’t spent a lot of time with little kids in his life. He mostly fell back on treating them like adults. Eleanor didn’t seem to mind.

“No,” she said lightly. She didn’t look up or stop coloring.

“Do you know when she’s coming back?”

She shook her head. What kind of mother would leave a five-year-old to take care of herself? Quentin felt sorry for Eleanor. She was a sweet, earnest little girl. She made him feel paternal, which wasn’t a feeling he had much experience with, but he was finding that he liked it. She obviously didn’t get much attention, and what she got wasn’t exactly dripping with maternal affection.

“All right. We have to go soon, but we’ll wait till she gets back.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Well, we sort of do. Are you still drawing bunny-pegasi?”

“Yes.”

“You know, I think they might be hare-pegasi, not bunnies. Hares are bigger, and much fiercer.”

“They’re bunnies.”

The eternal question. Eleanor changed the subject.

“I made these for you.”

With some effort she pulled open a desk drawer—the humidity made it stick, and when it came unstuck it pulled out all the way and fell on the floor. She rummaged in it and took out some papers, four or five of them, and handed them to Quentin. They were heavily scribbled over in colored pencil.

“They’re passports,” she said, anticipating his question. “You need them if you want to leave Fillory.”

“Who said I’m leaving Fillory?”

“You need them if you’re leaving Fillory,” she said. “If you’re not you don’t need them. They’re just in case.”

And then more quietly: “You have to fold them in half yourself.”

She must have been copying from something official, because they were in their own way impressive documents. They had the Fillorian arms on the front, or a crude facsimile thereof. Inside Quentin’s—once you folded it in half—there was a picture of Quentin, more or less, with a big red smile and a golden crown on his head, and some squiggly lines representing writing. On the back were the arms of the Outer Island: a palm tree and a butterfly. She’d made one for each of them, even the sloth, whom she had never seen but had been extremely interested in. She must be bored stiff without any other kids around, Quentin thought. She must be practically raising herself.

He could relate. He was an only child too, and his parents had never paid much attention to him either. They considered their attitude toward parenting to be rather enlightened: they weren’t going to be the kind of couple whose lives revolved around their child. They gave him a lot of freedom and never asked him for much. Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.

“Thank you, Eleanor. That was very, very sweet of you.” He bent down and kissed her on her blond crown.

“It’s because you brought me cake,” she said shyly.

“I know.”

Poor moppet. Maybe when he got back to Whitespire he could start up some Fillorian equivalent of Child Social Services.

“We’ll wait till your mom comes back before we go.”

“You don’t have to.”

But he did, or he waited as long as possible. They spent the day lounging around the embassy and fishing off the dock. He made another attempt to teach Eleanor to read the palm clock-tree and was again rebuffed. Around four o’clock Quentin called it. He had Benedict take Eleanor into town—over her strident objections—to find somebody responsible to leave her with and ordered everybody else back on the freshly watered and provisioned Muntjac.

Benedict returned an hour later, haggard but victorious. They weighed anchor as the first stars appeared. Playtime was over. They set sail for Castle Whitespire.

CHAPTER 6

A funny thing happened to Julia after that business with her fake social studies paper. A magic trick, you might even call it: where once there had been only one Julia, there were now two Julias, one for each set of memories. The Julia that went with the first set, the normal set, the one where she wrote the paper and went home and had dinner, did normal Julia things. She went to school. She did her homework. She played the oboe. She finally slept with James, which she’d kind of been meaning to do anyway, but for some reason had been putting off.

But there was a second, stranger Julia growing inside the first Julia, like a parasite, or a horrible tumor. At first it was tiny, the size of a bacterium, a single cell of doubt, but it divided and divided and grew and grew. This second Julia wasn’t interested in school, or the oboe, or even James particularly. James backed up the first Julia’s story, he remembered meeting her in the library, but what did that prove? Nothing. It just proved that in addition to writing her paper on intentional communities for her, they’d gotten to James.

And James bought the story, heart and soul. There was only one James.

The problem was that Julia was smart, and Julia was interested in the truth. She didn’t like inconsistencies, and she didn’t let go until they were resolved, ever. When she was five she’d wanted to know why Goofy could talk and Pluto couldn’t. How could one dog have another dog for a pet, and one be sentient and the other not? Likewise she wanted to know who the lazy fucker was who wrote her paper on intentional communities for her and used Wikipedia as a source. Granted that the answer, “the nefarious agents of a secret school for wizards in upstate New York,” was not a league-leadingly plausible answer to her question. But it was the answer that fit her memories, and those memories were getting sharper all the time.

And as they got sharper the second Julia grew stronger and stronger, and every bit of strength she gained she took away from the first Julia, who got weaker and weaker and thinner and thinner, to the point where she was practically transparent, and the parasite behind the mask of her face became almost visible.

The funny thing, or rather one of the many funny things in this haha-hilarious story, was that nobody noticed. Nobody noticed that she had less and less to say to James, or that with three weeks to go before the holiday