The Magician King

Except the thing was, doctor, it was all much too orderly. It didn’t have the quality of a hallucination, it was too dry and firm to the touch. For one thing it was her only hallucination. It didn’t spill over into other things. Its borders were stable. And for another thing it wasn’t a hallucination. It fucking happened.

If this was madness it was an entirely new kind of madness, as yet undocumented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She had nerdophrenia. She was dorkotic.

Julia broke up with James. Or maybe she just stopped answering his calls and greeting him when they passed each other in the hall. One or the other, she forgot which. She did some careful calculations with her GPA, which until that point had been highly robust, and figured she could go to school two days out of five, eke out straight D’s, and still graduate. It was just a matter of careful brinksmanship, and the brink was where Julia lived now.

Meanwhile she continued to see the shrink regularly. He was a perfectly decent sort, nothing if not well- meaning, with a funny stubbly face and reasonable expectations of what he could hope to achieve in life. She didn’t tell him about the secret school for magic that she hadn’t gotten into, though. Maybe she was crazy, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d seen Terminator 2. She wasn’t going out like Sarah Connor.

Every once in a while Julia did feel her conviction slackening. She knew what she knew, but there just wasn’t a lot to go on, day to day, to keep her belief in what happened strong. The best she could hope for was that every couple of weeks Google might pop up a hit on Brakebills, maybe two, but a few minutes later it would be gone again. As if by magic! Apparently she wasn’t the only person out there who had a Google alert on it, and that person was clever enough to scrub the Google cache when the alert went off. But it gave Julia something to chew on.

Then, in April, they made their first wrong move. They really blew it. Blew it wide open. Because seven envelopes arrived in her mailbox: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech. Congratulations, we are pleased to accept you as a member of the class of ha ha ha ha you must be fucking kidding me! She laughed her fucking head off when she saw them. Her parents laughed too. They were laughing with relief. Julia was laughing because it was so goddamned funny. She kept on laughing as she ripped the letters in half, one after the other, and fed them to the recycling bin.

You goddamned idiots, she thought. Too clever for your own good. No wonder you let Quentin in, you’re just like him: you can’t stop outsmarting yourselves. You think you can buy off my life with this? With a bunch of fat envelopes? You are perhaps under the impression that I will accept these in lieu of the magic kingdom that is my rightful inheritance?

Oh my no. Not on your life, mister. This is a standoff, a waiting game, and I’ve got all day. You’re looking for a quick fix to the Julia problem, but no such fix exists. You’d best settle in, my friend, because Julia is playing the long game.

CHAPTER 7

On the way home, Quentin made it his royal business to orbit the Muntjac and check in on everybody once or twice a day. The morning after they left the Outer Island, Quentin’s first stop was Benedict. The ship was racing along under the tropical sun, its every line and sail twangingly taut and perfect, and Quentin was feeling a little silly that he’d had the Muntjac so thoroughly fitted out for what had amounted to a trip around the block. He found Benedict sitting on a stool in his cabin, hunched over his tiny fold-down writing desk. Spread out on it was a hand-drawn naval chart showing a few jagged little islands and peppered with tiny numbers that might have denoted the depths of the ocean. Somebody had gone over the shallow water with a pale blue wash to make it look more watery.

Benedict hadn’t warmed to Quentin any since they’d left the mainland, but Quentin found himself liking him anyway. There was something bracing about the sheer consistency of his contempt for Quentin, who was, after all, Benedict’s king. It took some backbone to stick to that position. And if nothing else Benedict was about the nerdiest person he’d met in Fillory, of a type that didn’t really exist in the real world: he was a map nerd.

“So what have you been up to?” he said.

Benedict shrugged.

“Seasick mostly.”

He hadn’t seen much of Benedict, though he’d tried a couple of times to tutor him on his math. Benedict was conspicuously skillful at doing arithmetic in his head, but Fillorian mathematics weren’t particularly advanced. It was amazing how far he’d gotten on his own.

“What are you working on?”

“Old map,” Benedict said, without looking up. “Like really old. Like two hundred years ago.”

Quentin peered over his shoulder, hands clasped behind his back.

“Is that from the embassy?”

“Like I would do that. It was on the wall. In a frame.”

“It’s just that it has the Outer Island Embassy seal on it.”

“I copied it.”

“You copied the seal too?”

“I copied the map. The seal was on the map.”

It was a gorgeous map. If he was telling the truth, Benedict had genuine talent. It was detailed, precise, without any hesitations or erasures.

“That’s amazing. You have a real gift.”

Benedict flushed at this and worked even more industriously. He found Quentin’s approval and his disapproval equally unbearable.

“How’ve you found the fieldwork? Must be different from what you’re used to.”

“I hate it,” Benedict said. “It’s a fucking mess. Nothing looks like it’s supposed to. There’s no math for it.” His frustration brought him out of his shell a little. “Nothing’s ever correct, ever. There’s no straight lines! I always got that maps are approximations, I just never understood how much they leave out. It’s chaos. I’m never doing this again.”

“That’s it? You’re giving up?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Look at that—” Benedict waved at the wall, in the general direction of the heaving sea. “And now look at this.” He pointed to the map. “This you can make perfect. That—” He shuddered. “It’s just a mess.”

“But the map isn’t real. So sure, maybe it’s perfect, but what’s the point?”

“Maps don’t make you seasick.”

The irony wasn’t lost on Quentin. He’s the one who’d turned the ship around, back toward Whitespire. He looked at the map Benedict was working on. Sure enough, one of the little islands toward the edge of the page, almost falling into the margin, had the word After written next to it in tiny calligraphic script.

“After Island.” There it was, right there. Quentin touched it lightly with his finger. He half-expected to get a shock. “Is that on our way?”

“It’s east of here. It’s the complete opposite of on our way.”

“How far?”

“Two days, three days. Like I said, the map is really old. And these are outlying islands.”

Benedict explained, rolling his eyes practically up into his head at Quentin’s ignorance, that the islands farther out in the Eastern Ocean didn’t stay still once they caught on that they’d been mapped. They didn’t like it, and through some kind of tectonic magic they wandered around to make sure the maps didn’t stay too accurate. More chaos.

Benedict whispered some calculations to himself, speed and time, then nimbly, precisely—you wouldn’t think