The Magician King

it was possible with those black bangs hanging over his eyes—he drew a perfect freehand circle around After Island in light pencil.

“It has to be somewhere inside this circle.”

Quentin gazed at the little island-dot, lost in the web of curving lines of meridians and parallels. A net that wouldn’t catch him if he fell. It wasn’t Fillory out there. But somewhere in that abyss shone a key, a magic key. He could come back with that in his hand.

An image swam into his mind, an album cover from the 1970s, a painting of an old-fashioned sailing ship on the very edge of a cataract over which the green sea was roaring and pouring. The ship was just beginning to tilt, and the current was strong, but still: a bold tack in a strong wind might just save it. A sharp, barked order from the captain and it would slew around and beat back up against the current to safety.

But then where would the ship go? Back home? Not yet.

“Mind if I borrow this?” he said. “I want to show it to the captain.”

With the course change they left the warm blue-green ocean behind and crashed their way into a heaving black one. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. Flail-blows of cold rain clattered on the deck. Quentin couldn’t have pointed to the dividing line, but now the water around them seemed like a completely different element from the one they’d been sailing in before, something opaque and solid that had to be smashed and shoved aside rather than slipped silently through.

The Muntjac bulled its way gamely through the waves ahead of a firm, pressing salt wind. The ship had a surprise for them: below the waterline it seemed—it was hard to see clearly through the chop—to have put out a pair of sleek wooden fins, unfolding from pockets in the hull, which swam them forward. Whether they were animated by magic or a mechanical arrangement, Quentin didn’t know. But he felt a warm surge of gratitude. The old ship was repaying his kindness and more.

He thought the sloth might know something about it, given how much time it spent down there in the hold, but when he visited he found it fast asleep, hanging by its boat-hook claws, rocking gently with the ship’s rolling. If anything it was more serene in the heavy weather. The air in the hold was warm and humid and slothy, and a salad of rotting fruit rinds and less identifiable debris sloshed around in the bilge.

Julia, then. She might know. And he wanted to discuss the magic key with her. She was his only real peer on board the Muntjac, and she had access to sources he didn’t. And he was worried about her.

Julia kept to her cabin even more than usual now that the weather had turned. She may have been spiritually one with Fillory, but the freezing drizzle had hounded even her belowdecks. Quentin lurched down the narrow passage that led to her room, with errant swells flinging him playfully against one bulkhead, then the other.

Her door was shut. For a moment, just as the Muntjac paused weightlessly on the crest of the wave, Quentin had a powerful sense of the romance of the scene, and his crush stirred inside him, unfolding its leathery wings. He knew it was at least partly a fantasy. Julia was so solitary, so wrapped up in Fillory, that it was hard to imagine her wanting him or anyone, or at any rate anyone human. She was missing something, but it probably wasn’t a boyfriend.

Then again they were both here, far out at sea, tempest-tossed, together in a warm berth in the freezing wasteland of the ocean. It was liberating being out from under the snarky, gossipy gazes of Eliot and Janet. Surely Julia couldn’t be so far gone that she didn’t recognize the allure of a shipboard fling. The scene practically wrote itself. She was only human. And they would be home soon. He knocked on her door.

Always at the back of his mind, never spoken but always felt, was his awareness that Julia was from before: before Brakebills, before he knew magic was real, before everything. She’d never known Alice. If he could fall back in love with Julia, it would be like time winding itself back, and he could start over again. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was in love with Julia or just that he wanted to be in love with her, because it would be so comforting, such a relief, to be in love with her. It seemed like such a good idea. Was there really that big of a difference?

Julia opened the door. She was naked.

Or no, she wasn’t naked. She was wearing a dress, sort of, but only to her waist. The top half was hanging down in front of her, and her breasts were bare. They were pale and conical, neither full nor slight. They were perfect. When he was seventeen he’d devoted entire months of his life to constructing a mental image of Julia’s naked upper body based on forensic evidence gathered from furtive surveys of her clothed form. As it turned out he’d been quite close. Only her nipples were different from what he’d expected. Paler, hardly darker than the pale skin around them.

He closed the door again—he didn’t slam it, but he closed it firmly.

“Jesus Christ, Julia!” he said under his breath. Though he said it to himself more than to her.

A long minute passed. He spent it with his back against the bulkhead next to Julia’s door. He could feel his heart beating hard against the hard wood. Sure, he wanted something to happen, but not that. Or at least not like that. What the hell did she mean, waving those things around? What, was this a joke to her? He could hear her moving around in her room. He took a deep breath and knocked again, slowly. When she answered the door again her dress was fully on.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

“Sorry,” she said flatly.

She sat down on a little stool at the other end of the room, facing the windows. She didn’t ask him in, but she hadn’t closed the door either. Warily, he stepped inside.

Julia’s quarters were the mirror image of Quentin’s, but due to an irregularity in the ship’s plan, an errant staircase on his side, they were a little bigger, with room for two people to sit if one of them sat on the bed. Quentin sat on the bed. Light came from a glowing blue ball that bobbed up against the ceiling like a balloon that had lost its string, an odd casting of Julia’s that looked like a trapped will-o’-the-wisp.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I forgot.”

“What did you forget?” It came out angrier than he meant it to. “That your arms go in the sleeves? Look, it’s not like I don’t . . .” No good end to that sentence. “Never mind.”

He looked at her, really looked, for the first time in a while. She was still beautiful but thin, much too thin. And her eyes were still black. He wondered if the change was permanent, and if so what else had changed that he couldn’t see.

“I don’t know.” She stared out at the spray. “I forget what I forgot.”

“Well, okay, so, but now you remembered.”

“Look, I forget how things work sometimes. All right? Or not so much how but why. Why people say hello, why they take baths, why they wear clothes, read books, smile, talk, eat. All those human things.” She tugged her mouth to one side.

“I don’t understand this, Julia.” The anger was gone. He kept revising how much trouble Julia was having, and every time he did he revised it upward. “Help me understand. You’re human. Why would you forget that? How would you?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. Then she turned those black eyes on him. “I’m losing it. It’s losing me. It’s going away.”

“What is? What happened to you, Julia? Do you need to go back to Earth?”

“No!” she said sharply. “I’m not going back there. Not ever.”

The idea seemed to frighten her.

“But you remember Brooklyn, right? Where we’re from? And James, and high school, and all that?”

“Remembering.” Her delicate mouth quirked again, bitterly. She spoke in something like her old voice, with contractions and everything. “That’s always been my problem, hasn’t it. I remembered Brakebills. Couldn’t forget it.”

Quentin remembered her remembering. She’d failed the entrance exam at Brakebills, which he’d passed, and she was supposed to forget about it afterward so the school would stay secret. They’d cast spells on her to make sure. But the spells hadn’t held, and she hadn’t forgotten.

But it had brought her here, he reminded himself. To a beautiful ship on a magical ocean. It had made her a queen of a secret world. The path was crooked, but it led to a happy ending, right? It was dawning on him that Fillory was his happy ending, but it might not be Julia’s. She needed something else. She was still out there on the crooked path, and night was coming on.