The Magician King

clawed at Quentin, trying to drag him back into the past. He wondered what he would say if he could talk to the boy he had been, sitting in what looked like this exact same chair, all those years ago, wearing the rumpled clothes that he’d slept in, joggling his knee with nerves, and trying to figure out if this was all a joke. Proceed with caution? Take the blue pill? Maybe something more practical. Don’t sleep with Janet. Don’t go touching strange keys.

And what would his younger self say? He would look back at him the way Benedict looked at Quentin and say: like I would do that.

“So,” Fogg said. “What can I do for you? What brings you back to your humble alma mater?”

The problem was how to ask for help without giving away more than he should about Fillory. Its existence— its reality—was still a secret, and Fogg was the last person he wanted to know about it. If he found out, then everybody would hear about it, and next thing you know it’s the hot spot for Brakebills kiddies on spring break, the Fort Lauderdale of the magical multiverse.

But he had to start somewhere. Just pretend to be as ignorant as he is.

“Dean Fogg, how much do you know about travel between worlds?”

“A little. More theory than practice, of course.” Fogg chuckled. “Some years back we had a student with an interest along those lines. Penny, I think his name was. Can’t have been his real name.”

“He was in my year. William was his real name.”

“Yes, he and Melanie—Professor Van der Weghe—spent quite a bit of time working on that very subject. She’s retired now, of course. What would be the nature of your interest, exactly—?”

“Well, I always liked him,” Quentin said, improvising haplessly. “Penny. William. And I’ve been asking around, but nobody’s seen him in a while.” Since he got his hands bitten off by an insane godling. “And I thought you might have some idea about where he is.”

“You thought he might have—crossed over?”

“Sure.” Why not. “Yeah.”

“Well,” Fogg said. He stroked his goatee, mulling, or appearing to mull. “No, no, I can’t go around handing out information about students left and right without their consent. It wouldn’t be proper.”

“I’m not asking for his cell number. I just thought you might have heard something.”

The springs of Fogg’s chair squawked as he leaned forward.

“My dear boy,” he said, “I hear all sorts of things, but I can’t repeat them. When I arranged for you to recuse yourself with that firm in Manhattan, you don’t suppose I went around telling people where you’d ended up?”

“I suppose not.”

“But if you’re really interested in Penny’s whereabouts, I’d advise you to start your search in this reality”— dry chuckle!—“rather than some other. Will you be staying for lunch?”

Julia was right. They shouldn’t have come. Obviously Fogg didn’t know anything, and being around him wasn’t good for Quentin. He could feel himself regressing in the direction of an adolescent tantrum—it was like trying to talk to his parents. He lost all perspective on who he was and how far he’d come. He really couldn’t believe the awe in which he used to hold this man. The towering, Gandalfian wizard he once cowered before had been swapped out and replaced with a smug hidebound bureaucrat.

“I can’t. But thanks, Dean Fogg.” Quentin clapped his hands on his knees. “Actually I think we’d better be moving on.”

“Before you do, Quentin.” Fogg hadn’t moved. “I’d like to prolong this conversation a little further. I’ve heard some pretty exotic rumors about what you and your friends have been up to these past few years. The undergraduates talk about it. You’re quite the campus legend, you know.”

Now Quentin did stand up.

“Well,” he said. “Kids. Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“I assure you I don’t.” Fogg’s eyes had regained their old flinty spark from somewhere. “But a word of advice from your old dean, if I may. Notwithstanding my regrettable ignorance of interdimensional travel, I don’t know what your interest in Penny might be, but I do know perfectly well that you never liked him. And no one’s heard from him in years. No one’s heard from Eliot Waugh or Alice Quinn in years, either. Or Janet Pluchinsky.”

Quentin noticed that Josh didn’t figure in Fogg’s memory. He should have asked about Josh first. Though he probably would have gotten the same answer.

“And now you’ve turned up dressed very oddly, and you’ve brought a civilian onto the grounds, one of our rejections if I’m not mistaken, which is—well, it’s just not something we ordinarily tolerate. I don’t know what you’re mixed up in, but I’ve put myself out for you over the years, quite a bit, and I have the reputation and the security of the school to think of.”

Aha. There’s the Fogg he used to know and fear. Not gone, he’d just been playing possum. But Quentin wasn’t the naughty schoolboy he used to be.

“Oh, I do know that, Dean Fogg. Believe me.”

“Well, good. Don’t go digging too deep, Quentin. Don’t stir. Shit. Up.” Fogg enunciated the obscenity crisply. “Right now you have the air of somebody who thinks he knows better. Humility is a useful quality in a magician, Quentin. Magic knows better, not you. Do you remember what I told you the night before you graduated? Magic isn’t ours. I don’t know whose it is, but we’ve got it on loan, on loan at best. It’s like what poor Professor March used to say about the turtles. Don’t bait them, Quentin. One world ought to be enough for anyone.”

Easy for you to say. You’ve only ever seen one.

“Thank you. I’ll try to remember that.”

Fogg sighed tragically, like Cassandra warning the Trojans, destined never to be heeded.

“Well, all right. Professor Geiger should be in the junior common room, if you need a portal. Unless you’d rather walk out the way you came.”

“A portal would be great. Thank you.” Quentin stood up. “By the way, that ‘rejection’ sitting in the hall? She’s a better magician than most of your students. Most of your faculty too.”

Quentin walked with Julia down to the junior common room. He had to get out of here. Everything was smaller than he remembered it—it was like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and he’d drunk the magic tonic. He felt like his head was sticking out the chimney, and his arm was out the window.

“Not going here?” he said. “You didn’t miss much.”

“Really?” Julia said. “You did.”

CHAPTER 10

Julia was playing the long game. But the problem with the long game, it turned out, was that it was long. They knew she was out here, and sooner or later they would have to deal with her. All she had to do was wait them out. But meanwhile weeks passed. People graduated. Julia included, probably, although she didn’t go to the ceremony.

The summer turned her darkened room into a convection oven, baking its contents to a hard hydroptic crisp, and then fall came and the weather relented. The ivy that ran up the house in back of them changed color and ruffled in the wind, and rain spattered the window. She could feel the neighborhood empty out as her classmates all went off to college. She didn’t. She was eighteen now, a responsible adult. Her coming-ofage story was over. Nobody could make her do anything anymore.

She could breathe easier with all her old friends, First Julia’s friends, out of town, but at the same time it made her nervous. She was all alone on this one. Very alone. She had made her way out to the edge of the world, hung by her fingers from the lip, and let go into free fall. Would she fall forever?

Julia would do anything to make the time pass. She killed time, murdered it, massacred it and hid the bodies. She threw her days in bunches onto the bonfire with both hands and watched them go up in fragrant smoke. It wasn’t easy. Sometimes it felt like the hours had ground to a halt. They fought her as they passed, one after the other, like stubborn stools. Online Scrabble helped ease them on their way, and movies. But you could only watch The Craft a finite number of times, and that number turned out to be about three.

And yes, all right, she did spend six weeks in an insane asylum. There, she said it. It was awful, but she