brick, affording glimpses of silent, secret courtyards. Every time they thought they’d left the sea behind they’d stumble on it again—a dark angular vein of water branching in between the buildings, lined on both sides with bright-colored skiffs.
Just being here made Quentin feel better. It was more suitable for a king and a queen than suburban Boston. He didn’t know yet whether they were getting any closer to Fillory, but he felt closer.
Julia kept her pace brisk and her eyes fixed straight ahead. It should have been a short walk, ten minutes at most, but the street plan was so chaotic they had to stop at literally every corner to reorient themselves. They took turns snatching the map from each other and getting lost and having it snatched back. Only about one building in five had a number on it, and the numbers didn’t even seem to be in sequential order. It was a city built for wandering, which was all well and good unless you had urgent business at one very particular location.
Finally they stopped at a wooden door, painted brown, that was barely as tall as they were. It was an open question whether they were on the right street, but if nothing else the door had the right number on a little stone plaque above it. It had a tiny window set in it, which had been painted over. There was no knob.
Quentin put his hand on the warm stone wall next to it. He counted a rhythmic sequence under his breath, and a thick fabric of lines the deep orange of a heating filament flashed for a minute over the old stone.
“The wards on this place are ironclad,” he said. “If your fixer doesn’t live here, whoever does knows what they’re doing.”
Either they were about to improve their situation or significantly worsen it. There being no buzzer, Quentin knocked. The door didn’t resonate under his knuckles—there could have been a solid mile of rock behind it. But the window swung open promptly.
“We’d like to talk to your boss,” Quentin said.
The window shut immediately. He looked at Julia and shrugged. What else was he supposed to say? She looked back at him impassively from behind her black glasses. Quentin wanted to walk away. He wanted to go back, but there was no back to go to. The only way out was through. Onward and downward.
The street was silent. It was narrow, practically an alley, with buildings going up four stories on either side. Nothing happened. After five minutes Quentin muttered some words in Icelandic and held his palm an inch away from the door. He felt the wall around it, which was in the shade but still warm.
“Stand back,” he said.
Whoever made the wards knew what they were doing. But they didn’t know everything Quentin knew. He moved the heat from the wall, all of it, into the little glass window, which expanded, as glass will when it’s heated. The wards were good enough that the heat didn’t want to go, but Quentin had ways of encouraging it. When the glass couldn’t expand anymore it popped with a ping like a lightbulb. Warren’s students would have been impressed.
“
A minute passed. Quentin’s thermal transfer spell had made a sheen of frost appear on the old stone wall. The door opened. It was dark inside.
“See?” he said. “I did learn something in college.”
A short, heavyset man met them in the foyer, a tiny room lined with brown ceramic tiles. He was surprisingly gracious. They must have to replace that little window a lot.
He ushered them up a short flight of stairs into one of the most beautiful rooms Quentin had ever seen.
He’d been snowed by Venice’s bizarre topography. He’d assumed they’d be shown into some crap Euro-trash crash pad, with white walls and uncomfortable couches and tiny geometrical lamps, but the building’s exterior was pure camouflage. They were in one of the big palaces on the Grand Canal. They’d come in the back way.
The entire front wall was a row of tall windows with Moorish peaks, all looking out onto the water. The obvious intention was to awe guests into a state of trembling submissiveness, and Quentin surrendered immediately. It was like a full-scale mural, a Tintoretto maybe, with vivid green water and boats of all shapes and sizes, imaginable and unimaginable, crossing back and forth. Three hideous, glittering Murano chandeliers lit the room, translucent octopuses dripping with crystals. The walls were stacked with ranks of paintings, classical landscapes and scenes of Venice. The floor was old marble tiles, their lumps and scars smothered under overlapping oriental carpets.
Everything in the room was very much just so. It was the kind of room you wanted to spend years in. It wasn’t Fillory, but things were definitely looking up. It felt like Castle Whitespire.
Their escort departed, and for the moment they were left to their own devices. Quentin and Julia sat on a sofa together; its legs were so deeply carved it looked like it was going to walk away. There were four or five other people in the room, but it was so huge that it seemed private and empty. Three men in shirtsleeves were talking in low tones over a tiny table, sipping something clear out of tiny glasses. A broad-shouldered old woman stared out at the water with her back to them. A butler, or whatever they were called in Italy, stood at the foot of the stairs.
Everyone ignored them. Julia squished herself into one corner of the couch. She pulled her feet up, putting her shoes on the nice antique upholstery.
“I guess we take a number,” Quentin said.
“We have to wait,” Julia said. “He will call us.”
She took off her glasses and closed her eyes. She was starting to withdraw again. He could see it. It seemed to come in waves. Maybe it was because she felt safe here, she could let herself go for a while. He hoped so. He would take it from here.
“I’m going to get you some water.”
“Mineral water,” she said. “Fizzy. And ask him for rye.”
If there was one thing being a king prepared you for, it was talking to domestic staff. The butler had both mineral water—
“Warren’s fixer must be pretty good at fixing things,” Quentin said. “This place is nice even by magician standards.”
“I cannot stay here” was all Julia said.
She sat there sipping the rye and shivering, cupping it between her hands as if it were a magic healing cordial. She drank without opening her eyes, like a baby. Quentin had the butler bring her a wrap. She had the butler bring her another rye.
“I can’t even get drunk anymore,” she said bitterly.
After that she didn’t speak. Quentin hoped she could rest. He occupied the other end of the couch, sipping a Venetian spritz (Prosecco, Aperol, soda water, twist of lemon, olive) and looking out at the canal and not thinking about what they’d do if this didn’t work out. The palace directly opposite them was pink; the setting sun was turning it salmon. Its windows were all shuttered. Over the years it had settled unevenly—one half had sunk slightly while the other half stayed where it was, creating a fault line up the middle. It must have run through the whole building, all the rooms, Quentin thought. People were probably always tripping on it. Stripy poles stuck up at odd angles from the water in front of the pink palace.
It was strange to be in a place and not be king of it. He’d gotten out of the habit. It was like Elaine had said: nothing made him special here. Nobody noticed him. He had to admit it was strangely relaxing. It was an hour, and Quentin had cut himself off after his third spritz, before a small, intense young Italian in a pale suit, no tie, came and invited them upstairs. It was the kind of outfit an American couldn’t have gotten away with in a million years.
He showed them into a small all-white salon with three delicate wooden chairs set around a table. There was a plain silver bowl on the table.
No one sat in the third chair. Instead a voice spoke to them out of the air—a man’s voice, but high and whispery, almost androgynous. It was hard to tell where it was coming from.
