The Magician King

before you got to dragons. Poppy knew about as much about them as it was possible to know with actually ever having seen one. She’d followed leads all over the world, and now she’d followed one here. Josh had put out feelers for an expert on the topic, and he’d been very pleased indeed when his expert had turned out to be as good-looking as Poppy was. She’d been there for three weeks, and Josh didn’t feel she’d worn out her welcome.

He introduced her as his friend, but given who Josh was, and given Poppy’s undeniable prettiness, Quentin didn’t think it was uncharitable to assume that Josh was trying to sleep with her or had already slept with her. He was new and improved, but he was still Josh.

Frankly Poppy got on Quentin’s nerves a bit, but she was about to come in extremely handy. Josh had yet to give her the full download about the dragon of the Grand Canal. He told Quentin he’d been slowplaying it in an attempt to prolong her visit. But now the moment had arrived. They needed her. Needless to say Poppy was beyond excited. Her wide blue eyes got even wider.

“Well, okay,” she said, talking at a runaway clip. “So most of the dragons have a place where you’re supposed to be able to jump into their river and they’ll notice. They monitor it just in case somebody worth their while wants to talk to them. If they want to talk to you, they’ll take you down to where they live. But it’s not a well-understood process at all. There are a lot of urban legends around it. Lots of people say they’ve talked to dragons, but it’s very hard to verify. Supposedly the Thames dragon wrote most of Pink Floyd’s stuff. At least after Syd Barrett left. But there’s no way to prove it.

“Traditionally you approach them via the first bridge upstream from the sea, in this case I guess the Accademia. Haven’t you guys heard all this stuff? I can’t believe you haven’t heard about this. Go at midnight. Go to the middle of the bridge. Take a copy of today’s newspaper and a nice steak. Wear something nice. And that’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. And then you jump in. It’s all just tradition. I mean, God knows if any of it helps. There’s so little data, and so little of it is reliable.”

And then you jump in. That was all.

“But it does sometimes work?” Quentin said.

“Sure!” Poppy nodded brightly. “Uh-huh. Some dragons like to talk more than others. The valedictorian of the magic school in Calcutta makes a run at the Ganges dragon every year, and it works about half the time.

“A dragon in the Grand Canal, though. That’s new. I mean, really new. I was starting to think you were full of shit.” She gave Josh a sharp, reappraising look.

“Starting?” Quentin said.

“So when are you going?”

“Tonight. But listen, do me one favor. Don’t tell anybody about this yet.”

Poppy frowned prettily, which seemed to the only way she knew how. “Why not?”

“Just give us a week,” Quentin said. “That’s all I ask. The dragon isn’t going anywhere, and I need to get a decent chance with it. If word gets out there’s going to be a mob scene.”

She thought for a second.

“All right,” she said.

Something about the way she said it suggested to Quentin that she might actually keep her promise.

Recovering her high spirits immediately, Poppy addressed herself to her jam and toast. Thin as she was, she ate more than Josh, presumably burning it all in whatever inner furnace kept her at such a pitch of eager excitement all the time.

That left the rest of the day to dispense with. Life at the Palazzo Josh (formerly the Palazzo Barberino, after the sixteenth-century clan that built it and eventually sold it to a dot-com jillionaire, who never set foot in it, and who blew his jillions on Ponzi schemes and a trip to the International Space Station, after which he sold it to Josh) wasn’t exactly taxing. He felt disloyal for thinking it, disloyal to Fillory, but he could almost get used to this. The palazzo’s comforts were many. You could spend the morning in bed, reading and watching the Venetian light track slowly over an oriental carpet that was so fractally ornate it practically scintillated right there on the floor in front of you. Then there was all of Venice to wander around—the structural spells alone, the titanic bonds that kept the whole place from drowning itself in the lagoon, were a must-see for any tourist of the world’s magical wonders.

Then there was the daily late-afternoon spritz. Taken altogether it was enough to make Quentin forget for minutes at a time that once upon a time he used to be the king of a magical otherworld.

Not Julia, though. Not quite. She found him nursing his drink on the piano nobile and admiring the cityscape over its heavy stone railing. Together they looked down at the traffic on the canal, much of which consisted of tourists on boats looking up at them and wondering who they were and whether they were famous.

“You like it here,” Julia said.

“It’s amazing. I’d never even been to Italy before. I had no idea it was like this.”

“I lived in France for a while,” she said.

“You did? When did you live in France?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Was that where you learned to steal cars?”

“No.”

Having brought it up, she didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

“It is nice here,” she conceded.

“Do you want to stay here?” Quentin asked. “Do you still want to go back to Fillory?”

She set her glass down on the wide marble parapet. More whiskey, still neat. A muscle twinged in her jaw.

“I have to go back. I cannot stay here.” Before when she said this she sounded angry and desperate. Now she sounded regretful. “I must keep going. Are you coming with me?”

It made Quentin’s heart ache, to hear Julia ask him for something. Anything. She needed his help. People needing him: it was a new feeling. He was starting to like it.

“Of course I am.” It was what she’d said when he asked her to come along to the Outer Island.

She nodded, never taking her eyes off the view.

“Thank you.”

That night at five minutes to midnight Quentin was remembering that conversation and trying to hold on to that feeling as he loitered on the Ponte dell’Accademia, holding copies of Il Gazzettino and the International Herald Tribune, just to cover all the bases, and a really great, amazingly expensive raw steak, doing his very best impression of somebody who wasn’t about to jump into the Grand Canal.

After the crushing, malodorous heat of the day, the night air was surprisingly frigid. From the point of view of someone who was planning to immerse himself in it, the creamy green water of the Grand Canal looked about as enticing as glacial runoff. It also looked a lot farther away than it had looked from the banks. It also looked clean, which Quentin knew it wasn’t.

But somewhere under all that water there was a button. And a dragon. It didn’t seem real. He half- suspected Josh of having lost the button in a sofa and making up the story about the dragon because it was less embarrassing.

“This is going to be really wretched, dude,” Josh said. “You are not going to be a happy puppy in there.”

“No kidding.” He’d hoped Josh would offer to do it himself, or go in with him, but no such luck.

“You’ll get used to it,” Poppy said, hugging herself.

“Why are you here, again?” Quentin said.

“Interests of science. Plus I want to see if you’ll actually go through with it.”

It was a personal tic of Poppy’s that she never seemed to lie when other people would. It was either tactless or admirable, depending on how you looked at it.

Quentin took some deep breaths and leaned against the splintery wooden railing, which still retained some of the fading heat of the sun. Remember what’s at stake. Julia wouldn’t hesitate. She’d be over the railing like a damn Olympic hurdler. At his request they hadn’t told her they were going tonight, but slipped out after she went to