The Magician King

something.”

“Venice is a port. That’s a kind of door. A portal. The whole city is a door.”

“Yeah, but the first?”

“Or it’s a metaphorical door,” Poppy said. “The Bible or something. Like in Dan Brown.”

“You know, I bet it’s something about the pyramids,” Josh said.

“It means the Chatwins’ house,” Julia said.

The conversation stopped.

“What do you mean?” Poppy said.

“Their aunt’s house. In Cornwall. Where they discovered Fillory. That was the first door.”

It was nice to see Poppy beaten to the punch for once.

“But how do you know?” Poppy asked.

“I know,” Julia said. Quentin hoped that she wouldn’t say what she was about to say next, but she said it anyway. “I can feel it.”

“What do you mean, feel it?” Poppy said.

“Why do you care?” Julia said.

“Because I’m curious.”

Quentin intervened. Julia seemed to have taken an instinctive, prickly dislike to Poppy.

“It makes sense. What’s the first way people got into Fillory? Through the Chatwins’ house. The clock in the back hall.”

“I don’t know,” Josh said. He rubbed his round stubbly chin. “I thought you could never get in the same way twice. And anyway, Martin Chatwin was a little kid. That’s fine for him, but no way I could fit through the door of a grandfather clock. Not even you could.”

“All right,” Quentin said. “Sure, but—”

“Plus it was supposed to be a personal invitation, specific to the Chatwins,” Josh went on. “Like, those particular kids were particularly awesome in some way, so Ember summoned them so they could use their awesome personal qualities to fix shit in Fillory.”

“We have awesome personal qualities,” Quentin said. “I think we should go. It’s our best lead.”

“I am going,” Julia said.

“Road trip!” Josh said, turning on a dime.

“All right.” It felt good to be making decisions anyway, whatever they were based on. It felt good to get moving again. “We’ll go tomorrow morning. Unless anybody has a better idea before then.”

It was getting increasingly hard to not notice that Poppy was helpless with laughter.

“I’m sorry!” she said. “I really am. It’s just that—I mean, I know it’s real, or I mean I guess it’s real, but you do realize that this is a kids’ thing? Fillory? It’s like you’re worried about how to get to Candy Land! Or I don’t know, Smurftown.”

Julia got up and left. She didn’t even bother to get annoyed. She took Fillory seriously, and she had no patience for, and no interest in, anyone who didn’t. He hadn’t noticed till now, but Julia could be pretty unpleasant when she wanted to be.

“You think Candy Land is real?” Josh said. “’Cause I would ditch Fillory in a red-hot minute for that shit. Chocolate Swamp and all. And have you seen Princess Frostine?”

“Maybe it’s not real to you,” Quentin said, a little stiffly. “It’s just that it’s very real to us. Or to me anyway. It’s where I live. It’s my home.”

“I know, I know! I’m sorry. I really am.” Poppy wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry. Maybe you just have to see it.”

“Maybe you do.”

But, Quentin thought, you probably never will.

The next day they all went to Cornwall.

That’s where the Chatwins’ house was: the house where in 1917 the Chatwin children went to stay with their aunt Maude, and met Christopher Plover, and found their way into Fillory, and the whole magnificent, wretched story began. It was incredible that the house still existed, and had been sitting there all this time, and that you could just go there.

But in a way it was incredible that he hadn’t been there already. The Chatwin house wasn’t open to the public, but its general whereabouts weren’t a secret. It was a matter of historical-slash-Wikipedian record. Nobody had torn it down. It’s not like somebody was going to stop them, other than possibly the current owners and the local constabulary. It was about time he went there, if only to pay his respects at what was basically the Trinity test site of the Fillorian mythos.

As far as getting there went, Josh swore up and down that he’d been doing serious work with opening portals lately, and he was pretty sure he could get one through to Cornwall. Quentin asked Josh where he thought Cornwall was, then immediately rephrased and said he would give Josh a hundred dollars if he could tell him whether Cornwall was in England, Ireland, or Scotland. Smelling a trick question, Josh went nonlinear and guessed Canada.

But when Quentin actually showed Josh where it was on a map, way down at the southwestern tip of England, Josh redoubled his swearing—that shit’s practically next door! it’s in Europe— and went into a very technically sophisticated disquisition on lines of magnetic force and astral folding. It really was time Quentin got out of the habit of underestimating him.

Poppy said she wanted to come too.

“I’ve never been to Cornwall,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to meet a native speaker.”

“Of English?” Josh said. “Because you know, I can probably introduce you.”

“Of Cornish, jackass. It’s a Brythonic language. Meaning it’s indigenous to Britain, like Welsh and Breton. And Pictish. Before everything was polluted by the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. There’s tons of power in those old languages. Cornish died out a couple hundred years ago, but there’s a big revival happening now. Where are we going exactly?”

They were still sitting around the breakfast table, which over the course of the morning had become the lunch table. Espresso cups and wobbly towers of plates and silverware had been transferred to the floor to make room for a massive atlas Josh retrieved from the library, along with the Fillory books and a biography of Christopher Plover.

“It’s called Fowey,” Quentin said. “It’s on the south coast.”

“Hm,” Poppy said. She put a fingertip on the map. “We could come in through Penzance. It’s a couple of hours’ drive from there, tops.”

“Penzance?” Josh said. “Like as in the pirates of? Since when is that a real place?”

“See, okay, I want to say something about this,” Poppy said. She pushed the atlas away and sat back in her chair. “If I could have the floor for just a moment. Yes, Penzance is a real place. It’s a town. It’s in Cornwall. And it’s real, as in it exists on Earth. You’re all so obsessed with other worlds, you’re so convinced that this one is crap and everywhere else is great, but you’ve never bothered to figure out what’s going on here! I mean, forget Penzance, Tintagel is real!”

“Is that—didn’t King Arthur live there?” Quentin said weakly.

“King Arthur lived in Camelot. But he was conceived at Tintagel, supposedly. It’s a castle in Cornwall.”

“Fuck it,” Josh said. “Poppy’s right, let’s go there.”

It was amazing. Quentin had never met a magician like Poppy. How could someone so utterly literal-minded, so resolutely uninterested in anything beyond mundane reality, work magic?

“Yes, but you see,” he said, “the fact is, King Arthur probably wasn’t conceived at Tintagel. Because he probably didn’t exist. Or if he did exist he was probably some depressing Pictish warlord who was always killing people and breaking them on the wheel and raping their widows. He probably died of the plague at thirty-two. See, that’s my problem with this world, if you really want to know. I’m pretty sure that when you say that King Arthur was ‘real,’ you don’t mean King Arthur like in the books. You don’t actually mean the good King Arthur.

“Whereas, in Fillory—and feel free to find this hilarious, Poppy, but it’s true—there are actual real kings who aren’t bullshit. And I’m one of them. Plus there are unicorns and pegasi and elves and dwarves and all that.”