The Magician King

too, but I cannot find it. In The Flying Forest they get in by climbing a tree. That might be our best bet.”

“We wouldn’t have to break into the house,” Quentin said. “And we could all fit.”

“Exactly. And in The Secret Sea they ride a magic bicycle, so let us keep an eye out for that. Maybe there is a garage or a shed with old things in it.”

“You realize the fans have probably picked this place clean like years ago,” Josh said. “We can’t be the first people to think of this.”

“Then in The Wandering Dune Helen and Jane are painting in a meadow somewhere nearby. Which seems like a long shot, but if we have to we can go back to Fowey for art supplies. And that is it.”

“It’s not quite it.” Sorry, but nobody one-upped Quentin on Fillory trivia, not even Julia. “Martin gets back in in The Flying Forest, at the end, though Plover doesn’t say how he did it. And there’s a book you’re missing, The Magicians, which is Jane’s book about how she went back to Fillory to find Martin. She used the magic buttons to get in, which she found in the well, where Helen threw a whole box of them. Jane only used one to get back, so there may be more lying around.”

Julia turned around in her seat.

“How do you know that?”

“I met her. Jane Chatwin. It was in Fillory. I was getting better from my injuries after we fought Martin. After Alice died.”

There was silence in the car, broken by the ticking of the turn signal as Poppy took a fork in the road. Julia studied him with those empty, unreadable eyes.

“Sometimes I forget everything you have been through,” she said finally, and turned around to face forward.

It only took them forty-five minutes to find Plover’s house, aka Darras House, which must have once been in the deep countryside, but now you could get there on a well-maintained two-lane road. Poppy pulled over on the other side. There was no shoulder, and the Jag tilted at a perilous angle.

All four of them got out and straggled across the road. There was no traffic. It was about three-thirty in the afternoon. The grounds were surrounded by a formidable stone wall, and the gate framed, with an almost fussy architectural perfection, a view of a palatial Georgian country house set back deep in carefully tended grounds. Darras House was one of those rectangular English houses made of gray stone that probably conformed to some nutjob eighteenth-century theory about symmetry and ideal proportions and perfect ratios.

Quentin knew Plover had been rich—he’d made one fortune in America already, selling dry goods, whatever they were, before he came to Cornwall and wrote the Fillory novels—but the scale of it was still stunning. It wasn’t so much a house as a cliff with windows in it.

“Jeez,” Josh said.

“Yeah,” said Poppy.

“Hard to imagine somebody living there all by themselves,” Quentin said.

“He probably had servants.”

“Was he gay?”

“Dude, totally,” Josh said.

There was a sign on the gate, DARRAS HOUSE/PLOVER FARM, with a schedule of hours and tours and entrance fees. A blue plaque gave them a capsule biography of Plover. It was a Thursday, and the house was open. A large black bird retched loudly in the underbrush.

“So are we going in?” Poppy asked.

He’d thought they would, on the off chance that they might stumble on something, and so they could say they had. But now that they’d arrived the place felt empty. Nothing here called to Quentin. Plover had never gone to Fillory. All he’d done was write books. The magic was somewhere else.

“Nah,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Nobody disagreed. They could come back tomorrow. If they were still on Earth.

They trooped back across the road and spread out the map on the hood of the car. The exact location of the house the Chatwins had stayed at near Fowey was a matter for speculation, but not wild speculation. There was a limited number of places it could be. Plover’s books were full of enchanting descriptions of how the Chatwin kids, singly and en masse, ran and skipped and cycled over from their aunt Maude’s house to visit their beloved “uncle” Christopher. Plover had even famously had a little child-size gate built in the wall that separated their properties to let them through.

They had two Plover biographies with them, one a soft-focus hagiography from the 1950s, authorized by the family, the other a hardnosed psychoanalytic expose from the early 1990s that anatomized Plover’s complex and “problematic” sexuality, as symbolically dramatized in the various Fillory novels. They stuck to that one. It had better geography.

They knew that the Chatwin house was on one Darrowby Lane, which helped, although the Cornish were even less interested in signage than the Venetians. Fortunately Poppy turned out to be excellent at this kind of cross-country dead-reckoning navigation. At first they thought she must be using some kind of advanced geographical magic until Josh noticed that she had an iPhone in her lap.

“Yeah, but I used magic to jailbreak it,” she said.

It was late afternoon, and they’d traversed what seemed like several hundred verdant and Watership Down–esque but stubbornly unmarked and unidentifiable rural byways, and the light was turning bluish, before they settled on a target property, which sat on a narrow lane that wasn’t definitely not called Darrowby and as near as they could tell pretty much had to back onto Plover’s enormous estate.

There was no wall or gate, just a gravel track curving back through the late-summer trees. A square stone post next to it supported a NO TRESPASSING sign. They couldn’t see the house from here.

Quietly Julia read out the relevant passage from The World in the Walls:

The house was very grand—three stories tall, with a facade made of brick and stone, and enormous windows, and endless numbers of fireplaces and window seats and curving back stairs and other advantages, which their London house distinctly lacked. Among those advantages were the sprawling grounds around the house, which included long straight alleys and white gravel paths and dark-green pools of grass.

There was a time when Quentin could probably have said it along with her from memory.

Quentin sat in the car and stared across the road. He couldn’t see much evidence of anything as nice as that. The place didn’t exactly scream “portal to another world” either. He tried to imagine the Chatwins arriving here for the first time, the five of them crammed into the backseat of some sputtering black proto-automobile, more carriage than car, and with a fair amount of locomotive DNA in it as well, their luggage tied to the boot with twine and Victorian leather strappage. They would have been funereally silent, resigned to exile from London. The youngest, five-year-old Jane, the future Watcherwoman, reclining on her older sister’s lap as on a chaise longue, lost in a fog of longing for her parents, who were respectively fighting World War I and raving in a posh rest home. Martin (who would grow up to become a monster who would kill Alice) keeping his composure for the sake of the youngsters, his soft boy’s jaw set in grim preadolescent determination.

They’d been so young and innocent and hopeful, and they’d found something more wonderful than they could ever have hoped for, and it had destroyed them.

“What do you think?” he said. “Julia?”

“This is the place.”

“All right. I’m going to go in. Look around.”

“I’ll come,” Poppy said.

“No,” Quentin said. “I want to go alone.”

To his surprise it worked. She stayed put.

Becoming invisible was a simple idea in theory, but in practice it was a lot harder than you’d think. It had been done, but it took years of meticulous self-erasure, and once accomplished it was practically impossible to undo; apart from anything else you could never be sure you’d reinstated your visible self completely accurately. You came out looking like a portrait of yourself. The best work-around Quentin knew was more like an animal’s protective coloring. If you were standing in front of some leaves, you looked drab and leafy. If you weren’t moving or jumping around, an observer’s eye tended to skate over you. Usually. If the light wasn’t too good. The car door