The Magician King

some lovely and talented Mrs. Quentin (Who? Poppy? Surely not) would get married, and Fillory would fade away like the dream it so fundamentally was. So what if he wasn’t a king. It had been lovely for a while, but here was real life, and he would make the most of it like everybody else. What kind of a hero was he, if he couldn’t do that?

Julia kicked his foot. By unspoken agreement they were all grimly determined to finish the game of High C’s, and it was his turn. He flicked the spinner and moved forward two waves. Josh, who was playing as the whale, had a commanding lead, but Julia (the squid) was making a late charge, leaving Poppy (fish) and Quentin (jellyfish) to battle it out for a distant third place.

Josh spun. He was on a charade square.

“Caw!” Josh said. “Caw! Caw!”

“Seagull,” they all said in unison. It was like when they were geese. Josh spun again. Julia belched.

Quentin slumped over behind Poppy’s warm back, onto the infinitely soft and sweet-smelling pillows. From this point of view it was apparent that Poppy was wearing a thong. The bed was not entirely stable. The drinks were catching up with him. It wasn’t clear whether the spins were going to spin themselves out or gather speed and power and wreak a terrible vengeance upon him for his many transgressions. Well, time would undoubtedly tell.

“Caw!” Josh said.

“Enough already,” Quentin said.

“Caw! Caw!”

“Seagull! I said seagull!”

The light hurt his eyes. It was uncomfortably bright in Thomas’s room. That was enough drinking for tonight. Quentin sat up.

“I know, man,” Josh said. “I heard you.”

“Caw!”

The cawing didn’t stop, nor did the spinning. The bed was definitely in motion, not so much spinning as rocking gently. They all froze.

Poppy reacted first.

“No way.” She lunged off the bed and landed in water. “Goddamn it! No fucking way!”

The sun was hot overhead. A curious albatross was circling over them, making respectful inquiries.

Quentin jumped up on the bed.

“Oh my God! We did it. We did it!”

They had broken through. It wasn’t the end, it was all about to start all over again. He spread his arms wide to the daylight and let the hot sun slam straight down into his face. He was a man reborn. Julia was looking around her and sobbing as though her heart would break. They were back. The dream was real again. They were adrift on the high seas of Fillory.

BOOK III

CHAPTER 17

“Thomas will be so disappointed,” Poppy said. “He missed everything.”

She sat glumly on a sail locker on the deck of the Muntjac, wrapped in a rough ship’s blanket. Her curly hair was flat from the salt water. She’d tried to swim away, back to Earth, back to Thomas’s little-boy bedroom, but when she saw that she had no shot she stroked back to the bed instead, and they’d hauled her dripping back up onto it to await rescue. She was a strong, easy swimmer, which was somehow not surprising.

The bed, while a top-quality bed that contained a fair amount of actual bona fide wood—Thomas’s parents had spared no expense—was only so-so as a raft and had trended downward rapidly as the bedclothes and then the mattress soaked through and lost their buoyancy. Josh sat heavily on it, crisscross applesauce, resigned, Buddha going down with the ship, while the bed gradually swamped, and the cold seawater lapped up over his knees.

But the Muntjac was already in view by then, sheering keenly through the waves toward them, the force of a fresh wind setting it at a rakish angle. Its sails—his sails, Quentin’s sails, with the pale blue ram of Fillory—stood out in taut, proud curves. The power of it, the color, the solidity, the reality of it, were almost too thrilling. A tiny action-figure sailor was already at the railing, pointing in their direction.

Quentin hadn’t for a second doubted that the Muntjac would be there. It seemed like years since he’d seen it. They had come to take him home.

As it bore down on them he’d had a moment of worry: what if centuries had passed, what if Eliot and Janet really were dead, and the Muntjac was the last survivor of the Brakebills era, and he was going home to a court of strangers? But no, there was Bingle at the railing, looking just as he always had, ready to haul his royal body back on board and get back to guarding it.

Though even as they were toweling off, and hugging each other, and making introductions, and securing fresh clothes and hot tea, he could see that not everything aboard the Muntjac was exactly as he’d left it. The ship was older. Not that it was shabby, but it had aged, settled into itself some. What had been glossy—the paint on the railings, the varnish on the deck—was now rubbed to matte. Ropes that had once been bright and prickly were now smooth and soft and dun-colored from having been run through blocks over and over again.

Also Quentin was no longer in charge of the Muntjac. Eliot was.

“Where have you been!” he said, when he was done embracing Quentin. “You ridiculous, ridiculous man. I was starting to think you were dead.”

“I was on Earth. How long have we been gone?”

“A year and a day.”

“God. It was only three days for us.”

“That makes me two years older than you now. How do you think that makes me feel? How was Earth?”

“The same. It ain’t Fillory.”

“Did you bring me back anything?”

“A bed. Josh. An Australian girl named Poppy. I didn’t have a lot of time. And you know how hard you are to shop for.”

Quentin was still in a euphoric state, but the adrenaline was wearing off, and his eyes felt sandy and jet- lagged. Twenty minutes ago it had been midnight, the tail end of a long and arduously alcoholic party, and now it was early afternoon again. They went below to Quentin’s cabin, which was now Eliot’s cabin, and he dried off and changed clothes and cursed Ember that He hadn’t thought to bless Fillory with the miracle of coffee beans.

Then he lay down on Eliot’s bed and looked up at the low woodwork ceiling and told Eliot about everything that had happened. He told him about going back to Brakebills, and about Julia’s safe houses, and how Josh had sold the button. He told him about the Neitherlands being in ruins, and about the dragon, and about the Chatwins’ house.

Eliot sat at the foot of the bed. When Quentin was done Eliot watched him for a minute, slowly tapping the hollow of his upper lip with the tip of his index finger.

“Well,” he said finally. “This is interesting.”

Yes, it was. Although Quentin’s immediate personal interest in it was faltering. He wanted to fall asleep and moreover felt confident of his ability to do so very quickly. Being back in Fillory was a massive dose of comfort, a huge inflatable cushion of relief of the kind stuntmen fall into from great heights without injury, and he sank into it.

Though if Quentin could have had absolutely everything exactly the way he wanted it, he would have asked