The Magician King

for one more thing: he didn’t want to be on a boat anymore. He wanted to go home, meaning not just to Fillory but specifically to his room in Castle Whitespire, with its high ceiling and its big bed and its special calm hush. Quentin did not consider himself a great interpreter of signs and wonders, but the lesson of the golden key seemed pretty clear to him. It was this: you’ve already won the game, so quit playing. Remain where you are, in your castle, and you will be safe. No further action on your part is required.

“Eliot,” he said. “Where are we?”

“We’re east. Very far east. Even farther than you went. We left After Island behind two weeks ago.”

“Oh, no.”

“We’re over the horizon.”

“No, no, no.” Quentin closed his eyes. “We can’t be.” He wanted it to be dark, but surly yellow late-afternoon sun continued blasting in through his—Eliot’s—cabin window unabated. “All right. We are. But we’re going back now, right? You found me and Julia. Mission accomplished. End of story.”

“We will go back. We just have to do one more thing first.”

“Eliot, stop. I’m serious. Turn the ship around. I’m never leaving Fillory again.”

“Just one thing. You’ll like it.”

“I don’t think I’m going to like it.”

Eliot smiled broadly, or as broadly as his bad teeth would allow.

“Oh, you’re going to love it,” he said. “It’s an adventure.”

It was unbelievable. Never mind Thomas: he, Quentin, had missed everything. It had started as soon as he left for the Outer Island.

This all came out at a massive feast belowdecks that evening. By then Quentin had almost come to accept that when you were surfing the great interdimensional divide certain days were just destined to stretch out to about thirty-six hours long, and there was nothing you could do except to wait them out till they ended. The new arrivals ate like wolves—their exhaustion had turned into a raging hunger. They’d never had a proper dinner the night before anyway, just the occasional passed hors d’oeuvre. Only Julia picked at her food, managing a bite every few minutes, like her body was an unloved pet that she was being forced to babysit.

“I knew something was up,” Eliot said, cracking open a massive, lethal-looking crimson crab. Like Julia he never seemed to eat, but somehow he got through massive quantities of food anyway, which of course never made him any less skinny. “First off, two days after you left Whitespire, someone tried to kill me in my bath.”

“Really?” Josh said with his mouth full. “And that tipped you off?”

It hadn’t taken long for Josh to get acclimated aboard the Muntjac. Discomfort just wasn’t in his nature. He’d picked up with Eliot exactly where they’d left off two years ago.

“That’s awful,” Quentin said. “Jesus.”

“It was! I was lolling in my bath of an evening, as one does, blameless as a newborn child—more so, if you’ve ever met such a creature, they’re absolutely horrible—and one of my own towel boys came creeping up behind me with a big curvy knife in his hand. He tried to cut my throat.

“I’ll spare you the details”—which is what Eliot said when he was going to march you through everything blow by blow—“but I grabbed his arm, and he went in the water. He’d never been a particularly good towel boy. Perhaps he felt he was meant for better things. But he was no great success as an assassin either, I can tell you. He got his knife against my neck, but nowhere near the artery, and he hadn’t braced himself properly at all. So in he went, and I scrambled out of the water, and I froze it.”

“Dixon’s charm?”

He nodded. “It was no great loss. I was about to get out anyway. I’d put in so many bath salts I didn’t know if it would take, but it froze solid right away. He looked like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. The resemblance was actually quite striking.”

“You and your towel boys,” Josh said. “But I ask for a harem and it’s all, morality this, human rights that.”

“Well, and I spared you a good stabbing, didn’t I?”

Eliot didn’t tan, he was too pale for that, but the sun and the wind had put some texture in his otherwise immaculate pallor, and he’d grown some nicely naval stubble. He’d dropped some of the god-king preciousness that had dominated his persona back at Whitespire, shed some of the gold leaf. He spoke to the crew with an air of easy familiarity and command—even the ones like Bingle whom he’d never met before the ship sailed, and in Quentin’s mind wasn’t supposed to know. Now he knew them better than Quentin did. They’d been at sea together for a year.

“I let him out, of course. I didn’t have the heart to let him suffocate. But would you believe it, he wouldn’t tell us a thing! He was a fanatic of some kind. Or a lunatic, maybe. Same thing. Do you know, some of the generals wanted to torture him? I think Janet would have done it too, but I couldn’t. But I couldn’t just let him go either. He’s in prison now.

“I was shaken, but I suppose you’re not really High King until somebody tries to kill you in your bath. If they ever succeed, by the way, make sure you leave me in there and have a painting done. Like Marat.

“I wanted to let the whole thing drop, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t let me drop. I don’t know what it was. Fillory, I suppose. At any rate, that’s when the wonders started.

“That’s what everyone called them, and I couldn’t think of another name for them. It started out just as feelings. You would look at something, a carpet, or a bowl of fruit, and the colors would seem different. Brighter, more vivid, more saturated. Sudden rushes of grief or excitement or love would come over you for no reason. Some very unmanly crying jags were observed among the barons.

“It was like drugs more than anything else, but I hadn’t taken any drugs. I remember one night in my bedroom lying there smelling spices in the darkness, one after the other. Cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, something else—something wonderful I couldn’t place. Paintings started to change as I walked by them. Just the backgrounds. The clouds would move, or the sky would go from day to night.

“Then I saw a hunting horn hovering before me at dinner. Some of the others saw it too. And one night in the middle of the night I opened the bathroom door, and it opened onto deep forest instead. It’s all the same when it comes to taking a piss, I suppose, but still. It put me right off my game.

“For a while I thought I was going mad, literally mad, until the tree came. A clock-tree grew up right in the middle of the throne room, right through the carpet, in broad daylight. It did it all at once, all in one go, with the whole court watching. And then it just stood there, silently, like a hallucination, ticking and sort of swaying with the energy of its just having grown. It was as if it were saying, ‘Well, here I am. This is me. What are you going to do about it?’

“After that I knew it wasn’t me that had gone mad. It was Fillory.

“I don’t mind telling you I found the whole business more than a little provoking. I was being called, you understand, and I most definitely did not want to come. I understand the appeal this sort of thing has for you, quests and King Arthur and all that. But that’s you. No offense, but it always seemed a bit like boy stuff to me. Sweaty and strenuous and just not very elegant, if you see what I mean. I didn’t need to be called to feel special, I felt special enough already. I’m clever, rich, and good-looking. I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury.”

“Nicely put,” Quentin said. Eliot must have mounted this set piece before.

“Well, and then that damned Seeing Hare came bolting through the room during our afternoon meeting. Scattered the whiskey service and frightened one of my more sensitive proteges half to death. Everyone has a limit. Next morning I called for my hunting leathers, saddled a horse, and went riding out alone into the Queenswood. And you know, I never go anywhere alone, not anymore, but these things have certain protocols and not even the High King—or I suppose especially not the High King—is exempt.”

“The Queenswood,” Quentin said. “Don’t tell me.”

“But I am telling you.” Eliot finished his wine, and a rangy, shaven-headed young man refilled his glass without his having to ask. “I went back to that ridiculous meadow of yours, the round one. You see, you’d been right to want to go in. It was our adventure after all.”

“I was right.” Quentin felt crestfallen. He stared down at his hands. “I can’t believe it, I was right!”

If he hadn’t been so tired, and a bit drunk, it probably wouldn’t have struck him the way it did. But as it was he felt himself filling up with a sense of—how could he put it? He thought he’d learned a lesson about the world,