The Magician King

back up the hill and find a new way down, and that was the kind of thing he wanted to avoid. And besides, he was keeping the rising sun on his right hand, and that’s how navigation works, right? If things really went wrong he could go all the way down to the beach and cut along the coast. No way he could miss the camp that way. He still had hopes of getting back to the beach in time for breakfast.

One thing he couldn’t ignore, though, although he tried to for as long as he could, was that the shadows of things weren’t getting shorter anymore, in the usual manner of shadows cast by a rising sun. They were getting longer. Which would have meant that the orange-red stew boiling at the edge of the sky was somehow no longer a sunrise, but a sunset instead.

And it would mean he was on the wrong side of the island. But that was impossible. The strangest thing was that he didn’t even realize that somebody had hit him with a sword till after it had happened.

All he knew at first was that suddenly he’d lost his balance, and his left arm was numb.

“Shit!” he said.

He staggered and caught himself with his good right hand on the cold turf. There was a man behind him, a large young man with a round pale face and a goatee. The two of them were stuck together somehow. They were connected by a short broad-bladed sword that was stuck in Quentin’s collarbone, and the man was trying to wrench it out.

What had saved him was this: half of Quentin’s collarbone was made of hardwood, put there by the centaurs to replace what Martin Chatwin had bitten out of him. The man with the sword, not knowing this, had unluckily chosen that side when he attempted to cut Quentin in half from behind.

“Son of a bitch!” Quentin said. He didn’t mean the man specifically; he didn’t know who, or Who, he meant.

If he’d been thinking clearly Quentin might have actually tried to win the tug-of-war over the sword, but in the moment he just wanted it out of him, badly. They both did—their interests were temporarily aligned. In a state of almost disembodied fear Quentin reached up and gripped it with the opposite-side hand. It cut his palm. The man planted a booted foot on Quentin’s back and yanked the sword out with a grunt.

They faced each other, both panting. The quietness of it was weird: real fights happened without a sound track. The man was lightly armored, wearing some kind of blue livery, and not even as old as Quentin. It felt strangely personal—there, alone in a clearing on a silent island, in low-angle morning (evening) light, Quentin felt the youness of the man intensely. For an endless second they stared at each other while Quentin, like everyone else who has ever faced a blade unarmed, made little feinting motions in either direction, as if he were a defender and the man with the sword was going to try to cut past him to the basket. Just in case he lost that matchup, Quentin whispered the opening words to a spell, a Persian fainting charm, he could do it with one hand, which was lucky because he still couldn’t feel his left—

Rudely, the man didn’t wait for him to finish. He advanced, cutting off Quentin’s angles, then lunged appallingly fast, stabbing this time rather than chopping. Quentin twisted desperately to his right and away, but not quite far enough because the sword cut into him. It was incredible that he hadn’t made it, in his mind he was so absolutely sure he would make it, but instead the metal went right into his right side, through his clothes and into his body.

He’d twisted so far around that it went in from behind. At first the sensation was just strange, this hard, awkward presence taking up space where usually his body was, grinding against his ribs. Then it felt warm, almost pleasantly warm, then almost immediately hot, searing hot, as if the sword wasn’t just sharp but glowing white from a forge.

“Ahhhh . . .” Quentin said under his breath, and he sucked air through his clenched teeth, exactly as if he’d cut himself chopping an onion.

The man was obviously a soldier, but Quentin had never really thought about what that meant. He was a professional killer, efficient and businesslike. He had none of Bingle’s elegance. He was like a baker, except instead of making bread he made corpses, and he wanted to make Quentin into one. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He jerked the sword out so he could go in again, right away, this time aiming for something more vital. Time to make the donuts. Quentin couldn’t think.

“?s?k!” he shouted. He snapped his fingers.

It was just what came to him; it had been nagging at the back of his mind ever since the safe house. He’d gotten it right this time: light flared between them in the clearing. Startled, the man fell back a step. He must have thought Quentin had hurt him somehow. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he was all right, but it didn’t take Quentin long to blurt out the Persian fainting charm either.

The man dropped his sword and fell forward onto the thin grass. Quentin stood there panting and holding his side. Blood soaked his shirt. That was too close. Too close. He almost died. The pain was amazing, like a pulsing flare hanging there in the softening early evening, an evening star. Not looking, he couldn’t have said with absolute confidence if the pain was even located inside his body. When it couldn’t get any worse he threw up. Sour fish from last night’s dinner. Then it got even worse than that.

Gingerly he took off his shirt, detaching it in one go from the wounded place, and ripped off one of the sleeves. He folded the sleeve into a pad and pressed it against the wound, then tried as best he could to tie the rest of the shirt around him to hold it in place. When it was done he spent a minute just gritting his teeth and trying not to pass out. His heart was fluttering in his chest like a trapped sparrow. He kept repeating the phrase damage control under his breath. It helped for some reason.

When he could inspect it again he saw that the wound was bleeding but not pumping blood. There seemed to be a sharp limit to how deep a breath he could take without his vision going gray with pain. He tried to think what was in there. From the pain when he moved the sword must have cut muscle, but it couldn’t have reached his lung. Could it? What the hell else was over there? Probably it had just gone into the flank meat.

Adrenaline was flooding his system, dimming the pulsing flare of pain, pulling oxygen away from it. It was there, but he started to be able to bear it. As he did he realized what was happening. It dawned on him with a terrible, fiery power. He was having an adventure. A real one this time. That’s what the pain was.

He looked at his hands. He could feel his left one again. He made fists with both of them. There was a chunky notch in his wooden collarbone, but no deep structural damage. The kind of thing you’d fill in with Bondo. He shook his head. It seemed clear. Or clearish.

He looked at the man snoring facedown on the stubby island grass. He picked up his sword and began walking in the direction the man had come from.

The castle was a small three-part affair: a stodgy boxy keep with two outlying watchtowers, all built out of gray stone, with enormous trees growing around them. The whole layout was visible from where he stood on the rocky hillside. It was built on a grassy knob of land at the foot of the hills that Quentin could now see dominated one coast of the island, screening the castle from other angles of view. No wonder he and the others had missed it.

Quentin crept from rock to rock, keeping out of sight of whoever might be monitoring the hillside, zigzagging downhill toward the castle. He didn’t meet any more soldiers. Maybe it had just been bad luck. Not wanting to push it, he picked his way down a rocky defile to the edge of the sea. He would approach by creeping along the shore.

A narrow crust of rocky beach ran along it, barely enough to keep his feet dry. The sea lapped at it excitedly with dark, rapid wavelets. Quentin wasn’t even thinking about what he was doing. If he had to explain it to anybody, that he was preparing a one-man Die Hard magical assault on a castle, it would have been difficult to justify. He might have said that he was performing vital reconnaissance, probing its defenses, but all that meant was that if he got scared enough he was going to run away. What he was really thinking was that this was what Ember had meant, what Ember had given him. His chance. Something was in there, something to do with the keys, or Jollyby, or Julia, or all of them, and he was going to get it and bring it back.

And then he stopped. A boat was drawn up on the thin shingled beach, a gray, weathered rowboat. The oars were there, laid neatly inside it like the folded wings of a dragonfly. It was in good repair. The painter was knotted around an overhanging branch.

Just like that Quentin got stuck, mentally stuck. It felt like no force on Earth could compel him to walk past the boat without getting in it. He was going to get into it and retreat. He would row back around to the other side of the island, to where his friends were. His sword wound would compromise his rowing ability, but not fatally. The sudden sense of inertia was overwhelming. No one could reproach him for cowardice; indeed it would be foolhardy