across the cobblestones next to him. He looked at it curiously, then scrambled violently backward out of the courtyard when he saw that it was an arrow.
Poppy saw it at the same time he did. She darted behind the pedestal, singing something in rapid-fire Polish, and a green tracer appeared in the air, like a green laser, connecting the arrow to the roof of the castle. She had back-traced its path through the air.
She didn’t faze easily. It must be an Australian thing. Probably she grew up fighting off snakes and dingoes and whatever else. He’d never seen her cast anything before, and it was amazing. He’d never in his life seen anybody move their hands that quickly.
“Oy!” she called, her back to the stone obelisk. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right!”
“Eliot and Benedict are finishing in the tower!” she shouted.
“I’m going in!” He pointed to the keep.
“Wait! No! Bingle’s coming too!”
“I’m going in!”
He didn’t hear what she said next. He was overjoyed to see them, and somehow weirdly Poppy, good old Poppy, most of all, but he felt a surge of longing at the same time. This was his chance. If he didn’t stay ahead of them, if he didn’t get there first, he would lose it, and he didn’t want to be selfish about it, but if it was all the same to them he wanted this one to be his show. Quentin whispered a few words to his sword and struck it twice on the ground. It took on a golden sheen. Poppy was working on the end of the green trail from the arrow now. The end became a spark, and the spark raced along the trail like a lit fuse. It disappeared over the parapet, and there was a crack of thunder.
Quentin ran for the doorway of the keep. The feeling was absolutely glorious. He didn’t know how he knew what to do, but he did. With the others at his back, his last doubt was gone.
The doors were made of foot-thick iron-bound beams. He took a skip-step, wound up with the sword, and smashed it into them overhand. The spell he’d put on it didn’t affect the way the sword felt to him, but it acted on everything else as if it weighed about half a ton. The whole structure vibrated, and the wood cracked and split. More dust. The boom echoed out into the night. Another hit smashed the door halfway in, and another cleared the doorway.
Striding into the castle Quentin felt so full of power it was almost painful. It was bursting out of him. He didn’t know where it was coming from—his chest felt huge, its contents under maximum pressure. He was a walking bomb. Five men stood in the hall behind the broken door, pointing swords and spears at him, and a shout of wind rushed out of Quentin’s hands and blew them backward. He blinded them with a flash of light and then threw them bodily down the great hall. It was just so
He turned and put one hand on the ruins of door he’d just knocked out, and it began to burn. This seemed like a good idea, and very dramatic, but just in case it caused problems later he hardened his skin against fire.
He was discovering, in a way for the first time, what it felt like to truly be a Magician King. That fat bastard he’d been when he was sitting around Castle Whitespire, playing with swords and getting drunk every night? That was no king. This was a king. Master and commander. This was the culmination of everything that had started the day he’d walked into that frozen garden in Brooklyn, all those years ago. He had at last come into his own. Maybe all he’d needed was Ember’s permission. You have to have faith.
The ritual he’d done to ramp up his senses was actually working: he was so wired, he could feel where people were through the walls—he could sense the electricity in their bodies, the way a shark does. Time, that dull mechanism that usually reliably stamped out one second after another, like parts on a conveyor belt, erupted into a glorious melody. He was getting it all back now, everything that he’d missed and more. Poppy was right, that time on Earth, it had been an adventure after all. It wasn’t just blundering around, it was the buildup to this. And this was living. He would live like this from now on.
“This is me,” he whispered. “This is me.”
He trotted up the front stairs and through a series of grand rooms. When people approached him, objects flew at them and battered them to the floor—chairs, tables, urns, chests, whatever he could get traction on with a spell. Lightning struck and stunned them. Lazily, he stopped a thrown ax in midair with one outstretched hand, and sent it back the way it came. Breathing in, he sucked the oxygen out of rooms until the people in them choked and passed out, lips blue, eyes bulging. Pretty soon they began to run when they saw him coming.
He felt altered, like he had grown physically giant. It didn’t stop the spells pouring out of him, one after another, effortlessly. The enemy troops were mixed, human and fairy and a few exotics: a stone golem of some sort, a water elemental, a red-bearded dwarf, a rather tatty talking panther. It didn’t matter, he was an equal- opportunity hero. He was a gusher, a fire hose. He barely even felt the wound in his side anymore. He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him. All he had to do was be who he was: the Magician King.
He had no idea where he was going, he just worked room to room, clearing the building. Twice he heard the
But the real terror was Julia. She’d summoned a kind of transformative magic Quentin didn’t know, or maybe whatever it was in her that wasn’t human had come to the surface in the fight. He hardly recognized her. Her skin was shining with that phosphorescent silver, and she’d grown at least six inches. She fought bare-handed—she advanced on the soldiers till somebody was foolish enough to thrust a spear at her, at which point she simply grabbed it like he was moving in slow motion and began beating the shit out of him and his friends with it. Her strength looked enormous, and metal blades just skated off her skin.
She didn’t look like she needed help. Quentin found the stairs up to the top floor. He kicked open the first door he saw and almost died when a massive fireball rolled over him.
It was a colossally powerful casting. Someone had spent a long time setting it up and pumping energy into it. It enveloped him completely, and he felt the flames licking him, icy through the fireproofing spell. But the spell held. When the fire had dissipated his limbs were smoking but undamaged.
He was standing in the doorway of a darkened library. Inside, sitting at a desk with two lanterns on it, was a skeleton in a nice brown suit. Or not quite a skeleton, a man, but an obviously dead one. He still had flesh on him, but it had shrunk and turned leathery.
It was very still in the library. Bookshelves smoldered and crackled quietly on either side of Quentin, from the fireball. The corpse watched him with eyes like hard dry nuts.
“No?” it said finally. Its voice buzzed and flapped, a blown-out speaker. It obviously didn’t have much left in the way of vocal cords. Some unnatural force was keeping it alive, long after its sell-by date. “Well. That was my only spell.”
Quentin waited. The thing’s face was immobile, unreadable. Its dried lips didn’t cover its teeth completely. It wasn’t pretty to look at, but for some reason Quentin didn’t feel angry at it. Why were they fighting again? For a second Quentin really couldn’t remember. He wondered if he’d gotten too far ahead of the others. But no, this was on him. He’d started it. And this was the boss fight.
The corpse came to convulsive life again and whipped a throwing knife at him with one skinny, loose-jointed marionette arm. Quentin ducked, purely out of instinct, but it was a wild throw, nowhere near him. It went through the open door behind him and skittered on the flagstones.
“All right,” it said. “Now I’m really done.”
The corpse might have sighed.
“Where’s the key?” Quentin said. “You have one, don’t you?” For a terrible second he worried that it might not.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore,” the corpse said wheezily. It pushed a small wooden box toward him with one shriveled hand. The skin had worn off some of the knuckles, like the leather off the arms of an old chair. “It used to be my daughter’s.”
“Your daughter’s,” Quentin repeated. “Who are you?”
“Don’t you know the story?” It sighed again. It seemed much more resigned to its fate than Quentin
