Lev Grossman - The Magician King

As for Lacker, he looked unfairly comfortable in the heat in his full dress uniform as they toured an even greater variety of inappropriate vessels. Most of them were out there because their drafts were too deep to anchor any farther in: a great bruiser of a ship of the line, some nobleman’s bloated party yacht, a fat, butter-colored merchant tub.

“What about that one?” Quentin said. He pointed.

“I beg your indulgence, Your Highness, my eyesight has suffered in the service of our great nation. You do not mean—”

“I do.” Enough with the period drama. “That one. There.”

A flat sandbar projected from one of the horns of Whitespire’s great bay. A ship lay near it in a few feet of water. The low tide had laid it gently down on one side on the sandy bottom, its underbelly exposed like a beached whale.

“That ship, Your Highness, has not left the bay for a very long time.”

“Nevertheless.”

It was partly out of thoroughness, partly out of a perverse desire to pay the admiral back for being, his promise notwithstanding, a little bit of a cock. The owner of the smack exchanged a long look with Admiral Lacker: this man, the look said, lubs his land.

“Let us return to the Morgan Downs .”

“And we will,” Julia said. “But King Quentin wishes to see that ship first.”

It took ten minutes to tack over to it, the sails flapping as the fisherman gamely worked his way upwind. Quentin reminded himself to pay the man something for this after. They circled the wreck listlessly in the shallow water. Its hull had been painted white, but the paint had been weathered and blasted down to the gray wood. There was something odd about its lines — something curiously swoopy about them. It finished in a long slender bowsprit that had been snapped off halfway.

He liked it. It was neither harsh and blocky like a warship, nor soft and too pretty like a yacht. It was elegant, but it meant business. Too bad it was a carcass and not a ship. Maybe if he’d gotten here fifty years earlier.

“What do you think?”

The smack’s keel scraped the sandy bottom loudly in the stillness. Admiral Lacker regarded the horizon line. He cleared his throat.

“I think,” he said, “that that ship has seen better days.”

“What do you think it was?”

“Workhorse,” the smack’s owner piped up huskily. “Deer Class. Ran the route between here and Longfall.”

Quentin hadn’t even realized he spoke English.

“It looks nice,” Quentin said. “Or it looked nice.”

“That was,” Admiral Lacker said solemnly, “one of the most beautiful ships that was ever made.”

He couldn’t tell if Lacker was joking or not. Except that it was pretty obvious that he never joked.

“Really?” Quentin said.

“Nothing moved like the Deer Class,” Lacker said. “They were built to carry bergspar from Longfall, then coldspice on the way back. Fast and tough. You could ride them to hell and back.”

“Huh. So why aren’t there more of them?”

“Longfall ran out of bergspar,” the fisherman said. Now he’d gone all chatty. “So we stopped sending them coldspice. That was the end of the Deer Class. Most were broken up for the clockwood in them, sold for scrap. It was the Lorians built them. Every shipwright in Fillory tried to copy them, but there was a trick to it. Trick’s been lost.”

“My first command,” Lacker said, “was a Very Fast Picket out of Hartheim. Nothing in the service could have caught us, but I saw a Deer Class blow by me once on its way north. We had studding sails set on both sides. Made us look like we were standing still.”

Quentin nodded. He stood up in the boat. A halo of little birds lifted off from the ship’s blasted hull, stalled for a moment on a puff of wind, and then settled back down again. The smack had come around to the far side, and they could see the deck, which was stove in in at least two places. The ship’s name was painted across the stern: MUNTJAC.

This wasn’t a Fillory novel. If it were, this was the kind of boat he’d have.

“Well, I think that settles it,” he said. “Take us back to the Morgan Downs, please.”

“The Morgan Downs, Highness.”

“And when we get there tell the captain of the Morgan Downs to get his floating rattrap over here and haul that thing”—he pointed at the Muntjac —“into dry dock. We’re taking it.”

That felt good. Some things it was never too late for.

Getting the Muntjac —it turned out to be the name of a species of deer — into anything like seaworthy condition was going to take a couple of weeks, even if Quentin exercised his royal prerogatives and press-ganged all the best shipwrights in the city, which he did. But that was fine. It gave him time for more preparations.

He’d been sitting on his nervous energy for so long, it was good to have something to do with it, and he was discovering how much of it he had. He could have powered a small city with it. The next day Quentin had an announcement posted in every town square in the country. He was going to hold a tournament.

In all honesty Quentin had only a very vague idea of how tournaments worked, or even what they were, except that they were something kings used to do at some point between when Jesus was alive and when Shakespeare was alive, which was as close as Quentin could get to placing when the Middle Ages had actually happened. He knew that tournaments were supposed to involve jousting, and he also knew that he wasn’t interested in jousting. Too weird and phallic, plus it was hard on the horses.

Sword fighting, though, that was interesting. Not fencing, or not just fencing — he didn’t want anything that formal. He had in mind something more like mixed martial arts. Ultimate fighting. He wanted to know who the best swordsman in the realm was: the no-buts, fuck-you, all-Fillory champion of sword fighting. So he put the word out: a week from now anyone who thought he could handle a blade should turn up at Castle Whitespire and start whacking till there was no one left to whack. Winner gets a small but very choice castle in the Fillorian boondocks and the honor of guarding the king’s royal person on his upcoming journey to an undisclosed location.

Eliot walked in while Quentin was clearing the grand banquet hall. A column of footmen was filing out, carrying a chair each.

“Pardon me, Your Highness,” Eliot said, “but what the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry. It’s the only room that was big enough for the matches.”

“This is the part where I’m supposed to say, ‘Matches, what matches?’”

“For the tournament. Sword fighting. You didn’t see the posters? The table goes too,” Quentin said to the housekeeper who was directing the move. “Just put it in the hall. I’m having a tournament to find the best swordsman in Fillory.”

“Well, can’t you have it outside?”

“What if it rains?”

“What if I want to eat something?”

“I told them to serve dinner in your receiving room. So you’ll have to do your receiving somewhere else. Maybe you can do that outside.”

A man was on his hands and knees on the floor ruling out the piste with a lump of chalk.

“Quentin,” Eliot said, “I just heard from someone in the shipwrights’ guild. Do you have any idea what that ship of yours is costing us? The Jackalope or whatever it is?”

“No. The Muntjac. ”

“About twenty years’ worth of Outer Island taxes, that’s how much it’s costing us,” Eliot said, answering his own question. “Just in case you were curious how much it’s costing us.”

“I wasn’t that curious.”

“But you do see the irony.”