Lev Grossman - The Magician King

The Seeing Hare’s eyes focused. It looked directly at Quentin. It bared its huge orange incisors.

“Death,” it rasped.

They all stood there for a second. It didn’t seem scary so much as inappropriate, like somebody had made a dirty joke at a child’s birthday party.

Then Jollyby frowned and licked his lips, and Quentin saw blood in his teeth. He coughed once, experimentally, as if he were just trying it out, and then his head lolled forward. The hare dropped from his nerveless fingers and shot away across the grass like a rocket.

Jollyby’s corpse fell forward onto the grass.

“Death and destruction!” the hare called out as it ran, in case it hadn’t made itself clear before. “Disappointment and despair!”

There was a special room in Castle Whitespire where the kings and queens met. That was another thing about being a king: everything you had was made specially for you.

It was a marvelous room. It was square, the top of a square tower, with four windows facing in four directions. The tower turned, very slowly, as some of the towers in the castle did — Castle Whitespire was built on complicated foundations of enormous brass clockwork, cleverly designed by the dwarves, who were absolute geniuses at that kind of thing. The tower completed one rotation every day. The movement was almost imperceptible.

In the center of the room was a special square table with four chairs — they were thrones, or thronelike, but made by someone who had the knack, pretty rare in Quentin’s experience, of making chairs that looked like thrones but were also reasonably comfortable to sit in. The table was painted with a map of Fillory, sealed under many layers of lacquer, and at each of the four seats, pieced into the wood, were the names of the rulers who’d sat there along with little devices appropriate to said rulers. Quentin got an image of the White Stag, and the vanquished Martin Chatwin, and a deck of playing cards. Eliot’s place was the most elaborately embellished, as befitted the High King. It was a square table, but there wasn’t any question which side was the head.

The chairs didn’t feel comfortable today. The scene of Jollyby’s death was still very clear and present in Quentin’s mind’s eye; in fact it replayed itself more or less constantly, with showings every thirty seconds or so. As Jollyby collapsed Quentin had lurched forward and caught him and eased him to the ground. He groped helplessly at Jollyby’s huge chest, as if he’d hidden his life somewhere about his person, in some secret inside pocket, and if Quentin could only find it he could give it back to him. Janet screamed: a full-throated, uncontrollable horror-movie scream that wouldn’t stop for a full fifteen seconds until Eliot grasped her shoulders and physically turned her away from Jollyby’s corpse.

At the same time the clearing filled with ghostly green light — a bleak, alien spell of Julia’s that Quentin still didn’t get the details of, or even the broad outlines of, that was intended to reveal any bad actors who might be present. It turned her eyes all black, no whites or iris at all. She was the only one who’d thought to go on the attack. But there was no one to attack.

“All right,” Eliot said. “So let’s talk about it. What do we think happened today?”

They looked at each other, feeling jittery and shell-shocked. Quentin wanted to do something, or say something, but he didn’t know what. The truth was, he hadn’t really known Jollyby all that well.

“He was so proud,” he said finally. “He thought he’d saved the day.”

“It had to be the rabbit,” Janet said. Her eyes were red from crying. She swallowed. “Right? Or hare, whatever. That’s what killed him. What else?”

“We can’t assume that. The hare predicted his death but it may not have caused it. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. It’s a logical fallacy.”

If he’d waited even another second he would have realized that Janet wasn’t interested in the Latin name of the logical fallacy that she might or might not have been committing.

“Sorry,” he said. “That’s my Asperger’s flaring up again.”

“So it’s just a coincidence?” she snapped. “That he died right then, right after it said that about death? Maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe the hare doesn’t predict the future, maybe it controls it.”

“Perhaps it does not like being caught,” Julia said.

“I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”

It was five o’clock in the afternoon, their regular meeting time. For the first few months after they’d arrived at Castle Whitespire Eliot had left them to do their own things, on the theory that they’d naturally find their own courses as rulers, and take charge of the things that best suited their various gifts. This had resulted in total chaos, and nothing getting done, and the things that did get done got done twice by two different people in two different ways. So Eliot instituted a daily meeting at which they sorted through whatever business of the realm seemed most pressing as a foursome. The five o’clock meeting was traditionally accompanied by what may have been the most gloriously comprehensive whiskey service ever seen on any of the possibly infinite worlds of the multiverse.

“I told the family we’d take care of the funeral,” Quentin said. “It’s just his parents. He was an only child.”

“I should say something,” Eliot said. “He taught me bugling.”

“Did you know he was a were-lion?” Janet smiled sadly. “True story. It went on a solar calendar — he changed only at equinoxes and solstices. He said it helped him understand the animals. He was hairy everywhere .”

“Please,” Eliot said. “I would give anything to not know how you know that.”

“It helped with lots of things.”

“I have a theory,” Quentin said quickly. “Maybe the Fenwicks did it. They’ve been pissed at us ever since we got here.”

The Fenwicks were the most senior of the several families who were running things at the time when the Brakebills returned to Fillory. They weren’t happy about being kicked out of Castle Whitespire, but they didn’t have the political capital to do much about it. So they satisfied themselves with making mischief around the court.

“Assassination would be a big step up for the Fenwicks,” Eliot said. “They’re pretty small-time.”

“And why would they kill Jollyby?” Janet said. “Everybody loved Jollyby!”

“Maybe they were trying for one of us, not him,” Quentin said. “Maybe one of us was supposed to catch the hare. You know they’re already trying to put it around that we killed him?”

“But how would they have done it?” Eliot said. “You’re saying they sent a rabbit assassin?”

“They could not turn the Seeing Hare,” Julia said. “Unique Beasts do not intervene in the affairs of men.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the Seeing Hare at all, maybe it was a person in hare form. A were-hare. Look, I don’t know!”

Quentin rubbed his temples. If only they’d hunted that stupid lizard instead. He was annoyed at himself for forgetting what Fillory was like. He’d let himself believe that things were all better after Alice had killed Martin Chatwin, no more death and despair and disillusionment and whatever else the hare had said. But there was more. It wasn’t like the books. There was always more. Et in Arcadia ego.

And even though he knew it was crazy, in a childishly elegant way, he couldn’t escape a vague feeling that Jollyby’s death was his fault, that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been tempted by that adventure. Or maybe he wasn’t tempted enough? What were the rules? Maybe he should have gone into the clearing after all. Maybe Jollyby’s death had been meant for him. He was supposed to go into the meadow and die there, but he didn’t, so Jollyby had to instead.