Lev Grossman - The Magician King

“Maybe there isn’t an explanation,” he said out loud. “Maybe it’s just a mystery. Just another crazy stop on Fillory’s magical mystery tour. No reason for it, it just happened. You can’t explain it.”

This didn’t satisfy Eliot. He was still Eliot, the languid lush of Brakebills, but becoming High King had uncovered a dismayingly rigorous streak in him.

“We can’t have unexplained deaths in the kingdom,” he said. “It won’t do.” He cleared his throat. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’ll put the fear of Ember into the Fenwicks, just in case. It won’t take much. They’re a bunch of pussy dandies. And I say that as a pussy dandy myself.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” Janet said.

“Then, Janet, you’ll go lean on the Lorians.” That was Fillory’s neighbor to the north. Janet was in charge of relations with foreign powers — Quentin called her Fillory Clinton. “They’re always behind everything bad in the books. Maybe they were trying to decapitate the leadership. Stupid pseudo-Viking fuckers. Now for Christ’s sake let’s talk about something else for a while.”

But they had nothing else to talk about, so they lapsed into silence. Nobody was especially happy with Eliot’s plan, least of all Eliot, but they didn’t have a better one, or even a worse one. Six hours after the fact Julia’s eyes were still flooded with black from the spell she’d cast in the forest. The effect was disconcerting. She had no pupils. He wondered what she could see that they couldn’t.

Eliot shuffled his notes, looking for another item of business, but business was in short supply these days.

“It is time,” Julia said. “We must go to the window.”

Every day after the afternoon meeting they went out on the balcony and waved to the people.

“Damn it,” Eliot said. “All right.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t today,” Janet said. “It feels wrong.”

Quentin knew what she meant. The thought of standing out there on the narrow balcony, frozen smiles on their faces, princess-waving at the Fillorians who gathered for the daily ritual, felt a little off. Still.

“We should to do it,” he said. “Today of all days.”

“We’re accepting congratulations for doing nothing.”

“We’re reassuring the people of continuity in the face of tragedy.”

They filed out onto the narrow balcony. In the castle courtyard far below, at the bottom of a vertiginous drop, a few hundred Fillorians had gathered. From this height they looked unreal, like dolls. Quentin waved.

“I wish we could do something more for them,” he said.

“What do you want to do?” Eliot said. “We’re the kings and queens of a magic utopia.”

Cheers drifted up from far below, faintly. The sound was tinny and far away — it had the audio quality of a musical greeting card.

“Some progressive reforms? I want to help somebody with something. If I were a Fillorian I would depose me as an aristocratic parasite.”

When Quentin and the others took the thrones, they hadn’t known exactly what to expect. The details of what was involved were vague — there would be some ceremonial duties, Quentin supposed, and presumably a lead role in policy making, some responsibility for the welfare of the nation they ruled. But the truth was that there just wasn’t much actual work to do.

The weird thing was that Quentin missed it. He’d expected Fillory to be something like medieval England, because it looked like medieval England, at least on casual inspection. He figured he’d just use European history, to the extent that he remembered it, as a crib sheet. He would pursue the standard enlightened humanitarian program, nothing extraordinary, greatest hits only, and go down in history as a force for good.

But Fillory wasn’t England. For one thing the population was tiny — there couldn’t have been more than ten thousand humans in the whole country, plus that many talking animals and dwarves and spirits and giants and such. So he and the other monarchs — or tetrarchs, whatever — were more like small-town mayors. For another, while magic was very real on Earth, Fillory was magical. There was a difference. Magic was part of the ecosystem. It was in the weather and the oceans and the soil, which was wildly fertile. If you wanted your crops to fail you had to work pretty hard at it.

Fillory was a land of hyperabundance. Anything that needed making could be gotten from the dwarves, sooner or later, and they weren’t an oppressed industrial proletariat, they actually enjoyed making things. Unless you were an actively despicable tyrant, the way Martin Chatwin had been, there were just too many resources and too few people to create anything much in the way of civil strife. The only shortage that the Fillorian economy suffered from was a chronic shortage of shortages.

As a result whenever any of the Brakebills — as they were called, even though Julia had never even been to Brakebills, as she wasn’t slow to point out — tried to get serious about something, there turned out not to be much to be serious about. It was all ritual and pomp and circumstance. Even money was just for show. It was toy money. Monopoly money. The others had all but given up on trying to make themselves useful, but Quentin couldn’t quite let it go. Maybe that was what had been nagging at him, as he stood on the edge of that meadow in the woods. There must be something real somewhere out there, but he could never quite seem to get his hands on it.

“All right,” he said. “What next?”

“Well,” Eliot said, as they filed back inside. “There is this situation with the Outer Island.”

“The where?”

“The Outer Island.” He picked up some royal-looking documents. “That’s what it says. I’m king of it, and even I don’t know where it is.”

Janet snorted. “Outer is off the east coast. Way off, a couple of days’ sail. God, I can’t believe they even let you be king. It’s the easternmost point in the Fillorian Empire. I think.”

Eliot peered at the map painted on the table. “I don’t see it.”

Quentin studied the map too. On his first visit to Fillory he’d sailed deep into the Western Sea, on the other side of the Fillorian continent, but his knowledge of the east was pretty sketchy.

“It’s not big enough.” She pointed to Julia’s lap. “That’s where it would be if we had a bigger table.”

Quentin tried to imagine it: a little slip of white tropical sand, embellished with a decorative palm tree, embedded in an ocean of blue-green calm.

“Have you been there?” Eliot said.

“No one’s ever been there. It’s just a dot on the map. Somebody started a fishing colony there after his ship collided with it like a million years ago. Why are we talking about the Outer Island?”

Eliot went back to his papers. “Looks like they haven’t paid their taxes in a couple of years.”

“So?” Janet said. “Probably that’s because they don’t have any money.”

“Send them a telegram,” Quentin said. “DEAR OUTER ISLANDERS STOP SEND MONEY STOP IF YOU HAVE NO MONEY THEN DO NOT SEND MONEY STOP.”

The meeting flagged while Eliot and Janet tried to outdo each other in composing the most useless possible telegram to the Outer Islanders.

“All right,” Eliot said. The turning tower had rotated to where the flaming Fillorian sunset lit up the sky behind him. Ladders of pink cloud were stacked up above his shoulders. “I’ll lean on the Fenwicks about Jollyby. Janet will speak to the Lorians.” He waved vaguely. “And somebody will do something about the Outer Island. Who wants scotch?”

“I’ll go,” Quentin said.

“It’s just there on the sideboard.”

“No, I mean to the Outer Island. I’ll go there. I’ll see about the taxes.”