Lev Grossman - The Magician King

“Well, sure.” Had he? The exact particulars were fuzzy. “I mean, not in granular detail.”

The truth was that they hardly ever talked about that time. They talked around it. No good memories there for anybody. It was after the big disaster in Ember’s Tomb. Quentin had been half-dead and had to be left in the care of some irritating but ultimately very medically effective centaurs while Eliot and Janet and the others returned to the real world. Quentin had spent a year recovering in Fillory, then he went back to Earth and gave up magic. He spent another six months working in an office in Manhattan until Janet and Eliot and Julia finally came and got him. If they hadn’t he’d probably still be there. He was grateful, and he always would be.

Eliot stared out the window into the black moonless night, like an oriental potentate in his dressing gown, which looked too heavily embroidered to be comfortable.

“You know Janet and I were in pretty rough shape when we left Fillory?”

“Yes. Though at least Martin Chatwin hadn’t chewed you practically in half.”

“It’s not a contest, but yes, that is true. But we were shaken up. We loved Alice, too, you know, in our way. Even Janet did. And we thought we’d lost you as well as her. We were well and truly done with Fillory and all its goods and chattels, I can tell you.

“Josh went home to his parents in New Hampshire, and Richard and Anaïs went off somewhere to do whatever it was they’d been doing before they went to Fillory. Not big mourners, those two. I couldn’t face New York again, nor could I face my grotesque so-called family in Oregon, so I went home with Janet to L.A.

“That turned out to be an excellent decision. You know her parents are lawyers? Entertainment lawyers. Fantastically rich, huge house in Brentwood, working all the time, no discernible emotional life whatsoever. So we sucked around Brentwood for a week or two until Janet’s parents got tired of the sight of our post-traumatic faces shuffling off to bed as they were getting up for a predawn squash match. They packed us off to a fancy spa in Wyoming for a couple of weeks.

“You wouldn’t have heard of it, it was that kind of place. Impossible to get into and ludicrously expensive, but money means nothing to these people, and I wasn’t about to argue. Janet practically grew up there — the staff all knew her from when she was a little girl. Imagine that — our Janet, a little girl! She and I had a bungalow to ourselves and positively legions of people to wait on us. I think Janet had a manicurist for every nail.

“And they did a thing with mud and hot stones — I swear to you there was magic in it. Nothing feels that good without magic.

“Of course, the terrible secret of places like that is that they’re horrifically boring. You have no idea the extremes we were driven to. I played tennis. Me! They got very scoldy when it came to drinking on the court, I can tell you. I told them it’s just part of my form. You can’t relearn technique, not at my age.

“Well, by the third day Janet and I were considering having sex with each other just to relieve the tedium. And then, like a dark angel of mercy come to safeguard my virtue, Julia appeared.

“It was like one of those Poirot mysteries set at a posh country seat. There was some accident down by the pool — I was never clear on the details, but an enormous fuss was made. I suppose that’s one of the things you pay for: first-class fuss. At any rate the first time I laid eyes on our Julia she was being carried through the lobby strapped to a backboard, soaking wet and cursing a blue streak and insisting that she was fine, absolutely fine. Take your paws off me, you damned dirty apes.

“The next day I came down to the bar around three or four in the afternoon and there she was again, drinking alone, all in black. Vodka gimlets I believe. The mysterious lady. It was painfully obvious that she didn’t belong at the spa. Her hair was a rat’s nest, you literally can’t imagine. Worse than now even. Her cuticles were bitten down to the quick. Shoulders hunched. Nervous stutter. And then she had no grasp of how things worked. She tried to tip the staff. She pronounced the names of French wines with an actual French accent.

“Of course I was drawn to her at once. I figured she must be Russian. Daughter of a jailed oligarch, that sort of thing. No one but a Russian could afford to stay there and still have hair that bad. Janet thought she was just out of rehab and from the looks of it headed right back in. Either way we fell upon her like starving people.

“The approach was subtle. The trick was not setting off her alarms, which were all obviously set to a hair trigger. It was Janet, that mistress of seduction, who cracked her in the end — she planted herself in a public lounge and complained loudly about a rather involved computer issue. You could watch our Julia wrestle with herself, but it was a fait accompli.

“After that — well, you know how it is on those vacations. As soon as you learn another person’s name they become inescapable. We ran into each other everywhere. You wouldn’t think a place like that was her style, would you? But there she was, up to her neck in mud, with cucumber slices over her eyes. She was constantly plunging in and out of baths and things. Once Janet tried to go in a steam bath with her, but she’d turned it up so high everybody else had to flee. Probably she had them thrash her with birch twigs. It was like she was trying to rid herself of some stubborn taint.

“It came out that she had a weakness for cards, so we spent hours just drinking and playing three-handed bridge. Not talking. We didn’t know she was a magician, of course. How could we? But you could tell she was bursting with some terrible secret. And she had those things that one likes about magicians: she was disgustingly bright and rather sad and slightly askew. To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you.

“Well, you know how in the Poirot books he always goes on vacation to get away from it all, the mysteries and whatever else, only to have a murder committed on the very island he’s fled to for peace and quiet and some civilized gastronomy? It was exactly like that, except that we were fleeing magic. One night I wandered over to her bungalow around ten or eleven at night. Janet and I had had a fight, and I was looking for someone to complain about her to.

“When I passed Julia’s window I saw that she was building a fire. That was odd to begin with. The fireplaces were absolutely enormous in those bungalows, but it was the middle of summer and nobody in their right mind was using them. But Julia had a roaring blaze going. She was building it very methodically, placing the logs very carefully. She marked each log before she put it on — scraped away some of the bark with a little silver knife.

“And then as I watched. . I don’t know how to describe it so you’ll understand. She kneeled down in front of the fire and began putting things in it. Some of the things were obviously valuable — a rare shell, an old book, a handful of gold dust. Some of them must just have been precious to her. A piece of costume jewelry. An old photograph. Each time she put one in she’d stop and wait a minute, but nothing happened, except that whatever it was burned or melted and gave off a nasty smell. I don’t know what she was waiting for, but whatever it was it never came. Meanwhile she got more and more agitated.

“I felt utterly tawdry spying on her, but I couldn’t look away. Finally she ran out of precious things, and then she started crying, and then she put herself into the fire. She crawled over the hearth and collapsed, half in and half out of the flames, sobbing her little heart out. Her legs were sticking out. It was awful to see. Her clothes went up right away, of course, and her face got black with soot, but the fire never touched her skin. She was absolutely sobbing. Her shoulders shook and shook. .”