Lev Grossman - The Magician King

Eliot stood up and went to the window. He struggled with one of the little panes for a second, then he must have found a catch Quentin had never noticed because he pulled the whole window open. Quentin couldn’t see how he did it. He put his glass on the sill.

“I don’t know if you’re falling in love with her or if you just think you are or what it is you’re doing,” he said. “I suppose I can’t blame you, you always did like to make things as hard as possible on yourself. But just listen to what I’m telling you.

“That was how it all started, how we knew she was one of us. The spell was something very strong. I could hear the hum of it even over the fire, and the light in the room had gone a funny color. But so much of her magic is just impossible to parse. I knew right away she’d never been to Brakebills, because it sounded like gibberish to me, and I couldn’t get within a thousand miles of how it worked or what she was trying to do, and she never said, and I never asked.

“But if I absolutely had to guess I’d say she was attempting a summoning. I’d say she was trying to bring back something that she’d lost, or that was taken away from her, something that was very precious to her indeed. And if I had another guess, I’d have to say that it wasn’t working.”

The next morning, Quentin rode down to the docks in a black carriage with velvet curtains and plushly padded velvet seats. It was safe and musty inside, like a living room on wheels. Next to him, swaying loosely with the rocking of the carriage, sat Queen Julia. Across from them, their knees practically touching, was the admiral of the Fillorian navy.

Quentin had decided that if he was going on a trip to the island at the ass end of the universe, he should do it properly. He should make preparations. There were rules for this kind of thing. Such as: if you were going on a journey you needed a stout vessel.

All ships were available to the crown, in theory, but most of the ones they kept just lying around on call were warships, and those turned out to be scarily spartan on the inside. Rows of hammocks and racks of hard pallets. Not a stateroom in sight. Not really suitable at all for the Voyage of King Kwentin, as Eliot liked to spell Quentin’s name in official documents. So they were going down to the docks to find a ship that was suitable.

Quentin was feeling good. He was full of energy and a determination that he hadn’t felt for long time. This is what he’d been waiting for. The admiral was an almost alarmingly short man named Lacker with a thin gray face that looked like it had been hollowed out of schist by the action of fifty years of wind and spray.

It wasn’t that Quentin couldn’t have said what he was looking for, it’s just that he didn’t want to, because if he did it would have been embarrassing. What he was looking for was a ship from one of the Fillory novels, specifically the Swift, which figured in the fourth book, The Secret Sea. Pursued by the Watcherwoman, Jane and Rupert — he could have explained to Admiral Lacker, but didn’t — had stowed away on the Swift, which turned out to be run by pirates, except they were only pretending to be pirates. They were really a party of Fillorian noblemen, wrongly accused, who were seeking to clear their names. You never got a particularly nautically rigorous look at the Swift, but you nonetheless came away with a powerful impression of it: it was a plucky but cozy little vessel, elegant to look at but game in a fight, with sleek lines and glowing yellow portholes through which one glimpsed snug, shipshape cabins.

Of course if this were a Fillory novel the ship he needed would already be tied up at the docks, awaiting his command, just like that. But this wasn’t a Fillory novel. This was Fillory. So it was up to him.

“I need something not too big and not too small,” he said. “Mediumsized. And it should be comfortable. And quick. And sturdy.”

“I see. Will you require guns?”

“No guns. Well, maybe a few guns. A few guns.”

“A few guns.”

“If you please, Admiral, don’t be a cock. I’ll know it when I see it, and if for some reason I don’t, you tell me. All right?”

Admiral Lacker inclined his head almost imperceptibly to indicate that they had a deal. He would endeavor to be as little of a cock as possible.

Whitespire stood on the shore of a wide, curving bay of oddly pale green sea. It was almost too perfect: it could have been carved out of the coastline on purpose by some divine being who took a benevolent interest in mortals having somewhere to put their ships when they weren’t using them. For all Quentin knew it had been. He had the driver drop them at one end of the waterfront. They clambered out, all three of them, blinking in the early morning sun after the swaying dimness of the carriage.

The air was ripe with the smell of salt and wood and tar. It was intoxicating, like huffing pure oxygen.

“All right,” Quentin said. “Let’s do this.” He clapped his hands together.

They walked, slowly, all the way from one end of the docks to the other, stepping over taut guy ropes and squashed and dried fish carcasses and weaving their way around massive stanchions and windlasses and through labyrinths of stacked crates. The waterfront was home to an astounding variety of vessels from all points in the Fillorian Empire and beyond. There was a gargantuan dreadnought made of black wood, with nine masts and a bounding panther for a figurehead, and a square-snouted junk with a brick-red sail crimped into sections by battens. There were sloops and cutters, galleons and schooners, menacing corvettes and tiny darting caravels. It was like a bathtub full of expensive bath toys.

It took an hour to reach the far end. Quentin turned to Admiral Lacker.

“So what did you think?”

“I think the Hatchet, the Mayfly, or the Morgan Downs would suffice.”

“Probably. I’m sure you’re right. Julia?”

Julia had said almost nothing the entire time. She was detached, like she was sleepwalking. He thought about what Eliot had told him last night. He wondered if Julia had found whatever it was she’d been looking for. Maybe she was hoping she’d find it on the Outer Island.

“It does not matter. They are all fine, Quentin. It makes no difference.”

They were both right, of course. There were plenty of decent-looking ships. Beautiful even. But they weren’t the Swift. Quentin folded his arms and squinted down the length of the docks in the late-morning glare. He looked out at the ships floating in the bay.

“What about those ones out there?”

Lacker pursed his lips. Julia looked too. Her eyes were still black from the day before, and she didn’t have to shade them against the sun. She looked right into it.

“They are at your disposal as well, Your Highness,” Lacker said. “Of course.”

Julia walked out along the nearest pier, straight-backed and sure-footed, to where a humble fishing smack was tied up. She jumped the gap neatly and began untying it.

“Come on,” she called.

Lacker gestured to Quentin to precede him.

“Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”

It was good to get out on the open water, but there wasn’t much wind, and as it warmed up the smack began to smell. Amazingly its owner emerged from belowdecks, where he must have been asleep. He was a sun-and windburned man with a gray beard, wearing overalls with nothing obviously on underneath them. Lacker addressed him in a language Quentin didn’t recognize. He didn’t seem at all put out or even surprised to discover that his boat had been commandeered by two monarchs and an admiral.