Lev Grossman - The Magicians

The story of The Magicians picked up immediately after the end of The Wandering Dune , after Jane, the youngest, and her sister Helen (“that dear, self-righteous busybody”) quarreled over Helen’s hiding of the magic buttons that could take them to Fillory. Having failed to unearth them herself, Jane was forced to wait, but no further invitations to Fillory arrived. She and her siblings seemed fated to live out the rest of their lives on Earth as ordinary children. She supposed it was all right — after all, most children never got to go to Fillory at all — but it hardly seemed fair. The others had all gone to Fillory at least twice, and she’d only gotten to go once.

And there was the matter of Martin: he was still missing after all this time. Their parents had long since given up hope, but the children hadn’t. At night Jane and the other little Chatwins crept into each other’s bedrooms and whispered about him, wondering what adventures he was getting up to in Fillory, and when he would finally come home to them, as they knew he one day would.

Years passed. Jane was thirteen, no longer a girl, as old as Martin was when he’d disappeared, when the call finally came. She was visited by a cooperative and industrious hedgehog named Prickleplump, who helped her recover an old cigar box containing the buttons from the old dry well down which Helen had dropped it. She could have enlisted one of the others to come with her, but instead Jane returned to Fillory alone, by way of the City, the only Chatwin ever to enter the other world without a sibling to keep her company.

She found Fillory beset by a powerful wind. It blew and blew and never stopped blowing. At first it was amusing, and everybody flew kites, and a craze for flowy clothing that billowed out on the breeze swept through the royal court at Whitespire. But over time the wind became relentless. The birds were exhausted from struggling with it, and everybody’s hair was getting tangled. The leaves were being stripped from the forest, and the trees were complaining. Even when you went inside and closed the door you could still hear it groaning, and feel it blowing on your face for hours afterward. Castle Whitespire’s wind-powered clockwork heart threatened to spin out of control, and had to be decoupled from its windmills and halted for the first time in living memory.

A group of eagles and griffins and pegasi allowed themselves to be borne away on the wind, convinced that it would blow them away to a fantastical land, one even more magical than Fillory. They returned a week later coming from the other direction, hungry and disheveled and windburned. They refused to discuss what they had seen.

Jane belted on a rapier, put her hair up in a tight bun, and set off into the Darkling Woods alone, resolute, bent forward against the gale, heading upwind in search of its source. Soon she came across Ember, alone in a clearing. He was injured and distraught. He told her of Martin’s transformation, and his efforts to expel the child, which had ended with the death of Umber. They held a council of war.

With a bellowing bleat Ember summoned the Cozy Horse, and together they mounted its broad velvet back and set off to see the dwarves. Swing players at the best of times, the dwarves could never be relied upon to cooperate with anybody, but even they were convinced that Martin was dangerous, and besides, all that wind was blowing the topsoil off their beloved underground warrens. They fashioned for Jane a silver pocket watch, a work of consummate horological mastery, so dense with tiny gears and cams and glorious spiral springs that its interior was a solid teeming mass of gleaming clockwork. With it, the dwarves explained, Jane could control the flow of time itself — turn it forward, turn it back, speed it up, slow it down — as she liked.

Jane and Ember left with the pocket watch, shaking their heads. Honestly, there was never any telling what the dwarves were capable of. If they could build a time machine, you wondered why they didn’t run the whole kingdom. Except, she supposed, that they couldn’t be bothered.

Quentin turned the last page. The book ended there. It was signed on the bottom of the last page by Jane herself.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Quentin said out loud.

“The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it? But I think I tied up most of the loose threads. I’m sure you can fill in the rest, if you really think about it.”

Quentin practically jumped out of what was left of his skin. Sitting on top of his desk on the other side of the room, very still, long legs crossed, was a small, pretty woman with dark hair and pale skin.

“At least I try to make a good entrance.”

She had gone native: she wore a light brown cloak over a practical gray traveling dress that was slit up the sides far enough to show some leg. But it was unmistakably her. The paramedic, and the woman who’d visited him in the infirmary. And yet that wasn’t who she was at all.

“You’re Jane Chatwin, aren’t you?”

She smiled brightly and nodded.

“I autographed it.” She pointed to the manuscript. “Imagine what it would be worth. Sometimes I think about turning up at a Fillory convention just to see what would happen.”

“They’d probably think you were a cosplayer,” Quentin said, “and getting a little old for it.”

He set aside the manuscript on the bed. He had been very young when he met her for the first time, but he wasn’t young anymore. As her brother Martin would have said: My, how he’d grown. Her smile was not as irresistible as it used to be.

“You were the Watcherwoman, too, weren’t you?”

“Was and am.” Still sitting, she sketched a curtsy. “I suppose I could retire now that Martin is gone. Though really, I’ve only just started to enjoy myself.”

He expected himself to smile back at her, but the smile did not materialize. He didn’t feel like smiling. Quentin couldn’t have said exactly what he was feeling.

Jane remained very still, studying him as she had that first day they met. Her presence was so laden with magic and meaning and history that she almost glowed. To think she had spoken to Plover himself, and told him the stories Quentin had grown up on. The circularity of it all was dizzying. The sun was setting, and the light stained Quentin’s white bedspread a dusky orange-pink. The edges of everything were softening in the twilight.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said. He had never felt less tempted by a pretty woman’s charms. “If you were the Watcherwoman, why did you do all those things? Stop time and all that?”

She smiled wryly.

“This item”—she produced a silver pocket watch as thick and round as a pomegranate from somewhere in her cloak—“did not come with an instruction manual. It took a bit of experimenting before I got the hang of it, and some of those experiments weren’t so successful. There was one long afternoon in particular…” She grimaced. Her accent was the twin of Martin’s. “People took it the wrong way. And anyhow, Plover embroidered all that stuff. What an imagination that man had.”

She shook her head, as if Plover’s flights of fancy were the most incredible part of all this.

“And you know, I was only thirteen when I started out. I had no training in magic at all. I had to figure everything out on my own. I suppose I’m a bit of a hedge witch that way.”

“So all those things the Watcherwoman did—”

“A lot of it did actually happen. But I was careful. The Watcherwoman never killed anyone. I cut corners, sometimes at other people’s expense, but I had other things on my mind. My job was to stop Martin, and I did what I had to. Even those clock-trees.” She snorted ruefully. “Brilliant idea those were. They never did a bloody thing. The funniest part is that Martin was terrified of them! He couldn’t figure them out.”