Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Five weeks out they made landfall on a scorched black rock, and the crew threatened to mutiny if they didn’t turn back. Quentin stared them down, then bluffed about his magical powers, then finally quintupled their pay. They sailed on.

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up. Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer. Before this Quentin had never been on a sailboat big enough to have a jib, but now he was as lean and brown and salty-skinned as his crew. The sun became huge, and the seawater grew hot against the Skywalker ’s gunwales. Everything felt electrically charged. Ordinary objects gave off strange optical effects, flares and sunspots and coronas. The stars were low, burning orbs, visibly spherical, pregnant with illegible meaning. A powerful golden light shone through everything, as if the world were only a thin scrim behind which a magnificent sun was shining. The stag kept bounding on ahead of them.

At last an unknown continent filled the horizon. It was wrapped in a magical winter and thickly wooded with fir trees that grew right up to the shore, so that the salt water lapped at their tangled roots. Quentin dropped anchor and told the crew, who were shivering in their thin tropical clothes, to wait a week and then leave without him if he wasn’t back. He gave them the rest of the gold he’d brought, kissed the seven-fingered sister goodbye, lowered the sloop’s caïque, and rowed himself to shore. Strapping his bow to his back, he pushed his way into the snow-choked forest. It was good to be alone again.

The Questing Beast showed itself on the third night. Quentin had made camp on a low bluff overlooking a clear, spring-fed pool. Just before dawn he woke to find it standing at the water’s edge. Its reflection shivered as it lapped the cold water. He waited for a minute, on one knee. This was it. He strung his bow and slipped an arrow from his quiver. Looking down from the low bluff, with the early-morning air almost dead, it wasn’t even a difficult shot. At the moment of release he thought: I’m doing what even the Chatwins failed to do, Helen and Rupert. He didn’t feel the pleasure he thought he would. He put his shaft through the tough meat of the white stag’s muscular right thigh.

He winced. Thank God he hadn’t hit an artery. It didn’t try to flee, just sat stiffly on its haunches like an injured cat. He had the impression, from its resigned expression, that the Questing Beast had to go through this kind of thing once a century or so. The cost of doing business. Its blood looked black in the pre-dawn twilight.

It showed no fear as Quentin approached. It reached back with its supple neck and grasped the arrow firmly in its square white teeth. With a jerk the shaft came free. It spat out the arrow at Quentin’s feet.

“Hurts, that,” the Questing Beast said matter-of-factly.

It had been three days since Quentin had spoken to anybody.

“What now,” he said hoarsely.

“Wishes, of course. You get three.”

“My friend Penny lost his hands. Fix them.”

The stag’s eyes defocused momentarily in thought.

“I cannot. I am sorry. He is either dead or not in this world.”

The sun was just beginning to come up over the dark, massed fir forest. Quentin took a deep breath. The cold air smelled fresh and turpentiney.

“Alice. She turned into some kind of spirit. A niffin . Bring her back.”

“Again I cannot.”

“What do you mean you can’t? It’s a wish.”

“I don’t make the rules,” the Questing Beast said. It lapped at the blood that still trickled down its thigh. “You don’t like it, find some other magic stag and shoot it instead.”

“I wish that the rules were different.”

The stag rolled its eyes. “No. And I’m counting those three together as your first wish. What’s number two?”

Quentin sighed. He hadn’t really allowed himself to hope.

“Pay off my crew. Double what I promised them.”

“Done,” the Questing Beast replied.

“That’s ten times their base salary, since I already quintupled it.”

“I said ‘done,’ didn’t I? What’s number three?”

Years ago Quentin had worked out exactly what he would wish for if anybody ever gave him the chance. He would wish to travel to Fillory and to be allowed to stay there forever. But that was years ago.

“Send me home,” he said.

The Questing Beast closed its round brown eyes gravely, then opened them. It dipped its antlers toward him.

“Done,” it said.

Quentin supposed he could have been more specific. By rights the Questing Beast could have sent him back to Brooklyn, or to his parents’ house in Chesterton, or to Brakebills, or even to the house upstate. But the stag went the literal way with it, and Quentin wound up in front of his last semipermanent residence, the apartment building in Tribeca that he’d shared with Alice. Nobody noticed as he abruptly came into being in the middle of the sidewalk in the late morning of what appeared to be an early-summer day. He walked away quickly. He couldn’t even look at their old doorway. He left his bow and arrows in a trash can.

It was a shock to suddenly be surrounded by so many of his fellow human beings again at such close quarters. Their mottled skins and flawed physiognomies and preening vanities were less easy to ignore. Maybe some of that centaur snobbery had rubbed off on him. A revolting stew of fragrances both organic and inorganic invaded his nose. The front page of a newspaper, acquired at the corner deli, informed him that he’d been gone from Earth for a little over two years.

He would have to call his parents. Fogg would have kept them from fretting too much, but still. It almost made him smile to think of seeing them now. What the hell would they say about his hair? Soon, but not yet. He walked around, getting reacclimated. The spells involved in retrieving cash from an ATM were child’s play now. He got a shave and a haircut and bought some clothes that weren’t made by centaurs and hence didn’t look like a Renaissance Faire costume. He babied himself. He had lunch at a fancy steakhouse and nearly died with pleasure. By three o’clock he was drinking Moscow Mules in a long, dark, empty basement bar in Chinatown where he used to go with the Physical Kids.

It had been a long time since he’d drunk alcohol. It had a dangerous thawing effect on his frozen brain. The ice that kept his feelings of guilt and sorrow under control creaked and groaned. But he kept on with it, and soon a deep, pure, luxurious sadness came over him, as heady and decadent as a drug. The place started filling up at five. By six the after-work drinkers were jostling Quentin at the bar. He could see that the light falling down the stairs out front had changed. He was on his way out when he noticed a slender, pretty girl with blond curls nuzzling a man who looked like an underwear model in a corner booth. Quentin didn’t know the underwear model from Adam, but the pretty girl was definitely Anaïs.

It wasn’t the reunion he would have wanted, nor was she the person he would have chosen to reunite with. But maybe it was better this way, with somebody he didn’t care too much about, who didn’t care too much about him, either. And he had those trusty Moscow Mules to carry some of the load for him. Baby steps. They sat outside on the stairway. She put her hand on his arm and goggled at his white hair.

“You would not have believed eet ,” she said. Oddly, her pan-European accent had deepened and her English grammar worsened since he’d seen her last. Possibly it played better in the bar scene. “The time we ’ad getting out. It was quiet for a while, and then they rush us again. Josh was very good, you know. Very good. I had never seen him work magic like that. There was a thing that swam in the floor, under the stones — like a shark, I think, but it swam in the stones. It got hold of your leg.”