Lev Grossman - The Magicians

After another round of schnapps and scintillating persiflage with Humbledrum, the little silver birch sapling emerged from wherever it had been concealing itself and threaded its way through the room toward them, padding on feet of matted roots which still had clods of dirt clinging to them.

“I am Farvel,” it said chirpily.

It looked even stranger in the full light of the bar. It was a literal stick figure. There were talking trees in the Fillory books, but Plover was never very precise in describing their appearance. Farvel spoke through what looked like a lateral cut in its bark, the kind of wedge that a single hatchet blow might have left. The remainder of its features were sketched out by a spray of thin branches covered in fluttering green leaves, which roughly limned the outlines of two eyes and a nose. He looked like a Green Man carving in a church, except that his flat little mouth gave him a comically sour expression.

“Please pardon my rudeness earlier, I was disconcerted. It is so rare to meet travelers from other lands.” It had brought a stool from the bar, and now it bent itself into a rough sitting position. It looked a little like a chair itself. “What brings you here, human boy?”

At last. Here we go. The next level.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Quentin began, casually throwing an arm over the back of the booth. Obviously, he was emerging as the designated point person, the team’s natural first-contact specialist. The bartender joined them as well, having been replaced at his station by a solemn, dignified chimp with a hangdog face. “Curiosity mostly, I guess. We found this button? That let us travel between worlds? And we were all sort of at loose ends on Earth anyway, so we just… came over here. See what we could see, that kind of a thing.”

Even half drunk, that sounded a lot lamer than he’d hoped. Even Janet was looking at him with concern. God, he hoped Alice wasn’t listening. He smiled weakly, trying to play it cool. He wished he hadn’t had quite so much beer on quite such an empty, weary stomach.

“Of course, of course,” Farvel said companionably. “And what have you seen so far?”

The bartender watched Quentin steadily. He sat back-to-front on a cane chair, his arms resting on the seat back.

“Well, we ran into a river nymph who gave us a horn. A magic horn, I think. And then this bug — this insect, in a carriage, I guess it was a praying mantis — it shot an arrow at me, that almost hit me.”

He knew he should probably be playing this closer to the vest, but which part should he be leaving out exactly? How did those calculations work? The rigors of keeping pace with Humbledrum had left him a shade less than razor-keen. But Farvel didn’t seem put off, he just nodded sympathetically. The chimp came out from behind the bar to place a lighted candle on their table, along with another round of pints, this time on the house.

Penny leaned over the back of the booth again.

“You guys don’t work for the Watcherwoman, do you? Or I mean, like, secretly? Not like you want to, but you have to?”

“Jesus, Penny.” Josh shook his head. “Smooth.”

“Oh my, oh dear,” Farvel said. A charged glance passed between him and the bartender. “Well, I suppose you could say… but no, one shouldn’t say. Oh dear, oh dear.”

Its composure thoroughly disrupted, the little treelet, the picture of arboreal distress, let its branches droop a little, and its green birch leaves fluttered anxiously.

“I like a touch of lavender in my honey,” Humbledrum observed, apropos of nothing. “You want the bees to nest near a good-size field of it. Downwind, if you can manage it. That’s the real trick of it. In a nutshell.”

Farvel wrapped one slender twig-hand around its glass and tipped some beer into its mouth. After a visible struggle with itself, the tree-spirit began again.

“Young human,” Farvel said. “What you suppose is true, in a sense. We do not love her, but we fear her. Everybody does, who knows what’s good for them.

“She has not yet succeeded in slowing the advance of time, not yet.” It glanced at the humid green twilight forest visible through the open doorway, as if to reassure itself that it was still there. “But she hungers to. We see her sometimes, from far away. She moves through the forest. She lives in the treetops. She has lost her wand, they say, but she will find it again soon, or fashion a new one.

“And then what? Can you imagine it, that eternal sunset? All will be confused. With no boundaries to separate them, the day animals and the night creatures will go to war with each other. The forest will die. The red sun will bleed out over the land until it is as white as the moon.”

“But I thought the Witch was dead,” Alice said. “I thought the Chatwins killed her.”

So she was listening. How could she sound so calm? Another glance passed between Farvel and the bartender.

“Well, that’s as may be. It was long ago, and we are far from the capital here. But the rams have not shown themselves here for many a year, and here in the country living and dead are not such simple things. Especially when witches come into it. And she has been seen!”

“The Watcherwoman has.” Quentin was trying to follow. This was it, they were getting into it, the sap was starting to flow.

“Oh yes! Humbledrum saw her. Slender she was, and veiled.”

“We heard her!” Penny said, getting into the spirit of it. “We heard a clock ticking in the woods!”

The bear just stared into his glass of schnapps with small, watery eyes.

“So the Watcherwoman,” Penny said eagerly. “Is this a problem we can, you know, help you with?”

All of a sudden Quentin felt supremely tired. The alcohol in his system, which had thus far been acting as a stimulant, without warning flipped to a chemical isomorph of itself and became a sedative instead. Where before he’d been burning it like rocket fuel, now it was gumming up the works. It was dragging him down. His brain began to shut down nonessential operations. Somewhere in his core the self-destruct countdown had begun.

He sat back in the booth and allowed his eyes to glaze over. This was the moment that should have galvanized him into action, the moment that all those years at Brakebills had been leading up to, but instead he was letting go, sinking down into dysphoria. Whatever, if Penny wanted to take this over, let it be his show from now on. He had Alice, why shouldn’t he have Fillory, too? The time for clever thinking had passed anyway. The tree was clearly taking their bait, or they were taking its bait, or both. Either way, here it was, the adventure had arrived.

There was a time when this had been his most passionate hope, when it would have ravished him with happiness. It was just so weird, he thought sadly. Why now, when it was actually happening, did the seductions of Fillory feel so crude and unwanted? Its groping hands so clumsy? He thought he’d left this feeling behind long ago in Brooklyn, or at least at Brakebills. How could it have followed him here, of all places? How far did he have to run? If Fillory failed him he would have nothing left! A wave of frustration and panic surged through him. He had to get rid of it, break the pattern! Or maybe this was different, maybe there really was something off here. Maybe the hollowness was in Fillory, not in him?

He slid warily out of the booth, rubbing up against Humbledrum’s huge scratchy thigh on his way out, and visited the restroom, a malodorous pit-style affair. He thought for a second that he might be sick into it, and that maybe that wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world, but nothing happened.

When he got back, Penny had taken his seat. He took Penny’s place in the other booth and rested his chin in his hands and his hands on the table. If only they had drugs. Getting high in Fillory, that would really be the ultimate. Eliot had moved to the bar and appeared to be chatting up the horned man.