Lev Grossman - The Magicians

Cool autumn sunlight slotted through the narrow windows cut in the heavy log walls of the Two Moons. Sober, Quentin felt more eager than ever to get on with it. He looked hard at his beautiful, despoiled Alice — his anger at her was a hard nugget he didn’t know if he could ever digest, a kidney stone. Maybe when they were kings and queens. Maybe then he could have Penny executed. A palace coup, and definitely not a bloodless one.

Penny proposed that they all swear an oath together, to celebrate their shared high purpose, but it seemed like overkill, and anyway he couldn’t muster a quorum. They were all shrugging into their packs when Richard abruptly announced that they could go if they wanted, but he would be staying behind at the inn.

No one knew how to react. Janet tried to joke him out of it, then when that didn’t work she pleaded with him.

“But we’ve come this far together!” she said, furious and trying not to show it. Of all of them she hated this kind of disloyalty to the group the most. Any crack in their collective facade was an attack on her personally. “We can always turn back if things get sketchy! Or in an emergency we can use the button as a rip cord! I think you’re way overreacting.”

“Well, and I think you’re underreacting,” Richard said. “And I think you can count on the authorities to overreact when they find out about how far you’re taking this.”

“If they find out about it,” Anaïs put in. “Which they will not.”

“ When they find out about it,” Janet said hotly, “this is going to be the discovery of the century, and we are going to make history, and you’re missing out on it. And if you can’t see that, I frankly have no idea why you came along in the first place.”

“I came along to keep you people from doing anything stupid. Which is what I’m trying to do right now.”

“Whatever.” She put a hand in his face, then walked away, her own face crumpling. “Nobody cares if you come or not. There are only four thrones anyway.”

Quentin half expected Alice to join Richard — she looked like she was hanging on to her nerve by the very tips of her fingers. He wondered why she hadn’t bolted already; she was way too sensible for a random lark like this. Quentin felt the opposite way. The danger would be going back, or staying still. The only way out was through. The past was ruins, but the present was still in play. They would have to tie him down to keep him from going to Ember’s Tomb.

Richard would not be dislodged, so in the end they set off in a loose pack without him, with Dint and Fen walking ahead. They followed yesterday’s carriage path for only a short while before striking out at an angle into the woods. For all the glory of their high and noble purpose, it felt like they were going on a summer-camp nature hike, or a junior high field trip, with the kids goofing off and the two counselors looking dour and superior and grown-up and glaring them back into line when they strayed too far. For the first time since they came to Fillory everybody was relaxing and being themselves instead of playing intrepid explorer-heroes. Low stone walls traversed the forest floor, and they took turns balancing along them. Nobody knew who had built them, or why. Josh said something about where was the damn Cozy Horse when you needed it. Before long they emerged from the forest into a maze of sunlit meadows, and then into open farmland.

It would not have been hard to get Alice alone. But whenever Quentin rehearsed what he wanted to say, however well it began, he got to a point where he had to ask her what happened with Penny, and then the dream sequence just went white, like a film of a nuclear blast. Instead, he made conversation with the guides.

Neither of them was very talkative. Dint did show a flicker of interest when he learned that the visitors were magicians, too, but they turned out not to have much in common. His entire expertise was in battle magic. He was barely aware that there were other kinds.

Quentin had the impression he was loath to give away any trade secrets. But he did open up about one thing.

“I sewed this myself,” he said, a little shyly, pulling his cape to one side to show Quentin a bandolier-like vest underneath with many small pockets on it in rows. “I keep herbs in here, powders, whatever I might need in the field. If I’m casting something with a material component I can just… like this”—he executed a series of rapid pinching-and-dispensing motions that he’d obviously spent a lot of time practicing—“and I’m ready to go!”

Then the dour facade descended again, and he went back to his silent brooding. He carried a wand, which almost nobody at Brakebills did. It was considered slightly embarrassing, like training wheels, or a marital aid.

Fen was more overtly friendly but at the same time harder to read. She wasn’t a magician, and she carried no obvious weapons, but it was understood that of the two of them she was the muscle. As far as Quentin could make out she was some kind of martial artist — she called the discipline she practiced inc aga , an untranslatable phrase from a language Quentin had never heard of. She kept to a strict regimen: she couldn’t wear armor or touch silver or gold, and she ate practically nothing. What inc aga looked like in practice was impossible for Quentin to fathom — she would talk about it only in high-flown, abstract metaphors.

She and Dint were both adventurers by profession.

“There aren’t many of us now,” Fen said, her short sturdy legs somehow devouring distance faster than Quentin’s long skinny ones. She never looked at him as she talked, her bulgy eyes continuously searching the horizon for potential threats. “Humans, I mean. Fillory is a wild place, and getting wilder. The forest is spreading, getting deeper and darker. Every summer we cut down the trees, burn them down sometimes, and then mark the borders of the woods. The next summer the borders are buried a hundred yards deep. The trees eat the farms, and the farmers come to live in the towns. But where will we live when all of Fillory is forest? When I was a girl, the Two Moons was in open country.

“The animals don’t care,” she added bitterly. “They like it this way.”

She lapsed into silence. Quentin thought it might be a good time to change the subject. He felt like a green-as-grass PFC from Dubuque, Iowa, trading banter with the hardened South Vietnamese regular attached to his unit.

“So, I don’t mean to sound crass,” he said, “but are we paying you for this? Or is somebody?”

“If we succeed, that will be payment enough.”

“But why would you want somebody from our world to be king anyway? Who you don’t even know? Why not somebody from Fillory?”

“Only your kind can sit the thrones of Castle Whitespire. It’s the Law. Always has been.”

“But that makes no sense. And this is speaking as the beneficiary of the Law here.”

Fen grimaced. Her protuberant eyes and full lips gave her face a fishy cast.

“Our people have been slaughtering and betraying one another for centuries, Quentin,” she said. “How can you be any worse? The rule of the Chatwins is the last peaceful time anyone can remember. You don’t know anyone here; you have no history, no scores to settle. You belong to no faction.” She stared fixedly at the road ahead of them, biting off her words. The bitterness in her tone was bottomless. “It makes perfect political sense. We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.”

They hiked through slow-rolling hills for the rest of the day, their thumbs hooked in the straps of their backpacks, sometimes along chalk roads, sometimes cutting across fields, crickets jumping up out of the long grass to get out of their way. The air was cool and clean.