Lev Grossman - The Magicians

For no reason, and against his express conscious wishes, some very tight elastic band of muscle around Quentin’s chest relaxed very slightly. Something between a laugh and a cough escaped him.

He sank back against his pillar.

“God, I am literally losing my fucking mind.”

Across the room Anaïs sat with Dint, talking intently and going over a handmade map of their progress so far that he’d sketched on what looked suspiciously like graph paper. Anaïs seemed more like a part of the guides’ gang than the Brakebills gang now. As he watched she bent over the map, deliberately smooshing her tit into Dint’s shoulder as she did so. Josh was nowhere to be seen. Penny and Eliot were dozing on the floor in the center of the room, their heads resting on their packs. Eliot had hectored Janet about the gun until he extracted a promise from her to dispose of it responsibly.

“Do you even want this anymore, Quentin?” Alice asked. “I mean, what we’re doing here? This kings and queens idea?”

“Of course I do.” He’d almost forgotten why they were here. But it was true. A throne was exactly what he needed right now. Once they were ensconced in Castle Whitespire, wreathed in glory and every possible physical comfort, then maybe he could find the strength to come to grips with all this. “You’d have to be an idiot not to.”

“You know the funny thing though?” She sat up straight, suddenly animated. “I mean the really hilarious thing? You actually don’t. You don’t even want it. Even if this whole thing came off without a hitch, you wouldn’t be happy. You gave up on Brooklyn and on Brakebills, and I fully expect you to give up on Fillory when the time comes. It makes things very simple for you, doesn’t it? Well, and of course you were always going to give up on us.

“We had problems, but we could have fixed them. But that was too easy for you. It might actually have worked, and then where would you be? You would have been stuck with me forever.”

“Problems? We had problems?” People looked up. He dropped his voice to a furious whisper. “You fucked fucking Penny! I’d say that’s a fucking problem!”

Alice ignored this. If he didn’t know better, he would have said that the tone of her voice almost resembled tenderness.

“I will stop being a mouse, Quentin. I will take some chances. If you will, for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

“You can’t just decide to be happy.”

“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want? Do you want to be the asshole who went to Fillory and was miserable there? Even in Fillory? Because that’s who you are right now.”

There was something true about what Alice was saying. But he couldn’t grasp it. It was too complex, or too simple. Too something. He thought of that first week he’d spent at Brakebills, when he and Eliot had gone sculling, and they’d watched the other rowers hunching and shivering in what to Quentin was a warm summer day. That was what he looked like to Alice. It was strange: he’d thought that doing magic was the hardest thing he would ever do, but the rest of it was so much harder. It turned out that magic was the easy part.

“Why did you come here, Alice?” he said. “If you don’t even want this?”

She looked at him evenly.

“Why do you think, Quentin? I came because of you. I came here because I wanted to take care of you.”

Quentin looked around at the others. He saw Janet sitting with her back against one wall with her eyes closed, though Quentin didn’t get the sense that she was asleep. The revolver was cradled in her lap. She wore a red T-shirt with a white star on it and khaki pants. She must be cold, he thought. As he watched she sighed and licked her lips without opening her eyes, like a little girl.

He didn’t want to be cold. Alice was still watching him. Behind her the mosaic was a swirl of green tentacles and whitecaps and floating fragments. He slid down the stone bench to her end and kissed her and bit her lower lip until she gasped.

After a certain point it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that they were lost. The hallways wound fiendishly and branched frequently. They were in a maze, and they were not solving it. Dint had become obsessive about his map, which now stretched to half a dozen sheets of graph paper that he shuffled and scribbled on intently whenever they turned a corner. At Brakebills they’d learned a spell that would leave glowing footprints behind them, but Dint thought it would just lead predators straight to them. The walls were carved with ranks of crude marching figures in profile, thousands of them, each one holding a different totem: a palm leaf, a torch, a key, a sword, a pomegranate.

It was darker here. They kept piling on light spells to anything that would take one, but the glow just didn’t seem to go as far. They fast-walked down the corridor, double-time now. The mood was that of a picnic threatened by lightning. The corridor branched and branched again and intermittently dead-ended, forcing them to backtrack. Quentin’s feet hurt in his brand-new hiking boots; a stray spur of something hard stabbed him in the same spot on his left ankle every time he took a step.

He risked a glance back the way they’d come. There was a red glow back there — something somewhere in the maze was throwing off a deep crimson light. He felt a deep-seated lack of interest in finding out what it was.

Ten minutes later they got hung up at a fork in the passageway, Dint vigorously supporting the right fork, Josh making the case, admittedly largely on intangibles, that the other fork looked “ way more promising” and just “feels more like what we want.” The walls were painted with oddly convincing trompe-l’oeil landscapes now, crowded with tiny dancing figures. Doors slammed open and shut in the distance.

The hallway was brightening behind them. They all saw it now. It was like a subterranean sun was rising. Discipline was getting ragged. They broke into a half run, and it was too dark for Quentin to be absolutely sure that nobody lagged behind. He focused on Alice. She was panting. The back of her blouse gaped palely open where the demon had torn its way out; he could see her black bra strap, which had somehow survived the operation. He wished he had a jacket to give her.

He caught up with Dint.

“We should slow down,” Quentin panted. “We’re going to lose somebody.”

Dint shook his head. “They’re tracking us now. If we stop, they’ll mob us.”

“What the fuck, man! Didn’t you plan for this?”

“This is the plan, Earth child,” Dint snarled back. “You don’t like it, go home. We need kings and queens in Fillory. Is that not a thing worth dying for?”

Not really, Quentin thought. Asshole. That slutty nymph was right. This is not your war.

They bulled through a door into a tapestry that was apparently concealing it from the other side. Behind the tapestry was a candle-lit banquet hall set with food, fresh and steaming. They were alone; it was as if the waiters who placed the dishes there had just moments earlier scampered out of sight. The table stretched out in both directions with no end points. The tapestries were rich and detailed, the silverware gleaming, the crystal goblets full of wine, deep gold and arterial purple.

They stopped and stared in both directions, blinking. It was like they had stumbled into the dream of a starving man.