Quentin waved at Alice frantically to run—maybe if they all split up?—but she wasn’t looking at him. She licked her lips and tucked her hair behind her ears with both hands. She got to her feet.
Something had changed in her face. She had made a decision. She began to work with her hands, the preliminaries to something very advanced. At the sound both Martin and the cacodemon looked at her. Martin took the opportunity to break the demon’s neck and push the rest of its body into his mouth.
“So,” she said. “So you think you’re the biggest monster in this room?”
“Don’t,” Janet said, but Alice didn’t stop. She was trying something. Everybody seemed to get it except Quentin.
“No, no, no!” Eliot said angrily. “Wait!”
“You’re not even a magician at all, are you, Martin?” Alice said quietly. “You’re just a little boy. That’s all you are. That’s all you ever were.” She bit back a sob. “Well, I’m sorry.”
She closed her eyes and began to recite. Quentin could see it all in Alice’s face, everything they’d been through, everything they’d done to each other, everything they’d gotten past. She was letting it all come out. It was a big spell, Renaissance, very academic magic. Big energies. He couldn’t imagine what good it would do, but a moment later he realized the spell wasn’t the point. The side effects were the point.
He began scratching his way toward her, anything he could do to get closer. He didn’t care if it killed him.
“No!” he shouted. “No!”
The blue fire began in her fingertips and spread, inexorably, through her hands and up her wrists. It lit up her face. Alice opened her eyes again. She regarded it with fascination.
“I’m on fire,” she said, almost in her normal voice. “I didn’t think—I’m burning.” And then in a rising shriek that could have been agony or could have been ecstasy: “I’m burning! Oh, God! Oh, Quentin, I’m burning! It’s burning me!”
Martin halted his slow advance to observe as Alice became a
niffin
. Quentin couldn’t see his expression. Alice took a step backward and sat down, still staring at her arms. They were now blue fire up to the shoulders. They were like two highway flares; her flesh was not consumed but, strangely, replaced by the fire that was chewing through it. She stopped speaking, just moaned on an ever-higher, ever-louder note. Finally as the blue fire rose up her neck she threw back her head and opened her mouth wide, but no more sound came out.
The fire left behind it a new Alice, one that was smaller and made of something like blue glowing glass, fresh and hot from the furnace. The process flooded the cavern with blue light. Even before the transformation was complete Alice had left the ground. She was pure fire now, her face full of that special madness belonging to things that are neither living nor dead. She floated above the floor as easily as if she were floating in a swimming pool.
The spirit that had replaced Alice, the
niffin
, regarded them neutrally with furious, insane, empty sapphire eyes. For all her power she looked delicate, like she was blown from Murano glass. From where he lay Quentin watched with detached, academic interest through a red haze of agony. The capacity for terror or love or grief or anything but pain had gone along with his peripheral vision.
She was not Alice. She was a righteous destroying angel. She was blue and nude and wore an expression of irrepressible hilarity.
Quentin had stopped breathing. For a moment Alice hovered before the Beast, incandescent with anticipation. At the last instant he appeared to sense that the odds had shifted and began a step backward, then he bolted in a blur. But even then he was too slow. The angel had him by his gray, conservatively cut hair. Bracing her other hand on his shoulder, she tore Martin Chatwin’s head off his neck with a crisp, dry ripping sound.
All of this action had become too exhausting for Quentin to watch. He clung to it like a faltering radio signal, but it was so hard to maintain clear reception. He rolled languorously over onto his back.
His mind had become a loopy parody of itself, stretched thin as taffy, translucent as cellophane. Something unspeakable had happened, but he couldn’t keep hold of it. Somehow the world as he knew it was no longer there. He’d managed to find a reasonably soft, sandy patch of floor to recline on—it was thoughtful of Martin, really, to have brought them to a room where the sand was so deliciously fine and cool. Although it was a shame that this clean white sand was now almost entirely saturated with blood, his and Penny’s. He wondered if Penny was still alive. He wondered if it would be at all possible to pass out. He wanted to fall asleep and never wake up.
Quentin heard the scuff of a fine leather shoe, and Eliot loomed into the patch of ceiling directly above him, then passed by.
From somewhere ambiguous in space and time, Ember’s voice reached Quentin. Not dead yet, he thought. Tough bastard. Or maybe he was just imagining it.
“You have won,” the ram’s voice bleated from the shadows. “Take your prize, hero.”
Eliot picked up the golden crown of the High King of Fillory. With an inarticulate cry he threw it like a discus off into the darkness.
The last dream was broken. Quentin either fainted or died, he didn’t know which.
BOOK IV
THE RETREAT
Quentin woke up in a beautiful white room. For a second—or was it an hour? a week?—he thought it was his room in Brakebills South, that he was back in Antarctica. But then he saw that the window was open and heavy green curtains were puffing in, and out, and in again with the coming and going of a warm summer wind. So definitely not Antarctica.
He lay looking up at the ceiling, letting himself drift and spin along on spacey, narcotic mental currents. He didn’t feel even remotely curious about where he was or how he’d gotten there. He blissed out on insignificant details: the sunlight, the smell of clean linens, a splinter of blue sky in the window, the gnarly whorls of the dark chocolate brown timbers that crossed the whitewashed ceiling. He was alive.
And those nice, surprisingly Pottery Barn-y curtains, the color of the stems of plants. They were coarse-woven, but it wasn’t the familiar, depressing fake-authentic coarseness of high-end Earth housewares, which merely imitated the real coarseness of fabrics that were woven by hand out of genuine necessity. As he lay there Quentin’s uppermost thought was that these were
authentically coarse-woven curtains,
woven by people who didn’t know any other way of making curtains, who didn’t even know that their way was special, and whose way was therefore not discounted and emptied of meaning in advance. This made him very happy. It was as if he’d been looking for these curtains forever, as if he’d been waiting his whole life to wake up one morning in a room in which those coarse-woven, stem-green curtains hung over the windows.
From time to time a horsy clippety-clopping could be heard from the hall outside. This mystery solved itself when a woman with the body of a horse stepped partway into the room. The effect was surprisingly unsurprising. She was a sturdy, sun-kissed woman with short brown hair who just happened to be attached to the chassis of a sleek black mare.
“You are conscious?” she asked.
Quentin cleared his throat. He couldn’t get it all the way clear. It was horribly dry, too dry to speak, so he just nodded.
“Your recovery is nearly complete,” the centauress said, with the air of a busy senior resident doing rounds who didn’t have time to waste rejoicing over medical miracles. She began the slow process of reversing herself, daintily, purposefully, back out into the hall.
“You have been asleep for six months and two days,” she added before she disappeared.
Quentin listened to her clippety-clop away. It was quiet again. He did his best to hang on to the blissful feeling. But it didn’t last.
The six months of his recovery were practically a blank—just a quickly evaporating impression of blue depths and complex, enchanted dreams. But Quentin’s memories of what happened in Ember’s Tomb were very clear. He might reasonably have expected that day (or had it been night?) to fall in a blackout period, or at least be veiled in merciful post-traumatic haziness. But no, not at all. He could remember it with perfect fidelity, deep focus, full force, from any angle, right up until the moment he lost consciousness.
The shock of it snapped his chest flat. It emptied out his lungs the way the Beast’s jaws had, not just once but over and over again. He was helpless against it. He lay in his bed and sobbed until he choked. His weak body spasmed. He made noises he’d never heard a human being make. He ground his face into his flat, prickly straw pillow until it was wet with tears and snot. She had died for him, for all of them, and she was never coming back.
He couldn’t think about what happened, he could only play it back again and again, as if there were a chance it could come out differently, or even just hurt a little less, but every time he played it back he wanted to die. His half-healed body ached all over, as if it were bruised right down to his skeleton, but he wanted it to hurt even more. He didn’t know how to operate in a world that would allow this to happen. It was a shit world, a fraud and a con, and he wanted nothing more to do with it. Whenever he slept, he woke up trying to warn somebody of something, but he never knew what, or who, and it was always too late.
With the sorrow came anger. What had they been thinking? A bunch of kids walking into a civil war in an alien world? Alice was dead (and Fen, and probably Penny, too) and the worst part was that he could have saved them all, and he hadn’t. He was the one who told them it was time to go to Fillory. He’d blown the horn that summoned the Beast. Alice had come because of him, to take care of him. But he hadn’t taken care of her.
The centaurs watched him weep with alien unconcern, like fish.
He learned over the next few days that he was in a monastery, or something like it, or that was as much as he could gather from the centaurs who ran the place. It wasn’t a place of worship, they explained, with a note of whinnying condescension, but a community devoted to the most absolute possible expression, or incarnation—or perhaps realization was an even better word—of the incomprehensibly complex but infinitely pure sylvan values of centaurhood, which Quentin’s fallen human brain could never hope to grasp. There was something distinctly German about the centaurs.
It came out, not very tactfully, that they considered humans to be inferior beings. It wasn’t the humans’ fault. They were simply cripples, severed by an unhappy accident of birth from their rightful horse halves. The centaurs regarded Quentin with pity nicely tempered by a near-total lack of interest. Also, they seemed to be constantly afraid that he was going to tip over.
None of them had any exact memory of how Quentin had gotten here. They didn’t pay close attention to the backstory of the occasional damaged human who fetched up in their midst. When pressed, Quentin’s doctor, a terrifyingly earnest individual whose name was Alder Acorn Agnes Allison-fragrant-timber, said she vaguely remembered some humans, unusually filthy and bedraggled specimens, now that you mention it, bringing Quentin in on a makeshift litter. He’d been unconscious and deep in shock, with his rib cage crushed and one of his forelimbs badly dislocated, practically detached. Such anatomical disorder was distasteful to the centaurs. And they were not insensible of the service the humans had rendered to Fillory in ridding it of Martin Chatwin. They did their best to render assistance.
The humans lingered in the area for a month, maybe two, while the centaurs wove deep webs of wood-magic around Quentin’s torn, bruised, insulted body. But they thought it unlikely that he would ever wake up. And in time, as Quentin showed no signs of recovering consciousness, the humans reluctantly departed.
He supposed he could have been angry that they had left him there, in Fillory, with no way of returning to his own world. But all he felt was warm, cowardly relief. He didn’t have to face them. The sight of their faces would have burned the skin right off him with shame. He wished he had died, and if he couldn’t have death, at least he had this, the next best thing: total isolation, lost forever in Fillory. He was broken in a way that magic could never fix.
His body was still weak, and he spent a lot of time in bed, resting his atrophied muscles. He was an empty shell, roughly hollowed out by some crude tool, gutted and left there, a limp, raw, boneless skin. If he tried, he could summon up old sense-memories. Nothing from Fillory or Brakebills, just the really old stuff, the easy stuff, the safe stuff. The smell of his mother’s oil paints; the lurid green of the Gowanus Canal; the curious way Julia pursed her lips around the reed of her oboe; the hurricane that blew through when they took that family vacation in Maine, he must have been about eight, when they went out on the lawn and threw their sweaters in the air and watched them sail away over the neighbor’s fence and then fell down laughing. A beautiful blossoming white cherry tree stood outside his window in the warm afternoon sunlight. Every part of it moved and swayed in a slightly different rhythm from every other part. He watched it for a long time.
If he was feeling daring, he thought about the time he’d spent as a goose flying south, wingtip to wingtip with Alice, buoyed up by pillowy masses of empty air, gazing coolly down at looping, squiggly, switchbacked rivers. If he did it now, he thought, he would remember to look out for the Nazca Lines in Peru. He wondered if he could go back to Professor Van der Weghe and have her change him back, and he would just stay that way, live and die as a stupid goose and forget that he’d ever even been a human. Sometimes he thought of a day he’d spent with Alice on the roof of the Cottage. They had a joke that they were going to play on the others when they got back from somewhere, but the others never came home, and he and Alice had just lain up there on the warm shingles all afternoon, looking at the sky and talking about nothing.