The Magicians (60 page)

“Have dinner with me tonight.” Her gaze was disarmingly direct. “Come to my apartment. I’ll cook for you.”

“Can’t do it tonight,” he said blurrily. “I’m sorry. Next time maybe.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Listen, Quentin. I know you think you’re not ready for this—”

“I know I’m not ready.”

“—but you’ll
never
be ready. Not until you decide to be.” She squeezed his forearm. “Enough drama, Quentin. Let me help you. It’s not the worst thing in the world, admitting you need help. Is it?”

Her kindness was the most touching thing he’d seen since he left Brakebills. And he hadn’t had sex, good God, since the time he’d slept with Janet. It would be so easy to go with her.

But he didn’t. Even as they stood there he felt something tingle in his fingertips, under his fingernails, some residue left by the thousands of spells that had flowed through them over the years. He could still feel them there, the hot white sparks that had once come streaming so freely from his hands. She was wrong: blaming magic for Alice’s death wasn’t going to help him. It was too easy, and he’d had enough of doing things the easy way. It was all well and good for Emily Greenstreet to forgive him, but people were responsible for Alice’s death. Jane Chatwin was, and Quentin was, and so was Alice herself. And people would have to atone for it.

In that instant he looked at Emily Greenstreet and saw a lost soul, alone in a howling wasteland, not so different from the way her one-time lover Professor Mayakovsky had looked standing alone at the South Pole. He wasn’t ready to join her there. But where else could he go? What would Alice have done?

 

 

Another month went by, and it was November, and Quentin was sitting in his corner office staring out the window. The building across the street was considerably shorter than the Grunnings Hunsucker Swann building, so he had a clear view of its rooftop, which consisted of a neat beige gravel walkway running around a gray grid of massive, complicated air-conditioning and heating units. With the coming of the bitter late fall weather the air-conditioning had gone silent and the heaters had sprung into life, and huge nebulae of steam curled off them in abstract whorls: hypnotic, silent, slowly turning shapes that never stopped and never repeated themselves. Smoke signals sent by no one, to no one, signifying nothing. Lately Quentin spent a lot of time watching them. His assistant had quietly given up attempting to schedule appointments for him.

All at once, and with no warning, the tinted floor-to-ceiling window that made up one entire wall of Quentin’s office shattered and burst inward. Quentin’s ultra-modern, narrow-wale Venetian blinds went crazily askew. Cold air and raw unfiltered sunlight came flooding in. Something small, round, and very heavy rolled across the carpet and bumped into his shoe.

He looked down at it. It was a bluish marble sphere: the stone globe they used to use to start a welters match.

Three people were floating in midair outside his window, thirty stories up.

Janet looked older somehow, which of course she was, but there was something else different about her. Her eyes, the irises, radiated a seething violet mystical energy like nothing Quentin had ever seen before. She wore a tight black leather bustier that she was in imminent danger of spilling out of. Silver stars were falling all around her.

Eliot had acquired a pair of immense white feathery wings somewhere that spread out behind him, with which he hovered on an intangible wind. On his head was the golden crown of Fillory that Quentin had last seen in Ember’s underground chamber. Between Janet and Eliot, her arms wrapped in black silk, floated a tall, painfully skinny woman with long wavy black hair that undulated in the air as if she were underwater.

“Hello, Quentin,” Eliot said.

“Hi,” Janet said.

The other woman didn’t say anything. Neither did Quentin.

“We’re going back to Fillory,” Janet said, “and we need another king. Two kings, two queens.”

“You can’t hide forever, Quentin. Come with us.”

With the tinted window gone and the afternoon sunlight pouring into his office, Quentin couldn’t read his monitor anymore. The climate control was howling trying to fight off the cold air. Somewhere in the building an alarm went off.

“It could work this time,” Eliot said. “With Martin gone. And besides, we never figured out what your Discipline was. Doesn’t that bother you?”

Quentin stared at them. It was a few seconds before he found his voice.

“What about Josh?” he croaked. “Go ask him.”

“He’s got another project.” Janet rolled her eyes. “He thinks he can use the Neitherlands to get to Middle-earth. He honestly believes he’s going to bone an elf.”

“I thought about being a queen,” Eliot added. “Turns out they’re very open-minded about that kind of thing in Fillory. But at the end of the day rules is rules.”

Quentin put down his coffee. It had been a long time since he’d experienced any emotion at all other than sadness and shame and numbness, so long that for a moment he didn’t understand what was happening inside him. In spite of himself he felt sensation coming back to some part of him that he’d thought was dead forever. It hurt. But at the same time he wanted more of it.

“Why are you doing this?” Quentin asked slowly, carefully. He needed to be clear. “After what happened to Alice? Why would you go back there? And why would you want me with you? You’re only going to make it worse.”

“What, worse than this?” Eliot asked. He tilted his chin to indicate Quentin’s office.

“We all knew what we were doing,” Janet said. “You knew it, we knew it. Alice certainly knew it. We made our choices, Q. And what’s going to happen? Your hair’s already white. You can’t look any weirder than you already do.”

Quentin swiveled around to face them in his ergonomic desk chair. His heart felt like it was burning with relief and regret, the emotions melting and running together and turning into bright, hot, white light.

“The thing is,” he said. “I’d hate to cut out right before bonus season.”

“Come on, Quentin. It’s over. You’ve done your time.” Janet’s smile had a warmth in it that he’d never seen before, or maybe he’d just never noticed it. “Everybody’s forgiven you but you. And you are
so
far behind us.”

“You might be surprised about that.”

Quentin picked up the blue stone ball and studied it.

“So,” he said, “I’m gone for five minutes and you have to bring in a hedge witch?”

Eliot shrugged.

“She’s got chops.”

“Fuck you,” said Julia.

Quentin sighed. He unkinked his neck and stood up.

“Did you really have to break my window?”

“No,” Eliot said. “Not really.”

Quentin walked to the floor’s edge. Sprays of smashed window glass crunched on the carpet under his fancy leather shoes. He ducked under the broken blinds. It was a long way down. He hadn’t done this for a while.

Loosening his tie with one hand, Quentin stepped out into the cold clear winter air and flew.