The Magician’s Land (40 page)

He rested. He looked at His work, watched it tick and turn like a great watch, here and there smoothing a rough edge or roughening a smooth one, slowing a torrent or urging on a tide, till all was in balance. When there was nothing else to mend He simply gazed at it, felt its atoms circulating and combining or simply shivering in place, and He subsided into a grand peace. Fillory lived again. It wasn’t what it had been, yet, but it would be once it had healed, and that it could do without His help. He could have watched it forever.

But it was not for Him to do so. He had been given custody of this power, but He sensed that it didn’t belong to Him. Wistfully, but not regretfully, He restored time to its customary rate of speed with a wave of His right hand. As His last act, a divine whim really, He retrieved the remains of the White Stag from the gullet of the giant snapping turtle of the Northern Marsh, fused its skeleton back together, reconstituted its organs and its skin, and restored it to life. He placed it on an island far out to sea to begin its wanderings again. The next age of Fillory would have a Questing Beast too.

Then He allowed the power to leave Him. As it did so He shrank and shrank, the tiny disk of Fillory rising up to meet him and then stretching out endlessly around him, until he stood on it again as just one more of its inhabitants.

He wasn’t alone. When he was a god the particular names of Fillory’s many inhabitants hadn’t greatly concerned him, but now he was in the company of a woman and a demigoddess, and after a few seconds their names came back to him. They were Alice and Julia.

Y
ou let go of the power,” Julia said.

Dawn was breaking over the raw, ragged, still-healing horizon, and he was losing it all already, everything but the faintest, most transparent memory of what it had meant to be a god. He savored the very last of it—the certainty, the power, that sense of total knowledge and well-being and control, forever and ever. It evaporated from his mind and was gone. It wasn’t the kind of memory that a mortal brain could hang on to.

He was just Quentin again, nothing more. But he would always know that it had happened, that he’d known what it was like, both for a few seconds and, in the life of a god, a thousand years.

“I let it go,” he said. “It wasn’t mine.”

Julia nodded thoughtfully.

“You’re right, it wasn’t yours. A more jealous god, or a more jealous man, might have tried to keep it, though I think the outcome would have been the same. Thank you for doing that, Quentin, for mending Fillory. I might have done it myself, but the fiddly stuff like coastlines always takes me ages. I don’t have the knack for it. Also I thought you might enjoy it.”

“Thank you. I did. Or I think I did.” Already he wasn’t crystal clear on what exactly he’d enjoyed.

She was recognizably her old self, still the Julia of Brooklyn, or directly descended from her, with her freckly face and her long black hair. But at the same time she was unmistakably divine: her height had been
somewhat variable in the past, but at the moment she was seven feet tall. She wore a rather dramatic dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a presidential inauguration, even though it was made of equal parts bark and green leaves.

“Walk with me,” Julia said.

They walked, the three of them together. Fillory was Fillory again, though it was a wan and wasted Fillory, waking again piece by piece after its catastrophic illness. The meadow was still brown, the ground still dry and cracked. The new age was still in its first minutes.

Quentin was light-headed. He still had the blood of Ember and Umber on his shoes. It was hard to connect the brutal, bloody thing he’d just done with the renewal of Fillory. But this world was rudely, potently alive again, you could feel it.

“I have a question,” Alice said. “Julia, why didn’t you kill Ember yourself? I mean, it all worked out fine in the end, but you would have done a quicker job than we did.”

“I might have. But there would have been no power in it. A demigod slaying a god . . . even if I could have managed it, those are not the terms of the ritual.”

“Still, you seem more godly now than you did when I last saw you,” Quentin said. “More divine. Am I wrong?”

“You’re not wrong. I was made queen of the dryads. I’m a bit more than a demigod now—more of a three-quarters god. There ought to be a word for it.”

Now and then Julia would brush a dead plant with her fingers, absentmindedly, and it would straighten up and become green. When she pointed at a fallen tree its roots would come to life and grip the ground again, and it would pull itself up hastily as if it had been caught napping on the job. Quentin couldn’t figure out how she decided which ones to revive. Maybe it was random; maybe some trees were more deserving than others.

“I’d like to do something for you, Quentin,” she said. “On behalf of Fillory. You did us a great service today, and you’ve always served us well. Is there something here that you’ve never seen or done, that you’ve always wanted to?”

Quentin thought for a minute. He’d picked up the silver sword and was
carrying it, but a little awkwardly since for whatever reason he hadn’t managed to summon a sheath to go with it, and he was leery of touching the pale flames that licked along its blade. He stuck it in the ground and left it there. Probably he’d be able to summon it again, if he ever needed it.

What did he want? It was a lovely gesture, but as far as he knew he’d been everywhere in Fillory, or everywhere that was worth going. He didn’t feel especially interested in the dwarf tunnels, or the Fingerling Islands, or in the tourist attractions of greater Loria.

But wait. There was one thing.

“Can you show me the Far Side of the World? Show us? Alice should come too, if she wants.”

“Of course.”

“It’s not like I haven’t already been there,” Alice said. “As a niffin.”

“True,” Quentin said. “I forgot. You should get a different reward.”

“I’ll save mine. This is for you. I’ll stay here for a while.”

So Julia took Quentin’s hand, and they rose up together and flew west out over the coast of Fillory, faster and faster, across the sea and then over the wall at the rim of the world and down, head down, in a great curving roller-coaster swoop. Soon Quentin became aware that his point of view had changed, that without having turned around they were rising up rather than diving down. Gravity had turned around. They surmounted another wall and then they were looking out over the Far Side.

Julia paused, hovering. For him it would have been exhausting, but for Julia flying was nothing, and as long as he was with her it was nothing for him too. Her large hand encased his completely; the feeling reminded Quentin of being a child. It was twilight on the Far Side; the sun had just set there as it rose on Fillory. He couldn’t see much, just hushed fields and valleys. The difference was subtle, but even from this distance it was quieter and more intense than Fillory—richer in whatever made Fillory magical, more densely infused. There was an air of excited expectation. Curious little motes of light sparkled in the dusk, like tiny glowing gnats.

“I can’t show you everything,” Julia said. “Not even I have those permissions. But there’s something in particular I think you might like.”

When they moved the wind moved with them, so that the air around them remained still as they flew. Down below there were dark rivers and
pale chalk roads. Quentin spotted what might have been an elaborate tree house in a forest, and a castle on an island in a moonlit lake.

“Are those fireflies?” he asked. “The lights?”

“No, the air is just kind of sparkly here. It’s a thing. You don’t notice it during the daytime.”

Tiny lights were bobbing along in their wake, too, streaming out behind them, like the phosphorescent trail of a ship in a tropical sea. The sunset was in different colors from a terrestrial or even a Fillorian sunset: it ran more to greens and purples.

She set them down in the center of a grand, rambling garden. It must once have been laid out according to a precise design, like a French formal garden, all ruled lines and perfect curves and complex symmetries. But it had been left to go to seed, shrubs overflowing onto paths, vines winding themselves lasciviously through wrought iron, rose beds dying off into withered brown traceries, exquisite in their own way. It reminded him of nothing so much as the frozen community garden he’d wandered into long, long ago in Brooklyn, chasing the paper note that Jane Chatwin had given him, before he came out the other side and into Brakebills.

“I thought you’d like it. Of course it was different when it was new, but then when it started to get overrun everyone thought it looked better this way, and they let it go. But it’s more than a garden, it’s deep magic. Keep your eye on one spot and you’ll see.”

Quentin did, and he saw. Slowly, but far faster than they would have in nature, some of the plants were dying and reviving, crisping up before his eyes and bursting back into bloom, rising up and sinking down in slow motion, making tiny crackles and whispers as they did. It made him think of something, but he couldn’t quite place it.

Julia could.

“Rupert mentions it in his memoir,” she said. “We call it the Drowned Garden, though I don’t know why. The plants aren’t just plants, they’re thoughts and feelings. A new thought happens and a new plant springs up. A feeling fades away and the plant dies. Some of the more common ones are always in bloom—fear, anger, happiness, love, envy. They’re quite unruly, they grow like weeds. Certain basic mathematical ideas never go away either. But others are quite rare. Complex concepts, extreme or subtle emotions.
Awe and wonder are harder to find than they once were. Though there—I think those irises are a kind of awe. Once in a while you even see a new one.”

The peace in the garden was inexpressibly calming. It made Quentin never want to leave, and at the same time he supposed that that feeling was itself manifested in vegetable form somewhere in the garden. He wondered where, and whether he’d know it if he saw it.

Julia stooped to one knee—an awesome sight, given the scale of her divine frame.

“Look. This one is very rare.”

Quentin kneeled down too, and a few of the sparkly motes gathered around them helpfully, for illumination. It was a humble little plant, fragile, a fledgling shrub with a few sprays of leaves—a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. As Quentin watched it wobbled, losing heart, and its leaves browned and spotted, but then it caught itself, filled out again and stiffened and even grew an inch. A couple of seedpods sprouted from its branches.

He recognized it. It was the plant he’d seen drawn on the page from the Neitherlands, and again in Rupert’s spell. He’d given up on ever finding it, and now here it was, right in front of him. Julia must have known. All unexpectedly his eyes were full of hot tears, and he sniffled and wiped them away. It was ridiculous, crying over a plant—he hadn’t cried when he killed Ember—but it was like seeing a loyal old friend he’d never even met before. He reached down and touched one leaf, gently.

“This is a feeling that you had, Quentin,” she said. “Once, a very long time ago. A rare one. This is how you felt when you were eight years old, and you opened one of the Fillory books for the first time, and you felt
awe and joy and hope and longing all at once. You felt them very strongly, Quentin. You dreamed of Fillory then, with a power and an innocence that not many people ever experience. That’s where all this began for you. You wanted the world to be better than it was.

“Years later you went to Fillory, and the Fillory you found was a much more difficult, complicated place than you expected. The Fillory you dreamed of as a little boy wasn’t real, but in some ways it was better and purer than the real one. That hopeful little boy you once were was a tremendous dreamer. He was clever, too, but if you ever had a special gift, it was that.”

Quentin nodded—he couldn’t quite talk yet. He felt full of love for that little boy he’d once been, innocent and naive, as yet unscuffed and unmarred by everything that was to come. He was such a ridiculous, vulnerable little person, with so many strenuous disappointments and wonders ahead of him. Quentin hadn’t thought of him in years.

He wasn’t that boy anymore, that boy was lost long ago. He’d become a man instead, one of those crude, weather-beaten, shopworn things, and he’d almost forgotten he’d ever been anything else—he’d had to forget, to survive growing up. But now he wished he could reassure that child and take care of him. He wished he could tell him that none of it was going to turn out anything like the way he hoped, but that everything was going to be all right anyway. It was hard to explain, but he would see.

“Someone must be feeling it now,” Quentin said. “What I felt. That’s why it’s green.”

Julia nodded. “Someone somewhere.”

Though even now the plant shrank and dried and died again. Delicately, Julia pinched off one hard seedpod and straightened up.

“Here. Take this with you. I think you should have it.”

It looked like a seedpod from any ordinary plant anywhere, brown and stiff and rattly, but it was unmistakably the one from the page. He’d have to find a way to show it to Hamish. He put it in his pocket. The plant didn’t seem to mind. It would grow again, sooner or later.

“Thank you, Julia.” Quentin dried his eyes and took a last look around. It was almost night. “I think I’m ready to go back now.”

—

They found Alice where they’d left her, but she wasn’t alone now. The others had come through while he was off on the Far Side—Eliot, Janet, Josh, Poppy—and they were standing around talking animatedly about plans to rebuild Castle Whitespire. Penny had stayed at his post in the Neitherlands, but Plum was there. She was off by herself, just looking around and trying to take it all in. She was seeing Fillory for the first time in her life. Quentin caught her eye, and she smiled, but he thought she probably wanted to be alone with it for a few minutes.

He remembered the first time he saw Fillory. He’d cried his eyes out
in front of a clock tree. Not much chance of Plum doing that, but still: he’d give her some time.

“No more spinning,” Janet said. “That’s all I ask. The spinning thing was always bullshit. I don’t know how the dwarfs sold them on that in the first place.”

“I hear you,” Eliot said. “I’m not arguing. We’ll take it up with them when they get back. If they come back.”

“But listen, what about the color?” Josh said. “Is that on the table? Because I gotta tell you, the white never did it for me. A bird took a crap on that thing, you could see it a mile away. I know Castle Blackspire was a house of unspeakable evil or whatever, but you have to admit it looked pretty badass.”

“What about the name, though?” Poppy said. “We’d have to change that too.”

“Ooh, good point,” Josh said. “I guess we can’t live in Castle Mauvespire or whatever. Or could we? Hi, Quentin!”

“Hi, guys. Don’t let me interrupt.”

They didn’t. They kept talking, and he just listened. It was good seeing them all together in Fillory again, it made him happy, but there was a distance between him and them now too: a thin, almost undetectable gap, even between him and Eliot. They never would have admitted it—they would have hotly denied it if he said anything—but the truth was that he wasn’t quite in the club anymore. He would always be part of Fillory, especially now that he’d held the entire world in his temporarily divine hands—it would always have his vast, invisible fingerprints on it, forever, like the paths of spiral labyrinths. But he knew his place too, and he was starting to think it wasn’t here. He’d come back one day, or he hoped he would, but they were the kings and queens now.