About the Book
Quentin Coldwater is king of the bizarre and wonderful land of Fillory, but the days and nights of royal luxury are losing their appeal and Quentin is getting restless. Even in heaven a man needs a little adventure. So when a steward is murdered on a morning's hunt that is exactly what Quentin gets. But this quest is like no other. What starts as a flight of fancy, a glorified cruise to faraway lands, soon becomes the stuff of nightmares when Quentin is unceremoniously dumped at his parents' house in a decidedly un-magical suburb in Massachusetts.
Back in this grey reality, Quentin has never wanted his magical kingdom more. Fortunately he is accompanied by his old friend Julia, who learned her own brand of black and twisted magic outside Brakebills College at an illegal, underground school in the real world. As they struggle through the paranormal alleyways, past Venetian dragons and fairytale houses, it becomes clear that only Julia's black arts can save them. But there is a greater power at work, one that is threatening to destroy Fillory forever, and to defeat it they must unravel the secrets of Julia's tragic past, and the terrible pact she made to gain her power.
The Magician King is a grand voyage into the dark, glittering heart of magic, an extraordinary journey that allows the imagination to run riot and proves Grossman is the modern heir to C.S. Lewis.
THE
MAGICIAN KING
A Novel
Read on for the first chapter of The Magician’s Land
The final part in the Magician’s Trilogy
Available Now
CHAPTER 1
THE LETTER HAD said to meet in a bookstore.
It wasn’t much of a night for it: early March, drizzling and cold but not quite cold enough for snow. It wasn’t much of a bookstore either. Quentin spent fifteen minutes watching it from a bus shelter at the edge of the empty parking lot, rain drumming on the plastic roof and making the asphalt shine in the streetlights. Not one of your charming, quirky bookstores, with a ginger cat on the windowsill and a shelf of rare signed first editions and an eccentric, bewhiskered proprietor behind the counter. This was just another strip-mall outpost of a struggling chain, squeezed in between a nail salon and a Party City, twenty minutes outside Hackensack off the New Jersey Turnpike.
Satisfied, Quentin crossed the parking lot. The enormous bearded cashier didn’t look up from his phone when the door jingled. Inside you could still hear the noise of cars on the wet road, like long strips of paper tearing, one after another. The only unexpected touch was a wire birdcage in one corner, but where you would have expected a parrot or a cockatoo inside there was a fat blue-black bird instead. That’s how un-charming this store was: it had a crow in a cage.
Quentin didn’t care. It was a bookstore, and he felt at home in bookstores, and he hadn’t had that feeling much lately. He was going to enjoy it. He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.
The store should have been empty, coming up on nine o’clock on a cold rainy Thursday night, but instead it was full of people. They browsed the shelves silently, each one on his or her own, slowly wandering the aisles like sleepwalkers. A jewel-faced girl with a pixie cut was reading Dante in Italian. A tall boy with large curious eyes who couldn’t have been older than sixteen was absorbed in a Tom Stoppard play. A middle-aged black man with elfin cheekbones stood staring at the biographies through thick, iridescent glasses. You would almost have thought they’d come there to buy books. But Quentin knew better.
He wondered if it would be obvious, if he would know right away, or if there would be a trick to it. If they’d make him guess. He was getting to be a pretty old dog—he’d be thirty this year—but this particular game was new to him.
At least it was warm inside. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a cloth. He’d just gotten them a couple of months ago, the price of a lifetime of reading fine print, and they were still an unfamiliar presence on his face: a windshield between him and the world, always slipping down his nose and getting smudged when he pushed them up again. When he put them back on he noticed a sharp-featured young woman, girl-next-door pretty, if you happened to live next door to a grad student in astrophysics. She was standing in a corner paging through a big, expensive architectural-looking volume. Piranesi drawings: vast shadowy vaults and cellars and prisons, haunted by great wooden engines.
Quentin knew her. Her name was Plum. She felt him watching her and looked up, raising her eyebrows in mild surprise, as if to say you’re kidding—you’re in on this thing too?
He shook his head once, very slightly, and looked away, keeping his face carefully blank. Not to say no, I’m not in on this, I just come here for the novelty coffee mugs and their trenchant commentary on the little ironies of everyday life. What he meant was: let’s pretend we don’t know each other.
It was looking like he had some time to kill so he joined the browsers, scanning the spines for something to read. The Fillory books were there, of course, shelved in the young adult section, repackaged and rebranded with slick new covers that made them look like supernatural romance novels. But Quentin couldn’t face them right now. Not tonight, not here. He took down a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold instead and spent ten contented minutes at a checkpoint in gray 1950s Berlin.
“Attention, Bookbumblers patrons!” the cashier said over the PA, though the store was small enough that Quentin could hear his unamplified voice perfectly clearly. “Attention! Bookbumblers will be closing in five minutes! Please make your final selections!”
He put the book back. An old woman in a beret that looked like she’d knitted it herself bought a copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and let herself out into the night. So not her. The skinny kid who’d been camped out cross-legged in the graphic novels section, reading them to rags, left without buying anything. So not him either. A tall, bluff-looking guy with Cro-Magnon hair and a face like a stump who’d been furiously studying the greeting cards, pretty clearly overthinking his decision, finally bought one. But he didn’t leave.
At nine o’clock exactly the big cashier closed the door and locked it with a final, fateful jingle, and suddenly Quentin was all nerves. He was on a carnival ride, and the safety bar had dropped, and now it was too late to get off. He took a deep breath and frowned at himself, but the nerves didn’t go away. The bird shuffled its feet in the seeds and droppings on the bottom of its cage and squawked once. It was a lonely kind of squawk, the kind you’d hear if you were out by yourself on a rainy moor, lost, with darkness closing in fast.
The cashier walked to the back of the store—he had to excuse himself past the guy with the cheekbones—and opened a gray metal door marked STAFF ONLY.
“Through here.”
He sounded bored, like he did this every night, which for all Quentin knew he did. Now that he was standing up Quentin could see that he really was huge—six foot four or five and deep-chested. Not pumped, but with broad shoulders and that aura of slow inexorability that naturally enormous men have. His face was noticeably asymmetrical: it bulged out on one side as if he’d been slightly overinflated. He looked like a gourd.
Quentin took the last spot in line. He counted eight others, all of them looking around cautiously and taking exaggerated care not to jostle one another, as if they might explode on contact. He worked a tiny revelation charm to make sure there was nothing weird about the door—he made an OK sign with his thumb and forefinger and held it up to one eye like a monocle.
“No magic,” the cashier said. He snapped his fingers at Quentin. “Guy. Hey. No spells. No magic.”
Heads turned.
“Sorry?”
Quentin played dumb. Nobody called him Your Majesty anymore, but he didn’t think he was ready to answer to guy yet. He finished his inspection. It was a door and nothing more.
“Cut it out. No magic.”
Pushing his luck, Quentin turned and studied the clerk. Through the lens he could see something small shining in his pocket, a talisman that might have been related to sexual performance. The rest of him shone too, as if he were covered in phosphorescent algae. Weird.
“Sure.” He dropped his hands and the lens vanished. “No problem.”
Someone rapped on the windowpane. A face appeared, indistinct through the wet glass. The cashier shook his head, but whoever it was rapped again, harder.
He sighed.
“What the shit.”
He unlocked the front door and after a whispered argument let in a man in his twenties, dripping wet, red-faced but otherwise sportscaster-handsome, wearing a windbreaker that was way too light for the weather. Quentin wondered where he’d managed to get a sunburn in March.
They all filed into the back room. It was darker than Quentin expected, and bigger too; real estate must come cheap out here on the turnpike. There were steel shelves crammed full of books flagged with fluorescent-colored stickies; a couple of desks in one corner, the walls in front of them shingled with shift schedules and taped-up New Yorker cartoons; stacks of cardboard shipping boxes; a busted couch; a busted armchair; a mini-fridge—it must have doubled as the break room. Half of it was just wasted space. The back wall was a steel shutter that opened onto a loading dock.
A handful of other people were coming in through another door in the left-hand wall, looking just as wary. Quentin could see another bookstore behind them, a nicer one, with old lamps and oriental rugs. Probably a ginger cat too. He didn’t need magic to know that it wasn’t a door at all but a portal to somewhere else, some arbitrary distance away. There—he caught a telltale hairline seam of green light along one edge. The only thing behind that wall in reality was Party City.
Who were they all? Quentin had heard rumors about dog-and-pony shows like this before, gray-market cattle calls, work for hire, but he’d never seen one himself. He definitely never thought he’d go to one, not in a million years. He never thought it would come to that. Stuff like this was for people on the fringes of the magical world, people scrabbling to get in, or who’d lost their footing somehow and slipped out of the bright warm center of things, all the way out to the cold margins of the real world. All the way out to a strip mall in Hackensack in the rain. Things like this weren’t for people like him.
Except now they were. It had come to that. He was one of them, these were his people. Six months ago he’d been a king in a magic land, another world, but that was all over. He’d been kicked out of Fillory, and he’d been kicked around a fair bit since then, and now he was just another striver, trying to scramble back in, up the slippery slope, back toward the light and the warmth.
Plum and the man with the iridescent glasses sat on the couch. Red Face took the busted armchair. Pixie Cut and the teenage Stoppard reader sat on boxes. The rest of them stood—there were twelve, thirteen, fourteen in all. The cashier shut the gray door behind them, cutting off the last of the noise from the outside world, and snuffed out the portal.
He’d brought the birdcage with him; now he placed it on top of a cardboard box and opened it to let the crow out. It looked around, shaking first one foot then the other the way birds do.
“Thank you all for coming,” it said. “I will be brief.”
That was unexpected. Judging from the ripple of surprise that ran through the room, he wasn’t the only one. You didn’t see a lot of talking birds on Earth, that was more of a Fillorian thing.
“I’m looking for an object,” the bird said. “I will need help taking it from its present owners.”
The bird’s glossy feathers shone darkly in the glow of the hanging lights. Its voice echoed in the half-empty stockroom. It was a soft, mild-mannered voice, not hoarse at all like you’d expect from a crow. It sounded incongruously human—however it was producing speech, it had nothing to do with its actual vocal apparatus. But that was magic for you.
“So stealing,” an Indian guy said. Not like it bothered him, he just wanted clarification. He was older than Quentin, forty maybe, balding and wearing an unbelievably bad multicolored wool sweater.
“Theft,” the bird said. “Yes.”
“Stealing back, or stealing?”
“What is the difference?”
“I would merely like to know whether we are the bad guys or the good guys. Which of you has a rightful claim on the object?”
The bird cocked its head thoughtfully.
“Neither party has an entirely valid claim,” it said. “But if it makes a difference our claim is superior to theirs.”
That seemed to satisfy the Indian guy, though Quentin wondered if he would have had a problem either way.
“Who are you?” somebody called out. The bird ignored that.
“What is the object?” Plum asked.
“You’ll be told after you’ve accepted the job.”
“Where is it?” Quentin asked.
The bird shifted its weight back and forth.
“It is in the northeastern United States of America.” It half spread its wings in what might have been a bird-shrug.
“So you don’t know,” Quentin said. “So finding it is part of the job.”
The bird didn’t deny it. Pixie Cut scooched forward, which wasn’t easy on the broken-backed couch, especially in a skirt that short. Her hair was black with purple highlights, and Quentin noticed a couple of blue star tattoos peeking out of her sleeves, the kind you got in a safe house. He wondered how many more she had underneath. He wondered what she’d done to end up here.
“So we’re finding and we’re stealing and I’m guessing probably doing some fighting in between. What kind of resistance are you expecting?”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Security, how many people, who are they, how scary. Is that specific enough?”
“Yes. We are expecting two.”
“Two magicians?”
“Two magicians, plus some civilian staff. Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I know.”
“As far as you know!” The red-faced man guffawed loudly. He seemed on further examination to be a little insane.
“I do know that they have been able to place an incorporate bond on the object. The bond will have to be broken, obviously.”
A stunned silence followed this statement, then somebody made an exasperated noise. The tall man who’d been shopping for greeting cards snorted as if to say can you believe this shit?
“Those are supposed to be unbreakable,” Plum said coolly.
“You’re wasting our time!” Iridescent Glasses said.
“An incorporate bond has never been broken,” the bird said, not at all bothered—or were its feathers just slightly ruffled? “But we believe that it is theoretically possible, with the right skills and the right resources. We have all the skills we need in this room.”
“What about the resources?” Pixie Cut asked.
“The resources can be obtained.”
“So that’s also part of the job,” Quentin said. He ticked them off on his fingers. “Obtaining the resources, finding the object, breaking the bond, taking the object, dealing with the current owners. Correct?”
“Yes. Payment is two million dollars each, cash or gold. A hundred thousand tonight, the rest once we have the object. Make your decisions now. Bear in mind that if you say no you will find yourself unable to discuss tonight’s meeting with anyone else.”
Satisfied that it had made its case, the bird fluttered up to perch on top of its cage.
It was more than Quentin had expected. There were probably easier and safer ways in this world for a magician to earn two million dollars, but there weren’t many that were this quick, or that were right in front of him. Even magicians needed money sometimes, and this was one of those times. He had to get back into the swim of things. He had work to do.
“If you’re not interested, please leave now,” the cashier said. Evidently he was the bird’s lieutenant. He might have been in his mid-twenties. His black beard covered his chin and neck like brambles.
The Cro-Magnon guy stood up.
“Good luck.” He turned out to have a thick German accent. “You gonna need this, huh?”
He skimmed the greeting card into the middle of the room and left. It landed face up: GET WELL SOON. Nobody picked it up.
About a third of the room shuffled out with him, off in search of other pitches and better offers. Maybe this wasn’t the only show in town tonight. But it was the only one Quentin knew about, and he didn’t leave. He watched Plum, and Plum watched him. She didn’t leave either. They were in the same boat—she must be scrabbling too.
The red-faced guy stood against the wall by the door.
“See ya!” he said to each person as they passed him. “Buh-bye!”
When everybody who was going to leave had left the cashier closed the door again. They were down to eight: Quentin, Plum, Pixie, Red Face, Iridescent Glasses, the teenager, the Indian guy, and a long-faced woman in a flowing dress with a lock of white hair over her forehead; the last two had come in through the other door. The room felt even quieter than it had before, and strangely empty.
“Are you from Fillory?” Quentin asked the bird.
That got some appreciative laughter, though he wasn’t joking, and the bird didn’t laugh. It didn’t answer him either. Quentin couldn’t read its face; like all birds, it had only one expression.
“Before we go any further each of you must pass a simple test of magical strength and skill,” the bird said. “Lionel here”—it meant the cashier—“is an expert in probability magic. Each of you will play a hand of cards with him. If you beat him you will have passed the test.”
There were some disgruntled noises at this new revelation, followed by another round of discreet mutual scoping-out. From the reaction Quentin gathered that this wasn’t standard practice.
“What’s the game?” Plum asked.
“The game is Push.”
“You must be joking,” Iridescent Glasses said, disgustedly. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”
Lionel had produced a pack of cards and was shuffling and bridging it fluently, without looking, his face blank.
“I know what I require,” the bird said stiffly. “I know that I am offering a great deal of money for it.”
“Well, I didn’t come here to play games.”
The man stood up.
“Well why the fuck did you come here?” Pixie asked brightly.
“You may leave at any time,” the bird said.
“Maybe I will.”
He walked to the door, pausing with his hand on the knob, as if he were expecting somebody to stop him. Nobody did. The door shut after him.
Quentin watched Lionel shuffle. The man obviously knew how to handle a deck; the cards leapt around obligingly in his large hands, neatly and cleanly, the way they did for a pro. He thought about the entrance exam he’d taken to get into Brakebills, what was it, thirteen years ago now? He hadn’t been too proud to take a test then. He sure as hell wasn’t now.
And he used to be a bit of a pro at this himself. Cards were stage magic, close-up magic. This was where he started out.
“All right,” Quentin said. He got up, flexing his fingers. “Let’s do it.”
He dragged a desk chair over noisily and sat down opposite Lionel. As a courtesy Lionel offered him the deck. Quentin took it.
He stuck to a basic shuffle, trying not to look too slick. The cards were stiff but not brand new. They had the usual industry-standard anti-manipulation charms on them, nothing he hadn’t seen before. It felt good to have them in his hands. He was back on familiar ground. Without being obvious about it, he got a look at a few face cards and put them where they wouldn’t go to waste. It had been a while, a long while, but this was a game he knew something about. Back in the day Push had been a major pastime among the Physical Kids.
It was a childishly simple game. Push was a lot like War—high card wins—with some silly added twists to break ties (toss cards into a hat; once you get five in, score it like a poker hand; etc.). But the rules weren’t the point; the point of Push was to cheat. There was a lot of strange magic in cards: a shuffled deck wasn’t a fixed thing, it was a roiling cloud of possibilities, and nothing was ever certain till the cards were actually played. It was like a box with a whole herd of Schrödinger’s cats in it. With a little magical know-how you could alter the order in which your cards came out; with a little more you could guess what your opponent was going to play before she played it; with a bit more you could play cards that by all the laws of probability rightfully belonged to your opponent, or in the discard pile, or in some other deck entirely.
Quentin handed back the cards, and the game began.
They started slow, trading off low cards, easy tricks, both holding serve. Quentin counted cards automatically, though there was a limit to how much good it could do—when magicians played the cards had a way of changing sides, and cards you thought were safely deceased and out of play had a way of coming back to life. He’d been curious what caliber of talent got involved in these kinds of operations, and he was revising his estimates sharply upward. It was obvious he wasn’t going to overwhelm Lionel with brute force.
Quentin wondered where he’d trained. Brakebills, probably, same as he had; there was a precise, formal quality to his magic that you didn’t see coming out of the safe houses. Though there was something else too: it had a cold, sour, alien tang to it—Quentin could almost taste it. He wondered if Lionel was quite as human as he looked.
There were twenty-six tricks in a hand of Push, and halfway through neither side had established an advantage. But on the fourteenth trick Quentin overreached—he burned some of his strength to force a king to the top of his deck, only to waste it on a deuce from Lionel. The mismatch left him off balance, and he lost the next three tricks in a row. He clawed back two more by stealing cards from the discard pile, but the preliminaries were over. From here on out it was going to be a dogfight.
The room narrowed to just the table. It had been a while since Quentin had seen his competitive spirit, but it was rousing itself from its long slumber. He wasn’t going to lose this thing. That wasn’t going to happen. He bore down. He could feel Lionel probing, trying to shove cards around within the unplayed deck, and he shoved back. They blew all four aces in as many tricks, all-out, hammer and tongs. For kicks Quentin split his concentration and used a simple spell to twitch the sex amulet out of Lionel’s pocket and onto the floor. But if that distracted Lionel he didn’t show it.
Probability fields began to fluctuate crazily around them—invisible, but you could see secondary effects from them in the form of minor but very unlikely chance occurrences. Their hair and clothes stirred in impalpable breezes. A card tossed to one side might land on its edge and balance there, or spin in place on one corner. A mist formed above the table, and a single flake of snow sifted down out of it. The onlookers backed away a few steps. Quentin beat a jack of hearts with the king, then lost the next trick with the exact same cards reversed. He played a deuce—and Lionel swore under his breath when he realized he was somehow holding the extra card with the rules of poker on it.
Reality was softening and melting in the heat of the game. On the second-to-last trick Lionel played the queen of spades, and Quentin frowned—did her face look the slightest bit like Julia’s? Either way there was no such thing as a one-eyed queen, let alone one with a bird on her shoulder. He spent his last king against it, or he thought he did: when he laid it down it had become a jack, a suicide jack at that, which again there was no such card, especially not one with white hair like his own.
Even Lionel looked surprised. Something must be twisting the cards—it was like there was some invisible third player at the table who was toying with both of them. With his next and last card it became clear that Lionel had lost all control over his hand because he turned over a queen of no known suit, a Queen of Glass. Her face was translucent cellophane, sapphire-blue. It was Alice, to the life.
“What the shit,” Lionel said, shaking his head.
What the shit was right. Quentin clung to his nerve. The sight of Alice’s face shook him, it froze his gut, but it also stiffened his resolve. It reminded him what he was doing here. He was not going to panic. In fact he was going to take advantage of this—Alice was going to help him. The essence of close-up magic is misdirection, and with Lionel distracted Quentin pulled a king of clubs out of his boot with numb fingers and slapped it down. He tried to ignore the gray suit the king wore, and the branch that was sprouting in front of his face.
It was over. Game and match. Quentin sat back and took a deep, shaky breath.
“Good,” the bird said simply. “Next.”
Lionel didn’t look happy, but he didn’t say anything either, just crouched down and collected his amulet from under the table. Quentin got up and went to stand against the wall with others, his knees weak, his heart still racing, revving past the red line.
He was happy to get out of the game with a win, but he’d thought he would. He hadn’t thought he’d see his long-lost ex-girlfriend appear on a face card. What just happened? Maybe someone here knew more about him than they should. Maybe they were trying to throw him off his game. But who? Who would bother? Nobody cared if he won or lost, not anymore. As far as he knew the only person who cared right now was Quentin.
Maybe he was doing it himself—maybe his own subconscious was reaching up from below and warping his spellwork. Or was it Alice herself, wherever she was, whatever she was, watching him and having a little fun? Well, let her have it. He was focused on the present, that was what mattered. He had work to do. He was getting his life back together. The past had no jurisdiction here. Not even Alice.
The red-faced guy won his game with no signs of anything out of the ordinary. So did the Indian guy. The woman with the shock of white hair went out early, biting her lip as she laid down a blatantly impossible five deuces in a row, followed by a joker, then a Go Directly to Jail! card from Monopoly. The kid got a bye for some reason—the bird didn’t make him play at all. Plum got a bye too. Pixie passed faster than any of them, either because she was that strong or because Lionel was getting tired.
When it was all over Lionel handed the woman who’d lost a brick of hundred-dollar bills for her trouble. He handed another one to the red-faced man.
“Thank you for your time,” the bird said.
“Me?” The man stared down at the money in his hand. “But I passed!”
“Yes,” Lionel said. “But you got here late. And you seem like kind of an asshole.”
The man’s face got even redder than it already was.
“Go ahead,” Lionel said. He spread his arms. “Make a move.”
The man’s face twitched, but he wasn’t so angry or so crazy that he couldn’t read the odds.
“Fuck you!” he said.
That was his move. He slammed the door behind him.
Quentin dropped into the armchair the man had just vacated, even though it was damp from his wet windbreaker. He felt limp and wrung out. He hoped the testing was over with, he wouldn’t have trusted himself to cast anything right now. Counting him there were only five left: Quentin, Plum, Pixie, the Indian guy, and the kid.
This all seemed a hell of a lot more real than it had half an hour ago. It wasn’t too late, he could still walk away. He hadn’t seen any deal-breakers yet, but he hadn’t seen a lot to inspire confidence either. This could be his way back in, or it could be the road to somewhere even worse. He’d spent enough time already on things that went nowhere and left him with nothing. He could walk out, back into the rainy night, back into the cold and the wet.
But he didn’t. It was time to turn things around. He was going to make this work. It wasn’t like he had a lot of better offers.
“You think this is going to be enough?” Quentin asked the bird. “Just five of us?”
“Six, with Lionel. And yes. In fact I would say that it is exactly right.”
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” Pixie said. “What’s the target?”
The bird didn’t keep them in suspense.
“The object we are looking for is a suitcase. Brown leather, average size, manufactured 1937, monogrammed RCJ. The make is Louis Vuitton.”
It actually had a pretty credible French accent.
“Fancy,” she said. “What’s in it?”
“I do not know.”
“You don’t know?” It was the first time the teenage boy had spoken. “Why the hell do you want it then?”
“In order to find out.”
“Huh. What do the initials stand for?”
“Rupert John Chatwin,” the bird said crisply.
The kid looked confused. His lips moved.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Wouldn’t the C come last?”
“It’s a monogram, dumbass,” Pixie said. “The last name goes in the middle.”
The Indian guy was rubbing his chin.
“Chatwin.” He was trying to place the name. “Chatwin. But isn’t that—?”
It sure is, Quentin thought, though he didn’t say anything. He didn’t move a muscle. It sure as hell is.
Chatwin: that name chilled him even more than the night and the rain and the bird and the cards had. By rights he should have gone the rest of his life without hearing it again. It had no claim on him anymore, and vice versa. He and the Chatwins were through.
Except it seemed that they weren’t. He’d said good-bye and buried them and mourned them—the Chatwins, Fillory, Plover, Whitespire—but there must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them to him. Something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed, but the scar wouldn’t fade, not quite. Quentin felt like an addict who’d just caught the faintest whiff of his drug of choice, the pure stuff, after a long time sober, and he felt his imminent relapse coming on with a mixture of despair and anticipation.
That name was a message—a hot signal flare shot up into the night, sent specifically for him, across time and space and darkness and rain, all the way from the bright warm center of the world.
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446457863
Published by William Heinemann 2011
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Copyright © Lev Grossman 2011
Lev Grossman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
William Heinemann
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780434020805
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Lev Grossman
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Book I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Book II
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Book III
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Book IV
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Preview of The Magician’s Land
Copyright
For Sophie
About the Author
Lev Grossman is a novelist and Time magazine’s book critic. A graduate of Harvard and Yale, he has written articles for the New York Times, Salon, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York and the Village Voice. In 2005 his debut novel Codex was published to great critical acclaim. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
ALSO BY LEV GROSSMAN
Codex
The Magicians
We shall now seek that which we shall not find.
—Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur
BOOK I
CHAPTER 1
QUENTIN RODE A gray horse with white socks named Dauntless. He wore black leather boots up to his knees, different-colored stockings, and a long navy-blue topcoat that was richly embroidered with seed pearls and silver thread. On his head was a platinum coronet. A glittering side-sword bumped against his leg—not the ceremonial kind, the real kind, the kind that would actually be useful in a fight. It was ten o’clock in the morning on a warm, overcast day in late August. He was everything a king of Fillory should be. He was hunting a magic rabbit.
By King Quentin’s side rode a queen: Queen Julia. Up ahead were another queen and another king, Janet and Eliot—the land of Fillory had four rulers in all. They rode along a high-arched forest path littered with yellow leaves, perfect little sprays of them that looked like they could have been cut and placed by a florist. They moved in silence, slowly, together but lost in their separate thoughts, gazing out into the green depths of the late summer woods.
It was an easy silence. Everything was easy. Nothing was hard. The dream had become real.
“Stop!” Eliot said, at the front.
They stopped. Quentin’s horse didn’t halt when the others’ did—Dauntless wandered a little out of line and halfway off the trail before he persuaded her for good and all to quit walking for a damn minute. Two years as a king of Fillory and he was still shit at horseback riding.
“What is it?” he called.
They all sat for another minute. There was no hurry. Dauntless snorted once in the silence: lofty horsey contempt for whatever human enterprise they thought they were pursuing.
“Thought I saw something.”
“I’m starting to wonder,” Quentin said, “if it’s even possible to track a rabbit.”
“It’s a hare,” Eliot said.
“Same difference.”
“It isn’t, actually. Hares are bigger. And they don’t live in burrows, they make nests in open ground.”
“Don’t start,” both Julia and Janet said, in unison.
“Here’s my real question,” Quentin said. “If this rabbit thing really can see the future won’t it know we’re trying to catch it?”
“It can see the future,” Julia said softly, beside him. “It cannot change it. Did you three argue this much when you were at Brakebills?”
She wore a sepulchral black riding dress and an actual riding hood, also black. She always wore black, like she was in mourning, even though Quentin couldn’t think of anyone she should have been in mourning for. Casually, like she was calling over a waiter, Julia summoned a tiny songbird to her wrist and raised it up to her ear. It chipped, chirruped something, and she nodded back and it flew away again.
Nobody noticed, except for Quentin. She was always giving and getting little secret messages from the talking animals. It was like she was on a different wireless network from the rest of them.
“You should have let us bring Jollyby,” Janet said. She yawned, holding the back of her hand against her mouth. Jollyby was Master of the Hunt at Castle Whitespire, where they all lived. He usually supervised this kind of excursion.
“Jollyby’s great,” Quentin said, “but even he couldn’t track a hare in the woods. Without dogs. When there’s no snow.”
“Yes, but Jollyby has very well-developed calf muscles. I like looking at them. He wears those man-tights.”
“I wear man-tights,” Quentin said, pretending to be affronted. Eliot snorted.
“I imagine he’s around here somewhere.” Eliot was still scanning the trees. “Discreet distance and all that. Can’t keep that man away from a royal hunt.”
“Careful what you hunt,” Julia said, “lest you catch it.”
Janet and Eliot looked at each other: more inscrutable wisdom from Julia. But Quentin frowned. Julia made her own kind of sense.
Quentin hadn’t always been a king, of Fillory or anywhere else. None of them had. Quentin had grown up a regular non-magical, non-royal person in Brooklyn, in what he still in spite of everything thought of as the real world. He’d thought Fillory was a fiction, an enchanted land that existed only as the setting of a series of fantasy novels for children. But then he’d learned to do magic, at a secret college called Brakebills, and he and his friends had found out that Fillory was real.
It wasn’t what they expected. Fillory was a darker and more dangerous place in real life than it was in the books. Bad things happened there, terrible things. People got hurt and killed and worse. Quentin went back to Earth in disgrace and despair. His hair turned white.
But then he and the others had pulled themselves together again and gone back to Fillory. They faced their fears and their losses and took their places on the four thrones of Castle Whitespire and were made kings and queens. And it was wonderful. Sometimes Quentin couldn’t believe that he’d lived through it all when Alice, the girl he loved, had died. It was hard to accept all the good things he had now, when Alice hadn’t lived to see them.
But he had to. Otherwise what had she died for? He unslung his bow and stood up in the stirrups and looked around. Bubbles of stiffness popped satisfyingly in his knees. There was no sound except for the hush of falling leaves slipping through other leaves.
A gray-brown bullet flickered across the path a hundred feet in front of them and vanished into the underbrush at full tilt. With a quick fluid motion that had cost him a lot of practice Quentin nocked an arrow and drew. He could have used a magic arrow, but it didn’t seem sporting. He aimed for a long moment, straining against the strength of the bow, and released.
The arrow burrowed into the loamy soil up to the feathers, right where the hare’s flashing paws had been about five seconds ago.
“Almost,” Janet said, deadpan.
There was no way in hell they were going to catch this thing.
“Toy with me, would you?” Eliot shouted. “Yah!”
He put the spurs to his black charger, which whinnied and reared obligingly and hoofed the empty air before lunging off the path into the woods after the hare. The crashing sound of his progress through the trees faded almost immediately. The branches sprang back into place behind him and were still again. Eliot was not shit at horseback riding.
Janet watched him go.
“Hi ho, Silver,” she said. “What are we even doing out here?”
It was a fair question. The point wasn’t really to catch the hare. The point was—what was the point? What were they looking for? Back at the castle their lives were overflowing with pleasure. There was a whole staff there whose job it was to make sure that every day of their lives was absolutely perfect. It was like being the only guests at a twenty-star hotel that you never had to leave. Eliot was in heaven. It was everything he’d always loved about Brakebills—the wine, the food, the ceremony—with none of the work. Eliot loved being a king.
Quentin loved it too, but he was restless. He was looking for something else. He didn’t know what it was. But when the Seeing Hare was spotted in the greater Whitespire metropolitan area, he knew he wanted a day off from doing nothing all day. He wanted to try to catch it.
The Seeing Hare was one of the Unique Beasts of Fillory. There were a dozen of them—the Questing Beast, who had once granted Quentin three wishes, was one of them, as was the Great Bird of Peace, an ungainly flightless bird like a cassowary that could stop a battle by appearing between the two opposing armies. There was only one of each of them, hence the name, and each one had a special gift. The Unseen Monitor was a large lizard who could turn you invisible for a year, if that’s what you wanted.
People hardly ever saw them, let alone caught them, so a lot of guff got talked about them. No one knew where they came from, or what the point of them was, if any. They’d always been there, permanent features of Fillory’s enchanted landscape. They were apparently immortal. The Seeing Hare’s gift was to predict the future of any person who caught it, or so the legend went. It hadn’t been caught for centuries.
Not that the future was a question of towering urgency right now. Quentin figured he had a pretty fair idea of what his future was like, and it wasn’t much different from his present. Life was good.
They’d picked up the hare’s trail early, when the morning was still bright and dewy, and they rode out singing choruses of “Kill the Wabbit” to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” in their best Elmer Fudd voices. Since then it had zigzagged them through the forest for miles, stopping and starting, looping and doubling back, hiding in the bushes and then suddenly zipping across their paths, again and again.
“I do not think he is coming back,” Julia said.
She didn’t speak much these days. And for some reason she’d mostly given up using contractions.
“Well, if we can’t track the hare we can track Eliot anyway.” Janet gently urged her mount off the track and into the trees. She wore a low-cut forest-green blouse and men’s chaps. Her penchant for mild cross-dressing had been the scandal of the season at court this year.
Julia didn’t ride a horse at all but an enormous furry quadruped that she called a civet, which looked like an ordinary civet, long and brown and vaguely feline, with a fluidly curving back, except that it was the size of a horse. Quentin suspected it could talk—its eyes gleamed with a bit more sentience than they should have, and it always seemed to follow their conversations with too much interest.
Dauntless didn’t want to follow the civet, which exuded a musky, un-equine odor, but she did as she was told, albeit at a spiteful, stiff-legged walk.
“I haven’t seen any dryads,” Janet said. “I thought there’d be dryads.”
“Me neither,” Quentin said. “You never see them in the Queenswood anymore.”
It was a shame. He liked the dryads, the mysterious nymphs who watched over oak trees. You really knew you were in a magical fantasy otherworld when a beautiful woman wearing a skimpy dress made of leaves suddenly jumped out of a tree.
“I thought maybe they could help us catch it. Can’t you call one or summon one or something, Julia?”
“You can call them all you want. They will not come.”
“I spend enough time listening to them bitch about land allocation,” Janet said. “And where are they all if they’re not here? Is there some cooler, magical-er forest somewhere that they’re all off haunting?”
“They are not ghosts,” Julia said. “They are spirits.”
The horses picked their way carefully over a berm that was too straight to be natural. An old earthwork from an ancient, unrecoverable age.
“Maybe we could make them stay,” Janet said. “Legislate some incentives. Or just detain them at the border. It’s bullshit that there’s not more dryads in the Queenswood.”
“Good luck,” Julia said. “Dryads fight. Their skin is like wood. And they have staves.”
“I’ve never seen a dryad fight,” Quentin said.
“That is because nobody is stupid enough to fight one.”
Recognizing a good exit line when it heard one, the civet chose that moment to scurry on ahead. Two sturdy oak trees actually leaned aside to let Julia pass between them. Then they leaned back together again, leaving Janet and Quentin to go the long way around.
“Listen to her,” Janet said. “She has so totally gone native! I’m tired of her more-Fillorian-than-thou bullshit. Did you see her talking to that fucking bird?”
“Oh, leave her alone,” Quentin said. “She’s all right.”
But if he was being honest, Quentin was fairly sure that Queen Julia wasn’t all right.
Julia hadn’t learned her magic the way they had, coming up through the safe, orderly system of Brakebills. She and Quentin had gone to high school together, but she hadn’t gotten into Brakebills, so she’d become a hedge witch instead: she’d learned it on her own, on the outside. It wasn’t official magic, institutional magic. She was missing huge chapters of lore, and her technique was so sloppy and loopy that sometimes he couldn’t believe it even worked at all.
But she also knew things Quentin and the others didn’t. She hadn’t had the Brakebills faculty standing over her for four years making sure she colored inside the lines. She’d talked to people Quentin never would have talked to, picked up things his professors would never have let him touch. Her magic had sharp, jagged edges on it that had never been filed down.
It was a different kind of education, and it made her different. She talked differently. Brakebills had taught them to be arch and ironic about magic, but Julia took it seriously. She played it fully goth, in a black wedding dress and black eyeliner. Janet and Eliot thought it was funny, but Quentin liked it. He felt drawn to her. She was weird and dark, and Fillory had made the rest of them so damn light, Quentin included. He liked it that she wasn’t quite all right and she didn’t care who knew it.
The Fillorians liked it too. Julia had a special rapport with them, especially with the more exotic ones, the spirits and elementals and jinnis and even more strange and extreme beings—the fringe element, in the hazy zone between the biological and the entirely magical. She was their witch-queen, and they adored her.
But Julia’s education had cost her something, it was hard to put your finger on what, but whatever it was had left its mark on her. She didn’t seem to want or need human company anymore. In the middle of a state dinner or a royal ball or even a conversation she would lose interest and wander away. It happened more and more. Sometimes Quentin wondered exactly how expensive her education had been, and how she’d paid for it, but whenever he asked her, she avoided the question. Sometimes he wondered if he was falling in love with her. Again.
A distant bugle sounded—three polished sterling silver notes, muffled by the heavy silence of the woods. Eliot was sounding a recheat, a hunting call.
He was no Jollyby, but it was a perfectly credible recheat. He wasn’t much for drafting legislation, but Eliot was meticulous about royal etiquette, which included getting all the Fillorian hunting protocol exactly right. (Though he found any actual killing distasteful, and usually managed to avoid it.) His bugling was good enough for Dauntless. She trembled, electrified, waiting for permission to bolt. Quentin grinned at Janet, and she grinned back at him. He yelled like a cowboy and kicked and they were off.
It was insanely dangerous, like a full-on land-speeder chase, with ditches opening up in front of you with no warning, and low branches reaching down out of nowhere to try to clobber your head off (not literally of course, though you could never tell for sure with some of these older, more twisted trees). But fuck it, that’s what healing magic is for. Dauntless was a thoroughbred. They’d been starting and stopping and dicking around all morning, and she was dying to cut loose.
And how often did he get a chance to put his royal person at risk? When was the last time he even cast a spell? His life wasn’t exactly fraught with peril. They lay around on cushions all day and ate and drank their heads off all night. Lately whenever he sat down some unfamiliar interaction had been happening between his abdomen and his belt buckle. He must have gained fifteen pounds since he took the throne. No wonder kings looked so fat in pictures. One minute you’re Prince Valiant, the next you’re Henry VIII.