The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(100)

Quentin tried to kill her. He knew he couldn’t, but he thought she might feel it, and as long as she was a niffin this was virtually the only interaction they could have together. He cast the magic missiles, full strength and then some; they practically took his fingertips off. They were green, seething things that darted at Alice like hungry fish.

But about ten feet from her they slowed to a crawl. She looked at them, pleased, as if Quentin had made her cookies. You shouldn’t have! Under her gaze the missiles lost the courage of their convictions. They formed a line, single file, and obediently encircled her waist in a sparking, fizzing green ring.

Then the ring burst out in all directions. Two of the missiles whanged resonantly off Quentin’s sextuple shield. He flinched. He wouldn’t have survived even one of them.

Then Alice was across the room and hanging in the air right in front of him. He couldn’t tell if she’d teleported or just darted straight at him, she was that fast. For the first time she looked pissed off. She bared her sapphire teeth. Was it being a niffin that made her this angry? Or had she been this angry all along? Maybe the rage had been inside her already, and becoming a niffin had just revealed it—burned away the protective shielding.

Either way she was Alice to the life, he’d know her anywhere; she was more than alive, she was humming and crackling with energy. Her eyes were the brightest, angriest, most magnificently amused eyes he’d ever seen. She reached out and put a hand on the first of his six shields, pressed on it with two blue fingertips, then put them through it. The shield flared and died.

The second shield buzzed angrily when she touched it. That should have killed her too; he’d laced it with a magical charge he’d only read about, and in a book he shouldn’t have been reading. She wiggled her fingers with sensual pleasure. Delightful! With both hands she grasped the third shield and picked it up—set it aside as if it were a physical object, an old picture frame maybe, and leaned it against a wall. It was a joke, magic didn’t even work that way, but if you were a niffin it worked however you wanted it to. She did the same thing with the next one, and the next, stacking them neatly like folding chairs.

Quentin didn’t wait around for the ending. He could see where this was heading. Ceding the field of battle, he stepped back through the doorway. Let her follow him if she could, but she couldn’t. It was hard and smooth as glass to her. She mushed her face and her breasts against the barrier, like a kid squishing her face against a window, and looked at him with one antic eye, blue on blue.

She was daring him, baiting him. Come on! Quit moping around! Don’t you want to have some fun? When she opened her mouth it was bright inside, like in a photographic negative.

“Alice,” Quentin said. “Alice.”

He closed the red door. He’d seen enough.

—

She was the madwoman in the attic. It was weirdly intimate, this one-sided duel, just her and him, one on one. Not like sex, but intimate. He was like a free diver trying for greater and greater depths, forcing himself down, lungs bursting, then kicking frantically for the surface with his puny human flippers, the big blue nipping at his heels.

Quentin kept records of his trips in a spiral notebook: where he went, where she went, what he’d done, what she’d done. There wasn’t much point to it, because the performance went more or less the same way every time, but it helped him fight off sadness. And he did notice one thing: Alice liked to herd him toward the front door of the house, like she was daring him to open it. That seemed like a dare he’d be better off not taking.

But if there was nothing else on offer? Their little dance was like the endgame of a disastrously bloody chess match, just a queen chasing a beleaguered king around an empty board, sadistically refusing to checkmate him. It was difficult to know what if anything was going on in the queen’s mind, but one thing was clear: Alice was better at this game than he was. Apart from everything else she knew him better than he knew himself. She always had.

So that night, close to midnight, when Plum was safely in bed, he reversed tactics again. Alice wanted him to open the front door? He was going to head straight for it. Give her what she wants, see what she does with it. He still didn’t know what he was looking for, but maybe he’d find out what she was looking for.

He prepped a couple of spells in advance, and cast the first one as soon as he’d stepped through the door. It created a reasonably lifelike image of him in every room in the house.

It didn’t confuse her, but it might have pissed her off, because Quentin barely made it to the stairs before she banished the illusion so harshly that he felt like somebody had scrubbed his brain with steel wool. Go on or go back? In an undignified panic he feinted for the stairs, dodged past Alice at close quarters, arching his body like a bullfighter, and locked himself in the half bathroom off the landing.

Now he’d trapped himself, but good. He fumbled in his pocket and whipped out a Sharpie he’d been keeping on him in case of emergency. Scribbling at top speed he wrote an inscription in Swahili across the door, then sketched a big rectangle around the whole frame, with fiddly ornaments at the corners, all executed in one unbroken line. It was just a ward to insulate against magic, because, he reasoned hopefully, Alice was made of magic now. It was all he could think of.

The door shook with an impact, bulged visibly inward, air puffing in around the edges as if a grenade had gone off behind it. It held, but immediately it began warping in its frame, and the paint started to blister. It wasn’t going to hold for long. It wasn’t meant to be a magic barrier, it just wanted to be a bathroom door.