The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(106)

He snapped out orders—there was no time to be polite—and Plum and Eliot handed him things as he called for them: powders, liquids, books open to such and such a page, one of the gold coins. He took them without looking, like a surgeon up to his elbows in a patient.

It was like he’d been assembling the pieces without knowing it. He couldn’t have done it without his newfound strength, and not without minor mendings either: he knew how to knit broken things together. He scraped at his insides for every last scintilla of magical strength. He was feverish, and his knees felt like they could buckle at any moment, but his mind was clear. He knew what he had to do, if he could just stay upright long enough.

When everything was complete, when the enchantment was hovering latent in the air like a thundercloud about to burst, he turned his back to the room and opened the trap.

It was like letting out an enormous breath that he’d been holding for way too long. The room flooded with blue light, the light in a swimming pool on a summer afternoon. Quentin almost blacked out with relief. Later he would look at his tattoo and find a raised, blackened scar in the center of the star.

Alice’s blue form was floating limp in the center of the room, on its back, listless but stirring. She wasn’t smiling now, not at all. Her expression, when she focused on him, was black. She was angry, a wasp who’d been trapped in a jar and then shaken, and she was ready to sting. She was the most beautiful, terrible thing he’d ever seen, like an acetylene flame, an incandescent filament, a fallen star right in front of him.

He met her gaze and held it and spoke a word in a language so old that the linguists of the world believed it to be lost and forgotten forever. But magicians had not forgotten.

Mayakovsky’s coin, the second coin, flared in his hand, and he forced himself to grip it tight even though it felt like a fistful of molten gold or dry ice—like his fingers must be melting or blackening and curling up. Alice startled as if she’d heard a sound. Not his voice, but something else, something far off. A distant church bell tolling at dawn.

Then the air around her darkened, and the world began falling into her. It had begun: the spell was pulling atoms from the room around her. Her skin darkened and became dull and opaque. She writhed as particles swarmed around her like insects, embedding themselves in her form. Matter rushed at her, crowded into her, substituting crude substance for her luminous, translucent blue flesh.

Quentin stumbled back, and Plum and Eliot caught him, and together they staggered out through the doorway; it wouldn’t do to be too close, to have any of their atoms pulled into Alice. The spell would do it if it had to, the spell didn’t care. Alice was convulsing now, growing heavier, condensing out of the air, being forcibly embodied. She moaned, a deep agony moan, already half human. Her niffin-light was fading. She sounded like she was dying, and for a horrific second Quentin wondered if he’d been wrong, if he was killing her instead of saving her. But it was too late to take it back.

When it was finished, when the blue was all gone, Alice fell to the wooden floor with a dull smack, hard enough to bounce once and lie still. The room reeked of rarefied gases, sharp spikes in his nostrils.

Alice lay sprawled on the floor on her back, her eyes closed, breathing shallowly. She was flesh again. The old Alice, human Alice, pale and real and naked.

He knelt down next to her. Her eyes opened, just barely, narrowed against the light.

“Quentin,” she said hoarsely. “You changed your hair.”





CHAPTER 24


Listen up, everybody. I got a letter from Eliot.”

Janet felt comfortable in Eliot’s chair in the meeting room in Castle Whitespire. She could have conducted business from her own official chair, but she liked Eliot’s. It didn’t look different from the other thrones, but there was something about it that felt more . . . pleasant. Accommodating.

Power, she supposed it was. It suits me.

“Point of order,” Josh said. “Are you, like, High Queen now? Like with Eliot gone?”

Was she?

“Sure. Why not.”

“It’s just—”

“Your constitutional arguments are kind of de trop at this exact moment, Josh. Also I wrote most of the constitution, so you will definitely lose them. All of them.” Josh opened his mouth. “Bup bup bup! Do you want to hear the letter or not?”

“Yes,” Josh and Poppy said together. Then they gave each other a loathsome little miniature married smile.

“Sure,” Poppy added.

Their deaths would be awesome—I mean the balcony was right there—but hard to justify politically. Janet moved on. For now.

“It goes like this.” She held up the little paper tape, like a ticker tape, or a fortune-cookie fortune. “THICK PLOTTENS STOP UMBER WAS SLASH IS EVIL AND MAYBE ALIVE STOP WHO KNEW RIGHT STOP FIND HIM ASAP STOP MIGHT SAVE WORLD STOP TRY UNDER NORTHERN MARSH MAYBE STOP BACK SOONEST KISS STOP.”

There was silence in the room.

“That’s it?” Poppy said.

“You were expecting . . . ?”

“I don’t know. Something a bit more formal maybe.”

“He doesn’t even say hi to us?” Josh said.

“No. Other questions?”

“Does he really have to do it like that? Like a telegram?”

“No, not really. I think he just enjoys it. Any questions of a more substantive nature?”