The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(116)

Alice paused there, and she didn’t speak for a full minute. Quentin fetched water for her. She seemed to have lost track of the desire to keep on talking, but then it found her again.

“I liked it in the earth. It was dark and dense. Remember what a good girl I was? Remember how meek and pleasing I was to everybody? For the first time in my life I could just be. That was always part of the problem, Quentin. I felt like I had to be interested in you all the time. You wanted love so desperately, and I thought it was my job to give it to you. Poor little lost boy! That’s not love, that’s hell. And I was getting a taste of heaven. I was a blue angel now.

“I swam through the ground for months. It’s full of skeletons. Magical dinosaurs, miles long. There must have been a great age of them. I followed the spine of one for a whole day. Caves, too, and ancient earthworks, and many, many dwarf tunnels. I found a whole underground city once, where the roof had fallen in, a long time ago. It was full of bodies. A hundred thousand dwarfs buried alive.

“Even farther down there are black seas, with no outlets, buried oceans full of eyeless sharks that breed and die in the darkness. There are stars down there too, the understars, burning underground, embedded in the earth, with no one to see them. I might have stayed down there forever. But in the end I broke through to the other side.”

“We know about the Far Side,” Quentin said.

“But you haven’t been there. I know that. I watched you sometimes. I was there at the End of the World, watching from inside the wall, when they turned you away. I followed you there in your little ship, nine fathoms deep, like the spirit in the Ancient Mariner. I watched your friend die on the island. I watched you f*ck your girlfriend. I watched you go to Hell.”

“You could have helped us, you know.”

“No, I couldn’t. No, I couldn’t!” Her face was full of a crazy joy. “That’s the thing! And do you know why? Because I didn’t care.”

She stopped and sniffed.

“Funny. I couldn’t smell when I was a niffin.”

But she didn’t laugh.

“Then I went the other way. I let myself rise and float up and out like a balloon, into the outer darkness. I jostled the stars on my way up. I entered the sun, spent a week in its heart, riding it around and around and around. I was indestructible, nothing could touch me, not even that.

“I went farther. Did you ever wonder, Quentin, whether the universe of Fillory is like ours? Whether it goes on and on, and there are other stars and other worlds? There aren’t. Fillory is the only one. I went out there, out past the sun and the moon, out through the last layer of stars—the stars were the only things in all my time as a niffin that I couldn’t pass through—and then nothing. I flew and flew for days, never getting tired, never getting bored, and then I turned around and looked back, and there was Fillory. It looks hilarious from far away, you can’t imagine: a flat whorled disk, in a crowd of stars, balanced on a tottering tower of turtles like in Dr. Seuss. It’s ridiculous. A little toy land, looking for all the world like a piece of spin art, inside a buzzing swarm of white stars. I watched it for a long time. I didn’t know if I would ever go back. It’s the closest thing I ever felt to sadness.”

She fell silent. The fridge buzzed. Eliot got up and shoved it.

“But you did go back,” Quentin said.

“I went back. I did whatever I wanted. Once I boiled a lake with everything in it. I chased birds and animals and burned them. Everyone was afraid of me, I was a bluebird of unhappiness. Sometimes they screamed or cried and begged me. Once—”

Alice gasped suddenly, as if something cold had touched her.

“Oh God. I killed a hunter.” A quick, convulsive sob gripped her, almost a cough. “I’d forgotten that till just now. He was going to kill a deer. I didn’t want him to. I burned him to nothing. It took no time at all. He never saw me.”

She was breathing hard, hoarsely, one hand on her chest, like she was trying not to pass out or throw up. Her gaze darted around the room.

“It’s all right now, Alice,” he said softly. “It’s not your fault.”

That seemed to revive her. Alice slapped her palms down on the table. Her expression was angry again.

“It is my fault!” She shrieked it at him, as if he were trying to take away her most precious possession. “I killed him, me! I did that! No one else!”

She put her head down on her arms. Her shoulders were tense.

“I hated him. But I hated everyone. And more than anyone I hated you, Quentin. Hate isn’t like love, it doesn’t end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it’s so pure, so unconditional! Do you know what I see when I look at you? I see dull, stupid, ugly creatures full of emotional garbage. Your feelings are corrupt and contaminated, and half the time you don’t even know what you’re feeling. You’re too stupid and too numb. You love and you hate and you grieve and you don’t even feel it.”

Quentin stayed very still. It wasn’t even that she was wrong. It was true, that’s what people were like. But she’d forgotten that he knew that too, and that once upon a time that was part of what brought them together.

But he didn’t say that. Not yet. She stopped and sat up again.

“I’m having weird cravings. Mangos. Marzipan.” She frowned. “And—what’s it called? Fennel? Then it goes away. It’s been so long since I tasted anything.”