The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(118)

“And do you know why? Because all you ever do is what you think people expect you to do, and then you feel sorry for yourself when they hate you.”

“I’ve changed a lot, Alice,” Quentin said. “Maybe that was true once, I don’t know. But I’ve changed a lot in seven years.”

“No. You haven’t.”

“Think about this: could the Quentin you knew have made you human again?”

Alice was silent for a few seconds, long enough that Plum jumped in.

“Why are you telling us all this anyway?” Plum appeared to have had enough of Alice. “I mean it’s fascinating and all, but it’s sort of not what we expected.”

“I am telling you this,” Alice hissed, “so that he knows what he did.” She was answering Plum, but she stared at Quentin.

“Tell me what I did.” Quentin stared back at her. Her eyes had changed—they weren’t quite the same eyes she’d had before. “I want to know.”

“Then listen: you robbed me.” She spat it. But she was already losing steam, she didn’t even have the energy to be angry anymore. “I was perfect. I was immortal. I was happy. You took all that away from me. Did you expect me to be grateful? Did you? I didn’t want to be human again, but you dragged me back into this body.”

She held up her hands like they were low-grade meat, a butcher’s discards.

“I lost everything, twice. The first time I gave it up. But the second time you stole it.”





CHAPTER 26


Another tremor. It shook Umber awake. He opened His eyes.

“My heart,” He whispered.

But when Janet looked away from the sunset, the sunfall, the god was already gone.

Lots to do. World ending. Can’t hang around. He bounced back pretty fast from His beating, she would give Him that. It crossed her mind that maybe He’d been faking—maybe He’d gone down easy, taken a dive. It would have been like Him.

Either way she was kind of relieved Umber was gone. She didn’t especially want to spend the end of the world with Him.

Meanwhile the action on the edge of the world was deeply, sublimely awful. The sun was squashing there like a rotten pumpkin—it hadn’t just grazed the rim of Fillory, it was definitively, agonizingly bottoming out there, grinding itself flat, spending its remaining thermal and kinetic energy on destroying itself and throwing stupendous curling gouts and ferns of fire in the air and erecting a vast pillar of steam reaching up to the sky.

She’d never even seen the edge of the world. The others had, but now she never would. Or even if she did it wouldn’t be the same: now it would have a big cigarette burn on it. Janet looked over her shoulder at the other horizon and saw that the moon was rising, as per usual. Good old moon. It must orbit twice as fast as the sun, she thought, to get in its eclipse at noon and then get back around again to rise in the evening. Or no, it would have to go even faster than that. Variable speed? Multiple moons? She started trying to figure it out and then stopped. What did it even matter now.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Poppy said. “We should be back at the castle.”

“What does it even matter,” she said, out loud this time.

She wished Eliot were here. Or Quentin. Josh and Poppy were all right, but come on, they were short-timers, rookies. She would have liked the company of another old-schooler like herself. Even Julia.

“This means we’re the last,” she said. “The last kings and queens of Fillory, ever. I suppose that’s a claim to fame.”

“It’s not over yet. We should go back to Whitespire. The people need us.”

That’s the spirit.

“Go,” Janet said. “You’re right, take care of them. I’ll catch up. I’m going to stay here for a bit.”

She couldn’t have said why, but being here felt right. The weird, evenly spaced hills, lit up by the flickering, flaring light from the dying sun, casting long shadows back and away—she felt calm here. They would be fine back at Whitespire. What on earth would her presence add? She would sit her final vigil here, in the hills of the Chankly Bore.

Josh started to say something, but Poppy touched his arm and he shut up. She got it: they were out of their depth. In a quiet, businesslike way Josh began the portal ritual.

“I’ll leave it open after,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“When it gets too bad,” he said, “we’ll come back for you. With the button.”

“Yeah. I’ll be here.”

Then they were gone. Overhead the sky was a deepening blue, and with the green of the hills and the gray of the mountains and the flaming red-orange of the horizon it was a pretty striking scene. Too bad she didn’t have a camera, or an easel, or a powerfully developed aesthetic sensibility. Janet wasn’t much for rapt contemplation. She sat down on the chilly grass with her back to the hard, lumpy oak at the summit of the hill. Maybe she should be wearing sunglasses, like those people who went out to the desert to watch the early atomic tests.

Janet shivered. It seemed wrong that of them all she was the one to bear witness to this. Her—the cynical one. No shits or f*cks given. Well, maybe it’s better this way, better than somebody with a lot of big weepy feelings. Quentin would be a Trevi f*cking Fountain of tears by this point. Somebody or something west of her winded a great deep horn, a massive sustained brass pedal note. There were a few seconds of silence, then it was answered from off to the south by a piercing silver trumpet tone, the same note a fistful of octaves higher. Then six or seven notes followed in unison, from all points of the compass, even out to sea, shifting between major harmonies and clashing tritones.