The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(119)

Who the f*ck is playing that shit? Janet thought. How do they even know what notes to play? Probably it was Written somewhere, probably there’s always been a big alpenhorn somewhere under glass, with a sign that says In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat.

Where’s my horn? It would have been nice to at least have a horn, she thought, allowing herself some bitterness, some self-pity, because if not now then when. It would have given her something to do. As one, all around her, the clock-trees began to toll. She didn’t know they could.

She got to her feet. This would never do. She was moping, and it wouldn’t do. She needed to get involved, find out what was happening. She stood up, and on cue the grass in front of her practically exploded as a hippogriff slammed down onto it, landing at speed and skidding halfway down the slope on its talons and hooves and ripping up half the hillside with it.

It gathered itself and trotted back up the slope to her. It had come to find her.

“Your highness, Queen Janet, ruler of Fillory. This hippogriff awaits your pleasure.”

Respect. From a hippogriff. It really was the end of the world. She strode to him, set a foot on its thigh and swung her leg over its broad, tawny, close-furred back. It helped that the slope of the hill was on her side.

She realized she knew this one—it had a red crest. She’d ridden it to the Northern Marsh before.

“Let us fly then, you and I, brave beast,” she said. “Though it be for the last time, on the last day.”

Whatever, she told herself. Don’t judge. If there was ever a time for this kind of talk, this was it. She wasn’t sure if it was tears or the wind or both, but her eyes were streaming as they took to the sky, and she had to blot them with her sleeve.

Janet gave the hippogriff its head, and it spiraled up over the Chankly Bore (was it a tidal bore? No, that was something else, she was almost sure) and turned south. The light was indescribably weird: dying, flickering sunlight from the west, on her right, and on her left the light of the rising moon, the two meeting and mingling into a silver-gold radiance unlike anything she’d ever seen.

“Higher, higher!” she called, and the hippogriff obeyed. As it did Janet laid a few spells on herself, specifically on her eyes: distance, focus, resolution, night vision. If she was going to witness this she wanted to see everything, to spare herself nothing. Ears too; she jacked up her hearing. She would be the recording angel, this night.

The effect was disconcerting—data came flooding in, more than her brain was really meant to process, and she literally jerked her head back as her vision exploded with detail. But she had to see it all. It was on her now, no one else.

Fillory seethed with motion—it was a restless night for the magic land, and everybody was out on the town. Even the trees were moving: the huge inky mass of the Darkling Woods to the west was no longer keeping to its customary outline. The trees, or the animate ones anyway, had pulled up their roots and were marching east in the direction of Castle Whitespire, cracking their gnarly knuckles as if to say, oh yeah, at last, we’re going to get this done. It must have some ancient beef with the Queenswood, she thought, and now they were going to throw down. The trees left behind them a five-o’clock shadow of regular inanimate trees, a skeleton crew where the original forest was.

Yup: the Queenswood was in turn adopting a defensive crouch, elongating itself into a protective crescent around the borders of Whitespire. Moving from the south to intercept the Darklings (presumably, it was what she would have done) were the smaller but no less game trees of Corian’s Land, bolstered by the plucky little apple and pear trees of the Southern Orchard.

Fateful. Like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane. It’s so Macbeth. Or Hamlet, I forget which.

Whitespire itself was lit up, every window; it looked like a Manhattan skyscraper full of high-powered lawyers pulling an all-nighter. The courtyard was full of men armoring up. Who were they going to fight? They must have no idea what was going on. Or maybe it was her, Janet, who was out of the loop. They’d probably read a bunch of prophecies. It’s not like she had a f*cking horn, was it?

Her eyes were two invisible searchlights, pitilessly clear, and she swept their twin beams over the eerily lit grassy hills of Fillory. It wasn’t just the trees that were moving, animals were running below her too, and galloping and scampering and lumbering and fluttering. Deer, horses, bears, birds, bats, smaller things that might have been foxes or weasels or something. Wolves and big cats coursed along side by side—my but this was a biodiverse nation she presided over, at least for, oh, the next couple of hours anyway. All of them, all of them were flowing in vast numbers on various vectors in the direction of Castle Whitespire.

Or whoops—her eyes cut over—not all. Some of them were already there. More animals were already formed up around Whitespire to meet them. The penny dropped. God, all the buried tensions of this gorgeous, f*cked-up place were just spilling over tonight. Those must be the talking animals at Whitespire, and the regular animals were marching to war against them. She knew they’d always avoided each other, but she never realized that they actually loathed each other. They must have been planning for this night for centuries.

The nonspeaking animals came on in a massed rabble; the talking ones stood stock-still in neat squares in the fields outside Whitespire, trampling the crops the way crops had been trampled by every army since the beginning of time. It was a black mass, a night with no rules. In the vanguard for the nonspeakings were a few of the very fastest beasts, bounding singly and in pairs over the low stone walls, clearing them by ridiculous margins that bordered on the show-offy: cheetahs and antelopes, ignoring each other for once, or maybe they were gazelles, plus a couple of lions and wild horses and some gnuey-looking motherf*ckers that might have been wildebeests. Who knew those bastards could run like that? It was pretty awesome actually. Behind them, just ahead of the second wave, came a pack of very large, ambitious, energetic dogs.