The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(121)

“Hey!” Janet said to the hippogriff. “You want to get in on this? You want to fight?”

But the beast shook its head. Ferrying Queen Janet around was enough for it. Its ambitions went no further. Which she totally got. This would be its war effort.

“What’s your name?”

“Winterwing!” it squawked back at her. She patted its neck again.

“Well flown, Winterwing. Well flown. Fillory is grateful to you this night. Take us higher now.”

No part of Fillory was untouched by the conflict. Here and there along the rivers and streams the nymphs had surfaced, the water around them reflecting the weird mingled light, though they only watched for now. Janet didn’t imagine they’d be drawn into a fight unless their interests were directly threatened. Some of the dryads took the same tack, standing by their trees, leaning against them or twirling their staves the way a cop would twirl a nightstick.

God! She’d totally forgotten about the forests. They were almost into it now. A grove of the forwardmost elms and birch from Corian’s Land (Corian: who he? Another thing she’d never know) had already jumped a big outriding oak from the Darkling Woods. The oak was a monster, and it had uprooted a couple of the lighter trees and was waving them over its head like a kraken, but it was being overrun. A few of its branches were cracked off already, and the leaves were flying. Trees were f*cking mental in a fight, it turned out.

Janet looked up to see the moon tumbling overhead. It was still up there but way off course, spinning slowly end over end, aimless, lost in space. For some reason that was what did it. Janet threw her arms around the hippogriff’s neck. She sobbed into its soft feathers, and got snot on them too. Whatever, it probably had bird mites. This was it, she thought. This was my best thing. My best thing. I thought I would always have it, but I was wrong.

The hippogriff’s neck was stiff and proud against her face. It didn’t turn to look at her. Maybe it wasn’t very comfortable with displays of emotion. Well, tough. Since her nights in the desert Janet was all about being in touch with her emotions.

Janet heard and felt a deep boom, and she looked up mid-weep. Half the mountains in the Northern Barrier Range had just erupted, blown their tops off like ripe pimples. She hadn’t even known they were volcanic, but now they were lobbing big seminal gobbets of lava all over their lower slopes, like a drunk prom queen puking on her dress. Shit was getting geological, yo. Fillory was bleeding its hot arterial blood.

She made a visual survey of the coast. Broken Bay was overflowing its banks, drowning the lower reaches of the Chankly Bore in seawater; some of the hills were gone, you could just see the trees poking up out of the water. Farther out to sea she thought she saw a couple of sentient boats trying to ride out the tempest. To the south monstrous dunes from the deep desert were slamming into the headwall of the Copper Mountains and threatening to bury the lush southern plains in sand. No! Keep out! She wanted to stretch out her hands and push the desert back, stick her finger in the dike. Probably the Foremost’s gang were shivering down in their ice caves.

Fillory was under siege, and the boundaries were failing everywhere. The center cannot hold, and the edges are in pretty f*cking dire shape too. A crack opened, zigging across two open fields, glowing hot and red, the grass crisping up at the lip. She wanted to throw her arms around Fillory, hug it and squash it back together. But she couldn’t. Nobody could.

Now something was harrying the Darkling Woods in the rear, and Janet focused in on . . . Jane Chatwin, come on down! The former Watcherwoman looked pissed off, gray hair loose and flying, and whenever she pointed her finger at an ambulatory tree it stopped, its shoulders sort of sank, and it rooted itself back down to the ground again. Looks like she was planning to ride this bomb down like Slim Pickens.

All the heavy hitters were checking in now. Up in the Barrier Range the giants—for lack of anybody their own size to pick on, and because they knew they were all going to die anyway—were fighting each other, brawling and weeping huge tears as they did so. Over by Whitespire the battle lines parted to make way for a large flightless bird, proceeding in a stately fashion between the two sides of the Battle of the Animals, and that could only be the Great Bird of Peace, one of the Unique Beasts. It had the gait of a cassowary, or what Janet imagined the gait of a cassowary to be, lifting its feet carefully with its inverted knees and swaying its head backward with every step.

When it reached the center of the field it paused, gazing around it calmly as if to say, now then, my lovelies, isn’t it time to put an end to this foolishness? Do you not feel the love in my heart, and in your own? Then two big cats, a panther and a leopard, swarmed it, and it went down without even a squawk. It might have had love in its heart, Janet thought, but it also had a hell of a lot of blood.

Along with her regular serving of horror Janet felt an extra cold chill. Whatever magic gave the Unique Beasts their mandate, that was the foundation of Fillory, the rebar in the cement. Even the Deeper Magic wasn’t cutting it tonight. If that was failing then all bets were really off.

The Northern Swamp was disgorging its beasts, some real sick f*cks, chief among them that snapping turtle, the Prince of the Mud, and some huge wet lizard thing banded in yellow and black, flat and wide and squashed-looking. A grotendous big salamander. Even as she watched it it paused, trying to focus its wide-set eyes on something tiny, or relatively tiny, directly in front of it.