The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(122)

It was a white stag. It was the Questing Beast, standing before it, alone and unafraid. Oh, thank God, she thought. She couldn’t hear, but as she watched it said something. It said it again, and then a third time, like someone trying to strike fire from a wet matchbook. The salamander closed its huge eyes and settled down on its belly. It was dead. The Questing Beast had wished it dead.

It had taken three tries, though, and apparently even the Questing Beast only got three. It had saved its wishes all those years, all those centuries, and now they were gone. It seemed to shrug, if a stag can shrug, and then the snapping turtle snapped, and the beautiful beast’s white legs were sticking out of its mouth for a second, and then it was gone.

That seems unfair, Janet thought. A bad trade. The Questing Beast for some big salamander I never even heard of before. A rook for a knight.

She checked back in on the sun. Still boiling and thrashing on the horizon, spreading out laterally, like dropped ice cream melting on a hot sidewalk; probably it would take like a million years or some other cosmic span of time to expend all its energy and die. She checked back in on Josh and Poppy. Poppy was taking a break on top of one of Whitespire’s walls, which were holding pretty well so far. Janet supposed that if things got bad they’d have to open the gates and retreat into the bailey, but it hadn’t come to that yet. She missed Josh for a minute, till she found him down on the battlefield itself. He was in magic armor, sealed up tight—she was amazed he could even breathe in there—clumping around the field with a mace (always the fat man’s weapon of choice, for some reason), whacking at whatever got in range. An angry elephant put its foot on him, and Janet’s breath caught in her throat, but Josh’s armor held. In fact it was so smooth and frictionless that he squirted out from under the elephant’s foot like a pumpkin seed and flew twenty yards.

Josh picked himself up. He’d dropped his mace, but he was completely invulnerable anyway. Janet wondered what he thought he was doing, if hitting some wildebeests or whatever with a stick was making him feel better.

Let them join the fray, she thought. Let them have their fun. She just hoped the baby was safe. And at that moment, out of nowhere, Janet knew that she herself would never have children. Probably she’d known it for a while, but it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. Let others breed. Let them, and God be with them. She would be the witness—she was tough enough to see everything break and not break herself. They also serve who fly around on hippogriffs and watch.

There was a lot to watch. It was all on now, Fillory had gone all in, the whole f*cking pub quiz. Probably even the bugs were fighting each other. Where were the dwarfs, she wondered? Sitting it out underground? A tall and rather august man in a tuxedo had joined the fray, fighting bare-handed, and Janet thought she recognized him from Quentin’s stories about the edge of the world. The battle was dissolving into frantic scrums featuring all kinds of weird shit she’d never even seen before: a burning suit of armor, a man who seemed to be woven out of rope, another who was just built out of pebbles. To the south a towering dune had finally crested the Copper Mountains, and surfing on it like a mad thing was a tremendous clipper ship crewed by—rabbits? For real? Was that something from the books? It had been so long. They came ripping down the steep slopes, heeled over.

It should have been exciting—bunnies! A magic clipper ship! That goes on land!—but all it provoked in Janet was exhaustion. What next? Sir Hotspots? Fuck all this, she said, and she squeezed her eyes shut for a minute. There was no end to Fillory, no end to the beauty and strangeness, except that there was, and this was it. She had to force herself to let go of it, and it felt like tearing off a piece of her own flesh. It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended. How was that fair? Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit.

The chaos itself was momentarily, unfairly beautiful. The thrashing sun, the spinning, looping moon, Fillory half light and half shadow, dotted with flashes of fire, lava and flame and magical strikes from magical beings. Ignorant armies clashing by night. And way off in the distance, but still visible to her far-sighted eyes, came the glow of the Clock Barrens going up in flames and fireworks, all at once. So at least she’d seen that after all.

Then Janet saw maybe the most flat-out marvelous thing she had ever seen or ever would see in her life. Overhead a constellation in the shape of a lanky, loose-jointed person detached itself from the night sky, hung by one stellar hand for a second and then dropped, falling for a long minute and sending up a shower of sparks when it hit on its back, its component orbs embedding themselves in the turf of a meadow. It was immediately engaged there by the only other two-dimensional combatant on the field, the Chalk Man, who had recovered his spirits and repaired his staff. Puffs of limestone flew, and motes of light.

It’s like Revelation, she thought. It’s Revelation, and I’m the Scarlet Woman.

“Winterwing,” Janet said. “Back to Whitespire. It’s time.”

The hippogriff set them down on top of the broad wall of Whitespire, which looked like it was going to finally see the battle it was presumably built to withstand, because the humans and the talking animals were giving ground now, falling back toward the great gates, which even Janet had never seen opened.

She dismounted and walked over to where Poppy stood. Neither of them said anything. The last queens of Fillory.