The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(133)

“What happens here? I mean, what happens to the fountain?”

“Oh, it dries up. Falls into disrepair. It’s a mysterious process, but consistent with the integrity of the Neitherlands as a whole, so we allow it to happen.”

“Here’s what I’m wondering: could the tail wag the dog, so to speak? What if you repaired the fountain? Rebuilt it or replumbed it or what have you? Would that bring a dead world back to life?”

Penny thought for a minute, his lips moving silently. He walked the length of the ballroom and then back to where the rest of them stood.

“It’s not as stupid as it sounds,” he said, “but no. You couldn’t bring it back that way. You could wag the tail, but the dog would still be dead.”

Eliot nodded sadly.

“That was my last idea. I didn’t really expect it to work.” The fire had gone out of him. “Look, this is going to take forever. Let’s just go straight to the fountain.”

“I need to do something first,” Plum said. “Watch this: a magic trick.”

She’d seen it almost as soon as they walked in, she was just waiting for her moment. Plum walked right up to the enormous wall of books, feeling very small with the ranks of them towering above her. There was one narrow gap, a thin space where a single volume was missing. She took her great-grandfather’s memoir out of her bag.

Penny’s face went slack when he saw it.

“The Door in the Page,” he said, in a childlike voice. “It’s the Holy Grail of Fillory books. The last and rarest one. I’ve been hunting it for so long.”

She went to slide it in, paused, reflected, turned it the other way up, then shelved it. It fit perfectly, not just the size but the pattern: the spine was the perfect shade of a pale green, with a band of light blue near the top to fill in the last bit of the Lower Slosh, and a sliver of the Burnt River to go with it. It was so satisfying, like finishing an enormous jigsaw puzzle, that her fingers tingled, and she involuntarily let out a breath.

She was playing her part in the Chatwin story now. No more lingering in the wings, she was onstage, in the thick of it. She’d done what she could: she had brought Rupert home, or as close as he would ever get.

“Hey—Penny, is it?” Plum said. “That ought to pay for Quentin’s library fines, don’t you think? Or Alice could just punch you again, it’s all good.”

But Penny’s attention was completely occupied by his new acquisition. He went trotting up to it—half running across the shiny ballroom floor—and slid it gingerly out again, touching only the upper edges of its pages in order to spare the spine. He let it fall open and sniffed the paper.

“How did you get this?”

“Stole it.”

“We tried to steal it too.”

“I know,” Plum said. “From us. Next time try harder.”

The failure didn’t appear to sting Penny. He looked like a little boy with a new puppy. It was weird: he was obviously an *, but he wasn’t a sociopath. He had feelings—in fact from the way he held the book it looked like he had an enormous capacity for love. He just wasn’t very good at loving people, apart from himself.

Only Eliot looked grave.

“I just thought of something,” he said. “That was the last book. The wall’s full. The map is finished. That must mean the story’s over, Fillory’s history has been written. The apocalypse must have already come.”

“You don’t know that,” Quentin said.

“Yes, I do,” Eliot snapped. “And don’t try to make me feel better.”

Could it be true? The idea made its way through Plum in a cold ripple. All this time, all her life really, she’d been thinking about Fillory, dithering about it, hiding from it. Fillory and the Chatwins and the fatal longings they represented had been her dark side, and she’d tried to pretend they didn’t exist. She’d wanted to have one side only, like a M?bius strip. A M?bius person.

But that was a mistake. She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future. She was ready to face it, thought perhaps she might even quite like to face it, that there might be not just danger but joy and love in facing it—and just like that she’d lost it forever. She should have done what she’d told Quentin to do with Alice (totally correctly by the way): she should have met it head-on and made her peace with it when she could. Now she’d never have the chance. The books in front of her looked subtly different now. They’d gone from being about the present to being about the past.

Or had they? Maybe they had. But maybe that was giving up too easily. Fillory didn’t feel dead to her, that was the thing. She could still sense it out there, just the other side of the thin partition that stood between this reality and the next. If she pressed her ear to it she could still hear Fillory singing to her, however faintly.

“The wall isn’t actually full, you know.” She cleared her throat—it was dusty in this damn library. “Not necessarily. You could run another row of books under there, along the floor.”

She pointed. There was still space under the lowermost shelf.

“You certainly could not,” Penny said.

“Well, you actually could, if you wanted to.”

Fillory! she thought. We’re coming! Just hold on a little longer! It was as if just by convincing Penny she could keep Fillory alive.