The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(140)

She was recognizably her old self, still the Julia of Brooklyn, or directly descended from her, with her freckly face and her long black hair. But at the same time she was unmistakably divine: her height had been somewhat variable in the past, but at the moment she was seven feet tall. She wore a rather dramatic dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a presidential inauguration, even though it was made of equal parts bark and green leaves.

“Walk with me,” Julia said.

They walked, the three of them together. Fillory was Fillory again, though it was a wan and wasted Fillory, waking again piece by piece after its catastrophic illness. The meadow was still brown, the ground still dry and cracked. The new age was still in its first minutes.

Quentin was light-headed. He still had the blood of Ember and Umber on his shoes. It was hard to connect the brutal, bloody thing he’d just done with the renewal of Fillory. But this world was rudely, potently alive again, you could feel it.

“I have a question,” Alice said. “Julia, why didn’t you kill Ember yourself? I mean, it all worked out fine in the end, but you would have done a quicker job than we did.”

“I might have. But there would have been no power in it. A demigod slaying a god . . . even if I could have managed it, those are not the terms of the ritual.”

“Still, you seem more godly now than you did when I last saw you,” Quentin said. “More divine. Am I wrong?”

“You’re not wrong. I was made queen of the dryads. I’m a bit more than a demigod now—more of a three-quarters god. There ought to be a word for it.”

Now and then Julia would brush a dead plant with her fingers, absentmindedly, and it would straighten up and become green. When she pointed at a fallen tree its roots would come to life and grip the ground again, and it would pull itself up hastily as if it had been caught napping on the job. Quentin couldn’t figure out how she decided which ones to revive. Maybe it was random; maybe some trees were more deserving than others.

“I’d like to do something for you, Quentin,” she said. “On behalf of Fillory. You did us a great service today, and you’ve always served us well. Is there something here that you’ve never seen or done, that you’ve always wanted to?”

Quentin thought for a minute. He’d picked up the silver sword and was carrying it, but a little awkwardly since for whatever reason he hadn’t managed to summon a sheath to go with it, and he was leery of touching the pale flames that licked along its blade. He stuck it in the ground and left it there. Probably he’d be able to summon it again, if he ever needed it.

What did he want? It was a lovely gesture, but as far as he knew he’d been everywhere in Fillory, or everywhere that was worth going. He didn’t feel especially interested in the dwarf tunnels, or the Fingerling Islands, or in the tourist attractions of greater Loria.

But wait. There was one thing.

“Can you show me the Far Side of the World? Show us? Alice should come too, if she wants.”

“Of course.”

“It’s not like I haven’t already been there,” Alice said. “As a niffin.”

“True,” Quentin said. “I forgot. You should get a different reward.”

“I’ll save mine. This is for you. I’ll stay here for a while.”

So Julia took Quentin’s hand, and they rose up together and flew west out over the coast of Fillory, faster and faster, across the sea and then over the wall at the rim of the world and down, head down, in a great curving roller-coaster swoop. Soon Quentin became aware that his point of view had changed, that without having turned around they were rising up rather than diving down. Gravity had turned around. They surmounted another wall and then they were looking out over the Far Side.

Julia paused, hovering. For him it would have been exhausting, but for Julia flying was nothing, and as long as he was with her it was nothing for him too. Her large hand encased his completely; the feeling reminded Quentin of being a child. It was twilight on the Far Side; the sun had just set there as it rose on Fillory. He couldn’t see much, just hushed fields and valleys. The difference was subtle, but even from this distance it was quieter and more intense than Fillory—richer in whatever made Fillory magical, more densely infused. There was an air of excited expectation. Curious little motes of light sparkled in the dusk, like tiny glowing gnats.

“I can’t show you everything,” Julia said. “Not even I have those permissions. But there’s something in particular I think you might like.”

When they moved the wind moved with them, so that the air around them remained still as they flew. Down below there were dark rivers and pale chalk roads. Quentin spotted what might have been an elaborate tree house in a forest, and a castle on an island in a moonlit lake.

“Are those fireflies?” he asked. “The lights?”

“No, the air is just kind of sparkly here. It’s a thing. You don’t notice it during the daytime.”

Tiny lights were bobbing along in their wake, too, streaming out behind them, like the phosphorescent trail of a ship in a tropical sea. The sunset was in different colors from a terrestrial or even a Fillorian sunset: it ran more to greens and purples.

She set them down in the center of a grand, rambling garden. It must once have been laid out according to a precise design, like a French formal garden, all ruled lines and perfect curves and complex symmetries. But it had been left to go to seed, shrubs overflowing onto paths, vines winding themselves lasciviously through wrought iron, rose beds dying off into withered brown traceries, exquisite in their own way. It reminded him of nothing so much as the frozen community garden he’d wandered into long, long ago in Brooklyn, chasing the paper note that Jane Chatwin had given him, before he came out the other side and into Brakebills.