The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(142)

He remembered the first time he saw Fillory. He’d cried his eyes out in front of a clock tree. Not much chance of Plum doing that, but still: he’d give her some time.

“No more spinning,” Janet said. “That’s all I ask. The spinning thing was always bullshit. I don’t know how the dwarfs sold them on that in the first place.”

“I hear you,” Eliot said. “I’m not arguing. We’ll take it up with them when they get back. If they come back.”

“But listen, what about the color?” Josh said. “Is that on the table? Because I gotta tell you, the white never did it for me. A bird took a crap on that thing, you could see it a mile away. I know Castle Blackspire was a house of unspeakable evil or whatever, but you have to admit it looked pretty badass.”

“What about the name, though?” Poppy said. “We’d have to change that too.”

“Ooh, good point,” Josh said. “I guess we can’t live in Castle Mauvespire or whatever. Or could we? Hi, Quentin!”

“Hi, guys. Don’t let me interrupt.”

They didn’t. They kept talking, and he just listened. It was good seeing them all together in Fillory again, it made him happy, but there was a distance between him and them now too: a thin, almost undetectable gap, even between him and Eliot. They never would have admitted it—they would have hotly denied it if he said anything—but the truth was that he wasn’t quite in the club anymore. He would always be part of Fillory, especially now that he’d held the entire world in his temporarily divine hands—it would always have his vast, invisible fingerprints on it, forever, like the paths of spiral labyrinths. But he knew his place too, and he was starting to think it wasn’t here. He’d come back one day, or he hoped he would, but they were the kings and queens now.

He had a different role to play. Maybe he and Alice could be a club. He walked back to where she stood talking with Julia.

“It’s too bad James never made it here,” Quentin said. “He would have liked it. I sometimes wonder what happened to him.”

“Hedge fund, Hoboken. He’ll die in a skiing accident in Vail, age seventy-seven.”

“Ah.”

“Wait,” Alice said. “But does that mean you know how we’re going to die too?”

“Some people’s deaths are harder to predict than others. James is easy. Yours I can’t see. You’re too complicated. Too many twists and turns left to come.”

The first dawn was over, and the sun was up now, and Quentin had the distinct feeling it was getting to be time to go. He never thought he’d leave Fillory again, not of his own free will, but he understood now, with steadily increasing keenness, that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Not yet. He had a bit farther to go.

“Julia,” Quentin said. “Before I leave I should tell you: Plum and I ran into an old friend of yours. She called herself Asmodeus.”

Quentin knew this might be hard for Julia to hear, but he thought she would want to know.

“Asmo,” she said. “Yes. We were friends, back in Murs.”

“When we found Rupert’s suitcase, the one with the spell in it, there was a knife there too. She took it. She said it was a weapon for killing gods. She said to tell you she was going fox hunting.”

“Oh, I know.” Julia’s great goddess’s eyes had become distant. “I know all about it. Did you ever notice how Asmo always had a little more information than she was supposed to? That was me, keeping an eye on her. I didn’t want to be too obvious, but I made sure she found what she needed.”

“What about Reynard?” Quentin said. “Do you know if she caught him?”

“Caught him?” Now she half smiled, though her eyes remained at the same distance. “She gutted him like a furry red fish.”

Quentin hoped that a three-quarters-goddess wasn’t so lofty and divine that she couldn’t enjoy some bloody and well-deserved revenge. He didn’t think she was. He was enjoying it just by association.

Plum joined them. She was ready to talk now.

“This is kind of amazing.” She still couldn’t stop staring at everything; she held up her own hands and wiggled her fingers, as if she were looking at them underwater. “I mean, really amazing.”

“Is it what you expected?”

“It is and it isn’t,” she said. “I mean, so far all I’ve seen is a whole lot of trees and grass. I haven’t gotten to any of the exotic stuff, so it’s not like it’s that different from Earth. Except for you,” she added, to Julia. “You’re different.”

“How do you feel?”

“Floaty, sort of. If that makes any sense. But in a good way. Like something incredibly interesting could possibly happen to me at literally any second.”

“Do you want to stay?” Julia asked.

“I think so, if that’s all right. For a while at least.” Julia inspired a certain instinctive deference even in Plum. “I like it here. I feel whole.”

“I’m sure they can put you up in Whitespire,” Quentin said, “or whatever’s left of it.”

“Actually I thought I might pay a visit to my great-aunt Jane. It’s way past time I got to know that side of the family, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only relative she’s got left. I don’t know, maybe she’ll teach me how to make clock-trees. From what I hear about her I think we might get along.”