The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(143)

Quentin thought she might be right. It was all beginning for Plum—he could almost see the plans forming in her head—but it reminded him again that for him things were ending. A cool breeze blew through the clearing. He wondered if Alice would come with him.

“I keep thinking about something,” Alice said. “If Ember and Umber are dead, and Quentin’s not the god of Fillory anymore, then it must be somebody else. But who? Is it you, Julia?”

“It’s not me,” Julia said.

Alice was right, the power must have gone somewhere, but Quentin didn’t know where either. He’d felt it flow out of him, and he could tell that it knew where it was going, but it hadn’t told him. If not Julia then who? Probably it was one of the talking animals, the way it had been before. The sloth, maybe. The others were listening—they wanted to know too.

“Fillory’s always had a god,” Quentin said. “It has to be someone.”

“Does it?” Julia said. “When you were a god you mended Fillory, Quentin. You don’t remember it, but you did. You did it well. Fillory’s in tune now—it’s perfectly balanced and calibrated. It could run on its own for a few millennia without any trouble at all. Maybe Fillory doesn’t need a god right now. I think this age might just be a godless one.”

A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them and helping or not according to his or her divine mood. There would be nobody to praise them and nobody to condemn them. They would have to do it all themselves.

The cold wind was blowing steadily now, and the temperature was dropping. Quentin hugged himself.

“Fillory will have you, though,” Alice pointed out.

“Oh, I spend most of my time on the Far Side,” Julia said. “I’ll look in now and then. Fillory will have to make do with a part-time three-quarters god, but I have a feeling that will be enough. Things are different now. It’s a new age.”

“A new age.”

It was very different. Very new. Fillory was a land reborn, and he’d been there, he’d assisted at the birth, but he wasn’t going to see it grow up. He looked around: it was all really ending, the great love affair of his youth, and it was as if he were already gone, and he was seeing Fillory without him in it. Somewhere along the way he’d finally outgrown it, the way people always said he would. Long or short, great or terrible, Fillory’s new age would happen without him. He belonged to the last age, the one he’d just ended with two strokes of a sword. This age would have its own heroes. Maybe Plum would be one of them.

Time to go, before he lost his composure in front of everybody. Eliot was staring up at the sky. It was covered over with a thick blanket of cloud.

“Oh, thank God,” he said. “Or whatever the appropriate expression is now. Finally.”

Out of a sky blank and pale as a clean sheet of paper, white snow began to fall. The flakes settled on the warm ground and melted there, like a cool hand on the forehead of a feverish child. The long summer was over at last.





CHAPTER 31


A week later Quentin and Alice stood together in the fourth-floor workroom of Plum’s townhouse in Manhattan. A door to somewhere else stood in front of them. They felt neither comfortable nor uncomfortable with each other, or maybe they felt both at once. They both knew each other and they didn’t. They were old lovers, and they were practically strangers.

It was just them now. Everybody else had stayed behind in Fillory.

“Are you sure you didn’t want to stay too?” Alice said, frowning at him doubtfully. “I mean, obviously you’re not a king anymore, but I’m sure you could have. Eliot would have loved it, and there’s no Ember and Umber to kick you out anymore, and they never would anyway. Not after everything that happened.”

“Really. I’m sure. This feels right.”

She shook her head.

“I still don’t get it. Back in the day you were the biggest Fillory weenie around.”

“That is true. I was a huge Fillory weenie.”

“I have this awful feeling,” Alice said, “that you left for me. And/or that you left because you’re pissed that you’re not a king anymore.”

“I’m really not pissed about it. At all. It wasn’t that.” He was a bit surprised himself at how untempted he’d been. “Fillory is who I used to be, but I’m somebody different now.”

“I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that. Though it does beg the question, who the hell are you?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

She considered that.

“Maybe the answer’s in there,” she said.

Alice indicated the door. It wasn’t a grand or even particularly unusual-looking door, though it was handsome enough: tall and narrow, made of weathered wood painted a pale green. It was the kind of thing you’d find leaning up against the back wall of a vintage furniture store.