The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(144)

“Well,” she said, “if we f*ck up our lives completely we can always go crawling back to Eliot.”

“Right,” Quentin said. “We’ll always have that.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“You do know we’re not going out anymore, right?”

“I do know that.”

“I don’t want you to have the wrong idea.”

“I really don’t have any ideas at all. Right or wrong.”

That last part wasn’t strictly true. He had a lot of ideas, of both kinds, most of them about Alice. But he could keep them to himself for a little longer.

As soon as he was back in New York Quentin had thrown himself right back into the process of making a new land. He knew right away that he was going to try it again. He’d thought that particular dream was gone forever, after he used the last of Mayakovsky’s coins, but now that he had the seedpod from the Far Side it seemed worth a try at least. He didn’t have Rupert’s book anymore, or the page either, but he was pretty sure he knew them by heart; at this point he doubted he could forget them if he tried.

And he had Alice to help him. She seemed content to stay in the townhouse for now, and even seven years out of practice she was a better magician than he’d ever been, or ever would be. She kibitzed.

Whatever came out of it, it was good for him and Alice to have a project to do together. It took some of the pressure off. It was a chance to get to know each other again, and for that matter for Alice to get to know herself again. She still had a lot of healing to do, and they needed something to talk about that wasn’t of life-or-death importance, something to bicker over, something concrete to focus on other than their own bruised, confused feelings.

Maybe nothing would come of it, but Quentin thought it was worth finding out, and he thought it wasn’t impossible that Alice thought so too. It was pretty clear to him now that if she’d ever loved him, back then, it wasn’t just for the person he was, it was for the person that he might one day become. Maybe that’s who he was now.

When they finished casting the spell, and the dust and smoke cleared, there was a brand-new door on the far wall of the room. They studied it for another minute. There was no hurry.

“The door knocker,” she said. “Nice touch. Was that you?”

Quentin looked closer. He was going to have to get new glasses, his eyes were getting even worse. But sure enough: it was in the shape of a blue whale’s tail.

“Remind me to tell you about that sometime.”

The whale seemed like a good sign. He walked up to the door and opened it. Cool white sunlight spilled through. It wasn’t another ghost house; this world had a proper outdoors. His first impression was of cool, sweet air and a dark vegetable green.

The curse was lifted. They really had made a land, alive and brand new. A bird called. He stepped through.

“Atmosphere’s breathable,” he said.

“Dork.”

She joined him.

“So this is your secret garden,” Alice said.

The weather wasn’t much: a trifle brisk and with clouds moving in. They were looking down an orderly corridor of trees, fruit trees: there really was an orchard this time. What they could see of the sky contained three moons of various sizes, like stray marbles: one white, one pale pink, and a tiny bluish one.

“You are going to have some freak-show tides,” Alice said.

“If there’s even an ocean,” he said. “And I wish you’d say ‘we’ and not ‘you.’ We made this together, you know.”

“It’s your land, Quentin. It came out of your head. But I like it here. Looks like Scotland, sort of.”

“Want an apple? Or whatever these are?” They were hard and round and red anyway.

“I really don’t. Feels like I’d be eating your fingernail or something.”

They strolled through the orchard and stepped out into open country. Quentin’s land was an uneven land, covered with grassy humps and hillocks like ocean swells. They passed a copse of thin trees that resembled aspens, but with their trunks woven together more like banyan trees. The clouds were curious shapes, not cumulus and cirrus, new varietals of cloud that didn’t occur on Earth. Something shot through the air overhead with a fast whirring sound, leaving a fleeting impression of gray feathers, but they turned their heads too late to catch it.

“Interesting,” Quentin said.

For no particular reason there was a rainbow low above the horizon. Alice pointed it out.

“Nice art direction. Bit of a cliché, but nice.”

“Like I’m sure your magic land is totally original.”

Alice booted a pebble.

“You’ll have to think of some clever secret way kids can find their way in here,” she said.

“That should be fun.”

“Don’t make it too easy, though.”

“No, not too easy. And not for a while.” He took her hand; she didn’t take it back. “I want us to have it to ourselves for a bit.”

Their cheeks were turning red, and they had to stop and warm each other up with spells to keep going. Then they resumed tramping along, over short bristly grass, through sprays of tiny phosphorescent wildflowers that shut up frantically when they got too near, like sea anemones. It was a big country, bigger than Quentin expected: there were mountains in the distance, and soon they were skirting a sizable forest. When Quentin kicked up a clod of grass the soil underneath was smooth and rich as black butter.