The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(145)

Something tickled his breastbone, and he reached inside his jacket. His old Fillorian pocket watch: it was ticking. He thought it would never run again. It must like it here.

“Hang on, I want to do something.”

He’d always half expected that the watch would turn out to have some sort of amazing magical power—turning back time, maybe, or slowing it, or freezing it, or something. It certainly looked magical enough. But if it had any powers at all he’d never found them. Funny how some things you’re sure will pay off never do.

Slipping it off its chain, he approached a tree on the edge of the forest, this world’s answer to a beech tree, and placed the watch against its trunk and pressed. After a moment’s hesitation the tree accepted it: the watch sank into the smooth gray bark as if it were warm clay and stuck there, embedded, still ticking. He left it there. A homemade clock-tree. Maybe it would breed more.

Quentin recognized this land and yet at the same time he didn’t. Could this be home? He didn’t see any reason why not. But it was a strange, wild country. It was no utopia. It wasn’t a tame land.

He’d come a long way to get here. He was very far from the bitter, angry teenager he’d been in Brooklyn, before this all started, and thank God for that. But the funny thing was that after all this time he still didn’t think that that miserable teenager had been wrong. He didn’t disagree with him—he still felt solidarity with him on the major points. The world was f*cking awful. It was a wretched, desolate place, a desert of meaninglessness, a heartless wasteland, where horrific things happened all the time for no reason and nothing good lasted for long.

He’d been right about the world, but he was wrong about himself. The world was a desert, but he was a magician, and to be a magician was to be a secret spring—a moving oasis. He wasn’t desolate, and he wasn’t empty. He was full of emotion, full of feelings, bursting with them, and when it came down to it that’s what being a magician was. They weren’t ordinary feelings—they weren’t the tame, domesticated kind. Magic was wild feelings, the kind that escaped out of you and into the world and changed things. There was a lot of skill to it, and a lot of learning, and a lot of work, but that was where the power began: the power to enchant the world.

They walked and walked, and they kept waiting for the land to end (how? A bottomless cliff? A sea? A brick wall?) but it went back and back and back. It was a lot more than a hundred acres. Some weather was coming on: they could see it advancing down the valley, clouds trailing smudgy gray rain.

“I didn’t realize there would be so much of it,” Quentin said.

“How deep do you think it goes?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

They passed a tree stump that must have been ten yards across. They climbed over a fence (built by who?) using a stile. Wind rumpled the grass and pushed at the trees; the leaves seemed to turn pale when the wind blew, until Quentin realized they just flipped over in the breeze, showing their white undersides.

He caught the deep thump of hooves, and a rustling and snapping in the trees. Something big was coming. Alice heard it too.

“What the hell is that?” she said.

He didn’t know. Some monster that had escaped out of his unconscious, into this pristine new land? He hoped they weren’t going to have to fight, he’d had enough of that for now. It was coming at them through the forest, and he could see disturbances in the canopy as whatever it was bulled its way closer. He looked back: they’d never make it back to the door in time. He couldn’t even see it anymore.

Out of the woods, leaves spraying and branches springing back in its wake, burst an enormous equine beast. It was a horse the size of a house. It came trotting up to them and stopped a few feet away, breath steaming, as if it were awaiting their pleasure. Quentin’s head was just about level with its massive, balding knees.

It was unquestionably a horse, a chocolate-colored horse, complete with a black mane and glossy, watery brown eyes as big as bowling balls. But it appeared to be covered in something softer than horsehair—it looked like it was part horse, part sofa. In fact—

“Is that velveteen?” Alice touched the thing’s shin lightly.

“You know what?” Quentin said. “I think this must be the Cozy Horse.”

“Has to be!” Alice’s face lit up, and she laughed.

In all his time in Fillory he’d never once seen it. No one had, and Quentin had started to think it didn’t exist, whatever Rupert said. It was easily the silliest single inhabitant of Fillory, a total nursery fantasy, but as it turned out it was extremely real. Uncomfortably real, even, to the point where it was currently blotting out the sky above them in an intimidating manner.

“But what’s it doing here? Why isn’t it in Fillory?”

The Cozy Horse regarded them dumbly. It wasn’t going to tell. It flared its nostrils and gazed off over their heads in that supremely unconcerned way horses have. Quentin was pleased that it was here: he’d made a land, and the Cozy Horse’s presence seemed like a stamp of approval.

“I have a theory about this place,” Alice said. “Are you ready? I’m starting to think this land isn’t an island after all, Quentin. I think it must go all the way through. You meant to make an island, but you also made a bridge. A bridge connecting Fillory and Earth. This big fellow must have come across it to welcome us.”