The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(40)

He was ready. The whole business of getting kicked out of Fillory had been good for him. It made him tougher, more grounded in reality, to the point where he could deal with getting kicked out of Brakebills. He was basically homeless, and getting increasingly less respectable, but he knew who he was and what he had to do.

He just needed a plan. He needed to get himself together—he needed resources, he needed somewhere to live. He needed to find out everything he could about niffins. For that he needed money, and to get money they would have to break this damn bond.

They weren’t going to do that without help. Unfortunately the only magician Quentin could think of who was smart enough to help them was very far away, on another continent in fact. It was a place that he and Alice had known well.

When Quentin first suggested a field trip to Antarctica Plum wasn’t enthusiastic. It was cold there, and a pain to get to, and also Professor Mayakovsky was kind of a dick. But Plum was a creature of enthusiasms, and it didn’t take her long to come around to the idea. It would be an adventure! She could be a goose again! She’d loved being a goose.

“Except,” she said, even more excited, “why be a goose? We’ve been geese. We could go as something else! Anything else!”

“I was thinking of going as a human being,” Quentin said. “Like on an airplane.”

Plum was already at her laptop and Googling.

“OK, check this out. What’s the fastest migratory bird on Earth?”

“An airplane.”

“Whatever, you are like the bullshittest magician ever. Look at this, it’s called the great snipe.”

“Are you sure that’s a real bird? It sounds like something from Lewis Carroll.”

“‘Some have been recorded to fly nonstop for forty-eight hours over 6,760 kilometers.’ I’m quoting here.”

“From Wikipedia.”

But still. He looked over her shoulder. The great snipe was a plump little wading bird, roughly egg-shaped, with a big long bill and zigzaggy brown stripes, like a not particularly exotic seashell. It didn’t look like a speed demon.

“‘Female great snipe are, on average, significantly larger than the male,’” Plum said.

“We’d need something to base the spell on, like some great snipe DNA. At least the first time we did it. I don’t think we can do the transformation based on an image from a Wikipedia entry.”

“Are you sure? They have it in hi-res.”

“Even so. Plus I’m kind of concerned about the cold. That bird doesn’t look like it was evolved for Antarctica.”

“Except it’ll still be summer,” Plum said. “Backward seasons.”

“Even so.”

“Stop saying that.” Plum frowned, then brightened up again. “OK, forget about birds. I don’t know why I was even thinking birds. We could be fish! Or whales—blue whales!”

“We’d still have to go the last bit. After we got to Antarctica.”

“We’d just swim under the ice!”

“That’s the North Pole. Antarctica is a continent. Under the snow it’s all rock.”

She huffed her annoyance.

“Whatever, Nanook.”

But of course she was right: it would be cool to be a blue whale. The idea grew on him. There was no particular reason to do it, other than it would be more interesting, but that seemed like enough. What else was magic for? It was safe: they were legally protected, and barring scattered orca attacks blue whales had no natural predators. The only downside was that even though they were fast swimmers by cetacean standards they turned out to be painfully slow compared with most birds, let alone the great snipe—20 mph was about a blue whale’s top speed, at least over long distances. At that rate it would take them a couple of months to get to Antarctica.

“I doubt we could delay the job that long,” Quentin said.

“Yeah,” Plum said sadly. “It would have been nice though. Oh well, another dream dies.”

But in the end they found a way to save it. They flew commercial most of the way, as far as Ushuaia, a small but unexpectedly charming port in Tierra del Fuego that claimed the distinction of being the southernmost city in the world. It was squeezed into a narrow strip of land between the Beagle Channel and the snow-covered peaks of the Martial Range behind it, as if it were backed up against them and trying not to fall into the freezing water. From there they could cross the Drake Passage to the coast of Antarctica in the form of blue whales.

From the airport they took a taxi to the waterfront. They’d brought no luggage. From the safety of a concrete wharf, the Beagle Channel did indeed look forbiddingly cold, a flat gray stripe of sea lapped at by glaciers on either side. But they couldn’t do anything from dry land. For the actual transformation they’d have to be in deep water.

Chartering a boat would have been the sensible thing to do, if they were tourists, or sport fishermen, or smugglers. But Quentin and Plum were magicians, so they waited until midnight, then cast spells on their shoes and hiked out onto the channel on foot.

It was tricky at first, till they made it out through the mercifully light surf and got used to the rhythm of the swells. It was only their shoes that were buoyant, so if they fell over they’d get wet like anybody else. Once they were a couple hundred yards from shore, out beyond the glow of the lights along the beach, it got quiet and very dark and very cold.