The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(41)

“I feel vaguely blasphemous doing this,” Plum said. “Like, only Jesus is allowed to do this.”

“I really don’t think he’d mind.”

“How do you know what Jesus would mind?” She was silent for a minute, concentrating on the walking. It was not wholly unlike trying to walk on a black, cold, unusually violent bouncy castle. “Did you like Brakebills South?”

“I don’t think anybody likes it. But it was good for me. I learned a lot.”

“Yeah. I liked it when we were animals.”

“That was good. Did they turn you into foxes?”

She shook her head.

“Bears and seals. For some reason they don’t do foxes anymore.”

When they’d gotten on the plane that morning Brakebills South had seemed very far away, but now they were here, just a short splash across the Drake Passage from Antarctica, and suddenly it was very close, and his memories of it felt very fresh. They’d been so innocent then, he and Alice, even after what happened when they were foxes. Their feelings had been so big and raw and urgent, and they’d had absolutely no idea what to do with them. He wished he had it to do over again. He would try to be a nicer, stronger person.

Except that wasn’t quite it. What he really wished was that he had Alice back now, in the present.

“Did you do that thing at the end, where you race to the pole?” Plum said. “I bet you did.”

“Yup. You win.”

Plum just seemed excited about going back.

“I bet you got there first.”

“That one you lose.”

“Ha!” Her laughter got lost among the waves. “I can’t believe the great Professor Coldwater got beat to the pole! Who beat you?”

“A better magician than me. Did you win your year?”

“I sure did,” she said. “By a mile.”

The moon came up, unnaturally bright, a wafer of white phosphorus, but the black water seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it. Even a ripple was enough to trip over, so they wound up taking big exaggerated steps. Farther out from the beach the water smoothed out but the swells got bigger. The few lighted windows in Ushuaia, which shut down after ten o’clock, looked inexpressibly cozy. Fortunately they were wearing warm clothes, parkas and long underwear, which if all went according to plan they would never see again.

They hiked out about a half mile, well out into the bay. According to the nautical charts Quentin had consulted that was far enough. They stopped and bobbed up and down on the water in place, comically, not quite in sync. They’d prepared as much of the spell as they could ahead of time.

Quentin took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. It was rare for magicians to kill themselves with their own magic, but stories that ended that way usually began something like this.

“All right?”

Plum chewed her lip and nodded.

“All right.”

Quentin peeled open a Tupperware container full of a revolting paste he’d ginned up back in New York based on whalebone dust scraped from some scrimshaw he’d bought at an antique store. They each dipped in two fingers and anointed their foreheads.

“Maybe we should stand farther apart,” Plum said. “If this works we’re going to get really big.”

“Right.”

They took a few steps back, like they were preparing to fight a duel, then faced the same direction. Quentin braced himself. Based on his memory of the goose transformation back at Brakebills he was pretty sure that this was going to be really unpleasant. He took a deep breath, held up his hands, and made a gentle downbeat, like he was cueing the start of a Mahler symphony.

It began. Surprisingly, it wasn’t that bad.

Shrinking, having the mass squeezed out of him like toothpaste out of a tube, must have been the rough part of becoming a goose, because now the opposite was happening, Quentin was expanding, and it didn’t feel that bad at all. He was inflating like a balloon, especially his head, which was getting absolutely huge. His parka strained and stretched and then burst apart in a cloud of down.

His neck and shoulders merged into his body as the Quentin-balloon grew and grew and his eyes zoomed off in opposite directions on either side of his gigantic head. His arms and hands grew more slowly, becoming proportionally smaller, then flattened and dearticulated into flippers—it was like wearing mittens—and slid smoothly down toward his waist. His legs fused together, and something very curious was going on with his feet, but he took note of this fact only in passing—it didn’t especially alarm him. The most hilarious part was his mouth: the corners raced back toward his ears so that his head was practically split in half by a fifteen-foot recurved smile.

His lower teeth melted away completely. His upper teeth lengthened and multiplied crazily into a hairy overbite, more like a mustache than teeth.

The only real moment of panic came when he toppled forward into the water and went under. His human instincts told him he was about to freeze or drown or both, but he did neither. The water was neither warm nor cold—it was nothing. It was like air. He did utter some truly epic, booming whale-sneezes before his blowhole-based respiratory system got going. But even that was kind of enjoyable.

And then everything was still. He was hanging in the void, neutrally buoyant, twenty feet below the surface. The Quentin-blimp had been launched. He was a blue whale. He was roughly as long as a basketball court. He was in a really good mood.