The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(47)

But Plum was frowning.

“But I mean so why are you still here?” she said. “In Antarctica? If you’re this great wizard? I don’t get it. I mean, look at all this stuff! You could be famous!”

“I could be.” Mayakovsky said it sourly; the showman was gone. “But why? Why should I care if people know my name? People do not deserve Mayakovsky!”

“So you like being here? Alone like this? I don’t understand.”

“Why shouldn’t I like it?” He stuck out his lower lip. He didn’t much care for being psychoanalyzed. “Here I have everything. Outside there is nothing for me. Here I can do my work.”

“But she’s right, it makes no sense.” Quentin found his voice. “You’ve probably solved problems people have been banging their heads against for years. You have to go back and tell everybody.”

“I have to do nothing!” And then more quietly: “Enough. I will never go back. I am done with that.”

Even with his ordinary, averagely brilliant brain Quentin was beginning to understand. He knew a few things about Mayakovsky’s personal history: how he’d had an affair with a student named Emily Greenstreet that ended so disastrously that he’d had to flee to Brakebills South. And Quentin knew something about hiding out from the world, too. He’d done his fair share of it. He’d been so depressed and traumatized after what happened to Alice that he withdrew from the world of magic and swore never to cast a spell again. If he never risked anything more—he reasoned—he could never lose anything more. He could never hurt anybody else.

But it hadn’t lasted. It wouldn’t do. Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out. Eliot and Janet and Julia had come for him, and he’d gone back to Fillory after all. He’d risked again, and won, and lost, and it hurt but he didn’t regret it, not any of it.

“You’re wrong,” Quentin said. “Fine, you’re a genius, but you’re wrong about this. You could go back. It wouldn’t be as bad as you think.”

“Do not tell me what I can do. Do not tell me who I am. When you can do all this, little man, then you can judge me.”

“I’m not judging you. I’m just saying—”

“You—you are not such a mystery.” Mayakovsky jabbed Quentin in the chest with a finger like a dried sausage. “You think I do not know you? They threw you out of that place, that other world you go to. Yes? And you came back to Brakebills. But they would not have you there either! So out you go again!”

Jesus, he must know about Fillory, or at least the Neitherlands. Mayakovsky advanced on Quentin, who gave ground.

“Well, yeah,” Quentin said. “But you’ll notice I’m not hanging around my ice castle brooding about it.”

“No! No! Now you want to be a criminal! But even that is too much! You have to come running to Daddy, begging for help!”

“My dad’s dead.”

Quentin stopped backing up.

“I may be a second-rate magician,” he said, “but at least I’m not a weird recluse who yells at people. I’m out in the world trying to get something done. And I’ll tell you something else, I think you know how to break an incorporate bond. In fact”—oh my God, maybe he actually was a genius—“in fact, I think you’re under one yourself. That’s what’s keeping you here. Isn’t it?”

Mayakovsky had been very well prepared for their visit. Too well, even for him. It was a long shot—but Mayakovsky hesitated, and Quentin knew he was close.

“Tell me how to break it.” He pressed his advantage. “You must have figured it out, even if you’re too scared to do it yourself. Tell me how. Help somebody for a change!”

He’d touched a nerve, because something went cold behind Mayakovsky’s eyes, and he slapped Quentin across the face. Quentin had forgotten how he liked to do that. It stung like hell, though not as much as it would have if he hadn’t already been drunk on lichen vodka. It made his ears ring, but his face was already two-thirds numb.

He was drunk enough that he did something he’d always wanted to do, which was to slap Mayakovsky back. With his grizzly hide it was like slapping a crocodile. Mayakovsky broke out in his sulfurous yellow grin.

“There it is!” he shouted. “Again!”

Quentin slapped him again.

With no warning Mayakovsky threw his thick arms around Quentin in a big Russian bear hug. It was hard to follow the emotional about-face, but Quentin went with it. Why not? Over Mayakovsky’s shoulder he saw Plum watching them round-eyed—she looked like she was trying to teleport herself out of the room through sheer force of will. But f*ck it, why shouldn’t two men hug each other in a basement in the middle of Antarctica? He patted Mayakovsky’s back with his free hand. This poor f*cking guy.

And Quentin’s father was dead. Who else was he going to hug? This must be what having a family is like, he thought. This must be how people hug their parents. Good old Mayakovsky. They weren’t so different after all.

“I am a dead man, Quentin. This is my grave. I bury myself here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Quentin said. “It’s stupid. You can break the bond. You can come back anytime. Come with us!”