The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(48)

Mayakovsky pulled away. He held Quentin at arm’s length.

“You keep your shit world! You hear me? You keep it! I will stay here. I am done!”

He patted Quentin’s cheek.

“It is over for me. You are a pathetic mediocrity, but you are braver than me. You will not end like Mayakovsky. It is not over for you.”

He held out the bottle. Christ, Quentin thought they’d finally finished it, but there it was, practically full again. He must be refilling it by magic.

Quentin didn’t remember much after that. Later he would have a hazy recollection of Mayakovsky singing and laughing and weeping but it all got mixed up with the lichen-flavored dreams he had after he passed out, and he could never separate the fact from the hallucinations. In his dreams, at least, they sat on the floor of the workroom, passing the bottle around, and Mayakovsky told them about how he’d been there in the Neitherlands too, when the big blue gods returned and tried to take their magic back. How he’d fought them, alongside the dragons, how he’d ridden bareback on the great white dragon of Lake Vostok. How he’d smashed the bell jar over the Neitherlands with lightning and thunder from his own hands.

—

The next morning Quentin woke up in his own bed. Not in Brakebills South, in his own bed back in the Newark Airport Marriott. He had no memory of how he got there. Mayakovsky must have sent them back through a portal after all, the same way he’d sent Quentin back to Brakebills after the race to the South Pole.

Though Jesus, it made him shudder to think of Mayakovsky opening portals in the state they’d been in. Alcohol and portal magic, not a great combination.

When Quentin sat up he immediately wished he had in fact died in a catastrophic teleportation accident. Every hangover feels like the worst hangover you’ve ever had, but this one was definitely a classic. One for the ages. He felt like all the water had been forcibly sucked out of his body, like an apricot in a dehydration chamber, and replaced with venom from an angry adder.

Slowly, carefully, he got to his hands and knees. He pushed his face into his pillow, abasing himself before whatever angry god had done this to him. Maybe there was some untainted blood left somewhere in his body, and it would run downhill into his aching brain. His fingers felt something under his pillow, something hard and round and cool to the touch. A gift from the tooth fairy. He took it out.

He was right, it was a gift. It was a coin, shiny and gold, the size of a silver dollar but slightly thicker. There were three of them. He turned one over in his hand. It gleamed like it was in sunlight, but the curtains were drawn. He knew what it was right away.

Quentin smiled, his dry lips cracking. Mayakovsky had done it, exactly what Quentin had said: he’d stored up power in these coins, the power he’d need to break the bond. Mayakovsky must have prepared them to break his own bond but then never used them. God bless the old bastard. Maybe Quentin’s father hadn’t had any power, but Mayakovsky did, and more than that he’d had the courage to pass it on to someone else. He was wrong about himself: he was a brave man after all.

Kneeling on the bed, his headache already fading, Quentin held one of the coins between two fingers and made it disappear—a one-handed sleight, stage magic—then brought it back. It felt like the present he’d been waiting for all his life. He wouldn’t waste it. The plan was going to work, they were going to break the bond, and steal the case, and then he could start over. He could start his real work. For the first time since he’d left Brakebills his life was starting to make sense to him again.

The coin’s edges were sharp and newly minted. On one side was the image of a wild goose in flight. On the other was a face, a young woman in profile: She was Emily Greenstreet.





CHAPTER 11


Man,” Josh said. “I cannot believe the world is ending.”

“Stop saying that,” Janet said.

“Order,” Eliot said, not for the first time, “in the court.”

Poppy said nothing. She was thinking, her mouth twisted to one side. They were in the high square room in Castle Whitespire where the kings and queens met every day at five o’clock. The flaming ruins of a five-alarm sunset smoldered in the window behind her, which was currently pointing west.

“It can’t really all be going to end,” she said finally.

“And yet.” That was Janet.

“I feel like I just got here. I did just get here! Do we have any other evidence that it’s ending? I mean besides Ember’s say-so?”

“Sweetie, He is the god of us,” Josh said. “He probably knows.”

“He’s not infallible.”

“How do you know?”

“Because if He were infallible,” Janet put in, “He wouldn’t be such a twat all the time.”

Janet never shrank from taking both sides of an argument at once.

“You know,” Josh said, “I bet it’s because of sacrilege like that that the world is ending. Your earthy, irreverent sense of humor has doomed us all.”

“Poppy does have a point,” Eliot said. “Don’t forget that the first time we met Ember He was a prisoner. Martin Chatwin had Him locked away in Ember’s Tomb.”

“So He’s not omnipotent,” Josh said, clinging to his point. “He might still be infallible.”

“Either way, He never tells us everything He knows.” Eliot adjusted his crown, which had gotten crooked. “Not till it’s too late. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s going on now. All Ember is saying so far is that if it continues on its present course, the world is going to end. That doesn’t mean Fillory can’t be saved. Necessarily.”