The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(49)

He waited for somebody to jump in. Nobody did.

“What I’m suggesting is that maybe we, its kings and queens, could save it.”

“Sure,” Janet said. “We could put on a show! We could use the old barn!”

“I’m making a serious point.”

“Yes, and I am mocking your serious point to show how ludicrous it is.”

“Look, Ember is a god,” Eliot said, “but He’s a god only of Fillory. He’s limited. He doesn’t know everything there is to know about the wider universe. I think we should poke around some ourselves, see if He’s missed something. See how far our royal power can stretch. See if we can get an advance look at this so-called apocalypse. Maybe we can head it off at the pass.”

This was met with more silence, while everybody tried to think of a reason why what Eliot was proposing might be plausible or achievable.

“Yeah, no, of course,” Josh said. “I mean, we’re gonna go down fighting, right?”

“Right!” Loyal Poppy gave a swift nod of her sharp chin.

“So—what?” Janet said. “We just head back out into the wilderness? Looking for adventure? In whatever comes our way?”

“That’s right,” Eliot said. “That’s what we do.”

She weighed this suggestion.

“OK. But I’m coming this time. Last time I got stuck babysitting the country and you guys were gone for like a year and a half. When do we leave?”

“ASAP.”

“And what if we can’t?” Poppy said. “What if we can’t head it off?”

Janet shrugged.

“I guess we go back home. I mean, to our other home. Our former home.”

“That’s what the Neitherlands is for,” Josh said.

“Guys, listen.”

Eliot leaned forward. He put on his High King face and his High King voice. At times like this he wanted to look as much as possible like Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, from The Lord of the Rings, and he didn’t think he was a million miles off base. He made eye contact with each one of them in turn.

“I know I don’t speak for all of you. Not in this. But if Ember is right, if Fillory really is ending, I’m going to stay and see it end. This land is where I became who I am, who I was meant to be. Who I am is who I am in Fillory, and if Fillory dies, then I’ll die with it.” He studied his kingly fingernails. “I think I made that choice a long time ago. I don’t expect you to make it with me, but I want you to know, there isn’t any going back. Not for me.”

The crescent moon was already visible, early today, opposite the sunset, hooking a pale horn over the rim of the world. Eliot could picture it, the rim of the world, now that he’d been there, with its endless brick wall and its narrow gray strip of beach and its single door to the Far Side. The tower was high enough that sometimes you could kid yourself that you could really see it, on a clear day, which this was.

Josh cocked his head and screwed up his face and studied Eliot with one eye. He pointed at him, hesitantly.

“Fuck you.”

Eliot cracked his crooked grin. Everybody relaxed.

“Look, it sucks,” he said. “I hate it. But we’ll take it as far as we can, then we’ll walk away. We’ll go back to Earth, have a decent drink for a change. We’ll see what Quentin’s up to.”

“Oh, God,” Janet said. “I think death might be preferable.”

Everybody laughed except for Poppy, who was still thinking.

“I just wish—”

She broke off and gave a shaky sigh, to try to calm herself down. It mostly worked. Josh took her hand under the table.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“It’s just that if it all ends then the baby will never see Fillory! I know it’s silly, but I wanted the baby to be born here. I wanted him to see all this. Or her. I wanted us to have a little prince or princess!”

“They’ll still be one, baby,” Josh said. “Whatever happens. We’ll be royalty in exile. It still counts.”

“No,” Janet said. “It doesn’t.”

—

In the end it was only Janet and Eliot who went, for the simple reason that Josh couldn’t really ride a horse yet, not even a talking one who could coach him, and anyway Poppy was feeling sick, and Josh didn’t want to leave her.

So it was just the two of them. It felt very different from when they’d set out to fight the Lorians, or even from when they’d gone hunting in the old days. It was quieter. More somber. They rode out shortly after dawn through a small stone arch in the rear of the castle that let out on a narrow trail, hardly more than a goat track, that ran along the tops of the cliffs overlooking the bay. No fanfare, no confetti, no loyal retainers. They went alone.

“Which way?” Janet said.

Eliot pointed north. No particular reason, it was just good to be decisive in these situations.

The grass was still wet. The new pink sun hovered low above Whitespire Bay. Eliot felt very small and Fillory felt, for a change, very big and very wild around him. It was a while since it had felt like that. This was a serious quest, maybe the last one. What happened now truly mattered. Eliot had struggled before he found Fillory, he knew that: he drank too much, he found clever ways to be nasty to people, he never seemed to have an emotion that wasn’t either ironic or chemically generated. He’d changed in Fillory, and the thought of going back to that, of becoming that person again, frightened him. He wouldn’t die with Fillory, he’d meant that when he said it, but if Fillory died Eliot knew that something in him, something small but essential, wouldn’t survive either.