The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(51)

In businesslike fashion, Janet pulled a short staff from a pair she wore crossed on her back and trotted off into the trees. Eliot had never seen her wield a staff before, but she held it as if she knew what to do with it.

“Hm,” he said.

It was a spooky place to be alone in, especially without his queen. The grass was dotted with wildflowers; he’d always meant to name some of the Fillorian flowers, but he’d never gotten around to it, and now he probably never would. It was too late. He heard a rustling, cracking sound from all sides which alarmed him until he realized that the trees along the edge of the meadow were helpfully dropping dead branches for firewood. They must have accepted his presence, he thought. It was strangely touching.

From one saddlebag Eliot extracted their tent, a neat canvas parcel, and tossed it on the soft grass. It unfolded and erected itself in the deepening twilight, with a sound like a sail being hoisted in a high wind.

—

In the morning a fine mist hung over the meadow, as if a heavy cannonade had just moments ago ceased firing, leaving behind puffs of silent white gunsmoke in the air.

They rode all day without incident—that’s two down, five to go, Janet said—and by sunset they’d reached the end of the green splendor of the Queenswood and entered the adjacent maze of gray firs called the Wormwood. On the third day they forded the Burnt River, never a pleasant experience, though rarely actually dangerous. Its black water was always choked with ashes, nobody knew why, and the nymph who lived in it was the glossy black of a beetle—a terrifying creature with silvery eyes who went up and down the river at night screaming.

Eliot proposed trying to talk to her, but Janet shuddered.

“That’s a last resort,” she said. “That’s like day six.”

“Whatever. It’s not the end of the world.”

“FYI, you only get to make that joke one time, so I hope you enjoyed it.”

Eliot would have preferred to head west from there, toward the lakes called Umber’s Tears, or maybe to Barion, a mellow walled hill-town where they made an incredible clear liquor out of some native grain. Eliot maintained a comfy royal townhouse there that he hardly ever got to visit. But Janet wanted to ride north.

“That would be fine,” Eliot said, “except that there’s this horrible thing called the Northern Marsh. It’s north of here, hence the name.”

“That’s why I want to go north. I want to go there. I’m feeling the marsh.”

“I’m not. I hate that place.”

“Wow, I thought you were supposed to be all Johnny Quest over here. Fine, I’ll meet you in Barion.”

“But I don’t want to go to Barion alone!” Eliot said.

“Your whininess is beyond unattractive. Come with me to the marsh and then we’ll both go to Barion.”

“What if I die in the Northern Marsh? People do, you know.”

“Then I’ll go to Barion alone. I like traveling alone. If you die can I have your townhouse?”

Eliot said nothing. Privately, and very much in spite of himself, Eliot understood that Janet was having a hunch about the marsh, and you couldn’t ignore those. Not in the context of a quest.

“Fine,” he said. “I was just testing your resolve. Gloriously, you have passed. To the marsh we go.”

The Northern Marsh wasn’t actually as far north as all that. By late afternoon the ground had begun to get squishy, and they made camp on its outskirts that same night. The next day dawned gray and brisk, and they picked their way through cattails and coarse grass and chilly puddles until the horses refused to go any farther. Janet’s was a Talking Horse, and he politely explained that he was speaking for both him and his dumb companion when he said that this was not a place you wanted to cross on hooves, not when your legs break as easily as horses’ legs do. Eliot accepted their resignation graciously. The two of them went on on foot.

The air was full of the smell of warm mud and rotting things. They circled around big weedy expanses of standing water and occasionally waded through them when they had to. The Great Northern Marsh was a lonely, quiet place. You would have thought it would be full of frogs and insects and waterfowl, but nothing seemed to live there. Just a lot of plants and smelly microbes.

As they forced their way deeper in, the ground became mud flats and water punctuated by occasional stubborn hummocky tufts of grass. Their boots were getting hopelessly befouled, and Eliot felt the ratio of solid ground to water shifting slowly and inexorably in the water’s favor. The way was bordering on impassable when they found a narrow boardwalk which Janet had been looking for without telling him. It was just two thin weather-beaten gray planks laid flat over the sucking puddles, and in places elevated a few feet off the ground by stilts and pilings and opportunistic tree stumps.

Eliot took a minute to scrape his boots off, though he was pretty sure they weren’t salvageable, then they set off again. There were no railings, and they had to balance their way along like a damn circus act. He tried to remember whether quicksand was a real thing or an urban myth.

“I wonder where all the birds are,” he said, to take his mind off it. “I’ve seen, like, two birds. This place should be covered in them.”

“Makes you wish Julia were still here,” Janet said. “She was good with birds.”

“Mm. Do you? Wish she were here?”