The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(54)

She spat, and the gob froze in midair and slid across the ice. With that she turned and walked away. Eliot practically fell off the boardwalk getting out of her way. He didn’t want to touch those axes.

He felt like he should say something too, before he went, so he did.

“Dick.”

“Worm,” the turtle rasped back. Its breath smoked in the sudden cold. “You’ll see. It’s turtles all the way down.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’ve heard that before.”

He trotted off after Janet. She left frost footprints behind her.





CHAPTER 12


It wasn’t until a couple of hours later, when they were back on their horses and heading southwest, the direction of blessedly solid dry ground and, eventually, Barion and its clear alcoholic balm, that Janet cleared her throat and said:

“So I guess you’re probably wondering how I all of a sudden turned into an amazing ice goddess with magic axes just now.”

Eliot was, actually. But he was going to see how long he could go without mentioning it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to know, they both knew he did. It was a game they played.

They both knew he would cave eventually.

“With what now?” he said airily. “Oh. Sure. I guess so.”

“I call the right axe Sorrow,” she said. “You know what I call the left one?”

“Happiness?”

“Sorrow. I can’t tell them apart.”

“Mmm. Mm-hm.”

They rode together in silence for another five minutes. They were both seasoned players. Eliot kept looking over his shoulder—he was paranoid that one of those pink jellyfish things was going to come up on him from behind and drape its tentacles all over him. After it stopped his heart it would probably reel him up into its innards and you’d be able to see him being digested through its translucent flesh. It would all be very public.

Though again: what did it matter, if the world was ending? But it did matter. He knew that. Everything still mattered. Now more than ever. He decided to concede the loss.

“OK, so how did you all of a sudden become etcetera and so on?”

“I’m so happy you asked! Remember that time when you guys went off to sea and left me in charge of Fillory for like a year and a half?”

“And saved magic and by extension the entire world? I do.”

“Well, it was fun running everything and making all the decisions and implementing long-overdue reforms, but then after a month things got a little slow, and I needed a project. So you know that desert that’s south of Fillory, across the Copper Mountains?”

“I know of it.”

“I annexed it.”

“Wait.” Eliot reined in his horse, and they both stopped. “You invaded the desert?”

“I annexed it. I was thinking how in the books other countries are always coming after Fillory and threatening it and so on. I figured why not turn it around? Let’s go expansionist! Preempt some shit! I mean, we have all the magic and freaky monsters in the world. Just the giants alone are basically the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal. Oh and plus we have our own god, who’s actually real. It’s practically a moral imperative. Manifest destiny.”

Eliot heeled his horse, and it ambled into motion again. He loved Janet, but she really was beyond belief. He waited what felt like a suitable interval.

“Don’t think that because I’m not saying anything I’m not stricken with shock and regret,” the High King said. “Because I am. That’s why I’m not saying anything.”

“Well, if you didn’t want me to invade the desert, you shouldn’t have gone off and saved the world,” Janet said. “It was a very popular initiative internally. The people loved it. And our standing army was just standing there, and the lesser nobility were spinning their wheels looking for a way to climb the ladder. Earn some honors and titles and whatever. You have to use that stuff or it ends up going bad on you, like with the Fenwicks.”

Eliot snorted.

“Well, this is why you don’t understand politics,” Janet said.

“Politics doesn’t understand me!”

“And think of the mineral resources out there. Our raw materials are crap in this country.”

“Please forbear to insult the High King’s minerals.”

“They’re crap. So I took a regiment and a bunch of Talking Elephants and that ninja lady Aral—you know, the one Bingle beat in the tournament, which don’t get me started on that travesty of justice—and we crossed the Copper Mountains. Which by the way, have you ever seen them? It’s amazing. They really are practically all copper, and they’ve turned this great green oxidized color. There’s even a special word for it: aeruginous. Aral taught me that. Turns out she’s a demon at Scrabble.”

“Copper is a mineral. And we call them brigades, not regiments.”

“And I’ve never really been sure whether or not we owned the Copper Mountains, you know? It’s not clear on the maps.” It was like Janet couldn’t hear him. “So now we do, because I annexed them on my way to the desert. It only took a couple of days. An elephant fell off a cliff, a copper cliff, which practically broke my heart. Elephants and gravity, not a great mix. But you know what? The other elephants immediately stopped and went down and found what was left of it and stood around it in a ring. I couldn’t see what they did, but when they were done—it took a day—the one that fell was all back together and up and running again. They resurrected him. I’ve never seen anything like it. Elephants, they know some shit. I don’t know why we rule them, they should rule us.”