The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(55)

“That’s treason,” Eliot said lightly. “True, though. What was the desert like?”

“The desert? The desert was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Having spent a lot of time around Janet, Eliot was used to the way she shifted smoothly and without warning from irony and aggression to honest expressions of actual authentic human emotion.

“You must go, Eliot. Go in winter. The Wandering Desert is like an ocean of sand, which I realize is a cliché, but it literally is like an ocean. The dunes move along like big swells in the open sea. Slowly, but you can see it. We spent a day just sitting on the slopes of the Copper Mountains watching them roll in and smash themselves against the foothills, all in silence, like humongous breakers.”

“And then,” Eliot said, “realizing that you were about to invade a beautiful but otherwise useless and wholly innocent desert, you took stock of your tactical and ethical errors and turned around . . .”

“But I didn’t. I didn’t turn around. In fact that was when I knew why I’d come.

“I sent the elephants back. Elephants—God, I don’t know what I was thinking, bringing a bunch of elephants over the mountains. Hannibal, I guess. They were nice about it, but it was no place for them. I told them they could go graze the Southern Orchards. That seemed to square it.

“I sent the regiment back too. Brigade, whatever. They were good sports, very valiant, and they didn’t want to go, but I ordered them and they had to. I guess they were hoping for a fight, but there was nobody to fight. Once they were gone I walked out into the desert alone.”

“Why,” Eliot said, “the hell would you do that?”

As they rode the landscape around them was turning back from bogs into meadows again, going from squashy to firm, the dry land sorting itself out from the wet like it was waking up from a bad dream. But Janet was far away and seeing a different landscape entirely.

“You know, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain it. It was just so pure. Suddenly all this life, all this greenery, seemed so needlessly elaborate and wet and messy. The desert was honest and real: just dry sand making smooth curves against an empty sky. It was like I’d been floundering in the mud my whole life and here was the way out.

“I suppose I was taking my life in my hands, but it didn’t feel like it at all. I felt safe there. Safer than I’d ever felt anywhere. I didn’t have to seem anymore, I could just be.” She sighed in frustration. “I’m not explaining it right. God knows I’m not a spiritual person or anything. I just felt like I could breathe out there.”

“No, I get it. Keep going.”

For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet’s mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her. No wonder she liked it out there by herself.

“That night the most amazing thing happened: the stars came down from out of the sky. They weren’t used to seeing human beings, so they weren’t afraid. They were like tame birds—they were all around me, a few feet off the ground, each one about the size of a softball. Spiky, and a little warm, and they sort of squeaked. You could hold them.” She sighed again. “I know that sounds weird even for Fillory. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed it.

“I walked for three days, till my supplies ran out, but it never crossed my mind to go back. Not once. I kept waiting to lose my nerve, but I never did. I kept going south. The swells get big out there in the middle, in the deep desert, big as hills. At the top you could see a long way, but I never did see the edge. Maybe they go on forever.

“Well, you can guess what came next. I passed out from hunger and exhaustion and woke up in some guy’s sand-boat, sailing across the desert.”

“Really?” Eliot said. “I was going to guess that you realized you were going to die and went back the way you came. Either that or that one elephant who fell off the cliff before and came back to life showed up, galumphing majestically through the dunes, and rescued you. With Aral riding it maybe. I figured you were setting that up as a surprise twist.”

“Well, I wasn’t. I woke up on this guy’s boat. It wasn’t much of a boat—basically it was a board with a pole stuck in it and a sheet tied to the pole. It was more like a windsurfer. He sat cross-legged on it, with one hand on the tiller and one on the mainsheet—his forearms were like bowling pins—and the whole business went flying across the sand.

“He didn’t say anything, but he was incredibly good-looking. Tall, lean, big nose, brown skin. He took me back to his home, which was in a huge rock outcropping sticking up out of the sand. At the top was a big crater full of black earth with things growing in it. A whole tribe lived in little cells carved out of the rock in a ring around it.”

“Where did they get water?” Eliot asked.

“I wondered that too. I found out. But I’ll get to that.

“They were a pretty hard crew. This guy who saved me, he was the leader, they called him the Foremost. I tried to explain to him that we were invading him, or that I was, and that this desert was all part of Fillory now. I thought about letting it go, since he saved my life and all, but come on: an invasion’s an invasion. Or an annexation. Anyway I figured I’d better put it out there up front, that they were now free to enjoy the benefits of being a semiautonomous quasi-national territory within the larger embrace of the Fillorian empire.