The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(56)

“But the Foremost was having none of it! He was very firm. Said he’d never even heard of Fillory. I know right? It pissed me off, but it impressed me at the same time. So I hung around.

“I liked it there. For a bunch of people with no obvious enemies they had this dope fighting style: they all carried a personal weapon made out of this wicked black metal. Light and strong, and when it hit something it struck blue sparks—very mysterious, I couldn’t figure out where it came from. The Foremost had a whole spear made out of it. He had a big speech about how great it was. Forged in the desert, slew a god, that kind of talk. He said it acted as a focus for magic—amped up your discipline—but I never saw him use it like that.

“I decided I was going to win them over. The charm offensive. I started helping out around the place, trying to get into the rhythms of the tribe. You wouldn’t have believed it, a queen of Fillory on her hands and knees pulling parsnips out of the ground, eating these gross grubs they sieved out of the sand—I tried to think of them as lobsters, but they were grubs. And you know what? I didn’t even mind it. It didn’t make me angry. I can’t remember when I’ve ever felt less angry than I did out there.

“And I slept with the Foremost. I didn’t love him, but I liked him a lot, and I loved his world. I wanted to be part of that place. And God knows he was easy on the eyes. Sex with him was amazing. Like going to bed with the desert.

“After about three months—”

“Wait,” Eliot said. “You’ve been in Rockville for three months at this point? What was going on in Fillory?”

“In Fillory matters were unfolding according to protocol. What did you think was going to happen? You set up a country right, it runs itself. I got those people thinking I could hear their thoughts, for Christ’s sake. They were scared to piss in the shower. No way were they going to try anything.

“Anyway after about three months the Foremost told me that if I was going to stay any longer I had to undergo their initiation rites. It was a major deal, every year a couple of people died. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t ready to leave. And if you passed, you got one of those black-metal weapons. Never say I do things by halves.”

“I will never say that,” Eliot solemnly promised. “Janet, this is kind of intense.”

“I know. And you haven’t even heard the intense part. So I’m breaking a sacred oath by telling you about it, but what the hell, here’s what it was. The Foremost took me out of the city, back out into the desert, and then he kneeled down with me and picked up a handful of sand and told me that what I sought was in there. Well, what the hell right? But so I looked at the damn sand.

“And after a while I began to notice that there were little glittery bits in it. Not a lot of them, but every once in a while you’d come across a black grain with a shiny sheen to it. I started to get it. That was the black metal the weapons were made out of. It was all around us, in the sand. One grain in a thousand, the Foremost said.

“He gave me a canvas sack and told me that I had to sit alone in the desert until I’d filled the whole sack with just metal grains, one by one. I was like, filled-filled? Like overflowing? Or just, you know, a nice amount? He said I’d know because when I was finished, when the sack was full, something called the Smelter would come. It would turn the ore I’d collected into pure metal and fashion a weapon for me.”

“Really?” Eliot said. “How incredibly nice of it.”

“Well, I know. Pretty convenient. You’d think I would have been suspicious. But I had to have one of these things. Had to.

“So I stayed out there. I would take a handful of sand, make a little pile in my palm, pick out the black specks and sort of brush them off my palm into the sack. No magic, it was just me and my sack and my bare hands. After a few hours my eyes were red and streaming and just about crossed. By the time the sun rose the next day I was hallucinating. The bag was filling up, you could weigh it in your hand, but it was going to be a race to see whether I finished or went insane first.

“It was pretty bad. All the usual stuff happened that happens in an ordeal. I peed myself. I practically went blind. I threw up at one point. It was really, really unpleasant. But at the same time I could feel the ordeal remaking me. You know? Like the desert itself was smelting me, melting away weaknesses and impurities and extracting what was hard and true. I thought a lot of that kind of crap while I was collecting my grains.”

“Janet.” Eliot didn’t know what to say. He’d never heard her talk this openly about her feelings. Whatever happened out there, something about her really had changed. He hadn’t seen it till now. “Janet, how could you do that to yourself?”

“I don’t know, I just knew I had to. I picked and I picked and I picked. My hands were shaking like crazy. The sun was going down the third day when I started to feel like maybe I was pretty close to done. It wasn’t a huge sack—more of a bag, really—but it was looking pretty full. If somebody asked you for a sack of ore you wouldn’t be embarrassed to give it to them.

“Supposedly if you had even one grain of regular sand in there the Smelter wouldn’t come, and I don’t know if I believed that or not, but I kept shaking the bag and fishing around in it to see if somehow one had gotten in. I really loved my bag of black metal. It felt cool, and oily, and so dense. It had a special smell. I was proud of it. I just could not wait to see what kind of weapon came out of it. I knew that whatever it was would be like the sharp, unbreakable expression of my innermost will. It would be what I’d been waiting for my whole life.