The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(57)

“I guess my defenses were low, because a lot of stuff came back to me out there that I’d been pretty much avoiding thinking about for a long time. Like I thought about Alice coming to Brakebills for the first time, thrashing through the woods, not even knowing if they’d let her in. I thought about how shitty I was to her before she died or whatever. I thought about Julia waiting for Brakebills to come and get her, waiting and waiting alone in her room, and Brakebills never coming.

“I thought about you, and how I used to feel about you, and how bad that felt. I thought about how far you’ve come. You really got yourself together when you came here, Eliot, and I respect that. I guess I never told you that. Everybody does.”

“Thank you.” She hadn’t. It felt good.

“I thought about this one time when I was at boarding school. I never think about my childhood, ever, but that night it all just came oozing out. You know my parents sent me away to boarding school when I was eight? Now I think it was too early, but at the time I just assumed it was normal. I don’t even think the school takes students that young anymore. And as it turned out it was a rough year for my family—I had a baby brother die of SIDS—and I think they kind of forgot about me for a while there. What with all the grieving and such. They just figured I’d take care of myself.

“Which I guess I must have. But it was a pretty bad year.”

“Why haven’t you ever told me this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess I never really let myself feel how much it hurt. But I kind of relived the whole experience that fourth night, waiting for this Smelter thing to come. I literally regressed to being eight years old.

“Anyway then it was June, and the school year was all over. Time to go home. But on the last day there was some kind of mix-up, my dad thought he sent a car for me, I guess, but his assistant forgot, or the driver never showed, either way nobody came for me. I sat on my suitcase in the lobby all day, while the other kids got picked up one by one, and I kicked my legs and read one of those big floppy Peanuts books over and over again, and nobody came. That was before cell phones, and they couldn’t track down my parents. The staff were whispering behind my back. They felt sorry for me, but I could tell they kind of wanted me the hell out of there too so they could go home.

“I can still remember the view from the lobby: the line of palm trees through the glass doors, the sunset highlights on the wobbly linoleum tiles, the smell of the varnish on the wooden benches. I’ll never forget it. I’d look at the shadows and think, definitely he’ll have come by the time the shadow of the window frame hits that corner of the bench, but then he wouldn’t come, and I’d pick a new spot. I was realizing for the first time what a small part of my parents’ world I was. They were everything to me, but I wasn’t everything to them.

“The staff let me eat dinner with them, which ordinarily students never got to do. They ordered in from Popeye’s. I felt so excited and special.”

Eliot wished he could go back in time and get that mini-Janet, scoop her up and take her home. But he couldn’t.

“Then after dinner my dad finally showed up. He came striding through the door, stiff-arming it open without breaking stride, tie loose, walking too fast. He was probably pissed off at himself, about the mix-up, but it came off like he was pissed off at me somehow. Like it was my fault. He was pretty much of an * about the whole thing.

“I guess you can see where this is going. I was seriously weak at that point. I had the spins. I was falling asleep every five minutes. I woke up at dawn on day five and I knew that the Smelter wasn’t coming. And I gave up. It was over.

“Somebody stronger would have stayed out there till they died. Julia might have. Alice, maybe. I guess if somebody really wants to break me, it turns out I can be broken. There it is. I didn’t know. Now I know.

“I walked back to the rock. I still had my sack of metal. I couldn’t let go of it—maybe they could use it for something else, I don’t know. I was not in good shape, I can tell you. I was so dehydrated I couldn’t even cry. It was pretty much of a mad scene, like Ophelia in Hamlet. Except, you know, a lot drier.

“And then I was back in the city, and they were taking care of me, helping me to a table where there was all this food and drink. They were having a party. The whole tribe was there. Everybody was smiling. The Smelter hadn’t come, but somehow it was all right. I’d failed, but that was just the way of things. The desert was eternal, and I had fought it and done my best and lost and that was all I could do. Everybody sat there smiling at me and after a while I was smiling too.

“The Foremost asked me to come up to where he was, at the head of the table, in front of everybody. He told me to kneel, and he took the sack of metal from me and held it up.

“You are an outsider, he said. But you came to us, and you bowed before the desert, and you combed through its sands with your fingers.

“Dramatic pause.

“You thought the desert would grant you its treasures. The treasures of our people. You thought it would give up our secrets. Our metal. Our strength. You thought you would take our desert from us, and rule over us.

“Here is what the desert has given you: a bag of worthless sand.

“And he poured my sack out onto the floor.

“You will never find our metal. The desert guards its secrets. It shares them only with its sons and daughters. You may take this sand back to your High King of Fillory and tell him that I let you live. Tell him that he may send us more whores if he chooses, this one was adequate.”