The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(58)

Janet rode in silence for a minute. Her back was to Eliot. He didn’t know if she was composing herself at the memory or just lost in thought. He saw her touch her face once, that was all.

“Janet,” he said.

“The Foremost got a good laugh out of that last one, believe me.” Her voice was unchanged. “He knew his audience. All that black sand was in front of me on the floor in a little pile. It had seemed a lot bigger out in the desert. I still couldn’t believe it wasn’t metal. I almost died for it.

“But I didn’t finish the story before, about when I was at boarding school. You know what I did that day, when my father came for me? I f*cking spat on him. I told him I would never go home again. I tore his expensive shirt. He slapped me and dragged me out to the car kicking and screaming.

“But I’m not eight anymore. I’m not a little girl. And the Foremost wasn’t half the man my father was.

“I whispered something to him. He had to lean down to hear me. I whispered: I don’t need your secrets, Foremost. But I’ll take your weapons. And I’ll take your desert too.

“Then I threw a handful of that fine black sand right in his eyes. And I got up off my knees. And I stopped whispering.

“And you can tell your god when you see him that I didn’t let you live. But I guess that’ll be kind of obvious.

“See, he’d made a big mistake. He thought when he sent me out there that he was going to crush me, but he was wrong. He made me stronger. The desert made me look at my own secrets, the ones I kept from myself, and I did. When I came back I didn’t have a weapon, I was a weapon.

“I can cast Woven Strength pretty quick when I have to. I was worn out from the ordeal, believe me, but nothing was going to stop me. Before he knew what was going on I punched the Foremost into the f*cking wall. My hands were basically like stone. It felt good.

“For a minute everybody else just watched. I think they were thinking, OK, fair fight, let’s see if the Foremost can get out of this by himself. Don’t want to disrespect him by trying to help, sort of thing. By the time they changed their minds about that it was too late for him. And for them.

“Well, look, I was angry. I don’t think I commit a lot of gratuitous violence, but this was war, and he was a jerk, and I made a mess of him. I threw him through a couple of doors, and he cried like a f*cking baby. You know what they used to write on cannons? The last argument of kings. I guess you could say magic is the last argument of queens.”

Eliot didn’t say anything. For all the years of his life he’d spent with Janet, he’d never really known her, not deep down. Sometimes he looked at her and thought, Gosh, I wonder what’s underneath all that anger, all that hard glossy armor? Maybe there’s just an innocent, wounded little girl in there who wants to come out and play and be loved and get happy. But now he wondered if maybe that little girl was long gone, or if she’d ever been there at all. What was under all that armor, all that anger? More anger, and more armor. Anger and armor, all the way down.

Janet’s face was white, but her voice was still calm.

“When the Foremost was done crying I made him show me everything. All their secrets. I didn’t even care anymore, I just wanted him to know how beaten he was. That rock went deep under the desert—they’d cut shafts down through it—and underground it was all ice caves. That’s where the water came from.

“No metal though. There wasn’t any. Can you believe that? Those weapons were all they had—I think it must have come from a meteorite or something, a long time ago. Forged from star-metal, kinda thing. They just passed them down, father to son, mother to daughter. I locked the Foremost in an ice cave and left him there. I figured his buddies would find him eventually. Maybe he’d die, maybe he’d be OK, I don’t know. What am I, a f*cking doctor?”

Eliot urged his horse forward a bit, right up beside Janet’s, and as well as his horsemanship would allow he leaned over, put his arm around Janet, and kissed her on the cheek. He felt her smile.

“Before I left I took his spear away from him. I still had the strength going, so I broke it in half with my bare hands, right in front of him, and I formed an axe-head on the end of each one, out of ice. Not bad, right? I was going to say, ‘Consider yourself annexed, bitch!’ or something like that, but sometimes an exit line just feels de trop, you know?”

“Yeah,” Eliot said quietly. “I know. I really do.”

“So anyway,” Janet said, “that’s how I got my new axes.”

She spurred her horse down the trail toward Barion.





CHAPTER 13


One day, about a week after Quentin got back from Antarctica, Lionel knocked on his door. It was two thirty in the afternoon.

“Ten minutes.” Lionel didn’t wait for him to open it. “In the lobby. Bring your gear.”

By the time Quentin got there Lionel was already down the hall at the other suite.

Mid-afternoon had become a dead time in the daily life cycle of their little criminal cell. They’d already gone over their parts in the plan one more time, as best they could in the confines of a hotel room, which was probably nothing like the field conditions, which they still knew way too little about. Stoppard didn’t seem to mind tinkering with his apparatuses eighteen hours a day, but the rest of them were slowly going out of their minds. They’d spent the morning tweaking a couple of things that didn’t really need tweaking. Quentin had taken this as far as he could, and he was impatient. Alice was out there somewhere.