The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(61)

“Not even remotely.” Quentin didn’t blink either. He didn’t like being bullied. “Why do you care? What are you close to? It’s only money.”

“Do you know what’s in the case?”

“No. Not even the bird knows what’s in the case.”

“I know what’s in the case,” Betsy said. “And I’ll give you a f*cking hint: this isn’t about money.”

“Maybe you could be a little more specific.”

“You want to know what’s in the case? Freedom.” She held his eyes for another long second, then sat back against the banquette. Quentin looked over at Plum, then at Stoppard, who’d gone back to picking at the insides of the watch. The prospect of starting over again at the beginning, finding some new way in, was not appealing. If they could just get it right and get it over with he could move on with his life.

And there was the Chatwin connection, he couldn’t let that go. And there was Alice. Who was he trying to fool? He wasn’t going to walk away. He was in this much too deep already. He opened his eyes. Betsy was still watching him.

“You’d better believe,” he said, “that if this starts getting ugly, I’m going to be the first one to bolt. Then maybe I’ll hunt you down. Think about that.” Quentin put a hand on Stoppard’s shoulder, who looked up at him as if he were waking from a dream. “Better give me that back for now. You can look at it later.”

Stoppard nodded and closed up the watch and mutely handed it over, though his eyes followed it until Quentin tucked it back into his jacket.

They climbed out of the limo. It was late March, around four in the afternoon, and the temperature hovered around freezing. They were on a back road, really just a gravel track, somewhere in rural Connecticut, with a row of trees running along one side and dead-looking blackberry bushes on the other. Hayfields were all around them. There were no houses in sight.

Plum stayed behind in the car to change, and when she got out they were all in matching black. Quentin wore his overcoat instead of a parka, because it looked more magicianly, and it was black anyway, and he had no idea when if ever he’d see the limo again. He had the page from the Neitherlands folded in an inside pocket, along with the watch.

“Well,” Plum said. “This doesn’t look suspicious.”

The breeze was icy, and even though they weren’t supposed to use magic Quentin quietly added a couple of charms to keep himself warm. Off in one of the meadows Pushkar was waving at them, and they struck out toward him through the dry, unmown grass. Lionel stood behind him, looking as big as a haystack, and the blackbird came winging over from the darkening trees to settle on his shoulder. It looked much more like a wild animal out here in the country. Quentin wondered what the other birds made of it.

Pushkar had an enormous rectangular oriental carpet unrolled on the grass, a gorgeous thing with a knotted floral pattern on it in cream and pale blue and lion-gold. Pushkar was studying it and nodding slowly, sometimes bending down and smoothing out folds and making small adjustments to the fringes and to the pattern itself—it looked woven into the material, but it altered at his touch.

A flying carpet. He’d never actually seen one. Pushkar wore a multicolored, utterly tasteless game-day sweater under his parka.

“Nice rug,” Quentin said, since it was.

“Guess how much it cost?” He didn’t wait for Quentin to guess. “Seventy thousand dollars. The bird paid cash, I saw it.”

They stood around the edges. The gathering looked like a cold, formal, badly planned picnic. The bird addressed them from the top of Lionel’s head.

“We found the Couple a week ago. They are in a house two miles northwest of here. A large estate, with nothing else near it. We have been watching it, learning their routines. This morning something agitated them. We are concerned that they are preparing for something—maybe they are going to leave, maybe they will upgrade security, we don’t know. But there is no more time. We will make our attempt tonight. Questions?”

Quentin couldn’t think of any. Plum sniffled in the cold. Stoppard picked up his cases.

“Is it OK if I—?”

“Sure.” Pushkar nodded, and Stoppard stepped gingerly onto the carpet, as if he were worried it would scoot out from under him, or roll up with him in it.

He kneeled down and opened both suitcases; one was full of tools, the other one, the heavy one, contained a stumpy, silvery steel cylinder about a foot in diameter and two feet long. That’s what he’d been working on in his room, apparently—Quentin had seen it in pieces, but never put together. It had a white enamel clock face on one end and a cluster of small wheels and dials on the other. Stoppard unfolded a spindly stand and placed the cylinder on it, then opened the steel case and started fiddling.

Lionel wandered off; he was wearing only a black sweatshirt, the same one he’d been wearing that night in the bookstore, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold. At least they had a big bastard on their side. Betsy began a stretching routine.

“I feel like we should be doing something,” Plum said.

“I wish I smoked. Do you want to go through the spells again?”

“Not really. You?”

“I would but I think my head would fall off.”

So they sat down cross-legged on the carpet in the cold and waited. Quentin could feel Mayakovsky’s coins in his pants pocket. They felt good. They felt like confidence. Stoppard took out a small metal crank, fitted one end into a socket on the back of the machine, and began furiously turning it.