The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(7)

He took the silver watch out of his pocket, the one Eliot had given him before he left Fillory. He’d hardly glanced at it before—he’d been too shocked and angry when they told him he had to leave—but now that he did he saw that its face was studded with a really glorious profusion of detail: two extra dials, a moving star chart, the phases of the moon. It was a beautiful watch. He thought about how Eliot had harvested it himself, from a clock-sapling in the Queenswood, and then carried it and kept it safe for him during all his months at sea. It was a great gift. He wished he’d appreciated it more at the time.

Though it had stopped ticking. Being on Earth didn’t seem to agree with it. Maybe it was the weather.

Quentin stared at his parents’ darkened house for a long time, waiting to feel an urge to go inside, but the urge never came. As dark and massive as it was the house exerted no gravitational pull on him. When he thought of his parents it was almost like they were old lovers, so distant now that he couldn’t even remember why his link to them had once seemed so real and urgent. They’d managed the neat trick of bringing up a child with whom they had absolutely nothing in common, or if there was something none of them had ever risen to the challenge of finding it.

Now they’d drifted so far apart that the silver thread connecting them had simply snapped. If he had a home anywhere, it wasn’t here.

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and chanted four long, low syllables under his breath while at the same time making a big circle with his left hand. The rain began sheeting off an invisible lens over his head, and he felt, if not dryer, then at least that he had taken the first step on the long and arduous path to dryness.

Then he walked away down the wide wet suburban sidewalk. He was out of Fillory, and he wasn’t a king anymore. It was time to start living his damn life like everybody else. Better late than never. Quentin walked half an hour to the center of Chesterton, caught a bus from there to Alewife, took a subway to South Station, and got on a Greyhound bus bound for Newburgh, New York, north of Manhattan on the Hudson River, which was the closest you could get to Brakebills via public transportation.

Coming back was easier this time. Last time he’d been with Julia, and he’d been panicked and desperate. This time he was in no particular hurry, and he knew exactly what he needed: to be somewhere safe and familiar, where he had something to do, where people knew magic and knew him. What he needed was a job.

He stayed at the same motel as last time, then took a taxi to the same bend in the road and picked his way in through the damp forest from there. It had rained here too, and every twig and branch he brushed soaked him all over again with cold water. He didn’t bother with any fancy visualization spells this time. He figured they would see him, and that when they did they would know him for what he was.

He was right. Quentin spotted it a long way off through the trees: just a stray patch of sunlight on an otherwise overcast day. As he got closer it resolved itself into an oval of lighter, brighter air hanging there among the wet branches. The oval framed a woman’s disembodied head and shoulders, like a cameo in a locket. She was fortyish, with almond-shaped eyes, and though he didn’t recognize her she had the unmistakably alert air of a fellow practitioner.

“Hi,” Quentin said, when he was close enough that he didn’t have to shout. “I’m Quentin.”

“I know,” she said. “You coming in?”

“Thanks.”

She did something, made a small gesture somewhere out of view, and the portrait went full-length. She was standing in an archway of summer light and grass carved out of the gloomy autumn forest. She stood aside to let him pass.

“Thanks,” he said again. When the summer air hit him, tears of relief prickled unexpectedly at the corners of his eyes. He blinked and turned away, but the woman caught it.

“It never gets old, does it?”

“No,” he said. “It really doesn’t.”

—

Quentin went the long way around, bypassing the Maze—it would have been redrawn ten times over since the last time he knew it—and walked up to the House. The halls were quiet: it was August here, and there were no students to speak of, though if they hadn’t filled the incoming class yet they might still be holding entrance exams. Early afternoon sunlight fell undisturbed on the much-abused carpets in the common rooms. The whole building felt like it was resting and recovering after the catastrophe of the school year.

He didn’t know what to expect from Fogg: the last time they spoke they hadn’t parted on the best possible terms. But Quentin was here, and he was going to make his case. He found the dean in his office going through admissions files.

“Well!” Still groomed and goateed, the older man made a show of surprise. “Come in. I didn’t expect to see you back so soon.”

Fogg smiled, though he didn’t get up. Quentin sat down, cautiously.

“I wasn’t expecting it either,” he said. “But it’s good to be here.”

“That’s always nice to hear. Last time I saw you I believe you had a hedge witch in tow. Tell me, did she get wherever it was she was going?”

She had, though by a long and circuitous route, and Quentin didn’t want to go into detail about it. Instead he inquired after the fortunes of the Brakebills welters team, and Fogg filled him in on that in all the detail he could have wanted and more. Quentin asked after the little metal bird that used to inhabit his office, and Fogg explained that someone had made it their doctoral project to turn it back into flesh and feathers. Fogg took out a cigar and offered one to Quentin; Quentin accepted it; they smoked.