The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(70)

Then they plunged out of the sunlight into the gloom of the Darkling Woods, where they’d appeared the very first time they came to Fillory. This was a more chaotic scene than the Queenswood; not all the trees were sentient, and the ones that were tended to be loners, and not very civic-minded. They spent a morning looking for the exact spot on which they’d arrived—there was a clock-tree there, they remembered, and a sort of a gully—and there would have been a nice circularity to it, paying their respects to where it had all started. But they argued about where it was, and in the end it turned out that neither of them was right, by which time they were both in bad moods. They couldn’t even find the Two Moons Inn, where they’d kind of hoped to stop for some lunch and a beer.

The next morning they broke out of the woods again and into the Clock Barrens, which turned out to be a vast flat plain sparsely covered with tiny twisted scrub trees, the tallest of them only waist high. It was a bonsai forest. The Barrens began more or less abruptly, as things tended to in Fillory: it was one of the peculiarities of Fillory that it bore an uncanny resemblance to a map of itself.

Eliot had never seen the Clock Barrens before. There had never been any particular reason to go here, and he guessed he’d just never gotten around to it. Good to check that box before it was too late.

“So that’s it,” he said.

Words failed him. They sometimes did. Eliot wondered if he was seeing it for the last time as well as the first, and what else he hadn’t seen, and wouldn’t ever see.

“I thought it would be . . .” Janet said. “I don’t know. Clockier.”

She poked at one of the stunted trees with a headless axe.

“Me too.”

“Maybe it is and we’re just looking at it wrong. Maybe from overhead it looks like a giant clock or something.”

“It so does not look like a giant clock from overhead.”

There were no paths, but they didn’t especially need any. The little scrub trees were far enough apart that the horses could walk between them. Eliot had to fight a feeling of panic, an urgent need for decisive action. This was day six of Janet’s timeline, and even though she’d made it up on the spur of the moment it had taken on an authoritative feel. They had a lead, a slim one, but it was a stretch to call it an adventure. It wasn’t much to hang a quest on. They were trotting along in search of they didn’t even really know what, and there was no way to speed up the process, if there even was a process. It was quixotic, was what it was. Not even that, it was sub-quixotic. My kingdom for a windmill to tilt at.

“I had an idea last night,” Janet said. “For saving the world. I woke up with it in the middle of the night but then forgot all about it till now. Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“We hunt the White Stag, like Quentin did. We catch it or shoot it or whatever you do with it. We get three wishes. We wish Fillory would last forever and not die. Done. Mischief managed.”

Eliot was silent.

“You have to admit—”

“No, it’s good,” he said. “It’s definitely good. You think the stag could do that?”

“No idea. But it’s worth a try, right?”

“Definitely worth a try. Agreed. If this quest is a bust we’ll do that.”

“Plus we’d still have two wishes left over after we saved the world,” Janet said. “One each. What else would you wish for?”

“I feel like I should wish for Quentin back.”

Janet laughed.

“Then I could use my wish to wish him away again. Psych!”

They slept that night in the barrens; they had to burn flat a circle of ground to make room for their tent. The trees were surprisingly fireproof—the wood was fantastically hard and dense—but when they caught they burned like rocket fuel, hot on their faces, sending sparks and spears of light up into the night sky and leaving fountainous afterimages on their vision. It made for a July Fourth atmosphere, a summer carnival in a wasteland, and they broke out the last of the wine. After a couple of bottles Janet suggested they start a huge forest fire, because it would look cool; Eliot thought it would be more prudent not to, but he agreed that if they couldn’t save the world they might as well come back here and burn the Clock Barrens before the end.

By mid-morning the next day, day seven, they could see where they were going: a single clump of trees sticking up on the horizon, regular-size non-bonsai ones. As they got closer they saw that the trees stood in a circle, a thin ring one tree deep, and that there was a house in the middle.

“Barren, or barrens?” Janet said. “Can you have just one barren? Or multiple barrens? Barrenses?”

“Hush. This is it.”

They drew up a hundred yards from the ring. They were all clock-trees, every one. It was a strange and beautiful tableau. Eliot had never seen more than one full-grown clock-tree at a time; Quentin used to joke that there was probably only one clock-tree in Fillory, it just moved very fast when they weren’t looking. But here were twelve of them, and all different kinds: there was a gnarled oak; a slender birch with a rectangular dial; a needle-straight pine; a melted-looking, morbidly obese baobab.

The house in the middle was perfectly square, with a steeply pitched shingled roof. It was made of a pale stone that looked like it had been brought from a long way off.