The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(71)

“Very Hansel and Gretel,” Janet said.

“It’s not like it’s a candy house.”

“You know what I mean.”

He did actually, there was a fairy-tale feel to it all. Nobody answered when they knocked so they walked around to the back, where they found an old woman on her knees working in a vegetable garden. The resident witch, obviously. Her hair was gray but pulled back in a girlish ponytail. A small woman, she wore a long brown dress, coarse and practical. When she stood up to greet them her face was pleasant and peaceful, though there was something mischievous in it too.

“Greetings,” she said, “to the High King of Fillory. And to Queen Janet, of course.”

“Hi,” Eliot said. “Sorry to drop in like this.”

“Not at all. I knew you were coming.” She crouched down again and went back to what she was doing, which was fixing a little wicker cloche that stood over some sweet peas. “I figured you weren’t trying to be stealthy when you lit those trees on fire. Are you wondering how I know your names?”

“Because we’re famous?” Janet said. “Because we’re the king and queen of you?”

“I know your names,” the woman said, “because I’m a witch. I’m a bit famous too. Jane Chatwin. Or as I used to be known, the Watcherwoman.”

“Jane Chatwin,” Eliot said. He felt something very close to awe. “Well. We meet at last.”

She was right, she was famous: she was one of the first children to come to Fillory, decades ago, and she had haunted it for decades as the mysterious Watcherwoman. It was she who, with the help of a magic watch that controlled time, helped orchestrate their journey to Fillory in the first place, and their disastrous confrontation with the Beast, who had once been her brother, Martin Chatwin.

“Or are you still the Watcherwoman? What shall we call you?”

“Oh, Jane is fine. I haven’t been the Watcherwoman for years now.”

“Somehow I thought you’d be hotter,” Janet said.

“You’ve been talking to Quentin. Why don’t you come inside, we’ll have some tea.”

The cottage was well kept, neat as a pin and swept to within an inch of its life. The décor was a crude Fillorian approximation of the interwar English drawing rooms that Jane must have remembered from her childhood. Funny that for all the effort she’d put into escaping the real world, she’d wound up re-creating it here. She summoned a blue bloom of fire out of her stove and placed a teakettle on it. Hard to say where she got a natural gas hookup out here.

“One could boil the water with magic,” she said, “but it never tastes quite the same.”

While they waited they sat around a sunny-yellow wooden table with a water glass full of wildflowers on it. Now that they were here Eliot thought he’d wait a bit before he popped the big question.

“How long have you been living here?” he asked. “We didn’t even know you were still in Fillory.”

“Oh, I never left. I’ve been here for years, ever since that business with you and Quentin and Martin. Since I broke my watch.”

“I’ve always wondered about that,” Janet said. “Is it really gone?”

“It’s gone. There’s nothing left. I broke it and jumped on the pieces.”

“Darn.”

Eliot hadn’t even thought of that. It might’ve been handy, if they could’ve put it back together. Though he wasn’t sure what they would go back and do differently. Maybe they could just relive the same couple of years forever. Was that how it worked? It was confusing. And irrelevant now.

“Not that I don’t miss it,” Jane said. “As it turned out, it was all that was keeping me young. When I broke it I went from twenty-five to seventy-five overnight, or thereabouts—with all that back-and-forthing I’d lost track of how old I really was. Now I know.” She looked down at the backs of her hands, which were ropy and mottled. “I wish the dwarfs had warned me. They must have known.”

“I’m sorry,” Eliot said. He tasted his tea; it was bitter, and it tingled on his lips. “Fillory owes you a debt.”

“We all owe each other debts. I always thought you must hate me, for the way I used you.”

Janet shrugged.

“You did what you had to. It’s not like you got off easy—your brother’s dead. And without you we never would have found our way to Fillory at all. Call it a wash. Though I did wonder what happened to you. What the hell are you doing all the way out here?”

“I study with the dwarfs now. They’re teaching me clockwork.”

“I didn’t know there were any dwarfs out here,” Eliot said. “I thought they only lived in the mountains.”

“There are dwarfs everywhere. They’re like ants—for every one you see, there’s fifty more you don’t. These ones are underground.” She tapped her foot on the floor. “There’s tunnels all the way under the barrens. You’re sitting over one of the entrances.”

Huh. Janet had the wrong fairy tale, she should have said Snow White. He suppressed an urge to look under his chair. It made him a bit uncomfortable to think that Fillory might be riddled with dwarf-tunnels. They’d never done anybody any harm, yet, but Jesus. They were like termites.