The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(73)

Jane walked over to one of the trees, the smallest one, knobby and broken-backed like an olive tree—it was bent over so far she’d had to prop it up with a board. She knocked twice on the crystal face of its clock; it was on a section of trunk that ran parallel to the ground, and its face looked up at the sky. It swung open, first the glass, then the dial, to reveal the works inside, gears and catchments turning and meshing silently.

She bit her lip.

“What should we do?” Eliot said.

“Damned if I know.” She slammed the clock face shut like it was the door of a washing machine. “Listen. Eliot.”

“Your Highness,” Janet prompted. She felt free to disrespect Eliot—very free in fact—but she didn’t like other people doing it. Jane ignored her.

“Look at me: this is what an ended story looks like. I was giving my life for this country, this world, before you were born. Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead. I had my own brother killed. I have no partner, no children. I’ve done my great deed, and it took everything I had. I won’t be dragged back into another adventure. I’ve made a separate peace.”

“Well, and we would rather not drag you,” Janet said. “But, see, apocalypse.”

“Has it occurred to you that you might just accept it?” She was a small woman, but she drew herself up, and there was some Edwardian dignity in her manner. “Has it crossed your minds that you don’t have to go off on a holy crusade every time things don’t go your way? You children and your adventures. Stories have ends! Why don’t you let Fillory die gracefully, in its own time and its own way? Maybe it wants to let go! I was never a real paramedic, but a phrase comes back to me: do not resuscitate. Let it go. Let Fillory die in peace.”

“No.”

“We’re not asking you to come with us,” Eliot said. “Just tell us what you know. There has to be something. Please.”

The High King of Fillory went down on one knee before the Watcherwoman.

“Please. Our stories haven’t ended yet. Yours may have, but ours haven’t. If it’s time, then it’s time, but I am not the last High King of Fillory. I don’t believe it. This land isn’t ready to die.”

Jane stared at him for a long time. Then she made a disgusted noise in her throat and turned away and boosted herself up onto the bent trunk of the clock-tree.

“All right,” she said. “All right. I’ll tell you what I know, but it isn’t much. I feel like I know less and less every day. Maybe it’s the time travel—some days I wonder if I’m starting to live backward, like Merlin. God, I think I would kill myself. Or would I already have killed myself? My brother could have helped you, but he’s dead. Long ago.”

“What, Martin? Not likely.”

“Not him, the other one. Rupert. He spent a lot of time in Fillory. He was close to Martin.”

“That’s not actually a huge plus in our book,” Janet said.

“It should be. Martin was an *, but he was smart. He found out things about Fillory that you and I will never know, and he was only thirteen when he did it. Have you ever wondered where he got all that power from? How he became what he was?”

“I guess I have wondered that,” Eliot said.

“I have too. I never knew. But I think Rupert did. He was with Martin the day he disappeared. He always said he didn’t see anything, but I think he did. He was an open book, our Rupes, no good at keeping secrets, though he thought he was.

“If I were looking for missing puzzle pieces, I would start there. Go back to Earth. Find his things, see what he left behind. Maybe he wrote something down. And I think he nicked something—you weren’t supposed to bring things through, from Fillory back to Earth, or not big things anyway, but I think Rupert did. I think he stole something. At any rate when he left here there was a big stink about it. No one ever pinned it on him, and by then Martin was raising hell so it rather got lost in the shuffle, but I think he had something he wasn’t supposed to.

“That’s what I would do: go back, all the way back to where this whole disaster started. You weren’t there, and even I wasn’t there. But Rupert was.”

That was all they got out of her. Eliot asked her some polite questions about the garden, while Janet walked from clock-tree to clock-tree, knocking on the faces, trying to get them to open for her the way they did for Jane; Jane claimed not to know why they didn’t. After ten more minutes Eliot said they should be on their way, and Jane didn’t disagree.

She walked them to their horses. They hadn’t wanted to come inside the ring of clock-trees.

“Good luck,” the Watcherwoman said. “And I do mean that.”

“Thanks,” Eliot said. “Good luck with your clockwork lessons.”

“Thank you.”

“I bet you wish you hadn’t broken that watch,” Janet said.

She wouldn’t leave it alone.

“Wishes are for children,” Jane Chatwin said. “I grew up.”





CHAPTER 16


It was like a really terrible party where on top of everything else at the end it turns out your ride bailed and you have to walk home. It was cold, and Plum kept worrying that the bird would come back at any moment with reinforcements to claim its stolen goods. Or the surviving half of the Couple, if he had survived. She worried to the point where she kept losing her shit every time anything cawed or hooted or one of them stepped on a stick. It had to be after them. No way would it let this go, not after the lengths it had already gone to. The only question was when.