The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(74)
After Betsy left, or Amadeus, or whatever her name was, Stoppard had departed the scene too at top speed on the busted club chair, with promises to reconnect back in New York once the coast was clear. Plum and Quentin were going to take the pool table, but when they tried to shift it they discovered that they lacked the necessary motive power. All their magical strength was spent. So they set off on foot instead.
Maybe they should have taken Lionel’s gun, for added protection, but they didn’t. They just didn’t want it.
It was a long night, and a long walk, but then again everybody had a lot of explaining to do, and a lot of thinking to do too. Quentin told her what he knew about why Asmodeus (that was it) would have wanted the knife, and after hearing the tale of Reynard the murdering rapist fox-god she thought it was pretty understandable. She must have been planning to steal it all along, that was the whole reason she was there. All else being equal Plum wished her well.
But how had she known it was in the case in the first place? Plum didn’t even have a guess. Quentin didn’t either, or if he did he didn’t make it.
More disquieting was the fact that Asmodeus obviously knew about Plum’s family. She’d realized a while ago that the bird must know; now it was clear that her secret identity wasn’t anywhere near as secret as she thought it was, and that being a Chatwin meant that she was already part of a lot of other people’s stories in ways that she was only now becoming aware of. She figured she might as well tell Quentin at this point; she felt safe with him. She’d almost told him once, at the hotel bar, and anyway he asked why she could open the suitcase when nobody else could, because of course he wasn’t going to let that go, and that had to be the answer. Her great-grandfather had locked it and made sure only a family member could unlock it. She could have made up something, but she was so tired she couldn’t think of a lie, and anyway what was the point.
For the record Plum thought it was pretty rich that Quentin turned out to be connected to a hard case like Betsy, if only indirectly. But he was turning out to be a pretty hard case himself, in his way, or at any rate harder than she’d thought based on first impressions. And everywhere she looked things were getting connected up, or rather it was becoming clear that they were already connected in ways that she was only just now picking up on. It was a worrying trend. Everybody else was deep into their own stories, and all the stories were woven together just beneath the surface into a web that included Plum. But what was Plum’s story?
Toward dawn they’d recovered enough strength from the spellcasting orgy of the day before that they could risk some low flight, just above the trees. They had no idea where they even were. Once the sun was up they found a road and walked along it looking sufficiently pathetic and unthreatening that some guy out for an early-morning drive in his Honda Element gave them a ride into the nearest town.
The town was called Amenia, as it happened, like Armenia but without the r. It was in Dutchess County, New York, and it turned out to be the very last stop on the commuter train line to Manhattan, two and a half hours away. So they steal-o-mancied some dollars out of an ATM and bought tickets, plus some bad coffee and rubber croissants at the snack bar in the lobby of the train station. Then they sat on the old red bench in said lobby. It was nine in the morning, and the next train wasn’t till noon.
It had been a long night, and a long day before that, and Plum needed to go to sleep and perchance to dream—maybe dreaming she could begin to process and understand the sight of a roomful of robed figures with golden hands, and Betsy standing over an electrocuted corpse, and Lionel opening fire on Stoppard, and Asmodeus née Betsy carving a suddenly nonhuman Lionel to pieces with a knife . . . thinking about it again she started to shake. Things had gone much too far, and her brain felt raw and scarred from it all.
It wasn’t how she’d imagined spending what should have been her last semester at Brakebills. It wasn’t even how she’d imagined spending her post-Brakebills life of crime. As soon as she read the letter she found on her bed the night of the ghost, she knew she was going to take the job. Keep moving, keep busy, that was rule number one of being Plum. And yeah, part of her got an illicit thrill out of it. She’d never had a rebellious phase, and she wasn’t sure she wanted one, but she’d sure as hell gotten one. It was crazy and weird and kind of sleazy but she embraced it.
At least she’d learned some new magic from Quentin and Pushkar. Maybe she could spin it to her parents as an internship. What she really wanted was something she could fall in love with the way she loved Brakebills, but at this point she wasn’t sure she would ever find it.
Even after her dramatic reveal she and Quentin had eventually run out of conversation, and now they just sat there on the bench in the empty waiting room of the Amenia train station, looking out at the cement platform, and the empty tracks, under the empty white sky, feeling the weight of the sleepless night pressing down on their shoulders like a mile of ocean, and them sunk to the bottom of it. Plum let her mind spin off its axis. Her brain wasn’t up to thinking about the future right now, or about the past. It wasn’t functioning on that level. So she hung out in the present, second by second.
It was a surprisingly substantial train station for a town this tiny, this far from New York City. A flat-screen TV wedged into one corner of the lobby showed local news, including shaky iPhone footage of strange objects seen streaking across the sky last night. Plum wondered if people actually commuted to Manhattan from here. She wondered what it would be like just to be a regular civilian person who lived in Amenia, New York. She thought it might be pretty nice.