The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(78)

Anyone who has led a secret life—spies, criminals, fugitives, adulterers—knows that a fa?ade is not an easy thing to maintain, and some people are better at it than others. I, as it turned out, had something of a gift for lying to adults; I sometimes wonder if I was left out of certain expeditions simply because I could be relied on to cover for the others. I don’t know how many times I found myself forced to invent stories—outlandish but far more mundane than the reality—to explain why one sibling or another hadn’t turned up for Mass or lessons or tea.

We were always scrambling to change in and out of our Fillorian things before they could be discovered. Our feats of arms often left us covered with scratches and bruises that had to be accounted for too. Martin’s shin was split wide open once by an arrow, hunting bandits near Corian’s Land, and he spent a month in Fillory convalescing.

Perhaps the greatest indignity was having to pretend that we didn’t know things that we’d learned in Fillory. I still remember falling over laughing watching Fiona, the great huntress of the Queenswood, laying it on thick at the archery range, getting tangled up and finally sitting down on her bum trying to string a bendy little schoolgirl’s bow.

We gave that up, in the end. Jane just didn’t care enough to dissemble, and one day she simply galloped away from her riding class, hallooing wildly in centaur as she cleared the stone wall at the end of the meadow and disappeared into the forest. After that we all stopped caring. Let people be amazed, if they absolutely must.

Very often, when the way to Fillory was closed to us, and we had exhausted the limited possibilities of Aunt Maude, her house, her library, her staff and the grounds, we crossed the road and picked our way through the trees and through a gap in the hedge to Mr. Plover’s house. I know now that he cannot have been over forty, but we thought of him as a very old man because his hair was already grey. I think he was quite terrified of us at first—he had no children himself and was not much used to their company. And as children went we were very childish indeed. At that time in our lives Martin was the closest thing we had to a parent, and although he did his best he was still only twelve. We were loud and obstreperous and very nearly feral.

Even on the first day we invaded Plover’s house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they’re too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely. We exploited it. Unwilling to throw us out, incapable of entertaining us properly, unable to think of anything else to do, he offered us tea, though it wasn’t yet three in the afternoon.

It was an inauspicious start. We threw our crusts and dueled with our spoons and tittered and whispered and asked rude questions as we ate—but we did eat, for it was a very good tea, with nice biscuits and homemade marmalade. Plover can’t have enjoyed himself much, but he was wealthy and unmarried and had already retired from business, and he must have been nearly as bored in the country as we were. So we all soldiered on.

In most respects the occasion was very unsuccessful, and we couldn’t have guessed at the time that it would be the first of many. I realize now that we, all five of us, must have been very angry children: angry at the absence of our parents, angry at the presence of louche, neglectful Aunt Maude and her many suitors, angry at the war, angry at God, angry at our own strangeness and seeming irrelevance. But people are slow to recognize anger in little children, and children never recognize it in themselves, so it comes out in other ways.

Whatever the reason, we competed to see who could push the boundaries of propriety the furthest. It was Fiona who won that contest—and I recall her doing it triumphantly, with an almost sensual pleasure—by mentioning Fillory.

This was a transgression not only of earthly rules but of Fillorian ones. The disrespect was not toward Mr. Plover, who was merely baffled, but toward Ember and Umber, who had sworn us to secrecy. Up until that moment none of the five of us had ever said the word “Fillory” within earshot of an adult. We weren’t even positively certain that we could. Would the rams’ magic reach across the void between worlds and seal our lips?

It would not. There was silence at the table. Fiona froze, alive and trembling with delight at her victory, and with terror at her sin. Had she gone too far? Nobody knew. We waited for the thunderclap of retribution.

“Fillory?” asked Mr. Plover innocently, in his flat Chicago tones. He seemed happy to have found a question to ask us. “What on Earth is that?”

“Oh,” Martin said airily, as if the admission cost him nothing, “it’s not on Earth at all. It’s a place we go to sometimes. We found it inside a clock.”

And after that the boundary was breached, and the walls crumbled, and we all rushed ahead, the stories tumbling out one after the other, none of us wanting to be left behind.

—

It really was too funny, Plover listening away and, after a while, making notes on some loose paper. He was wide-eyed at the treasure trove of childish whimsy he’d stumbled on—he must have fancied himself a latter-day Charles Kingsley, the Charles Dodgson de nos jours. He would never ask about it right away, instead he would work his way around to it circuitously—he would chat and nod and observe the niceties, but always the moment arrived when he would reach for a notebook, which he never seemed to be without, hoist one leg over the other, lean forward and say, in his queer accent, neither American nor English, “And what’s the latest from Fillory, huh?”