The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(83)

The tide was out and the wind was slack. The sea was flat as a made bed. It looked about eleven in the morning.

Martin was halfway up the dunes already. He had had plenty of time to think through what he would do in Fillory, if he ever got the chance. He was here on borrowed time, and he wasn’t going to waste it.

“Hey!” I called after him. “Wait for us!”

Fiona was watching him too, but she wasn’t following. The joke had gone far enough for her.

“He’s not going to Whitespire,” she said quietly.

“He’s not? Martin!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

“I think you should go with him,” Fiona said. “Someone should.”

Martin had paused at the crest and was considering us.

“Well, come on then,” he said, “if you’re coming.”

I did. Fiona stayed where she was.

—

Nothing happened the way Plover said it did later. All that business with Sir Hotspots in The Flying Forest is his invention—pure fiction. In reality it was just me and Martin. I was the only witness.

Martin’s gait was a stolid, purposeful tramp, and I had to skip every few strides to keep up with him.

“Where are we going?”

“I’m not going back,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m not going back to England, Rupes. I hate it, I hate England, and everybody there hates me. You know that. And if I go home I’ll never get back here again, we both know it. You saw the book, it almost had my legs off. If the rams want me out They’ll have to throw me out, and when They try by God They’ll have a fight on Their hands.”

There was no point in arguing with him. There was a bit of our father in Martin, and just then he sounded like Father cursing the Germans, something he used to do often and at great length.

“What are you going to do?”

“Anything,” he said. “Everything. Whatever I have to.”

“But what?”

“There’s something I want to try. I had an idea about a trade.”

“A trade. With who? What have you got to trade?”

“I’ve got me!” he snarled. “For what that’s worth.” And then, less angrily, in the voice of Martin the little boy, who would exist for only an hour or so longer: “Will you come with me?”

“All right. Where are we going?”

“We’re going to see someone. Who knows, might be you could do a trade with him too.”

He looked over his shoulder, to make sure Fiona hadn’t followed us, then he quickly sketched a square in the air with his fingers. The shape became a window, looking out over a marshy landscape, and he stepped over the sill and through it. The casual speed with which he did this shocked me deeply. We’d seen magic practiced by Fillorian sorcerers, but none of us had studied it, or not as far as I knew. Martin must have been practicing secretly for months, leading an entire life that he concealed from us. A secret life within a secret life.

I followed him through.

“Where are we?”

“Northern Marsh,” he said. “Come on.”

The ground here was boggy, but Martin picked his way through it with confidence, ever the intrepid explorer. I tried to step where he stepped, but I lost my balance and put a hand down, and it came up covered with black muck. Soon our shoes were full of water, and the marsh was sucking at them as if it liked the taste. I wasn’t dressed for this; I was lucky I’d had shoes on at all.

After a quarter-hour of this I climbed up on a round rock, an oasis of solidity, and stopped. Ahead was just black puddles and reeds and more black puddles and then open water.

“Mart! Stop!”

He turned and waved at me. Then he took a last look around at the horizon, pressed his hands together in front of him, prayerfully, and dived headfirst down into a puddle.

The water barely looked deep enough to reach his ankles, but it swallowed him as completely and easily as if it were an ocean. I watched the surface settle and reseal itself behind him and turn glassy again.

Only then did I become truly afraid.

“Mart! Martin!”

I left my shoes on the rock—for all I know they’re still there—and thrashed ahead to where he’d disappeared and shoved my arm into the puddle up to the shoulder. It had no bottom. I took a deep breath and put my head under.

My inner ear spun. I tried to steady myself and instead fell forward. There was a moment of nausea and weightless confusion, then I was lying on my back on wet ground gasping like a fish. Gradually everything began to right itself.

I was lying on the underside of the swamp—the reverse side of the muddy plain I’d just been tramping through. Gravity had turned upside-down. If I looked down I was looking up through the puddles at the blue sky of Fillory. If I looked up there was only darkness overhead. It was nighttime in the world under the Northern Marsh, and before me, across a flat plain of black mud and sun-filled puddles, was a fairy castle made of black stone. Its towers pointed down instead of up, but so did everything, including me.

This was new. Martin had taken us somewhere truly strange. Fillory was a land of wonders, but this place had an uncanny quality that I can only describe as not correct. It was a place that shouldn’t have been, somewhere off the edge of the board, where you weren’t meant to put a playing piece down. This wasn’t an ordinary adventure, another legend in the making. I knew already that Plover would never hear about it. This was happening off the books.