The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(85)

“What if I’m not?” he said. “What good is Martin? Everybody hates him, me included. I’d rather be somebody else. Anybody else. Even if it’s nobody.”

He picked up a dry shirt from a neat stack of clothes on a chair.

“I suppose I’m like one of those guests at Maude’s parties, the ones who won’t go home when it’s over, not even after she turns the lights on. But I’ve got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise.”

The clothes looked rich, and they fit him perfectly, as I knew they would: cool, shadowy colors, black velvets and small silvery pearls like the little sugar balls they use to decorate cakes. He looked very much like a king.

“Mart, come on,” I said, even though I knew from experience that begging only made him angrier. “Leave it alone. Let it be how it was.”

“Don’t!”

He jabbed a finger at me. I felt more than two years younger than him then—somewhere he’d learned the secret of a richer, more powerful adult rage.

“It isn’t how it was! It never will be again! They changed the rules on us, so as far as I’m concerned all bets are off.” He cinched his belt tight. “If They apologized, if They showed any regret, then maybe. Maybe. If They would even say why.

“But They wouldn’t. Not Them. So I’m off to war, like Daddy. They can’t give us Fillory and then just take it away again. The rams have sunk low, but I’ll sink lower. They’re bad, I’ll be worse.”

He flung open both doors to the throne room.

“Mart, who lives here?” I asked. “Whose house is this?”

He went in; I hung back in the doorway. The walls of the throne room were lined with more footmen, still and heavy-lidded as frogs. The torches burned strangely, not warm and yellow but sparking and spitting like holiday fireworks.

“Here I am!” Martin shouted.

I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the joy in his voice—he was relishing the rage and shame. I think he’d been keeping them down for a long time, trying to feel nothing at all, and after so much numbness anything felt sweet, even pain.

“Well, come on!” He spread his arms wide. “I’ve got what you want. Come on and take it!”

I think I knew then why They did it—why Ember and Umber wouldn’t let us stay in Fillory. It wasn’t that we were too old, or too sinful. It wasn’t so that we could spread Their wisdom in another world, our world. It wasn’t that being in Fillory made you happy, and in its way too much happiness was as dangerous as too much sadness. That is a lie that even Ember and Umber never told.

No, it was that Fillory was cruel, as cruel in its way as the real world was. There was no difference, though we all pretended there was. There was nothing fair about Fillory, just as there was nothing fair about people’s fathers going to war, and their mothers going mad, and the way we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would. Fillory was no better than our world. It was just prettier.

I didn’t think those things, not then, but I felt them all when I looked past Martin into the golden barbell eyes of the great ram Umber, the Shadow Ram. Castle Blackspire was His house. Umber was Martin’s buyer.

Give him credit, Martin took this in stride.

“Oh, it’s You, is it?” he said. “Well, come on, you old faker. It’s all here, and only slightly soiled. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” came the resonant reply. Not like Ember’s voice: higher, and calm and civilized, even urbane. “I am ready.”

“So go ahead. Take it. Take it all, you bloody coward, and give me what I want!”

I gave up then. I could have tried one last time to change Martin’s mind. I could have tried to drag him out of that room. I could have tried to take his place, or to fight a god, but I didn’t. I was afraid, and I fled. I ran through the empty halls of the night palace and didn’t stop till I was lying on my face in the cold mud on the edge of the Northern Marsh. I never saw my brother again.

—

Martin’s disappearance made headlines all over England, pushing even news of the war below the fold. The English love a good tragedy, especially when it involves a child, and this one was a nine-days’ wonder. Detectives were dispatched to Fowey from Penzance and London and farther away. Dockery House was turned upside down, from attic to basement, and Plover’s house was too. Notices were circulated. Dogs were loosed. Gardens were dug up. Ponds and fountains were dragged. Men with slight builds were lowered into abandoned wells.

An amazing number of lost things were recovered: bicycles, pets, keys, odd items of silver, one or two petty criminals, in one case a rogue bassoon which had been stolen and then apparently abandoned in a ha-ha when it proved impossible to sell. The bassoonist having by that time pined for it and then passed away, the instrument was lodged temporarily and then eventually permanently by the police at Dockery House, as if by way of an apology—a sort of replacement for the child they never managed to find. Jane, in her inscrutable way, learned to play it passably well.

A cloud of suspicion settled on Christopher Plover, but over time it dispersed, as clouds will, pausing on its way to shadow a few of the less savory locals in turn, but always inconclusively. Truth to tell Plover was a little heartbroken when Martin disappeared. There was no evidence, and no arrests were ever made. We children knew where Martin had gone, of course, more or less, though I never told the others everything I knew. I never told them it was Umber who’d taken Martin’s offer. I didn’t have the heart to do it.