The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(86)

I think the adults knew we were keeping something to ourselves, but they could never put their big, clumsy, groping fingers on what it was. It was our shared secret.

But we didn’t all feel the same way about what he’d done. Helen in particular—always the arch-Ramsian—was scathing about it, excoriating Martin for defying Ember and Umber’s will, as she saw it. But I believe that we all understood it and even, on some level, admired it. I know that I did. It must have taken great will and resourcefulness to seek out Umber, to strike the deal and then to go through with it. He was many things, and God only knows what he is now, but Martin was not stupid, and he wasn’t a coward.

Though it was difficult to reconcile Martin’s escape into Fillory with the damage it caused in the real world. One of the secrets Martin must have learned down below the Northern Marsh was how not to care about some things, and there was power in that, the power to live as though his actions had no consequences. It fell to us to witness the consequences, and they were ugly. Our mother’s nerves were always fragile, and Martin’s disappearance finally and permanently annihilated her. We saw her more and more rarely, and when we did, in one or other dispiriting institutional setting, she never failed to accuse us of keeping Martin from her. Her own children seemed sinister and alien to her. She knew, somehow, that we knew. And she was right.

But I never saw Martin again. I always looked for him, though as time passed I became more and more worried about what would happen if I found him. He could or would not show himself to me. I’ve never understood why not.

He certainly had the chance. There were more adventures left for us in Fillory, most of which ended up in A Secret Sea and The Wandering Dune. I didn’t turn them down. Even after what I’d seen that day, even with my heart half broken, I still could never say no to Fillory.

And then Fillory said no to us. By the end of A Secret Sea I was twelve, and after that I was never asked back. One by one we became too old. Helen had one final adventure, in the company of Jane, and the two girls returned bearing a box of magical buttons which Jane claimed could have given them free entry to Fillory forever. But Helen considered the buttons to be a perversion of magic, she thought using them would be a blasphemy against the rams, and she disposed of them immediately and could not be persuaded to divulge their hiding place. Her arguments were very Ramsian indeed, and everyone sided against her, even Jane. It was a schism, and after it we Chatwin children were never as close again, and our integrity as a tribe was diminished even further.

Maybe the strangest consequence of Martin’s disappearance was that Plover started writing. Whatever went on between him and Martin, when that ended, the writing began, and one day Plover surprised us with a book. He’d had it privately printed. He called it The World in the Walls. The cover was his own charmingly amateurish drawing of Martin and the grandfather clock.

It will sound strange, but after the initial surprise the book never interested us much. We took one cursory glance at it, made fun of the illustrations—Plover had the most ignorant, sentimental ideas of what a dwarf looked like—but we already knew everything in it. People like to call the Fillory books magical, but they never seemed that way to us. If you’ve seen magic, then the Fillory books are very pale imitations indeed. Plover’s words were like dried flowers, stiff and crumbling, crushed flat between pages, when we’d had the living, blooming blossoms all around us.

Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives.

We each of us on our own found ways to get on without Fillory. The real world was not as fantastical and brightly colored as Fillory, but it was very distracting nonetheless, and if it didn’t contain any pegasi or giants it was absolutely teeming with girls who seemed almost as magical and dangerous. Fillory was sweet, but this world was very savory. It was easy to let Fillory go when every football match and scholarship examination and furtive kiss told you to stop fighting, forget it, let it be, leave it behind. We talked about Fillory less and less among ourselves, and we went to Plover’s less and less, and the whole business began to seem less and less real.

By this time the books had begun to sell, too, and a miraculous rain of money began to fall upon us. We wouldn’t have said it out loud, or even to ourselves, but it was as if we had sold Fillory itself—or rather we’d sold its realness, reduced it to the status of a children’s fantasy, in exchange for regular and startlingly large payments into accounts which would come under our control when we were twenty-one. By the time I was seventeen and sitting an entrance examination for Merton College, Oxford, I’m not entirely sure I believed in Fillory at all anymore.

Jane did. She never stopped looking for the buttons that Helen hid, and when she disappeared at thirteen I believe that she found them. But she knew better than to try to take me with her, and none of us tried to follow her. When she did not return, I could only assume that she went down the same path that Martin did.

It has been years now since Helen or Fiona or I have mentioned Fillory to each other, except as it pertains to our finances. We don’t talk about Martin or Jane—in their way they’ve come to seem as fantastical to us as the Cozy Horse. Without those things we’ve got very little to talk about at all, and I would pay any price not to have to suffer any more of Helen’s glittery-eyed, American-accented chatter about Jesus. It’s as though we three are the survivors of a great disaster—like the bombing of a city, the way London is being bombed to pieces now—and to even mention what happened would be to risk calling back the planes to blast us to pieces all over again.