The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(93)

“So you’re just . . . living and working with this mysterious brooding older man twenty-four-seven,” Chelsea said.

“I have the phrase ‘Girl Friday’ in my mind for some reason,” Wharton said.

“Guys. It’s not anything like as intimate as you’re imagining. We live in the same house. I’m assisting him on a project.”

“Because, see, any amount of intimate there would be, you know—” Chelsea wrung her hands frantically. “Squick.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said loyally, raising the flag for the backlash to the backlash. “I mean, come on, guys. He’s only what—forty?”

“He’s thirty,” Plum said.

“Sorry. It’s hard to tell with the, you know, the hair. I just meant that we’re not in Humbert Humbert territory here. Not quite.”

“We are not in any territory at all! God! There is no territory!”

“All right, all right.” Darcy held up her hands: we surrender. For now. “I just wish you’d give us a hint about what you are doing.”

Plum did. She’d had enough. Something in her wanted to rise to the challenge of defending herself, and Quentin too. At some point, she couldn’t have said when, this had gone from Quentin’s weird impulse project to something she cared about too. She wanted it to work.

“Look,” she said, “I know it sounds weird. And I have total respect for everything you guys are doing. I do. Even if you’re just going to get high all the time and make light shows on the ceiling.”

Chelsea gave the double V-for-victory sign.

“Those are your paths, and they’re awesome. I’m just on a different one, and it’s definitely a path, but it’s different because I don’t know where it’s going. What Quentin is doing—look, I don’t want to get into details, but it’s pretty brilliant, and he’s after something real. He’s taking a big risk. I like that. I think one day I might want to do something like that too.”

She finished her beer in silence. Everybody was a little embarrassed that Plum had made a speech that wasn’t self-deprecating or funny. Well, so be it, she thought.

“So . . .” Darcy broke the silence.

“So you want to know what we’re doing? We’re doing magic. And if it comes off it’s going to be a f*cking masterpiece.”

That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny.

—

It wasn’t completely true. They hadn’t done any magic yet. But they would soon. The elaborate preparations in the fourth-floor room were starting to have an effect. One morning Plum walked in and noticed something funny about one of the windows, a little square one set in the back wall. It looked dark, like something was covering it from the outside, whereas the others were full of Manhattan sunlight. The window wasn’t blocked, but the view had changed. It looked out at somewhere else now, or maybe somewhen else: a silent steel-gray marshland in early evening. Miles of swaying drowned grass, in fading light, stretching out to the horizon.

Plum touched the glass. Where the other windows were cool, it was unseasonably warm.

“Weird. Where the hell is that?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Quentin said.

Plum was enjoying her stint as a sorcerer’s apprentice more than she would have thought. Morale was high. Once she’d learned that Fillory really was real, she’d braced herself for an assault from her depressive streak. The revelation seemed like the kind of thing that would give her depression a scary power and substance. But instead she’d found the news left her unexpectedly light, and free, as if maybe it wasn’t her Chatwin-ness at all but rather the bracing-against-it that had caused her so much trouble over the years.

They spent a long cold day up on the house’s flat, sticky tarpaper roof finishing out the magical security up there. If any passing satellite happened to snap a picture, some truly weird shit was going to turn up on Google Earth.

“So tell me about Alice,” Plum said. She was painting sigils, black paint on black roof. “I mean, more about her.”

This kicked off a long pause from Quentin, and Plum wondered if she’d crossed a line. She knew the basic facts, but he hadn’t been forthcoming with a lot of details, probably because he didn’t want to talk about them. But Plum did. She figured since Alice almost killed her, probably, she had the right to subject Quentin to a little exploratory interrogation. He obviously hadn’t given up on his whole Alice project. It was lying fallow for the moment, but Plum wasn’t fooled.

“What do you want to know?”

“What was she like, what kind of stuff was she into, that kind of thing. I mean, I met her ghost or niffin or whatever, but I didn’t get a good sense of her day-to-day interests.”

Quentin stopped working and stood up and massaged the small of his back.

“Alice was great. She was kind, she was funny, she was weird. She was smart—smarter than me, and a better magician too. She did things I still don’t understand. It was sort of part of who she was—there was a force to her, a power, that I’ve never seen in anybody else.”

“Were you in love with her? I mean, I know you were boyfriend-girlfriend, but.”

“Totally.” He smiled. “Totally in love. But I wasn’t ready for her. She was more grown-up than me, and I had a lot of stuff left to work out. I made some mistakes. I thought some things were important that really weren’t.”