The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(98)

They looked at each other, both breathing hard.

“I don’t,” Quentin panted. “Think. She can. Come through.”

He looked like he was going to cry or be sick or both. She really hoped he did neither of those. They shouldn’t have cast the spell. Jesus, how stupid did you have to be—ancient enchantment rouses primal horror, it was the oldest story there was. Hubris. They were such idiots.

“How the f*ck did she get here?” Plum gasped.

Quentin didn’t answer. His face looked weird: happy and sad and terrified all at once.





CHAPTER 22


Quentin didn’t sleep that night. He did try, because it seemed important, because sleeping was something you did at night, but it was never going to happen. After a couple of hours of staring at the ceiling shivering, his mind spinning and lurching like a dryer with a shoe in it, he gave up and got dressed and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. It was three in the morning. He stood in front of the red door for a good half hour, nervously jiggling his knee, clenching his jaw till it ached.

Then he began plastering himself with wards and boosting his reflexes and doing whatever else he could think of that might come in handy. He was going back through.

The safeguards were probably beside the point. Alice had been stronger than him when she was human, and now she was on another power scale entirely. Now she was plugged into the main line. But he had to get closer to her. He didn’t understand why she was here. Maybe he’d summoned her somehow, without even knowing it, trapped her and bound her in this weird mirror-house. Maybe she’d come on her own—Alice had found him at Brakebills, and now she’d found him again here, wriggled her way into his land like a worm into an apple. She was the snake in his Eden.

It didn’t really matter. He hadn’t managed to make a land, or not much of one, but this was better. Making a land was a distraction anyway. So was the robbery. This was what he wanted.

But what did Alice want? To haunt him? Laugh at him? Hunt and kill him? The scholarly literature on niffins was pretty thin. Their behavior was unpredictable at best. But whatever she wanted, he knew what she needed, and that was to be human again. He couldn’t have asked for a better chance.

And he needed her too: he needed to see her again, she was the only person he’d ever felt completely at home with. He knew he should wait and eat and sleep and talk it over with Plum, but—he told himself—it was hard to know how long he had. The whims of a niffin were pretty much the definition of perverse. If she left now he might never find her again. He was going to finish this.

And plus Plum would try to talk him out of it.

The house was quiet. He wasn’t even remotely tired. Staring at the red door he tried to summon up in his mind the Alice he knew. Did he really remember what she was like? Maybe he was pursuing a ghost, the ghost of a ghost, a figment of his own memory. It had been seven years: that was longer than he’d known her as a human. Maybe he was chasing some long-gone, never-was fantasy-Alice. If he could bring her back, who would she be?

Quentin was going to find out. He opened the red door but didn’t cross the threshold. The other room was still there, the mirror room, with its mirror windows. He sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and waited.

He’d been sitting there for ten minutes when Alice swam by, slowly, in profile, her legs trailing lightly behind her, as silent and malevolent as a shark in an aquarium. She was slightly smaller than she had been in life, like an expensive doll of herself. She didn’t see him; if she knew he was there she didn’t bother to turn her head.

Once she was out of view he stood up, waited five more minutes, then stepped through the door. Everything was just as it had been. There was the same deep muffled quiet. No wind from outside rattled the mirrored windows. Nothing moved. Or almost nothing: there was an unnerving flicker at the corner of his eye, like a television left on without the sound. It was the mirror in the bathroom, where flakes of snow were still drifting down.

He stood at the top of the stairs, swung his arms and bounced on his toes. He had not even a glimmer of a plan. How did you turn a monster back into a person? It took a long time for Alice to appear again, and he was starting to wonder if he should call her name when he heard a muffled, fumbling clatter in the room below, like somebody kicking something small and heavy across a rug. A minute later that thin blue radiance came filtering up the stairwell. Whatever he’d been about to do or say or cast exited his head, and he got up and walked stiff-legged back to the door. He couldn’t stop himself. It was like his legs were bionic and somebody else was controlling them.

That was what it was to fear for your life. He stopped himself in front of the door, breathing hard, not quite going through, not yet. What was he going to do? He wanted to shout at her: Wake up! Remember who you are! I need to talk to Alice! But the thing about monsters was, you couldn’t talk to them about it, because they wouldn’t admit they were monsters in the first place.

She came rising up right through the floor. Quentin bounded away from the door, out of the room and down the stairs like an athlete. He heard laughter, creepily familiar. It was hers, but cold, musical, mechanical, somebody tapping on a wineglass. She came floating down the stairs after him, and he backed away into the mirror-version of Plum’s bedroom. He caught a glimpse of her—she wasn’t quite Alice, not exactly. She blurred out for a second, a low-res hologram of herself. Her hair floated weightless around her head.