The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(122)
He couldn’t think about what happened; he could only play it back again and again, as if there were a chance it could come out differently, or even just hurt a little less, but every time he played it back he wanted to die. His half-healed body ached all over, as if it were bruised right down to his skeleton, but he wanted it to hurt even more. He didn’t know how to operate in a world that would allow this to happen. It was a shit world, a fraud and a con, and he wanted nothing more to do with it. Whenever he slept, he woke up trying to warn somebody of something, but he never knew what, or who, and it was always too late.
With the sorrow came anger. What had they been thinking? A bunch of kids walking into a civil war in an alien world? Alice was dead (and Fen, and probably Penny, too) and the worst part was that he could have saved them all, and he hadn’t. He was the one who told them it was time to go to Fillory. He’d blown the horn that summoned the Beast. Alice had come because of him, to take care of him. But he hadn’t taken care of her.
The centaurs watched him weep with alien unconcern, like fish.
He learned over the next few days that he was in a monastery, or something like it, or that was as much as he could gather from the centaurs who ran the place. It wasn’t a place of worship, they explained, with a note of whinnying condescension, but a community devoted to the most absolute possible expression, or incarnation—or perhaps realization was an even better word—of the incomprehensibly complex but infinitely pure sylvan values of centaurhood, which Quentin’s fallen human brain could never hope to grasp. There was something distinctly German about the centaurs.
It came out, not very tactfully, that they considered humans to be inferior beings. It wasn’t the humans’ fault. They were simply cripples, severed by an unhappy accident of birth from their rightful horse halves. The centaurs regarded Quentin with pity nicely tempered by a near-total lack of interest. Also, they seemed to be constantly afraid that he was going to tip over.
None of them had any exact memory of how Quentin had gotten here. They didn’t pay close attention to the backstory of the occasional damaged human who fetched up in their midst. When pressed, Quentin’s doctor, a terrifyingly earnest individual at the same timeR at thev with whose name was Alder Acorn Agnes Allison-Fragrant-Timber, said she vaguely remembered some humans, unusually filthy and bedraggled specimens, now that you mention it, bringing Quentin in on a makeshift litter. He’d been unconscious and deep in shock, with his rib cage crushed and one of his forelimbs badly dislocated, practically detached. Such anatomical disorder was distasteful to the centaurs. And they were not insensible of the service the humans had rendered to Fillory in ridding it of Martin Chatwin. They did their best to offer assistance.
The humans lingered in the area for a month, maybe two, while the centaurs wove deep webs of wood-magic around Quentin’s torn, bruised, insulted body. But they thought it unlikely that he would ever wake up. And in time, as Quentin showed no signs of recovering consciousness, the humans reluctantly departed.
He supposed he could have been angry that they had left him there, in Fillory, with no way of returning to his own world. But all he felt was warm, cowardly relief. He didn’t have to face them. The sight of their faces would have burned the skin right off him with shame. He wished he had died, and if he couldn’t have death, at least he had this, the next best thing: total isolation, lost forever in Fillory. He was broken in a way that magic could never fix.
His body was still weak, and he spent a lot of time in bed, resting his atrophied muscles. He was an empty shell, roughly hollowed out by some crude tool, gutted and left there, a limp, raw, boneless skin. If he tried, he could summon up old sense-memories. Nothing from Fillory or Brakebills, just the really old stuff, the easy stuff, the safe stuff. The smell of his mother’s oil paints; the lurid green of the Gowanus canal; the curious way Julia pursed her lips around the reed of her oboe; the hurricane that blew through when they took that family vacation in Maine, he must have been about eight, when they went out on the lawn and threw their sweaters in the air and watched them sail away over the neighbor’s fence and then fell down laughing. A beautiful blossoming white cherry tree stood outside his window in the warm afternoon sunlight. Every part of it moved and swayed in a slightly different rhythm from every other part. He watched it for a long time.
If he was feeling daring, he thought about the time he’d spent as a goose flying south over Patagonia, wingtip to wingtip with Alice, buoyed up by pillowy masses of empty air, gazing coolly down at looping, squiggly, switchbacked rivers. If he did it now, he thought, he would remember to look out for the Nazca Lines in Peru. He wondered if he could go back to Professor Van der Weghe and have her change him back, and he would just stay that way, live and die as a stupid goose and forget that he’d ever even been a human. Sometimes he thought of a day he’d spent with Alice on the roof of the Cottage. They had a joke that they were going to play on the others when they got back from somewhere, but the others never came home, and he and Alice had just lain up there on the warm shingles all afternoon, looking at the sky and talking about nothing.
A few days of this went a long way. His body was healing fast and getting restless, and his brain was waking up and needed new diversions to distract it. It wouldn’t leave him alone for long.
Onward and upward. He couldn’t stop himself from getting better. Soon Quentin was out and about and exploring the grounds, a walking skeleton. Severed from his past, and from everything and everyone he knew, he felt as insubstantial and semi-existent as a ghost. The monastery—the centaur name for it was the Retreat—was all stone colonnades and towering trees and wide, well-maintained paths. Despite himself, he was raven said over his shoulder. y.ool andgously hungry, and although the centaurs were strict vegetarians they turned out to be wizards with salad. At mealtimes they set out huge heaping wooden troughs full of spinach and lettuce and rocket and sharp dandelion greens, all delicately oiled and spiced. He discovered the centaur baths, six rectangular stone pools of varying temperatures, each one large enough that he could do three long, deep breaststrokes from one edge to the other. They reminded him of the Roman baths in Alice’s parents’ house. And they were deep, too: if he dove in and kicked downward with enough vigor, until the light dimmed and his hindbrain complained and the water pressure forced its fingers into his ears, he could still just barely brush the rough stone bottom with his fingers.