The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(126)
Quentin folded his arms. Muscles were jumping in his back. He was practically vibrating with fury. “Well, then. We’ll go back all the way. To before The World in the Walls. Stop him before it all starts. Find a timeline where he doesn’t even go to Fillory.”
“I’ve tried, Quentin! I’ve tried!” She was pleading with him. “He always does! I’ve tried it a thousand times. There is no world where he doesn’t.
“I’m tired. I know you lost Alice. I lost my brother. I’m tired of fighting that thing that used to b, so that she
THE WHITE STAG
THE HUNT FOR the Questing Beast took him to the edge of the vast Northern Marsh, then back south, skirting the edge of the Great Bramble, then north again, angling west through the Darkling Woods as far as the gently gurgling expanse of the Lower Slosh. It was like visiting places he’d seen in dreams. He drank from streams and slept on the ground and ate fire-roasted game—he had become a passable archer, and when he couldn’t hit something on his own he used magic to cheat.
He rode his horse hard; she was a gentle bay who didn’t seem very sorry to leave the centaurs behind. Quentin’s mind was as empty of thoughts as the woods and fields were of people. The pond in his head was frozen again, a foot thick this time. On his best days he could go hours without thinking about Alice.
If he thought of anything it was the white stag. He was on a quest, but it was his quest now, nobody else’s. He scanned the skyline for the prickle of its antlers and thickets for the flash of its pale flank. He knew what he was doing. This was what he’d dreamed about all the way back in Brooklyn. This was the primal fantasy. When he had finished it, he could close the book for good.
The Questing Beast led him even farther west, through the hills of the Chankly Bore, over a pass in a bitterly sharp mountain range, beyond anything he recognized or had ever heard of from the Fillory books. He was in virgin territory now, but he didn’t stop to explore, or name the peaks. He descended a blazing white chalk cliff to a strip of volcanic black sand on the shore of a great, undiscovered western sea. When it spotted him still in pursuit, the stag bounded out onto the surf as if it were dry land. It leaped from breaker to breaker and swell to swell like it was jumping from crag to crag, antlers erect, shaking its head and snuffing sea foam from its nostrils.
Quentin sighed. The next day he sold the gentle bay and booked passage across the western sea.
He managed to hire a nimble sloop named, embarrassingly enough, the Skywalker, crewed by an efficient foursome of three taciturn brothers and their burly, suntanned sister. Without speaking they swarmed through Skywalker’s fiendishly idiosyncratic rigging, which consisted of two dozen small lateen sails that required constant minor adjustments. They were awed by his wooden prosthetics. Two weeks out they put in at a jolly tropical archipelago—a sun-drenched scatter pattern of mango swamps and sheep meadows—to take on fresh water, then they pushed on.
They passed an island inhabited by angry, bloodthirsty giraffes, and a floating bea magic is real. But youri dedid he got st that offered them an extra year of life in exchange for a finger. (The sister took the beast up on it, times three.) They passed an ornate wooden staircase that spiraled down into the ocean, and a young woman adrift on an open book the size of a small island, in which she scribbled tirelessly. None of these adventures inspired in Quentin anything resembling wonder or curiosity. All that was over for him.
Five weeks out they made landfall on a scorched black rock, and the crew threatened to mutiny if they didn’t turn back. Quentin stared them down, then bluffed about his magical powers, then finally quintupled their pay. They sailed on.
Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up. Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer. Before this Quentin had never been on a sailboat big enough to have a jib, but now he was as lean and brown and salty-skinned as his crew. The sun became huge, and the seawater grew hot against the Skywalker’s gunwales. Everything felt electrically charged. Ordinary objects gave off strange optical effects, flares and sunspots and coronas. The stars were low, burning orbs, visibly spherical, pregnant with illegible meaning. A powerful golden light shone through everything, as if the world were only a thin scrim behind which a magnificent sun was shining. The stag kept bounding on ahead of them.
At last an unknown continent filled the horizon. It was wrapped in a magical winter and thickly wooded with fir trees that grew right up to the shore, so that the salt water lapped at their tangled roots. Quentin dropped anchor and told the crew, who were shivering in their thin tropical clothes, to wait a week and then leave without him if he wasn’t back. He gave them the rest of the gold he’d brought, kissed the seven-fingered sister good-bye, lowered the sloop’s ca?que and rowed himself to shore. Strapping his bow to his back, he pushed his way into the snow-choked forest. It was good to be alone again.
The Questing Beast showed itself on the third night. Quentin had made camp on a low bluff overlooking a clear, spring-fed pool. Just before dawn he woke to find it standing at the water’s edge. Its reflection shivered as it lapped the cold water. He waited for a minute, on one knee. This was it. He strung his bow and slipped an arrow from his quiver. Looking down from the low bluff, with the early-morning air almost dead, it wasn’t even a difficult shot. At the moment of release he thought: I’m doing what even the Chatwins failed to do, Helen and Rupert. He didn’t feel the pleasure he thought he would. He put his shaft through the tough meat of the white stag’s muscular right thigh.