The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(65)
“Can you believe they have these here? It’s a full set—they were in the bookcase in the bathroom.” She held up the book she was reading. Incredibly, it was an old copy of The World in the Walls.
“I had that exact same edition.” The cover showed Martin Chatwin halfway through the old grandfather clock, with his feet still in this world and his amazed head poking into Fillory, which was drawn as a groovy 1970s disco winter wonderland.
“I haven’t looked at them for years. God, remember the Cozy Horse? That big velvet horse that would just carry you around? I wanted one so badly when I was that age. Did you read them?”
Quentin wasn’t sure how much to reveal about his Fillory obsession.
“I may have taken a look.”
Alice smirked and went back to the book. “Why is it that you still think you can keep secrets from me?”
Quentin folded his hands behind his head and lay back on the pillow and looked up at the low, tilted ceiling. This wasn’t right. There was something brother-sister about it.
“Here. Budge over.”
He switched beds and lay down next to Alice, hip-checking her sideways to make room on the narrow bed. She held up the paperback, and they read together silently for a few pages. Their shoulders and upper arms touched. Quentin felt like the bed was on a train moving very fast, and if he looked out of the window he’d see the landscape racing past. They were both breathing very carefully.
“I never got it about the Cozy Horse,” Quentin said after a while. “First of all, there’s only one of it. Is there a whole herd of Cozy Horses somewhere? And then it’s too useful. You’d think somebody would have domesticated it by now.”
She whacked his head with the spine, not completely gently.
“Somebody evil. You can’t break the Cozy Horse; the Cozy Horse is a free spirit. Anyway it’s too big. I always figured it was mechanical—somebody made it somehow.”
“Like who?”wood-paneled b First Yearv with
“I don’t know. A magician. Somebody in the past. Anyway the Cozy Horse is a girl thing.”
Janet stuck her head in. Apparently the exodus downstairs was general.
“Ha!” Janet brayed. “I can’t believe you’re reading that.”
Alice scooched an inch away from him, instinctively, but he didn’t move.
“Like you didn’t,” Quentin said.
“Of course I did! When I was nine I made my family call me ‘Fiona’ for two weeks.”
She vanished, leaving behind a comfortable, echoless silence. The room was cooling down as hot air ascended out through the half-open window. Quentin imagined it rising in an invisible braided plume into the blue summer day.
“Did you know there really was a Chatwin family?” he asked. “In real life? Supposedly they lived next door to Plover.”
Alice nodded. She unscooched now that Janet was gone. “It’s sad, though.”
“Sad how?”
“Well, do you know what happened to them?”
Quentin shook his head.
“There’s a book about it. Most of them grew up to be pretty boring. Housewives and insurance magnates and whatnot. I think one of the boys married an heiress. I know one got killed in World War Two. But you know the thing about Martin?”
Quentin shook his head.
“Well, you know how he disappears in the book? He really did disappear. He ran away or had an accident or something. One day after breakfast he just vanished, and they never saw him again.”
“The real Martin?”
“The real Martin.”
“God. That is sad.”
He tried to imagine it, a big fresh-faced, floppy-haired English family—he pictured them in a sepia-toned family portrait, in tennis whites—suddenly with a gaping hole opening in the middle of it. The somber announcement. The slow, decorous acceptance. The lingering damage.
“It makes me think of my brother,” Alice said.
“I know.”
At this she looked at him sharply. He looked back. It was true, he did know.
He propped himself up on one elbow so he could look down at her, the air around him whirling with excited dust motes. “When I was little,” he said slowly, “and even when I was not so little, I used to envy Martin.”
She smiled up at him.
“I know.”
“Because I thought he’d finally done it. I know it was supposed to be a tragedy, but to me it was like he broke the bank, beat the system. He got to stay in Fillory forever.”
“I know. I get it.” She put a restraining hand on his chest. “That’s what makes you different from the rest of us, Quentin. You actually still believe in magic. You do realize, right, that nobody else does? I mean, we all know magic is real. But you really believe in it, don’t you?”
He felt flustered. “Is that wrong?”
She nodded and smiled even more brightly. “Yes,wood-paneled b First Yearv with Quentin. It’s wrong.”
He kissed her, softly at first. Then he got up and locked the door.
And that’s how it started, though of course it had been starting for a long time. At first it was like they were getting away with something, as if they half expected someone or something to stop them. When nothing happened, and there were no consequences, they lost control—they ravenously, roughly pulled each other’s clothes off, not just out of desire for each other but out of a pure desire to lose control. It was like a fantasy. The sound of breathing and rustling cloth was thunderous in the little chaste bedroom. God only knew what they could hear downstairs. He wanted to push her, to see if she had it as bad as he did, to see how far she’d go and how far she’d let him go. She didn’t stop him. She pushed him even further. It wasn’t his first time, or even his first time with Alice, technically, but this was different. This was real, human sex, and it was so much better just because they weren’t animals—because they were civilized and prudish and self-conscious humans who transformed into sweaty, lustful, naked beasts, and not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.