The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(85)

Alone in his studio apartment, sitting on his pea-soup-colored foam couch, Lovelady took stock. His best guess was this: he had inadvertently acquired an object of genuine power, and something out there coveted it. He was being hunted.

That same night he pulled up stakes. He abandoned his security deposit, donned a rattling array of charms and fetishes, took a bus to London and the Chunnel train to Paris, and from there crossed the Atlantic to throw himself on the already overtaxed mercy of Brakebills. He spent an exhausting afternoon combing the woods north of New York for the school’s familiar, comforting compound.

As the sun set through the trees, and the early-winter chill gnawed at the tips of his ears, the horrifying truth sank in. He was in the right place, but Brakebills would no longer appear to him. Something, either him or his wares, was objectionable to the school’s defensive spells. Whatever he was carrying had rendered him untouchable.

That was when he cut and ran to Maine. It was ironic: for once in his life Lovelady had lucked into something genuinely powerful, a big score. But it was too much luck all at once. He was out of his league. He could have dumped his stock, all of it, right there in the middle of the frozen woods, but after a lifetime of greedy scrimping he didn’t quite have the gumption. It would have broken his avaricious heart. Instead he rented a Kozy Kabin off in the woods at the off-season rate and conducted a thorough inventory.

He recognized it right away, mixed in with a jumbled consignment of grubby costume jewelry, in a plastic bag tied with a twisty. He didn’t know what it was, but its power was obvious even to his untrained eye.

He motioned Penny over to a corner, reached into the pocket of his seedy overcoat, which he hadn’t taken off all night, and laid the Baggie on a round particleboard bar table. He grinned his livid, discolored grin at Penny. The buttons were ordinary surplus vintage buttons: two holes, four holes, fake leather, fake tortoiseshell, big angular novelty knobs, and tiny bakelite pinpricks. A few of them were just leftover beads. Penny’s eye immediately went to one of them, a flat, otherwise unremarkable pearlescent-white overcoat button about an inch across. It was heavier than it should have been. It practically vibrated with barely contained magical force.

He knew what it was. He knew better than to touch it.

“A magic button?” Janet said. “How weird. What was it?”

Her hair was a disaster, but she was obscenely relaxed, sipping coffee in an armchair, showing off her legs in a short silk bathrobe. She obviously felt triumphant, relishing her conquest, and by extension her victory over Alice. Quentin hated her at that moment.

“You really don’t know?” Penny said.

Quentin thought he had a guess, but he wasn’t going to say it out loud.

“What did you do?” he said instead.

“I made him come back with me to my apartment. That night. He wasn’t safe where he was, and at least I had a basic security setup. We called the woman who sold him the consignment, but she insisted the buttons weren’t in her records. The next day we went and got his stuff and drove to Boston, and I gave him eighty thousand dollars for it. He wouldn’t take cash, just gold and diamonds. I practically cleaned out a Harry Winston, but it was worth it. Then I told him to fu“Eighty thousand dollars,” Eliot said, “wouldn’t clear out a display case at a Zales, let alone a Harry Winston.”

Penny ignored him.

“That was two days ago. That button attracts attention. I was staying at a hotel in Boston, but last night a fire two floors above me killed a cleaning lady. I never went back to my room. I took the Fung Wah Bus from South Station. I had to walk here from Chinatown; whenever I got in a cab the engine would die.

“But what matters is that it’s real, and it’s ours.”

“Ours? Who are ‘we’?” Richard asked.

“You,” Quentin said coldly, “are a f*cking nutjob.”

“Quentin gets it,” Penny said. “Anybody else?”

“Q, what is he talking about?”

A silent spear of pure, glittering ice entered Quentin’s heart. He hadn’t heard Alice come in. She stood at the edge of the circle, her hair unwashed and adrift, like a sleepy child who wakes in the middle of the night and appears like an uncertain spirit at the edge of a grown-up party.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Quentin muttered. He couldn’t look at her. He was drowning in remorse. It almost made him angry at her, how much it hurt to look at her.

“Do you want to explain it or should I?” Penny said.

“You do it. I’m not going to be able to say it without laughing my head off.”

“Well, somebody say something, or I’m going back to bed,” Eliot said.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Penny said, gravely and grandly, “we are all going to Fillory.”

At the end of The Wandering Dune—Penny began; it was a lecture he had obviously rehearsed—Helen and Jane Chatwin receive a gift from Highbound, the captain of the rabbit-crewed clipper ship that the girls encounter in the desert. The gift is a little brass-bound oak chest containing five magical buttons, all different shapes and colors, one for each of the Chatwins, each with the power to take the wearer from Earth to Fillory and back again at will.

Everybody in the room had read the Fillory books, in Quentin’s case multiple times, but Penny rehearsed the rules anyway. The buttons don’t take you directly there: first they move you to a kind of in-between netherworld, an interdimensional layover, and from there you can make the leap to Fillory.