The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(89)

Quentin had no idea how long they’d been there, but it was a while. Hours maybe. They’d walked through square after square, like lost tourists, the three of them. Everything they saw shared a common style, and the same weathered, ancient look, but nothing ever quite repeated. Quentin and Alice couldn’t look at each other, but they couldn’t resist the seductions of this grand, melancholy place either. At least the rain had let up.

They passed through a tiny square, a quarter the size of the others and paved in cobblestones, where if they stood in the center it seemed like they could hear the ocean, the breaking and withdrawing of waves. In another square Penny pointed out a window with ghostly scorch marks above it, as if it had been the scene of a fire. Quentin wondered who had built this place, and where they’d gone. What had happened here?

Penny described in great technical detail his elaborate but ultimately think about itNGty-gunsuccessful campaign to rappel up the side of one of the buildings to get a view above the rooftops. The one time he’d managed to secure a line, on a piece of decorative masonry, he’d been overcome by dizziness halfway up, and when he recovered he found himself turned around, rappeling down the same wall he’d been trying to ascend.

At different times all three of them saw, in the farthest possible distance, a verdant square that seemed to contain a garden, with rows of what might have been lime trees in it. But they could never reach it—as they approached it always lost itself in the shifting perspectives of the alleyways, which were slightly out of alignment with one another.

“We should get back,” Alice said finally. Her voice sounded dead. It was the first time she’d spoken since she screamed at him.

“Why?” Penny asked. He was having the time of his life. He must have been terribly lonely here, Quentin thought. “It doesn’t matter how much time we spend here, you know. No time passes on Earth. To the





UPSTATE


OF COURSE AFTER that everybody had to go. They barely even said anything about Quentin’s swollen eye. (“The natives were restless,” he ad-libbed dryly.) Moments after he and Alice returned Josh came in—he’d spent the night with Ana?s after all—and they had to tell him the whole story all over again. Then they went through in threes. Josh went through with Penny and Richard. Penny took Janet and Eliot through. Josh called Ana?s and made her come over, and she went through with him and Penny.

Quentin watched Janet with cold loathing. She was a vampire, he thought. She preyed on other people’s healthy love and made it sick and crippled.

When they’d all been through, and seen what there was to see, nobody knew what to say. The mood in the room was serious and sober. Everybody gave each other long, searching looks heavy with significance. Nobody could seem to put into words how important it was, but they all agreed that this was a major thing. Major. And it had to be their thing, for now at least; they had to contain it. Nobody else could know. At Penny’s insistence they sat down in a big circle on the rug in the living room and rewove the wards on the apartment, right then and there, working together. Richard’s taste for authority, which so often made his presence all but unendurable, turned out to come in handy now. He directed the group casting in an efficient, businesslike fashion, like a seasoned conductor leading a chamber orchestra through a difficult passage of Bartok.

It took twenty minutes to finish the spell, and then an extra ten to add some fancy extra defensive and concealment layers—prudent, given the level of interest the button was evidently attracting in the at-large magical ecosystem. When they were done, when everything was checked out and double-checked, a hush settled over the room. They all sat still and just let the magnitude of what was happening here marinate in their minds. Josh rose quietly and went to the kitchen to make sandwiches for lunch. Eliot threw open a window and lit a cigarette. Janet regarded Quentin with cool amusement.

Quentin lay back on the rug and stared up at the ceiling. He needed sleep, but this was no time for sleep. Wild emotions competed for possession of his brain, like rival armies taking and retaking the same hill: excitement, remorse, anticipation, foreboding, grief, anger. He tried to focus on Fillory, to make the good feeling come back. This would change everything. Yes, his universe had just expanded times a million, but Fillory was the key to it all. That creeping, infectious sense of futility that had been incubating in his brain even since before graduation had met its magic bullet. Alice didn’t see it yet, but she would. This was what they’d been waiting for. This is what her parents had never found. A bleary grin kept smearing itself across his face, and the years fell away from him like layers of dead skin. They weren’t wasted years exactly, he could never say that, but they were years in which, in spite of all his amazing gifts, he’d been conscious of somehow not quite getting the gift he wanted. Enough to get by on. Sure. But this, this was everything. Now the present had a purpose, and the future had a purpose, and even the past, think about itlvvin was the faculty their whole lives, retroactively, had meaning. Now they knew what it was for.

If only it hadn’t happened now. If Penny could just have shown up a day earlier. Fucking Penny. Everything had been completely ruined and then completely redeemed in such rapid succession that he couldn’t tell which state ultimately applied. But if you looked at it a certain way, what happened between him and Janet wasn’t about him and Janet at all, or even him and Alice. It was a symptom of the sick, empty world they were all in together. And now they had the medicine. The sick world was about to be healed.