The Magician King (15 page)

That was probably a few more lessons down the track.

“Be careful what you learn from me,” he said. “What is written with a sword cannot be erased.”

“That’s why I have you,” Quentin said. “So I won’t have to write anything. With my sword.”

“Sometimes I think I am fate’s sword. She wields me cruelly.”

Quentin wondered what it was like to be so unselfconsciously melodramatic. Nice, probably.

“Right. Well, there won’t be much cruelty on this trip. We’ll be back at Whitespire pretty soon. Then you can go check out your castle.”

Bingle turned to face the wind. He seemed to be living out some story of his own in which Quentin was just a minor character, a chorus member, without even a name in the program.

“I shall never see Fillory again.”

In spite of himself Quentin felt a chill. He didn’t like the feeling. He was chilly enough as it was.

After Island was a low strip of gray rocks and thin grass flocked with sheep. If the Outer Island was a tropical paradise, After could have passed for a stray member of the Outer Hebrides.

They circled it, hugging the shore, until they found a harbor and dropped anchor. A couple of rain-ravaged fishing boats were moored there, and a handful of empty buoys suggested that more were out to sea. It was a hell of a dreary spot. A more enterprising king might have tried to claim it for Fillory, Quentin supposed, except that it didn’t really seem worth it. Not exactly the jewel in the crown.

There was no wharf, and the bay was crowded with surly breakers. They barely managed to get the launch in past the surf without swamping. Quentin jumped out, wetting himself to the waist, and wallowed up onto the rocky beach. A couple of fishermen watched them, smoking and mending a vast tangled net that was stretched out around them on the shale. They had the brick-red complexions of lifelong outdoorsmen, and they shared the same thickheaded look. They didn’t seem to have enough forehead—their hairlines were pulled down too low over their eyebrows. Quentin would have put their age at anything between thirty and sixty.

“Ahoy there,” he said.

They nodded at him and grunted. One of them touched his cap. Over a few minutes’ parley the friendly one was persuaded to divulge the general direction of the nearest and probably only town. Quentin, Bingle, and Benedict thanked the men and slogged their way up the beach through the cold white sand scalloped with black tide marks. Julia trailed silently behind them. Quentin had tried to persuade her to stay on board, but she insisted. Whatever else was going on with her, she was still up for a party.

“You know what I’m waiting for on this trip?” Quentin said. “I’m not waiting for somebody to be happy to see us. I just want someone to look surprised to see us.”

The weather deepened to a light wuthering rain. Quentin’s wet pants chafed. The sand gave way to dunes capped with saw grass and then to a path: grassy sand, then sandy grass, then just grass. They tramped through humpy, unfenced meadows and low hills, past a lost, orphaned well. He tried to summon a heroic feeling, but the setting wasn’t especially conducive. It reminded him of nothing so much as walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn in the freezing rain with James and Julia on the day he took his Brakebills exam.
In olden times there was a boy, young and strong and brave-o . . .

The town, once they found it, was a thoroughly medieval affair of stone cottages, thatched roofs, and mud streets. Its most marked characteristic was the thorough lack of interest the locals showed in the oddly dressed strangers in their midst. A half dozen of them were sitting at an outdoor table in front of a pub. They were eating sandwiches and drinking beer out of metal tankards in the face of weather Quentin would have made it a major priority to get out of.

“Hi,” he said.

Chorus of grunts.

“I’m Quentin. I’m from Fillory. We’ve come to your island in search of a key.” He glanced at the others and coughed once. It was pretty much impossible to do this without sounding like he was reciting a Monty Python sketch. “Do you know anything about that? A magic key? Made of gold?”

They looked at each other and nodded: agreed, we all know what he’s talking about. They shared a family resemblance. They could all have been brothers.

“Aye, we know the one you mean,” one of them said—a large, brutallooking man encased in a huge woolly coat. His hand on his knee was like a piece of pink granite. “It’s down t’road.”

“Down the road,” Quentin repeated.

Right. Of course. The golden key is down the road. Where else would it be? He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.

“Aye, we know it.” He jerked his head. “Down t’road.”

“All right. Down the road it is. Well, thank you very much.”

He wondered if it was ever warm and sunny here, or if they lived in the permanent equivalent of a New England November. Did they know they were three days’ sail from a tropical zone?

The travelers set off down the road. They would have looked nobler if they’d been riding horses instead of wallowing through the mud like a bunch of peasants, but the
Muntjac
wasn’t set up for horses. Maybe they could hire local horses. Shaggy, sturdy ponies resigned to always being cold and damp, and to never being sleek and beautiful. He missed Dauntless.

The street changed to cobbles, rounded cubes that turned slick and ankle-breaking in the drizzle. It wasn’t much of a setting for a quest or an adventure or even an errand. Maybe Bingle was right, maybe they were just minor characters in his drama.

Benedict wasn’t even taking notes the way he usually did.

“I’ll just remember it,” he said.

There you had it: an island not even Benedict would bother to map.

It wasn’t a large town, and it wasn’t a long road. The last building on it was a stone building like a church, though it wasn’t a church, just a boxy structure two stories high, built up out of flat gray local stones, unmortared. It had a blank façade that looked unfinished, or maybe whatever ornamentation had once been there had been stripped away.

Quentin felt like the little boy at the beginning of
The Lorax,
at the mysterious tower of the dismal Once-ler. They should have been facing down bellowed challenges from black knights bearing the vergescu, or solving thorny theological dilemmas posed by holy hermits. Or at the very least resisting the diabolical temptations of ravishing succubi. Not fighting off seasonal affective disorder.

If he’d had to put his finger on it he would have said that more than anything else the rhythm of it was wrong. It was too soon. They shouldn’t have found it this quick, nor should they obtain it without a fight.

But fuck it. Maybe he was just lucky. Maybe it was destiny. In spite of everything, he felt a rising excitement. This was it. The doors were enormous and made of oak, but there was a smaller, man-sized door set in one of them, presumably for days when you couldn’t be bothered to fling open an entire grand double-height oaken portal. The doorway was flanked by empty niches for statuary, past or future but not present.

They straggled to a stop in front of it, a brave company of knights assembled before the Chapel Perilous. Which of them would brave what lay within? Quentin’s nose was running. His hair was wet from the rain; he did have a hat, but he felt an obstinate urge to face whatever suffering was available for him to face, and that was a cold drizzle. He and Julia sniffled at the same time.

In the end they all braved the chapel, if only to get in out of the wet. It was no warmer inside than outside. The atmosphere was of an old country church from which the verger had stepped away for a few minutes. The air smelled like stone dust. Diffuse gray light misted in through a few narrow, high windows. A collection of rusty gardening implements resided in one corner: a hoe, a shovel, a rake.

In the center of the room stood a stone table, and on the stone table lay a worn red velvet pillow, and on the pillow lay a golden key, with three teeth.

Next to it was a yellowed slip of paper on which was neatly printed:

 

GOLDEN KEY

 

The key wasn’t bright, and it wasn’t tarnished. It had the deep matte patina of an authentically old thing. Its dignity was undisturbed by its humble surroundings—the stillness in the room seemed to come from it. Probably the rubes around here just didn’t know enough to take it seriously. Like some European village with a cannon as a war monument, and no one realizes it still has a live round in the chamber, until one day . . .

Bingle picked up the key.

“Jesus!” Quentin said. “Careful.”

The guy must have a death wish. Bingle turned it over in his hands, examining both sides. Nothing happened.

Quentin realized what was going on. He’d been given a do-over. He was back on the edge of that meadow in the forest, but this time he was going in. There was more to life than being fat and safe and warm in a clockwork luxury resort. Or maybe there wasn’t more, but he was going to find out. And how did you find out? You had an adventure. That’s how. You picked up a golden key.

“Let me see it,” he said.

Satisfied that it wasn’t lethal, or at least not instantly, Bingle passed it to Quentin. It didn’t buzz, and it didn’t glow. It didn’t come alive in his hand. It felt cool and heavy, but not cooler and heavier than he imagined a golden key should feel.

“Quentin,” Julia said. “There is old magic on that key. A lot of it. I can feel it.”

“Good.”

He grinned at her. He felt elated.

“You do not have to do this.”

“I know. But I want to do this.”

“Quentin.”

“What?”

Julia offered him her hand. God bless Julia. Whatever else she had lost she still had a hell of a lot of human kindness inside her. He took her hand, and with the other he felt around in the air with the key. Maybe if he—? Yes. He felt it click against something hard, something that wasn’t there.

He lost it for a second—he waved the key around but couldn’t find it. And then he had it again, the clack of metal on metal. He stopped with the key resting on it, then pushed and it slipped in, ratcheting past an invisible tumbler and fitting firmly. Experimentally he let go of it. It stayed there: a golden key suspended in midair, parallel to the ground.

“Yes,” he whispered. “This.”

He took a breath, tremblier than he wanted it to be. Bingle did an odd thing, which was to place the point of his sword on the ground and drop to one knee. Quentin gripped the key again and turned it clockwise. Running on instinct, he felt for a doorknob and found it—he could picture it in his mind’s eye, cold white porcelain. He turned it and pulled and an immense cracking, tearing sound filled the room—not a terrible sound, a satisfying sound, the breaking of a seal that had been intact for centuries, waiting to be breached. Julia’s soft hand tightened on his. Air rushed from the room behind him out through the crack he was opening, and hot light flooded over him.

He was opening a door in the air, tall enough for him to walk through without stooping. It was bright in there, and there was warmth, and sunlight, and green. This was it. Already the gray stone of the After Island looked insubstantial. This was what he’d been missing—call it adventure or whatever you wanted to. He wondered if he was going somewhere in Fillory or somewhere else entirely.

He stepped through onto grass, leading Julia through after him. There was light all around them. He blinked. His eyes began to adjust.

“Wait,” he said. “This can’t be it.”

He lunged back for the doorway, but it was already gone. There was nothing to lunge through, no way back, just empty air. He lost his balance and caught himself with his hands, skinning both his palms on the warm concrete sidewalk in front of his parents’ house in Chesterton, Massachusetts.

“O
kay,” he said. “Okay. It’s disappointing.” He sat on the curb, elbows on his knees, staring up at the power lines, and attempted to reason with himself. His scraped hands smarted and throbbed. It felt like late summer. For some reason it was the power lines more than anything else that looked weird, after two years in Fillory.

That and the cars. They looked wrong, like animals. Angry alien animals. Julia was sitting on the grass, hugging her knees and rocking slightly. She looked worse off than he did.

Quentin’s heart was sinking out of his chest and out of his body and down into the dirt of this goddamned useless planet. I was a king. I had a ship. I had a beautiful ship, my own ship!

It was like somebody was trying to send him a message. If so he got it. Message received.

“I get it,” he said out loud. “I hear you. I get it already.”

I am a king, he thought. Even in the real world I’m still a king. Nothing can take that away.