The Magician King

They filed out onto the narrow balcony. In the castle courtyard far below, at the bottom of a vertiginous drop, a few hundred Fillorians had gathered. From this height they looked unreal, like dolls. Quentin waved.

“I wish we could do something more for them,” he said.

“What do you want to do?” Eliot said. “We’re the kings and queens of a magic utopia.”

Cheers drifted up from far below, faintly. The sound was tinny and far away—it had the audio quality of a musical greeting card.

“Some progressive reforms? I want to help somebody with something. If I were a Fillorian I would depose me as an aristocratic parasite.”

When Quentin and the others took the thrones, they hadn’t known exactly what to expect. The details of what was involved were vague—there would be some ceremonial duties, Quentin supposed, and presumably a lead role in policy making, some responsibility for the welfare of the nation they ruled. But the truth was that there just wasn’t much actual work to do.

The weird thing was that Quentin missed it. He’d expected Fillory to be something like medieval England, because it looked like medieval England, at least on casual inspection. He figured he’d just use European history, to the extent that he remembered it, as a crib sheet. He would pursue the standard enlightened humanitarian program, nothing extraordinary, greatest hits only, and go down in history as a force for good.

But Fillory wasn’t England. For one thing the population was tiny—there couldn’t have been more than ten thousand humans in the whole country, plus that many talking animals and dwarves and spirits and giants and such. So he and the other monarchs—or tetrarchs, whatever—were more like small-town mayors. For another, while magic was very real on Earth, Fillory was magical. There was a difference. Magic was part of the ecosystem. It was in the weather and the oceans and the soil, which was wildly fertile. If you wanted your crops to fail you had to work pretty hard at it.

Fillory was a land of hyperabundance. Anything that needed making could be gotten from the dwarves, sooner or later, and they weren’t an oppressed industrial proletariat, they actually enjoyed making things. Unless you were an actively despicable tyrant, the way Martin Chatwin had been, there were just too many resources and too few people to create anything much in the way of civil strife. The only shortage that the Fillorian economy suffered from was a chronic shortage of shortages.

As a result whenever any of the Brakebills—as they were called, even though Julia had never even been to Brakebills, as she wasn’t slow to point out—tried to get serious about something, there turned out not to be much to be serious about. It was all ritual and pomp and circumstance. Even money was just for show. It was toy money. Monopoly money. The others had all but given up on trying to make themselves useful, but Quentin couldn’t quite let it go. Maybe that was what had been nagging at him, as he stood on the edge of that meadow in the woods. There must be something real somewhere out there, but he could never quite seem to get his hands on it.

“All right,” he said. “What next?”

“Well,” Eliot said, as they filed back inside. “There is this situation with the Outer Island.”

“The where?”

“The Outer Island.” He picked up some royal-looking documents. “That’s what it says. I’m king of it, and even I don’t know where it is.”

Janet snorted. “Outer is off the east coast. Way off, a couple of days’ sail. God, I can’t believe they even let you be king. It’s the easternmost point in the Fillorian Empire. I think.”

Eliot peered at the map painted on the table. “I don’t see it.”

Quentin studied the map too. On his first visit to Fillory he’d sailed deep into the Western Sea, on the other side of the Fillorian continent, but his knowledge of the east was pretty sketchy.

“It’s not big enough.” She pointed to Julia’s lap. “That’s where it would be if we had a bigger table.”

Quentin tried to imagine it: a little slip of white tropical sand, embellished with a decorative palm tree, embedded in an ocean of blue-green calm.

“Have you been there?” Eliot said.

“No one’s ever been there. It’s just a dot on the map. Somebody started a fishing colony there after his ship collided with it like a million years ago. Why are we talking about the Outer Island?”

Eliot went back to his papers. “Looks like they haven’t paid their taxes in a couple of years.”

“So?” Janet said. “Probably that’s because they don’t have any money.”

“Send them a telegram,” Quentin said. “DEAR OUTER ISLANDERS STOP SEND MONEY STOP IF YOU HAVE NO MONEY THEN DO NOT SEND MONEY STOP.”

The meeting flagged while Eliot and Janet tried to outdo each other in composing the most useless possible telegram to the Outer Islanders.

“All right,” Eliot said. The turning tower had rotated to where the flaming Fillorian sunset lit up the sky behind him. Ladders of pink cloud were stacked up above his shoulders. “I’ll lean on the Fenwicks about Jollyby. Janet will speak to the Lorians.” He waved vaguely. “And somebody will do something about the Outer Island. Who wants scotch?”

“I’ll go,” Quentin said.

“It’s just there on the sideboard.”

“No, I mean to the Outer Island. I’ll go there. I’ll see about the taxes.”

“What?” Eliot sounded annoyed by the idea. “Why? It’s the ass end of nowhere. And anyway, it’s a treasury matter. We’ll send an emissary. That’s what emissaries are for.”

“Send me instead.”

Quentin couldn’t have said what the impulse was exactly, he just knew that he had to do something. He thought of the circular meadow and the broken clock-tree and the film clip of Jollyby dying started up again. What was the point of all this when you could just drop dead, just like that? That’s what he wanted to know. What was even the fucking point?

“You know,” Janet said, “we’re not invading it. We don’t need to send a king to the Outer Island. They haven’t paid their taxes, which by the way is like eight fish. They’re not exactly powering the whole economy.”

“I’ll be back before you know it.” He could already tell he’d gotten it right. The tension inside him broke as soon as he said it. Relief was flooding through him, at what he didn’t even know. “Who knows, maybe I’ll learn something.”

This would be his quest: collecting taxes from a bunch of backwater yokels. He had skipped the adventure of the broken tree, and that was fine. He would have this one instead.

“Could look weak, with the Jollyby thing.” Eliot fingered his royal chin. “You taking off at the first sign of trouble.”

“I’m a king. It’s not like they’re going to not re-elect me.”

“Wait,” Janet said. “You didn’t kill Jollyby, did you? Is that what this is about?”

“Janet!” Eliot said.

“No, really. It would all fit together—”

“I didn’t kill Jollyby,” Quentin said.

“All right. Fine. Great.” Eliot ticked the item off on his agenda. “Outer Island, check. That’s it then.”

“Well, I hope you’re not going alone,” Janet said. “God knows what they’re like out there. It could be Captain Cook all over again.”

“I’ll be fine,” Quentin said. “Julia’s coming with me. Right, Julia?”

Eliot and Janet both stared at him. How long had it been since he surprised those two? Or anybody? He must be on to something. He smiled at Julia, and she looked back at him, though with her all-black pupils her expression was unreadable.

“Of course I am,” was all she said.

That night Eliot paid Quentin a visit in his bedroom.

When he first found it the room had been stuffed with an appalling amount of hideous quasi-medieval junk. It had been literally centuries since all four of Whitespire’s thrones had been filled at the same time, and in the meantime the extra royal suites had been invaded and occupied by creeping armies of superfluous candelabras, defunct chandeliers listing and deflated like beached jellyfish, unplayable musical instruments, unreturnable diplomatic gifts, chairs and tables so piteously ornamental they would break if you looked at them, or even if you didn’t, dead animals ruthlessly stuffed in the very act of begging for mercy, urns and ewers and other even less easily identifiable vessels that you didn’t know whether to drink out of or go to the bathroom in.

Quentin had had the room cleared out to the bare walls. Everything must go. He left the bed, one table, two chairs, a few of the better rugs, and some pleasing and/or politically expedient tapestries, that was all. He liked one tapestry in particular that depicted a marvelously appointed griffin frozen in the act of putting a company of foot soldiers to flight. It was supposed to symbolize the triumph of some group of long-dead people over some other group of long-dead people whom nobody had liked, but for some reason the griffin had cocked its head to one side in the midst of its rampage and was gazing directly out of its woven universe at the viewer as if to say, yes, granted, I’m good at this. But is it really the best use of my time?

When it was finally empty the room had grown by three times its size. It could breathe again. You could think in it. It turned out to be about as big as a basketball court, with a smooth stone floor, towering timbered ceilings where light got lost in the upper reaches and made interesting shadows, and soaring Gothic lead-glass windows a few little panels of which actually opened. It was so gloriously still and empty that when you scuffed your foot on the stone it echoed. It had the kind of hushed stillness that on Earth you saw only from a distance, on the other side of a velvet rope. It was the stillness of a closed museum, or a cathedral at night.

There was some murmuring among the upper servants that such a spartan chamber was not entirely suitable for a king of Fillory, but Quentin had decided that one of the good things about being a king of Fillory was that you got to decide what’s suitable for a king of Fillory.

And anyway, if it was high royal style they wanted, the High King was their man. Eliot had a bottomless appetite for it. His bedroom was the gilded, diamond-studded, pearl-encrusted rococo lair of a god-king. Whatever else it was, it was entirely suitable.

“You know in the Fillory books you could actually get into the tapestries?” It was late, after midnight, and Eliot was standing eye-to-eye with the woven griffin and sipping from a tumbler of something amber.

“I know.” Quentin was stretched out on the bed, wearing silk pajamas. “Believe me, I’ve tried. If they really did it I have no idea how they did it. They just look like ordinary tapestries to me. They don’t even move like in Harry Potter.”

Eliot had brought a tumbler for Quentin too. Quentin hadn’t drunk any yet, but he hadn’t ruled out the possibility either. At any rate he wasn’t going to let Eliot drink it, which he would inevitably try to do when he was done with his own. Quentin made a nest for the tumbler in the blankets next to him.

“I’m not sure I’d want to get into this one,” Eliot said.

“I know. Sometimes I wonder if he’s trying to get out.”

“Now this fellow,” he said, moving on to a full-length portrait of a knight in armor. “I wouldn’t mind getting into his tapestry, if you get what I mean.”

“I get what you mean.”

“Pull that sword out of its scabbard.”

“I get it.”

Eliot was building up to something, but there was no rushing him. Though if he took much longer Quentin was going to fall asleep.

“Do you think if I did you’d see a little tapestry version of me running around in there? I don’t know how I’d feel about that.”

Quentin waited. Since he’d made the decision to go to the Outer Island he felt calmer than he had in ages. The windows were open, to the extent that they could be opened, and warm night air flowed in, smelling like late summer grass and the sea, which wasn’t far off.

“So about this trip of yours,” Eliot said finally.

“About it.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

“Do you have to?”

“Something about quests and adventures and whatever. Sailing beyond the sunset. It doesn’t matter. We don’t need you here for the Jollyby thing. One of us really should go out there anyway, they probably don’t even know they have kings and queens again. Just pass along any prurient details as a matter of state security.”

“Will do.”

“But I want to talk to you about Julia.”

“Oh.” Whiskey time. Trying to drink lying down, Quentin took a bigger swallow than he meant to, and it ignited a brush fire in his guts. He suppressed a cough. “Look, you’re only High King,” he gasped, “you’re not my dad. I’ll figure it out.”

“Don’t get defensive, I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“Did I ever tell you,” Eliot said, sitting on one of the two chairs, “how Julia and I met?”

“Well, sure.” Had he? The exact particulars were fuzzy. “I mean, not in granular detail.”

The truth was that they hardly ever talked about that time. They talked around it. No good memories there for anybody. It was after the big disaster in Ember’s Tomb. Quentin had been half-dead and had to be left in the care of some irritating but ultimately very medically effective centaurs while Eliot and Janet and the others returned to the real world. Quentin had spent a year recovering in Fillory, then he went back to Earth and gave up magic. He spent another six months working in an office in Manhattan until Janet and Eliot and Julia finally came and got him. If they hadn’t he’d probably still be there. He was grateful, and he always would be.