The Magicians
Page 27“See?” she demanded, close to tears. “You see it too, right? It’s not too late for me. I won’t go back to college. Tell them. Tell them I could still come.”
“Does James know?”
She shook her head tightly. “He wouldn’t understand. I don’t see him anymore.”
He wanted to help her, but there was no way to. It was far, far too late. Better to be blunt about it. This could have been me, he thought. This was almost me.
“I don’t think there’s anything I can do,” he said. “It’s not up to me. I’ve never heard of them changing their minds—no one ever gets a second Exam.”
But Alice got an Exam, he thought, even though she wasn’t Invited.
“You could tell them, though. You can’t decide, but you can tell them I’m here, right? That I’m still out here? You can at least do that!”
She grabbed his arm again, and he had to mutter a quick counterspell to snuff out the Prismatic Spray. That stuff could eat into fabric.
“Just tell them you saw me,” she said urgently, her eyes full of dying hope. “Please. I’ve been practicing. You can teach me. I’ll be your apprentice. I’ll do whatever you need. I have an aunt who lives in Winchester, I can live with her.
“Or what do you need, Quentin?” She moved closer to him, just slightly, so that her knee touched his knee. In spite of himself he felt the old electrical field form between them. She hazarded a curvy, sardonic smile, letting the moment hang in the air. “Maybe we can help each other. You used to want my help.”
He was angry at himself for being tempted. He was angry at the world for being this way. He wanted to yell obscenities. It would have been terrible to see anybody scrape the bottom like this, but her . . . it should have been anybody but her. She has already seen more unhappiness, Quentin thought, than I will ever see in my life.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Julia. If I tell them, they’re just going to find you and wipe your memory. For real this time.”
“They can try,” she snarled, suddenly fierce. “They tried once already.”
She breathed hard through pinched white nostrils.
“Just tell me where it is. Where we were. I’ve been looking for it. Just tell me where the school is, and I’ll leave you alone.”
Quentin could only imagine the kind of shit he’d be in if Julia showed up at the House hell-bent on matriculating and dropped his name.
“It’s in upstate New York. On the Hudson somewhere, I don’t know exactly where. I really don’t. It’s near West Point. They make it invisible. Even I don’t know how to find it. But I’ll tell them about you, if that’s truly what you want.”
He was just making it worse. Maybe he should have bluffed her after all, he thought. Tried harder to lie. Too late.
She put her arms around him, as if she were too exhausted by relief and despair to stand anymore, and he held her. There was a time when this was everything he wanted.
“They couldn’t make me forget,” she whispered into his chest. “Do you understand that? They couldn’t make me forget.”
He could feel her heart beating, and the word he heard when it beat was shame, shame, shame. He wondered why they hadn’t taken her. If anybody should have gone to Brakebills, it was her, not him. But they really would wipe her memory, he thought. Fogg would make sure this time. She’d be happier that way anyway. She could get back on track, go back to college, get back together with James, get on with her life. It would all be for the best.
By next morning he was back at Brakebills. The others were already there; they were surprised he’d lasted as long as he did. The most any of them had spent at home was forty-eight hours. Eliot hadn’t gone home at all.
While they played Janet told the story of Alice’s Antarctic ordeal, despite the fact that everybody except Quentin had heard it already, and Alice herself was right there in the room, silently paging through an old herbal in the window seat. Quentin didn’t know how he would feel about seeing Alice again, after he’d made such a comprehensive mess of their last conversation, but to his amazed relief, and despite every possible reason to the contrary, it wasn’t awkward at all. It was perfect. His heart clenched with silent happiness when he saw her.
“And then when Mayakovsky tried to give her the bag of sheep fat, she threw it back in his face!”
“I meant to hand it back to him,” Alice said quietly from the window seat. “But it was so cold and I was shaking so badly, I sort of flung it at him. He was all ‘chyort vozmi!’ ”
“Why didn’t you just take it?”
“I don’t know.” She put the book down. “I’d made all these plans for getting by without it, it just threw me off. Plus I wanted him to stop looking at me naked. And anyway I didn’t know he was going to have mutton fat for us. I hadn’t even prepared the Chkhartishvili.”
That was a white lie. Like Alice couldn’t have cast Chkhartishvili cold. He had missed her so much.
“So what did you do for heat?” he said.
“I tried using some of those German thermogenesis charms, but they kept fading away whenever I fell asleep. By the second night I was waking myself up every fifteen minutes just to make sure I was still alive. By the third day I was losing my mind. So I ended up using a tweaked Miller Flare.”
“I don’t get it.” Josh frowned. “How is that supposed to help?”
“If you kind of mangle it a little it becomes inefficient. The extra energy comes out as heat instead of light.”
“You know you could have cooked yourself by accident?” Janet said.
“I know. But when I realized the German thing wasn’t going to work, I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“I think I saw you once,” Quentin said quietly. “At night.”
“You couldn’t have missed me. I looked like a road flare.”
“A naked road flare,” Josh said.
Eliot came in with a tureen full of viscous, unappetizing flip and began ladling it into teacups. Alice picked up her book and headed for the stairs.
“Hang on, I’m coming back with the hot ones!” Eliot called, busily grating nutmeg.
Quentin didn’t hang on. He followed Alice.
At first he’d thought everything would be different between him and Alice. Then he thought everything was back to normal. Now he understood that he didn’t want things to be back to normal. He couldn’t stop looking at her, even after she’d looked at him, seen him looking at her, and looked away in embarrassment again. It was like she’d become charged in some way that drew him to her uncontrollably. He could sense her naked body inside her dress, smell it like a vampire smells blood. Maybe Mayakovsky hadn’t quite managed to get all the fox out of him.
He found her in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was lying on one of a pair of twin beds, on top of the bedspread, reading. It was dim and hot. The roof slanted in at an odd angle. The room was full of odd, old furniture—a wicker chair with a staved-in seat, a dresser with a stuck drawer—and it had deep red wallpaper that didn’t match any other room in the house. Quentin yanked up the window halfway—it made an outraged squawk—and flopped down on the other twin bed.
“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 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 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?”
“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.”
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, 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 ever 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, not through magic but because that’s who on some level they really were all along.