Janet looked amused.
“Shit’s illegal, babe,” she said, obviously impressed despite herself. “You know that.”
“I don’t care if it is.” Anaïs shook her precious blond curls. “We need it. We have no idea what we will be seeing when we cross over. We have to be ready. Unless any of you big strong men knows how to use a sword?” There was silence, and she smirked. “Alors.”
“Did they teach you that stuff where you went?” Josh asked. He looked a little afraid of her.
“We are not so pure in Europe as you Americans, I guess.”
Penny was nodding. “Battle magic isn’t illegal in Fillory.”
“Out of the question,” Richard said crisply. “Do you realize the kind of heat you’d bring down on us? Who here besides me has dealt with the Magicians’ Court? Anybody?”
“We’re already in the shit, Richard,” Eliot said. “You think that button would be legal if the court knew about it? If you want out, get out now, but Anaïs is right. I’m not going over there with just my dick in my hand.”
“We can get a dispensation for small arms,” Richard went on primly. “There are precedents for that. I know the forms.”
“Guns?” Eliot made a sour face. “What is wrong with you? Fillory is a pristine society. Have you ever even watched Star Trek? This is basic Prime Directive stuff. We have a chance to experience a world that has not yet been fucked up by assholes. Do any of you get how important that is? Any of you?”
Quentin kept expecting Eliot to declare himself too cool for the whole Fillory project and start making snarky jokes about it, but he was turning out to be surprisingly focused and unironic about it. Quentin couldn’t remember the last time Eliot had been openly enthusiastic about anything. It was a relief to see that he could still admit that he cared about something.
“I do not want to be around Penny with a gun,” Janet said firmly.
“Look, Anaïs is right,” Eliot said. “We’ll work up some basic attack spells, just in case. Nothing too insane. We’ll just have a couple of aces in the hole. And we have those cacodemons in our backs, don’t forget. And the button.”
“And our dicks in our hands.” Anaïs giggled.
The next day Richard, Eliot, Janet, and Anaïs drove into Buffalo to shop for supplies; Janet, being from L.A., was the only one who had a driver’s license. Quentin, Josh, Alice, and Penny were supposed to be researching battle magic, but Alice wouldn’t speak to Quentin—he had knocked on her door that morning, but she wouldn’t come out—and the technicalities were beyond Josh, so it came down to Alice and Penny working together.
Soon the big dining room table was covered with books from Penny’s U-haul stash and sheets of butcher paper crawling with flow charts. They were deep into it. As the two biggest magic nerds of the group, Alice and Penny were completely absorbed in each other, speaking some ad hoc technical jargon they came up with on the fly, Penny scribbling reams of archaic notations and Alice nodding seriously over his shoulder and pointing. They were doing original work, building spells from scratch; it wasn’t fantastically difficult stuff, but any prior art in the area had been thoroughly suppressed.
Watching them work, Quentin was consumed with jealousy. Thank God it was Penny—anybody else and he would have been seriously suspicious. He and Josh spent the afternoon in the den with some beer and Smart Food watching cable on a flat-screen TV the size of a billboard. There had been no TV at Brakebills, or in their Manhattan apartment, and it felt exotic and forbidden.
Around five o’clock Eliot came and roused them.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re missing Penny’s big show.”
“How was Buffalo?”
“Like a vision of the apocalypse. We bought parkas and hunting knives.”
They trailed Eliot out to the backyard. Seeing him happy and excited and reasonably sober restored Quentin’s faith in the possibility that they were on the right track, that everything broken was fixable. He grabbed a scarf and a bizarre Russian hat with earflaps that he found in a closet.
The sun was setting behind the Adirondacks in the distance, cold and red and desolate through the haze. The others were grouped at the bottom of the lawn, which sloped down to a row of bare, decorative lindens. Penny was sighting down his arm at one of the trees while Alice paced off distance in long, even steps. She jogged over to Penny and they whispered, then she paced off the distance again. Janet stood to one side with Richard, looking adorable in a pink parka and a woolly watch cap.
“All right!” Penny called. “Stand back, everybody.”
“How much farther back can we stand?” Josh asked. Sitting on a broken white marble balustrade, a random architectural element dropped in by the landscaper, he took a nip from a bottle of schnapps and passed it to Eliot.
“Just so you’re standing back. Okay, fire in the hole.”
Like a sequined assistant, Alice stepped up to an end table on the green, placed an empty wine bottle on it, and stepped away.
Facing the bottle, Penny took a quick breath and spoke a rapid sequence of clipped syllables under his breath, ending with a one-handed flicking gesture. Something—a spray of three somethings, steely gray and tightly grouped—shot out of his fingertips, too fast to follow, and flickered across the lawn. Two of them missed, but one of them snapped the bottle’s neck off cleanly, leaving the base standing headlessly upright.
Penny grinned. There was scattered applause.
“We call it ‘Magic Missile,’ ” he said.
“Magic Missile, baby!” Josh’s breath steamed in the cold air. His face was radiant with excitement. “That’s straight up Dungeons & Dragons shit!”
Penny nodded.
“We actually based some of this on old D & D spells. There’s a lot of practical thinking in those books.”
Quentin wasn’t smiling. Wasn’t anybody going to say anything? This was dark magic. God knows he wasn’t a prude, but this was a spell meant to break up flesh, to physically wound. They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore. If they ever actually had to cast this stuff, it would already be too late.
“God, I hope we don’t have to use that,” was all he said out loud.
“Oh, come on, Quentina. We’re not looking for trouble. We just want to be ready if it comes.” Josh could hardly contain himself. “Dungeons & Dragons, motherfucker!”
Next Alice whisked the card table away so that Penny stood alone, facing the dark line of lindens. The others stood and sat scattered behind him, under the empty sunset sky. The sun was almost down now. Their noses were running and their ears were red, but the cold didn’t seem to bother Penny, who was still wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants. They were really in the middle of nowhere. Quentin was used to the background blare and hum of Manhattan, and even at Brakebills there were so many people around, there had always been someone somewhere yelling or knocking something over or blowing something up. Here, when the wind wasn’t sighing moodily in the trees, there was nothing. The whole world was on mute.
He tied down the earflaps of his Russian hat with a string.
“If this doesn’t work—” Penny began.
“Just do it already!” Janet said. “It’s cold out here!”
Penny did a deep knee-bend and spat on the gray-brown grass. Then he executed a grotesque, wild-armed flailing movement, at odds with what Quentin had seen of his otherwise highly disciplined style. Violet light sputtered in his cupped hands in the darkness so that the bones in his fingers were visible through the skin. He shouted something and finished with an overarm pitching motion.
A small, dense, orange spark left Penny’s palm and flew across the grass, dead level. At first it looked absurdly inoffensive, silly, like a toy, or an insect. But as it sailed toward the trees it grew, blooming into a fiery sparking comet the size of a beach ball, veined and roiling and snapping. It was almost stately, spinning slowly backward as it moved through the cold dusk air. Shadows wound across the lawn, shifting with the fast-moving light source. The heat was intense; Quentin felt it on his face. When it hit a linden, the whole tree went up at once with a single loud crackling woof. A gout of flame ascended into the sky and vanished.
“Fireball!” Penny called out unnecessarily.
It was an instant bonfire. The tree burned fast and merrily. Sparks flew up impossibly high into the twilight sky. Janet whooped and jumped up and down and clapped her hands like a cheerleader. Penny smiled thinly and took a theatrical bow.
They stayed at the house upstate for a few more days, lounging around, grilling on the back patio, drinking up all the good wine, going through the DVD collection, all cramming into the hot tub and then not cleaning it afterward. The fact was, Quentin realized, after all the buildup, all the hasty preparation and rush-rush-rush, they were stalling, vamping, waiting for something to push them into pulling the trigger. They were so excited they didn’t see how terrified they were. And when he thought about all the happiness waiting for him in Fillory, Quentin almost felt like he didn’t deserve it. He wasn’t ready. Ember and Umber would never have summoned someone like him.
In the meantime Alice had somehow figured out a way of never being in the same room as Quentin at the same time. She’d developed a sixth sense about him—he’d catch a glimpse of her out a window, or a flash of her feet as she vanished upstairs, but that was as close as they came. It was almost like a game; the others played it, too. When he did spot her in the open—sitting up on the kitchen counter, kicking her legs and chatting with Josh, or hunched over the dining room table with Penny and his books, like everything was fine—he didn’t dare intrude. That would be against the rules of the game. Seeing her there, so close and at the same time so infinitely removed, was like looking through a doorway into another universe, a warm, sunny, tropical dimension that he had once inhabited, but from which he was now banished. Every night he left flowers outside her bedroom door.
It was a shame: he probably never even had to know what happened. He could easily have missed it. Though maybe they would have stayed there forever if he had. He stayed up late one night, playing cards with Josh and Eliot. Playing cards with magicians always degenerated into a meta-contest over who was better at warping the odds, so that practically every hand came up four aces against a couple of straight flushes. Quentin was, tentatively, feeling better. They were drinking grappa. The twisted knot of shame and regret in his chest that had been there since the night with Janet was gradually coming undone, or at least scarring over. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either. There was so much right between him and Alice. They could get past this.
Maybe it was time he helped her see that. He knew she wanted to. He’d screwed up, he was sorry, they would get past it. QED. They just needed to get it into perspective. She was probably just waiting for him to say it. He excused himself and headed up the stairs to the third floor, where the master bedroom was. Josh and Eliot gamely rooted him on his way:
“Q! Q! Q! Q!”
When he was almost at the top of the stairs, he stopped. Quentin would have known it anywhere, the sound that Alice made when she was having sex. Now here was a conundrum for his drunken mind to reflect on: she was making it now, but it wasn’t Quentin who was making her make it. He stared down at the burnt-orange natural-weave fibers of the runner that ran down the middle of the stairs. He could not be hearing that sound. It came in through his ears and made spots appear in his vision. His blood fizzed like a science experiment and turned to acid. The acid propagated through his body and made his arms and legs and brain burn. Then it made its way to his heart, like a deadly blood clot that had broken loose and was drifting free, bringing death with it. When it reached his heart, his heart turned white hot.
She was with Penny or Richard, obviously. He had just left Josh and Eliot, and they would never do that to him anyway. He walked stiff-legged back down the stairs and down the hall to Richard’s room and kicked open the door and slapped the light on. Richard was there in bed, alone. He sat bolt upright, blinking in an asinine Victorian nightshirt. Quentin turned off the light and slammed the door shut again.
Janet came out into the hall in pajamas, frowning.
“What’s going on?”
He shouldered roughly past her.
“Hey!” she yelled after him. “That hurt!”
Hurt? What did she know about hurt? He snapped on the lamp in Penny’s room. Penny’s bed was empty. He picked up the lamp and threw it on the floor. It flashed and died. Quentin had never felt like this before. It was kind of amazing: his anger was making him superpowered. He could do anything. There was literally nothing he could not do. Or almost. He tried to rip down Penny’s curtains, but they wouldn’t come, even when he hung on them with all his weight. Instead he opened the window and ripped the clothes off the bed and stuffed them out through it. Not bad, but not enough. He spiked the alarm clock, then started pulling books off the shelves.
Penny had a lot of books. It was going to take a while to get them all off the shelves. But that was okay, he had all night, and he had all the energy in the world. Wasn’t even sleepy. It was like he was on speed. Except that after a while it got harder to pull the books off the shelves because Josh and Richard were holding his arms. Quentin thrashed insanely, like a toddler having a tantrum. They dragged him out into the hall.
It was so stupid, really. So obvious. Certainly you couldn’t call it clever. He fucked Janet; she fucks Penny. They should be even now. But he’d been drunk! How did that make them even? He barely knew what he was doing! How did that make them even? And Penny—Jesus. He wished it had been Josh.