“That was—” She stopped and started over. “That wasn’t good.”
“So why did you do it.”
Alice tilted her head, thoughtfully, but her face was white.
“To get back at you. Because I was feeling like shit about myself. Because I didn’t think you would care. Because I was drunk, and he came on pretty strong—”
“So he raped you.”
“No, Quentin, he did not—”
“Never mind. Stop talking.”
“I don’t think I understood how much it would hurt you—”
“Just stop talking, I can’t talk to you anymore, I can’t hear anything you’re saying!”
He’d started that little speech speaking normally and he ended it shouting. In a way fighting like this was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse. Quentin leaned forward, all the way forward, until he had placed his forehead on the cool marble of the bench in front of him. His eyes were closed. He wondered what time it was. His head felt a little spinny. He could fall asleep right there, he thought. Just like this. He wanted to tell Alice he didn’t love her, but he couldn’t, because it wasn’t true. It was the one lie he couldn’t quite tell.
“I wish this were over,” Alice quietly.
“What.”
“This mission, this adventure, whatever you want to call it. I want to go home.”
“I don’t.”
“This is bad, Quentin. Somebody’s going to get hurt.”
“Good, I hope they do. If I die doing this, at least I’ll have done something. Maybe you’ll do something one of these days instead of being such a pathetic little mouse all the time.”
She said something he didn’t catch.
“What?”
“I said, don’t talk to me about death. You don’t know anything about it.”
For no reason, and against his express conscious wishes, some very tight elastic band of muscle around Quentin’s chest relaxed very slightly. Something between a laugh and a cough escaped him.
He sank back against his pillar.
“God, I am literally losing my fucking mind.”
Across the room Anaïs sat with Dint, talking intently and going over a handmade map of their progress so far that he’d sketched on what looked suspiciously like graph paper. Anaïs seemed more like a part of the guides’ gang than the Brakebills gang now. As he watched she bent over the map, deliberately smooshing her tit into Dint’s shoulder as she did so. Josh was nowhere to be seen. Penny and Eliot were dozing on the floor in the center of the room, their heads resting on their packs. Eliot had hectored Janet about the gun until he extracted a promise from her to dispose of it responsibly.
“Do you even want this anymore, Quentin?” Alice asked. “I mean, what we’re doing here? This kings and queens idea?”
“Of course I do.” He’d almost forgotten why they were here. But it was true. A throne was exactly what he needed right now. Once they were ensconced in Castle Whitespire, wreathed in glory and every possible physical comfort, then maybe he could find the strength to come to grips with all this. “You’d have to be an idiot not to.”
“You know the funny thing though?” She sat up straight, suddenly animated. “I mean the really hilarious thing? You actually don’t. You don’t even want it. Even if this whole thing came off without a hitch, you wouldn’t be happy. You gave up on Brooklyn and on Brakebills, and I fully expect you to give up on Fillory when the time comes. It makes things very simple for you, doesn’t it? Well, and of course you were always going to give up on us.
“We had problems, but we could have fixed them. But that was too easy for you. It might actually have worked, and then where would you be? You would have been stuck with me forever.”
“Problems? We had problems?” People looked up. He dropped his voice to a furious whisper. “You fucked fucking Penny! I’d say that’s a fucking problem!”
Alice ignored this. If he didn’t know better, he would have said that the tone of her voice almost resembled tenderness.
“I will stop being a mouse, Quentin. I will take some chances. If you will, for just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”
“You can’t just decide to be happy.”
“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want? Do you want to be the asshole who went to Fillory and was miserable there? Even in Fillory? Because that’s who you are right now.”
There was something true about what Alice was saying. But he couldn’t grasp it. It was too complex, or too simple. Too something. He thought of that first week he’d spent at Brakebills, when he and Eliot had gone sculling, and they’d watched the other rowers hunching and shivering in what to Quentin was a warm summer day. That was what he looked like to Alice. It was strange: he’d thought that doing magic was the hardest thing he would ever do, but the rest of it was so much harder. It turned out that magic was the easy part.
“Why did you come here, Alice?” he said. “If you don’t even want this?”
She looked at him evenly.
“Why do you think, Quentin? I came because of you. I came here because I wanted to take care of you.”
Quentin looked around at the others. He saw Janet sitting with her back against one wall with her eyes closed, though Quentin didn’t get the sense that she was asleep. The revolver was cradled in her lap. She wore a red T-shirt with a white star on it and khaki pants. She must be cold, he thought. As he watched she sighed and licked her lips without opening her eyes, like a little girl.
He didn’t want to be cold. Alice was still watching him. Behind her the mosaic was a swirl of green tentacles and whitecaps and floating fragments. He slid down the stone bench to her end and kissed her and bit her lower lip until she gasped.
After a certain point it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that they were lost. The hallways wound fiendishly and branched frequently. They were in a maze, and they were not solving it. Dint had become obsessive about his map, which now stretched to half a dozen sheets of graph paper that he shuffled and scribbled on intently whenever they turned a corner. At Brakebills they’d learned a spell that would leave glowing footprints behind them, but Dint thought it would just lead predators straight to them. The walls were carved with ranks of crude marching figures in profile, thousands of them, each one holding a different totem: a palm leaf, a torch, a key, a sword, a pomegranate.
It was darker here. They kept piling on light spells to anything that would take one, but the glow just didn’t seem to go as far. They fast-walked down the corridor, double-time now. The mood was that of a picnic threatened by lightning. The corridor branched and branched again and intermittently dead-ended, forcing them to backtrack. Quentin’s feet hurt in his brand-new hiking boots; a stray spur of something hard stabbed him in the same spot on his left ankle every time he took a step.
He risked a glance back the way they’d come. There was a red glow back there—something somewhere in the maze was throwing off a deep crimson light. He felt a deep-seated lack of interest in finding out what it was.
Ten minutes later they got hung up at a fork in the passageway, Dint vigorously supporting the right fork, Josh making the case, admittedly largely on intangibles, that the other fork looked “way more promising” and just “feels more like what we want.” The walls were painted with oddly convincing trompe-l’oeil landscapes now, crowded with tiny dancing figures. Doors slammed open and shut in the distance.
The hallway was brightening behind them. They all saw it now. It was like a subterranean sun was rising. Discipline was getting ragged. They broke into a half run, and it was too dark for Quentin to be absolutely sure that nobody lagged behind. He focused on Alice. She was panting. The back of her blouse gaped palely open where the demon had torn its way out; he could see her black bra strap, which had somehow survived the operation. He wished he had a jacket to give her.
He caught up with Dint.
“We should slow down,” Quentin panted. “We’re going to lose somebody.”
Dint shook his head. “They’re tracking us now. If we stop, they’ll mob us.”
“What the fuck, man! Didn’t you plan for this?”
“This is the plan, Earth child,” Dint snarled back. “You don’t like it, go home. We need kings and queens in Fillory. Is that not a thing worth dying for?”
Not really, Quentin thought. Asshole. That slutty nymph was right. This is not your war.
They bulled through a door into a tapestry that was apparently concealing it from the other side. Behind the tapestry was a candle-lit banquet hall set with food, fresh and steaming. They were alone; it was as if the waiters who placed the dishes there had just moments earlier scampered out of sight. The table stretched out in both directions with no end points. The tapestries were rich and detailed, the silverware gleaming, the crystal goblets full of wine, deep gold and arterial purple.
They stopped and stared in both directions, blinking. It was like they had stumbled into the dream of a starving man.
“Nobody eats!” Dint called. “Don’t touch it! Nobody eats, nobody drinks!”
“There are too many entrances,” Anaïs said, her pretty green eyes flicking in all directions. “They can attack us.”
She was right. A door opened farther down the hall, admitting two large, rangy individuals of the monkey family, though Quentin couldn’t have said exactly what to call them. Their glazed simian eyes looked bored. In perfect synchrony they dipped their hands into pouches slung over their shoulders and came up with golf-size lead balls. With a practiced windup of their overdeveloped shoulders and overlong arms, they whipped the balls at the group at big-league fastball speeds.
Quentin grabbed Alice’s hand, and they cowered back behind a heavy tapestry, which caught one of the balls. The other one clipped a candlestick on the table and then spectacularly vaporized four wineglasses in a row. Under other circumstances, Quentin thought, that would actually have been cool. Eliot touched his forehead, where he’d been hit by a shard of glass. His fingers came away bloody.
“Would somebody please kill those things, please!” Janet said disgustedly. She was crouched under the table.
“Seriously,” Josh complained through clenched teeth. “This shit isn’t even mythological. We need some unicorns or something up in this piece.”
“Janet!” Eliot said. “Do your demon!”
“I already did!” she yelled back. “I did it the night after graduation! I felt sorry for it!”
Huddling behind the rough fabric of the tapestry, Quentin watched a pair of legs stroll by, unhurriedly. While the rest of them hunkered down, Penny strode confidently toward the two ball throwers as they wound up again, no expressions on their stiff monkey faces. He was gesturing fast with both hands and singing an incantation in a high, clear tenor. Calm and serious in the shifting candlelight, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans, he looked much less like a puffy wannabe than he used to. He looked like a hardened young battle-mage. Was that how he’d looked to Alice, Quentin wondered, the night she slept with him?
With one hand Penny stopped a lead ball in midair, then a second. They hovered there unsupported for a moment like surprised humming-birds before they recovered their weight and dropped to the floor. With the other hand Penny lobbed back a fiery seed that grew and expanded like an unfurling parachute. The tapestries on either side of the hall blazed where the fireball brushed them. It engulfed the two monkeys, and when it dissipated they were simply gone, and a ten-foot section of the banquet table was a roaring bonfire.
“Yeah!” Penny yelled, momentarily forgetting his Fillory-speak. “Boom, bitches!”
“Amateur,” Dint muttered.
“If my hairline is messed up,” Eliot said weakly, “I will bring those things back to life and kill them all over again.”
They retreated along the banquet hall in the opposite direction, awkwardly shuffling past the straight-backed wooden chairs. The hall was just too narrow—with the table in the center there wasn’t enough room for them to form up properly. The setup had a zany Scooby Doo feeling. Quen tin took a running step and half leaped, half slid across the banquet table, clearing dishes as he went, feeling like an action hero sliding across the firebird-emblazoned hood of his muscle car.
A curious Alice in Wonderland menagerie was crowding into the hall from either side. As military order broke down in the room so did taxonomical order. Species and body parts were mashed up seemingly at random. Had everything collapsed after the Chatwins left, to the point where humans and animals interbred? There were ferrets and rabbits, giant mice and loping monkeys and a vicious-looking fisher, but there were also men and women with the heads of animals: an astute-looking fox-headed man who appeared to be preparing a spell; a woman with a thick-necked lizard head with huge independent eyes; an oddly dignified pike-bearer upon whose shoulders swayed the sinuous neck and tiny head of a pink flamingo.
Fen plucked a sharp knife off the banquet table, gripped the blade carefully between her thumb and forefinger, and threw it spinning so that it took the fox-man point-first in the eye socket.