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UPSTATE

Of course after that everybody had to go. They barely even said anything about Quentin’s swollen eye. (“The natives were restless, ” he ad-libbed dryly. ) Moments after he and Alice returned Josh came in—he’d spent the night with Ana& #239; s after all—and they had to tell him the whole story all over again. Then they went through in threes. Josh went through with Penny and Richard. Penny took Janet and Eliot through. Josh called Ana& #239; s and made her come over, and she went through with him and Penny.

Of them all only Janet had a bad reaction. The moment they surfaced, apparently, she heaved and threw up her breakfast right into the cold, clear magical water. Then she panicked. Eliot came back with a dead-on impression of the frantic way she’d clutched Penny’s arm and said:

“Button! Button now! ”

Quentin was unmoved by her discomfort. She was a vampire, he thought. She preyed on other people’s healthy love and made it sick and crippled.

The mood in the room was serious and sober. Everybody gave each other long, searching looks heavy with significance. Nobody could seem to put into words how important it was, but they all agreed that this was a major thing. Major. And it had to be their thing, for now at least, they had to contain it. Nobody else could know. At Penny’s insistence they sat down in a big circle on the rug in the living room and rewove the wards on the apartment, right then and there, working together. Richard’s taste for authority, which so often made his presence all but unendurable, turned out to come in handy now. He directed the group casting in an efficient, businesslike fashion, like a seasoned conductor leading a chamber orchestra through a difficult passage of Bart& #243; k.

It took twenty minutes to finish the spell, and then ten more to add some fancy extra defensive and concealment layers—prudent, given the level of interest the button was evidently attracting in the at-large magical ecosystem. When they were done, when everything was checked out and double-checked, a hush settled over the room. They all sat still and just let the magnitude of what was happening here marinate in their minds. Josh rose quietly and went to the kitchen to make sandwiches for lunch. Eliot threw open a window and lit a cigarette. Janet regarded Quentin with cool amusement.

Quentin lay back on the rug and stared up at the ceiling. He needed sleep, but this was no time for sleep. Wild emotions competed for possession of his brain, like rival armies taking and retaking the same hill: excitement, remorse, anticipation, foreboding, grief, anger. He tried to focus on Fillory, to make the good feeling come back. This would change everything. Yes, his universe had just expanded times a million, but Fillory was the key to it all. That creeping, infectious sense of futility that had been incubating in his brain even since before graduation had met its magic bullet. Alice didn’t see it yet, but she would. This was what they’d been waiting for. This is what her parents had never found. A bleary grin kept smearing itself across his face, and the years fell away from him like layers of dead skin. They weren’t wasted years exactly, he could never say that, but they were years in which, in spite of all his amazing gifts, he’d been conscious of somehow not quite getting the gift he wanted. Enough to get by on, maybe. Sure. But this, this was everything. Now the present had a purpose, and the future had a purpose, and even the past, their whole lives, retroactively, had meaning. Now they knew what it was for.

If only it hadn’t happened now. If Penny could just have shown up a day earlier. Fucking Penny. Everything had been completely ruined and then completely redeemed in such rapid succession that he couldn’t tell which state ultimately applied. But if you looked at it a certain way, what happened between him and Janet wasn’t about him and Janet at all, or even him and Alice. It was a symptom of the sick, empty world they were all in together. And now they had the medicine. The sick world was about to be healed.

The others stayed sitting on the floor, leaning back on their elbows, lounging with their backs against the couch, glancing at one another every once in a while and breaking out in incredulous giggles. It was like they were stoned. Quentin wondered if they were feeling what he was feeling. This was what they’d been waiting for, too, without knowing it, he thought. The thing that was going to save them from the ennui and depression and meaningless busywork that had been stalking them ever since graduation, with its stale, alcoholic breath. It was finally here, and not a moment too soon. They couldn’t go on like this, and now they wouldn’t have to.

It was Eliot who finally took control of the situation. He almost seemed like his old self again. Calendars were cleared. Nobody had any serious obligations pending, not compared to this, nothing that couldn’t be delayed or sicked out of or blatantly welched on. He clapped his hands and gave orders, and everybody seemed to enjoy being serious and efficient for a change.

Nobody knew Ana& #239; s especially well—not even Josh, really—but she turned out to be a highly useful individual. Her circle of acquaintance included somebody who knew somebody who owned a place upstate, a comfortable old farmhouse on a hundred acres, somewhere private enough and defensible enough to use as a staging area for whatever it was they were going to do next. And that first somebody was also a magician senior enough to open a portal to get them there. She would come by later that afternoon, as soon as the Nets game was over.

They had to do it on the roof, because the very effective and thorough triple-triple wards they’d just that morning set up (and were now about to abandon) prevented any magical transport directly in or out of the apartment. By five thirty that afternoon they were looking out over the crowded cocktail-tray skyline of lower Manhattan. No one else was up there in winter. The roof was littered with windblown, overturned plastic lawn furniture and char-encrusted barbecue implements. A lonely wind chime burbled to itself from the eaves of a utility shed.

They hugged themselves against the cold and scuffed the gravel with their feet as they watched a hale, gray-haired Belgian sorceress with nicotine-stained fingers and a rather sinister wicker fetish on a string around her neck pull open the portal. It was a five-sided portal, the bottom edge running parallel to the ground, and its vertices shed tiny sputtering actinic blue-white sparks—a purely cosmetic touch, Quentin suspected, but they gave the scene an air that was both melancholy and festive at the same time.

There was a sense of momentous occasion. They were embarking on a grand adventure on the spur of the moment. Isn’t that what it means to be alive, Goddamn it? When the portal was finished and stable, the gray-haired witch kissed Ana& #239; s on both cheeks, said something in French, and left hurriedly, but not before Janet made her take a picture of all of them together with their trunks and bundles and bags full of groceries piled up behind them, using a disposable camera.

The group, all eight of them now, stepped through together onto a vast, frost-burnt front lawn. The serious mood on the roof was instantly broken as Janet and Ana& #239; s and Josh raced one another inside and squealed and bounced on the sofas and ran around arguing over the bedrooms. Ana& #239; s had been mostly right about the house: it was certainly large and comfortable, and at least a few bits of it were old. Apparently it was once a generously proportioned Colonial farmhouse, but somebody with progressive architectural ideas had gotten hold of it and remixed its old timber and fieldstone with glass and titanium and poured cement and added flat-screen TVs and a high-end audio system and an Aga range.

Alice went directly and silently up to the master bedroom, which took up almost half the third floor, and closed the door, glaring away any rival claimants with burning, red-rimmed eyes. Suddenly exhausted after his mostly sleepless night, followed by his magically extended day, Quentin found a small guest bedroom at the back of the house. Its hard, antiseptic twin bed felt like all he deserved.

It was dark when he woke up. The cool blue digits of the clock radio said 10: 27. In the darkness they could have been phosphorescent squiggles on the side of a deep-sea fish. He couldn’t find the light switch, but his groping hands encountered the door to a small half bath and managed to turn on the light over the mirror. Quentin splashed water on his face and wandered out into the strange house.

He found the others, except for Alice and Penny, in the dining room, where they had already made and demolished a meal of heroic proportions, the remains of which lay spread out on a stupendous table that looked like it was built from the beams of the True Cross, handsomely varnished and nailed together with authentic iron spikes. Large pieces of modern art the color and texture of dried, crusted blood hung on the walls.

“Q! ” they shouted.

“Where’s Alice? ”

“Came and went, ” Josh said. “What’s going on? You guys fighting or what? ”

He shadowboxed a jab or two. He obviously didn’t know what had happened. Ana& #239; s, sitting next to him, delivered a mock knockout punch to his stubbly chin. They were all drunk again, same as last night, same as every night. Nothing had changed.

“Seriously, ” Janet said. “Did she give you that shiner? Seems like somebody’s always punching you in the face, Q. ”

Her manner was as bright and toxic as ever, but her eyes were rimmed with red. Quentin wondered if she’d come out of last night’s holocaust quite as unscathed as he’d thought.

“It was Ember and Umber, ” he said. “The magic rams. Didn’t Alice tell you? They punished me for being sinful. ”

“Yeah? ” Josh said. “Did you kick their woolly asses? ”

“I turned the other cheek. ” Quentin didn’t feel like talking, but he was hungry. He got a plate from the kitchen and sat down at the far end of the table and served himself leftovers.

“We were talking about what to do next, ” Richard said. “Making up an actions list. ”

“Right. ” Josh pounded authoritatively on the heavy table. “Who’s got some action items for me? We need to enumerate our deliverables! ”

“Food, ” Richard said, straight-faced. “And if we’re really going to Fillory, we all need to reread all the books. ”

“Gold, ” Ana& #239; s chipped in gamely. “And trade items. What do Fillorians want? Cigarettes? ”

“We’re not going to Brezhnev-era Russia, Ana& #239; s. Steel? ”

“Gunpowder? ”

“My God, ” Eliot said. “Listen to you people. I am not going to be the man who brought the gun to Fillory. ”

“We should bring overcoats, ” Richard said. “Tents. Cold-weather gear. We have no idea what season it is there. We could be walking into deep winter. ”

Yesterday—meaning before his nap—Fillory was going to make everything all right. Now it was hard to focus on it: it seemed like a dream again. Now the mess with Janet and Alice was the real thing. It would drag everything else down with it.

He pulled himself together with an effort.

“How long are we talking about going for? ”

“A couple of days? Look, we can just come back if we forget something, ” Eliot said. “With the button it’s a snap. We’ll just stay till it gets boring. ”

“What should we do when we get there? ”

“I think they’ll probably give us a quest, ” Penny said. “That’s what always happened to the Chatwins. ”

Heads turned. Penny was standing in the doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants, blinking like an owl, looking like he’d just woken up, too.

“I don’t know if we can count on that, Penny. ” For some reason it annoyed Quentin, how starry-eyed and optimistic Penny was being about this. “It’s not like the rams summoned us. It might not even be like the books. Maybe there never were any quests. Plover probably just put that stuff in so there would be a good story. Maybe we’ll just suck around Fillory like we’re sucking around here. ”

“Don’t be a killjoy, ” Josh said, “just because your girlfriend beats you up. ”

Penny was shaking his head. “I just don’t see Plover coming up with all that stuff on his own. It’s not rational. He was a gay dry-cleaning magnate with a background in practical chemistry. He didn’t have a creative bone in his body. No way. It’s Occam’s razor. It’s much more likely that he was writing it as it happened. ”

“So what do you think, ” Eliot said, “we’re going to meet a damsel in distress? ”

“We might. Not necessarily a damsel, but. . . you know, a nymph maybe. Or a dwarf, or a pegasus. You know, that needs help with something. ” Everybody was laughing, but Penny kept on going. It was almost touching. “Seriously, it happens in the books, every time. ”

Josh pushed a tiny doll glass of something clear and alcoholic in front of Quentin, and he took a sip. It was some kind of fiery fruit eau-de-vie, and it tasted like a vital nutrient that his body had been chronically deprived of his entire life.

“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that, ” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that. ”

“Maybe your world doesn’t, Earth man, ” Josh said. He winked. “We’re not in your world anymore. ”

“And I don’t want to turn this into a theological discussion, ” Richard added, with towering dignity, “but there is room for disagreement on that score. ”

“And even if you don’t believe that this world has a god, ” Penny finished up, “you must admit that Fillory has one. Two even. ”

“This does bring us back, albeit in an insane way, to what is actually a pretty reasonable question, ” Eliot said. “Which is what do we do when we get there? ”

“We should go after that magic flower, ” Josh suggested. “You know, the one that when you smell it it automatically makes you happy? Remember that? That thing would be worth bank here. ”

While nobody was watching, Janet caught Quentin’s eye and waggled her eyebrows and did something lewd with her tongue. Quentin eyed her back, unblinking. She was actually enjoying this, he thought. She’d sabotaged him and Alice, and she was loving it. Little montage flashes of last night—it couldn’t possibly have just been last night—cycled through his brain, snapshots that had stubbornly survived the merciful angel of alcoholic erasure. Everything about sex with Janet had been so different from Alice. The smell, the feel of her skin, her businesslike know-how. The shame and the fear had caught up with him even before it was over, before he came, but he hadn’t stopped.

And had Eliot really been awake for the whole thing? His brain dealt out a sloppy fan of mental Polaroids, out of sequence: an image of Janet kissing Eliot, of her hand working diligently between Eliot’s legs. Had she really been weeping? Had he kissed Eliot? A vivid sense memory of somebody else’s stubble, surprisingly scratchy, chafing his cheek and upper lip.

Good God, he thought wearily. What goes on.

He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so. Poor Alice. He needed a hair shirt, or ashes, or a scourge—there should be some ritual that he could perform to show her how desperately sorry he was. He would do anything, if she would just tell him what to do.

He shoved the pictures back down wherever they came from, back into the mental shuffle, speeding them on their way with some more of that yummy eau-de-vie. An idea was germinating in his tired, bruised brain.

“We could find Martin Chatwin, ” Richard volunteered. “The way the other children were always trying to. ”

“I’d like to bring something back for Fogg, ” Eliot said. “Something for the school. An artifact or something. ”

“That’s it? ” Josh said. “You’re going to Fillory to bring back an apple for teacher? God, you’re so unbelievably lame sometimes. ”

Oddly, Eliot didn’t take the bait. This was affecting them all in different ways.

“Maybe we could find the Questing Beast, ” Quentin said quietly.

“The what? ” Josh wrinkled his forehead. No Fillory scholar he.

“From The Girl Who Told Time. Remember? The beast that can’t be caught. Helen chases it. ”

“What do you do with it if you do catch it? Eat it? ”

“I don’t know. Maybe it leads you to treasure? Or gives you some secret wisdom? Or something? ” He hadn’t thought this through completely. It had seemed important to the Chatwins, but now he couldn’t remember why.

“You never find out, ” Penny said. “Not in the books. They never catch it, and Plover never mentions it again. It’s a good idea. But I was thinking, you know, maybe they’ll make us kings. Kings and queens. The way the Chatwins were. ”

As soon as Penny said it, Quentin wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself. It was so obvious. They’d be kings and queens. Of course they would. If the City was real, why not all the rest of it, even that? They could live in Castle Whitespire. Alice could be his queen.

God, he was agreeing with Penny. That was a danger sign if there ever was one.

“Huh. ” Janet mulled this over, her ever-alert brain ticking over. She was actually taking it seriously, too. “Would we have to marry each other? ”

“Not necessarily. The Chatwins didn’t. Then again, they were all siblings. ”

“I don’t know, ” said Ana& #239; s. “It sounds like a big job, being queen. There is probably bureaucracy. Administration. ”

“Lucrative though. Think of the perks. ”

“If the books are even accurate, ” Eliot said. “And if the thrones are vacant. That’s two big ifs. Plus there’s seven of us and only four thrones. Three people get left out. ”

“I’ll tell you what we need, ” Ana& #239; s said. “We need war magic. Battle magic. Offense, defense. We need to be able to hurt people if we have to. ”

Janet looked amused.

“Shit’s illegal, babe, ” she said, obviously impressed despite herself. “You know that. ”

“I don’t care if it is. ” Ana& #239; s 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 Ana& #239; s 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, Ana& #239; s 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. ” Ana& #239; s giggled.

The next day Richard, Eliot, Janet, and Ana& #239; s 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.

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