THE WHITE STAG

The hunt for the Questing Beast took him to the edge of the vast Northern Marsh, then back south, skirting the edge of the Great Bramble, then north again, angling west through the Darkling Woods as far as the vast, gently gurgling expanse of the Lower Slosh. It was like visiting places he’d seen in dreams. He drank from streams and slept on the ground and ate fire-roasted game—he had become a passable archer, and when he couldn’t hit something on his own he used magic to cheat.

He rode his horse hard; she was a gentle bay who didn’t seem very sorry to leave the centaurs behind. Quentin’s mind was as empty of thoughts as the woods and fields were of people. The pond in his head was frozen again, a foot thick this time. On his best days he could go hours without thinking about Alice.

If he thought of anything it was the white stag. He was on a quest, but it was his quest now, nobody else’s. He scanned the skyline for the prickle of its antlers and thickets for the flash of its pale flank. He knew what he was doing. This was what he’d dreamed about all the way back in Brooklyn. This was the primal fantasy. When he had finished it, he could close the book for good.

The Questing Beast led him even farther west, through the hills of the Chankly Bore, over a pass in a bitterly sharp mountain range, beyond anything he recognized or had ever heard of from the Fillory books. He was in virgin territory now, but he didn’t stop to explore, or name the peaks. He descended a blazing white chalk cliff to a strip of volcanic black sand on the shore of a great, undiscovered western sea. When it spotted him still in pursuit, the stag bounded out onto the surf as if it were dry land. It leaped from breaker to breaker and swell to swell, like it was jumping from crag to crag, antlers erect, shaking its head and snuffing sea foam from its nostrils.

Quentin sighed. The next day he sold the gentle bay and booked passage across the western sea.

He managed to hire a nimble sloop named, embarrassingly enough, the Skywalker, crewed by an efficient foursome of three taciturn brothers and their burly, suntanned sister. Without speaking they swarmed through Skywalker ’s fiendishly idiosyncratic rigging, which consisted of two dozen small lateen sails that required constant minor adjustments. They were awed by his wooden prosthetics. Two weeks out they put in at a jolly tropical archipelago—a sun-drenched scatter pattern of mango swamps and sheep meadows—to take on fresh water, then they pushed on.

They passed an island inhabited by angry, bloodthirsty giraffes, and a floating beast that offered them an extra year of life in exchange for a finger (the sister took the beast up on it, times three). They passed an ornate wooden staircase that spiraled down into the ocean, and a young woman adrift on an open book the size of a small island, in which she scribbled tirelessly. None of these adventures inspired in Quentin anything resembling wonder or curiosity. All that was over for him.

Five weeks out they made landfall on a scorched black rock, and the crew threatened to mutiny if they didn’t turn back. Quentin stared them down, then bluffed about his magical powers, then finally quintupled their pay. They sailed on.

Being brave was easy when you would rather die than give up. Fatigue meant nothing when you actually wanted to suffer. Before this Quentin had never been on a sailboat big enough to have a jib, but now he was as lean and brown and salty-skinned as his crew. The sun became huge, and the seawater grew hot against the Skywalker ’s gunwales. Everything felt electrically charged. Ordinary objects gave off strange optical effects, flares and sunspots and coronas. The stars were low, burning orbs, visibly spherical, pregnant with illegible meaning. A powerful golden light shone through everything, as if the world were only a thin scrim behind which a magnificent sun was shining. The stag kept bounding on ahead of them.

At last an unknown continent filled the horizon. It was wrapped in a magical winter and thickly wooded with fir trees that grew right up to the shore, so that the salt water lapped at their tangled roots. Quentin dropped anchor and told the crew, who were shivering in their thin tropical clothes, to wait a week and then leave without him if he wasn’t back. He gave them the rest of the gold he’d brought, kissed the seven-fingered sister goodbye, lowered the sloop’s ca& #239; que, and rowed himself to shore. Strapping his bow to his back, he pushed his way into the snow-choked forest. It was good to be alone again.

The Questing Beast showed itself on the third night. Quentin had made camp on a low bluff overlooking a clear, spring-fed pool. Just before dawn he woke to find it standing at the water’s edge. Its reflection shivered as it lapped the cold water. He waited for a minute, on one knee. This was it. He strung his bow and slipped an arrow from his quiver. Looking down from the low bluff, with the early-morning air almost dead, it wasn’t even a difficult shot. At the moment of release he thought: I’m doing what even the Chatwins failed to do, Helen and Rupert. He didn’t feel the pleasure he thought he would. He put his shaft through the tough meat of the white stag’s muscular right thigh.

He winced. Thank God he hadn’t hit an artery. It didn’t try to flee, just sat stiffly on its haunches like an injured cat. He had the impression, from its resigned expression, that the Questing Beast had to go through this kind of thing once a century or so. The cost of doing business. Its blood looked black in the pre-dawn twilight.

It showed no fear as Quentin approached. It reached back with its supple neck and grasped the arrow firmly in its square white teeth. With a jerk the shaft came free. It spat out the arrow at Quentin’s feet.

“Hurts, that, ” the Questing Beast said matter-of-factly.

It had been three days since Quentin had spoken to anybody.

“What now, ” he said hoarsely.

“Wishes, of course. You get three. ”

“My friend Penny lost his hands. Fix them. ”

The stag’s eyes defocused momentarily in thought.

“I cannot. I am sorry. He is either dead or not in this world. ”

The sun was just beginning to come up over the dark, massed fir forest. Quentin took a deep breath. The cold air smelled fresh and turpentiney.

“Alice. She turned into some kind of spirit. A niffin. Bring her back. ”

“Again I cannot. ”

“What do you mean you can’t? It’s a wish. ”

“I don’t make the rules, ” the Questing Beast said. It lapped at the blood that still trickled down its thigh. “You don’t like it, find some other magic stag and shoot it instead. ”

“I wish that the rules were different. ”

The stag rolled its eyes. “No. And I’m counting those three together as your first wish. What’s number two? ”

Quentin sighed. He hadn’t really allowed himself to hope.

“Pay off my crew. Double what I promised them. ”

“Done, ” the Questing Beast replied.

“That’s ten times their base salary, since I already quintupled it. ”

“I said ‘done, ’ didn’t I? What’s number three? ”

Years ago Quentin had worked out exactly what he would wish for if anybody ever gave him the chance. He would wish to travel to Fillory and to be allowed to stay there forever. But that was years ago.

“Send me home, ” he said.

The Questing Beast closed its round brown eyes gravely, then opened them. It dipped its antlers toward him.

“Done, ” it said.

Quentin supposed he could have been more specific. By rights the Questing Beast could have sent him back to Brooklyn, or to his parents’ house in Chesterton, or to Brakebills, or even to the house upstate. But the stag went the literal way with it, and Quentin wound up in front of his last semipermanent residence, the apartment building in Tribeca that he’d shared with Alice. Nobody noticed as he abruptly came into being in the middle of the sidewalk in the late morning of what appeared to be an early-summer day. He walked away quickly. He couldn’t even look at their old doorway. He left his bow and arrows in a trash can.

It was a shock to suddenly be surrounded by so many of his fellow human beings again at such close quarters. Their mottled skins and flawed physiognomies and preening vanities were less easy to ignore. Maybe some of that centaur snobbery had rubbed off on him. A revolting stew of fragrances both organic and inorganic invaded his nose. The front page of a newspaper, acquired at the corner deli, informed him that he’d been gone from Earth for a little over two years.

He would have to call his parents. Fogg would have kept them from fretting too much, but still. It almost made him smile to think of seeing them now. What the hell would they say about his hair? Soon, but not yet. He walked around, getting reacclimated. The spells involved in retrieving cash from an ATM were child’s play now. He got a shave and a haircut and bought some clothes that weren’t made by centaurs and hence didn’t look like a Renaissance Faire costume. He babied himself. He had lunch at a fancy steakhouse and nearly died with pleasure. By three o’clock he was drinking Moscow Mules in a long, dark, empty basement bar in Chinatown where he used to go with the Physical Kids.

It had been a long time since he’d drunk alcohol. It had a dangerous thawing effect on his frozen brain. The ice that kept his feelings of guilt and sorrow under control creaked and groaned. But he kept on with it, and soon a deep, pure, luxurious sadness came over him, as heady and decadent as a drug. The place started filling up at five. By six the after-work drinkers were jostling Quentin at the bar. He could see that the light falling down the stairs out front had changed. He was on his way out when he noticed a slender, pretty girl with blond curls nuzzling a man who looked like an underwear model in a corner booth. Quentin didn’t know the underwear model from Adam, but the pretty girl was definitely Ana& #239; s.

It wasn’t the reunion he would have wanted, nor was she the person he would have chosen to reunite with. But maybe it was better this way, with somebody he didn’t care too much about, who didn’t care too much about him, either. And he had those trusty Moscow Mules to carry some of the load for him. Baby steps. They sat outside on the stairway. She put her hand on his arm and goggled at his white hair.

“You would not have believed eet, ” she said. Oddly, her pan-European accent had deepened and her English grammar worsened since he’d seen her last. Possibly it played better in the bar scene. “The time we ’ad getting out. It was quiet for a while, and then they rush us again. Josh was very good, you know. Very good. I had never seen him work magic like that. There was a thing that swam in the floor, under the stones—like a shark, I think, but it swam in the stones. It got hold of your leg. ”

“That might explain this, ” Quentin said. He showed her his wooden knee, and she goggled all over again. The alcohol was making all this much easier than expected. He was braced for a torrent of emotion, a cavalry charge of grief on his defenseless peace of mind, but if it was coming it hadn’t yet.

“And there was a thing—a spell in the walls, I think—so that we went around in circles. We ended up in Amber’s room again. ”

“Ember’s. ”

“What did I say? Anyhow we ’ad to break the spell—” She stopped to wave through the window at her buff boyfriend in the bar. She sounded as if she’d told this story many times already, to the point where she was quite bored of it. For her it all happened two years ago, to people she’d barely known anyway. “And we carried you the whole way. My God. I don’t think we would have made it if Richard”—ree-SHARD—“ ’adn’t found us.

“It almost makes you like him, you know? He had a way of making us invisible to the monsters. He practically carried us out of that place. Still I have a scar. ”

She flounced up the hem of her skirt, which was none too long to begin with. A thick, bumpy keloid strip six inches long stood out from her smooth, tanned thigh.

Amazingly, Penny had survived, she told him, or at least he had for a while. The centaurs were unable to reconstruct his hands, and without them he could no longer cast spells. When they reached the Neitherlands Penny walked away from the rest of the party, as if he were searching for something. When he came to a tall, narrow stone palazzo, unusually old and worn, he stopped in front of it and spread out his handless arms as if in supplication. After a minute the doors of the palazzo opened. The others caught a glimpse of ranks of bookcases—the warm, secret paper heart of the City. Penny stepped inside and the doors closed behind him.

“Can you believe it even all happened? ” she kept saying. “It is like a cauchemar. But it is all over now. ”

It was strange: Ana& #239; s didn’t seem to blame him, or herself. She had found some way of mourning what had happened. Or maybe it hadn’t touched her to begin with. It was hard to guess what went on under those blond curls.

Throughout the story she kept looking over his shoulder at the underwear model, and after a while he took pity on her and let her go. They said goodbye—kiss, kiss. Neither party promised to keep in touch. What was the point of lying now, at this late stage in the game? Like she said, it was all over now. He stayed sitting outside on the steps, in the warm early hours of the summer evening, until it crossed his mind how much he didn’t want to run into Ana& #239; s again on her way out.

It was getting dark, and he would need somewhere to sleep tonight. He could find a hotel, but why bother? And why wait? He had abandoned almost everything he owned back in Fillory, but one thing Quentin had hung on to was the iron key Fogg had given him when he graduated. It hadn’t worked from Fillory—he’d tried—but now, standing by himself on a trash-littered street in Tribeca, breathing the soupy, sun-warmed city air, he took it out of the pocket of his brand-new jeans. It felt reassuringly hefty. On a hunch he held it up to his ear. It gave off a high, constant musical ringing tone, like a struck tuning fork. He’d never noticed that before.

Feeling grandly lonely, and only a little frightened, he gripped the key with both hands, closed his eyes, relaxed, and let it tug him forward. It was like riding the rope tow at a ski slope. The key parted an invisible seam in the air and drew him swiftly forward and with a delightful sense of acceleration through some highly convenient sub-dimension back to the stone terrace out behind the house at Brakebills. The pain of going back was great, but the necessity was greater. He had one last piece of business to take care of, and then it really would all be over forever.

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