KINGS AND QUEENS

As the junior member of the PlaxCo account team, associate management consultant Quentin Coldwater had few actual responsibilities beyond attending the occasional meeting and being civil to whatever colleagues he happened to bump into in the elevator. On the rare occasions when actual documents managed to make their way into his in-box or onto his desk, he rubber-stamped them (Looks good to me!!! —QC) without reading them and sent them on their way.

Quentin’s desk was, as it happened, unusually large for a new hire at his level, especially one as youthful as he appeared to be (though his startling white hair lent him a certain gravitas beyond his years), and whose educational background and previous work history were on the sketchy side. He just appeared one day, took possession of a corner office recently vacated by a vice president three times his age, and started drawing a salary and piling up money in his 401(k) and receiving medical and dental benefits and taking six weeks of vacation a year. In return for which he didn’t seem to do much of anything beyond play computer games on the ultra-flat double-wide-screen monitor the outgoing veep had left behind.

But Quentin didn’t inspire any resentment in his new colleagues, or even any particular curiosity. Everybody thought somebody else knew the story on him, and if it turned out that they didn’t, they definitely knew for a fact that somebody over in HR had the scoop. And anyway, supposedly he’d been a superstar at some high-flying European school, fluent in all kinds of languages. Math scores through the roof. The firm was lucky to have him. Lucky.

And he was affable enough, if a little mopey. He seemed smart. Or at least he looked smart. And anyway, he was a member of the PlaxCo account team, and here at the consulting firm of Grunnings Hunsucker Swann everybody was a team player.

Dean Fogg had advised Quentin against it. He should take more time, think it over, maybe get some therapy. But Quentin had taken enough time. He had seen enough of the magical world to last him the rest of his life, and he was erecting a barrier between himself and it that no magic could breach. He was going to cut it off and kill it dead. Fogg had been right after all, even if he didn’t have the guts to make good on his own argument: people were better off without magic, living in the real world, learning to deal with it as it came. Maybe there were people out there who could handle the power a magician could wield, who deserved it, but Quentin wasn’t one of them. It was time he grew up and faced that fact.

So Fogg set him up with a desk job at a firm with large amounts of magician money invested in it, and Quentin took the subway and rode the elevator and ordered in lunch like the rest of humanity, or at any rate the most privileged 0. 1 percent of it. His curiosity about the realms invisible had been more than satisfied, thanks tremendously much. At least his parents were pleased. It was a relief to be able to tell them what he did for a living and not lie.

Grunnings Hunsucker Swann was absolutely everything Quentin had hoped it would be, which was as close to nothing at all as he could get and still be alive. His office was calm and quiet, with climate control and tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. Office supplies were abundant and top-notch. He was given all the balance sheets and org charts and business plans to review that he could possibly have wanted. To be honest, Quentin felt superior to anybody who still messed around with magic. They could delude themselves if they liked, those self-indulgent magical mandarins, but he’d outgrown that stuff. He wasn’t a magician anymore, he was a man, and a man took responsibility for his actions. He was out here working the hard flinty bedrock face of it all. Fillory? He’d been there and done that, and it hadn’t done him or anybody else any good. He was damn lucky he got out alive.

Every morning Quentin put on a suit and stood on an old elevated subway platform in Brooklyn, raw cement stained with rust by the bits of iron rebar poking out of it. From the uptown end he could just barely see the tiny, hazy, aeruginous spike of the Statue of Liberty out in the bay. In the summertime the thick wooden ties sweated aromatic beads of liquid black tar. Invisible signals caused the tracks to shift and shunt the trains left and right, as if (as if, but not actually) directed by unseen hands. Nearby unidentifiable birds swirled in endless cyclonic circles above a poorly maintained dumpster.

Every morning when the train arrived it was full of young Russian women riding in from Brighton Beach, three-quarters asleep, swaying in unison to the rocking of the car, their lustrous dark hair dyed a hideous unconvincing blond. In the marble lobby of the building where Quentin worked, elevators ingested pods of commuters and then spat them out on their respective floors.

When he left work every day at five, the entire sequence repeated itself in reverse.

As for his weekends, there was no end to the multifarious meaningless entertainments and distractions with which the real world supplied Quentin. Video games; Internet porn; people talking on their cell phones in bodegas about their stepmothers’ medical conditions; weightless supermarket plastic bags snagged in leafless trees; old men sitting on their stoops with no shirts on; the oversize windshield wipers on blue-and-white city buses slinging huge gouts of rainwater back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

It was all he had left, and it would have to be enough. As a magician he had been among the world’s silent royalty, but he had abdicated his throne. He had doffed his crown and left it lying there for the next sucker to put on. Le roi est mort. It was a kind of enchantment in itself, this new life of his, the ultimate enchantment: the enchantment to end all enchantments forever.

One day, having leveled up three different characters in three different computer games, and run through every Web site he could plausibly and even implausibly want to surf, Quentin noticed that his Outlook calendar was telling him that he was supposed to be at a meeting. It had started half an hour ago, and it was on a fairly remote floor of GHS’s corporate monolith, necessitating the use of a different elevator bank. But throwing caution to the wind he decided to attend.

The purpose of this particular meeting, Quentin gathered from some hastily harvested context clues, was a joint post-mortem of the PlaxCo restructuring, which had apparently been triumphantly wrapped up some weeks earlier, though Quentin had somehow missed that crucial detail till now. Also on the agenda was a new, related project, just kicking off, to be conducted by another team consisting of people Quentin had never met before. He found himself sneaking glances at one of them.

It was hard to say what stood out about her, except that she was the only person besides Quentin who never spoke once during the entire meeting. She was some years older than him and not notably attractive or unattractive. Sharp nose, thin mouth, chin-length mousy brown hair, with an air of powerful intelligence held in check by boredom. He wasn’t sure how he knew, maybe it was her fingers, which had a familiar muscular, overdeveloped look. Maybe it was her features, which had a mask-like quality. But there was no question what she was. She was another one like him: a former Brakebillian in deep cover in the real world.

The thick plottens.

Quentin buttonholed a colleague afterward—Dan, Don, Dean, one of those—and found out her name. It was Emily Greenstreet. The one and only and infamous. The girl Alice’s brother had died for.

Quentin’s hands shook as he pressed the elevator buttons. He informed his assistant that he would be taking the rest of the afternoon off. Maybe the rest of the week, too.

But it was too late. Emily Greenstreet must have spotted him, too—maybe it really was the fingers? —because before the day was over he had an e-mail from her. The next morning she left him a voice mail and attempted to remotely insert a lunch date into his Outlook calendar. When he got online she IMed him relentlessly and finally—having gotten his cell phone number off the company’s emergency contact list—she texted him:

Y POSTPONE THE INEVITABLE?

Y not? he thought. But he knew she was right. He didn’t really have a choice. If she wanted to find him, then sooner or later she would. With a sense of defeat he clicked ACCEPT on the lunch invitation. They met the following week at a grandly expensive old-school French restaurant that had been beloved of GHS executives since time immemorial.

It wasn’t as bad as he thought. She was a fast-talking woman, so skinny and with such erect posture that she looked brittle. Seated across from each other, almost alone in a hushed circle of cream tablecloths and glassware and heavy, clinking silverware, they gossiped about work. He hardly knew enough of the names to keep up, but she talked enough for both of them. She told him about her life—nice apartment, Upper East Side, roof deck, cats. They found that they had a funny kind of black humor in common. In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster. Who could possibly know that better than they—the man who watched Alice die, and the woman who’d essentially killed Alice’s brother? When he looked at her he saw himself eight years down the line. It didn’t look all that bad.

And she liked a drink or five, so they had that in common, too. Martini glasses, wine bottles, and whiskey tumblers piled up between them, a miniature metropolis of varicolored glass, while their cell phones and BlackBerries plaintively, futilely tried to attract their attention.

“So tell me, ” Emily Greenstreet said, when they’d both imbibed enough to create the illusion of a comfortable, long-standing intimacy between them. “Do you miss it? Doing magic? ”

“I can honestly say I never think about it, ” he said. “Why? Do you? ”

“Miss it, or think about it? ” She rolled a lock of her mousy, chin-length hair between two fingers. “Of course I do. Both. ”

“Are you ever sorry you left Brakebills? ”

She shook her head sharply.

“The only thing I regret is not leaving that place sooner. ” She leaned forward, suddenly animated. “Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods. They’re just kids, Quentin! With all that power! What happened to Charlie and me could happen again to any one of them, any day, any minute. Or worse. Much worse. It’s amazing that place is still standing. ” He noticed that she never said “Brakebills, ” just “that place. ” “I don’t even like living on the same coast with it. There’s practically no safeguards at all. Every one of those kids is a nuclear bomb waiting to go off!

“Somebody needs to get control of that place. Sometimes I think I should blow their cover, get the real government in there, get it properly regulated. The teachers will never do it. The Magician’s Court will never do it. ”

She chattered on in that vein. They were like two recovering alcoholics, hopped up on caffeine and Twelve Step gospel, telling each other how glad they were to be sober and then talking about nothing but drinking.

Though unlike recovering alcoholics they could and did drink plenty of alcohol. Temporarily revived by a molten affogato, Quentin went to work on a bitter single malt Scotch that tasted like it had been decanted through the stump of an oak tree that had been killed by lightning.

“I never felt safe in that place. Never, not for a minute. Don’t you feel safer out here, Quentin? In the real world? ”

“If you want to know the truth, these days I don’t feel much of anything. ”

She frowned at that. “Really. Then what made you give it all up, Quentin? You must have had a good reason. ”

“I would say my motives were pretty much unimpeachable. ”

“That bad? ” She raised her thin eyebrows, flirtatiously. “Tell me. ”

She sat back and let the restaurant’s fancy easy chair embrace her. Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin.

He told her just how low he’d sunk. He told her about Alice, and their life together, and what they had done, and how she had died. When he revealed the specifics of Alice’s fate, Emily’s smile vanished, and she took a shaky slurp from her martini glass. After all, Charlie had become a niffin, too. The irony was quite comprehensively hideous. But she didn’t ask him to stop.

When he was finished, he expected her to hate him as much as he hated himself. As much, perhaps, as Quentin suspected she hated herself. But instead her eyes were brimming over with kindness.

“Oh, Quentin, ” she said, and she actually took his hand across the table. “You can’t blame yourself, truly you can’t. ” Her stiff, narrow face shone with pity. “You need to see that all this evil, all this sadness, it all comes from magic. It’s where all your trouble began. Nobody can be touched by that much power without being corrupted. It’s what corrupted me, Quentin, before I gave it up. It’s the hardest thing I ever did. ”

Her voice softened.

“It’s what killed Charlie, ” she said quietly. “And it killed your poor Alice, too. Sooner or later magic always leads to evil. Once you see that then you’ll see how to forgive yourself. It will get easier. I promise you. ”

Her pity was like a salve for his raw, chafed heart, and he wanted to accept it. She was offering it to him, it was right there across the table. All he had to do was reach out for it.

The check arrived, and Quentin charged the astronomical sum to his corporate card. In the restaurant’s foyer they were both so drunk that they had to help each other into their raincoats—it had been pissing rain all day. There was no question of going back to the office. He was in no shape for that, and anyway it was already getting dark. It had been a very long lunch.

Outside under the awning they hesitated. For a moment Emily Greenstreet’s funny, flat mouth came unexpectedly close to his.

“Have dinner with me tonight. ” Her gaze was disarmingly direct. “Come to my apartment. I’ll cook for you. ”

“Can’t do it tonight, ” he said blurrily. “I’m sorry. Next time maybe. ”

She put a hand on his arm. “Listen, Quentin. I know you think you’re not ready for this—”

“I know I’m not ready. ”

“—but you’ll never be ready. Not until you decide to be. ” She squeezed his forearm. “Enough drama, Quentin. Let me help you. It’s not the worst thing in the world, admitting you need help. Is it? ”

Her kindness was the most touching thing he’d seen since he left Brakebills. And he hadn’t had sex, good God, since the time he’d slept with Janet. It would be so easy to go with her.

But he didn’t. Even as they stood there he felt something tingle in his fingertips, under his fingernails, some residue left by the thousands of spells that had flowed through them over the years. He could still feel them there, the hot white sparks that had once come streaming so freely from his hands. She was wrong: blaming magic for Alice’s death wasn’t going to help him. It was too easy, and he’d had enough of doing things the easy way. It was all well and good for Emily Greenstreet to forgive him, but people were responsible for Alice’s death. Jane Chatwin was, and Quentin was, and so was Alice herself. And people would have to atone for it.

In that instant he looked at Emily Greenstreet and saw a lost soul, alone in a howling wasteland, not so different from the way her one-time lover Professor Mayakovsky had looked standing alone at the South Pole. He wasn’t ready to join her there. But where else could he go? What would Alice have done?

Another month went by, and it was November, and Quentin was sitting in his corner office staring out the window. The building across the street was considerably shorter than the Grunnings Hunsucker Swann building, so he had a clear view of its rooftop, which consisted of a neat beige gravel walkway running around a gray grid of massive, complicated air-conditioning and heating units. With the coming of the bitter late fall weather the air-conditioning had gone silent and the heaters had sprung into life, and huge nebulae of steam curled off them in abstract whorls: hypnotic, silent, slowly turning shapes that never stopped and never repeated themselves. Smoke signals sent by no one, to no one, signifying nothing. Lately Quentin spent a lot of time watching them. His assistant had quietly given up attempting to schedule appointments for him.

All at once, and with no warning, the tinted floor-to-ceiling window that made up one entire wall of Quentin’s office shattered and burst inward. Quentin’s ultra-modern, narrow-wale Venetian blinds went crazily askew. Cold air and raw unfiltered sunlight came flooding in. Something small, round, and very heavy rolled across the carpet and bumped into his shoe.

He looked down at it. It was a bluish marble sphere: the stone globe they used to use to start a welters match.

Three people were floating in midair outside his window, thirty stories up.

Janet looked older somehow, which of course she was, but there was something else different about her. Her eyes, the irises, radiated a seething violet mystical energy like nothing Quentin had ever seen before. She wore a tight black leather bustier that she was in imminent danger of spilling out of. Silver stars were falling all around her.

Eliot had acquired a pair of immense white feathery wings somewhere that spread out behind him, with which he hovered on an intangible wind. On his head was the golden crown of Fillory that Quentin had last seen in Ember’s underground chamber. Between Janet and Eliot, her arms wrapped in black silk, floated a tall, painfully skinny woman with long wavy black hair that undulated in the air as if she were underwater.

“Hello, Quentin, ” Eliot said.

“Hi, ” Janet said.

The other woman didn’t say anything. Neither did Quentin.

“We’re going back to Fillory, ” Janet said, “and we need another king. Two kings, two queens. ”

“You can’t hide forever, Quentin. Come with us. ”

With the tinted window gone and the afternoon sunlight pouring into his office, Quentin couldn’t read his monitor anymore. The climate control was howling trying to fight off the cold air. Somewhere in the building an alarm went off.

“It could work this time, ” Eliot said. “With Martin gone. And besides, we never figured out what your Discipline was. Doesn’t that bother you? ”

Quentin stared at them. It was a few seconds before he found his voice.

“What about Josh? ” he croaked. “Go ask him. ”

“He’s got another project. ” Janet rolled her eyes. “He thinks he can use the Neitherlands to get to Middle-earth. He honestly believes he’s going to bone an elf. ”

“I thought about being a queen, ” Eliot added. “Turns out they’re very open-minded about that kind of thing in Fillory. But at the end of the day rules is rules. ”

Quentin put down his coffee. It had been a long time since he’d experienced any emotion at all other than sadness and shame and numbness, so long that for a moment he didn’t understand what was happening inside him. In spite of himself he felt sensation coming back to some part of him that he’d thought was dead forever. It hurt. But at the same time he wanted more of it.

“Why are you doing this? ” Quentin asked slowly, carefully. He needed to be clear. “After what happened to Alice? Why would you go back there? And why would you want me with you? You’re only going to make it worse. ”

“What, worse than this? ” Eliot asked. He tilted his chin to indicate Quentin’s office.

“We all knew what we were doing, ” Janet said. “You knew it, we knew it. Alice certainly knew it. We made our choices, Q. And what’s going to happen? Your hair’s already white. You can’t look any weirder than you already do. ”

Quentin swiveled around to face them in his ergonomic desk chair. His heart felt like it was burning with relief and regret, the emotions melting and running together and turning into bright, hot, white light.

“The thing is, ” he said. “I’d hate to cut out right before bonus season. ”

“Come on, Quentin. It’s over. You’ve done your time. ” Janet’s smile had a warmth in it that he’d never seen before, or maybe he’d just never noticed it. “Everybody’s forgiven you but you. And you are so far behind us. ”

“You might be surprised about that. ”

Quentin picked up the blue stone ball and studied it.

“So, ” he said, “I’m gone for five minutes and you have to bring in a hedge witch? ”

Eliot shrugged.

“She’s got chops. ”

“Fuck you, ” said Julia.

Quentin sighed. He unkinked his neck and stood up.

“Did you really have to break my window? ”

“No, ” Eliot said. “Not really. ”

Quentin walked to the floor’s edge. Sprays of smashed window glass crunched on the carpet under his fancy leather shoes. He ducked under the broken blinds. It was a long way down. He hadn’t done this for a while.

Loosening his tie with one hand, Quentin stepped out into the cold clear winter air and flew.

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