“You—you are not such a mystery.” Mayakovsky jabbed Quentin in the chest with a finger like a dried sausage. “You think I do not know you? They threw you out of that place, that other world you go to. Yes? And you came back to Brakebills. But they would not have you there either! So out you go again!”
Jesus, he must know about Fillory, or at least the Neitherlands. Mayakovsky advanced on Quentin, who gave ground.
“Well, yeah,” Quentin said. “But you’ll notice I’m not hanging around my ice castle brooding about it.”
“No! No! Now you want to be a criminal! But even that is too much! You have to come running to Daddy, begging for help!”
“My dad’s dead.”
Quentin stopped backing up.
“I may be a second-rate magician,” he said, “but at least I’m not a weird recluse who yells at people. I’m out in the world trying to get something done. And I’ll tell you something else, I think you know how to break an incorporate bond. In fact”—oh my God, maybe he actually was a genius—“in fact, I think you’re under one yourself. That’s what’s keeping you here. Isn’t it?”
Mayakovsky had been very well prepared for their visit. Too well, even for him. It was a long shot—but Mayakovsky hesitated, and Quentin knew he was close.
“Tell me how to break it.” He pressed his advantage. “You must have figured it out, even if you’re too scared to do it yourself. Tell me how. Help somebody for a change!”
He’d touched a nerve, because something went cold behind Mayakovsky’s eyes, and he slapped Quentin across the face. Quentin had forgotten how he liked to do that. It stung like hell, though not as much as it would have if he hadn’t already been drunk on lichen vodka. It made his ears ring, but his face was already two-thirds numb.
He was drunk enough that he did something he’d always wanted to do, which was to slap Mayakovsky back. With his grizzly hide it was like slapping a crocodile. Mayakovsky broke out in his sulfurous yellow grin.
“There it is!” he shouted. “Again!”
Quentin slapped him again.
With no warning Mayakovsky threw his thick arms around Quentin in a big Russian bear hug. It was hard to follow the emotional about-face, but Quentin went with it. Why not? Over Mayakovsky’s shoulder he saw Plum watching them round-eyed—she looked like she was trying to teleport herself out of the room through sheer force of will. But fuck it, why shouldn’t two men hug each other in a basement in the middle of Antarctica? He patted Mayakovsky’s back with his free hand. This poor fucking guy.
And Quentin’s father was dead. Who else was he going to hug? This must be what having a family is like, he thought. This must be how people hug their parents. Good old Mayakovsky. They weren’t so different after all.
“I am a dead man, Quentin. This is my grave. I bury myself here.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Quentin said. “It’s stupid. You can break the bond. You can come back anytime. Come with us!”
Mayakovsky pulled away. He held Quentin at arm’s length.
“You keep your shit world! You hear me? You keep it! I will stay here. I am done!”
He patted Quentin’s cheek.
“It is over for me. You are a pathetic mediocrity, but you are braver than me. You will not end like Mayakovsky. It is not over for you.”
He held out the bottle. Christ, Quentin thought they’d finally finished it, but there it was, practically full again. He must be refilling it by magic.
Quentin didn’t remember much after that. Later he would have a hazy recollection of Mayakovsky singing and laughing and weeping but it all got mixed up with the lichen-flavored dreams he had after he passed out, and he could never separate the fact from the hallucinations. In his dreams, at least, they sat on the floor of the workroom, passing the bottle around, and Mayakovsky told them about how he’d been there in the Neitherlands too, when the big blue gods returned and tried to take their magic back. How he’d fought them, alongside the dragons, how he’d ridden bareback on the great white dragon of Lake Vostok. How he’d smashed the bell jar over the Neitherlands with lightning and thunder from his own hands.
—
The next morning Quentin woke up in his own bed. Not in Brakebills South, in his own bed back in the Newark Airport Marriott. He had no memory of how he got there. Mayakovsky must have sent them back through a portal after all, the same way he’d sent Quentin back to Brakebills after the race to the South Pole.
Though Jesus, it made him shudder to think of Mayakovsky opening portals in the state they’d been in. Alcohol and portal magic, not a great combination.
When Quentin sat up he immediately wished he had in fact died in a catastrophic teleportation accident. Every hangover feels like the worst hangover you’ve ever had, but this one was definitely a classic. One for the ages. He felt like all the water had been forcibly sucked out of his body, like an apricot in a dehydration chamber, and replaced with venom from an angry adder.
Slowly, carefully, he got to his hands and knees. He pushed his face into his pillow, abasing himself before whatever angry god had done this to him. Maybe there was some untainted blood left somewhere in his body, and it would run downhill into his aching brain. His fingers felt something under his pillow, something hard and round and cool to the touch. A gift from the tooth fairy. He took it out.
He was right, it was a gift. It was a coin, shiny and gold, the size of a silver dollar but slightly thicker. There were three of them. He turned one over in his hand. It gleamed like it was in sunlight, but the curtains were drawn. He knew what it was right away.
Quentin smiled, his dry lips cracking. Mayakovsky had done it, exactly what Quentin had said: he’d stored up power in these coins, the power he’d need to break the bond. Mayakovsky must have prepared them to break his own bond but then never used them. God bless the old bastard. Maybe Quentin’s father hadn’t had any power, but Mayakovsky did, and more than that he’d had the courage to pass it on to someone else. He was wrong about himself: he was a brave man after all.
Kneeling on the bed, his headache already fading, Quentin held one of the coins between two fingers and made it disappear—a one-handed sleight, stage magic—then brought it back. It felt like the present he’d been waiting for all his life. He wouldn’t waste it. The plan was going to work, they were going to break the bond, and steal the case, and then he could start over. He could start his real work. For the first time since he’d left Brakebills his life was starting to make sense to him again.
The coin’s edges were sharp and newly minted. On one side was the image of a wild goose in flight. On the other was a face, a young woman in profile: She was Emily Greenstreet.