She nodded but didn’t answer at first. The setting sun caught the bezel of a clock-tree and flashed off it, orange light on silver.
“I suspected something like that,” she said. “Did you notice the clocks? They don’t agree anymore. They used to keep perfect time, but now look at them. Their hands are going everywhere. It’s like they’re panicking. Little idiots.”
She frowned at the fairy ring of clock-trees like they were disobedient children. He supposed they were all the children she had, or would have.
“What do you think it means?”
“Hard to say.” Lost in thought, for a moment she looked young and beautiful and intensely curious, the way she must have looked to Quentin when she first recruited him back in Brooklyn, dressed as a paramedic, all those years ago. “You know, these were the last clock-trees I ever made. I always thought I’d think of a better name for them.
“Their roots go very deep into Fillory. Not all the way through to the Far Side, I don’t think they’ve made it that far, but more than halfway. They’re like a nervous system, very quick to register systemic change. They’re useful that way.
“But they shouldn’t be able to disagree with each other. It shouldn’t be possible. They’re all one big tree below the surface—they reach out for each other and grow together at the roots. The dwarfs hack through them sometimes, but they grow right back. Except that this time they haven’t. Deep underground, something must be tearing them apart. Tearing Fillory apart.”
Jane walked over to one of the trees, the smallest one, knobby and broken-backed like an olive tree—it was bent over so far she’d had to prop it up with a board. She knocked twice on the crystal face of its clock; it was on a section of trunk that ran parallel to the ground, and its face looked up at the sky. It swung open, first the glass, then the dial, to reveal the works inside, gears and catchments turning and meshing silently.
She bit her lip.
“What should we do?” Eliot said.
“Damned if I know.” She slammed the clock face shut like it was the door of a washing machine. “Listen. Eliot.”
“Your Highness,” Janet prompted. She felt free to disrespect Eliot—very free in fact—but she didn’t like other people doing it. Jane ignored her.
“Look at me: this is what an ended story looks like. I was giving my life for this country, this world, before you were born. Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead. I had my own brother killed. I have no partner, no children. I’ve done my great deed, and it took everything I had. I won’t be dragged back into another adventure. I’ve made a separate peace.”
“Well, and we would rather not drag you,” Janet said. “But, see, apocalypse.”
“Has it occurred to you that you might just accept it?” She was a small woman, but she drew herself up, and there was some Edwardian dignity in her manner. “Has it crossed your minds that you don’t have to go off on a holy crusade every time things don’t go your way? You children and your adventures. Stories have ends! Why don’t you let Fillory die gracefully, in its own time and its own way? Maybe it wants to let go! I was never a real paramedic, but a phrase comes back to me: do not resuscitate. Let it go. Let Fillory die in peace.”
“No.”
“We’re not asking you to come with us,” Eliot said. “Just tell us what you know. There has to be something. Please.”
The High King of Fillory went down on one knee before the Watcherwoman.
“Please. Our stories haven’t ended yet. Yours may have, but ours haven’t. If it’s time, then it’s time, but I am not the last High King of Fillory. I don’t believe it. This land isn’t ready to die.”
Jane stared at him for a long time. Then she made a disgusted noise in her throat and turned away and boosted herself up onto the bent trunk of the clock-tree.
“All right,” she said. “All right. I’ll tell you what I know, but it isn’t much. I feel like I know less and less every day. Maybe it’s the time travel—some days I wonder if I’m starting to live backward, like Merlin. God, I think I would kill myself. Or would I already have killed myself? My brother could have helped you, but he’s dead. Long ago.”
“What, Martin? Not likely.”
“Not him, the other one. Rupert. He spent a lot of time in Fillory. He was close to Martin.”
“That’s not actually a huge plus in our book,” Janet said.
“It should be. Martin was an asshole, but he was smart. He found out things about Fillory that you and I will never know, and he was only thirteen when he did it. Have you ever wondered where he got all that power from? How he became what he was?”
“I guess I have wondered that,” Eliot said.
“I have too. I never knew. But I think Rupert did. He was with Martin the day he disappeared. He always said he didn’t see anything, but I think he did. He was an open book, our Rupes, no good at keeping secrets, though he thought he was.
“If I were looking for missing puzzle pieces, I would start there. Go back to Earth. Find his things, see what he left behind. Maybe he wrote something down. And I think he nicked something—you weren’t supposed to bring things through, from Fillory back to Earth, or not big things anyway, but I think Rupert did. I think he stole something. At any rate when he left here there was a big stink about it. No one ever pinned it on him, and by then Martin was raising hell so it rather got lost in the shuffle, but I think he had something he wasn’t supposed to.
“That’s what I would do: go back, all the way back to where this whole disaster started. You weren’t there, and even I wasn’t there. But Rupert was.”
That was all they got out of her. Eliot asked her some polite questions about the garden, while Janet walked from clock-tree to clock-tree, knocking on the faces, trying to get them to open for her the way they did for Jane; Jane claimed not to know why they didn’t. After ten more minutes Eliot said they should be on their way, and Jane didn’t disagree.
She walked them to their horses. They hadn’t wanted to come inside the ring of clock-trees.
“Good luck,” the Watcherwoman said. “And I do mean that.”
“Thanks,” Eliot said. “Good luck with your clockwork lessons.”
“Thank you.”
“I bet you wish you hadn’t broken that watch,” Janet said.
She wouldn’t leave it alone.
“Wishes are for children,” Jane Chatwin said. “I grew up.”
CHAPTER 16
It was like a really terrible party where on top of everything else at the end it turns out your ride bailed and you have to walk home. It was cold, and Plum kept worrying that the bird would come back at any moment with reinforcements to claim its stolen goods. Or the surviving half of the Couple, if he had survived. She worried to the point where she kept losing her shit every time anything cawed or hooted or one of them stepped on a stick. It had to be after them. No way would it let this go, not after the lengths it had already gone to. The only question was when.
After Betsy left, or Amadeus, or whatever her name was, Stoppard had departed the scene too at top speed on the busted club chair, with promises to reconnect back in New York once the coast was clear. Plum and Quentin were going to take the pool table, but when they tried to shift it they discovered that they lacked the necessary motive power. All their magical strength was spent. So they set off on foot instead.
Maybe they should have taken Lionel’s gun, for added protection, but they didn’t. They just didn’t want it.
It was a long night, and a long walk, but then again everybody had a lot of explaining to do, and a lot of thinking to do too. Quentin told her what he knew about why Asmodeus (that was it) would have wanted the knife, and after hearing the tale of Reynard the murdering rapist fox-god she thought it was pretty understandable. She must have been planning to steal it all along, that was the whole reason she was there. All else being equal Plum wished her well.
But how had she known it was in the case in the first place? Plum didn’t even have a guess. Quentin didn’t either, or if he did he didn’t make it.
More disquieting was the fact that Asmodeus obviously knew about Plum’s family. She’d realized a while ago that the bird must know; now it was clear that her secret identity wasn’t anywhere near as secret as she thought it was, and that being a Chatwin meant that she was already part of a lot of other people’s stories in ways that she was only now becoming aware of. She figured she might as well tell Quentin at this point; she felt safe with him. She’d almost told him once, at the hotel bar, and anyway he asked why she could open the suitcase when nobody else could, because of course he wasn’t going to let that go, and that had to be the answer. Her great-grandfather had locked it and made sure only a family member could unlock it. She could have made up something, but she was so tired she couldn’t think of a lie, and anyway what was the point.
For the record Plum thought it was pretty rich that Quentin turned out to be connected to a hard case like Betsy, if only indirectly. But he was turning out to be a pretty hard case himself, in his way, or at any rate harder than she’d thought based on first impressions. And everywhere she looked things were getting connected up, or rather it was becoming clear that they were already connected in ways that she was only just now picking up on. It was a worrying trend. Everybody else was deep into their own stories, and all the stories were woven together just beneath the surface into a web that included Plum. But what was Plum’s story?
Toward dawn they’d recovered enough strength from the spellcasting orgy of the day before that they could risk some low flight, just above the trees. They had no idea where they even were. Once the sun was up they found a road and walked along it looking sufficiently pathetic and unthreatening that some guy out for an early-morning drive in his Honda Element gave them a ride into the nearest town.
The town was called Amenia, as it happened, like Armenia but without the r. It was in Dutchess County, New York, and it turned out to be the very last stop on the commuter train line to Manhattan, two and a half hours away. So they steal-o-mancied some dollars out of an ATM and bought tickets, plus some bad coffee and rubber croissants at the snack bar in the lobby of the train station. Then they sat on the old red bench in said lobby. It was nine in the morning, and the next train wasn’t till noon.
It had been a long night, and a long day before that, and Plum needed to go to sleep and perchance to dream—maybe dreaming she could begin to process and understand the sight of a roomful of robed figures with golden hands, and Betsy standing over an electrocuted corpse, and Lionel opening fire on Stoppard, and Asmodeus née Betsy carving a suddenly nonhuman Lionel to pieces with a knife . . . thinking about it again she started to shake. Things had gone much too far, and her brain felt raw and scarred from it all.
It wasn’t how she’d imagined spending what should have been her last semester at Brakebills. It wasn’t even how she’d imagined spending her post-Brakebills life of crime. As soon as she read the letter she found on her bed the night of the ghost, she knew she was going to take the job. Keep moving, keep busy, that was rule number one of being Plum. And yeah, part of her got an illicit thrill out of it. She’d never had a rebellious phase, and she wasn’t sure she wanted one, but she’d sure as hell gotten one. It was crazy and weird and kind of sleazy but she embraced it.
At least she’d learned some new magic from Quentin and Pushkar. Maybe she could spin it to her parents as an internship. What she really wanted was something she could fall in love with the way she loved Brakebills, but at this point she wasn’t sure she would ever find it.
Even after her dramatic reveal she and Quentin had eventually run out of conversation, and now they just sat there on the bench in the empty waiting room of the Amenia train station, looking out at the cement platform, and the empty tracks, under the empty white sky, feeling the weight of the sleepless night pressing down on their shoulders like a mile of ocean, and them sunk to the bottom of it. Plum let her mind spin off its axis. Her brain wasn’t up to thinking about the future right now, or about the past. It wasn’t functioning on that level. So she hung out in the present, second by second.
It was a surprisingly substantial train station for a town this tiny, this far from New York City. A flat-screen TV wedged into one corner of the lobby showed local news, including shaky iPhone footage of strange objects seen streaking across the sky last night. Plum wondered if people actually commuted to Manhattan from here. She wondered what it would be like just to be a regular civilian person who lived in Amenia, New York. She thought it might be pretty nice.
Quentin kept taking out his pocket watch and looking at it. Plum wanted to find it annoying—it was kind of a hipster affectation, that watch, like a novelty beard, especially since it didn’t appear to work in spite of Stoppard’s attentions—but it was such a strange and beautiful object. It drew her gaze, magnetically. It must have been a gift, she supposed, from someone who loved him. That Julia person maybe. More stories.
“Do you want to read the book?” he asked.
Oh, that. The leather-bound book that had been in the case. They’d taken it with them, of course, humped it through the woods, but now the thought of opening it filled her with dread.
“Maybe we should burn it,” she said. “Sooner or later the bird’s going to come after it. So maybe when it does we’re going to want to not have it.”
“The bird will have to hire some new muscle first. Round up more stooges like us. That’ll take time. In the meantime maybe it would help if we knew why the bird thought it was so important.”
“I guess. We could always burn it later.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“Lemme see it.”
It was an old leather notebook, or maybe ledger was a better word for it. The kind of thing an accountant with a green eyeshade might have written in, in an old-timey bank. The cover had the same monogram as the suitcase: RCJ. The spine was oddly mottled, blue and green.
“This was my great-grandfather’s.”
“I figured.”
“What do you think’s in it?”
“Diary?” Quentin said.
“What if it has dirty parts in it. Like intimate confessions, that sort of thing.”
“One way to find out.”
She nodded, resigned, but still she let the book lie in her lap. It felt heavy, too heavy to lift. She was at a crossroads, but the kind that had no signs at it. She wondered what could possibly be inside the book that people should have died for it; she was assuming that Lionel had done away with Pushkar too. She wondered if later on she would wish she hadn’t looked. That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.
But she could feel Quentin practically panting with excitement at her elbow—whatta dork. Always the eager beaver. Suddenly a wave of physical and emotional exhaustion just steamrolled over her, and Plum did want to be reading something, anything at all, rather than sitting in this empty train station lobby staring at the cinder block walls. She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else.
She was ready to sink, really sink, to the black, airless bottom of where this all began.
“OK,” she said. “Bottoms up.”
“Skoal.”
That made her wish she had a real drink instead of this shitty coffee. She opened the book.
From the first page it was evident that Great-Grampa Rupert had had literary aspirations, and that he’d undertaken this project with some actual seriousness of purpose, because he’d arranged the page like a formal title page. He wrote with a fountain pen, the blue ink faded now from midnight blue to midday, but still elegant, a diligent schoolboy’s handwriting. The pages weren’t ruled for prose, they were set up for columns of numbers, but Rupert had filled them with letters instead.
Plum’s heart went out to the guy. Probably he was having a midlife crisis, and this was the novel or memoir or whatever that he just had to get out of him. This was how he was going to make his mark, have his say, show the world he wasn’t like the others. (But if that was true why lock it in a case?)
With great ceremony, in the deliberate hand of a man who genuinely believed he was making a new beginning for himself, a clean breast of things, Rupert had written and then crossed out two possible titles: