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?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?s and made her come over, and she went through with him and Penny.
Quentin watched Janet with cold loathing. She was a vampire, he thought. She preyed on other people’s healthy love and made it sick and crippled.
When they’d all been through, and seen what there was to see, nobody knew what to say. 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 Bartok.
It took twenty minutes to finish the spell, and then an extra ten 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. Sure. But this, this was everything. Now the present had a purpose, and the future had a purpose, and even the past, think about itlvvin was the faculty 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?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 round 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?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. nostrils.
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?s and Josh raced each other inside and squealed and bounced on the sofas and ran around arguing over the bedrooms. Ana?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?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.”