“Yeah?” Josh said. “Did you kick their woolly asses?”
“I turned the other cheek.” Quentin didn’t feel like talking, but he was hungry. He got a plate from the kitchen and sat down at the far end of the table and served himself leftovers.
“We were talking about what to do next,” Richard said. “Making up an actions list.”
“Right.” Josh pounded authoritatively on the heavy table. “Who’s got some action items for me? We need to enumerate our deliverables!”
“Food,” Richard said“Gold,” Ana?s chipped in gamely. “And trade items. What do Fillorians want? Cigarettes?”
“We’re not going to Brezhnev-era Russia, Ana?s. Steel?”
“Gunpowder?”
“My God,” Eliot said. “Listen to you people. I am not going to be the man who brought the gun to Fillory.”
“We should bring overcoats,” Richard said. “Tents. Cold-weather gear. We have no idea what season it is there. We could be walking into deep winter.”
Yesterday—meaning before his nap—Fillory was going to make everything all right. Now it was hard to focus on it: it seemed like a dream again. Now the mess with Janet and Alice was the real thing. It would drag everything else down with it.
He pulled himself together with an effort.
“How long are we talking about going for?”
“A couple of days? Look, we can just come back if we forget something,” Eliot said. “With the button it’s a snap. We’ll just stay till it gets boring.”
“What should we do when we get there?”
“I think they’ll probably give us a quest,” Penny said. “That’s what always happened to the Chatwins.”
Heads turned. Penny was standing in the doorway in a T-shirt and sweatpants, blinking like an owl, looking like he’d just woken up, too.
“I don’t know if we can count on that, Penny.” For some reason it annoyed Quentin, how starry-eyed and optimistic Penny was being about this. “It’s not like the rams summoned us. It might not even be like the books. Maybe there never were any quests. Plover probably just put that stuff in so there would be a good story. Maybe we’ll just suck around Fillory like we’re sucking around here.”
“Don’t be a killjoy,” Josh said, “just because your girlfriend beats you up.”
Penny was shaking his head. “I just don’t see Plover coming up with all that stuff on his own. It’s not rational. He was a gay dry-cleaning magnate with a background in practical chemistry. He didn’t have a creative bone in his body. No way. It’s Occam’s razor. It’s much more likely that he was writing it as it happened.”
“So what do you think,” Eliot said, “we’re going to meet a damsel in distress?”
“We might. Not necessarily a damsel, but … you know, a nymph maybe. Or a dwarf, or a pegasus. You know, that needs help with something.” Everybody was laughing, but Penny kept on going. It was almost touching. “Seriously, it happens in the books, every time.”
Josh pushed a tiny doll glass of something clear and alcoholic in front of Quentin, and he took a sip. It was some kind of fiery fruit eau-de-vie, and it tasted like a vital nutrient that his body had been chronically deprived of his entire life.
“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re and sweatpantsR arrivedv with not going to be a character in a story; there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”
“Maybe your world doesn’t, Earth man,” Josh said. He winked. “We’re not in your world anymore.”
“And I don’t want to turn this into a theological discussion,” Richard added, with towering dignity, “but there is room for disagreement on that score.”
“And even if you don’t believe that this world has a god,” Penny finished up, “you must admit that Fillory has one. Two even.”
“This does bring us back, albeit in an insane way, to what is actually a pretty reasonable question,” Eliot said. “Which is what do we do when we get there?”
“We should go after that magic flower,” Josh suggested. “You know, the one that when you smell it it automatically makes you happy? Remember that? That thing would be worth bank here.”
While nobody was watching, Janet caught Quentin’s eye and waggled her eyebrows and did something lewd with her tongue. Quentin eyed her back, unblinking. She was actually enjoying this, he thought. She’d sabotaged him and Alice, and she was loving it. Little montage flashes of last night—it couldn’t possibly have just been last night—cycled through his brain, snapshots that had stubbornly survived the merciful angel of alcoholic erasure. Everything about sex with Janet had been so different from Alice. The smell, the feel of her skin, her businesslike know-how. The shame and the fear had caught up with him even before it was over, before he came, but he hadn’t stopped.
And had Eliot really been awake for the whole thing? His brain dealt out a sloppy fan of mental Polaroids, out of sequence: an image of Janet kissing Eliot, of her hand working diligently between Eliot’s legs. Had she really been weeping? Had he kissed Eliot? A vivid sense memory of somebody else’s stubble, surprisingly scratchy, chafing his cheek and upper lip.
Good God, he thought wearily. What goes on.
He had reached the outer limits of what Fun, capital F, could do for him. The cost was way too high, the returns pitifully inadequate. His mind was dimly awakening, too late, to other things that were as important, or even more so. Poor Alice. He needed a hair shirt, or ashes, or a scourge—there should be some ritual that he could perform to show her how desperately sorry he was. He would do anything, if she would just tell him what to do.
He shoved the pictures back down wherever they came from, back into the mental shuffle, speeding them on their way with some more of that yummy eau-de-vie. An idea was germinating in his tired, bruised brain.
“We could find Martin Chatwin,” Richard volunteered. “The way the other children were always trying to.”
“I’d like to bring something back for Fogg,” Eliot said. “Something for the school. An artifact or something.”
“That’s it?” Josh said. “You’re going to Fillory to bring back an apple for teacher? God, you’re so unbelievably lame sometimes.”
Oddly, Eliot didn’t take the bait. This was affecting them all in different ways.
“Maybe we could find the Questing Beast,” Quentin said quietly.
“The what?” Josh wrinkled his forehead. No Fillory scholar he.
“From The Girl Who Told Time. Remember? The beast that can’t be caught. Helen chases it.”
“What do you do with it if you do catch it? Eat it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it leads you to treasure? Or gives you some secret wisdom? Or something?” He hadn’t thought this through completely. It had seemed important to the Chatwins, but now he couldn’t remember why.
“You never find out,” Penny said. “Not in the books. They never catch it, and Plover never mentions it again. It’s a good idea. But I was thinking, you know, maybe they’ll make us kings. Kings and queens. The way the Chatwins were.”
As soon as Penny said it, Quentin wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself. It was so obvious. They’d be kings and queens. Of course they would. If the City was real, why not all the rest of it, even that? They could live in Castle Whitespire. Alice could be his queen.
God, he was agreeing with Penny. That was a danger sign if there ever was one.
“Huh.” Janet mulled this over, her ever-alert brain ticking over. She was actually taking it seriously, too. “Would we have to marry each other?”
“Not necessarily. The Chatwins didn’t. Then again, they were all siblings.”
“I don’t know,” said Ana?s. “It sounds like a big job, being queen. There is probably bureaucracy. Administration.”
“Lucrative, though. Think of the perks.”
“If the books are even accurate,” Eliot said. “And if the thrones are vacant. That’s two big ifs. Plus there’s eight of us and only four thrones. Four people get left out.”
“I’ll tell you what we need,” Ana?s said. “We need war magic. Battle magic. Offense, defense. We need to be able to hurt people if we have to.”
Janet looked amused.
“Shit’s illegal, babe,” she said, obviously impressed despite herself. “You know that.”
“I don’t care if it is.” Ana?s shook her precious blond curls. “We need it. We have no idea what we will be seeing when we cross over. We have to be ready. Unless any of you big strong men knows how to use a sword?” There was silence, and she smirked. “Alors.”
“Did they teach you that stuff where you went?” Josh asked. He looked a little afraid of her.
“We are not so pure in Europe as you Americans, I guess.”