Penny was nodding. “Battle magic isn’t illegal in Fillory.”
“Out of the question,” Richard said crisply. “Do you realize the kind of heat you’d bring down on us? Who here besides me has dealt with the Magician’s Court? Anybody?”
“We’re already in the shit, Richard,” Eliot said. “You think that button would be legal if the court knew about it? If you want out, get out now, but Ana?s is right. I’m not going over there with just my dick in my hand.”
“We can get a dispensation for small arms,” Richard went on primly. “The topic of conversation bottles soon as gre are precedents for that. I know the forms.”
“Guns?” Eliot made a sour face. “What is wrong with you? Fillory is a pristine society. Have you ever even watched Star Trek? This is basic Prime Directive stuff. We have a chance to experience a world that has not yet been fucked up by assholes. Do any of you get how important that is? Any of you?”
Quentin kept expecting Eliot to declare himself too cool for the whole Fillory project and start making snarky jokes about it, but he was turning out to be surprisingly focused and unironic about it. Quentin couldn’t remember the last time Eliot had been openly enthusiastic about anything. It was a relief to see that he could still admit that he cared about something.
“I do not want to be around Penny with a gun,” Janet said firmly.
“Look, Ana?s is right,” Eliot said. “We’ll work up some basic attack spells, just in case. Nothing too insane. We’ll just have a couple of aces in the hole. And we have those cacodemons in our backs, don’t forget. And the button.”
“And our dicks in our hands.” Ana?s giggled.
The next day Richard, Eliot, Janet, and Ana?s drove into Buffalo to shop for supplies; Janet, being from L.A., was the only one who had a driver’s license. Quentin, Josh, Alice, and Penny were supposed to be researching battle magic, but Alice wouldn’t speak to Quentin—he had knocked on her door that morning, but she wouldn’t come out—and the technicalities were beyond Josh, so it came down to Alice and Penny working together.
Soon the big dining-room table was crawling with books from Penny’s U-haul stash and sheets of butcher paper covered with flow charts. They were deep into it. As the two biggest magic nerds of the group, Alice and Penny were completely absorbed in each other, speaking some ad hoc technical jargon they came up with on the fly, Penny scribbling reams of archaic notations and Alice nodding seriously over his shoulder and pointing. They were doing original work, building spells from scratch; it wasn’t fantastically difficult stuff, but any prior art in the area had been thoroughly suppressed.
Watching them work, Quentin was consumed with jealousy. Thank God it was Penny—anybody else and he would have been seriously suspicious. He and Josh spent the afternoon in the den with some beer and Smart Food watching cable on a flat-screen TV the size of a billboard. There had been no TV at Brakebills, or in their Manhattan apartment, and it felt exotic and forbidden.
Around five o’clock Eliot came and roused them.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re missing Penny’s big show.”
“How was Buffalo?”
“Like a vision of the apocalypse. We bought parkas and hunting knives.”
They trailed Eliot out to the backyard. Seeing him happy and excited and reasonably sober restored Quentin’s faith in the possibility that they were on the right track, that everything broken was fixable. He grabbed a scarf and a bizarre Russian hat with earflaps that he found in a closet.
The sun was setting behind the Adirondacks in the distance, cold and red and desolate through the haze. The others were grouped at the bottom of the lawn, which sloped down to a row of bare, decorative lindens. Penny was sighting down his arm at one of the trees while Alice pacor maybe they actually werem0%; text-align:center; text-indent:0em; margin-left:0em;goed off distance in long, even steps. She jogged over to Penny and they whispered; then she paced off the distance again. Janet stood to one side with Richard, looking adorable in a pink parka and a woolly watch cap.
“All right!” Penny called. “Stand back, everybody.”
“How much farther back can we stand?” Josh asked. Sitting on a broken white marble balustrade, a random architectural element dropped in by the landscaper, he took a nip from a bottle of schnapps and passed it to Eliot.
“Just so you’re standing back. Okay, fire in the hole.”
Like a sequined assistant, Alice stepped up to an end table on the green, placed an empty wine bottle on it, and stepped away.
Facing the bottle, Penny took a quick breath and spoke a rapid sequence of clipped syllables under his breath, ending with a one-handed flicking gesture. Something—a spray of three somethings, steely gray and tightly grouped—shot out of his fingertips, too fast to follow, and flickered across the lawn. Two of them missed, but one of them snapped the bottle’s neck off cleanly, leaving the base standing headlessly upright.
Penny grinned. There was scattered applause.
“We call it ‘Magic Missile,’” he said.
“Magic Missile, baby!” Josh’s breath steamed in the cold air. His face was radiant with excitement. “That’s straight up Dungeons & Dragons shit!”
Penny nodded.
“We actually based some of this on old D & D spells. There’s a lot of practical thinking in those books.”
Quentin wasn’t smiling. Wasn’t anybody going to say anything? This was dark magic. God knows he wasn’t a prude, but this was a spell meant to break up flesh, to physically wound. They were crossing so many lines it was hard to figure out where they were anymore. If they ever actually had to cast this stuff, it would already be too late.
“God, I hope we don’t have to use that,” was all he said out loud.
“Oh, come on, Quentina. We’re not looking for trouble. We just want to be ready if it comes.” Josh could hardly contain himself. “Dungeons & Dragons, motherfucker!”
Next Alice whisked the card table away so that Penny stood alone, facing the dark line of lindens. The others stood and sat scattered behind him, under the empty sunset sky. The sun was almost down now. Their noses were running and their ears were red, but the cold didn’t seem to bother Penny, who was still wearing only a T-shirt and sweatpants. They were really in the middle of nowhere. Quentin was used to the background blare and hum of Manhattan, and even at Brakebills there were so many people around, there had always been someone somewhere yelling or knocking something over or blowing something up. Here, when the wind wasn’t sighing moodily in the trees, there was nothing. The whole world was on mute.
He tied down the earflaps of his Russian hat with a string.
“If this doesn’t work—” Penny began.
“Just do it already!” Janet said. “It’s cold out here!”
Penny did a deep knee-bend and spat on the gray-brown grass. Then he executed a grotesque, wild-armed flailing movement, at odds with what Quentin ha think about itNGs soon as gd seen of his otherwise highly disciplined style. Violet light sputtered in his cupped hands in the darkness so that the bones in his fingers were visible through the skin. He shouted something and finished with an overarm pitching motion.
A small, dense orange spark left Penny’s palm and flew across the grass, dead level. At first it looked absurdly inoffensive, silly, like a toy, or an insect. But as it sailed toward the trees it grew, blooming into a fiery sparking comet the size of a beach ball, veined and roiling and snapping. It was almost stately, spinning slowly backward as it moved through the cold dusk air. Shadows wound across the lawn, shifting with the fast-moving light source. The heat was intense; Quentin felt it on his face. When it hit a linden, the whole tree went up at once with a single loud, crackling woof. A gout of flame ascended into the sky and vanished.
“Fireball!” Penny called out unnecessarily.
It was an instant bonfire. The tree burned fast and merrily. Sparks flew up impossibly high into the twilight sky. Janet whooped and jumped up and down and clapped her hands like a cheerleader. Penny smiled thinly and took a theatrical bow.
They stayed at the house upstate for a few more days, lounging around, grilling on the back patio, drinking up all the good wine, going through the DVD collection, all cramming into the hot tub and then not cleaning it afterward. The fact was, Quentin realized, after all the buildup, all the hasty preparation and rush-rush-rush, they were stalling, vamping, waiting for something to push them into pulling the trigger. They were so excited they didn’t see how terrified they were. And when he thought about all the happiness waiting for him in Fillory, Quentin almost felt like he didn’t deserve it. He wasn’t ready. Ember and Umber would never have summoned someone like him.
In the meantime Alice had somehow figured out a way of never being in the same room as Quentin at the same time. She’d developed a sixth sense about him—he’d catch a glimpse of her out of a window, or a flash of her feet as she vanished upstairs, but that was as close they came. It was almost like a game; the others played it, too. When he did spot her in the open—sitting up on the kitchen counter, kicking her legs and chatting with Josh, or hunched over the dining-room table with Penny and his books, like everything was fine—he didn’t dare intrude. That would be against the rules of the game. Seeing her there, so close and at the same time so infinitely removed, was like looking through a doorway into another universe, a warm, sunny, tropical dimension that he had once inhabited, but from which he was now banished. Every night he left flowers outside her bedroom door.
It was a shame: he probably never even had to know what happened. He could easily have missed it. Though maybe they would have stayed there forever if he had. He stayed up late one night, playing cards with Josh and Eliot. Playing cards with magicians always degenerated into a meta-contest over who was better at warping the odds, so that practically every hand came up four aces against a couple of straight flushes. Quentin was, tecause he knew
entatively, feeling better. They were drinking grappa. The twisted knot of shame and regret in his chest that had been there since the night with Janet was gradually coming undone, or at least scarring over. It wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t everything either. There was sotween him and Alice. They could get past this.
Maybe it wa much right be