When he rushed her, glance passed between and the simply gAlice was ready. She was the only one. There was no warning: he went at her from a standing start—first he was still; then he was a blur. Quentin didn’t know how she could react so fast, when he could barely track Martin’s movements, but before the Beast was even halfway to her she had him up in the air, his legs churning pathetically, gripped in an iron kinetic spell. She slammed him to the ground so hard he bounced.
He was on his feet again almost at once, smoothing out his suit, and he came at her again without even seeming to set himself. This time she stepped to one side like a matador, and he blew past her. Alice was moving like the Beast now—she must have sped up her own reaction time, the way Penny had with the arrow. With a massive effort Quentin pushed himself up till he was half sitting; then something gave in his chest and he collapsed back down again.
“Are you following this?” Alice asked Martin. There was a growing confidence in her voice, as if she were trying bravado on for size and finding that she liked it. “You didn’t see it coming, did you? And this is just straight Flemish praxis. Nothing else. I haven’t even gotten to any Eastern material yet.”
With a crack the Beast snapped off a stalagmite at the base and whipped it sidearm at Alice, but the stone spear burst in midair before it reached her. Fragments whined away in all directions. Quentin wasn’t tracking it all, but he didn’t think she’d done that. The others must be backing her up, a phalanx with Alice at the head.
Though Alice was way ahead of them. Maybe poor Penny could have followed what she was doing, but Alice was in a place Quentin hadn’t known she could go. He was a magician, but she was something else, a true adept. He had no idea she was so far beyond him. There was a time when he might have felt envious of her, but now he felt only pride. That was his Alice. Sand rushed hissing from the floor in a shroud, like a swarm of enraged bees, and wrapped itself round Martin’s head, trying to penetrate his mouth and nose and ears. He twisted and flailed his arms frantically.
“Oh, Martin.” A smile played at the corners of her mouth. It was almost wicked. “That’s the trouble with monsters. No theoretical rigor. No one ever made you iron out your fundamentals, did they? If they had, you certainly wouldn’t fall for this …”
In his blinded state Martin walked straight into a fireball à la Penny that burst over him. But Alice didn’t wait. She couldn’t afford to. Her lips never stopped moving, and her hands never stopped their fluid, unhurried motions, one spell rolling right over into the next. It was high-stakes blitz chess. The fireball was followed by a glimmering spherical prison, then by a toxic hail of Magic Missiles—she must have taken apart that spell and supercharged it so that it yielded a whole flock of them. The sand she’d whipped up from the floor gathered and fused into a faceless glass golem, which landed two jabs and a roundhouse punch before Martin shattered it with a counterpunch. But he seemed disoriented. His round English face was an ominous flustered red. A colossal, crushing weight seemed to settle on his shoulders, some kind of invisible yoke that took him down to one knee.
Ana?s projected an ochre lightning strike at Martin that left behind a bloodshot afterimage on Quentin’s retinas, and Eliot and Josh and Janet had joined hands and were sending a hail of rocks that beat on his back. The room was full of a babel of incantations, but Martin didn’t seem to notice. Alice was the only one he saw.
From a half crouch he lunged at her across the sand, and some kind of phantasmal armor materialized around her, like nothing Quentin had ever seen before, silvery and translucent—it flickered in and out of visibility. The Beast’s fingers slid off it. The armor came with a shimmery pole arm that Alice spun in one hand, then set and thrust at Martin’s stomach. Sparks flew between them.
“Fergus’s Spectral Armory!” she shouted. She was breathing hard. His eyes were red and fixed on her grimly. “Like it? Do you? Very basic principles. Second Year stuff! But then you never bothered with school, did you, Martin? You wouldn’t have lasted an hour at Brakebills!”
Seeing her fight alone like this was intolerable. Quentin lifted his cheek from the sandy floor and tried to speak a spell, anything, even to create a distraction, but his lips wouldn’t shape words. His fingers were going numb. He beat his hands against the ground in frustration. He had never loved Alice more. He felt like he was sending her his strength, even though he knew she couldn’t feel it.
Alice and Martin sparred savagely for a solid minute. The armor spell must have come with a bonus of martial-arts savvy, because Alice whipped her fairy glaive around in a complicated pattern, two-handed now; it had a small, vicious spike on its butt end that drew blood. Sweat matted her hair to her forehead, but she never lost focus. After another minute the armor vanished—the spell must have expired—and she did something that froze the air around the Beast into an intricate frostwork mummy. Even his clothes froze and fell to pieces in shards, leaving him naked and fish-belly white.
But by then he was close enough to seize her arm. Suddenly she was a girl again, small and vulnerable.
But not for long. She spat out a ferocious sequence of syllables and transformed into a tawny lioness with a white scruff of beard under her chin. She and Martin went down grappling, mouths gaping, trying to get their teeth into each other. Alice worked with her huge back legs to scratch and disembowel, caterwauling angrily.
Janeh red skin was
t was circling the fight, trying to cram bullets into the revolver and dropping them freely on the sand, but there was nowhere to aim anyway. They were all tangled up together. The next moment the Beast was in the coils of a massive spotted anaconda, then Alice was an eagle, then a huge brindled bear, then a horrific man with pincing legs and its venomous sting, the size of a crane hook, lodged in Martin Chatwin&-size scorpion
BOOK IV
THE RETREAT
QUENTIN WOKE UP in a beautiful white room. For a second—or was it an hour? a week?—he thought it was his room in Brakebills South, that he was back in Antarctica. But then he saw that the window was open and heavy green curtains were puffing in, and out, and in again with the coming and going of a warm summer wind. So definitely not Antarctica.
He lay looking up at the ceiling, letting himself drift and spin along on spacey, narcotic mental currents. He didn’t feel even remotely curious about where he was or how he’d gotten there. He blissed out on insignificant details: the sunlight, the smell of clean linens, a splinter of blue sky in the window, the gnarly whorls of the dark chocolate-brown timbers that crossed the whitewashed ceiling. He was alive.
And those nice, surprisingly Pottery Barn-y curtains, the color of the stems of plants. They were coarse-woven, but it wasn’t the familiar, depressing fake-authentic coarseness of high-end Earth housewares, which merely imitated the real coarseness of fabrics that were woven by hand out of genuine necessity. As he lay there Quentin’s uppermost thought was that these were authentically coarse-woven curtains, woven by people who didn’t know any other way of making curtains, who didn’t even know that their way was special, and whose way was therefore not discounted and emptied of meaning in advance. This made him very happy. It was as if he’d been looking for these curtains forever, as if he’d been waiting his whole life to wake up one morning in a room in which those coarse-woven, stem-green curtains hung over the windows.
From time to time a horsy clippety-clopping could be heard from the hall outside. This mystery solved itself when a woman with the body of a horse stepped partway into the room. The effect was surprisingly unsurprising. She was a sturdy, sun-kissed woman with short brown hair who just happened to be attached to the chassis of a sleek black mare.
“You are conscious?” she asked.
Quentin cleared his throat. He couldn’t get it all the way clear. It was horribly dry, too dry to speak, so he just nodded.
“Your recovery is nearly complete,” the centauress said, with the air of a busy senior resident doing rounds who didn’t have time to waste rejoicing over medical miracles. She began the slow process of reversing herself, daintily nostrils.
“You have been asleep for six months and two days,” she added before she disappeared.
Quentin listened to her clippety-clop away. It was quiet again. He did his best to hang on to the blissful feeling. But it didn’t last.
The six months of his recovery were practically a blank—just a quickly evaporating impression of blue depths and complex, enchanted dreams. But Quentin’s memories of what happened in Ember’s Tomb were very clear. He might reasonably have expected that day (or had it been night?) to fall in a blackout period, or at least be veiled in merciful post-traumatic haziness. But no, not at all. He could remember it with perfect fidelity, deep focus, full force, from any angle, right up until the moment he lost consciousness.
The shock of it snapped his chest flat. It emptied out his lungs the way the Beast’s jaws had, not just once but over and over again. He was helpless against it. He lay in his bed and sobbed until he choked. His weak body spasmed. He made noises he’d never heard a human being make. He ground his face into his flat, prickly straw pillow until it was wet with tears and snot. She had died for him, for all of them, and she was never coming back.
He couldn’t think about what happened; he could only play it back again and again, as if there were a chance it could come out differently, or even just hurt a little less, but every time he played it back he wanted to die. His half-healed body ached all over, as if it were bruised right down to his skeleton, but he wanted it to hurt even more. He didn’t know how to operate in a world that would allow this to happen. It was a shit world, a fraud and a con, and he wanted nothing more to do with it. Whenever he slept, he woke up trying to warn somebody of something, but he never knew what, or who, and it was always too late.
With the sorrow came anger. What had they been thinking? A bunch of kids walking into a civil war in an alien world? Alice was dead (and Fen, and probably Penny, too) and the worst part was that he could have saved them all, and he hadn’t. He was the one who told them it was time to go to Fillory. He’d blown the horn that summoned the Beast. Alice had come because of him, to take care of him. But he hadn’t taken care of her.
The centaurs watched him weep with alien unconcern, like fish.
He learned over the next few days that he was in a monastery, or something like it, or that was as much as he could gather from the centaurs who ran the place. It wasn’t a place of worship, they explained, with a note of whinnying condescension, but a community devoted to the most absolute possible expression, or incarnation—or perhaps realization was an even better word—of the incomprehensibly complex but infinitely pure sylvan values of centaurhood, which Quentin’s fallen human brain could never hope to grasp. There was something distinctly German about the centaurs.
It came out, not very tactfully, that they considered humans to be inferior beings. It wasn’t the humans’ fault. They were simply cripples, severed by an unhappy accident of birth from their rightful horse halves. The centaurs regarded Quentin with pity nicely tempered by a near-total lack of interest. Also, they seemed to be constantly afraid that he was going to tip over.
None of them had any exact memory of how Quentin had gotten here. They didn’t pay close attention to the backstory of the occasional damaged human who fetched up in their midst. When pressed, Quentin’s doctor, a terrifyingly earnest individual at the same timeR at thev with whose name was Alder Acorn Agnes Allison-Fragrant-Timber, said she vaguely remembered some humans, unusually filthy and bedraggled specimens, now that you mention it, bringing Quentin in on a makeshift litter. He’d been unconscious and deep in shock, with his rib cage crushed and one of his forelimbs badly dislocated, practically detached. Such anatomical disorder was distasteful to the centaurs. And they were not insensible of the service the humans had rendered to Fillory in ridding it of Martin Chatwin. They did their best to offer assistance.
The humans lingered in the area for a month, maybe two, while the centaurs wove deep webs of wood-magic around Quentin’s torn, bruised, insulted body. But they thought it unlikely that he would ever wake up. And in time, as Quentin showed no signs of recovering consciousness, the humans reluctantly departed.
He supposed he could have been angry that they had left him there, in Fillory, with no way of returning to his own world. But all he felt was warm, cowardly relief. He didn’t have to face them. The sight of their faces would have burned the skin right off him with shame. He wished he had died, and if he couldn’t have death, at least he had this, the next best thing: total isolation, lost forever in Fillory. He was broken in a way that magic could never fix.
His body was still weak, and he spent a lot of time in bed, resting his atrophied muscles. He was an empty shell, roughly hollowed out by some crude tool, gutted and left there, a limp, raw, boneless skin. If he tried, he could summon up old sense-memories. Nothing from Fillory or Brakebills, just the really old stuff, the easy stuff, the safe stuff. The smell of his mother’s oil paints; the lurid green of the Gowanus canal; the curious way Julia pursed her lips around the reed of her oboe; the hurricane that blew through when they took that family vacation in Maine, he must have been about eight, when they went out on the lawn and threw their sweaters in the air and watched them sail away over the neighbor’s fence and then fell down laughing. A beautiful blossoming white cherry tree stood outside his window in the warm afternoon sunlight. Every part of it moved and swayed in a slightly different rhythm from every other part. He watched it for a long time.
If he was feeling daring, he thought about the time he’d spent as a goose flying south over Patagonia, wingtip to wingtip with Alice, buoyed up by pillowy masses of empty air, gazing coolly down at looping, squiggly, switchbacked rivers. If he did it now, he thought, he would remember to look out for the Nazca Lines in Peru. He wondered if he could go back to Professor Van der Weghe and have her change him back, and he would just stay that way, live and die as a stupid goose and forget that he’d ever even been a human. Sometimes he thought of a day he’d spent with Alice on the roof of the Cottage. They had a joke that they were going to play on the others when they got back from somewhere, but the others never came home, and he and Alice had just lain up there on the warm shingles all afternoon, looking at the sky and talking about nothing.