Now the two of them were thoroughly nested, and a week ago they’d told him that Poppy was pregnant. It wasn’t public yet, but she was starting to show. The people would love it. There hadn’t been a prince or princess of Fillory in centuries. It made Eliot feel a little alone, and a little empty, but only a little. Life was long. Plenty of time for that stuff, if he ever found himself wanting it. He was High King in a Great Age. His business right now was logging some Great Deeds.
He heard the thump of hooves on the grass, and a stiff wingtip brushed the coarse silk wall by his head. The pegasi were here. He opened his eyes and heaved himself up; he was pretty sure the wound had stopped bleeding, though he could feel where his shirt was stuck to it. Quentin had been shot with an arrow there once. They’d fix him up back at Whitespire. He would have them leave a nice scar. Without waiting for Janet he put on his king-face and strolled outside.
The pegasi were trotting around on the cold grass, circling each other restlessly, their tremendous white eagle-wings still half extended. They hated to keep still, pegasi. Marvelous beasts they were, pure white and light as air, though they looked as solid as any regular horse, with thick muscles and squiggly blue veins standing out beneath the skin like power cords under a rug. Their silver—platinum? shiny anyway—hooves flashed in the morning sun.
They stopped pacing and stared at him expectantly. They could speak, but they hardly ever deigned to, not to humans, not even to the High King.
“Janet!” he called.
“Coming!”
“Just leave your stuff. They’ll pack it for you.”
“True.”
She exited the tent a moment later, empty-handed; she’d changed into jodhpurs.
“You know, I had a thought,” she said. “With the army all mobilized like this, why don’t we take advantage of the momentum? Keep on pushing them back and take Loria?”
“Take Loria.”
“Right. Then we bring the whole army to the Neitherlands and march it through the fountain and take Earth! Right? It would be so easy!”
“Sometimes,” Eliot said, “I find it so hard to know when you’re joking.”
“I have the same problem.”
The pegasi seemed even more reluctant than usual to remain earthbound. They barely stayed still long enough for Eliot and Janet to mount.
Pegasi wouldn’t wear saddles, so you just hung on to their manes or necks or feathers or whatever you could get ahold of. Eliot felt thick muscles playing under skin as the beast pumped its way up into the air. They spiraled higher and higher, and his ears popped, and the camp shrank below them. He saw the pass where he’d fought Vile Father, the Fillorian host still formed up into crisp lines, the Lorians straggling away back home. When they were maybe a thousand feet up the pegasi leveled off and turned southeast for Whitespire.
Eliot loved Fillory at all times, but never more so than when he saw it from the air, when the land rolled out beneath you like a map in a beloved book that you’d spent your whole childhood gazing at, studying, wishing you could fall into it, feeling like you could. And Eliot had fallen.
From here he could see the old stone walls that crisscrossed Fillory, built by hands unknown, for no known reason. It made the green landscape look quilted. In some places the walls had been broken and scattered by weather or animals or people who needed the stones for more immediate and practical purposes. Dark green hedges followed the main roads for miles, neat double lines from here, but as thick and daunting as Norman hedgerows when you got up close to them. He made a couple of mental notes of where they were getting a bit unruly. He would notify the Master of Hedge.
They charged on and up into white cloud, and Fillory vanished. Clouds in Fillory weren’t clammy and disappointing the way they were in the real world, they brushed past you all warm and soft and cottony, just solid enough to be comforting. Fuck love, fuck marriage, fuck children, fuck fucking itself: this was his romance, this fantasy land at whose helm he sat, steering it on and on into the future, world without end, until he died and tastefully idealized statues were made of him. It was all he needed. It was all he would ever need.
When they emerged from the clouds they were over the Great Northern Marsh. Bad shit down there, he knew. In fact there—the water was disturbed over a wide area as the mottled back of some vast living mass sank from view, into the black bogs. Maybe one day, if he ever got that bored, he would lead an expedition in there and see what was what.
Then again maybe he wouldn’t. He stared down into the marsh for a long time, lost in thought, and when he looked up he found that they were no longer two, but three. Ember had joined them, in between him and Janet, flying in formation.
It had been some time since he’d had an audience with the god.
“High King,” the ram said. “I would have words with you.”
Ember’s deep bass voice was clearly audible even over the rushing of the wind. He had no wings, and He didn’t even bother to gallop, though occasionally the air ruffled His tight woolly curls. He just flew along in between them, stiff ram’s legs tucked up under Him like He was sitting on an invisible flying carpet.
“Hi!” Eliot called out. “I’m listening!”
“You have won a great victory for Fillory today.”
“I know! Thanks!”
Maybe this was the time to bring up Quentin. But Ember went on.
“But this was only one battle. A war is beginning, Eliot, a war we cannot win. The last war.”
“What? Wait, I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
This wasn’t the speech Eliot was expecting. He was expecting the one where Ember praised him to the skies, showered him with fatherly approval, granted him a boon.
“What war are You watching?” Janet shouted. “We crushed those guys! Eliot crushed them! It’s over!”
“Have you not wondered how it is that the Lorians could have crossed the Northern Barrier into Fillory?”
“Well, yeah,” Eliot admitted. “A little.”
“The old spells have weakened. This invasion was merely a portent, foretold long ago. The war we are losing is with time.”
“Oh,” Eliot said. “OK.”
Was it? A war with time. He vaguely remembered something like this in the books, but it had been a long time since he read them. And even then he hadn’t read them too closely. Once again he wished Quentin were here.
“The end is almost here, Eliot,” Ember said.
“The end of what?”
“Of everything,” Ember said. “Of this land. This world. Fillory is dying.”
“What? Oh, come on!” That was ridiculous. A cheap shot, at best. Fillory wasn’t dying. Fillory was kicking ass right now. Time of legends! World without end! “What are you talking about?”
Ember didn’t reply. Instead the pegasus spoke for the first time. Eliot had never heard one speak before.
“Oh no,” it said. It gave a horsey sigh. “Not again.”
CHAPTER 6
They left the bookstore in two cars. A black Lexus SUV rolled up to the loading dock and Lionel loaded the birdcage carefully into the backseat, then put a seatbelt on it and climbed in the other side. Once they were gone a white stretch limousine pulled up.
It was still raining.
“If I’d’ve known it was prom night,” Pixie said, “I would’ve worn a dress.”
They piled in. The arrangement felt involuntarily intimate, like they were strangers who somehow wound up sharing a long cab ride from the airport. But they weren’t strangers anymore, they were his comrades-in-arms now. Quentin wondered if their stories were as complicated as his was. He especially wondered about Plum. From what he knew of her story, it wasn’t supposed to end up here.
The ceiling was mirrored, and the interior was black velvet trimmed with strips of LEDs. There was a moon roof in case anybody felt the u
rge to open it and stick their head out. It wasn’t exactly dignified, but there was plenty of room, and the five of them spread out along the banquettes so as to put the maximum amount of distance between them. Nobody spoke as the limo slid smoothly out into the New Jersey night, through the parking lot and onto the turnpike, past a seemingly endless power plant lit up with a grid of pale orange lights.
For a second Quentin was reminded of nights in the Muntjac: gliding from island to island on oily blackness, far out in Fillory’s Eastern Ocean, seawater slapping wood, creamy wake streaming out behind. He was heading out into the unknown again.
Then the LEDs came on—the kid had found the controls. He’d chosen a disco rainbow pattern.
“What can I say,” he said. “I love the nightlife.”
“So,” Plum said, to the group in general. “I’m Plum.”
“I’m Betsy,” said the Pixie.
“Quentin.”
“My name is Pushkar,” the older Indian man said. He had a salt-and-pepper goatee and looked way too placid and suburban to be involved in something like this. Everybody turned to the kid. Quentin put him at around fifteen.
“You’re joking, right?” the boy said. “You’re all gonna use your real names?”
“No,” Quentin said, “we’re not joking. And yes.”
“Well, I’m not. You can call me the Artful Dodger.”
The Pixie—Betsy—cackled.
“Try again.”
“What’s wrong with the Artful Dodger? Like in Oliver!”
“I know where it’s from, I’m just not calling you that.”
“Well I’m not going to be Fagin.”
“Maybe we should call you Stoppard,” Quentin said.
The boy looked confused.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Is that from Oliver!?”
“That is the name of the man who wrote the book that you were reading earlier,” Pushkar said. “At the bookstore. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”
“Jeez, I thought that shit was Shakespeare.”
“Well,” Pushkar said pleasantly, “you thought wrong.”
“Fine, OK. I’m Stoppard. Whatever.”
“Stoppard, please set the lighting system to a neutral white.”
Stoppard huffed loudly, but he did it.
In the white light Quentin could see better, and what he saw was five people who didn’t look much like a team of world-beating master thieves. He felt more like he’d just joined the French Foreign Legion: they were the sweepings of the magical world, the lost souls, here because nobody else would take them. When he leaned back Quentin caught a whiff of skunked beer and dead cigarette smoke, the ghosts of bachelor parties past.
“Anybody know where we’re going?” Betsy said, studying her reflection in the ceiling.
“If I had to guess,” Plum said, “I’d say Newark.”
“You don’t have to guess,” Stoppard said. “We’re going to the Newark Liberty International Airport Marriott.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw the guy put it into his GPS.”
“Now that is some master magician shit,” Betsy said. “Right there. Damn, I was hoping for at least a DoubleTree.”
Of them all she was the only one who really fit the profile. Lots of attitude, lots of aggression. And something else. She kept the banter coming, but she had the air of somebody who’d survived some tough breaks along the way.
“So have you guys done stuff like this before?” Plum asked. She was showing a lot of persistence in keeping the conversation going.
“Like what?” Stoppard said. “Like stealing something?”
“Like stealing something.”
“Torrenting porn doesn’t count,” Betsy said.
“I have,” Quentin said.
“Really. You have.” Betsy had dramatic eyebrows. She knitted them skeptically. “What have you stolen?”
“A crown. Some keys.”
Betsy didn’t look impressed, grudgingly or otherwise.
“Anybody else?”
“I’ve stolen things,” Stoppard said.
“Like?”
“Like I’m going to tell you!” He opened the mini-bar, but it was empty. He slammed it shut. “Cheap crow.”
“Like you’re such a big drinker. What are you, twelve?”
“It’s not a crow, it’s a blackbird,” Plum said. “Crows have black beaks. This one’s was brown.”
The mood in the limo was slightly hilarious—they might have been a bunch of tourists in the same gondola, passing a flask of schnapps around, and in another minute they’d get to the top of the mountain and ski off in separate directions forever. Except that they wouldn’t. It was strange to think that he might have to trust these people with his life.
“Tell me,” Pushkar said. “Who here went to Brakebills?”
“What’s Brakebills?” Stoppard said brightly.
“Oh my God.” Betsy looked like she was thinking about jumping out into traffic. “It’s like a mobile fucking Breakfast Club in here!”
“I did.” Quentin couldn’t think of any reason to keep it a secret.
“I did.” Plum shrugged. “Sort of.”
The limo slowed down and went over a speed bump. They were almost at the airport already.
“So are we supposed to have specialties, or something?” Plum said. “Is that how this works? I got the impression we were all supposed to have special skills or something.”
“You’re saying you don’t have any special skills,” Betsy said.
“Is that what I said? Probably I’m here because they want somebody who does illusions.”
“I specialize in transport,” Pushkar said crisply. “And some precognition.”
“Stoppard?”
“Devices,” he said proudly. Quentin tentatively tagged him as some kind of prodigy, or precocious anyway. That would explain his youth, and the special treatment from the bird.
“All right,” Betsy said. “I guess I’m offense. Penetration. Damage. What do you do, Quentin?”
She said it as if she were not completely convinced it was his real name.
“Not much,” he said. “My discipline is mending.”
“Mending?” Stoppard said. “The fuck do we need somebody who mends shit?”
“Beats me. You’d have to ask the bird that.”
Quentin very much doubted that that was why he was here. He was doubting it more all the time.
Fortunately it was a short trip: the limo drew up under the lighted awning of the airport Marriott, and bellmen in cheap livery converged on it, probably hoping it contained drunk, heavy-tipping newlyweds. They were going to be disappointed.
“I cannot wait to get out of this thing,” Betsy said.
“Speak for yourself,” Plum said. “I never went to prom.”
—
Lionel and the bird had reserved three suites. The five of them sat on a vast beige sectional couch in one of the living rooms, waiting to be briefed. Betsy paged through the room service menu. The bird pecked at some nuts from the mini-bar. A clutch of Heinekens stood on the coffee table, but only Stoppard was drinking. From his expression it seemed not impossible that this was a first for him.
“All right,” Lionel said. “Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know.” He had the manner of a bored tech-support guy explaining something very, very basic. He was standing by the flat-screen TV, which he’d unplugged. He touched it and an image appeared—he was apparently able to project them straight from his mind, which was a trick Quentin hadn’t seen before. “This is the case. Not the actual one, but same make and model.”
It was a handsome but unassuming leather suitcase, pale brown, pleasantly battered, very English, with lots of nice straps and clasps on it. It looked read
y for a weekend in the country.
“So we’re looking for Bertie Wooster,” Quentin said.
Nobody laughed.
“We’re pretty sure it’s on the eastern seaboard.” A map appeared on the dead TV, showing the eastern states with possible sites pinpointed and annotated. “We’re also pretty sure that the people who have it don’t know what they have. As far as we know they haven’t been able to open it.”
“Why don’t you just buy it off them?” Plum said. “If they don’t know what it is. You obviously have plenty of money.”
“We tried,” Lionel said. “They don’t know what they have, but they’re pretty sure they have something big, and they don’t want to give it up till they’ve figured out what. They acquired it as part of a cache of artifacts from a dealer, who we presume they killed. Unfortunately our attempts to purchase it from them have only confirmed their estimate of its value.”
“Wait,” Stoppard said. “They killed him?”
“Her. And yes.”
Stoppard’s eyes were wide. He looked more excited than appalled. He took another hasty swig.
“One thing you don’t have to worry about with these guys is your conscience,” Lionel said. “They’re assholes, major league. They call themselves the Couple.” Two photographs appeared, side by side, a man and a woman, both good-looking and in their early thirties, evidently taken from some distance away with a long-range lens. “They’re manipulators. They work behind the scenes, messing around with the civilians. They get off on it; it’s all a big game to them.”
Quentin frowned. He’d heard about magicians who did that: competed with each other to move the stock market, throw elections, start wars, choose popes. The mundane world was a big chessboard to them. Supposedly the whole electoral debacle of 2000 was mostly a shoving match between two magicians who were trying to settle a bet.
“How are we going to find them?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I still don’t understand why you want this thing,” Plum said.
“You don’t have to,” the bird said. “We are not paying you to understand.”
“Well, no. I guess not. It all seems kind of sketchy though.”