Lying there in bed in the half-light, rain spattering on the window, he forgot all about the bird and the Couple and the money. All that seemed beside the point now. He forgot about Brakebills. He even let himself forget Alice for a minute. This was new magic: half enchantment, half work of art. He’d spent too long searching for new kingdoms. He wanted to make one of his own, a magical place, a place like Fillory.
But not in Fillory. He would build it here on Earth.
—
“I don’t want to make you sound like a crazy person,” Plum said, “but just then it sounded like you said you were going make a land.”
“I am. Or we are. We could. That’s what it does, Rupert’s spell.”
Plum frowned.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “You can’t just make a land.”
“It helps if you don’t say it like that.”
“You mean with rocks and trees and stuff?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Wow.” She stretched, then plunked her chin in her hands. They were having breakfast at their brand new Ikea dining table. “Wow. Well, that would be a hell of a spell. Great granddad wasn’t much of a writer, but you gotta admit he was a pretty good thief. Do you think it’s actually possible?”
“I think we should find out.”
“But I don’t get it. Why? I mean it’s cool and all, but it sounds like a gigantic pain in the ass.”
It was hard to put into words. The land would be a good place to hide from the bird, if they needed to hide, but that wasn’t the point. This meant something to him. It would be like Prospero’s island, but in a good way: not a country of exile, a model world, safe and peaceful and private. A magician’s land.
Plum, a highly perceptive person, could see that he wasn’t going to change his mind. She sighed.
“So if we do make a land, what does that make us? Are we like the gods of it?”
“I don’t think so,” Quentin said. “I don’t think this land would have any gods. Or maybe it would. But we’d have to make those too.”
With Plum on board, or at least not actively resisting, things progressed more quickly. Quentin made contact with a very dodgy and unappealing wizard in the South Bronx who sold him a steaming, lightly buzzing metal box which he swore up and down contained a sample of ununoctium, a synthetic element with an atomic number of 118, the very last entry on the periodic table. Its existence was still mostly theoretical—laboratories had only ever put together a few atoms of it at a time, and ordinarily it decayed in about a millisecond. But the atoms in this sample were chronologically frozen, or at least vastly slowed down. Or at least they were supposed to be. It had cost him a good chunk of the money left over from his first-day payment from the bird.
“Do you think it’s really in there?” Plum studied the box skeptically.
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “We’ll find out.”
“How?”
“The hard way, I guess.”
Quentin had a very expensive, very cool-looking staff purpose-built for the project. It was made of pernambuco—the dense, black, almost grainless tropical wood cello bows are made of—and shod and chased with silver. Quentin didn’t normally work magic with wands and staves, but in this case he thought he might need it as a last resort, a panic button, if things were coming completely apart.
He had to hide it all, to avoid attracting the bird’s attention, but it went beyond that: Quentin was pretty sure the spell would be highly illegal from the point of view of magical society. There weren’t very many laws among magicians, but synthesizing an entire land and concealing it inside a Manhattan townhouse would violate a goodly portion of them, so as far as magical energy was concerned the house had to be watertight. The power levels required would be massive too, and he could only be grateful they hadn’t used up Mayakovsky’s coins on the incorporate bond. He’d have to use one now. It wasn’t what he’d made them for, but Quentin thought Mayakovsky would like the idea anyway.
Quentin dug seven long lines of Fillorian script into the hardwood floor of the workshop with a gouge and a mallet. He went at the ceiling too, embedding long curls of platinum wire in the plaster. In places he stripped the walls and nailed more wire along the bare studs. The only piece of the puzzle that was completely missing in action was that damned plant, the one from the Neitherlands page. Incredibly it had turned up in Rupert’s spell as well. Quentin wasn’t sure it was absolutely crucial, but either way he still couldn’t identify it, so they’d just have to scrape by without it.
One night, after they’d both worked themselves into a state of exhaustion, he and Plum were lying limply on couches in the ex-disco room like they’d been flung there in the aftermath of an explosion. They were too tired to go to bed.
“So how big is this land of yours even supposed to be?” Plum said.
“I don’t know yet. Not giant, I don’t think. Ten acres maybe. Like the Hundred Acre Wood in Winnie-the-Pooh.”
“Except with ten.”
“Yeah. I’m trying to specify it in a couple of places,” Quentin said, “but it’s hard to know exactly what goes where.”
“But it won’t take up any space in the real world.”
“I hope not.”
“Quentin, why are you doing this?”
He recognized the importance of the question. He was going to fall asleep right there on the couch, he felt like he was melting into it. But he tried to answer it before that happened.
“What do you think magic is for?”
“I dunno. Don’t answer a question with a question.”
“I used to think about this a lot,” Quentin said. “I mean, it’s not obvious like it is in books. It’s trickier. In books there’s always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world’s in danger, evil’s on the rise, but if you’re really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine.
“But in real life that guy never turns up. He’s never there. He’s busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone’s just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you’ve figured it out and done it, you’ll never know whether you were right or wrong. You’ll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn’t. There’s no answers in the back of the book.”
Plum was silent so long that Quentin wondered if she’d dozed off while he was talking. But then she said:
“So—what? So you figured it out, and magic is for making lands?”
“No.” Quentin closed his eyes. “I still have no idea what magic is for. Maybe you just have to decide for yourself. But you definitely have to decide. It’s not for sitting on my ass, which I know because I’ve tried that. Am I making any sense?”
“You have not been making sense for some time.”
“I was afraid of that. Well, it’ll mean something when you’re my age. You’re what, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-one.”
“OK, well, I’m thirty.”
“That’s not that old,” Plum said.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“Fair enough. So what do you think the land is going to look like?”
“I don’t know that either,” Quentin said. “I try to picture it sometimes, but it’s always different. Sometimes it’s meadows. Sometimes it’s an orchard, just rows and rows of apple trees. Maybe it looks like whatever you want it to.”
“I hope it looks like the Hundred Acre Wood,” Plum said. “I think you should concentrate on that.”
CHAPTER 20
Plum needed a night off. It was early April in Manhattan, and winter break was almost over at Brakebills, but some of her former classmates were still in the city. Knowing they were so close she was overcome by a fit of longing for her old life. She decided to indulge it.
She wasn’t even completely sure if she was still received in polite company, after her dramatic departure from Brakebills, so Plum was relieved when they turned up. The venue was a basement bar on Houston Street with a low ceiling and a lot of busted couches and a decent jukebox; it had survived untouched by the rage for elaborately perfect artisanal cocktails. Most of the old League was there, plus a few extras, including Wharton—their impending entry into the wider world seemed to have brought him and the Leaguers together, to the point where they were all more or less on the same side. Plum got the impression that the League had pretty much gone dormant in her absence anyway.
Well, time to put aside childish things, as the verse sayeth. At least they’d gone out on top.
They drank pints of IPA and attempted observational humor about the civilians or muggles or mundanes or whatever you wanted to call them all around them. They made bets about what people were feeling, and then Holly, who had a knack for it, did a mind-reading to see who was right. She couldn’t get anything too specific, not words, or images, just the emotional tone, but that was usually enough. Bars were a good place for it. Alcohol had a way of making people’s minds more transparent, like oil on paper.
Plum knew they were going to talk about Brakebills, and she knew that it was going to hurt. It was partly what she came for, the pain. She was going to test her new sense of herself as someone who was past all that now, who’d had a taste of life in the real world, even though it was turning out to be something of an acquired taste.
Fortunately the pain, when it came, came in bearable quantities of ache. Hearing news from the candlelit bubble-world of Brakebills helped her mourn for the comparatively simple, hopeful Plum who used to inhabit that world. Tonight would be a wake for that other Plum, the Plum who’d never tried that stupid prank. Rest in peace.
She interrogated them methodically for gossip. They were absolutely teeming with it: with graduation coming the Fifth Years were reverting to a state of nature. Everybody who’d been holding their breath for the past five years was letting it out. Even socially anxious, authority-respecting students had begun conducting risky experiments with sass. The candlelit bubble-world was on a collision course with the hard and rocky rogue planet of reality, and when they hit the bubble would pop.
And it was all happening without Plum. She felt like she’d been born too soon—she was a sickly, withered preemie next to a bunch of healthy pink full-term babies.
Most of them already had postgraduation plans. Darcy was going to work for somebody who was working for a judge in the Wizard’s Court (that word, wizard, being an anachronism that cropped up mostly in legal contexts). Lucy was going to assist some possibly fraudulent but indisputably famous artist who constructed enormous invisible magical sculptures in the sky above the city. Wharton would be doing environmental stuff. Holly was part of a hard-core quasi-vigilante group bent on anticipating and averting violent crime among civilians.
The others were busy planning to give themselves over to pleasure, or if not pleasure then at least sloth. Life was already sorting them into categories, whether they liked it or not. All they could do was stare at each other dumbly across the widening gaps.
Plum found herself sorted into an extra ad hoc subcategory of one. Nobody felt comfortable asking her about life after her career-ending and, from their point of view, essentially life-ending disaster. So she volunteered that she was currently working with ex-Professor Quentin Coldwater on an Absolutely Fascinating Research Project the exact nature of which she couldn’t reveal.
Heads turned. This was gossip of the very first water—pure pharmaceutical-grade gossip.
“Oh my God,” Darcy said, hand over her mouth. “Oh my God. Tell me you’re not sleeping with him. Lie to me if you have to, I just want to hear the words.”
“I’m not sleeping with him! Jesus, what an idea.” Fortunately Plum didn’t have to pretend to be appalled at the idea. Quentin was like her know-it-all older brother. “Who do you think I am?”
“So you’re just . . . living and working with this mysterious brooding older man twenty-four-seven,” Chelsea said.
“I have the phrase ‘Girl Friday’ in my mind for some reason,” Wharton said.
“Guys. It’s not anything like as intimate as you’re imagining. We live in the same house. I’m assisting him on a project.”
“Because, see, any amount of intimate there would be, you know—” Chelsea wrung her hands frantically. “Squick.”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said loyally, raising the flag for the backlash to the backlash. “I mean, come on, guys. He’s only what—forty?”
“He’s thirty,” Plum said.
“Sorry. It’s hard to tell with the, you know, the hair. I just meant that we’re not in Humbert Humbert territory here. Not quite.”
“We are not in any territory at all! God! There is no territory!”
“All right, all right.” Darcy held up her hands: we surrender. For now. “I just wish you’d give us a hint about what you are doing.”
Plum did. She’d had enough. Something in her wanted to rise to the challenge of defending herself, and Quentin too. At some point, she couldn’t have said when, this had gone from Quentin’s weird impulse project to something she cared about too. She wanted it to work.
“Look,” she said, “I know it sounds weird. And I have total respect for everything you guys are doing. I do. Even if you’re just going to get high all the time and make light shows on the ceiling.”