Chelsea gave the double V-for-victory sign.
“Those are your paths, and they’re awesome. I’m just on a different one, and it’s definitely a path, but it’s different because I don’t know where it’s going. What Quentin is doing—look, I don’t want to get into details, but it’s pretty brilliant, and he’s after something real. He’s taking a big risk. I like that. I think one day I might want to do something like that too.”
She finished her beer in silence. Everybody was a little embarrassed that Plum had made a speech that wasn’t self-deprecating or funny. Well, so be it, she thought.
“So . . .” Darcy broke the silence.
“So you want to know what we’re doing? We’re doing magic. And if it comes off it’s going to be a fucking masterpiece.”
That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny.
—
It wasn’t completely true. They hadn’t done any magic yet. But they would soon. The elaborate preparations in the fourth-floor room were starting to have an effect. One morning Plum walked in and noticed something funny about one of the windows, a little square one set in the back wall. It looked dark, like something was covering it from the outside, whereas the others were full of Manhattan sunlight. The window wasn’t blocked, but the view had changed. It looked out at somewhere else now, or maybe somewhen else: a silent steel-gray marshland in early evening. Miles of swaying drowned grass, in fading light, stretching out to the horizon.
Plum touched the glass. Where the other windows were cool, it was unseasonably warm.
“Weird. Where the hell is that?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Quentin said.
Plum was enjoying her stint as a sorcerer’s apprentice more than she would have thought. Morale was high. Once she’d learned that Fillory really was real, she’d braced herself for an assault from her depressive streak. The revelation seemed like the kind of thing that would give her depression a scary power and substance. But instead she’d found the news left her unexpectedly light, and free, as if maybe it wasn’t her Chatwin-ness at all but rather the bracing-against-it that had caused her so much trouble over the years.
They spent a long cold day up on the house’s flat, sticky tarpaper roof finishing out the magical security up there. If any passing satellite happened to snap a picture, some truly weird shit was going to turn up on Google Earth.
“So tell me about Alice,” Plum said. She was painting sigils, black paint on black roof. “I mean, more about her.”
This kicked off a long pause from Quentin, and Plum wondered if she’d crossed a line. She knew the basic facts, but he hadn’t been forthcoming with a lot of details, probably because he didn’t want to talk about them. But Plum did. She figured since Alice almost killed her, probably, she had the right to subject Quentin to a little exploratory interrogation. He obviously hadn’t given up on his whole Alice project. It was lying fallow for the moment, but Plum wasn’t fooled.
“What do you want to know?”
“What was she like, what kind of stuff was she into, that kind of thing. I mean, I met her ghost or niffin or whatever, but I didn’t get a good sense of her day-to-day interests.”
Quentin stopped working and stood up and massaged the small of his back.
“Alice was great. She was kind, she was funny, she was weird. She was smart—smarter than me, and a better magician too. She did things I still don’t understand. It was sort of part of who she was—there was a force to her, a power, that I’ve never seen in anybody else.”
“Were you in love with her? I mean, I know you were boyfriend-girlfriend, but.”
“Totally.” He smiled. “Totally in love. But I wasn’t ready for her. She was more grown-up than me, and I had a lot of stuff left to work out. I made some mistakes. I thought some things were important that really weren’t.”
Plum stood up too. She was windburned and tired, and the fabric of the seat of her pants disengaged from the roof in such a way as to suggest that the tarpaper had probably wrecked them.
“I feel like you’re talking around something here.”
“Yeah. Probably it’s that I slept with somebody else.” Ah. Kind of sorry she asked there, but Quentin kept going. “Then she slept with somebody else. It was bad, I almost ruined everything. Then just when I was starting to really figure things out, that was when she died.”
“That sucks. I’m really sorry.”
“It took me a long time to get over it.”
Plum’s own romantic history so far had been pretty limited, with minimal drama. It was one area where she felt comfortable lagging behind her peers. But she prided herself on her powerful philosophical insights into other people’s relationships.
“So if you do end up somehow, you know, bringing her back, do you think you’ll be together? I mean are you still in love with her?”
“I don’t really know her anymore, Plum. It was a long time ago. I’m a different person now, or at least I hope I am. We’d have to see.”
“So you’d start over.”
“If she wanted to. Though I feel like we were only just about to get started. We wouldn’t start over, we’d just start.”
Deep orange rays of sunlight meandered past, slowed by the viscous urban air they were passing through, full of floating particulates and toxic emissions. Bubbles popped in Plum’s knees.
“Here’s what I don’t get. If you were so unready, if you had all that stuff left to work out, why do you think she loved you?”
Quentin went back to mixing the smelly reagent he’d been working on before.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never did know.”
“That would be a good one to figure out. Maybe before you bring her back?”
—
The next morning was the dress rehearsal. They broke the enchantment down into its component spells, running through each of them individually, then in small groups, being careful all the while not to let them combine into anything that was actually live and volatile. In cases where the spell involved some exceptionally expensive component, or it was physically dangerous, they just mimed their way through it.
Though once Plum forgot and spoke something she was supposed to skip, and just like that there was bright light and heat in the room. For an instant it was unbearable, like when there’s bad feedback in an auditorium.
“Shit!” Quentin bolted, and she heard water running in the bathroom. When he came back his fingernails were still steaming slightly.
“Sorry!” Plum said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Though you could tell he was annoyed. “Start over. From the beginning.”
It was funny about magic, how messy and imperfect it was. When people said something worked like magic they meant that it cost nothing and did exactly what you wanted it to. But there were lots of things magic couldn’t do. It couldn’t raise the dead. It couldn’t make you happy. It couldn’t make you good-looking. And even with the things it could do, it didn’t always do them right. And it always, always cost something.
And it was inefficient. The system was never airtight, it always leaked. Magic was always throwing off extra energy, wasting it in the form of sound, and heat, and light, and wind. It was always buzzing and singing and glowing and sparking to no particular purpose. Magic was decidedly imperfect. But the really funny thing, she thought, was that if it were perfect, it wouldn’t be so beautiful.
On the big day they agreed they would start at noon, but like anything else involving more than one person and a lot of moving parts—band rehearsals, softball games, model-rocket launches—it took about five times longer to get ready than they planned. They cleared away the books and stacked them tidily in the corners, and they laid out all the tools and materials on trays, neatly labeled and lined up in the order they’d be needed in. Quentin stuck a list of the spells on the wall, like the set list for a gig. There were a lot of things that they had, by mutual consent, skipped in the dress rehearsal but which it turned out were really time-consuming, like reading out the full text of one of these old cultic chants ten times.
They started in on the low-hanging fruit, making sure that conditions in the room were optimal and were going to stay that way. Constant temperature; a little extra oxygen; low light from the chandelier; no weird magical incursions. They cast spells on each other to ward off any weird charges or energies and to speed up their reaction times just a touch; some of this stuff you just couldn’t cast right at baseline human speed. Caffeine helped with that too, so they kept plenty of that around.
The air in the workroom became still and cool, and it began to smell very slightly sweet—jasmine, she thought, though she wasn’t quite sure. She couldn’t remember when they’d arranged that.
By around five o’clock in the afternoon they realized they were putting off casting anything that would take them past the tipping point—that would commit them to doing this thing right here and now, tonight, and not tomorrow or some other day. The train was still in the station, it could still be delayed. But they’d run out of bullshit prep work. It was in or out.
Only now did Plum realize how nervous she was.
“I’m calling it,” Quentin said. “If we’re doing this let’s do it.”
“All right.”
“Go ahead and cast Clarifying Radiance.”
“OK.”
“I’ll start prepping the Scythian Dream.”
“Check.”
“OK, go.”
“Going.”
She went. Plum turned to the first set of materials on the shelf: four black powders in little dishes and a silver bell. Clarifying Radiance. Meanwhile Quentin said a word of power, and the light in the room became a shade more sepia, like the sunlight moments before a thunderstorm. Everything began to sound echoey, as if they were in a much larger room. Just like that they crossed the Rubicon. The train left the station.
From that point on it was controlled chaos. Sometimes they worked together—one or two of the spells were four-handed. Other times the flow diverged, and they’d be doing totally different spells in parallel, stealing glances at the other one’s work to make sure they finished up at the same time.
There was a steady flow of cross-talk.
“Slow it down, slow it down. Finish in three, two—”
“Look out, the streams are forking. They’re forking!”
A single curve of Irish Fire delaminated into two, then four, curling away to either side. The curls started pointing worryingly back toward Plum, who was casting them.
“I’ve got it,” she said. “Dammit!”
The fire went out.
“Do it again. Do it again. There’s still time.”
It went on like that for three or four hours—it was hard to keep track. By then they were deep into it, and the atmosphere in the room had gotten thoroughly dreamlike. Huge shadows stalked along the walls. The room seemed to list and bank like it had taken flight with them inside it. She banged a tray down onto the work table in front of Quentin, and he began picking what he needed off it without even glancing down at it, and she was shocked to realize that it was the second-to-last spell on the list. This was almost it.
Plum had run out of things to do so she just watched him, drinking a glass of water she’d placed under the table when they started and had somehow managed not to kick over. The rest of it was all him. She was dizzy, and her arms felt weak. She folded them over her chest to keep them from shaking.
Plum didn’t think her friends would have made fun of Quentin at that moment. For a while she’d fallen into the habit of thinking of him as a peer, basically, but over the past week she’d been reminded that he was a decade older and doing magic on a different level from her. Right now he looked like a young Prospero in his prime. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, which was wringing with sweat. He must have been tired but his voice was still firm and resonant, and his fingers were working with a practiced crispness through positions she’d never seen before, the tendons standing out on the backs of his hands. This was the kind of magic, Plum thought, she would do when she grew up.
Big surges of power were flowing through the room. It crossed her mind that spells like this were exactly what turned people into niffins, when they got out of hand. Huge tranches and structures of magic that so far she’d only ever seen in isolation were colliding and interacting like weather systems. The intensity doubled and redoubled itself. Without warning the room juddered and dropped, leaving them in free fall for an instant—if it had been an airplane the oxygen masks would have come down. Quentin’s voice sounded artificially deep, and he’d started to tremble with the effort of keeping everything together. He hastily dragged an arm across his forehead.
“Staff,” he said. “Staff!”
The second time he barked it, loudly, and Plum snapped awake and turned and grabbed the black wood staff from where it stood leaned up in one corner.
He was hitting the panic button. Quentin grabbed the staff from her quickly, blindly, and as soon as it was in his hands it began jerking and vibrating, like it was attached to a line with an enormous fish on the other end, or a giant kite caught in a high wind.
She moved to help him, but he shook his head.
“Better not touch me,” he said through clenched teeth. “Could be bad.”
The air was thick with the smell of burning metal and the sweat of tired magicians. She could sense it in the room with them now, the land itself: an angry, hungry, thirsty infant thing demanding life, ready to take it from them if it had to. It cried out with an almost human voice. A spray of golden light erupted from between one of Quentin’s fingers: that must have been one of Mayakovsky’s coins going. Scenery raced past the windows, all of them now, too blurred to make out.