The Magician’s Land Read Online Free
Author: Lev Grossman
spoken. “Why the hell do you want it then?”
“In order to find out.”
“Huh. What do the initials stand for?”
“Rupert John Chatwin,” the bird said crisply.
The kid looked confused. His lips moved.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Wouldn’t the
C
come last?”
“It’s a monogram, dumbass,” Pixie said. “The last name goes in the middle.”
The Indian guy was rubbing his chin.
“Chatwin.” He was trying to place the name. “Chatwin. But isn’t that—?”
It sure is, Quentin thought, though he didn’t say anything. He didn’t move a muscle. It sure as hell is.
Chatwin: that name chilled him even more than the night and the rain and the bird and the cards had. By rights he should have gone the rest of his life without hearing it again. It had no claim on him anymore, and vice versa. He and the Chatwins were through.
Except it seemed that they weren’t. He’d said good-bye and buried them and mourned them—the Chatwins, Fillory, Plover, Whitespire—but there must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them to him. Something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed, but the scar wouldn’t fade, not quite. Quentin felt like an addict who’d just caught the faintest whiff of his drug of choice, the pure stuff, after a long time sober, and he felt his imminent relapse coming on with a mixture of despair and anticipation.
That name was a message—a hot signal flare shot up into the night, sent specifically for him, across time and space and darkness and rain, all the way from the bright warm center of the world.
CHAPTER 2
I t wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Quentin had tried to go straight.
It started in the Neitherlands, the silent city of Italianate fountains and locked libraries that lies somehow behind and between everywhere else. The fountains were really doorways to other worlds, and Quentin stood leaning against the one that led to Fillory. He had just been forcibly ejected from it.
He stood there for a long time, feeling the cool roughness of the stone rim. It was reassuringly solid. The fountain was his last connection to his old life, the one where he’d been a king in a magical land. He didn’t want it to be over; it wouldn’t really be over till he let go and walked away. He could still have it for a little longer.
But no, he couldn’t. It was done. He patted the fountain one more time and set off through the empty dream-city. He felt weightless and empty. He’d stopped being who he was, but he wasn’t sure yet who he was going to be next. His head was still full of the End of the World: the setting sun, the endless thin curving beach, the two mismatched wooden chairs, the ringing crescent moon, the sputtering comets. The last sight of Julia, diving off the edge of Fillory, straight down to the Far Side of the World, down into her future.
It was a new beginning for her, but he’d hit a dead end. No more Fillory. No further.
Though he wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t notice how much the Neitherlands had changed. Before this it had always been quiet and serene, trapped under a bell jar of stillness and silence beneath a cloudy twilight sky. But something had happened: the gods had come back to fix the flaw in the universe that was magic, and in the crisis that followed the bell jar broke, and time and weather had come flooding in. Now the air smelled like mist. Ripped, ragged clouds streamed by overhead, and patches of blue sky were mirrored in shivering pools of snowmelt. The sound of trickling water was everywhere. Reluctantly, resentfully, the Neitherlands was having its first spring.
It was a season of wreckage and ruin. All around Quentin roofless buildings lay open to the elements, the toppled bookshelves inside lying in domino rows, exposed like the ribs of rotting carcasses. Stray pages torn from the libraries of the Neitherlands floated and tumbled high in the troubled air overhead. Crossing a bridge over a canal Quentin saw
“In order to find out.”
“Huh. What do the initials stand for?”
“Rupert John Chatwin,” the bird said crisply.
The kid looked confused. His lips moved.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Wouldn’t the
C
come last?”
“It’s a monogram, dumbass,” Pixie said. “The last name goes in the middle.”
The Indian guy was rubbing his chin.
“Chatwin.” He was trying to place the name. “Chatwin. But isn’t that—?”
It sure is, Quentin thought, though he didn’t say anything. He didn’t move a muscle. It sure as hell is.
Chatwin: that name chilled him even more than the night and the rain and the bird and the cards had. By rights he should have gone the rest of his life without hearing it again. It had no claim on him anymore, and vice versa. He and the Chatwins were through.
Except it seemed that they weren’t. He’d said good-bye and buried them and mourned them—the Chatwins, Fillory, Plover, Whitespire—but there must still be some last invisible unbroken strand connecting them to him. Something deeper than mourning. The wound had healed, but the scar wouldn’t fade, not quite. Quentin felt like an addict who’d just caught the faintest whiff of his drug of choice, the pure stuff, after a long time sober, and he felt his imminent relapse coming on with a mixture of despair and anticipation.
That name was a message—a hot signal flare shot up into the night, sent specifically for him, across time and space and darkness and rain, all the way from the bright warm center of the world.
CHAPTER 2
I t wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Quentin had tried to go straight.
It started in the Neitherlands, the silent city of Italianate fountains and locked libraries that lies somehow behind and between everywhere else. The fountains were really doorways to other worlds, and Quentin stood leaning against the one that led to Fillory. He had just been forcibly ejected from it.
He stood there for a long time, feeling the cool roughness of the stone rim. It was reassuringly solid. The fountain was his last connection to his old life, the one where he’d been a king in a magical land. He didn’t want it to be over; it wouldn’t really be over till he let go and walked away. He could still have it for a little longer.
But no, he couldn’t. It was done. He patted the fountain one more time and set off through the empty dream-city. He felt weightless and empty. He’d stopped being who he was, but he wasn’t sure yet who he was going to be next. His head was still full of the End of the World: the setting sun, the endless thin curving beach, the two mismatched wooden chairs, the ringing crescent moon, the sputtering comets. The last sight of Julia, diving off the edge of Fillory, straight down to the Far Side of the World, down into her future.
It was a new beginning for her, but he’d hit a dead end. No more Fillory. No further.
Though he wasn’t so far gone that he didn’t notice how much the Neitherlands had changed. Before this it had always been quiet and serene, trapped under a bell jar of stillness and silence beneath a cloudy twilight sky. But something had happened: the gods had come back to fix the flaw in the universe that was magic, and in the crisis that followed the bell jar broke, and time and weather had come flooding in. Now the air smelled like mist. Ripped, ragged clouds streamed by overhead, and patches of blue sky were mirrored in shivering pools of snowmelt. The sound of trickling water was everywhere. Reluctantly, resentfully, the Neitherlands was having its first spring.
It was a season of wreckage and ruin. All around Quentin roofless buildings lay open to the elements, the toppled bookshelves inside lying in domino rows, exposed like the ribs of rotting carcasses. Stray pages torn from the libraries of the Neitherlands floated and tumbled high in the troubled air overhead. Crossing a bridge over a canal Quentin saw
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