Chapter Text
Quentin woke up to the sun slicing through the gap in the curtains and thought, like he had on so many mornings: I want to fucking die.
He rolled over onto his back and lay still for a minute, staring at the bottom of Julia’s bunk above his and listening to the familiar morning sounds drifting up from the first floor of the Physical Cottage: silverware clinking on plates, tense murmurs weaving serpentine back and forth, incantations barked in a practice duel and the strange reverberation of blunted attack spells. Someone was doing fucking calisthenics down the hall, feet thudding heavily on the floor.
A year ago his life would have been unrecognizable, its textures and sounds alien in every particular: its setting, its arc, its cast of characters. He’d stumbled half-hungover through a hedge and emerged in a story that would alter all the details that filled his days, except one. Except the thing that mattered most, the miserable stone center of him. The force that clung to him like a dark gravity, like cold clammy hands gripping his skin to hold him under the water until he drowned. The hideous yearning pinching every cell, filling him up and spilling out past his borders, beating in time with his heart as it echoed through the cavernous pit inside him.
I want to die. I want to die. I want to fucking die.
How many times had he stayed paralyzed under the weight of it like a boulder on his chest? How much of his life had he wasted—well. Whatever. Not today. Quentin pushed himself upright, swung his legs around, and stood up to get dressed. Today would be a better day. Because today, he’d decided—if everything went right—today was the day he would finally get what he had always wanted.
*
“Alright, guys. I know it’s nice out and the semester’s almost over, but this is important. You don’t want to lose a finger because you forgot to adjust the compass orientation of your sigil for the lunar circumstances.” Lipson folded her arms, looking cross as her words had no effect. It was May at Brakebills, and outside the lecture hall, the campus’s manufactured spring was in full bloom: sky impossibly blue, pink and white petals drifting across the verdant quad dotted with yellow and purple flowers. “And yes, this will be on the final.”
Reluctantly several students dragged their eyes away from the windows towards the chalkboard, dutifully copying down the set of diagrams she had drawn for intermediate applications of short-term warding procedures.
At his uncomfortable wooden desk Quentin tried to concentrate on labeling the usages by phase before Lipson erased her table. It was difficult, although not because of the weather. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately; the drinking probably hadn’t helped. His grades were slipping, basic spells he’d mastered by December fucking up when he tried to build on them in practical demonstrations and simple lab reports turned in late because he couldn’t organize his thoughts long enough to write them up. Sunderland had re-tested his discipline at the start of the month, and the incredulous line between her brows had seemed to say more than her cheerful reassurance that it would emerge in time. A week ago he’d gotten rejected for a mago-engineering internship he’d applied for in D. C., and while he had other applications out it was hard to imagine what they’d see in him that the architectural firm hadn’t. Julia had told him every slot had more qualified applicants than they could take, but that was easy for her to say; her mentor, some kind of digital enchantments whiz kid barely out of school himself, had offered her a summer gig at his interspecies communications start-up all the way back in the fall. He felt shitty about not getting it and guilty about caring about some internship when his dad was sick and might not get better and frustrated that he was so fickle he couldn’t even commit his energies in one direction and was instead stuck being a bad son and bad student both.
Time had started once more knotting up around him, jerking past somehow both too fast and too slow. The future loomed dark and inescapable, approaching with frightening speed; his days trudged by in thousands of dull and bitter moments, lasting an eternity before slipping away as meaningless as if they had never been. In late nights with his vision blurring and runes swimming uselessly in his memory the way half-written sentences on Hemingway used to during certain months back at Columbia, the fear had started to creep up his throat that he was starting to feel the way he had before: before Brakebills, before magic, before he found the secret key that had unlocked a door he hadn’t even known was inside him.
He’d spent his whole life dying because no one had ever told him the reason he was alive, and nothing scared him more than the growing body of evidence that perhaps even that wasn’t enough.
When he thought about finals approaching while he remained too out of it to study, his stomach tied itself like rope around an anchor. He didn’t know what Brakebills’ policy on failed classes was, and he was afraid that if he asked Fogg would expel and erase him on the spot, just to save them both time. But finals were coming whether Quentin was fucked up or not, so he shook himself and double-checked his work to make sure it matched exactly what was written on the board.
Later he would remember that moment and think it was kind of funny: he’d been so afraid of failing Foundations Of Spellcraft 102. That was what catastrophe had looked like back then.
Suddenly the light in the room started blinking red: red flashing on the white chalk, out of the long rectangular lights in the ceiling. Red pulsing, Quentin noticed with alarm, in the pretty spring sky; next to him Julia peered out the window, then swung her face around to shoot him a look of worry that must have been mirrored on his face. Fogg’s voice boomed from nowhere, everywhere, deep enough that they felt it in their bones.
THE CAMPUS HAS ENTERED LOCKDOWN. FACULTY REPORT TO YOUR PRE-ASSIGNED LOCATIONS; ALL STUDENTS ARE TO REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO ONE OF THE RESIDENCE HALLS. REPEAT, THIS IS A LOCKDOWN. FACULTY TO PRE-ASSIGNED LOCATIONS, STUDENTS TO ONE OF THE RESIDENCE HALLS.
Above the swelling commotion in the classroom, Lipson tried to offer words of calm. “It’s fine, we get one of these every couple years. In all likelihood some large-scale ambient event has thrown the circumstances off and this is just a precaution while we reestablish the wards. Just go to your dorms and enjoy the afternoon off.” But there was a shadow on her face that Quentin didn’t like the look of.
“Do you feel that?” Julia whispered as they followed the stream of students out the door.
Quentin almost said No I fucking don’t, enlighten me, because that was how their first two or three months had gone: Julia picking up on nuances of the magical current while he was still struggling to plug into it at all, like he was sounding out words and she wanted him to read Shakespeare. They’d fought about it, more than once, acrid exchanges that pushed at the unbridgeable gap between them neither wanted to look at or name. But Julia was the only ally he had left, so he was trying to play nice. Besides, he did feel it—a sharp, shuddering palpitation. “Yeah.”
“It feels—” Julia shook her head, frowning. “I don’t know, I can’t—I can’t name it.”
“Anxious,” Quentin supplied. One of the few areas where his expertise outweighed hers.
Julia nodded, dark eyes serious. “Anxious. But it’s Fogg’s spell, right? If Fogg’s nervous—” She didn’t finish.
A ripple of shining blonde hair passed at his side, moving with quick purpose. “Alice,” Quentin tried, hopeful for a moment that maybe the sudden shock would have changed the state of things between them, “hey, are you—”
But Alice, of course, walked on as if he weren’t even there, her only concession to his presence a distinct upward jerk of her chin as she wove through the crowd to escape him.
Quentin watched after the spot in the hall where she had been. Like a ghost, there and gone, leaving him to live with the haunting. “She still hates me.”
Julia took a long inhale through her nose. “Can you really blame her?”
“Wow, thanks, Jules. So nice to know that at least my best friend is on my side.”
“I’m your best friend. Nothing’s ever going to change that. But—” Julia shrugged. “You cheated on her, Q. What did you think was going to happen?”
The truth was, he hadn’t been thinking at all. He’d been drunk, and avoiding his homework because he couldn’t stop picturing the future stretching out before him barren and lonesome, at once endless and closing quickly to shut out every worthwhile possible thing, and he was stressed about summer internships with Julia already set for San Francisco, and stressed about how it had felt like such a fucking relief when he and Julia had started at Brakebills together, like proof that no matter what else might happen the two of them still matched because they both had fucking magic, but if it was possible for her to leave him behind even in this new world they ostensibly shared then obviously she would eventually, and if she would then Alice would too, because Alice was like Julia and people who mattered had no reason to stick around for people who didn’t, and he was in love with Alice like a fever but the longer they stayed together the harder it got to imagine someone like her wanting to hold on to someone like him once she realized how much better she could do, which was the type of thing he knew he couldn’t say to her because it was the type of thing that made people think you were the kind of emotional black hole Quentin was trying to keep Alice from figuring out he was, and when he wasn’t thinking about how the first person he had ever managed to truly love in a real and meaningful adult kind of way had loved him back and it still wouldn’t be enough he was thinking about how his dad was maybe or maybe not dying and between those two things he had gotten a C on his three-page paper on abortifacient spells in medieval England because he’d turned it in a week late because every time he started to write it the only words that came into his mind were about how everyone would leave the way he wanted to leave himself—
He’d been drunk, and he’d been stressed, and Eliot Waugh had been—there. Eliot had been nice to him, and Quentin had been himself. Needy and desperate and selfish and pathetic.
In the morning, after Alice had screamed at him loud enough to alert the entire Cottage to his crimes, a miserable part of him had thought: Maybe this is good. She was going to find out who he really was eventually. The worst part of any ending was the long waiting period where you knew it was coming but not how or when.
That was the other thing on his mind, but in some ways it was the only thing, or the same thing as all the other things. Loving Alice, and losing Alice, and the way he’d woken up in Eliot Waugh’s bed with Eliot’s arm draped across his chest and proof burned indelibly on his skin that even here, in this miraculous place, surrounded by literal magic, he was still the same useless piece of shit he’d always been.
The Knowledge kids’ nook above the library was one of the faculty checkpoints during lockdowns, so Julia came with him to the Physical Cottage. Quentin was grateful; he thought having her around might deflect some of the hostility recently aimed in his general direction. Alice was furious for obvious reasons; Kady was pissed at him on principle, as were a handful of second- and third-years he barely knew; Penny was pissed at him for fun/on Alice’s behalf, because apparently they had really bonded sometime when Quentin wasn’t looking, which was just great; Margo was pissed at him for disrupting the house ecosystem with drama, and, according to her, not interesting drama but depressing drama that was bumming everyone out; and Eliot —
If Eliot was pissed at him, it was probably because Quentin had been diligently avoiding him since the night they’d fucked. But Eliot could deal with that, because Quentin was pissed at Eliot for ruining his life. For pouring that last drink, for smiling like Quentin was someone worth smiling for, for making Quentin laugh. For saying yes when Quentin had said please.
Sometimes when Eliot wasn’t around, Quentin missed his friendship guiltily. Eliot was outrageous and rude and totally up his own ass, but from the moment Quentin had stumbled across the Brakebills lawn he had extended to him a kind of lofty graciousness, as if Quentin were a simple peasant who had stumbled into the royal palace and Eliot were the benevolent king charmed by his rustic ways. Being allowed into Eliot’s orbit, even as a curiosity, had been the first thing to make his new surroundings feel like a home; when he thought of the Cottage, he always pictured first Eliot tending bar with casual expertise and a cigarette burning between his lips. Now his own house felt like hostile territory, with no refuge in sight.
But every time Quentin looked at Eliot’s face, all the misery and shame and rage of the morning after came washing back fresh, so it didn’t look like things between them would be mended any time soon.
Walking into the common area there was a palpable tension, but to Quentin’s relief he could tell it wasn’t about him. Everyone was perched oddly still or else fidgeting agitatedly. Eliot was drinking from his flask; Margo was next to him with pursed lips, arms and legs crossed. On the floor Penny and Kady were holding hands. Alice had a book open in her lap, but she didn’t seem to be reading it.
“Come on,” said Margo. “It’s a lockdown. Weird magic shit goes down all the time. Probably someone blew something up in the Potions lab and they have to pull this shit for liability reasons. We should make it a party. Put on some music, at least.”
But no one did. Even Margo didn’t look like she believed it. They’d all felt the jagged magic in the Dean’s announcement. They knew something had happened that wasn’t normal and likely wasn’t good.
Quentin took his herbalism textbook out of his bag and tried to study, ignoring the staticky discomfort of the silence in the room. He didn’t have much luck. When he looked over at Julia’s notebook she was doodling huge looping spirals in purple ink, which made him feel better and worse. Better, that they were in this together; worse, because if Julia was freaked, everyone else should probably have been running screaming for the hills.
The door opened and they all looked up like the room itself had gasped. Dean Fogg cast his gaze around before settling on Kady. “Ms. Orloff-Diaz, please come with me.”
Kady exchanged looks with Penny before standing up and silently walking towards the door, an uncertain furrow between her brows.
“It was me.”
Quentin swiveled his neck to look up at Julia, who had shot to her feet.
“It was me,” she repeated. “I helped Kady steal that stuff from the lab. We had to do it—you kicked Marina out, you know what she’s like. It was the only way to cut her off—honestly in the long run we probably did Brakebills a favor.”
“Ms. Wicker—”
“But it was me. It was my plan, and my magic.” Julia squared her shoulders. “So if you’re going to expel her, you should kick me out, too.”
Quentin held his breath. He couldn’t imagine Julia bringing that upon herself; selfishly, he felt his stomach collapsing at the idea of continuing at Brakebills without her. But it had to be a bluff, right? Everyone knew that Julia had waltzed onto campus and into the dean’s special graces, instantly haloed with a blatant favoritism too obviously unasked for to be much begrudged. Fogg tolerated most of his students, but he loved Julia. There was no way he would—there was just no way.
God, if Quentin had to do this alone—
Fogg stared at her, betraying nothing. After an excruciating silence he said, “Thank you for your candor regarding your conduct, Ms. Wicker. As disappointed as I am to hear of your involvement in that unfortunate matter, your presence will not be required at this time.” Without another word he turned and exited through the door. Kady shot the room a baffled look over her shoulder and followed him out.
Julia sat back down heavily. “Shit.”
“Shit?” Quentin echoed. “Jules, if he had taken you up on it—” He couldn’t even finish the thought.
Penny let out a laugh somewhere between bitter and impressed. “Only you could confess to a literal crime and walk away with Fogg still thinking you shit fucking rainbows.”
“I’m sure Kady will be fine,” Alice said with a tenderness it hurt to hear offered to someone else. “Fogg said that’s not what this was about.”
“Exactly,” said Julia. “Don’t you guys get it?”
“Get what?” said Margo. “That something’s finally grabbed his attention other than his whiskey and his pet?”
Julia shook her head. “Look, Fogg is—”
“A mid-functioning alcoholic,” Penny muttered.
“Messy,” said Julia. “But there’s one thing on earth he takes seriously, and it’s the integrity of his school.”
“Creative way he has of showing it,” Margo drawled, but her nonchalant disdain felt strained.
“I just confessed to the theft of rare and necessary magical supplies, and he didn’t blink,” said Julia. “Like—come on.”
Quentin couldn’t follow. He was stuck still on the awful possibility that Fogg might pursue the matter later, when things had calmed down.
But Eliot lifted his head from where he was reclining in the window seat and said, tipsy but sincere, “She’s right. If that bombshell wasn’t enough to distract Henry from whatever’s going on, then whatever’s going on—”
“—must really be fucked up,” Alice finished. “Shit.”
Julia gave a wry smile. “Like I said.”
*
“You better not be hungover,” Penny said when Quentin walked into the kitchen. Quentin hadn’t thought it would have been possible for him to get broodier and more sour, but a lot had changed in the last three months.
“Clean as a whistle.” He poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot by the stove and set to fixing himself some eggs and toast. The area smelled sweet and thick, like flour and sugar.
“Good,” said Penny. He was positioned directly in front of the standing fan, beads of sweat dripping down his forehead in spite of its lukewarm breeze. “Last thing I need to worry about is you puking on me after we Travel out.”
Quentin gritted his teeth. “I promise to only cause the same problems for you I normally cause.”
Penny looked like he was about to say something but thought better of it. Probably smart, Quentin thought, no small amount of resentment in the admission. No one needed to go into this afternoon with more bad blood in their crew than was already there.
Anyway, in a few hours it wouldn’t matter that Penny hated him.
Julia came in with a mug in her hands, smiling when she saw him. Quentin felt a pang that he quickly pushed aside. If he had any preemptive regrets—but he didn’t. He’d made up his mind.
She sidled up next to him with a friendly bump against his hips. “You nervous?”
His heart pounded before he remembered that—she didn’t know. Of course she didn’t. He took a sip of his coffee, smoothing himself out. “Why would I be nervous?”
“I wasn’t implying—I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said with an almost imperceptible roll of her eyes. “Just checking. I mean it’s kind of a big deal. I was nervous, my first time out. Hell, I’m nervous now.”
He’d probably sounded tenser than he meant to. “Sorry. Guess maybe I am a little nervous.” He tried for a smile. In reality he wasn’t nervous at all; for once his outcome was secure. It was surprisingly calming, knowing exactly what was coming. But it was strange, being around her, knowing that this would be the last time but he couldn’t tell her goodbye.
He could say something, maybe, that would sound differently once he was gone, but—if he did, after everything was done, when she was looking back at this moment, she’d feel awful for not seeing it for what it had been. He didn’t want her to carry any more of his shit than she already always had.
Alice appeared by the refrigerator, and Quentin dropped his eyes out of politeness. To Penny she said, “We’re circling up at noon, right?”
“Unless someone shows up to tell us otherwise, yeah.”
“Right.”
A beat. “Why? Something you need to do?”
“I was thinking of calling my parents—my dad, mostly. In case... I don’t know if that would make it worse, or—I don’t know.”
None of them could say it. Last night they’d talked tactics and strategy until it was time for bed, but in the pale August morning, damp with humidity, it was like they all wanted to hold on to these last few unbloodied hours where it still seemed impossible any of them might not come back alive. Even Quentin, who knew he wouldn’t.
“—I could Travel you out there for a few minutes. If you wanted to see him in person. You can text me when you’re done.”
“Really?—No, it’s not safe. And if plans do change—we should both be here. Thanks, though. That’s really sweet.”
The sound of Alice Quinn calling Penny Adiyodi sweet would have made him want to kill himself, Quentin thought grimly, if he hadn’t already charted that course in full.
Something dinged and summoned Josh Hoberman. “Morning-morning, dudes and dudettes.” He helped himself to a pair of oven mitts and retrieved a tray of mini-muffins. “Baked you all some valedictory goods in honor of today’s excursions.”
Penny started to pick one up, then cursed, shaking out his hand.
“Careful,” Josh said unhelpfully, “they’re hot.” Unlike the rest of them, he was radiating uninhibited anxiety. It made Quentin feel exhausted, which was usually how Josh Hoberman made him feel.
“They’re not laced with some fucked up shit, are they?” said Penny.
Josh chuckled nervously. “Not unless you want them to be.”
“Thanks, Josh,” said Julia. “This was a really nice idea.”
“Thank me when you all get back.” Josh snapped finger guns at her, accidentally throwing off sparks in his manic cheer.
Quentin rolled his eyes. Still, he took one when they’d had a minute to cool. His last muffin, he thought as the chocolate chips melted on his tongue. He thought he should feel something about it. He thought he should feel something in general—more angst, more relief, more conflict, more regret. But it had been a while now since he’d felt anything except wanting it all to stop.
*
They didn’t talk much after that, sitting in silence as the gravity of the situation set into them like night. Quentin kept thinking that any of them could stand up, stretch their legs, head to their rooms until there was actual news. But they all stayed.
When Fogg returned, face as impassive as before, he wasn’t alone. On his left Kady stood with arms folded, spine stiff, mouth an inscrutable line. On his right was a pale woman with wavy brown hair pulled into a bun.
“I don’t believe in sugar-coating,” Fogg said, “so I’ll get to the heart of the matter as it concerns you. Effective immediately, Brakebills is closed until further notice.”
A wave of indignant shock swelled up in outcries of What? Why? You can’t just—. Quentin felt like he’d taken a hammer to the solar plexus. As fucked up as life at Brakebills had been lately, the alternative was—out there he would—
Dad, he thought, throat tight.
Fogg held up a hand until the chatter died back down. “You all deserve an explanation,” he said. “I am hardly the person best equipped to give it to you, so I’ve asked my... associate to summarize the present situation.” He nodded to the woman with the bun.
She stepped forward with an apologetic nod. When she spoke, her accent was British. “Thank you for your time, and I do apologize for the disruption to your studies. I think you’ll understand once I’ve finished that we had no choice, but I recognize we’ve burdened you with a substantial inconvenience through no fault of your own.” Her lips twisted wryly, as if in anticipation of some outsized reaction. “My name is Jane Chatwin, and I am the steward to the Fillorian throne.”
“No fucking way.”
Quentin and Julia locked eyes; they’d spoken in awestruck unison. He thought he heard Penny scoff, but he didn’t care. On Julia’s face the stress of the day had been washed off by shocked glee sparking up her eyes. Quentin’s heart was jackhammering strong enough to erase momentarily every shitty thing in the white-hot sun of this revelation.
The woman—Jane fucking Chatwin, what the fuck—glanced at them, not disapprovingly. She continued, “Decades ago on Earth, my brothers and I slipped through the curtain between the worlds that leads to Fillory. For a time we traipsed back and forth as Children of Earth had done since time immemorial, naifs playing at the whims of the gods in a garden the size of our dreams. We thought—I thought—that was how it would ever be: a second home, our magical secret.”
Her face clouded over. “But we began to grow up. My oldest brother, Rupert, was crowned High King, locking him to Fillory for life. Meanwhile, my brother Martin was—troubled. Complicated in a way the cosmic order of Fillory found unpalatable. Fillory was built as a place of whimsy, of wonder. It has little patience for melancholy. Martin’s visits grew rarer and briefer, his entry more difficult. He—well.” She gave a brisk shake of her head. “Martin was also a precocious magician. I’m sure you’ve heard it said that magic comes from pain; he had much of both. He was clever, and stubborn, too. He thought he had found a way to secure the boundaries of Fillory such that he could stay there permanently, no longer subject to the permission of the gods. It was dangerous magic he was working with, ancient and untamed—magic beyond the grasp of human hands to shape it. When Rupert discovered what he was doing, he hurried to find Martin—to help him, or to stop him, I never found out. Whatever happened that day in the woods killed them both.”
Quentin’s stomach lurched forward as he pictured his childhood heroes dying unhappy and alone. Julia’s hand found his and squeezed tight.
“But the magic worked.” A ghost of a smile curled at Jane’s mouth, like she couldn’t help taking pride in her brother’s power. “The barrier between Fillory and Earth closed almost entirely. Only a small gap remained, opening occasionally, always leading to the same place—to Brakebills.”
“Why Brakebills?” asked Alice.
Jane shook her head. “I don’t know. The wards here, combined with the frequency and potency of the experimental magic carried on by the faculty, make it one of the most concentrated magical sites on Earth—perhaps it acts as a sort of magnet, or a gravitational field, for otherworldly magic. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. Rupert was an alumnus; the place held sentimental value for him. It’s possible that he laid the path here, by design or through some unconscious ray of magic sent out with his dying wish. But as I said, I’ve never been sure.
“After Rupert died, the royal council determined I should hold the responsibilities of the throne until such time as Children of Earth could once more come newly into the realm and be crowned. As part of my duties, I’ve used our rare opportunities for passage between the worlds to keep the office of the Dean of Brakebills apprised as to the connection between our domains, in case the time should come when it would have some bearing on the functioning of the school. I didn’t find that likely, but with Fillory it never hurts to be prepared.”
“Let me guess,” said Margo. “Today’s the lucky day.”
Jane nodded. “Well deducted. Fillory has never been without its challenges, but since the closing of the barrier, we’d managed for the most part to live in peace. Last summer, we began receiving reports from the western edges of our kingdom regarding—mysterious deaths in the middle of the night. Land and property laid waste. The few survivors spoke of gnarled creatures who seemed impervious to pain, commanded by a figure they called only the Beast. An expeditionary crew we sent to investigate never returned. As the attacks continued under cover of darkness, we began to shore up our fortifications at the capital at Castle Whitespire and in the outlying settlements within our borders. For a time the onslaught seemed to have abated in the face of our defenses.
“But a month ago, the Army of the Beast attacked one of our principal market towns in broad daylight. The soldiers stationed there fought them into a retreat, but the bloodshed was devastating. The creatures, if they can even be called that, appear to be powered by some external magic—we assume the magic of the Beast. They crave only destruction, and it feeds their dark power. In these past few weeks, as they’ve attacked and we’ve defended, the magic of Fillory has begun to be drained. Without magic, Fillory has nothing. They don’t need to defeat us in battle. If they erode the world’s magic, the kingdom is theirs to do as they wish. And I shudder to consider what it is the Beast wants with us.”
Quentin couldn’t help himself. “What about the gods? Ember and Umber—can’t they do anything?”
Jane met his gaze. “The gods haven’t been seen or heard from on Fillory since Martin and Rupert died. If they survived the spell, they’ve been keeping quiet.”
“So what are you going to do?” said Julia.
“We’ve called on our neighbors for assistance,” said Jane. “They understand that their self-interest is firmly entrenched with ours. Loria has deployed military aid; the Tribe of the Floating Mountain has sent supplies. The issue is magic. If we’re correct that the Army of the Beast is magical in nature, soldiers and swords won’t ever be enough. Fillory runs on magic—the world is magic. But there has never been in Fillory’s history an institution dedicated to the development of spellcraft and the training of magical adepts akin to the colleges on Earth, nor do we have the written tradition that allowed for diligent autodidacts such as myself to develop their talents. Some of our soldiers can harness ambient on occasion, and I’ve been attempting to teach what I know to the handful who demonstrate real facility, but to defeat the Army of the Beast we need power and skill and numbers far beyond what our forces contain.”
“You need actual magicians,” Julia said slowly. “That’s why you’ve come to Earth.”
“And why should Earth help?” said Margo. “No offense, but this seems pretty obviously a you problem.”
“That was my question,” said Fogg, “when Jane approached me yesterday. However, today our wards were breached, for the first time in decades, by an intruding power with a magical signature unlike anything I or anyone else on our distinguished and widely traveled faculty had ever seen on this planet. We were able to restore them to their usual functioning, but the message was unmistakable.”
“The Beast is coming for you,” Jane said. A chill ran down Quentin’s neck. “He won’t be satisfied with his conquest of Fillory; he’ll move to Earth next, and he has the power to do it. If we don’t win, it’s only a matter of time.”
“We’ve put out a call through the alumni network and other channels for magicians with relevant expertise,” said Fogg. “Several have already responded. The campus will form our base as we gather forces, gain intelligence, and craft a strategy.” He nodded his chin at Kady, still standing by him with her arms crossed. “Ms. Orloff-Diaz has an unusual level of mastery in the art of battle magic for a magician her age. She has agreed to participate in a limited capacity in exchange for an agreement from the school to overlook certain unsavory and illegal actions on her part this past fall.”
“Excuse me?” Penny said, enraged.
“That’s extortion,” Julia muttered, “but whatever.”
“The rest of you,” Fogg continued, “will need to pack up as soon as possible. Christine Davies at the registrar’s office is available to you for help securing lodgings on short notice, and a few professors have agreed to partner with Career Services in case any of you should need references for relevant employment. The school will be in touch about plans to reopen when this mess is taken care of.”
From the back of the room floated Eliot’s sardonic voice. “When? That’s uncharacteristically optimistic of you.”
Fogg smiled grimly. “If it doesn’t get taken care of, we will all have much bigger problems to worry about than rescheduling final exams.”
Quentin felt his heart falling through him like a stone dropped from a cliff. He would have to leave, he thought. As bad as things had been lately, this was still the only place he had ever really hoped they might get better. He would have to leave and he might never come back. And if he never came back, that would mean—
“I have to head to the Naturalists’ treehouse,” said Fogg, “to give them the news. My assistant will be taking messages if you have further questions.”
He began to leave, Jane and Kady in tow. In the room was a horrible silence, thick as smog.
“Wait.”
All eyes turned to Julia, once more pushing to her feet. Quentin felt the familiar stirring of anxiety and preemptive admiration her steel-set jaw had provoked so many times before.
Fogg was already halfway out the door. Over his shoulder he said, “Ms. Wicker, I recognize that you all may have questions remaining, but—”
“Why don’t you use us?” said Julia.
For that, Fogg turned around.
“Use us,” Julia repeated. “We’re young, but the third years are as good as fully fledged by now, and—come on, Brakebills never shuts up about how it’s the number-one destination for young magical talent on the continent.You have all this talent, all this power—even just in this room Penny’s a Traveler, and everyone knows Alice is a fucking phenomenon, and you told me to my face I was a once-in-a-generation magical mind—hell, even Eliot’s a caster to be fucking reckoned with if you manage to catch him sober—”
Quentin tried not to be embarrassed that he didn’t merit inclusion in Julia’s list of students who could work magic worth a damn.
“What you are proposing,” said Fogg, “is unfathomably dangerous, and wildly irresponsible, and most of all an egregious liability issue—”
“You said it yourself,” said Julia. “If this doesn’t get fixed, we’ll all have bigger problems than a lawsuit from some helicopter parent. You need all hands on fucking deck. We all do.”
Fogg’s expression didn’t change, but he paused long enough before responding that Quentin knew Julia had his ear, at least. “None of you have the requisite background to be useful in a combat setting, particularly with non-human opponents.”
“So train us,” she shot back. “What the fuck else are we going to be doing the next few months anyway? Some bullshit internships for companies that might not exist if this gets out of hand?”
“Calm your tits, Katniss Evertwat,” said Margo. “Some of us have actual lives.”
“Train us,” said Julia. “We can be your back-up plan. Kady can teach us battle spells, we can help each other practice. Look, maybe you’ll get the most powerful magicians on Earth together and this will all blow over in a few weeks. But if it doesn’t—and it sounds to me like it’s not going to—train us, and then when the time comes that you need reinforcements, we’ll be ready to do something, at least.”
Fogg levelled his gaze. When he spoke it sounded like it was meant just for Julia to hear. “What you’re asking to be taught—what you’re asking to do—it isn’t an extra credit project in first-year transfiguration.”
“No,” said Julia. “It’s something that actually fucking matters.”
“She’s right.”
The room’s attention shifted to Eliot, still sprawled by the window. Fogg stared at him like he thought a shapeshifter might have infiltrated the campus.
Eliot’s eyes were cast downward, as though he hadn’t intended the uncharacteristic display of earnestness and was embarrassed by it. “Well, she is.” He shrugged. “This is bigger than any of us. Isn’t it, Henry?”
“Don’t call me that,” said Fogg. But he didn’t argue Eliot’s point.
No one did.
Quentin felt his heart judder in his chest. What Julia was saying—and, apparently, Eliot?—was both impossible and inescapable, and from the eerie stillness in the Cottage he wasn’t the only one reckoning with it. Penny was leaning against the wall, scowling at the floor; the line between Alice’s brows had deepened. There was too much all at once; Quentin couldn’t wrap his mind about it. Fillory and Jane Chatwin and some kind of Beast and a war—it sounded crazy, but hadn’t he always wanted the chance to be brave? To stand for something real—to prove himself worth more than the nothing his life had amounted to—to show that Quentin Coldwater was more than his wreckage of breakdowns and betrayals, more than his mediocre grades and his minor magic—
Dad—
“I’m in too,” he heard himself say. “If, I mean—if we’re doing this.”
“Congratulations on being slightly less useless than usual,” Penny said.
“Penny,” Kady said, “you don’t have to—”
“Yeah,” he said, “I do.”
“It’s not your problem,” she insisted.
He gave her a startlingly soft smile. “Genocidally ambitious army of darkness kind of sounds like an everyone problem.”
“If this is as serious as it seems,” Alice said hesitantly, “I mean—my dad has some books I can ask him to send us—targeted at novices, from before the regulations on battle magic tightened at the Copenhagen Accords of ’46...”
Next to Eliot, Margo was digging her glossy red fingernails into her arms, eyes fixed on the side of his face. She looked like she was about to cry. She didn’t say anything; she didn’t need to. No one who knew them would think for a second she’d let Eliot go into something like this alone.
Dean Fogg inhaled deeply through his nostrils. “God, I hate millennials.” To Jane he said, “Do you have an opinion?”
“I was a child,” Jane said simply. “I managed. But of course it’s your school. Your decision.”
Fogg turned to Kady. “What about you? Are you okay with Julia volunteering you for an unpaid adjunct position?”
Kady shrugged. “I told you. I’ll do what I can.”
He nodded. “Fine. Those of you who wish to join the effort, you may stay, although we may condense the residential facilities and reduce certain amenities to redirect some of the campus’s magical infrastructure towards more pressing needs. This is, it goes without saying, wholly voluntary, and the school does not take responsibility for any harm that may befall you as a result of your decision to stay.”
“Did it ever?” said Penny.
“For the rest of you,” Fogg continued, “everything I stated previously still applies. Please let the registrar know of your decision one way or the other by close of business tomorrow. And now, I really do have to get to the Naturalists before they smoke themselves into a coma.” With that, he was gone, Jane and Kady behind him.
There was a long beat following the shutting of the door.
“So,” Eliot said brightly, clapping his hands together, “I guess we’re all set for summer plans. See, Bambi, I knew inspiration would strike me in time.”
Margo swatted him upside the head, hard enough that he frowned at her. “Yeah, brilliant, genius. Just fucking great. You get one of your fucking ideas and the rest of us get drafted into Dumbledore’s fucking Army.”
“No one’s forcing you to stay, Margo,” Julia said coolly. “You heard Fogg. You can’t stand the heat, feel free to get out of the fucking kitchen.”
Margo glared at her. “Obviously I’m staying. But when the first one of us comes home short half a leg or missing an eye—or worse, doesn’t come home at all—I hope you’re fucking proud of yourself.” She turned on her heel and stormed out.
If that rattled Julia, she didn’t show it. “We’re all adults,” she said to the room at large. “We can make our own choices.”
Quentin nodded. His pulse had calmed down; inside him was spreading something smooth and still and sure. He wasn’t afraid, he realized. For the first time in a long while he felt that he was exactly where he was supposed to be, doing precisely what he should. Life was calling him, and for once he was heeding its summons. And if he didn’t make it back—if the war got the best of him, if he couldn’t hold his own against the dark forces they’d be facing—
—at least he’d die doing something that mattered.
*
Julia asked him if he wanted to drill once or twice more to get warmed up, but he begged off, citing a nonexistent headache, and she paired up with Penny instead. Quentin wandered into the common room by the entrance and sat on the sofa, knees drawn up against his chest to wait for the last few grains to slip to the bottom of his hourglass. Normal people, left to wile away the hours before death, would have had something they wanted to do, he thought. Affairs to get in order, farewells to bid. The blankness stretching out before him seemed like a final proof of his fundamental incompatibility with the world of the living. One more thing he couldn’t get right.
The house felt empty lately, even though it held now more people than had stayed there during the semester. Without Eliot and Margo, it seemed over-large, skeletal. The shape lingered of the memories they’d made in that time—God, was it only a few months back?—when Quentin had thought he’d been building the start of his actual life. He didn’t know what stung more, sitting in the room where it had begun: their absence, or the rush of embarrassment in his cheeks as he remembered how sure he’d been that finally he’d arrived somewhere good.
He shouldn’t be thinking like that, when they were—it didn’t matter. In a few hours none of it would matter, except his death. His death would matter. At least he’d have that.
Alice rounded the corner into view, tensing when she caught sight of him. Quentin made himself very still, like a prey animal trying to outwait its enemy. It was fucked up to think of Alice as his enemy when he was the one who’d set fire to their love, but one nice thing about your last day on earth was that you could give up the fiction that you were a good person. Quentin was a selfish ashole who didn’t know how to live; he’d proved that. He didn’t have the energy now to keep pretending he didn’t resent her for reflecting with such painful clarity exactly who he was and what he deserved.
Alice hesitated before walking over towards the couch adjacent to his and perching gingerly on the edge like a doubtful marionette. “Hey.”
Quentin didn’t know what she wanted from him. He said, “Hi.”
“Look—” Alice bit her lip, eyebrows pinched. Her hands were folded in her lap.
The worst part was that Quentin still knew her; he recognized every minute flicker of her beautiful face, every flutter and choke of her voice teeming always with her certainty and her fear, her ocean of contradictions. He’d loved that so much about her, the silver edges of her that appeared if you knew where to look, and he’d still—
“We don’t know how it’s going to go out there, today,” she said. “I’ve been lucky so far, and we’ve prepared, but ever since what happened to Margo, I keep thinking... We just don’t know. And I don’t—I don’t want to go into—what might happen, with things between us—the way they’ve been.”
Quentin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What are you saying?” His voice sounded unnaturally cold to his own ears.
“I just mean—I never got to say goodbye to Charlie,” Alice pressed on. “And you and I, we were friends first, before—anything else. You were kind of one of the first friends I ever had, actually. And it—sucked, to lose that, even more than—everything else, and I don’t—if this is the last time we ever see each other, I don’t want us to go out as two people who hate each other’s guts. I want to—I don’t know, mend fences. And if—if we do both make it back, then I want—I want it to be as friends. I want to be your friend, Q.”
Quentin stared at her. Her index finger pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, her huge imploring eyes. The tense mouth he had kissed open so many times.
Somewhere in the hollowed-out cavern of his ribcage a voice that sounded almost like his was echoing saying Yes. Alice, yes, of course, please, anything, I love you, I’m sorry, the first time I woke up with you curled up in my arms I thought that everything in my stupid meaningless life had been worth it to bring me here, you fell for someone who didn’t deserve you and I’ll take anything, anything at all to have any piece of you in my life, you made me better, you made me laugh, you made me happy or as close to it as I’ve ever fucking come, you opened a door to a place I didn’t know I could touch and when I saw the person I could be in the golden light there I could barely breathe for the joy of it, loving you was the best thing I ever did and hurting you was the worst, so yes, yes, yes, let’s do it, let’s fix it, I want to fix it, I want to fix everything—
But there would be no time. The decision had been made. It was too late, he thought, almost swaying with dismay; it was already too late. He had already decided he could never—
“So you’re not getting back together with me,” he said, flat. Swallowing down everything she’d dragged almost out of him that he didn’t have the time to feel anymore.
Alice blinked. “What? No—no, of course not. What you did—my feelings changed. I can’t go back. But I thought—”
“Then I don’t really see what else you and I have to talk about.” It didn’t matter, he told himself; it didn’t matter. He didn’t have space for this.
Alice’s chin wobbled; Quentin didn’t feel it. It was like a transmission from a universe he’d already stepped out of. “Fuck you, Quentin. I don’t know why I wasted my fucking time.”
She stormed out of the room, leaving him alone with the reverberation of her words. Her face swimming in his mind’s eye like orange-red afterimages after a light had gone out. Exhausted, wounded—it didn’t matter. The story was over; she just didn’t know it yet. And maybe it was shitty of Quentin to leave her this splinter for when he was gone, but he couldn’t imagine she’d mind much, after long. He would erase himself, and time would take care of the rest.
*
In the end, twenty-six students went home. None of them were people Quentin had known well. He didn’t judge them for bailing, but privately he enjoyed maybe more than he should have the feeling of superiority he got watching them decide to go. There was an acid satisfaction in comparing himself to the ones who were too afraid of dying to do what was right. It made him feel kind of superpowered, how easily he walked towards what they ran from.
He’d spent half his life wanting to die, and overnight it had transformed from symptom to skill.
They shut down the Illusionist Castle, leaving one wing open as temporary housing for incoming fighters while Fillory erected barracks near Whitespire to make room, and converted the Healers’ lodgings to an expansion of the infirmary in anticipation of increased need; they restricted the library to faculty and students with a permit, and took over the Naturalists’ treehouse to grow herbs used in poultices for wounds and potions to enhance eyesight and reflexes. The Psychics got to keep their quarters to avoid extrasensory overload (and because, Eliot said, no one would tolerate them elsewhere), but everyone else crowded into the Physical Cottage, partitioning common areas and doubling up to make space. Julia and Quentin set up bunk beds in his room; Penny took the excuse to make official what had been practically the case for months, leaving the other Psychics behind to move in with Kady full time, because Quentin couldn’t catch a fucking break.
Faculty stayed, but spent their days sequestered in the library or crossing over through the campus window or with an assist from Penny or Victoria; most of the support staff had been sent home. The student cafe shut down, as did other common hangouts; the weather-controlling spells shuttered so that the power used to keep the campus’s climate mild could be channeled to fortifying the protective wards in case the Beast moved against the barrier again. In the Cottage students, or whatever they were now, portaled down to the city and returned with standing fans and polyester blankets to adjust to the vagaries of an upstate spring in a building that had never had cause to be properly insulated. Fanning herself as she studied a page on weaponized runes, Julia gave Quentin a crooked smile and said, “Do you think the X-Men had central air?”
Quentin said, “Since when are you into the X-Men?”
She shrugged. “I watched the movies. I know things.”
Some things didn’t change: Julia was still Julia, impervious as ever to the world’s every attempt to change her or make her bend to its will; Quentin still knew how to be her best friend. Alice still hated him, Margo still looked like a fashion model no matter the hour or circumstance, Eliot still sipped from his flask all day long and transitioned to wine glasses once the sun started to set, Penny was still a dick. But now the Cottage was crowded but never bustling, the champagne-bubble swell of partygoers laughing replaced by a constant murmuring tension. Now the Naturalist with all the weed had set up permanent shop in their kitchen, using his apparently extensive powers of stress-cooking for good, and also Quentin finally got it to stick that his name was Josh. Now Alice at least deigned to speak to him in clipped tones to correct his form when he was dry-running an emergency buffering spell, and even Eliot could reliably be found, tipsy but attentive, with his head bent over some diagram or incantation, asking Margo for her opinion on changing the verb from the subjunctive to the optative mood.
And now, they trained.
The third-year Healers gave everyone else a crash course on standard first aid and basic procedures for magical injury; Lipson, harried and frazzled, talked them through powerful but short-term spells to cast on wounds in the midst of the action, and gave them a golem and a series of exercises to practice. The Naturalists compiled a list of the herbs in the kits magicians were taking into battle, and Alice made flashcards so they could drill each other on their relevant properties and uses. Jane Chatwin sent them a copy of a map, uncannily similar to the one printed in the frontispiece of all the books, and they began familiarizing themselves with the terrain. Fogg summoned Mayakovsky up from South to, apparently, berate them for their soft and unmanly ways, but the news trickling in from Kady’s brief reports was dark enough that when he prescribed a morning calisthenics regimen, no one refused. It was getting too easy to imagine the day drawing closer when they would need to run for their lives.
Mostly, though, they worked on battle magic. Energetic defenses, offensive spells; tuts and verbal enhancement and proper footwork. Battle magic, Kady explained, was difficult because it required total mastery of the self, body and soul. “It’s precise—you can’t fudge your angles with this shit. Stance is more forgiving, but it tracks closely to power. If you’re off, your spell might still fly, but it’ll be weak as hell. The real juice, though, happens in your mind.”
She smirked at the assembled gathering. “Usually when you hear people talk about how magic comes from pain, they mean it in some wishy-washy Van Gogh way. Your pain is your inspiration, or your perspective, or whatever—the thing that makes you powerful. The thing that makes you special. I’m no theoretician. Maybe that’s true, for minor mendings and other bullshit. But that’s not how it works here.”
Quentin shifted his weight, unaccountably nervous. Next to him Julia stood up a little straighter with anticipation.
“If regular magic is like thinking about your ex-boyfriend and writing a whiny song,” said Kady, “battle magic—real battle magic, not spontaneously going wide when you’re having a bad day—is like amputating your own leg and sharpening the sword into a point. You’re taking the worst shit that’s ever happened to you, and hardening it into steel. And your power doesn’t come from how bad it is, or how much it hurts—you can be real fucking spoiled and still learn to throw Berenson’s Loop like you mean it. Your power over battle magic comes from your power over yourself. It comes from knowing, whatever the darkest place inside you is, you’re strong enough to survive it.”
Quentin’s stomach flipped unpleasantly.
Kady opened up a wooden chest and took out an empty glass vial dangling on a chain. “Usually it takes years to master, but we’re not working on that kind of timeline, so think of these as your training wheels. Wake a bottle up, and it can hold your emotions for a while—about three hours, then it’s a safety hazard. Long enough to get some practice in. It won’t come close to what you’ll be able to do once you can cast offensive spells unfiltered, but the hope is that building familiarity with the magic will shorten the learning curve.”
She started handing out the little bottles. When Quentin closed his fingers around his, it was unnervingly warm.
“One thing you want to watch out for,” said Kady, “is that you’re building emotional reactions the whole time—you just can’t feel them while your shit’s in the bottle. Once you drink them back, your system needs to catch up on what it’s missed. The comedown can be... intense.”
“Well, cheers to that,” muttered Margo.
Eliot raised his vial. “Bottoms up,” he said. “Or down, so to speak.”
The effect was immediate, and profound. All the roiling mess of him quieted down, easy as still water after a storm. Like weed without the giggling or the anxiety, like alcohol without the maudlin sentimentality or fear of what he was about to let slip from his mouth. Every gnarled fear and twisted strand of misery—just gone.
Quentin noted the irony that he would have been thrilled, if he could have felt it.
Margo turned to Alice. “I wish we were friends.”
Alice blinked. “I do too, sometimes. But my mother is a narcissist, so I have problems relating to other women.”
“Focus up, kids,” said Kady. “We’re going to start with something simple. Eyes on me and triple-check your axis of orientation, because even with the safety on this shit can go bad quick.”
She taught them Odair’s Pulse, a basic energy wave you could cast to throw your enemy off their balance long enough to gather your wits for a proper attack. Once she was satisfied they could all run the tuts dry, she walked them to the woods out back for target practice. That was when the real work started: feet planted shoulder width apart, toes pointing out, hands running the sequence as they tried to summon the magic they were calling into their fingers.
It was difficult, even with their emotions stoppered up. Battle magic flowed differently than other magic; it lit up the skin unpleasantly, like fever. As though it were something the body was attempting to reject, and their goal was to hold it long enough to turn that expulsion reflex outward. It took concentration to initiate; it tangled easily on the way through. It hurt, when it went wrong, that strange extraphysical sting specific to miscasting made more intense, and it could injure the caster; Julia dislocated her wrist and Quentin helped her reset it using one of Lipson’s spells.
“Mastery is the name of the game,” Kady told them over and over. “Right now you feel invulnerable—use that. It’s a distance that creates power if you use it right.”
If they hadn’t had the bottles, Quentin suspected he would have quit in frustration. But his frustration was locked tightly away, along with his embarrassment, and his worry, and his fear, and every other miserable psychic anchor that had ever weighed him down. So he checked his stance, and he fixed the positioning of his thumbs with an assist from Julia, and he called the magic into the hollow space of himself, over and over. He cut his shoulder and let Julia stanch the wound. He marveled distantly at the void inside him, an emptiness like peace; he thought of his father on some day in the unwelcome future lying in a white-sheeted hospital bed with plastic tubes connecting his body to burbling machines, and the image had no power to hurt him. And he cast: a bubble of energy in a clean straight line, knocking an old mug off the stump where it was stationed.
Next to him Kady nodded. “Good.” She worked some quick kinetic magic to restore the mug to its place. “Again.”
Just under three hours in, Kady blew a whistle through her teeth to march them back to the Cottage to drink their emotions back. Again the effect was immediate; this time it was also brutal. Three hours’ worth of irritation and resentment and guilt and anxiety crashed back into him like water bursting through a dam, filling his lungs. He wanted to scream at the total hopeless idiocy of what they were doing, playing fucking hero while master magicians were coming back from the war bleeding and broken and dead; he wanted to fucking kill himself for being so goddamn pathetic, useless at the one thing he’d ever thought might make him matter, make him special, the humiliation of the wish burning through his ears; he wanted to punch a wall about Julia’s perennial smug perfection, correcting his tuts like they weren’t the same, like she knew so much goddamn better, and he wanted to cry because they weren’t the same, they’d never been the same, and if they survived this she was going to figure it out and finally she’d leave too because that was what he did, he broke things, and it was always already too late to stop; he wanted his dad—
Next to him Julia was crying. Julia never cried; in his present state the sight made him sick with dread and with a nauseous gratification. “You’re my best friend,” she said, voice thick, “you know that right? You have to know that, tell me you know that.”
Quentin nodded, unable to speak.
Julia’s face crumpled as she cried harder. “So then why can’t I help you? Why haven’t I ever been able to help you? What the fuck is wrong with me that I can’t—”
“It’s because I’m broken, Julia,” he said, “I’m—I’m unfixable, and one day you’re going to see—”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to fix you, I want to feel like I can trust you to live to fucking thirty—”
“It doesn’t matter, you’ll be gone by then anyway,” he said. He felt like he was tilting off a cliff. “Just like Alice, just like my mom—and you never fucking wanted me anyway, not for real—”
“How could you fucking say that to me—to me, Q—”
At that moment mercifully a hand tapped his shoulder and a pair of wine glasses materialized between them. “Shots need chasers,” Eliot said. His typical archness had a slightly hysterical edge. “Drink up, mes enfants.”
“Q,” Julia said, like a plea.
Quentin took the proffered glass. “Thanks.”
Eliot shrugged. “Just trying to be a good host.” He wasn’t meeting anyone’s eye.
In the corner of the room Margo was nearly doubled over with shaking shoulders, arms wrapped around her waist. Quentin couldn’t see her face behind the smooth curtain of her hair.
He downed the glass quickly. After a moment’s hesitation, Julia followed suit.
When morning came unwanted and unbearable his head was killing him and Julia was smoking out the window. “This was a bad idea.”
In the bleariness of waking into a literal and metaphysical hangover, Quentin couldn’t tell what she meant: the spell, the war, Brakebills, magic itself. The two of them, here in this room or ever.
“The bottles,” she clarified. “It was—I couldn’t sleep, I—am just barely starting to feel like myself—I don’t think we should do it again. I’m going to talk to Kady. There has to be a better way.”
Quentin’s tongue felt leaden, tasted acidic. “You heard what she said. The other way takes years, and we don’t have that.”
“It’s just magic,” Julia said insistently. “It’s—tuts and incantations and channeling and circumstances, the same shit we’ve been doing all year. There’s no reason we can’t just—apply ourselves, and work hard, and practice the way we practice everything else—”
Like he wasn’t fucking working hard—like he wasn’t trying, every day of his life, harder than she had ever had to try for anything. “Yeah, maybe that’ll work for a once-in-a-generation magical talent.”
“Q—”
“The rest of us mere mortals probably need to suck it up, though. On the bright side, I’m like basically a black belt at feeling like total shit, so—for me, at least, this part isn’t exactly new.”
His stomach was reeling too much to move. There was a carving in the corner of the bottom of her bunk ahead of his—initials in a crude heart. JL + NK 4EVER, etched by hand, not by magic. Quentin wondered how long ago some lovestruck first-year had made it. He wondered how long JL and NK had lasted.
He heard Julia sigh her familiar maternal sigh and felt his jaw set automatically. “This isn’t just about me, Q. You heard what Kady said—this stuff isn’t just awful, it’s dangerous.”
He knew where she was going with this, but damned if he would make it easy for her. “She said that after three hours, there’s some risk. There’s risk with any magic. There’s risk to fighting a fucking war.”
“Three hours is the general baseline. For someone like—”
His face burned. Her fucking nerve. “Someone like what, Julia? Like me?” He turned his head so she’d have to look him in the face. “What exactly am I like?”
“It’s not what you’re like, it’s—” She pressed her mouth into a line, like she didn’t want to say it. No one ever did. It made them too uncomfortable to admit that there really was something wrong with him.
Quentin waited. He wanted to see what she’d say. How exactly she saw him, at the core of it.
Julia took a drag on her cigarette. Smoke drifted past her dark hair. Finally she sort of shrugged like she was too tired to figure out how to be polite about it and said, “You’ve been hospitalized for clinical depression. More than once. Two years ago—”
“For the millionth time, that was basically an accident—”
“—you almost died,” she finished. “It’s not outrageous to think that you might be—”
“Too sensitive?” he demanded. “Like I have some, some kind of allergy? I might be, what—closer to snapping, than everyone else here?”
“You might be more likely to have a particularly extreme adverse reaction.” She kept her tone infuriatingly even. “Through no fault of your own. And if that happens, you could—”
“Kill myself?”
Julia flinched. Good, Quentin thought savagely. It should hurt, this thing he had to watch her seeing in him that she didn’t even have the guts to say out loud. If she didn’t want to hear the words she should have kept her mouth shut.
“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable concern,” she said quietly.
Quentin made himself take a breath before answering. He could hear footsteps crossing the hall, going downstairs. “We don’t really have time to worry about my mental health. If they need us, and we’re not ready, that’s going to be a way bigger issue than my screwed-up neurochemistry.”
Julia regarded him for a long moment. She snapped her fingers to put out her cigarette and set it down on the ashtray on his desk. “Are you still taking your meds?”
Quentin let out a bitter laugh. “Fuck you.”
“I’m serious.”
“That’s not any of your goddamn business.”
She opened her mouth and closed it, lips pursed disapprovingly. “Fine. Do what you want. I’m going to talk to Kady, maybe some of the others—I can’t be the only one having second thoughts.” She stood to go.
“For the record, I am,” Quentin said. “Still taking them, I mean.” He didn’t know why he told her. Maybe he just didn’t want to spend the next month feeling like every time she talked to him she was mentally checking symptoms off on a fucking depression screening questionnaire she’d found on the internet.
Julia nodded, her face relaxing minutely. “Good.” She gave a quick flickering smile before heading out into the hall.
Quentin rolled his eyes at her retreating back. They always said that: his mother, his dad, Julia in the half-dozen previous iterations of this conversation they’d had. They never asked what Quentin thought of as the obvious follow-up, which was: does it fucking matter? It wasn’t like he’d ever found a pill that could hide the truth of him from himself. He kept taking them because if he didn’t, people got upset. But that raw abyss was always waiting, if he looked for it, a cliff with no end. He’d never really understood the great advantage everyone assumed was to be found in an extra inch of distance from the edge. What did it matter, if he could still trip and fall into himself to be swallowed whole?
That was the thing Julia didn’t understand about battle magic. Kady had told them: Your power comes from knowing you can survive yourself. But Quentin wasn’t at all sure that was true.
*
At noon they gathered in the woods out back to go over the plan one more time before Traveling out.
It was still strange, assembling in their depleted numbers. Gaps appeared in the circle as if people were subconsciously leaving space for the ones who weren’t coming back. Quentin wondered if the next time they did this, there’d be one more column of empty air between his classmates, marking the place he would have stood, or if they would close it up easily, like he’d never been there.
In the center, Kady surveyed their ranks with arms crossed. The raised white skin of the scar across her cheek stood as a silent reminder of what they were going up against.
“I know it might feel like we’ve talked this to death, but I want to go through it one more time,” she said. “You don’t want to be wasting time trying to remember details in the heat of battle. Especially since for some of you, it’ll be your first time out. Those of you who’ve been, you know how fast it moves when you’re in the thick of it. And you know it helps to have the stakes fresh in your mind when you’re pulling out the hardest magic you’ve got.”
Scattered faces nodded, eyes dark. Quentin kept scanning the thinned-out crowd, half-expecting to see Eliot and Margo, standing side by side with eyebrows arched and elbows linked, a world to themselves even now. But of course they hadn’t been in the circle for weeks.
Kady worked a complicated series of tuts so that a map of Fillory hung in the air, viewed head on at every angle. As she spoke, the locations she named lit up in gold. “The Army of the Beast has been advancing east from the coastline. The Brass City has fallen, every citizen dead or evacuated; the Lower Slosh is a wasteland. Based on their trajectory, we think they’ll soon be crossing Milkwater River. If they do that, it’s a straight shot across Morgan Downs and through the Southern Orchard to sack Brighthaven and from there hit Castle Whitespire. Both of those locations are heavily fortified, but the fortifications rely on magic, and they’re getting patchier by the day. If they fall, the ramifications for the energetic ecosystem of Fillory will be huge.
“Jane Chatwin thinks she’s close to finding some kind of spell that could re-up the fortification—that might even juice Fillory back to full power. If she’s right, that would be a huge assist. With all the people we’ve got on the ground now, we might stand a chance at driving the enemy out for good. But she needs time to get it right, and the clock is ticking. If we can hold the Beast’s forces off at Milkwater River, we can buy her that time. If not... it’s game over. For them and for us.”
A breeze swept through the silence. Even knowing he wouldn’t be around to see the final outcome, Quentin felt cold.
“We’re not quite as fucked as it sounds,” said Kady. “Don’t get me wrong: we are plenty fucked. But while the Army is huge, they travel in packs, not as a unified force. We should have a solid numerical advantage on whoever shows up first. Plus, we’ll be setting up alarms once we’re out there that should give us a decent heads-up on who’s coming and how many. Penny will be watching those to see if we need to call in reinforcements. If we do, he’ll Travel out to Whitespire, bring back who he can, and the rest of them will be riding out to join us on foot.”
“Remind me why they aren’t just meeting us there?” asked Todd.
Kady rolled her eyes. “To repeat myself once again, it’s a lot of uncovered territory to cross. That could draw the Beast’s attention when they’re not ready. In the meantime, Whitespire would be left unattended. We don’t think they’re in the radius of attack, but frankly, we don’t understand the Army’s operation well enough to be sure. We can’t be too careful. This way we can work in shifts, trading off with Whitespire’s forces to stay fresh so we can block the river and guard the castle as long as Jane needs.”
She spread her fingers to zoom in on the map, “Remember, the goal is not a decisive victory. No offense, but we’re not strong or experienced enough to rout them on our own. The plan is to hold the line until they retreat. You’re playing defense, not angling for the hero play. Julia and I will be calling for a lot of cooperative shields, especially at the beginning. Ideally we put up enough of a show that they second-guess their plan, and we spend most of our time out there waiting for them to show up. If it does become a real battle, think fast, but cast conservatively, and stay in formation. Geometric circumstance is key in multi-caster battle magic. One person steps out of the lattice, everyone loses minimum ten percent off their max power. Everything counts.”
She took a long slow turn, taking them in. Quentin tried to look ready, whatever that meant.
“Any last questions?”
For a second Quentin could almost hear Eliot’s voice drawling irreverently. Is there an in-flight movie? He wondered if they’d see each other out there.
Kady nodded. “Then it’s time. Link up. Penny, on my count.”
Quentin reached for Julia to his right and a second-year Illusionist on his left. Julia gave his hand a little squeeze.
“One,” said Kady, “two, three—”
And they were gone.
*
Julia got the green light from Kady to practice battle magic unassisted, along with a few others shaken badly enough by the aftereffects of the bottles that they thought it seemed worth trying. Alice was among them, predictably; unexpectedly so was Penny, which enhanced the irrational sense that overcame Quentin each night as his feelings flooded back into his body that this set-up was a cosmic punishment for him personally. Post-emotion drinks became a ritual, doled out by Eliot who seemed to take as much comfort from putting on the costume of his pre-war role as he did from the wine. More than once Quentin found himself, drunk and despondent, staring pathetically out the window where Julia and the others stayed late into the evening sharpening their craft, blowing up dusty crockery with whoops and cheers. He wondered if he would have been out there with them, in some other universe where it was Alice in his bedroom not in the top bunk but curled close around his body, some other life where he’d held out a little longer on imploding his own life. Maybe the Quentin who’d held it together would have been a decent enough magician to trust to his skills, or at least try.
In this universe, the bottles were awful but the cheat was working. Quentin, or some abstract numbed-out version of him, was learning to work quick tricks for distraction, more potent attacks that would deal real damage. He and Margo practiced a dual-cast shield until they could toss it up wordlessly; their entire motley cohort practiced advantageous formations until they could practically move into a Goldman Net in their sleep. When he came back to himself afterwards there was sometimes a strange thread of belated satisfaction mixed in with the spew of anguish, a flickering light made painful by appearing in the moment that revealed its inadequacy.
It got worse as the weeks wore on, spring swelling into the damp heat of summer, and more people gained the confidence and fluency to start casting unfiltered. When Quentin tried, it felt like trying to pour cement through a straw. He could feel the edge of the magic he’d cast while hollowed out, but there was too much of himself to drag it through to where he could use it, and the effort left him quickly drained.
Kady said, “You know you can do this because you’ve done it before, so stop stressing about how hard you think it is and breathe through it until it’s done,” and Quentin thought, How?
Julia said, “Just keep trying, and I know you’ll get there,” and Quentin thought, Fuck you.
Eliot said, “You look like you could use a drink,” and Quentin thought, only a little guiltily, Thank God.
They started getting called out in late June. It wasn’t a surprise; by then Healing students had been coming back from their infirmary rotations for weeks whispering about how rapidly the beds were filling up, and how slowly injuries dealt by the Beast’s creatures seemed to mend. At first it was just Penny and Victoria, brought in for quickfire Traveling that had them stumbling back into the Cottage pale and exhausted; then the third-year Healers began working as emergency medics. One day Kady put Julia in charge of the evening’s practice and went off to join the rearguard during an unexpected skirmish and when she came back her clothes were torn and she couldn’t cast for hours.
Everyone wanted to know what it was like out there, in it, the wild of Fillory and the heat of battle; no one who’d been could manage to say much. They fought on wide open plains, in the heart of dark forests, on the edges of settlements yet to be evacuated, holding off the enemy long enough for the residents to Travel east; they came home and described slimy creatures with too many legs and gnarled claws, soldiers with no faces except enormous mouths revealing jagged teeth, warriors that disintegrated into flocks of gray moths. The fighting was vicious, that much was clear—vicious and quick, master magicians collapsing with bodies destroyed, blood spurting from their necks.
“It’s not like any magic you’ve seen before,” one of the Healers said of the Beast’s living weapons. “Even if they don’t hit you, just being there—it hurts.”
July rolled in, sweltering and bright. Quentin slept poorly, tangled in the sheets and the wine and strange guilty dreams of hospital beds and haunted woods full of broken glass; he woke up hungover, drenched in sweat and the clammy stew of his own feelings. The news from Fillory was grim. Early on, the royal forces with Earth’s assistance had scored the occasional decisive victory, but as Fillory’s magic continued to drain the Army of the Beast only grew in power. It seemed the best anyone hoped for now in each conflict was to fight until they tired their opponents into a retreat. And fight they did, but slowly the Army made its way east. Scouting spells worked irregularly; surprise attacks grew more common; the casualty count continued to climb. Alice went out one day, Julia the next. Quentin spent three hours mindlessly practicing battle spells while waiting to see if she’d return and when he drank himself back into consciousness the shame and fear was so powerful he fell to his knees and vomited onto the rug.
One day six people went out and five people came back, red-eyed and shaking. In the usual commotion of curiosity the room went devastatingly silent when Josh asked, “Where’s Victoria? Is she in the infirmary?”
Penny’s mouth worked like he was forcing himself to look Josh in the eye. “I’m sorry, man. She—she didn’t make it.”
Josh blinked dumbly; then he fell, as if his skeleton were simply giving way. One of the third-year girls let out a shaky cry while another, tears running down her face, made her way to pick him up off the floor.
The Cottage was quiet and mournful the rest of the day. Victoria’s friends clutched each other, weeping their remembrances; it felt wrong to interrupt. Quentin had barely known Victoria, but he felt like he was going to be sick, and by the stricken looks on other people’s faces he wasn’t the only one. Suddenly it had become real, and whatever optimism had carried them this far seemed in the light of actual death hopelessly naive.
At dinner Josh came in from wherever he’d been crying to announce, red-eyed and trembling, “I’m out. Sorry, but—I’m not, I’m not the hero, okay, I can’t—I can’t do this. I’ll stick around here to support on the back end, but—I’m not going in. I’m not that guy.”
Coward, Quentin thought, meanly smug. At least whatever he was, he was better than that. But the satisfaction didn’t last.
Drinking that night on the couch by the fireplace which had lain unused for months he said, “What’s the point?”
Next to him Eliot lifted a languid eyebrow. “Of what?”
“Any of it,” Quentin said before he could stop himself. It was the sort of thing he thought often but was usually restrained enough to avoid voicing out loud. In the haze of the bottles and the wine and the memory of Julia stumbling wan and shaky leaning against Penny’s shoulder from her latest outing he didn’t have the energy to hold it back. “What’s the point of—of fighting if we’re just going to lose anyway, of fucking—making myself crazy trying to cast these fucking spells that I can’t even get close to because to cast them you need to like, trust in your fucking inner strength or whatever and I’m not—that’s not me, I’ve never—” Why would he trust his own strength, he thought, when it had failed him so spectacularly before?
Eliot didn’t respond for a long time. Quentin wondered if maybe he had taken something other than the wine, and if he should ask. Margo had recently dropped the bottles for her own training, and when she looked at Eliot these days there was some dark knot in her eyes Quentin couldn’t read.
Suddenly Eliot laughed, an unsettlingly familiar rising noise that made Quentin feel off-kilter, like gravity was coming unwound. “The point’s the same as it ever was, darling.”
Quentin eyed him warily. “And what’s that?”
Eliot’s smile was like a plaster cast of a smile. “To live fast and leave a beautiful corpse.”
Quentin’s stomach clenched. He turned his empty glass in circles in his hand. Suddenly he remembered where he had heard that laugh before—the night they fucked, a guilt-soaked blur of limbs and tongues. Eliot’s fingers in his hair; Eliot’s breath against his mouth; Eliot laughing darkly, like he couldn’t believe the nerve of the cosmic joke. They had never talked about it and now they might die before they ever did.
Quentin supposed that had always been likely, but the new immediacy of it stung.
“El...” He didn’t know what he wanted to say. They weren’t the kind of friends who talked about real things; Quentin wasn’t sure Eliot did that with anyone, even Margo.
Eliot gave him a smile that would have been condescending if he hadn’t looked so sad. “Chin up, little Q. This is still the drink-and-be-merry portion of events.” He reached out, head tilting forward, to tuck a strand of hair behind Quentin’s ear.
Quentin felt himself leaning into Eliot’s touch.
It didn’t feel good, exactly, to fall right back on the same landing he’d crashed onto in the spring; it didn’t feel good to hurl himself bodily into the proof of his own worst self. But everything that hadn’t already broken was breaking, and it seemed increasingly certain that there would be no time to excavate some salvageable Quentin from the rubble. It didn’t fucking matter anymore, who he pretended to be until the end. And Eliot was there.
They didn’t talk; there was nothing to say. Eliot kissed him viciously, almost violently, and Quentin pressed his body up against Eliot’s inviting heat. Eliot gripped his hips roughly for a minute before pushing him off so he could unceremoniously lead Quentin up to his room and strip him bare behind the closed door. They tumbled onto Eliot’s bed touching, reaching, grasping for each other with fingers and teeth. Quentin didn’t have it in him to be generous or considerate and found solace in the uncharacteristic lack of grace in Eliot’s movements that suggested he didn’t, either. Eliot pushed him onto his back; Quentin rutted desperately against Eliot’s dick. They came quickly and uninspiringly in Eliot’s hand, the sticky mess between them dematerialized by Eliot’s spell before he finished pushing himself off Quentin’s heaving chest, cool afterwards against the air. When he’d caught his breath Quentin thought he should make some gesture towards standing to retrieve his clothes and head back to his room, but the ceiling was spinning and he was dreading Julia’s prying eyes and every time he fell asleep alone he remembered that he had done that to himself and he still felt like shit and Eliot was still there.
He managed to say, “Should I...”
Eliot, sitting up against the headboard with a cigarette between lips, shrugged. “Does it matter?”
Quentin watched him tut to light the end. His elegant movements so unlike Quentin’s own. “I guess not.”
In the morning Eliot was gone. Quentin felt a shock of disappointment that blurred into embarrassment. He dressed himself and slipped downstairs and out the back door to pretend, probably unconvincingly, that he was coming in from an early walk. At the kitchen counter he avoided Julia’s eyes and wondered how awkward it would be when he saw Eliot again.
That didn’t happen until late in the afternoon. A dozen students had been called out as a precautionary measure to escort a handful of farming settlements moving to a barricaded town further east; in the Cottage, the ones who remained pretended to brush up on Kady’s tactical cheat sheet while waiting anxiously for any updates. Quentin was trying not to stare at Alice, still recuperating from her last mission, his face flushed hot with inscrutable guilt like she could somehow see on him what he’d done the night before and even more irrationally like she’d give a shit, when Penny appeared in the center of the common room, streaked with dirt and out of breath.
“Eliot,” he said, “where the fuck is Eliot, a bridge collapsed and they’re coming—”
As if out of thin air Eliot appeared, standing tall with a wry smile. “Expert telekinetic at your service. Really it’s an honor just to be nominated.” Quentin blinked at him. He seemed—different, somehow. Sober, to start with, but there was something else—a regalness to his bearing, a steady set in his jaw. As if in the hours since Quentin had fallen into restless sleep in his bed, he had grown up. Like all he had needed was for someone to ask.
It probably shouldn’t have made Quentin feel worse, but it did.
Eliot raised his elbow. “Bambi?”
Margo took her place at his side, to Penny’s protest. “Save it. I go where he goes. We don’t have the time to argue.”
Penny apparently agreed. He rolled his eyes, but took them one in each hand, and the three of them were gone.
It was late at night by the time Penny and Kady returned, this time walking through the door. The residents of the Cottage crowded around them, bursting with questions. They’d abandoned the pretense of training for the day; no one had been able to concentrate since Penny’s previous appearance.
“What happened?”
“Where’s everyone else?”
“Are they okay?”
“Kady,” said Alice, distraught, “your face—”
Kady held up a hand to silence them. A thick red gash crossed her cheek like a bloody river on a crudely drawn map. “Beer first. Then we can fucking talk.”
Once she’d settled on the couch, still clutching Penny’s hand in a way that felt uncomfortably intimate to witness, Kady started to explain.
“The bridge was fucked, probably a trap—it crumbled as soon as we set foot on it. Eliot and Margo gave us enough of a magical lift that we managed to get the kids across before the Beast’s minions showed up. I don’t know how the hell Eliot heard them coming, but thank God he did—without that we would have been fucking toast. Not to mention—”
“Where the hell has that guy been hiding?” said Penny. “Last I checked he couldn’t throw a basic block unassisted, but once the action started he was like some kind of fucking military prodigy.”
“Credit where credit’s due,” said Kady, “he’s one of the top three most annoying people I’ve ever met, but when the shit hit the fan he was the real deal. Fought like he didn’t fear death or god, hit his targets with insane power—I had no idea he was capable of that. Magic and strategy. He knew exactly what to do to keep us from getting wiped out. I was taking orders from him by the end. He found some kind of sacred Fillorian knife or whatever, was using it to cut through the enemy like air. We should have been decimated, but thanks to him we made it okay—well. Close enough.”
“Where’s everyone else?” asked Alice.
“The infirmary, mostly,” said Penny. “Minor injuries—broken bones, meridian disruptions, that kind of thing—except...”
“Margo got hit by a pretty ugly spell,” Kady said. Quentin couldn’t breathe. “I didn’t see it up close, but it made contact with face, right across her eye. They’re keeping her at Whitespire, under a magically induced coma, until she’s stable enough to operate on. Last I heard, they think the damage might be permanent, but the odds are on survival. And Eliot—”
“What happened,” Quentin couldn’t stop himself from asking, avoiding Alice’s eye. “Did he—”
Kady gave a hoarse, disbelieving laugh. “He’s fine. This is the craziest part of all. That knife he found? Apparently it’s been missing for decades, and it comes with this cosmic destiny fine print, where by a decree of the gods it can only be wielded by a member of the royal family. Once the Fillorians got wind of what Eliot had done, they went nuts. Apparently, they’re saying he’s now their goddamn king.”
Time sped up after that.
Eliot, newly crowned High King of Fillory, joined Fogg and Jane Chatwin in directing the campaign against the Army of the Beast. He moved into Whitespire immediately, sending a trio of castle staff in richly dyed linen to fetch his personal effects; Quentin watched, dazed, as they gathered Eliot’s assortment of enchanted items, at least some of which were definitely sex toys, and tucked them into woven baskets with politely blank faces. When Quentin saw Eliot, in his rare visits to brief them on updates from the west or instruct them on ways to adjust their casting for Fillorian circumstances, he was like a different person. He stood tall in brocaded finery with feet planted firmly in leather boots, a diadem of polished stones sitting atop his dark hair; he spoke in tense, earnest tones, with nary an innuendo in sight. It was shocking, actually, how easily he had stepped into the role of king, how naturally he wore his new seriousness. It made Quentin feel childish and stupid, unable to reconcile the fact that they’d been joint fuck-ups together and not twenty-four hours later Eliot had become a person who no longer needed the kind of distraction Quentin could provide. Some petulant part of him couldn’t help but resent it: he’d had Eliot, crawling around desperately at the bottom with him, and now Eliot had left, like everyone.
Julia when she came out of the infirmary was different, too: harder, brisker, like she’d made a conscious choice to set aside every unuseful piece of herself until this was over or she was dead. She tensed on the rare occasions when Margo’s name came up, as if she were waiting for someone to dare her to say that she didn’t regret it. When she wasn’t sleeping or eating or talking to Kady with heads bent together, which was less and less often, she was out practicing, her precise magic wreaking havoc on chipped plates and empty bottles in the woods. She didn’t say anything but Quentin thought he could feel an unarticulated impatience rising between them, the hairline crack at their foundation finally starting to split apart under pressure.
Alice’s jaw took on a permanent set; Penny’s habitual scowl deepened. Kady kept a charmed map illustrating the situation in her hand and almost never spoke except to pass information on. Josh Hoberman looked more often than not like he was about to burst into tears, and even Todd kept mostly to himself. Margo remained unconscious, her condition holding steady but too weak still to risk the complicated casting the Healers would need to work before waking her up; sometimes Quentin dreamed of her body lying eerily still on a bed that looked more like a coffin, swirling with pale magic like a corpse embalmed.
It had been a war all along, and now they knew what that meant.
And still, still, still Quentin could not summon into himself the magic that would let him help. There were fewer days where no one left to join the fray, more people departing for battle and returning to the infirmary, more bruises and scars that no amount of magic could erase—more pain, more death, and ever less time before Fillory’s magic gave out for good—and Quentin stayed back while the others risked their lives, useless, tutting and trying and failing to cast.
One night, lying sleepless in his bed with Julia above him and time running out for Quentin to prove himself worthy of the task before them all, he crept out of the room with a quick silencing ward and made his way to where the wooden chest that stored the emotion bottles lay. It wasn’t recommended to use them twice in a twelve-hour period, but Quentin was desperate. He couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t fight and he couldn’t stop the old familiar litany running through his head of useless worthless want to fucking die and he wanted some clarity or at least a reprieve. At least a chance to empty out his head from all the noise swirling through it.
Sitting in the dark by the unused fireplace, drained of himself and absent any immediate project towards which to put his powers of concentration, Quentin considered the situation. In order to help, he needed battle magic; in order to cast battle magic, he needed to draw on both the worst of himself and the part that knew what it was to survive. This was problematic, because he was not convinced that any part of him knew any such thing. Survival for Quentin had been an obligation or a goal or a reluctant project or on rare bittersweet occasions a relief, but it had never been a guarantee. That sure-footed promise that other people could make to themselves, that they would keep going in the face of obstacles or hardship—he had never been able to make that promise without a queasy doubt burning beneath. He had never trusted himself to keep it.
He had never really wanted to.
In his everyday mind, this was a stain, a weakness, a blot on his character, an embarrassment. A childish melancholy insufficiently outgrown. But tonight, viewing it unclouded by shame or doubt or the perennial wish that it would just go away, it occurred to him that there may be a way to turn it now to his advantage. He’d thought all along, hadn’t he, that the war was an opportunity for someone like him—someone less afraid of death than perhaps he ought to have been. Maybe this was the time to prove himself right.
Battle magic required mastery, a steady inner light. The ability to reach through the turmoil and find deep calm. Everyone assumed that meant trusting in your capacity to survive, but maybe there was another way. Maybe he could find the peace he needed by sidestepping the question of survival altogether.
Maybe his power came not from surviving, but from not needing to.
Even after only twenty minutes, the comedown was a nightmare, but when he’d stopped shaking and crying as soundlessly as possible Quentin slipped out the back door to their makeshift shooting range and began to cast.
He felt the ungainly heat of battle magic flowing thick and clotted into him, aching where it snarled against the places in himself he had not yet disciplined into a path smooth enough to let it pass. He felt the power building, and he felt it stop, like a jagged knot of metal in the throat, choking the breath out of him. And this time, instead of grasping for some imagined solid land on which to plant his feet—instead of breathing through it or willing the magic forward where he could promise to catch it—Quentin thought simply: I don’t need this anymore.
He didn’t need to keep dragging himself through a life that had never worked, that had felt like a punishment for his failings more often than it had felt like any kind of gift. He didn’t need the strain or the ache or the humiliation or the accumulated weight of all the years he’d fucking tried. He didn’t need to spend any more days pretending he had hope in some future where he became anything other than broken.
It felt so easy, when he looked at it like this. Quentin could see that in fact his life was finally offering him all he’d ever wanted: the chance to matter, for one brief shining moment, followed at last by a way out he wouldn’t need to feel sorry for taking.
There was a war on. People were dying. He could hold off long enough to make it count, and then he could let go.
The empty wine bottle in his sights shattered with the force of his magic, a jolt of power that sent him reeling backwards, struggling to stay on his feet.
Quentin stared at the empty spot of night where it had stood. So he’d found the answer, then—to the magic he needed, to the unsolvable problem of his entire life. They would fight, and he would die—die taking out some bloodthirsty creature, or protecting his allies from a deadly spell. Maybe he would save Julia’s life for her to lead the fight another day, belated recompense for all the years he’d spent clinging to her generosity; maybe Alice would see him sacrifice himself so that she could go on. Maybe Eliot would know that it had turned out Quentin could be a hero, too.
Not that it would matter. He would be gone.
That was the whole point.
Quentin took a deep breath, feeling the cool night air fill his lungs for one of the last times. Then he mended the bottle at a distance, glass shards glinting in the moonlight as they melted back into each other, and readied his hands to cast again, drawing on the truth he’d spent so many years fighting back and could now allow to fill him up with its power: it would all be over soon. Soon, there would be nothing more.
*
Fillory in his head was still, after months of reports detailing the blood spilled on its fields, the broken bounds and lacerated skin and festering injuries to their personal flow people brought back with them, a sunlit land of whimsy and wonder, drenched in color and bursting with fantastical beauty around every bend. An escape from the drudgery of reality and the quagmire of his own unspectacular self, glowing and unmarred.
The reality of Fillory was grim. When they landed on the banks of Milkwater River, the water had none of the pearly white froth that had given it its name in the books. Instead it was an unsettling green-brown, rolling turgid and filthy beneath a creaking wooden bridge. The grass lay in wilted patches in the dry soil; the air stank heavily with the smell of decay. And the magic—the ambient felt ill, almost. Weak and queasy, coursing in rough uneasy pulses like a consumptive’s dying breaths.
There was something else, too. Something off-kilter, like white noise in his extrasensory perception.
“Get in formation,” Kady said. “Eyes up, hands ready.”
They moved into their positions, checking their stances and flicking their wrists to initiate the lattice. Quentin couldn’t shake the sense of wrongness, a nagging question he couldn’t answer or turn off. He looked to Julia, gathering power at his side, to ground himself in remembering why he was here. They were here to fight; they were up against an enemy who stood poised to destroy everything any of them had ever held dear; they weren’t all going to make it out of this alive. Quentin would ensure someone else lived at least a little longer, and then he would be done.
He ran the opening tuts on a shield spell, feeling the thick magic come into his hands riding his secret knowledge: he was almost done. With everything.
A soft breeze stirred across his skin. The sky was colorless, light shining wanly behind unbroken clouds. He felt a tremor pass through him and thought it was strange; he knew what he needed to do. Then he realized it was the earth moving—
“Did you all feel that?” said Julia.
“Shit,” said Kady, rough with alarm, “shit, wards up now—”
—but already the ground was splitting beneath their feet—
A gnarled arm reached up out of the growing chasm and wrapped its many-fingered hand around a third-year Illusionist who screamed at the touch. Penny hit the creature with a spell that sliced the arm off at the elbow but the fingers clung to the guy’s calf, dripping green blood. Enormous pincers burst from a mound of soil, knocking Todd off balance, and as someone reached to help him one of the claws sliced into her waist, gushing blood.
“It’s a trap,” Julia said unnecessarily. “They were waiting for us—”
“Don’t break the lattice,” urged Kady, but it was too late.
All around them the Beast’s monsters were rising, attacking, bursting from under the soil. Birds with deadly talons swooped in, slashing at faces, arms, necks; someone howled in agony as he covered his eyes, blood spilling down his cheeks. A thick scaled tentacle reached out from the putrid river and wrapped itself around a Naturalist’s neck, choking her as it dragged her back to the water. And across the field were charging men like living marionettes, their stiff limbs moving impossibly fast under their clanking armor as they closed in on the magicians at the river’s edge.
Quentin stood paralyzed by shock, heart pounding in his throat. The Brakebills cohort was throwing everything they had at the enemy, spells whizzing through the air and shots of energy exploding like grenades, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and thrown off-balance by the sudden melee. Everywhere he looked, they were losing. Penny kept casting defensively to fend off attacks against the less experienced magicians around him, until some rusty sword flew through the air and hit with devastating precision, cutting into and across his wrists. He fell to his knees, staring at the red stumps where his hands had been. Alice at the front was holding a steady stream of spells fending off the Army’s approach when seemingly out of nowhere a hooked claw stretched out of the earth beneath her and Quentin watched, helpless, as it struck deep into her back, sending her to the ground with sickening convulsions and an anguished cry.
How could they have thought they could do this? How could he have ever believed he could help?
“Q,” called Julia, “on your left—”
By some miracle the sound of her voice pulled him to action and he managed to swerve, avoiding the bite of a monstrous spider.
“Clarke’s Blade,” she urged, “on the legs, hurry—”
Casting felt impossibly slow in the frenzy around him but he reached for the simple truth more obvious by the second that soon he would be gone—soon he would be free—a relief now more than ever in the face of his helplessness and his fear and the sounds of war and the sick smell of death—and the spell flew out of him, sending the creature’s body to lie dying on the ground with an indignant hiss, severed from its limbs.
He turned back to Julia, who somehow in the midst of hell managed to give a quick smile of approval. “Okay,” she said, “I think if we cast a Kline net together, that can buy us—”
But then Quentin was watching in horror as a shrieking bat with leathery wings collided with her face, shoving her to the ground—
“Julia,” he said, moving in what felt like slow motion—
—and a soldier of the Beast pounced on her, grabbing her body with inhuman strength and twisting—her spine bending too far, much too far, with a nauseating crunch until her head lay at a horrible lifeless angle, neck broken, eyes gazing lifelessly out of her unmarred face—
Someone was calling his name; somehow the fight raged on. Quentin paid it no heed. He stood alone in the fray—sure that for the first time in his years of self-pity he had finally learned what alone really meant.
Julia—
A spell rocked his body and in the split second between the pain and the darkness he thought, Finally—thank God—
*
Quentin woke up to the sun slicing through the gap in the curtains and thought, like he had on so many mornings: I want to fucking die.
Then he thought: Wait, WHAT?