“What are you going to do?”
“Anything,” he said. “Everything. Whatever I have to.”
“But what?”
“There’s something I want to try. I had an idea about a trade.”
“A trade. With who? What have you got to trade?”
“I’ve got me!” he snarled. “For what that’s worth.” And then, less angrily, in the voice of Martin the little boy, who would exist for only an hour or so longer: “Will you come with me?”
“All right. Where are we going?”
“We’re going to see someone. Who knows, might be you could do a trade with him too.”
He looked over his shoulder, to make sure Fiona hadn’t followed us, then he quickly sketched a square in the air with his fingers. The shape became a window, looking out over a marshy landscape, and he stepped over the sill and through it. The casual speed with which he did this shocked me deeply. We’d seen magic practiced by Fillorian sorcerers, but none of us had studied it, or not as far as I knew. Martin must have been practicing secretly for months, leading an entire life that he concealed from us. A secret life within a secret life.
I followed him through.
“Where are we?”
“Northern Marsh,” he said. “Come on.”
The ground here was boggy, but Martin picked his way through it with confidence, ever the intrepid explorer. I tried to step where he stepped, but I lost my balance and put a hand down, and it came up covered with black muck. Soon our shoes were full of water, and the marsh was sucking at them as if it liked the taste. I wasn’t dressed for this; I was lucky I’d had shoes on at all.
After a quarter-hour of this I climbed up on a round rock, an oasis of solidity, and stopped. Ahead was just black puddles and reeds and more black puddles and then open water.
“Mart! Stop!”
He turned and waved at me. Then he took a last look around at the horizon, pressed his hands together in front of him, prayerfully, and dived headfirst down into a puddle.
The water barely looked deep enough to reach his ankles, but it swallowed him as completely and easily as if it were an ocean. I watched the surface settle and reseal itself behind him and turn glassy again.
Only then did I become truly afraid.
“Mart! Martin!”
I left my shoes on the rock—for all I know they’re still there—and thrashed ahead to where he’d disappeared and shoved my arm into the puddle up to the shoulder. It had no bottom. I took a deep breath and put my head under.
My inner ear spun. I tried to steady myself and instead fell forward. There was a moment of nausea and weightless confusion, then I was lying on my back on wet ground gasping like a fish. Gradually everything began to right itself.
I was lying on the underside of the swamp—the reverse side of the muddy plain I’d just been tramping through. Gravity had turned upside-down. If I looked down I was looking up through the puddles at the blue sky of Fillory. If I looked up there was only darkness overhead. It was nighttime in the world under the Northern Marsh, and before me, across a flat plain of black mud and sun-filled puddles, was a fairy castle made of black stone. Its towers pointed down instead of up, but so did everything, including me.
This was new. Martin had taken us somewhere truly strange. Fillory was a land of wonders, but this place had an uncanny quality that I can only describe as not correct. It was a place that shouldn’t have been, somewhere off the edge of the board, where you weren’t meant to put a playing piece down. This wasn’t an ordinary adventure, another legend in the making. I knew already that Plover would never hear about it. This was happening off the books.
I could have turned back, but I knew that if I did I would never have a brother again. I also knew that what was happening to him would happen to me too. I would have two more years, three at the most. I didn’t want the game to be over yet. I’ll follow behind Martin at a safe distance, I thought, and watch what he does. Maybe he’s found a way out of the maze.
I stood up, fighting vertigo. Martin was waiting for me in front of the great door to the castle. He was sopping wet and smiling, though a little sadly I thought. I picked my way toward him, avoiding the puddles.
“This is it,” he said. “Just like they said in the books, but it’s different when you really see it.”
“Like who said? Martin, what is this?”
“What does it look like?” he said grandly. “Welcome to Castle Blackspire.”
“Blackspire.”
Of course it was. It was just the same as Whitespire, stone for stone, but the stones were black, and the windows were empty and dark. It was Whitespire upside-down and backward and in the middle of the night, the way it must look when we were all asleep and dreaming. Martin pulled his sopping sweater off over his head and dropped it with a smack on the smooth stone.
“But who lives here?”
“I’m not sure. At first I thought it might be backward versions of us. You know—Nitram, Trepur, that sort of thing. What’s Fiona backward? I can’t do it in my head. And we’d have to fight our opposite numbers to the death. But I’m starting to think it’s not like that at all.”
“Well and thank God for that. What is it like?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s find out!”
He heaved on one of the big doors and it opened silently on oiled hinges. The great hall inside was lit by torchlight. Pale silent footmen in black livery stood against the walls.
“Right.” Martin seemed not at all disconcerted. I think he was past fear by then. He raised his voice—he was full of a kind of hopeless bravado. “Is your master at home?”
The footmen inclined their heads, silent as chess pieces.
“Good. Tell him the High King has arrived, and his brother. We’ll wait for him in his throne room. And light some damn fires, it’s cold in here.”
Two of them withdrew, backward, showing proper deference. Or maybe everybody walked backward at Castle Blackspire.
We were far off the track here, off the script and improvising. Everything we’d done till now in Fillory was like a game, dress-up, good fun and then laughing all the way back to the nursery. But Martin was entering into a darker kind of play. This was a double game: he was trying to save his childhood, to preserve it and trap it in amber, but to do that he was calling on things that partook of the world beyond childhood, whose touch would leave him even less innocent than he already was. What would that make him? Neither a child nor an adult, neither innocent nor wise. Perhaps that is what a monster is.
I didn’t want to follow him. I wanted to stay behind and be a child for a little while longer. But I couldn’t stand to lose him either.
He led me deeper into the castle—we both knew the way. I dragged my feet, but he strode along like he was on his way to his own birthday party. He was going to make an end of it, one way or another, and he couldn’t wait. He was so relieved he was practically glowing.
“I don’t like this, Mart. I want to go back.”
“Go then,” he said. “But there’s no going back for me. This is my last stand. I’m breaking the rules, Rupe. Either I’ll break them or they’ll break me. I don’t care anymore, not since Ember and Umber decided to punish me for nothing at all.”
“What rules?” I was on the point of tears. “I don’t understand!”
He steered us into a dressing room off to one side of the throne room, a chamber where up in Castle Whitespire, up in the world of light and air, foreign dignitaries visiting Fillory would await our pleasure. There was a fire here, and I was grateful for the warmth. There were dry clothes too, in Blackspire colors, and Martin began stripping off. I kept my wet clothes on.
“I’ll tell you how I came to it,” he said. “I was thinking, isn’t it funny that we get to be kings and queens here? We’re children. We’re not even from here. There’s nothing special about us, not that I can see. But we must have something special, mustn’t we? Something you can’t get in Fillory?”
“I suppose.”
Fully naked, unembarrassed, he warmed his bare pale skin in front of the fire. He was happier than I’d seen him in months.
“What is it? I’m damned if I know. My humanity, I suppose. But whatever it is, it means nothing to me, so I’m going to see how much it’s worth to them. I’ve put it up for sale, on the open market, and now I’ve found a taker. We’re here to see how much I can get for it.”
“I don’t understand. You’re going to buy your way back into Fillory?”
“Oh, I’m not doing it like that. I’m not asking for favors. What I want is power, enough power that even Ember and Umber won’t be able to send me home.”
“But Ember and Umber are gods.”
“Then maybe I’ll be a bit of a god too.”
“But what if—?” I swallowed, simple child that I was. “If you sell part of yourself, what if you aren’t Martin anymore?”
“What if I’m not?” he said. “What good is Martin? Everybody hates him, me included. I’d rather be somebody else. Anybody else. Even if it’s nobody.”
He picked up a dry shirt from a neat stack of clothes on a chair.
“I suppose I’m like one of those guests at Maude’s parties, the ones who won’t go home when it’s over, not even after she turns the lights on. But I’ve got no other home to go to, not anymore. When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise.”
The clothes looked rich, and they fit him perfectly, as I knew they would: cool, shadowy colors, black velvets and small silvery pearls like the little sugar balls they use to decorate cakes. He looked very much like a king.
“Mart, come on,” I said, even though I knew from experience that begging only made him angrier. “Leave it alone. Let it be how it was.”
“Don’t!”
He jabbed a finger at me. I felt more than two years younger than him then—somewhere he’d learned the secret of a richer, more powerful adult rage.
“It isn’t how it was! It never will be again! They changed the rules on us, so as far as I’m concerned all bets are off.” He cinched his belt tight. “If They apologized, if They showed any regret, then maybe. Maybe. If They would even say why.
“But They wouldn’t. Not Them. So I’m off to war, like Daddy. They can’t give us Fillory and then just take it away again. The rams have sunk low, but I’ll sink lower. They’re bad, I’ll be worse.”
He flung open both doors to the throne room.
“Mart, who lives here?” I asked. “Whose house is this?”
He went in; I hung back in the doorway. The walls of the throne room were lined with more footmen, still and heavy-lidded as frogs. The torches burned strangely, not warm and yellow but sparking and spitting like holiday fireworks.
“Here I am!” Martin shouted.
I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the joy in his voice—he was relishing the rage and shame. I think he’d been keeping them down for a long time, trying to feel nothing at all, and after so much numbness anything felt sweet, even pain.
“Well, come on!” He spread his arms wide. “I’ve got what you want. Come on and take it!”
I think I knew then why They did it—why Ember and Umber wouldn’t let us stay in Fillory. It wasn’t that we were too old, or too sinful. It wasn’t so that we could spread Their wisdom in another world, our world. It wasn’t that being in Fillory made you happy, and in its way too much happiness was as dangerous as too much sadness. That is a lie that even Ember and Umber never told.
No, it was that Fillory was cruel, as cruel in its way as the real world was. There was no difference, though we all pretended there was. There was nothing fair about Fillory, just as there was nothing fair about people’s fathers going to war, and their mothers going mad, and the way we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would. Fillory was no better than our world. It was just prettier.
I didn’t think those things, not then, but I felt them all when I looked past Martin into the golden barbell eyes of the great ram Umber, the Shadow Ram. Castle Blackspire was His house. Umber was Martin’s buyer.
Give him credit, Martin took this in stride.
“Oh, it’s You, is it?” he said. “Well, come on, you old faker. It’s all here, and only slightly soiled. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” came the resonant reply. Not like Ember’s voice: higher, and calm and civilized, even urbane. “I am ready.”
“So go ahead. Take it. Take it all, you bloody coward, and give me what I want!”
I gave up then. I could have tried one last time to change Martin’s mind. I could have tried to drag him out of that room. I could have tried to take his place, or to fight a god, but I didn’t. I was afraid, and I fled. I ran through the empty halls of the night palace and didn’t stop till I was lying on my face in the cold mud on the edge of the Northern Marsh. I never saw my brother again.
—
Martin’s disappearance made headlines all over England, pushing even news of the war below the fold. The English love a good tragedy, especially when it involves a child, and this one was a nine-days’ wonder. Detectives were dispatched to Fowey from Penzance and London and farther away. Dockery House was turned upside down, from attic to basement, and Plover’s house was too. Notices were circulated. Dogs were loosed. Gardens were dug up. Ponds and fountains were dragged. Men with slight builds were lowered into abandoned wells.