She was playing her part in the Chatwin story now. No more lingering in the wings, she was onstage, in the thick of it. She’d done what she could: she had brought Rupert home, or as close as he would ever get.
“Hey—Penny, is it?” Plum said. “That ought to pay for Quentin’s library fines, don’t you think? Or Alice could just punch you again, it’s all good.”
But Penny’s attention was completely occupied by his new acquisition. He went trotting up to it—half running across the shiny ballroom floor—and slid it gingerly out again, touching only the upper edges of its pages in order to spare the spine. He let it fall open and sniffed the paper.
“How did you get this?”
“Stole it.”
“We tried to steal it too.”
“I know,” Plum said. “From us. Next time try harder.”
The failure didn’t appear to sting Penny. He looked like a little boy with a new puppy. It was weird: he was obviously an asshole, but he wasn’t a sociopath. He had feelings—in fact from the way he held the book it looked like he had an enormous capacity for love. He just wasn’t very good at loving people, apart from himself.
Only Eliot looked grave.
“I just thought of something,” he said. “That was the last book. The wall’s full. The map is finished. That must mean the story’s over, Fillory’s history has been written. The apocalypse must have already come.”
“You don’t know that,” Quentin said.
“Yes, I do,” Eliot snapped. “And don’t try to make me feel better.”
Could it be true? The idea made its way through Plum in a cold ripple. All this time, all her life really, she’d been thinking about Fillory, dithering about it, hiding from it. Fillory and the Chatwins and the fatal longings they represented had been her dark side, and she’d tried to pretend they didn’t exist. She’d wanted to have one side only, like a Möbius strip. A Möbius person.
But that was a mistake. She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future. She was ready to face it, thought perhaps she might even quite like to face it, that there might be not just danger but joy and love in facing it—and just like that she’d lost it forever. She should have done what she’d told Quentin to do with Alice (totally correctly by the way): she should have met it head-on and made her peace with it when she could. Now she’d never have the chance. The books in front of her looked subtly different now. They’d gone from being about the present to being about the past.
Or had they? Maybe they had. But maybe that was giving up too easily. Fillory didn’t feel dead to her, that was the thing. She could still sense it out there, just the other side of the thin partition that stood between this reality and the next. If she pressed her ear to it she could still hear Fillory singing to her, however faintly.
“The wall isn’t actually full, you know.” She cleared her throat—it was dusty in this damn library. “Not necessarily. You could run another row of books under there, along the floor.”
She pointed. There was still space under the lowermost shelf.
“You certainly could not,” Penny said.
“Well, you actually could, if you wanted to.”
Fillory! she thought. We’re coming! Just hold on a little longer! It was as if just by convincing Penny she could keep Fillory alive.
“I think you’re looking at this too literally,” Eliot said.
“Maybe you’re not looking at it literally enough,” Alice said, startling everybody, possibly including herself. “Those two walls are empty. And there’s space between the windows too.”
“It would be very irregular.” Penny folded his arms, his gilded hands glowing with indignation. “But more to the point it makes no sense. The map is complete. There is no more Fillory.”
“That’s not completely true,” Quentin said. “There’s a whole bunch of outlying islands. Like Outer Island would be over there”—he pointed—“if you wrapped it around the corner of the room.”
“And Benedict Island, I suppose,” Eliot said, reluctantly picking up the thread. “That’s way the hell over there. And who knows what there is on the other side, the west side.”
“There’s a whole other continent,” said Quentin.
Plum couldn’t tell if they were arguing for the sake of arguing or if she had a real point, but Penny was looking around the room uncertainly, as if the walls were crawling with insects. She even felt a little bad for him.
But not so bad that she shut up. Never let it be said Plum was without a plan. She wouldn’t let Fillory be dead. It wasn’t getting off that easily. No more hiding. The two halves of her life would become one.
“You could do the night sky!” she said. “The stars! You could have a bunch of navy books with silver dots on them. You could do that thing where you hang them from the ceiling!” She favored Penny with her most winning beam. “You love that thing!”
Penny was not a man much used to being beamed at. It had an effect.
“It’s not complete,” he said, half to himself. “It’s not nearly complete. We’re going to need more books, a lot more. Quentin, you have to save Fillory.”
“That’s what I keep saying,” Quentin said. “And I think I’ve figured out how. I think I finally know how to fix everything.”
CHAPTER 29
Historically speaking,” Alice said, “when people have said that they’ve almost always been wrong.”
Quentin loved having Alice alive again. It was absolutely the greatest thing ever. Whether or not she loved him, whether or not she could stand the sight of him, the world, any world, was just so much better with her in it.
“What are you going to do?” Eliot said.
“Something stupid. Penny, where’s the Fillory fountain from here?”
It had come over him slowly, but he’d been pretty sure for a while now. It was something Alice said. He’d been thinking about Fillory, trying to picture its dying agonies, what it would look like—but of course he knew what a dying Fillory would look like. Alice had told them. Alice had seen Fillory’s beginning, and the end of the world that came before it. The dead ocean, the dead land, the dying god. Even if he wasn’t completely sure how to do it, he knew what to do.
Of course it was also true what Alice said about people who thought they could fix everything, and it was quite possible that he was about to get himself killed for nothing, but he was going to try, and now was the time. It was six Neitherlandish blocks from the library to the Fillory fountain and they took it at a run. The Neitherlandish moon, which was small and strangely squarish, like an old-fashioned TV screen, was low in the sky ahead of them. As he ran Quentin felt that he was at the heart of a vast cosmic drama, as if the universe had chosen very briefly to turn around just him. Everything was happening at once but very slowly, as if time were both speeding up and slowing down at the same time. He noticed little details: the outlines of things, the texture of the stones, glimpses of water in canals, shadows in windows. Everything depended on his doing this right.
The Fillory fountain was in the shape of the titan Atlas struggling under the weight of a globe, which was a bit of poetic license since Fillory wasn’t a globe at all, it was flat. Quentin had planned to hurdle the rim without breaking stride and hope Fillory’s security was completely shot by now, but instead he pulled up short, because as he got closer to the fountain he saw that someone was getting out of it.
It was Janet, and she had Josh and Poppy right behind her. Janet and Poppy pushed themselves briskly up and over the side, as if they’d just completed Olympic dives; Josh threw an arm and then a leg over and sort of rolled out onto the pavement. Their clothes dried instantly, but their faces stayed shocked and haggard.
“It’s over,” Janet said. “Fillory’s dead.”
The words glanced harmlessly off Quentin’s mind. It wouldn’t let them in.
“Quentin, we just watched it,” Josh said. “It was horrible.”
The others straggled up behind him, in the darkness of the square. It was the first time in seven years that the five original Physical Kids—Eliot, Janet, Josh, Alice, Quentin—were in the same place at the same time, but the mood wasn’t celebratory.
“What happened?” Eliot said. “What did you see?”
Josh and Janet were staring at Alice.
Janet grabbed her hand. Josh hugged her. Poppy, in the spirit of the moment, grabbed her other hand, even though they’d never actually met before.
“Oh my God,” Janet said. “Oh my God, Alice.”
“I know,” Alice said gravely. “But just tell us.”
“OK. OK.” Janet didn’t let go of her hand; it was like she needed a lifeline to hang on to. “The sun fell down. Everything started fighting everything else, even the trees. It was terrible. Then Julia came back from the Far Side and sent us back here.”
“Shit.” Eliot looked up at the night sky and shouted: “Shit!”
The city sent him back a faint echo.
“Where’s Julia?” Quentin asked.
“She must have stayed behind.”
Janet couldn’t meet his eyes.
“So that’s it?” Plum said. She looked as stricken as the rest of them did. Quentin stepped up to the fountain. If he was going to try, he’d better try.
“Quentin, stop,” Janet said. “It’s dead.”
“In that case I’ll view the body.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“The fountain’s still here. There has to be something left.”
“No, there doesn’t,” Janet said. “And there isn’t. Please, Quentin.”
Even as she said it the statue of Atlas in the fountain began to move. It bent forward slowly and reached up to the enormous black marble globe it supported on one shoulder. It was preparing, at long last, to set its burden down.
“Hey!” Quentin said. “Not so fucking fast!”
If Fillory was going to be dead it was going to have to prove it to him personally, to his face. He side-vaulted over the rim into the water—it should have been cold, but it was hot and getting hotter. Probably in a few minutes it would start boiling away to nothing. Josh grabbed his arm, but Quentin shook him off. Atlas glared at him, but even though he was twice as tall as Quentin and made of stone he must have seen something truly murderous in Quentin’s face because he straightened up a little and grudgingly shrugged the globe back into position.
Everybody was shouting at him.
“Don’t be an idiot, Quentin!” Janet yelled. “For once!”
“Quentin, don’t,” Eliot said. “You don’t have to.”
“But I do.”
Quentin fumbled awkwardly in his coat pocket for the button while trying to tread water at the same time. Somebody had his arm again, and he tried to jerk away, but at the same moment his finger touched the button and the bottom dropped out.
Once again he was free-falling down toward the magic land of Fillory. He never thought he’d see it again. It made him feel almost painfully tender—after all this, everything that had happened, Fillory was taking him back. The whole country was spread out below him, and he was inbound like a deorbiting space capsule.
He definitely never thought he’d see it like this. Far to the west he caught a smeary glimpse of a crash-landed sun like an egg yolk on a skillet, melting and burning in a steaming, boiling sea at the edge of the world. He had a close booming fly-by with a massive object which he only realized after it was gone was the moon itself, spinning low and off its axis. Fires blazed and dark armies surged across the surface of the world. Something colossal was slowly surmounting Fillory’s rim, peering up over it with its enormous curious face: one of the great turtles that formed the foundation of the world, coming up at last to have a look at what it had been carrying on its back all these thousands of years. Fillory, his beautiful Fillory, was ruined and dying.
But it wasn’t dead. Not quite. Not until there was nothing left.
Then he was down. The ground shook under his feet, and the air was full of rumbling and tearing and distant cries and the smell of smoke. Burning ash from somewhere whipped by on a hot wind.
His arm: someone still had hold of it. It was Alice.
“What are you doing?” he shouted over the noise.
“Being an idiot,” she said.
She actually managed a slight smile, her first of the new era. He smiled too.
“Come on then. We have to find Ember.”
The button had set them down outside the city gates of Whitespire. The wall around the city was half collapsed, and one half of the great gate hung askew. Some of the towers of the castle still stood, for now, but they were swaying. Quentin pointed to them; Alice nodded. There was no way they’d find Ember in all this unless He at least halfway wanted to be found, and if He wanted to be found at all that’s where He’d be.
“I’ll do shields, you do speed,” Alice shouted.
They spent an intense minute casting on themselves and each other, then they held hands and ran through the gate together.
The streets were deserted. The town looked like it had been bombed, and the inhabitants were either dead or gone or huddled in their cellars. Quentin and Alice ran carelessly, bounding along with exaggerated magical strength. Sometimes they cut through ruins and leveled lots to save time; once a tremor sent a teetering wall of stone flopping down heavily right onto them, which would have killed them if Alice’s spellwork hadn’t been top-notch. Instead it just slammed them face down into the dust, and they shrugged off the heavy blocks and picked themselves up and caught their breath and ran on.