The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [105]
“You told me not to!”
“Janet told you not to. I don’t know why you listened to her. But look, I know.” Eliot put a hand on his arm. “I know. I had no choice. Whoever is in charge of handing out quests has a damned peculiar sense of humor.
“At any rate, off I went. And I did feel something, you know, as I set off that morning. Nip in the air, sun on my armor, a knight pricking across the plain. I wished you could have been there.
“Though I looked much better than you would have. I had special questing armor made, just for that day, embossed and damascened within an inch of its life. I won’t lie to you, Quentin. I looked magnificent.”
Quentin wondered what he’d been doing at that moment. At least he’d gotten to drink a Coke. That was something. He wished he had one now. He was exhausted.
“It took me three days to find that fucking meadow, but finally I did. The Seeing Hare was there, of course, waiting for me under the branches of that hideous great tree, which was still thrashing away in its invisible wind.”
“Intangible,” Poppy said in a small voice. “All wind is invisible.”
Good to see she was finding her feet.
“The hare wasn’t alone. The bird was there as well, and the monitor, the Utter Newt, the Kind Wolf, the Parallel Beetle—it does a geometrical thing, it’s so boring I can’t even explain it. All of them, all the Unique Beasts, the full conclave. Well, except the two aquatic ones. The Questing Beast sends you his regards by the way. I think he’s fond of you for some reason, even though you shot him.
“Well, when I saw them all there together, standing in two neat rows, the little ones in front, like they were posing for a class picture, I knew the jig was up. It was the newt that did the talking. He let it be known that the realm was in peril, and nothing else would do but my recovering the Seven Golden Keys of Fillory. I asked him why, what good were they, what were they for, what did they unlock. He wouldn’t say, or he couldn’t. He said I would know when it was time.
“I haggled a bit of course. I wanted to know, for example, how rapidly these keys would have to be recovered. I could imagine doing one every few years. Organize my holidays around it. At that rate I might even look forward to it—it’s always nicer traveling when you have some business to do. But apparently it’s a time-sensitive issue. They were very insistant about that.
“They gave me a Golden Ring that the keys were supposed to go on, and I left. What else could I do? When I got back Whitespire was up in arms. There were all kinds of terrible portents, all over the kingdom. That storm had spread—all the clock-trees had started thrashing the way that first one did. And you know the waterfall at the Red Ruin? The one that flows up? It started flowing down. You know, the regular way. So that was about the last straw.
“And then the Muntjac came screaming into port, and they told me you and Julia had vanished.”
In full hero mode, Eliot took command of the Muntjac. He spent a day repairing and provisioning it while the whole kingdom buzzed with anxiety and excitement. High King Eliot was going on a quest! Apart from everything else it was a public relations triumph. The docks were mobbed by volunteers offering to join the search for the Seven Keys. The dwarves sent over a trunkload of magical keys they happened to have been kicking around in their vaults, in case there was a match in there, but most of them turned out to be useless.
One, though, fit on the key ring. So six to go. Funny how every once in a while the dwarves came up trumps.
Eliot left Janet in sole possession of the castle. He felt bad about making her shoulder everything even more than she already did, but she was practically licking her chops as he left. She would probably be running a fascist dictatorship by the time they got back. So he set off.
Eliot had no idea where he was going, but he’d read enough to know that a state of relative ignorance wasn’t necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and