The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [114]
Bingle had found his disciple.
“Those guys are amazing.”
He hadn’t heard Poppy come up beside him. She was watching the action too.
“Can you do that?” she asked.
“Are you kidding?” Poppy shook her head. She was not kidding. “I wish I could. The one on the right, the older guy? He’s the best swordsman in Fillory. We had a contest.”
“It all still looks like a movie to me. I can’t believe it’s all real. Wow!” Bingle did one of his signature gymnastic tumbling passes. “Oh my God. I thought he was going over the side.”
“I know. I was going to take lessons with him.”
“That sounds exciting. What happened?”
“I accidentally went back to the real world. Then a year went by here in three days.”
“Well, I can see now why you wanted to come back. It’s beautiful here. I’m sorry I thought it was funny before. I was wrong.”
Quentin had expected Poppy to be miserable on board the Muntjac . After all, she’d effectively been abducted from everything she knew and cared about and brought here. It was an outrage to every principle she lived by.
And all that was true, and she’d spent a day being outraged about it. Well, half a day. Poppy had spent yesterday afternoon sulking, then she showed up at breakfast this morning with a brand-new can-do attitude. She just wasn’t temperamentally suited to long-haul sulking. Sure, all right, she’d been accidentally transported to a magical world that until recently she had understood to be fictional. The situation wasn’t ideal. But it was what she had to work with, so she would work with it. She was a tough one, Poppy.
“I talked to the other one at dinner last night,” she said. “The kid. Benedict. He’s a big fan of yours.”
“Benedict? Really?”
“Did you see how he lit up when he saw you watching him just now? Look at him, he’s killing himself to impress you. You’re a father figure for him.”
Quentin hadn’t seen. How was Poppy here for one day and she’d seen all that?
“To be honest I always thought he hated me.”
“He’s gutted he didn’t get to go to Earth with you.”
“You must be joking. And miss out on all the adventures here?”
Now Poppy directed her guileless blue gaze at him instead of the sword fight.
“What makes you think what happened to you on Earth wasn’t an adventure?”
Quentin started to answer, and stopped with his mouth open. Because it turned out he had nothing to say.
It was five more days before they sighted land.
They were having breakfast al fresco on deck: Quentin, Eliot, Josh, and Poppy. It was a practice Eliot had instituted: the crew set up a table on the poop deck, with a blinding white tablecloth clipped on to keep it from blowing away. He kept this up in a surprising range of meteorological conditions. Once Quentin saw him up there alone in a squall, munching on marmalade toast that was obviously soaked through with salt spray. It was a matter of principle with him.
But today it was nice out. The weather was almost tropical again. Sunlight flashed off the silverware, and the sky was a perfect blue dome. Though the food itself was getting pretty grim, the kind of unspoilable stuff that came out of deep storage late in an ocean voyage: hard biscuits and meat so salty it was more salt than meat. The only thing that was still good was the jam. Quentin used a lot of it.
“So is this how it works?” he said. “The questing? We just keep sailing east till we hit something?”
“Unless you have a better idea,” Eliot said.
“No. Just remind me why we think it’s going to work?”
“Because that’s how quests always work,” Eliot said. “I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of it, but the lesson seems to be that you just can’t force the issue with a whole lot of detective work. It’s a waste of energy. The ones who go around knocking on doors and looking for clues never find the thing,