The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [115]
“What attitude is that?”
Elliot shrugged.
“I haven’t got a clue. I guess we’re supposed to have faith.”
“I never really took you for the faith-having kind,” Quentin said.
“I didn’t either. But it’s worked out so far. We’ve got five of the seven keys. You can’t argue with results.”
“You can’t,” Quentin said, “but that’s actually not the same thing as having faith.”
“Why do you always try to ruin everything?”
“I’m not ruining it. I just want to understand it.”
“If you had faith you wouldn’t have to understand.”
“And why exactly are you looking for these keys?” Poppy asked brightly. “Or I guess, why are we looking for them?”
“Yeah, why are we?” Josh said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re cool and all. They sound cool. Can I see them?”
“We don’t really know why,” Eliot said. “The Unique Beasts wanted us to find them.”
“But find them and do what with them?” Poppy said.
“I suppose once we have them all they’ll tell us. Or perhaps we’ll know when we have them. Or perhaps we’ll never know. They might just take the keys and pat us on the behind and send us on our way. I don’t know. I’ve never done a quest before.”
“So . . . the journey is the arrival, kind of thing?” Josh said. “I hate that stuff. I’m an old-fashioned arrival-is-the-arrival kind of guy.”
“For what it’s worth, they told me the realm was in peril,” Eliot said. “So there is that. But it’s not like the Holy Grail was actually useful for anything.”
“I told everybody the Neitherlands are jacked, right?” Josh said.
“You think that’s part of this?” Quentin said. “You think they’re connected?”
“No. Well, maybe.” Josh stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger. “But how?”
“The Neitherlands are down.” Quentin ticked them off. “Jollyby is dead. The realm is supposedly in peril. Seven Golden Keys. A dragon collecting buttons. If there’s a thread running through all that, I’m not seeing it.”
Maybe he didn’t want to see it. That would be a hell of a thread. You’d want to think twice about yanking on it.
Someone up in the rigging shouted that he could see an island.
The boat’s prow scrunched almost soundlessly into the damp white sand. Quentin vaulted over the bow just as it spent the very last of its momentum and landed on his feet on powdery white sand with his boots still dry. He turned back toward the launch, bowed, and received a smattering of applause from its passengers.
He grabbed the painter and hauled on it as the others—Eliot, Josh, Poppy, Julia, Bingle, Benedict—scrambled out on both sides. The air was quiet and still. It felt weird to be standing on solid ground again.
“Worst away team ever,” Josh said, wading up onto land. “Not a single redshirt.”
Pretty: that was the impression the island had made from a distance. Chalk cliffs that parted to reveal a small bay with a tidy beach. A row of single trees stood out against the skyline, so fine and still and green against the blue sky they looked like they’d been carved in jade. Vacation paradise.
It was late afternoon; it had taken them most of the day to make landfall. They stood together on the shore in a knot. The sand was as clean as if it had been sifted. Quentin slogged across it and up the first dune to the crest to see what was beyond it. The dune was steep, and just short of the top he flopped down on the slope and peered over the crest. It was like being a kid at the beach. Beyond the dune were more dunes topped with scrub, then a meadow, then a line of trees, then Ember knew what else. So far so good. Pretty.
“Welp,” Quentin said. “Let’s get questin’.”
But first there were more mundane matters to attend to. Quentin and Poppy and Josh had been in Venice three days ago, but this was the first land the men had seen in something like three weeks. They piled ashore in twos and threes; some of them cannonballed off the Muntjac’s sides into the flat green sea. After a suitable interval for goofing off Eliot mustered them on the shore and sent them out in teams to find fresh water, gather wood for