The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [117]
He wiggled his toes in the hot sand and watched the weird moire optical effects that the miniature sand avalanches created. They went to bed that night hardly having explored more than the thin crescent of island they’d already seen. Tomorrow they would strike inland, into the forest and up into the hills.
Quentin woke early. The sun wasn’t even up yet, though there was a gray blur of predawn to the east. He wondered what happened out there, in the extreme east. The rules were different in Fillory. For all he knew the world was flat, and the sun ran on tracks.
Everything was gray: the sand, the trees, the sea. Deep red embers smoldered under the gray ashes of the bonfires. It was warm out. The sleepers on the beach looked as though they had fallen there from a great height. Poppy had kicked off her blanket—she slept with her arms crossed over her chest, like a knight on a tomb.
He would have gone back to sleep, but he was dying for a piss. He got up and jogged to the top of the dune and down the other side. It didn’t seem quite far enough for hygienic purposes, so he went one farther, and at that point he figured he might as well get as far as the field and pee there.
It was undeniably a vulnerable feeling, as he let fly into the tall grass, but the morning was as still as a painting, and they hadn’t been completely stupid about it. Anybody who knew the proper reveal spells—meaning almost no one—would have seen a gossamer-thin line of magical force, pale blue in color, looped along the edge of the forest like a trip wire. They’d set it up the day before. It wouldn’t hurt anybody who walked into it, not permanently, but the magicians would know they were there, and they wouldn’t be walking anymore. They’d be lucky if they were conscious. They’d already caught a wild pig that way.
Even the insects were hushed. Quentin sneezed—he was mildly allergic to some local plant—and wiped his eyes. On the far side of the meadow something slipped into the forest. It went just as his eye began to track it—it must have been standing there, stock-still, watching him while he pissed. He got an impression of something large, the size of a big boar maybe.
Quentin fastened his trousers—zippers were foreign to Fillory, and so far impossible to reverse-engineer, you just couldn’t explain them to the dwarves—and walked across the meadow to where the animal had been. Standing just on the near side of the blue line, he peered in among the trees. They were thick enough that it was still full night in the forest. Still, he caught the faintest shadow of a pair of heavy animal haunches receding into it.
Is this it? Is it starting? Carefully, like he was stepping over an electric fence, he put one leg over the invisible blue line, then the other, and walked into the forest. He was pretty sure he knew Who he was chasing even before He was fully in view.
“Hey, Ember,” he called. “Ember! Wait up!”
The god looked at him impassively over His shoulder, then continued to trot.
“Oh, come on.”
The ram-god had not been seen in Fillory since the Brakebills took the thrones, or not as far as Quentin knew. He looked fully recovered from the beating He’d taken from Martin Chatwin. Even His hind leg, which had been crippled the last time Quentin saw Him, was restored and could take His weight without a limp.
Quentin had complicated feelings about Ember. He wasn’t like Ember was in the books. Quentin was still angry that