The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [119]
“That’s a big ask.”
“Fillory asks for what it needs. Do you, Quentin? What do you need? What do you ask for?”
The question stopped him. He was used to scolding and pseudo-Socratic interrogation from Ember, but here was a rare gem: a good question. What did he want? He’d wanted to get back to Fillory, and he’d done that. He thought he’d wanted to go back to Castle Whitespire, but now he wasn’t so sure. The terror of almost losing Fillory had been extreme, but he’d found his way back. Now he wanted to find the keys. He wanted to finish the quest. He wanted his life to be exciting and important and to mean something. And he wanted to make Julia better. He felt like he would do anything to help Julia, if he only knew what to do.
“I guess it’s like what You said,” Quentin said. “I want to be a hero.”
Ember turned away again and faced the rising sun.
“Then you will have your chance,” He said.
Quentin scrambled up onto the rocky summit and watched the dawn alongside Him. He was going to ask Ember about it, about the sun, and what it was, and what happened out there at the rim of the world, or whether Fillory even had a rim. But when he turned to ask Him he was alone on top of the hill. Ember was gone.
Just when things were getting interesting. He turned slowly, in a full circle, but there was no sign of Him. Vanished without a trace. Oh, well. Now that He was gone Quentin almost missed Him. There was something special about being in the divine presence, even when the divinity was Ember.
He stretched, standing at the top of the island, and then jumped carefully down from the rocks and began trotting back down the hill to the beach. He couldn’t wait to tell the others what had happened, though the whole thing already felt like a dream, an early morning, half-awake dream tangled up with sheets and pillows and dawn light through closed curtains, the kind you only remembered by chance hours later, for a few seconds, when you were going to sleep again at the end of the day. He wondered if anyone else was up yet. Maybe he could still go back to bed.
He should have noticed that something had changed, but he’d been distracted on the way up. He’d been practically running, and plus he’d been talking to a god. And he’d never been an especially assiduous observer of flora and fauna. He wouldn’t have noticed a spectacular beech tree or an unusual elm because he didn’t know what the difference between them was, if any.
Still, after a few minutes he began to wonder if he was coming down a different way than he’d come up, because it all seemed a little rockier than he remembered—the ratio of rocks to plants and dirt to grass wasn’t quite what it had been. He didn’t let it worry him too much, because if it worried him too much he would have to climb back up the hill and find a new way down, and that was the kind of thing he wanted to avoid. And besides, he was keeping the rising sun on his right hand, and that’s how navigation works, right? If things really went wrong he could go all the way down to the beach and cut along the coast. No way he could miss the camp that way. He still had hopes of getting back to the beach in time for breakfast.
One thing he couldn’t ignore, though, although he tried to for as long as he could, was that the shadows of things weren’t getting shorter anymore, in the usual manner of shadows cast by a rising sun. They were getting longer. Which would have meant that the orange-red stew boiling at the edge of the sky was somehow no longer a sunrise, but a sunset instead.
And it would mean he was on the wrong side of the island. But that was impossible. The strangest thing was that he didn’t even realize that somebody had hit him with a sword till after it had happened.
All he knew at first was that suddenly he’d lost his balance, and his left arm was numb.
“Shit!” he