The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [15]
“It came out that she had a weakness for cards, so we spent hours just drinking and playing three-handed bridge. Not talking. We didn’t know she was a magician, of course. How could we? But you could tell she was bursting with some terrible secret. And she had those things that one likes about magicians: she was disgustingly bright and rather sad and slightly askew. To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you.
“Well, you know how in the Poirot books he always goes on vacation to get away from it all, the mysteries and whatever else, only to have a murder committed on the very island he’s fled to for peace and quiet and some civilized gastronomy? It was exactly like that, except that we were fleeing magic. One night I wandered over to her bungalow around ten or eleven at night. Janet and I had had a fight, and I was looking for someone to complain about her to.
“When I passed Julia’s window I saw that she was building a fire. That was odd to begin with. The fireplaces were absolutely enormous in those bungalows, but it was the middle of summer and nobody in their right mind was using them. But Julia had a roaring blaze going. She was building it very methodically, placing the logs very carefully. She marked each log before she put it on—scraped away some of the bark with a little silver knife.
“And then as I watched . . . I don’t know how to describe it so you’ll understand. She kneeled down in front of the fire and began putting things in it. Some of the things were obviously valuable—a rare shell, an old book, a handful of gold dust. Some of them must just have been precious to her. A piece of costume jewelry. An old photograph. Each time she put one in she’d stop and wait a minute, but nothing happened, except that whatever it was burned or melted and gave off a nasty smell. I don’t know what she was waiting for, but whatever it was it never came. Meanwhile she got more and more agitated.
“I felt utterly tawdry spying on her, but I couldn’t look away. Finally she ran out of precious things, and then she started crying, and then she put herself into the fire. She crawled over the hearth and collapsed, half in and half out of the flames, sobbing her little heart out. Her legs were sticking out. It was awful to see. Her clothes went up right away, of course, and her face got black with soot, but the fire never touched her skin. She was absolutely sobbing. Her shoulders shook and shook . . .”
Eliot stood up and went to the window. He struggled with one of the little panes for a second, then he must have found a catch Quentin had never noticed because he pulled the whole window open. Quentin couldn’t see how he did it. He put his glass on the sill.
“I don’t know if you’re falling in love with her or if you just think you are or what it is you’re doing,” he said. “I suppose I can’t blame you, you always did like to make things as hard as possible on yourself. But just listen to what I’m telling you.
“That was how it all started, how we knew she was one of us. The spell was something very strong. I could hear the hum of it even over the fire, and the light in the room had gone a funny color. But so much of her magic is just impossible to parse. I knew right away she’d never been to Brakebills, because it sounded like gibberish to me, and I couldn’t get within a thousand miles of how it worked or what she was trying to do, and she never said, and I never asked.
“But if I absolutely had to guess I’d say she was attempting a summoning. I’d say she was trying to bring back something that she’d lost, or that was taken away from her, something that was very precious to her indeed. And if I had another guess, I’d have to say that it wasn’t working.”