The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [35]
“All right. We have to go soon, but we’ll wait till she gets back.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Well, we sort of do. Are you still drawing bunny-pegasi?”
“Yes.”
“You know, I think they might be hare-pegasi, not bunnies. Hares are bigger, and much fiercer.”
“They’re bunnies.”
The eternal question. Eleanor changed the subject.
“I made these for you.”
With some effort she pulled open a desk drawer—the humidity made it stick, and when it came unstuck it pulled out all the way and fell on the floor. She rummaged in it and took out some papers, four or five of them, and handed them to Quentin. They were heavily scribbled over in colored pencil.
“They’re passports,” she said, anticipating his question. “You need them if you want to leave Fillory.”
“Who said I’m leaving Fillory?”
“You need them if you’re leaving Fillory,” she said. “If you’re not you don’t need them. They’re just in case.”
And then more quietly: “You have to fold them in half yourself.”
She must have been copying from something official, because they were in their own way impressive documents. They had the Fillorian arms on the front, or a crude facsimile thereof. Inside Quentin’s—once you folded it in half—there was a picture of Quentin, more or less, with a big red smile and a golden crown on his head, and some squiggly lines representing writing. On the back were the arms of the Outer Island: a palm tree and a butterfly. She’d made one for each of them, even the sloth, whom she had never seen but had been extremely interested in. She must be bored stiff without any other kids around, Quentin thought. She must be practically raising herself.
He could relate. He was an only child too, and his parents had never paid much attention to him either. They considered their attitude toward parenting to be rather enlightened: they weren’t going to be the kind of couple whose lives revolved around their child. They gave him a lot of freedom and never asked him for much. Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.
“Thank you, Eleanor. That was very, very sweet of you.” He bent down and kissed her on her blond crown.
“It’s because you brought me cake,” she said shyly.
“I know.”
Poor moppet. Maybe when he got back to Whitespire he could start up some Fillorian equivalent of Child Social Services.
“We’ll wait till your mom comes back before we go.”
“You don’t have to.”
But he did, or he waited as long as possible. They spent the day lounging around the embassy and fishing off the dock. He made another attempt to teach Eleanor to read the palm clock-tree and was again rebuffed. Around four o’clock Quentin called it. He had Benedict take Eleanor into town—over her strident objections—to find somebody responsible to leave her with and ordered everybody else back on the freshly watered and provisioned Muntjac.
Benedict returned an hour later, haggard but victorious. They weighed anchor as the first stars appeared. Playtime was over. They set sail for Castle Whitespire.
CHAPTER 6
A funny thing happened to Julia after that business with her fake social studies paper. A magic trick, you might even call it: where once there had been only one Julia, there were now two Julias, one for each set of memories. The Julia that went with the first set, the normal set, the one where she wrote the paper and went home and had dinner, did normal Julia things. She went to school. She did her homework. She played the oboe. She finally slept with James, which she’d kind of been meaning to do anyway, but for some reason had been putting off.
But there was a second, stranger Julia growing inside the first Julia, like a parasite, or a horrible tumor. At first it was tiny, the size of a bacterium, a single cell of doubt, but it divided and divided and grew and grew. This second Julia wasn’t interested in school, or the oboe, or even James particularly. James backed up the first Julia’s story, he remembered meeting her in the library, but what did that prove? Nothing.