The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [42]
“I don’t understand this, Julia.” The anger was gone. He kept revising how much trouble Julia was having, and every time he did he revised it upward. “Help me understand. You’re human. Why would you forget that? How would you?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. Then she turned those black eyes on him. “I’m losing it. It’s losing me. It’s going away.”
“What is? What happened to you, Julia? Do you need to go back to Earth?”
“No!” she said sharply. “I’m not going back there. Not ever.”
The idea seemed to frighten her.
“But you remember Brooklyn, right? Where we’re from? And James, and high school, and all that?”
“Remembering.” Her delicate mouth quirked again, bitterly. She spoke in something like her old voice, with contractions and everything. “That’s always been my problem, hasn’t it. I remembered Brakebills. Couldn’t forget it.”
Quentin remembered her remembering. She’d failed the entrance exam at Brakebills, which he’d passed, and she was supposed to forget about it afterward so the school would stay secret. They’d cast spells on her to make sure. But the spells hadn’t held, and she hadn’t forgotten.
But it had brought her here, he reminded himself. To a beautiful ship on a magical ocean. It had made her a queen of a secret world. The path was crooked, but it led to a happy ending, right? It was dawning on him that Fillory was his happy ending, but it might not be Julia’s. She needed something else. She was still out there on the crooked path, and night was coming on.
“Do you wish you hadn’t remembered Brakebills? Do you wish you’d stayed in Brooklyn?”
“Sometimes.” She folded her arms and leaned back against the wall of her cabin in a way that couldn’t have been comfortable. “Quentin, why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t you rescue me, when I came to you for help that day in Chesterton?”
It was a fair question. It’s not like he’d never asked himself that before. He’d even come up with some good answers.
“I couldn’t, Julia. It wasn’t my choice. You know that. I couldn’t get you into Brakebills, I barely got myself in.”
“But you could have come to see me. Showed me what you knew.”
“They would have expelled me.”
“Then after you graduated—”
“Why are we still talking about this now, Julia?” Knowing he was on shaky ground, Quentin counterattacked. Your best defense is a good offense. “Look, you asked me to tell them about you. I did what you asked. I told them. I thought they’d found you and wiped your memory! That’s what they always do.”
“But they didn’t. They couldn’t find me. By the time they came looking for me I was long gone. Into thin air.” She snapped her fingers. “Like magic.”
“And anyway, Julia, how was it supposed to work? What, you were going to be the sorcerer’s apprentice, like Mickey Mouse? And how do you think I felt about it? You didn’t used to give a shit about me, then suddenly I’m Spelly McSpell and you’re all over me. That’s just not how it works.”
“I gave a shit about you, I just didn’t want to sleep with you. God!” She rounded on him in the narrow space. She’d been leaning the stool back on two legs, and now it clunked back down onto four. “Though by the way, I would have, if you’d just given me what I needed.”
“Well, you got it anyway, didn’t you?”
“Oh, I sure did. I got it and a whole lot more. You shouldn’t be surprised about any of this, you of all people. You abandoned me out there in the real world, without magic! Everything that happened to me started with you! You want to know what it was? I’ll tell you. But not until you’ve earned it.”
A heavy silence hung in the room. Outside night was falling hard on the stone-colored waves, and her little window was splashed with seawater.
“I never wanted this for you, Julia. Whatever it is. I’m sorry.”
He had to say it, and it was true. But it wasn’t the only truth. There were other truths in there that weren’t as attractive. Such as: he’d been angry at Julia. He’d been her lapdog in high school,