The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [47]
“I shall never see Fillory again.”
In spite of himself Quentin felt a chill. He didn’t like the feeling. He was chilly enough as it was.
After Island was a low strip of gray rocks and thin grass flocked with sheep. If the Outer Island was a tropical paradise, After could have passed for a stray member of the Outer Hebrides.
They circled it, hugging the shore, until they found a harbor and dropped anchor. A couple of rain-ravaged fishing boats were moored there, and a handful of empty buoys suggested that more were out to sea. It was a hell of a dreary spot. A more enterprising king might have tried to claim it for Fillory, Quentin supposed, except that it didn’t really seem worth it. Not exactly the jewel in the crown.
There was no wharf, and the bay was crowded with surly breakers. They barely managed to get the launch in past the surf without swamping. Quentin jumped out, wetting himself to the waist, and wallowed up onto the rocky beach. A couple of fishermen watched them, smoking and mending a vast tangled net that was stretched out around them on the shale. They had the brick-red complexions of lifelong outdoorsmen, and they shared the same thickheaded look. They didn’t seem to have enough forehead—their hairlines were pulled down too low over their eyebrows. Quentin would have put their age at anything between thirty and sixty.
“Ahoy there,” he said.
They nodded at him and grunted. One of them touched his cap. Over a few minutes’ parley the friendly one was persuaded to divulge the general direction of the nearest and probably only town. Quentin, Bingle, and Benedict thanked the men and slogged their way up the beach through the cold white sand scalloped with black tide marks. Julia trailed silently behind them. Quentin had tried to persuade her to stay on board, but she insisted. Whatever else was going on with her, she was still up for a party.
“You know what I’m waiting for on this trip?” Quentin said. “I’m not waiting for somebody to be happy to see us. I just want someone to look surprised to see us.”
The weather deepened to a light wuthering rain. Quentin’s wet pants chafed. The sand gave way to dunes capped with saw grass and then to a path: grassy sand, then sandy grass, then just grass. They tramped through humpy, unfenced meadows and low hills, past a lost, orphaned well. He tried to summon a heroic feeling, but the setting wasn’t especially conducive. It reminded him of nothing so much as walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn in the freezing rain with James and Julia on the day he took his Brakebills exam. In olden times there was a boy, young and strong and brave-o . . .
The town, once they found it, was a thoroughly medieval affair of stone cottages, thatched roofs, and mud streets. Its most marked characteristic was the thorough lack of interest the locals showed in the oddly dressed strangers in their midst. A half dozen of them were sitting at an outdoor table in front of a pub. They were eating sandwiches and drinking beer out of metal tankards in the face of weather Quentin would have made it a major priority to get out of.
“Hi,” he said.
Chorus of grunts.
“I’m Quentin. I’m from Fillory. We’ve come to your island in search of a key.” He glanced at the others and coughed once. It was pretty much impossible to do this without sounding like he was reciting a Monty Python sketch. “Do you know anything about that? A magic key? Made of gold?”
They looked at each other and nodded: agreed, we all know what he’s talking about. They shared a family resemblance. They could all have been brothers.
“Aye, we know the one you mean,” one of them said—a large, brutallooking man encased in a huge woolly coat. His hand on his knee was like a piece of pink granite. “It’s down t’road.”
“Down the road,” Quentin repeated.
Right. Of course. The golden key is down the road. Where else would it be? He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.
“Aye, we know it.” He jerked