The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [52]
“We’ll have to walk a couple of miles through the woods,” he said.
“That does not bother me.”
“A vision spell should reveal it. It’s veiled, but just to keep civilians out. There’s an Anasazi spell. Or Mann. Maybe just a Mann reveal.”
“I know the Anasazi.”
“Okay. Great. Then I’ll let you know when.”
Quentin kept his tone carefully neutral. Nothing made Julia angrier than the feeling that she was being condescended to by a Brakebills graduate. At least she wasn’t blaming him for getting them shunted back to Earth. Or probably she was, but she wasn’t doing it out loud.
It was a hot late August morning. The air was saturated with bronze sunlight. A mile off, at the bottom of the valley, they caught glimpses of the huge blue Hudson River. They parked at a bend in the road.
He got that it hurt her pride, and maybe something even more vital, to be dragged back to Brakebills begging for help. It didn’t change the fact that it was their first and best and possibly only option. He was not fucking staying on Earth. He wanted a quest? Now he had one. The quest was to get back to where he was when he started his goddamned quest. That ought to learn him, but good.
Before they set off Julia spent fifteen minutes on a spell that she curtly informed him would cause the car to wait an hour and then drive itself back home to Chesterton. Quentin didn’t see how that was even remotely possible, on any number of levels, but he kept his doubts to himself. If he’d thought to keep more of the glass he could have at least fixed the window, but he hadn’t, so hard cheese on whoever’s muscle car it was. He tucked two hundred dollars in twenties into the glove compartment, then they drank the rest of the Coke and climbed over the sheet-metal guardrail.
These weren’t recreational woods, meant to be hiked through and picnicked in. They hadn’t been curated and made user-friendly by helpful park rangers. They were dense, and the light was dim, and walking through them wasn’t fun. Quentin was constantly ducking his head too late to avoid being slashed across the face by a branch. Every five minutes he was convinced that he’d walked through a spiderweb, but he could never find the spider.
And he wasn’t sure what would happen if they walked into the Brakebills perimeter without knowing it. Nothing in theory, of course, but Quentin had watched Professor Sunderland lay down the barrier after the Beast attacked. He’d seen some of the things she’d ground into those powders. Any second they could be running smack into it. The idea made his face tingle. After half an hour he called a halt.
The woods were still. There was no sign of the school, but he felt it somewhere around here, as if it were hiding behind a tree waiting to jump out at him. And he imagined he could feel older tracks running through the woods too. Like Alice’s—poor cursed teenage Alice, wandering all night looking for the way in. It would have been better for her if she’d never found it. Careful what you hunt, lest you catch it.
“Let’s try it here,” he said.
Julia launched into the Anasazi spell in her rough, fierce casting style, clearing invisible layers away from the air in a square in front of her, like wiping fog off a windshield. He winced, inwardly, to watch some of her upper hand positions, but it didn’t make her castings any less forceful. Sometimes it seemed to make them more so.
He began work on the Mann instead. It was a lot easier, but it wasn’t a contest. Best to diversify.
He never finished. He heard the usually imperturbable Julia squeak and skip a step backward. Suspended in the air in front of her, in the square she’d cleared, was a face. It belonged to an older man with a goatee wearing a royal-blue tie and an appalling yellow blazer.
It was Dean Fogg, the head of Brakebills. His face was in the square because he was standing right in front of Julia.
“Soooooo,” the dean said, drawing out the vowel until he practically burst into song. “The prodigal has returned.”
Not five minutes later they were walking across the Sea, which was as lush and green and immense