The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [69]
He could have used someone stable to hang on to right now, but as it happened, through no particular fault of her own, Julia was not a person one could hang on to. She needed one of those warning decals that they put on airplane parts: NO STEP. He would have to be that person, the stable, reliable person, the one who had his shit together, for both of them. They could either do this together or separately, except they had to do this together, because he was out of leads and she was very nearly out of her mind. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous role—it wasn’t the Bingle role—but it was his role. It was time he accepted it.
Though so far she’d been a lot more help than he had. When he got back to the table at the café she had undergone yet another unexpected transformation. She was smiling.
“You look happy.” He sat down. “Maybe you should slap me more often.”
“Maybe I should,” she said. She sipped her coffee. “This is good.”
“The coffee.”
“I had forgotten how good it can be.” She turned her pale face into the light and closed her eyes, like a cat sunning herself. “Did you ever miss it? Being here?”
“I honestly never did.”
“Me neither. Not until now. I had forgotten.”
Warren had written the address on a blue Post-it, which Julia had kept clutched in her fist all the way from Richmond. Now they pored over the city map together, like all the other tourists in the square were doing, until they’d figured out where they were and where they were going. Their destination was in a neighborhood called Dorsoduro, on a street a block off the Grand Canal. Not far. A bridge crossing away.
Quentin guessed it was probably only around nine or ten at night by their internal clocks, but it was midafternoon in Venice, and he felt like they’d been up for days. It was hot in the square but cool up on the bridge, in the seaborne jet stream that blew down the Grand Canal, so they stopped there to orient themselves. There were no cars in Venice, or not in this part anyway. The bridge was a wooden footbridge, disappointingly modern. It would be a hundred years at least until it started looking like it belonged in Venice.
Beneath them oily black gondolas poled along, spinning off miniature spiral whirlpools after them, and sturdy vaporetti chugged, and long thin barges glided, roiling the green water behind them into milky smoothness. Debauched, listing palazzi lined the canal, all tiles and terraces and colonnades. Venice was the only city he’d ever seen that looked the same in real life as it did in pictures. It was consoling that something in this world met expectations. The one factoid Quentin remembered about the Grand Canal was that after Byron was done screwing his mistresses he used to like to swim home along it, carrying a lighted torch in one hand so that boats wouldn’t run him over.
He wondered what was happening in Fillory. Would they wait around on After Island for them? Hold an investigation? Put the locals to the sword? Or would they go back to Whitespire? The truth was, whatever was going to happen had probably already happened. Weeks could have gone by already, or years, you never knew how the time difference would work. He could feel Fillory floating away from him, into its future, leaving him behind. Hell must have broken loose when they vanished, but life would go on, they’d get back to normal. Right now Janet and Eliot could be growing old without him. They’d miss him but they’d live. Quentin, king of Fillory, needed Fillory more than Fillory needed him.
In Dorsoduro the streets were narrow and quiet. It was less like a stage set and more like a real city than the part they’d come from—people actually seemed to live and work here, they weren’t just putting on a show for the tourists. As much as Quentin wanted to hurry through