The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [8]
“It’s not a bong, Quentin,” Janet said.
“No,” Julia said. “Do not ask it.”
But Jollyby was enjoying his moment as the center of royal attention.
“Is that true, you useless animal?” he said. He reversed his grip on the Seeing Hare and hoisted it up so that he and the hare were nose to nose.
It gave up kicking and hung down limp, its eyes blank with panic. It was an impressive beast, three feet long from its twitching nose to its tail, with a fine gray-brown coat the color of dry grass in winter. It wasn’t cute. This was not a tame hare, a magician’s rabbit. It was a wild animal.
“What do you see then, eh?” Jollyby shook it, as if this were all its idea and therefore its fault. “What do you see?”
The Seeing Hare’s eyes focused. It looked directly at Quentin. It bared its huge orange incisors.
“Death,” it rasped.
They all stood there for a second. It didn’t seem scary so much as inappropriate, like somebody had made a dirty joke at a child’s birthday party.
Then Jollyby frowned and licked his lips, and Quentin saw blood in his teeth. He coughed once, experimentally, as if he were just trying it out, and then his head lolled forward. The hare dropped from his nerveless fingers and shot away across the grass like a rocket.
Jollyby’s corpse fell forward onto the grass.
“Death and destruction!” the hare called out as it ran, in case it hadn’t made itself clear before. “Disappointment and despair!”
CHAPTER 2
There was a special room in Castle Whitespire where the kings and queens met. That was another thing about being a king: everything you had was made specially for you.
It was a marvelous room. It was square, the top of a square tower, with four windows facing in four directions. The tower turned, very slowly, as some of the towers in the castle did—Castle Whitespire was built on complicated foundations of enormous brass clockwork, cleverly designed by the dwarves, who were absolute geniuses at that kind of thing. The tower completed one rotation every day. The movement was almost imperceptible.
In the center of the room was a special square table with four chairs—they were thrones, or thronelike, but made by someone who had the knack, pretty rare in Quentin’s experience, of making chairs that looked like thrones but were also reasonably comfortable to sit in. The table was painted with a map of Fillory, sealed under many layers of lacquer, and at each of the four seats, pieced into the wood, were the names of the rulers who’d sat there along with little devices appropriate to said rulers. Quentin got an image of the White Stag, and the vanquished Martin Chatwin, and a deck of playing cards. Eliot’s place was the most elaborately embellished, as befitted the High King. It was a square table, but there wasn’t any question which side was the head.
The chairs didn’t feel comfortable today. The scene of Jollyby’s death was still very clear and present in Quentin’s mind’s eye; in fact it replayed itself more or less constantly, with showings every thirty seconds or so. As Jollyby collapsed Quentin had lurched forward and caught him and eased him to the ground. He groped helplessly at Jollyby’s huge chest, as if he’d hidden his life somewhere about his person, in some secret inside pocket, and if Quentin could only find it he could give it back to him. Janet screamed: a full-throated, uncontrollable horror-movie scream that wouldn’t stop for a full fifteen seconds until Eliot grasped her shoulders and physically turned her away from Jollyby’s corpse.
At the same time the clearing filled with ghostly green light—a bleak, alien spell of Julia’s that Quentin still didn’t get the details of, or even the broad outlines of, that was intended to reveal any bad actors who might be present. It turned her eyes all black, no whites or iris at all. She was the only one who’d thought to go on the attack. But there was no one to attack.
“All right,” Eliot said. “So let’s talk about it. What do we think happened today?”
They looked at each other, feeling jittery and shell-shocked. Quentin wanted to