The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [81]
Then there was the daily late-afternoon spritz. Taken altogether it was enough to make Quentin forget for minutes at a time that once upon a time he used to be the king of a magical otherworld.
Not Julia, though. Not quite. She found him nursing his drink on the piano nobile and admiring the cityscape over its heavy stone railing. Together they looked down at the traffic on the canal, much of which consisted of tourists on boats looking up at them and wondering who they were and whether they were famous.
“You like it here,” Julia said.
“It’s amazing. I’d never even been to Italy before. I had no idea it was like this.”
“I lived in France for a while,” she said.
“You did? When did you live in France?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Was that where you learned to steal cars?”
“No.”
Having brought it up, she didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
“It is nice here,” she conceded.
“Do you want to stay here?” Quentin asked. “Do you still want to go back to Fillory?”
She set her glass down on the wide marble parapet. More whiskey, still neat. A muscle twinged in her jaw.
“I have to go back. I cannot stay here.” Before when she said this she sounded angry and desperate. Now she sounded regretful. “I must keep going. Are you coming with me?”
It made Quentin’s heart ache, to hear Julia ask him for something. Anything. She needed his help. People needing him: it was a new feeling. He was starting to like it.
“Of course I am.” It was what she’d said when he asked her to come along to the Outer Island.
She nodded, never taking her eyes off the view.
“Thank you.”
That night at five minutes to midnight Quentin was remembering that conversation and trying to hold on to that feeling as he loitered on the Ponte dell’Accademia, holding copies of Il Gazzettino and the International Herald Tribune, just to cover all the bases, and a really great, amazingly expensive raw steak, doing his very best impression of somebody who wasn’t about to jump into the Grand Canal.
After the crushing, malodorous heat of the day, the night air was surprisingly frigid. From the point of view of someone who was planning to immerse himself in it, the creamy green water of the Grand Canal looked about as enticing as glacial runoff. It also looked a lot farther away than it had looked from the banks. It also looked clean, which Quentin knew it wasn’t.
But somewhere under all that water there was a button. And a dragon. It didn’t seem real. He half-suspected Josh of having lost the button in a sofa and making up the story about the dragon because it was less embarrassing.
“This is going to be really wretched, dude,” Josh said. “You are not going to be a happy puppy in there.”
“No kidding.” He’d hoped Josh would offer to do it himself, or go in with him, but no such luck.
“You’ll get used to it,” Poppy said, hugging herself.
“Why are you here, again?” Quentin said.
“Interests of science. Plus I want to see if you’ll actually go through with it.”
It was a personal tic of Poppy’s that she never seemed to lie when other people would. It was either tactless or admirable, depending on how you looked at it.
Quentin took some deep breaths and leaned against the splintery wooden railing, which still retained some of the fading heat of the sun. Remember what’s at stake. Julia wouldn’t hesitate. She’d be over the railing like a damn Olympic hurdler. At his request they hadn’t told her they were going tonight, but slipped out after she went to bed. She would have insisted on going in.
“They hardly ever eat people,” Poppy said. “I mean like twice a century. That we know of.”
Quentin didn’t respond to this.
“How deep do you think it is?” Josh said. He dragged on a cigarette. Of the three of them he looked the most nervous.
“Twenty feet maybe,” Quentin said. “I read it on the Internet.”
“Jesus. Well, whatever you do don’t dive.”
“If I break my neck and end up paralyzed just let me drown.”
“Two minutes,” Poppy said. An empty vaporetto churned by underneath them, off duty,