The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [92]
“Is that—didn’t King Arthur live there?” Quentin said weakly.
“King Arthur lived in Camelot. But he was conceived at Tintagel, supposedly. It’s a castle in Cornwall.”
“Fuck it,” Josh said. “Poppy’s right, let’s go there.”
It was amazing. Quentin had never met a magician like Poppy. How could someone so utterly literal-minded, so resolutely uninterested in anything beyond mundane reality, work magic?
“Yes, but you see,” he said, “the fact is, King Arthur probably wasn’t conceived at Tintagel. Because he probably didn’t exist. Or if he did exist he was probably some depressing Pictish warlord who was always killing people and breaking them on the wheel and raping their widows. He probably died of the plague at thirty-two. See, that’s my problem with this world, if you really want to know. I’m pretty sure that when you say that King Arthur was ‘real,’ you don’t mean King Arthur like in the books. You don’t actually mean the good King Arthur.
“Whereas, in Fillory—and feel free to find this hilarious, Poppy, but it’s true—there are actual real kings who aren’t bullshit. And I’m one of them. Plus there are unicorns and pegasi and elves and dwarves and all that.”
He could have added that some very bad things were real in Fillory that weren’t real here. But that wouldn’t have strengthened his argument.
“There are not elves,” Julia said.
“Whatever! That’s not the point! The point is, I could pretend I don’t have a choice, and just live here my whole life. I could even go live in Tintagel. But I do have a choice, and I only have one life, and if it’s all right with you I’m going to spend it in Fillory, in my castle, chilling with dwarves and sleeping on pegasus feathers.”
“Because it’s easier,” Poppy said. “And why not do the easiest possible thing? Because isn’t that always the best thing?”
“Yes, why not? Why not?”
Quentin had absolutely no idea why Poppy aggravated him so much, and so efficiently, with such great precision. And he didn’t know why he sounded so much like Benedict right now either.
“All right already,” Josh said. “Stop. You live here. You live in Fillory. Everybody’s happy.”
“Sure,” Poppy chirped.
God, Quentin thought. It’s like Janet all over again.
They assembled two hours later in the narrow street behind the palazzo. The building was too heavily warded to cast a portal inside it.
“I thought maybe we could do it down there.” Josh peered doubtfully down the street. “There’s one of those tiny Venetian micro-alleys down there. Nobody ever uses it.”
Nobody else had a better suggestion. Quentin felt shifty—it was like they were looking for a place to shoot up, or have sex outside. Josh led them twenty yards down the street, which itself wasn’t much more than an alley, then cut left into a gap between buildings. There was barely room for two people to walk next to each other. At the end of the alley was a bright ribbon of water and sunlight: the Grand Canal. It was deserted, but Josh hadn’t been completely right about nobody ever using the alley, because somebody had definitely used it as a urinal not too long ago.
It reminded Quentin of when he used to catch a portal back to Brakebills at the end of summer. Usually they’d send him down some random local alley and put the portal at the end. The thought of it ignited a hot coal of nostalgia in his chest, for a time when he didn’t know better.
“Let me just see how much of this I remember . . .”
Josh pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, on which he’d scribbled neat columns of coordinates and vectors. Poppy, who was taller than him, kibitzed over his shoulder.
“See, it’s not direct,” he said, “but there’s a junction you can use, it’s out in the English Channel somewhere.”
“Why don’t you go through Belfast?” Poppy said. “Everybody does. Then you double back south. It’s actually shorter in astral geometry.”
“Nah,