The Magicians - Lev Grossman [128]
So she hid them. Jane was inconsolable, understandably enough, and tore up half the property looking for them, but according to The Wandering Dune she never found them, and Plover never wrote any more books.
The Wandering Dune ends in the summer of 1917, or possibly 1918; because of the lack of real-world detail it’s impossible to date it precisely. After that the whereabouts of the buttons is unknown. But try a thought experiment, Penny suggested: How long could a box of buttons hidden by a twelve-year-old girl plausibly have stayed hidden? Ten years? Fifty? Nothing stays hidden forever. Wasn’t it possible—even inevitable—that in the decades that followed a maid or a real estate agent or another little girl would have found them again? And that from there they would have made their way onto the magical gray market?
“I always thought they were supposed to be lapel buttons,” Richard said. “Like a pin. Like ‘I Like Ike.’ ”
“Um, okay, so let’s back up for a second?” Quentin said cheerily. He was in the perfect mood for somebody, anybody besides himself, to make an ass of himself, and if that person could be Penny, and if Quentin could help him do it, then ever so much the better. “The Fillory books are fiction? Nothing you’re talking about actually happened?”
“Yes and no,” Penny said, surprisingly reasonably. “I’ll allow that much of Plover’s narrative might be fictional. Or fictionalized. But I’ve come to believe that the basic mechanics of interdimensional travel that Plover describes are quite real.”
“Really.” Quentin knew Penny well enough to know that he never bluffed, but he kept going anyway out of pigheadedness, urged on by his own inner vileness. “And what makes you think that?”
Penny regarded him with benevolent pity as he prepared the hammer blow.
“Well, I can certainly tell you that the Neitherlands are very real. I’ve spent most of the past three years there.”
No one had an answer to this. The room was silent. Quentin finally dared to glance over at Alice, but her face was a mask. It would almost have been better if she looked angry.
“I don’t know if you know this,” Penny said, “in fact I’m pretty sure you don’t, but I did most of my work at Brakebills on travel between alternate worlds. Or between planes, as we called them. Melanie and I.
“As far as we could determine it was an entirely new Discipline. Not that I was the first person ever to study the subject, but I was the first to have a special aptitude for it. My talents were so unusual that Melanie—Professor Van der Weghe—decided to pull me out of regular classes and give me my own course of study.
“The spellcraft was extremely involved, and I had to improvise a lot of it. I can tell you, a lot of what’s in the canon on this stuff is way off base. Way off base. They’re not seeing the whole picture, and the part of it they are seeing is by far the least important part. You’d think your friend Bigby would have some grasp of this stuff, but he has no idea. I was surprised, I really was. But there were still some issues I couldn’t resolve.”
“Such as,” Eliot said.
“Well, so far I’ve only been able to travel alone. I can transport my body and clothes and some small supplies, but nothing else and nobody else. Second, I can cross to the Neitherlands, but that’s it. I’m stuck there. The wider multiverse is closed to me.”
“You mean—?” said Janet. “Wait, so you’ve been to this amazing magical Interville but that’s it?” She actually looked underwhelmed. “I thought you were coming in here this badass multidimensional desperado and all.”
“No.” Penny could be defensive when he felt like he was under attack, but he was so autistically focused right now that even direct mockery bounced right off him. “My explorations have been limited to the City. It’s quite a rich environment