The Magicians - Lev Grossman [148]
Richard took out a compass but found the needle stuck, pinned down against its cardboard backing, as if Fillory’s magnetic pole were deep underground, straight down beneath their feet. He flung it away into a bush. Janet hopped up and down as she walked, her hands crammed under her armpits against the cold. Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.
They walked for twenty minutes, half an hour at most. Quentin alternately blew into his hands and withdrew them into the sleeves of his sweater. He was wide awake now, and sober, at least for the moment.
“We need to get some fauns up in this piece,” Josh said, to nobody. “Or some swordfights or whatever.”
The path meandered and then faded out. They were expending more and more effort just to push their way through the foliage. There was some internal disagreement as to whether or not there had ever been an actual path, or whether it was just a strip of thin forest, or even whether—this was Penny’s take—the trees had begun subtly, imperceptibly shifting themselves to get in their way. But before they could arrive at a consensus they came across a stream percolating through the woods.
It was a lovely little winter stream, wide and shallow and perfectly clear, twinkling and lapping along as if it were delighted to have just found this twisty channel. Wordlessly, they gathered at its edge. The rocks were capped with round dollops of snow, and the quieter eddies along the banks had iced over. A branch poking up in the middle of the stream was hung with fabulous Gothic-sculpted icy drops and buttresses all along its length. There was nothing overtly supernatural about it, but it temporarily satisfied their appetite for wonder. On Earth it would have been a charming little rill, nothing more, but the fact that they were seeing it in Fillory, in another world, possibly the first Earth beings ever to do so, made it a glittering miracle.
They had stared at it for a full minute in rapt silence before Quentin realized that right in front of them, emerging from the deepest part of the stream, was a woman’s naked head and shoulders.
“Oh my God,” he said. He took a clumsy, numb step backward, pointing. “Shit. You guys.”
It was surreal. She was almost certainly dead. The woman’s hair was dark and wet and thick with clumped ice. Her eyes—she appeared to be looking right at them—were midnight blue and didn’t move or blink, and her skin was a pale pearlescent gray. Her shoulders were bare. She looked sixteen at most. Her eyelashes were clotted with frost.
“Is she—?” Alice didn’t finish the question.
“Hey!” Janet called. “Are you all right?”
“We should help her. Get her out of there.” Quentin tried to get closer, but he slipped on a frozen rock and went in up to his knee. He scrambled back onto the bank, his foot burning with cold. The woman didn’t move. “We need rope. Get the rope, there’s rope in one of the packs.”
The water didn’t even look deep enough to submerge her that far, and Quentin actually wondered, horribly, if they were looking at a body that had been severed at the waist and then dumped in the water. Rope, what was he thinking? He was a damn magician. He dropped the pack he was rifling through and began a simple kinetic spell to lift her out.
He felt the premonitory warmth of a developing spell in his fingertips, felt the weight and tug of the body in his mind. It felt good to do magic again, to know that he could still focus despite everything. As soon as he started he realized that the Circumstances were scrambled here—different stars, different seas, different everything. Thank God it was a simple spell. The grammar was a shambles—Alice corrected him in a clipped voice as he worked. Gradually the woman rose up dripping