The Magicians - Lev Grossman [191]
The envelopes were thick and made of the coarse bleached-white paper the centaurs made. On the first his name was written in an elegant calligraphic handwriting that Quentin recognized as Eliot’s. His vision swam; he had to sit down.
Inside it was a note. It was rolled around the flattened, dehydrated remains of what was once a single Merit Ultra Light cigarette, and it read as follows:
DEAR Q,
HELL OF A THING GETTING YOU OUT OF THAT DUNGEON. RICHARD SHOWED UP, FINALLY, FOR WHICH I SUPPOSE WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL, THOUGH G-D KNOWS HE DOESN’T MAKE IT EASY.
WE WANTED TO STAY, Q, BUT IT WAS HARD, AND GETTING HARDER EVERY DAY. THE CENTAURS SAID IT WASN’T WORKING. BUT IF YOU’RE READING THIS THEN YOU WOKE UP AFTER ALL. I’M SORRY ABOUT EVERYTHING. I KNOW YOU ARE TOO. I KNOW I SAID I DIDN’T NEED A FAMILY TO BECOME WHO I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE, BUT IT TURNED OUT THAT I DID. AND IT WAS YOU.
WE’LL MEET AGAIN.
—E
The other envelope contained a notebook. It was thick and old-looking and squashed around the corners. Quentin recognized it instantly, even though he hadn’t seen it since a chilly November afternoon six years ago.
With a cold, clear mind he sat down on his bed and opened The Magicians.
The book was disappointingly short, maybe fifty handwritten pages, some of them smudged and water-damaged, and it was not written in Christopher Plover’s usual plain, simple, open-hearted prose. It was cruder, funnier, more arch, and it showed signs of having been scribbled in haste, with a generous assortment of misspellings and missing words. This was because it wasn’t written by Christopher Plover at all. It was—the author explained in the first paragraph—the first book of Fillory and Further by somebody who had actually been there. That person was Jane Chatwin.
The story of The Magicians picked up immediately after the end of The Wandering Dune, after Jane, the youngest, and her sister Helen (“that dear, self-righteous busybody”) quarreled over Helen’s hiding of the magic buttons that could take them to Fillory. Having failed to unearth them herself, Jane was forced to wait, but no further invitations to Fillory arrived. She and her siblings seemed fated to live out the rest of their lives on Earth as ordinary children. She supposed it was all right—after all, most children never got to go to Fillory at all—but it hardly seemed fair. The others had all gone to Fillory at least twice, and she’d only gotten to go once.
And there was the matter of Martin: he was still missing after all this time. Their parents had long since given up hope, but the children hadn’t. At night Jane and the other little Chatwins crept into each other’s bedrooms and whispered about him, wondering what adventures he was getting up to in Fillory, and when he would finally come home to them, as they knew he one day would.
Years passed. Jane was thirteen, no longer a girl, as old as Martin was when he’d disappeared, when the call finally came. She was visited by a cooperative and industrious hedgehog named Prickleplump, who helped her recover an old cigar box containing the buttons from the old dry well down which Helen had dropped it. She could have enlisted one of the others to come with her, but instead Jane returned to Fillory alone, by way of the City, the only Chatwin ever to enter the other world without a sibling to keep her company.
She found Fillory beset by a powerful wind. It blew and blew and never stopped blowing. At first it was amusing, and everybody flew kites, and a craze for flowy clothing that billowed out on the breeze swept through the royal court at Whitespire. But over time the wind became relentless. The birds were exhausted from struggling with it, and everybody’s hair was getting tangled. The leaves were being stripped from the forest, and the trees were complaining. Even when you went inside and closed the door you could still hear it groaning,