The Magicians - Lev Grossman [194]
“As bad as it was, as bad as it is, this is by far the best outcome I’ve ever achieved. No one ever stopped him but you and your friends, Quentin. You were the only ones. And I’m sticking with it. I can’t risk losing everything we’ve gained.”
Quentin folded his arms. Muscles were jumping in his back. He was practically vibrating with fury. “Well, then. We’ll go back all the way. To before The World in the Walls. Stop him before it all starts. Find a timeline where he doesn’t even go to Fillory.”
“I’ve tried, Quentin! I’ve tried!” She was pleading with him. “He always does! I’ve tried it a thousand times. There is no world where he doesn’t.
“I’m tired. I know you lost Alice. I lost my brother. I’m tired of fighting that thing that used to be Martin.”
Suddenly she did look very tired, and her eyes lost their focus, as if she were seeing into some other world, one she would never get to. It made it hard for him keep up his high-pressure rage. It kept bleeding away even as he stoked it.
This wasn’t over. He lunged, but she saw it coming. He was quick, but she was quicker. Maybe they’d played this scene already, in another timeline, or maybe he was just that obvious. Before he was halfway across the room she spun on her heel and threw the silver watch as hard as she could at the wall.
It was hard enough. The wall was stone, and the watch squashed like an overripe fruit. It made a sound like a bag of nickels. The delicate crystal face shattered, and tiny gears and wheels skittered away across the floor like pearls from a broken necklace.
Jane turned back to him defiantly, breathing hard. He stared down at the corpse of the broken timepiece.
“No more,” she said. “Put an end to it. It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost. I wish I could have told you more before it was too late, but I needed you too much to tell you the truth.”
In a curious gesture she placed her hands on his cheeks, drew his face down to hers, and kissed him on the forehead. The room was almost dark now. The door creaked in the quiet spring evening as she opened it.
“Try not to judge Martin too harshly,” she said from the doorway. “Plover used to diddle him whenever he could get him alone. I think that’s why he went to Fillory in the first place. Why else would he try to crawl into a grandfather clock? He was looking for somewhere to hide.”
With that she was gone.
Quentin didn’t go after her, just stared at the doorway for a long minute. When he walked over to the door to close it, pieces of the broken watch scrunched under his feet.
It just went down and down. Had he finally gotten to the bottom of it? In the last of the dying light he looked down at the notebook on the hard centaur bed. There was a note tucked into the pages, the same one the wind had snatched away from him the first time he tried to read it. But all it said was:
SURPRISE!
He sat back down. In the end he and Alice had just been bit players, extras who had the bad luck to wander into a battle scene. A brother and sister at war with each other in their nightmare nursery fantasyland. No one cared that Alice was dead, and no one cared that he wasn’t.
Now he had answers, but they weren’t doing what answers were supposed to do: they weren’t making things simpler or easier. They weren’t helping. Sitting there on his bed, he thought about Alice. And poor, stupid Penny, and miserable Eliot. And that poor bastard Martin Chatwin. He got it now, of course, finally. He’d been going about this all wrong. He should never have come here at all. He should never have fallen in love with Alice.