The Magicians - Lev Grossman [198]
It had been three days since Quentin had spoken to anybody.
“What now,” he said hoarsely.
“Wishes, of course. You get three.”
“My friend Penny lost his hands. Fix them.”
The stag’s eyes defocused momentarily in thought.
“I cannot. I am sorry. He is either dead or not in this world.”
The sun was just beginning to come up over the dark, massed fir forest. Quentin took a deep breath. The cold air smelled fresh and turpentiney.
“Alice. She turned into some kind of spirit. A niffin. Bring her back.”
“Again I cannot.”
“What do you mean you can’t? It’s a wish.”
“I don’t make the rules,” the Questing Beast said. It lapped at the blood that still trickled down its thigh. “You don’t like it, find some other magic stag and shoot it instead.”
“I wish that the rules were different.”
The stag rolled its eyes. “No. And I’m counting those three together as your first wish. What’s number two?”
Quentin sighed. He hadn’t really allowed himself to hope.
“Pay off my crew. Double what I promised them.”
“Done,” the Questing Beast replied.
“That’s ten times their base salary, since I already quintupled it.”
“I said ‘done,’ didn’t I? What’s number three?”
Years ago Quentin had worked out exactly what he would wish for if anybody ever gave him the chance. He would wish to travel to Fillory and to be allowed to stay there forever. But that was years ago.
“Send me home,” he said.
The Questing Beast closed its round brown eyes gravely, then opened them. It dipped its antlers toward him.
“Done,” it said.
Quentin supposed he could have been more specific. By rights the Questing Beast could have sent him back to Brooklyn, or to his parents’ house in Chesterton, or to Brakebills, or even to the house upstate. But the stag went the literal way with it, and Quentin wound up in front of his last semipermanent residence, the apartment building in Tribeca that he’d shared with Alice. Nobody noticed as he abruptly came into being in the middle of the sidewalk in the late morning of what appeared to be an early-summer day. He walked away quickly. He couldn’t even look at their old doorway. He left his bow and arrows in a trash can.
It was a shock to suddenly be surrounded by so many of his fellow human beings again at such close quarters. Their mottled skins and flawed physiognomies and preening vanities were less easy to ignore. Maybe some of that centaur snobbery had rubbed off on him. A revolting stew of fragrances both organic and inorganic invaded his nose. The front page of a newspaper, acquired at the corner deli, informed him that he’d been gone from Earth for a little over two years.
He would have to call his parents. Fogg would have kept them from fretting too much, but still. It almost made him smile to think of seeing them now. What the hell would they say about his hair? Soon, but not yet. He walked around, getting reacclimated. The spells involved in retrieving cash from an ATM were child’s play now. He got a shave and a haircut and bought some clothes that weren’t made by centaurs and hence didn’t look like a Renaissance Faire costume. He babied himself. He had lunch at a fancy steakhouse and nearly died with pleasure. By three o’clock he was drinking Moscow Mules in a long, dark, empty basement bar in Chinatown where he used to go with the Physical Kids.
It had been a long time since he’d drunk alcohol. It had a dangerous thawing effect on his frozen brain. The ice that kept his feelings of guilt and sorrow under control creaked and groaned. But he kept on with it, and soon a deep, pure, luxurious sadness came over him, as heady and decadent as a drug. The place started filling up at five. By six the after-work drinkers were jostling Quentin at the bar. He could see that the light falling down the stairs out front had changed. He was on his way out when he noticed a slender, pretty girl with blond curls nuzzling a man who looked like an underwear model in a corner booth. Quentin didn’t know the underwear model from Adam, but the pretty girl was definitely Anaïs.
It wasn’t the reunion he