As soon as Penny said it, Quentin wondered why he hadn’t thought of it himself. It was so obvious. They’d be kings and queens. Of course they would. If the City was real, why not all the rest of it, even that? They could live in Castle Whitespire. Alice could be his queen.
God, he was agreeing with Penny. That was a danger sign if there ever was one.
“Huh.” Janet mulled this over, her ever-alert brain ticking over. She was actually taking it seriously, too. “Would we have to marry each other?”
“Not necessarily. The Chatwins didn’t. Then again, they were all siblings.”
“I don’t know,” said Anaïs. “It sounds like a big job, being queen. There is probably bureaucracy. Administration.”
“Lucrative though. Think of the perks.”
“If the books are even accurate,” Eliot said. “And if the thrones are vacant. That’s two big ifs. Plus there’s seven of us and only four thrones. Three people get left out.”
“I’ll tell you what we need,” Anaïs said. “We need war magic. Battle magic. Offense, defense. We need to be able to hurt people if we have to.”
Janet looked amused.
“Shit’s illegal, babe,” she said, obviously impressed despite herself. “You know that.”
“I don’t care if it is.” Anaïs shook her precious blond curls. “We need it. We have
“Did they teach you that stuff where you went?” Josh asked. He looked a little afraid of her.
“We are not so pure in Europe as you Americans, I guess.”
Penny was nodding. “Battle magic isn’t illegal in Fillory.”
“Out of the question,” Richard said crisply. “Do you realize the kind of heat you’d bring down on us? Who here besides me has dealt with the Magicians’ Court? Anybody?”
“We’re already in the shit, Richard,” Eliot said. “You think that button would be legal if the court knew about it? If you want out, get out now, but Anaïs is right. I’m not going over there with just my dick in my hand.”
“We can get a dispensation for small arms,” Richard went on primly. “There are precedents for that. I know the forms.”
“Guns?” Eliot made a sour face. “What is wrong with you? Fillory is a pristine society. Have you ever even
Quentin kept expecting Eliot to declare himself too cool for the whole Fillory project and start making snarky jokes about it, but he was turning out to be surprisingly focused and unironic about it. Quentin couldn’t remember the last time Eliot had been openly enthusiastic about anything. It was a relief to see that he could still admit that he cared about something.
“I do
“Look, Anaïs is right,” Eliot said. “We’ll work up some basic attack spells, just in case. Nothing too insane. We’ll just have a couple of aces in the hole. And we have those cacodemons in our backs, don’t forget. And the button.”
“And our dicks in our hands.” Anaïs giggled.
The next day Richard, Eliot, Janet, and Anaïs drove into Buffalo to shop for supplies; Janet, being from L.A., was the only one who had a driver’s license. Quentin, Josh, Alice, and Penny were supposed to be researching battle magic, but Alice wouldn’t speak to Quentin—he had knocked on her door that morning, but she wouldn’t come out—and the technicalities were beyond Josh, so it came down to Alice and Penny working together.
Soon the big dining room table was covered with books from Penny’s U-haul stash and sheets of butcher paper crawling with flow charts. They were deep into it. As the two biggest magic nerds of the group, Alice and Penny were completely absorbed in each other, speaking some ad hoc technical jargon they came up with on the fly, Penny scribbling reams of archaic notations and Alice nodding seriously over his shoulder and pointing. They were doing original work, building spells from scratch; it wasn’t fantastically difficult stuff, but any prior art in the area had been thoroughly suppressed.
Watching them work, Quentin was consumed with jealousy. Thank God it was Penny—anybody else and he would have been seriously suspicious. He and Josh spent the afternoon in the den with some beer and Smart Food watching cable on a flat-screen TV the size of a billboard. There had been no TV at Brakebills, or in their Manhattan apartment, and it felt exotic and forbidden.
Around five o’clock Eliot came and roused them.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re missing Penny’s big show.”
“How was Buffalo?”
“Like a vision of the apocalypse. We bought parkas and hunting knives.”
