She closed her eyes and began to recite. Quentin could see it all in Alice’s face, everything they’d been through, everything they’d done to each other, everything they’d gotten past. She was letting it all come out. It was a big spell, Renaissance, very academic magic. Big energies. He couldn’t imagine what good it would do, but a moment later he realized the spell wasn’t the point. The side effects were the point.
He began scratching his way toward her, anything he could do to get closer. He didn’t care if it killed him.
“No!” he shouted. “No!”
The blue fire began in her fingertips and spread, inexorably, through her hands and up her wrists. It lit up her face. Alice opened her eyes again. She regarded it with fascination.
“I’m on fire,” she said, almost in her normal voice. “I didn’t think—I’m burning.” And then in a rising shriek that could have been agony or could have been ecstasy: “I’m burning! Oh, God! Oh, Quentin, I’m burning! It’s burning me!”
Martin halted his slow advance to observe as Alice became a
The fire left behind it a new Alice, one that was smaller and made of something like blue glowing glass, fresh and hot from the furnace. The process flooded the cavern with blue light. Even before the transformation was complete Alice had left the ground. She was pure fire now, her face full of that special madness belonging to things that are neither living nor dead. She floated above the floor as easily as if she were floating in a swimming pool.
The spirit that had replaced Alice, the
She was not Alice. She was a righteous destroying angel. She was blue and nude and wore an expression of irrepressible hilarity.
Quentin had stopped breathing. For a moment Alice hovered before the Beast, incandescent with anticipation. At the last instant he appeared to sense that the odds had shifted and began a step backward, then he bolted in a blur. But even then he was too slow. The angel had him by his gray, conservatively cut hair. Bracing her other hand on his shoulder, she tore Martin Chatwin’s head off his neck with a crisp, dry ripping sound.
All of this action had become too exhausting for Quentin to watch. He clung to it like a faltering radio signal, but it was so hard to maintain clear reception. He rolled languorously over onto his back.
His mind had become a loopy parody of itself, stretched thin as taffy, translucent as cellophane. Something unspeakable had happened, but he couldn’t keep hold of it. Somehow the world as he knew it was no longer there. He’d managed to find a reasonably soft, sandy patch of floor to recline on—it was thoughtful of Martin, really, to have brought them to a room where the sand was so deliciously fine and cool. Although it was a shame that this clean white sand was now almost entirely saturated with blood, his and Penny’s. He wondered if Penny was still alive. He wondered if it would be at all possible to pass out. He wanted to fall asleep and never wake up.
Quentin heard the scuff of a fine leather shoe, and Eliot loomed into the patch of ceiling directly above him, then passed by.
From somewhere ambiguous in space and time, Ember’s voice reached Quentin. Not dead yet, he thought. Tough bastard. Or maybe he was just imagining it.
“You have won,” the ram’s voice bleated from the shadows. “Take your prize, hero.”
Eliot picked up the golden crown of the High King of Fillory. With an inarticulate cry he threw it like a discus off into the darkness.
The last dream was broken. Quentin either fainted or died, he didn’t know which.
Quentin woke up in a beautiful white room. For a second—or was it an hour? a week?—he thought it was his room in Brakebills South, that he was back in Antarctica. But then he saw that the window was open and heavy green curtains were puffing in, and out, and in again with the coming and going of a warm summer wind. So definitely not Antarctica.
