The Questing Beast showed itself on the third night. Quentin had made camp on a low bluff overlooking a clear, spring-fed pool. Just before dawn he woke to find it standing at the water’s edge. Its reflection shivered as it lapped the cold water. He waited for a minute, on one knee. This was it. He strung his bow and slipped an arrow from his quiver. Looking down from the low bluff, with the early-morning air almost dead, it wasn’t even a difficult shot. At the moment of release he thought: I’m doing what even the Chatwins failed to do, Helen and Rupert. He didn’t feel the pleasure he thought he would. He put his shaft through the tough meat of the white stag’s muscular right thigh.
He winced. Thank God he hadn’t hit an artery. It didn’t try to flee, just sat stiffly on its haunches like an injured cat. He had the impression, from its resigned expression, that the Questing Beast had to go through this kind of thing once a century or so. The cost of doing business. Its blood looked black in the pre-dawn twilight.
It showed no fear as Quentin approached. It reached back with its supple neck and grasped the arrow firmly in its square white teeth. With a jerk the shaft came free. It spat out the arrow at Quentin’s feet.
“Hurts, that,” the Questing Beast said matter-of-factly.
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
“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.
