The check arrived, and Quentin charged the astronomical sum to his corporate card. In the restaurant’s foyer they were both so drunk that they had to help each other into their raincoats—it had been pissing rain all day. There was no question of going back to the office. He was in no shape for that, and anyway it was already getting dark. It had been a very long lunch.
Outside under the awning they hesitated. For a moment Emily Greenstreet’s funny, flat mouth came unexpectedly close to his.
“Have dinner with me tonight.” Her gaze was disarmingly direct. “Come to my apartment. I’ll cook for you.”
“Can’t do it tonight,” he said blurrily. “I’m sorry. Next time maybe.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Listen, Quentin. I know you think you’re not ready for this—”
“I know I’m not ready.”
“—but you’ll
Her kindness was the most touching thing he’d seen since he left Brakebills. And he hadn’t had sex, good God, since the time he’d slept with Janet. It would be so easy to go with her.
But he didn’t. Even as they stood there he felt something tingle in his fingertips, under his fingernails, some residue left by the thousands of spells that had flowed through them over the years. He could still feel them there, the hot white sparks that had once come streaming so freely from his hands. She was wrong: blaming magic for Alice’s death wasn’t going to help him. It was too easy, and he’d had enough of doing things the easy way. It was all well and good for Emily Greenstreet to forgive him, but people were responsible for Alice’s death. Jane Chatwin was, and Quentin was, and so was Alice herself. And people would have to atone for it.
In that instant he looked at Emily Greenstreet and saw a lost soul, alone in a howling wasteland, not so different from the way her one-time lover Professor Mayakovsky had looked standing alone at the South Pole. He wasn’t ready to join her there. But where else could he go? What would Alice have done?
Another month went by, and it was November, and Quentin was sitting in his corner office staring out the window. The building across the street was considerably shorter than the Grunnings Hunsucker Swann building, so he had a clear view of its rooftop, which consisted of a neat beige gravel walkway running around a gray grid of massive, complicated air-conditioning and heating units. With the coming of the bitter late fall weather the air-conditioning had gone silent and the heaters had sprung into life, and huge nebulae of steam curled off them in abstract whorls: hypnotic, silent, slowly turning shapes that never stopped and never repeated themselves. Smoke signals sent by no one, to no one, signifying nothing. Lately Quentin spent a lot of time watching them. His assistant had quietly given up attempting to schedule appointments for him.
All at once, and with no warning, the tinted floor-to-ceiling window that made up one entire wall of Quentin’s office shattered and burst inward. Quentin’s ultra-modern, narrow-wale Venetian blinds went crazily askew. Cold air and raw unfiltered sunlight came flooding in. Something small, round, and very heavy rolled across the carpet and bumped into his shoe.
He looked down at it. It was a bluish marble sphere: the stone globe they used to use to start a welters match.
Three people were floating in midair outside his window, thirty stories up.
Janet looked older somehow, which of course she was, but there was something else different about her. Her eyes, the irises, radiated a seething violet mystical energy like nothing Quentin had ever seen before. She wore a tight black leather bustier that she was in imminent danger of spilling out of. Silver stars were falling all around her.
Eliot had acquired a pair of immense white feathery wings somewhere that spread out behind him, with which he hovered on an intangible wind. On his head was the golden crown of Fillory that Quentin had last seen in Ember’s underground chamber. Between Janet and Eliot, her arms wrapped in black silk, floated a tall, painfully skinny woman with long wavy black hair that undulated in the air as if she were underwater.
“Hello, Quentin,” Eliot said.
“Hi,” Janet said.
The other woman didn’t say anything. Neither did Quentin.
“We’re going back to Fillory,” Janet said, “and we need another king. Two kings, two queens.”
“You can’t hide forever, Quentin. Come with us.”
With the tinted window gone and the afternoon sunlight pouring into his office, Quentin couldn’t read his monitor anymore. The climate control was howling trying to fight off the cold air. Somewhere in the building an alarm went off.
“It could work this time,” Eliot said. “With Martin gone. And besides, we never figured out what your Discipline was. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Quentin stared at them. It was a few seconds before he found his voice.
