The Magician King by Lev Grossman Page A

Quentin poured himself more rum from a decanter. Not that he needed it, but who cared. He wondered if they’d solved the mystery of Jollyby’s death yet.
    “It’s on After. The next island farther out.”
    “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not following. What’s where?”
    “There’s an island farther out from here, called After. Two days’ sail, maybe three. I’ve never been there. But that’s where the key is.”
    “The key. You must be joking.”
    “Am I laughing?” Was she? She gave him a funny half smile.
    “I’m thinking this is a metaphorical key. The key to life. It’s a piece of paper that says ‘haste makes waste’ or ‘early to bed early to rise.’”
    “No, Quentin, it’s a real key. Made of gold. Teeth and everything. Very magical, or that’s what people say.”
    Quentin stared at the bottom of his glass. He needed to be thinking now, but he’d taken steps to disable his thinking apparatus. Too late. Haste makes waste.
    “Who makes a key out of gold?” he said. “It makes no sense. It would be too soft. It would get bent all the time.”
    “You’d certainly have to be careful where you stuck it.”
    Quentin’s face felt hot. Thank God the night was cooling off, finally, and a night wind was rising in the trees around the embassy.
    “So there’s a magic golden key a couple of days’ sail away from here. Why haven’t you gone and gotten it yourself?”
    “I don’t know, Quentin. Maybe I haven’t got any magic locks.”
    “It never occurred to me that the key might be real.”
    It was tempting. It was more than that: it was a big buzzing neon sign in the darkness that read ADVENTURELAND. He could feel the pull of it, from out over the horizon. The Outer Island was a bust, a red herring, but that just meant he hadn’t gone far enough.
    Elaine sat forward on the couch, looking more sober and cogent than he felt. Probably she was used to this rum stuff. He wondered what it might be like to kiss her. He wondered what it might be like to get into bed with her. They were all alone on a sweaty tropical night. The moon was up. Though if he’d been serious about that he probably should have stopped drinking a little sooner. And now that he did think about it, he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to kiss those thin, smiling lips.
    “Will you let me tell you something, Quentin?” she said. “I would think very hard about whether you want to look for the key. This island is a pretty safe place as islands go, but it’s the jumping-off point. This is the end of Fillory, Quentin.
    “Out there”—she pointed out to sea, past the Muntjac ’s cozy hurricane lamps, past the faint black-on-blue outlines of the palm trees on the rim of the bay, where the hushing of distant breakers came from—“that’s not Fillory. Your kingdom ends here. Here you’re a king, you’re all-powerful. You’re not king of any of that. Out there you’re just Quentin. Are you sure that’s going to be enough?”
    When she said it, he saw what she meant. They were on the very rim of something, the lip. The edge of that meadow in the forest, where Jollyby died. The sill of his office window, when Eliot and the others had come to fetch him on Earth. Here he was powerful. There, he didn’t know what he was.
    “Of course I’m not sure,” he said. “That’s why you go. To find out if it’s enough. You just have to be sure you want to find out.”
    “Yes, you do, Your Highness,” Elaine said. “Yes, you do.”
     
     
    Quentin was the last one to bed that night and the last one up in the morning. His sense of time had gotten pleasantly elastic in Fillory, since he wasn’t constantly being assaulted with blinking digital clocks here the way he was in the real world, but it was late enough that the sun was already scorching. Late enough for him to feel the shame that comes with hearing other people going about their business while he was still weakly tangled up in his sweaty sheets. His room was airy and