The Magician King by Lev Grossman Page B

equatorial, with cool white linen and flung-open windows, and it was still suffocatingly hot.
    The rum, which had seemed so delightful the night before, so absolutely good and necessary, had now revealed its true nature as a hideous toxin, a drier of mouths and a ravager of brains. He cursed the earlier incarnation of himself that drank so much of it. Then he got up and went in search of water.
    There was plenty of it around. Probably there was a beautiful songbird somewhere around here that puked gallons of sparkling springwater every morning, to go with the gold beetles. He ran himself a cool bath and sat in it and sipped more water till his head felt better. You can’t feel fresher and cleaner than when you’re soaking in fresh water within sight of the ocean.
    Most of the night before was blotted out, or available to his memory only in the form of mental security-camera footage, grainy figures with blurred voices, but one thing remained bright and clear and high-definition: the golden key. She’d said it was real. He wondered what the magic was. He wondered what it opened. Had she told him, and he’d forgotten? No, that didn’t sound right. But she’d told him where it was: After Island. He needed to know more. They had a choice to make: go on, or go home.
    But by the time he came down for breakfast Elaine was already gone. She’d left a note reminding him to take the chest with him, the one with the taxes in it, and wishing him well. She also left him a slender gray book called The Seven Golden Keys. She didn’t say where she’d gone.
    I guess she won’t be showing me those gold beetles after all, he thought. Or her fancy stamp. Thank God he hadn’t made a pass at her.
    Elaine had left behind her daughter too. Eleanor was back at her mother’s desk, just as they’d found her when they arrived, industriously documenting the habits of the bunny-pegasus in bright primary-colored pencils on official Outer Island Embassy stationery. There seemed to be an unlimited supply of it.
    Quentin looked over her shoulder. The letterhead really was nice.
    “Good morning, Eleanor. Do you know where your mom went?”
    Quentin hadn’t spent a lot of time with little kids in his life. He mostly fell back on treating them like adults. Eleanor didn’t seem to mind.
    “No,” she said lightly. She didn’t look up or stop coloring.
    “Do you know when she’s coming back?”
    She shook her head. What kind of mother would leave a five-year-old to take care of herself? Quentin felt sorry for Eleanor. She was a sweet, earnest little girl. She made him feel paternal, which wasn’t a feeling he had much experience with, but he was finding that he liked it. She obviously didn’t get much attention, and what she got wasn’t exactly dripping with maternal affection.
    “All right. We have to go soon, but we’ll wait till she gets back.”
    “You don’t have to.”
    “Well, we sort of do. Are you still drawing bunny-pegasi?”
    “Yes.”
    “You know, I think they might be hare-pegasi, not bunnies. Hares are bigger, and much fiercer.”
    “They’re bunnies.”
    The eternal question. Eleanor changed the subject.
    “I made these for you.”
    With some effort she pulled open a desk drawer—the humidity made it stick, and when it came unstuck it pulled out all the way and fell on the floor. She rummaged in it and took out some papers, four or five of them, and handed them to Quentin. They were heavily scribbled over in colored pencil.
    “They’re passports,” she said, anticipating his question. “You need them if you want to leave Fillory.”
    “Who said I’m leaving Fillory?”
    “You need them if you’re leaving Fillory,” she said. “If you’re not you don’t need them. They’re just in case. ”
    And then more quietly: “You have to fold them in half yourself.”
    She must have been copying from something official, because they were in their own way impressive documents. They had the Fillorian arms on the