They needed a new plan, a way forward, maybe even another job. None of it got him any closer to Alice either, or not that he could see. And if Umber did help Martin, why would Martin have killed him, as Jane Chatwin said he did? It made no sense. There was something seriously wrong with one of Fillory’s gods, or at least there had been. That threw Quentin as much as anything else. There was news in it: if Rupert was to be believed then Umber was the one who’d turned Martin into the Beast, in exchange for some obscure, grotesque sacrifice. He told her about everything, Alice and Julia and all the rest.īut for him it was different, and while Plum slept he sat up, leaning against the wall, and read the journal again.
#THE MAGICIANS LAND QUINTEN AND ALICE FULL#
On the train he’d told her the whole story of his life there, from beginning to end, as bridges and stations and other trains flashed by in the window, and lots full of idle municipal snowplows, and backyards full of overturned play structures.
For Plum it had been a reckoning, a massive correction, that finally forced her to see that Fillory was real and that in some inescapable way she was part of it. The journal had affected them in different ways. Plum did fall asleep, right there on the floor, with her face smushed into her black parka from the limo for a pillow. Was it him? Was he making the same mistake over and over again? Or different mistakes? He’d like to think he was at least making different mistakes.
Quentin thought about how wrong things had gone. Lying on the hard floor made it hurt less.