The Magician King Read Free Page A

Quentin’s white face. “That fucking civet threw her and bolted. I tried to hold it but I couldn’t. She’s okay, she just got the wind knocked out of her.”
    “You’re all right.” That phrase again. Quentin rubbed Julia’s back while she took croaking breaths. “You’re okay. I always said you should get a regular horse. I never liked that thing.”
    “Never liked you, either,” she managed.
    “Look.” Eliot pointed off into the twilight. “That’s what made it bolt. The hare went in there.”
    A few yards away a round clearing began, a still pool of grass hidden in the heart of the forest. The trees grew right up to its edge and then stopped, like somebody had cleared it on purpose, nipping out the border precisely. It could have been ruled with a compass. Quentin picked his way toward it. Lush, intensely emerald-green grass grew over lumpy black soil. In the center of the clearing stood a single enormous oak tree with a large round clock set in its trunk.
    The clock-trees were the legacy of the Watcherwoman, the legendary—but quite real—time-traveling witch of Fillory. They were a magical folly, benign as far as anyone could tell, and picturesque in a surreal way. There was no reason to get rid of them, assuming you even could. If nothing else they kept perfect time.
    But Quentin had never seen one like this. He had to lean back to see its crown. It must have been a hundred feet tall, and it was massively thick, at least fifteen yards around at its base. Its clock was stupendous. The face was taller than Quentin was. The trunk erupted out of the green grass and burst into a mass of wiggly branches, like a kraken sculpted in wood.
    And it was moving. Its black, nearly leafless limbs writhed and thrashed against the gray sky. The tree seemed to be caught in the grip of a storm, but Quentin couldn’t feel or hear any wind. The day, the day he could perceive with his five senses, was calm. It was an invisible, intangible storm, a secret storm. In its agony the clock-tree had strangled its clock—the wood had clenched it so tightly that the bezel had finally bent, and the crystal had shattered. Brass clockwork spilled out through the clock’s busted face and down onto the grass.
    “Jesus Christ,” Quentin said. “What a monster.”
    “It’s the Big Ben of clock-trees,” Janet said behind him.
    “I’ve never seen one like that,” Eliot said. “Do you think it was the first one she made?”
    Whatever it was, it was a Fillorian wonder, a real one, wild and grand and strange. It was a long time since he’d seen one, or maybe it was just a long time since he’d noticed. He felt a twinge of something he hadn’t felt since Ember’s Tomb: fear, and something more. Awe. They were looking the mystery in the face. This was the raw stuff, the main line, the old, old magic.
    They stood together, strung out along the edge of the meadow. The clock’s minute hand poked out at a right angle from the trunk like a broken finger. A yard from its base a little sapling sprouted where the gears had fallen, as if from an acorn, swaying back and forth in the silent gale. A silver pocket watch ticked away in a knot in its slender trunk. A typically cute Fillorian touch.
    This was going to be good.
    “I’ll go first.”
    Quentin started forward, but Eliot put a hand on his arm.
    “I wouldn’t.”
    “I would. Why not?”
    “Because clock-trees don’t just move like that. And I’ve never seen a broken one before. I didn’t think they could break. This isn’t a natural place. The hare must have led us here.”
    “I know, right? It’s classic!”
    Julia shook her head. She looked pale, and there was a dead leaf in her hair, but she was back on her feet.
    “See how regular the clearing is,” she said. “It is a perfect circle. Or at least an ellipse. There is a powerful area-effect spell radiating out from the center. Or from the foci,” she added quietly, “in the case of an ellipse.”
    “You go in