The Magician King (The Magicians, #2)

by Lev Grossman

“I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit,” Eliot said. “Though that would explain a lot.”

For the first few months after they’d arrived at Castle Whitespire Eliot had left them to do their own things, on the theory that they’d naturally find their own courses as rulers, and take charge of the things that best suited their various gifts. This had resulted in total chaos, and nothing getting done, and the things that did get done got done twice by two different people in two different ways.

He liked one tapestry in particular that depicted a marvelously appointed griffin frozen in the act of putting a company of foot soldiers to flight. It was supposed to symbolize the triumph of some group of long-dead people over some other group of long-dead people whom nobody had liked, but for some reason the griffin had cocked its head to one side in the midst of its rampage and was gazing directly out of its woven universe at the viewer as if to say, yes, granted, I’m good at this. But is it really the best use of my time?

Quentin had an obsolete sailing ship that had been raised from the dead. He had a psychotically effective swordsman and an enigmatic witch-queen. It wasn’t the Fellowship of the Ring, but then again he wasn’t trying to save the world from Sauron, he was attempting to perform a tax audit on a bunch of hick islanders.

Quentin waited to see if his mind would tip over into sleep. When it didn’t, and it had made it clear that it wasn’t going to without a fight, he sat up and looked at the books on the bookshelves.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect.

“Huh.” He wanted to find fault with the idea but couldn’t quite do it on the spur of the moment. He filed it away for later discrediting.

The dragon was a lot scoldier than he expected. And disappointingly cryptic. Somehow in the back of his mind he’d vaguely thought that the dragon might want to be his friend, and they would fly around the world solving mysteries together. The chances of that happening now looked vanishingly small.

“Oh, right. The Deeper Magic. I forgot about that.” The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn’t feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole.

Quentin landed lightly on the stone roof, which had a low wall around it. Again he felt the absence of a sound track keenly.