The Magician King

The second installment of Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy follows Quentin Coldwater, one of four monarchs ruling the magical land of Fillory, a place he once believed existed only in a series of children's novels. Restless at Castle Whitespire, Quentin rides out with High King Eliot, Queen Janet, and Queen Julia to hunt the Seeing Hare, a legendary beast said to predict the future. Their hunt leads them to a broken clock-tree, an enchanted tree fused with clockwork, in a perfectly circular clearing. When Jollyby, the Master of the Hunt, arrives with the captured hare, it looks at Quentin, rasps "Death," and Jollyby drops dead.

Shaken, the monarchs try to determine what killed Jollyby. Quentin volunteers to sail to the remote Outer Island to collect unpaid taxes, driven by a nameless restlessness, and asks Julia to accompany him. Julia learned magic not at Brakebills, the elite school where Quentin trained, but on her own as a "hedge witch" through unofficial, dangerous channels. She dresses in black, communicates secretly with talking animals, and speaks in a stilted manner that troubles Quentin. He restores a beached ship called the Muntjac, holds a tournament to find a bodyguard (won by a melancholy mercenary named Bingle), and recruits Benedict Fenwick, a sullen teenage cartographer. The Muntjac departs with a small crew, including a talking sloth sent as a representative by the talking animals.

The novel alternates between Quentin's voyage and Julia's backstory. Years earlier, Julia took the same Brakebills entrance exam as Quentin but failed. The school's memory-wipe did not fully hold, leaving her with the tormenting knowledge that a secret magical world existed and she had been excluded from it. Depression consumed her. She eventually found a fragment of a real spell online and practiced it until her fingers left trails of color in the air. She tracked Quentin to Massachusetts and begged him for help in a graveyard, but Quentin, in love with someone else, refused. Julia lay in the rain, realizing that magic was real and extraordinary, but no one would let her in.

Quentin reaches the sleepy Outer Island, where the Customs Agent Elaine reveals that a magical golden key exists on After Island, farther east beyond Fillory's borders. Elaine's five-year-old daughter Eleanor charms the party by making paper passports for everyone. On After Island, Quentin finds the golden key, turns it, and opens a door that deposits him and Julia on the sidewalk in front of his parents' house in Massachusetts. The portal vanishes, stranding them on Earth.

Julia guides Quentin through the underground hedge-witch network, a system of safe houses linked by enchanted mirror-portals. At Brakebills, Dean Fogg, the head of the school, refuses to help. They travel to Venice, where their old classmate Josh Hoberman reveals he sold the magic button, their only known means of returning to Fillory, to a dragon in the Grand Canal. Quentin dives in at midnight. The dragon refuses to return the button but warns that the old gods are returning to reclaim magic and that "the first door is still open" (178). Julia interprets this as the Chatwins' house in Cornwall, where the fictional children in the Fillory novels first entered the magical land through a grandfather clock. They find the house and search it fruitlessly. Exhausted, they end up playing board games on a boy's bedroom floor. Mid-game, the bed begins to rock, the light changes, and they find themselves adrift on the open sea of Fillory.

The Muntjac finds them. A year and a day has passed in Fillory. Eliot has spent the year on a quest assigned by the Unique Beasts, Fillory's one-of-a-kind magical creatures: He must recover the Seven Golden Keys to save the realm. He has found five, but the After Island key is missing.

In the interspersed backstory chapters, Julia's path deepens. She discovers the hedge-witch safe-house network and rapidly advances through its ranking system, but hits a ceiling: the spells are small and practical, never approaching real power. GPS coordinates lead her to a farmhouse in Murs, Provence, where her closest online friends reveal themselves as magicians who have been watching her progress. Their ambition is Project Ganymede: accessing divine power, which they believe is simply magic operating on a titanic scale. They study Provençal mythology and sense an ancient fertility goddess they call Our Lady Underground. An ancient hermit gives them a Phoenician invocation to summon her.

The summoning goes catastrophically wrong. Instead of the goddess, Reynard the Fox, a trickster-deity, erupts from a candle flame. He slaughters most of the group. Julia offers her life to spare her friend Asmodeus, but Reynard rapes Julia instead, pouring divine power into her while ripping away her shade, her essential humanity. Julia walks out of the house, speaks a word she has never heard, and flies into the sky, changed forever.

In Quentin's storyline, Ember, the ram-god of Fillory, tells Quentin the realm needs a hero. Quentin survives an ambush and storms a small island castle, where he finds a centuries-old living corpse who surrenders the sixth key. Benedict is killed by an arrow during the battle. Later, when the group uses the sixth key to try to send Poppy, an Australian dragon researcher who joined the expedition, back to Earth, the key instead opens a portal to the ruined Neitherlands, a dimension between dimensions. There Quentin encounters Penny, an old classmate who has joined an ancient Order maintaining the space between worlds. Penny reveals that the gods are closing the loophole through which mortals access magic, and that the seven keys can reopen the flow if taken to the End of the World.

The sloth reveals herself as a psychopomp, a guide to the underworld, and leads Quentin below to visit Benedict's shade. The underworld is a vast, fluorescently lit gymnasium where the dead play listless games. Julia follows but discovers that no one among the dead can see her: She has lost her shade. Benedict confesses he secretly kept the After Island key, which came with him to the underworld, and gives it to Quentin: the seventh and final key. As shades close in, Julia transforms, growing luminous and tall, becoming a dryad and daughter of Our Lady Underground. The goddess herself appears, gathers Quentin and Julia, and lifts them out. Benedict grabs Quentin's ankle, but Quentin cannot hold on. Benedict falls back among the dead.

The Muntjac sails to the End of the World. The ocean grows shallower until the travelers wade the last miles to a brick wall with a wooden door bearing seven keyholes. Quentin inserts the keys, and the door opens onto empty space: Magic is saved. Elaine reappears and explains that beyond the door lies the Far Side of the World, but Quentin cannot pass. He gave Eleanor's handmade passport to the boy guarding the underworld and has nothing left to present. Julia, now a demigoddess, insists on going through. The doorkeepers object, arguing that the Murs summoning alerted the old gods, but Quentin claims the fault is his: He failed to help Julia when she begged for his aid years ago, setting her on the path to Reynard. He takes her blame. Julia kisses him and dives through the door.

As payment, Quentin is stripped of his crown. Josh and Poppy will fill the two empty thrones. Ember decrees that Quentin must leave Fillory forever. Eliot gives him a silver pocket watch from the enchanted clock-tree and kisses him goodbye. Quentin takes a magic button and surfaces through a frozen fountain into the Neitherlands, alone, no longer a king. But the Neitherlands are warming. Magic is flowing again, the sun is breaking through, and green shoots are pushing up between the paving stones.