The Magician King Read Online Free PDF

Fillorians who gathered for the daily ritual, felt a little off. Still.
    “We should to do it,” he said. “Today of all days.”
    “We’re accepting congratulations for doing nothing.”
    “We’re reassuring the people of continuity in the face of tragedy.”
    They filed out onto the narrow balcony. In the castle courtyard far below, at the bottom of a vertiginous drop, a few hundred Fillorians had gathered. From this height they looked unreal, like dolls. Quentin waved.
    “I wish we could do something more for them,” he said.
    “What do you want to do?” Eliot said. “We’re the kings and queens of a magic utopia.”
    Cheers drifted up from far below, faintly. The sound was tinny and far away—it had the audio quality of a musical greeting card.
    “Some progressive reforms? I want to help somebody with something. If I were a Fillorian I would depose me as an aristocratic parasite.”
    When Quentin and the others took the thrones, they hadn’t known exactly what to expect. The details of what was involved were vague—there would be some ceremonial duties, Quentin supposed, and presumably a lead role in policy making, some responsibility for the welfare of the nation they ruled. But the truth was that there just wasn’t much actual work to do.
    The weird thing was that Quentin missed it. He’d expected Fillory to be something like medieval England, because it looked like medieval England, at least on casual inspection. He figured he’d just use European history, to the extent that he remembered it, as a crib sheet. He would pursue the standard enlightened humanitarian program, nothing extraordinary, greatest hits only, and go down in history as a force for good.
    But Fillory wasn’t England. For one thing the population was tiny—there couldn’t have been more than ten thousand humans in the whole country, plus that many talking animals and dwarves and spirits and giants and such. So he and the other monarchs—or tetrarchs, whatever—were more like small-town mayors. For another, while magic was very real on Earth, Fillory was magical. There was a difference. Magic was part of the ecosystem. It was in the weather and the oceans and the soil, which was wildly fertile. If you wanted your crops to fail you had to work pretty hard at it.
    Fillory was a land of hyperabundance. Anything that needed making could be gotten from the dwarves, sooner or later, and they weren’t an oppressed industrial proletariat, they actually enjoyed making things. Unless you were an actively despicable tyrant, the way Martin Chatwin had been, there were just too many resources and too few people to create anything much in the way of civil strife. The only shortage that the Fillorian economy suffered from was a chronic shortage of shortages.
    As a result whenever any of the Brakebills—as they were called, even though Julia had never even been to Brakebills, as she wasn’t slow to point out—tried to get serious about something, there turned out not to be much to be serious about. It was all ritual and pomp and circumstance. Even money was just for show. It was toy money. Monopoly money. The others had all but given up on trying to make themselves useful, but Quentin couldn’t quite let it go. Maybe that was what had been nagging at him, as he stood on the edge of that meadow in the woods. There must be something real somewhere out there, but he could never quite seem to get his hands on it.
    “All right,” he said. “What next?”
    “Well,” Eliot said, as they filed back inside. “There is this situation with the Outer Island.”
    “The where?”
    “The Outer Island.” He picked up some royal-looking documents. “That’s what it says. I’m king of it, and even I don’t know where it is.”
    Janet snorted. “Outer is off the east coast. Way off, a couple of days’ sail. God, I can’t believe they even let you be king. It’s the easternmost point in the Fillorian Empire. I think.”
    Eliot peered at the