The Magician King by Lev Grossman Read Free Book Online Page B

not matter. They are all fine, Quentin. It makes no difference.”
    They were both right, of course. There were plenty of decent-looking ships. Beautiful even. But they weren’t the Swift. Quentin folded his arms and squinted down the length of the docks in the late-morning glare. He looked out at the ships floating in the bay.
    “What about those ones out there?”
    Lacker pursed his lips. Julia looked too. Her eyes were still black from the day before, and she didn’t have to shade them against the sun. She looked right into it.
    “They are at your disposal as well, Your Highness,” Lacker said. “Of course.”
    Julia walked out along the nearest pier, straight-backed and sure-footed, to where a humble fishing smack was tied up. She jumped the gap neatly and began untying it.
    “Come on,” she called.
    Lacker gestured to Quentin to precede him.
    “Sometimes you just have to do things, Quentin,” Julia said, as he climbed on board after her. “You spend too much of your time waiting.”
    It was good to get out on the open water, but there wasn’t much wind, and as it warmed up the smack began to smell. Amazingly its owner emerged from belowdecks, where he must have been asleep. He was a sun- and windburned man with a gray beard, wearing overalls with nothing obviously on underneath them. Lacker addressed him in a language Quentin didn’t recognize. He didn’t seem at all put out or even surprised to discover that his boat had been commandeered by two monarchs and an admiral.
    As for Lacker, he looked unfairly comfortable in the heat in his full dress uniform as they toured an even greater variety of inappropriate vessels. Most of them were out there because their drafts were too deep to anchor any farther in: a great bruiser of a ship of the line, some nobleman’s bloated party yacht, a fat, butter-colored merchant tub.
    “What about that one?” Quentin said. He pointed.
    “I beg your indulgence, Your Highness, my eyesight has suffered in the service of our great nation. You do not mean—”
    “I do.” Enough with the period drama. “That one. There.”
    A flat sandbar projected from one of the horns of Whitespire’s great bay. A ship lay near it in a few feet of water. The low tide had laid it gently down on one side on the sandy bottom, its underbelly exposed like a beached whale.
    “That ship, Your Highness, has not left the bay for a very long time.”
    “Nevertheless.”
    It was partly out of thoroughness, partly out of a perverse desire to pay the admiral back for being, his promise notwithstanding, a little bit of a cock. The owner of the smack exchanged a long look with Admiral Lacker: this man, the look said, lubs his land.
    “Let us return to the Morgan Downs .”
    “And we will,” Julia said. “But King Quentin wishes to see that ship first.”
    It took ten minutes to tack over to it, the sails flapping as the fisherman gamely worked his way upwind. Quentin reminded himself to pay the man something for this after. They circled the wreck listlessly in the shallow water. Its hull had been painted white, but the paint had been weathered and blasted down to the gray wood. There was something odd about its lines—something curiously swoopy about them. It finished in a long slender bowsprit that had been snapped off halfway.
    He liked it. It was neither harsh and blocky like a warship, nor soft and too pretty like a yacht. It was elegant, but it meant business. Too bad it was a carcass and not a ship. Maybe if he’d gotten here fifty years earlier.
    “What do you think?”
    The smack’s keel scraped the sandy bottom loudly in the stillness. Admiral Lacker regarded the horizon line. He cleared his throat.
    “I think,” he said, “that that ship has seen better days.”
    “What do you think it was?”
    “Workhorse,” the smack’s owner piped up huskily. “Deer Class. Ran the route between here and Longfall.”
    Quentin hadn’t even realized he spoke English.
    “It looks nice,”